Friday, April 25, 2003
Odin, the TV-watching Rottweiler celebrated Shirley Temple Black's birthday Wednesday by watching Bright Eyes ... In which our plucky heroine is rescued from her orphaned state by Loop and a gang of lovable aviators. Odin's review is here.
Thursday, April 24, 2003
Disappeared by the Crime Dog. From The Progressive: “OK, so you're an American citizen, you're working at your job, and all of a sudden FBI agents show up at your place of employment and take you away. They don't charge you with any crime. They just lock you up indefinitely.Then they go to your home and grab whatever they want--your computers, your financial records, even your kids' videos. Does that sound outlandish to you? Well, it's happening right now in these United States.” Read more. And if you can stomach it, even more.
It can't happen here?! Visit freemikehawash.org to learn more and donate to the Hawash Legal Defense Fund or the Hawash Family Support Fund. Write your elected representatives demanding that American citizens' right to Due Process — that's Amendment VI of the Bill of Rights, Mr. Ashcroft — is not trampled by JOD red, white and blue jackboots.
Saturday, April 19, 2003
Zu vashe zdorov’ye, Baghdad! Husband Val sends us his Russian Baghdad map desktop, which he stitched together from maps available at the University of Texas Library Online: Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection — whose Iraqi maps are available here. As a bonus, he sends this link to the clever “Reading Russian by Example”. Click here to go to the katecohen desktop collection, which now includes Val’s map.
Wednesday, April 16, 2003
Good Pesach! and Your Parrot Can Observe Pesach, Too.
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
Privacy International's Stupid Security Contest.
Sunday, April 13, 2003
When bad machines turn over a new leaf: Find the Art-o-Mat near you. [thanks memepool]
The art of the chain reaction. It's broadband fun, but worth the 10 meg download. Here's a witty kinetic romp disguised as a Honda ad. [Thx Nik via Val] Plus: Val sends this link to the slashdot thread about this remarkable little movie.
Laugh, Cry, Wince, Laugh: Get Your War On #23 is up at www.mnftiu.cc.
Friday, April 11, 2003
VonRumsfeld speak. Sitting here watching the lawless-zone known as Baghdad burn on CNN — split-screen with the Pentagon briefing. Rumsfeld calls the chaos “untidy”. I wonder if he would use the same neat description if he was having a heart attack and the hospital he needed was closed by looting and if the water he needed didn't come out of the tap and if the street where he lives was on fire — a fire that would burn until it burned itself out because there were no firefighters. I can just see him — expensive suit looted right off his back — wrinkled, pale, naked, crying, crying out in his burning street, “Oh, oh, oh the untidiness of it all!” Yeah, that's the thing in the New World Order — untidiness can kill you.
Another lift-off. Launched yesterday: Kate-designed PattMorrison.com — a website for the lauded Los Angeles Times columnist, author and media maven. Especially nice is her resources page which is a neat little guide to her beloved Los Angeles.
Thursday, April 10, 2003
Wolfowitz of Arabia, the neocons and the New World Order. The Christian Science Monitor focuses on the nascent Masters of the Universe.
Tuesday, April 8, 2003
The excruciating job of taxes done, I called mom. I tell her, "They're done at last. It took me days, all the while with the war coverage grinding on in the background. 30,000 sorties flown. I'm forking over a third of my income to pay for three titanium rivets on a satellite guided bomb." "Yes," she says, "I saw them find a cache of weapons yesterday on CNN; they said they were from the Iran-Iraq war, and I thought, hey there's my taxes from 1978. Right there." Yeah that's when Saddam was our boy — just another in that too long line of convenient thugs paid for by teachers’ salaries, waitesses’ wages, printers’ paychecks. I hang up the phone and walk into the garden to put my face up to the warm, low, lingering light of the new daylight savings time. And, I wonder who my 2002 taxes will be propping up.
Wednesday, April 2, 2003
Paintings by Kate Cohen are featured in the brand new spring edition of smallspiralnotebook!
I can't think globally. It paralyzes me, casts a shadow on all I do. My every action — including all my sighing and crying about the war — seems a vanity. After all, my street isn't blowing up, my loved ones are not incinerated. I am not hungry or thirsty or naked or lost. There are no death squads to conscript me, no secret police to cut out my tongue for its tendency to dissent. At the beach house, there are flowers on my desk and this computer where I work costs far more than most of the planet's population can make in a year, five years. Thinking globally, my life is drained of meaning — I am a tiny instance, born lucky in a lucky country and I have never known want.
And even this malaise is luxury; I have so much time for hand wringing, watching CNN. I can't think globally; I seek salvation in acting locally. Be good to those around me. Especially strangers. Especially when there is no benefit for me. So I took some time out of the work crush to put up projectseek.org, a little web site for a parents group dealing with the California school budget crisis (When is Ken Lay going to jail?). I don't have children or even live in the little town where the group operates. I was just helping out a friend, something I would have done war or no. But now, I find the effect of good works runs deeper, it lets me feel as if I am doing more than floating on a sea of suffering. Dipping in, it was the first thing in many weeks that made me feel better, worthwhile. So I am passing on the recipe for the cure: Help someone. If you are feeling eclipsed by world events, find light in good deeds. Be peace.
Seeing is not believing. [thanks Nik]
Check out this search engine's nifty "sneak a peek" feature.