TV: The Urge to Purge : "Will she agree to give up that teddy bear collection? Will he freak out when his trophies are carted away? In both Clean House and TLC's Clean Sweep, the tag sale is the cathartic centerpiece around which the show pivots--a fantastic transaction which shifts junk from one clutter bug's house to another. "

London's Abandoned Tube Stations

Hearing starts 6 AM PST: "For one thing, at the outset of the new administration, Bush and Rice decided to keep Richard Clarke--a veteran of the first Bush and the Clinton administrations--in his job as National Security Council counterterrorism director. Second, in a break with past practice, the president insisted that Clarke report to him exclusively through Rice.

That made Rice solely responsible for what the president learned about appraisals of terrorist threats from Clarke and others in the months before Sept. 11. She was also responsible for coordinating counterterrorism efforts, including ranking its priority relative to other threats and problems."

Pantaloons rounds up Scalapino, Champion & more--
"We know Scalapino is a bona fide avantast, and on whichever side we find ourselves in the Naropa Wars, the demeanor of a calming, enlightened refusal has likely rubbed off during her and our intake of an illusory simultaneity in the social imagination. Or don't know."

DiamondDead George Romero's back!!

free download of dj c's junglist bashment mix, which has been rattling the windows of the Manse for several days...

conossieurs of deep ick may want to check out Robert Christgau's "thanks for sharing" Janet Jackson review-- "Yet she exudes carnality, a desire to please and be pleased radiating from and to the mucous membranes, and the nipples too. And thus she moves blood to the groin, where it awaits deployment in socially useful endeavors—in my case, marital relations. "

Significant Trees of Ladysmith

review of my book "Hammertown" in the Georgia Straight!

Vancouver Cops: " "In Vancouver it is not just a case of a few renegade officers, but an underlying problem of the Vancouver Police Department attacking poor and working class people all across city," says Bundock. "It's clear that it's not just one demonstration but an escalating role of the VDP in the service of the provincial government that is really attacking people across the province.""

Daph says they could see the smoke from town: "A spectacular fire damaged a 35-metre wooden trestle on the E&N Railway at Nanaimo late Monday afternoon, forcing the suspension of freight and passenger service north of that city."

Oor Wullie is top Scottish icon: "Oor Wullie has been appearing in the Sunday Post newspaper since 1936 and has legions of fans around the world.
Lulu, in fifth place, was the only woman who made it into the top 10. "

Nader Fails to Make Oregon Ballot: "'The ball game, it had to be the ball game,' Nader muttered as he climbed a stairway leading to the stage."

The art of pain: "Romero's films fetishise gore, but he always insisted that his animated corpses - sometimes greenly mouldering, on occasion freshly autopsied with sutures like zip fasteners from neck to pelvis, usually missing odd limbs after accidents - were exemplary citizens of contemporary America. He called them 'the silent majority', identifying them with the voters who elected Nixon in 1968 (and who may well re-elect George W. Bush this year). "

Draining the Language out of Color: "Kay and Berlin hit on color terminology in the early 1960s while comparing notes on their field research. Kay, a New York City-born, New Orleans-bred cultural anthropologist, had just returned from 15 months in Tahiti. Berlin, a linguistic anthropologist reared in Oklahoma, had been researching a Mayan language of southern Mexico. 'We found that in both our languages, all the major color terms but one were exactly like those in English, and in the one area of difference, they differed in exactly the same way.' (They grouped green and blue to form what Kay and Berlin called 'grue.') That two such profoundly unrelated languages should name colors alike seemed to point to some universal linguistic pattern. "

found, by accident, my village (edge node? suburb?) of South Wellington in the OED under the entry for "jitney"-- I wish those buses were still running!-- but the reduction of the service must coincide with the decline of the mines, even during wartime...

"2. bus, omnibus. An omnibus or other motor vehicle which carries passengers for a fare, orig. five cents. So, on account of the low fare or the poor quality of these buses, used attrib. to denote anything cheap, improvised, or ramshackle.

1914 Let. 28 Nov. in Nation (N.Y.) (1915) 14 Jan. 50/3 This autumn automobiles, mostly of the Ford variety, have begun in competition with the street cars in this city [sc. Los Angeles]. The newspapers call them ‘Jitney 'buses’. 1915 N.Y. Even. Post 16 Apr., The jitney wears out the streets and should contribute to their repair. 1916 Daily Colonist (Victoria, B.C.) 6 July 4/5 The daily jitney service between Nanaimo and South Wellington has been discontinued. Hereafter cars will run on Saturdays only and the fare has been raised from 25 cents to 50 cents. 1916 H. L. Wilson Somewhere in Red Gap ii. 59 He+sells these jitney pianos and phonographs and truck like that. 1917 E. Frost Lett. (1972) 13, I hired McGrath, the jitney driver, to bring us home. 1919 M. A. von Arnim Christopher & Columbus xxxi. 400 He had come in the jitney omnibus to the nearest point. 1920 [see Daiquiri]. 1921 Daily Colonist (Victoria, B.C.) 25 Mar. 2/4 The decision of the Provincial Legislature to prohibit the sale of near beer will affect 58 jitney bars in this city, according to City Licence Inspector Charles Jones. 1923 F. Parsons Everybody's Business 215 All the jitney operators on the line. 1925 Amer. Speech I. 152/1 That bastard word ‘jitney’ is still used in outlying places, where a ‘jitney dance’ means a nickel dance. 1933 N.Y. Herald Tribune 5 Dec. 17/3 We refer to the jitney economists, the boys who play the money tunes only by ear. 1946 E. O'Neill Iceman Cometh (1947) i. 36 He never worries in hard times because there's always old friends from the days when he was a jitney Tammany politician. 1947 E. A. McCourt Music at Close 108 He would go to the jitney dance held in the big open space behind the town hall unless an outdoor floor had been set up. 1967–8 Bahamas Handbk. & Businessmen's Ann. (ed. 7) 197 There are jitneys on New Providence+which travel over unscheduled and not necessarily prescribed routes picking up and dropping off passengers. 1973 Philadelphia Inquirer (Today Suppl.) 7 Oct. 8/2 From the museum a jitney carries visitors to the Mills. "

"There Goes the Neighborhood" : "Greenspan knows, perhaps better than anyone, that this economy is perched nervously on top of a wobbly, Dr. Seuss-like tower."

Berlin Mitte. Explorations of an Urban Conversion

download for free the best American movie of 1968---Night of the Living Dead

Battling back against the 'human jackals': "Most are no strangers to violence, having served as special forces soldiers in countries such as Afghanistan, Bosnia, and other places they usually politely decline to name. Yet as the men working for US company Blackwater Security learned the hard way, working without a uniform on can be even more dangerous. As mercenaries in the world's dirtier conflicts have known for centuries, captured guns-for-hire cannot even expect the right to a dignified burial. "

Happy Birthday Fragonard!

Maintaining the Vista: "While busy urban border crossings such as the ones in Niagara Falls and Detroit may be the most common image, much of the Canada/U.S. border stretches through forests, mountains and prairie. It is along these vast stretches of uninhabited and occasionally rough terrain that 'maintaining the vista,' as the commission calls it, has been challenging."

Bioluminescence

Metrorama - Photos panoramiques du metro de Paris

cassettes picked up at the dollar store today

1. Shabba Ranks--Rough and Ready vol 1 (was there a vol 2?--big slick sound, though, David Morales worked on it) (later--pretty good beats throughout)
2. PM Dawn--Jesus Wept (their third, never before heard by me, playing now & good, forget how much I miss that compressed but fat bass sound on late-era ('95) cassettes--and the big fold outs!) (great acoustic cover of 1999 just came on!) (which just segued into "once in a lifetime", wild!) (...then nilsson's coconut??--odd medley--wonder what they're up to now?)
3. Strictly Bass Too--"nonstop dance mix" odd Canadian compilation--has dance mixes of U2 but Chaka Demus & Pliers too--last days for the Muchmusic utopia?? (later--rather good--had forgotten how close dancehall came to the mainstream back then)
4. Strictly Bass Three--more Chaka Demus but also Ashley MacIsaac and Jann Arden
5. Bim Skala Bim--Tuba City--Boston Ska band I'd never heard of on Celluloid (called here "skaloid") from 88--has cover of "sunshine of your love" though
6. Don Sebesky--Moving Lines--14 minute big band fusion version of "malaguena"!(best tunes here were the versions of "cherokee" and "skyliner"--he should have done a whole album of charlie barnet)
7. Herb Jeffries--The Four Winds & the Seven Seas--great Ellington crooner and cowboy movie star, uncertain vintage (later--use of echo chamber and booming hifi mono sez 50's for sure), has "its easy to remember" and the self-penned "sunday isnt sunday anymore" only ten songs, though
8. Rhythm Formula Essentials vol 4.--14 full length extended club mixes--lots of big mid-90's pophouse mixes compiled in Montreal or Toronto--includes two versions of the mildly smutty "disco's revenge" by Gusto, todd terry mixes as well

massive cache of Literature for Children

Ian McEwan reaches the promised land: "According to a US Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection spokesman, the problem arose because he told officials he was being paid for his west coast lecture tour, but he did not have a visa for business visitors. McEwan was turned back and spent the night in a Vancouver hotel."

Music swappers win court victory: "The act of 'making available' is illegal under a World Intellectual Property Organization treaty that Canada has signed, 'however that treaty has not yet been implemented in Canada and therefore does not form part of Canadian copyright law,' said von Finckenstein."

here's the mixup/mashup master IDC's site, Pete

Big Baby: "'I think it reinforces the idea that the president cannot go it alone,' she said. 'The president should stand tall, walk in the room himself and answer the questions.' "

April Fools: "When semiotician cum novelist, Umberto Eco teamed (as director) with actor/producer Gerard Depardieu, to bring Perec's great Oulipian novel to the viewing public, he set out to create "a work of art like none that has been made before."
"...because," Eco said, picking up a baroque recorder from his desk, "that novel is like no book ever written." "

S/FJ: "Headline in that free downtown paper today: 'MURDERERS!' As opposed to who? As compared to when? Women? Children? Soldiers? A year ago? Yesterday? Is this going to be a regular feature? Murder Watch (tm)? Which murderers and murderees are we tracking? Would there, then, be a day when you couldn't run that headline? And would there, could there be a day when you didn't have a picture to go with it?"

Daily Kos: "I was angry that five soldiers -- the real heroes in my mind -- were killed the same day and got far lower billing in the newscasts. I was angry that 51 American soldiers paid the ultimate price for Bush's folly in Iraq in March alone. I was angry that these mercenaries make more in a day than our brave men and women in uniform make in an entire month. I was angry that the US is funding private armies, paying them $30,000 per soldier, per month, while the Bush administration tries to cut our soldiers' hazard pay. I was angry that these mercenaries would leave their wives and children behind to enter a war zone on their own volition. "

Iraq: The Secret Policeman's Other Ball

The privatisation of war: "The private sector is so firmly embedded in combat, occupation and peacekeeping duties that the phenomenon may have reached the point of no return: the US military would struggle to wage war without it. "

Britain's secret army in Iraq: "So many British security firms are cashing in on the violence in Iraq that armed private security men now outnumber most of the national army contingents in the country."

"Hellboy" rave