A lot of things came across the wire today that worry me. These include Venezuela’s massive strike that has essentially shut down its economy, paralyzed its workforce, and prevented the poor there from having a chance again.
Yemen’s demanding its missles back is also slightly problematic. What do they need tired old North Korean SCUDs for when they have the whole U.S. D.O.D. attending to their needs? Once again, I argue that Yemen, Saudia Arabia, and its friends, are not.
Then, there’s Mayor Bloomberg, who says, “Prepare for the worst”. Not for terrorism but for a mass transit strike that will completely cripple this fragile city of ours. Good ol’ Governor Pataki “doesn’t want to get involved,” which is nice of him, since he did recently get elected by a vast majority of New York City voters. And Mayor Bloomberg says the city will function, even though the traffic (complete with four-person cars, which will make the whole city look like a clown-show) will be insane. 7 million people ride the subways and buses. Surely, the city, if it can singlehandedly figure out how to deconstruct the WTC last year, can solve a transit problem during this one.

Have a bad cold, headache, tired. Won’t post this again, promise. Here is a self-promotional link of sorts — this month’s featured artist, Andy Simionato’s small Flash pieces rule (as does his ThisIsaMagazine.com) and he’s on The Site at MANOVERBOARD this month (and last).

Amazon.com (truth be told, I’m a very small time investor) has recently taken over the online ordering business of CDNOW. The latter company, started in a garage in Philadelphia (truth be told, from where I hail), was always kind of crapola — bad service and way more email announcements than any CD company should ever need in order to stay in touch with customers.
But philosophically, this is interesting. CDNOW is now Amazon, as is Target, BabiesRUs, ToysRUs, Marshall Fields, Office Depot, and a host of other smaller companies now sold through their “Apparel & Accessories” tab (including Old Navy, Land’s End, Guess, and weird company Spiegel). Take a look at the huge tabs Amazon.com has set up for these stores. It’s possible that Amazon.com will become the online shopping equivalent of Microsoft in a nice, comfy, cool sort of way. We’ll feel bad about shopping there and curse its monopolies. Or, on the other hand, perhaps Amazon.com will become THE outpost for all comparison shopping — a bright star around thousands of unique competitors, illuminating their lines and innovating the technology used to sell things at their online st ores.

TheStar.com – Latest attack on Jews brings a deafening silence This article is making the rounds right now. While the Toronto Star is a pretty weak newspaper, Ms. Dimanno makes a cogent and powerful argument about how Jews and the idea of Jews continue to be treated in the media and in world cultures. Few countries seem to care that much that a very small, very specific group continues to be targeted for destruction.

The New York Times Magazine had a great series of very questionably important articles about product design this Sunday. One of the articles that I found especially interesting is by Austin Bunn, called Not Fade Away.
Mr. Bunn, whose name is appropriate to an article about well-worn jeans, shows how the vintage jean market took shape (it was the Japanese that got it rolling) and how it has crested. He speaks with a few genuinely unique individuals who make jeans that look like you worked on the docks, in the farms, or at the factory for folks like me who work in front of a back-lit screen. Ironically, or not, the jeans pictured in this article online look way more worn (or vintaged) than they do in the printed version.

Qaeda Internet Claim Could Be Impossible to Trail I found this to be an interesting current events story in its intersection of technology, politics, and terrorism.
Two points: 1. I’ve seen very few articles explaining how Al Qaeda is able to communicate efficiently with its brothers-in-arms throughout the world. Are they really as fiercely Internet savvy as we or the government likes to think? Does any of the money that Mr. Bush authorized for the Pentagon go towards communication analysis? In pure flights of fancy, I wonder what would happen if we just pulled the plug on the Internet one day. I know this is heresy in some parts. But would that stop terrorists from their devilry? Nope. 2. I notice that journalists often put “hot” links to sites they want their readers to visit. In this article, there is a non-“hot” link to a Web site claiming responsibility for the Kenya attacks. This seems to me to be biased journalism — these folks are pure evil but why not make it easy for readers to see directly what sites journalists are talking about?

Two years ago, I volunteered to ride my bike almost 300 miles from Boston to New York City, as part of the AIDSRide. I raised a good deal of money from very, very generous friends and family and the operative hope was that, maybe, somehow I could make a little dent in the cloud storming over most of the world (and most recently Russia, where secrecy and despair have begun to ravage the population with HIV/AIDS)
Today is World AIDS Day and I signed on to dedicate this Web log today to those who are threatened with the virus. That means all of us. The statistics can be found at the link above (and thousands of other Web log participants can be found here). But in case you don’t have time, there’s this:
“According to estimates from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization (WHO), 38.6 million adults and 3.2 million children were living with HIV at the end of 2002. This is more than 50% higher that the figures projected by WHO in 1991 on the basis of the data then available.”

Here’s an album that is a must-have in these darkish days: Johnny’ Cash’s brand new American IV: The Man Comes Around.
A number of the songs are originals, like the beautiful first one entitled “The Man Comes Around,” but he does some of the most powerful covers I’ve heard, including NIN’s painful “Hurt” and the Beatles’ troubled “In My Life.” These are sad, despairing songs breathed through the dying lungs of perhaps the most truly romantic, dystopian singer “Around.”

I spend a lot of time in the car these days and I am blessed to listen to NPR while driving. I heard an excellent WNYC interview this morning with a number of Iraqis living in New York, who are supposedly going to be questioned by the FBI soon, for whatever reason. They talked about the murders and mayhem they witnessed back home, the relatives killed and left in jails for them to pick up, the utter fear that people in Iraq live with every single day.
It wasn’t so much the content of what they were saying that interested me, however; it was the tone of their voices, the slight intonations of sadness marked with ambivalence and anxiety about their country that I heard. Their voices sounded frail, even the ones who had not been back to Iraq in 30 years. I knew I had heard these voices before and it struck me that they sounded Polish — these men spoke with the same quiver in their words, the same intensity, and the same sorrowful conviction of possibility that I had heard from Polish men during the year I spent in Poland. I’m sure there are some political and cultural parallels. But probably, it’s just an aural feeling I had about their lives lived.

Okay, I warned you that this week and next might be pretty bad for posts. But it took a while to find this page, and, for all you Feiss fans, it’s quite funny: Take a look-see at this Ellen Feiss Look-a-Like contest in the Netherlands.
If you missed my original post about this Apple Switch star, just do a search for her name on this site…beep beep beep beep beep.