meta-roj

economic thinkers

spice

o doubt, buried with a #2 pencil

once upon a time, in a land so near to here, in jackson and george counties, mississippi, someone found some naked supreme court justices. and panicked.

Some Miss. Libraries Ban Jon Stewart Book [ap via abc news, january 9, 2005]

Library officials in two southern Mississippi counties have banned Jon Stewart’s best-selling “America (The Book)” over the satirical textbook’s nude depictions of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices.

“I’ve been a librarian for 40 years and this is the only book I’ve objected to so strongly that I wouldn’t allow it to circulate,” said Robert Willits, director of the Jackson-George Regional Library System of eight libraries in Jackson and George counties.

it’s just a start. soon, we’ll be able to protect children all over this great land from naked humor.

Sudan, Southern Rebels End 21-Year War [reuters, january 9, 2005]

Bare-chested warriors danced and turbaned heads bowed in prayer when Sudan’s Islamist government and southern rebels sealed a comprehensive peace agreement on Sunday ending Africa’s longest-running civil war.

i know most of the world is still focused on south asia, but this was worth mentioning.

in that british way, the economist has news on the eclipse of the dollar – unfortunately, it’s a print thing, so i can’t link to it. but i can share the teaser from their “premium content”:

In December, we warned that the dollar’s role as the world’s main currency was under threat if America continued in its profligate ways. Yet the dollar has been dethroned even sooner than we expected. It has been superseded not by the euro, nor by the yen or yuan, but by another increasingly popular global currency: frequent-flyer miles.…

fortunately, in this vastly-connected media world, you can catch a re-interpretation of that at the guardian.

Frequent flyer miles soar above sterling [january 8, 2005]

By the end of 2004, almost 14 trillion frequent flyer miles had been accumulated worldwide, worth between 1p and 6p apiece.

oddly enough, i happen to know someone that can be held personally responsible for the flood of currency.

i bring this up today, for two reasons… one is to remind (or rather, direct your attention to) the idea of donating frequent flier miles to make a difference.

and the second is to raise the question of the impending “bank failures” in this miles-economy as american airlines all fight to drive themselves out of business.

pretty quiet around here, but some news under the hood….

i’ve recent upgraded the engine under this beast, now “mt-pi.” in the process, of course, things broke. it took some time to track down a conflict with templates that seemed to be a problem with directories and configurations, but that’s sorted out now. left on the table so far is a problem with the stylesheet. right now things look functional, but broken. i’ll get into that someday.

i’m also in the process of cleaning out old, irrelevant drafts i’ve left “to blog” that no longer make sense to keep around (lots of presidential politics stuff that’s well… pointless). i’ll also be re-categorizing things a bit to make the archives more tolerable.

hot topics coming up for 2005 will definitely incldue a revival of the music business material – i’ve got some good friends and genuinely good people that are dangerously close to the beast right now, so their adventures will be near the top of my attention pile, and, as a result, somewhere near the blog.

i’ll also take some time someday soon to do a wrapup of what happened in 2004 with regard to my dark corner of the net. 2004 marked a pretty steep drop off in content here – a major shift from big, in-depth, personally-focused pieces (like that big three part adventure on the future of the cd and the music business toward one-liners and a whole pile of obituaries. thanks to the obits, the raw number of posts here has been pretty consistent, but the substance is lacking. there are many reasons for all this – economic, personal and artistic – but it is what it is.

so, back under the hood for me, and hopefully i’ll see you again soon.

bundt pan

art history

jazz biographer