I ran into this over at Late Night Pool (thanks, Rogério!). NewsMap looks at the Google news aggregator and displays its contents more as a work of art than anything else. The newest stories are in the brightest colors, etc. Very pleasant to leave on the desktop. (I don’t know if it refreshes / pushes to the browser at any point.)
Get a load of this.
“On June 8th, in a tiny village in Slovakia, Tomas Maruska took a picture that is … beyond rare. It shows Venus and the International Space Station (ISS) transiting the Sun at the same time.
“The double transit was visible only inside a narrow corridor a few hundred meters wide. And it was brief. The space station crosses in the Sun in a split second!
“Maruska knew when and where to look thanks to the predictions of Thomas Fly, an expert forecaster of ISS transits.”
Thanks so much to SpaceWeather.com!
Dated 8 June, 2004: “America Online, Inc. and multiple award winning author Harlan Ellison today announced a settlement of their four-year old copyright dispute.
“Ellison sued AOL in April 2000 over concerns that unauthorized copies of his and the works of other authors were being distributed through the USENET newsgroup alt.binaries.e-book, which, at that time, could be accessed through AOL’s and others’ services. AOL blocked its users’ access to the alt.binaries.e-book newsgroup immediately after Ellison filed his lawsuit.
“In April 2002, AOL won a summary judgment dismissing Ellison’s claims based on the limitations of copyright liability granted to Internet service providers under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (‘DMCA’). Ellison appealed that decision. In February 2004, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit partially affirmed and partially reversed the summary judgment. The Court confirmed that AOL could qualify for the DMCA’s limitation on copyright liability as a ‘passive conduit’ under the DMCA.
“Both AOL and Ellison are pleased this case was able to draw the courts’ and the public’s attention to the issue of online piracy and advance the legal issues relating to copyrights in the digital world.”
Yay Harlan!!
The Pedant in the Kitchen is a lot of fun. Peter spotted the book in a swing through Hodges Figgis in Dublin, glanced through it, and handed it to me, saying, “This guy is our kind of people.”
I opened the book at random and found:
“How many cookbooks do you have?
(a) Not enough
(b) Just the right number
(c) Too many?
“If you answered (b) you are disqualified for lying or complacency or not being interested in food or (scariest of all) having worked everything out perfectly. You score points for (a) and also for (c), but to score maximum points you need to have answered both (a) and (c) in equal measure. (a) because there is always something new to be learned, someone coming along to make it all clearer, easier, more foolproof, more authentic: (c) because of the regular mistakes made when applying (a).”
The author then lists his twenty or so most-used cookbooks, which live in his kitchen (as opposed to the many others which reside in other parts of his house). Of his list, we have fifteen of his twenty, in just about the same order of importance. This impressed me, since I have to confess I love it when people agree with me.
The book has many other charms. Mostly it’s about Julian Barnes’ attempt to bring precision to the art of cooking: but there’s more to the book than that. Bits like this:
“Anthony Lane, reviewing the scarily efficient Martha Stewart, quotes this typical piece of advice about having folks around for a bite: ‘One of the most important moments on which to expend extra effort is the beginning of a party, often an awkward time, when guests feel tentative and insecure.’ To which Lane exactly responds: ‘The guests are insecure? How about the frigging cook?'”
“River Cafe Green has a terrific recipe for Penne with Tomato and Nutmeg (and basil, garlic and Pecorino), which I make regularly: the nutmeg is the key surprise element. But I did first have to overcome the recipe’s first sentence: ‘2.5 kg ripe vine cherry tomatoes, halved and seeded’. So that’s well over five pounds of cherry tomatoes. And how many of the little buggers do you think you get to the pound? I’ll tell you: I’ve just weighed fifteen and they came to four ounces. That’s sixty to the pound. So we’re talking 300, cut in half, 600, juice all over the place, flicking out their seeds with a knife, worrying about not extracting every single one. All together now: NO, WE’RE NOT GOING TO DO THAT. Leave the seeds in and call it extra roughage.”
“What do cookbook writers want? Mute obeisance? What kind of relationship would that imply? You’re not a spud-bashing squaddie after all, and they can’t put you on a charge for insolence, dumb or otherwise. Remind yourself who paid money for whose book. The only way to earn their respect is to rebel. Go on: it’s good for you. It’s probably good for them too.”
“Kitchen shops sell a lot of useful gadgets and time-saving equipment. One of the most useful and most liberating would be a sign that the domestic cook could place to catch the eye in moments of tension: THIS IS NOT A RESTAURANT.”
…Definitely a recommended book.
Mmf. All right, this would be good news, if true. What makes it difficult for me to swallow is the source…the same way I had a little difficulty on first hearing the news that “Cromwell didn’t kill nearly as many Irish people as we thought” coming from British scholars.
It’d be interesting to see what some scholars the Vatican didn’t approve might have to say on the subject.
And I’m still waiting for the Vatican to apologize for what they did to Giordano Bruno, but I think I may have a long wait, because he was a Neoplatonist as well as a Copernican, and the Neoplatonism probably annoyed the Renaissance Church a whole lot more than his saying the planets went around the Sun. (He also said that all planets had life, and that they themselves were giant intelligent beings. I suppose that idea, too, could have really gotten under some people’s skins.)
(A fascinating line, too, in the above-linked article: “1591 found him in Frankfurt. Apparently, during the Frankfurt Book Fair, he received an invitation to Venice from one Zuane Mocenigno, who wished to be instructed in the art of memory, and also heard of a vacant chair in mathematics at Padua…” [chuckle] Networking, then as now. But the image of Bruno stalking around the big convention center in Frankfurt gave me a start…)
Just across the road from our house lies a big country estate with all the “country estate” trimmings — a Big House, a lake, gigantic trees, private roads, you name it. The people there are into horse breeding, as are many people in this neck of the woods.
Now, this Vast Tract of Land has in the recent past mostly been important to our lives because our littlest and youngest cat, Bubble, would vanish into it, over the high stone wall across the road, nearly every night. She would normally be back in the morning, though sometimes she’d be missing for longer.
About two weeks ago I flew back into Dublin from the Continent, and Peter joined me in town for an overnight stay before we came home again. When he left the house, Bubble was sleeping in one of her usual places, in his office window under the stand where his computer monitor sits. When we got home, she was nowhere to be seen. Well, that was no big deal. We both figured she’d be back in the morning.
But she wasn’t. Nor the next morning, nor the morning after that. The other cats were becoming concerned: Beemer, in particular, started searching for her.
Her record to date had been seventy-two hours missing, after which she’d turned up perfectly all right: so we waited that long. And still no Bubble. 
At that point we began leafleting the neighborhood (which isn’t much of a neighborhood at all: the three houses a quarter-mile west of us, the two houses a quarter-mile east (both of them on the estate’s lands) and the Big House in the middle of the estate. Everyone said they’d look out for the kitty: there was always the possibility that she’d gotten herself shut into an outbuilding.
We also leafleted the local pub. And a couple of anxious days later we got a phone call from one of the estate staff who’d seen the leaflet there. “Sure she’s fine, your little cat,” he said. “She’s been down among the barns since last Monday. Come on down and you can collect her.”
The same kindly man lured Bubble into an empty garage, shut her in, and then drove up to the house to get me and the cat carrier. It seems that Bubs had gone somewhat farther into the estate than usual and had been chased by a couple of the farmyard dogs there, and as a result had become disoriented enough that she couldn’t figure out how to get home. Once returned home, she ate prodigiously, slept a lot…and then, a day and a half later, went right out again: over the wall and away…
Late that afternoon someone else, a more senior staff member at the estate, stopped by. “Are you missing your little cat again?”
“Only since this morning,” I said.
“She’s down checking out the new barn we built for the mares,” he said. “She seems to like the horses. And she’s death on the mice, that one.”
We chatted for a while, and the story came out. Apparently, for at least the past six months, Bubble has been patrolling the estate’s main barn daily for rats and mice. At that point no one was sure who she belonged to — apparently she wouldn’t let anyone get close enough to see that her collar had her name and “her” phone number written on it. But they were glad to have her, since she is, indeed, “death on the mice.” And rats, and anything else small and edible that crosses her path…or, indeed, not so small. Peter and I are still bemused by the memory of the evening she brought in, through the electric cat door, a live and very annoyed rat nearly a third her size, and turned it loose in the kitchen to play with. The other cats, all of them much bigger and stronger than Bubble, when brought in and shown this situation, unanimously backed away with expressions that plainly said, “Uh-uh, no way, nothing to do with us.” We finally had to open the kitchen door and chase the rat outside — at which point Bubble ran out to deal with it more conclusively, and the other cats all ran after her to watch.
We had always been curious about what Miss Bubs did over in the estate. And now, at last, we know. She’s been punching the clock on her day job…
I was minding my own business when my husband said, “It’s your birthday and we’re going out to dinner.”
“Oh?” I said. “Okay. Where? Aya? Gotham Cafe?”
“Ma Bourgogne,” he said.
[blink] “But that’s in Paris.”
Which is where we got off the plane three hours later…
My husband, it should be mentioned, is a prince among men, a king.
So we checked into the hotel, and then went out to Ma Bourgogne, and had one of those five-hour dinners, and then strolled around the neighborhood of the Place des Vosges in perfect summer weather (which Peter had somehow also apparently arranged) and then crashed and burned in utter contentment. Up early the next morning, more strolling, a brief early lunch, and then back to Charles de Gaulle, the most disorganized airport on Earth, and home to Dublin.
It may take me a while to recover from this.
Meanwhile, I leave you with Troy in 15 minutes.
I guess I was still having the one-day collapse that followed getting back from those four days away. Never mind. 
“The historic first image of a planet circling another star may have been taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The ‘planet’, 5-10 times the mass of Jupiter, is orbiting a small white dwarf star about 100 light-years away.
“Astronomers are being cautious, saying they require more data to be sure it really is a planet and not a background object caught in the same field of view.”
“Petersen’s skimpily-clad sirens are the men – Brad Pitt’s moody muscleboy Achilles, and Orlando Bloom’s earnest Paris, fragrant and fetching in a floaty, chest-baring blouse (but then, Paris is always lovely this time of year).”
…The reviews about Troy have been very decidedly mixed. There’s an interesting sidebar to all this: we almost had Wolfgang Petersen as director for Kingdom in Twilight. But he dropped away from the production to do this instead.
I have a lot of trouble going to see a movie which tampers so radically with the structure of a story which has worked in its present form for three thousand years. (My favorite translation, if anyone cares, would be this one by W. H. D. Rouse: he tells the story in prose rather than verse — and especially he doesn’t pull his punches during the battle scenes.) But if there were a single reason that I’d go, it would be to see this man.
Poor Cory! What a way to find out what the term means.
For those who haven’t heard it before: “U.K.: petty bureaucrat: a minor official who insists on following regulations to the letter, especially with the intention of being deliberately obstructive ( informal )”
Feh.
Every now and then I have a small noisy fit about the unnatural things they do to mass-produced bread over here. I see from Blog of a Bookslut that there’s just been an article in the Guardian that restates the heart of my rant with some interesting additions — including the suggestion that some of the present wave of gluten and yeast allergies can be laid at the door of the Chorleywood process.
I wouldn’t be even slightly surprised. Grr.
…Nothing to do by way of direct resistance but get out some of that super “primitive-grain” flour from BienManger.com in France and make bread the old-fashioned way. Cold rise, 48-hour cold rise sponge, crunchy crust, mmmm….
(Oh, and there’s a book, too: Not On The Label: What Really Goes Into The Food On Your Plate. The article is an excerpt from the book.)