My dearest friend Alev, my co-conspirator since about 8th grade, notorious trouble-maker, accomplished career gal, brilliant wit and ravishing beauty proved that good things do come to those who wait in her recent marraige to the likewise beautiful, brilliant and accomplished Nelson Thayer. Here's what Alev's employer, the NY Daily News recently published on the matter:

More photos on the way, like it or not.

As mentioned the other day, Jay Niemann is blogging. This is a good thing. I don't mean to be pedantic, but let me first point out that the name of his blog, Filboid Studge, is not so much cryptic, as I suggested, but simply very obscure. As he points out, I had failed to notice that the name is explained in a short story running along the right margin of his blog: "Filboid Studge, The Story of a Mouse that Helped," from The Chronicles Of Clovis (1912), by H.H. Munro (Saki).

This is classic Jay. If I may indulge myself for a moment (and gee, I have a blog, do I really need to ask permission to indulge myself?), Jay was a big character in my life once upon a time. My late teens and early 20s, to be precise. We met when my mom started dating his father. After they hitched, we were kind of like the Brady Bunch, except for the drug arrests, good music and other stuff.

Around about the second or third time I met Jay, I arrived home from my high school job at a cheese shop. Jay greeted me with a chorus of "We have a friend in cheeses" (to the tune of "We have a friend in Jesus," in case that wasn't obvious). I decided then I liked him.

He introduced me to Lou Reed. How could I not be grateful for that? Not to mention Robyn Hitchcock, The Jazz Butcher, We Might Be Giants, Richard Thompson, The Proclaimers and many, many others. Last time I asked, several years ago, he had around 4,000 LPs plus a few thousand CDs.

He also taught me the word "pedantic," in the lyrics to our smash-hit single "We're Huge!" (composed while sitting on the roof of our house): "Like battleship and barge, we're oh so fucking large. We're huge! We don't mean to be pedantic, but we are just gigantic. We're huge!"

It is also "thanks" to Jay that I have such phrases in my vocabulary as "holy Jesus acid fuck!"

One of the smartest guys I know, albeit a complete freak (in a good way). Just discovered his blog (we don't keep in close enough touch), but am already discovering some of the most frightening nonsense on the Internet yet. How's that for bald-faced nepotistic blogrolling?

It is my great pleasure to announce the product of many months of work, ExecutiveSummary.com's Vendor Universe Database, a large and growing directory of e-marketing and e-media technology and services solutions providers I've been putting together since last year (with the help of the gifted jazz musician/java developer Travis Shook).

I've also just made some significant updates to my Rick's Resources section of ExecutiveSummary.com.

Enjoy. Feedback eagerly awaited.

One of the many things I love about Google is its usefulness as a spell checker. Have you noticed this? If you're a lousy speller (like I am), it's quickly addictive. Type in a wrong selling into the main search field (e.g., I just tried "indespensible"), and the top link on the results page will come back with a suggestion of what is usually the correct spelling ("Did you mean: indispensable?"). No matter how far off you are, enough people have probably tried that same wrong spelling that Google has the right suggestion for you. Faster than running MS Word and better accuracy on the suggestions.

Just bought me one of these. :-) Thank you, NYCBlogger.com!

I'm an athiest - or let's just say a lazy agnostic. My parents made that decision for me before I was born when they abandoned the Catholic Church in college. I grew up going to services with some frequency at the Unitarian Universalist Church, where athiesm is tollerated, if not even encouraged (hard to tell what the Unitarians really do believe, as I've been discovering on my occasionally lapses back into that community). In short, I'm spiritual in a vague way, but I certainly don't subscribe to anyone's version of the Gospel (unless we're talking about Thomas Dorsey or Sweet Honey in the Rock).

I very much respect anyone's right to believe and worship whatever they want (within reason; Satanism's a bit out there). This is what our Constitution says is a defining American characteristic, and I'm on board with the Constitution in general. But, like the Constitution also says, I really don't like anyone, pariticularly the government, telling me or anyone else what to believe or think about "God."

Thus, I have to tell you I'm really pleased to hear that a three-judge panel for the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court has found the "Pledge of Allegiance" to be unconstitutional, as this Times article reports. Of course it's unconstitutional. We're supposed to separate church and state. During the recitaton of the pledge when I was in grade school (which I never really minded in general, a basic lesson in civics), I always stopped reciting that particular phrase "...one nation, under God...," because that didn't apply to me. I was teased a few times, but mostly it was my own silent reflection on the hipocracy of the system, even back then.

My favorite quote from the majority ruling today:

“A profession that we are a nation ‘under God’ is identical, for Establishment Clause purposes, to a profession that we are a nation ‘under Jesus,’ a nation ‘under Vishnu,’ a nation ‘under Zeus,’ or a nation ‘under no god,’ because none of these professions can be neutral with respect to religion.”

NPR's legal affairs correspondent, Cokie Roberts (don't you just love that name?), said today that the chances that the ruling will withstand an inevitable review by the full Ninth Circuit court are roughly "zilch." Oh well, I applaud them for their courage on this issue. I suppose if they opened up that can of worms, we'd have to start wondering about swearing on a Bible in court, "In God We Trust" printed on our currency and having televangalists inaugurating our president in the name of Jesus.

Rob Taylor responded to my earlier posting about just what Enetations is up to with its new little comment utility.

Hi,

I will try and explain what we are doing...

First up we are not evil spammers using a cunning email gathering device, however now you mention it.... ;) We have not and will not sell any information gathered to anyone. We ask for your email address so if we need to alert you to a change in code or something big we can - as not all users read the front page.

All the information posted in a comment is stored on our servers, so yes this is turning into a spam harvester's wet dream. You're even getting me scared now! We did implement a anti-spam device to try and make sure that email addresses are not picked up by translating email@address.com to email at address dot com. That is straying from the point, however that was the extent to our spam related thoughts ;). I must say my personal spam levels have increased with admin@enetation.co.uk also being 'targeted' by earthlink users with macro virus's :S

Displaying a privacy policy that we will stick to is something I will look into very shortly. Likewise I will expand on exactly who we are, what we are doing and why and post it all on the enetation.co.uk site.We will write biographys, and possibley oblidge with the odd 'me as a baby' picture as well. The inital aim was to make a good working system, the next aim is to improve it (such as more transparancy in 'us') and secure the long term future of enetetion, without shifting too much from what is alread established. The reason it has not happened yet as it is only 2 weeks old ;)

Briefly I will outline what/how we are doing enetation here. I (Rob Taylor) run Studio-51.co.uk, a company that does outsourced programming and techie friendly hosting in the UK. Due to this I have some surplus resources and bits of kit allowing me to host something as bandwidth hungry as enetation.co.uk. Likewise it means that in effect studio-51.co.uk is currently subsidising enetation.co.uk and will do for a while yet.

I have been astounded by the response by the community to enetation, which has prompted me to think a little earlier that I was expecting on enetation's future. There will be a point where I will have to make enetation 'pay for itself', or at least not incur infinately expanding costs to run it, that is as your reader correctly points out its very 1999ish and hiding from reality if I just ignore the issue until its too late. Usually generating an income stream would be done via donations or some form of 'Pro' version for a subscription fee. However I hope to combat that by enabling users to 'donate' bandwidth and 'load balancing' the commenting system. I must state this is just an idea and an ideal at this moment, and it would be damn good if the community could 'run' its own commenting systems!

There are numerous problems with that, such as backups of comments, the system itself, integrity of donors etc. All problems that will have to be countered - or just accepted and revert back to one of the above sources of income.

So in all honesty we havn't a clue, as we didnt expect it to be as popular as it is. We are not ignoring the fact at some point some poor sods going to have to give enetation something - however if they get more features, a big 'thank you' or whatever. I just cannot say.

This has gone on more than I expected, so much for 'briefly', but I hope it answers the readers question, even if the answer is 'we dont know'.

Cheers, Rob

Many thanks for the reply. Keep up the great work!

Golf and tennis are cool. (I thought I posted the golf thing once before, but now can't find it in my own archives.)

I love reading my friend Emmanuelle's blog in bad Google translation (as she writes it in her native French). It's brilliant what the translation system comes up with. My favorite is "blogist" instead of "blogger," which is hence forth my preferred term for our ilk.

Delighted to see that my step-brother Jay Niemann has started a blog, cryptically titled Filboid Studge, which apparently specializes in weird minutiae, not unlike the man himself.

A Bruner Blog reader writes in offering grains of salt about my recent optimism for new free software products, including Cloudmark's anti-spam plug-in SpamNet, and the free utility for creating reader comments on blogs and websites from Enetations, which I use on ExecutiveSummary.com. SpamNet, it should be noted, is experiencing a fair bit of bugginess in its beta release.

My reader (who didn't want the message made public) specifically wondered about Enetation's business model, which as I mentioned in my prior note about them, is not exactly transparent or well marketed, if there is one at all. (No fee, no ads, no self-promo. Just plain free. Sound too good to be true? It's not 1999 anymore, after all.)

The reader speculates that they could just be farming email addresses for resale. On the face of it, that's true. When you sign up to use the service as a web logger, they ask for your email address, but they never mention what their purpose is in acquiring that address. Also, when someone uses the utility to post a comment on my blog, by default the form asks for their email address. (I believe I had the option to edit the form and perhaps turn that off when I set it up, but I'm not sure and can't be bothered to go back and check.) Does that email address get stored on their servers? I'm not sure. Either way, there appears to be no explanation about privacy policies or how they treat email addresses in the FAQ or their About Us pages.

Furthermore, the About Us page gives no real explanation of the mission of the "business" (if it is, indeed, even a business), how it intends to make money, what happens to all my comment records if they go bust, or even biographies of the founders. It only offers their email addresses.

My own assumption has been that these are a couple of well-meaning techies who coded this elegent little utility and made it freely available to the world just for their love of the blog world and their programming creativity, and that how to make money or issues concerning privacy just haven't really occurred to them yet because they're too good and pure for that. And their British modesty makes them think no one would be interested in their biographies anyway.

Describing it like that makes me sound like quite a sap. But I think I'm right. In part because I wrote them email earlier with a minor bug report, and they both answered me personally. I know this thing's gotten a lot of publicity inside the blog world, so they're doutbless getting tons of mail. If they were just running an elaborate scam to farm email address, I can't see them delivering such good customer service.

But the reader's question is a good one that deserves a response, and an update of the site w/ a privacy policy at minimum. As readers should know, I am not just an armchair Internet media pundit: it's how I make my living. I've done a lot of research in the email marketing space, and I can assure you that theirs are not best practices in terms of handling sacred email addresses online. But I am willing to bet they're just naive, not nefarious. I'll update with a response if I get one. (I'm not holding my breath for a consulting gig on this one.)

English scientists building artificially intelligent robots were surprised when one broke free of its cage and made it as far as the parking lot.

Morto the Magician

This animation was written by Steve Martin, apparently. I guess Morto is even suposed to be a caricature of him. Frankly, I would have expected better from him, tho it's rather amusing.

Webbies

Lots of interesting sites to explore among the winners of this years Webby Awards, announced earlier this week..

It's Only Fun Till Someone Gets Hurt

I just upgraded this morning from the free version of Blogger.com to Blogger Pro. (It's great. If you use Blogger.com, you should really upgrade to the Pro version. Ev could use your support.) The transaction was confirmed with an email that began, "You are now a Blogger Pro subscriber. May you use your new powers for good and not evil."

I have to admit, I've been a bad blogger. The other day I used the blog to mock a friend, a journalist who didn't think blogs ammount to a hill of beans. I thought it was pretty funny at first (and so did a few readers, I believe), but it got a bit out of hand. I'll spare you the details, because that wouldn't really be having learned a lesson to gloat about it. Point is, it was mean, and he was offended, and I've learned my lesson. I'm sorry, and hereby take the Blogger Pro pledge to use my powers of blogging only for good from here on after.

Bush Doctrine 2.0

My sister sent this very funny political animation by Mark Fiore.

Must See TV: 'Bigger Than Enron' on PBS

Just finished watching the PBS Frontline documentary expose "Bigger Than Enron," by correspondent Hedrick Smith. Amazing. If you missed it, you must go to PBS.org (via link above) and find out when it is rebroadcasting in your area.

First rate investigative journalism. Top level access to key players, including past and present chairmen of the SEC, Andersen CEO Joseph Berardino and many other luminaries who, presented with the smoking gun, basically fess up about just how egregiously Corporate America has been and continues to ride the American people doggie style. Total breakdown in fundamental moral values. Greed. I'm not a religious guy, but isn't that one of the 7 deadly sins?

Clear moral of the story: nothing has changed. Bush's new man at the SEC, Harvey Pitt, is toeing the auditor's line on the question of breaking apart auditing and consulting (among other issues, but that one's key). In the seven months since Enron broke, nothing but cosmitics have changed in the system that makes Enron-style accounting abuse so commonplace, as the documentary makes abundantly clear.

Favorite quote: Andersen CEO Berardino: "People are always asking me how I can sleep at night. I tell them I sleep like a baby: I wake up every two hours and cry."

Trading Fat Credits?

Sounds like a combination of eBay and those ridiculous schemes companies use to trade pollution credits. Per my earlier note that Soutwest is going to charge fat people double for two seats, Mark's ex-wife observes:

"A whole new business could arise out of this. Very thin people could sell 1/2 of their seats to very fat people, so the fares would be more equitable. You could have brokers handling this for a small fee, checking heights, weights and hip sizes to make sure everyone will fit in as planned."

What Do You Feel Is Essentially American?

I had the pleasure of lunching yesterday with Vanessa Amador, whom I met via the funky online networking community Ryze (listed among my favorites). Vanessa wants to hear how people answer that question: "What do you feel is essentially American?"

It's pretty much her obsession these days. But in a good way. She moved to NYC from Florida (where she was/is an actress, model and real estate marketing specialist), arriving a few months before Sept. 11. But her pursuit of this question, spurred doubtless by the country's introspection in the wake of that awful day last fall, is now approaching a full-time occupation, or at least so she hopes.

The idea is a TV show, shot documentary style around the country out of an RV, a la Charles Kuralt. She would engage people with the question (the fact that she's easy on the eyes certainly helps her case; I don't think I'm over-stepping to post her picture here (lifted from her Ryze page), as she also uses it on her business card), and then she'd build the show around their responses. As they share their thoughts, she would weave in images and background on the themes they are talking about: family farmers, jazz music, the founding fathers, Christianity, diversity, civil liberites, New York City, fried chicken, Elvis, etc.

At first blush, it seemed a bit schmaltzy to me until I actually tried to give her a straight answer. I found myself blathering on (imagine that) as thoughtfully as I could on a range of topics till she changed the subject back to her idea for the show.

One thing you can't doubt is her determination. She sold me. I think that if done well (tightly edited, thoughtful, balanced, honest, down-to-earth), it could be quite an interesting show. There's a lot there to the question: really probing what it means to be an American and what America represents in the world. Everyone in one way or another has already been having that same conversation for the last nine months, all around the world. Having an ongoing TV dialog to just discuss that one theme could prove tremendously stimulating, if you think about it. Perhaps even good for international relations (I could see it having an avid international following). She also envisions a rich and lively Internet component, which could be great. I think the whole package could also be very attracitive to advertisers.

In short, it's a crazy dream, baby, but it just might work! She's a great saleman (in the Malcom Gladwell "Tipping Point" sense). Problem is, all that I know about producing a TV show I learned from those "Show About Nothing" episodes of Sienfeld.

If anybody out there has any ideas or contacts in the TV industry, or even if you'd just like to answer her question, you can drop her a line at vanessa@bruner.net (not her actual address; I've set up forwarding for her to remove her one layer from the weirdos among you).

Relief From Spam!

Thank you Cloudmark! This company, founded by one of the creators of Napster, has just released a peer-to-peer spam filtering plug-in that removes spam from your email! Check out my longer note about this on ExecutiveSummary.com, or just download it immediately at Cloudmark.com. (Note: it only works at the moment for Outlook, tho support for other email clients is coming soon.)

Comments With Enetation

Just discovered a neat new comments tool from Enetation. Yes, their name is stupid (it's a dense play on "annotation"), and I don't see how they expect to make money off the thing, as it's free to web developers, there a no ads and not even any self-promotional "Powered by Enetations" kind of thing in the utility, but the app seems to work perfectly well, so the rest is their problem. (Come to think of it, I guess it will be my problem when they go out of biz, as all the comments appear to be stored on their servers, but a risk I'm willing to take.)

To see it in action, visit my biz blog ExecutiveSummary.com (and leave a comment!).

Bloomberg Compromises on Recycling

Updating my earlier post on Bloomberg's efforts to cut recycling in NYC to close the city's $5 billion budget gap, WNYC was reporting this moring that the City Council (pro recycling) and the mayor (against) were near a compromise on this key sticking point in the overdue city budget, whereby glass recycling would be suspended for a year and mentals for two years. Not clear what's up with paper. News Day has a piece that touches on the compromise.

Not good enough in my opinion, but the best we're likely to get, I suppose. Such is politics. Heidee (who apparently likes seeing her name in print, even if just on a friend's blog), points out that recycling also represents inome for many of the homeless. Bloomberg's record on the homeless, meanwhile, appears to be shaping up as a mixed bag, with the mayor seeking to increase funds for public housing (I heard the figure 7,000 new units on the radio today), while trying to overturn a ban that presently prevents the city from evicting trouble-making families from city shelters.

Regarding recycling and NYC environmentalism, here are some interesting links:

• The city's sanitation department page on the recycling program, which ironically still reads "Whether you live, work, or visit NYC—recycling is the law. New York City has the largest, most ambitious recycling program in the nation."
• Council on the Environment of New York City
• NYC Environmental Justice Alliance
• Green Guerillas (another NYC green group)
• TreeBranch (ditto)

Southwest Super Sizes Ticket Prices

Per my comment the other day on corporate responsibility for overweight Americans, Southwest Airlines is about to start charging double for any passengers that can't fit into a seat with the arm rest in normal position.

Source: Haas

Sad But True

This from my dad:

A guy walks in and asks the barman, "Isn't that Bush and Powell sitting over there?" The barman says, "Yep, that's them." So the guy walks over and says, "Wow, this is a real honor. What are you guys doing in here?"

Bush says, "We're planning WW III." And the guy says, "Really? What's going to happen?" Bush says, "Well, we're going to kill 23 million Iraqis and one blonde with big tits."

The guy exclaimed, "A blonde with big tits? Why kill a blonde with big tits?"

Bush turns to Powell, punches him on the shoulder and says, "See, smart ass?! I told you no one would worry about the 23 million Iraqis!"

Goldfinger Bin Laden

Fox News weblogger Ken Layne had the same reaction I did watching "Goldfinger" on ABC Monday night: how creepy the the climax scene now seems where Goldfinger uses nerve gas to sedate the U.S. army so he could blow up Fort Knox. Yikes. I guess Bin Laden watches the old movie classics, also. Too bad James Bond doesn't work for the CIA.

Legos and the Christian Faith

Perhaps the most stimulating thing to happen to the Net in years was for all the really creative people to get laid off. Otherwise we wouldn't see things like this.

More on Anthrax Investigation Cover-up

More support for my pet issue of an alledged cover-up by the FBI on the anthrax investigation. Where the hell is the mainstream media on this?

Did McDonald's Make America Fat?

I love this. John Banzhaf, the American lawyer who first started suing tobacco companies for injury to smokers back in the 1960s (though the late '90s) is now proposing to sue the junk-food industry for America's obesity epidemic. His George Washington University class on legal activism is preparing a suit against McDonald's. I say, go get the bastards! Fry them in their own deep fat fryers. I'm sure when they take the lid off this industry, Eric Schlosser's expose best-selling book "Fast Food Nation" will prove to be only scratching the surface of the vilany and damage this industry wreaks on humankind.

I'm serious. I make it a point not to eat in McDonald's, have avoided them for decades. And this nation is fat as hell, it's disgusting. Quoting from a piece in the UK Independent (see link below):

America, as we all know, is the fattest nation on the planet and getting fatter all the time. According to a report by the US Surgeon-General, released a few months ago, 61 per cent of Americans are now significantly overweight, compared with 55 per cent in the early 1990s, and 46 per cent in the late 1970s. Obesity generates $117bn in annual medical bills and triggers 300,000 premature deaths each year

I was recently outside of NY and spend a few hours in Chicago's Midway airport, and I can confirm it: outside of NY, everyone's fat. And I certainly think McDonald's and many other purveyors of needlessly and knowingly harmful crap food bear some of the responsibility.

• "Fast Food Nation: An Appetite for Litigation" -- published June 4 in the Independent
• "Is Food the Next Tobacco?" -- published June 13 in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required)

Greetings Dork!

Big shout out to Dork Zygotian, who recently googled the Bruner Blog and read it cover to cover and wrote in with a long missive, his first in a while. Dork and I go way back, to late 1990, to be precise. Budapest Week was actually conceived over a joint of Dork weed, as Steve likes to point out. Wonder if it made a difference to the fate of the poor little pub that it was such raggy-ass dope (albeit the best one could grow along the roadside back then). Dork became a key player at the paper for many years, editing the vaunted Style section for while fairly early on, before I fired him once or twice. He always wrote the most brilliantly hilarious opinion pieces the paper ever published.

In his note, Dork makes few brief political comments on my earlier posting about the recent Socialist (MSZP) election victory in Hungary and defeat of nationalist egomaniac former Fidesz party prime minister Viktor Orban:

So I read through the thing, and found the Hungarian election rant amusing. You should check the news here now. Basically, Fidesz is acting like they didn't lose the election and setting up "civic committees" to do street demos and harrass MSZP officials in public. You can even go to OrbanViktor.hu and read how Orban "is, naturally, still the prime minister in our hearts." Somebody ought to take the time to tear Vikibacsi a new a-hole concerning his post election anti-democratic antics. Also, there is a movement to compensate voted-out Fidesz politicians and civil servansts who "have been victimized and lost their jobs because of their political views," i.e., they were voted out. This ain't joking, this is in the parliament care of Repassy Robert.

Dork vows that he is not interested in blogging, which is a huge mistake, as it would be the funniest blog on the Net, hands down. But he is a rather stubborn character, so I don't know how easily I can wear him down. I'll see if Steve has some of his old columns backed up that I'll repost here.

Instead of applying his brilliant craft of writing the funniest stuff in Eastern Europe, Dork is running a publication he's so ashamed of I'll omit all identfying details: "Absolutely the worst job since I was a rat handler in Boston at a lab." That and he continues to perform with his klezmer and Eastern European folk band around Europe, with a U.S. tour this summer in the offing.

FYI, DorkZygotian.com is an unregistered domain. :-)

America the Beautiful

Just allow youself for one moment the pleasure of envisioning a U.S.A. sweep to become the World Cup champs for the first time in our history. I have to admit soccer is far from my favorite sport, and I'm not really such a nationalist that I care for that reason. I guess it just so appeals to my sense of irony and fantasy. I don't know why, but picturing it makes me giddy like a school boy. The slack-jawed expression on the faces of billions of people worldwide... Would it make them begrudgingly respect us or hate us even more? It's just such a topys-turvy world anymore, it seems perversely possible.

In any event, NBC must be thrilled after the U.S. 2-0 victory over Mexico (advancing us to the quarterfinals), and the idea of securing rights to air the World Cup probably doesn't sound like such a frivolous idea at this point.

The Women

Quick heads up, this Tuesday night at 8pm, the PBS affiliate Channel Thirteen (in the NY area, anyway) is airing a filmed version of the stage play "The Women," a hilariously bitchy all-female play set in the '30s (when it was originally written by Clare Booth Luce, wife of Time Magazine founder Henry Luce). I mention this because I was lucky enough to see this on Broadway at a special pre-screening several months ago thru my friend Alev, who is the women's pages editor at the NY Daily News. I don't know how well this filmed version of the stageplay works, but if it works well at all, it's probably worth tuning into, as the play was quite hilarious. The performers are all great, with stand-outs including Kristen Johnston (of "Third Rock From the Sun"), who is absolutely brilliant in this, Cynthia Nixon (of "Sex in the City," whom I was friends with in college!) and Jennifer Tilly (of "Cat's Meow"), among many others.

Bush Rich From Nazi Loot?

I try to avoid blogging about political stuff while still trying to keep this thing interesting, because many others do it better. But this was too intriguing to pass up. Was just browsing the site of an old favorite pub of mine, Unte Reader, and came across a link to this piece from Clamor Magazine, alleging that Bush's family fortune in part came from money Dubya's grandfather Prescott Bush made in banking lending money to Hitler. The article reads in part:

According to classified documents from Dutch intelligence and US government archives, President George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush made considerable profits off Auschwitz slave labor. In fact, President Bush himself is an heir to these profits from the holocaust which were placed in a blind trust in 1980 by his father, former president George Herbert Walker Bush.

Throughout the Bush family's decades of public life, the American press has gone out of its way to overlook one historical fact – that through Union Banking Corporation (UBC), Prescott Bush, and his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, along with German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, financed Adolf Hitler before and during World War II. It was first reported in 1994 by John Loftus and Mark Aarons in The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People.

If true, would be nice to see that get a bit more pickup in the mainstream media...

The Thayers

Congratulations Alev and Nelson! Wishing you many happy years together. Special thanks to you, Nelson, for rescuing her from spinsterhood!

Rainy Days and Mondays

PWC Consulting, separating from PricewaterhouseCoopers (the post-Enron thing to do at the Big 5), is changing its name to Monday. Hmmm. Odd. Better, perhaps, than Accenture, I suppose, but that's not saying much. But Monday? It's a bit too touchy feely for my image of the postive brand attributes PWC Consulting presumably still carries. So far, the site looks like an ad agency has just run amok without any real thought to the business positioning of the new firm.

I hope Monday Magazine got a pretty penny selling its old domain.

Spelling Correction

Mr. Haas also corrects my spelling, that the plural of "goy" is "goyim" not "goim" as I said in my recent note. I think I saw "goim" somewhere on the Web, but I'll go with the more classic spelling he suggests. What would I know, I'm just a dumb goy.

Reminded of a joke: Why did God invent goyim? Because somebody has to pay retail.

Dancing Dubya

Silly fun with Flash, Dancing Bush. Much better when you turn on the music, dancefloor and lights before you start playing with the dance moves.

Source: Mark Haas, who is threatening to take my advice and launch a blog of his own, which should be good, but at my expense, since I already pass off many of the amusing tidbits he regularly emails me that he would presumably use on his own blog instead. Stay tuned.

Americans Just Don't Understand the World

This is sad. The Pew Research Center just released results of a recent survey that said that despite September 11, most Americans still don't want more foreign news coverage because "they simply have trouble understanding foreign events," as this Washington Post article puts it.

Source: Maass

Bloomberg vs. Recycling

I had to dig to find this story buried on the Time's web site (tho the issue is getting lots of coverage on WYNC), about how the NY City Council is holding up the city budget, technically due today, because of a stand-off w/ Mayor Bloomberg over recycling. Everything else they've agreed on, including putting money back in for teachers and other good things he was trying to cut.

I'll admit, I didn't vote in the mayoral election. Green was too much of a weenie and I didn't know what to think of Bloomberg and was still in a fog after Sept. 11, so I decided to let it slide and accept my fate. I didn't think either would be so bad. And so far, Bloomberg hasn't outraged me. He's presentable, seems reasonable, he takes the subway (supposedly), which is cool.

But I'm totally behind the City Council on this recycling stand-off. Bloomberg was supposed to be the businessman who could fix inefficiency in the system. So he accuses the recycling programs of being inefficient because a sizeable portion of bottles and cans end up in landfills (this Times article doesn't cite what percentage, but I seem to recall from earlier reports something like 20-30% fall thru the recycling programs). But just axing the program is hardly "fixing" the inefficiencies. That's penny wise and pound foolish.

Besides, the money to be gained from killing the program is a drop in the bucket: the article says killing recycling would save the city budget $56 million, but the budget deficit is estimated at roughly $5 billion. I empathize with Bloomberg about how difficult his job will be to close that massive and unexpected gap, but killing this program is hardly the answer. I don't understand why he's making such a stand on something that is monetarily meaningless in the big picture but symbolically so important.

Regardless of whether there are inefficiencies in the current recycling system, the truth is recycling as we now practice it across this country makes virtually no difference to the rapid deterioration of our environment. It's not really part of the "sustainable development" movement that preaches a significantly different approach to industry and product development for humans to continue to live in harmony with the planet for several more generations. I nominally subscribe to the sustainability movement, in as much as I think it's the right idea but have my doubts that it will ever take hold w/ the powers that be. Which is precisely why I think Bloomberg should back off recycling. Not because I believe that it actually makes much difference to the environment, but because it's symbolic of at least our will to try to do the right thing. If nothing else, sorting your damn papers and cans is one of the simplest balms to assuage liberal guilt.

It's taken years to get people to even disciplined to do this much. To throw that away is to throw away an important vision of our future.

Winona vs. The FBI

The 2002 PowerPoint Competition is now underway! (In case you missed it, I blogged on this a few days ago.) The contestants, Michael Sippey in SF and Leslie Harpold in NY are battling to see who is the best PPT designer in America. The first of seven rounds (at ClicktoAddTitle.com) has Michael with "Improving the FBI Starts With You" vs. Leslie's "Winona Needs Us."

It's a tough call, but since Michael is a client and I'm running a bit late on an assignment for him, I'm going to give my vote to him this round. At least I know that while I'm wasting time blogging, he's spending a lot more time on these silly PPT presentations.

'Round Midnight

In the unlikely event that I were banished to a hermit's life with only one piece of music ever to enjoy, I think I'd pick this recording (MP3) of Thelonious Monk playing solo his beautiful composition "'Round Midnight" (composed in partnership with trumpeter Cootie Williams), recorded in 1954 in France. I got the track off a nice three-CD box set called "Jazz Piano Anthology," which Amazon is selling for $16 (as of this writing).

Monk is generally one of my favorite composers, and this melody in particular I find hypnotizing. Not only a great composer ("'Round Midnight" is a standard in the jazz world today recorded by everybody), but as a musician, Monk was one of a kind. The subtlety and nuances in this five-and-a-half minute recording is deep enough for me to listen to 1,000 times.

For anyone interested in Monk, I'd highly recommend the one-hour documentary "Thelonious Monk: American Composer," available on video.

Lyricist Bernie Hanighen also put a beautiful set of lyrics to "'Round Midnight" which has also been widely recorded by vocalists. My favorite vocal version is by Sarah Vaughan (MP3), available on a terrific album, "Sarah Sings Soulfully", where she's backed by only a five-piece band (I hate listening to her with the orchestras full of strings) (which Amazon has for $12).

Photos

I fancy myself a photographer, which is probably a mistake. Picked up contact sheets at B&H Photo today, always a sobering experience.

About a year ago, I picked up a Leica IIIa. It's a sweet camera, manufactured in Germany circa 1938 (not the proudest era of German manufacturing, but I bought it at B&H where they're all Hasids, so I don't feel so bad). My inspiration for this camera was Bruno Brourel, a talented French photographer friend of mine who lives in Budapest (here's the only pic of his I could find online). His black-and-white candid street shots are in the vein of Hungarian masters Brassai and Andre Kertesz. All of them (and many others, e.g., contemporary French master Henri Cartier-Bresson) use(d) similar model Leicas.

It's an incredibly simple camera design: the only things you can control are the focus, the shutter speed and the aperture. That simplicity, however, seems to have an inverse effect on the quality of my pictures, unfortunately. I finally broke down and bought a handheld light meter a while ago, as my previous attempts to "wing it" on the light were wasting a lot of film. Even with the light meter, I'm still pretty wobbly on getting the light right. Focus is occasionally a challenge as well. Loading the film, in fact, continues to post a challenge, perhaps explaining what appear to be scratch marks on the shots below.

Suffice it to say, I'm no Brassai. But what's the point of having a blog if I can't subject you dear readers (whoever the hell you are) to even my disappointments (this is, as the sign says, All Bruner, All the Time). These were shot at Peter's birthday a few weeks ago, using 1600 ASA film in available light in an apartment at night (should have had 3200). These were simply scanned from a contact sheet:

Brent 1	Brent 2	Peter
Sam	Sam and Friend	Sam and Friend Artsy
Subway

One final note. For anyone else out there familiar with B&H, what's the deal with the "Goi Goi" candy? Is that some kind of insider joke?

For those of you who don't know B&H, if you like photography, you should. It's a perhaps the biggest photography story anywhere -- certainly in New York City. I believe it is the successor of the famous defuct 47th Street Photo. In any event, virtually all of the 100+ staff are Orthodox Hasidic Jews. And on virtually every countertop throughout the store are bowls of Goi Goi fruit flavored taffy. And most of the customers stuffing their faces with the candies, unlike the staff, are goim. Is that supposed to be just an ironic coincidence?

Their Sense of Humor Is Different

Reuters reports: "Beijing's most popular newspaper [Beijing Evening News] has unwittingly republished a bogus story about U.S. Congress threats to skip town for Memphis or Charlotte unless Washington builds them a new Capitol building with a retractable dome. The source? America's celebrated spoof tabloid, the Onion."

Source: NPR & Haas

Good Find

I just discovered FreeFind, quite a good little search utility for web sites (see it in my navigation menu to the left). One advantage to FreeFind over other utilities I played with (notably Google) is that you can have it immediately index all the pages in your site, while Google doesn't make any promises that it will index your pages anytime soon (at least not for free). The results with Google were all pointing to my homepage, where blog entries had once lived, not my blog archive pages, where the entries now live. The trade-off with FreeFind is advertising on the results pages, of course, but they don't seem too disruptive to me.

Racial Profiling on Visas

This is disgusting. The Bush administration is now proposing to get fingerprints for visa holders, but spefically from Muslims and Middle Easterners. I have no problem with fingerprinting visa holders (although my wife, a Hungarian citizen, may not be thrilled to hear me say it). What's the big deal about fingerprints? If you're law abiding, why worry about it? Back when I was a temp in college, I had to get fingerprinted to work for an afternoon at Bankers Trust, so somewhere the FBI has my prints on record (tho how they could find them without computers I'd like to know).

I lived in Hungary for five years, and true enough, I was at best semi-legal the whole time, due to a number of factors, including youthful expat-arrogance, an immigration bureaucracy that made the INS look like a walk in the park, and the fact that it was so easy to cheat the system there back then. But had it not been, and had I really wanted to stay in the country badly enough, I would have done what it took to be legal, including fingerprints. My father has just moved back to Hungary (no, we're not Hungarian, we just like the place), and the hoops they're having him jump thru to get legal are incredible.

But my point is, finger prints are not the objection, despite what my privacy-phreak friends might believe. Hell, I don't even strongly object to the idea of national identity cards, seeing as we already need official IDs to drive a car or even be a passenger on a plane (the only difference being you can forge a drivers license at a Times Square gift shop in five minutes).

The outrage is the blatant racial profiling being proposed. Aside from the fact that it goes so obviously against our sense of civil liberties and fair play, it's so narrow minded it is stupid in the extreme. Does this administration really believe that Muslims and Middle Easterners are the only groups of people in the world that are angry enough with U.S. policies to resort to terrorism? I'm not saying anyone is justified in doing so, but it's absurdly niave to assume Middle Easterners are the only threat we face in the next 50 years. When some environmental extremists from New Zealand blow up a dam or whatever, then we'll finger print New Zealanders, too? It's like the foolishness that we all have to have our shoes examined at the airport b/c one guy tried to bring a bomb on-board that way. When the "hat bomber" strikes, then they'll examine everyone's shoes and hats, at least until the "belt bomber" strikes...

I'm all for keeping better tabs on foreigners in this country. Obviously, I don't want to see a police state where IDs and retina scans are demanded of anyone on a regular basis, but enough (if not "everything") has changed as of September 11 that I don't think fingerprinting visa applicants is asking too much. This administration, however, seems determined to flush America's "moral authority" down the toilet with assine, indefensibly racist policies like this one.

Can't Win for Losing

Being described as a plague of "biblical proportions," Afghanistan is currently battled an infestation of billions of locust that are desimating its crops.

O Dee Dee

Dee Dee Ramone is dead. Sad. I spent a lot of time listening to these guys in high school. But there is some irony that he ODed. I mean, given his name and everything. Off to join fellow band member Joey Ramone in that great garage band in the sky. Gaba gaba hey!

Tributary samples:

• We're a Happy Family
  
• I Wanna Live

Truth, Beauty and PowerPoint

NBA finals? World Cup? Bah! I am looking so forward to the 2002 PowerPoint Competition between West Coast contender Michael Sippey and Leslie Harpold for the East.

Real Reality TV

I saw an episode of ABC's new series Boston 24/7. I'm impressed. Running every night for the several days at 10pm on ABC, each episode is a short documentary featuring three or four real people -- a new principal at a struggling inner-city vocational high school, a lesbian cop, the city's mayor, Thomas Menino. The episodes follow the subjects closely over the course of a day, poignant vignettes that make up a riveting hour of TV.

Real people we can accept as everyday heroes. Not even especially attractive people. None of the subjects apparently seeking celebrity or looking to get rich off the show. No glamour. During a child rape trial, the camera shows a stream of people coming into the courtroom late just behind the frumpy D.A. as she makes her opening arguments for the case before a jury -- honest, ineligant distractions that would never make it on "The Practice" or "Law & Order."

Documentaries in prime time on network TV. I like it. I hope it's a trend, and I suspect it is. ABC supposedly has two similar documentary series in the works, and next week NBC will be showing a similar documentary-style twist on their Law & Order franchise with "Crime & Punishment." I hope NCB doesn't win the PR battle with what to call this new genre: they propose the awful "drama-mentary."

Boston.com's review of "Boston 24/7"
CNN's coverage of the new style of show.

'Insomnia' Keeps My Eyes Open

I saw the new film "Insomnia" a few days ago, but hadn't gotten to mentioning it here yet. It was pretty good. The script was quite good. Yes, ultimately it is a "game of wits" between an evil psycho and a down-on-his-luck, soon-to-retire detective that pretty much defines the psycho thriller genre, but the plot also hinges on a compelling moral dilemma that the cop, Al Pacino, faces. I won't go into it, but Pacino's character must pick between two bad options. Pacino gives a strong performance as an LA cop out of his element in small-town Alaska while trying to catch a killer and save his career. As if that weren't enough to lose sleep over, the 24-hour sunlight of an Alaskan summer is unrelenting and adds something (tho not really that much) to the suspense. The scenery is also pretty incredible. Alaska is just damn photogenic. There are also at least a few good nerve-wracking scenes (notably including the shoot-out in the fog and real heart-stopper when Pacino falls into the water chasing Williams across a river sending hundreds of logs down stream.

I was particularly disappointed, however, by Robin William's performance. I thought, here's a great chance for him to break character and play an evil psycho, and he really did little with the opportunity. True, he wasn't being his usual moronic self, but he played it very straight, taking no risks, arguing his case so calmly and rationally it would have been more suited for a courtroom drama than a thriller. Hillary Swank was also pretty flat as the innocent young backwater detective star-struck by the big city cop whose cases she studied in school. She played it by the numbers, bringing out nothing very interesting about her character.

I like a good thriller, and this was a decent one. Only after I left the theater, however, did I realize that the director, Christopher Nolan, was also responsible for the brilliant "Memento." This new film was good as your typical thriller goes, but it certainly was nothing like Memento in really breaking new creative ground in filmmaking. Here is "Insomnia's" official site.

Films I'm interested in seeing next include lots of summer blockbuster goodies:

• The Bourne Identity
• Sum of All Fears (Out of morbid curiosity. I expect it won't be very good, and the CIA vs. terrorists theme makes me pretty uneasy, but I'm a sucker, what can I say)
• Men in Black II
• Minority Report (easy on the pop-up windows, guys)

Well, the Nets could have done a lot worse. Those uniforms, tho, were so dorky. Grey suits and black socks and shoes? Does their mom shop at Wal-Mart?

Ugh. I'm a New Jersey boy. Reporting at the first commercial break of the first game of the NBA finals at just over six minutes into the game, looks pretty bleak for the NJ Nets: LA lakers lead 19-8. A person might as well watch the World Cup.

USA!! USA!! USA!!

Nick, gimme a break. You spend a whole day rubbing the Saudis' noses in their defeat (deliciously humiliating as it was), but for the U.S.'s amazing upset victory, all you can offer is that you think we should have the "decency to lose" because we prefer basketball? (At least in basketball, exciting games score points like 85-83, not 0-1.)

(And you can't convince me that you actually like "football" any better than I do, save the opportunity the World Cup provides for ironic/snide remarks about international affairs.)

Your anti-American piece the other day really was rather patronizing and facile. Dubya may have put it a bit to simply with "you're either with us or agin' us," but couldn't you give us a little better cheer for KICKING PORTUGAL'S ASS, the 5th best ranked team in the world? Your cynicism is getting a bit too predictable.

How ironic would it be if we actually won the championship this year. :-)

Build a Mosque on Ground Zero

I love this idea. Daniel Brenner, writing on BeliefNet, suggests that we use Ground Zero in part to build an inter-faith center, featuring a mosque, a church and a synagogue. Personally, I'm an athiest, or agnostic at best, but I can't think of a better message to send to Al Qaeda and their like than to demonstrate the openness of our society with action. Thanks to Nick Denton for pointing this out.

2-bedroom $1,900, 1-Bedroom, $1,2000

If anyone knows of an apartment seeker, there's one available in my buidling, apparently. The sign has been up for more than a week, which is unusual. It's a great neighborhood: 45 Tiemann Place, just south of 125th Street between Broadway and Riverside Dr. Right up above Columbia University. Highly diverse neighboord with lots of students (Barnard, Columbia, Union Theological Seminary, Jewith Theological Seminar, Bank Street College and Manhattan School of Music all within eight blocks). Private security patrols, old-time neighborliness. Elevated subway can be a bit loud, depending on how the windows face, but it's very urban chic.

Best of all, no broker fee. You deal straight with the superintendent and his wife (nice people) for a small fee. If anyone's interested, call 212 865-8001.

I've Got Moxie!

I've recently had the pleasure of drinking the original Moxie, supposedly America's oldest soft drink soda, which continues to be made today in Lisbon, Maine. I discovered it because my friend Mike, who I mentioned recently, drove up from DC to see our old college buddy Dan, who moved to nearby Lisbon Falls last year from Nashville, TN. One his way back from Maine, Mike stopped in again and brought me a six-pack of Moxie.

Maybe it's just Mike and me, but we had never heard of the stuff before, which apparently shocked them up in Maine, where the stuff is legendary. For anyone who liked the movie "The Coca-Cola Kid" or enjoys the taste of Zwack Unicum (Hungary's national aperitif), run, don't walk, to Maine or your nearest online soda distributor to get yourself some Moxie.

I don't know if it's always done so, but today the stuff comes in a bright orange can, so I asked Mike if it was orange soda. (Notice the eerie glowing orange aura around the Moxie Boy in the logo above -- his inner Moxing shining through. The can is that same color.) But no, it's not orange soda, and according to Mike that question really annoys Moxie-lovers in Maine. In fact, it is a brown soda, with a hearty flavor and slightly bitter aftertaste, something like fermented tamarind or Jagermeister. Quite tasty, really.

As far as I can see, there is no official Moxie web site, which is a shame, because I'm curious about the actual company that still makes this stuff. Most of Mike's education about Moxie seemed to come from a guy who identified himself to Mike only as the Moxie Man (who I think might be the guy pictured here; he fits Mike's general description of a Moxie-obsessed old guy). According to the Moxie Man, Moxie's distinctive bitter aftertaste comes from its extremely high caffeine content. Mmmmmm, caffeine. The stuff does seem to pack a bit of a punch that way.

From my subsequent web investigations, I