Netflix has struck on a fantastic idea: show classic films at the locations where they were filmed. The Netflix Roadshow will occur throughout this August — tho at this writing, details about tickets, dammit! are still forthcoming.
My personal top candidates, in descending order: The Searchers in Monument Valley, Arizona; The Shining at Estes Park, Colorado; and Escape from Alcatraz on Alcatraz Island.
…Oh shit! I’ve used up all my vacation for the 3D World Expo II! Argh!!
For anyone who grew up in the Midwest, James Lileks’ Gallery of Regrettable Food will bring back memories of being forced to sit at the table until you eat all of your over-boiled canned vegetables and scary meat.
While cruising down Midwestern mastication memory lane, you’ll want to pull off and make a stop at the White Castle Recipes site. Sup like a fallen king on dubious delights like White Castle Souffle, Stubby’s 3-Cheese Spinach (and White Castle) Quiche, Castle Balls (hmmm), and (shudder) Castle Cobbler.
And assuming you’re still clinging to life after such a malicious meal, you’ll definitely need to partake of Recipes of the Damned. Fruit Cocktail-SPAM Buffet Party Loaf — need I say more?
And to think sushi once scared me…
Update: As a public service, because obesity is such a problem these days, I am obliged to refer you, dear gustinaut, to these Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974. These are definitely your tickets to immediate weight loss. Mostly by aversion therapy. The last time I saw a Frankenfurter Spectacular, I threw toast at the screen.
Rebellion: John Horse and the Black Seminoles, First Black Rebels to Beat American Slavery is an amazing site that you must visit at length.
Per Metafilter (thanks once again):
“Rebellion is a Web documentary that explores the inspiring, true, and largely unknown story of John Horse and the Black Seminoles, a community of free blacks and fugitive slaves who in 1838 became the first black rebels to defeat American slavery.” This visually arresting site is a treasure trove of information about the Seminoles, early Florida history, and a largely unrecognized (and successful!) slave rebellion that may have been the largest in American history. The site includes interactive maps, arresting images, and a thorough history of the rebellion. Too bad the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma expelled all its black members in 1990.
Learn more about the Black Seminoles at Wikipedia.
Wow. “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (in the latest issue of Rolling Stone) is another (long) piece of required reading.
Rolling Stone has been throwing down with some pretty interesting investigative reporting lately that almost harkens back to its heyday during the Watergate era.
Ice Lens Photography by Matthew Wheeler
Matthew Wheeler took his first picture through an ice lens in response to a challenge by Scientific American and CBC calling on listeners to light a fire with a lens made entirely of ice.
Too easy by far – Matthew took it one step farther and started photographing the natural beauty of his surroundings through the ice lenses he made.
Fuck
By Christopher M. Fairman
Ohio State University – Michael E. Moritz College of Law March 2006
Ohio State Public Law Working Paper No. 59
Center for Interdisciplinary Law and Policy Studies Working Paper Series No. 39
Abstract:Â
This Article is as simple and provocative as its title suggests: it explores the legal implications of the word fuck. The intersection of the word fuck and the law is examined in four major areas: First Amendment, broadcast regulation, sexual harassment, and education. The legal implications from the use of fuck vary greatly with the context. To fully understand the legal power of fuck, the nonlegal sources of its power are tapped. Drawing upon the research of etymologists, linguists, lexicographers, psychoanalysts, and other social scientists, the visceral reaction to fuck can be explained by cultural taboo. Fuck is a taboo word. The taboo is so strong that it compels many to engage in self-censorship. This process of silence then enables small segments of the population to manipulate our rights under the guise of reflecting a greater community. Taboo is then institutionalized through law, yet at the same time is in tension with other identifiable legal rights. Understanding this relationship between law and taboo ultimately yields fuck jurisprudence.
Long ago — before CDRs were affordable, before MP3s or even streaming audio, before every Mac came with GarageBand pre-installed and, hell, almost before Macs — there was the mighty analog cassette tape and the 4-track cassette recorder. During the 1980s these now-lowly and pathetic pieces of technology empowered countless freakazoid musicians to make a joyful (or woeful) (or uncategorizable) sound unlike ever before. Like the zine culture it paralleled during the same period, it was a democratizing form of creative samizdat that spawned an entire generation of new art and artists, a whole new form of distribution, and even new forms of music.
Homemade Alien Music is an ongoing series of 1-hour podcasts featuring music/racket/audio phenomena from the cassette underground during the ’80s and ’90s. Emphasis is on experimental, industrial, and electronic music.
The podcast is curated by Hal McGee, who was truly at the epicenter of the cassette/home-taper underground as a founder of the experimental/industrial label Cause and Effect and, later, editor of the legendary Electronic Cottage zine.
The whole thing is beautifully perfect: using the new medium of free Internet distribution of MP3s to remind us all of it’s analog, proto-sneaker-net roots.
Required Reading. In another new article from A List Apart, Joe Clark writes a thorough but blistering and dismaying review of the W3C’s long-awaited new iteration of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, aptly entitled To Hell With WCAG 2. (The article includes links to all the primary documents.)
To quote some summarizing comments (with bold emphases added):
In an effort to be all things to all web content, the fundamentals of WCAG 2 are nearly impossible for a working standards-compliant developer to understand. WCAG 2 backtracks on basics of responsible web development that are well accepted by standardistas. WCAG 2 is not enough of an improvement and was not worth the wait.
…A lot of loose ends have been tidied up, and many low-priority guidelines are now pretty solid. The problem here is that standardistas already knew what to do to cover the same territory as those low-priority guidelines. Where WCAG 2 breaks down is in the big stuff. Curiously, though, and perhaps due to meticulous editing over the years, the big stuff is well camouflaged and, to an uninformed reader, WCAG 2 seems reasonable. It isn’t, and you as a working standards-compliant developer are going to find it next to impossible to implement WCAG 2.
…WCAG 2 will be unusable by real-world developers, especially standards-compliant developers. It is too vague and counterfactual to be a reliable basis for government regulation. It leaves too many loopholes for developers on the hunt for them. WCAG 2 is a failure, and not even a noble one at that.
While reading the article, I nearly wept. Over the last few months, in part because of a client highly sensitized to accessibility issues (which is good), I have spent a great deal of effort educating myself about accessibility issues and best practices. The touchstone for suches has been WCAG 1.0 — now seven years old. This standards document serves as a mutual enforcement device: my client can use it to remind me of what I need to do, and I can use it to remind my client of what is reasonable (and possible) to expect.
And that means WCAG 2.0 will be the new touchstone. Unfortunately, it’s difficult-at-best to understand, impossible to comply with, and — incredibly — does not even include the most rudimentary demands of valid HTML and (hello!) plain language.
And that means that WCAG 2.0 will not achieve its primary function:Â improving web accessibility by providing clear, practical (i.e. real-world), and achievable standards for creating web sites and content.
This is a huge issue that is not merely semantic because in many countries — such as Britain and, oh, the entire European Union — a site that is not accessible faces potentially devastating lawsuits or other legal action. This is not a hypothetical — just ask Target.com, subject of a huge legal judgement on precisely this point. And, again, a key standards touchstone are the standards put forth by the W3C — an international body that defines stuff like, oh, the HTTP protocol itself.
Stay tuned, and keep aware of emerging developments. This is a very big deal.
What with the Ajax invasion and all, JavaScript is once again all over the damn place. The big difference now vs. the ’90s is JavaScript is doing a lot more heavy lifting and — more importantly — interacting with both host server and browser client (i.e. user’s machine) in ways heretofore (mostly) not seen. And that means along with all the cool stuff and wond’rous toys and tools comes a whole new avenue for mayhem by lowlifes, script kiddies, and really gnarly folks like the Russian mafia.
Server-side programmers — at least the good ones — are already atuned the potentially cataclysmic horrors that can be wrought via insertion attack methods, but in javaScript circles — even the upper aeries of guru-dom — awareness of such dangers is not as pronounced. This is bad.
Fortunately, A List Apart is doing its part for responsible web development (as usual) and has posted a good 2-part primer on writing secure JS code by Niklas Bivald:
Community Creators, Secure Your Code!
Community Creators, Secure Your Code! Part II
Let’s hope this is the start of a trend of articles and discussion along these lines.
Posted online by the British Ministry of Defence on 15 May 2006:
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) in the UK Air Defence Region
During a policy review in 1996 into the handling of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sighting reports received by the Ministry of Defence, a study was undertaken to determine the potential value, if any, of such reports to Defence Intelligence. Consistent with Ministry of Defence policy, the available data was studied principally to ascertain whether there is any evidence of a threat to the UK, and secondly, should the opportunity arise, to identify any potential military technologies of interest.
The Ministry of Defence has released this report in response to a Freedom of Information request and we are pleased to now make it available to a wider audience via the MOD Freedom of Information Publication Scheme. Where indicated information is withheld in accordance with Section 26 (Defence), Section 27 (International Relations) and Section 40 (Personal Information) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
- UAP in the UK Air Defence Region: Executive Summary PDF [5.3 MB]
- UAP in the UK Air Defence Region: Volume 1 — The Main Report (Volume 1) describes the Background, Methodology used, the Data Base and the Statistical Analysis.
- UAP in the UK Air Defence Region: Volume 2 — Volume 2 – Supporting Technical Point Papers covering topics relevant to an undersanding of the phenomena.
- UAP Volume 2 Part A PDF [8.4 MB]
- UAP Volume 2 Part B PDF [9.0 MB]
- UAP Volume 2 Part C PDF [11.0 MB]
- UAP Volume 2 Part D PDF [9.3 MB]
- UAP Volume 2 Part E PDF [10.7 MB]
- UAP Volume 2 Part F PDF [8.2 MB]
- UAP Volume 2 Part G PDF [7.3 MB]
- UAP Volume 2 Part H PDF [7.8 MB]
- UAP Volume 2 Part I PDF [7.9 MB]
- UAP Volume 2 Part J PDF [6.8 MB]
- UAP Volume 2 Part K PDF [5.4 MB]
- UAP Volume 2 Part L PDF [6.8 MB]
- UAP Volume 2 Part M PDF [8.9 MB]
- UAP Volume 2 Part N PDF [8.1 MB]
- UAP Volume 2 Part O PDF [9.1 MB]
- UAP Volume 2 Part P PDF [9.8 MB]
- UAP Volume 2 Part Q PDF [12.9 MB]
- UAP in the UK Air Defence Region: Volume 3 — Volume 3 considers classified radar performance data and contains an assessment of relevant technologies in the context of potential military applications and an assessment of UAP as potential hazards to aircraft.