Radio Australia/Pacific Beat: "An American zoologist is returning to rural Papua New Guinea to videotape local customs, after an overwhelming response to a similar expedition last year. Mark Wanner, a zoological manager at the St Louis Zoo, last year developed a school curriculum on world cultures, using Inuit from Alaska, the Masai of Kenya, and Australian Aborigines." Zoologist?!? Of course, of course, science should be -- as it was of old -- more interdisciplinary, with physicists doing geology and naturalists studying the stars. But still, can't we at least refer to Mr Wanner, despite his specialty, as at least a temporary anthropologist?

NY Times: "In another study, just completed, the researchers found that people who were told that they loved asparagus as children were much more drawn to that slender delicacy than those whose memories were left alone."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/31/health/psychology/31psyc

CHEF DE L'ETAT , PRESIDENT DU F.U.N.K.

The King of Cambodia has a web site:

http://www.norodomsihanouk.info/

Check out esp. the royal messages, including, as reported by The
Economist, a recent failed online attempt to abdicate the throne. O
to read French now ...

[email fragment] Yeah, the Warhol book was the one by Koestenbaum. It was quite stylish/stylized, but I got the feeling that it (and the series) are kind of designed to be read by people who are already familiar with the subjects' conventional bios. The strange thing is, most of what I previously knew about Warhol came from this article we ran in [the magazine] a few years back, about the depth of his oft-overlooked religious faith and practice -- the daily masses, the work in soup kitchens, etc. So I was familiar with Andy the Closet Catholic, and now, thanks to the latest bio, with Andy the Supergay Filmmaker (the only graphics in the book were 1 ballpoint drawing and a half-dozen black and white stills from "Empire" and "Blow-Job" and "Haircut No. 1"). But the central field of vision's still somewhat a blur.

The latest from Moscow: the magazine Novy Ochevidets, a New Yorker clone (though the editors apparently deny it, with a wink). [GO]


[via aldaily.com]

More thrilling moments from Viking lore, from Njal's Saga, Chapter 102: THE WEDDING OF HAUSKULD, THE PRIEST OF WHITENESS

[...]
Then they go to the Court of Laws, and Njal spoke and said,
"Thee, Skapti Thorod's son and you other chiefs, I call on, and
say, that methinks our lawsuits have come into a dead lock, if we
have to follow up our suits in the Quarter Courts, and they get
so entangled that they can neither be pleaded nor ended.
Methinks, it were wiser if we had a Fifth Court, and there
pleaded those suits which cannot be brought to an end in the
Quarter Courts."
[...]

Where have you gone, Doogie Howser?



[via an ad on the front page of the Hindustan Times]

Have you heard about Newseum.org? Every night, three or four hundred newspapers worldwide upload PDFs of the next day's front page to the Web site, which makes them available for browsing and download. The "map view" feature is particularly exciting -- roll your cursor over all them dots and see what made the front page in all them places.

http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/

I've actually, though, graduated from the map view to direct downloads. I figured out how to write a script that would get my computer to download, with a single click, the PDFs for the NY Times, LA Times, USA Today, Boston Globe, Birmingham News (sweet home Alabama!), Sydney Morning Herald, Hindustan Times (Delhi), O Globo (Rio de Janeiro), El Tiempo (Bogota), El Universal (Mexico City), Toronto Globe and Mail, The Guardian (UK), El Pais (Madrid), Le Monde (Paris), and this paper from northern Germany with decent layout but a forgettable name. Then I can unplug the laptop, open them all in my PDF viewer, and read/skim/view it all.

I find the PDFs far far superior to looking at the same papers' websites -- more of each article is on the same page, and you can literally zoom in and out to read rather than having to click on a headline and be catapulted to a whole different page. And way more photo- and typo- and info-graphic possibilities.

Also, one gets to see the dizzying way in which stories -- and not just the major news stories -- bounce across the globe in different languages and layouts. One about Viagra use among young men started in Delhi, popped up the next day in one of the US papers, and two days later: Bogota.

Anyway, this has become a little obsessive, but oh well.

[via the web log newsdesigner.org]

[email fragment on South Africa's fast-dwindling opposition parties] Meanwhile, though the SOCCER party has vanished (or maybe changed into the Independent Sport Party (ISP)), many other old and new favorites plug away on -- KISS, the Pro Death-Penalty Party, the Super Party, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance, the God's People Party, and UMMA (the United Moral Movement for the Advancement of All). Below's linked the full, logo-rific list of parties local and national for the 2004 elections. [GO]