Amy's Robot

China to SARS victims: "Time to catch up on some reading", especially such page-turners as "16th Party Congress Report" and "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics".

I tried to find an English version of this pronouncement, but came up empty. But, here's a site that will give you a good idea of China's official responses to the epidemic.

Yeah, next time I'm coughing up my collapsing lungs, I'm gonna spend some time brushing up on the party line. It would sure beat watching Ecks vs. Sever again, anyway.

They trotted out Elizabeth Smart to watch our prez sign the federal kidnap-response Amber Alert legislation. Here's a picture, which is sad. Here's the whole set, some of which are less sad. Message to ES's parents: if you want to reclaim the privacy in your life, would you please quit with the public appearances. It's grotesque.

I purposely didn't mention it the other day when the story broke, but if you haven't heard, some Salt Lake Tribune reporters got fired for selling apparently made-up information about the Smart family to the National Enquirer for $20,000. The Enquirer's headline, which they have since retracted, was: "Utah Cops: Secret Diary Exposes Family Sex Ring", if that gives you any idea.

So now Lady Miss Kier from Deee-Lite is suing Sega for a video game they produce that supposedly copies her image. Which consists of platform shoes, a big ponytail, and the phrase "Ooh La La!", which pretty much describes every 22-year old hanging out on St. Mark's Place on weekends. Also: for the article, LMK says she is British, while in fact she is from Youngstown, Ohio. And she hasn't had a hit since 1990. Give me a break. [tx ADM]

Well, if you like TKTS, you'll love mobile TKTS (aka ArtsVan) coming soon to 14th Street. Official site.

Another consequence of September 11 that Osama Bin Laden could never have foreseen. (See links for details.)

Did you hear about the new nickels? There's going to be new nickels. Do you have a shot at redesigning them? Probably not, says Slate.

Do you know what the technical name for "heads" is? "Obverse."

Related to ADM's post about models getting their start at a very young age:

Since saltyt is on emotional hiatus, I have to tell you about this: Latest hot runway model from LA Models, Gerren Taylor: curly-haired, 5 feet, 10 inches, "with full lips and rounded hips", says modeling "is something I've wanted to do since I was little".

The twist? She's 12.

Update: Ok, this is just sick. Here's her official page at her agency. They list her bust size. Look, people, she's twelve. Cool it with the bust size, okay?, and start modeling her in some Caldor circulars, playing Chutes and Ladders or something.

Don't expect the rifts caused by the war in Iraq to be healed any time soon: Putin makes derisive fun of Blair and the US-UK agenda to Blair's face in a press conference in Moscow.

The British generally have us beat in their cool advertising, but some questionable ads last year made complaints to the advertising standards authority shoot way up. Here are the most offensive poster ads of the year.

Not all Italians are in the mob. Salon has a piece on the new Italian-American Reader, which features writing from Don DeLillo, Frank Lentricchia, John Ciardi, and others. The gist of it is that Italian-Amerians have been "minstrelized". [Click through the ads to read it.] I think the important sub-point of the piece is that not all Italian-Americans write about Italian-Americans, cf. Delillo, whose books are less Italian-themed than, say, Richard Price's.

There's only one way, in good conscience, to shoe-horn this great LA Times profile of David Foster Wallace into this blog, since one of our conceptual-cousin blogs has already linked to it:

That's right: another rousing edition of "WHO'S OLDER?". You ready? Okay:

Remember the rules from last time? There's at least a three-calendar-year difference between them. I know -- it's a good one right? Yeah, and you even have to scan the article (written because he's at Pomona now) to find DFW's age.

What, that isn't hot enough shit for you? Try this one on for size:

An exhibit in DC features work by Mark Bennett, who creates floorplans of the fictional houses and settings of movies and TV shows, drawn entirely from memory [via King Pigeon]. You can see more of his pieces here.

Style Wars, early documentary about graffiti/hip-hop culture is finally out on DVD, so you can buy it. [via babak, who needs to get his own blog]

I'll check this later, but I think Evan Bernard's Root Down video has a lot of footage from the film.

Remember that fiasco a couple years ago when McDonald's admitted it was using beef fat in its supposedly vegan products in India? Well, they're trying to make amends:

McDonald's has made itself extra-sensitive in the Indian market since then, and the results are beginning to show. Its mayonnaise is made without eggs. All stores maintain two separate burger-cooking lines, one vegetarian and one not. Workers in the vegetarian section wear green aprons, and workers from the nonvegetarian section are forbidden to cross over without showering first.

Don't forget about FREE ICE CREAM: Today at Ben and Jerry's, tomorrow at Baskin Robbins.

Do you know who I love: Alan Cumming. He's in Spy Kids 2 (best. movie. ever.) for about 5 seconds and steals the show, singing a song he first heard the morning of the shoot. Now -- and we mentioned this a long time ago -- he's playing Nightcrawler, the devilish teleporting elf-man in X-Men 2.

The LA Times profiles him. Note the bit at the end about a TV show he's developing: "a gay Hart to Hart."

Something is toxically amiss at Beverly Hills High School, and guess who's getting to the bottom of it: Erin Brockovich and Albert Finney. The rate of Hodgkin's lymphoma among the former Beverly Hills students was 20.3 times higher than the national average; thyroid ailment rates were 17.8 times higher than the national average. [login req'd. use 'amysrobot' and 'password']

Chuck Klosterman, who writes for Spin and came to NY from North Dakota, by way of Akron, Ohio, writes about how to be cool in New York. Some great, sentimental moments about how friendly people in NY really are.

Police in Boston have uncovered a "secret laboratory" in Beacon Hill, containing 60 dead cats, hundreds of syringes, and a Great Dane. The lady who rents the apartment also runs whitepersians.org, which has been shut down, but -- can you see this coming? -- it's available in Google's cache. Note the multiple grammatical errors and references to genetics.

Jack Osbourne has checked into rehab. Colin Farrell burps and mumbles, "What's rehab?" (again).

You know who Esther Dyson is? Yeah, well, she has a blog, which Blogger has added to their hot list. Sorry, Esther: not very interesting so far. For instance, why are you linking to Google news? It launched like 4000 years ago. Plus, you've got the name-droppiest blog I've seen since celebritysex.

Not to be mean, but you've also gotten a little too much mileage out of that "Release x.x" trope. Maybe it's time to move on to something else.

NYT explains why everyone the world was and is afraid of dragons.

I'm glad Amy mentioned the Ashleigh Banfield story. So basically she charged MSNBC (her own network) with obscuring the reality of the war. But some of the coverage has pointed out a meta-story that is more interesting: NBC News is "concerned" with her remarks, but, as she points out, they recently hired Michael Savage, a controversial neo-conservative WHO CALLED BANFIELD A "SLUT" on his radio show and implied she was a traitor. MSNBC has, since they hired him, stood behind Savage and began sending Banfield out to pasture, even though they could not tout her enough when she was their hot shit reporter last year.

I'm not clever enough to create a succinct essay on gender politics about this -- maybe Amy is -- but it seems evident that MSNBC is, among other things, blind to their own hypocrisy. I never had a strong opinion of Banfield one way or the other, but I find it commendable that she has risked so much to stand up to her employer on both issues here. I feel like writing her a supportive email.

Update: Here's more backlash against Ashleigh, which has the same demeaning tone as Clinton calling Lewinsky "that woman".

Ashleigh Banfield shaking things up again: she should watch what she says in criticizing the US media's coverage of the war, or she might get arrested. Unlike ADM and I, who are patriots. Here's coverage from Kansas State U., where she delivered her message.

So, Apple's new music service: download any song you want for 99 cents, and burn it to a CD, apparently without any rights-management. (There is rights-management for song-swapping, though.) Not bad. Almost cooler than the 99-cent-download, though: you can preview any song in the whole music catalog, which represents all the major labels.

OK, but here's something important: Apple was creative with their pricing strategy for when you want to buy a whole album: for instance, Beck's Sea Change, which has 12 songs, is sold for $9.99. This could be a watershed moment for the music industry: selling stuff in digital form for cheaper than they sell it in stores. Amazing. I can just see those record execs getting brainwashed by the Steve Jobs reality distortion field.

Some stuff you might miss if you weren't paying attention: the music store is integrated into iTunes 4* [screenshot], which was also released (although it's not on Software Update yet), as were the new iPods, which are higher-capacity, thinner, lighter, and have more built-in applications, such as a few games, a text reader, and an alarm clock.

Apple also introduces a proprietary audio format called AAC, which I assume stands for "Apple Audio Codec Advanced Audio Coding". iTunes and iPod are compatible with it, too, obviously.

The music service is Apple-only for now, but will be available to Windows users later, a good way for Apple to generate much-needed revenue without requiring people to buy their machines.

*Now that I've downloaded it, I can tell you that the music store sort of turns iTunes into a web browser -- the store's pages show up in iTunes playlist window and look like webpages. As you can see from the screenshot [220 kb], when you click an album title, the top half of the window looks like a web page, and the bottom half looks like a playlist.

Update: Three more things about iTunes 4:

• It has file sharing built-in, but I'm not sure what you're supposed to do with it (Apple says it works with Rendezvous)
• The buttons have been cleverly redesigned to resemble iPod buttons
• There's a new button for "show/hide album artwork". Looks like you can drag a scan of some liner notes onto a box. In fact, you can drag the scans from Amazon right into it. Presumably, it works automatically with the music store, too. Strangely, though, iTunes associates the artwork with individual songs instead of albums. Does that mean you're supposed to copy the artwork for every song on the album? Hmm. One option is to shift-click all the songs on the album, and then drag your picture to the box. But still: it seems like it should be more automatic than this.

As fimoculous reports, the trailer for the new Neil LaBute movie, The Shape of Things, is out. This is the film version of an off-Broadway play LaBute directed last year, which the theater desk of Amy's Robot attended because of our special connection to the cast. The play had some weaknesses -- namely the pedantic anti-moralizing ending -- but does offer some typical Labutian insight into human nature.

More and more people are camping at the North Pole, including the runner up in the Mrs Russia 2002 pageant. [nyt] Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Antarctica needs plumbers. Why? To keep the pipes from freezing, of course. Sign up here.

NYC's Department of Health detained a foreign tourist against his will for 10 days b/c they suspected he had SARS. Only the second time in 25 years that has happened. Explanation: "your right to cough and sneeze on someone else ends when you have a dangerous communicable disease and you cannot be isolated otherwise." Well, I'm glad to see that NY'ers rights to sneeze and cough on people under ordinary circumstances has been affirmed. [nyt]

Fantastic interview with Roger Ebert in The Progressive, a lot of which has almost nothing to do with movies. You can also listen to the interview.

Boston Globe Magazine has a lengthy piece about how Accutane causes birth defects, but no one seems to care. The story's opening anecdote discusses a woman who got an abortion because she was worried she would have a disfigured "Accutane baby". She then went back on the medicine and proclaims, "My skin glows when I use it. I would die if they took it off the market."

Well, she's not alone. 61% of Accutane pregnancies are terminated.

Interesting account of a journalist who was tracked by the Secret Service for supposedly saying something about our prez. [nyt]

The Rorschach Test is under fire, again. [nyt]

NY Daily News tests the limits of the smoking ban, lighting up in 42 bars last weekend. 16 of the 42 let them get away with it, to an extent, though that's expected to change on Thursday, when inspectors will start enforcing the ban.

Frank Rich offers some perspective on the looting in Iraq, and damning criticism of the administration's attitude about it.

Fifty years ago, a grocery store in Billings, Montana closed. No one ever cleaned it out. Now, they're auctioning everything in the store. Here's pictures of the stuff. [via babak]

Congratulations, Washington, DC! You've regained your title as the Murder Capital of America! On a per capita basis, that is.

Mayor Mike's latest proposed solution to the budget crisis? Casinos!

I guess you won't be allowed to smoke in them.

Beck has a blog. He's in Australia. He took some Beck-like pictures.

Let me ask you something. Is a "what I did today" blog inherently more interesting just 'cause your famous? I love Beck and everything, but give me something juicy, B. [via fimoculous]

NYT has 10 questions for Tom Wolfe. He finally admits that he hates De Palma's movie of Bonfire, but forgives him. Everyone talks endlessly about how bad that movie is, but I have to tell you, I sort of like it.

Also, he says he likes Black Hawk Down, the book, as an example of New Journalism, a method of reporting/writing that he pioneered.

NYT discusses what a friend calls "yet another dying esoteric subculture": fire buffs, people who listen to their police scanners to find out where the fires are, and race up to take pictures, see the spectacle, etc. [via babak] In Boston, we used to call these people "sparkies", but here they're "buffs". There's an interesting relationship between the buffs and the firefighters, one that seems to be a weird mix of admiration, gratitude, and defensiveness.

The article mentions something you might have presumed -- 9/11 added a certain extra morbidity to the whole enterprise.

Anyway, in case you're interested in tuning in to the police and fire chatter, pick up a scanner and get the freqs here.

Jon Stewart signed his contract to host the Daily Show for another 18 months, an event that allows me to introduce what we hope will become an occasional feature here on Amy's Robot. It's called:

Here's how it works: we tell you two celebrities and ask: Who's Older? and you have to guess the answer. Then you can click on the links to find out the answer. To make it interesting, we'll try to have it so there is at least a three-year difference between the two. Ok, you ready? Here's the first one.

Didn't like that one? Ok, here's another one, for free.

Who's older?

Claudia Schiffer or Billy Corgan?

Becky has been following this trend, but here's the latest on extreme ironing: some Englishmen climbed Mount Everest with an ironing board. And did some ironing. On Mount Everest.

Here's Angelina Jolie getting a Khmer tattoo in Thailand to ward off bad luck. Not a bad picture, but not as good as my favorite celebrity tattoo picture of all time: Christina Ricci.

The Beasties are playing a concert in Taiwan, and are speaking to the media about their anti-war/anti-Chinese-regime sentiments. Sometimes it's tiresome, but I guess somebody has to do it.

Spider-Man 2 (aka "The Amazing Spider-Man") was filming in NYC the other day. Here's some photos. Funny, the non-CG'd photos are reminiscent of the original old Spidey live action TV movies (download short video to really see the similarities).

Preternatural former porn star Traci Lords has a vivid autobiography out soon. Mini-summary in the Chicago Sun Times.

Apple has a profile of the guy who handles set design continuity for 24. He uses iPhoto to keep track of everything. If he uses a Mac, he must be one of the good guys.

Good interview with DJ Spooky by a colleague of ours.

Interview with a vampire: Washington Post talks to a Fedayeen torturer/killer who has blended back into society. "I was just following orders," he says. Pretty grisly.

NYT has a follow-up article on how the city's non-emergency services hotline, 311, is doing. The overwhelming majority of calls so far are noise complaints. This continues a thread we began when the service launched.

The Dixie Chicks get naked for peace, or redemption, or something. They look fake. Especially the one on the left.

I asked for it, and now I got it: the Hello Kitty surgical mask.

Has anyone seen Bulletproof Monk? I have. Here is my somewhat obvious summary of it: it's a cross between Shanghai Noon and The Matrix*, the latter of which everyone has already compared it to.

The movie is weighted down with buddy cop and neo-martial-arts cliches -- bogus spirituality, overly-knowing masters, one-dimensional supporting cast, etc -- but it doesn't collapse from the burden. Mixed in with all the cliche is some actual fresh stuff: a fight scene on a helicopter, for one, and the movie's explanation and use of how Sean William Scott learned martial arts (I think it's new, anyway). Chow Yun Fat seems bemused by his own presence in the movie, but SWS plays it a little straighter than you might expect. I imagine this came from the first-time director being somewhat tentative about what tone he wanted the movie to have.

James King, the female love interest, is striking in her first scene, but gradually fades into Jennifer Garner stand-in status, which is unusual for her.

The film's fight sequences were frequently done in CG instead of with wires, and it shows, particularly in the opening sequence (which otherwise would have been very visceral) and the more elaborate fights later in the movie. As with Daredevil, the over-reliance on CG makes it harder to suspend your disbelief and takes you out of the movie, which is exactly the opposite of the intended effect.

Nevertheless, the film is fun to watch -- probably worth a $9 ticket, but not a $10 one.

*Funny, since CYF reportedly turned down the role of Morpheus in The Matrix.

One of the detained Newsday journalists details his 8 days in Iraq prison. [via romenesko] Here's some photos of the prison where they were held.

More 24: Kiefer dies and is resurrected just in time for Easter. (Not the first time he's flatlined either, as TWoP points out.) And shoots lots of people while naked. TV just doesn't get better than this.

An Irish discount airline have jokingly used the popular Information Minister Mohammed Saeed Sahaf as their spokesman on some ads [via Agent 0019]. You may remember Sahaf from his wildly enthusiastic statements about the Iraqi military [via rungu].

I'm not sure I mentioned this, but a couple weeks ago I built a function into this blog that logs how people found us. For instance, if you Googled for "Kiefer Sutherland naked", you might end up here, and we would log what you searched for. Anyway, it seems that lots of people are finding us by looking for pictures of Laci Peterson's decomposed body. Gross.

See for yourself in our referral log.

Nobody likes Madonna's new album: not the Philadelphia Inquirer, nor the Chicago Tribune*, nor the NYT*.

Don't forget you can see the pulled video over at Salon.

*you can login as "amysrobot" with the password "password".

Sure to be widely blogged: New Yorkers live longer than other Americans. It's only 6 months longer, but still: think about all we accomplish in those 6 months! That's 6 more months of Ectasy, 6 more months of unprotected sex with strangers, and 6 more months of $45 hamburgers.

The downside: 4 out of 10 of us die from heart disease, but that stat may be on the decline, too, because of the smoking ban: "Smoking killed more people in New York among preventable deaths, causing about 14 percent of the deaths from heart disease and a quarter of cancer deaths, the research showed."

Here's the whole report from the city's department of health. The first page of the report has this great chart titled "The Conquest of Pestilence in New York City", which features death rates annotated by milestones in the city's pestilent history. Page 7 has a list of all the causes of death in the city in 2001, divided by borough, race, and gender.

NYC readers probably have already heard this, but others might be interested: city and state auditors have discovered TWO SETS OF BOOKS at the MTA -- the one with the public budget, and the one with the secret budget. So when everyone was scratching their heads during the fare hike debate wondering "what happened to last year's surplus?", the MTA bigwigs knew the whole time, but were keeping everything secret. Amazing.

Update: Here's NY Comptroller Havesi's official report, "An Examination of the Finances of the MTA" [pdf].

So the MTA joins Adelphia, Enron, Catherine Martell, and several others who've kept two sets of books.

Well, I'm glad we went over there and liberated people. Now -- finally -- they are free to cut their heads and bleed all over themselves for religious purposes. Freedom has many faces. Now I bet they can even dress up as Saddam for Halloween.

I've been a little bit out of touch the last couple days, but has anyone mentioned the somewhat obvious point that all this illicit money in Iraq ($768 million, so far) is pretty reminiscent of Three Kings, which was all about George Clooney and Marky Mark robbing some Iraqi spoils after GW1? Apparently reality is mirroring fiction here: esp. now that 4 GI's have been arrested for stealing $1 million.

I've often wondered: when people are in the midst of mass hysteria because of one thing, does that make them more susceptible to mass hysteria over some other thing? E.g., just before Phantom Menace came out, suburban teenagers were losing their shit and pulling their hair out...and then The Matrix came out right before PM, and they all went nuts for it. I figured at the time that their desperate anticipation over Phantom Menace made them prone to fixation on The Matrix which, when you think about it (or not), isn't really that great a movie.

Anyway, an incident in Chinatown on Tuesday seems to confirm this idea at least as much as suburban teenagers did a few years ago: in the midst of hysteria over SARS, people in C-town all of a sudden starting freaking out about the financial security of a bank down there, and stormed it. The bank's owners had to come out with bullhorns to get them to calm down until Jimmy Stewart showed up and saved the day.

Should have been blogged last week, but here's some after-the-fact commentary on the looting of the National Museum of Iraq, which resulted in cultural losses that are already being compared to the burning of the Library in Alexandria. Many countries have pledged money to UNESCO's recovery efforts; the US is not one of them. [press release]

Email spammers and anti-spammers play cat and mouse, often changing their respective tactics several times per day. Say one email marketer: "These antispammers should get a life. Do their fingers hurt too much from pressing the delete key? How much time does that really take from their day?" [tx Whiskas for pointing out the comedy of this article]

A sign of the recession we can all relate to: New Yorkers are going out for drinks, instead of more expensive dinners.

Today Madonna does her first ever in-store performance at the Tower Records on Broadway. Next in-store at Tower: Lee Rocker, the (other) guy from the Stray Cats. No, Madonna's not washed up.

Interesting brief interview with Eugene Levy (one of the funniest people around, I think.) Notes: he doesn't think folk music is funny, he doesn't think he is funny, he doesn't like jokes, and he doesn't like "mockumentary".

Somebody wrote in asking for this (our recap of the Oscars, etc), so here it is. Are you sure you were looking at the right date?

Washington Post has a piece on 24's treatment of Kim Bauer, the character we've loved hating since the show's earliest days. Their take: "Stupid, stupid wonderful Kim." [tx tkg]

Nasty diseases are breaking out all over Boston. If you're going there soon, coat your body in latex first[via Whiskas].

Bush administration has clamped down even further on travel to Cuba: no more conservation/ecology/film buff/trainspotter trips, for one thing.