Archive for July, 2006

06w28:1 Misc

Posted July 12th, 2006 by timothy. 0 Comments

Good Reads Mailing List |2006 week 28 number 1 (misc)

Here are links collected over the past couple of months. Long time subscribers remember a time when Goodreads was more frequent, and more topic oriented, but I have to say I’ve come to like the format of miscellaneous links more, in addition, I like taking my time to send them out. The net is so fickle and has become such a wonderful place for evaporated memory, it seems much more sane to sit on things for a bit and let the hype pass before sending the link ’round one more time again.

If you disagree with me and would like more frequent emails, let me know. At the beginning, Goodreads functioned as a extension of my conversations, but over the past year (!) my conversations have dried up and this project has lost that perspective. Which is round-a-bout way of saying any input is welcome since I’m not getting it the old fashioned way any more.

For those of you whose submissions are finally being included: apologies. But see above.

Call for Wikipedia Content | Ever notice how Canadian art (and contemporary art in general) is underrepresented on Wikipedia? Consider this a call to do something about it. TVO broadcast Artist on Fire: The Work of Joyce Weiland on Masterworks last week and I tried to look her up on Wikipedia and found nothing, which I thought embarrassing and shameful. I know there are lots of people in the know on this list who could be putting their knowledge to good use by contributing to Wikipedia, so lets improve their art entries. Wikipedia used to let anyone create pages but nowadays you have to register. (If you can’t be bothered to register, send me what you’d like to see there and I’ll post it for you, since I’m registered. But I hope you’re not that lazy.) – Timothy

Some submissions
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Submitted by Joanne Todd in April (related to Easter)

Activist Art and the Counter-Publich Sphere | Gregory Sholette
http://goodreads.ca/docs/05_darkmattertwo.pdf
Sumbitted by Amish Morell PDF 514K

Andy Kaufman Lives
www.andykaufmanlives.com
“He (Andy Kaufman) wanted to collaborate on something really fantastic and enormous, but we could never figure out what it would be. He was especially fascinated with how I had gotten people to believe I was dead. He’d say, ‘How can I do that? I want to do that.'” -Alan Abel the world’s greatest hoaxer
“If I do go ahead with my plan, I will do so by pretending to have cancer”–Andy Kaufman (speaking to Mimi Lambert) | (Related:Alan Abel Esquire story)
Submitted by Timothy P. Barrus
// This is pretty fucked up actually. I hope people have bought t-shirts!

Interview with Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez with Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/20/1330218
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/19/1336214
Sumbitted by Ben Skinner late last September

End Subs; Am I forgeting one? Send me a nasty email and I’ll include it next time.
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Aristophanes’ Birds
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/aristophanes/birds.htm

Cancer surgery reveals 49-year-old ‘fossil’ fetus | Taiwan News
http://www.taiwanheadlines.gov.tw/20000106/20000106s5.html

Confronting the New Misanthropy | Frank Furedi
http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CB021.htm

Darren O’Donnell’s Social Acupuncture | RM Vaughan
http://rmvaughanink.blogspot.com/2006/05/type-cast-16.html

Email | Robert Fulford
http://www.robertfulford.com/Email.html
“In every generation people mourn the death of letter writing (our literary culture enjoys nothing more than signing the death certificate of an art form). Decades ago, reviewers discussing collections of letters felt they had to say that there would be few such books in the future because the hurry of modern life had killed the habit. But as those reviews were appearing, people were still busy writing letters. In the years that followed, good collections kept appearing — like the correspondence of publisher Jack McClelland last year. Letter writing didn’t die, it just became a minority taste. Now it’s regained much of its popularity. In 20 or 30 years, people will be reading books of e-mails (whether they’ll read them in the form of paper books is another question). Incidentally, anyone seeking that kind of immortality should be warned to keep hard copies of their letters on paper; disc memory is unstable and unreliable, and may even be unreadable on the equipment of the future.”Article date: January 2000

Man surfs the Net to death | China Daily
http://tinyurl.com/l9m6s

‘Skeleton woman’ dead in front of TV for years | Telegraph UK
http://tinyurl.com/rcvly

Study: Using big words needlessly makes you seem stupider | Clive Thompson
http://tinyurl.com/ryauz
(Related)

PM canes ‘rubbish’ postmodern teaching | Steve Lewis and Imre Salusinszky
http://tinyurl.com/pmlhy
“Associate Professor Morgan said the English literature syllabus in Western Australia was being replaced by a course called “Texts, traditions and cultures”, which had led to a large degree of dissatisfaction and low morale among teachers. “Literary theory covers a broad range of cultural and social theory from Marxism to post-structuralism, feminism and queer theory,” he said. “It’s very obscure. It encourages students to use buzzwords and jargon to cover up that they have no idea what they’re talking about. “Teachers are disappointed they are not teaching literature any more. They feel the subject has been hijacked by those who want to teach about race, gender and Marxism, rather than about literature.”

Learning to Savor a Full Life, Love Life Included | Jane Gross
http://tinyurl.com/ovy2s

Bug Chasers: The men who long to be HIV+ | Gregory A. Freeman
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/5939950/bug_chasers
(Article Date: January 2003 | One of the most disturbing things I’ve ever read, and the last paragraph is my new measure of depravity.)

Godwin’s Law | Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_Law
“‘Godwin’s Law (also Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies) is, in Internet culture, an adage originated in 1990 by Mike Godwin that states: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.'”

(An earlier edit of this article had this: ‘This law does not pertain to any discussion of U.S. President George W. Bush and his Cabinet, when that discussion involves the manipulation of the public through fear mongering.‘ Of course, it was gone after about an hour. – Timothy)

Great Photographers on the Internet | Mike Johnston
http://tinyurl.com/g5ycf

What if some the 20th Century’s best photographers had posted their images on online forums?

Guinness: World’s Largest Photo | AP
http://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/0,71161-0.html?tw=rss.index
(Convert a former airplane hangar into a camera obscura. Related self-promotion here)

The North Korean Subset

The Photos link was found some weeks ago, the other two appeared in response to the July 4 Missle Test. Rockets’ red glare eh? One newsman discussing the ‘type-o-dong’ failure on CNN the next day, ‘It is complex, it is rocket science … ‘A trip to North Korea – Photos | Artemii Lebedev
http://www.tema.ru/travel/choson-1/
As much as I hate Toronto’s concrete ugliness, at least I’m not in Pyongyang. The link above is to the orginal Russian, this link has the translated captions.

Bob Woodward goes to NK | Nightline

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2158379
The link is to video from ABC’s Nightline broadcast on 5 July 06 (link to audio mp3 podcast)

Kim’s Catastrophe | Fred Kaplan
http://www.slate.com/id/2145068/fr/rss/

Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Seeks More Power | John Markoff and Saul Hansell
http://tinyurl.com/pfvz8
The future home of Wintermute?

Lioness in zoo kills man who invoked God | Reuters
http://tinyurl.com/gsgbn
“A man shouting that God would keep him safe was mauled to death by a lioness in Kiev zoo after he crept into the animal’s enclosure, a zoo official said on Monday.”

Born at 6am on 06/06/06, his mum was induced for 6 days, he weighs 6lbs 6oz and he’s called … Damien | Richard Smith
http://tinyurl.com/r5ktd

Friendship Puzzle
http://tinyurl.com/h8e8d
This is totally gay

The in-betweeners | Philip Marchand
http://tinyurl.com/quhkh
“We speak constantly about the baby boomers and the ‘Greatest Generation,’ the veterans of D-Day, but we rarely refer to the generation born in-between.It was precisely this generation, however, that transformed our culture. From this demographic cohort came the men and women who became the icons of the 1960s and who have had no equivalent successors. They cast very long shadows.”

Mass Natural | Michael Pollan
http://tinyurl.com/m2zeh
Wal-Mart’s beginning to sell organic food. A good thing, no?

Ink in their veins | Bill Taylor
http://tinyurl.com/lmb4f
At 81, Bob Gladding still runs the presses at the family-owned Gazette in never-dull Tavistock

Losing Their Edge? | Scott Jaschik
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/01/edge
“In ‘Are Elite Universities Losing Their Competitive Edge?,’ the scholars examine evidence that the Internet ó by allowing professors to work with ease with scholars across the country and not just across the quad ó is leading to a spreading of academic talent at many more institutions than has been the case in the past.

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Long links made short by using TinyUrl (http://www.tinyurl.com)
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emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 12 July 2006 @ 2:08 PM