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Friday, December 03, 2004 |
"It sounds like Nazi book burning to me"
"It sounds like Nazi book burning to me": "
State Rep. Gerald Allen has introduced a bill into the Alabama legislature that would ban books featuring gay characters and gay-positive textbooks from state public libraries and university libraries and classrooms.
Allen said that he realized his attempt to shield Alabama's children and teens from the 'homosexual agenda' would result in such books as The Color Purple and Brideshead Revisted being removed from libraries, while colleges would be unable to perform Cat On a Hot Tin Roof.
How to discard all those books? Said Allen, 'I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them.'
[TT] Birmingham News via email (thanks to Mac Thomason)
(Via Censoround.)
8:56:29 AM Permalink
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Brain Drain Becomes Gusher
From Tom Peters:
Brain Drain Becomes Gusher: 'The foreign visa crisis, left unattended, is going to have deep and lasting effects on American security and competitiveness.' —Fareed Zakaria/Newsweek/11.29.04/ commenting on an unlikely entry for SecState Designate C. Rice's agenda
'The dirty secret about our scientific edge is that it's largely produced by foreigners and immigrants. We don't do science.' —FZ
Strong language. And accurate, as best I can judge.
Peters hasanother post on this matter. We're working so hard to make ourselves dumb. College gets more expensive, we prefer to teach religion instead of science in school, and we're turning smart people away from our shores. How are we going to win hearts and minds? What a depressing future we're building for ourselves.
8:55:30 AM Permalink
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Ray
Jamie Foxx turns in a fantastic performance as Ray Charles, just awesome. I didn't really realize it till I got out of the theatre, but there wasn't a minute during the movie where I thought of it as a performance. I always believed it was Ray Charles. Using Ray's voice in the songs helped, but Foxx just seemed to channel him, getting all the gestures and movements down perfectly. The movie's not without its flaws -- it's a bit to long and repetitive -- but they are minor compared with Foxx's performance. A really great movie.
8:55:11 AM Permalink
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U.S. Casualties in Iraq
U.S. Casualties in Iraq: " From Juan Cole:
Informed Comment : CBS has elicited from the Pentagon the real figure of US casualties in Iraq, which is more like 25,000. That number includes the 1230 or so killed and the 9300 classified as 'wounded in battle,' but also 17,000 classified as non-combat sick or injured, of whom 80 percent do not return to their units in Iraq. Although some of the 17,000 are victims of disease, some unspecified number have actually been injured as a result of being in a theater of war...
"
(Via Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004).)
8:53:25 AM Permalink
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P.G. Wodehouse
P.G. Wodehouse: "The Economist Nov 25 2004 12:31PM GMT"
(Via Moreover - moreover....)
This review contains one of the best sentences I've read in some time:
A good test of almost any book is to ask whether one would not be better off reading a work by P.G. Wodehouse, and the answer, in this reviewer's opinion, is nearly always “Yes.”
That is, perhaps unfair to most writers: virtually anything by Wodehouse is better reading than virtually anything by anyone else.
8:53:05 AM Permalink
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An Antidote
Here's a nice antidote to the Christianity of hate that's too common today.
Anyone who takes the bible seriously and sits down to actually read about Jesus in the four gospels, who reads through the whole book of Luke, for example, and lets himself or herself become involved with the spirit of this Jesus as narrated there, cannot help but realize that Jesus walked and talked with those who were the least powerful in his time. Jesus was born in a lowly manger to a lower class woman. Jesus did not come to the high and the mighty; in fact they were afraid of him and finally killed him. Jesus did not use the law against people, except religious authorities; he violated what was then the law for the sake of the people. People following Jesus experienced their lives opened for others and their future, even lepers who were totally ostracized from society.
8:52:25 AM Permalink
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Family values
Family values: " Via Lance Knobel , this astonishing story from the Financial Times:
US distributors of the film Merchant of Venice, which premiered in London this week, have asked the director to cut out a background fresco by a Venetian old master so it is fit for American television viewers…
According to [director Michael] Radford, there was ‘a very curious request which said ‘Could you please paint-box out the wallpaper?’. I said wallpaper, what wallpaper? This is the 16th century, people didn’t have wall-paper.’
When he examined the scenes, he realised the letter was referring to frescoes by Paolo Veronese, the acclaimed Venetian 16th-century artist, which, when examined closely, showed a naked cupid.
‘A billion dollars worth of Veronese great master’s frescoes they want paint-boxed out because of this cupid’s willy. It is absolutely absurd,’ he said.
"
(Via Crooked Timber.)
8:51:56 AM Permalink
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Okay... It's A "Nice Device"
Okay... It's A "Nice Device": " But it doesn't matter, claimed Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. iPods and standalone music players will be obsolete in five years, replaced by mobile phones that have much more powerful MP3 players built in, reports Mike Wendland. "
(Via MyAppleMenu.)
This makes sense; it probably adds credence to tall the talk about Apple making an iPod/Phone we've had recently.
8:47:28 AM Permalink
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Op-Ed Contributor: The Hit We Almost Missed
Op-Ed Contributor: The Hit We Almost Missed: "Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" was almost never released."
(Via The New York Times > Most E-mailed Articles.)
This story is new to me! Amazing.
It's official, I guess. Forty years after he recorded it, Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" was just named the greatest rock 'n' roll song of all time by Rolling Stone magazine, a tribute it had previously been given by New Musical Express, Britain's leading pop-music weekly. Quite an honor, considering that the single was almost never released.
"Like a Rolling Stone" was recorded on June 15, 1965, in Studio A at 799 Seventh Avenue, then the New York headquarters of Columbia Records, where I worked as the coordinator of new releases, scheduling every step of a record's production. (On the top floor of the building, the modest studio had been used by Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Barbra Streisand.) When the edited tape was played a few days later for Mr. Dylan and his manager, the reaction was unanimous: it would be a hit and should be released immediately.
But before that could happen, the so...
1:53:07 PM Permalink
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Live to 1000?
Cambridge's Aubrey de Grey believes that the first person to live to 1,000 is 60 today. Interestting. Tonight I'm going to see Ken Dychtwald speak about the consequences of human life extension at the Long Now Seminars. I've been negligent about blogging these things, but I've seen most all of them, and all that I've seen have been fascinating. This one follows up last month's seminar, at which Michael West talked about specific technologies that may enable long life. It's too bad the Long Now website makes it hard to find links to these various seminars.
11:14:08 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2005 Steve Michel.
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