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Will the 2008 Election Be Cancelled?
Bush and Cheney have set up the architecture to cancel the election entirely if a state of emergency is declared. Three possible scenarios spun correctly would result in a state of emergency:
“War with Iran – unfortunately, not so far-fetched. The National Intelligence Estimate released in December concluded that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program back in 2003. But when have Bush and Cheney ever based their foreign policy decisions on evidence? Moreover, the most important reason they want to attack Iran is to control the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf, nukes or no nukes.
The assassination of a presidential candidate. Obama evokes memories of JFK and Martin Luther King. The bullet could come from a lone racist, a terrorist, or an agent of a state. The threat is real. The Secret Service knows it and so should we.
A terrorist strike, on the scale of 9/11 or worse. Again, not so far-fetched. Bush and Cheney have been Osama bin Laden’s greatest recruiters, making the U.S. appear to be the enemy of millions across the world. Al Qaeda may consider that regime change in the U.S. is not in their interest.”
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Men who do housework may get more sex
The average dad has gradually been getting better about picking himself up off the sofa and pitching in, according to a new report in which a psychologist suggests the payoff for doing more chores could be more sex.
Remember that episode of Everybody Loves Raymond where Ray is vacuuming and Debra gets all turned on? It works. If I wash the dishes and make the bed…. oh yeah…it’s on.
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Red-Eyed Asian Girl Follows Your Cursor
http://www.motionportrait.com/about/TIminoriHair.swf
MotionPortrait.com.. this is prob the best remapping apps I’ve seen in recent years.
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Pugwash
Maid doesn’t do Windows? no worries.
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Why free reading is important
Neil Gaiman’s got some good further ruminations on the nature and
reason for free ebooks in a post he called “The nature of free.” Bottom
line: low-risk/low-cost books are how readers discover new authors, and
the biggest threat writers face is the overall unpopularity of reading
books, not people reading for free. The more barriers there are to
reading, the worse the former gets.
During one of the interviews recently, a reporter said something like, “Of course, a real publisher wouldn’t give away paper books,” and I pointed out that 3,000 copies of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy were given away by Douglas Adams’ publisher, with a ‘write in and get your free book’ ad in Rolling Stone.
They wanted copies of HHGTTG on campuses in the US, and they wanted
people to read it and tell other people. Word of mouth is still the
best tool for selling books.
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Free download of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods
Neil Gaiman’s publisher Harper Collins has put his magnificent novel American Gods online for free reading as an experiment to see free digital copies sell print books.
This is a great idea — it’s really exciting to see publishers trying to get actual data about the market, rather than simply condemning all copying as piracy and hoping that the Internet just goes away.
However, I think that Harper Collins got this one wrong. They’ve put the text of American Gods up in a wrapper that loads pictures of the pages from the printed book, one page at a time, with no facility for offline reading. The whole thing runs incredibly slowly and is unbelievably painful to use. I think we can be pretty sure that no one will read this version instead of buying the printed book — but that’s only because practically no one is going to read this version, period.
The fact is that the full text of American Gods has been online for years, and can be located with a single Google query. I managed to buy/download the entire text of the book in less time than it took me to get the Harper Collins edition to load the first page of Chapter One (literally!). The “security” that Harper Collins has bought with its clunky, kudgey experiment is nonexistent: pirates will just go get the pirate edition.
Unfortunately, the “security” has also undermined the experiment’s value as a tool for getting better intelligence about the market. This isn’t going to cost Neil any sales, but it’s also not going to buy him any. We take our books home and read them in a thousand ways, in whatever posture, room, and conditions we care to. No one chains our books to our desks and shows us a single page at a time. This experiment simulates a situation that’s completely divorced from the reality of reading for pleasure. As an experiment, this will prove nothing about ebooks either way.
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Brief books in style
Brief books are in style. “Fine, old-fashioned self-improving middlebrow literature.”
Series mentioned:
*Penguin Lives (Penguin Group)
*Books That Changed the World (Grove/Atlantic)
*Eminent Lives (HarperCollins)
*Ackroyd’s Brief Lives (Doubleday)
*The Canongate Myth Series (Canongate)
*The art of .. (Graywolf Press)
*Great Generals Series (Palgrave
*The American Presidents Series (Times Books)
*National Geographic Directions (National Geographic)
*Jewish Encounters (Next Books)
*Very Short Introductions (Oxford University Press)
RobDurdle.com 
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