orbis quintus

These are my links for April 30th:

• NATIONAL JOURNAL: Secret Order By Gonzales Delegated Extraordinary Powers To Aides (04/30/07) – “Attorney General Alberto Gonzales signed a highly confidential order in March 2006 delegating to two of his top aides — who have since resigned because of their central roles in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys — extraordinary authority over the hir
• WordPress Theme Generator –
• There And Back Again: A Guided Tour To Sarah Records’ First 50 Singles – Article – Stylus Magazine – four more installments to go. This is a lot of the stuff that was lost in mp3 crashes, and have not replaced. Never properly bought the stuff.
• Former Political Director at ABC Is Moving to Time Magazine – New York Times – worthless hack. Again… why does the media keep giving jobs to people like this?
• The Blotter: D.C. Madam Wants Washington Clients to Testify – Boring. I want only the sanctimonious, hypocritical Bible bashers. “Also on Palfrey’s list of customers who could be potential witnesses are a Bush administration economist, the head of a conservative think tank, a prominent CEO, several lobbyists and a h
• ‘I Abhor Injustice,’ Alleged Madam Says – washingtonpost.com – Like others. prostitution doesn’t bother me. It’s the corruption and double-standards that do. This is a silly sideshow compared to the other stuff, but it might be the only thing to get the attention of the media.
• US artillery bombards southern Baghdad – Yep. “like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime.” We shell our own American cities with artillery all of the time.
• Inspectors Find Rebuilt Projects Crumbling in Iraq – New York Times – No surprise here. “inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of pro
• David Broder is a senile, hypocritical schmuck – Media Matters – “Media Matters”; by Jamison Foser – Topple him from his pedestal.

These are my links for April 29th:

• Scant offered intl. aid helped Katrina victims-WPost – Yahoo! News – It’s not the fault of the international community. It’s the U.S. government. They either spurned aid or squandered, while the people on the Gulf Coast were still (and are still) suffering.
• Crooks and Liars » Monica Goodling Instructs DOJ Officials to Delete Documents – Poster seems to believe it sloppiness and incompetence more than a deliberate coverup in this instance
• Privatizing Monopolizable Infrastructure | The Agonist – “Infrastructure is one of the two very basic jobs of government, and any government that is getting out of it is refusing to do its job.”
• One million Turks rally against government | Reuters –
• theory.isthereason » From Del.icio.us to WordPress: How to automatically post daily links – Maybe a plugin is the wrong way to go with WordPress. It looks like del.icio.us does it all for you now.
• HorsesAss.Org» Blog Archive » Does FDA spell FEMA? – Fairly certain now that our dog was poisoned by contaminated food. Considering that the Bush administration has filled every level of the government with unqualified politically partisan hacks, there is little doubt that more of this contaminated gluten m
• Militia raid targets weapons – “Simultaneous raids carried out in four Alabama counties Thursday turned up truckloads of explosives and weapons, including 130 grenades, an improvised rocket launcher and 2,500 rounds of ammunition belonging to the small, but mightily armed, Alabama Free
• All Twitter tools and mashups in one place – franticindustries. – i think that i have most of the ones that i want already.
• Firedoglake – Firedoglake weblog » Oversight: The Coming Attractions (May) – i might be feeding these dates into my Google Calendar
• The Blog | Tom Tomorrow: What They Said | The Huffington Post – Disgusting. How can these people be held accountable for just how wrong they were? Why do they still have jobs?
• clapclap.org says “welcome to the baudrillardian hellscape, bitch”: Hallelujah – not read the whole thing yet
• Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant » Thoughts from the Playground (Dirda revisited) – Whew. I’m glad that was cleared up. Dirda seems like a pretty decent guy. I confess that i actually own all of his books.
• Stone Pages Archaeo News: Hungarian burial site yields unique archaeological find – When traded goods show up, it pleases me.
• Stone Pages Archaeo News: Evidence of ancient human activity on Ram Sethu – Well, the Ramayana said it happened….

It turned out that del.icio.us can do that dump of links from its site to any blog automatically, but the format sucks. It’s all over the page, and cuts off whatever comments i attached to the links. I’m watching the Venture Brothers right now (some Season 2 episodes that i missed, right now the one with the Scooby-Doo references) so ironing out problems comes later. As much as i liked the idea of using one of those social bookmarking sites, it’s not integrating well.

The truth is that i don’t think that i’ve learned how to use WordPress properly either.

• Stone Pages Archaeo News: Evidence of ancient human activity on Ram Sethu
  Well, the Ramayana said it happened….
  (tags: India Sri_Lanka archaeology)
• Stone Pages Archaeo News: Hungarian burial site yields unique archaeological find
  When traded goods show up, it pleases me.
  (tags: Hungary neolithic archaeology)
• Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant » Thoughts from the Playground (Dirda revisited)
  Whew. I’m glad that was cleared up. Dirda seems like a pretty decent guy. I confess that i actually own all of his books.
  (tags: Dirda books review)
• clapclap.org says “welcome to the baudrillardian hellscape, bitch”: Hallelujah
  not read the whole thing yet
  (tags: pop_culture music television)
• The Blog | Tom Tomorrow: What They Said | The Huffington Post
  Disgusting. How can these people be held accountable for just how wrong they were? Why do they still have jobs?
  (tags: news media Iraq comics politics)
• Firedoglake – Firedoglake weblog » Oversight: The Coming Attractions (May)
  i might be feeding these dates into my Google Calendar
  (tags: politics oversight)
• All Twitter tools and mashups in one place – franticindustries.
  i think that i have most of the ones that i want already.
  (tags: Twitter tools web blog)
• Militia raid targets weapons
  “Simultaneous raids carried out in four Alabama counties Thursday turned up truckloads of explosives and weapons, including 130 grenades, an improvised rocket launcher and 2,500 rounds of ammunition belonging to the small, but mightily armed, Alabama Free
  (tags: terrorism Alabama ATF)
• HorsesAss.Org» Blog Archive » Does FDA spell FEMA?
  Fairly certain now that our dog was poisoned by contaminated food. Considering that the Bush administration has filled every level of the government with unqualified politically partisan hacks, there is little doubt that more of this contaminated gluten m
  (tags: FDA gluten health ChemNutra bush)
• theory.isthereason » From Del.icio.us to WordPress: How to automatically post daily links
  Maybe a plugin is the wrong way to go with WordPress. It looks like del.icio.us does it all for you now.
  (tags: del.icio.us blog plugin web tools)

Looks like they found a commentary on Aristotle’s Categories. See the story for a smallish sample passage as well as these words from Dr. William Noel, the project director:

“We have one book that contains three texts from the ancient world that are absolutely central to our understanding of mathematics, politics and now philosophy,” he said.

He added: “I am at a loss for words at what this book has turned out to be. To make these discoveries in the 21st Century is frankly nutty – it is just so exciting.”

Since i installed almost two days ago, there should have been at least one post should have been generated from del.icio.us posts. Obviously, i need to work on this more… damn it.

Finally i’m using del.icio.us in a somewhat productive manner. I’d tried to use it before, but in an extremely backwards manner, when i was still refusing to use RSS feeds, and couldn’t see any benefit to it. Now i am slowly catching on…

Last night i was mucking about with various plug-ins for WordPress, to see if there was anything that could post directly from del.icio.us to Orbis Quintus. Of course, there is such a plug-in, but i couldn’t be bothered to screw around with php, as i’m an ignorant jackass. I’m using Postalicious for now. There might be some nearly duplicate posts until i can iron out the kinks.

I hate changing the format, but considering that the old blog Fighting Against Making the Pie Higher was pure HTML on Geocities until 2004, Orbis Quintus cannot remain static.

Any suggestions?

in design (the one place I assumed the movement had no place…)

and

in the museum.

We should exploit the natural tendencies of mass tourism – which is another way of saying that there are some who probably find Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas more Roman than the Coliseum.

Just think how many people will be more satisfied by the fake temple at Albanella, all in one piece, shining and splendid, than by the real thing that has struggled to survive in nearby Paestum. Let the crowds in search of easy satisfaction be directed to Albanella, leaving Paestum to those who know why they want to see it and who won’t litter.

It would be so useful to have an Uffiziland on the outskirts of Florence, with perfect reproductions of the items in the real Uffizi Gallery on display, maybe even with their colors touched up a little, the way funeral parlors add makeup to the lips of the deceased.

Given that crowds gather in front of Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio to admire a “David” that isn’t the original (but they don’t know this, or don’t care), why shouldn’t they go to Uffiziland? And if there were fewer mouths emitting noxious fumes in the vicinity of Botticelli’s “Primavera,” this would help with efforts to preserve it.

Don’t tell me that my proposal is “class-driven” in the sense that it would represent an attempt to separate the troglodytes from people with refined artistic sensibilities. True, it might, but each person would decide to which category he or she belongs by choice and not by social decree. Similar choices are made by millions of people – including those who consider themselves aesthetes and connoisseurs – when they tune in to trash TV shows.

Come to think of it, unlike the proletariat of Marxian memory, the new proletarians of art wouldn’t even know they were such and would feel fortunate to have visited the shiniest, newest temple of them all.

Link.

Over at Words Without Borders, Aura Estrada has a nice piece from 2005 on Borges and Bolano.

During their lifetimes, Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Bolaño struggled against vanity and all things pretentious, aspirational, ordinary, and obliging. They are peculiar cases in literature, ones that the literary machine itself seems to reject. They were not bestsellers. During a substantial part of their lives, they existed either under the shadow of public rejection, or in the clandestinity of aesthetic infringement. The relationship they sustained with “their time” and the writers of their time was complex and peppered with barbs. Certainly, what they understood as literature had little to do with the desire to appease any aesthetics (social, moral, political, philosophical) other than their own. Their relationship with literature was almost sacred. They believed in little else and were consecrated to her alone, as if literature were (perhaps because it is) a matter of life and death.

Bolano I’ve only just recently become interested in. I haven’t decided whether to tackle The Savage Detectives or a book of his stories first, but he’s an author I’m determined to explore.