Circadian Shift

Why don't I kick things off here by cribbing a bunch of linkage from Metafilter?:

• a brief guide to various Noam Chomsky resources on the web (MeFi discussion)
• UK troops angry over US "friendly fire" (MeFi discussion and additional linkage)
• US ambassador takes the piss out of Canada (yeah, I know this news item is a few days old, but go check out the discussion on MeFi)

Meanwhile, Media Dystopia weighs in with his thoughts on playing "God Bless America" at Toronto Blue Jays games.

[Addendum: As it turns out, Toronto fans cheered tonight during the playing of "The Star Spangled Banner" and "God Bless America".]

Switching gears, HBS Working Knowledge (who did send me an update today) briefly examines The Future of IT Consulting.

And lastly, just because, here is a baby panda:

Awwwwww...

Seeing this post on Corante's Idea Flow blog made me realize that I didn't get an e-mail update from HBS Working Knowledge this week. Anyway, check out When Bad Ideas Won't Die.

I also haven't been getting my weekly update from InformIT for the last couple of weeks. Wonder why.

However, thanks to my pal "D" for e-mailing me with a link to 'The Digested Read', a series of book summaries/reviews that are each exactly 400 words in length, and written in the style of the book under discussion. Jolly good fun.

Well, lookit me -- I'm listed on BlogShares.

Huh?

"BlogShares is a fantasy stock market for weblogs. Players get to invest a fictional $500, and blogs are valued by inbound links."

Uh, okay. There's an FAQ and an Instruction Manual for playing. I suppose I could read them, but that would require having an attention span.

Mind you, for anyone out there who is playing: please buy early, and buy often.

In the wake of the demise of Last Tram to Mancentral, fans of The KLF/JAMs/Timelords can turn to KLF Online for all things pertaining to The Kopyright Liberation Front.

Right now, Thomas is making available for download high quality MP3s of KLF's unreleased (and bootlegged) The White Room: Original Motion Picture Sound Track, if you're willing to supply your name and e-mail address.

There's also this thing that I heard on CBC's Definitely Not The Opera this afternoon called "two minutes fifty seconds silence for the USA", an audio piece by Matt Rogalsky made up of the "silent" pauses in George W. Bush's ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, issued on Monday March 17 2003, at 8 pm EST.

It's hardly silent, though (lawyers for the Estate of John Cage can back off now), as the pauses in Bush's speech contain all sorts of ambient background noise. Listen for what you didn't hear the first time.

And, lastly, there's a new mix available on Brilliantine for your listening enjoyment.

Just because I can:

• XHMTL and CSS code that yields Bullet-Proof Rounded Corners -- hell, it even works in Opera
• Edward Tufte dissects a PowerPoint slide from a Boeing report concerning the possible tile damage on the Columbia space shuttle, and the results ain't pretty
• you too can find out Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age -- sigh
• a guide to the Five kinds of "busy" -- "apathy-filled lassitude" does not appear on the scale

And a link not cribbed from blogdex:

• a strategy+business article on Treating the Troubled Corporation (free registration required)

Must turn off computer before retinas fry beyond recognition.

Dinner time / nap time

A bunch of links:

• the CBC has seen fit to set up a web page with links to all its stories and other resources on Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome
  • also check out the SARS FAQ from the World Health Organization (via Neat New Stuff on the Net)
• Jon Udell muses on publishing a project weblog (via blogdex)
  • I briefly mused on the same a couple months back
• a handy article on Architectural Design Patterns for XML Documents (spotted on InfoDesign yesterday, and highlighted in today's XML.com newsletter)
• an article by Naomi Klein on Standing up to Uncle Sam -- quote: "Canada and Mexico may seem expendable on their own, but combined? That's a different story. Together, they represent 36 per cent of America's export market. We supply the U.S. with 36 per cent of its net energy imports and 26 per cent of its net oil imports." (via Lilly Wonka)

Perfect for curling up on the futon with a flask of Stoli:

Svefn-G-Englar by Sigur Ros

You can find more Sigur Ros MP3s here.

And, apropos of nothing:

• the signalling repertoire of the domestic cat and its undomesticated relatives
• sleeping positions of Hoffmann's two toed sloth plus other characteristic behaviours

Thank you, badger bag.

Walmart and sleep deprivation can be a dangerous mix.

That is all.

Over on Writing On Your Palm, Jeff sings the praises of using a fold-out keyboard with your PDA. Share it, brother!

(His last column, on surviving a hard reset on your PDA might also come in handy sometime.)

And this is just a reminder to myself to check out this website later (haaaahahahahahaha): Baseline: The Project Management Center.

I love my Opera browser, really I do, but I've learned that it isn't always the most cooperative beast when it comes to rendering CSS 2.0.

I've been stumbling over Opera stylesheet issues on my much-lamented-but-yet-to-go-live resume/portfolio site. I've yet to come up with something I'm happy with. More tinkering required.

And, the other day at Graig and Emma's Oscar party, Emma gave in to my and Jeremy's whingeing and changed her stylesheet so that her blog text will show up in its entirety when viewed with my favourite browser. But she's not happy with the trade-offs she had to make to get it to work.

Also of note, diveintomark has put together an article on doing tabs purely in CSS. Of course, it doesn't work in Opera. Boo.

[Addendum 29 March 2003: Mark has now made the tab thing work in Opera, thanks to the controversial *7 hack.]

Meanwhile, plasticbag shares his thoughts on Trackback HOWTOs. However, I shan't be pinging Tom to let him know I've linked to him.

New from the Kraft kitchens: Bacon Snack Bars. The key ingredients include:

• bacon pieces
• peanut butter
• Tang

The Empty Bowl (where I got the above link) tries it out, and the results are considerably more frightening than the pretty picture on the Kraft page would suggest.

In an attempt to at least come up with something vaguely original for today, I did another post for The Big List:

You can take the girl out of Scarborough, but you can't take Scarborough out of the girl

Please don't hold it against me.

No rhyme or reason here; just a bunch of linkage.

• Richard Dawkins (author of The Selfish Gene, and the person who coined the word "meme") argues that Bush has played right into Osama Bin Laden's hands (via MemeMachineGo!)
• Disinfopedia is "a directory of public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests" (via Post Atomic)
• Pareto Principle -- 'the 80:20 rule' -- "A minority of input produces the majority of results." (via paranoidfish)
• paranoidfish also shares his thoughts On Marking up Code Blocks, and More on Marking Up Code Blocks for display in web browsers
• Having trouble stopping and smelling the flowers? Maybe it's because you're depressed. (via Complexity Digest)
• Trying to investigate something suspicious? Maybe you're the suspect. (via Follow Me Here)
• A sneak peek at the soon-to-be-released HP iPAQ h2200 Series (via Gizmodo)

Creating content merely by pointing to other content. How postmodern. Or lazy.

Despite yesterday's incoherent sleep-deprived avowal to the contrary, I clearly did not get my shit together to write up any more of my thoughts on the movie Derrida. It ain't gonna happen today, either.

Meanwhile, here is:

• Using Deconstruction to Astonish Friends & Confound Enemies (In Two Easy Steps!)
• a handy list of film links, courtesy of Chronopolis

Must get dressed and go partake of this sunshine.

Stumbled across a brand new blog called Blown Out Hits. Subtitled "Questionable music for questionable tastes", it looks like it's going to cover mostly electro and other mixed media recordings. I should keep an eye on this one.

CBC 1 continues to derail all its regular programming in favour of non-stop war war war coverage. Let's hear it for Q107's Psychedlic Psunday.

Anil Dash's Trackback for Dummies (via JOHO: The Blog).

Trackback is yet another blog feature that I do absolutely nothing with.

Guess I'm just not that hardcore.

[Addendum 24 March 2003: Found this more useful article on How Trackback Works via blogdex.]

The words that I quoted from Lactose Incompetent some time back are still reverberating in my head.

Could this also apply to the relationship between Canada (and other parts of the world) and the United States?

I dunno, I'm just saying...

IA Slash posts some brief musings on the dangers of infographics.

And, following a link I spotted on the IA/ sidebar, someone proposes some designs for a new Danish flag.

Note to self:

You really must defragment your hard drive more often.

A couple links from MeFi:

• Decoding Visual Language Elements in News Content
• downloadable AVI files depicting the Bush on-air combing incident

Maybe if I get my shit together today, I'll write more about the film on Derrida I saw earlier in the week. Maybe.

As I'm feeling utterly disinclined to come up with my own content today, I thought I'd mine my inbox for linkage that people have e-mailed to me.

From my pal "D" come the following:

• Sleep improves accuracy at motor tasks
• Net surfing is a dying sport
• Confused ostriches raised on farms are falling for their keepers

From "J", I got:

• High-tech workers are walking on a high-wire
• Work-life conflict is getting worse, not better
• Workers more stressed out, have less time for family
• a discussion paper on Work-Life Balance in the New Millenium (PDF, 379 kb)

"N" sent me:

• Microwave weapons: the dangers of first use
• HK doctors 'identify killer disease' (it so happens that my parents are in the Phillipines right now; fortunately they flew in via Tokyo and not Hong Kong)

Thanks, everyone!

The identity of one America's heretofore unnamed allies in The War of on Terror has been revealed.

(Thanks, bro!)

Meanwhile, over on GTA Bloggers, cultural cross-referencing is making people a wee bit cranky.

"Art is useless. Go home."

Right. We are back. Sorry for yesterday's outage, folks.

Kudos once again to Disquiet for tipping me off to more electro listening goodness. No Type is "a vast repository of some 70-plus free downloadable EP-length collections of MP3 files".

I downloaded the three sets that comprise "Sine Fiction", billed as "an ongoing series of musical tributes to science fiction novels"; it's all very minimal -- think of it as audio wallpaper to listen to while reading.

This ain't no party, this ain't no disco
This ain't no fooling around

I have been listening to the CBC for the last two and a half hours. That's enough.

Jazz, here we come.

If a tree falls in the forest, is the web affected?

As if you had nothing else to do:

• The Definitive Desktop Environment Comparison -- compares desktop environments from different operating systems in terms of look-and-feel, usability, flexibility, and other criteria (via InfoDesign)
  • Completely frivolous aside #1: Of course, not everyone likes customizable computer desktops
  • Completely frivolous aside #2: On the subject of the Mac's soi disant user friendliness, the first time I tried to use a G3 (this was a few years ago) I couldn't find the freaking "On" switch -- yeah, that's real intuitive
• Starting a Blog (with MovableType) -- many of the points are applicable to other blogging tools as well (via paranoidfish)
• the April issue of Fast Company is online now
• and yes, I've mentioned this before, but you really ought to read it: Politics and the English Language, by George Orwell (also available for download in various e-book formats)

Ow. My brain, my brain...

[Addendum: In a preview of the April issue of Business 2.0, check out the all-new 101 Dumbest Moments in Business.]

Thanks to Disquiet, I have my wonky-minimalist-electro listening needs taken care of for the next while:

• Scores for Stores is a brief article in Metropolis magazine about Activaire, a company that designs soundtracks for retail spaces. From the Metropolis site, you can download a bunch of MP3s, chosen by Activaire to be a series of "soundtracks" for three famous buildings in New York City, as well as one "soundtrack" for generic elevator space. Tracks notes are available on Activaire's site.
• Red Antenna is an online music label that specializes in electronic music. There are a number of free MP3s available on their site.

The selections from Activaire and from Red Antenna each nicely fill an 80 minute CD, which makes for a little less than 160 minutes of fine listening in all.

From the old school, this week's featured download on The First Cut is a rare live recording of Erasure performing the song "Just Can't Get Enough", a tune better known by Vince Clarke's first group, Depeche Mode.

Enjoy.

I've discovered that my posts are now getting picked up via Feedster.

Meanwhile, Jeremy has modified his RSS feeds, thanks to a bit of blog peer pressure.

I should probably do the same. Eventually.

baaaaaaah

Likely the chief reason why I don't post about film very often is because I tend to wait until movies go into second run at the various repertory cinemas here in town; I then feel stupid writing about a movie that most people saw two months before I did.

Today, I caught the film Derrida, which didn't get a main theatrical run here in Toronto, but instead has hit the Bloor Cinema for a few days.

At this point, all I'll say is that the film is very recursive.

I haven't done a lot of reading on deconstruction, but I think a perusal of some of Derrida's texts is in order. I'm particularly interested in the book Archive Fever.

I took some notes during the movie (I have a very neat pen with a tiny light built into the nib, so I can write in the dark), but I think I need to see it again. Gawd, I'm such a keener.

I don't know what's kicked my brain into gear, but I managed to bash out another post for The Big List.

Go check out the list of my favourite elements.

Got this a few days back via my Anecdotage.com newsletter:

Shortly after Charles de Gaulle's retirement, his wife was asked what she most looked forward to in the coming years. Her astounding reply - "a penis" - was met with an embarrassed silence.

Finally the former president came to his wife's rescue. "My dear," he remarked, "I think the English don't pronounce the word quite like that. It's 'happiness'."

---

De Gaulle, Charles Andre Joseph Marie (1890-1970), French statesman, general (from 1940), president (1945-46, 1958-69) [noted for his advocacy of mechanized warfare (Vers l'armee de metier, 1934), his opposition to an armistice with Germany, his subsequent exile and formation of the (Allied) Free French forces, his policy of independent nationalism, and his withdrawal of France from NATO (1966)]

Source: Robert Morley, Book of Bricks

And, as long as I'm quote-slinging:

"Without my morning coffee I'm just like a dried up piece of roast goat."

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) The Coffee Cantata

---

(quote via Badgett's Coffee eJournal)

Did I mention that Bach is my favourite composer?

There are three loads of laundry finishing up in the dryer and a load of hang-to-dry stuff on the rack. There remains one more load of hang-to-dry stuff, but I can whip through that either tomorrow or Monday. Yay, me.

This from Gizmodo:

Watching TV. Faster.

Buried in this story over at PCWorld on all the unexpected gadgets that getting WiFi added to them, like a digital camera from Sanyo and a handheld file server from Sony, is this: a new DVD recorder from Matsushita that records television shows at 1.3 times faster than normal speed. Why? "That's slow enough to understand what is going on but also cuts the time it takes to watch a TV show by a quarter." Sounds crazy, but if you're a busy person, that'll skim fifteen minutes off an hour-long show.

Here at Gizmodo we've got another trick for cramming more TV into less time, though it only works with a TiVo or other digital video recorder: turn on closed-captioning and watch the show on TiVo's slowest fast-forward setting. The captions will still pop up, so you won't miss what anyone's saying, but everything will happen in double-speed, making it perfect for watching three episodes of Blind Date in a half hour. And yes, we know how messed up this is.

Hate to tell you this, kiddies, but Douglas Coupland documented the same idea, although he was talking about watching foreign films with subtitles, in his 1995 book Microserfs.

Lastly, if you so wish, you can read all about The Beer Can Theory of Creativity (link via abuddhas memes).

Must go get clothes from the dryer now.

OK, I kind of cheated and plundered one of my notebooks for material, but I managed to do another post on The Big List.

Why don't you go read my list of Favourite Songs by Elvis Costello, Part 2? And there's always my original list of Favourite Songs by Elvis Costello, which I posted last year.

I keep meaning to clean up my blogrolls. I'm also thinking of putting up a separate links page on this site.

Or I could use one of the various web-based bookmark managers listed on a page that I found courtesy of Neat New Stuff on the Net.

(Also via Neat New Stuff on the Net this week: The Librarian's Guide to Anime and Manga.)

Several days back, Richard was commenting that he is two degrees separated from Sam, via me. Got me thinking about who I'm two degrees away from, at least within the blogosphere.

Even funnier are scenarios where I'm separated from someone via two different bloggers, but those two connecting bloggers don't know each other:

• I am two degrees separated from Mike Wolf via eggnog publications, and via JimBuck2. Gary is a GTA Blogger turned NYC Blogger. Jim also happens to be a GTA Blogger, but I don't believe he and Gary have ever met, as Gary left town before Jim started hanging out with us.
• I am two degrees separated from Stennieville, via Blamb!Blog, and via Paramecium Parachute. Brett is a GTA Blogger, whereas Greg lives in Los Angeles. To my knowledge, neither peruses the other's site. (Blamb and Greg also both link to Photojunkie, as do I.)

God, we're an incestuous little bunch, aren't we?

And, because you may have nothing better to do (I, on the other hand, seriously need to catch up on laundry, yet here I am), here are some links:

• stuff people have found when cleaning out their fridge (thanks to my brother, who credits Fark for the link)
• the above article links to another piece which outlines how long various foods can be stored in your freezer
• and, just because, why don't you caption this picture?

Right. Domesticity awaits.

Linkage:

• 100 words everyone's gotta know to be smart -- Erudition ahoy. (Via WebWord.)


• Power To The People...In Management -- Frontline employees take it up the backside. (Via blogdex.)


• New wearable digital camera from Philips -- For all your surreptitious photography needs. (Via Gizmodo.)

Like a sad little hamster that all the kids were excited about getting, at first, but eventually became neglected, grudgingly fed only when necessary, The Big List is a group blog that's been sparsely contributed to over the last while. (Much of the credit for the few additions that have been made of late goes to GAK and Graig.)

It's been a few months since I posted a list there, and my last couple were pretty crappy. Not that this one is much of an improvement, but at least it wasn't generated using automated web-widgets. So, why don't you go take a look at my list of Books and Articles Sitting On My PDA That I Have Yet to Finish Reading?

Here's a very nice list of alternative web browsers (link via paranoid fish).

BTW, I notice this site renders as plain-vanilla text in Mozilla and Phoenix. The styles do sort-of-render in Netscape 4.79, but the layout is wierd.

The styles and layout of course do render normally in that Micro$oft browser, although I think the top banner looks funny, compared to how it looks in Opera. Score one for #3 in the browser market.

If this image does not appear, then something is amiss:

sigh

[Addendum: Appears to be working. Thanks, Gary and Marko!]

This is only a test. Do not adjust your set.

Regularly scheduled programming will resume shortly.

Still doesn't look like http://circadianshift.net actually goes anywhere yet.

Lalalalala...

[Addendum 12 March 2003: Looks like the DNS thingy is kicking in. Yay!]

Dear George W. Bush:

Given that you got to where you are by riding on your daddy's coat-tails, now would be a really good time to start listening to him and stop behaving like such an asshole.

Regards,
jv

(link spotted at Accordion Guy and BoingBoing)

I was curious to see how the new blog looks on my PDA screen, whatwith the layout being done all through the magic of CSS 2.0. Here is the result:

Way cool.

Time to throw out some linkage:

• InformIT (free registration required) looks at sources of XSL information, tools, and implementations for your geeky enjoyment
• an interview with the KDE and Gnome UI/usability developers about the drive towards consistency in Linux desktop interfaces (via Slashdot)
• HBS Working Knowledge looks at taming toxic emotions in the workplace

Yeehaw.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the new Circadian Shift!

For all three of you who have blogrolled/bookmarked me, you're going to want to eventually change your links to

http://circadianshift.net

once the web has worked its magic and the IP address finds its way to your neighbourhood DNS.

(Conventional wisdom says it takes 24 to 48 hours for an address to propagate. I'll believe it when I see it.)

A large debt of gratitude goes to Gary, a.k.a. His GAK-ness, a.k.a. Señor Eggnog, for his gracious offer to host my humble blog, and do a bunch of yucky server stuff to make it all work properly.

<applause>yaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy!!!!!!!</applause>

Anyway, you'll no doubt run across a few hiccups here and there (my Blogger archives got way screwed up when I reformatted my posts for import into Movable Type, and the old comments remain on the YACCS server), but hopefully your reading/browsing experience here will be minimally affected.

Feel free to hang out, make yourself at home, and enjoy!

Interesting blurbage on the use of tabs in web browser interfaces (via Slashdot).

Two very cool music links, courtesy of Consolation Champs:

• Punk77: Punk Rock in the UK 1976-1979
• A Chronological History of English Glam Rock

Today's acquisition from Sonic Boom: Laugh? I Nearly Bought One!, a compilation of tunes by post-punkers Killing Joke. For those of you unfamiliar with them, their sound is not unlike Joy Division, but more angry. And, like Joy Division, towards the end of their career they released a radio-friendly song that became an 80s retro mainstay -- the tune "Love Like Blood".

BTW, if you happen to spot the March issue of Mojo magazine on the newstands, they've got a lovely compilation of old and new punk tunes to go with it. Representing the old school are the likes of The Damned, The Buzzcocks, X-Ray Spex, The Only Ones, and others. The only reason why I didn't buy a copy the instant I saw it is because I already have several of the tunes in MP3 format. But I may just break down and get it.

Yeah, it's 8 in the morning, and I am awake.

As a change of pace from my usual dream, I dreamed that I was back in an office and someone tried to hand off to me a file folder of the kinds documents that I used to deal with in my days at the Soul Crushing Corporate Job From Hell. I got way pissed off and was yelling, "You are not sucking me back into doing that job again!" Then I woke up.

BTW, today marks the one year anniversary of my layoff from my last IT job. You probably don't have to be Sigmund Freud to realize what's been ricocheting through the back of my head.

Whilst spelunking through the Circadian Shift archives, I decided to check in at Last Tram to Mancentral and see if there was anything new. There was this message:

This site is closing down.
EVERYTHING MUST GO.

Shit -- March 7 is today. Hopefully Mancentral can hang in there for just a little longer.

New on Search Engine Watch: a look at Google's entry into the contextual advertising market.

The Spring 2003 issue of strategy+business is available online (free registration required). Of interest:

• Creating Chaos for Fun and Profit
• Finding Sanity with Game Theory
• and, someone who argues Why Open Source Stifles Innovation -- you may or may not agree

Am currently listening to Ontario Today on CBC Radio 1. Today's "Phone In" topic: improving your concentration and memory.

Couple points of interest:

• Memory does not behave like a muscle, in that you can't strengthen your memory by doing "memory exercises".
• Concentration, which is like the gatekeeper to memory (ie. you stand a better chance of remembering what you concentrate on), is somewhat like a muscle; you can improve your concentration skills through certain activities.

Just happened to stumble across this on the "Recently Updated" list on the Blogger homepage:

excited utterances -- a bevy of knowledge management links and posts, with a heavy slant towards KM in law firms

My afternoon sojourn outside The Hovel took me to my local Home Hardware store, where I acquired the "Benchmark Retract-A-Bit" and "Retract-A-Bit Mini" screwdrivers. They're very nifty (if you happen to like dorky things like that).

The Mini shall be put to good use over the next several days while I mess around with my two desktop PCs. I'm finally, finally going to rebuild my Windows desktop PC (having relied solely on my notebook for quite some time). Am also going to stick a bigger hard drive in my Linux box.

And I'm still working on my web sites. Was messing with my resume/portfolio site yesterday (ah, the joys of using CSS 2 for layout), but there's still much to be done.

Every once in a while, Mother Nature likes to give us a smack upside the head to let us know who's still boss. Damn, it's cold out there.

Believe it or not, this article appears on the InformIT website (free registration required):

Face-Off in the Gulf: Why Iraq, Why Now?
The journalists of Reuters look at the case for and against a war in Iraq, examining the Bush Doctrine, the chronology of events since the Gulf War, and why this is coming to a head now.

(You know, it's occured to me more than once that, despite the fact that this blog is subtitled "Reading. Computers. Film. Music. Insomnia.", I almost never talk about film -- a deficit that I will have to address in the future.)

Meanwhile, over at Builder.com (where registration may or may not be required -- depends on the article, I think):

• Develop 'personal mastery' for effective project management -- this has absolutely nothing to do with that Seinfeld episode


• Five rules for dealing with marching orders you dislike -- aimed at managers who have to implement policy decisions that they may not agree with


• How to influence senior management -- the gentle art of flattery and persuasion

Linkage:

• Fallacies and War (via Blogdex)


• bonus companion link to the above: a guide/tutorial to the logical fallacies (also via Blogdex)


• The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science (hell, why surf anywhere else when Blogdex is available?)


• The New Totalitarianism:  Cyber-hegemony and the Global System (via abuddhas memes this time)

Thanks to "J" for e-mailing me on this: Paul Gutman has posted an essay (115 KB PDF file) on blogging and employment law. Good stuff.

Seeing as we are now in a new month, I've gone and thrown a couple more MP3s into CS: The Outpost:

• "The Voice" by Ultravox (4,140 KB) [lyrics]


• "Words" by Missing Persons (4,189 KB) [lyrics]

And, yes, "Dancing With Tears In My Eyes" is a good song, but I don't think it's one of their best; of course, the video, released in the days when anxiety over nuclear war was at its peak, made for prime MTV/MuchMusic fodder.

Fun fact: back in 1975, Ultravox lead singer Midge Ure was approached by some bloke called Malcolm McLaren to join some fledgling band known as the Sex Pistols. Midge turned them down. Whatever happened to that band?....

(More about Ultravox at their official web site.)

Anyway, the track I chose to post -- "The Voice" -- is from their 1981 album Rage In Eden, and fits in with what's evolving to be my theme-of-sorts for today.

Also in the same thematic vein is the Missing Persons' track "Words"; I rambled about Missing Persons before when I posted another track from them in January.

New articles on Slate:

• The Ugly Canadian: Is Canada's ruling party anti-American?


• Dubyathink: Bush's Orwellian case for war

Yikes, it's March already. How did that happen?

Couple links for you:

• Problem Behaviors in Cats -- "You cannot discipline cats as you would dogs. Dogs form social hierarchies that you can take advantage of by placing yourself at the top. Cats form social groups only by necessity and the arrangement is based on respecting territory, not by respecting the "top dog". Many mistakes made with cats are due to thinking that they will react like dogs." (via Neat New Stuff on the Net)


• A treasure trove of writings by and about George Orwell (via Lactose Incompetent)