News

Blogs

Other stuff

Comic Strips

Radio Stations on the web

Online references

• Yahoo! Maps
• MapBlast
• Mapquest

Weblog:

Tuesday, February 29 2000

Common Ground: Institutionalized Ignorance

Interesting article by Kevin Killiany at Nationet Online comparing the problems that left-handed folks go through to the problems African-Americans go through.

Monday, February 28 2000

The Diallo Lesson

As Bruce Shapiro says in one of four Salon articles about the Diallo verdict: the lesson behind the shooting is that there's something wrong with police procedure and training, not with the officers themselves. As, to a great degree, was the case in the Rodney King beating.

Friday, February 25 2000

Economist assesses civil rights gains

From Stanford Online Report: Gavin Wright, president of the Economic History Association, says that there's hard evidence that the economic outcome of the Civil Rights movement has been positive for Southern blacks; he also believes the South as a whole is better off, economically, but says that's much harder to prove.

Thursday, February 24 2000

Movie #2: My Giant. Director: Michael Lehmann. Genre: comedy.

Big Gheorghe Muresan.

He's Billy Crystal's straight man,

Lost, looking for love.

Search Engine Shootout/Who Wants to Be a Millionaire

At websearch.about.com: Chris Sherman poses Who Wants to Be a Millionairequestions to various major search engines, to determine which'll come up with pages that answer the questions. None work perfectly; and recent wunderkind Google actually does poorly.

Tuesday, February 22 2000

Long, detailed William Gibson interview

An interview at Ain't It Cool News, in which he talks about, among other things, his reaction to the movie The Matrix and about his latest book, All Tomorrow's Parties. I haven't read his latest, so I actually didn't finish reading the interview...

Monday, February 21 2000

Death by train, death by plane

Historic Railways Accidents - links to current news about train/railway crashes, and historical info on bad train crashes. Airsafe.com - "safety information for the airline passenger." With a link to the NTSB's list of aviation accidents involving fatalities.

Net Citizen

My first technology column for Nationet Online, "Black America's Direct Connection," is up. It's half intro-to-the-column, half "stop calling us consumers." The idea came from hearing Dave Farber (new FCC chief technologist) talk at a DC ISOC meeting a few days before.

Movie #1: Sphere. Director: Barry Levinson. Genre: science-fiction.

Spaceship crashed, sea floor.

Look inside: what's with that Sphere?

Nightmares manifest.

Saturday, February 19 2000

Wilderness Photos

In responding to a thread on the webdesign-l mailing list about the crisp photos on Apple's web site, Rolf Kraiker sent out a pointer to some really good wilderness photos he's taken over his 25-year career. Usually, I prefer pictures of people; but his photos are quite nice.

Thursday, February 17 2000

In Search of the Novel

Why am I leaving a client who puts such great stuff up on the Web? Annenberg/CPB's latest (which I had minimal involvement in): In Search of the Novel - a teacher's workshop where they give guidance on how to teach various novels to students. A good set of books: Bridge to Terabithia, Flowers for Algernon, Frankenstein, others.

Wednesday, February 16 2000

Homicide: Stakeout

Episode 49.

Bayliss: Those guys are like a family. I have never, ever felt that in Homicide. We may be the best, the elite, but we are not a family.

Pembleton: Yes we are. But we're like a real family. Opinionated, argumentative, holding grudges, challenging each other. We push each other to be better than we are. That kind of thing doesn't happen at barbecues or ball games. It happens on the job where it's supposed to. Putting down a murder. The work itself is the most
important thing. What we do is important. We speak for those who can no longer speak for themselves and you're not gonna ever find anything like that anywhere.

Memorable Homicide quotes, including the one above. Still photos from the movie, mostly reaction scenes to "the news." (And I wish someone who officially worked on the movie would reveal to the world what blue ink on The Board meant.)

Song: Talk Show Host. Album: William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (soundtrack). Artist: Radiohead

You want me

Fucking well come and find me

I'll be waiting

With a gun and a pack of sandwiches

And nothing



nothing

 
 

nothing

 
 
 
 

nothing

Track 11. (No sample.)

Tuesday, February 15 2000

Valentine Story

At Word, a mag I don't read enough: Chris Tsakis relates the goings-on and feelings surrounding two Valentine's Days spent with a girlfriend-at-the-time, circa 1998-99. Abortion, jealousy, and nude pix are all in the mix.

My Boot

A good source for the various short films you've seen scattered around the Net: http://www.myboot.com/movies/. With the Superfriends Wassup commercial (though the site owner assumes for no good reason that the Cartoon Network did the commercial); Exploding Whale; Trooper Clerks; and others. There're also some interesting links from the site's front page.

Sunday, February 13 2000

Homicide: The Movie

I'm taping the Homicide movie on TV right now; and wondering how, if they continue to do movies, they'll be able to either (a) keep coming up with excuses for Pembleton to come back, even though he's quit (maybe he joins the unit again in this movie - I don't know) or (b) get old-time fans to watch w/o Pembleton being involved.

Homicide links: NBC's official site (which http://www.homicide.com/ is redirected to), including "Second Shift," a web-only series of stories detailing the cases of the other 12-hour shift at Baltimore homicide. Blouses, Bloodstains and Bowties: Race and Gender on Homicide - an insightful article on Homicide by Joe Clark, who flamed me for no good reason on a totally unrelated issue. Interview with David Simon, author of the book on which the series was based. Data on the Board from each season - lots of red names. Lots of links to amateur Homicide websites at this site.

A long time ago, on alt.tv.homicide, someone who regularly critiqued the Homicide episodes critiqued a basketball game that preempted the show, but treating it like another Homicide show. Can't find the link, but it was damn funny...

Friday, February 11 2000

Mr. Cranky vs. the World Socialist Web Site

Compare and contrast: the World Socialist Web Site's movie reviews and Mr. Cranky Rates the Movies. The Socialists hate movies just as much as Mr. Cranky does; they just have less of a sense of humor about it, and tend to pierce the cultural assumptions and contradictions in films. Choice quote from the WSWS Any Given Sunday review: "He's given up 'everything' for the team, he tells Christina Pagniacci - everything, that is, except an enormous salary and a palatial home by the sea."

Thursday, February 10 2000

Red Rock Eater: Feb. 7th Notes and Recommendations

Phil Agre, as usual, serves up a whole heap of thought-provoking prose in his latest Notes and Recommendations. Topics covered: John McCain conservativism vs. Republican Establishment conservativism; the conflict between database consistency and database ubiquity; spam; communal network databases and the corps that want to own them; why to turn off cookies; Rage Against the Machine; Noam Chomsky; and more. Info on his email newsletter is at http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html.

Wednesday, February 9 2000

African Kingdoms

At about.com (I still prefer their old name, The Mining Company): an overview of ancient (and not-so-ancient) African kingdoms. Goes beyond just Egypt.

Screw Big Tobacco

So, I'm watching TV (as I'm unfortunately doing more and more these days). I see a bunch of Gen-Xers (maybe Gen-Yers) bungee-jumping off a bridge, grabbing cans of soda (labeled "'Splode!") off a rock, drinking as they bob back up; looks pretty much like a Mountain Dew commercial. Then one of the three drinkers explodes, and up pops the message: "Only one product kills a third of the people who use it. Tobacco."

The website it's advertising? thetruth.com. Full of Flash and Quicktime and Truth, dedicated to skewering Big Tobacco. Much better than the dull supposedly anti-youth-smoking commercials which the tobbacco companies are running as part of their settlement with the federal government (Cig pusher: "Want a smoke?" Kid: "No thanks."); even better than the anti-smoking billboards they have out in California (Glam Man: "Mind if I smoke?" Glam Woman: "Care if I die?").

Billboard Liberation Front

The Billboard Liberation Front web site - detailing the 23-year history of a billboard defacing collective of sorts. Includes some pix of altered billboards...

Tuesday, February 8 2000

Life on Other Planets, the Drake Equation

Link from Slashdot.org: a book suggesting there probably aren't any (or, at least, many) alien civilizations out there. Essentially, the authors/scientists say that the nature of the solar systems and planets observed elsewhere suggest the deck is stacked against stable, Earth-like planets existing in large numbers. Related, from seti.org: the Drake Equation, including a calculator into which you can plug in a few numbers (number of Sun-like stars, fraction of those stars with planets, etc.) to come up with a guess at the number of "communicative civilizations."

Monday, February 7 2000

Old Man for Rent for Valentine's Day

The Register reports on a man who's auctioning himself as a Valentine's Day date on eBay. Top bid by 2/3/00: $45.

Commercials, Super Bowl and other

First up (courtesy of CamWorld): the SuperFriends do the Wazzup commercial. Funny. Also available at this spot.

Related to commercials: Ad Critic, which provides Quicktime movies of "good" commercials. Very misleading domain name; there is no criticism involved. They have a copy of the original commercial and a bunch of others, including many Superbowl ads. Site dedicated to Superbowl ads, with news article links and video links: http://www.superbowl-ads.com/. And no discussion of ads is complete without a reference to Adbusters, the only magazine I pay for. (Well, no, now I pay for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, too...)

"Web sites for Black History Month"

Nando Techserver has a list of "web sites for Black History Month." The URLs, cause Nando actually screwed up a bunch of 'em:

• The Black World Today
  
• Charles Isbell's "This Week in Black History" (I contributed the Bernard Harris item 4 years and 363 days ago)
  
• Black Voices
  
• OneNetNow
  
• KRON TV's black history month list
  
• NetNoir
  
• Britannica's Guide to Black History
  
• Writing Black - links to famous African-American writers
  
• African Heritage Month - a Canadian perspective
  
• Blackfamilies.com
  

Saturday, February 5 2000

Death Penalty Moratorium

The Black World Today is one of the places reporting on the moratorium on death penalty executions imposed by Illinois Governor George Ryan. The American Bar Association has been calling for such moratoriums since Spring 1997, due to what they see as the lack of due process involved in the process, and the "numerous" people convicted of capital crimes, and later exonerated. Much of the Spring 1997 issue of their Focus on Law Studies focuses on the death penalty. Related resource, chock-full of info: the Death Penalty Information Center.

Friday, February 4 2000

Calm Down or Die

Two recent studies indicate that hostile individuals are at greater risk for obesity and high blood pressure.

Thursday, February 3 2000

Orson Scott Card, hard-core Mormon

Salon magazine: Orson Scott Card interview, the author of which regrets one of her favorite author's homophobia. The discussion of Ender's Shadow here makes me want to go read it... Related: Orson Scott Card's official web site.

Comfortable plane trips? Yeah, right.

Two new airlines aim to outdo the established airlines by providing more comfort - especially, more legroom - at a reasonable price. Jet Blue and Legend Airlines are their names. Limited flights, though.

Wednesday, February 2 2000

Rebuilding Kosova

At the NY Review of Books: Anarchy & Madness - a chronicle from Timothy Garton Ash detailing what's wrong in Kosovo, from corrupt politicians to an ineffectual international presence to, obviously, a lot of burned-down villages and destroyed buildings and property. Long article.

Etymology

Tipworld offers a bunch of emailed newsletters, but unfortunately, each letter includes annoying text ads. The only letter I've found so far which is worth the annoyance of the ad: Word Origins. The author of that letter has her own site at http://www.funwords.com/..

AIDS

A Time magazine article reports on a theory that AIDS may have originated in 1930; the theorists speculate that it was transferred from a monkey sometime around then through a bite or accident. But they don't know how it was transferred from monkey to human for sure.

This conflicts with an earlier theory (from 1992?) that the AIDS virus originated from a polio vaccine that was developed using monkey kidney cells. (Hit the first link on the list of articles which comes up from previous link.)

About this site

This is the personal web site for Edward (Ed) Piou. Consisting mainly of a blog (operational since 1999) and various photos.

Some online projects I'm working on

Politics

Charity, Non-profits...

A while ago, I decided to put my money where my mind is on a (roughly) monthly basis and give to:

Photos

Public events documented through pictures...