Good Reputation Sleeping

Under Cover of Darkness

Handover Completed Early to Thwart Attacks, Officials Say

Iraq's occupying powers formally transferred sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government on Monday -- two days earlier than expected -- to try to thwart guerrilla attacks, officials said.

Music on the National Mall

Download work_song.mov (Sanyo videophone-384k)

This week, the Smithsonian's annual Folk Life Festival gets started on the Mall in Washington. I was down here for another reason, research at the Museum of American History, but decided to stop by one soulful tent on the way back to the office.

What's the Frequency Kenneth?

Boing Boing: Who owns recordings of numbers stations?

Followed this link on Boing Boing yesterday and ended up in the dark underground of the Cold War. Cool!

Something I had no clue about, numbers stations, has quite a Third Man, late-night-radio-in-the-dark feel...the recordings are truly amazing, hard to describe if you've never heard them. Listen for yourself here, The Conet Project Recordings, and get great info here, at Simon Mason's Short Wave Espionage site. Lost and Found Sound has a great audio piece on number stations here. Ain't the Web wonderful?

The 'Other' Spiderman

About a year ago I discovered Warren Ellis through his Global Frequency series and his weblog, Die Puny Humans. Then I found Transmetropolitan. Wow.

I am about halfway through the books, which are available at Amazon, and find the stories of journalist Spider Jerusalem quite appropriate for today's confused and connected world. Ellis' Jerusalem is a next-gen member of the 4th estate - perhaps where we are all headed after blogs, phonecams, and wi-fi meshs enter the DNA of our cultural embryos. Till then we'll have to make due with Sy Hersh and the citizen journalist experiments at the BBC and OhmyNews.

In this election year, however, what we the people really need is for our talking heads to be less like Dan Rather and and more like Spider Jerusalem.

The 62 Mile High Club

BBC NEWS | Private craft makes space history

"SpaceShipOne has rocketed into the history books to become the first private manned spacecraft to fly to the edge of space and back."

In spite being drowned out by yet another bloody day in the on-going "war on terror", the significance of this event should not be over looked.

This is huge.

And while we are still fighting over the rules governing cyberspace, imagine where we are headed when companies start launching their own expeditions to the Moon and Mars in a couple of years, claiming land not for a nation but for their shareholders! This event, more than anything else, may get NASA truly back in the game or force them permanently to the sidelines.

Dining In

I find myself, more and more, awaiting the Wednesday New York Times with a rapt anticipation usually reserved for Sunday's always excellent edition. Why? For the food of course! Every week there is something to inspire, amaze, teach, and tempt the taste buds. And it always looks so good to see a big 6 column photo! This week its crab cakes!

Hot and Bothered

...you know your a geek when you start lusting after a limited edition motherboard and its packaging.

The Art of Torture

Torture Incarnate, and Propped on a Pedestal

"ICONS live their own lives. Of all the photographs of American soldiers tormenting Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison, one alone has become the icon of the abuse.

The image appears in mock advertisements in New York, in paintings in San Francisco, on murals in Tehran and on mannequins in Baghdad. It shows no dogs, no dead, no leash, no face, no nakedness, no pileup, no thumbs-up. It is the picture of a hooded prisoner standing on a box, electrodes attached to his outstretched arms." ~ Sarah Boxer/The New York Times

Contractors

This American Life | I'm From the Private Sector and I'm Here to Help.

"Civilian contractors make up a huge part of the American occupation of Iraq. They were interrogating prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Twenty thousand of them are private guns-for-hire doing security work. And they've been getting killed. This American Life Contributing Editor Nancy Updike recently spent three weeks with several contractors, talking to them about what they do, how they view the situation on the ground, and why in the world they volunteered for jobs in the middle of a war zone."

Great audio report, insight into another aspect of this confusing and very different kind of war.
It should be available here in RealAudio June 7.