Black People Loot, White People Find?

Boing Boing.net showed two photos of people waist deep in water, one was a black person the other two whites. In each, a person appears to be dragging a bag or box or two of food or beverages.

The images were shot by different photographers, and captioned by different photo wire services. The Associated Press caption accompanying the image with a black person says he's just finished "looting" a grocery store. The AFP/Getty Images caption describes lighter skinned people "finding" bread and soda from a grocery store. No stores are open to sell these goods.

Perhaps there's more factual substantiation behind each copywriter's choice of words than we know. But to some, the difference in tone suggests racial bias, implicit or otherwise."

I'd Like To Give The World a ...$100 Laptop!

Nicholas Negroponte has a mission. It's to outfit the third world with $100 laptops to get everybody surfing and to put the power of the internet into the hands of the poor. Men's Journal included a story by Paul Hochman about this endeavor.

"Despite its low price, the computer is not a bare-bones throwaway. "It will be a Linux-based, full color, full-screen laptop," Negroponte says. 'It will be rugged, use a wind-up charger, be Wi-Fi and cellphone enabled, and have USB ports galore. "The design challenge for producing the computer, available in 2006, centered around reducing the price of the screen, which is responsible for half the cost of the average laptop. The solution: a mechanism that resembles a minature rear-projection television. The free Linux operating system also brought down costs."

Reverse Engineering the Boat Propeller

Reading through Men's Journal on the way to Boston in the car. Came across an amazing photo of a boat with the engine facing the wrong way. Volvo-Penta has come up with a revolutionary way to improve fuel efficiency, by facing the prop 'backwards." Accelleration is increased 15%, top speed bumps up 20%, and all in all it comes down to : Why didn't we think of this until now?


Volvo's newest reverse direction boat engine. 

"The entire system can also turn like a rudder, enabling both high speed turns and precision parking. Prices start at about $300,000 for the large inboards."

Shaking his Finger at the New Yorker

Lewis Lazare wrote scathingly last week in the Chicago Sun-Times about the New Yorker's recent all Target ad issue.

"But make no mistake. Target advertising executives must be laughing all the way to the image bank because of the ad placement coup they have pulled off, while New Yorker staffers, most notably Editor David Remnick, can only wipe the egg from their faces.

What is most stunning about the issue is the New Yorker's refusal to clearly flag any of the pages and pages of copyless Target illustrations as "advertisements." And in "ad" after "ad" it would be quite easy to confuse them for New Yorker editorial content, because all of them are done in a stylish format closely resembling the cartoons and illustrations for which the magazine has become famous.

Yet, perplexingly, the New Yorker seemingly went out of its way to boldly flag with the word "advertisement" a few small house ads in the issue that no one could misconstrue as anything but ads.

Whatever the damage done to the New Yorker's vaunted editorial integrity by its first-ever single-advertiser issue, Target, already perceived as a relatively classy discount retailer thanks to its savvy advertising profile, has had its image immeasurably burnished by the practically seamless blending of its ads into the New Yorker editorial product.

But the real kicker in what has to be counted among the most shameful moments in New Yorker history is the list of illustrators involved in the Target ad campaign that appears on page 87. The ad copy above that list simply says: "Our thanks to all the illustrators who brought this project to life."

Would it have been too much to ask for the New Yorker or Target to reference this as an "advertising project," just to provide a tiny bit of clarity somewhere in the magazine? Instead, we are left to conclude that maybe the New Yorker and Target had decided the project was, in fact, something more deceptive."

The Newest Hartshorne, model 2005. 

Will Play For Food or Money

Stepping past the entertainers in downtown Northampton, MA on Friday night. 

How Flat Is the World, Really?

Joshua Clover writes in opposition to Thomas Friedman's thesis that the world is flat in the Village Voice.

"If Friedman's no global economist, one might expect him to check in with one who works his beat: Fernand Braudel, say, or Giovanni Arrighi, highly regarded "world systems" scholars who study interlocking histories of capital accumulation. They agree, commonsensically, that with each cycle—Renaissance Italy to the Dutch East India Trading Company, Britannia to the United States' "Long Twentieth Century"—the relative power of a given era's leading military-industrial regime, compared to the rest of the world, has increased steadily. That is, they believe the exact opposite of The World Is Flat. Alas, Arrighi and Braudel appear in the book's index a combined total of zero times, 49 fewer than Microsoft.

But if Friedman's in search of common sense he needn't look far afield; this spring, The New York Times featured a series called "Class Matters." In the May 15 flagship essay, his colleagues Janny Scott and David Leonhardt noted that class mobility in the United States is now less likely than it has yet been in our lifetimes. This simple, empirical fact—the playing field is tilted, and rolling uphill is harder than ever—cannot coexist with the book's thesis."

Why He Won't Wash His Hands

Peter R made the case against handwashing on errtravel.com.

"Let's assume you wash up before leaving your hotel room. Consider the germs, dirt, cleaning product residues, and other contaminants you probably picked up on your way out of the hotel, getting into and out of the taxi, paying the driver with cash, taking your shoes off and putting them back on at the security checkpoint, eating at the airport restaurant, shaking hands with colleagues going off to other flights, and so on. (And then consider the germs you pick up if you happen to rub your eyes, touch your hair, blow your nose, scratch your arm or leg, etc. during this time.)

Now you enter an airport restroom, where there's often no door to touch and with urinals that automatically flush. You touch your clothing (pretty clean) and one part of your body (pretty clean, assuming good hygiene). (Plus note that urine is generally considered to be sterile.) And NOW you're worried about what's on your hands? I'd suggest that most times, your hands are not measurably dirtier when you leave the restroom, than when you entered.

In fact, it would probably be better if men washed their hands when ENTERING the restroom, so they don't expose a sensitive part of the body to all the stuff they've picked up in getting there!"

When the Wind Really Blows

Most are familiar with Hurricane Andrew, which slammed into the Florida coast in 1992. Andrew is the costliest hurricane on record. CBS News reported on this in Sept 2004.

"John Gurney of the National Weather Service says, “Hurricane Andrew dwarfs all other storms we've had: $26 billion in damage by Hurricane Andrew, parts of Florida were devastated by that storm.”

At $7 billion - about a quarter of the cost of Andrew, Hugo was the second most expensive storm in history. But when everything is totaled, last month's Hurricane Charley will probably bump Hugo out of the No.2 position.

A hurricane's devastation isn't always measured in dollars. The costliest hurricane in lives happened in the year 1900 in Galveston, Texas. At least 8,000 people died.

Weather 2000 meteorologist Jeffrey Schultz says, “Before the day of computers before the day of satellites, hurricanes were able to gather up a lot of strength and almost come out of nowhere and without any warning, bringing along a storm surge, high winds and heavy rains and actually killed a lot of people.”

The storm surge was responsible for the majority of those deaths, which is true of most hurricanes.

Gurney notes, “Historically, nine out of 10 fatalities have been related to storm surge. Storm surge is basically the rising of the water due to the hurricane's central pressure and also the winds pushing the water on shore.”

High winds aren't as deadly as you might think. For example, 1969's Camille packed winds at a whopping 190 miles per hour. It was one of only three Category 5 hurricanes to hit the U.S. this century. Yet neither Camille nor Andrew rank in the top 10 for deadliest storms on file."

Vietnamese Vignettes

Amanda Hesser, the NY Times magazine's food editor, wrote about a trip to Vietnam in Sunday's paper.

"Hoi An, which means "peaceful life union," is a sleepy place easily traversed on foot. Down an alley off of Phan Boi Chau, we saw a man who stood in the center of the road, tossing bricks up to the second floor where another man caught them. A house was being built, one brick at a time. When we strolled through the central market one afternoon, nearly all the vendors were napping, some lying on bags of rice, others with feet propped up on piles of dried beans, heaps of cucumber.

But the inevitable reorientation to tourists has begun, and it is hard to escape the town's many energetic tailors. More than one woman grabbed me by the arm and tried to drag me to her store.

I was more charmed by Xuan, a tailor on Hoang Dieu, who simply posted a sign in English, which read: "Stop looking, you've found the most honest, friendly, non-pressuring + accurate craftswoman in Hoi An. Surpassed all expectations with her creative flair. Gucci move aside!!!"

Hoi An's charm is its historic buildings, whose architecture was heavily influenced by immigrants from Japan and China. At Fujian Assembly Hall, a Chinese-style community center, a wooden model of a junk stood near sculptures of the man of the sun and the woman of the moon, two magical Chinese gods. At the back of the hall were altars to deities for beauty, wealth and social position.

A group of young men wearing T-shirts that said "Netnam" - the Microsoft of Vietnam - crowded in behind us. They were there to pray to Tan Tai Cong, the tycoon deity who determines people's financial future. If an entrepreneur's prayers are granted, he is supposed to return to thank the deity. If he fails to, it is certain death - or, at the very least, social ostracism."

We've Been Doing it Like Banshees--Now he's Yours

Augusten Burroughs is a brilliant writer who lives nearby in Northampton, MA. He wrote a column in this month's Details magazine about various kinds of f**cks.

"Turns out, the day the divorce had become final, Amanda and her now ex-husband had spent the afternoon in bed, in what was now Amanda's home. "We've been f**king like banshees," she said, "We've been meeting up at lunch. At hotels." Amanda detailed hours of determined felatio and crusty french bread spread with Brie. "When we were married, we never had sex in the shower. Now? Let me tell you that the man will never think of hair conditioner the same way again."

"That evening, Amanda called the home of her ex-husband and spoke to the girlfriend, the mother of the other baby. And she said, "I just wanted you to know that your boyfriend has been f**king me every day for three weeks. And he's just today told me that he loves me and wants to come home. But I don't want him, and I'm officially giving him to you."

Amanda had successfully pulled off the Revenge f**k."

Less Destruction in the Amazon for the Year

Good news came out of Brazil from the AP yesterday.

"The destruction of the Amazon rain forest has slowed dramatically this year, the government said, but environmentalists said it was too soon to celebrate and urged caution with the statistics.

Preliminary data indicate that 3,551 square miles of rain forest was destroyed between August 2004 and July 2005, the Environment Ministry said Friday. The figure was half the area the ministry initially said was razed the previous year a total that was later revised upward to 10,190 square miles.

The ministry attributed the decline to a stronger police presence in the Amazon and tougher fines for illegal deforestation. Last year, the government launched a $140 million plan to reduce Amazon destruction.

Environmental defenders applauded the decline in destruction but warned that many factors including an off-season for farming may have contributed to a one-time drop.

A sharp decline in international soy prices has prompted less soy planting in Brazil, the world's second-largest producer after the United States. Expanding soybean plantations are a big cause of Amazon destruction."

The Beach by the Seine Will Have to Suffice

The number of French vacationers has risen continuously, growing from an estimated 30 percent of the population in 1950 to more than 70 percent in the early eighties, Froidure said. CNN Travel had this sad story in today's editions.

"After stagnating for about two decades, these numbers appear on the decline. Nearly four out of every 10 French people don't go on vacation -- nearly half of them because they can't afford it, according to a 2004 study by the Tourism Ministry.

All European nations guarantee employees between four and five weeks' paid vacation a year. The United States and Australia are the only industrialized countries without national minimums on the length of vacations, according to the International Labor Organization.

The French average seven weeks of paid vacation a year -- two more than the country's labor laws stipulate. They work an average of 1,441 hours per year, compared with 1,661 hours for the British, and 1,824 for Americans, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reports.

In August, France all but shuts down. In Paris, so many shops, restaurants and pharmacies close that those staying open often put up signs: "We're here in August."

But things are changing. The number of people unable to get away is on the upswing, and worried officials are starting to respond.

For a fourth year, Paris has transformed a 3.5-kilometer (2.1-mile) stretch of the right bank of the Seine into a temporary beach, trucking in tons of sand and palm trees and drawing hoards of well-oiled, bikini-clad stay-at-homes.

Last year, a record 3.9 million people -- Parisians and tourists alike -- visited the riverside beach."

The Gaulic Dismay: "We were Robbed"

The New Yorker's August 22 'all Target ads issue' included among the creative uses of the red and white bullseye, a look at the sour mood in France by Adam Gopnik. He writes.

"When the name "London" was announced, a punch-in-the-stomach silence struck Paris. The French Olympians insisted that the British has somehow cheated, or failed to show "fair play"--an idiom borrowed from English and used regularly in French. Almost unbelievably, Bernard Delanoe, the green-gay mayor of Paris, was still making the accusations of English trickery and cheating four days after the truly horrible news from London arrived---a failure of decency and common sense that had left-wing newspaper Liberation, a natural ally, lecturing him on the meaning of 'sore loser' and reminding its readers that no instance of British Olympic treachery has even vaguely been discovered."

Further in the story, Gopnik discusses the French tendency to throw out whoever was the incumbent. 'veering wildly from the left to the right side of the road, like Cary Grant trying to drive while drunk in North by Northwest. 'We and North Korea are the only countries left that still have a military parade on their national holiday,' adds Alain Minc, of the Le Monde newspaper, who says the stock market in France, despite all the naysayers, beat out New York, London and the rest of the world in gains this summer.

Would You Pay Half a Buck for A Short Story?

David Utter writes in WebProNews about Amazon's new Short Story Shorts.

"For less than the price of a Coke Zero, customers can purchase short stories by a selection of published authors.

It's an experiment in little payments for little stories. 49 cents will gets the buyer a dozen pages by John Twelve Hawks, or 14 by medical thriller author Robin Cook. Established authors reign in Amazon.com's Shorts pages.

Amazon Shorts offers works in several genres:
• Biography & Memoirs
• Literature & Fiction
• Mystery & Thrillers
• Nonfiction & Essays
• Science
• Science Fiction & Fantasy

The online retailer delivers the works in digital format. Customers can receive PDF, HTML, or an emailed text version of the short. Shorts purchases remain in an Amazon customer's 'digital locker' for future retrieval.

The works offer a way to take an inexpensive look at an established character like F. Paul Wilson's "Repairman Jack," in 33 pages for 49 cents. For an established author, the program offers a gateway for readers unfamiliar with their work to get interested in purchasing and reading longer works in published form.

Currently, Amazon only wants to hear from published authors who want to be considered for the Shorts program. It will be interesting to see if they open the program to a wider pool of writers, and if Amazon can grow the body of Shorts beyond its current numbers."

Takes a Lotta Time to Write Reality Shows

On his first day as a story assistant for the reality TV series "Renovate My Family," Zachary Isenberg said, his bosses made an unusual request: Fill out your time card for the next three weeks of work.

Isenberg was puzzled. How could he estimate his hours before he worked them?

"They said, 'It's crazy in production and the accountants need the paperwork right now,' " the 32-year-old writer recalled. So Isenberg, who hoped that the job would further his prospects in TV, did as he was told.

Thus allegedly began a 2 1/2 -month ordeal — marked by interminable workdays spent in overheated, cramped offices — that is part of the basis for a lawsuit filed Tuesday by Isenberg and nine other writers and editors on seven reality TV shows.

Reality TV producers have disputed allegations that their employees toil in sweatshop conditions. They say writing for a reality show, which often involves plotting out story lines and editing interviews as much as writing dialogue, isn't the same as working on a scripted program.

Guild officials contend, however, that writers for reality TV play an integral role and deserve similar benefits to those enjoyed by their peers in movies and scripted television.

Joined by Petrie and other guild officials, Isenberg and two other plaintiffs held a news conference Wednesday. Isenberg described conditions on "Renovate My Family" as "unbearable." Working as many as 80 hours a week left him "so dazed all the time I never had a chance to rest or recuperate," he said.

To meet the deadline, Isenberg recalled, he found himself working six days a week, often until 10 p.m. Occasionally, the writers would stay past midnight to screen footage for Fox executives. Isenberg said one story assistant was so distraught after working 28 hours straight that she broke down in tears and had to be sent home.

"Everybody wanted to do a good job and work hard," Isenberg said, "so people felt very frustrated and angry."

Through it all, Isenberg continued to receive the same pay, about $900 a week. Under state labor laws, the suit alleges, he and his fellow writers should have received several thousand dollars in overtime pay.

After 2 1/2 months, Isenberg quit. He is now working on another reality TV show.

"It was a difficult choice," he said. "I'm not a quitter. But they treated me like I was nothing." The LA Times' Richard Verrier reported this story today.

Dining on Gino's Chicken to Honor the Man

Gino Piccin is a legendary salesman who taught me many things about the business. He was in the news recently, being honored by his fellow Dante clubbers in West Springfield, Tom Shea wrote about him in today's Republican. Gino's famous chicken with herbs will be cooked up by his brother Dino, at a Sept 9 Supper in Gino's honor. He is battling leukemia, but his spirits are good, and the treatment is working. I remember Gino used to have one finger that was cut off, at the top knuckle, he said it happened in his dad's bakery, the Venetian.

I met Gino in 1980, and he taught he how to sell Val-pak direct mail advertising. We had a memorable time once when we went to a convention on Cape Cod with our girlfriends. We went deep sea fishing in Buzzard's bay, got sun tanned and drank a lotta beers and made it back to Western Mass by 2 am Sunday night. It was a dreamy, fun four-day weekend.

Throughout the years I run into Gino from time to time, and we always laugh and both fondly recall our earlier days. He would always say, "after you've got the sale, get out!...don't hang around and mess it up." He bought and sold Val-Pak franchises, and bounced back twice working for competitors, selling the same concept of coupons by mail. Gino is a wonderful man, and I wish him the best.

What We Really Want

Attention is becoming the holy grail of mankind, the thing we most strive for but get the least. I predict that there will be a surge in demand for someone's full and undivided attention...and a valueing and delineation of this. This special thing will be what advertisers crave but rarely ever get.

Split multitaskers are never focusing on just one thing these days. They talk on the phone while browsing the web, chat in IM while writing in Word. Those times when you get someone's FULL attention are becoming rare...and valuable.

Today as I am typing and reading stories on the web, the tv in the background is churning out a dramatic urban nighttime soap opera. A story set during the Iraq war, with soldiers, and embeds, and bad guys who wear black or red hoods.

Paying attention some day will count for much more than it does now.

Travel Vandals Invading Venice

Venice illustrates some of the complicated political and economic issues involved in tourism. The city receives 16.5 million tourists a year, most of whom shuffle down the main route from St Mark's Square to the Rialto Bridge. The latest plague there is the cruise ships. Forbe's Anna Somers writes in the latest issue.

"They come through the deep-water channel that has been carved across the lagoon and is one of the reasons why this is turning from shallow water in to something closer to open sea conditions. This contributes to the flooding that is undermining the survival of the city, but the town council dares not close the Port of Venice to big ships for the jobs that would be lost.

These cruise ships disgorge hundreds upon hundreds of tourists, most of whom go to Saint Mark's Square and feed the pigeons, a not so minor ecological problem in itself. Venice cannot take this number of people, let alone any increase, and remain tolerable for the permanent residents, and so the population goes down, year on year: from 150,000 in the 1960s to 60,000 today.

The easy money from the visitors has corrupted the locals to the extent that they even serve up bad food in the restaurants--something that goes against every Italian's natural instinct--because they have learned to despise their clients. After all, what does it matter if somebody complains; there are plenty more to take his place. And so the city dies, spiritually and physically.

A gorilla-tracking permit in Uganda costs $250, which has led to gorillas being treated with much more respect by the locals, quite apart from the revenue generated. In West Virginia, a white-water rafting tax is collected from everyone who goes on commercial rafting expeditions. The fee goes to studying the ecological effect of the rafting and cleaning up the river banks several times a year.

There should be a charge to visit Venice, although with the same kinds of concessions that museums give to students and the old. Through imposing or withholding charges, you could encourage tourists to go off the beaten track and thus spread the numbers around. It should be cheaper, for example, to visit the whole of the Louvre, but without the Mona Lisa, than to see just the Mona Lisa. If it is free to visit Bologna, a wonderful town of medieval towers, great art and the best food in Italy, but which has never been on the Grand Tour circuit, then the busloads may decide to go there rather than Florence, where a charge should again be levied.

Lastly, tourists should better educate themselves about where they are going, so that they respect it more and get more out of it. Slower, better informed travel, with the readiness to put something back in the way of direct contribution to improving and protecting the experience is the way to be a tourist."

A Tiny Town Kinda Tale

The Boston Herald editorial staff wrote a doozer today, on their website.

"So does anyone think Aramark Concessions went to the Yellow Pages and by chance picked a security firm owned by a Suffolk court official who also happens to have a sister on the Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission?

No? Well, that's what's wrong with this whole business, which is beginning to smell worse than a keg of stale beer.

It's no secret how this town works. Why should the folks who pump the beer at Fenway hire some Joe Schmoe without connections? What's the point? Maybe hiring a firm owned by Suffolk County Register of Probate Richard P. Iannella and his wife doesn't guarantee a thing. And maybe sister Suzanne Iannella does indeed recuse herself as one of three ABCC commissioners when any matter involving Fenway Park comes up. But community activists insist she was quite interested in Red Sox plans to use Yawkey Way as an outdoor beer garden, which doesn't exactly sound like a hands-off arrangement to us.

Then there's the register himself, who can't seem to remember how long his firm has held the Fenway contract to help oversee alcohol sale compliance. Iannella told Herald reporter Kevin Rothstein he got the contract last year. Aramark officials say the firm was hired three years ago.

And how an allegedly full-time court official finds time to run a full-time business is another intriguing question. (Gosh, those nights and weekends must be brutal.)

This is a deal court officials and the state Ethics Commission need to take a closer look at."

Like the Song Says, Women ARE Smarter!

A smart woman named Cindy emailed me this story from the International Herald Tribune by Thomas Fuller.

"Christopher Clarke, the president of a headhunting company cites studies showing that women are better at performing many things at once, or multitasking, and that they have more sophisticated emotional intelligence, like being able to recognize another person's feelings more accurately than men.

"There's a lot of evidence that says that women are superior in evaluating people, in managing their ego, in calming aggression in others," Clarke said in an interview. "These are precisely the characteristics you need in a modern corporation."

Clarke said companies seemed more interested in hiring top-level female executives, especially after the scandals at companies like Enron, Parmalat, Tyco and WorldCom. These companies might have avoided "aggressive types of behavior," Clarke said, if they had had more women as directors.

The most recent data show a small increase in the percentage of women on corporate boards, to 8.2 percent today from 7.1 percent in 2003, based on a survey of 1,600 companies worldwide. The sharpest increases have been in Scandinavia.

Clarke says it is in companies' interest to recruit more women into their boardrooms because more diversity means broader perspectives and "better decisions."

"The days of the dominant 800-pound gorilla steel magnates who built huge monopolies by roughriding over everybody are gone," he said. Traditional corporate executives are like dominant male apes who have to collude with allies to cast rivals out of the troop, he wrote.

"As we share 98 percent of our genes with the great apes," Clarke wrote, "it is no surprise that in today's boardrooms we can observe much similar behavior."

Yippee! Good News for Newspapers' Websites

The Internet has proved to be a moneymaker for traditional newspapers, as they ring up big-time online ad revenue. David Utter reported today in Web Pro News.

"Quiet the carillons and stop the procession. Newspapers aren't quite dead yet. Readership of the printed page may be down, but the online versions have pulled in over $500 million in ad revenue for the second quarter of 2005, according to MediaPost.

The Newspaper Association of America was cited as noting a jump in ad revenue of 29 percent from the same period last year. Overall, ad revenue for the papers only grew 2.8 percent from last year.

2005 online ad revenues for papers could see a figure of $1.4 billion if forecasts by eMarketer prove correct. Newspapers have been seeing this growth come at the expense of print advertising, a much more costly medium."

Hey, What About the Wedding?

Agents seized $700,000 in fake U.S. postage stamps and blue jeans worth several hundred thousand dollars, FBI Deputy Director John Pistole said, in a report on AOL News today. They also got 42 million in viagra, meth amphetamine, and fake cigarettes. Eight of those charged were arrested on their way to the fake wedding, called for 2 p.m. Sunday, off the Jersey coast. Operation Royal Charm was named for the yacht.

The affair was seven months in the making, and the bride and groom were actually undercover FBI agents who worked with the accused smugglers for several years, said Christopher J. Christie, the U.S. attorney in New Jersey.

"Invitations were sent out, a date was given and RSVPs were received from different points around the world," Christie said at a Justice Department news conference.

"One guest even brought a pair of gold Presidential Rolex watches," New Jersey FBI Special Agent in Charge Leslie G. Wiser Jr. told reporters in Newark.

They were assured transportation would be provided to the yacht. They were taken into custody instead. Some of the men arrested Sunday appeared in U.S. District Court in Camden, New Jersey, on Monday in clothes that looked appropriate for a wedding.

The containers carried phony manifests identifying the goods inside as toys, rattan furniture and other items, Richter said.

Will the Handles Fall Off?

Philip Wartel is out of business, and after two years he has nothing good to say about the funeral directors in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts who ran him into the ground. Wartel opened Pioneer Valley Casket Co just a year ago, and has faced the wrath of the funeral directors who didn't like him undercutting their prices by $1500-2000 per casket. Today's Recorder newspaper details the sad story.

"David Quinn Sr., of Kidder Funeral Home in Northfield,
confronted a grieving widow at her husbands wake and told her he hadn't signed earlier in the day for receipt of the casket they'd purchased from Wartel because "I won't be responsible if the handles fall off or the bottom falls out after you leave. You chose to buy the casket elsewhere; you should be here to sign for it when it arrives."

Wartel said the incident was a violation of the funeral home rule that says homes can't require purchase of a casket along with purchase of other funeral goods and services. Another funeral director said Wartel's caskets 'were seconds, they squeaked, and they were faded and/or damaged, and some were used before.

Under 1994 federal rules, people can provide their own caskets and can request a preprinted price list for services and products from funeral homes.

No More Lectures. Only Conversations

Chris Waddle, director of the Knight Community Journalism Fellows writes in the Annistonstar.com, delivering more bad news to newspapers.

"Modern media advocates from the American Press Institute love to stump newspaper executives by asking if they can identify Craig Newmark. Few can. Too bad. He’s the inventor of craigslist.org, the highly successful classified ad alternative spreading like a virus on the Internet. When editors asked the head of Knight Ridder newspapers what keeps him awake at night, he answered “online advertising.”

It’s not just the loss of revenue. Buying stuff online is a major activity of the young, non-readers of newspapers. Ads are news too. So attract the youthful pocketbook and you’ve got a new customer for a virtual information community.

Most newspapers try to please existing readers instead of potential ones, according to journalist and scholar, David T. Z. Mindich in “Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don’t Follow the News.”

Seeking different readers is why multiculturalism is so important in the newsroom.

When a news organization consists of white people speaking to white people about black people, as an example, its influence on public affairs such as school reform may diminish in a multi-cultural community of communities. Economic influence with advertisers may diminish if ads don’t reach young consumers.

The generational shift means editors can no longer talk down to readers or define news without consulting readers. No more lectures. Only conversations."

Beefing About Life in Uganda

Marie Javins has written a lot for GoNOMAD and she has moved to Uganda. Here is a slice of her life there with HM, her partner.

"Sunday mornings are the quietest time at Paraa, the small ranger/tourist village at Murchison Falls National Park where I share H.M.s home. Mornings are beautiful, as he has set up the bed (covered in a mosquito net) on the screened verandah, which faces east.

Hippos grunt from the Nile, which is located right down the bushy hill. Birds chirp cheerfully and relentlessly. The eleven warthogs that roam the grounds battle for pack supremacy, using strange grunts and wheezes as war cries. The sunrises are frequently dramatic, and thanks to the 7 a.m. Nile ferry that acts as a daily alarm clock, we never miss them.

H.M. works daily from 7:30 to 5:30, but no one works from noon to 2 as this is the hottest part of the day. He comes home and lays in the hammock while I cower in the shade of the house, hunched as usual over the laptop and whatever comic book emergency I am dealing with at the moment.

Food is usually one thing cooked in a variety of ways: just beef. Beef, beef, and more beef. It’s good and cheap and plentiful in Uganda. I foolishly showed up in Masindi the first time and said to H.M.: “Where can I buy some chicken breasts?”

He pointed to a live caged chicken by the side of the road.

“There is your chicken.”

At this point, I decided to stick with his steaks he’d bought in Kampala. I don’t know how to kill or butcher a chicken. And vegetarian options are limited to using whatever is on sale in Masindi that week. Right now, avocados are big and mango season has passed us."

Calvin Broadus Livin' Large

Calvin Broadus is everywhere. The famous rapper by the name of Snoop Doggy Dogg has made the mainstream....you see him on Chrysler commercials, teeing off with Lee Iacocca, and you read about his new youth football league, that's poaching all of the best coaches from the other kids leagues. His rail thin body is lithe and his stoned out visage is compelling.

Snoop is also an accomplished pornographer, he appears and produces films wearing clothes with women who are naked. Snoop has a demeanor that appeals to middle class whites, even though some of his songs such as "control yo ho" can grate on anyone's sense of woman's rights and feminists should probably hate him.

I find it fascinating that Snoop has climbed up to such a mainstream place that he can call up Chrysler and demand a free car...and they send him one!

While Googling the Snoopster I found a court case from 2001 where two recordings were sampled. Damn if that first one (the complainer) didn't sound just like Snoop's song (the defender). But they both took their melody from Otis Redding's Hard to Handle, published decades earlier.

Pity the Man behind the Pump

Jay Fitzgerald writes in today's Boston Herald that gas station owners are hurting despite the huge price increases we are seeing at the pumps.

"Huge rivals such as Wal-Mart and Stop & Shop that now sell gasoline at cheaper prices to draw customers into theirlarge stores. But the biggest current problem for gas-station owners is that the more prices rise at the pumps, the worse the cash flow is for station owners. Gas stations don't charge motorists a percentage of pump prices to cover their costs. They usually charge from 5 cents to 12 cents a gallon.

But they still have to shell out tens of thousands of dollars up front each time a huge truck tanker pulls in to refill underground tanks at stations.

``The margin in this business is at its worst point in history,'' said Paul O'Connell, executive director of the New England Service Station and Automotive Repair Association and owner of the Lunenburg Exxon station.

``It's killing them,'' said Paul Fiore, executive vice president of the Service Station Dealers of America and Allied Trades, referring to the multitude of pressures on small service-station owners.

The numbers bear that out.

Tens of thousands of service stations have closed in recent decades across the nation, industry figures show. According to the Massachusetts Standards Division, there were about 7,500 licensed fuel sellers in the state in 1995 – and today that number is about 6,500."

What it Takes to Get 'Em In the Seats

Symphony orchestras are becoming a hard sell to time pressed, distracted Americans. But some orchestras have begun introducing novel ways to stem the outgoing tide..with martini bars, free buffet lines, speed dating and special event tee shirts.

The rub is that the biggest drop is in the subscriber numbers. People are willing to go, but in the true spirit of 'bowling alone' won't subscribe for the whole series. These are the lifeblood of the symphonies.The NY Times included this long account in Sunday's arts section.

Another factor is that there are many more concerts being performed than ten years ago, without a corresponding rise in concertgoers. Too much product.

But there has been success in adding elements of other popular pasttimes, like video screens projecting the orchestra members flailing their arms and close ups of them playing their instruments.

Have More Kids--Please!

Some villages in South Korea "haven't heard babies crying in 18 years," said Lee Kwon Hee, an official who was quoted in today's NY Times. So the country has changed its national health care plan to cover reversing vasectomies and tubal ligations, in order to spur more couples to have more children.

"In South Korea, the decline has been so precipitous that it caught the government off guard. Policies designed to discourage more than two children, like vasectomies and tubal ligation, were covered. 'In the next two or three years, we won't be able to increase the birthrate,' said Park Ha Jeong, of the Health ministry. 'But we have to stop the decline or it will be too late.

Unlike many western countries, Korea doesn't have immigrants coming in who have more babies. Some of the elementary schools are down to a tenth of the number of students as in the 1970s. When one young couple in the village of Seokdong celebrated the birth of twins, they were given $1100 as a cash incentive.

More of the Good, Less of the Bad

My mother Valerie visited us last week, and showed me a column by David Brooks from the NY Times. Apparently there has been a huge increase in virtue in America.

According to Brooks, family violence in all forms is way, way down. Violent crime overall is down by 55% since 1993, and violence by teens is down 71%, according to the Justice dept. Drunk driving fatalities have declined by 38% (this has to be related to airbags, though), even though we're driving 81% more. Even our consumption of hard liquor is down, by over 30 percent. Teen pregnancy has also declined, more than 28%, also down are teenage births.

Brooks says we're in the midst of a moral revival, despite our media which prefers to play up the negative. Nice to read it, even though it feels made up.

Don't Have a Quarter for the Meter? Use Your Cell

Donna Goodison writers in today's Boston Herald about an ingenious idea. "It could answer Boston's pesky parking meter woes.

Instead of fishing for a quarter to feed the meter - or jamming it - dial your cell phone. Representatives of a Finnish company were in the Boston area this week pitching its cashless cell-phone parking technology, first introduced in high-tech Nordic countries in 2001. Nextpark Corp.'s system - billed as fraud- and vandal-proof - eliminates the need for parking meters or ticketing machines altogether.

After finding a parking space, drivers with a Nextpark account use their cell phone or other wireless device to dial the Nextpark service number. They select the corresponding parking spot and how long they expect to park.

When their time is about to run out, Nextpark makes a call or sends a text message to their cell phones. Drivers can then opt to extend the time by phone - no need to dash out of a business meeting to put more quarters in the meter.

Parking enforcement officers are equipped with a mobile phone or special hand-held device that can download data to monitor against scofflaws. It was recently reported that more than 25 percent of the city's 7,000 parking meters are out of service on a given day.

It Was a Very Good Year

Lakshmi Mittal had a good year. He made $19 billion in profits from his, the world's largest steel company, by acquisitions of other mills. Forbes gave details about this $25B Rich Dude.

"Mittal's Wharton-educated son, Aditya, is the group's president and chief financial officer. But it was Mittal's other child, his daughter Vanisha, who attracted the spotlight last June.

Mittal threw a lavish wedding party for 23-year-old Vanisha, who married Amit Bhatia, a Delhi-born investment banker based in London. More than a thousand guests were flow in from around the world. The invitations were 20 pages thick and encased in silver, and the festivities lasted five days spread across some of France's most famous settings, including the chateau built for Nicolas Fouquet, King Louis XIV's finance minister. Indian press reports tagged the cost at $60 million.

Mittal is no stranger to extravagance. He paid $127 million for a 12-bedroom mansion in London's tony Kensington Palace Gardens, a record price for a private residence. The home was formerly owned by Formula One racing boss Bernie Eccleston.

But Mittal and his family can well afford it. Mittal Steel is planning to pay a 40-cents-a-share dividend this year. Mittal and his family own 97% of the company, which would give them a $260 million payout, one of the largest dividends ever paid to a family-run business. Going forward, the family is understood to be diversifying by selling 11% of the company for $2 billion, reducing their holding to 88%.

Apple's iBod can't afford iPod

Carla M. Collado writes in today's Boston Herald:

"The woman behind the striped bikini silhouette that launched millions of iPod sales says she sees herself everywhere but still can't afford one of the digital tune toys. Mandy Coulton, 26, a dancer and nanny from Los Angeles, was paid $1,500 to have her iBod photographed for Apple's highly successful ad campaign. However, that still wasn't enough for her to get one of the popular, white ear-budded gizmos.
I would like one – but $400 for an iPod is too much for me at the moment. I can't justify spending that much money when I have day-to-day stuff to pay for like the car and rent,'' she told The New York Post.

Meanwhile, in addition to dancing, Coulton, who lives with her husband, Chris, in Sherman Oaks, Calif., has to work as a part-time nanny to pay the bills.
``Nannying puts the money in my pocket. My dance jobs are very sporadic,'' Coulton told the Post, ``But I'm not bitter or anything.''

Coulton auditioned alongside hundreds of other people in Los Angeles last March, and was one of just 10 chosen by Apple executives for the campaign. Apple has sold more than 20 million of the music players since its introduction in 2001."

Can Jane be Jane without Jane?

"The magazine should be called 'Brandon,' after the new editor. Jane doesn't exist. Jane has left the building," says Robin Steinberg, director of print services for Publicis Groupe's MediaVest..."I will definitely monitor to understand the audience's reaction," she adds. Today's Wall Street Journal weighed in:

Tradition says that magazines named for their editors tend not to survive for any significant period of time without those editors," says Roberta Garfinkle, director of print strategy at TargetCast tcm. Indeed, Mirabella, a women's magazine launched by former Vogue editor Grace Mirabella, lasted five years after Lagardère's Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. acquired it from News Corp. in 1995. Ms. Mirabella gave up her role as editor in chief of the magazine before it was sold to Hachette.

But some media buyers wonder whether Jane, whose ad pages have been relatively flat lately, may be better off with Ms.Brandon Holley. Jane's total paid circulation for the first six months of 2005 was off 4.5%. Although newsstand sales were up 15.6% for the period, that came only after Jane cut its newsstand cover price.

Fairchild is working to bolster Ms. Holley. The publisher took out a six-page ad in its own Women's Wear Daily touting the editor and playing up her "Jane" personality. "Music-obsessed? Check," reads the ad, which says of Ms. Holley, "She's so Jane." Fairchild planned to stencil Jane-related phrases on sidewalks outside certain advertisers and media-buying firms last night.

Let's Drop Dropping the F-bomb

In May a New York television reporter who apparently thought he was off the air lit into two men who had intruded on his shot, broadcasting a word-bomb to the five boroughs. From the New York Times Style section July 31

"This month a card player at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas made his name by launching a word-bomb across the table early in the tournament.

And all that art, if you want to call it that, reflects life, if you want to call it that. In the schoolyards kids bomb the pencils, the books and the teachers' dirty looks. Outside office buildings smokers bomb their bosses, and nonsmokers bomb the smokers. On the streets T-shirts bomb milk in favor of marijuana, bomb the space between the words New York and City and even bomb you just because "we're from Texas."

In the workplace, where so many of us spend our time, we are on the verge of a neo-Victorian age," said Anthony J. Oncidi, a Los Angeles labor lawyer with the firm Proskauer Rose. "Anybody can now take the position that they are subjected to a hostile work environment, and a hostile work environment can be made up of profanity."

In one case, now before the California State Supreme Court, an assistant who worked in the writing room for the television show "Friends" based a sexual harassment complaint in part on profanity. A lower court had said that a defense of "creative necessity" may apply, Mr. Oncidi said.

In advertising you hear it all the time," said Linda Kaplan Thaler, the chief executive of the Kaplan Thaler Group, an advertising agency, and a conscientious objector to word-bombing. "This is an agency that is run by women, and we weren't brought up to talk like truck drivers."

Truck drivers, sailors or pirates; it doesn't matter. The stand-ins for riffraff change, but plenty of people are still genuinely offended by profanity, not posing. James Bovino, chairman of the real estate investment firm Whiteweld, Barrister & Brown, says he watches only G-rated movies and has fired people for cursing. That's walking the walk, and it sends a message as unmistakable as a bow tie's."

Here, You Want More Coffee?

Jackie Mason on his least favorite coffee shop, Starbucks.

"You want coffee in a regular coffee shop, they'll give you all the refills you want until you drop dead. You can come in when you're 27 and keep drinking coffee until you're 98, and they'll start begging you: "Here, You want more coffee?" Do you know that you can't get a refill at Starbucks? A refill is a dollar fifty, two refills $4.50...

'And there's no chairs in those Starbucks. Instead, they have these high stools. You ever see these stools? You haven't been on a chair that high since you were two. Seventy-three year old Jews are climbing and climbing to get to the top of the chair. And when they get to the top, they can't even drink the coffee because there's 12 people around one little table, and everybody is saying 'excuse me, excuse me...then they can't get off the chair. Old Jews are begging Gentiles, "Mister, could you get me off this?"

Mind if I Brush?

Esquire Magazine has begun arriving in my mailbox, and I am usually impressed with their ribald mixture of anecdotes, intriguing photos and plain common sense. In this month's Seven Most Remarkable Things about Culture, they included this tale about the world's most famous blond.

"She was wearing a diaphanous, totally see-through black negligee, her feet were bare and she was holding a hairbrush in her hand. In a few minutes the interviewer arrived,and...Marilyn asked the woman if she minded if she brushed her hair. "Of course not," the woman replied, and when she looked up, Marilyn was brushing her pubic hair."

From Marilyn Monroe, photographer Eve Arnold's visual and anecdotal account of her experiences photographing the actress.

Pot Farms Destroying Sequoia Nat'l Park

Famed for the biggest trees in the world, Sequoia National Park is now No. 1 in another flora department: marijuana growing, with more land carved up by pot growers than any other park. Joe Robinson wrote about this in the LA Times.

"Parts of Sequoia, including the Kaweah River drainage and areas off Mineral King Road, are no-go zones for visitors and park rangers during the April-to-October growing season, when drug lords cultivate pot on an agribusiness-scale fit for the Central Valley.

"I've had meetings with law enforcement throughout the state, and everybody just sits there with their mouths open. Nobody can believe this has happened on the scale that it has," says William Ruzzamenti, a 30-year Drug Enforcement Administration official who heads up the Central Valley High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a program that spearheads drug investigations and has provided support to Sequoia and Kings Canyon.

Pot plantations have surged as Mexican-affiliated drug cartels adapt to increased border security since 9/11 and cash in on the rising price of high-grade weed, now more profitable than methamphetamine, according to investigators."

Fighting a Crowd for a $50 Laptop

An estimated 5,500 people turned out at the Richmond International Raceway in hopes of getting their hands on one of the 4-year-old Apple iBooks offered for $50 apiece recently. The Henrico County school system was selling 1,000 of the computers to county residents. New iBooks cost between $999 and $1,299. Kristen Gelineau of the AP reports on the fracas.

"Officials opened the gates at 7 a.m., but some already had been waiting since 1:30 a.m. When the gates opened, it became a terrifying mob scene.

People threw themselves forward, screaming and pushing each other. A little girl's stroller was crushed in the stampede. Witnesses said an elderly man was thrown to the pavement, and someone in a car tried to drive his way through the crowd.

"It's rather strange that we would have such a tremendous response for the purchase of a laptop computer _ and laptop computers that probably have less-than- desirable attributes," said Paul Proto, director of general services for Henrico County. "But I think that people tend to get caught up in the excitement of the event _ it almost has an entertainment value."

Wireless Dreams Coming True

A few years ago, cities wanted to be wired. Now it’s all about being wireless.
Tempe is at the forefront of what is going to be the next big thing in municipal oneupmanship: Making your entire city a WiFi hot spot. Tom Gibbons writes in the East Valley Tribune yesterday.

"Tempe likely will become the first city in the United States with border-to-border access to high-speed, wireless Internet.

And it looks like a pretty good deal for the city. The contractor, MobilePro Corporation of Bethesda, Md., is using city light poles and the like to attach the equipment. No charge to the city. MobilePro gets to showcase its wares.

When completed, visitors and residents with laptops with wireless capability will be able to access the Internet from anywhere in town. They will be able to view city and ASU Web pages free. For anything else, they’ll need an Internet Service Provider.

Other cities will follow quickly. Philadelphia plans to become the first big city with citywide wireless capability. The mayor of San Francisco wants every citizen to have it. City-wide wireless will be an issue in the upcoming New York mayoral election.

Yes, this will be the latest rage in the competition among cities."

Hurricane bearing down on a ship going the wrong way in a storm. 

Beer lugger. 

Wouldn't It Help to See a Photo on the Map?

David Utter in Web Pro News reports on the latest in search engine schemes. Showing actual photos of the blocks and stores you might find when you use their mapping features.

"Fargo, ND, made it onto the list of major cities getting the Block View treatment from Amazon's search engine, A9. The company has dispatched specially equipped trucks to take pictures of buildings as they pass by.

Oh yeah, they included places like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago as well. According to Pandia.com, A9's efforts will help that company as it begins to sell ads for Yellow Pages results. Those ads could be complemented by "click to call" links; searchers could instantly connect via VoIP to a business.

And the street level photos would be a boon for people who need driving directions. It's great to know where you're going, but even better will be seeing a picture of what you should expect to find at the end of the trip.

A9 has taken roughly 35 million pictures of those cities. Bigger rivals like Google and MSN have been implementing satellite photos into their mapping solutions. But A9 feels a street level view will be more useful to users.

A Recipe for Keeping Newspapers Alive

Michael Socolow, a professor at Brandeis, serves up a recipe for success, and explains some of why newspapers are in so much trouble in this article from the Baltimore Sun.

"Yet other key, but too often ignored, issues in the history of the newspaper business have played a role in the industry's problems. Very few Americans - or even journalists - realize that Congress passed, and President Richard M. Nixon in 1970 signed into law, the Orwellian-titled Newspaper Preservation Act. That law (essentially) allowed local newspaper monopolies to flourish throughout the country. In all but a handful of markets, dominant newspapers would employ tactics that in other industries would be considered restraint of trade in order to corner their local markets for newspaper advertising.

Joint operating agreements between newspapers that otherwise would have been competitors became legal. The cost certainty of operating in a noncompetitive environment allowed these "hometown" newspapers to grow fat with advertising revenue. New sections were added. Newspaper chains such as Gannett and Knight-Ridder scooped up these profitable properties around America. The chains grew accustomed to profit margins that would have been impossible to achieve in a truly competitive environment.

By desperately trying to serve its core - but dwindling - audience, the newspaper business is shortchanging that audience. Most newspapers are offering little more than a comfortable rehash of events that their consumers are already aware of. Instead, newspapers should be challenging their readers by providing difficult-to-obtain firsthand reports from around the world that are unavailable anywhere else. They should combine that reporting with bracing, counterintuitive commentary that would provoke thought and discussion in the civic arena."

Cindy's Impeachment Tour Stops in Crawford

Tom Engelhardt writes on tomdispatch.com about the phenomena of the Soldier's mother who is haunting Bush on his long Texas vacation.

"And then, if matters weren't bad enough, there was Cindy Sheehan. She drove to Crawford with a few supporters in a caravan of perhaps a dozen vehicles and an old red, white and blue bus with the blunt phrase "Impeachment Tour" written on it. She carried with her a tent, a sleeping bag, some clothes and evidently not much else. She parked at the side of the road and camped out - and the next thing anyone knew, she had forced the president to send out not the Secret Service or some minor bureaucrat, but two of his top men, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin.

For 45 minutes, they met and negotiated with her, the way you might with a recalcitrant foreign head of state. Rather than being flattered and giving ground, she just sent them back, insisting that she would wait where she was to get the president's explanation for her son's death. ("They said they'd pass on my concerns to George Bush. I said, 'Fine, but I'm not talking to anybody else but him'.")

She's been called up from the Id of his own war: a mother of one of the dead who demands an explanation, an answer, when no answer he gives will ever conceivably do; a woman who, like his neo-con companions, has no hesitation about going for the jugular. And, amazingly, she's already made the man flinch twice."

The War Is Over on the Happiest Day in History

From Garrison Keillor's wonderful poetry and writing website Writer's Almanac came this today.

"Today is the 60th anniversary of the day on which President Harry Truman announced that the Second World War had come to an end. You might argue that more human beings were happy on this day in 1945 than on any other day in history.

It was the worst war in history. An estimated 60 million people died; about two-thirds of them were civilians. In the United States, the war had been going on for three years and eight months. About one in every eight Americans served in the war—more than 16 million American soldiers. Virtually every American family had at least one member overseas. With 400,000 Americans killed, most families knew somebody who had died in the war, and the most American casualties had come in the last year of the war.

Most Americans had believed that the war was far from over. The first few battles on Japanese islands had been some of the bloodiest battles of the war. Military analysts were projecting horrific losses, casualty estimates in the hundreds of thousands. But after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese suddenly accepted terms of complete surrender. And the announcement was made on this day at about 7:00 p.m. The newswires carried the headline, "Japan Surrenders."
There were spontaneous celebrations and parades in every major city in America. In New York City, more than a million people filled the street, overflowing Times Square, the crowd stretching from 40th all the way up to 52nd streets. Factories blew their whistles. Air raid sirens went off. Ships and trains and cars honked their horns. Churches tolled their bells.

And one thing that commentators noticed at the time was that nobody shouted, "We've won the war!" or anything about triumph. They simply shouted, "The war is over!"

Under Size Me? Losing Weight at Mickie D's

Today's Boston Globe incuded this Associated Press story:

One person went so far as to make her own independent film about dieting at McDonald's. "Me and Mickey D" follows Soso Whaley, of Kensington, N.H., as she spends three 30-day periods on the diet. She dropped from 175 to 139 pounds, eating 2,000 calories-a-day at McDonald's.

Morgan used nutritional information downloaded from McDonald's Web site to create meal plans of no more than 1,400 calories a day. She only ate french fries twice, usually choosing burgers and salads. Those choices are a stark contrast with those made by Spurlock, who ate every menu item at least once.

At the end of the 90 days, she had dropped from 227 to 190 pounds.

"It feels great," she said. "Because, the truth of the matter is that beauty is power, and if you're fat, or your overweight, then people don't really take you seriously."

Dawn Jackson Blatner, a registered dietitian and spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, agreed that a low-calorie, McDonald's-only diet can help people lose weight but said it may not offer enough long-term variety. Whatever an individual does to lose weight, they need to do for the rest of their life, she said.

Morgan said she hasn't decided if she will stick with the McDonald's-only plan to reach her goal of 150 pounds. But she does have one complaint about McDonald's.

"If I could suggest anything to McDonald's, I would suggest the McMargarita," Morgan said. "Dine-in only, of course."

Americans to Bush: We're Outta There!

Frank Rich writes that the war is already over, but President Bush doesn't know it yet.

"What lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat in vietnam: some kind of negotiations, (in this case Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater disaster, but this administration long ago squandered the credibility needed to make the difficult case that more human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from continuing its descent into civil war and its devolution into jihad central.

Thus the president's claim on Thursday that 'no decision has been made yet' about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice president's preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its 'last throes.'
The country has already made the decision for Bush. We're outta there."

Gross Spam as "Comments" on my Blog!

I just opened my email to find comments posted about yesterday's post about Chinese Sweet Wormwood. BUT IT WAS SPAM! Some freakin' auto loan outfit put up 'comments' pitching new car loans....in the guise of blog comments. This is a sinister development, one which I hope can be stopped. I used Blogger's 'hide comments' button to trash the spam but I feel like they can creep back any time.

Bloggers, there must be a way to stop this...is this format just too tempting to marketers, is being able to get your spam message published on a highly ranked page worth such fraudulence? I will hide any of these if they creep in again.

A sultry and simmering August day. We are driving to Duxbury for a funeral for a friend's dad who passed away. Colby Hewitt Jr. was a gregarious, fun loving man who lived a long and happy life, and saw all of his children succeed, and bounced grandkids on his knees. I am sorry to say good bye to him and glad that I can honor my old friend Bill by showing up at his service, with my lady Cindy by my side. Rest in peace, Colby.

There's Something About Sweet Wormwood

Howard W. French writes in today's NY Times about the acres and acres of a new crop, called qinqhat, or sweet wormwood, that's become a huge cash producer in China--
Because Novartis is making anti-malarial drugs with its active ingredient.

"Even peasants closely associated with these efforts, however, say they are being kept in the dark about the drug's uses, and grumbled over what they said was the company's secretiveness.

Xu Qianmin, a farmer who gets his seeds from Holley, said his arrangements with the company prevented him from talking about the uses of sweet wormwood, probably, he said, because there may be more commercial hopes for the plant. Little by little, though, with his family gathered around in their simple farmhouse, he opened up.

"I hear there's a country in Africa with a population of 1.5 million people, and only 14 kilos of our qinghao cured all of their malaria," he said, touting his plants as a sort of miracle drug.

"Qinghao isn't only good for one disease," he added. "We've heard it can be made into 300 different medicines."

Asked for examples, he acted briefly as if he had committed an indiscretion, but then mused that treating cancer might be one of the drug's future uses.

"The company has found a way to make money, and they want to keep things a secret," Mr. Xu said, when asked why one needed to keep things quiet. "They don't want others to come in and steal their business. They want it for themselves."

An ad for Target by Andre Dubois. 

Just Don't Try to Buy it in Manhattan

Target is taking over the New Yorker next week, buying all available ad space. But they don't have any stores in Manhattan! New York Times' Stuart Elliot wrote.

"Many of Target's special ads are aimed at New York City for reasons that include a desire to burnish the image of its stores among fashionistas in the garment district and burnish the image of its corporate parent on Wall Street. There are five Target stores in three New York City boroughs: the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens; so far, to contradict a famous Lorenz Hart lyric, Target does not have Manhattan (or Staten Island).

Ms. Gralnek said she was aware that some Manhattan shoppers, seeing all the Target ads in a borough that has no Target stores, have expressed frustration.

"If it does make some people want a Target more, that's not a bad thing," Ms. Gralnek said, adding that they could "get to the other stores" in the outer boroughs or visit the 53 Target stores in the metropolitan New York area, including Long Island and New Jersey.

True, but is there a magazine called The Long Islander, or The New Jerseyan?

Filling the Gas Tank with Plants

Every week I get an email from E magazine. Sometimes these folks cry hysterically, such as when they claimed that every baby in the world is born polluted on the inside. But often they have good news about alternative ways to do things. Roddy Scheer reports today:

"Biofuels" such as ethanol and biodiesel account for only about three percent of all transportation fuel sold in the U.S., but they are coming on strong, with domestic consumption doubling just since 2001. With a little extra help from Congress in the form of strong biofuel incentives in the new omnibus energy bill, ethanol and biodiesel could eventually emerge as key players in the high-stakes fuel wars.

Biodiesel and ethanol are manufactured from ultimately renewable agricultural crops like sugar cane, soybean and rapeseed. Furthermore, since the fuels start their lifecycles as growing plants that absorb carbon dioxide, burning them up in automobiles does not contribute significantly to global warming. Biodiesel can run in standard diesel automobile engines.

So what's the problem, then? "For either the United States or Europe to replace just 10 percent of transport fuel using today's crops and technology would require around 40 percent of cropland," writes Newsweek. So, like many of the other promising alternatives to petroleum, biofuels are likely to serve as one of many choices to bridge the gap until a new energy economy becomes a reality."

The Boston Herald: GoNOMAD In the News

Today we finally saw the first press mention as a result of the Associated Press story filed on Monday. The Boston Herald ran the short item in their "Take Offs" section, the story said in part..."Off the beaten path Far from the world of all-inclusive resorts, motorcoach tours, and standard top-10 itineraries is a totally different type of travel.

Experience places and cultures through activities interactions and tourism that involves doing instead of just seeing. To help you plan such a trip, go to www.gonomad.com. You'll find a searchable database of unusual lodgings, events, tours activities and opportunities for working, studying and volunteering around the world, from weaving in Guatemala to staying with a family in Africa, to helping a community in Nepal.

Other recommendations from the website include a relatively affordable trip to Antarctica--$3000--and a trek to Bolivia to hunt down the legend of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who may have ended their days there, (depending on which legend you believe). Although you can use the website to explore exotic and unusual places, it's edited and run from the small town of South Deerfield, MA.

"

Howling at the Moon about Burning Man

Gadling is a highter tier blog, and Erik does a great job. Here is his howl to the moon about Burning Man, the famous fall desert extravaganza. "Yes, dear people, the official countdown has begun. The raggedy hordes are assembling, brightening their tattoos, oiling their dreadlocks, and buffing their bongs, and soon the vast, scarred desert will play host once again to the pagan ceremony of the Burning Man. The desert air will be tinctured with the sweet scent of pheromones as ripe young men and women surrender their inhibitions to the raging moon.

Drunk on estrus and California wine, they will congregate in tents and teepees, yurts and lean-tos, limbs and lips entwined under the raw black sky. They come to celebrate, to rejoice, to leave behind the dreary trappings of domesticity, and for one long, curling cacophony of time, they trumpet their hopes and desires to their god, the golden calf of the desert, the man who burns. Yes, people, it is nearly THAT TIME again.

Burning Man.

Who Is This Nut?

Abe Hirschfeld once attempted, in 1993, to run the New York Post for 16 days. Finally, a full-scale staff revolt published an entire issue trashing him, including a page 1 picture of Post founder Alexander Hamilton shedding a tear. The eccentric self-made millionaire, who died this week, was famous for his infamy, as Larry McShane wrote for the AP.

"The immigrant made his fortune catering to America's fascination with automobiles, by building parking lots. "Open air garages," as Hirschfeld called them. Later, when health clubs boomed, he opened the Verticle Fitness and Racket Club.

He later founded his own paper in NY, "Open Air" which folded after five months. His trademark, while in the newspaper business, was to hand out ties with a crossword puzzle pattern. Comedian Jackie Mason once derided the millionaire as 'a common deranged maniac. Hirschfeld, in his thick Yiddish accent, didn't disagree, saying "I'm crazy...maybe. I'm a man whose mold the Good Lord wisely decided to set aside after he created me."

Some Things You Didn't Know About Valerie Plame

Christopher Goffard of the St. Petersburg Times did some digging about the most famous CIA employee in the U.S.


Outed CIA spy  

She married and soon divorced her college boyfriend.

As a new recruit at the Farm, the CIA's training facility, her skill with an AK-47 stunned classmates.

She speaks French, Greek and German.

With the CIA, she had nonofficial cover, or NOC, status and used a fake job title, meaning she lacked diplomatic protection if exposed overseas. Said to be the agency's creme de la creme, NOCs reportedly handle and recruit foreign agents.

She lied even to close friends and family about what she did.

In February 1997, she met diplomat Joseph Wilson, who was soon to be divorced, at the Washington, D.C., home of the Turkish ambassador, where she reminded Wilson of a young Grace Kelly and left him "hopelessly smitten."

She told him she was an energy consultant in Brussels. "Ladies don't date married men," Plame told him when he tried to hold her hand.

She drives a Prius hybrid, believing it socially responsible.

She told her next-door neighbor, Victoria Tillotson, she was an economic consultant to foreign countries. When Mrs. Tillotson leaves town, she entrusts Plame with her pets, house key and alarm code, and has no fear Plame will misplace them.

In seven years as a neighbor, Plame has never knocked on the door to borrow sugar.

She keeps her house intimidatingly neat. Even the walls are mind-bogglingly clean.

She worried whether she'd make a good mother.

She doesn't hold grudges, except for maybe against columnist Robert Novak & Co.

When Novak outed her as a spy in July 2003, she worried whether she would have any friends left now that they knew she'd been lying to them for years.

She attends the same church, but not the same service, as Republican mastermind Karl Rove. Once exposed, she took greater care with her hair and lip gloss, knowing everyone would be staring.

Valerie Plame is her real name. She wishes you hadn't heard of her.

Runaway Bride Mows the Lawn

Jennifer Wilbanks briefly spoke when the mower's engine died in tall, wet grass. Daniel Yee of AP met her in Lawrenceville, GA.

"I'm doing well," said Wilbanks. "I need to get back to work. I don't want to get into trouble," she added.

Her lawn mower then kept dying in the grass, each time prompting her to repeatedly yank on the pull string to restart it. After the eighth time it quit, she let out a big sigh.

In all, she was ordered to do 120 hours of service. Wilbanks had already completed 16 hours of her sentence by cleaning probation offices and washing public vehicles. Department of Corrections spokeswoman Peggy Chapman said Wilbanks planned to work off eight more hours Tuesday, also picking up trash.

"She's a hard worker. She didn't take advantage of anything. She did more work than most people," said 17-year-old Michael Powell, who has cleaned bathrooms and offices with Wilbanks while working off his own sentence of 80 hours of community service for an offense he declined to disclose.

Hiking the Jewish Meadow in Hungary. 

Jennings Death is Freakin' Them Out

Naush Boghossian writes in the LA Daily News about the wake-up call of ABC's anchor's death from lung cancer.

"John Wayne, Bob Marley, Steve McQueen and Peter Jennings. Each man was among the best in his profession, and each, in his own way, epitomized cool. But the mystique was shattered when they each fell victim to lung cancer - a hazard of smoking brought again into the national spotlight by Jennings' death Sunday.

"It freaked me out," said Michele Ross, 39, of Chatsworth, when she realized Jennings was just 67 when he died.

You have no idea the hell it takes you to," said Henley, who now lives in Nevada. "It was surreal. Sometimes I felt like I came out of my body and was looking at myself, saying, How could you let this happen, how could you not have been smarter than them?

"I was scared I was going to die and afraid I wouldn't."

"Even if I stop, there's still a chance that I can get something later down the line. I don't want to die young, I don't want to have a terminal illness.

"It definitely opened my eyes. I very much am considering stopping and I'm hoping I didn't do damage to myself."

As somebody who experienced lung cancer, Henley said Jennings' death devastated her.
"How does a man go through the wars and go into war zones and a thing like a cigarette kills him?" Henley said. "I don't understand it."

Arthur Frommer's GI Guide to Europe

Arthur Frommer was profiled in the Seattle Times by Jay Boyar of the Orlando Sentinel.

"We lived very close to the bone," Frommer recalls. Still, to hear him tell it, life in Jefferson City was largely carefree. When he was 14, though, his father found a better job and the boy moved, "kicking and screaming," to Brooklyn.

On his second day in New York, young Arthur snagged a job as a copy boy at Newsweek. Soon, he became the editor in chief of The Dutchman, the student newspaper at Erasmus Hall High School.

Hoping to become a journalist, Frommer enrolled at the University of Missouri. But when his mother took ill, he moved back to New York and transferred to NYU, where he majored in government. Deciding on a career in law, he attended Yale Law School.

But immediately upon graduation in 1953, in the midst of the Korean War, he was drafted into the Army. "It was," he reveals, "what changed my life."

In the service, Frommer dutifully went through basic training and advanced infantry drills, fully expecting to be sent to war. He might well have been if he hadn't spoken Russian, which he picked up from his mother and studied at NYU.

Evidently, that was enough to get him assigned to Army Intelligence in Germany. Propelled by an irresistible impulse, Frommer was determined to use whatever time off he had from his military duties to explore Europe.

Frommer came to see things differently.

As the elder Frommer was finishing his hitch, he wrote a small book, "The G.I.'s Guide to Travelling in Europe." On the red-white-and-black cover of that 74-page publication is a simple drawing of a soldier with a small bag and a camera. The cover copy promises, among other things, the inside scoop on "G.I. Gasoline Discounts," "How to Speak 7 Languages," "Military Train Reductions" and "Living on a Shoestring."

The price was 50 cents and the author's name is given as "Pfc. Arthur Frommer." On the back, there is this advisory:"Not for the civilian on a luxury tour but for the smart G.I.

"It benefited from the fact that it was never copy edited," he says. "I'm convinced, to this day, that if I'd handed it to a publishing house in New York City, it would have been given to some young English major, who had just graduated college, who would have destroyed it — taken out all the voice, all the personality."

Take Off Your Helmet--We Need Your Heart

A heart surgeon once told me that the best way to increase the number of available human hearts for transplant is to get rid of helmet laws. Suddenly there are many healthy hearts available from unwitting organ donors. CNN just published this similar story.

"Motorcycle fatalities have risen sharply in Florida since the state repealed its mandatory helmet law.

States that repeal such laws run the risk of increased deaths and mounting health care costs for injured bikers, according to two studies released Monday, one by the government, the other by the insurance industry.

The first, by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, found that in the three years following Florida's repeal of its mandatory helmet law in 2000, 933 motorcyclists were killed, an 81 percent increase from the 515 bikers killed from 1997 to 1999.

Even though the state requires helmet use by riders under age 21, fatalities among that group nearly tripled in the three years after the repeal; 45 percent of those killed were not wearing helmets. The cost of hospital care for motorcycle injuries grew from $21 million to $44 million in the 30 months after the law changed; the figures were adjusted for inflation.

``The results are remarkably similar that when you repeal a helmet law, you can expect an increase in fatalities and you can expect an increase in medical costs,'' said NHTSA spokesman Rae Tyson.

Which tire do you think will get better traction? I saw these dirt bikes going up I-91 yesterday. 

Wouldn't you love a boat like this? 

It Ain't Easy Being Patagonia's Biggest Landowner

Today's Sunday NY Times included a story about a rich man who has become Chile's largest landowner. Douglas Tompkins, founder of the North Face and Esprit clothing companies, first fell in love with Chile as a backpacking teenager. Now he has turned his land, about the size of Rhode Island, into nature sanctuaries, and this hasn't made the natives particularly happy. The Chilean government has blocked some of his aquisitions, choosing to sell a 125-acre tract to a power company instead of to the Americano.

"Some have suggested that he wants to turn Patagonia into a nuclear dumping ground, other speculate that he wants to seize control of water supplies in a world with a growing thirst, and there have even been accusations that Tompkins, a gray-haired WASP, has aquired the land as a site for a new Jewish state. 'He is little appreciated, understood or welcomed in Chile today, said Carlos Weber, an national park official, 'but I predict that 30 years from now, no one will be against him.'

Waiting for the AP Shoe to Drop

Cindy woke me up early today, at 7 am on a Sunday, asking "hey come on, it's time to check to Google alerts!" We have been waiting anxiously for today, since a few weeks ago when we corresponded with Beth Harpaz, Travel Editor for the Associated Press. She wrote a short article about GoNOMAD, mentioning a few of our stories and generally praising us as a good place for travel research.

In terms of print, we couldn't really ask for a bigger distribution, since AP has more than 2500 member newspapers, and thousands of websites, radio, and television news outlets rely on AP to fill their news holes. So we are waiting, hopeful that we will be a part of many Sunday newspapers today. Come on, put us in coach, we're ready to play!

Ridin' the Green Tortoise to Alaska

Sam Hartshorne, 20, has joined the roster of writers who contribute stories to GoNOMAD. Sam went out to San Francisco and joined the Green Tortoise bus for a 28-day trip up to Alaska. The trip took a long time, spending it all together on a converted bus. His story is linked at his byline.


Green Tortoise bus 

Hef and His Three Girlfriends on TV

Hugh Hefner has a new reality show on E!. Comcast had this to say..."More than anything, the program is a bittersweet take on how one man's dream might be an imperfect fantasy for his women.

"I think there's two main adjectives people think when they see us: bimbo and slut," Marquardt [one of Hef's girlfriends] says, with a fixed smile and giggle.

And while all the women profess to enjoy their female camaraderie, Madison lays out the hard truth (and if she's playacting for reality's sake, she does a good job).
"Do I like him having other girlfriends? No," she said. "I know I'm his No. 1 girlfriend but I think he needs to get rid of the extra girls."

 


The extras, however, seem intent on maintaining the status quo.

"Kendra and I are just icing on the cake," Marquardt said, adding: "I can't turn this down and go back to Lodi," a reference to her small California hometown.
"I love him. He loves me," Wilkinson firmly declares.

While "love" is a word that rarely slips from Hefner's lips, at least on camera, he insists he is deeply romantic, the result of growing up with the glossy music and Hollywood love stories of the 1930s. Those who simply tally his exploits are missing the point, he said."

How Brazil Solved its Energy Crisis

Thomas Friedman's column is so logical and simple, it is almost hard to bear. Why can't some of these ideas make it on the political agenda?

"During the 1973 Arab oil embargo Brazil was importing almost 80 percent of its fuel supply," notes Mr. Luft, director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. "Within three decades it cut its dependence by more than half. ... During that period the Brazilians invested massively in a sugar-based ethanol industry to the degree that about a third of the fuel they use in their vehicles is domestically grown. They also created a fleet that can accommodate this fuel." Half the new cars sold this year in Brazil will run on any combination of gasoline and ethanol. "Bringing hydrocarbons and carbohydrates to live happily together in the same fuel tank," he added, "has not only made Brazil close to energy independence, but has also insulated the Brazilian economy from the harming impact of the current spike in oil prices."

The new energy bill includes support for corn-based ethanol, but, bowing to the dictates of the U.S. corn and sugar lobbies (which oppose sugar imports), it ignores Brazilian-style sugar-based ethanol, even though it takes much less energy to make and produces more energy than corn-based ethanol. We are ready to import oil from Saudi Arabia but not sugar from Brazil.

The sum of all lobbies. ...

It seems as though only a big crisis will force our country to override all the cynical lobbies and change our energy usage. I thought 9/11 was that crisis. It sure was for me, but not, it seems, for this White House, Congress or many Americans. Do we really have to wait for something bigger in order to get smarter?"

Pondering Cellphone Reception on Vacation

During vacation, I still gravitate to my old habit of thinking about work. So I came back to the cool circular newspaper reading room of the Edgartown Public Library to indulge. Here they had the WIFI connection, the electric plug and even a comfy place for a mouse and pad, and I thought about what Thomas Friedman wrote about in the NY Times yesterday. He said he wished our cellphone service were as good at Ghana's. And that if he ran for office, a promise to make it as good as even, gasp, Japan's wonderfully advanced system, would win him the race easily.

The same question, why do we have such crappy cellphone service, can be answered simply: It's the Capitalist way. Instead of agreeing by government decree, that GSM is going to be used for all phones, we let CDMA (Verizon) and GSM (T-mobile, Sprint, Nextel) fight it out, and the problem is that Verizon is too damn big to be pushed around, though the other guys have the platform that the rest of most of the world has adopted. Remember betamax? VHS won, even though Beta was better.

As we drove up island and the service cut out, I compared this to Hungary where no matter how far out on top of a mountain in the boonies you are, nobody ever loses service...But then again, no one minds that there are cell towers on every church and barn roof. NIMBY doesn't work as well without all of our lawyers to plead their case.

Noises from the Sea

Lifeboats, coastguards and police turned out off of Hollicombe beach, near Devon, England, when screams were heard from a rubber dinghy - only to find a naked couple making love. A walker on nearby cliffs thought their shreaks of delight at 8 a.m. were calls for help and dialled 999 (the British equivalent of the U.S. 911), reports the Mirror newpaper.

Lifeboatman Nigel Crang said: "It was an amazing shout. I've never seen anything quite like it in all my 18 years I've been doing the job."

He said the startled pair were totally naked, adding: "I've never seen such things in a six-foot inflatable at such an early hour. They were a bit surprised when we turned up. He was using his hands as a fig leaf, while she was protecting her modesty with a towel."

Police ordered the pair, both in their 20s, to paddle to Hollicombe beach, in Paignton, Devon. They eventually agreed and were given a stern warning by police and coastguards. Yesterday the mystery couple were in hiding.

King Fahd's Wild and Crazy Days

On the ferry over to Martha's Vineyard, I got a chance to read a long NY Times story about King Fahd, the just deceased leader of Saudi Arabia. The story included a glimpse into his younger, wilder days, when he was just a prince waiting for his chance. Fahd got his Kingship after his brother crown prince Faisal was assassinated by a relative. A few years later he shocked his subjects when he spent the holy month of Ramadan in Europe, and enjoyed the company of women and even imbibed in firewater occasionally.

The King truly lived like royalty. He commissioned the same designers who built the flashy sets of the Star Wars movies to decorated his giant private jet. His yacht was as big as an ocean liner. And he once had a huge palace built that was an exact replica of the White House...but never lived there.

The King's last decade was sadly impotent, he suffered a stroke 10 years ago and his step brother Abdullah has led in his place. Many Saudis cut short their vacations just be present at his burial, one man decamping from Dubai to get back.

Kim Hartshorne--The Music Moved Him

Today we went to a funeral in New Jersey for my Uncle Kim. As we all age, and time marches on we notice that we go to more and more of these. Seeing family meet their ends brings me to think about Nathan and Greta and the other babies who are bringing up the rear of the family. Each funeral presents a chance to look at the person's life in total, guided by those who were close enough to give the eulogies.

The service was in a woody, small Episcopal Church, in Bay Head NJ. Later we went to the Yacht Club where we had lunch, enjoying seeing relatives and old friends, connected through Kim, who had departed.

It was a still day, and there were men in a boat anchored off shore, fishing, or just sitting, and everywhere boats were tied up, and some passing listlessly by.

My father Nathaniel Hartshorne talked about Kim's writing a novel when he was eight years old. And how when he was a soldier in World War II, he helped decifer a code that let the Allies know about an approaching group of Panzer tanks, and he was awarded a bronze star. Dad was eloquent, and talked about what really moved Kim--It was music. He was a professional musician for a while, but didn't like the hours so he gave it up. He moved down to Bay Head later in life, and was married for 32 years to Tina. Later Chris Hartshorne took the floor, and dispensed with his script. He talked about show business, and music, and riding to the dump with his dad in their old Willys Jeep. Kim Hartshorne lived from 1920 until July, 2005. Rest in peace, uncle.