The Glasgow Daily Record said President Bush canceled a trip to London this week intended to bolster Tony Blair’s government. He canceled when he was told that his presence in London would bring down Tony Blair’s government. He should fly to Baghdad. [Argus Hamilton]

Leve Amerika.

Country stations across the United States have pulled the Chicks from playlists following reports that lead singer Natalie Maines said in a concert in London earlier this week that she was “ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” [Reuters]

Ik zou mijzelf zo graag lid maken van de Bunny Of The Month Club, maar ik vrees dat Sandra mij vermoordt. Oh well. Niet dus.

Howard Dean, presidentskandidaat in de VS. Zegt geen achterlijke dingen.

Go Zappa!

Elsewhere in the program, before the interval, we had to sit through three commissions, all of which were pretty benign stuff. Nothing to set the heart racing, nothing to object to. The harshness of most contemporary music in the 70s and 80s is now being replaced, I fear, with blandness. One of our new composers, Dan Coleman, is arranging music for Lisa Loeb. Another, Hsueh-Yung Shen, wrote a piece called Autumn Fall about which he writes that “the work follows a large unbroken arch”. (It’s something of an in-joke among readers of contemporary-music program notes that at least 50% of all new music is “in the form of an arch”.) Zappa would skewer them all without a second thought. There was more life and imagination in any 30 seconds of his music than in the entire first half of the concert. Here’s hoping we get more of him at Carnegie Hall, and that he continues to mix it up with young and old.

Ik lig al in bed, zo ziek ben ik.

Gotta love it: Forbes doet een artikel over een groep mensen die elkaar nog nooit gezien hebben, maar wel samen een website van $400.000 gemaakt hebben.

Citaat:

Max and Yves agree that a pair of Macromedia softwareprograms will change the world. One is Flash, a 3-D graphics program; the other is ColdFusion, which lets people update Web sites without a programmer. As Max described this software to me, I thought: Yes, makes perfect sense. Such cheap, off-the-rack software will indeed open up Web design to artists, the way Adobe opened up page design 15 years ago. Max, of course, would have missed my analogy altogether. Fifteen years ago Max was 2.

Zucht. Is het nu zo moeilijk om eventjes zo’n artikel te laten nalezen door iemand die iets afweet van Tinternet? Zucht. Of tenminste door één van die newfangled Softwareprogrammers of zo?

Naar From Hell aan het kijken. Ik weet niet wat ik zou doen als ik geen internet meer had. Er wordt ergens gewag gemaakt van een “Liston knife”. Google derop, en hopla:

Dr. Robert Liston (1794-1847) was a very prominent surgeon in the 19th century and invented a number of surgical techniques used today. In fact, many of the instruments in his surgical sets were named after him. Dr. Liston was a large man who cut a broad figure in the operating room and was proud of his reputation as a fast surgeon, a reputation that was well respected in this preanesthetic era for obvious reasons. Legends of his operating techniques are numerous, including the carved notches Dr. Liston made on his amputation knife following each procedure. […]

Liston’s fourth most famous case:
Removal in four minutes of a 45-pound scrotal tumour, whose owner had to carry it around in a wheelbarrow.

Liston’s third most famous case:
Argument with his intern. Was the red, pulsating tumour in a small boy’s neck a straightforward abscess of the skin? Or a dangerous aneurism of the carotid artery?
“Pooh!” Liston exclaimed impatiently. “Whoever heard of an aneurism in a boy so young?”. Flashing a knife from his waistcoat pocket, he lanced it.
Intern’s note: “Out leaped arterial blood and the boy fell.”
The patient died but the artery lives, in the University College Hospital pathology museum specimen No. 1256.

Liston’s second most famous case:
Amputated the leg in two and a half minutes, but in his enthusiasm the patient’s testicles as well.

Liston’s most famous case:
Amputated the leg in under two and a half minutes – the patient died afterwards in the ward from hospital gangrene (they often did in those early days).
He amputated in addition, the fingers of his young assistant who too died afterward in the ward from hospital gangrene.
Liston also slashed through the coat tails of a distinguished surgical spectator, who was so terrified that the knife had pierced his vitals that he dropped dead from fright.
Thus ended the only operation in history with a 300 percent mortality !”

[Alan Moore Portal]

Macromedia heeft alweer een nieuwe homepagina. Al Ramadan legt uit waarom ze wat veranderd hebben tussen beta 1 vorige week en beta 2 nu. Boeiend, interessant, en vooral: moedig van Macromedia.

En ze geloven ook in dogfooding:

Behind the scenes, the new macromedia.com system architecture is very straightforward and scalable. We are using Apache as our web server, handling all content and Macromedia Flash requests. Apache is running on a cluster of 10 Sun E420s, all with 4CPUs and 4GB RAM. The application servers are running ColdFusion MX for J2EE on JRun, a cluster of 3 Sun E4500s, all with 8 CPUs and 8GB RAM. Our Oracle database supporting all of the new applications is running on two mirrored E4500s, again with 8 CPUs and 8GB RAM.

So far this configuration has worked flawlessly – 0% downtime. In addition, we have only hit 40% capacity during peak hours, which is good.

Ik weet dat ik niet zou mogen, maar ik kan er niets aan doen: het blijft grappig.

Och here dat kindje 🙂

Zal een computer tegen 2029 slagen in de Turingtest? Interessante discussie (nu ja, twee essays) pro en con op Longbets.com.

Nog een geluk bij een ongeluk, ik ben maar ziek aan één kant van mijn gezicht. Linkeroog, linkerkant van mijn neus, linkeroor, linkerkant  van mijn keel.

Enfin, waarschijnlijk ben ik maandag weer helemaal in orde. Niet direkt uitgerust, maar toch in staat o te gaan werken. Huh, zie mij zielig doen 🙂

History News Network. Goed.

Here’s a good column by Jill Nelson of MSNBC about “presidential lust” — Clinton’s was for a “piece on the side,” W’s is for war.

Here’s a CSM piece about the return of the imperial presidency.

Here’s the closest thing you’ll get to a mea culpa from today’s journalists. My goodness it is so goddamned lame and carefully worded so as not to admit any wrong-doing by the press.

You see, they sort of helped the administration sell us on a bogus Al-Qaeda-Saddam link that has fooled the most ignorant and incurious of Americans into supporting this also bogus war.

Ooopsy. I’m sure they’ll try to do better next time, won’t they?

I mean, hell, this mistake on their part may only cost tens of thousands of innocent people their lives but, hey, they’re only human, right?

Surely, we can forgive them for their little mistakes, can’t we?

En meer van dat moois, grappig artikel:

Getting the Canadians seriously mad at us took real work. Our latest ploy in that direction was to contemptuously reject their compromise that had a few more days’ delay in it than the British-U.S. version. Then, when our version didn’t fly, we decided on a few more days’ delay ourselves ? without, of course, the contempt.

Ze hebben op dit ogenblik al 1.412.650.348,09 frank verzameld.

En Ricky Gervais doet een echt stukje cringe tv. Wijs 🙂