Dowbrigade

A renowned graffiti artist managed to slip into one of Britain’s best
known galleries and stick one of his own works on the wall.

Banksy, best known for creating the sleeve of the latest Blur album,
glued his painting to the wall of Tate Britain and it was only discovered
when it crashed to the floor hours later.

The work has now been placed in the London gallery’s lost property section.
He visited Tate Britain in prosthetic make-up to make him look elderly.

from Ananova

It is my moral
duty to take full and personal responsibility for the loss
of the American League Championship Series to the Doughboys
of Doom, the New York Yankees. If you are interested, below are the reasons
for my direct responsibility, and a solemn promise that this is
the last I will write about the Red Sox – ever.

Fitfully, the Dowbrigade tossed and turned, trying unsuccessfully to
take a siesta and chill his fevered brain, which was awash
in raw emotions rooted in his dearest dreams and deepest hatreds. I was
trying
to rest up and gather my forces, meager though they were, to keep my
fragile psyche in one piece and focus my full psychic energies on the
upcoming climatic clash between the charismatic hometown Sox and the
universally detested New York Yankees.

read on….

It’s Bolivia’s
turn for a day or two in the stark, twisted spotlight of world media
attention. Maybe once a decade that merciless eye will sweep this benighted
morass of human suffering and then move on, nothing solved or even exposed
to anything more than momentary indifference.

Bolivia is the poorest and most backward nation in this hemisphere,
probably in the world outside of sub-Sahara Africa. When I was there
a few years ago, things in the capital, La Paz (the highest world capital
not counting Tibet, and lets not have that discussion now), were like
the US in the 50’s; ancient cars, no franchises or neon signs, sorry,
worn cobblestone streets rising at impossible angles, and dirt-poor Indians
everywhere. The only ostensible signs of wealth were the shadowy black
Mercedes ferrying aging Aryan aristocrats in greatcoats and boots to
bars and bistros with names like "Der Racket" and "Mein Rache" to rue
the
fall of the Reich.

Outside of the capital things were much worse. It was like traveling
backwards in a time machine at least 100 years, before electricity and
running water, to a land mired in malnutrition and human suffering. A
landlocked nation with little to export anyway, no institutions to speak
of, and consisting of inhospitable populated zones controlled by heavily
armed local generals and warlords, similar to the situation in lawless
lands
elsewhere.
A stagnant, forgotten land ripe for revolution.

For the major media take on things, here is the New
York Times article.
For the Radical Left side of the story, see Narco
News.

Are there any bloggers in Bolivia?

Have the
Who jumped the shark? Considering half the band is currently gigging
with Jimi Hendrix, you’d have to say the shark won. All things considered,
the fact that "The Who" is re-releasing "Tommy" as a digitally remastered
2-CD
set featuring rare rough cuts, outtakes and excised material (Who knew
Townsend originally intended to play Tommy himself?) is understandable,
I guess.

Rarities include previously unavailable outtakes such as "I Was," and "Ms.
Simpson," as well as alternate versions of tracks like "We’re
Not Gonna Take It."

from Rolling Stone

Ming, a 20-month-old
tiger who until last week lived in a New York City apartment is seen
in this New York Police Department video Saturday, Oct. 4, 2003. The
400-pound pet tiger is one of thousands of wild animals living in private
homes across the country, part of a multibillion-dollar industry with
little regulation.

AP Photo
Newsday Story

SEOUL
(Reuters) – Chop about half an inch or so off your tongue and become
a fluent English speaker.
 

That is the hope that recently drove one mother to take her six-year-old
son for surgery aimed at ridding him of his Korean accent when speaking
the language of choice in global business.

It takes about five minutes to complete the operation, called
a frenotomy, which slices about half an inch off the frenulum to make the
tongue more flexible.

Who knew? Here I’ve been knocking myself out all these long years
trying to teach Korean, and Japanese, and Thai, and Brazilian kids
to speak
the Queen’s English correctly, when all I really needed was an Exacto
knife and some tongue tourniquets to staunch the bleeding. Well,
its not too late to add this technique to my repetoire. Step into my
office, Young Ju, and stick out your tongue….

from Reuters

from
Reuters

So much has changed since 9/11, and yet so much has stayed
the same. Undercover agents last week smugged a range of "prohibited items"
through security checkpoints at Logan Airport.

What kind of "prohibited items"? According to Reuters, "the agents carried
knives, a bomb and a gun past several checkpoints at different terminals
without
being
stopped by Transportation Security Administration officers."

Sure inspires confidence in our new-found State Security Apparatus,
doesn’t it? -"Excuse me, ma’am, but you’ll have to store that bomb in
the overhead compartment."- Dowbrigade is thinking of flying out of Providence
– one way.

So much has changed since 9/11, and yet so much has stayed
the same. Undercover agents last week smugged a range of "prohibited items"
through security checkpoints at Logan Airport.

What kind of "prohibited items"? According to Reuters, "the agents carried
knives, a bomb and a gun past several checkpoints at different terminals
without
being
stopped by Transportation Security Administration officers."

Sure inspires confidence in our new-found State Security Apparatus,
doesn’t it. Dowbrigade is thinking of flying out of Providence – one
way.

In
a few short hours the most significant baseball game of the modern era
will get underway at Yankee Statium,
and I won’t be there.  I won’t be watching on TV either.  Instead
I’ll be with Dave Winer and his zany band of bloggers at the regular
Thursday night meet-up at the Berkman center.

The Dowbrigade know that when he enters the room Dave will
exclaim, "Well look who’s here.  I thought we wouldn’t see
you til next week.  Aren’t you going to watch the game?"

"Well, Dave," I will answer, "I would much prefer to pass
this evening with you guys than watching the game of the century, because
YOU, Dave, have not let me down EVERY FALL for the past 32 years.  Because
you, my friend, would never RIP my HEART from my chest and stomp it into
the dirt behind home plate!"

What can I say? Last week I skipped the bloggers meeting
to watch the game, and of course the Red Sox lost (the mangy curs). So
I HAVE to attend this week. So goes the Karma.

Of course, artound about 8:30 I will slip quietly from
the room, scamper down the street to a neighborhood bar and cast my
hopes and dreams in with a bunch of inebriated undergraduates, for better
or worse. 

Who knows how long I will last, so raw and intense are
the emotions brought to the fore on a night like tonight? How much more
can I take? Better than even money, sometime around the 7th or 8th inning,
the Dowbnrigade will drain his last beer and stagger out into the chilly
Cambridge night, ready to let the baseball gods have their way with him
and the assembled multitudes, content to wait until the morning to find
out the answer to the question he most wants answered, at that moment,
in the whole wide world.

You either trust the Universe, or you don’t.

Microsoft
warned consumers Wednesday about four critical new flaws in its popular
Windows software as the company shifted to monthly alerts for serious
problems that could let hackers break into computers. In particularly
embarrassing disclosures,

Microsoft acknowledged problems in its technology to authenticate software
publishers over the Web and in its Windows help and support system.

The company said it did not believe hackers were yet exploiting any of
the vulnerabilities it announced.

from
Wired News