Live and Let Die

From today's London Daily Express website:

By Dennis Rice

SIR Paul McCartney has been threatened that he will be the target of suicide bombers unless he abandons plans to play his first concert in Israel.

Self-styled preacher of hate Omar Bakri claimed the former Beatle’s decision to take part in the Jewish state’s 60th anniversary celebrations had made him an enemy of all Muslims.
Sources said Sir Paul was shocked but refused to be intimidated.
In an interview with Israeli media yesterday he said: “I was approached by different groups and political bodies who asked me not to come here. I refused. I do what I think and I have many friends who support Israel.”
Sir Paul, 65, should have gone to Israel with the Beatles in 1965 but they were barred by the Jewish nation’s government over fears they would corrupt young people.
Yesterday a number of websites described him as an infidel and suggested he was going to Israel only because of the reported £2.3m fee for the one-off concert.
A message posted on one website said: “Shame on you Paul McCartney for day trippin’ to apartheid Israel” and vowed never to buy his music again.
Bakri, who made his weekly Internet broadcast to fellow extremists from his home in Lebanon, where he has lived in exile since being banned from returning to Britain, said Sir Paul was “making more enemies than friends”.

Syrian-born Bakri, 48, went on: “I heard today that the pop star Paul McCartney is playing as a part of the celebrations.
“If you speak about the holocaust and its authenticity never being proved historically in the way the Jewish community portray it, people will arrest you. People will you say you should not speak like this. Yet they go and celebrate the anniversary of 60 years of what?
“Instead of supporting the people of Palestine in their suffering, McCartney is celebrating the atrocities of the occupiers. The one who is under occupation is supposed to be getting the help.
“And so I believe for Paul McCartney, what he is doing really is creating more enemies than friends.”
Explaining his comments, Bakri told the Sunday Express: “Our enemy’s friend is our enemy.
“Thus Paul McCartney is the enemy of every Muslim. We have what we call ‘sacrifice’ operatives who will not stand by while he joins in a celebration of their oppression.
“If he values his life Mr McCartney must not come to Israel. He will not be safe there. The sacrifice operatives will be waiting for him.”
Lawyer Anjem Choudary, who last week chaired a meeting in London at which extremists claimed the next 9/11-style atrocity would be in Britain, said Sir Paul had allowed himself to become a propaganda tool for Israel.
He added: “Muslims have every right to be angry at Paul McCartney. How would the world react if he wanted to have a
concert in occupied Kashmir?
“They would not allow it to happen but because it is Israel he can play. A country which, as the celebration indicates did not exist 60 years ago, only exists thanks to stealing and occupying another country’s lands.” Yesterday the comments drew condemnation from Palestinian sources and outsiders.
Omar Barghouti, of The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, described the threat as “deplorable”.
Patrick Mercer, the Conservative MP for Newark and a former Shadow Security Minister, said: “One could dismiss Bakri as a ranting extremist but history has shown that he has an ability to twist minds, so his comments should not be underestimated.
“If Sir Paul McCartney wants to play at the 60th anniversary then it is the worst form of illiberalism for Omar Bakri to restrict the artist’s freedom in this way.”
A spokesman for Sir Paul declined to comment on the threat, saying: “Paul’s Friendship First concert is about his music. Paul’s is a message of peace.”
Tickets for the concert range from £70 to £230.
Last night Sir Paul performed his first concert in the Ukraine, playing to tens of thousands in the capital Kiev.

Not trying very hard

Don't believe Hillary or Bill Clinton when they hit the campaign trail for Barack Obama between now and election day.

Hillary raised and spent nearly $235 million in her bid for the Democrat nomination and was in debt by another $20.8 million as of last May. There is no doubt in anyone's mind that she was as serious as a heart attack about being president.

If Obama wins, it could be another eight years before she gets another shot and by that time Joe Biden may be the presumptive candidate.

But if the voters relegate Obama to also-ran obscurity as they did with that Kerry guy and that Gore fellow, she gets to try it again in four years.

Does anyone really think she's given up on her dream?

Bringing home the gold

Our friend Lauri rules!

She won First Place for Best Creative Advertising Designer of all Indiana daily newspapers with circulation between 6,000 and 14,999 Friday evening in the Hoosier State Press Association Advertising Contest.

She's taken home two firsts and a third place award over the last three years, competing against papers nearly twice as large as hers.

There are no words to say how proud we are of her.

Preparing for Monday night's digital photo class

Maria's gone grocery shopping and I'm assembling a PowerPoint presentation for my class on digital photography tomorrow evening.

I used to hate PowerPoint, having sat through dozens of insanely tedious examples at school board meetings and other gatherings back when I was an education writer for The Indianapolis Star's Metro North Bureau.

Now I realize the problem wasn't with PowerPoint - it was with the unimaginative dopes who just dumped their talking points onto slides and then read them to the audience straight off of the screen.

For what it's worth, I'm using Impress, the PowerPoint clone that comes with the free OpenOffice.org office suite. I build the slides on my laptop, then burn the presentation to CD-ROM and run it from our laptop connected to a nifty Dell projector.

Tomorrow's presentation will deal with exposure, aperture, shutter speed, depth of field, stuff like that.

Our visit with Ike

What was left of Ike blew through here overnight.

We awoke to gusting west winds and a yard full of tree branches of varying sizes. There was a large limb on the patio - fortunately it missed the grill and outdoor fireplace - but coupled with the still somewhat scary wind, it kept Pete the Timid Aussie on the porch.

I finally walked him out into the yard so he could do his business. I think he was grateful.

It was gusting to about 50 mph up around the treetops and I watched one of the taller trees in the woods west of our house snap. I heard a loud crack, then moments later saw the top 20 feet or so of the tree fall and then dangle by a few splinters.

So I guess I'm finally going to have to fire up the chainsaw I bought last winter and carve the fallen limbs into logs for our outdoor fireplace. The largest deadfall I can see from the house came down exactly where I've been seeing the 6-foot Blue Racer. I expect to see him when I go out to saw the branch into firewood.

It's amazing to consider that the wind energy that made a mess of our yard was born near the Azores and trashed Haiti and Cuba, Galveston and Houston before visiting us.

It's making people miserable in Missouri and Illinois now and will doubtless dampen the spirits of our friends at the MotoGP motorcycle races in Indianapolis today.

Snake sighting

I surprised an Eastern Racer - what my Dad used to call a Blue Racer - on my first lap around the yard on my mower this afternoon.
It was near the woods on the southwest corner of our lot - the same place where I saw one a couple of months ago. Chances are, it's the same individual.
He was hauling ass for the woods when I noticed him, then he froze as I got about 20 feet away. That's their strategy, to hold still and hope they haven't been noticed. I shouted and clapped my hands and he took off again, disappearing into the woods.
I remained vigilant, but saw no more snakes.
The 25-song blues playlist was exactly the right length to get me through the lawn mowing.

The Genius of Apple

I didn't buy one of the new iPods this week - the new Touch is supremely tempting, but doesn't have nearly enough capacity for my needs - but I did install the new iTunes 8.0.

Genius is the big new feature of iTunes 8.0 and it's already having an effect on how I use my 3-year-old 60GB iPod Classic.

Once you've downloaded and installed the new version of iTunes, you activate Genius by uploading data to Apple about your music library (yeah, I had a moment of paranoia about that).

Then, every time you select a song, the Genius panel to the right shows you similar music you can buy from the iTunes Store. I suppose some people will take the bait on that one, but I haven't bought anything from the iTunes Store in months - ever since I took my online music business to Amazon.com.

But the really cool feature for me is the Genius playlists.

Select a song you like, then click on the little Genius spinning electrons logo at the bottom right of the iTunes frame and voila! - you see a 25-song playlist of similar music drawn from your own iTunes library. You can also set it to create playlists of 50, 75 or 100 songs.

Here's an example. I selected Junior Wells' Messin' With the Kid and Genius built a playlist that includes:

• Lie to Me - Jonny Lang
• Texas Flood - Stevie Ray Vaughn
• The Things I Used to Do - Stevie Ray Vaughn
• The Seventh Son - Tab Benoit
• Route 66 - Billy Branch
• Every Day I have the Blues - Professor Longhair
• Highwayman - Tinsley Ellis
• I'm the Zydeco Man - Clifton Chenier
• Going to the River - Robbie Robertson
• Shake for Me - Stevie Ray Vaughn
• Too Sick to Pray - A3
• Let's Make It - John Lee Hooker
• Mean Cheatin' Woman - Dr. John
• She's Looking Good - Canned Heat
• The Stumble - Henry Vestine
• Juke Box Mama - Sonny Landreth
• Mojo Hand - Lightnin' Hopkins
• Born in Chicago - Paul Butterfield
• Messin' With the Kid - Buddy Guy and Junior Wells
• Work Song - Paul Butterfield
• Come on in my Kitchen - Robert Johnson
• Ain't Gone n Give Up on Love - Stevie Ray Vaughn
• Tin Pan Alley - Stevie Ray Vaughn
• You got What I want - Tab Benoit

That playlist was a little heavy on Stevie Ray Vaughn, so I re-selected the Junior Wells song and tried again. Fortunately, my blues collection is deep enough - I have almost 10,000 songs in my library - that Genius came up with a whole new playlist - this time more diverse and balanced.

The new iPods can generate Genius playlists on their own, but those of us with the older models have to do it in iTunes. I don't mind that minor inconvenience. It's a great addition to an already free download.

Looks like a stormy Sunday

We awoke to sunny skies, but the outer cloud bands of Hurricane Ike are moving in. Looking out my office window, I can see low clouds moving rapidly from south to north.

There's no rain on the radar within about 300 miles, so I'll have plenty of time to mow the lawn as long as I get it done today.

A large contingent of the BMW Riders of the Mid-South, including our Jonesboro friends Charlie and Deb, rode up to Indianapolis for the MotoGP motorcycle races at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Looks like they're going to have a very wet and unpleasant ride home tomorrow and/or Monday. I considered going along, but worried that I might not have time to get back to teach my digital photography class Monday evening. I made the right decision.

The hurricane, not the president

Several Jonesboro gas station operators, notably the Kum & Go folks, jacked their prices up significantly overnight. Kum & Go was charging $4.29/gallon this morning while Conoco was charging $3.69. The Super D drugstore/gas station on Stadium Avenue had regular at $3.69 at 9 a.m., but bumped it up to $3.75 by 9:30 a.m.

I gassed about 9:20 a.m. at Sam's Club and paid $3.60, the same price Kroger was charging. By noon, Kroger had raised their price to $3.99.

A mid-afternoon check of arkansasgasprices.com showed the $4.29 being charged by Kum & Go and five other stations in Jonesboro and nearby Paragould are the highest prices reported in the entire statae. The statewide average is $3.82 and the lowest is $3.42 at Sam's Club in Fort Smith. The national average stands at $3.71. (This time last year, Arkansans were paying $2.76/gallon.)

Gov. Mike Beebe invoked emergency price controls, which presumably freezes gas prices and prevents gouging, but it remains to be seen whether the profiteers will comply.

Ten Signs You Might Be a Member of the Taliban

Got this in an email this morning from BMW motorcycle friend Rich Nathan:

10. You refine heroin for a living, but you have a moral objection to beer.
9. You own a $300 machine gun, a $5,000 rocket launcher, but you can't afford shoes.
8. You have more wives than teeth.
7. You think vests come in two styles: bullet-proof and suicide.
6. You can't think of anyone you HAVEN'T declared Jihad against.
5. You consider television dangerous, but routinely carry grenades in your robe.
4. You've never been asked, "Does this burka make my ass look big?"
3. You have yet to discover that cell phones have uses other than setting off roadside bombs.
2. A common compliment is, "I love what you've done with your cave."

And, the NUMBER ONE SIGN you might be a member of the Taliban:

1. You wipe your ass with your bare hand, but consider bacon unclean.

Thanks,Ike

Waiting in a long line at Sam's Club to buy $3.60/gallon gasoline.
Fortunately, the line moved quickly and I got to a pump after only about 18 minutes of waiting.

Never Forget

This is my nomination for the greatest newspaper front page headline of all time, although I would have liked something stronger - like Motherfuckers!

Let the Bush-haters say what they like, Osama and his band of psychopaths have been on the run ever since and there have been no more attacks on U.S. soil.

Yikes!

The apparently rare imported CD of the 1975 Lou Reed Live album is $38.99 on Amazon.com.

I just digitized my extremely clean LP version for free.

Hand me down my Phasmatodea

This is the season in Northeast Arkansas for an order of bugs commonly known as walking sticks.

I started seeing them about three or four weeks ago and they seem to have an affinity for our garage door.

When I came home from having lunch downtown with Maria today, I noticed one on the overhead door and two on the door frame.

There are more than 3,000 species of these bugs that look like a small stick or twig. On closer examination, it becomes apparent that they have four legs (Does that means it's actually not and insect, since insects have six legs?) and what looks like a pair of eyes on long stalks running parallel with a pair of antennae.

The name Phasmatodea  is derived from the Greek "phasma" meaning an apparition or phantom, and refers to the resemblance of many species to sticks or leaves.

 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The lovely Lauri points out that I mistook the front pair of legs for eyes on stalks. Doh!

Then this would be the "face" with brown eyes on either side.

Fear and Loathing in the browser wars

Like a lot of other people, I've been wondering why Google created Chrome, its new browser released earlier this month.

Tech blogger Robert X. Cringely offers the most plausible explanation so far in his blog, I, Cringely.

The short version speculates that the folks at Google - whose lifeblood is online advertising - came to the chilling realization that Microsoft could cripple them, maybe even wipe them out, by simply turning off advertising in the Internet Explorer browser.

Statistics from w3schools.com show that as of last month, Microsoft's Internet Explorer - versions 5, 6, and 7 - had about half of the marketplace:

IE7	IE6	IE5	Firefox	Mozilla Suite	Safari	Opera
26.0%	24.5%	0.1%	43.7%	0.5%	2.6%	2.1%

 

Internet Explorer 8 has been released in Beta version since those stats were compiled, but its market share is probably still negligible since only geeks (myself included) get involved with Beta versions of new software.

(I'm regretting it already because IE8 is proving to be horribly buggy. I'm bouncing back and forth between it and Chrome. Chrome is simpler and marginally faster and has yet to crash on me, but it doesn't have plug-ins and I really like having my bookmarks on Delicious.)

The Fabulous Poodles

This is one of the vinyl LPs I most wanted to rescue from oblivion by digitizing it for replay on CD and iPod and I got the job done yesterday.

Mine is a review copy that was sent to The Indianapolis News in 1978, complete with 8x10 black-and-white glossy photo, press release and poster.

I never understood why these guys didn't make it because this is a killer album. As far as I can tell, it was never released on CD. Amazon.com has two used copies of the LP for $10 and $19.99.

Seven of the 10 tracks turned up in 1995 on a kind of greatest hits CD titled His Master's Choice. It's out of print and I found one copy available on Amazon.com for $199.99.

The Fabulous Poodles released their second LP - Think Pink - in 1979 and Amazon.com has one used copy for $9.95.

All 10 of the tracks on Mirror Stars are brilliantly crafted, well-performed pop songs that I have a hard time getting out of my head. One song was used by John Entwhistle on a solo album and the whole thing has a Who-ish vibe to it.

Small wonder, since the enclosed biography from Epic Records says the leader, tony de Meur, claims the Who and Tom Waits as influences.

So now I am most certainly the only guy in Arkansas with the first Fabulous Poodles album on his iPod. How's that for a distinction?

Off to a good start

I taught my first session of the St. Bernards Senior Life Center digital photography class last night and was generally pleased with the way things went.

I think the final count was about 10 students and, as I expected, there is a wide range of photographic skill in the class, running from the woman who kept pressing the "off" button to take a picture to some folks who used to process their own film. The woman with glasses in the center of the photo is the only one with a digital SLR and she's catching on quickly.

I was able to clear up a lot of photographic mysteries in the Q&A part of the class and we ran out of time before we had a chance to really get into the Looking At Pictures part of the program. No problem. We have seven more sessions and there will be plenty of time to look at photos and discuss what's right and what's wrong with them.

I thought this might be fun and it is.

Maria came along to help and did a good job of filling in the gaps and showing some of our photo equipment to the folks in the class.

Bringing, taking, going away

I had a long-distance relationship with a woman who lived on Long Island several years ago and it sharpened my awareness of the difference in word choices between Midwesterners and people on the East Coast.

Like bring/take. New Yorkers, especially, flip the use of these words. I would say, "I will take my laptop with me when I go to the mountains," because "take" means to carry something away from the location of the speaker and "bring" means to have something in one's possession while away from where it normally belongs.

She would reverse the usage.

And then there is "going away," which I gather is the operative term for traveling, going out of town, going on vacation, etc. The first time I heard it, it sounded so mysterious and final, sorta like, "I am going to disappear."

And it's clear that New Yorkers don't understand the distinction between "garbage" and "trash." They don't realize that garbage is food waste and trash is everything else you throw away, or take away, or bring away.

I'm going to go away.

What? Another browser?

I now have four Internet browsers on my desktop computer, having installed Google's new product called Chrome. Chrome was released earlier this month and I learned about it from a podcast while driving to my eye doc appointment this morning.

It looks pretty straightfoward and simple and renders my blog OK. I'll write more after I've had time to explore it.

Speaking of Exploring things, I can report that Internet Explorer 8 is buggy as hell. It locks up tight whenever I try to access my favorites (bookmarks). Fortunately, I transferred all of my IE bookmarks to Delicious.com a week or so before I "upgraded" to IE8. The bad thing about IE upgrades is that they install on top of the previous version and, if you hate the new version you're screwed because you can't go back.

My son Steve swears by Apple's browser Safari - says it loads sites much faster than IE. I've not noticed any significant speed difference with Safari. Leo Laporte says Chrome is build on the same architecture as Safari, so maybe you should check it out, Steve.

I also have Mozilla Firefox 3 and use it occasionally, but I'm not crazy about it.

Opera is the only major browser I haven't tried and I understand Chrome has already eclipsed Opera in downloads.

I guess it's good to have choices.

What am I doing with all of these old people?

This is the 40th anniversary reunion of the Delphi (Ind.) High School Class of 1963 back in 2003.

That's me (arrow) in the middle of the back row. Do I know where to stand, or what?

My classmates tried to railroad me into coordinating the 45th anniversary reunion and I dimly recall someone being named my co-coordinator. I checked in with Tina Tyner (brown plaid, second from right in the front row) late last summer when it became clear that we were moving to Arkansas and told her I wasn't going to be able to discharge my duties because I would be living 450 miles away. I told her I might not even make it back for the reunion, much less be available for its planning and execution.

I supposed that the reunion had gone on without me, but I got a voicemail just before Labor Day weekend from the woman who I gather has inherited the job asking if I would be able to help. I left a phone-tag-style voicemail for her explaining my situation and have heard nothing more from her. I learned from another classmate that no date has been set and there are no firm plans.

I'm kind of a reunion/nostalgia junkie, having attended every class reunion (held at five-year intervals) since 1968. I even crashed the Class of 1964's reunion 11 years ago because I had a lot of friends in that class who I hadn't seen in decades.

If I didn't already have my plate full with an unsold house, a digital photo course, a long overdue visit to my granddaughter in Las Vegas and a bunch of other things, I might be tempted to offer my assistance from afar. But I don't have that luxury here in Arkansas and I'll just have to stifle that impulse.

Besides, all of those people are so damned old.