[ from George, who has a good memory and follows these things much more closely than your host ] :
The Emory Wheel - Poet declines position in light of tragedy
Two months after his wife and son died in an apparent murder-suicide, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa has decided not to join the University's creative writing faculty.
Rush Limbaugh should have never been hired by ESPN as a commentator. His recent racist comments were pre-destined. Of course, he's blaming his critics, never going to apologize and probably only resigned because of other pressing issues. He deserves it.
* FAIR link courtesy of Aaron X
Looks interesting:
From Steven G. Fullwood's blog:
THINK AGAIN is not your usual HIV risk prevention literature. Instead of telling black men what to do to avoid catching the virus, each essay, short story and poem lays bare a glimpse into each author’s own struggles with HIV/AIDS as academicians, artists, outreach workers, and perhaps most poignantly, as same gender loving men.
THINK AGAIN hopes to help in building a community discourse or a vision around HIV risk and prevention that is uniquely cast for black men who are intimately and sexually involved with other men. Each piece is fresh, thought provoking, well written and easily accessible for the average reader. The editors of THINK AGAIN hope that the volume sparks excitement among community organization workers, critical thinkers, funders and men in the street. Cover to cover, THINK AGAIN is a collection of different, unconventional ideas about HIV and its effects on the world of MSMs.
Go read this Newsday article on the African Burial Ground in its entirety:
Ceremony Marks Return of African Remains To NYC
Additional Newsday links:
A photo gallery
A video presentation
[ From Joi Ito, Net Wunderkid ] :
So what's their hang-up? by Dave Barry
In August, I wrote a column about the National Do Not Call Registry, which allows you to go to an Internet site (www.donotcall.gov) and register your phone number. The plan is that most telemarketers would then be prohibited from calling you.
The Do Not Call Registry is wildly popular with the human public. More than 50 million households have signed up. This displeases the telemarketing industry, which believes it has a constitutional right to call people who do not want to be called. Several telemarketing groups have filed lawsuits to block the registry.
So in my August column, I printed the toll-free telephone number of one of these groups, the American Teleservices Association. My thinking was: Hey, if the ATA feels its members have a constitutional right to call you, then surely the ATA feels that you have an equally constitutional right to call the ATA.
Well.
It turned out that a lot of you were eager to call up the telemarketing industry. Thousands and thousands of you called the ATA. I found out about this when I saw an article in a direct-marketing newspaper, the DM News, which quoted the executive director of the ATA, Tim Searcy. Here's an excerpt from the article:
''The ATA received no warning about the article from Barry or anyone connected with him,'' Searcy said. ``. . . the Barry column has had harmful consequences for the ATA. An ATA staffer has spent about five hours a day for the past six days monitoring the voice mail and clearing out messages.''
That's correct: The ATA received NO WARNING that it was going to get unwanted calls! Not only that, but these unwanted calls were an INCONVENIENCE for the ATA, and WASTED THE ATA'S TIME!
I just hope nobody interrupted the ATA's dinner.
Think Secret - iPod update: Peripherals and Special Edition
Last month's Apple Expo in Paris came and went without any announcement of iPod peripherals, a rumor that had been circulating the web in recent months as well as echoed by one Think Secret source.
What happened? One source explains that Apple is ironing out some issues with the next update to the iPod firmware, iPod Software 2.1. As soon as that update is ready, the company will reportedly announce the new peripherals. While Apple had indeed hoped to release the accessories in Paris, the software issues made such a release impossible. Separately, another source says that iPod recording is still coming, but is being held up due to a software issue -- likely connected to the iPod Software 2.1 delay.
[ ... ]
"iPod recording?!" I would jump at the chance to buy a recordable iPod. Forget about a powerbook or new desktop. I've been waiting for one for nearly two years. I'm somewhat regretting earlier portable music purchases. Hell, I'm already feenin' for iPod accessories.
AppleInsider | Sources: Apple Ready to Roll with iTunes for Windows
Continuing its aggressive strides in the music industry, Apple's progress in the iTunes for Windows forum has reportedly jumped ahead of schedule.
Company CEO, Steve Jobs, has publicly advocated a release by year's end, though sources in the recording industry are citing a sooner than expected time frame. Furthermore, anonymous reports claim that active online functionality of the Windows store was in-place as of this past weekend.
With the final pieces of engineering in place, the decision to officially launch the service now lays in the hands of Apple Marketing. An announcement could come as early as next week, sources said, citing a date relevant to Apple's fourth quarter fiscal results statement, which will be announced after the close of the market on October 15th.
Mac OS X has evolved. The fourth major release in just three years, Panther offers breakthroughs in innovation, ease of use and reliability that won't be seen in other operating systems for years, if ever.
OK, I think I'll be in the SoHo store on the 24th to scope the new OS and see about give-aways, posters and such. If you plan to be there, lemmeno.
The File-Sharing Debates By David Pogue
Last week in this space, I wondered why the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and movie studios get so worked up about online file swapping, when public libraries distribute their works freely without a penny of compensation.
As usual, some of this column's readers responded thoughtfully and with authority; I thought I'd share three of those reactions with you this week.
When I was a Publishing Certificate student, and extremely interested in electronic books, I predicted books would be the next cultural/information item lent to the masses on a regular basis. I'm disappointed that ebooks have fallen on hard times. I hope to produce my own electronic content later this year or early next year.
MacNN: Apple to launch iTunes for Windows next week
Apple is expected next week to debut iTunes for Windows and a Windows-compatible version of its online music service at an event scheduled for next Thursday (October 16) at San Francisco's Moscone West convention hall, according to AppleInsider and CNET's News.com. "The year's biggest music story is about to get even bigger," Apple said in an invitation to journalists. Apple is expected to launch the long-awaited Windows version of the iTunes Music Store at the event, according to Wall Street brokerage Needham.
[ via Rob McNair-Huff's Mac Net Journal and related somewhat to George's and Jonno's podwhacking posts ] :
A Smart Playlist is a song list in Apple's iTunes application which is updated automatically depending [on] a set of rules.
* this entry was stuck in "draft" mode for some time.
Cute, mindless and wishful thinking:
The Mac Observer - Mac User-Created Movie Explores Colored Flat-Panel iMacs
Ever wonder if flat panel iMacs will come in colors like the original gumdrop? Ever wonder what a commercial for colored flat-panel iMacs would look like? No? Well I spend way too much time thinking about such things. Inspired by the many talented designers at Apple and the music of Living Color, here then is my answer to a question that has nagged me since January 2002, when the machine was originally released. Maybe now I can free up some brain space for more important questions such as why Little Orphan Orange's parents abandoned her. -- George Masters
1. Who are the Central Park 5?
A. Five Black and Latino teens wrongfully convicted of raping a white investment banker in a highly contentious case wrought with racial overtones. They are Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Kharey Wise. In actuality, there were over a dozen boys questioned and implicated, some of them plead to lesser charges, and many -- including the supposed ringleader, Steven Lopez -- were not charged with the attack on the jogger.
2. Who is the Central Park Jogger?
A. After more than a decade, Trisha Meili came forward as the Central Park jogger. While most of mainstream media would not reveal her name, she was known as Patricia Meili after after two local news stations (WPIX, channel 11, and WNBC, channell 4) and a couple of newspapers geared towards the African American community (The New York Amsterdam News and The Daily Challenge) published her name; the former apologized and decided to keep her anonymous, while the latter chose to publicize her name often since it was already known by many.
3. What happened on April 19, 1989?
A. Simply: Trisha Meili was raped and left for dead, and white media went wilding. So did prominent pols and personalities like Donald Trump -- his "bring back the death penalty" ad is infamous, nearly 15 years later. So are misguided, false notions of "superpredators.
4. Why all the recent fuss if this happened more than 14 years ago?
A. One name: Matias Reyes.
5. What happens now?
We will most definitely see lawsuits move forward and possibly large settlements or awards for the five young men. They have gone forward with their lives, especially Raymond Santana.
This just makes no sense:
US soldiers bulldoze farmers' crops
US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops.
The stumps of palm trees, some 70 years old, protrude from the brown earth scoured by the bulldozers beside the road at Dhuluaya, a small town 50 miles north of Baghdad. Local women were yesterday busily bundling together the branches of the uprooted orange and lemon trees and carrying then back to their homes for firewood.
Nusayef Jassim, one of 32 farmers who saw their fruit trees destroyed, said: "They told us that the resistance fighters hide in our farms, but this is not true. They didn't capture anything. They didn't find any weapons."
Other farmers said that US troops had told them, over a loudspeaker in Arabic, that the fruit groves were being bulldozed to punish the farmers for not informing on the resistance which is very active in this Sunni Muslim district.
"They made a sort of joke against us by playing jazz music while they were cutting down the trees," said one man. Ambushes of US troops have taken place around Dhuluaya. But Sheikh Hussein Ali Saleh al-Jabouri, a member of a delegation that went to the nearby US base to ask for compensation for the loss of the fruit trees, said American officers described what had happened as "a punishment of local people because 'you know who is in the resistance and do not tell us'." What the Israelis had done by way of collective punishment of Palestinians was now happening in Iraq, Sheikh Hussein added.
This may up the ante, causing even more deaths for American troops.
Will iTunes 5 debut this Thursday? I think so. Will Apple integrate WMA files into iTunes? They should. The Windows market is just too big and they currently hold the lead on portable music options, Napster 2.0 be damned.
Just wishing more and more that I had an iPod instead of a MD recorder.
"Pretty ironic, that the only Republican with a prescription drug plan is Rush Limbaugh. Actually today Rush said he would have no comment on his drug problem until he could figure out a way to blame it on the Clintons." -- Jay Leno
* from MacRumors.com:
iTunes 5 to accompany Apple music announcements Thursday? Several rumor sites have suggested this to be so. We have recently seen test builds of iTunes 5, and it does indeed appear to include WMA audio support -- even with the Mac version. The Windows version still has some outstanding bugs -- not something one would expect only days from release, although the build in question was compiled roughly one week ago -- including sometimes completing MP3 CD burns without giving an error even though the disc in question is damaged and will not play.
* via MacMinute.com:
The Mozilla Organization has released three updates -
Mozilla 1.5, the Web application suite. Improvements to MailNews and Composer, enhanced tabbed browsing,and, "the usual improved performance, stability, standards support and Web compatibility." I don't like using large, cumbersome software. See below.
Firebird 0.7, the standalone Web browser has been updated slightly. Depending on improvements, this may become my primary browser. Of course, I expect Apple will offer at least a modest upgrade to Safari, even for those of us not rushing out to buy Panther.
Thunderbird 0.3, the relatively new standalone e-mail and news client has also been updated slightly. I'll have to download this and give it a try. My .Mac account expires in about two weeks.
UPDATE: Mozilla offers the above software (and more) on CD for a just $3.95. You'll receive one year of CD updates. I'm getting one after I test drive the FireBird update for two weeks.
Reliable sources have informed Think Secret of possible announcements for Apple's upcoming "major music" event:
* iPod-compatible peripherals = will include an iPod-compatible microphone as well as an image card reader. Through the firmware update, iPod Software 2.1, users will be able to use the new accessories to record voice memos and store digital photos. I'm somewhat doubtful of the latter capability. Seems like so much work and too little hardware. Let's hope I'm wrong.
* iTunes 4.1 = will enable users to share music between Mac and Windows computers, as well as synchronize On-The-Go playlists and voice notes from an iPod. Users will also be able to use iTunes 4.1 to buy spoken-word content from Audible.com directly through the iTunes Music Store. Other updates in Version 4.1 will include the ability to drag URLs from the iTunes Music Store to other applications, and to burn large playlists on multiple CDs without interruption.
* iPod Software 2.1 = will include enhancements and improvements to the On-The-Go playlist feature, playback performance, backlight functionality and battery status indicator, as well as a better default contrast setting. The firmware update will also include a new Music Quiz game in addition to Solitaire, Brick, and Parachute. iPod Software 2.1 will require a third-generation iPod with a dock connector.
Let's see how much of this is true, and of course, other non-reported announcements.
Los Angeles Times: Apple Is Expected to Unveil Pact With Pepsi
Consumers would get free iTunes downloads with soda purchases, sources say.
OK, that sounds vaguely pornographic. Updates today to the iPod and iTunes Music have greatly exceeded my expectations. But what do you expect when Bono can make this statement regarding iCEO Steve Jobs:
From David Pogue in the New York Times online: Finishing Touches for the 'Pod
Apple Computer's technical support for the makers of accessories for its popular iPod music player has led to the creation of dozens of compatible products.
From Spymac.com:
iPod Accessories By Amy Percival
Apple has released two much anticipated new accessories for its successful line of iPods. A new microphone and speaker accessory, for US$49, allows users to record up to 670 hours of audio. Apple also released a US$99 photo storage accessory, which connects to the iPod via the bottom connector and syncs with iPhoto. The accessories work only with Apple's third generation iPods.
Apple, Audible.com, and AOL By Amy Percival
As part of a massive music-related announcement today, Steve Jobs stated that Apple has reached a multi-year exclusive deal with Audible.com to distribute more than 5000 audible books online through the iTunes Music Store. Another deal, with AOL, allows AOL's American users to use their AOL ID at the iTMS instead of a credit card number. The iTunes Music Store will also feature prominently on AOL's music site, with an iTMS purchase button beside almost every song.
Yahoo! Finance has more details on yesterday's news of free music downloads in a partnership between Apple and Pepsi:
Apple and Pepsi to Give Away 100 Million Free Songs
Apple and Pepsi-Cola North America today announced a historic promotion to legally give away 100 million free songs to Mac and Windows PC users from Apple's iTunes Music Store. Beginning February 1, 100 million winning codes will be randomly seeded in 20 ounce and 1 liter bottles of Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and Sierra Mist, and the winning codes will be redeemable for a free song from the iTunes Music Store. Winners will simply go to Apple's iTunes Music Store (www.iTunes.com), enter the code found under the bottle cap and choose any 99 cent song from the online store's vast catalog of over 400,000 songs. The Pepsi iTunes promotion will kick-off with a Super Bowl ad on February 1, 2004, and will run until March 31, 2004.
Wondering about iTunes Music store numbers? Have no fear, Mac Network News has the details:
Apple today said that over 13 million songs have been download from the iTunes Music Store in the first six months, surprassing its initial expectations. The iTunes Music Store has over 70% marketshare in online music song market. Apple's new goal is to sell 100 million songs in its first year (by end of April 2004, when the iTMS was launched) and will have over 400,000 songs and over 200 independent labels available by the end of October. Apple also noted that the iPod is the No. 1 in both unit and market share. It also debuted a new "Rock n' Roll" iPod commercial, which will begin airing tonight in the US and is now available via the Web.
Oh yeah, QuickTime and iPod software has been updated as well.
Donald has something interesting on his planet and invites you to participate:
I have a Jabber Instant Messager server that I'm testing. You can help!
I already downloaded Fire as my client of choice on his word. I'll test the system over the weekend.
My username is, of course, ronn. Feel free to subscribe to my presence and I'll do the same with you.
As one of the free giveaway gifts at the Panther Launch tonight, Apple will reportedly be giving away Panther Dog Tags.
OurBlog 2.0! a collaboration between Black gay men around the world, across the Diaspora. We are here to share experiences, thoughts and opinions in an effort to get to know each other better. There is no theme or goal other than that. There is also no particular format - make journal entries, share poetry, quotes, provide links to interesting things, etc.
NOTE: the comments feature has been closed on this entry. Check the links within for additional info.
Been meaning to post this link for some time. Especially since "Emmett Till" is usually the top keyword search on my site since I started as { a burst of light } about a year or so ago:
James L. Hicks Investigations from The Lynching of Emmett Till by Christopher Metress
According to many reporters in attendance, the judicial process had failed Emmett Till, and the real question to come out of the whole trial was whether, without federal intervention, blacks could get justice in Mississippi. For another set of dissenters, however, the trial raised a different set of questions, many of them concerned with the truths of the case. Despite the best efforts of the prosecuting attorneys, the trial seemed to hide more truths than it answered as many competing testimonies were never fully explored or cross-examined.
And they wonder why Black people won't/can't trust them!
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) today ridiculed the Republican Party for planning to place Election Day challengers at 59 voting precincts in predominantly Black neighborhoods in Kentucky. Voters there will cast ballots in the hotly contested race for governor on Tuesday, November 4, 2003.
* from Prometheus 6
I'll take the old Michael Jackson from the "Rock With You"-era any day.
Kate of Electric Venom had a great idea to lend her daily visitors to bloggers trackbacking to this post.
Say hi if you're coming from her site. (email link on the right)
* via Terrance