The Real Paul Jones

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Lilly, You’ll always be hot to me

Yvonne as Lilly

Yvonne De Carlo (nee Peggy Yvonne Middleton) who played a number of hot but minor roles including most famously to me Lilly Munster died Monday.

Of the Munsters, De Carlo said (as quoted on CNN): “It meant security. It gave me a new, young audience I wouldn’t have had otherwise. It made me ‘hot’ again, which I wasn’t for a while.”

Lilly, although I’m much shorter than Herman, you’ll always be ‘hot’ with me.

Could it be that shock of white hair that drives me wild?

Moonshine!

Just took a call from Charlotte Observer columnist and BBQ author Dan Huntley about the Moonshine site on ibibilio.org.

Back in 1997, I was teaching a class called “Cyberpublishing and Cybercasting” in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication here at UNC-Chapel Hill. I took the class up to the wonderful Southern Historical Collection and asked to them to create multi-media websites based on the rich collection of materials there.

Michael Manning, Eric Chernoff and Sarah Smith chose to work with materials about Moonshine in North Carolina including photographs, music and movie clips as well as a lot of great factual material.

For 1997, the site was pretty advanced and except for some visual design elements it stands up as a good and very useful and amusing site a decade later. Michael, Eric and Sarah did a great job. (I should check and see what grades they earned ;->).

Music of the iPhone Intro

What does it say that these songs were the ones used as examples of who great the iPod-like features of the iPhone are:

  1. Beatles – from Sargent Pepper’s “I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends” and “Lovely Rita” [note: not for sale at the iTunes store – yet]
  2. Bob Dylan – from Highway 61 Revisitied “Like a Rolling Stone”
  3. Greenday – from American Idiot “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”
  4. Talking Heads – from Stop Making Sense “Life During Wartime”

Then TV, Movies, websites and people noticed:

  1. The Office (beginning with an acknowledgement of NBC)
  2. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
  3. Google Maps
  4. NY Times
  5. Amazon
  6. “An Inconvenient Truth” with props to Al Gore
  7. Starbucks in SFO on Google Maps [but the Delocator would be good too]
  8. Eric Schmidt of Google
  9. Jerry Yang of Yahoo
  10. Red Hot Chili Peppers – from Stadium Arcadium

ibiblio @ Duke

I’ll be speaking about contributor-run digital libraries at Duke‘s John Hope Franklin Center‘s TechTuesdays on Tuesday January 23. We’re delaying the start of the talk from the regular TechTuesday time — starting at noon:30. The announcement is below and on the ISIS TechTuesday site. I’ll be creating a wiki entry for the talk to which you may add stuff if you like and/or you can leave comments on what I should be saying to this post.

ISIS TechTuesdays featuring Paul Jones
January 23, 2007, 12:30-1:45 PM
John Hope Franklin Center 240

Paul Jones, founder of sunsite.unc.edu and director of ibiblio.org, will present “Participatory Digital Libraries – Past and Futures; the ibiblio trends,” in which he will talk about experiences and futures of Contribtor-run Digital Libraries and Digital Repositories with some particular focus on the ibiblio tends. This will be somewhat of an update of his paper “Open (source)ing the doors for contributor-run digital libraries.[PDF]” Communications of the ACM. Volume
44 , Issue 5 (May 2001). Also at http://ibiblio.org/pjones/presskit/ACM-p45-jones.pdf
or if you prefer the Japanese language version http://www.ibiblio.org/pjones/presskit/p45-jones.jp.pdf.

Revisiting the Speaker Ban at UNC

At a Journalism faculty meeting in which a film, featuring in part the Speaker Ban Law, is being shown, “Crossroads on the Hill” which is a fine history of the uneasy relationships between the state of North Carolina and its principles and the state of North Carolina.

Not “Beyond the Wall” which would have been great.

Ferrell Guillory is introducing. Notes below are from Ferrell’s talk.
Jock Lauderer was the photographer for much of this. Bill Friday confessed to having advised the students on how to sue the University (“If the Trustees knew what I was doing, they should have fired me”).

Two currents of NC politics. New South and Old South, say. Traditionalists (rural and small town; Lake, Helms etc) vs Progressives (Sanford, Friday). Progressives (public-private partnership. business, banks, insurance are one leg. state government is one including public schools. university of nc as the third leg. this is progressive as forward looking not to be confused by progressive as a substitute for liberal).

Not in the film: Robert Morgan (later US Senator; at the time a pro-Ban legislator, but he changed as he became NC Atty General and a consumer activist) and Jesse Helms (later US Senator; at the time and editorialist at WRAL Channel 5 and very pro-Ban)

Although on TV, none of the Helms video editorials are to be found. Text versions exist.

Science Blogging Conference gets closer

Science Blogging Conference

Saturday January 20th is not so far away.

The Science Bloggers Conference is just around the corner. We’ve got over 140 people signed up as of this writing.

Anton says we can handle 150.
So go register now!

New Conference news from Anton: Burroughs Wellcome Fund and BlogAds have signed on as sponsors. Grab bag items will include: copies of The Lancet (Jan 6-12 issue), copies of American Scientist (Jan-Feb issue), and bookmarks and notepads from the NC Science, Math and Technology Education Center, copies of Seed Magazine, and assorted books from HarperCollins (Best American Science Writing 2006 and 3 other titles), copies of The Scientist Magazine, and copies of Nature. We’ll also get  copies of a science DVD from The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

Social Networking and Teens

The Pew Internet and American Life report on Social Networking and Teens is out. Brief on findings: 55% of teen in America use social networking sites. Girls use them more than boys.

Both genders (91%) use them for relationship maintenance (just like Brett Bumgardner’s honors thesis found), but older girls even more for that. Of those who use social networking to flirt and make new friends (49%), older boys make up the largest section of that group.
Fred has his reactions posted here. And danah boyd has hers here. BBC reports the story in this way.

Jim Ray’s Absinthe update

Jim Ray, who is too shy to publish comments here, send us this update on absinthe:

The New Yorker wrote a pretty definitive piece on the absinthe revival that does a good job of refuting the mythology (Feb 06 in PDF form here ).

A few months earlier, Wired gave the green fairie a similar treatment (seems Conde Nast has an interest in absinthe’s future)

I’ve succesfully procured some of the real deal from Ted Breaux’s absinthe distillery (Jade Liquer’s Nouvelle Orleans was my poison of choice) and was quite pleased with the result, even if a bottle does cost about US$150 shipped. Beat the pants off that acerbic crap I was lighting on fire in Prague a few years back.

And here’s a handy guide on how to properly imbibe, varied by region. Much like kissing, I find the French method preferable.

I prefer the Swiss method for absinthe, myself. All this mumbo jumbo with sugar is a bit tedious and dare I say too sweet.

Catalogers as Critics?

In reviewing Kockroach by Tyler Knox in the December 31 NYTimes Book Review, Matt Weiland writes:

Our finest literary critics hold no endowed chairs and never win prizes, yet their work has the poetry of truth about it and there’s nobody better at answering the fundamental question about any book, a question always more interesting and always harder to answer than whether it’s any good: what is it really about? I mean, of course, the anonymous librarians who prepare the Cataloging in Publication data for the Library of Congress, the brief descriptive classifications that appear on the copyright page of most books. Is there a more succinct description of John Updike’s “Rabbit, Run” than “Middle class men — Fiction”? What writer doesn’t envy the economy and force of “Massacres — Fiction” for Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” and “Industrial accidents — Fiction” for Don DeLillo’s “White Noise”? And will there ever be a finer gloss on Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping” than “Eccentrics and eccentricities — Fiction”?

Absinthe gets cleared

Sally points me to this NYTimes article, Trying to Clear Absinthe’s Reputation, by Harold McGee.

Basic points: High alcohol is the killer, not wormwood. But wormwood is psycho-active — so is sage with the same chemical. Czech absinthe generally sucks. If it’s not green, it’s not the real thing. If it doesn’t cloud well, it’s not the real thing. Champagne has its own secrets; unclean glasses work best for bubbles.

Framed by a Hemmingway story. Male journalists all want to be like Papa. Why?

An alert NYTimes forum member sends us to a Terra online video feature, Forbidden Fruit: The Absinthe Drinker, (about 7 1/2 minutes) in which retired neurosurgeon David Cook (who is wearing Merrell Mocs) talks about absinthe and the myths and bad science associated with it.

And Ze Frank explains the real way that champagne works.

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