Monday, February 26, 2007

Afternoon Thread

A regulatory commission has advised the US Post Office to create a "forever stamp" that would hedge against rate increases. In other words, you can buy stamps in bulk without fear that you're going to have to buy two-cent stamps somewhere down the line.

The big question: Will this create a futures market in postal stamps?

Discuss. Or don't.

35 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hoo-rah!

Alice said...

http://www.battlefieldwithoutborders.org/

Standing There

After the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
June, 2006

Carried on radio waves,
news of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s death reached me
with unexpected force and in an unlikely place:
a Buddhist monastery.
It is a place where violence, in any form, is forbidden entrance,
and where vast internal spaces are mirrored
by the boundless natural landscape.
Nuns and monks, in simple robes, walk and work.
Radiant peacocks and peahens strut.
Students, aged six to eighteen, study in a school
that emphasizes character
and asks How can you be of service to the world?
Above it all, like guardians, massive oaks and sycamores
spread their arms.

The news arrived as I fastened my safety belt
and suddenly I felt anything but safer.
Two five hundred pound bombs, a radio voice said,
enough explosive bite in their jaws to swallow a house
and leave a house-sized crater in a date palm orchard.
Like a meteor, I thought. Sudden, suicidal, alien.

Al-Zarqawi, the disembodied voice of terrorist threats,
his actual body, broken and bloody, now a war trophy.

Who doesn’t want to see an end to terror in Iraq,
an end to exploding cars and baby carriages,
to looking for missing relatives in morgues?

I stepped out of my car.
Standing there,
I more than half expected those great trees to swoon,
the ground to turn momentarily fluid.

Days before, Rachael had told a story.
It seemed simple then.
A bug flew into my eye while I played soccer.
For a full minute,
I stumbled across the field, half-blind, frantically blinking,
trying to free the bug,
holding my big, clumsy fingers at my side.
It was hilarious.
Teammates told me ‘Just kill it,’
but I laughed and blinked
and the bug broke free.

Standing there alongside the sycamores,
I could not reconcile the two images:
on the one hand, the Fighter Falcon and its ferocious bombs
finding their target
and on the other the foolish fourteen-year old, fumbling,
finding another way.

Standing there outside the Buddhist elementary
and secondary schools,
I couldn’t help wonder which image would flower,
which image would seed our future:
the grown men in the F-16 following orders to kill
or the girl-woman, following a voice only she can hear.

Alice said...

Zapatistas to Raise Two Peace Encampments on Indigenous Territory

Subcomandante Marcos, spokesman of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), recently announced that the Sixth Commission and the EZLN will be supporting two peace encampments, one in Baja California and the other in Chiapas, on Zapatista and Cucapá territory.

The Cucupá, who live in the valley near Mexicali where the Colorado River once flowed strong into the sea, have been prohibited from fishing in their remaining native waters by the Mexican government, hastening the possible extinction of an entire people in the name of "conservation."
...

toniD said...

See you later. Off to work. Have to go early to clean my car from the snow :(

Have a great afternoon and listen to Randi now.

Alice said...

Cuba orders three foreign journalists out of Cuba

Anonymous said...

so this is where everyone is!

i was starting to take it personally!

ruiedjfx

-conbo

Alice said...

Conbo!!

:)

Anonymous said...

*cough*

I mean....

-alice....

Anonymous said...

Oops no it's this way...

I wanna be inconspicuous like you...

-alice....

Anonymous said...

hi Shell!

:)

-conbo

udhenxg

Anonymous said...

Soooo..you can see now that not everybody's here...just me really...Toni went to work... :)

-alice..

Anonymous said...

well. I am really ToniD, so everyone is here!

;)

-conbo

Anonymous said...

Don't freak me out at this late stage of our blogging together, conbo....

That's something you tell someone in year one... :)

-alice

Anonymous said...

Why are all of these idiots asking, "Who cares about the Oscar awards? Focus on real issues! Waaahh!"

Look, I agree that coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death on a supposedly serious news show is horrible, but I disagree with the notion that news must be morose and serious constantly. We can't do anything to stop the oil war anyway. It's going to continue probably until we are dead.

SCORSESE WON BIG FINALLY! Who cares about the other nonsense?

Alice said...

I think I broke your website, dada.....

Anonymous said...

Welcome to Conservapedia
A conservative encyclopedia you can trust.

The Politics of the Cactus

Anonymous said...

Are there any voiceprint specialists in the audience? I really would love for someone to take the recording of that last caller, did she call herself Della? Anyway, I swear this was the Queen of Harpies, MoDo herself, on the call. It sounded like her, and the caller became increasingly shrill as Sam wasn't having any of what she was dishing out. By the time he cut her off, I was checking to see if my radio was leaking brains from her exploded head. Sweet Jeßus, she's just messed up full of herself.

Alice said...

House Republicans Need a Copyright Refresher

posted by John

From today's New York Times (via CNET):

The House Republican Study Committee issued a news release accusing Speaker Nancy Pelosi of "pirating" 16 copyrighted clips of House floor debate from the public affairs network C-Span by including them on her new blog, The Gavel.

I guess they missed the lesson on government works being generally immune to copyright restrictions. Meanwhile, GooTube is making headlines for aggressively removing fair use parodies and snippets.

http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-6162082.html?tag=nefd.top

Alice said...

http://www.blinkx.com/

employs speech recognition technology to posted videos to enhance keyword searching capabilities for video content. They Say Blinkx's speech-recognition technology employs neural networks and machine learning using "hidden Markov models," a method of statistical analysis in which the hidden characteristics of a thing are guessed from what is known."

Alice said...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6396665.stm

Wireless Users More Engaged With Cyberspace

posted by birdie

Are you a wireless user? If so, The Pew Internet and American Life Project experts say that you "show deeper engagement with cyberspace" than your wired comrades.

The BBC reports that while 54% of internet users check e-mail "on the typical day," 72% of wireless users check daily. Just under half of wireless users get news online every day, compared to 31% of internet users at large.

Not sure if this is a positive trend, as life doesn't really revolve around cyberspace...or does it?

Alice said...

The Searchers - Umbrella Man (Liberty Records)

Anonymous said...

Speech recognition ≠ voiceprint analysis. The latter analyzes tonal and articulation qualities of speech samples of an unidentified speaker for the purpose of comparison with a known speaker. I say that Della was MoDo phoning in pseudonomously, and would like to see it proven. I detest her piss-taking attitude, and Della's stinking justification was just like her. Her fucking simpering ego makes her one of the most slappable on earth.

Anonymous said...

Big day today. Jesus jerky!

Thats right, I said it. Jesus, jerky.

Anonymous said...

Oh yeah, this will be big. I cant wait for him to kick off the catacomb tomb lid, jump his bones out and and start break dancing right there in the museum. Tour guide will be there, "These are the bones of our Lord and...what the?!!"...

. "Heeeeeey everybody! Im back! Im back! Told ya Id be back. Im like Nix from Lord of the Illusions. ...I uh, know I dont look as good as people have been saying I was going to look,. But hey, you still wann eat my body right? Comeon, lets drink some wine, itll poor though me like Bill Murrys boss in "Scrooged", but boy am I thirsty. Where's Lucifer, he still owes me 50 bucks. Said I couldnt do it.... So whats knew?"

Anonymous said...

//Don't freak me out at this late stage of our blogging together, conbo....

That's something you tell someone in year one... :)

-alice//

yes well i'm imature, what can I say.

-conbo

New Owner said...

sooooooooo...

Trying to match Jesus's DNA, huh?

I thought it was all about the cross, and the tomb, and the rock things.

Like, Jesus gets out of the tomb, is confronted by Mary Magdalen, then the other apostles, then ascends to heaven after having a few words with Peter, naming him his "rock", the first Pope, and declares that whatever Peter says on earth, God will agree to in heaven, thus laying the ground work for Papal Infallibility.

So, if instead Jesus just dies, doesn't ascend bodily to heaven, and they find something in a tomb that they can use for DNA testing, then...

Wouldn't that make the whole Easter holiday, not to mention Papal infallibility, irrelevant?

Or am I over thinking this?

New Owner said...

and ps - Congrats on finding your password to eblogger Samuel~

Alice said...

Lilith!

Jeez..just when I was about to wonder if the blog is Dead...

:)

Alice said...

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=51&ItemID=12219

Iraqis are People, too
by Cindy Sheehan

A majority of Americans do find the casualties on both sides unacceptable, but now it's time to go from thinking "unacceptable" to action. We need to get out of our comfy homes and hit the streets in the millions on March 17th, especially in Washington, DC, if for anything else, to demonstrate to the people of the world that citizens in democracies do not sanction killing innocent people. We need to do it for our soldiers, but more importantly for the innocent citizens of Iraq. We need to demand an immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq and we need to demand impeachment for BushCo to restore the peace and to restore our reputation in the world.

After the program, the Sheik approached me with a translator and apologized to me for Casey’s death saying that: “We don’t want to kill your soldiers, but we are protecting our country, it is our country.”

Time to give the Iraqis their country back.

We never should have allowed Bloody BushCo to go there in the first place.
...

Alice said...

Is dead.

Is dead.

Is dead.

-Kerouac

New Owner said...

Alice,

It's a nice touch that we can use avatars... I like the pic you use... it reminds me of a Maxwell Parish from this distance.

New Owner said...

well frack me, it's a cloud...

Alice said...

It IS a cloud Miss Cathy....

Was freakish that day...

:)

So the graphics don't bother your blogging experience...? cool..

Anonymous said...

BBC Reported Building 7 Had Collapsed 20 Minutes Before It Fell

VIDEO: BBC WAS HALF AN HOUR TOO EARLY REPORTING ON WTC7 COLLAPSE

Anonymous said...

Has anyone seen my script?