a crank’s progress

Communications From Elsewhere
What albums do you consider perfect, or nearly so? There are plenty of perfect songs, or tracks. I’m talking about albums on which every track is perfect, or nearly so. Here’s my short list (in no particular order)
Add your list to the comments . . . . .

Everything Burns | A new knowledge of reality
Project: spend 5 minutes and grab 7 or 8 books (big books take up more space) from your home (or work) library. These books must actually be in your collection at the time of the excercise. Stack them up, take a digital photo, post it on your website/blog, [...]

Hallowe’en today, so we bundled the younger set into their costumes, some warm layers (it’s supposed to snow Sunday morning and it’s damn cold now), and headed off to the local shopping district to score some sweets.
The University Village was our destination, and the nippers did well, lots of loot, and a pretty consistent [...]

A brief meeting with the Superior and Subordinate Professors yesterday. I was told in no uncertain terms that the Superior Professor was going to “exercise her management authority.” Trouble is, if you have to remind someone of your authority that forcefully, you might not actually have any.
Add to this, the Subordinate Professor was manifesting [...]

From the Desk of David Pogue: Customer-Service Cluelessness
Either there’s a plague of cluelessness sweeping the country’s customer-service systems, or a sinister, sneaky sort of thievery is going on. The worst part is that there’s no satisfaction in catching the culprits and calling them on it—because your time is worth something, too, and you don’t get [...]

Cost of War
[on the linked page] you will find a running total of the amount of money spent by the US Government to finance the war in Iraq. This total is based on estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.
When I first looked at this, it was ticking along at about $1,000 a minute [...]

[IP] Bill Joy’s interview to “Fortune”
I couldn’t pick just a couple of pull quotes: I recommend reading the whole thing.

CNN.com - The politics of getting around campus - Oct. 29, 2003
Robert Gardner’s Ford Explorer had “no” etched into its front windshield. Gardner, a sophomore from Memphis, Tennessee, was upset because driving an SUV for him isn’t so much a personal choice as a matter of financial circumstance.
“It’s just what my parents gave me,” he [...]

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: David Horsey
“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any [...]

Wildfires, as seen from space [caution: large image]