Posted by: J.Coates at February 27, 2005 12:47 AM

I would be curious to hear Michael and any other DO's comment on the design work and philosophy of Annelys de Vet

I suppose her motto is:
I am what I copy
I copy what I am

In the upper drop down menu --- on her home page choose "The right to copy" to see what she says.

"Omigosh, oh my God," she said, feigning excitement as she hoisted her best actress Oscar in one hand and her newly won worst actress Razzie in the other. "I never in my life thought that I would be here, winning a Razzie. It's not like I ever aspired to be here, but thank you."

Berry is the first actor to show up to accept her award in person since Canadian Tom Green did for 2001's Freddy Got Fingered.

"When I was a kid, my mother told me that if you could not be a good loser, then there's no way you could be a good winner," she said.

In addition to the best actress Razzie, Catwoman also won worst film, worst direction and worst screenplay at the ceremony.

U.S. President George W. Bush took the worst actor trophy for his appearances (via news and archival footage) in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. The film also won several other honours, including worst supporting actor for U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and worst supporting actress for pop singer Britney Spears, who makes a cameo in the documentary.

Just follow these three steps:

1. Download and install podcast software
(recommended: iPodder, Doppler, iPodderX, or others)

2. Add the Media Matters feed to your podcast software: http://mediamatters.org/tools/syndication/podcast.xml

3. Your podcast software will automatically download the latest audio from Media Matters and deliver it to your iPod or other MP3 player device.

redcone writes "New Scientist is reporting that translation software that develops an understanding of languages by scanning through thousands of previously translated documents has been released by U.S. researchers. According to the article "The translated documents used to teach the translation algorithms can be electronic, on paper, or even audio files. The system is not only faster than other methods, but also better suited to tackling less common languages and the unusual vocabulary found in specialised or technical texts.""

Possibly sounding even more of a death knell in Brooklyn than the invasion of hipsters or an Ikea, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz has invited Cracker Barrel representatives to look at the biggest borough as a possible venue for a new restaurant. Of course, the Southern chain's history of discriminating against, oh, blacks, women, gays and lesbians, has some city politicians up in arms: City Councilman Charles Barron tells the Daily News (who points out that Barron is a former Black Panther), "Is Marty out of his mind? That's ridiculous! I think it's insulting to our community that he would open his arms and take them on a tour without even consulting us. Does he know their reputation? Does he know their history?" Markowitz, slightly nonplussed, said, "I didn't know about their past; I've never been in a Cracker Barrel. I've already called and invited them. I can't now pick up the phone and say, 'Go, get out of here.'" This sounds like an awesome glimpse into what goes on in Borough President's offices: Cold calling companies to visit without researching them thoroughly.

Have you ever eaten at Cracker Barrel? Gothamist thinks we've had some of their cheese at a NJ mall in the 80s (an auspicious introduction to port cheese balls). The Daily News also posted these statistics: Cracker Barrel served 114 million slices of bacon, 127 million eggs and 18 million orders of chicken and dumplings. If there's an IHOP in Harlem, well, there very well might be a Cracker Barrel on Flatbush.

These Post-It note haxx0rs celebrated National Engineering Week by making an enormous, four-storey mural depicting exciting Super Mario scenes in pixellated glory. Link (Thanks, Mike!)

Another round of faculty debate about his management style awaited Harvard President Lawrence Summers in the wake of his decision to release the transcript of his remarks on the dearth of women in top science posts.

Summers was to meet Tuesday with Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the second such session since a furor erupted over his comments last month suggesting that intrinsic differences between the sexes play some role in why fewer women ascend to top-level university science jobs.

Some faculty have suggested they may push for a no-confidence vote, though that was considered unlikely for procedural reasons.

Even if such a measure passed it would be largely symbolic. Summers, who has apologized repeatedly for his remarks, maintains the support of the Harvard Corporation, the seven-member governing body of the university. And the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is just one of 12 divisions of the university.

Random House Inc. is suing Sean "P. Diddy" Combs, alleging that the hip-hop mogul never paid back a $300,000 advance for a memoir he never completed.

In papers filed Monday at the state Supreme Court in Manhattan, the publisher alleged that Combs and his corporation, Bad Boy, have "simply kept the money they never rightfully earned." Random House is seeking the advance's return, plus interest.

[...]

According to the court papers, Combs signed with Random House in 1998 and then arranged on his own to collaborate with Mikal Gilmore, a contributing editor to Rolling Stone and author of the acclaimed "Shot in the Heart." A manuscript was to be completed by Dec. 15, 1999, but the deadline passed and, in early 2000, Random House notified Combs that he was in breach of contract and that the publisher wanted the money back.

"Year after year," the papers allege, the publisher sent follow-up letters.

Combs is not the first musician who failed to meet the deadline for delivery of his life's story. Years ago, Mick Jagger received a seven-figure advance to write his memoirs. He eventually returned the money, saying he couldn't remember anything of significance.

Somecurrent or former troops sent to Iraq claim that Lariam, the commercial namefor the anti-malarial drug mefloquine, has provoked disturbing and dangerousbehavior. The families of some troops blame the drug for the suicides oftheir loved ones.

[...]

The drug's manufacturer warned ofrare but severe side effects including paranoia and hallucinations. It becamehis defense: The pills made him snap. The Army dropped all charges, a spokesmanlater saying that Pogany "may have a medical problem that requires care andtreatment."

"What are we doing giving drugs that cause hallucinations,confusion, psychotic behavior to people that carry weapons and hold secretclearances?" asked Pogany, 33, who is now seeking a medical discharge. "Itdoesn't pass the common-sense test."

A woman has been sentenced to two and a half years in jail for ripping off her ex-lover's testicle with her bare hands during a drunken brawl after he refused her sex.

Amanda Monti, 24, flew into a rage in May last year after Geoffrey Jones, 37, who had ended their long-term relationship, rejected her advances.

She grabbed him by the genitals, tearing off his left testicle, then hid it in her mouth before a friend of Jones handed it back to him saying "that's yours".

FederalAviationAdministration officials received 52 warnings prior to Sept. 11,2001, fromtheir own security experts about potential al-Qaida attacks, includingsomethat mentioned airline hijackings or suicide attacks, The New York Timesreported.

heTimes said in Thursday editions that a previously undisclosedreport by the9/11 commission that investigated the suicide airliner attackson the WorldTrade Center and the Pentagon detailed warnings given to FAAleaders fromApril to Sept. 10, 2001, about the radical Islamic terroristgroup and itsleader, Osama bin Laden.

The commission report, writtenlast August,said five security warnings mentioned al-Qaida’s training forhijackings andtwo reports concerned suicide operations not connected toaviation.

Remember "Jeff Gannon," the White House reporter who lobs softballs at Scottie McClellan when the other mean reporters won't let up with the real questions?

The "Jeff Gannon" who accused his colleagues of "working off the talking points provided by the Democrats" and then was found to have copied info directly from GOP documents and used it in his "news report"?

This would be the same "Jeff Gannon" who was subpoenaed in connection with the Plame investigation because he somehow obtained a copy of a purported State Dept. document which said that Ms. Plame had a hand in arranging the assignment to Niger for her husband (an allegation -- and document -- denied by the CIA).

Yes, we're talking about "Jeff Gannon, Washington Bureau Chief, Talon News" -- Talon News being the rinkydink wingnut "news service" chaired by the same guy who runs GOP USA (the wingnut site that is less upscale than Renew American, but slightly more professional than BushCountryUSA, and apparently run by various members of the Texas GOP).

Anyway, ever since it was revealed that "Jeff Gannon" is a pseudonym (even though he apparently gets daily White House passes issued in that name), bloggers have been trying to ascertain his real identity. Susan G. at Daily Kos (with the assistance of her readers) has been very energetic and organized in this endeavor, and has uncovered a great deal of interesting and suggestive info about "Jeff" and his associates.

So, just who is Jeff? Well, his Talon News bio has been delated, but it formerly indicated that he was a obtained a B.S. degree in Education from the Pennsylvania State University System, and attended a two-day right-wing school of journalism ("the Leadership Institute Broadcast School of Journalism"). Oh, and he "lives on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC."

His posts at his site "ConservativeGuy.com" also seem to have disappeared, but Susan and her readers found an archived copy of his "Who is Conservative Guy?" bio -- and it seems to indicate that "Jeff" can't hold a job:

(...here's the rest...)

Also, be sure to check out AMERICAblog. John has been going strong with this one.

In a crucial step heralded as a fresh start to peacemaking, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas promised Tuesday to halt all acts of violence and agreed to meet again soon to tackle the tougher issues that for decades have blocked the road to peace.

The U.S. military faces between 13,000 and 17,000 insurgents in Iraq, the large majority of them backers of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party, a senior military official said Tuesday.

Crucially, we should end our counter-insurgency operations; this offensive is failing -- at least according to the Rumsfeldian metric of whether we are killing the insurgents faster than we are creating them. A year ago, intelligence officials estimated that there were 2,000 to 5,000 insurgents; today, according to the head of the Iraqi intelligence service, there are 30,000 hardcore fighters and 200,000 insurgents overall.

Last year, I published some not-too-surprising research that revealed all but one Oscar-nominated film leaked onto the Internet. Let's see if the industry's evolving efforts to plug the leaks were any more effective this year.

Is Iraq just one big frat party? What else are we to assume based on the fact that, a) soldiers are whipping out their ‘Big Shockers’ during the obligatory wartime salute to the troops in the Superbowl pre-game show (above); and, b) female soldiers at Camp Bucca, in southern Iraq are mud-wrestling for the delight of their male colleagues, according to The New York Daily News.

Japan has already dabbled here and there with road surfaces that keep drivers awake by using appropriately-placed troughs to play rhythms through your tires. Now the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has gone a step further, with grooved sections of road that boom a melody up through your car.

The grooves are a few millimetres deep and 6-12 mm wide; unsurprisingly, the closer they're grouped together the higher the pitch of the note produced. They're planning to use different melodies for different areas, picking songs that have some association to the locale.

NYT's online content policies: could they suck any more?

In a word, yes. Boing Boing reader Drew says:

There have been a lot of previous Boing Boing posts about how nytimes.com's pay-for-archive approach is a bad strategy. Well, they've made matters worse by changing their email-an-article policy. Before, you could choose to email the entire body of an article (I often sent myself articles so I could re-read and reference them later), but now the email-an-article function only sends links to articles. Those articles are eventually moved into the archives, so they're really making you pay and cutting themselves off even more.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, will make separate statements at a historic summit meeting in Egypt Tuesday that are intended to achieve an eventual lasting cease-fire, Israeli and Palestinian officials said today.

Word of the planned statements came not long after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, renewing direct American involvement in the Middle East, announced the appointment today of a "senior security coordinator" to help train and equip Palestinian forces and monitor Israeli and Palestinian promises to suspend military actions against each other.

No formal document will be signed Tuesday, the officials said. A senior Israeli official said, "We are talking about understandings, not a formal agreement." He stressed that there will be no joint statements, no joint agreement, and nothing will be signed by the parties.

Still, officials expressed optimism that a break in the four-year-old hostilities could lead to a more lasting truce.

Federal revenues are at 1950s levels, while spending remains where it has been in recent decades - much higher.

In addition, the United States has two significant military missions.

The Bush administration's chosen remedy is the least feasible one. Reducing domestic spending, or eliminating "waste, fraud and abuse" is toothless because this slice of the budget is too small to solve the problem.

Indeed, if Congress were rash enough to balance the budget in this way, there would hardly be any such spending left.

Law enforcement, space exploration, environmental clean-up, economic development, the Small Business Administration, housing, veterans' benefits, aid to state and local governments would all but disappear.

It's fantasy to think these routine government functions could be slashed.

"The copyrights for the enhancements in Millennium Park are owned by the artist who created them. As such, anyone reproducing the works, especially for commercial purposes, needs the permission of that artist."

Pubs, clubs and other drinking venues in England and Wales can apply to stay open 24 hours a day under new laws that come into effect Monday.

Currently, many British drinkers imbibe as much as they can as quickly as they can before pubs shut at 11 p.m. Then heavy drinkers all stumble into the streets at the same time, often leading to fights and other drunken misbehavior. The government says the new laws will help curb the problem because people will drink in a more relaxed manner and leave at different times.

[...]

"The vast majority of people should be treated like the adults they are. It is ridiculous that the government should deny the entire population the right to a drink after 11 p.m.," Jowell said.

New York Court Rules Gays Must Be Allowed To Marry
by Beth Shapiro 365Gay.com New York Bureau

(New York City) A New York State court ruled Friday that same-sex couples must be allowed to marry.

State Supreme Court Judge Doris Ling-Cohan said that the New York State Constitution guarantees basic freedoms to lesbian and gay people, and that those rights are violated when same-sex couples are not allowed to marry.

The ruling said the state Constitution requires same-sex couples to have equal access to marriage, and that the couples represented by Lambda Legal must be given marriage licenses.

"This is a historic ruling that delivers the state Constitution's promise of equality to all New Yorkers," said Susan Sommer, Supervising Attorney at Lambda Legal and the lead attorney on the case.

"The court recognized that unless gay people can marry, they are not being treated equally under the law. Same-sex couples need the protections and security marriage provides, and this ruling says they're entitled to get them the same way straight couples do."

Lambda filed the suit last March in Manhattan on behalf of 5 gay and lesbian couples. (story)

The case was the first of its kind to be filed in New York since the Massachusetts high court ruled that same-sex couples are entitled to full marriage under that state's Constitution. (story)

In today's ruling, Judge Ling-Cohan said, "Simply put, marriage is viewed by society as the utmost expression of a couple's commitment and love. Plaintiffs may now seek this ultimate expression through a civil marriage."

"I was even more moved than I thought I'd be when I heard about this ruling. All of us cried; me, Mary Jo and our 15-year-old daughter. For the first time, our family is being treated with the respect and dignity that our friends, coworkers and neighbors automatically have," said Jo-Ann Shain, a 51-year-old New York City resident who is a plaintiff in the case with her partner, Mary Jo Kennedy, 49.

I loved this article in Wired Magazine and waited patiently for Wired.com to post it. Today, they did. Writer Frank Rose takes us inside Comedy Central's incredibly creative development team for glimpses of upcoming shows like Happy Game Fun Bomb, a video game variety show. They're also working on "a Daily Show-type program about Hollywood, like Entertainment Tonight but with a satirical edge." Cool stuff.

For progressives, the battle for Social Security represents a rare opportunity to stop the newly re-elected president dead in his tracks, to demonstrate the bankruptcy of his extreme conservative agenda, and to point to a new politics of "shared security" around which we can build a new majority for change. Winning won't be easy, but a powerful combination of progressive forces – national organizations, political funders and philanthropists, policy experts, and grass-roots and online networks (including veterans of the 2004 elections) – are coming together.

As I stated in earlier posts, I don’t buy the idea that the iPod shuffle makes my life funner by “shuffling things up". Heck no, I get in the groove for certain songs or artists and I don’t want to click that stinkin forward/backward button on the song to try and find it. The iPod shuffle is truly the “Poor Man’s iPod.” I know, I know - it’s so great for like taking to the gym and running and stuff, and yes I do run about 4 days a week. But I do not want to load a different play list every morning if I just want to hear one artist/album.

Human After All was recorded at Daft Punk's home studio in Paris between September and November of 2004. Notoriously press-shy-and uniquely loath to have their photos taken for publication -- the duo did have this to say to NME in January 2003: "The way the music industry is at the moment is allowing us to experiment. If everything is formulaic and we can finance ourselves to work outside of that formula, then for us there are no rules. We're setting our own agenda."

Michele, Ellen, Nathan, Corinne, Marcus and Jennie are friends. All of them live in Chicago. They go out three nights a week, sometimes more. Each of them has had several jobs since college; Ellen is on her 17th, counting internships, since 1996. They don't own homes. They change apartments frequently. None of them are married, none have children. All of them are from 24 to 28 years old.

Thirty years ago, people like Michele, Ellen, Nathan, Corinne, Marcus and Jennie didn't exist, statistically speaking. Back then, the median age for an American woman to get married was 21. She had her first child at 22. Now it all takes longer. It's 25 for the wedding and 25 for the baby. It appears to take young people longer to graduate from college, settle into careers and buy their first homes. What are they waiting for? Who are these permanent adolescents, these twentysomething Peter Pans? And why can't they grow up?

I spent 6 hours last week in Omaha with Warren Buffett. As I walked into the meeting I was pleasantly surprised to find Mr. Buffett dressed more like a scroungy sophomore chemistry student than the greatest investor of all time. It was an open Q&A session with some of my colleagues and me for about 3 hours.

Army Pfc. James Miller IV, a 2001 graduate of Anderson High School, died Sunday in Iraq doing a job his father said he was proud to do - protecting Iraqi citizens as they went to the polls to vote.

"Jim came to believe deeply in what he was doing over there," said his father, James Miller III, as he stood in the dining room of his West Chester home Monday afternoon, an array of photos of his 22-year-old son, from childhood to manhood, spread out on the table before him. "He was doing what he wanted to do."

Early Sunday morning, U.S. Army officers in dress uniform came to the front door of the Miller home on a quiet cul-de-sac in West Chester to deliver the news to Miller and his two other sons: Dan, 21, a student at Ohio State University; and Jeff, 17, a student at St. Xavier High School.

Pfc. Miller had died in an explosion earlier that day while performing guard duty at a polling place in Ramadi, a town 70 miles west of Baghdad where Iraqi insurgents have committed countless acts of violence against Iraqi citizens and American troops.

"They didn't have much information on exactly what happened; we'll just have to wait for the details," Miller said. "It is a very sad day.

"We have lost a very bright, sensitive caring young man who gave joy to everyone he met," his father said.

Make your representatives represent you. Tell your Senators to vote NO to Torture Czar Alberto Gonzales. Democrats get nothing by going along with Bush and his cronies on the Hill. The first step to taking back the White House is showing the country the party stands for something, and right now that has to be this: that torture sympathizers should not be in charge of the Justice Department. Go to this page, find your Senators and demand they vote NO on Gonzales.