linkmachinego.com
3 April 2003
[politics] Unfazed Passenger on a Dizzying Ride — Simon Hoggart on Tony Blair … ‘Tony Blair arrived for prime minister’s questions looking quite unflustered. This is something of a feat for a man who must feel he’s in the back of a truck which is hurtling up a mountain side at 70mph, through a dozen hairpin bends, a dizzying drop first on the right, then to the left – and who is at the wheel? Donald Rumsfeld! Aaargh!’
2 April 2003
[comics] Grant Morrison: Ten Cats Mad — Jeremy Dennis on Grant Morrison at the ICA. ‘…let’s talk cats! Paul loves cats, Grant loves cats. Grant loves cats so much that he has four in house and six buried in the back garden. “Are you a dog person?” asks Paul. Grant stares at his shiny boots and looks slightly guilty. “I really like dogs,” he says, “But I like cats more. And dogs need so much looking after, so much attention. I think I’d just get really frustrated with a dog.” The guy three rows behind me who came in to listen to Grant talk about acid trips and alien abductions nearly explodes with frustration.’ [via kookymojo | Related: Jeremy Dennis’ Website]
[comics] A Self-Aware DC Universe — Rich Johnson update on Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. ‘…Morrison talked about the basics of life. How it arises from complex systems. And how so comics continuity has become so complex as to support sentience. Expressed his intent to create a comic so complex that it becomes a living self-aware being, as well as bringing that same aspect to the DC Universe, wanting to make the DC Universe realise that it’s alive. He didn’t appear to be joking.’
1 April 2003
[war] Northern Iraq Weblog — BBC Reporter Stuart Hughes on-the-spot blog from Iraq … ‘We were woken by the News Desk at 0730 and for the next 8 hours we barely drew breath. The Rolling News Monster had us in its grip and wasn’t going to let us go. Each hour was filled with lives for World TV, News 24, World Service, Radio 4, Five Live, you name it, interspersed with the odd rushed phone call to find out what was actually happening.’ [via Bowblog]
31 March 2003
[comics] Ebay Auction — Batman: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland … I’m trying to prune back my comic collection a bit so expect a few auctions to show up here. This is an Alan Moore Batman comic from 1988… The Joker: ‘All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That’s how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day.’
[blog] The Dullest Blog in the World‘I put a compact disc into the machine and played track 1. I then forwarded it to track 9 and played that and tracks 10, 11 and 12. Later on I may play track 3 and 4 and perhaps 18 depending on how the mood takes me. I will miss out track 2 as I don’t like it that much.’ [via I Love Everything]
30 March 2003
[tech] Compressing Webpages for Fun and Profit — a how-to about compressing pages on the fly with PHP to speed-up downloads and save bandwidth. ‘…what if I told you that you can third your content easily with no work on your part whatsoever? It sounds like a pitch I might get in a lovely unsolicited email. The secret lies in the fact that every major browser of the past 5 years supports transparently decompressing content on the fly.’ [via Neil’s World]
29 March 2003
[blogs] Bloggers’ Delight — Steven Levy on Warblogging … ‘”I’ve got 32 windows open on my browser, the TV is on, and I’ve got the BBC on my RealPlayer,” says the 32-year-old freelance financial consultant. “I woke up to 332 e-mails this morning.” From this command post, [Sean-Paul] Kelley single-handedly creates a Weblog called The Agonist, which tracks and comments on developments in the war with Iraq.’ [Related: The Agonist | via Boing Boing]
28 March 2003
[news] The West Pier on Fire — a slideshow from Kevan.
27 March 2003
[war] War Porn — interesting article about the portrayal of War on television and the press … Krista Cowman: ‘Boys are both innately and through programming turned into obsessive collecting from an early age. My son collects Digimon cards at the moment; my husband, though an early modernist, has an anal obsession over first-world-war aircraft. It’s about categorising and sorting; it’s about the way the sexes communicate. Girls talk about their hopes and dreams and fears; boys communicate through the swapping of lists and football cards.’
26 March 2003
[comics] Sex in New X-Men #118 — X-Fans get worked up over subliminal SEX in an issue of the New X-Men … ‘When the issue in question was released several months ago, it went by almost unnoticed, but there is a subliminal message inside. Sure, some readers noticed the word SEX being hidden in the background art here or there, but only after an article in Wizard the general audience took a closer look and in fact the secret message has been discovered 17 times — so far.’ [thanks John]
25 March 2003
[war] Shock Tactics — interview with Harlan Ullman the creator of “Shock and Awe” … ‘On Wednesday night, after US commanders ordered a smaller strike of Tomahawk missiles at targets they believed included Saddam Hussein, CNN, for one, began running an on-screen alert reading “Shock and Awe postponed”. But “that was classic shock and awe,” says Ullman, who is now strategic associate at the centre for strategic and international studies in Washington. “If you kill the emperor, the empire’s up for grabs. And had we killed him, it would have been a classic application [of the theory]: $50m of ordnance, and we won the war.” After this, the argument begins to get a little circular: the postponement of shock and awe “was shock and awe, too,” Ullman says, because “we were threatening shock and awe”.’
[comics] Zenith Phase 3 Scorecard — amusing list of all the characters in Morrison and Yeowell’s corruption and destuction of a vast array of old British comic heroes … General Jumbo: ‘…this is General Jumbo. While we don’t see him properly until part 5 “Letter from the Underworld”, he is in this prologue – we see him dead, face down in the sea with his trousers round his ankles. Quite what Grant felt he did to deserve so ignominious a death I don’t know.’ [via Venusberg]
24 March 2003
[war] Baghdad Calling — the Guardian’s G2 Section had several pages of recent postings from Where is Raed? today … ‘Those who know Baghdad well, and who have read the diary closely, say there is no doubt in their mind that whoever is writing it is currently resident in the Iraqi capital. The author may display evidence of spending time in the west (possibly Britain, though he does use Americanisms) with his cynical sense of humour and love of David Bowie lyrics, but the reams and reams of fascinating detail about domestic and street life in Baghdad are highly convincing.’
[comics] Get Your War On — Part 22

Panel from Get You War On

23 March 2003
[war] BBC War [B]log links …

  • 22 March – Pushing … Rageh Omar in Baghdad: ‘Every sign here is that Saddam Hussein and his commanders have escaped attempts to assassinate them, despite persistent rumours from London and Washington ‘
  • 21 March – Attacks … Gavin Hewitt in Southern Iraq: ‘In the last few minutes we just crossed over the Basra-Baghdad highway. We’ve had several bizarre incidents in the last few minutes of drivers on the highway completely unaware that American armour may be this far north, stopping their vehicles in utter amazement as we crossed the highway.’
  • 20 March – At War … Nick Bryant in Washington: ‘The White House is trying hard to show that things are calm. They’ve put a lot of effort into making the President’s day seem effortless.’

[war] Iraq Still Online — brief article about the status of Iraqi Internet. (Where is Raed? has not updated since Friday) … ‘It’s not immediately clear, however, whether Iraqis have been able to easily access the Internet since the initial attacks. Repeated checks of the abbreviated log files for Uruklink.net and BabilOnline.net reveal only a few hits from users of SMS and AIT, the two satellite ISPs that supply Iraq.’
22 March 2003
[war] Minute After Minute the Missiles Came, with Devastating Shrieks — Robert Fisk in Baghdad. ‘…the symbolic centre of this raid was clearly intended to be Saddam’s main palace, with its villas, fountains, porticos and gardens. And, sure enough, the flames licking across the facade of the palace last night looked very much like a funeral pyre.’
21 March 2003
[war] Power Tool — profile of Tomahawk Cruise Missiles‘The message it communicates is not one of brute force, but of sheer, unmatchable technological superiority, enforced from a safe distance. “It’s still seen by many as a somehow unnatural development in the culture of war,” says the military historian Antony Beevor. “We have still failed to realise what an astonishing technical development there has been in a very short period of time. Human perceptions of change are simply not flexible enough.”‘
[blogs] Q: Is the Baghdad Blogger for real? — Paul Boutin wonders if the Where is Raed? iraqi weblog is a hoax … ‘Salam claims to connect to the Net via Uruklink, the state-run Iraqi ISP, using Web-based email from the British music magazine New Musical Express. Remember the Sex Pistols line, “I use the NME?” So does he. IP addresses in his email headers aren’t sufficient to pinpoint his location, but they’re consistent with his story, being in the same range used by past Uruklink posters.’ [thanks John]
20 March 2003
[war] Iraq on-the-spot Linkage …

  • Where is Raed?‘there is still nothing happening in baghdad we can only hear distant explosions and there still is no all clear siren.’
  • Reporters’ Log: At war in Iraq … Paul Wood in Baghdad: ‘People are very jumpy here. We now know the city of Baghdad was not the main thrust of the air attack. The focus is being described as a “target of opportunity”, where five senior members of the Iraqi government were gathered. It is believed that Saddam Hussein was amongst them. In the last few minutes it appears the telephone system has gone down here.’
  • Suddenly, the War is Very Real — Yesterday in Baghdad … ‘Reality finally came to Baghdad yesterday. Overnight, sandbags sprouted on football fields and roundabouts. In the evening the authorities rustled up yet another peace demonstration. The number of fatal car accidents seemed to surge, with drivers in a panic to get home, or to get out. Chemists sold out of valium.’ [via Words of Waldman]

[war] Steve Bell’s Iraq Cartoons (so far) …

Single-handedly, Jim lad! by Steve Bell.

19 March 2003
[war] Reporters’ Log — BBC News Correspondents are [b]logging the War … ‘The overwhelming feeling among the British troops is a wish to get on with the job they have been sent here to do. As one British commander put it: “It will be tea and medals in Baghdad in a few days time.” And no-one really wants to contemplate the alternative.’ [via Grayblog]
[war] Douglas Rushkoff has been talking to Grant Morrison about the war in Iraq‘[Morrison] says he’s decided not to think about the war and all this mess, at all. He’s calling it “what the adults do,” and making a strong case for the idea that “we told them this would happen,” and “they never listen to us, anyway.”‘
18 March 2003
[war] Sun sets on Kuwaiti Border Peace — eye-witness report from Northern Kuwait … ‘In the setting sun, the camouflage netting of one British camp looked like a sprawling field of jagged rocks, spreading from the road to the horizon. All these camps are filled with the lumps and spikes of armour and artillery. British tank guns point unblinkingly at the main highway, as if expecting attack from that direction. Yet it is not the weaponry which is most chilling about this armed host, which, with its five divisions, its training, its speed and mobility, its vast fleet of helicopters, its ability to fight at night and its digital technology is probably the most capable killing machine the world has ever seen. It is the industrial scale of the supply operation, and the amount of money which is visibly being spent, which scares. This is a professional army, and it goes at the job like a contractor.’
[google] How Google Grows…and Grows…and Grows — profile of Google. ‘…the difference between 0.3 seconds and 0.2 seconds is pretty profound. Most searches on Google actually take less than 0.2 seconds. That extra tenth of a second is all about the outliers: queries crammed with unrelated words or with words that are close in meaning. The outliers can take half a second to resolve — and Google believes that users’ productivity begins to wane after 0.2 seconds. So its engineers find ways to store ever-more-arcane Web-text snippets on its servers, saving the engine the time it takes to seek out phrases when a query is made. And it’s why, most of the time, the Google home page contains exactly 37 words. “We count bytes,” says Google Fellow Urs Holzle, who is on leave from the University of California at Santa Barbara. “We count them because our users have modems, so it costs them to download our pages.”‘
17 March 2003
[sars] SARS resources and comments — disturbing on-the-spot account from Hong Kong of the new lethal pneumonia called SARS … ‘Note that ICU staff are not going home to their families. As a physician, I find that observation chilling.’ [via Boing Boing]
[comics] The “Synchronicity” Triptych — Dave Sim reminisces about Bill Sienkiewicz

‘…Bill walked up and asked if anyone wanted to see some pages from the new project which he was working on with Frank Miller. And, of course, we all said “sure”. What ensued was the most “jaw-dropping” moment I have ever experienced in getting an advance look at a project in my life (smoking dope in a hotel room at Mid-Ohio Con while Frank Miller acted out a lot of The Dark Knight Returns comes a close second, though). The project, of course, was Elektra Assassin and what Bill had were original pages from (I believe) the first two issues. No word balloons, but fully rendered colour. Fully rendered colour but rendered in every imaginable way. Crayon, acrylic, charcoal pencil, pencil crayon, crayon, oil pastel. And collage. This was years before Dave McKean would define the extremes of collage with his Sandman covers, but — before Bill did it — it was completely unthinkable in a comic-book. Unthinkable.’

15 March 2003
[comic] Evolution Of A Hip, Ironic Catch Phrase‘Everybody Wang Chung Tonight.’
14 March 2003
[war] Pentagon hawk at war with his own side — interesting profile of Donald Rumsfeld‘A couple of weeks ago he was addressing a gathering of international officials at the Pentagon. “There are four countries that will never support us. Never,” barked Mr Rumsfeld, before instantly creating his own new axis of evil: “Cuba, Libya and Germany.” “What’s the fourth?” someone asked. “I forget the fourth,” he said, which was probably fortunate. Who knows who else he might have offended?’