Bookmarks for November 18th

Some additional reading November 18th from 14:16 to 22:25:

  • 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."

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