The day in posts: 08/07/2005

Google blacklists CNET reporters? An article about privacy issues that highlighted the potential for abuse if logs of search terms linked with IP addresses are combined by search companies with address and phone data, angered Google CEO Eric Schmidt enough to blacklist CNET reporters for a year, at least according to the bottom of this CNET story. The article begins with information about Schmidt found via Google searches, and goes on to "question Google's ability to adequately balance the heavy burden of safeguarding consumer privacy rights with the pull toward intermingling and mining data for ever more lucrative targeted advertising."
posted by mediareport at 10:36 PM PST - 18 comments

What A Revolutionary Laff Riot. Something I found interesting, even comical to contemplate, while clicking around: "Earlier in the day, we joined one of the feeder marches, chanting, "Soldiers Turn Your Guns Around, Shoot The Profit System Down!" While march organizers argued with the cops about what street to take, we made speeches linking the war to inter-imperialist rivalry and calling on students, teachers, workers and soldiers to destroy this system with communist revolution." And no, that does not mean I'm a PLP supporter, nor am I urging U.S. troops to mass mutiny (any more than I'd urge pigs to fly). I mean, hey, can anybody seriously picture "Petrograd 1917" happening in today's America?
posted by davy at 9:01 PM PST - 48 comments

Peter Jennings Dies of lung cancer at 67.
posted by AMWKE at 8:54 PM PST - 166 comments

Malls of America - Gone (some of them) but not forgotten (well, maybe). Vintage photographs and postcards of malls of the 1960s and '70s. For more personal stories, check out Deadmalls.com.
posted by deborah at 8:35 PM PST - 20 comments

Making music entirely from non-musical things: McDonalds Happy Meals, Henry Kissinger, Bread, Salad Tosser, Fluorescent Lamps, the Bible, Hearts, Dot Matrix Printers, Photocopiers, Volkswagen [possibly nsfw], The Postal Service, Blank Tapes, Eiffel Tower, Deportation Orders [scroll down], Cakes, Cucumbers, Furniture [scroll down to #12], Skin, Roads, Underpasses, Frogs, Vinyl Run-Out Grooves, Radios, Natural Geophysical Phenomena, Carly Simon and other stuff.
posted by nylon at 7:41 PM PST - 16 comments

"A distressing example of the breakdown of moral and social values . . ." 62 of the 66 accused were convicted and sentenced in France's largest child sex abuse case to date. From 1999 to 2002, 45 children in Angers, aged 6 months to 12 years, were prostituted by their own families in exchange for as little as a carton of cigarettes. Most of the families were monitored by social workers and reports of abuse began in 1999, but an in-depth investigation did not begin until three years later.

Each next news article reveals more horrifying details. Three children were raped by over forty adults; parents would be ". . . smoking cigarettes in the next room while men raped their children and the children were crying". And ". . . one girl was forced to perform oral sex so often that she cannot eat in the company of adults".

It can take a lifetime to recover from being raped once. A nine-year-old who's been raped by forty people, including her parents and grandfather? I pray her psychologist is better than her family's social worker.
posted by schroedinger at 7:40 PM PST - 64 comments

Tristan da Cunha has just been assigned its first postcode by the Royal Mail. This makes it easier for the inhabitants of these remote chunks of rock to receive mail. Easier, but still not easy - to get there, packages must first make their way to Cape Town and then travel 2,800 miles by fishing boat.
posted by kcds at 7:24 PM PST - 17 comments

Before they were famous - six pages of childhood photos of celebrities.
posted by jonson at 6:57 PM PST - 57 comments

Iraqi Insurgents are running a different kind of guerrilla war. And at least one Iraqi sniper is apparently playing havoc with coalition troops.
posted by etaoin at 3:32 PM PST - 30 comments

Mind Reading.
posted by Citizen Premier at 2:34 PM PST - 14 comments

In a world... where the success of an industry depends upon the creative ability of a few, greatness must be recognized. Imagine... five of the top voice-over artists in our country all in one car! Dan LaFontaine's car!
posted by Robot Johnny at 1:56 PM PST - 26 comments

I was the Duke of Hazzard. I lived it. Jerry Rushing inspired the 1975 movie Moonrunners (or Los Contrabandistas), which features Robert Mitchum's son and Spanky "Our Gang" McFarland and was the ur-text for the Dukes of Hazzard. "The characters in the show, Cooter, Uncle Jesse, Boss Hogg, Bo and Luke, and of course Daisy Duke are all based on real people from Jerry’s life." Rushing's car, Traveler, was named after General Lee's horse. [more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 12:37 PM PST - 7 comments

Athanasius Kircher was the 17th century's Jesuit version of the übergeek. His scholarly attentions were drawn to egyptology, astronomy, magnetism, languages, optics, music, geology, mathematics and many many other pursuits. The "dude of wonders" invented novel machines such as the mathematical organ and magnetic clock, established one of the first museums, published about 40 academic works (with beautiful accompanying illustrations) and was globally revered as one of his time's greatest intellectuals. He is also the main link in the Voynich manuscript mystery. [MI]
posted by peacay at 11:24 AM PST - 12 comments

Who are YOU?
posted by Gyan at 11:14 AM PST - 47 comments

"The music to The Wicker Man is quite extraordinary. I think it is probably the best music I've ever heard in a film. All the songs are so totally different from each other and yet they sum up the atmosphere of the scenes perfectly. What Paul Giovanni achieved is quite amazing and absolutely beautiful." -- Christopher Lee, July 2002
posted by ford and the prefects at 10:50 AM PST - 23 comments

In the Rough ..."Man has evolved throughout the ages ... Relationships, unfortunately, have not. After being kicked out of his cave, Brog discovers that living a bachelor's life is not all tha it's cracked up to be" quicktime. smaller version here.
posted by crunchland at 7:43 AM PST - 17 comments

On this day in 1974 French stuntman Philippe Petit walked a tightrope strung between the still-unfinished (and largely unrented) towers of New York's World Trade Center. In the course of a single morning, the unexpected -- and illegal -- actions of a daring young Frenchman and a few of his confederates would change public opinion about the troubled towers, which were courting financial disaster and facing a barrage of architectural and social criticism (pdf).
posted by three blind mice at 6:23 AM PST - 17 comments

Fractal animation videos. Tune in. Turn on. Drop in on a dripping skirling-swirling pulsating orgy of self-transforming recursive math. Some with fractal music. (Non-embedded mpeg-1 and mpeg-2 files, like God intended.)
posted by loquacious at 3:34 AM PST - 15 comments

Robin Cook , MP for Livingstone, has died whilst hill-walking in his native scotland. His principled stand on the Iraq war led to his resignation from the house of commons on the eve of the war. The UK has lost one of its most respected politicians.
posted by handee at 3:27 AM PST - 47 comments

Ibrahim Ferrer has passed. The 78 year old vaulted from relative obscurity - outside of Cuba, at least - to the forefront of the badly and over-generally named "International" or "World Music" scenes when he came out of retirement to perform with a number of past colleagues (including Compay Segundo and Ruben Gonzales) as Buena Vista Social Club. A film, directed by Wim Wenders, and an album made with the help of guitarist Ry Cooder cemented his position as one of the sweetest voices in Cuba's rich musical history in the west and elsewhere. He was generally considered one of the greatest masters of the traditional son and bolero styles.
posted by luriete at 12:44 AM PST - 36 comments