You knew this was coming. From ZD Net: Boston’s Logan International Airport is attempting to pull the plug on Continental Airlines’ free Wi-Fi node, which competes with the airport’s $7.95-a-day pay service. …airport officials have pledged to take all necessary steps to have the antenna removed from Continental’s frequent flyer lounge.
I love these kinds of logic puzzles. Charles Dodgson used to make them up for Alice and his other little friends. This one is attributed to Albert Einstein who claimed that 98 percent of the world’s population couldn’t solve it. It took me about 20 minutes to run through the matrix. I’ll post my solution on Monday. Can you find the owner of the fish?
Sunday nights at 325 East State Street meant Dr. Who on WOUB TV for Roy, Barney, Ed and me. It was 1982 and Tom Baker piloted the Tartis. Now, David Tennant plays the again regenerated Doctor and will look like the type of man Kate Moss might date, with a just-got-out-of-bed, dragged-through-a-hedge-backwards, only-thing-I-could-find look.
I’ve written very little poetry. I’m meter-challenged. But poets like Ernie O’Dell, Sherry Chandler and Terry have told me I am a poet. So I decided to try an experiment. Over the next 40 days I’ll write 40 Chaiqu on what ever topics spring to mind in the pre-dawn light of my morning meditation. These are my own rules for Chaiqu.
1. In homage to the Haiku rule that each poem must contain a seasonal word, Chaiqu have at least one word of Hebrew or Yiddish.
2. Chaiqu will contain 18 syllables — the Gematria, Numerology, for Chai, Life, is 18 — instead of the traditional 17 syllables.
3. Chaiqu have the structure: 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 6 syllables.
Here’s my first attempt:
Coffee at midnight
Studying Torah by lamp;
flame black fire on white fire
My Soundtrack: You Can’t Blame It On Anybody by Phoenix on WOXY.
I found Lawrence Simon via IsraellyCool. He writes: I like to write 100 word stories as much as I like to read them aloud. I regularly record my 100 Words or Les Nessman contributions and the ones I write for my main site about Abraham Lincoln or Mustard Man. No politics. No interviews. No crap. Just good old-time storytelling. Cool.
From today’s New York Times: It’s natural enough to think of the growth of the blogosphere as a merely technical phenomenon. But it’s also a profoundly human phenomenon, a way of expanding and, in some sense, reifying the ephemeral daily conversation that humans engage in. Every day the blogosphere captures a little more of the strange…
[Update — 1041, 5 August 05 — Jeff Jarvis is ecstatic over this one.]
I’ve got to wonder how the deal the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony cut with Wal Mart compares to the Cleveland deal. Let’s see, Cleveland is supplying $32 million in Federal New Markets Tax Credit financing and in Nevada, according to Reuters:
…the tribe is leasing the land to a property developer, who will sublet a 203,000-square-foot (18,800-square-meter) superstore to Wal-Mart in a long-term deal, perhaps to last 30 years, said Charles Rosenow, the director of the tribe’s economic development department.
[snip]
It spent $7 million to buy the land, Rosenow said, and like many who invested in now-booming Reno property market, they seem to have made a good investment. They expect to collect $4.4 million in annual sales tax, of which they will share $1.5 million with the state in a complicated development deal, he said. They will also take in $600,000 a year for the lease.
Sounds like some solid dealing to me.
My Soundtrack: Spanish Song by Kid 606 on WOXY.
Here’s one that I had no idea was coming. The theo/neocon wrong is in a panic over the possibility of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts being gasp gay. The commentators at Free Republic are all a twitter. Look at the evidence. Roberts didn’t marry until he was 41, his children are adopted and then there’s this:
As a private lawyer, Roberts “worked behind the scenes for gay rights activists, and his legal expertise helped them persuade the Supreme Court to issue a landmark 1996 ruling protecting people from discrimination because of their sexual orientation.”
If that doesn’t make him demon span, then some of the Freepers don’t know what does.
My take, Roberts is more interested in Law than he is in agendas or ideology. And that makes him a potentially bad judge in the eyes of the wrong wing.
My Soundtrack: What Are You To Me by UNKLE on WOXY.
Terry at I See Invisible People post photos of three computer accessories we all wish we had. The one that’s missing, but that I wish I had, would be way-back button allowing for a Groundhog Day leap-back 24 hours to correct all the stupid things I do in a day. But I’d settle for a 60-second delay on the email send button.
President George Bush told reporters on Monday that :I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought. As this cartoon (courtesy of Pharyngula) shows, the end result of such thinking is not pretty. When will we realize that ignorance and superstition are not good things to teach in science classes?
Following an on-air temper tantrum and his utterance of bullshit this afternoon, Mediabistro reports, Bob Novak’s behavior on CNN today was inexcusable and unacceptable. Mr. Novak has apologized to CNN, and CNN apologizes to its viewers for his language and actions. We’ve asked Mr. Novak to take some time off,” a CNN spokeswoman told us.
This email was forwarded to me by my reader Cailin. Gold Star Families For Peace plans an act of civil disobediance this Saturday, 6 August in Crawford, Texas, where President George Bush has withdrawn for a five-week vacation: the longest presidential retreat in 36 years. We shouldn’t pull out this way, but I applaud their effort.
This has to be covered somewhere in the Geneva Convention. According to Reuters, the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program are in their 10th day and delegates are subsisting on some 2,000 cups of coffee and, in what must be some kind of fiendish Korean torture: three enormous vats of semi-sweet green pea gruel.
I rise at 0445 (4:45 a.m. for you civilian types) to write. I’ve always been a morning person. When I was growing up I liked to do my homework before I caught the bus. My mind just seems to work best before dawn. A big part of it is, I think, the quiet. Today’s poem on Writer’s Almanac is Can You by Christian Barter. The closing lines spoke to me.
…in my notebook
of pre-day ecstasies. I love the feel
of gray seeping into black-what it represents:
the casting-out that could occur-and the real,
truant world opening, before it grows dense
with light and the need for endings, setting free
that inkling some lasting love might come to me.
— Can You by Christian Barter.
My Soundtrack: I Want To Tell You by The Beatles on WOXY.
From Chas Rich at NEO Babble comes this notice of legislation to ban eminent domain actions for two years. During that time a working group would consider state-wide options. The bill is sponsored by Sen. Kim Zurz (D-28) and Timoty Grendel (R-18). Kurz has set up Private Ownership And Public Good to blog on the progress.
News Flash! Not! The Free Times reported last week that filmaker Robert Greenwald has put out a call for video footage for use in his latest documentary… Except, readers of Have Coffee Will Write and No Cleveland Walmart read about it at the beginning of June.
My Soundtrack: Tightly Wound by The Capes on WOXY.
For more than 40 years, an American’s right to privacy has recognized by our Supreme Court. But it has not been an uncontested right. Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, for one, disagrees with the majorities in the Supreme Court who found a found privacy to be a fundamental right. According to Today’s Washington Post:
The new documents disclosed by the archive that reflect Roberts’ skeptical views regarding a fundamental right to privacy include a lengthy article on judicial restraint that he apparently drafted for publication in a journal of the American Bar Association under the name of then-Attorney General William French Smith, his boss.
The article approvingly quoted from a dissenting opinion by Justice Hugo Black in a 1965 court decision, in which the majority held that a Connecticut law forbidding the use of contraceptives was unconstitutional. Black’s opinion, as cited in the draft, complained that the court had used a loose, flexible, uncontrolled standard for holding laws unconstitutional. The draft article said that the broad range of rights which are now alleged to be fundamental by litigants, with only the most tenuous connection the to Constitution, bears ample witness to the dangers of this doctrine.
The draft released from Roberts’s files at the archive does not have his name on it, but a memo to Roberts from Bruce Fein, who then worked in the Justice Department, offers suggested changes on your draft. Fein said in an interview yesterday that my judgment is yes, that John wrote it.
A second memo, sent by Roberts to the attorney general on Dec. 11, 1981, summarized a lecture six years earlier by then- Solicitor General Erwin N. Griswold at Washington and Lee University, which touched on the same theme. Griswold’s lecture, Roberts said, devotes a section to the so-called right to privacy, arguing as we have that such an amorphous right is not to be found in the Constitution.
While privacy and civil rights are battered by the Patriot Act. A Supreme Court willing to roll the calendar back 40 years or so will make it impossible to even protest the loss.
My Soundtrack: Crosseyed And Painless by Talking Heads on WOXY.
Is Bentonville under siege? Near the end of The Price Is Right, a very pro-Wal Mart essay, on the Op-Ed page of this morning’s New York Times comes this:
…in retailing, American policies favor consumers and offer fewer protections to other interests than is typical elsewhere in the world. Is such pro-consumerism a good thing? The answer depends on who these consumers are, and Wal-Mart’s customers tend to be the Americans who need the most help.
Pankaj Ghemawat and Ken Mark co-authored the essay. Ghemawat is a professor of business administration at Harvard. Mark is a business consultant in Toronto. Anybody know anything about this duo?
My Soundtrack: Uno by Muse on WOXY.
[Update — 1855, 3 August 05 — Bill Callahan offers insightful commentary on the disastrous failure of the Cleveland School levy.]
[Update — 1322, 3 August 05 — The Democracy Guy Tim Russo graciously eats a little crow and offers an on-target assessment of the Hackett- Schmidt election. Best of all, Tim answers my question of what next? His prediction: Paul Hackett for Secretary of State in 2006.]
Two elections held my attention yesterday. In Cleveland, the school levy lost 65 percent to 35 percent. The Old School is dead. Who will lead the New School? In Cincinnati, Republican Jean Schmidt won 52 percent to 48 percent over Democrat Paul Hackett in Ohio’s 2nd Congressional District. It wasn’t the expected blood bath. What’s next?
[Update — 1218, 3 July 05 — From Paul Hackett:
Dear Supporter,
Yesterday, one of the reddest regions in America turned a whole lot bluer.
I ran in a special election to serve in the United States House of Representatives from the 2nd District of Ohio. I am a Marine recently returned from Iraq, a husband, a father, an attorney, and a Democrat.
When I won the Democratic primary for this contest, few people believed we had a shot at victory. But DFA put its faith in me — and went to work organizing on the ground and online. Your support helped build the greatest Democratic get-out-the-vote effort this district has ever known.
While we didn’t pull out a victory yesterday — we came incredibly close. We got 48 percent of the vote. And in those results rests hope for the future.
It had been 15 years since a Democratic candidate for Congress received more than 30 percent of the vote in Ohio’s 2nd District and decades since a Democrat held the seat. Your support helped me improve Democratic performance by nearly 20 percent. This is a victory for democracy. And if we can do this in Ohio — we can do it anywhere.
We have the power to win back Congress. Yesterday proved it. And DFA is on the front lines of the fight — determined, hopeful and fearless.
I believe we can change this country. I believe we can win in every state — and I know that you do too. Please join me today:
Thank you,
Paul Hackett]
My Soundtrack: The Last Song by Lucero on WOXY.
On Saturday, women bloggers gathered in Santa Clara, California, for BlogHer ’05. So much went on that it’s hard to know where to begin. After you read the wrap up of the event, be sure to also surf over to Jay Rosen’s Notes and Comment on BlogHer ’05. I like Ashley Richard’s post-event To Do list:
Enble Comments — I keep meaning to, but I just can’t bring myself to futz around with the code.
Ethics Manifesto — The idea for this was spawned from the Citizen Journalist Birds-of-a-Feather session. It was suggested that we look at Jay Rosen’s Q&A page to develop our own.
Link to Women Bloggers — We kvetch that more women need to be in the Technorati Top 100 but we’re not linking to each other. I’ve already added the Blogher roll.
Create My A-List — I don’t read all of the Technorati Top 100 blogs and don’t like them all. In the morning discussion it was said that we should be defining what our top 100 list is.
Ask for Links — Halley Suit said to just ask for someone to link to you and to ask 3 times. (Kinda the same logic if you’re trying to get someone to go on a date with you.) It was suggested that we also read Women Don’t Ask, a book about how women can negotiate more effectively (I think).
Jeff Jarvis today has a great comment on the concept of A Lists.
[Update — 1335, 3 July 05 — I actually know someone who attended BlogHer. Check out Tish’s experience.]
My Soundtrack: Candy by Ash on WOXY.
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