Nothing and Some More

I went to bed wishing that the post-vote polls would be wrong, just this time.
They were right, extremely right even.
cnn,NyTimes,BBC, FT, Straits Times, The Age, The Star, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sun, k5

French panel cautions on reliability of polls

In France, the results of canvasses undertaken by commercial public opinion research groups for fee-paying print and broadcast media are presented without reference to their margin for error or to their methods of extrapolation from small samples.
[...]The political editor of a major French newsgathering organization, requesting anonymity, said last month the margin for error was typically 3 percent to 4 percent.[...]
If this figure were superimposed on the French polls before the first round of balloting Sunday, it would suggest little difference in the potential scores of President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, or the narrowest of advantages for the incumbent president.

The Scorpion King

The Scorpion King so far from perfect it isn't funny, is nevertheless one of those movies that catches you up in something bigger than yourself, namely, an archetypal desire to enjoy good trash every now and then.

(and the real story of the Scorpion King)

Hollywood Hegemony

Exceptionnally odd... the title is even more appropriate now.

France is culturally and commercially impressive. But no longer is it exceptional in the sense that it can stand gloriously aloof from the sweep of the global economy, protecting its own businesses and movies, pretending to maintain a system that is neither capitalist fish nor socialist fowl, promoting a foreign policy that can no longer make a difference on its own. The presidential election, to date, has been notable for a dismal lack of candour about where the country is going or should go. Will that change in the next round? Probably not, but here's hoping.

USA's intelligence apparatus (and America's spies are in a mess, Time for a rethink)

After Oprah

Winfrey's core audience feels it has a relationship with her; if they tune in every day, they may spend more time listening to her than they do talking with their sisters or best friends. That relationship may be an illusion of sorts, the kind of phantom connection social commentators find so alarming, but nevertheless its effects are potent. Even people who don't really watch Oprah feel as if they know Oprah.

Free ebooks helps to sell more books

w3m-img, wow! (via NTK).

I know you don't care about any of this. I just wanted you to hear O'Leary say holy jumpin' Judas Priest!

Penthouse

Before Hustler, the choice was between the girls next door with gigantic tits in Playboy or those with smaller breasts in the slightly kinkier Penthouse.[...] Our Hustler Honeys were more like the hot little number down at the bar who'd likely give you a blow job out in the parking lot if you'd buy her a couple of beers.[...] I've always admired the way that Penthouse has tried to convince American men that small-breasted naughty young ladies are sexy, too -- quite a challenge in a culture where big boobs seem to be the primary sexual characteristic men look for in a woman<br/> "And," Ben [Pesta] noted, "online porn is vertically integrated. If you want to see pictures of 300-pound women stuffing tennis rackets up their butts, you just type in those words on Google. You don't have to page through all that other crap." (A recent Google search using the keywords tennis racket, hefty woman and butt turned up 52 hits. I did not check them out.)

Andrea Dworkin (Salon on Andrea Dworkin) and The People vs Larry Flint (IMDB info) and Google it :)

Animal Doctors

Romeo Wanted Juliette

We might be comforted by the fact that there has never been a generation that hasn't looked to the media as corrupting its youth. Before there was pornography, there was MTV, and before MTV, there was rock 'n' roll, before rock 'n' roll, there was comic books, before comic books, there was dime novels, before dime novels, there was burlesque. And yet each generation of youth somehow managed to grow up and be morally upstanding enough to decry whatever they felt was happening to the next generation.

The Hole in the Wall (via /. )

Still, not everybody's autobiography.
While I'm in MetaBlog mode, Not journalism, just world-wide water-cooler conversation

Anyway, I'm still trying to figure out what weblogging is, but it sure doesn't seem to be journalism most of the time.

and on Jon's Radio

Looking into blogspace with fresh eyes, Jeffrey [P Shell] wondered "Why write when there's so much else to do? Who's reading?"

I know I don't scale, even with RSS.

Automatic linkbacks. Don't add comment, add automatic linkback, it's more in the weblog spirit.
I was thinking of hacking something similar for the other site, and my problem was how to extract the permalink from the referring page (since usually readers will click via the home page and I would like to have hypertext conversations valid once archived.)
The quick-and-dirty answer is social engineering: the author voluntarily clicks on each link once from his permanent page and the linkback algorithm uses this permalink (obviously the first) for the other dateless homepage link. The problem is then with TimeZone and people using the Blogroll, but it is minor (means one false hit once in a while).
The better answer is BlogMl or some sort of standardized valid markup for the blog structure (see also BlogML and the Semantic Web).
And there are always the bidirectionnal links in Xanadu.

Internet firms no different and Loki: A promising plan gone terribly wrong

Language Box (via Courrier International (via Cooperation.net ))