Alley wall art, West Loop

• Media still trying to delegitimize MN recount - "Media outlets don't typically emphacize how much elections cost; they certainly don't emphacize how much individual aspects of elections cost. (When was the last time you saw a newscaster announce "election workers rolled voting machines out of storage this morning, at a cost to taxpayers of …"?)

  And that's all this recount is: it is one part of the elections process. Its cost is, simply put, irrelevent. Elections are worth doing correctly no matter how much they cost. Not only that, but $86,000 is, even in the midst of a struggling economy, an utterly trivial amount of money for the state of Minnesota to spend in order to get the results of an election right.

  How trivial? The $86,000 cost comes out to 1.7 cents per Minnesota resident. One point seven cents. It's a mere three cents per vote. Anybody out there think making sure each vote is counted correctly isn't worth three cents? Anyone at all?

• Auto officials nailed on private jets: The Swamp - "Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee asked at today's hearing on a potential bailout for the struggling U.S. auto industry asked the Big Three's chief executive officers which of them had flown by private jet into Washington for the hearing. All three raised their hands.

  Then he asked which would be heading home commercially. None of the three raised his hand."

• FiveThirtyEight.com: Politics Done Right: An Interview with John Ziegler on the Zogby "Push Poll" - Republican mind-set, encapsulated. Wow, just wow.
  "Ziegler was responsible for commissioning a Zogby International survey of Barack Obama supporters, which took the form of a multiple choice political knowledge test, stating a "fact" to the respondent and asking them which of the four major candidates (Obama, McCain, Biden, Palin) the statement applied to. Because I believe that many of the statements on the survey are questionable or false but are misleadingly presented as factual to the respondent, I characterized the survey as a "push poll" in an article posted early this morning."

  You should read this transcript if you are up for a good laugh. The RNC pays this guy Ziegler?

I kid you not, this *is* Main Street, in Scenic, South Dakota, right outside of the Badlands. Unfortunately, I did not have time to stop in for a beer.

[ maps.google.com/maps?f=d&saddr=Rapid+City,+SD&dad... ]

Next time.

I think the sign says, "Indians Allowed". Check out the large version to read the lettering (though since I enlarged a small crop, it is a little "soft")

California Rep. Henry Waxman won backing from a key group of Democrats in his bid to unseat Michigan Rep. John Dingell as chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee.

At stake is the direction of crucial legislation during a period of solid Democratic control of Congress. The committee’s mandate is broad, with oversight of everything from climate change to health care to telecommunications.

The Democrats’ Steering and Policy Committee, which helps allocate committee memberships and chairmanships, voted 25-22 Wednesday to nominate Mr. Waxman for the post. The full House Democratic membership will decide Thursday whether to heed the panel’s recommendation.

The starkest difference between the men may concern so-called greenhouse gases, which trap the sun’s heat in the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. Mr. Waxman favors stricter and faster regulation of such emissions than Mr. Dingell, who has been one of the auto industry’s staunchest allies in Congress. His ouster from the chairmanship would be a major setback for Detroit’s auto makers at a time when they are seeking assistance from Washington.

[From Key Group Backs Waxman to Head Energy Panel - WSJ.com]

Of course, the chairman hasn’t yet been rewarded; I am sure Dingell has plenty of favors to call in among the Congress members who are about to vote. Let us hope that Waxman presents a better case to those same members. From my perspective, Waxman is better fit with President-elect Obama. Danny Davis, are you listening?

Snow flurry in the West Loop, last winter.

we’ll have actual snow soon enough…

Millions of never-before-seen photos from the dusty archives of Life magazine will soon be unearthed and immortalized online, thanks to a new initiative from Google Inc.

Yesterday, the search engine kingpin announced that the Life magazine photo archive will now be available through Google’s Image Search feature. The collection is estimated to consist of more than 10 million photos, many of which were never published in the magazine and only exist as negatives, slides and etchings.

“This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Google software engineer Paco Galanes wrote on the company’s official blog.

“This collection of newly digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by Life dating all the way back to the 1750s.”

Life was first published in 1883 as a general-interest magazine and for more than a century was the pre-eminent magazine for American photojournalism. It went through several incarnations in the latter half of the 20th century, was rescued from closing several times and eventually ceased publishing in 2006.

[From reportonbusiness.com: Life magazine images find new life on Google]

So much history contained therein. Only a small percentage of the collection is currently available, but more is going to be added in the upcoming months.

From the official Google announcement:

The Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination; The Mansell Collection from London; Dahlstrom glass plates of New York and environs from the 1880s; and the entire works left to the collection from LIFE photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gjon Mili, and Nina Leen. These are just some of the things you’ll see in Google Image Search today.

We’re excited to announce the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.

Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We’re digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos.

[From Official Google Blog: LIFE Photo Archive available on Google Image Search]

A veritable boon to photography buffs, historians of all stripes, and students of the 20th century. Awesome. Search/browse for yourself using this link

• Life magazine photo collection goes online | - Awesome news, really.
  "One of the biggest photo collections in the world that ranges from the 1880s through to the seminal moments of the 20th century and on into the present day was made available to the public online yesterday.

  The bulk of the archive is from Life magazine, the premier platform for photojournalists in the 20th century. About 10m images will eventually be available, from Marilyn Monroe and JFK to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. About 97% of the pictures have never been seen before."

• Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens loses re-election bid - Yahoo! News - "The crotchety octogenarian built like a birch sapling likes to encourage comparisons with the Incredible Hulk, but he occupies an outsized place in Alaska history. His involvement in politics dates to the days before Alaska statehood, and he is esteemed for his ability to secure billions of dollars in federal aid for transportation and military projects. The Anchorage airport bears his name; in Alaska, it's simply "Uncle Ted."
  Tuesday's tally of just over 24,000 absentee and other ballots gave Begich 146,286, or 47.56 percent, to 143,912, or 46.76 percent, for Stevens."
• Interesting Times: George Packer: Online Only: The New Yorker - Dylan on Obama - Ahh, Bob, you wordsmith you…

  "Bob Dylan Quote of the Night from November 4th : “I was born in 1941. That was the year they bombed Pearl Harbor. I’ve been living in darkness ever since. It looks like things are going to change now.”"

• Interesting Times: George Packer: Online Only: The New Yorker - After Kristol - "The real grounds for firing Kristol are that he didn’t take his column seriously. In his year on the Op-Ed page, not one memorable sentence, not one provocative thought, not one valuable piece of information appeared under his name. The prose was so limp (“Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term?”) that you had the sense Kristol wrote his column during the commercial breaks of his gig on Fox News Sunday and gave it about the same amount of thought.

  In one sense, this mental shallowness and literary poverty come as a surprise from the son of Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, the student of Harvey C. Mansfield, the devotee of Leo Strauss, and the colleague of Robert Kagan, David Brooks, et al. Kristol was never an intellectual—he’s always been a Republican strategist with various public platforms, including government office"

  I say fire the punk! His columns are not a good reflection on the NYT, and aren't interesting either.

• Daily Kos: Why It Matters - "In the end, the Lieberman fight isn't entirely about Lieberman. Yes, people want to see consequences doled out for the perennially back-stabbing Senator who formed his own political party when his own Democratic voters voted him out, who used his committee as a protectorate of the abuses of the Bush administration, and who — for God's sake — campaigned for McCain and Palin, even when their campaign reached its most rancid lows.

  But more to the point, people in America want a change from the Bush years — desperately. And they voted for it, delivering a thumping mandate for Obama. They want things to change, and that's why this minor battle has taken on so much meaning, and why people are so peeved: this was the first test of mettle, and it showed no mettle at all."

• The Cure, 4:13 Dream - "What has been done to this record is not new; in fact, it's all too common these days. But it is particularly egregious here, and the Cure are just going to have to take one for the recording industry as a whole. This CD is very loud. Without getting into a lot of technical stuff (which is explained well here), past a certain point, the only way to make a CD's average volume louder is to make most of it quieter–i.e., digitally reduce the difference between the loudest sounds and the quietest ones–so that you can turn everything up. If it's done judiciously, the record sounds louder, but not a whole lot worse to the untrained ear. If it's done carelessly or ham-fistedly, it fucks everything up. My ear is not very well-trained, but this is the most fucked-up record I've heard."
• Weekend America: Fan Free Agent - "How about this: I am now a fan free agent. I contacted teams all over the league to see if they wanted to sign me as a fan now that I was on the open market. An overwhelming number of them did not respond. But some did!"
• 11 Surefire Landscape Photography Tips - Some not-bad tips:
  "There’s something about getting out in nature with the challenge of capturing some of the amazing beauty that you see. Perhaps it fits with my personality type - but I loved the quietness and stillness of waiting for the perfect moment for the shot, scoping out an area for the best vantage point and then seeing the way that the light changed a scene over a few hours."

Fewer than 1% of airline passengers singled out at airports for suspicious behavior are arrested, Transportation Security Administration figures show, raising complaints that too many innocent people are stopped.
A TSA program launched in early 2006 that looks for terrorists using a controversial surveillance method has led to more than 160,000 people in airports receiving scrutiny, such as a pat-down search or a brief interview. That has resulted in 1,266 arrests, often on charges of carrying drugs or fake IDs, the TSA said.

The TSA program trains screeners to become “behavior detection officers” who patrol terminals and checkpoints looking for travelers who act oddly or appear to answer questions suspiciously.

Critics say the number of arrests is small and indicates the program is flawed.

“That’s an awful lot of people being pulled aside and inconvenienced,” said Carnegie Mellon scientist Stephen Fienberg, who studied the TSA program and other counterterrorism efforts. “I think it’s a sham. We have no evidence it works.”

[From TSA's 'behavior detection' leads to few arrests - USATODAY.com]

I wonder if Droopy Dog Lieberman in his continued¹ role as chair-loser of the Homeland Security committee is responsible for TSA oversight? I wouldn’t be surprised.

1. inexplicably continued, I might add. I can see the logic of keeping Lieberman in the Democratic caucus, but head of the Homeland Security committee? Really? With his piss-poor performance when war profiteers like Haliburton and Blackwater thumbed their noses at taxpayers? Not good.

• Gilbert Arenas: Change We Believe In - NBA Player Blogs - "What I liked about the whole thing was watching that proved that our country is not as racist as people around the rest of the world actually thinks we are. America as a whole spoke and chose the president they wanted. It wasn't just the African-American community that elected Obama, it was America. If you looked at the TV, every color and creed was out there supporting Obama. It should have woke America up to say, "Hey, we're not as racist as people think."

  That was the most beautiful thing about it to me. Look how this one man united the world. You see clips on the TV and they're showing people in Kenya celebrating, people in London … you're just like, "Wow!" That's why I call him a uniter. If I have to describe Obama in one word, I'm going to say: uniter. He unites. "

• Can Danny Davis' star rise with a Moon in the way? | Change of Subject - "In promoting himself as a candidate to succeed Barack Obama in the U.S. Senate, U.S. Rep. Danny Davis (D-Chicago) seems to be hoping the public has forgotten his participation in a very creepy 2004 "coronation" ceremony in Washington for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his wife.

  As I wrote at the time, Davis was an active assistant (see this photo via Rich Miller) in pageantry designed to burnish and inflate the reputation of a man who, divine or not, wants to abolish Western-style democracy, compares gay people to dung-eating dogs, and in exhorting Jews to convert and follow him, told them: "You have to repent. Jesus was the King of Israel. Through the principle of indemnity, Hitler killed 6 million Jews."

I felt that Chicago added so much, just in terms of the energy. If you read any Tom Clancy novel, Chicago is much more a dangerous point in this country than people realize. Tom Clancy says, if you want to invade the U.S., come through Mexico and come through Chicago, and split the country in half. Chicago has much deeper-reaching fingers, from a national security point of view, than most people realize.

[From Swayze feels at home in Chicago -- chicagotribune.com]

Ok. Will make sure to stockpile weapons and canned goods, thanks Mr. Swayze.

1. sic, of course, but maybe he thinks the Venezuelans are coming? Unclear who this invading army might be as I’ve managed to avoid reading any Tom Clancy novels

“Ethiopiques 19″ (Ethiopiques (Buda Series), Mahmoud Ahmed)

I don’t have every album in this series¹ , but every CD except one has been a great addition to my African music library. My favorite song on this album, called Tezeta, has a simply stunning bass line, along with a moody vocal, sort of like a Hazzan², though in Ethiopian. Great sax too.

Tezeta means nostalgia, a bittersweet longing for the past, btw, and is a frequent song subject. In fact, there is an entire Ethiopiques album devoted to it.

1. estimate without counting that I’ve picked up slightly more than half of the 23 titles, mostly from my pals at Aquarius Records in San Francisco
2. cantor

• Properly Sauced: The Perfect Manhattan - Sounds delicious actually. I'll have to look for this vermouth.

  "2 oz. Old Overholt rye whiskey
  3/4 oz. Carpano Antica vermouth
  Angostura bitters

  Take a double old-fashioned glass and fill it almost full with cubed ice. Douse the ice with 2 dashes of bitters. Add the rye and vermouth. Stir gently. Serve.

  Most Manhattans use plain old whiskey and bottom-shelf sweet vermouth, resulting in an inspid, sickly-sweet drink. But if you use rye instead, the drink has a persuasive bite on the front end. Paired with Carpano Antica, arguably the best vermouth in the world, the initial sharpness dissolves into a pleasant amber cloud of spice, cherry and vanilla."

• S.E.C. Accuses Mark Cuban of Insider Trading - Mergers, Acquisitions, Venture Capital, Hedge Funds — DealBook - New York Times - I don't think the New York Times likes Mark Cuban much, for whatever reason.
  "Off the court and on his own blog, Mr. Cuban has been a frequent critic of the National Basketball Association and its commissioner, David Stern, particularly on the issue of officiating, where he once claimed a referee could not run a Dairy Queen. Mr. Cuban then ran a Dairy Queen for a day; even in retribution, he was seeking attention."
• 10,000 Hours - "This idea — that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice — surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours."

  Spending 8 hours a day - that's 1,250 days (or 3.42 years). Hmmm, does drinking wine count? Sex? Seriously, I've probably put that much effort into photography/Photoshop, but I wouldn't consider myself an *expert*, just better than some, and not as good as others.

From one of our most reliable sources ever:

The new Battlestar Galactica webisodes “The Face of the Enemy” start going on line next month. Two recurring male characters are revealed to be gay.

One hears the first webisode was shown at some sort of Producers Guild event or something. Full-on making out was apparently part of the fun!

Who are the recurring males? Gaeta, whose very name has “gay” in it, never seemed too interested in the girls – but perhaps that’s too obvious?

My money’s on Tigh and Tyrol. Remember how sore Tigh got when he found out the chief was secretly boning Boomer?

[From GALACTICA SITREP: Another Coming Out Party?]