Vox Publica

These are some of my favorite internet products & services, some of which I use daily. Check them out!

Skype

A free internet telephony product that really works. I use it to call my parents in LA, and my colleagues around the world. You can also use it to call phones - rather than computers -, at very low rates. If you want to call me, my username is mlacabe.

Picasa

This is a free image editor by Google. It's great in that it's very small and it takes minutes to download and install, but it lets you do simple photo editing (cropping, red-eye correction, color correction) very quickly and easily. It doesn't have the functionality of photoshop and its folder structure is a complete and total mess, but I like it quite well, in particular when used in conjuction with:

Hello

This is a tool that helps you share your pictures with other Hello users. It's also free and extremely quickly to download and install. Picture transfer is amazingly quick and you can see what your friends are looking at. My username here is margalacabe

Craigslist

I spend way too much time at the discussion groups here, but Craigslist is most useful as a place to buy and sell anything you want, find a job, a nanny or a lead or just kill some time.

Salon

The grandaddy of the internet magazines, it's also my favorite. I love the wide range of topics and viewpoints it presents. It's well worth the $35 annual subscription.

Epicurious and All Recipes.

These two websites offer thousands of recipes with user reviews. Epicurious' recipes come from cooking magazines (Bon Appetite, Gourmet and others) while All Recipes accepts submissions from everybody. I usually have better luck with epicurious recipes, but not always. They're both worth checking out.

btefnet.net

There are many torrent sites out there and they often close as quickly as they open, btefnet has been pretty stable so far. It's for episodes of TV shows only, mostly from network TV.

Amazon

I hate being so dependent on this megahuge ecommerce site, but it's the first place I go when I want to read consumer reviews of specific products. epinions is usually the second. Amazon also has good prices and lately I've been lucky with their shipping.

Yahoo Shopping

It has thousands of small stores so it's a great place where to go for comparison shopping and where to find difficult-to-find items.

Please feel free to comment with your favorites.

Too cute not to share

Sometimes the Wall Street Journal can steer you in the right direction, as it has today by recomending Rollyo, a website that allows you to create your own customized search engine. Basically, you can enter a list of websites where you want Rollyo to search and it will save that list in its own URL so you can use it over and over. You can also add it to your browser search bar.

Usually I wouldn't be so excited about that. In most instances when I search for something, I want to search the whole web. HOWEVER, when I'm doing pages for the disappeared for Project Disappeared, I often want to search a limited number of sites, those I know that have information about the disappeared. Now I can without having to do it one by one. Tres cool.

Here is my disappeared search page:

http://rollyo.com/marga/disappeared/

you can try it out by typing a person's name.

You can also put a search box in your own website (see below to the left). This is useful for those of us who have many different domain names, now you can search on all my domain names at once.

Go to Google, put "asshole" in the search field and then click on "I'm feeling lucky".

It will take you to http://filmstripinternational.com/, and a cool slideshow about some of our most well known assholes.

I'm not a huge fan of the US Post office - and in this internet age who really needs it? - but I have to say that the new "favorite children's book animals stamps" are just the cutest. They feature the very hungry caterpillar, curious george, one of the "wild things" from where the wild things are, wilbur the pig, the fox in socks, Maisy (I HATE Maisy) and, my very favorite, Olivia. I just LOVE Olivia, she is soooooo cute and so much like my 4-yo.

It's a good thing we don't mail very many letters, 'cause I don't think I want to use these up :)

BugMeNot - Bypass Compulsory Registration - is a website that allows you to find pre-registered userids and passwords to popular registration-only websites, including top newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post.

You can go to their website to obtain the userids, put a bookmaklet in your tool bar or even get a plug-in for Firefox.

Note that they only provide userids for free accounts.

School of Americas Watch has a new flash-animation "recruitment ad" that should generate a chuckle or too - despite the very serious subject.

Check it out at http://www.soaw.org/new/flash.html

Don't miss this hilarious (and actually quite good) new song by President Bush:

I'm The Decider

I'm not a David Copperfield fan but this is just cool. Apparently Copperfield and two assistants were robbed at gun point after a performance. His assistants handed off their stuff, but Copperfield used sligh of hands to show the robbers his pockets were empty, while in fact they had his cell phone, wallet and passport.

The robbers were later arrested.

David Copperfield Robbed at Gunpoint : People.com

I have a new hero. Stephen Colbert is a comedian. He has a show called "The Colbert Report" on Comedy Central in which he takes the persona of a right-wing Fox-news-like journalist to present fake-real news and interview celebrities and politicians. I don't actually watch his show, but I've seen him before in "The Daily Show", another "fake news" show in which he worked as a correspondant for several years. These shows are comedies, that's why they are in Comedy Central. They cover the irony and ridiculousness of news stories, but their genious is that they do it seriously (or at least pretending to be serious). It's a sad statement on the state of the news media today, that what they cover is often more relevant and their opinions are more respected than that of the general news media.

For some unfanthomable reason, Stephen Colbert was invited to be a speaker at the White House Correspondents Dinner. At the dinner, which is attended by white house and other correspondents, media moguls and people who have made news - in addition the President (yes, Bush), guests "roast" the President. A roast is a strange American tradition in which peole ridicule the guest of honor. I didn't watch the whole show, but apparently most of the speakers did so in a mild and welcoming way.

Stephen Colbert was left to the last, and he was clearly nervous when he started. As well as he should have been, for he proceeded to make what is probably the strongest and most direct indictment of the President's policies and positions that anyone has ever made to Bush's face. He did all of this in character, pretending to be a patriotic, Bush-loving Fox-like politican - and he did so amazingly away. Colbert took Bush to task on global warming, wiretapping, secret detention centers, the war in Iraq, his lack of concern for facts or reality and other matters; he also took on the press - his hosts - for the carte blanche they've given the president. And he did this standing up only a few feet from the President.

That must have taken a lot of courage, the kind of courage most of the press does not have. And it didn't have it that night. Even though the jokes were hillarious most of them only laughed quietly and nervously, if at all. The President and the First Lady looked uncomfortable as did pretty much everyone else - except for White House correspondent Helen Thomas.

You can read more about the show, including some of the jokes at http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002425363

Interestingly, while the news media covered the dinner - it barely mentioned Colbert's speech.

But I take my hat off to him for having the courage to speak the truth to a man everyone else keeps in the dark.

You can watch the show and thank him at http://thankyoustephencolbert.org/

This is Camila when she was first born, note her dark skin and hair

This is Camila now, with blond hair and light (though tanned) skin.

Who knew that babies bleach out?

If you are in the Bay Area, I hope you will come. I'm organizing this.

The San Leandro Community Action Network & Zocalo Coffee House invite you to

A RECEPTION & BOOK SIGNING
in honor of
BRIAN COPELAND
and his new book

Not a Genuine Black Man:
Or, How I Claimed My Piece of Ground in the LilyWhite Suburbs

The reception will take place on
Thursday, August 17th 7 PM at
Zocalo Coffeehouse, 645 Bancroft Ave. San Leandro

Copies available for purchase at the event.

" Based on the longestrunning oneman show in San Francisco history now coming to OffBroadway a hilarious, poignant, and disarming memoir of growing up black in an allwhite suburb

In 1972, when Brian Copeland was eight, his family moved from Oakland to San Leandro, California, hoping for a better life. At the time, San Leandro was 99.4 percent white, known nationwide as a racist enclave. This reputation was confirmed almost immediately: Brian got his first look at the inside of a cop car, for being a black kid walking to the park with a baseball bat.

Brian grew up to be a successful comedian and radio talk show host, but racism reemerged as an issue only in reverse when he received an anonymous letter: “As an African American, I am disgusted every time I hear your voice because YOU are not a genuine Black man!” That letter inspired Copeland to revisit his difficult childhood, resulting in a hit oneman show that has been running for nearly two years which has now inspired a book. In this funny, surprising, and ultimately moving memoir, Copeland shows exactly how our surroundings make us who we are."

Reviews
“A beautiful mix of wry humor and heartbreak, indignation and inspiration, a singular story of extreme isolation that speaks to anyone who’s ever felt out of place.”
San Francisco Chronicle"

UC Berkeley will be hosting a 2-day conference on "the Undead", those spirits and ghouls that haunt our minds, at least during Halloween's. The actual program of the conference doesn't sound nearly as interesting as its concept - which is good, as otherwise I'd want to go and I can't really afford the time (or the babysitting) - but the concept is just too rich not to share.
--

October 19-20, 2006

Conference: The Undead

From age-old whisperings of spirits and ghosts to the contemporary explosion of cultural interest in zombies, the concept of the undead is one that refuses to die. This conference will bring together speakers representing various disciplines, from literature, film, and art to anthropology, politics, and science, who will explore texts, concepts, bodies, and cultures that are at the intersections of life and death.

The conference opens on October 19 with a film screening and discussion in 142 Dwinelle Hall. Graduate Theological Union professor Naomi Seidman will introduce The Dybbuk, a film about spirit possession, and give a related talk from her paper "Ghost of Queer Loves Past." The conference continues with panel discussions October 20 in 370 Dwinelle Hall. Speakers will include: Roy Chan (Comparative Literature), Josh Weiner (English), Alexei Yurchak (Anthropology), Jonathan Cohn (Film Critical Studies, UCLA), Suzanne Daniels (Comparative Literature, NYU), Cathy Hannabach (Cultural Studies, UC Davis), Melanie Micir (University of Pennsylvania), and Sonali Thakkar (English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University). Writer Kelly Link will close the event with a literary reading.

The conference is co-sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the departments of Comparative Literature, Spanish and Portuguese, French, Rhetoric, English, Ethnic Studies, Italian Studies, and Jewish Studies, and the Center for Latin American Studies.

For event information email undead.conference@gmail.com or visit http://undeadconference.com.

When Napoleon visited/conquered Egypt back in the 18th century his intentions were not just to plunder, but also to learn. He took with him a team of scientists and scholars to study as much as the country as they could. The result was Description de l'Egypte, a multi-volume work that basically describes Egypt from tip to toe. It's also beautifully, beautifully illustrated.

They have a copy of the work at the American University in Cairo - which they keep under lock and key - but now you can also access it on the web, and for free. The effect is not the same as touching those ancient pages with your fingers, and the website is quite slow, but it's pretty cool nonetheless.

You can find it at:

http://descegy.bibalex.org/

Below is the press release I got, God knows why.

The penguins have moved from the Magellan Straight to Punta Tombo, in Argentina, and this weekend only (so today only) you can see them live online.

go to: http://200.58.119.161/pinguinos/pinguinos_en_vivo.html