February 2000

Tuesday 2-29 - Leap Day

Although I'd been vaguely aware of how a certain varied demographic finds this hairstyle acceptable, even desirable; my perception wasn't focused until until I first read Scott use the term "mullet". (He just mentioned the German version recently.) Libby Copeland holds forth in the Washington Post about this coiffure, providing an etymology:

The slang use of the word "mullet" to describe a hairstyle seems to descend from "mullethead," whose first mention in print can be found in 1857, according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang. "Mullethead," meaning a "stupid, ignorant person," was first truncated to "mullet," meaning "fool," around the 1950s. No one is quite sure when "mullet" came to mean a particular hairstyle, but it seems clear the term is not a compliment.

Monday 2-28

These excerpts from Sam Smith's Great American Political Repair Manual demonstrate "The most important fact about race - it doesn't really exist."

Our concept of race comes largely from religion, literature, politics, and the oral tradition. It comes creaking with all the prejudices of the ages. It reeks of territoriality, of jingoism, of subjugation, and of the abuse of power.

Friday 2-25

The flood of messages just formed a virtual blockade. Like Critical Mass bike rides, in which hundreds of people on bicycles peddle down the middle of a busy street bringing cars to a standstill, the hacks restricted access to the e-commerce sites simply by taking up space. Besides, the real war on the Internet has already been fought and, for the most part, lost. World War Internet was a virtual coup d'état. The blood started flowing when the dot-coms figured out how to stage the hottest IPOs, and suddenly freedom and interactivity were about our right to have carefully monitored AOL chats about Time Warner movies.

Since it is what is outside the frame (the intention of the photographer, the reaction of the viewer) that counts legally, we are actually encouraged to fantasize an action in order to determine whether or not this is child pornography. Every photo must pass this test: Can we create a sexual fantasy that includes it? Such directives seem an efficient means for manufacturing a whole nation of pedophiles.

Thursday 2-24

Wednesday 2-23

• Providing good news to chocoholics, researchers at a major scientific conference said on Friday that a preliminary study had shown chocolate to have a positive impact on cardiovascular health.
• White chocolate did not have the same apparent beneficial effect on the heart as regular chocolate did.
• Most of the new research was sponsored by chocolate maker Mars, which said it was encouraged by the early results.
• Chocolate consumption in the United States lags far behind that in some other countries. Industry figures for 1999 show that Americans eat 12 pounds of the substance a year, compared with up to 35 pounds for Europeans.

Regular readers of Salon might've missed Tom Tomorrow's Schulz eulogy. "How strange that he passed away as his final strip ran in the weekend papers... the strip didn't die with him - he died with the strip."

Saturday 2-19

Friday 2-18

Screalmin' Jay Hawkins died - ironically, of an intestinal blockage. His "Constipation Blues" began with a spoken-word intro: "Up until now nobody's done a song about real pain."

Wednesday 2-16

The ingredients include sucrose, cocoa, citric acid and ammonium - which speeds up the nicotine "hit". Stephen Hesford, a Labour member of the committee, suggested later that the additives also included cynanide and lead.

Thursday 2-10

Found the repository of Phil Agre's Red Rock Eater essays - I'm catching up on his "News and Recommendations." He's some UCLA academic, writing's cerebral but very astute and agreeable. Two samples:

... the tendency of people who define themselves against something to simply invert whatever it is they oppose, rather than actually having a new idea. Conservatives and liberals do this to one another all the time. Each side wants you to split your conscience, suppressing one half and hyperdeveloping the other half to the point of distortion. As a result, both sides are half right and three-quarters wrong, and in symmetrically related ways. Once we recognize this, we recover a moral orientation to many topics that we had formerly associated with the raving of the moralists. But we also get a sense of proportion.

In discussing the commercial forces arrayed against the Internet's open platform model, for example in the proprietary networks of AOL and Time Warner, I messed up my biology a little. The mollusc that attaches itself to the insides of pipes and sucks out the nutrients that go by, reproducing until it clogs the pipe, is called a zebra mussel, not a tiger mussel. I was writing quickly and got my striped animals mixed up. If you search for "zebra mussel" on the Web, you will discover a minor industry of research on this pest, a nonnative species in the US where it is causing a lot of trouble, for example in the Great Lakes. I think it makes an excellent metaphor.

Wednesday 2-9

I think that what happens is that in the course of writing on a very regular basis, the membrane between conscious and unconscious gets sandpapered down paper-thin, so there can be, like, ruptures. And then this stuff emerges that the conscious mind could never make up. For me, the trouble with too much genre SF is that it's so obviously the product of the conscious mind. I'm just not very interested in that.

[on cyberpunk] Those days are over. I don't know what the equivalent would be, "biopunk," or something. You know, kids in the Haight doing their own genetic manipulation. [Laughs.] That kind of thing is closer. What cyberpunk has become, I think, is just kind of a tag for a particular flavor of popular culture. You can describe a video or a pair of trousers as "cyberpunk." It's not really happening. It's not really happening anymore.

Tuesday 2-8

Monday 2-7

[Freedom Party's] Haider has cribbed much of his platform from the conservative wing of America's Republican Party -- he has proposed a Gingrichian "Contract with Austria," advocated a Forbesian flat tax, and closely studied former California governor Pete Wilson's anti-immigration strategies.

Saturday 2-5

There was an article in yesterday's Post about the current state of Usenet - the author's Rob Pegoraro, whose verbiage provided me with the necessary info and encouragment to post my first web pages. My own assessment of those on-line forums (a few of which I check daily, as I've been doing since 1994) is the annoying commercial spam which had infected the newsgroups (back when the web was new) is now rare.

Thursday 2-3

Airport authorities have refused to even consider giving a permit to Yab Yum, saying it wouldn't fit with the overall philosophy of Schiphol.

Yab Yum offers an expensive menu of caviar, champagne and sex at plush locations in downtown Amsterdam and Rotterdam.

Wednesday 2-2

Courtesy the nearby More Like This weblog, learn about Web Bugs:

A Web Bug is a graphic on a Web page or in an Email message that is designed to monitor who is reading the Web page or Email message. Web Bugs are often invisible because they are typically only 1-by-1 pixel in size. They are represented as HTML IMG tags.

Tuesday 2-1

University of Alaska Poker Flat Research Range Aurora Information and Images. (Nice pictures, but the site's one of those all-too-common examples of web pages made irritating and user-hostile due to the unnecessary, innappropriate usage of frames.)

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