Yeah, uh, maybe not this year. But this is a good post for my little-used Scribe category.

5 ways for Mac users to get ready for NaNoWriMo

Slashdot News Story | A Mathematician's Lament - an Indictment of US Math Education

Just starting, great links. (via Elaine Schele)

Blog That Glyph!

Sounds psychedelic, actually thoughtful design and futurism. via Bruce Sterling.

Doors of Perception weblog

Raiders of the Lost Ark - transcript of the 1978 story conference. Will we ever get over it?

Mystery Man on Film: The Raiders Story Conference

The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (The Witter Bynner version), Terebess Asia Online (TAO)

I just re-read "The Difference Engine" by Gibson and Sterling, and I am amazed how little I remembered from the first time around. Today I ran across this gem of a site. Might try some etching of Altoids tins myself. The rest I have too little patience for.

The Steampunk Workshop | Technology and Romance - Sustainable Rebellion

Inside Google Book Search: 1.5 million books in your pocket

Elaine Schele posted a small profile and tribute to Justin Kerr, with some good links and a photo of Justin with his rollout camera.

Austin Maya Meeting Hix Witz Volunteers: Aj tz'ib' Justin Kerr

From James Gleick:

Op-Ed Contributor - How to Publish Without Perishing - NYTimes.com

Josh's Blog - Drawing Robot

Josh, maker of OSCemote, made a drawing robot with his daughter Opal. Check it out

Their version of Wikipedia.

Official Google Blog: Knol is open to everyone

Here are some knol-writing How-to's:

Basics of Writing Knols - a knol by Knol Help

Advanced Knol Techniques - a knol by Knol Help

Simpler once you have set up hotkeys and installed a couple of Applescripts. Essentially, it lets you stay in a text-editing or wordprocessing window and still control Quicktime player. No switching between applications.

Simplify media transcription with hotkeys and AppleScript - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Green, yes. Technology, yes. But we will also have a shop in the new building for good old machines and tools. Here's a throwback we love.

Introduction to Letterpress Printing

Here in New York:

The Center for Book Arts

And their next class:

The Center for Book Arts - Letterpress I: Hand Typesetting

So I've shot in 1280X720 30P XDCAM format on the Sony PMW-EX1, transferred to Final Cut as mp4 using the XDCAM Transfer app from Sony (actually a rewrap from mxf to Quicktime), edited, exported a movie of the whole piece, then converted that in Quicktime player to AppleTV format for a smaller file and frame.

Along the way I brought old DV footage into the HD cut by converting the digitized DV to HDV with a crop on top and bottom to create the new aspect ratio. To do that I used Compressor. The HDV drops right into the otherwise XDCAM mp4 sequence in Final Cut.

And I took several WMV clips shot in movie mode on a Canon still camera, and (Compressor) converted those to a 1280X720 frame, with better results than I expected.

In a side project, I needed to convert some XDCAM HD raw footage to DVCPRO50 in standard definition and aspect, for delivery in SD. That clipped the sides of the frame off and transcoded the file - again in Compressor.

Now I need to use DVD Studio Pro for the first time to create a widescreen DVD that will play well on a normal DVD player and be shown on a 42" plasma display. In HD.

Here's my first stop to make sure I understand widescreen anamorphic DVDs. Then I'll find the settings for DVD Studio Pro.

The Ultimate Guide to Anamorphic Widescreen DVD for Everyone!

'skine.art. - dedicated to moleskine lovers and their art

I spent a week of Spanish classes on the subjunctive. Felt as if I understood at the time. Ha!

Good post on a screenwriter's useful blog.

johnaugust.com » Were I to seek examples of the subjunctive

On a site devoted to title sequences.

Forget the film, watch the titles

Winners of a competition poster design. And a great blog.

Winners of the What is Graphic design poster competition | Veerle's blog

Innovative Minds Don't Think Alike - New York Times

Re: Amazon, Kindle, 1984, etc.

The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)

Short story from 1909. Recommended.

THE MACHINE STOPS ... E.M. Forster

Not sure I could go this far, but this site is always intriguing.

Palimpsest: the guide to a (mostly) paperless life | 43 Folders

Wikipedia:WikiProject Mesoamerica - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

New SF webzine edited by Rudy Rucker.

FLURB, a Webzine of Astonishing Tales.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador - Recounting Our Way to Democracy - New York Times

This looks like a book I must have. Read the excerpt on this webpage.

Table of Contents and Excerpt, Houston, Stuart, and Taube, The Memory of Bones

On Mac OS X. As if I still can.

Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » Ten Mac tools for Getting Things Done

Lyn Dickey spent several hours showing me around Santiago Atitlan and telling me the story of the Hospitalito. She's the treasurer of the board of directors and plays a big part in the rebuilding of the hospital. She also has a beautiful website of her photos, including the panorama of Lake Atitlan above.

Fotomaya

Jaron Lanier, with responses from many others.

Edge; DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier

Excerpt: ...nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.

López Obrador gets a 6 page (online) profile in today's Times magazine. Pulls away the curtain a bit on his support from Carlos Slim, the third richest man in the world. I guess Slim (and the Times) know which way the wind is blowing.

The Populist at the Border - New York Times

I'll get to it just as soon as I post this to my weblog.

Turning procrastination into your shitty first draft | 43 Folders

Tomorrow in San Cristobal (I'll miss it): an homage to Alberto Dominguez, who composed the international hit "Perfidia" and put Chiapas marimba music on the world stage.

El Universal - Espectáculos - Recordarán al compositor Alberto Domínguez en Chiapas

Blogs Chapines, el directorio de Blogs de los Guatemaltecos

After several weeks with little use of my computer (bad AC adapter) I've just gotten a replacement from Alonso, who went to the Maya meetings in Austin and brought the adapter back. This is the view now in the Panchan cybercafe. Happy computer, happy Dave. Except I should be out on the road to Frontera, where the Lacandones have blocked access to Yaxchilan and Bonampak, in a dispute over tourist revenues. We'll see if the dispute is still going on Monday, when Alonso and I will drive around the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve to its sounthern tip, to the Chajul biological research station.

Considered the most successful African-American woman science fiction writer.

Transcripts from discussions she participated in at MIT, on science, media, and imagination.

octavia butler

podslam.org: the revolution of word

Rudy Rucker's "Ware" series (Software, Wetware, Freeware, Realware) was a formative influence on my imagination and that of my microbiologist son. Excuse me, I have some listening to do.

Rudy Rucker on GigaDial Public - powered by FeedBurner

Found at The Online Books Page, a collection of 25,000 public domain books on the web.

This "meta-book" of Twain essays includes "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences".

How to Tell a Story, and Other Essays, by Twain

Here's a good kickof for my annual attempt to improve my Spanish. It started when I ran across this phrase in an OPML blog:

Cuando el rio suena, piedras lleva

Water Proverbs: Latin America and the Caribbean: International Year of Freshwater 2003

Mexican proverbs - Wikiquote

That's the title of a new book by Frederic Jameson, reviewed as part of this essay on utopian and dystopian fiction.

Back to utopia - The Boston Globe

Compares the styles of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, among others.

Presentation Zen: Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic

OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) is a simple tool that still manages to confuse me and many otherwise smart people. Dave Winer released his free OPML editor last summer and has posted some how-tos and signposts, but for the most part he seemed to say "It's free, deal with it."

Amy Gahran has posted a simple walk-through with links that makes it all clearer.

Contentious » Using OPML for Thinking, Writing, Publishing

She may be going west, but she's still a Lower East Side girl!

Shown above with members of the Lower Eastside Girls Club. She's our celebrity spokesgirl! Thanks Rosario!

Go West, Young Mimi Marquez - New York Times

(requires QuickTime player)
"That wonderful night you climbed up to the moon"

This is a clip of Wilder Oakes, in Port Clyde, Maine, reciting a poem about one of his paintings. I'm putting it here for enjoyment and to make sure I know how to do the code right, so I can send it to him.

The Science Fiction Podcast Magazine. Via Boing Boing, of course. Thanks Cory!

Escape Pod

Mitch Ratcliffe offers more thoughtful commentary and a critique of the critique of Wikipedia.

RatcliffeBlog - Mitch's Open Notebook: Quality, quantity and critical thinking

Since I worked at CBS during Rather's peak as an anchor, and when many there were still Murrow acolytes, I enjoyed this defense of Murrow as a journalist and fallible human, by Mitch Ratcliffe.

History is the source code of the future: Murrow: A real story

Via Slashdot, a link to the Wall Street Journal review of Ray Kurzweil's new book:

WSJ.com - Here It Comes

And Charlie Stross's online novel:
Accelerando

One of the great pleasures of our visit to Port Clyde, Maine, was sharing the enthusiasm of our friend Margaret Bodell for the place and its people. That and some hilarious time getting to know C. Wilder Oakes, native son and painter of life in the fishing town / art colony that is Port Clyde. Looking forward to more fun there.

The Paintings of Charles Wilder Oakes

Mars Hall Gallery - Artists

Messages in a Bottle by David Grima

I've had a link to this site in my bookmarks since I started my own weblog. They've been busy working at the NY Public Library digitizing 500,000 items and putting them online. Now they are back, working in the area of digital preservation.

I tried to address this in my first network nonlinear editing job, at CBS in 1993. But the wave of digital post-production crashed over us all and now we just race to keep up with deadlines. Nicely organized digital files get wiped as soon as the show is delivered. Finished shows get put into archives and then re-digitized for the next project. Digital cannibals.

Rogue Librarian

Here's a list of student blogs from a project in Guatemala. Spanish language. The organizer hopes to get all 890 students blogging.

Regilete - Blogs de EnRed

Jimmy Wales, "creator" of the Wikipedia, is guest blogging on Larry Lessig's site at the moment. Here's his description of the next project - a free curriculum in all languages from kindergarten through college.

Lawrence Lessig's Blog

Fredy López sends word of a new, multilingual online cultural magazine that he has launched with other pals in San Cristóbal de las Casas, including Chip Morris, Janet Schwartz, and Megan O'Neill. Congratulations to them all for a first edition that looks great and reflects the diverse culture of the town we love so well.

Jovel News "El rostro amable de Chiapas"

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Film | Mel Gibson filming historic epic

I have to admit I barely made it through the first Harry Potter book. I think I saw one of the movies. But this tickles my long-dormant English major funny bone - the scene of Dumbledore's death, in the style of many other authors, submitted by readers of the Guardian, apparently a literary and devilish crowd.

Guardian Unlimited Books | Special Reports | Dumbledore's death

Via Making Light

Charles Stross' new novel is available for download online. SF, pre- and post-singularity. If you like Gibson, Sterling, Doctorow, this will grab you.

Accelerando!

Versión traducida de http://www.gomaya.com/glyph/

Brady Witt runs a great site with a great title. He's got the only other quirky archaeology site that I know of. Que viva Shovelmonkey!

SHOVELMONKEY'S TEST PIT

Via PressThink. A 1964 essay by the Pulitzer Prize winning author of "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life". I met his daughter Sarah in 1970, soon after Hofstadter had died. Another brilliant mind.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics

I found the link in Jay Rosen's invitation to Norman Mailer to re-enter journalism as a blogger, something Mailer has recently allowed as a possibility.

PressThink: Don't Be a Blogger Manqué, Norman Mailer

Because it's smart. Because I have to read this more carefully. Because librarians rule.

The Shifted Librarian: Why RSS and Folksonomies Are Becoming So Big

I posted this week about the Times article on the work of Ambar Past and Bob Laughlin. Someone wrote a comment asking for information on ordering the new book.

Click "More" for her information on ordering. And take a look at their website:

Taller Lenateros

Thank you for writing about Incantations by Mayan Women. and sorry about the delay in getting back to you! WE have received an avalanche of orders and we are filling them as soon as we can. Meantime, check out our web page www.tallerlenateros.com

If you are interested in buying a copy of the first edition, we still have a few copies left. We are expecting the book to sell out soon.

The first edition (200 signed and numbered copies) costs $200 plus $40 shipping by DHL from Mexico (3 days)...or $25 by MexPost (one week).

The second edition costs $100 plus $40 shipping by DHL or $25 by MexPost...

You can pay us by check, Western Union, Paypal, or direct wire transfer through your bank.

Here's how to pay by check:Send your check

(made out to JUDITH ELLEN PAST )

to Gloria Chacon

210 Riverside Avenue, Apt. A
Santa Cruz, CA 95060

Please indicate your telephone number and mailing address, (if you want DHL shipping it must be a street address and not a PO box, please).

HOW TO PAY BY WESTERN UNION: Send a money wire for the book plus shipping to PEDRO Alvarez Moshon

Flavio A. Paniagua #54

San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, 29230

The work of friends Ámbar and Bob is profiled in tomorrow's New York Times book review.

The Poetic Hearts of Mayan Women Writ Large - New York Times

UPDATE: I've received many inquiries about buying the book. You can see Ambar's ordering information on this page:

The Daily Glyph: Incantations by Mayan Women

(Full NY Times article below)

The Poetic Hearts of Mayan Women Writ Large

By DINITIA SMITH
Published: May 11, 2005

The Mayan women of the Chiapas highlands in southern Mexico are extremely poor, and many, especially the older women, are illiterate. The poorest own only a few blankets, articles of clothing and utensils. But what they do have is poetry, much to the surprise of Ámbar Past, an American-born Mexican poet who first encountered the Mayan women 30 years ago.

The poet Ámbar Past with a copy of "Incantations," a book of poetry by 150 Mayan women that she helped shepherd and which has been translated into English and Spanish.

Ms. Past, 55, came to Chiapas in 1973 as a self-described hippie and renegade housewife, escaping an unhappy marriage. She stayed with some Mayan women and taught herself Tzotzil, one of the local Mayan languages.

As she listened to the women, Ms. Past said she realized that they sometimes spoke in poetry, in couplets and in gleaming metaphors.

"I was so deeply moved hearing in these mud huts these breathtakingly beautiful verses, sometimes echoing verses and phrases spoken or written 500 years ago," she said. Some words resembled ones in the Popol Vuh, the Mayan creation story.

"They live with no comfort," Ms. Past said during a visit to New York in April. "Yet poetry is an essential part of their daily life."

Now after 30 years' work, 150 Mayan women from Taller Leñateros (Woodlanders' Workshop), a paper- and book-making collective founded by Ms. Past in 1975 in the Chiapas city San Cristóbal de las Casas, have produced what may be the first book of Mayan women's poetry created almost entirely by them, and translated into English.

The book, "Incantations," is a weirdly beautiful volume made from 295 pages of recycled and handmade paper with silk-screened illustrations. The cover is a three-dimensional rendering of the face of Kaxail, Mayan goddess of the wilderness, in recycled cardboard mixed with corn silk and coffee. Her eyes are excised and she stares out with an eerie power. (It was designed by Gitte Daehlin, a Norwegian artist living in the nearby state of Oaxaca.)

"Incantations" contains spells and hymns tape-recorded by the women and by Ms. Past, who transcribed and translated them from Tzotzil into Spanish and English. As members of a collective, the women share labor and profits.

Robert M. Laughlin, a curator of Mesoamerican and Caribbean ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution who has published two Tzotzil dictionaries, said of "Incantations": "There is very little publication about Mayan women's lives in their own language, and this gives a whole view of the culture that's been unknown before."(Mayan men in Chiapas also incorporate poetry into some of their formal and religious discourse, but that group has been well studied, Mr. Laughlin said.)

The Olmec and the Maya were among the first literate societies in the Western Hemisphere. Evidence of Mayan writing goes back to the first century A.D. Murals and ceramics from the height of Mayan civilization, A.D. 600 to 900, depict male scribes holding pens and brushes, making "Incantations" even more significant.

There are four surviving Mayan codices, bark-paper books that unfold like accordions, dating from the Spanish conquest in the early 16th century. Spanish bishops ordered other books burned.

Ms. Past first became interested in Mayan weaving, which is often highly symbolic, and in traditional natural dyes. She became aware of the women's poetry in 1975, when an epidemic swept through Magdalenas village, close to where she lived. She said that she went to San Cristóbal, the nearest large city, for help, but no doctors came. Many children died, she said.

In the cemetery, she said, she saw a woman carrying her dead baby lying on a board and wrapped in a shawl for burial. The mother offered her dead child a last sip of Coca-Cola and uttered a prayer, which Ms. Past still remembers:

Take this sweet dew from the earth,
Take this honey.
It will help you on your way.
It will give you strength on your path.

One reason "Incantations" took so long to create, said Ms. Past, who became a Mexican citizen in 1985 and has published 10 books in Mexico, is that some incantations last for days. She transcribed hundreds of hours of tape, from which she culled essential verses. In fabricating "Incantations," the women soaked recycled paper with palm fronds, making a pulp in a blender, dyeing it black with soot and campeachy wood. Mayan men helped with the offset printing.

The poems in "Incantations" incorporate ancient metaphors with the harshly contemporary. One poem, by Xpetra Ernándes, is "Witchcraft for Attracting a Man":

I want him to come with flowers in his heart.
With all his heart,
I want him to talk to my body.
I want his blood to ache for me
when he sees me on the way to the market.

Another, by Petra Tzon Te' Vitz , is "Lullaby":

Go to sleep little baby, go to sleep.
Your daddy's drunk
and if he hits me,
I'm running to the woods.

Tonik Nibak has an angry piece, "Hex to Kill the Unfaithful Man":
Let 13 Devil Women, 13 Goddesses of Death,
snuff out his name.
Let a wind that starts in his head, in his heart,
blow his candle out.
Let him die on the road.
Let him be run over by a car.
By a bicycle.
Break his leg.
If he dies, I'm going to be laughing.

The first edition of "Incantations," Tzotzil translated into Spanish, was in 1998.

So far, 1,850 volumes of the English edition are printed. The first 200 numbered copies cost $200 each, and half have sold, Ms. Past said. Another 1,650 are being bound, and will sell for $100.

The workshop also publishes a literary magazine, La Jícara (The Gourd), which, Ms. Past said, has been called "the most beautiful magazine in Mexico." The magazine is mainly in Spanish, but has an English section and always contains literature in Amerindian languages.

In 2002 the collective published "Mayan Hearts," two books of Tzotzil metaphors translated by Mr. Laughlin into Spanish and English. That book's thick black cover is made of agave fibers with a heart cut out to reveal red endpaper.

"I am in love/ My heart aches," one line reads.

"You perfume my heart/ you give me pleasure," says another.

Why are sf (I almost wrote sci-fi) writers hip to giving away their best works? I know I've bought Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow after reading them online. Sell more by giving it away. Thanks to Backup Brain for the link.

Worldcon 2005 UK - Hugo Nominee Links

Via Boing Boing:

BBC - Languages - Homepage

When I got off the Usumacinta River in 2003, I happened to pick up "Gringos" by Charles Portis, a picaresque novel of American expatriates in Mexico, ending with a chase down the Usumacinta. I was floored. Someone had been through this crazy scene before, and had managed to make comic art from it. No need to even imagine writing that novel. It's been done, hilariously.

Nicco, read this book first.

Here's a 2003 profile of Charles Portis:

Like Cormac McCarthy, But Funny

I'm in the process of redesigning this site and learning more CSS in the process. So for all 12 of my readers, here's a sneak peak at the latest, and a way back to the old. I like the new, but the banner takes longer to load.

Try the new Daily Glyph

And here's another new design

Go back to the old one

Via Slashdot, a commentary from the journal Language Learning and Technology on some unusual approaches to learning a foreign language, including the Sims video game.

LLT Vol9Num1: COMMENTARY: YOU'RE NOT STUDYING, YOU'RE JUST...

I'm starting to turn out DVDs of my projects. A scribble with a Sharpie on the disk just doesn't make it. There's probably a cheaper system but these guys look interesting.

Jewelboxing - Super Jewel Box Packaging System - CD and DVD Cases

Before I get buried in work this week, I'm posting below part of an email I sent to Jay Dedman, whom I just met this weekend on the web. Part bio, part manifesto, it fills in some background on what I'm doing and why.

I wrote it just before I found Brandon Fuller's MT plugin. The tools are coming. What happens after that will be interesting. A MoveOn for media and social change?

(click MORE for the whole rant).

You asked for topics. I'll give you a narrative.

To review my life stages: musician, ethnographic filmmaking beginner,
idealistic PBS editor apprentice, nonlinear editing pioneer, network TV
hack, jungle stomping Maya maniac, community media developer and
weblogger. Now I'm looking for a better way to do all that.

I've got the shooting, editing, posting, local network building down, more
or less. So I'm trying to grab time as I can to learn about RSS, enough
terminal and Perl to try Grumet's scripts, sufficient familiarity with
BitTorrent to understand what Drazen is doing (or at least take advantage
of it), towards making posts of videos in enclosures easy enough that I
can start posting my NYC and Maya videos. Then keep moving in that
direction in the community - PS 188, Girls Club tech centers, net radio and video.
And if I keep a hand in TV, I think it will be a useful tool for getting executive
approvals on cuts, or doing long distance editing. I have a house in
Mexico. My dream is to sit there looking out over the town and the
volcano, doing some useful work in my later years. That can be done now if
you are a programmer (I'm not) a writer (maybe) a composer (yes) but
bandwidth limitations prevent the kind of offshore video editing I want to
do. That could change. And if I can do it then, anybody else in the world
will be able to do it. Then of course the economics of being a media
professional change completely - they already have for the most part - but
I've been riding that wave a long time.

So RSS/enc/BT is going to be useful on a number of levels: personal P2P
media publishing, personal broadcasting, custom network aggregation into
PVRs (like Grumet's PTV), and professional services. Googling for
"enclosures" I keep running across a Disney link - they've run with it for
broadband distribution already. Now it's time to tackle the tools and
bandwidth issues for the little guys. I keep watching for the municipal
wireless to happen here beyond the office worker theme parks (Bryant, Wall
Street, okay Union Square is closer) but that's why I'm determined to find
a way to give it away in our neighborhood. For me the digital divide is
Avenue D. Gentry behind us, housing projects in front.

Let's assume we get the tools and bandwidth, within the next year or two.
We get the killer app - what then is the killer content? Is it enough that
we can do these things? What is compelling in P2P media? Is this just
going to be a delivery system for porn and DVDs? A way to actually see a
blogger's cat? Is it going to be the elite chat system or the web version
of cable public access (marginal now, you've got to admit), while the
media storm goes on around it? Or is it going to enable, empower, create
economic opportunity, add your own cliche? If I get it for the projects on
Ave D, is it full of crap downloads the next week? Or does it bootstrap us
all to something else?

As we invent this, we're still in the fun, pirate, let's-put-on-a-show
stage. I'm savoring it. I went through this at the three "big" networks -
"Hey, we're turning shows around on our desktops! The suits and the unions
don't know what to make of us, but we're the future!" It turned into another version of the hi-tech sweatshop.

Now I'm trying to get a longer view. And if anybody is going to make money on it, we better be prepared to share the wealth. Otherwise it just makes the digital
divide wider. And that divide, by the way, is as close as the next guy on
the subway.

Anyway, that's the manifesto off the top of my head right now. Feel free
to pass it along.

I gave my first Powerpoint presentation last summer. It went alright, not great. At least it had some good photos, instead of pages of talking points. And someone in the audience liked my phrase "involuntary economic development" when I talked about getting robbed on the river.

But I wish I had seen this first. Doc Searls provides a new link to an old (1998) essay of his.

IT'S THE STORY, STUPID -
DON'T LET PRESENTATION SOFTWARE KEEP YOU FROM GETTING YOUR STORY ACROSS

It's late, but I have to look at this later. A Joi Ito post from last fall when this was all starting and I was looking elsewhere.

Joi Ito's Web: RSS 2.0 Enclosures

The Girls Club farmer's market got a clever profile in the Times today. Nancy Vega got her press moment, famous photographer Dith Pran did the photos, and Nicholas Stein got perhaps his first byline in the Times (he's not in college yet). Cheers for everyone and especially for my wife Lyn who's led this merry movement for years.

The New York Times > New York Region > The City > East Village: 'Homegirls' With a Dream (and an Assortment of Produce)

The Lower Eastside Girls Club of New York

NY Times Metro - Lyn Pentecost

Yes, in the country and in the world, we hope. But I'm talking about this site, for the moment.

The Usumacinta campaign (to stop the proposed dams that would damage the watershed and flood Maya sites) is at a wait-and-see point. With Mexican President Vicente Fox's declaration in March that there is no plan to build dams on the river, there is cautious optimism that this round of proposals has been fought off. Time will tell. The dam-builders will return in a few years, if history is any indication.

So I intend to start sharing my years of travel and recording in the Maya region, and I'll redesign this site to that end. I'll continue posting news on archaeology, ecology and development from southern Mexico and Guatemala, but I'll make available more of my archive of photos and video. I'll also post reports by my colleagues that have resulted from our efforts on the river. And I'll look into better ways to distribute all of this. It should be a fun project for me, and for all twelve of my readers!

I stopped allowing comments when I started getting comment spam in a big way. That seems to have been solved by MT-Blacklist, so I'll reopen posts to comments. Not that I get many, but it seems like a friendly start to the new plan.

Friends Sarah and Dov just got back from a vacation in France. This photo, of the famous lily-pond and Japanese bridge in Giverny, appealed to me. So here it is. Click for a larger version.

To my twelve readers: Sorry I haven't posted in a while. I've been busy at my trade, editing TV shows. I did get to the movies to see both F911 and Some Kind of Monster, the Metallica documentary, though the sight of a former hellion getting in touch with his feelings makes me a little queasy (I'm talking about James of Metallica, not George of Bush).

Also, my laptop, the jungle iBook, had a logic board failure for the 2nd time in 2 years, so it's been off in the shop for 10 days. I think it's part of the batch that had similar problems, so it's covered. I'm hoping the Apple service guys spared my hard drive - it would save a tedious recovery of the files. Just got the call that it's ready for pickup...

UPDATE: Hard drive intact, computer's back.

Cartoon at left: This Modern World: The Sensible Liberal, by way of Electrolite.

One of the joys of being at home in New York - padding out to the front door of the building and getting the New York Times, then waking up to it over coffee. This weblog commentary on the Times will have to be my next must-read, over a second cup. Smart and ferocious.

Reading A1

Movable Type is moving to a version that costs more. Some people are complaining. Here`s a Slashdot post that airs their gripes:

Bloggers Assail Movable Type's New Pricing Scheme

Me, I like it, I paid them for it when it was cheap, it does what I need, I`m not even using the latest version. Other people are changing to something like this:

WordPress - Screenshots

Come to think of it, their approach to comments editing would be a nice way to deal with comment spam...

I`ll think about it when I get back home.

As I look forward to returning to a land with bookstores and broadband, I note this post by Cory Doctorow, linking to more science fiction published on the web.

Boing Boing - All Hugo-nominated short fiction now online

Did it just happen last night? A lot of reflection on Iowa already, with some of the best, and best links, from Britt Blaser and Doc Searls. As usual.

Escapable Logic

The Doc Searls Weblog : Tuesday, January 20, 2004

For about 6 months I've been getting la palabra del día, the word of the day, from La Página del Idioma Español (elcastellano.org). It's a site dedicated to the Spanish language. The word of the day reminds me how much I need to keep studying.

Go here to see the word of the day, or to subscribe to it.

Or here for their section on Spanglish.

From the LA Times (free registration) a fascinating essay about the preservation, or destruction, of written materials as a means of holding on to power. It mentions the burning of nearly all Maya books by the Spanish.

Fragile Guardians of Culture

I read two wonderful books on this Christmas trip to San Francisco. One, John McPhee's "Encounters with the Archdruid", gave me plenty to consider as I float down the Usumacinta this spring. The other, Gore Vidal's "Inventing a Nation", is food for thought this election year. It takes the founding fathers down off Mt. Rushmore and makes their debates and worries personal and relevant. Ben Franklin, in particular, foresaw the nation's drift toward despotism.

Here is Chris Lydon's blog entry on Vidal, and his mp3 of a conversation with him.

Christopher Lydon Interviews... :

UPDATE: THE LINKS ARE FIXED - Enjoy the interview.

From editorandpublisher.com:

The Top 10 Web Sites for Working Journalists

Incredible site, documenting layers of graffiti on walls in San Francisco. Via Boing Boing.

Warning: graphics heavy. May take a long time to load on a slow connection.

graffiti archaeology

No I'm not a baseball fan. I'm missing that gene.

I'm a New Yorker who has all but erased his true nature as a redneck from Georgia. I wish. At least I never had an accent.

But I have been known to argue the wrong side of the Confederate flag issue. Until my wife shut me up on that one. She insists all my ancestors were criminals that they sent over in the 1700's.

Here, thanks to a link from Patrick Nielsen Hayden, is a handy list of anti-Confederate rants for those who want to bait a Southerner, written by some damn Yankee named John Scalzi.

And why are we still fighting that war anyway? The Old South is gone gone gone with the wind and buried in fast food franchises.

WHATEVER: Speaking of Losers

NaNoWriMo.org : Home - Breaking News

National Novel Writing Month - Start on Nov. 1, write a 175 page, 50,000 word novel by midnight Nov. 30.

But no pressure...

Cory Doctorow has made 6 out of 9 stories from his new collection available for download online. I'll read them on the plane to San Diego this afternoon.

A Place So Foreign and Eight More

Too late at night, too long on the road. But my son Mick and I are in Eugene, Oregon, at the home of friends, after driving across the country with Mick's possessions in a 10-year old van. Next stop: Stanford University, Palo Alto, California. After an overnight in Bigfoot country.

It took days for my eyesight to get accustomed to the horizon. The wide spaces, some of it stark, dry and empty. The peaks: Black Hills, Absaroka, Cascades. The ancestors: elk, bald eagle, bison, mule deer. Rigby, Idaho: home of Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television. Geysers, lava flows, eroded spires.

Next, the last leg. From Ken Kesey to John Muir to Steve Jobs. And the best school of microbiology and immunology in the world. Mick and Tina: fly on, kids!

Here is the speech that Alex Shoumatoff delivered to the “Adirondack Voices For Peace” rally, at John Brown’s homestead in North Elba, New York, August 16, 2003

I am now [having sung and strummed a few peace songs with my three little boys] going to give a brief speech that is probably going to get me audited and sent to Guantanamo, but here goes :

The John Brown Homestead seems a somewhat strange venue for a peace rally, considering that Brown’s approach to social change was anything but peaceful.
But perhaps violence was what was needed to rid our noble democratic experiment of the greatest evil of the day—slavery-- whose bitter legacy is still poisoning our society. Today our society is plagued with other evils. One is our own unbridled capacity for violence. We need to evolve beyond the point that we think we can bomb innocent civilians in other countries in order to get rid of regimes we installed in the first place that are no longer to our liking. We’ve got to get over this penchant for “bombs bursting in air” that’s right there in the national anthem. As Bob Dylan puts it in Blowin’ in the Wind, “How many times must the cannonballs fly before they’re forever banned ?… How many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry ? How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died ?” And the solution to these horribly violent times is not more violence. I’ve been waiting for a prophetic voice of the stature of Dylan to arise. That’s someone we could really use about now.

Our second problem is that our government has been hijacked by some very dangerous people. The president we have now is not the one that the majority voted for, so this is no longer a democracy, and the reason he got in is because the Supreme Court has been bought, and the media, which should raising holy hell about the situation, is embedded with this illicit regime and scared to make a peep because they will lose access. It’s a very serious situation. America has lost its moral leadership in the world, and is morally adrift in savage capitalism and hyperconsumption and protofascistic militarism and our democracy, everything that makes this country great, is going down the tubes. What can we do about it? What should I as an American citizen who loves this country and the people and animals and plants in it be doing is something that I’ve been asking myself every day since we bombed Iraq again and this time invaded and occupied it, despite the clear global consensus that this was not anything we had any right to do, but the attitude of the illicit junta was : what are you going to do about it ?
So what are we going to do about it ? One thing is for those of us who are deeply disturbed about what is happening to our country to gather in peaceful protest rallies like this, and I want to thank Michele Syverson for putting this one together and everyone who has had the courage and conviction to come here this afternoon. We need to make it clear that not every American is going along with the agenda that this regime is trying to force on us and on the entire world. Then we need to get rid of these creeps, not by force, but by exposing what they’re doing, the way Woodward and Berstein exposed Watergate and brought down Nixon, and speaking out and organizing a viable alternative and voting them out and making sure this time that the election isn’t rigged and the majority gets the people it voted for in office.

But before we can do that we need to inform ourselves about what is going on, the impact that we are having on the rest of the world and what the rest of the world thinks about it. I can tell you something about this because for the last thirty years I have been traveling all over the world and writing about what I encountered. All too often I have traveled to some remote magical corner of the world and instead of finding the beautiful, pristine, exotic cultures and ecosystems I was expecting to be there, I have come upon scenes of appalling destruction. It started with a trip to Jamaica in l970. I was staying with some friends in a bungalow in the hills above Oche Rios that belonged to Reynolds Aluminum in a lush rainforest full of birds and butterflies but right behind the bungalow were two hills that had literally been decapitated and were oozing blood-red bauxite rich lateritic soil that had been trucked off and processed into aluminum foil and other products. When I returned to America I saw how obliviously and wastefully my countrymen were using aluminum foil without having a clue of the cost that it was taking on places like Jamaica.
Since then aluminum foil is not something I have bought or used.

Six years later, in l976, I went to the Amazon and saw a fire raging out of control on the King Ranch there that was bigger than Belgium. It was so hot that the huge trees of the rainforest were being sandblasted into the air and landing upside down with their huge flaring buttresses looking like the fins of crashed rocket ships. The rainforest was being burned off and converted to pasture for cattle so we could have our Big Macs, an unknown number of animal and plants species were being wiped out before they could even be identified—this particularly sad type of oblivion is known as Sentinelan extinction-- and the smoke from the fires was spewing millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I learned about the greenhouse effect that this co 2 was causing, heating up the planet, when it was still known to only a handful of scientists and environmentalists, and I realized that it might not be a bad idea to move north a few hundred miles, so a few years later I moved from Westchester County, where I was born and raised, to the Adirondacks, which is why I am here today. But most Americans didn’t learn about the fires in the Amazon until the scorching record breaking summer of l988, when the fires were incorrectly blamed as the main cause of what was happening. In fact the single greatest cause of global warming are the millions of cars that are on the road in America at any given moment.

The more I traveled, the more I saw the incredible disparities between the lucky few who live in America and the other developed countries and the rest of the world. Here are some examples : the c.e.o of Dell computer (one of whose laptops I own) makes more than $16,000 an hour, while two billion people in the developing world are struggling to survive on a dollar a day. 400 superrich Americans have an average income of nearly $174 million, a combined income of $69 billion, which is more than the combined income of the 166 million people in the four African countries that President Bush recently visited : Senegal, South Africa, Botswana, Uganda. The U.S. average life expectancy is 77 years. In Africa it’s 50 years, 40 in some AIDs-ravaged countries. There’s a guy called Ira Reinnert who’s building a 100,000 square foot mansion in the Hamptons of a sumptuousness not seen since Versailles. He makes his millions by buying up toxic mines that contaminate everybody for miles around. Many of his mining ventures aren’t doing too well because of the enormous number of lawsuits they have provoked from people they have made sick, but Reinnert still owns the company that makes Humvees, which get like six miles to the gallon and have replaced the Jeep as the vehicle of our armed forces, so he’s not going belly-up any time soon.

To continue : The U.S. consumes 25 million barrels of oil a day. The next biggest consumer is Japan, which consumes 7 million barrels. Big industrialized countries like Canada and Brazil, as well as England, France, and Germany, consume only 1 million barrels a day. The pulp and paper industry is responsible for 7 percent of the co2 emitted globally into the atmosphere per year. The production, consumption, and disposal of paper products contributes 420 additional million metric tonnes of atmospheric co2 annually. The average American consumes 337 kilos of paper a year, 111 times what the average Indian does.

I wrote a story about sturgeons, which are so endangered that it is criminal to eat caviar any more. The same is true of the Atlantic salmon. There are only a hundred thousand of them left in the wild. The Atlantic codfish, which once number in the billions, has been fished out, as have many of the other large commercial fish.

I am not a radical, and you are supposed to become more conservative as you get older, but in my case the opposite has happened. As Edward Hoagland recently wrote about himself in Harper’s magazine, I have become radicalized by the wholesale destruction of nature and traditional cultures that I keep encountering on almost every trip that I take. I am more radical than I have ever been in my life, and I’m becoming more radical by the minute. Twenty years ago I wouldn’t have been caught dead on the same podium as the pinko treehugging head of Greenpeace. Today I’m proud to be here and ready to be of any service to my buddy Passacantando that I can [Passacantando was the main speaker at the rally. The master of ceremonies was Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature. The last time the three of us had been together was in Kyoto.]

Three years ago I was so distraught by the situation that I founded a Web Site dedicated to raising consciousness about the worldwide destruction of species and cultures. It’s called DispatchesFromTheVanishingWorld.com and it contains lengthy, indepth articles about what it happening to the fish in the Gulf of Maine, the prairie dogs in Chihuahua, the Ukrainian Orthodox churches in the plains of Manitoba. Next time you’re on the Web, please check it out. DispatchesFromTheVanishingWorld.com .

One of the first Dispatches was commissioned by Ted Turner’s United Nations Foundations, which was contributing three million dollars to keep going the national parks in eastern Congo during the civil war that has ravaged that country for the last seven years. These parks contain some of the crown jewels of the animal kingdom, like the okapi, or forest giraffe, and the mountain gorilla. The UN Foundation wanted me to do a site report before the funds were being dispersed. What I found is that these parks are havens for not only many guerillas groups and bandits, the deserters of four different armies, tens of thousands of fugitive killers who committed the genocide in neighboring Rwanda in l994, but also the miners of a rare mineral called coltan, which has a very high melting point and is needed for every cellphone, laptop, solid-state electronic appliance, satellite, shoulder-fired anti-tank rocket, and ballistic missile. The miners of this metal are roasting and eating the last mountains gorillas and okapis and forest elephants on earth. Most of the coltan goes guess where—the USA. There’s a company called Cabot High Performance materials in Boyerstown, Pennsylvania that makes a hundred million dollars a year just grinding coltan into a purified powder and selling it to companies that stamp it into capacitors. The other big player in the coltan trade is Carlisle, which has George Bush Senior, ex-Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, the good, capitalist bin Ladens, Howard Baker and other Republic stalwarts on its board. Carlisle’s biggest customer is the American military. A whole lot of coltan was just used in the attack on Iraq. As a small-time African coltan dealer observed to me, “Isn’t it ironic that the people who are protecting the parks are the same ones who are destroying it ?”

When you put all this together, start connecting the dots, a clear and horrifying picture emerges : we are sucking the marrow out of the rest of the world. The 4% of us who are fortunate to be American are consuming anywhere from 25% to 66% of the world’s resources, depending on whose numbers you go with. This is obviously not right, and it can’t go on. We have become the hated, selfish upper class of the world. And when one small group has too much and refuses to share it, what happens : revolution. That’s what happened in Russia in l917. I know about that revolution, of belonging to an elete that had a good thing going and was violently overthrown, because my people belonged to the Russian nobility that was exterminated by the Bolsheviks. My immediate family was driven out of the country where we had lived for a thousand years, and ended up here, but whole lines of my kin, aunts, uncles, cousins, were slaughtered, and the same is true of my wife, a Rwandan Tutsi, so I am not a fan of violent social change, believe me, because what it ushers in, even with the best intentions, usually ends up worse that what was there before. The one thing that revolutions have in common is that they are betrayed, as the new guys get a taste for power, and this is what is happening in our country now : the American revolution is being betrayed. The principles that our republic was founded on, like the separation of church and state, are being overturned. Genesis establishes the supremacy of man over nature, a Roman Catholic archbishop heading the committee that decided the Vatican should come out in favor of genetically engineered food, declared recently. I don’t condone Al Quaida at all, I would rather, all in all, see the world run by our boys, creepy as they are, than by Islamic fundamentalists who I think need to do some serious rethinking about their intolerance, their readiness to kill anyone who doesn’t worship their god or obey their rules, and their attitude toward women, but I can understand why a devout Muslim might be offended by Calvin Klein ads in which thirteen year old girls are dressed in skimpy underwear and made up to look like sluts. 9/11 in my opinion is the end of the American imperium. Al Quaeda is simply the violent activist expression of a much more widespread discontent with what America is doing all over the world. The crashing of the planes into the World Trade Center can be likened to the bomb that was thrown into the carriage of Tsar Alexander 2 in l882. That was the end of tsarist Russia, even though the revolution didn’t happen for another thirty five years. America is going to hold on as only superpower with the world’s most powerful military and keep bullying everybody with impunity as long as it can, maybe for another decade or two, but it’s over. The empire that began with Teddy Roosevelt and spawned the banana republic attitude to the rest of the world, that it only exists for us to exploit its resources and cheap manpower, has had its day, just as the Roman, Spanish, French, and British empires came and went. We and the entire world are in for some dire times, not only more acts of violent terrorism, but blackouts of the grid that 50 million people depend on like the one that just happened. I read in the New York Times that the grid is antiquated and overstrained by more demand for energy that it can supply, but that no one in the current deteriorating economic circumstances has the will to spend the couple of billion dollars it would take to fix it. But what about the attack on Iraq which we were told was carried out at the bargain price of a billion dollars a day ?

What are our priorities here ? This totally uncalled for and unjustified war was not about the liberation of the Iraqui people. If Sadam had been the president of Rwanda do you think we would have lifted a finger ? Did we lift a finger in l994, when a million Rwandans were being slaughtered and the timely deployment of a couple of hundred peacekeepers could have prevented that genocide from happening ? No : in fact we blocked the UN from sending peacekeepers because, having been burned in Somalia, a disastrous attempt to keep the momentum of Desert Storm going in the name of “humanitarian intervention,” we didn’t want to get involved. And the same is true of our dithering over Liberia and finally sending a couple of dozen of marine ashore once the coast was clear.

I was in Paris last week. It was a hundred and four. A few days later the temperature hit 106 degrees in Switzerland. Switzerland ! The land of the Alps and glaciers that are melting like ice-cream cones. Europeans have no problem believing in the reality of global warming and have been taking steps to curb their CO2 emissions for years, but the country that is mainly responsible has reneged on the Kyoto protocol. Do you think this is adding to our popularity ?

What can we do as individuals to minimize the damage to us and the other cultures and species around the world ? Understand the terrible cost of the American good life to the rest of the world, reduce our consumption on all fronts, don’t switch on the air conditioning when the temperature rises, for instance, because that is only burning more energy and creating more emissions and adding to the problem. Make every effort to get to know and understand the people from other cultures in their own countries and in our midst and to respect their belief systems, curb the runaway violence in our society by starting on eliminating the violence in ourselves, getting rid of our guns, being there for our teenage kids so they don’t run amok in their schools, respect and appreciate the beauty and the right to exist of all sentient beings, hold peaceful consciousness-raising rallies like this, exercise our precious freedoms before we lose them, the right to free speech, speak out, protest vote fraud, savage capitalism, military madness, vote out the people who are selling out the domestic and global environment for their own personal gains and adding millions more to their personal fortunes every time we bomb somewhere, and who are destroying the future of our children, and give peace a chance.

I recently read Charlie Stross' 2001 debut story "Lobsters". Here's an interview with this accomplished SF writer:

: RevolutionSF - New Directions: Decoding the Imagination of Charles Stross : Interview

Here's his weblog:

Charlie's Fair and Balanced Diary

And the collaborative online story he wrote with Cory Doctorow:

Unwirer

Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing) has his Nebula Award - bound novella available free for the reading, online at Salon.

Salon.com Technology | "0wnz0red"

The team of Susana Hayward and Janet Schwartz have another story on Knight-Ridder online, about the popular Mexico City mayor (his father is from Palenque) who may have a shot at the Mexican presidency.

KR Washington Bureau | 07/09/2003 | Support for powerful Mexico City mayor may propel him to follow Fox

From Electrolite

“The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.”
(James Madison)

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
(Benjamin Franklin)

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”
(William Pitt)

A profile of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose City Lights book store in San Francisco is celebrating its 50th anniversary.

Ferlinghetti's City Lights, Still A Beacon at 50 (washingtonpost.com)

Including non-scientific writings and travel diaries.

Einstein Archives Online

In "Motley Fool" a column that refers to the "Mayan concept of the universe as it relates to investing."

That's right, guys - collapse. We've seen it before.

Fool.com: The Previous Menace [Commentary] June 11, 2003

By way of Boing Boing, a speech by Kurt Vonnegut on Mark Twain, George Bush and the strange world we find ourselves in today.

In These Times | Strange Weather Lately

I missed this story about P.S. 20 in the Lower East Side, an educational success story, due to its principal, Dr. G, and a little luck.

"But of all the tricks he's learned, by far the most important is reducing class size. "The first line of defense," he preaches. "My philosophy is you can't have a good education with 30 to 35 per classroom." It is no coincidence, he says, that P.S. 20's test scores have gone up since 1999, the first year of a state program that provided $140 million to reduce classroom size in elementary grades across the state."

Little-Known Jewel of Lower East Side

In the New York Times, an op-ed contributor, Azar Nafisi, writes of the need for imagination in times like these.

Words of War

In anticipation of the ideological spin to come (see Rancho Esmeralda news below):

George Orwell Library

From Patrick Nielsen Hayden's Electrolite weblog, a link to a CNN story about a bookseller who is a hero in these dangerous times.

CNN.com - Bookseller purges files to avoid potential 'Patriot Act' searches - Feb. 20, 2003

Two Mexico stories from Tim Weiner in the Times today. The guy is prolific.

Mexico's Corrupt Oil Lifeline

Mexico Challenges U.S. on Its Citizens on Death Row

Cory Doctorow, who just made his new novel available for free download (see my previous post), has a wi-fi future short story in Salon.

Salon.com Technology | Liberation spectrum

Just a note to other fans of Gibson, Stephenson, Sterling and other "cyberpunk" writers. At least two of them have weblogs. The Gibson site is fairly new.

William Gibson

The Infinite Matrix | Bruce Sterling | Schism Matrix

Online Journalism Review has a good interview with Matt Groening, creator of "The Simpsons." It includes links to a number of cartoon websites, comments on how technology has changed the way we view comedy.

OJR article: Doh! Groening's Guide to Digital Cartooning

As a former employee of Michael Eisner (I was a "cast member" in a windowless editing room in the basement of an ABC network building on the corner of the most over-civilized block in the world) I look forward to reading Cory Doctorow's new book. With the download he's provided, I may actually try to read it on my laptop. You can buy the dead tree version if you prefer.

To download it:
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

There's a new online monthly magazine that covers news in southern Mexico. Just in time for the resurfacing of the EZLN.

debateSUR revista mensual

Bishop of San Cristobal Makes an Appeal for Peace and Justice

In the New York Times, an article about the restoration of a mural by the Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros.

A New Life for Revolutionary Art

For anyone else playing with layouts in a weblog, or any kind of website, goddesskristine at scriptygoddess has posted a number of links to CSS resources. Once my head clears from the latest bout with the workaday world, I may hit CSS again.

CSS Tricks: CSS layout resources

I ran out of steam when I got to the design you see here. But I was pleased to read here that this "3 column page with a fluid center" is the holy grail, "the most elegant technique and perhaps the most sought after layout."

My apologies to all 12 of my readers. I've been too busy to post much lately, and there hasn't been much news on the Usumacinta dams front.

But for folks looking for downloadable books, here's a link, thanks to Cory Doctorow, to books in the public domain in much of the world. Might be useful to some friends in Mexico and Guatemala. But then there's always Amazon.

Books Online, NO US ACCESS

In spite of the link title, there are books on this list that are legal downloads in the US.

After 28 years here, I'm definitely a New Yorker. But the last couple of months I've been immersed in dark 50's Los Angeles, editing a show on L.A. Confidential, the book and the movie. That's also why I'm a little slow posting here the last few days. Author James Ellroy is in a new anthology of L.A. writing, reviewed here:

A literary life story of L.A.

In today's San Antonio Current (thank you Google News) is a story that our friend Janet Schwartz uncovered last year, about Maya converts to Islam who live on the outskirts of San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas. The article tries to tie the group to "radical anti-globalists" without too much success.

I guess I should have done this Google search a long time ago. Here's what gomaya means in Pali, the language that the Buddha used.

pali-english e, g, gh, ~n, h, i and ii

gomaya nt. cow-dung.

The Times has an article on weblogs and journalists:

Reporters Find New Outlet, and Concerns, in Web Logs

(free registration required)

Glad I'm not a news site. Now there's one-stop news shopping: Google News.

Alright, I hate the word blog. Sound like stomping through mud instead of zipping stuff onto the web and out to whoever wants it.

For my wife's cousin Michael who listened to my weblog rant this weekend, here's a link to a Weblog Tool Feature Comparison Table.

I've changed the right column on this weblog.

Under "Entries by topic", you can now choose either the entire topic archive, by clicking the topic name, which has an asterisk beside it (*Cacao, *Watery Way) or you can click on any individual entry in a topic.

Previously, you could only choose the topic, which meant loading all the entries in the the topic. Especially in Watery Way, where I have all the dam entries, this has been getting slower and more unwieldy as the topic expanded.

The obscure, allusive topic names haven't changed.

Thanks to Patrick Nielsen Hayden's weblog, Electrolite, for a quotation that's bounced around in my head in corrupted form for years:

"For every complex question, there's a simple answer. And it's wrong."(--H. L. Mencken)

And another that's just a pleasure, from a good old Southern girl:

"The prophet Amos said, 'Let justice roll down like mighty waters'--but then some politician has to get into the sewer system and figure out how to make it work."
(--Molly Ivins)

Thanks to Cary Doctorow for links to the winners of this year's Hugo awards. The stories are available for free reading online.

The Dog Said Bow-Wow by Michael Swanwick, Best Short Story

Hell is the Absence of God by Ted Chiang, Best Novelette

And for Best Novella:
Fast Times and Fairmont High by Vernor Vinge

You can find links to all the finalists here.

I don't use it much, since I prefer iView for photo organization, but iPhoto has a lot going for it once you get past its limitations. Here are some iPhoto Power Techniques from TidBITS.

(this is a list I'll keep adding to)

The best and first add-on to MacOS X is Graphic Converter 4.4.4, a $30 shareware graphics program. I'm using it on all graphics and digital photos, for resizing and converting. Other shareware downloads are on this page at MacUpdate.

Next, ditch Internet Explorer. But first download Mozilla for MacOS X, best browser. Do it before the Toho corporation (think Godzilla) makes them change the name.

And pay $50 for a Microsoft Office replacement, ThinkFree Office. Yes, excel and powerpoint compatibility. As far as I can tell.

I have some more Maya dam links to post, but I wanted to give a link to this unusual speech by Bruce Sterling at an Open Source conference. That way I can find it later, also.

Heather Hurst and Leonard Ashby spent over 2 years working in a studio above a tattoo parlor in New Haven. When they came out, they had painted stunning half-size replicas of the 3 Bonampak murals. (Click on thumbnails for larger photo)

Posted by Dave at 11:34 PM