Humility Equals History Plus Time
An e-mail received by the Drudge Retort:How long did it take for your Jewish handlers to force you to remove the Charlie Sheen/9-11 story the other day?
A comment on Workbench:
Two people witness an event (Jews and Palestinians) and you decide that Jews are simply not credible. You don't want credible, you want to continue to be a racist, Jew hating, angry young man.
When I was young, I can recall studying some of the more horrific moments in history and thinking myself fortunate to live in more rational and enlightened times.
Give Justice Scalia a Hand
When Justice Antonin Scalia received little consideration for promotion to Chief Justice, I wondered how well he'd take life as a second banana to John Roberts. Recent events suggest he isn't handling it well.
After making public remarks about Gitmo detentions that could force his recusal from an upcoming case, Scalia left a Catholic mass Sunday and made an obscene Sicilian gesture to a reporter.
As he was leaving the mass, Scalia was tossed a softball question by a Boston Herald reporter about whether he takes flak for public displays of his Roman Catholic beliefs.
"You know what I say to those people?" Scalia, 70, replied, making an obscene gesture, flicking his hand under his chin ...
The press is being coy about the gesture, which was photographed by a church journalist whose newspaper won't publish the picture, but it appears that Scalia made the move depicted here, which means the same thing as me ne frego! (I don't give a damn).
The service he attended has been described in press reports as a "special Mass for lawyers and politicians." I didn't know the Catholic Church was singling out these groups for extra attention, but it makes a lot of sense.
East Africa Suffers Worst Famine in Decades
I've written before about the journalist Anna Badkhen, who filed incredible reports from Iraq for the San Francisco Chronicle on the day-to-day lives of soldiers and Iraqis.She's now in Kenya, covering a drought across East Africa that has left millions of people dependent on food aid that's running out:
Now Isaaq's family -- her husband, Nur Muhammad, and their children, ranging in ages from 1 to 10 -- have no livestock to sell, and nothing of their own to eat or drink. They left the bush and moved to Jerirot, an impoverished settlement of about 6,000 former nomads who have also lost their cattle to drought. They are among the estimated 17 million people across Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Djibouti and Sudan who are surviving almost entirely on meager food rations distributed by international aid agencies.
The United Nations World Food Programme needs more donations to feed these people, estimating that another $226 million is required to help 6.25 million people in Kenya, Somalia and Djibouti.
Cost to feed one malnourished woman or child in East Africa for one day: 55 cents.
May Your RSS Always Be Well-Formed
I'm working on an RSS Profile, a set of recommendations for RSS publishers that make it easier to create feeds that work in aggregators and other software. I published the third draft this morning.Unlike a specification, the profile contains subjective advice on how to avoid common pitfalls in RSS, like the unresolved question of whether an item may contain multiple enclosures.
The goal of the project is to create a profile that's recommended by the RSS Advisory Board. If that fails, I'll promote it personally on Workbench.
Anyone who wants to build on the profile can do so, because it is offered under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license, even in the current draft form.
Rachel Corrie: The Show Must Go Away
The current issue of The Nation has a great cover story on My Name is Rachel Corrie, a play created from the e-mail and journal entries of the American activist killed in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer in March 2003.The play was supposed to begin yesterday at the New York Theatre Workshop off-Broadway, but it has been postponed indefinitely because the theater chickened out. Here's artistic director James Nicola's explanation:
In our pre-production planning and our talking around and listening in our communities in New York, what we heard was that after Ariel Sharon's illness and the election of Hamas, we had a very edgy situation. We found that our plan to present a work of art would be seen as us taking a stand in a political conflict that we didn't want to take.
When Corrie died, I felt admiration for a young American who risked her life to demonstrate her convictions, just as I'd think the same of a U.S. soldier who signed up to defend the country on 9/12 and a Western journalist who left a secure area in Iraq this morning to cover the war. If you don't appreciate the courage of other people, they might quit and leave the job to the rest of us. I find that prospect frightening.
Before she was killed by an armored bulldozer whose driver may not have seen her, Corrie was trying to save a pharmacist's house from destruction. The compassion and bravery she demonstrated with that act can be appreciated without making a tacit endorsement of everything she ever did or said in her short 23-year life.
The story mentions Playgoer, a theater blogger who has been all over this controversy, hounding the Theatre Workshop for an explanation of its decision. The blog includes this excerpt from the play, Corrie's own words:
The scariest thing for non-Jewish Americans in talking about Palestinian self-determination is the fear of being or sounding anti-Semitic. The people of Israel are suffering and Jewish people have a long history of oppression. We still have some responsibility for that, but I think it's important to draw a firm distinction between the policies of Israel as a state, and Jewish people.
That's kind of a no-brainer, but there is very strong pressure to conflate the two. I try to ask myself, whose interest does it serve to identify Israeli policy with all Jewish people?
The Dodgers Will Never Forget Hiroshima
I attended Sunday's spring training game between the Dodgers and Nationals at Vero Beach, the first time I've seen a game at the legendary Dodgertown. There are no bad seats, the atmosphere is completely laid back and you're right on top of the players. I sat so close to Eric Gagne warming up along the third base line I could've made a beer run for him.
The history of Dodgertown dates back to the years the team played in Brooklyn, and I found a very unexpected relic from those days in the stadium: an oxidized bronze plaque in which the Brooklyn Dodgers expressed their feelings about the Hiroshima bombing.
The inscription reads:
We dedicate this visit in memory of those baseball fans and others who here died by atomic action on Aug. 6, 1945. May their souls rest in peace and with God's help and man's resolution peace will prevail forever, amen.
One year after their first World Series championship, the Dodgers made a goodwill trip to Japan in November 1956, presenting the plaque with the intent it could be displayed in Hiroshima, as the word "here" indicates in the inscription. Only 11 years had passed since the bombing.
How the plaque ended up in Vero Beach is a mystery. All mentions on the web make it sound as if the Japanese kept it.
The emotional impact of the plaque, which marks an event that claimed an estimated quarter-million lives, is diminished somewhat by its placement next to a concession stand's mustard and ketchup dispensers, right beside another plaque that recognizes Dodgertown for achievements in landscaping.
RSS Board Supports Common Feed Icon
The RSS Advisory Board proposal to support the common feed icon has passed 5-0.In an effort to make the concept of syndication easier for mainstream users, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera will all identify RSS and Atom feeds with the same icon:
The board has adopted the symbol on its site and encourages its use on web sites, browsers, and syndication software.
Additionally, the board encourage web publishers to use the icon on any feed, regardless of whether it employs Atom or the two formats that call themselves RSS: RDF Site Summary and Really Simple Syndication.
If you've added the icon to a site published with Movable Type, WordPress or another weblog publishing system, your tips on implementing the icon are welcomed on the RSS-Public mailing list.
Social Media
Subscriptions
Blogroll
Projects
RSS Advisory Board
How to Read an RSS Feed with Java Using XOM
The RSS Advisory Board Just Turned 20
Downloading 50,000 Podcast Feeds to Analyze Their RSS
Tara Calishain Explains: What is RSS?
Be Unique And Use RSS Guid Like Everybody Else
Statistics
This blog has been published since Nov. 7, 1999 (a span of 9,446 days).
Thank you for visiting Workbench.
