During the day and early evening, the lot feels like a crowded schoolyard, with restless, distracted men hovering over card games or swarming around a soccer ball, their shouts drowned out every 90 seconds by the roar of incoming planes. Haitian drivers favor dominoes played on the trunks of their cars, Russians clot around backgammon boards held up by trash bins and Hispanic drivers crouch between vehicles, throwing dice and sometimes wagering their hard-earned dollars.As the light faded on Tuesday night, an elderly Korean man jogged around the perimeter while groups of drivers wearing turbans power walked up and down a vacant taxi lane quietly reciting sacred Sikh verses. A charmless patch of concrete behind the restrooms sheltered a dozen kneeling men who prayed toward Mecca.
Cool slideshow, too.
Well, perhaps not in the white-collar corridors of corporate America. In fact the full beard - that is, one that stretches from the chin and mustache out to the sideburns - has become a kind of signifier for the glamorously self-employed. It is a favorite of Hollywood actors like Russell Crowe and Matthew McConaughey (who flaunt their whiskers as a kind of too-cool-for-school look when not shooting) and a key part of the brand identity of hot young fashion designers like Rogan Gregory of Edun, Josia Lamberto-Egan of Trovata and Alex Carleton of Rogues Gallery; and of musicians like Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes and Babydaddy of Scissor Sisters.Among other things, today's beard is a kind of nostalgic nod to counterculture heroics that peaked - at least in Hollywood - in 1978. That was the Year of the Beard, brandished by Kris Kristofferson as an outlaw trucker in Sam Peckinpah's "Convoy" and Steve McQueen in his serious-actor turn in "Enemy of the People."
Stubble is as far as I'm gonna go, I think. Beards would have to go out of style again before I would even consider growing one.
Actually, I'm not even sure I can. I might have to get beard plugs or a beard toupee or something...
Now that I peer in on workplaces for a living, I see that too many allow age to divide them. Workers align themselves like middle schoolers at a dance - the upstarts (or young go-getters, depending on your point of view) on one side, the experienced (or past their prime, ditto) on the other. This explains why I so often hear from employees who feel disposable and unappreciated. It also explains why the Supreme Court recently lowered the threshold for age discrimination claims to 40....This is not exactly a revelation, but I found the article intriguing because at 35-going-on-36, I feel like I am in transition from the youthful go-getter category to the seasoned pro category. I had never really given it much thought until a few weeks ago, when I was asked to meet with a couple of internal consultant/efficiency expert types. All of a sudden, I found myself in the role of the Experienced Voice Of Wisdom Who Knows How It Works, trying to rein in the Bright-Eyed Young Hotshots Full Of Wild Ideas. It was a dizzying moment of inversion.
There was a time in the working world when age correlated pretty much exactly with experience and, therefore, seniority. While I do not think things were better then, they certainly were less confusing. You started at a job young, then moved up the ranks until you became either important or obsolete. Then you retired, from the same company where you began.
...asked by his lead lawyer why a $25 million bonus from the company did not appear on his 1999 tax return, Kozlowski said he could not explain why."I just was not thinking when I signed my tax return that I had a $25 million loan forgiveness," Kozlowski said. "Year in and year out at Tyco, my tax returns for the most part had been correct. I didn't pick up on it."
Man, I wish I had enough money that $25 million could just... slip my mind.
I really, really dig "I Love To Hate You", by Erasure - also "Hatred", by The Kinks.
Does this make me a bad person? Does liking "Oh L'Amour" and "Chains of Love" balance it out?
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Reuters) - A bunch of computer-generated gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific conference in a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Awesome.
Jeremy Stribling said on Thursday that he and two fellow MIT graduate students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with nonsensical text, charts and diagrams.
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To their surprise, one of the papers -- "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" -- was accepted for presentation.
(snip)
"Rooter" features such mind-bending gems as: "the model for our heuristic consists of four independent components: simulated annealing, active networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning" and "We implemented our scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67, augmented with opportunistically pipelined extensions."
As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees.My God, how I loathe these people. What's especially galling is that a lot of the Bush nominees are being blocked because they're too beholden to corporate interests, not because they're religious fanatics.
(snip)
But Mr. Perkins stood by the characterization of Democrats as hostile to faith. "What they have done is, they have targeted people for reasons of their faith or moral position," he said, referring to Democratic criticisms of nominees over their views of cases about abortion rights or public religious expressions.
Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean says his party needs to do more to appeal to voters who have been lost because of unease over "values," including people who oppose abortion and parents who are dismayed by TV programs they find offensive for their children.Man, I show hope Ho-Ho knows what he's doing. From here it looks like the DLC managed to slip something severed under his covers...
"We need to be a national party, we need a national message, and we need to understand why people in dire economic straits — people who certainly aren't being helped by Republican policies — why they vote for George Bush," he said. "We need to respect voters in red states who want to vote for us, but we make it hard for them by not listening to what they have to say."
He then provides a very comprehensive-looking timeline of two years' worth of Jim Wright scandal coverage. This is is not earth-shattering, but it's nice to see someone who so often channels the Republican viewpoint (to put it charitably) say that the Liberal Media Conspiracy claim is total bullshit.As the Tom DeLay controversy refuses to die--or, I suppose some folks would say, the press refuses to let it die--we've been hearing a lot from the Texas congressman about liberal media bias.
I'd suggest that DeLay is simply a big fat target for investigative reporters because he lives close to the edge (if the three House ethics panel admonishments are any indication). In fact, when another Texas congressman was in a House leadership position--a congressman who happened to be a Democrat--he also got pummeled by the press.
Are journalists really "out to get" the House majority leader, as he seems to believe? And is that because they don't like his conservative views?
It is my impression -- gleaned from reviews -- that Malcolm Gladwell's book "Blink" posits that first impressions often are right on the nose. Nonetheless, for reasons having to do with caution, prudence and a debilitating sense of fair play, I have until now withheld my first -- and only -- impression of John Bolton, probably destined to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations: He's nuts.On the plus side, I'm looking forward to the futile attempts at damage control every time Bolton shoots his mouth off or forgets that the ambassador from Togo or Nepal is not one of his buddies' employee. But this is who they wanted - apparently they believe that a living, breathing fuck-you to the UN than someone who can eloquently advocate and cajole. We'll see how that all works out for them.
(snip)
I have never seen such a performance by an American diplomat. He was dismissive. He was angry. He clearly thought the questioners had no right, no standing, no justification and no earthly reason to question the United States of America. The Bush administration had said that Iraq was lousy with WMD and Iraq therefore was lousy with WMD. Just you wait.
This kind of ferocious certainty is commendable in pit bulls and other fighting animals, but it is something of a problem in a diplomat.
(snip)
... once an ambassador is instructed as to a policy or personnel issue, it is up to him or her to implement it. That means constructing the argument, persuading opponents, flattering friends. It means, in short, diplomacy.
(snip)
Why the Bush administration would want such a person at the United Nations is beyond me. As always, the administration is entitled to great leeway when it comes to presidential appointments. If it wants a neocon, fine. If it wants a hard-liner, fine. If it wants a U.N.-trasher, it can have that, too. But it should not have someone who will be ineffectual in implementing its own policies -- who, if he is himself, will alienate other delegates and further isolate the United States.
OKEECHOBEE -- A mother is under arrest, accused of selling a 12-year-old daughter into prostitution and trading a 14-year-old daughter for a car.
(snip)
The youngest girl and her mother were living out of their car, and the prostitution was for food and an occasional shower at the men's homes, according to a report by Okeechobee County Sheriff's Office Detective K.J. Ammons.
The youngest daughter is three months pregnant, the report said, and the girl was 11 when her mother first forced her to have sex with a man. She charged $20 for the sex.
The older daughter refused to be used as a prostitute and was sold for a car, deputies contend.
"She was sold to a man for a Mercury Cougar," Ammons said. "But he never gave the mother the vehicle."
Ammons said the car has an estimated value of $500 to $1,000....
To House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the Republican Party's ''Contract With America'' ranks right up there with the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights among the ''great documents of freedom.''So says DeLay's Internet Web site. It describes that 1994 campaign treatise, credited with helping the GOP end four decades of House rule by Democrats, ''a written commitment that presented to the people an agenda for the House of Representatives.''
See for yourself if you don't believe me. I'll just be over here, sputtering incoherently...
U.S. President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld may not all get a library, airport or highway named after them. But each has a slime-mold beetle named in his honor.Two former Cornell University entomologists who recently had the job of naming 65 new species of slime-mold beetles named three species that are new to science in the genus Agathidium for members of the U.S. administration. They are A. bushi Miller and Wheeler, A. cheneyi Miller and Wheeler and A. rumsfeldi Miller and Wheeler.
The entomologists also named some of the new species after their wives and a former wife, Pocahontas, Hernan Cortez, the Aztecs, the fictional "Star Wars" villain Darth Vader ("who shares with A. vaderi a broad, shiny, helmetlike head"), Frances Fawcett (their scientific illustrator) and the Greek words for "ugly" and "having prominent teeth" and the Latin word for "strange."...
The decision to name three slime-mold beetles after Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, however, didn't have anything to do with physical features, says Quentin Wheeler, a professor of entomology and of plant biology at Cornell for 24 years until last October, but to pay homage to the U.S. leaders. "We admire these leaders as fellow citizens who have the courage of their convictions and are willing to do the very difficult and unpopular work of living up to principles of freedom and democracy rather than accepting the expedient or popular," says Wheeler....
Maybe they're tongue-in-cheek about the homage, but the result is the same. Too perfect.
UPDATE: Makes it all the more fitting if Tom "Bugman" DeLay brings them down...
Several years ago, Zanjani and his colleagues began injecting fetal lambs with human stem cells, mostly ones derived from human bone marrow. He said he hoped that the cells would transform into blood cells so that he could use the sheep to study the human blood system. According to Zanjani, when he examined the sheep he discovered that the human cells had traveled with their lymphatic system throughout the sheep's body, developing into blood, bone, liver, heart and assorted other cells, including some in the brain. While some scientists are skeptical of his findings, Zanjani told me that some have livers that are as much as 40 percent humanized, with distinct human structural units pumping out uniquely human proteins.While the idea of partly humanized sheep might make some people a little uncomfortable, it isn't easy to see where they trespass across some unambiguous ethical line. But according to Dr. William Hurlbut, a physician and consulting professor in human biology at Stanford, who serves with Kass on the President's Council for Bioethics, the seeing is exactly the point. What if, instead of internal human organs, Zanjani's sheep sported recognizably human parts on the outside -- human limbs or genitals, for instance, ready for transplant should the need arise? Hurlbut maintains that this is scientifically plausible. But it would be wrong. Every living thing has a natural trajectory through its life beginning at conception, and in Hurlbut's view, a visible chimera would veer dangerously off course.
''It has to do with the relationship between signs and their meaning,'' he told me. ''Human appearance is something we should reserve for humans. Anything else that looks human debases the coinage of truth.''
Um, excuse me, Dr. Hurlbut? If I may interject for a moment? Debasing the coinage of truth is the least of our ethical worries here, okay? Jeez, are you seriously saying that a sheep could have a human brain and internal organs, but as long as it still looks like a sheep, everything's okay?
Apparently, a large part of the reason the sheep do still look like sheep is that the human stem cells weren't injected until late in their fetal development, when they were already pretty definitively sheep. But there's a mad researcher who wants to try a similar experiment with highly impressionable 3-5 day old mouse embryos, which gives even genetic researchers the creeps.
Why all the shuddering? For starters, there is the gonad quandary. If the experiment really works, the human cells should differentiate into all of the embryo's cell lineages, including the one that eventually forms the animal's reproductive cells. If the mouse were male, some of its sperm might thus be human, and if it were female, some of its eggs might be human eggs. If two such creatures were to mate, there would be a chance that a human embryo could be conceived and begin to grow in a mouse uterus -- a sort of Stuart Little scenario, but in reverse and not so cute.
''Literally nobody wants to see an experiment where two mice that have eggs and sperm of human origin have the opportunity to mate and produce human offspring,'' says Dr. Norman Fost, professor of pediatrics and director of the bioethics program at the University of Wisconsin and a member of the National Academy of Sciences committee reviewing stem-cell research policies. ''That's beyond anybody's wildest nightmare.''
Gah!
More fun with mice:
...[Irving Weissman] came up with an ingenious idea: why not make a mouse with a brain composed entirely of human neurons? In theory, at least, this could be achieved by transplanting human neural stem cells into the fetal brain of a strain of mouse whose own neurons happen to die off just before birth. If the human stem cells took up the slack and differentiated along the same lines as in the earlier experiment, you might just end up with a living newborn mouse controlled by a functioning brain that just happened to be composed of human cells.
''One could imagine that if you took a human embryonic midbrain and spliced it into a developing chimpanzee, you could get a chimp with many of our automatic vocalizations,'' says Terrence Deacon, a biological anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley and a member of the Johns Hopkins committee. ''It wouldn't be able to talk. But it might laugh or sob, instead of pant-hoot.''Thankfully, it doesn't appear that anyone has any intention of trying this. But the man-mouse is unsettling enough, even though the article claims that, in essence, the human brain cells wouldn't have enough space to grow into anything like their accustomed human capabilities, and that the fetal man-mice would be aborted and never brought to term. Somehow, that all fails to make me feel a whole lot better about the whole enterprise...
"Now you may not like some of the things he's done," Santorum said. "That's for the people of his district to decide, whether they want to approve that kind of behavior or not."This is exactly the same as when libertarians and Republicans argue against the corporate regulation: They claim that if a company is behaving badly, that "the market" will fix it, that consumers will "punish" that company for its wrongdoing. This is patently ridiculous: If anything, the wrongdoing gives that company an unfair competitive advantage over its competitors (assuming they're not all doing the same thing), and the consumer will never even know about it, much less care enough to boycott - after all, the corporate miscreant probably has excellent prices as a result of its miscreancy.
Indeed, gonad for blood clot fall in love with hand living with shadow.When over guardian angel meditates, ball bearing behind hides.Where we can barely graduate from our fetishist.Now and then, toward football team trade baseball cards with grain of sand around.And prefer the dark side of her steam engine.Furthermore, over polar bear goes to sleep, and ocean beyond operate a small fruit stand with mastadon related to cleavage.Best. Spam. Ever.
Keeping terror suspects from buying guns seems like an issue the entire nation can rally around. But the National Rifle Association is, as usual, fighting even the most reasonable regulation of gun purchases. After the G.A.O. report came out, Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A.'s executive vice president, took to the airwaves to reiterate his group's commitment to ensuring that every citizen has access to guns, and to cast doubt on the reliability of terrorist watch lists.Yes, that's right, terrorists have no rights to due process or even minimally humane treatment, but Republicans and the N.R.A. will defend their right to bear arms to the bitter end!
bottle of beer living with turkey write a love letter to alchemist of necromancer.When you see for demon, it means that microscope around ball bearing trembles.Bob, the friend of Bob and hides with for fundraiser.It's like the synopsis of a lost Twin Peaks episode or something...
