High Masculine Tones

Via Satan's Laundromat, which points out the ways and means...

I had no idea this degree of customization was possible, though it sounds like the technology was supplemented by a significant degree of elbow-grease...

The idea surfaced a year ago at a cocktail party: What if you opened your mailbox to find a national magazine with your name on the cover and the headline "They Know Where You Live!" -- under an aerial photo of your house? And what if, when you turned the page, the editor's note and the advertisements included details about your neighbors?

It was too sexy a concept for Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of Reason magazine, to pass up. So, equipped with subscriber names and addresses, free Internet downloads and some fancy printing technology, Gillespie's staff and a team of direct-marketing experts produced 40,000 unique copies of the L.A.-based Libertarian magazine -- shocking and delighting readers with personalized June issues that were sent out last week.

The cover photos are framed as if viewed through a telescope, and they reveal local landmarks -- schools, post offices, football stadiums.

"It's a little creepy," says hypnotherapist Lon Waford, whose copy featured his office building in downtown Pocatello, Idaho. "They've circled in red exactly where my building is."

On the back cover, an ad for the civil liberties law firm Institute of Justice tells readers how many homes and businesses in their state have been condemned in the last five years. Inside, an ad for the Marijuana Policy Project, which seeks to reform marijuana laws, tells readers how their congressional representative voted on medical marijuana legislation.

"All of us have read '1984,' " says Waford. "The possibilities of '1984' are more real than ever."

...The customization of the magazine was a nifty experiment and a great promotional opportunity for everyone involved, but it was a logistical nightmare. A team of a dozen people in six states, from Connecticut to Arkansas to California, spent several months collating data and publishing test copies before realizing the final product.

"I certainly hope we never do it again," says Gillespie. "It was a very difficult task of orchestration. None of the main people involved were in the same time zone, much less the same office." The first step was compiling information. Led by San Bernardino direct-marketing firm Entremedia, the team downloaded maps and free satellite photos of each subscriber's mailing address -- courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey and Microsoft's TerraServer.com. (Later, higher-quality images were donated by AirPhotoUSA.)

Then hundreds of details on each subscriber's neighborhood -- from the number of children living with their grandparents to the percentage of neighbors with college degrees -- were pulled off the U.S. Census Bureau's website, factfinder.census.gov.

And that was just the free stuff available to anyone with Internet access. With a little bit of money, the issue could have included much more, from a reader's mortgage payment to his or her favorite brand of deodorant, "but that would start to look kind of scary on the cover," says Entremedia President Rodger Cosgrove.

From San Bernardino, Cosgrove and his staff spent a week creating a computer file for each personalized cover and stored everything on two hard drives. Then they drove those hard drives to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, where all the data were merged and downloaded onto the school's Xeikon DCP 50D digital web press, a $235,000 machine that can mass-produce unique color copies.

"On one level, an intelligent high school student could acquire these images and juxtapose them with one another," says Cosgrove. "The trick is writing software to do it tens of thousands of times and have a press that's capable of doing it at commercial speeds."

LA Times, This issue will hit you where you live (registration required) via Bookslut.

If you think of Rumsfeld as a character in a Gulf Wars II musical, these are the songs he might sing. The seven songs show the Secretary not only holding forth from his press podium, but in introspective moments as well. We see Rumsfeld being haughty and impatient, but also caught by surprise -- even vulnerable. These extremes are the natural results of the situation in which Rumsfeld finds himself -- waging a war with no easy outcome and trying to sell a story that doesn't hold up, as the public can see now.

Reflecting these different moods, the songs are set in a variety of musical forms and show strong contemporary influences. The first song, The Unknown, has a jaunty beat and repeated rhythms more often associated with pop music. You may recognize the words ("As we know, there are known knowns?"). A Confession is a haunting ballad. Happenings is a Hungarian-style march but with pop influences. Other songs include a waltz and even a Baroque aria.

Since I'm plugging somebody else's album, I'll use this opportunity to point towards my own poetic excursion into Rumsfeldia, Skydiving with Rummy: A Fever-Dream in Prose...

The latest awe-inspiring contribution by Otis Fodder to the cultural commons:

Comfort Stand is a not-for-profit internet-only community driven label where all releases are free for download with artwork and liner notes.

Having no business model or profit motive we strive to bring you recordings that we find interesting, compelling and downright enjoyable. We are not genre-specific and feature material from well known performers to those loud unknown kids down your block.

Comfort Stand artists retain all rights to their recordings (and all artists have 100% creative control over their work). It is a label run by artists for artists.

Because of the uncommercial ideology of Comfort Stand there are no banners, popups, spam and you don't have to register yourself to download the music you like. We are simply a platform for musicians who like to create music for people who like to listen to music.

Via SharpeWorld.

Quite a selection, John Negroponte as "Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to Iraq" (and no, I am not making that title up). He made a smashing impression in a previous Ambassador gig:

From 1981 to 1985, Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to Honduras, where he helped prosecute the contra war against Nicaragua and helped strengthen the military dictatorship in Honduras. Under the helm of General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, Honduras's military government was both a close ally of the Reagan administration and was disappearing dozens of political opponents in classic death squad fashion.

... On Negroponte's watch, diplomats quipped that the embassy's annual human rights reports made Honduras sound more like Norway than Argentina. Former official Rick Chidester, who served under Negroponte, says he was ordered to remove all mention of torture and executions from the draft of his 1982 report on the human rights situation in Honduras.

...Yet, according to a four-part series in the Baltimore Sun, in 1982 alone the Honduran press ran 318 stories of murders and kidnappings by the Honduran military. In a 1995 series, Sun reporters Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson detailed the activities of a secret CIA-trained Honduran army unit, Battalion 316, that used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves." In 1994, Honduras's National Commission for the Protection of Human Rights reported that it was officially admitted that 179 civilians were still missing.

This week the United States Senate confirmed Negroponte's appointment 95-3, with 2 not voting.

John Kerry was one of the two to abstain. To be fair, it wasn't exactly a tight vote.

Among the leading lights of the Weenie Party who voted to confirm the appointment: Robert Byrd, Hillary Clinton, Russ Feingold, Ted Kennedy, Carl Levin, Dianne Feinstein... Hell, except for three holdouts, they all went for it.

Nice bit of teamwork.

Democracy Now airs a recent speech by Noam Chomsky that notes Negroponte's experience as a "modern pro consul" was undeniably seen as a qualification, and that Honduras checked out of the coalition within days of his appointment.

A breakdown of state-wide IQ averages and Presidential preferences...

Can't say that I'm surprised by the political leanings of stupid people in themselves, but what shocks me is that IQ levels diverge so much on a state-by-state comparison. I would have guessed that each state would naturally tend to have averages right around 100.

Then again, the way they present their data ("we're still trying to track down the source for the IQ scores. As this is all a bit of good fun we aren't to concerned with the source."), the numbers aren't bedrock solid...

What is the ID SNIPER^TM rifle?

It is used to implant a GPS-microchip in the body of a human being, using a high powered sniper rifle as the long distance injector. The microchip will enter the body and stay there, causing no internal damage, and only a very small amount of physical pain to the target. It will feel like a mosquito-bite lasting a fraction of a second. At the same time a digital camcorder with a zoom-lense fitted within the scope will take a high-resolution picture of the target. This picture will be stored on a memory card for later image-analysis.

Why use the ID SNIPER^TM rifle?

As the urban battlefield grows more complex and intense, new ways of managing and controlling crowds are needed. The attention of the media changes the rules of the game. Sometimes it is difficult to engage the enemy in the streets without causing damage to the all important image of the state. Instead EMPIRE NORTH suggests to mark and identify a suspicious subject on a safe distance, enabeling the national law enforcement agency to keep track on the target through a satellite in the weeks to come.


The ID SNIPER^TM rifle was presented by Empire North in Beijing at the China Police 2002 exhibition.

And how does your JUJU work?

Via SharpeWorld.

Background on Empire North.