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]

Lately I've been realizing that all my favorite programs on public radio are the ones that feature hip-hop music from time to time: This American Life, Morning Becomes Eclectic, and my latest discovery, Pop Vultures. Have you heard of the latter? It's basically music-savvy people talking like teenagers about their favorite pop stars, with everything edited down so it sounds inane yet winds up being, at times, rather profound. There's also a lovely dramatic tension over the whole thing -- you can never quite tell how serious they are (which, given that it's produced by Garrison Kiellor, the king of mixing celebration and mockery, ain't so surprising). Listening to the first couple episodes, I couldn't tell whether I loved it or hated it, which probably suggests the former.

Anyhow, lis'n up: http://popvultures.publicradio.org/programs/

I'd suggest starting with the earlier episodes, which I think are, if not better, at least more alive with a sort of "hey we could do anything" spirit. It's always fun to see how a new show finds its feet.

[via the Ira Glass interview at transom.org]

[email fragment] Glad you've been hitting the Wodehouse and Theroux. For some reason reading the latter's always felt to me like a kind of guilty pleasure, only I don't feel so guilty and it isn't that pleasurable. For some reason the phrase that keeps running through my head is "A first-rate second-rate writer", which coming from me is uncharacteristically uncharitable, and is just the sort of thing he always had Naipaul saying about others in "Sir Vidia's Shadow". Anyway, what books? I've been reading some afrocuban folk tales, Pat Barker's WWI psychological novel "Regeneration", and Ha Jin's novel "Waiting". about a very boring extramarital affair. And about to start the Andy Warhol biography from the Penguin Lives series.

Radio Australia/Pacific Beat: "In less than a week, a Court sitting in New Zealand is expected to decide whether commandeering a British navy ship, sailing it to a remote deserted island then sinking it amounts to a declaration of independence. The Court of Appeal of the remote Pitcairn Island -- a British Pacific territory about half way between Australia and South America -- is being asked to decide whether seven islanders should face trial. The men are facing 96 sex charges, some of which date back to the 1960s and relate to underage girls. The public defenders acting for the men say that because the island was settled by the famous mutineers of the Bounty 214 years ago, along with their Polynesian wives, English laws don't extend to the island. But observers of international law say the court is unlikely to accept that an act of mutiny is enough to elude the long arm of English law."

An NGO I've started following and supporting a little recently is called Search for Common Ground; they focus on mediation, conflict resolution, etc. -- getting Hutus to talk to Tutsis, pro-choice activists to pro-life activists, Democrats to Republicans, Israelis to Palestinians. They also support ecumenical efforts that acknowledge the real, serious differences between religions -- and so make one a lot less queasy than the "You know, deep down, we all believe the same thing" types. Anyway, in their latest article packet was an op-ed by one of their officers, an Arab American, in the Detroit Free Press, calling Arab Americans to help step up to the plate in offering leadership in the whole obviously horrendously stalled "peace process", and also offered the following aside, which I found compelling: "What remains baffling is that topics that are off-limits for discussion in the United States get a much fuller hearing in Israel itself. Compare the diversity of critical opinions that appear in Israel's major newspapers to those in the United States -- you'd think the United States had a greater stake in defending the occupation than does Israel."

Been sampling some German pop these days on iTunes.de. Right now the only artist stepping above novelty value is Nena (of 99 Luftballons fame). Some of her more recent stuff reminds me of Julieta Venegas, my current fave-en-espanyol.

"Mortally wounded, Garfield lay in the White House for weeks. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, tried unsuccessfully to find the bullet with an induction-balance electrical device which he had designed. On September 6, Garfield was taken to the New Jersey seaside. For a few days he seemed to be recuperating, but on September 19, 1881, he died from an infection and internal hemorrhage."

http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/jg20.html

"Today, Garfield the comic strip appears in nearly 2,600 newspapers around the globe, and its readership is estimated at 260 million. If the readership number is right, then 4 percent of the world's population reads Garfield every single day."

http://slate.msn.com/id/2102299/

Discovery of the day: German country-Western music, specifically a guy called Tom Astor who, in addition to singing a mean "Country Roads Take Me Home", has a power-trucker-ballad called, no kidding, "Sturm und Drang", as well as a song for which I found the following possibly-poorly-transcribed lyric:

Fahr in die Redneck Riviera,
Marguaritas, icecream, Florida sunshine,
Cowboys, pick-up-trucks and Dosenbier,
Redneck girls, die gibt es nur hier.
nur in der Redneck Riviera.

I suppose all this shouldn't seem quite so bizarre -- after all, I come from a line of German Texans. And there's a genuine country-western classic called "Fraulein", about an American longing for his German lover, which I came to know from Townes Van Zandt's great cover, though just last week I heard a version of it in French, on a Quebec Internet radio station.

[email fragment] Books: Cormac McCarthey, "All the Pretty Horses", and another Wendell Berry novel, and "All Souls Day" by this Dutch guy Cees Nooteboom -- the latter quite good, a heartwarming novel of ideas with some wonderful descriptions of sausage dinners. I also found this book C.S. Lewis wrote in Spanish, something about a lion and a closet, which I'm reading in hopes that less pretension will equal greater comprehension. And this collection of Joan Didion essays from the 1960s.

"Therefore was one single man created first, Adam, to teach you that if anyone destroys a single soul from the children of Man, Scripture charges him as though he had destroyed the whole Universe -- and whoever rescues a single soul from the children of Man, Scripture credits him as if he had saved a whole Universe."

-- Sanhedren 4:5 of the Mishnah

[via the wonderful epilogue to Lawrence Weschler's A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers]

Perhaps the most euphonious headline ever written, from Radio Australia:

Typhoon Tingting roars through Micronesia

I just want to keep saying it over and over. Typhoon Tingting roars through Micronesia. Typhoon Tingting roars through Micronesia. Typhoon Tingting roars through Micronesia.

[email fragment] I've just taken delivery of a set of 300 or so unused European postcards, collected during the 1970s by an elderly woman from northwest Washington, D.C., and auctioned on ebay for the grand sum of $10. From this point on my location may become unclear.

Radio Australia/Pacific Beat: "Job descriptions for some members of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands may have to be re-written to include "crocodile hunter". Four locals on the main island of Guadalcanal have died recently as a result of crocodile attacks. And it seems the success of RAMSI's gun amnesty may be the reason for the increase in the numbers of man-eating crocodiles. In less than a year, RAMSI has successfully restored law-and-order and confiscated most of the high-powered weapons previously used to kill the crocs." Ah, unintended consequences. And with teeth.

Wonderful resource: bobdylan.com, full searchable lyrics, RealAudio samples of every song -- I'm kind of shocked at how useful the site is, at least for answering my questions, because a) it's corporate; b) it's for an artist who's not, as the Zulus say, of the eGeneration; and c) is famously reclusive, purposely mysterious, etc.

Though now iTunes gives the artist site a run for the money, at least when it comes to title searches and audio (I found a great Mac utility, itunesMSP that will play in order every song sample that shows up in an iTunes music store search, which eliminates much clicking).

Atlantic Monthly on the badness of campaign TV ads.

Writing systems of the world: my are there many of them

My latest Spanish reading is none other than "Naufragios", the conquistador/explorer/what-not Cabeza de Vaca's account of his shipwreck and journey overland from Florida to Mexico City. It was written sometime in the 16th century, but I seem to be understanding enough to at least follow the basic plot.

My other new project is a little herb garden on this second-floor deck we've got. It's kind of inspired by Nelson Mandela, who kept a rooftop garden during his final years in prison. He'd give the guards vegetables to win their favor. My parents weren't too happy at first when I mentioned this comparison ("What does that make us? Prison guards?") but they came around in the end ... anyway so far I've got oregano, rosemary, basil, chives, and two kinds of thyme.

Against my better instincts I watched some of the Miss Universe pageant last week. All the finalists kept making me think of praying mantises -- long and lithe and firm, triangular heads and enormous eyes. Actually, most beauty and bodybuilding contestants strike me as at least vaguely insectile.

In other news, watched Monsoon Wedding this week -- a good 'un.

The German Air Guitar Federation