Wow. This is really sad news to wake up to. I loved these guys in high school.

Just got back from three nights in Portland visiting my beloved wife, who has been there a month and will remain another two weeks studying digital film editing at Avid Film Camp. The camp has them training on the Avid digital film editing software program and actually cutting an independent film, Yorick [official site | IMDB], a prequel to Hamlet based on the life of the court jester to Hamlet Sr. (whose skull Hamlet famously contemplates in the graveyard). The writer and director is the charming Jonny Stranger, who hosted a fun little party at his place for the editing students the night of my arrival.

Portland is a lovely city, blanketed in mountain mist, a tranquil, hippie-dippy, Northwest burg of half a million. Quite liveable, I imagine. Though not for us, Adi assures me. Decent public transit. We got around easily enough without a car on light rail and buses, though they don't run frequently enough in the evenings. Too bad for a town that bills itself as the Green capital of the U.S. (metaphorically; I'm unaware of any literal campaign to that effect, but I wouldn't be surprised). Here are various impressions:

• Adi is amused by the fact that the downtown shopping district includes a handful of "high fashion" stores, including Saks Fifth Avenue (almost appropriately enough on SW 5th Avenue), featuring all sorts of elegent clothes, yet everyone in town dresses in fleece, jeans and hiking boots, and thus not surprisingly the department stores are almost empty.
• While we were standing in line for Michael Moore's liberal polemic "Bowling for Columbine," a guy in his 50s or 60s exits the showing ahead of us with a ying-yang earring. Old school!
• On the light rail (which is what they call it instead of my preference, "tram"), the disembodied recorded voice of the announcer says at each station stop "Doors will open to my left" (or right). But how do we know which way she's facing?
• I bought my Halloween costume from the Spoonman (who has the enviable web domain Spoonman.com) from his stall at the Portland Saturday Market (whose slogan is apparently "And Sundays Too!"). No, I didn't get the kitchen knife (he has a wide collection of headwear). You'll just have to show up at Dana's party to see it. Very convenient costume, tho. Requires nothing else. The guy is quite creative, also has jewelry, eyewear, wind chimes and other clever gifts.
  
• Hippie jazz pianist at the Saturday Market (an outdoor craft fair, basically) had a sign on his dilapidated upright piano with this poem I quite liked:

  Yesterday is history
  Tomorrow is a mystery
  Today is a gift. That's why it's called the present.

• Had brunch with my old Montana college roommate Rayce, who looks as boyish as ever, owing in large part, no doubt, to his lovely wife of many years, Ronda.
• Visited the Japanese gardens, which are quite beautiful. In a freaky moment, not an hour after Rayce dropped us off at the gardens, I run into Hans, another guy from the same big gang of friends I hung out with in college. Hans, who like Rayce I haven't seen in more than 15 years, now works as a ranger at Mt. St. Helens in Washington state. He and his family just happened to be visiting at the same time.

That's about the highlights. Also saw a couple of movies, but more thoughts on those shortly. Just thought I should check in, as it's been a while.

Remember this song from Sesame Street? (RealAudio file):

Mahna mahna
(ba dee bedebe)
mahna mahna
(ba debe dee)
mahna mahna
(ba dee bedebe badebe badebe dee dee de-de de-de-de)

Dedicated to Sue and Little Ricky. Thanks to Filboid Studge for tracking it down. More details on the song here and here.

Also available on the CD "Muppet Show: Music Mayhem & More - 25th Anniv Collection" via Amazon.

UDPATE:
The above RealAudio file is not the actual Muppet version. Filboid (aka my step-brother Jay Niemann, the smartest guy about pop music in the world, who also happens to be selling parts of his massive record collection) writes:

It's the Dave Pell Singers. On Liberty Records, home of the Chipmunks and late-period Julie London. For a fascinating look at the liberty records discography (I'm not kidding) consult your local library for [this book]. Get it from the library. Dave Pell is not worth that kind of money. Save your money to buy things from DustyGroove.com (a local Chicago record store with an amazing selection of funk, Brazilian,jazz, and soul records) and AquariusRecords.org (San Franscisco store with the weirdest collection of stuff for sale and the best commentary of any record store ever. I've ordered from them before and they are extremly nice and personable).

The recording is by my guess early 60's ('63-65). The author is listed as Piero Umillani. How much "authorship" is evident in that godamn song anyway.

Here's a short .au file clip of what the Sesame Street version sounded like.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE:
Filboid continues to enable my Mahna-Mahna jones, with the best web site yet on the background of the song and its composer:

Forget all that. Go to this website. Then go to Cdnow.com and order the three song remix CD single of Mahna-Mahna by British electronica duo Mucho Macho. It should sate your lust for this song.

Will blog more soon. Meanwhile, life has dragged me out of my Harlem basement too often in the past few days for me to catch up with any details, interesting or otherwise. Today, for example, holds in store jury duty. Love the whole civic responsibility thing, but am hell-bent on getting exempted, as I'm a struggling freelancer and have a plane ticket for Friday to see Adi in Oregon for the weekend (yay!). More to come as soon as possible.

Funny article from The Register for blog junkies about Beth Goza, a marketing manager at Microsoft who created a sincere, sappy blog "to wrestle with her conscience over whether it was OK to cheat at XBox games." The result?

Now a satire of Beth's blog is raging like a contagion on the web, and this could have all the makings of the Ellen Feiss cult. If that doesn't mean anything to you, Ellen Feiss is the Xanaxed-out Apple switcher who has spawned a host of tribute sites.

Ha, ha. Microsoft just can't catch a break.This whole Switch thing is really getting under their skin.

Iron Blogger is the most inspired new idea I've seen in the blogosphere in a quite a while: pitting bloggers into a week of open debates (the rules) on a topic of their readers' choosing (the revenue model). Brilliant! This will be a must-read site. An idea born, appropriately enough, out of a drunken orgy.

I'd pay $5 to read Elizabeth debate Nick about Iraq.

Sadly, looking at it all more carefully, I fear it may never amount to anything more than a wild night's folly. The present homepage does not exactly bespeak the idea's real potential. I do hope they follow through and bring it to fruition, as I'd definitely be a regular reader.

Rereading the rules, I'd offer two additional suggestions (bearing in mind I've never seen an episode of Iron Chef myself):

• Only readers who have paid the fee (of, I would recommend, a minium of $1-2) would be eligible to vote on the winner of the debate (perhaps that's what you had in mind, tho it's not entirely clear).
• Let readers suggest debates they'd like to see, but to do so, they'd have to pay a higher fee, say $20. If not enough people get behind the proposal to raise the pot to something worth fighting over, then the person would get their money back. I.e., not much risk, but enough to filter out too many proposals yet at the same time enable readers to control the entire process, if they are willing to put their money where their mouth is. One of the debaters could also thus challenge another, urging his posse of readers to come pledge enough money to tantalize the other party.

The whole idea makes a blogger's reader loyalty that much more engaged. You'd have to have a separate open peanut gallery where all the readers could attack each other with running meta commentary about who was winning the debate, etc., but separate it from the main debate thread (to avoid the signal:noise problem perfectly illustrated by Iron Blogger's historic first drunken attempt at debate).

It's a crazy idea, you kids, but it just might work!

A friend once said to me that he wanted to use me as a barometer for the next big cool trend of our generation, after my luck being part of Generation Expat in Budapest in the early '90s followed by San Francisco for the second half of that decade on board the dot-com wave. Well, Erik, I'm pretty sure I'm living it again: the NYC Blogosphere.

After last weekend's excitement, I laid low last night, but you can't get away from the frenzied beat of the party that just continues to drive this town wild. Elizabeth mentioned something yesterday (Friday) about a hangover (in the context of explaining why it wouldn't hinder her from planning to hit the Bulgarian club last night regardless) owing to some impromtu blogger party, but I didn't ask questions. Then I came across the link on her site about the rules of Iron Blogging, which took me to Jim's Objectionable Content, where he lays out the details for this excellent new concept (see post above). What really caught my eye, however, was the last paragraph:

I had to leave just as the tequila shots and girl-on-girl licking were getting into full swing...

Hmmm. Then, back to Elizabeth's site, where I see this:

And This One Goes Out To: Megan, Jim, Tim, Asparagirl, but most of all--Amy Langfield

Jose Cuervo
You are friend of mine
I like to drink you with
A little salt and lime
Did I kiss all the cowboys
Did I shoot out the lights
Did I dance on the bar
Did I start any fights

["Jose Cuervo" Shelly West]

"...[B]ut most of all--Amy Langfield"? There is a great story here not being fully told. Amy downplays the whole thing on her blog. (Come to think of it, Jim keeps referring to her as "Evil Amy Langfield.") AspraGirl briefly notes the night, but offers no other interesting details. The other participants are mum. I'll probably get the story out of Elizabeth off the record.

I'm telling you, NYC is a fun place to be right now. But if you can't afford the rent, at least you can read about it and imagine the rest.

Just stumbled on the Everlasting Blort, with the great domain Blort.Meepzorp.com. Very good use of pics. Which in turn lead me to RateMyKitten.com.

UPDATE: I didn't notice the Meepzorp Network Operation Center last night. Meepzorp's Yooha News is also quite amusing. Also, the MetaFilter paroday AnusFilter (motto: "squeeze through this"). Anyone passing by my window just now would think I'm totally insane, howling with laughter staring at the computer in an otherwise silent, dimly lit room.

Nice to know Canadians can be jackasses, too. Like this guy, who ran out onto the ice naked during an NHL game in Calgary, only to fall, knocking himself unconscious and leaving himself splayed on the ice belly up to the bleachers. You rock, dude.

Turn it into a suppository. I'd love to see the High Times centerfold on that one.

Le Monde reports on the full-body copier. I'm hoping something was lost in translation here, as I can't possibly understand the point of this. (Via bOing bOing.)

Mark writes, "Who said women were the gentler sex?" (Reuters story.) Yeah. She sounds like a real man-eater.

The mainstream media really sucks. One thing that struck me at the dawn of 2000 was how lame the retrospectives were in most media outlets on looking back at the accomplishments and history of the past millennium. I mean, how often do the media get to reflect on the millennium just past? What I remember, instead, was a bunch of reflections on the past decade, a few (very few) looks back on the past century, and virtually no truly big picture stuff making sense of the past 1,000 years.

Another way the media has totally let us down has been coming up with something to call this decade. I remember lots of idle speculation about whether it would be called Os or the Aughts or the Naughts or the Naughties or whatever. I had friends in San Francisco who set up an online poll to let "the people" decide NameThatDecade.com, instead of leaving it to the media. Predictably, the site is now defunct. But the media hasn't picked up the slack.

Here we are almost three years into this decade, and as far as I've noticed, people don't refer to it as anything. We still talk of the '90s, the '80s, etc., but I simply don't hear people in conversations or in the media refer to this decade by any nickname. Is it just me? Do the rest of you actually know what to call it and you're just not telling me?

UPDATE:
Olivier writes: "Well, it's simple, we call it... the '00s (mwahahah)"

Yeah, I know, I saw your post with that, which is what set me off on this (it doesn't take much). I'm just wondering how to pronounce that.

You know any story with "Geraldo" and "Hooters" in it has got to be good.

Reuters reports:

Two zookeepers in a small northwest German town have been suspended and put under police investigation for allegedly eating the zoo's animals, according to police.

Incredibily, marijuana would appear to be emerging as an issue in the NY governor's race.

On Monday, I listened to the debate among the candidates for NY governor on WNYC. Or at least I had it on in the background while I did other stuff. The whole thing was kind of a circus. There were seven candidates debating: Republican incumbant Governor George Pataki, Democrat hopeful Carl McCall, Independence Party challenger Tom Golisano and then the really fringe candidates from the Right to Life Party, the Libertarian Party, the Green Party and the Marijuana Reform Party. While the two major party candidates sounded like what you expect in a debate -- avoiding the questions and sniping at each other -- the fringe candidates were hilarious.

The Marijuana Reform Party candidate was the best, in that he was able to bring every issue thrown at him back to pot. Health care? Pot cures all. Crime? Decriminalize pot and free up judicial resources. The economy? Tax pot, stop wasting money enforcing pot laws, build huge industries on hemp production, etc. The Mid-East crisis? Switch to hemp oil and be done with the dependence on petrolium (I'm not making this up). The family farm? Let them grow pot! Etc.

What was more surprising was that he was not alone among the candidates advocating a pro-pot platform. The Libertarian also had several policy stances that similarly came back to pot. In one memorable exchange, the Marijuana Reform candidate was saying how taxing pot would be the answer to the state's economic woes, and he suggested "This is one tax that every pot smoker would be happy to pay," to which the Libertarian responded, "Well, I'm one pot smoker who doesn't want to pay more taxes."

It was confusing who was speaking some of the time, as the order of speakers changed with each question and I was only half paying attention, but it seemed that even more of the candidates might have also held pro-pot positions (possibly the Green?). I haven't seen the transcipt or I'd get my facts straight. In any event, for each question the panel of journalists asked about any topic, there was guaranteed chorus of marijuana-related perspectives in the replies. The result made it seem as if pot were the most burning issue of the campaign, if you will.

Now I see that the Independence Party candidate, Golisano, who actually sounded halfway intelligent during the debate, today has continued to make pot an issue, pledging in a new TV ad to legalize medical marijuana if elected.

As if that weren't enough, the federal government has its knickers in a twist over Canada's new proposal to decriminalize the herb.

It may be a while before Muslims boycotting U.S. products will come up with an Arab alternative to Intel, but Coca Cola is apparently an easier target. Iran's Zam Zam Cola already cannot keep up with demand across the Middle East, and now a French Muslim entrepreneur is launching Mecca Cola. Uh, I'm no expert, but doesn't that name seem a bit sacrilegious?

The first new Wallace & Gromit claymations from Oscar-winning Nick Park and Aardman Animations in seven years are now available on AtomFilms. The new animations are part of new a 10-part series known collectively titled "Cracking Contraptions," which will be released in full to AtomFilms subscribers for $10. See also WallaceandGromit.com. If you don't know Wallace & Gromit, where have you been? Here's a starter.

Mark points out that the CIGNA Foundation is donating $1 to Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation for every person who clicks on the pink ribbon at CIGNA's site (up to $100,000). Nice way for them to measure the web's pass-along effect while doing public good. Do click.

The CPAP device used to treat apnea, on the other hand, is pretty amusing, as this photo illustrates. My friend Glenn Fleishmann recently mentioned on his blog he was diagnosed with apnea, which is a sleep breathing disorder characterized by lapses in normal breathing.

I was also diagnosed with apnea, tho not really. I snore like hell, so to appease Adrienne I went to a ear-nose-throat specialist to weigh my options. Did a sleep study about two years ago. Most uncomfortable night's sleep ever, on absurdly uncomfortable bed for a sleep lab, plus my sensors (which cover the head and body) kept falling off, so I was constantly being awoken by an attendant sticking them back on my head. According to my doc, the study suggested I had apnea at around the lowest level at which they measure it, but that was apparently enough that he could compel my health insurance to pay for pallet-shortening surgery to reduce my snoring, a procedure that would otherwise be deemed "cosmetic."

In the end, Adrienne has agreed that surgery is a bit radical for now regarding my snoring, so for the time being we manage with a combination of allergy medicine, nasal spray, nose strips, sharp elbows and the couch.

Because I don't have apnea seriously, I don't take it seriously for myself, but I don't mean to belittle the condition, of course. It is serious for those who suffer it worse than I do. While the idea of someone simply stopping breathing and suffocating in their sleep is rare, apnea does mean its sufferers have a hard time getting a good night's sleep. In the long term, apnea can contribute to heart disease and other life-threatening conditions.

But I have to admit the whole point in my bothering to write about this (not the kind of personal details I normally feel compelled to publicize) was to have an opportunity to post the photo of the Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) mask. When I first researched apnea on the web, Adi assured me that if it came down to wearing one of these to bed, I should consider my sex life over.

I think Elizabeth is starting to crack. She told me the other day she's quite confident she can write anything she wants about Jonathan Franzen on her blog because, unlike Arthur Phillips, Franzen would never Google his own name. He's apparently somehow above that. Good thing. Check out #18 on her un-to-do list. (And she's got a restraining order against Enrique Iglesias? I think not.)

I do agree, as an aside, the "Things I Won't Get Done Today" concept is inspired, but the irony is too visceral. As if the act of blogging were in and of itself not enough evidence that you are a total slacker, using the blog to spell out what it is you should be doing instead is just too painful to confront.

Spot a typo, get linky love. New policy. Thanks to Aaron in Brooklyn (601am.com) for an email. Another blog worth reading. And for the NY ladies out there, he's apparently still fertile.

Letterman said that in the Iraqi election today, Saddam won 99% of the vote and 1% went to last-minute candidate Frank Lautenberg.

Water will be the future of many wars. The Middle East is no exception.

Former NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani has been hired by Mexico City to help bring down its crime rate (Guardian story). The NPR piece I heard on this ended with a totally bizarre comment I don't see picked up elsewhere: that another Mexico City crime fighting tactic is police dressed as Old West sherrifs, "to help make tourists feel more comfortable."

No, not me. It's just that his "campaign song" for today's Iraqi presidential election is "I Will Always Love You" by Whitney Houston. Why, I'd like to know, did he decide to go with an English-language American pop song for his one-man campaign? That had to be his own choice. Could you imagine someone else proposing that to him? "Yes, the Americans are Imperialist Dogs From Hell, but you do have to admit the song is pretty catchy...Your Evilness...Sir."

UPDATE: Always a step ahead, Nick points out the Arabic (?) language video, "Saddam Our Father," one of several that frequently end TV broadcasts. I like the bit where he hands the little kid a soda pop. Looks like it could be a Pepsi, but hard to tell.

Jay writes: "Put This in your blog and smoke it: Big Brother is wa-owww! my eyes!!!!!!!!!"

McDonald's experiment with Internet terminals in its restaurants ends badly with predictable results.

Up late, saw a rebroadcast of Leno from a week ago with the Queens of the Stone Age performance that has me obsessed with their hit song No One Knows, as I blogged the other day. I've been replaying the MP3 several times a day. Can't get enough.

One of the things I liked about the performance on Leno, seeing it again reminds me, is that lead singer/songwriter Josh Homme is chewing gum while he's singing, which is so inappropriate for your big TV moment, not to mention his coordinating that with reasonably complicated lead guitar licks, fairly rare for lead singers.

Found the band's official site, which is a bit weak, but it does feature the ratther silly music video for the hit song, as well as a funny backstage photo from the Leno appearance. To round out the infatuation, here's the band bio on RollingStone.com.

Yay! But she still doesn't have permalinks on her site, so I can't point to the specific post. Oh well, we'll be happy to have her join us among the growing camp of SF refugees here regardless.

Saw Rules of Attraction the other night with Elizabeth. Co-written and directed by Roger Avary (writing credits include Pulp Fiction and Resevoir Dogs), based on a novel by co-script writer Bret Easton Ellis. I enjoyed it, despite lukewarm reviews. Here's what I wrote about it in an email to Adi the aspiring film editor:

It was pretty good. You'd probably like it. For you, it might be interesting alone to see it for the editing, which is fairly flashy and gimmicky (e.g., a bunch of backward scenes that then play forward again, as well as some interesting split-screen stuff). Beyond that, it was cute, a nihilistic drug and sex-laden college nothing story. Tragic suicide, flamboyant young gays, violent drug dealers, and a menacing lead character played well by James Van Der Beek (of Dawson's Creek fame), which must have his fans all talking (includes a gay make-out fantasy scene that Leno wouldn't stop teasing him about the other night). Some good dialog and basically well acted by people I've never seen before, but overall a bit shallow in the end, tho I guess that's Brett Easton Ellis's whole schtick. Entertaining.

A memorable line. Our anti-hero Sean Bateman is staring blankly at the back of the bus carrying away the gay kid who's not-so-secretly in love with him, while narrating the unrelated thoughts in his head (to the best of my recollection): "I wonder if she cums easily, or at all. I won't sleep with any girl who can't cum. That's like asking questions in a letter."

Also saw previews for a few films that look interesting, including:

• 25th Hour, a new Spike Lee joint with Edward Norton. Great quote from the trailer, Norton toasting his old buddies: "Champagne for my real friends, and real pain for my sham friends."
• Adaptation, a new Spike Jonze joint with Nicholas Cage playing against type as a schlub of a screenwriter and Meryl Streep.
• House of 1,000 Corpses, by Rob Zombie

Dedicated to L.: Dirty Dozen Brass Band MP3

I have subscribed to Dave Winer's Davenet email newsletter for years, but I have to admit rarely reading it or is his various blogs. I know he's a god (in his own mind, anyway) of the blogosphere, but he was never my cup of tea. Consider this recent post, in which, in the course of talking about the new changes to how Google calculates PageRank, he links to Dictionary.com definitions for "iconoclast," "quirky" and "vagaries." What is he now, an English-as-a-second-language teacher? An SAT prep tutor? What reader of blogs doesn't have those words in their vocabulary already?

Adrienne at the Blue Angels airshow in SF this past weekend.

It would appear Nick doesn't have the stomach for gossiblogging. Unless I'm misinformed, he apparently removed a post to his blog with veiled references to a wild Saturday night. I gather I was a bit of a cad in yet another sensitive soul's opinion. Whatever. Call me a new-millennial, post-everything-has-changed, NYC lover of life, but if a man can't party at a party or grope an ass at the Bulgarian disco, what's the point? Anything less and the terrorists have won.

MORE:
Oh. Turns out the missing post wasn't really much about me, after all. Damn. I wonder if he took it down under pressure from P.

And lest there be any lingering doubt, the cigarette in the eye was an accident. M. asked me yesterday, on seeing the bruise, "She did that to you?" (He was referring to the other one.)

In the unlikely event that you check the Bruner Blog today before the TV or other major media, a terrible act of terrorism in Indonesia today. Bombers killed nearly 200 with a huge explosion at a dance club popular with young foreign back-packers. What I find immediately remarkable is a horrible irony that those international travelers the terrorists targeted are likely to be young, open-minded, international thinkers who were probably more sympathetic to the same causes of frustrated minorities of the world, opposing "globalization," American empirism, etc., compared to the average Westerner. Yes, this hideous act will get the terrorists on the international news, but how could it possibly win them supporters?

An industry friend posts an erotic poem from his own pen to his Ryze page. Plus a cool Fonzie-like photo. Interesting how Ryze brings out sides of people you never knew.

Gogol Bordello is not the kind of band you'd expect to get much radio airplay. But I notice they got a plug (and a web photo) on WNYC's Sunday art program "The Next Big Thing." Unfortunately I missed it and the show doesn't appear to have an audio archive.

Earlier in the night, a gruff, bustling New Yorker opened a taxi door into Elizabeth's eye. Later in the night, on the frenzied dance floor of the Bulgarian disco, Elizabeth nearly extinguished a cigarette in my eye. Thankfully, vision is still working all around and bruises are less pronounced than they ought to be.

My good friend Steve Carlson, with whom I co-founded Budapest Week newspaper more than 10 years ago, certainly is an industrious fellow, for an East European/Californian slacker. A few years ago, Steve made himself an intregal part of First Tuesday, the international Internet business networking organization (co-founded earlier by another mutual friend, Nick Denton). Among the innitiatives Steve has helped get First Tuesday involved in is the Technology Fast 50, in collaboration with Deloitte & Touche. This year's awards evaluated 12,000 regional technology companies to come up with the fastest-growing 50. I'm pleased to point out 20 of those are Hungarian. Here's a write-up in the Warsaw Voice.

Get ready NYers for a $2 subway fare.

I have tried to encourge my wife, Ildi and Miki to all blog in their own right in the past, but to no avail. Yet, when Hungary is in the news, they let me know so that the Bruner Blog can do its part to promote the proud Magyar homeland. I see fellow Hungarophile Nick Denton has not yet reported this either, so after several emails and an actually phone call urging me to post this, it is my pleasure to point out that 72-year-old Hungarian novelist, Imre Kertesz, has won the Nobel Prize for literature. The Swedish Academy called attention to his 1975 novel in its decision, "Sorstalansag'' ("Fateless''), about a young man who, like the author himself, is a concentration camp survivor.

Hungarians are quick to claim that their countrymen have won more Nobel Prizes than any other national group per capita, a weird stat I've heard for years but wouldn't mind double-checking the numbers on. Those existing prizes, however, are mostly in the sciences. Kertesz is the first Hungarian to win for literature. My congratulations to all of you.

There is an irony in this in that while many Hungarians have achieved great world reknown (Edward Teller, inventor of the H bomb, George Soros, billionaire philanthropist, Laszlo Biro, inventor of the ball-point-pen, Michael Curtiz, director of Casablanca, and on and on), the ones Hungarians themselves revere most are their poets and playwrights, after whom every other street in the capital are named. Sadly, no one else in the world has every heard of any of these writers, because the language is so freakin' difficult to translate. Maybe at last this prize will help Hungarian achieve the literary recognition by the world they so crave.

Shout out.

Archie Bunker	Slobodan Milosevic

Austrialia's News Interactive reports

ITALIAN porn star and former Italian parliamentarian "La Cicciolina" has offered to give herself to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in exchange for world peace, according to an interview published today.

Excuse me. She was an Italian parliamentarian, but she was born...(wait for it)...a Hungarian. See, the Europeans have some constructive ideas about how to deal with Saddam after all.

Gogol Bordello's #1 fan Elizabeth just posted some funny new quotes from the band's frontman during their trans-America tour. My favorite, him describing the act:

"All I tell you is that it will be approximately like circumcision, baptizing and a wedding at same time."

That about sums it up.

Nick points out this AP photo of Putin kicking ass shortly before his 50th birthday. I'd like to see W try this.

Of course, this smacks of a photo opp. I'm sure he picked his partner carefully, e.g., not challenging again the 10-year-old Japanese school girl who put him on his ass a couple of years ago.

As told by Frank.

Remind me to buy this. Saw these guys on Leno and they were most cool.

Very rich, heavy, driving funky, punky, guitary. Check out this MP3 of the song "No One Knows."

UPDATE: With the clarity of a night's sleep, I realize how pathetic it is to discover cool bands on Leno, meaning these guys were probably actually cool about two years ago, but I still can't stop playing this MP3. Despite what the record executives expect, I must buy this album.

This is just a bizarre piece of news. The AP's lead sums it up: "Gov. James E. McGreevey is seeking the power to fire the state's poet laureate, who has refused repeated calls to resign after writing a Sept. 11 memorial poem criticized as anti-Semitic." On the face of it, it's bizarre. Firing a poet laureate? Writing an anti-semetic poem about Sept. 11th (referencing the rumor that Jews and Israelis were warned to avoid the WTC that day). Here are stories in the NYT and the AP (via Salon). The stories neglect to point out that the poet, Amiri Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones), is an old-school radical black activist. The most bizarre thing, however, unless I'm misreading them, is the AP piece says Baraka was named NJ poet laureate in July (which I'm assuming means this year), yet he wrote the offending poem back in Oct., 2001, so why did they appoint him in the first place? He just published it? I'm confused.

I just posted a question to San Fransico NPR affiliate station KQED's web site asking listeners if they recalled a speech I heard once in the late '90s on the station that I've been recalling occasionally since Sept. 11. So, I figured I may as well put the appeal out here, too.

The speaker was the editor-in-chief of some major German newspaper, I'm fairly sure the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zietung, but not positive. The theme of his presentation was that America was remarkable in world history for being at the center of what amounted to a world empire (cf. 1997), in terms of global domination on three fronts: culture, economics and military. And yet, he argued, it had achieved that status by and large on a voluntary basis by countries and people around the world.

As for culture, the speaker argued, U.S. movies, TV, music, clothing and other styles and fashions have had tremendous influence around the world not because our armies occupied those countries and surpressed their people like empires and would-be empires of yore, e.g., Rome, Mongols, Ottomans, Nazis, Soviets, etc., but because people in South America or wherever had chosen to wear their baseball hats backwards because they agreed it looked cool. (Obviously, you could argue against this view, particularly today, but I'm just trying to summarize to the best of my recollection what this German editor said.) Likewise, he argued, the "open" U.S. economy dominates the world by the virtues of "free trade," and our military has (historically) not defined its goals by occupying foreign territory for long-term expansionism, as have prior empires.

Does that happen to sound familiar to anyone? A German editor of a top newspaper speaking to a body such as the National Press Club, the Commonwealth Club or some other such prestigeous body, round about '97, '98?

Obviously, you can see my interest in finding it would be to contrast it to the worldview post-Sept. 11. It's quite a contrast to the new Pax Americana Empire the current administration has scripted, which I wrote about the other day.

If you happen to have heard this same speech and have any other ideas about how I could find it, please drop me a note.

Attention unemployed NY professionals with a sense of humor: check out WeWantWork.com. A friend of mine, Kevin Lee, has been helping these folks organize. It's the brainchild of Kevin's friend (frankly not sure who), who was sick of working the traditional job-hunting channels after he got laid off as a dot-com marketing exec, so he organized this relatively small group (43 members to date) who are pounding the pavement with signs of protest demanding work, as well as handing out flyers for the site and resumes. Basically the site features the resumes of the members, but because there are so few of them, the exposure is much better than, say, Monster.com.

Most of the members are in the marketing, sales and IT areas. What this means in PR savvy. The web site has already gotten written up in Newsday, InformationWeek, The NY Sun, TimeOut and word is CNN is pending.

Not bad exposure for 43 resumes. An Bruner Blog, to boot. Sounds like a good deal to get in on to me.

I heard a piece on NPR this afternoon with the author of this book: "Bringing Down The House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions." Very amusing. This team of kids figured out how to count cards at blackjack well enough that with hidden signals to each other that they made millions beating the houses over the course of a few years.

This is by far the best proposal for solving this whole Iraq situation of any yet proposed: an Iraqi VP not known for his sense of humor proposes George W. and Saddam setting things in an old fashioned deul.

[This post is cross-posted, also on ExecutiveSummary.com. I try to avoid that, but whatever.]

The Democratic National Committee has taken a page from Odd Todd and umpteen other independently-made hit Flash cartoons, and it has put out a cynical animation on Democrats.org that shows Dubya pushing people in wheel chairs down a steep jagged chart of stock market declines while the announcer intones the dangers of the Bush Administration's plans for semi-privatizing Social Security. Here's a piece in the NY Times about it. Apparently they're getting more traffic than they expected, as I had trouble accessing the server for a few hours earlier today.

On ExecutiveSummary.com, I frequently beat up on the poor quality of creative executions in online advertising. That's because most online advertising really, really sucks. The flashing banners, buttons, pop-ups and boxes are all just completely obnoxious, valueless and demonstrate zero imagination. Yet I also link to ads that are actually good with some regularlity, mostly TV commercials streamed online, and my readers write me letters to thank me for it. That's because it's pull marketing, not push.

Advertainment. It's the future, baby. Give people what they want. Permission advertising. Put your money into quality creative, and then politely invite people to click on a long, entertaining ad. Forget the wonks working in most big cyber agencies. We've seen their work for a while. It's hopeless. Go find the unemployed, disgruntled multimedia artists who are putting out the hilarious, weird, edgy digital entertainment from their basements that everyone loves and sends to their friends and links to on their blogs.

Get them to do something utterly original that people will generally enjoy watching, slap your logo on it, and then design a polite ad spot -- a small screen shot with an invitation to be entertained with a click -- on some well chosen e-media outlets (here's a "wow" idea: try blogs!), and people will entertain themselves. Most of the "viral" stuff out there today tries too hard to be utilitarian and "action oriented," collecting email addresses, hyping sweepstakes and other ho-hum marketing staples. Forget the "call to action" for a minute. Advertain people. Give them something truly worth watching, and they'll forward it to lots of their friends.

Oh, but another thing. When viral marketing does work, lots and lots of people may want to download the ad. This means lots of traffic to your servers. Something you might want to consider beforehand, unlike Democrats.org.

The United Nations, having boldly acted on dwarf tossing, also weighs in on the critical issue of the world market for home robots. Glad our billions in U.N. dues are going such vital things, unlike squandering it on, say, making the world safe for democracy.

Source: bOing bOing (as with the story below)

AP Reports:

Montana's Libertarian candidate for Senate has turned blue from drinking a silver solution that he believed would protect him from disease

Stan Jones, a 63-year-old business consultant and part-time college instructor, said he started taking colloidal silver in 1999 for fear that Y2K disruptions might lead to a shortage of antibiotics.

He made his own concoction by electrically charging a couple of silver wires in a glass of water.

His skin began turning blue-gray a year ago.

Yes, they're wacky in Montana. Remember Violet Beauregarde from Willy Wonka? She turned blue, too, but from blueberry gum, not zany homemade cold-fusion Y2K-fighting rejuvenating vitamin juice. That's pure Montana libertarian survivalist wacko ingenuity. Hardly what the Republicans mean when they talk about "blue blood."

Now that Napster is dead, the music industry apparently has decided that even if you can beat them, join them anyway.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the Homeless Guy's blog. Now he got a write up in USA Today.

Hilarious piece in the New Yorker about British composer Mike Batt, who included a one-minute piece of silence on his new debut album Classical Graffiti (not yet released in the U.S.) as a tribute to John Cage's famous silent work from 1952 titled 4' 33". Incredibly, the music publishing company that now owns the rights to Cage's compositions is suing Batt for copyright infringement.

They are claiming a copyright on silence. Extraordinary. So, when a radio station has a couple of minutes of dead air, it has to pay royalties? Is it fair use to not hum? What if a tree falls in a forest and doesn't make any noise, is it in violation of copyright infringement?

Thanks to Mark for pointing out this fascinating piece by Jay Bookman, the deputy editorial page editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, titled "The President's Real Goal in Iraq." The piece lays out in no uncertain terms that what we are embarking on is nothing short of total global domination, an empire-building plan its proponents refer to as "Pax Americana," or the American Peace.

I've heard this argument before, but this piece puts the pieces together with chilling clarity, exposing how the super-hawks who now have the ear of the president -- Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Kagan -- explicitly laid out a series of actions the U.S. should take to assert its global dominance, documented in clear plans back in 2000 and 1992. Here are some choice excerpts from the piece:

In recent days, those missing pieces [about the motives for attacking Iraq] have finally begun to fall into place. As it turns out, this is not really about Iraq. It is not about weapons of mass destruction, or terrorism, or Saddam, or U.N. resolutions.

This war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the "American imperialists" that our enemies always claimed we were.

Once that is understood, other mysteries solve themselves. For example, why does the administration seem unconcerned about an exit strategy from Iraq once Saddam is toppled?

Because we won't be leaving. Having conquered Iraq, the United States will create permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the Middle East, including neighboring Iran.

. . . 

In essence, [the president's Sept. 20 National Security Strategy] lays out a plan for permanent U.S. military and economic domination of every region on the globe, unfettered by international treaty or concern. And to make that plan a reality, it envisions a stark expansion of our global military presence.

. . . 

The report's repeated references to terrorism are misleading, however, because the approach of the new National Security Strategy was clearly not inspired by the events of Sept. 11. They can be found in much the same language in a report issued in September 2000 by the Project for the New American Century, a group of conservative interventionists outraged by the thought that the United States might be forfeiting its chance at a global empire.

To preserve the Pax Americana, the report says U.S. forces will be required to perform "constabulary duties" -- the United States acting as policeman of the world -- and says that such actions "demand American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations."

To meet those responsibilities, and to ensure that no country dares to challenge the United States, the report advocates a much larger military presence spread over more of the globe, in addition to the roughly 130 nations in which U.S. troops are already deployed.

It's a long article, but very much worth reading. Bookman quotes Donald Kagan extensively, presumably from an interview. Kagan, a Yale professor influencial in conservitive foreign policy circles, has a bizarrely disarming bluntness that makes for great copy anyway:

"You saw the movie 'High Noon'? he asks. "We're Gary Cooper."

and

"People worry a lot about how the Arab street is going to react," he notes. "Well, I see that the Arab street has gotten very, very quiet since we started blowing things up."

Mighty Girl has an amusing post today:

"A little old man with a cane boards the bus one laborious step at time. He's about 70 and wearing a blue jacket and matching cap. He turns toward me; the front of his cap says, 'Old School.'"

For our friends who are wondering how Adi is doing, she is loving her Avid video editing workshop that began this week in Portand, Oregon. She recently went to a book opening there and wrote this email and said I could post it to the site, after I asked (she wanted me to emphasize it was written as an email, not a blog post):

hiya,

Just came back from Powell's Books where Lewis Lapham [editor-in-chief of Harpers] introduced his new book, Theater of War. I was really interested to see him, but was also interested to see how many and what kind of people show up. It was quite amusing. LL didn't blow me away, as i've been reading his writings in Harpers a lot so he didn't say anything that was new to me. The book is about US foreign policy of the past 50 years and it's mostly (if not entirely) his writings compiled. He said the book came out in France under the title of Jihad Americane [sp?] weeks before the US release.

He was extremely cynical of course and a bit too bitter about the administration (imagine that if i say so...). The crowd loved it and i was laughing, too, though. Anyway, the place was packed, and it was a large floor. Crowded with hardcore left coast liberals which was funny to see. LL said maybe this war hoopla will bring the political consciousness and interest out of people. I wish he was right and then we probably wouldn't even have to be afraid of a Bush reelection. I was at the bookstore for like 1 1/2 hours, there were lots of questions, the inevitable conspiracy theorist person also asked his question about a Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft/Rummy conspiracy about Sept 11 for which LL said he was very suspicious of these people [the administration] but he's not a conspiracy theorist. So the whole thing felt like an early SZDSZ [Hungary's Free Democrat political party] meeting. I was glad i went.

Of course finally had the chance to look around a bit downtown, it's incredibly cute. The people are obviously very different than New York and SF. Haven't seen many fat people! I'm surprised. Everybody looks outdoorsy of course, tanned, healthy and very much laid back after the people in NY. And everybody's very nice, they smile at you and say hello on the street, very scary. In the meantime i'm trying to avoid contact with other people, like you do in NY. Amusing.

The Northwest Film Center will have some good screenings next week, dance films (documentaries mostly), and the week after it's a week of Dovzhenko films, who was a Soviet director (post-war). I'm actually thinking about going to Gogol Bordello on Sun, but don't know yet. it's not so far.

All right, want to go get some sleep before my dawn waking hour. Last night i watched Showgirls on cable, everything was edited out. It became such an unerotic film, it lost all its energy. Oh well.

Bye love, hope you had fun at Nick's!
adi

Great NY moment this afternoon on the subway. On the #3 express from 72nd to 42nd, three young black guys with matching t-shirts, congo drums and folding chairs announced their arrival to the car in thick NY accents, put down their chairs in the middle and started banging out some seriously funky primal rhythms. There was no ignoring them, and they were quite good, so I just enjoyed the performance, as did most other commuters. They had their schtick down pat, beating out 3 minutes of hypnonic groove then passing the hat before we pulled to a stop at 42nd. The tourists next to me were charmed. The group collected nicely.

I noticed on their shirts they were called "United Drummers of Yisrael