The Hackenblog

Y’know, I’m starting to enjoy it.

Why should your blog essay have to stay in cyberspace? Let it find a new audience in print at The Journal of Bloglandia, Issue 2 (because Issue 1 was so much fun, we had to do it all over again)!

Here’s the scoop.

Be there! Please…

“Until recently, spending money you didn’t have was your patriotic duty. Wasn’t it the same George W. Bush who advised Americans to respond to the 9/11 terrorist massacres by heading to the mall? When the going gets tough, everybody laughed, the tough go shopping.

“Never mind that it was also Bush who inherited a $128 billion budget surplus and turned it into a $482 billion deficit—an estimate, incidentally, that leaves out the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They’re off the books, a bit like Enron’s money-losing ‘partnerships.’ In retrospect, the Enron collapse clearly predicted the fiscal consequences of Bushism.

“Psychiatrists call it magical thinking. Today it defines American culture. For decades GOP propagandists have endlessly pushed the fantasy that cutting taxes invariably brings more revenue into the treasury. Because it’s so counterintuitive, it makes people who think Rush Limbaugh is an intellectual feel smart. So they get their big $247.32 tax cut; Scrooge McDuck gets a few millions more to paddle around in; the pie theoretically gets higher and higher.

“It’s the Republican equivalent of Marxist cant about the “withering away of the state” under communism: An objectively false belief that’s repeated with ever more fervor as its bad consequences become harder to deny.”
Kidding ourselves about high price of debt, by Gene Lyons, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, July 30, 2008

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“WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A federal judge ruled on Thursday that Congress in its fight with the Bush administration can subpoena current and former top White House aides in its investigation over the firing of U.S. attorneys.

“U.S. District Judge John Bates, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, rejected the administration’s arguments that the aides were immune from such subpoenas and that Congress cannot force them to testify or turn over certain documents.

“In a lengthy ruling totaling nearly 100 pages, he rejected the administration’s request to dismiss the lawsuit that had been filed by the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee in March.

“The lawsuit seeks to get testimony or documents from White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers.

“The lawsuit charged that Bolten and Miers, cited by the House for contempt of Congress, defied subpoenas by refusing to testify or provide documents in the long-running investigation into the administration’s 2006 firing of nine of the 93 U.S. attorneys.”
Judge: Congress can subpoena Bush aides, by James Vicini, July 31, 2008

Hasn’t Congress always been able to subpoena anyone they wanted to? Weird. What a stupid lawsuit.

“LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – An earthquake struck just east of Los Angeles on Tuesday, rocking tall buildings and rattling nerves across Southern California, but causing no serious injuries or major structural damage.

“The quake hit at 11:42 a.m. local time (2:42 p.m. EDT) about 30 miles east of Los Angeles in suburban Chino Hills and registered magnitude 5.4 — making it the strongest seismic event centered near America’s second-largest city since the 6.7-magnitude Northridge quake in 1994.

“It was followed in the next few hours by more than two dozen aftershocks, the largest measuring 3.6, and geologists said there was a small chance it could be a foreshock to a larger earthquake still to come.”
Earthquake strongly jolts “lucky” Los Angeles, by Dan Whitcomb, July 29, 2008

Yup, that’s us. Lucky lucky lucky to only have rolling, instead of jolting, earthquakes. But if we’re really lucky John Garamendi will be our next governor. Next real governor.

“NEW YORK (Reuters) – Delta Air Lines on Tuesday doubled the fee to check a second bag for domestic flights to $50 from $25 to help offset record fuel prices.

“Delta announced a number of baggage fee increases on domestic and international flights, including a rise in the fee for items that require special handling such as surfboards or ski equipment.

“Delta also increased the fee for a third checked bag from $80 to $125 on domestic flights and from $150 to $200 on international flights. It also raised fees for bags that exceed its weight allowance.

“These changes will apply to tickets bought on or after July 31 for travel on or after August 5.”
Delta Air doubles fee for second checked bag to $50, July 29, 2008

Might be cheaper to ship your luggage ahead. UPS and FedEx? Are you listening?

“LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Comedian Jerry Lewis was detained by police in Las Vegas late last week when airport screeners found an unloaded gun in his baggage, authorities said on Tuesday.

“Lewis, 82, had a small .22-caliber handgun when he arrived at the security screening area on Friday at Las Vegas McCarran International Airport, said Officer Ramon Denby, a spokesman for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.

“The comedian was briefly detained and the gun was seized. Lewis was cited for carrying a concealed weapon without a permit, Denby said.”
Jerry Lewis detained for carrying gun at airport, by Alex Dobuzinskis, July 29, 2008

What a kidder! And an idiot!

“THE HAGUE (Reuters) – Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic faces a U.N. war crimes judge for the first time on Thursday to answer genocide charges after his dramatic arrest that ended 11 years on the run.

“The man who led a breakaway Serb Republic during the Bosnian War faces two charges of genocide over the 43-month siege of Sarajevo and the 1995 massacre of some 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica, the worst atrocity in Europe since World War Two.

“He is due in court at 1400 GMT after spending his first night in a cell at the U.N. war crimes tribunal detention centre in the Hague.”
Karadzic faces U.N. judge to hear genocide charges, by Alexandra Hudson, July 30, 2008

This should be the trial of the century, but probably won’t be. I can remember the horrors of the 90s, but in the light of the bush atrocities and monstrosities, they seem to pale.

“LOS ANGELES, CA. — Bob Newhart, winner of three Grammy Awards, a Peabody, an Emmy and the Mark Twain Prize for Humor, and author of his new show-business autobiography, I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This, making him perhaps the most celebrated comedian-humorist-actor-author-former accountant in show-business history, this summer took time away from his busy schedule to serve as finalist judge, for the 2008 winner of the Robert Benchley Society Award for Humor. Newhart chose, as first-place winner, New York City-based humor columnist, satirist, Madeleine Begun Kane.

“In a personal note Newhart told Kane her essay, ‘Guide for The Opera Impaired,’ finished first because it was “the most Benchleyesque. . . ‘I don’t know if Robert Benchley ever commented on operas in his writings, but it is certainly a subject I suspect he would have handled exactly as you did,’ Newhart said.”
Bob Newhart Names”Mad” Kane Winner of 2008 Robert Benchley Society Award for Humor, Robert Benchley Society, July 31, 2008

Mad! You rule so hard! Man, if Bob Newhart, the funniest man alive, thinks your funny, you’ve really FUNNY!

Go read Mad now!

So, 2008 Comic Con in San Diego and this year I had a camera!

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“On Monday, the first American war crimes trial in since World War II opened at Guantanamo, the United States presenting its case against Salim Ahmed Hamdan before a jury of US military officers. Hamdan, who at the time of 9/11 was Osama bin Laden’s driver, is charged with conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism. Two surface-to-air missiles were found in a car he was driving – he says it was a borrowed vehicle and that he had no idea what was in the trunk. The judge has thrown out confessions Hamdan made in Afghanistan after his capture. ‘The interests of justice are not served by admitting these statements,’ the judge said, ‘because of the highly coercive environments and conditions under which they were made.’ Hamdan was bound for long periods of time, with a bag over his head.

“You will know us by the company we keep. The burners of witches and the medieval masters of thumbscrews and Iron Maidens, the interrogators of the Spanish inquisition, the North Vietnamese soldiers who beat John McCain and his fellow American prisoners of war into false confessions. We have joined their ranks. In the almost seven years since 9/11, we have countered terror not only with vigilance and war but fear, imprisonment without due process and yes, torture.

“Torture is no more about learning the truth than rape is about sex. Both are about the violent abuse of power.”
Michael Winship: The Company We Keep, Bill Moyers Blog, July 28, 2008

It ain’t right. It just ain’t right.

“Can science help us determine if someone is deceiving us?

“The very high-tech stuff we rely on includes functional magnetic resonance imaging, magnetic encephalography, and some very, very sophisticated electroencephalography—one of the techniques used to test so-called guilty knowledge. That’s where you expose somebody to something and they have guilty knowledge—they’ve seen it before, let’s say. You can tell by looking at their brain response, up to a point, whether their brain has seen that thing or not. You say, well, do you know X, or have you seen X, and they say no, but their brain says otherwise.”
The Science of Sniffing Out Liars, An interrogation expert spills his secrets. By Susan Kruglinski, Discover, July 28, 2008

Being lazy and honest are the only way to fly.

“MENLO PARK, California (Reuters) – A start-up led by former star Google engineers on Sunday unveiled a new Web search service that aims to outdo the Internet search leader in size, but faces an uphill battle changing Web surfing habits.

“Cuil Inc (pronounced ‘cool’) is offering a new search service at www.cuil.com that the company claims can index, faster and more cheaply, a far larger portion of the Web than Google, which boasts the largest online index.

“The would-be Google rival says its service goes beyond prevailing search techniques that focus on Web links and audience traffic patterns and instead analyzes the context of each page and the concepts behind each user search request.”
Former Googleers unveil Cuil, a new search engine, by Eric Auchard, Reuters, July 28, 2008

Cool.

For those of you interested in such things:

“The Pajama Boy ” pre-sale ends August 1.

“SAN DIEGO — A $125,000 donation in support of an anti-gay marriage initiative by a San Diego hotelier has drawn the ire of gay and lesbian activists and local labor unions who are now calling for a boycott.

“Organizers held a news conference in front of the Manchester Grand Hyatt, near Seaport Village, on Thursday. A coalition of LGBT community leaders and the labor movement spoke out against Doug Manchester, who contributed a donation in support of Proposition 8, which would allow only men and women to marry in the state of California. The group opposes the ballot measure because it threatens the recent state Supreme Court decision that allows marriage between men and women.”
Gay Activists Urge Boycott Of Manchester Grand Hyatt. Hotelier Donated To Fight Gay Marriage,
NBC SanDiego.com, July 10, 2008

People of California: You see why it’s important to get registered to vote no later than October 20, 2008 for the November 4 election? I don’t have $125K to donate to the pro-gay marriage side for this election, I only have some pocket change and my vote against the gay hater’s constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in California FOREVER. So get with it, folks, all right-thinking people in California, gay or straight, need to vote against this craziness. /sermon

Comic Con SD is next week. I never stay at the Hyatt because I can’t afford it, but that’s never bothered me. The homophobe fanboys will have it all to themselves this year. Not. There’s more on this SD guy’s donation and reaction to it behind the jump.

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Contrary to what the psycho rightwingnuts and the New Yorker editorial staff think, not everyone is a registered Democrat in Manhattan. I mean, the world outside of Manhattan and the upcoming election might not matter to the New Yorker because it will take a long time for the flood waters to get that high, but I live in a barrio in Los Angeles, so this election really matters to me and most of the rest of the universe. Well, anyway…here’s someone saying it better, except my sympathies are not with the asshole artist:

“But back to the New Yorker cover. I’ve got sympathies for the artist because he has a difficult task here. In order to satirize something, you’ve got to take it over the top. This New Yorker cover merely repeats the smears and rumors about Sen. Barack Obama, and therefore it is indistinguishable from something you’d see from a right wing magazine. As Jonah Goldberg of the conservative National Review points out, ‘What I find interesting about the New Yorker cover is that it’s almost exactly the sort of cover you could expect to find on the front of National Review.’ Granted when you’re dealing with right wing crazies it’s pretty difficult to out do them. You could try to draw a cartoon of Obama crashing a jet into the White House while eating babies and showing an in-flight movie where he and Rick Santorum star in a bestiality porn film with an endangered species of sea turtle, but you’d probably just be disappointed when you found that is the topic of next week’s edition of CNN anchor Glenn Beck’s radio show.”
“Will the New Yorker give equal time to unfair McCain smears?”, by Eric Millikin, Talk About Comics, July 14, 2008

I like satire, when it works. But this cover doesn’t work as satire, it’s a smear, and I don’t like it. Fuck you, too, New Yorker. I’ll stick with Harper’s Magazine and Cursor.org.

in this particular handbasket:

“When an artist becomes branded, the market tends to accept as legitimate whatever the artist submits. Consider the attraction of a work by Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara, whose Today series involves painting a date on canvas. Thus the work Nov. 8 1989 (just those letters and numerals, in block white against a black background), in liquitex on canvas, 26 in _ 36 in (66 cm _ 91 cm), sold for 310,000 GBP in February 2006 at Christie’s auction house in London. Kawara paints freehand, and limits himself to the hours of one day to complete a work. A painting unfinished by midnight is discarded as it would no longer be a day painting. The paintings are all made on Sundays. If Kawara is in the United States, the date begins with the name of the month in English, followed by the day and year. If be is painting in Europe, the day precedes the month. If he is in a country that does not use Roman script, he writes the month in Esperanto. Each sale includes the front page of a newspaper from that date. Christie’s catalogue described the Kawara work as ‘an existential statement, a proof of life.’

“There is no rarity factor; Kawara has been making these paintings since 1966. There are two thousand Kawara day paintings in existence. But Kawara is a brand, and his branding stands as a beacon for every contemporary dealer and every aspiring conceptual artist. One dealer told me that so long as collectors will pay high auction prices for Kawara’s day paintings, there is hope for everyone.”
from: The $12 Million Stuffed Shark. The Curios Economics of Contemporary Art, by Don Thompson, page 14 of the uncorrected proof that I’m not supposed to quote from, but was unable to resist quoting this much. (Sorry, Ms. Thomas, email me and I’ll take it down.)

Fuck, why did I waste all that time in music school? I could have gone to art school.

“The $12 Million Stuffed Shark” is a wonderful book so far (I’m only on page 37, but so far it rules so hard) and if you like laughing/marveling/pondering/sneering/whatevering at the super rich and their wacky antics, this is the book for you.

Of course I have to point out that, yes, Eli Broad spent millions on a dead sheep in formaldehyde (I mean, it better be dead) and the LA County Museum of Art has armed guards in the building he donated to put it in (along with some wonderful R. Serra iron walls), but he also ponied up $25 million for a stem cell institute at USC medical school, so I guess I he’s not completely wacky. They say LA gazillionaires are flaky, but the serious nuts seem to be west of the Mississippi, in London, Russia, and Hong Kong. And our weather is so nice, too.

“I joined community members in celebrating the grand opening of the Witmer Heights Apartments, a 49-unit complex for low-income families in the Pico-Union neighborhood. In addition to the one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments, the complex also features two community rooms, a rooftop terrace, laundry facilities, a computer center, and a tot lot.”

~snip~

“Tenants will also have access to free classes on job skills, computer literacy, personal finance, health, nutrition, and more.”
Opening of Witmer Heights Apartments, Eric Garcetti blog, July 11, 2008

Why aren’t there more places like this in Los Angeles? How much does a good society really cost us? Probably a lot less than we know. Yeah, some of us need a little more help than others of us. It’s cheaper to help them than to punish them for needing help. And anyone who says this is not true is going straight to hell. /sermon

This email was forwarded to me from a reliable source. The original sender’s son, who was stationed there, confirmed that they have almost nothing in their library:

“I am now on active duty again and have deployed to Iraq for the second time. I am assigned to 1st Marine Logistics Group as the Camp Commandant of Camp Al Taqaddum. “TQ” is just west of Baghdad on the northeast corner of Lake Habbaniya. It is a large sprawling base that is home of several thousand Marines, Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen.

“We have a modest library on the camp and they are in need of more books. The library staff really wants copies of the Commandant’s Reading List and other books and DVDs that would be of interest to young men and women 18-30. College prep books would also be welcomed.
Books may be sent to:

“Sabine Glascoe
“KBR/MWR (B6)
“APO AE 09381″

from an email from my pals, Carol and Ted.

I don’t have anything on the Commandant’s Reading List, but I can certainly send a few things from Amazon and glean a little from my stacks as well. Please feel free to cross-post or let me know it’s a hoax, which would surprise me very much.

Although I’m kind of wondering about this now, because this site has the same text, but a different origin. I sent an email to the Sabine, let’s see if I get an answer.

So the email’s not bouncing and here’s what a googlefication of Sabine Glascoe turns up, so maybe it’s okay. I’ll weed some books and send them on the off chance it is.

If something new turns up, I’ll post it here.

The Pajama Boy
A novel by Ginger Mayerson
In Nagasaki, newspaperman Ryuu Shimada falls in love with a young guy who resembles his lost love in Tokyo. A novel by a woman who’s been reading too much yaoi.
Published by The Wapshott Press

Click the images for full-sized versions.

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“After its humble founding by Catholic nun Sister Karen Boccalero more than 35 years ago, non-profit organization Self Help Graphics & Arts was notified that the Catholic Archdiocese sold the building to a private real estate and investment company. As long as the organization continued to fulfill the mission of advancing Chicano and Latino art and developing local and emerging artists, the Sisters of St. Francis, Mount Alverno agreed to allow Self Help Graphics & Art to use the building. With record-breaking print fairs, community festivals such as its iconic Día de los Muertos celebration which draws thousands of attendees and artists – both emerging and veteran – flocking to the organization as a place to cultivate their art, Self Help has been undergoing a renaissance. Earlier this year Self Help board members were told that the building was not on the list of sites to be sold as part of the Archdiocese’s attempt to raise funds to pay the settlement to individuals who successfully sued the church for sexual abuse.”
Arroyo Arts Collective email, July 12, 2008

Shit.

Also

“The center’s board members, as well as many community artists, are upset about the sale; Self Help board president Armando Duron said the sale came as an unwelcome surprise. Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina said she hoped that the church did not sell the building to help pay for settlements in the priest sex abuse scandal; a spokesman for the archdiocese said that the settlements had nothing to do with the sale.”
L.A. Art Center Building Sold to Investment Firm, ARTINFO, July 10, 2008

And the LA Times behind the jump. (more…)

But a sense of humor

(ht)

“Classical violins created by Cremonese masters, such as Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri Del Gesu, have become the benchmark to which the sound of all violins are compared in terms of their abilities of expressiveness and projection. By general consensus, no luthier since that time has been able to replicate the sound quality of these classical instruments. The vibration and sound radiation characteristics of a violin are determined by an instrument’s geometry and the material properties of the wood. New test methods allow the non-destructive examination of one of the key material properties, the wood density, at the growth ring level of detail. The densities of five classical and eight modern violins were compared, using computed tomography and specially developed image-processing software. No significant differences were found between the median densities of the modern and the antique violins, however the density difference between wood grains of early and late growth was significantly smaller in the classical Cremonese violins compared with modern violins, in both the top (Spruce) and back (Maple) plates (p = 0.028 and 0.008, respectively). The mean density differential (SE) of the top plates of the modern and classical violins was 274 (26.6) and 183 (11.7) gram/liter. For the back plates, the values were 128 (2.6) and 115 (2.0) gram/liter. These differences in density differentials may reflect similar changes in stiffness distributions, which could directly impact vibrational efficacy or indirectly modify sound radiation via altered damping characteristics. Either of these mechanisms may help explain the acoustical differences between the classical and modern violins.”
A Comparison of Wood Density between Classical Cremonese and Modern Violins, Berend C. Stoel of the Department of Radiology, Division of Image Processing, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands and Terry M. Borman of Borman Violins, Fayetteville, Arkansas, United States of America, PlosOne, July 2, 2008

Apparently even trees grew better in the old days.