1. The Magnetic Fields - "Strange Powers": a track off the 1999 Holiday release, used to fine effect in Jonathan Caouette's lauded low-budget biopic, Tarnation
2. Devo - "Working In A Coal Mine"
3. David Bowie - "Blackout"
4. Eddie Rabbitt - "I Love a Rainy Night"
5. Le Tigre - "Deceptacon" [QuickTime video]
6. Low - "Silver Rider"
7. Brian Eno - Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror - "Among Fields of Crystal"
8. Sarah Vaughan - "From This Moment On"
9. The Revolutionaires - A History of Dub: The Golden Age - "Bitter Blood"
10. Hawkwind - "You Know You're Only Dreaming"

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  Psst. Did you know the Gubmint embeds secret computer chips in many laser printers, so authorities can track down exactly which printer a document came from?

No, really:

WASHINGTON--Next time you make a printout from your color laser printer, shine an LED flashlight beam on it and examine it closely with a magnifying glass. You might be able to see the small, scattered yellow dots printed there that could be used to trace the document back to you.

According to experts, several printer companies quietly encode the serial number and the manufacturing code of their color laser printers and color copiers on every document those machines produce. Governments, including the United States, already use the hidden markings to track counterfeiters.

Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, says his company's laser printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, such as its WorkCentre Pro series, put the "serial number of each machine coded in little yellow dots" in every printout. The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a page, nestled within the printed words and margins.

"It's a trail back to you, like a license plate," Crean says. [keep reading article in PC World]

The funny thing is, if we heard about the government secretly implanting consumer products with tracking devices in a nation like China, Cuba, or the former Soviet Union, we'd chalk it up to "normal" totalitarian interference. When it's done in the U.S., we rationalize it as an "anti-terrorism measure" or a "security precaution."

Personally, I wouldn't find this story half as sinister if the coding were 'above board': if consumers knew that each printer had a unique signature or embedded serial number that identified each machine's output. Authorities would argue that this secrecy is necessary to prevent subversion of the coding precaution, but I think any counterfeiter or terrorist worth their salt would discover the presence of these mechanisms in one way or another. After all, if the secret encoding is so "secret," why are printer manufacturers and the Secret Service talking to PC World about its existence?

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  This news development slipped by my nose, until I read about it on EclecticEveryday - after all, I don't live in New York any more. Riders on the New York City subway system are now subject to random police searches of their bags or parcels prior to entering the turnstiles, a measure adopted after the London subway bombing incidents. Cindy quotes from an article on Manhattan User's Guide by Charlie Suisman, "Fearful Times":

"On Monday, in response to the newly instituted random subway searches, MUG questioned the efficacy of these searches as they are currently set up. It seemed to me that this deployment of resources is largely cosmetic (and terrorism experts I have heard interviewed have said essentially the same thing), designed to make riders feel better. That’s not a bad goal in and of itself, but the benefit of making people feel better now is outweighed, perhaps, by the unease it will have created when, despite this, a bomb goes off...

The [MUG] mail from Monday ran 79 against the searches and four in favor of them. Even if it had been the other way around, I see no harm in asking the question. One reader wrote, "You might have heard in the real press (see www.1010wins.com for polls) that the average New York subway rider sees the searches as positive (which should also make you uneasy about broadcasting your anti-search views to your NYC readership)."

That made me uneasy all right, but not for the reason the author of the email supposed. I was uneasy that the author would think that simply because, even if true, New Yorkers favor the searches, that that is a reason not to point out what seem to me flaws in the logic of those searches...I found this in my email, from [reader] D. Stein: "How dare you question the subway searches???!?!?! You sound completely ignorant and foolish."

I know I blanched, because I felt the blood instantly drain from my face. It's not the second sentence – I'm ignorant and foolish on a daily basis. It was that a fellow New Yorker was so fearful that he was willing to fall into lock-step with authority and was shocked that someone else would not. Isn't asking questions, as Primo Levi learned, one of the fundamental elements of freedom?" – Charlie Suisman

Chicago's subway riders, thankfully, only have bomb-sniffing dogs and regularly stationed police and private security officers to face - not random searches. However, a single terror-type incident in any American city could up the ante to New York Style stop-and-search surveillance in many urban areas, like Chicago.

As a forethought, I recommend reading FlexYourRights.org's Citizen's Guide to Refusing Subway Searches, a safe and sane list of tips on how to prevent a random subway check from potentially escalating into violence, while preserving your rights against unreasonable searches:

In response to the recent London terror attacks, New York police officers are now conducting random searches of bags and packages brought into the subway.

While Flex Your Rights takes no position on the usefulness of these searches for preventing future attacks, we have serious concerns that this unprecedented territorial expansion of police search powers is doing grave damage to people's understanding of their Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

In addition, as innocent citizens become increasingly accustomed to being searched by the police, politicians and police agencies are empowered to further expand the number of places where all are considered guilty until proven innocent.

Fortunately, this trend is neither inevitable nor irreversible. In fact, the high-profile public nature of these random subway searches provides freedom-loving citizens with easy and low-risk opportunities to "flex" their Fourth Amendment rights by refusing to be searched.

If you're carrying a bag or package into the subway, here's what you need to know and do in order to safely and intelligently "flex" your rights [keep reading]:

How dare we question the subway searches? We question because simply cranking up surveillance of citizenry rarely leads to real improvements in safety, and because those in authority are known to abuse the "randomness" of "random" searches.

Unless everyone entering the subway system were checked thoroughly with metal and explosive detectors as airline passengers are - an untenable measure in urban mass public transit - surveillance agents must rely solely on their experience, training, and personal discretion in selecting their search marks.

Police experience is valuable, no doubt, but given that hundreds or thousands or individuals pass through any given station during the day, with distractingly high peak densities during risky rush hours, police must focus on the most "suspicious-looking" people carrying packages. Presumptive suspicion, in this case, goes hand-in-hand with profiling by personal appearance and outward behavior.

Consider what happens to public cohesion and sense of place when only certain types of people are selected for random searches: like airports, New York subway stations will become grudgingly-tolerated ethnic profiling zones. In New York's case, I don't believe the actual risk reduction gained by random subway checks will outweigh the loss of civil liberties, and "civic public comfort," so to speak. To law enforcement officials, even a single averted terrorist incident will justify the measures; but at as Charlie Suisman write, consider the unease if a subway bomb goes off despite the measures.

It could easily happen. An innocent but "suspicious-looking" person carrying a backpack or parcel might be searched and detained while a not-so-suspicious-looking terrorist bomber next to them passes unhindered through the turnstiles with a rucksack full of plastique and a heart full of martyrdom.

Above all, we question because we know from our easily forgotten recent history where not questioning potentially leads. For those of you that believe that troubled times call for suspension of civil rights, remember that while our Founding Fathers wrote the constitution before 9/11, they knew firsthand what war can do.

MORE: [UPDATE] The Village Voice has a good piece today (7/28) on the subway searches, "Terror By The Numbers":

"The important thing to understand is that security that moves a threat around is useless. So if we spend billions saving New York City subways and the terrorists go into movie theaters, we have wasted billions of dollars," says Bruce Schneier, a California-based security expert. "Defending the targets is the wrong way to think, because for the terrorist it doesn't matter if he hits the subway or a nightclub or a restaurant or a supermarket or the line at the DMV to renew your driver's license or the Oklahoma City federal building."

Terrorists, however, aren't just trying to kill people. They're trying to scare them. Even if the random searches have a negligible chance of preventing a terrorist attack, they might still help to counter the terrorists' actual mission. As long as most of the public believes—even wrongly—that random searches make them safer, the searches could be a plus.

Schneier calls this "security theater." In the months after 9-11 people were afraid to fly. It was probably an irrational fear, but it was undeniable. So, Schneier says, "National Guard troops in airports with no bullets in their guns was a good idea. The psychological component is very important and shouldn't be minimized." [keep reading]

Bruce Schneier on Searching Bags on Subways
CTA Tattler: Is Chicago Next? and The Legality of Random Searches

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  Lauren at Feministe reports that Israel is considering outlawing the employment of fashion models with eating disorders in that country:

"This Sunday, a committee of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, will decide whether to proceed with a bill to compel model agencies to monitor the health and body mass index (the ratio of height to weight) of models. Models would have to undergo regular medical tests to ensure their body mass index (BMI) is 19 or above. The most serious anorexics can have a BMI as low as seven.

If the Knesset passes the bill, [Israeli photographer and model agent Adi] Barkan hopes the effect will be two-fold. First, agencies will be forced to confront a problem they have for long ignored and, second, only "healthy" models will be seen on television, in magazines and on billboards. [keep reading in Guardian UK]

This news is interesting on a number of levels, especially considering the Dove "Real Beauty" ad campaign kerfuffle of late, and the "chicken or egg" question of how super-skinny models became the look du jour in the first place. Did anorexic models become a fashion standard because they represent a more extreme 'eye-catching' version of attractively slender "normal" women, or are women seeking to look like anorexic models because the starved look was spun from whole cloth by the fashion industry - and if so, why? Chicago Tribune staffer Mary Jenkins writes (facetiously, I hope),

See, ads should be about the beautiful people. They should include the unrealistic, the ideal or the unattainable look for which so many people strive. That's why models make so much money. They are freaks -- human anomalies -- who need to be paid to get photographed so we can gawk at them.

I see "real people" all the time. I don't need "real people" to sell me things. I'm a "real person" and I don't want to see me on the side of a bus -- and trust me, in my underwear neither do you.

Don't get me wrong; regardless of whether you like the look of anorexic models (I don't) or believe that this standard of beauty is detrimental to women in general (I do), in our global economy Israel's ban would only drive models with eating disorders and Israel's modeling industry elsewhere. Consider how America's restrictions on stem-cell research - another contentious issue - have impacted that industry. Our laws have done little or nothing to stop stem-cell research; outside the U.S., work on embryonic cells proceeds at an unabated clip in many nations, and the industry and investment money follows. Photographer Barkan writes,

"I reckon that around 30% of models are genetically thin. A few of the rest are reducing their weight through exercise and good diet, but most of the others are reducing their weight artificially by bulimia and drugs," he says, as we sit in a Tel Aviv cafe.

It is easy to cover up the blemishes caused by a poor diet and drug abuse with makeup and image-enhancing software, but after four years, a 24-year old might look 10 years older than she really is, says Barkan. He interrupts to point to a woman walking outside. "Look at how thin she is. She's an Israeli girl, not a Russian girl. [Twenty per cent of Israel's population are of Russian descent.] That's not healthy," he says.

He admits that anorexia can have a multitude of causes but is convinced that the fashion industry can have a major effect on it. "I think 50% of the problem can be dealt with by us. If the fashion stores, food companies and other consumers of model services refuse to employ unhealthy women, that will remove one part of the motivation to reduce weight."

On the one hand, I like to think Israel is making a humane statement by sanctioning the unhealthy practice of models' starving themselves for their work - in the same way that some nations prohibit other dangerous work practices. On the other hand, you'll likely never see coal-dust-blackened faces peering from the pages of Vogue as a standard of beauty.

What's intriguing is that historically, higher weight was considered attractive and desirable for women (and adult men and children), as low body weight often indicated malnutrition or disease - conditions undesirable for fertility and childbearing. It is only in fairly recent human history (now that under-nutrition and many diseases are no longer the problem they were) "fashionable weights" for women have fluctuated wildly, with curvy voluptousness a standard in some decades, pre-pubescent slimness in others - consider the "Flapper Era," supermodel Twiggy in the 1960's, and most recently the "heroin chic" look. However, the "fatter is better" sentiment also sometimes took unhealthy extremes, with 19th Century patent medicines once purporting to make babies "fat and healthy as pigs."

Interestingly, all of the above trends (with the exception of the tight-corset era, where "wasp-sized" waists served to accentuate the hourglass silhouette of large bosoms and hips) the current vogue of large augmented breasts (and lips, to some extent) paired with super-skinny hips and waists has only become desirable or possible in the age of weight-loss drugs and plastic surgery; in nature, the two states (a "starved" body with "obese" breasts) rarely if ever co-exist. Perhaps what we're collectively losing touch with most is our sense of reality; but if so, it likely isn't restricted solely to the realm of beauty.

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• The controversial art of tattooing swine: Wim Delvoye, along with three other artists, ink pigs on Delvoye's Chinese farm -

  While the tattoos themselves do not contain specific messages, Delvoye says that, as pigs grow in size, the tattoos stretch and fade, a visual reminder of human illusions and wishes that have faded. He told ThatsChina.net: "Tattooing somehow expresses a lot of heavy wishes, like Jesus Christ, or liberty,[...] or you're happy because you're in love; big events in life, big ideas in life, big ambitions, big wishes, projections...all these things are very human, they're human wishes and projections, and to put them on a pig, makes these wishes, these desires, so ridiculous."

  [Needled.com]
• Caesar, Reuben, and Buffalo: American food folklore and culinary history
• How to salvage interesting gadgets, components and subsystems from old electronic devices, and reduce clutter in landfills, too. Judging from the voltages some of these devices use, I'd add "possible electrocution of the inexperienced" to the above.
• Kelo watching: Tim Sandefur on why "Californians [are] Not Safe From Eminent Domain" -

  The court [in the recent Kelo v. City of New London, CT SCOTUS decision] held that although the Fifth Amendment only allows states to condemn property for "public use,' this only means that a condemnation has to "benefit the public' in some way.
  
  Whenever the Legislature decides that a new shopping center would "benefit the public,' therefore, it can bulldoze your home or business. California law, however, only allows the condemnation of "blighted' property, and this is why the bureaucrats who use eminent domain throughout the state contend that the court's decision doesn't affect us.
  
  But this is just lawyerly hair- splitting. Check out what the state considers to be blight: "incompatible adjacent or nearby uses of land parcels that hinder economic activity' is one of the legal factors. If a barber shop next to a bookstore is "hindering economic activity' - whatever that means - then the bureaucrats can consider the land blighted.
  
  Here's another factor: "small and irregularly shaped lots under multiple ownership that are vacant or underutilized." Underutilized in whose opinion? The bureaucrats, of course. [keep reading in the Whittier Daily News]

  I'd hazard a guess California's "protective" laws against Kelo-type property seizures may be (now or in the future) similar to other states', so property owners would do well to read the fine print of their state laws. UPDATE: Ed Brayton follows up with a post on Michigan's similar loopholes.

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  Positive Liberty has transformed into a group blog, with Jason Kuznicki sharing space with the likes of Timothy Sandefur (Freespace), Ed Brayton (Dispatches from the Culture Wars) and Jonathan Rowe. I've really enjoyed reading their respective individual blogs for some time, so this collaboration is a very exciting development. If you crave smart, insightful posts with an emphasis on intellectual freedom and preserving America's civil liberties, be sure to check it out.

Heck - just bookmark it.

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  Does anyone in town (or out of town, for that matter) happen to know what movie is currently shooting at the Chicago Armory at 53rd and Cottage Grove? There are several nice, lavish trailers and over a dozen crew and equipment trucks, so it looks big-budget. I checked out the City of Chicago Film Office page, but no details on that specific locale (probably for good reason).

UDPATE: Thanks to reader Matt, who tells us it's likely the new Vince Vaughn romantic comedy, "The Break Up." Today, I also spotted three rather old London-style double-decker buses parked along the Cottage Grove shooting location.

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  This morning, the Trib's screechy headline read "Nomination Vexes Women, Liberals": an irritating, if succinct way to describe the predicted frustration felt by many at John Roberts' SCOTUS nomination. Frankly, I'm less vexed by Roberts' nomination - I'm entirely un-surprised - than by President Bush's unctuous call for "civility" (read: silencing of dissenting opinion) during the confirmation process. When a speaker uses a keyword like "civility" two or three (or was it four, counting "civil"?) times in a short speech, you know there's some serious spinning underway.

Of course, all these calls for a smooth, unruffled "pass" for John Roberts' confirmation hearken back to the failed 1987 nomination of Robert Bork - one of the few SCOTUS nominee rejections in decades. I wasn't observing the details of political news quite so closely back in my teens, but I remember feeling a profound sense of relief at his non-confirmation.

Ed at Dispatches from the Culture Wars has an excellent, timely post today, at first glance a point-for-point response to another blogger's reaction to Ed's "Robert Bork and the Martyr Myth" posting from July 11th. However, it's crucial to reexamine the two-decades old Bork affair today, as Roberts faces his own Supreme Court confirmation. Why? Because Judge Robert Bork's views, unpleasant and antithetical as they were to fundamental American civil liberties, were in plain view. Roberts', for better or worse, are generally not.

Ed writes:

They [Supreme Court nominees] are asking to be given a lifetime appointment to the nation's highest court where their decisions will have more of an impact on our lives and our liberty than virtually any other body in the world. Our liberty is in their hands and they have an obligation to tell us what they intend to do with it before we give that power to them. I don't want to hear that the nominee is kind, decent, trustworthy, thrifty and brave. I want to hear what they would do with their almost unbridled power to interpret the Constitution because that document is the backbone of American liberty. [keep reading]

Bork wrote openly and widely about his beliefs, and did not veil his intentions behind a polished veneer of "civility" and the All-American success story. Unlike Bork, Roberts is a relatively young jurist, and one with little precedent history with which the Senate may judge his future actions. Roberts is, in essence, a "black box" Supreme.

If anything, the Senate needs to probe, prod, question and grill this nominee even more than Robert Bork - because this judge of relatively unknown public quantity stands to influence all American's lives - all our lives - for potentially two full generations.

Bork was not a martyr on the liberal altar; the Senate did what they were supposed to do in 1987. I agree with Ed: the Senators did not reject Bork on a whim, but rather, after a long and contentious partisan ideological scuffle, had the cautious forethought to vet (and wisely reject) a pernicious Supreme Court candidate before giving him or her a lifetime key to the ultimate check in our "checks and balances," the final bulwark of the Constitutional rule of law.

It's about informed consent: confirming a Supreme Court justice is akin to our nation getting a tattoo. They can be removed, but only at great pain and expense - so usually you're stuck with them until death do you part.

We, the People, only know Roberts by the company he keeps and the organizations that support him. That said, I honestly can't say I feel even moderately comfortable with a Supreme Court nominee that has Operation Rescue's enthusiastic support:

President George W. Bush has chosen John G. Roberts to succeed Sandra Day O’Connor to the US Supreme Court. Operation Rescue supports this selection. Roberts has shown strong conservative credentials with indications that he will not uphold Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that decriminalized abortion. Roberts coauthored a 1990 legal brief that stated, “The court’s conclusion in Roe that there is a fundamental right to an abortion … finds no support in the text, structure or history of the Constitution.” “A culture of life can never be built as long as Roe v. Wade is the law of the land,” said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman.

I don't believe for a moment that Roberts will be "Borked" in 2005 America. But we should look closely, very closely, at the direction of the Supreme Court's new "swing vote." If what is meant by "civility" is in actuality "silence," then to Hades with "civility." Senators on both sides of the aisle, please look closely under the hood and kick the tires - then check the exhaust emissions. After all, whoever's in that garage is in for life.

[MORE: Slightly off topic, but if you're looking to read some thoroughly odd stuff have a peek at http://www.tldm.org/news6/homosexuality13.htm, a website where a self-proclaimed prophet/Robert Bork fan club member from Bayside, New York quotes the (mainly anti-gay) revelations Jesus and Mary (and the Saints, oh my!) personally gave her between 1968 to 1995. For emphasis, these "new teachings of Jesus and Mary" are interspersed with Robert Bork quotes and photos.]

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• French food slang:

  "Go ahead, tall unhooker of sausages!" (Va donc, grand dépendeur d'andouilles!) means, "Go ahead, you big lug!" (The guy who unhooks the andouilles from the ceiling must be very tall and not very smart)...and "I could eat a parish priest rubbed with garlic" (Je pourrais manger un curé frotté d'ail) means "I could eat a horse."

  Come to think of it, "Je pourrais manger un curé frotté d'ail" actually rap-rhymes in French - sort of. Want fava beans and a nice Chianti with that?
• Dispatches from the Culture Wars reports on recent "takings" abuses in the wake of Kelo v. New London. MORE: The Castle Coalition's "Public Power, Private Gain"
• Sneaky, sneaky:

  
  
  Beginning [today], Illinois state police have a new way to catch speeders. State troopers will be dressed as construction workers in construction zones, and when a speeding car goes by, they will radio ahead to a waiting patrol car. Those caught going over the posted 45 mph speed limit will face a $375 fine. [NBC5 Chicago, and CBS2 Chicago]

• Heavy poaching of elephants for tusk ivory may be the reason why scientists are seeing more elephants with the "tuskless" gene [via Boing Boing]
• Help stop the menace of rampant burger abuse! [a spot-on parody from Drug WarRant] On a side note, Drug WarRant's Pete Guither is in town for his production of The Living Canvas:

  Theatre. Art. Movement. This is photography made flesh; the body as you've never seen it before. Pete Guither and his performers present the texture of movement with the extraordinary expressiveness of the unclothed human form. Images and patterns projected onto the actors create scenes that are alternately beautiful, disturbing, hilarious, and astonishing.

• Tigers and Strawberries' witty take on [human] meat eaters who are troubled by the fact meat comes from animals [>> US Food Policy blog, who also has an interesting post on "Cultured (lab-grown) Meat" >> Rebecca's Pocket]
• An awesome collection of blues classics for download, on www.livinblues.com [via Totally Fuzzy]

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  What would you do if you found this lovely creature under your bed, in your basement bedroom? He/she was a 6-foot-long, 3-inch-thick "garden snake" my better half's brother found a few nights ago while cleaning his room in Virginia. Snakie apparently wandered in through a small hole in the basement window siding in the laundry room. Bravely, bro-in-law's dad picked up the otherwise harmless (!) snake using only barbecue gloves and took it back outside.

We jest that it's all the horse manure in their backyard garden (which is lovely and verdant as can be) that makes the garden snakes grow so luxuriantly.

Come to think of it, Snakie was probably hours or minutes away from being found in the bed, rather than under it...and I've stayed in that room as a guest.

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  Today's Random Ten is a sugary, spacey blend of techno treats and retro faves, the sole exception being John Hiatt's bouncily ascerbic screw-the-mass-media-overload Luddite anthem from his 1995 CD Walk On, "Shredding the Document." It's ten years old, but lyrically as timely as ever.

1. John Hiatt - "Shredding the Document"
2. Armand van Helden feat. Spaldi - "Hear My Name"
3. S-Express - "Theme from S-Express (ViperXXL remix)"
4. Joan Jett and the Blackhearts - "I Love Playin' With Fire (Live in NYC 1982)"
5. Coldplay - "White Shadows"
6. Oakenfold - "Starry-Eyed Surprise": this one was featured as the backing track to a soft-drink commercial I saw recently, where volumes of glittering CGI bubbles rise from aluminum cans to encircle iPodded, rollerblading youngsters with clouds of carbonated joy. I suppose it's telling I remembered the song, but not which cola it was shilling.
7. The Egg - "Wall (Mylo remix)"
8. Donald Fagen - "New Frontier"
9. Air - "La Femme d'Argent"
10. Fine Young Cannibals - "Johnny Come Home"

Back when The Fine Young Cannibals and Donald Fagen were riding the charts, I couldn't stand their music. Every time "She Drives Me Crazy" came on the radio or MTV, I wanted to smash the TV with a baseball bat scream. Now, hearing Roland Gift's voice or Fagen's jazzy Steely Dan-style grooves don't recall teeth-grinding teenage radio malaise, but instead, pleasant summery recollections. What gives? I'll chalk it up as dementia praecox one of the nicer aspects of getting older.

However, just shoot me if I ever look back on Orange Alerts, the War on Terror, or Dubya Days with dumbfounded nostalgic glee. Let's hope that twenty years down the line, we won't have good reason to. Until then, keep the Space Pop coming, and have a great weekend.

UPDATE: that Oakenfold tune was selling Diet Croak™.

---

  This morning on my bus ride in to work, I saw several fire engines, police cars - and two or three news vehicles with antenna masts hoisted high - around the Chicago Police headquarters on South Michigan Avenue. Apparently someone sent an envelope containing a "white powder" to an undisclosed recipient at the facility, forcing a lockdown while hazmat crews scrambled to the scene:

(CBS) CHICAGO A criminal investigation is being launched into a threatening letter sent to Chicago Police Headquarters containing a white powdery substance.

The building was closed this morning as hazmat crews investigated the mysterious substance. No one was allowed in or out of the building at 3510 S. Michigan Ave, and all elevators and stairways were shut down. In a news conference held after the building was reopened, Fire Chief Mike Fox said the substance was “not harmful.”

A police officer opened a threatening letter with the unusual substance on the fifth floor and notified others. The letter had already been processed in the ground floor mailroom and sent upstairs to the same floor where Supt. Phil Cline’s office is located.

Between this and the false bomb warnings on the CTA "L" train recently, I'm starting to feel like I'm back at Salmon River Central School in Ft. Covington, NY, where (in the early 1980's) at least a couple of times a year, some meshuggener kid called in a bomb scare forcing evacuation of the entire school complex. Those were the days.

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• This case from France lends new meaning to the term "frivolous lawsuit"- the UK Guardian reports that five cleaning ladies who organized a carpool to transport them to their jobs in Luxembourg are being sued by a bus company who claims using their cars constitutes "unfair competition":

  The women, who live in Moselle and work five days a week at EU offices in Luxembourg, are being taken to court by Transports Schiocchet Excursions, which runs a service along the route. It wants the women to be fined and their cars confiscated. Two years ago a business tribunal threw out the company's case. It is now pursuing the women in a higher court, claiming that their action has cost it €2m (£1.4m). The women explained that for many years cleaners used the TSE line for the 40-minute ride across the border, which cost them €110 (£76) a month.
  
  "Using our cars is quicker and at least twice as cheap. And on the bus we didn't have the right to eat or even to speak," said Martine Bourguignon. Odette Friedmann added: "In the evening instead of coming to get us at 9.30pm the bus would arrive at 10.30pm. If you made any comment to the driver you'd get a mouthful of abuse." [read full article, via Overlawyered, or at Liberation.fr en Francais]

  Besides being assholery of the finest sort, I don't see how a few years' worth of bus rides (at €110 a month per person) adds up to €2 million in losses for a bus company. Another thought: does TSE honestly consider these cleaning ladies a "deep pockets" entity?
• Frank Herbert's classic Düne, in Hungarian (.rtf Rich Text File, requires Word or similar app to open)
• Homebrewers and Creative Commons fans, try cooking up a batch of Vores Øl, the Danish "open source" beer with guarana, whose "stimulating effect nicely balances the drowsiness that is associated with beer." *Burp*
• Explore real Italian cuisine at Cucina Italiana online World Edition
• Listen: Sisters by Mistake, an Estonian all-girl band
• Better late than never: I've recently discovered the joys of podcasting - listening, that is - after hearing about Chicago's outrageous Yeast Radio and Feast of Fools shows. If you're up for unexpurgated, raunchy, delightfully offensive and downright hilarious homemade radio shows (read more in the article "Poddy Mouth," featured in the Chicago Tribune Red Eye), fire up your mp3 player and enjoy. At last - another use for my trusty Rio S10, and another reason for people to look at me cross-eyed on the "L" when I laugh to myself as I listen. [Definitely NSFW]

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• "There's no Christmas like a home Christmas...": Suzette tips us to this delightful New Jersey holiday ornament, styled to look just like Taylor® Ham and cheese on a hard roll. Mmm.
• So this is what people do in Alaska in their spare time.
• Something about this sports story struck me as familiar - and then I realized, "Yes! Park Myung-hwan is the second coming of Cabbage Head!"

  SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- South Korea's love for cabbage - the key ingredient in its national dish, kimchi - apparently doesn't extend to the baseball field. The Korea Baseball Organization ruled that wearing cabbage leaves inside a baseball cap constitutes as an "alien material" that may disrupt a game, the organization said in a statement.
  
  The decision came after Doosan Bears pitcher Park Myung-hwan's cap fell off twice in a game last Sunday, revealing frozen cabbage leaves. He was using the vegetables to keep his head cool and no measures were taken at the time. "What will we do if another team argues that because the cabbage leaf fell just as the pitcher was pitching, the batter got confused?" league rules committee chair Heo Koo-youn said, according to South Korea's Yonhap News Agency.

  We all know how distracting cabbage on a ballfield can be. Make Buddy Cole Slaw, not war?
• Scientific American: researchers find a strange link between Parkinson's disease treatment and compulsive gambling
• We've seen them in nearly every science-fiction movie, and the buzz is on the military's new frontier of directed-energy "ray gun" weapons:

  For years, the U.S. military has explored a new kind of firepower that is instantaneous, precise and almost inexhaustible: beams of electromagnetic energy. "Directed-energy" pulses can be throttled up or down depending on the situation, much like the phasers on Star Trek could be set to kill or merely stun. Such weapons are now nearing fruition.
  
  ...[t]he hallmark of all directed-energy weapons is that the target - whether a human or a mechanical object - has no chance to avoid the shot because it moves at the speed of light. At some frequencies, it can penetrate walls.
  ...
  A separate branch of directed-energy research involves bigger, badder beams: lasers that could obliterate targets tens of miles away from ships or planes. Such a strike would be so precise that, as some designers put it at a recent conference here, the military could plausibly deny responsibility. [keep reading article in WIRED]

• A page with links to currently available NPR podcasts
• According to today's released results of a recent Salary.com and AOL survey, while both male and female American workers waste about 2 hours per day on non-work-related activites (*cough cough*), bosses tend to incorrectly assume that female employees waste more time than men. [via feministe]
• There's something inexplicably creepy about Bobby Neel Adams' "age maps" portrait series, where two monochrome images of an individual (one as a child, and one as an adult) are aligned along a "tear axis" to produce a surreal, time-shifted composite. [via Boing Boing]
• A video retrospective of the long-lost late 1970's-early 1980's music genre, Yacht Rock [Quicktime movie, via Panopticist]

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• Begging to Differ points us to this exemplary Instapundit post, containing a collection of live blog accounts from the London terror attacks: it's an example of how news dissemination will never be the same again.
• Today is not an easy day to be a public transit commuter, anywhere. We've some friends living in southwest London - who are thankfully safe, although they are transit riders. Chicago, like most major cities, has reported increased security in its public transit system starting today; but I didn't notice any increased presence yet this morning. I'll report on what I see tonight on the ride home. [MORE: CTA Security tips for bus and rail, CTA Tattler, ChicagoIST, and Gapers Block on the news]
• Browse hundreds of newpaper front pages from around the U.S. and the world at a glance at the Newseum
• This news story makes me think of a Philip K. Dick novel:

  "Secure optical data storage could soon literally be at your fingertips thanks to work being carried out in Japan. Yoshio Hayasaki and his colleagues have discovered that data can be written into a human fingernail by irradiating it with femtosecond laser pulses. Capacities are said to be up to 5 mega bits and the stored data lasts for 6 months - the length of time it takes a fingernail to be completely replaced." [Optics.org, via SlashDot]

  Optics.org quotes the inventor,

  "I don't like carrying around a large number of cards, money and papers," Hayasaki from Tokushima University told Optics.org. "I think that a key application will be personal authentication. Data stored in a fingernail can be used with biometrics, such as fingerprint authentication and intravenous authentication of the finger."
  ...
  Although the initial experiments have concentrated on small pieces of nail, the team is now developing a system that can write data to a fingernail which is still attached to a finger. "We will develop a femtosecond laser processing system that can record the data at the desired points with compensation for the movement of a finger," said Hayasaki.

  So much valuable information, all on a finger! I can think of a few ugly fraud scenarios, mainly involving bolt and cigar cutters.
• BoingBoing has a post today on Chicago's police spycams, which now not only watch, but listen. I saw one up close and personal for the first time last weekend, mounted on a pole near the Morse Red Line "L" stop: it looked like a little box-shaped cop-on-a-stick.
• Burned a CD/DVD-ROM, but no protective case to transport it? Try my quick-and-dirty "fishwrap" method. All you need is an ordinary letter-size sheet of paper:
  1. Lay the disc face-down on the center of the sheet.
  2. Fold the lower right corner upward diagonally over the disc (aiming across the center of the disc), the press the fold down.
  3. Turn the packet clockwise 90 degrees, and repeat the fold using the next corner.
  4. Repeat with the remaining two corners, and you now have a neatly-wrapped square packet that will protect your disc from scratches and fingerprints until you locate a proper storage binder or jewelcase.

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• If you've ever wanted to nuke farkleberries off your monitor, be my guest. [via Totally Fuzzy]
• File under "guilt inducement": have you been a good friend, or a naughty friend? WIRED magazine reports on The Social Fabric, a new prototype avatar-based graphic program that shows well you've been keeping in 'meatspace' touch.

  The Social Fabric features a display of avatars on a mobile device's screen, representing individuals in a group of friends or acquaintances. The avatars use body language to show how recently you've contacted each person: Regularly contacted friends appear alert and look directly at you. Less frequent contacts might slouch and turn to the side, and infrequent contacts could have their backs turned.
  
  "I wanted to capture the possible effect this would have and make us more aware of our actions and inactions in our social lives," said [creator So] Blyth. "Ideally, it (could) elevate our consciousness with regard to managing our social lives. It makes apparent, subtly, through the visualization, a negative trend or a positive trend. So we become more aware and see the repercussions of not nurturing our relationships."

  Also, another program called PlaceSite promises to help isolated café WiFi-ists get in touch with fellow caffeinators, using a Friendster™-like "buddy icon" system unique to each physical location.
• If you've ever wanted to create those fascinating computer "photo-mosaic" images that combine hundreds (even thousands) of smaller full digital images into a single large image, you'll love this freeware program: AndreaMosaic produces impressive results with only a little tweaking, and comes with helpful online user tutorials and documentation. Once you create an image library for the program to draw images from, basically all you need do is specify the main image to process, and the size, resolution and number of tiles to include in the finished mosaic. You can see an example of the end results here - I used Mike Dringenberg's 1990's "Still Life With Cats" painting from the Sandman series as the base image, and generated a 3000 pixel mosaic from resized portions of other images found in My Pictures folder. [Click on the image to view the full 7Mb mosaic in painful detail. Warning: large file!] Tip: it's helpful to have a fairly large collection of various .jpg images stored in a folder or directory on your computer for best results.
• Wither In The Light has a great how-to post on incorporating Google Maps API code into blogs and websites, as well as a follow-up that uses that information to scope out what's really going on in Area 51.
• Turn your Doberman into a poodle [via MeFi]
• According to Slashdot, the city of Vienna [Austria] is offically adopting Linux for its municipal computers. The distribution package name is...drumroll...WIENUX!
• TechDirt confirms my contentions that yes, Google is forever.
• M. Diddy on house-arrest monitoring bracelets:

  "I hate lockdown. It's hideous," Stewart tells the August issue of the magazine, on newsstands July 12. Asked about the electronic monitoring device she must wear on her ankle - she has complained repeatedly that it irritates her skin - Stewart says she knows how to remove it.
  
  "I watched them put it on. You can figure out how to get it off," she is quoted as saying. "It's on the Internet. I looked it up." Her publicist's eyes "widened with alarm" when Stewart made the remark. The article didn't say whether Stewart claimed ever to have taken off the device.

• Quote of the day: "Seeds of nasty stories quickly sprout into confirmatory vines when the wind blows them into fields of belief already so well prepared to receive them." -- Barbara Mikkelson writing in Snopes.com

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• I want to officially go on record as saying I am quite stoked about ABC's new show this fall, Night Stalker - it's a Frank Spotnitz (X-Files) project that updates Kolchak, The Night Stalker, the 1970's TV series that originally inspired The X-Files. Who knows: it could end up being a spectacular dud the likes of Harsh Realm (which, to be fair, actually showed some promise in its final three - unaired - episodes, available on DVD), but I'm mighty curious. I think we are seeing a little backlash to the nauseating glut of "reality" television, but I it's probably the recent success of shows like Lost and the new Battlestar Galactica spurring networks to take a chance on sci-fi/'fantasy' programming again.
• What Would Hildegard von Bingen [she's a fascinating 12th century historical figure, and my favorite saint, by the way] Do?
  1. Hildegard believed music was a clear path to transcendence, and if she had access to electronic synthesizers in her day, she'd surely use one in her anchorage: "Every Nun Needs a Synthi"
  2. There's a delighful collection of her compositions available on CD, called Canticles of Ecstasy
  3. A collection of Hildegard's lyrics, in Latin with English translations:

     "O path of strength that enters all places in the high places and in the plains, and in all the depths you call and unify all.
     
     From you the clouds/smoke flows, the ether files, stones/jewels have/given their feeling/moods/qualities water streams shown their way. (given their course) and earth made green and fresh." -- O Ignis Spiritus, translated by Rupert Chapelle

     Hmm. Erich von Daniken would have likely claimed that passage was Hildegard's prescient vision of overclocked water-cooled computer CPU's.
  4. Fordham University's informative introduction to the life and works of Hildegard von Bingen
  5. Last year, while looking through an old dusty box of cassette tapes someone at work was discarding, I found a small (2" x 4") framed minature painting of Hildegard von Bingen. Strange coincidence, I think...
• Slate's Elisabeth Eaves visits Brno in the Czech Republic in "Europe on 600 cc's a Day," hometown of her favorite novelist Milan Kundera [and the birthplace of your humble host, as well]:

  First we stopped about 12 miles short of Brno in the town of Slavkov u Brna, better known to historians as Austerlitz. In December of 1805, between Austerlitz and Brno, Napoleon's army met the combined forces of Russia's Tsar Alexander and the Austrian Emperor Francis. Twenty-thousand soldiers were killed.
  
  This seems to me, now, highly relevant to the opening of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which the author explains the idea of eternal return, a notion explored by Nietzsche. Eternal return posits that every occurrence recurs an infinite number of times. (Time is infinite, but there are only a finite number of events, so eventually anything that happens will happen again.) If this "mad myth" is true, Kundera suggests, everything we do matters. If it's not true, then even the most horrific events are ephemeral and thus forgivable. Nothing matters. [keep reading]

• Science is celebrating its 125th anniversary by asking 125 Big Questions that science knows it doesn't know yet [via Boing Boing]
• [also via Boing Boing] A Quicktime video of two guys doing something hilariously unspeakable to an auto repair shop sign. {not safe for work, but after you watch it, you can't say you wouldn't have been tempted to the same thing yourself.}

• "That fresh smell of baking buns: the mouth waters when one inhales the pleasant smell of buns either in the kitchen or outside the house and one immediately feels like tasting them. Everybody prefers these while taking coffee or tea either in the morning or in the evening. Some use them along with banana during nights. [!] People of all classes and ages consume buns. Their preparation is easy and economical. These ingredients are eggless and baked in quick time and people of any food habit can enjoy the taste."

  No offense to the Deccan Herald of Bangalore, but that recipe introduction really put a smile on my face.
• The New York Times has a story on Tuesday's announcement that a multinational consortium will build the world's first nuclear fusion reactor in France
• 'Lanta slammin':

  "Now, instead of being a second-rate city with an overpaid baseball team, antiquated infrastructure, intractable institutional racism, lousy museum, awful traffic, worsening pollution, and crunk, Atlanta ... has an Ikea." [via MonkeySARS]

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