1.18.2002
In an effort to get everyone watching CNN twenty-four hours a day, the folks at AOL-TimeWarner have given us a report entitled How Prepared Is Your City? and I’m glad to note that New York city is given the title of
And, since it seems that today is Enron day at Ishbadiddle, I’ll point out that CNN also reports on Veep Dick Cheney’s dunning India for money owed to Enron. It doesn’t feel better to hear that “no one at Enron asked Cheney to raise the issue”.
Want to buy the Enron Code of Ethics? How about their Risk Management Manual? (Bidding stands at $1000). Or an "Ask Why" Enron Stress Ball? I am sorely tempted to bid on the Enron Values "Tangle Puzzle" -- the irony must be worth at least $20.
1.17.2002
Want to see how Enron's board is connected to the military-industrial complex, where their donations go, and how Sam Nunn is at the center of the corporate universe, all using Flash? Go to They Rule.
Fear not, I’ll be putting more than oh-so-cool design-y posts here.
Link via blogdex -- yeah, I know, I'm a meme fiend.
1.16.2002
Tip from Trip.
When Punxsutawney Phil pops his head out of his hole on Feb. 2 to tell people whether or not they will experience six more weeks of winter, the famous groundhog may see more than his shadow. Because of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, security will be stepped up at Phil's home, Gobbler's Knob.
The whole inanity can be read here. Do they really think that Al Qaeda would attack a groundhog?
NYSE Guys Finish First
Why did Rudy Giuliani give the New York Stock Exchange a billion-dollar handout?
By Michael�Grunwald
Everyone knows that Rudy Giuliani went out on top, ending his operatic eight-year reign over New York City as the Person of the Year. But hardly anyone noticed that he left behind a parting gift. On his last day in office, Rudy signed an agreement to proceed with the largest corporate subsidy in New York history: up to $1.1 billion in cash and tax breaks for the New York Stock Exchange. Even when the deal was announced three years earlier, it committed money the city didn't really have to a new trading floor the exchange didn't really need in order to generate a new skyscraper no one really wanted in response to a flee-the-city threat no one really believed. And that was before the city began to hemorrhage cash, skyscrapers began to look like targets, and flee-the-city threats began to feel like municipal treason. . . .
[NB: This of course comes on the heels of Giuliani's 11th-hour Yankee Stadium loophole.]
1.15.2002
I can't let today go by without writing of the Great Boston Molasses Disaster, which happened 83 years ago today. Here's is Zeitler's account:
On January 15, 1919, an unseasonably warm day in Boston, tragedy struck. Neither this Massachusetts city nor any other has ever experienced a disaster quite like it. Around noon, the molasses tank located near North End Park, designed to hold up to 2.5 million gallons of molasses (one and a half times as heavy as water), burst, unleashing a torrent of sticky goo on the unexpecting community. Within minutes, businesses and houses were destroyed. A giant wave of sweetness unfurled its wrath on the city as a thirty-foot wall traveling with a speed of thirty-five miles per hour. The incredible force of two tons per square foot was enough to knock the firehouse on its side and bend the supports under the local elevated train. People were engulfed despite attempts to outrun or swim the flood. In total, the disaster took the lives of twenty-one people and left 150 injured.
Cleanup crews spent months attempting to remove the remnants of the sticky flood, eventually quitting when they realized the once-sweet smell of molasses would continue to linger for months longer. It took weeks just to find all the dead; the mothers crushed under their own houses, the children caught unaware in their own backyards, and the working man swallowed while enjoying the weather and perhaps discussing the possibility of Prohibition on his lunch break. The Boston Harbor was stained brown for over half of a year. This was not an event Boston would soon forget.
According to the memories of this Bostonian, printed in Smithsonian, on summer days the North End still smelled of molasses decades later. Also worth reading is this article from a 1965 Yankee Magazine. There's an article on the Wikipedia on the disaster too. On this page an engineer discusses why the accident happened, and how it increased government oversight of building safety. So perhaps some good came of this deadly, sticky day.
My favorite is Bomb
[Just in case I screwed up on the links here is the URL:
http://www.annumatthew.com/Portfolios/Bollywood%20Satirized/Bollywood.html]
NS in his debut direct post to Ish
Interesting article from the St. Petersburg Times on prime-time diversity. Via PopPolitics.
Trip writes:
I must, MUST, I say, take issue with your preference of Bring It On over Sugar and Spice. The faux "can't we all just get along" schtick of BIO, the pseudo-just ending (so why was it that the southsidaz weren't able to get to the championships for all these years if they're so good?), and, above all, the gall of actually taking cheerleading seriously left me mouth agape. In a country where mothers conspire to kill the competition to their daughters' cheering aspirations (from the director of Fletch and The Bad News Bears, and starring Holly Hunter, Beau Bridges and Swoosie Kurtz*) or assault cheering coaches, I didn't know what to say. Sugar and Spice, however, was nuthin' but a good old-fashioned heist movie, and one that ripped off The Usual Suspects in many ways, to boot. As cotton-candyish as the gals themselves.
Tk
*Damn! Forget about all these other movies, this seems like a real gem, right here.
But what are we supposed to do with the Beatles now? �We� the musically progressive, post-punk, neo-this-or-that wannabes who feel what other people don�t understand but which theologians from Miriam to Tolkien did � that God is in music. What does a Sonic Youth fan, or an Erikah Badu fan, or a Radiohead fan, do about the Beatles?
Also, an interesting article on our nation's real counter-culture: Christian Rock.
MS also writes:
I found the article about the Karine A. scary as shit. I'd prefer that Arafat be responsible and the Iranians merely his allies rather than Iran acting as a rogue party fucking things up for everyone else. I get the impression that Arafat is kind of clueless, which is more dangerous than if he were really on top of things.
As for your bad movies of the year, my unhesitating vote is for Pearl Harbor.
Speaking of movie recommendations, somehow Julie Taymor's Titus failed to make its way onto our list -- a glaring error I hope you'll all forgive.
Leading Them From Temptation? Ministers deliver a prayer-not-porn message at an adult trade show in Sin City.
"I say the rosary three times a week," Weigel says. "I believe in prayer and in God. It's made me a better person." Weigel finishes her prayer, crosses herself again and climbs up a ladder to begin her striptease.
These ministers have taken their message to the web in a suprisingly well-designed site.
Ken Lay -- daytrader extraordinaire
Simply by using the "Insider" stock trading records available through Yahoo! or other financial sites, we enjoyed monitoring what Enron CEO Kenneth Lay was doing throughout 2001. It appears that on just about every possible trading day, he had ordered his stockbroker to sell 2,500 of his shares of Enron along with another 500 in the name of his trust or his spouse (we can't tell which, but we suspect it's Linda Lay).
For those of you who don't know about this -- Enron is a once-multi-billion-dollar company (at least on the cooked accounting books, it was) that has crashed into bankruptcy in just a matter of months. While the board of directors and principals of the company were able to personally extract billions of dollars from the stock's value, the common employees were not allowed to divest any of their holdings from their retirement funds.
Now, the CEO was trying to assure his employees that all was well. On August 14th of last year, he wrote in a company-wide e-mail, "Our performance has never been stronger; our business model has never been more robust. ...We have the finest organization in American business today." We suspect to punctuate that point, just one week later, Mr. Lay purchased almost $1.5 million in Enron stock for himself, plus another $500,000 for his wife -- just to show his confidence in the company's value on Wall Street. What he probably DIDN'T trumpet to many employees is that for the previous 8 months, he had extracted about $45 million in SALE of stock.
For the complete story, go here; for the details of Lay's trades and contributions, go here.
1.14.2002
But most are just badly designed:
Can't we get better looking propaganda than this? It looks like a still from South Park. I mean, there's an army of unemployed designers out there. Compare to this Ben Shahn WWII propaganda poster:
PSYOPS link via boingboing.
Thanks to Naunihal for the wakaresaseya stories.
