Archive for July, 2005
82 items.
Alien, by H.o.p.
H.o.p. has been doing play-doh modeling clay sculptures since he was 4 or 5. We have boxes and boxes of them. They are all falling apart as this stuff doesn’t last. I need to get some of them scanned before they completely deteriorate. And I thought, hell, I’ll post them too. Or some of them.
Don’t be fooled. This modeling clay is really pretty difficult to work with. It’s not very user friendly. It’s not like pliable clay where you can smooth and create textures and make very fine details, nor is it like Fimo or Sculpey. It has an odd spongy quality. But it comes in colors and the colors can be mixed, and it dries in about 4 hours so that the creations can be played with. And that’s the main thing. H.o.p. likes to use it to make creatures and characters for toys.
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A new email scam with music industry as the target
July 31st, 2005 |Posted In: Computer And Stuff (Probably Be Damned), General
Am just recording this in the blog so it gets more Google visibility as at present there is only one search result.
A friend of ours in the music industry received the following and thought it to read like a scam, and it is:
Hello,
compliments of the day to you, how are you and how is
work, hope all is well.my name is Biola, I’m from Italy, and am into music
basically and for sometime now i have been working on
my major project.Actually i have been thinking about carrying out the
production of this album and i will like to let you
know that i will be interested in carrying out this
production at your studio so kindly let me know if we
can release in your Studio, we will be using seven
days for the recording so please let me know how much
it will cost us to release in your studio. i mean
record in your studio.hope to hear and work with you soon.
Best regards
Biola
Now, the thing is you can get some strange phone calls and emails from people who’d like to do recording. They’re on the up-and-up and are people who don’t know the first thing about what they’re doing, so the above email may to some sound to have the slightest percent of being plausible, considering some of the things you hear, but this one screams bogus. So our skeptical friend replied briefly and received the following email in return, at which point it begins to sound more like a the Nigerian scam though there is no “Get rich quick” scenario involved:
How are you doing today? Thank you for your email, First let me start by thanking you for interest in helping to turn this dream into a reality as i am very happy that we can work together. My sponsor/investor would like me to inform you that he will be sending you adequate amount of money which will be on a Casher check so you can help put all in place which will be required for the recording without any omission. We would be happy to use 7 days in your studio for the recording, the kind of music we will be producing it’s slow music, i mean “Blues” we will be recording 12 tracks, Band member we are 4 in number with my maniger , I would like you to give me the total cost .
My sponsorer will issue a cheque that will include the cost of all expenses such as, Airfare, Hotel reservation, I believe you will have in your mind why my sponsorer can’t issue a different cheque for us, he would have preffered to do so, but it’s because here in Italy, Us cashier checks will take up to 1 months to clears the bank, but my sponsorer said it will only takes 1 or 2 days working days for the cheque to cleared into your account.
i will not be happy if i lose this chance cos this is a life time chance i have been waiting for.i reassured him of your willingness and he indeed promised to include the cost of all such expenses in the cheque so that nothing will be left behind, pls let me know if this is okay by you, and if we can really trust on you, I would like you to give me the Name you want on the cheque, address, Home, Cell & Work Phone Number in order to be forwarded to my sponsor so that the payment can be issued down to you as soon as possible, once payment has been received, you will deduct your service fee and send the remaining money back to us via Western Union Or MoneyGram so that we can take care of all our travel expenses and accomodation.
Thanks for your cooperation and hope to hear from you soon. I will be looking forward to do business with you cos busniess is all about trust and understanding .
Best regards,
Biola James
Yeah, right.
Our friend contacted us to see if we’d heard about this. A search turns up one result of comments at a guestbook discussing on an almost identical email received by some other individuals.
Hello, compliments of the day to you, how are you and how is work, hope all is well. my name is Jim Mick, I’m from Italy, and am into music basically and for sometime now i have been working on my major project. actually i have been thinking about carrying out the production of this album and i will like to let you know that i will be interested in carrying out this production at your studio so kindly let me know if we can release in your Studio. please let me know how much it will cost us to release in your studio. i mean record in your studio. hope to hear and work with you soon. Best regards Jim Mick.
Seems that small music studios are receiving these emails, which means that websites are being scouted and specifically targeted.
I doubt that anyone could be taken in by this wacko business arrangement but I wanted to make a posting just to up the visibility factor.
Where have I been that I haven’t previously stumbled upon the “Center for Cooperative Research”.
The objectives are to (1) Reduce the fragmentation of the historical record (2) Increase the efficiency of information acquisition (3) Increase the efficiency of information production (4) Encourage the transition of oversight responsibilities from governments to civil society on a global scale.
It’s maintained by Derek Mitchell, an antrhopolgy graduate from James Madison University and has a massive timeline of 9/11 developed by Paul Thompson and Matt Everett. Mike Biven of Forgotten History joined the effort and developed the database, adding his timelines that make up the History of US Interventions area.
The 9/11 timeline is incredible. Reminded me of a number of things about which I’d forgotten, and alerted me to some things I’d not heard about before.
There is also a Complete timeline of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: Key Events related to issues raised in Downing Street Memo.
Other projects maintained are: US confrontation with Iran; US Military; Bush administration’s treatumen of US troops; Investigation into the 2004 US Election; Environmental impact of 911 attacks; the Bush administration’s environmental record; Prisoner abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere; 2004 Ousting of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Wouldn’t I like to see a timeline for London.
They have other timelines developed that are yet unfinished–related to US, Iraqi, Middle Eastern and African history–and are looking for volunteers with good writing and research skills to assist.
I should have found this a while back. Only happened upon it this morning because I was trying to locate information on how it had become confused that it was Mohammed Atta’s passport that had been found near the WTC rubble, when it had been instead revealed to be the passport of Satam al-Sugami.
Why was I trying to look up that bit of history?
Grumpy ol’ Man is skeptical about the London bombings.
Yeah, I know, mail me a tin foil hat, but I have my own dashes of skeptical floating around as to some of the things that have been going on. I have no theories. I’m a skeptic. And I too have wondered who has the most to benefit.
Grumpy ol’ Man notes,
Now all they had to do was come up with the bodies of the “Suicide bombers themselves. And seeing as how they had to meet certain criteria this did take a little time. But the boys in forensics did mange finally. Well almost. They were able to piece together three home grown Pakistanis, which are the most hated group of foreigners living in racist Briton. But obviously they couldn’t find enough bits and pieces to make up a fourth so this took a longer time. And they finally came up with something equally as good. A Jamaican convert to Islam and petty criminal to boot. No way you could get it any better than that. And gosh, by some miraculous process unknown to any explosives expert in the world, all their identity documents were intact and still attached to their bodies.
Of course they did have certain guidelines in this matter seeing as how the identification documents of the terrorists that flew the airplanes into the twin towers were also found intact and undamaged in the rubble after the towers collapsed. Just how the documents managed to survive the heat of the same terrible fire that melted the steel core of the buildings, causing them to collapse has never been the subject of any serious discussion that I have heard of.
Which reminded me of my amazement, after 9/11, when a hijacker’s passport was found intact and so swiftly in the debris that emerged from the carnage (as far as I know it was al-Sugami’s passport that was found near the WTC ruins, Mohammed Atta’s Greek passport instead found in luggage that had not made it onto the plane). Amazed that it had been through the crash, the explosion, the collapse and managed to be around at all, let alone around in any immediately identifiable way. And was amazed at the short amount of time in which it was ciscovered, considering the area covered and the devastation through which to be picked. Found by at least September 16, I’m not sure of what date. I became distracted by the 9/11 Timeline and never finished looking for the date the passport was discovered.
I live in an 800 to 850 square foot apartment. Considering all our books and CDs and the amount of space that can be taken up by a 7 year old and his toys, which is a significant amount, I have about one corner in which to “spread” my rather lackluster life’s clutter that I’ve not heretofore trashed. My desk and the narrow bookcase by my desk. And still, I manage to lose everything. I can spend days searching and searching again through my bookcase and desk drawers and still I won’t find papers that I should have, that I remember having saved. And sometimes I never find them and sometimes they materialize months later, out of the blue. Anyone else have this problem? I suspect some do. Or maybe most are more organized than me and it makes total sense to them that within a couple of days identity papers could be found amidst the wreckage of 9/11.
Anything is possible, I suppose.
I have no ideas about anything. Hell, if I had a clue about anything in life, I’d be the first one to say, “You’re kidding me.”
Which leaves me with questions. When you don’t have any answers to anything then your brain has arranged itself in such a way where about all it’s equipped to do is ask questions. May not be necessarily good questions some times. But questions. Keeps me wondering.
Visit Showandtellmusic.com and listen to the 60s English band “The Shaggs”, the clip offered from their 1968 “Philosophy of the World” album debut being Who are Parents?
I don’t know how they did it. As I only need to listen to “Who are Parents?” once in a lifetime, I’m not going to replay and try to figure out their truly unique sense of melody and time either.
My son’s favorite at “Show and Tell” is thus far a 1974 recording by the Williamsport Area High School, North Central District Band, Stargazing. He says it’s Marvin the Martian music and listened to it all evening. “Stargazing” is actually a 1966 composition, for band and electronic tape, by Donald Erb. But I think H.o.p. is right and that there is a good amount of Marvin interstellar wanderings in it.
The people at “Show and Tell” have a Bay Area record label Companion Records “dedicated to reissuing interesting and endangered music from past eras”.
Klondike Kate’s Aurora continues her watch on the sun’s antics. Her enthusiasm is catching. “Science is cool” she writes, and if H.o.p. was a little older and interested yet in the sun and sun spots then I’d be reading to him her entries.
A sample:
There is an intriguing picture in the film strip on the lmsal solarsoft page , the green strip, count from the left to the 7th or 8th box in and look at the curly cue of gas then the spike explosion — usually things don’t happen that fast in space, it takes hours to see changes because it’s space, a vaccum, the pictures we are receiving are covering millions of miles across, we are only looking at our tiny puzzle piece of the Big Picture, our miniaturized inset, within our own solar system.
But this was a spike, a volcano erupting in a thin laser line pointing straight up like an antenna, a beacon, a silent scream and then it released a big ball of fire the size of Jupiter. Scroll down to the bottom of the solarsoft page to see the location and incredible size of the M-4 flare. The sunspot group responsible hasn’t rotated around enough to be numbered yet (maybe 792?)
Two or three hours later, looking at the C-3 lasco photos, this plasma ball is still traveling…Usually, these things disintegrate, are absorbed into space, but this guy has kneepads and is roller-blading, keep on truckin’, dude…
Go to Klondike Kate’s for more and pictures.
We use blogs like Pharyngula and Unscrewing the Inscrutable. Such as Unscrewing the Inscrutable’s Science Friday: As the worm turns which had H.o.p. fascinated with the picture of the Rangemorphs.
When Unscrewing the Inscrutable disappeared for a bit, I was nearly heartbroken. But then it reappeared, continued on, and began replenishing its archives with old posts. Brent Rasmussen always has pictures that catch H.o.p.’s attention.
How we do things runs like this.
Me: “Oh, wow, cool. Nice photo. When the earth was wrapped in ice it perhaps looked like this photo. Imagine the earth being wrapped all in ice and when it melted it left algae like in the fish tank.”
And either H.o.p. is interested or he’s not. If he’s not interested, I figure he’s not going to listen and retain. If he’s interested he’s going to say, “Tell me more,” and take away something from it.
He was interested and interested in the idea of the blue-green crust of algae on parts of the earth after the melting of the ice, and was immediately interested in the Rangeomorphs. He wanted more pictures of Rangemorphs. We talked vertebrates and invertebrates. About slugs and worms and snails. Though he’ll listen to Brain Pop science animations for hours, repeat them over and over while he’s drawing pictures of the subject or Tim and the robot, Moby, talk on a subject can only go so long and when he’d had enough then he wanted to play snails and we talked over if we were snails what kind of snail houses we’d have. He said his would have toys and he said mine would have adult things but we would have to travel together. And he wanted our snail houses to have electricity so he hooked up imaginary power lines to them and reveled at the lights coming on. Then later I returned to the site and clicked on links, and he recognized the Cnidaria from other web science outings, and fell in love with the photo of the Cubozoan Carybdea sivickisi and made sure that I bookmarked it for him.
I’ve always had a terrible time with pronunciation. But fortunately there are places like Answers.com that has some audio files to supplement pronunciation guides.
And because I’m subscribed to different website update services we were able to talk a bit about the discovery of a 10th planet in the Kuiper Belt.
Speaking of coral, a subject that comes up via “As the Worm Turns”, I occasionally visit the Web Gallery of Art and Jacopo Zucchi’s The Coral Fishers is a not very enjoyable but curious piece of art.
Skookum has a new blog, Archipelago.
The impetus behind Archipelago is to provide a literary showcase for the unpublished, the self-published, and the uncelebrated islands of brilliance waiting to be discovered. Out of this collective luminescence, it is our hope that the pools of wisdom and currents of insight will carry thoughtful readers to their shores.
Before you think to comment or write to me about Menezes…
July 30th, 2005 |Posted In: General, Social Studies (the big grab bag)
All right. Before you think to comment or write to me about how you think Jean Charles de Menezes got what he was asking for (1) read Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s Menezes’ Killing Casts Ugly Glare on Racial Profiling in Britain, and then, if you are still itching to share that opinion (2) empty a bottle of Elmer’s glue into your keypad, chill for 2 hours, and then comment or write.
The authentic Everyman clown
July 29th, 2005 |Posted In: General, Social Studies (the big grab bag)
This is a photo by Nicolas Asfouri, AFP, from 2005 July 4.
“Police officers in riot kit block a street as a protester participating in the ‘carnival for full enjoyment’ rally stands in front of them in Edinburgh. The demo was to pressure leaders of the Group of Eight most industrialised nations who will stay in Gleaneagles hotel 40 miles (65 km) north west of the capital for the G8 summit. Around 10,000 police officers are preparing for the huge security operation when the summit starts 6 July.”
I had been looking at the photo and thinking of Jean Charles de Menezes. Who was said to have attracted police suspicion because he was in a bulky winter jacket, then jumped the gate at the Stockwell Tube. And as it turns out he was instead in a jeans jacket and he used his travel card at the tube. But the police shot him 8 times, 7 times in the head, just in case he was a suicide bomber. I’ve posted a couple of times previously on this and won’t go into it again here.
Anyway, I came upon this photo and thought of not only Jean Charles de Menezes while looking at it, but thought of those who say, “Why aren’t we doing something?” re: Bush et all the murderous thieving lot of liars who are running the show.
Innocent people have been dying all along, in Iraq and elsewhere. But even for those in the US, Jean Charles de Menezes brings it home in a different way. An innocent civilian executed by the police.
I don’t know actually how the carnival-styled protestors at G8 and other protests are viewed by progressives/lefties. But the photo, if one looks at it while thinking of Jean Charles de Menezes, says quite a lot. And I wonder if it says something about, “Why aren’t we doing something?” The clown gets hissed and booed a good bit, I think because of the way this bit of theatrical commentary has been turned into a simple kid’s ice cream cone side dish, when clowns are more than that. The protestors make use of the “Everyman” aspect associated with this type of clown, highlighting the condition the general public finds itself, or the position it will realize it’s in when it wakes up eventually. And that is in a police state guarding corporate interests that have raped the economic health of the nation, turned its citizens into serfs, corporate interests and their guardian governments raping the earth and pocketing for a few resources that belong to all and should be used judiciously and with a respect perversely absent in capitalist, corporate culture.
In the early 1900s, when we weren’t in near the police state we are now, there were some horrific police/National Guard actions taken against protestors of corporate interests.
The clown has historically been given a certain safe margin of expression that the man in plain clothes has not, because of his ridiculous, foolish appearance and behavior. But clowning is serious business. I don’t know the story of the gentlemen before the riot police in the above picture, but he’s a performer in that moment. If there had not been photographers there, he would have been performing for his peers, the sidewalk onlookers, and the police. But the photographer is there and takes a center stage shot of the clown miming panic. Which is something to meditate on, when he is in a position of confrontation with a formidable foe, and you don’t know in what condition you’ll be when the day is done. He’s miming for us the predicament in which we all find ourselves.
And the predicament of Jean Charles de Menezes. An innocent individual who was executed by the authorities because they believed him, some how, some way, to be a threat. Or maybe his only a terrible lesson to us all. At least that is what he has become, a lesson to us all as to what we face in our governments, as they carry out their empirical corporate interests, remote and alienated from our interests, those of the general public. And that includes Republicans as well, if they would look ahead and realize it, that the future painted for the next generations will be vaguely hospitable only to a very few.
Even if the authorities were operating in absolute conviction that Jean Charles de Menezes was a suicide bomber, a tragic and inexcusable assumption that either saw a reality different from what it was, or at first chose to depict it to the world as different from what it was, Jean Charles is still that lesson as to what we face. It’s a very short distance between Jean Charles de Menezes and the horizon where the face of terrorism resolves into a broader portrait of greed and all its self-interested operations.
Point a camera at a clown, a good clown, and though you look at it you end up seeing though its eyes. In this way, clowns are invisible as few other performers are. The clown has framed the above scene so that when one looks at it, one may not only observe but participate in his vision.
Rather as a tribute to the story being told in Asfouri’s photo, by the clown, I have been working on a digital painting of it based on the small photo I grabbed at Yahoo. I did it high resolution and rather large so one can’t see some of the detail below. You can click a link to a larger version which shows a little more. I highlighted certain aspects and altered a few minor things. The pink streamer dangling from the individual’s arm I went ahead and removed, though it is an interesting accidental detail that in the original photo gives the sense of a third beckoning hand. But it only works when you believe the clown is looking directly at you, which he is not. The original photo is dark and small enough over the internet that he appears to be looking at the cameraman, when instead he is looking off to his left, his eyes pointing to the police behind him.
I perhaps should have repainted it so his eyes were looking straight ahead and kept the streamer in there. But that’s not the painting of it I chose to do. It didn’t look right close up and large.
There’s also below a link to a larger variation that I did. Am not quite sure I’m satisfied with it. But it’s almost there.
Today a friend sends the following in an email saying it maybe a reason to be for Roberts (but I disagree):
“The exchange occurred during one of Roberts’ informal discussions with senators last week. According to two people who attended the meeting, Roberts was asked by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) what he would do if the law required a ruling that his church considers immoral. Roberts is a devout Catholic and is married to an ardent pro-life activist. The Catholic Church considers abortion to be a sin, and various church leaders have stated that government officials supporting abortion should be denied religious rites such as communion. (Pope Benedict XVI is often cited as holding this strict view of the merging of a person’s faith and public duties). Renowned for his unflappable style in oral argument, Roberts appeared nonplused and, according to sources in the meeting, answered after a long pause that he would probably have to recuse himself.”
The quote is from the following Jonathan Turley article and Turley’s say on it is, “It was the first unscripted answer in the most carefully scripted nomination in history. It was also the wrong answer.”
The Faith of John Roberts, by Jonathan Turley, The Los Angeles Times, 25 July 2005
Judge John G. Roberts Jr. has been called the stealth nominee for the Supreme Court – a nominee specifically selected because he has few public positions on controversial issues such as abortion. However, in a meeting last week, Roberts briefly lifted the carefully maintained curtain over his personal views. In so doing, he raised a question that could not only undermine the White House strategy for confirmation but could raise a question of his fitness to serve as the 109th Supreme Court justice.
The exchange occurred during one of Roberts’ informal discussions with senators last week. According to two people who attended the meeting, Roberts was asked by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) what he would do if the law required a ruling that his church considers immoral. Roberts is a devout Catholic and is married to an ardent pro-life activist. The Catholic Church considers abortion to be a sin, and various church leaders have stated that government officials supporting abortion should be denied religious rites such as communion. (Pope Benedict XVI is often cited as holding this strict view of the merging of a person’s faith and public duties).
Renowned for his unflappable style in oral argument, Roberts appeared nonplused and, according to sources in the meeting, answered after a long pause that he would probably have to recuse himself.
It was the first unscripted answer in the most carefully scripted nomination in history. It was also the wrong answer. In taking office, a justice takes an oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the United States. A judge’s personal religious views should have no role in the interpretation of the laws…
Rest of the article is here
I look at it like this. I’ve turned down jobs in the past because they conflicted with certain ethics of mine. It’s that simple. Now, if Roberts doesn’t believe in separation of church and state then there’s no conflict of interest there, despite the oath to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States, because he’d be a theocrat and he wouldn’t give a damn for the law in the first place. Hence, no conflict of interest as he would recognize no interests other than his godly own. But if Roberts believes his faith would interfere with his ability to render judgments?
“When he got things wrong, classmates assumed it was the teacher who had made the mistake.” — TIME
