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Links Book and Music Page, johnrpierce.com Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope Quel Blog, the blog of John Pierce
NEWSPAPERS
E-mail:
johnrpierce @ hotmail.com
Old North Church, Boston, October 29, 2003 |
June 30, 2004
At wired.com, I read that yesterday the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that "an e-mail provider did not break the law in reading his customers' communications without their consent." The decision is U.S. v. Councilman, United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
June 29, 2004
Brian Sack offers a
field guide
to online dating profile photography.
"Civil rights activists denounced as unconstitutional an MBTA police plan to search T riders' bags, backpacks and briefcases, saying it would create 'a police state atmosphere' during and after the Democratic National Convention. "'I don't think this is the kind of America most Americans want to live in,'' said Michael Avery, Massachusetts chapter president of the National Lawyers Guild."--from an article by David Weber in the Boston Herald.
June 27, 2004
One of the few television shows that I watch with any regularity is Reno 911. The fourteen episodes of the first season, 2003, were recently released on DVD for the U.S. and Canada.
The DVD version of the
movie
Die Mommie, Die
is set for release (for U.S. and Canada) on June 29, 2004. June 26, 2004
"Governor Schwarzenegger elated local
animal activists Friday by backing down from his plan to make it easier
for shelters to euthanize animals.
"A month ago, the governor proposed a law
that would have allowed county animal shelters to kill stray dogs and
cats after three days instead of the currently mandated six."--from an
article by Alex Wagner at
theunion.com.
A good political decision. The
killing of animals would have distressed millions of voters, and have
pleased relatively few. Last night I watched Carole Coleman of RTE's televised interview with the president. She seemed quite polite and sane. He, on the other hand, seemed like a testy old grouch, restraining but not completely hiding his anger. "Bush got downright snippy with an Irish TV reporter when she tried to move him beyond his stock answers," wrote Dan Froomkin at washingtonpost.com. John Ihle at
Back Seat Drivers
wrote: "Their exchange suggested two things to me: Bush is an
impatient man with a mean streak and Carol Coleman isn't quite there yet.
She held her nerve, but couldn't elicit more than the standard 'American
values' boilerplate."
Jack Ryan, the republican candidate for
the Illinois' U.S. senate seat, is dropping out of the race.
Article at
wifr.com.
"Charlotte Church has turned down the chance to wear the world's most expensive dress at the British premiere of 'Spider-Man 2' -- because she doesn't want to upstage the movie's star, Kirsten Dunst," reports sfgate.com.
June 25, 2004 Bjorn Again, an Abba tribute band, is the most successful tribute band in the world, writes Rebecca Lancashire for the Sydney Morning Herald of June 26.
The Sun, thesun.co.uk, says that Colin Farrell's "manhood is so big it had to be axed from nude scenes in new movie A Home At The End Of The World."
"Whether I'm speaking, I'll leave that up to them," said Arnold Schwarzenegger about the upcoming Republican National Convention, reports the International Herald Tribune. "If they're smart, they'll have me obviously in prime time."
"My opinion is that I don't care one way or the other," said Arnold Schwarzenegger yesterday when asked his opinion about gay marriage, reports the Los Angeles Times. You can call Governor Schwarzenegger's office at 916-445-2841, press 5 for Hot Issues, then press 1 for Same-Sex Marriage, and then choose 1 or 2 to indicate whether you favor it or oppose it. Thanks to the blog "a preponderance of evidence" for providing the number.
The people who come to this site by way of
search engines are interested in Arnold Schwarzenegger much more than in
any other subject.
According to CNN, Vice President Cheney said either "f--- off" or "go f--- yourself" to Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont during Tuesday's class photo of the Senate. June 24, 2004
The
King and I: Thirty-Six Years With My Client, Friend, and Burden, Luciano
Pavarotti : The Untold Story June 23, 2004 "Subway and commuter rail riders will be discouraged from bringing briefcases or backpacks on board during the week of the Democratic National Convention, and any passenger who does have a bag or parcel may be subject to having it searched, MBTA officials said yesterday," reports the Boston Globe. What about people who go shopping and want to go home with their purchases on the subway or commuter rail? Should the stores just close down, since, oh my goodness!, if somebody is carrying a bag, you wouldn't know what was in it! To my fellow citizens, I say: You are stupid, stupid, stupid! Your paranoia is stupid. Have you forgotten shoe bombs? How can you go out into a world where people wear shoes? Should you fearful cretins demand that the police search all shoes? Or maybe the shoes of every tenth person, so that at least a lot of shoes could be searched, but, of course, without ethnic profiling. God forbid that we should have ethnic profiling. By the way, who hijacked the airplanes that were crashed into the World Trade Center? Little old ladies from the First Church in Manchester-by-the-Sea? I don't think so. Would pestering the people who carried canvas bags into the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11 have prevented the crashes of airplanes into the buildings? I don't think so!
Yesterday, on a day when Massachusetts
governor W. Mitt Romney was in Washington to urge the U. S. Senate to pass
a federal constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, two Republican
former governors of Massachusetts attended the marriage of two men, Kevin
Smith and Mitch Adams, at King's Chapel in Boston, reports the Boston
Globe.
June 22, 2004 "Republican Jack Ryan vowed to stay in the race for U.S. Senate [from Illinois] despite embarrassing allegations that he tried to pressure his former wife to perform sex acts in clubs while others watched. * * * "[Ryan said] 'We did go to one avant-garde nightclub in Paris which was more than either one of us felt comfortable with. We left and vowed never to return.'" --from an Associated Press article at Fox News. Wonkette writes: "And speaking of fidelity: The Republicans, at least at this point, are sticking by their man. True, sources at BC04 say that the campaign will steer clear of Illinois, since allegations of sex clubs with 'cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling' giving an exciting if unwholesome connotation to the term 'battleground state.'" Is it OK to ask your wife to perform sex acts in a club while others watch? Will any of the Republican clergy or their devoted followers be offering comment?
Bill Clinton's My Life is selling well in both printed and audio versions. "This is one of the rare cases in publishing where people will want both versions," suggests Amanda D'Acierno, director of publicity for Random House Audio Publishing, as quoted in the Boston Globe by Mark Feeney. "It's an abridgement, so they'll want the whole thing but also want to hear the highlights in his voice." The audiobook is 6½ hours long.
When I first saw Ashleigh Banfield on a cable news channel
reporting from Iran, I thought that she was
Julia Louis-Dreyfus with a new career.
June 21, 2004
". . . [S]omebody came to power as a result
of the illegitimate acts of a legitimate institution that had the right to
put somebody in power. That is what the Supreme Court did in Bush versus
Gore. It put somebody in power,” said Guido Calabresi, a judge on the 2nd
Circuit Court of Appeals, which sits in Manhattan."
The judge was speaking from the floor during
a question and answer period during a conference of lawyers, reports Josh
Gerstein of the
New York Sun.
The new owners of the Lizzie Borden house in
Fall River, Massachusetts, site of two famous murders in 1892 and now a
bed-and-breakfast, want to open a Starbucks at the rear of the house,
writes Michael Levenson for the Boston Globe. A new
courthouse will be opening nearby.
"Michael Martins, curator of the Fall River Historical Society, which
includes a collection of Borden artifacts, says, 'There isn't a Starbucks
in the city, so that would be a good thing.'" "Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez, who heads
the Archdiocese of Tegucigalpa, put the Rev. Enrique Vásquez to work in
two remote parishes from last year until March. The priest had fled
criminal accusations in his native Costa Rica in 1998, then served in at
least two U.S. dioceses before running again and spending time at a
clergy treatment center in Mexico. * * * "Cardinal Rodríguez, who is 61 and a
fast-rising star in the Roman Catholic hierarchy, has spoken as
forcefully as any of his colleagues against telling police about abuse
allegations. "'For me it would be a tragedy to
reduce the role of a pastor to that of a cop. We are totally different,
and I'd be prepared to go to jail rather than harm one of my priests,'
he said at a 2002 news conference in Rome. 'We must not forget that we
are pastors, not agents of the FBI or CIA.'" --from an
article by Brendan M. Case and Brooks Egerton in the Dallas Morning News. June 20, 2004
According to
bmj.bmjjournals.com, the president's commission on mental health
"recommended comprehensive mental health screening for
'consumers of all ages,' including preschool children."
They must think that our population isn't sufficiently debased and drugged
up already. More people could be drugged up for even greater profits
for the drug companies. As I go about my daily life, I am amazed at
the apparent depravity, stupidity, obesity, and general ugliness of so
much of our population. How many of the people that I see are on
"medication"? Most of them, I suspect. June 18, 2004
"Arnold Schwarzenegger, the California
Governor who made his name playing movie tough guys, is under attack for
freeing a record number of 'lifers' from prison," writes Catherine
Elsworth in an article at
smh.com.au. June 17, 2004
Apprentice
winner Bill Rancic was seen dining at Sette in the Chelsea section
of Manhattan with Carolyn Kepcher, Donald Trump's
lieutenant, and two NBC producers, reports the New York Post.
The restaurant is in my former neighborhood on Seventh Avenue near 21st
Street. I got the
original Broadway cast recording of Avenue Q. It is pleasant
and amusing. Unfortunately the most memorable song is "It sucks to be me,"
not the ideal thought to have running through one's mind. June 16, 2004
"Torture, burning at the stake and other
punishment for [those] condemned as witches or heretics by church
tribunals during the Inquisition was not as widespread as commonly
thought, the Vatican said yesterday," reports an article at
newsday.com. Agostino Borromeo,
a professor at Rome's Sapienza University, said "that while there were
about 125,000 trials of suspected heretics in Spain, researchers found
that about 1 percent of the defendants were executed. It still sounds
like a lot to me. What was "commonly thought"?
June 15, 2004
Yahoo! has increased the storage capacity of
their free e-mail accounts, but I have found Yahoo! inaccessible for a
while this morning. Also, some search engines aren't working. June 14, 2004
Today, Flag Day, the United States Supreme
Court issued its decision in the case that questioned the
constitutionality of the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance to
the Flag that children recite in school. The Court ruled that the
plaintiff did not have sufficient legal custody of his daughter to file
the suit.
Associated Press article at cnn.com June 13, 2004
"A grapefruit-sized meteorite has smashed
through the roof of a New Zealand house, hitting a couch and bouncing off
the ceiling before coming to rest under a computer," says a Reuters report
at
uk.news.yahoo.com. June 12, 2004
"Alcohol abuse is up in America--sharply for
most groups--a government study said yesterday. At the same time,
however, alcoholism is down," writes Randolph E. Schmid in an Associated
Press article in the Boston Globe.
"Alcohol abuse is defined as
drinking-related failure to fulfill major obligations at work, school, or
home, interpersonal social or legal problems, and drinking in hazardous
situations. Alcoholism is characterized by compulsive drinking,
preoccupation with drinking, and tolerance to alcohol."
It sounds like a flawed study to me.
In my opinion, based on a lifetime of observation including eight years
representing indigent criminal defendants, alcohol abuse is a sign of
alcoholism, although the drinkers themselves would like to think
otherwise. "His
fashion house said he died in a hospital in Rome but declined to give
the cause of death."--from an article by Daniela Petroff for Associated
Press in the Boston Globe.
According to
agi.it, he was "long time ill."
The
Roosevelts and the Royals : Franklin and Eleanor, the King and Queen of England,
and the Friendship that Changed History, a new book
by Will Swift, has just been published. The book, by
"a longtime writer on royal history for Majesty magazine, focuses on the
brief visits, in the summer of 1939, by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to
Washington, D.C., and Hyde Park," says
Publishers Weekly as quoted by
amazon.com. "[T]he distinguished Roosevelt biographer James MacGregor
Burns has called [the book] 'a well-researched account of an historic and
ennobling relationship,'" says Daniel Patrick Columbia for Quest of June
2004. June 11, 2004
"New
York Democrats - after mistaking South Boston's historic L Street
Bathhouse for a gay club - have demanded their official convention party
be moved out of the neighborhood entirely because of its 'racial' past,"
reports David R. Guarino in the Boston Herald.
Why can't the convention delegates have
their parties in a hotel or restaurant like anyone else? They could
choose their own location and pay for it. I certainly don't regard
New York City as a center of racial harmony.
"Virginia
is for Haters," a new website, promotes a boycott of Virginia and of
Virginia companies because of recent legislation in that state that
provides: A civil union, partnership contract or other arrangement between
persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or
obligations of marriage is prohibited. Any such civil union, partnership
contract or other arrangement entered into by persons of the same sex in
another state or jurisdiction shall be void in all respects in Virginia
and any contractual rights created thereby shall be void and
unenforceable. J. Crew is one of the Virginia
companies that the site encourages people to boycott. "With
two-thirds of the 166 local councils declared, Labour was on its way to
a third-place finish."--CBC
News June 10, 2004
Next month we will have to tolerate searches
of our bags when we ride public transportation in the Boston area.
Should I get a camping vest with lots of pockets so that I can carry my
things without having a bag? I don't want any stranger to touch my
lunch.
I still remember a stupid customs employee in
1975 inspecting my bar of Neutrogena soap as if it might contain some sort of
illegal drug. He held it up to the light and looked at it from different
angles. I already have the occasional
problem when entering office buildings that the security people become
terribly unpleasant if I tell them that I don't want them touching some of
my things and even once that I don't want any of my things out of my
sight, least of all my wallet.
I absolutely DO NOT ACKNOWLEDGE that such
searches serve any good purpose.
June 9, 2004
Eric Alterman writes at
msn.com:
"In truth, Ronald Reagan was never as popular
as he is being presented to be with Americans.
* * *
"As a matter of historical record, Reagan
campaigned on government discipline but vastly expanded its size and
scope, along with the deficits it created; he provided weapons to
terrorists and misled the country about it; he helped engender genocide in
Central America—according to the terms employed, for instance, by
Guatemala’s own truth commission, and misled the country about that too--
and showed no compassion to those who were stricken with AIDS, owing to a
personal prejudice or (more likely) political calculations that
homosexuals were not worthy of presidential attention." "06/09/2004 --
Linkin Park, one
of the most innovative and influential forces in modern music, have taken
a giant step forward in bringing great live entertainment directly to the
fans with Projekt Revolution, a gala festival featuring a stellar line-up
of artists who together with their tour partners have positioned the day's
festivities as an all-around fantastic fan experience. The festival, which
announced its headlining performers earlier this year at a press
conference in Hollywood CA, will launch July 23 in Cincinnati and storm
across North America throughout the summer."--from an article at
marketwire.com. June 8, 2004
"NOT only were John Kerry's scheduled
New York and Los Angeles star-studded fund-raiser concerts next week with
everyone from Barbra Streisand to Whoopi Goldberg
both scratched, but Jann Wenner's VIP cocktail party, which was to
precede the June 10 Madison Square Garden affair and was to have everyone
from Bette Midler to Paul Newman, was also scratched.
"Tickets
to both fund-raisers were slow," writes Cindy Adams in the New York
Post. June 7, 2004
I watched the Tony Awards television show
last night. It was pleasant, better than it has been in some years.
Hugh Jackman doesn't sing anywhere near as well as Peter Allen. I
don't think that I'd want to see his show. I enjoyed the song from
Avenue Q. I may try to see that show in the next few weeks.
For me the low point of the broadcast was Mary Blige singing "What I did
for love." My own musical ability is almost nonexistent, but I think
that I could sing the song better than she did. Just give me a
microphone and I can be loud too. If musical values count for
nothing, I can do a good job!
Avenue Q cast recording at amazon.com
June 6, 2004
"Bush's Erratic Behavior
Worries White House Aides," writes Doug
Thompson at
commondreams.org. Thanks to
esoterically.net for
pointing out the article. Bush
seems to make frequent angry use of the "f" word. Is that OK with
holier-than-thou Protestants? "By their fruits ye shall know them," say I.
I recall reading that he has even used the word in front of other people's
children. June 4, 2004
Oliver Hoyos, owner
of BED Miami, plans to open his
Manhattan branch at 530 W. 27th St. in the fall, reports the New York
Post. June 3, 2004
The New York Post reports that the
New York delegation to the Democratic national convention is demanding a
change in the location of their welcoming reception. They don't want
to hold it at the L Street Bathhouse that has been assigned to them. June 2, 2004
"[A]nyone not already confirmed for a room
better schlep along a sleeping bag," says Cindy Adams, writing in the
New York Post about next month's Democratic national convention in
Boston.. June 1, 2004
Blaise, a.k.a. Bazima, provides some interesting statistics on the 36 people that she has slept with, only one of whom was a blogger.
To entries for Feb.,
March, & Apr. 2004
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