Pre-Positioning (Dr. Laura gets blown off)

This memo to the staff at Sacramento's KBFK (NewsTalk 1530) & KSTE (Talk 650), both owned by ClearChannel Communications, dictates how station staffers are to carry out wartime coverage, and also to make sure that the new desperately panicked listeners remain loyal consumers after the panic dies down.

"Remember to ask me if regular programming should continue to run on weekends and if we have specialty shows that can't or won't talk about the war we will probably blow them off. Even Dr. Laura. Remember, no fishing shows, gardening shows. We are AT WAR."

The US and the UN

We're at odds because Bush wants to undermine the central guidelines of the UN Charter, not because the UN has fallen away from its task. Stephen Zunes offers a fairly clear rebuttal to the rhetoric in this article.

Happy Friday

Just the thing for the bitter valentine hater in you, NotSoSoft offers
Anti-Valentine E-cards

I Cover the War

At a recent press conference for the UN security council, the large reproduction of Picasso's Guernica which depicts and evokes the horror of war, was covered by a blue curtain. Irony is still dead. (the real story) - apparently ArtDaily's take on it, no longer available online, was a bit one-sided)

Big

If you need anything made into a giant airbag, go see the professionals at the Art of Air

l33t xpl41|\|d

Ever run across gibberish like the above? Hie thee to How to Speak Like a Cyber Freak.

"It's about the superior feeling you get when posting on a forum that you are the only person who knows what you've written. It's about being able to call somebody else a llama simply because you are l33t3r than they are. And most of all, it's about feeling closer to the gaming community that you know you are the worst part of."

Campaigns of Deceit

Tony Blair's government cobbled together some student work from the web, threw in a few tidbits of "intelligence," and called it a "Dossier" attesting to Iraq's efforts to decieve UN arms inspectors. They didn't provide proper citations for their sources, and implied that the report was the work of British Intelligence. A bit sad, especially for all the Iraqi's we're about to kill on such manufactured "evidence" of wrong-doing, which, even if substantiated, doesn't amount to much. The weapons programs Iraq is accused of hiding were openly supported by the West (the US and UK) during the Iran-Iraq war.

Here's the Yahoo story which links to Blair's "Dossier" and to the paper by Ibrahim al-Marashi, a student researcher in Monterey, California, from which large sections of it were lifted. Check for yourself.

The Periodic Table in Verse

Mike Stanfill has put Tom Lehrer's classic "The Elements" into a nice Flash animation. [link]

The Island of San Serife

Lost Things in the Garden of Type is a pleasant introduction by John Trantor to some of the concerns of the historian of typefaces. [Note: In keeping with its policy to earn humongous profits, Microsoft no longer offers its "web fonts" for free.]

Fun and Happy

And more than a little bit strange...

We Like The Moon - found via Dave Barry's weblog. (!)