Friday, October 11, 2002

Practice. Purify. Purr-fection.

yogakitty.jpgYogaKitty

Very informative videos demonstrate yoga techniques for you and your cat.

"Our goal is to present a practical, step-by-step guide for humans & their cats to activate their fullest potential, allowing man, woman, & feline to dwell in the ecstasy of physical, mental, & spiritual health."

This site also has a comprehensive links page, including a link to the excellent documentary site: Cats are from Mars.
posted by lee on 10/11/02 at 05:35 PM

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Thursday, October 10, 2002

from Mark Fiore

Why we must invade Iraq right now, a Flash movie.

Check out his animation gallery while you're there -- very clever, very funny!
posted by lee on 10/10/02 at 05:25 PM

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science fiction zine

The Infinite Matrix is an, ummm, "online journal for people who like science fiction." Has a blog by Bruce Sterling, stories, a fundraising campaign, other things. It's very pretty -- worth looking at for sure.
posted by lee on 10/10/02 at 12:02 AM

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Wednesday, October 09, 2002

USA’s long history of bioweapons use

Yahoo! News - U.S. Secretly Tested Bioweapons

For example:
Devil Hole I, designed to test how sarin gas would disperse after being released in artillery shells and rockets in aspen and spruce forests. The tests occurred in the summer of 1965 at the Gerstle River test site near Fort Greeley, Alaska. Sarin is a powerful nerve gas that causes a choking, thrashing death. The Bush administration says it is part of Iraq's chemical arsenal.

Devil Hole II, which tested how the nerve agent VX behaved when dispersed with artillery shells. The test at the Gerstle River site in Alaska also included mannequins in military uniforms and military trucks. VX is one of the deadliest nerve agents known and is persistent in the environment because it is a sticky liquid that evaporates slowly. Iraq has acknowledged making tons of VX.

Big Tom, a 1965 test that included spraying bacteria over the Hawaiian island of Oahu to simulate a biological attack on an island compound, and to develop tactics for such an attack. The test used Bacillus globigii, a bacterium believed at the time to be harmless. Researchers later discovered the bacterium, a relative of the one that causes anthrax, could cause infections in people with weakened immune systems.

Rapid Tan I, II, and III, a series of tests in 1967 and 1968 in England and Canada. The tests used sarin and VX, as well as the nerve agents tabun and soman, at the British chemical weapons facility in Porton Down, England. Tests at the Suffield Defence Research Establishment in Ralston, Canada, included tabun and soman, the records show. Tabun and soman are chemically related to sarin and produce similar effects.
posted by lee on 10/09/02 at 04:58 PM

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psy-ops

The Village Voice: Forked-Tongue Warriors by Ian Urbina

An interesting look at at an army battalion we seldom hear about. The one that spends colossal amounts of money on things like dropping leaflets on populations with extremely low literacy rates. Or getting American soldiers killed because they screw up.

[snip]
Often more confusing than convincing, psy-ops can suffer hugely from the smallest graphical errors. A T-shirt used in Cambodia to try to deter kids from entering certain unsafe zones featured a boy squatting over a mine that he was poking with a stick. The silk-screened shirt was yanked from production, according to one account, when angered villagers kept asking why American personnel were distributing images of kids defecating over land mines. The squatting boy was eventually redrawn.

Bigger mistakes mean bigger consequences. Leaflets dropped in Somalia in 1992 prior to the UN troop arrival were meant to assure the populace of the mission's humanitarian intentions. Unfortunately, of all the personnel the U.S. initially deployed in the country, only two were native speakers, and one turned out to be the son of the country's bloodiest warlord. Pamphlet proofreaders, needless to say, were in short supply, and the result was sometimes quite embarrassing. Instead of announcing help from the "United Nations," the pamphlets spoke of help from the "Slave Nations," and as anyone who has seen the movie Black Hawk Down can certainly attest, neither the blue helmets nor the boys with stars and stripes were welcomed with open arms when they eventually landed ashore.

The backflow of misinformation can also be a serious problem. Though the Pentagon and the CIA are barred by law from propaganda activities in the United States, during the mid 1970s increased scrutiny of military intelligence operations revealed that programs planting fake leaks in the foreign press had resulted in false articles running back through the U.S. media. But sometimes the false articles are intentional. When the American public seemed to be developing weak knees about the Nicaraguan contras, the Office of Public Diplomacy, part of the Reagan-era State Department, quickly leaked fake intelligence to The Miami Herald that the Soviet Union had given chemical weapons to the Sandinistas.
[/snip]
posted by lee on 10/09/02 at 03:02 PM

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Tuesday, October 08, 2002

CSI Miami

A rabid fan of CSI, I had high hopes for CSI: Miami. We (Stanley and I) watched the pilot and decided to give it a chance.

The first episode, the downed plane in the Everglades, was stupid beyond belief. The CSI taking over the investigation of a crash site? As if. The writers tried to shove so many things into what they hoped would be a whammy of an opener all it did was induce a tendency to hurl. Especially the sappy closing bit, reading the BS letter from the deceased whistleblower-to-be.

Even the implausible story line could be forgiven if it were not for the addition of Kim Delaney to the cast. To the detriment of Emily Proctor, who was the reason we decided to give CSI: Miami a chance in the first place (it sure as hell wasn't David Caruso -- he's just retreading his NYPD Blue role). Delaney's acting (if it can even be called that) is about as one-dimensional as one can get without being a black hole. (Watch five minutes of her in any of her series and I defy you to tell me which was which.)

But, okay, we'll give it a chance, we decided.

I don't even remember what last week's episode was about.

Monday's episode was another trip through gag-me land. Not enough science. No point to Megan's role, and she wasn't called on the carpet for usurping Horatio's role as she would have been in the real world. Unbelievable portrayal of the Miami Cuban immigrant community (let's create a phony stereotype of them, just as we did for Chinese immigrant communities). And another stupidly sappy ending sequence.

I don't care if I see it again or not. Depends on what else in on at the time.
posted by lee on 10/08/02 at 07:40 PM

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Saturday, October 05, 2002

That’s billion, with a “b”

law.com: $28 Billion Smoker Award Could Be Cut

"A Los Angeles jury's $28 billion award shows that Californians are willing to hit cigarette makers in the pocketbook -- but don't expect the award to stand, attorneys and academics who monitor tobacco litigation say."

Philip Morris, the particular brand of tobacco company sued in this case, said the lady shoulda quit because she knew the dangers of smoking. The jurors didn't buy it. Maybe there were some smokers on the jury, or ex-smokers, or maybe the jury was just offended by the arrogance of the company. Or sick and tired of breathing in second-hand smoke.

Whatever Philip Morris says, I know how hideously difficult it is to quit smoking. And how hard it is to stay quit of it. It's been just over a year for me, and I would never have been able to quit without the help of my doctor and a three-month prescription for Wellbutrin and the patience and support of Stanley.

I still crave cigarettes. I've read that they're more addictive than heroin. I KNOW they're harder to kick than alcohol.

I know a judge will reduce this award -- but I hope he or she keeps it high enough to really HURT Philip Morris. It's still small compensation for a life cut way too short by lung cancer.
posted by lee on 10/05/02 at 05:23 PM

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Friday, October 04, 2002

on the other hand, there’s this museum website ...

MONPA. The Museum of Non-Primate Art. Done by New Zealand firm Catch-22. Well done and clever -- check out Bird Art.
posted by lee on 10/04/02 at 04:07 PM

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Matisse - Picasso exhibit

Matisse|Picasso is a site backing the exhibits that were/will be on display in London (it's gone), Paris, and New York. It's a beautiful site, but very hard to navigate. Once one does figure out that the way to enter is by selecting a city, it's hard to READ the text as the font is unchangeable and set way too small. The sponsor box on the bottom takes up too much real estate and distracts greatly from the content. There are gratuitous scroll buttons -- at least, I couldn't tell if they worked or if they were broken since I had no way of knowing where the content ended (not that I could actually read it ... )

This site was created by Mosquito.Web, which explains a lot of its hostility as Mosquito.Web is a French company. The company's sites are beautiful, user unfriendly, and basically, all look the same. Too bad, because the content -- mostly European museum exhibits -- is worthy of more thought and human-centered design than Mosquito.Net provides.
posted by lee on 10/04/02 at 04:03 PM

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they’re durable, no?

Duct Tape Fashion Gallery

More uses for duct tape. We know a kid who made his wallet out of duct tape. It isn't pretty, but it works just fine.
posted by lee on 10/04/02 at 03:42 PM

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