Towse: views from the hill

June 5, 2007

SocioSite: SOCIOLOGICAL SUBJECTS

Filed under: URL — Towse @ 10:56 pm

SocioSite: SOCIOLOGICAL SUBJECTS

Amazing collection of links. … and all I’d been doing was trying to track down some bits about Baudrillard!

The SocioSite is designed to get access to information and resources which are relevant for sociologists and other social scientists. It has been designed from a global point of view – it gives access to the world wide scene of social sciences. The intention is to provide a comprehensive listing of all sociology resources on the Internet. The enormity and constantly changing nature of the Internet makes it impossible to develop a definitive and comprehensive listing. That’s why the SocioSite will always be ‘under construction’.

The SocioSite is a project based at the faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. We present the resources and information that are important for the international sociological scene. It links students of sociology to many interesting, sociologically relevant locations in cyberspace. The SocioSite is a comprehensive information system which is very easy to use. That is why it has become a very popular yellow guide for social scientists from all over the world. The SocioSite is a toolkit for us social scientists. It contains high quality resources and texts that can be used as wheels for the sociological mind.

(Found the Baudrillard bits here. Now if I could only understand them bits …)

June 2, 2007

They were younger then …

Filed under: music,video — Towse @ 11:27 pm

… and so were we.

This video leaves me feeling … almost a feeling of saudade except that you can’t go home again. You can never go back.

For all you nostalgia freaks, myself included, which of the couples in this video are still a pair?

Or even would be if all the principals were still alive?

John and Yoko? John died.
Paul and Linda? Linda died.
George and Patti? Divorced. George married Olivia. Patti married Clapton. Patti divorced Clapton. George died.
Ringo and Maureen? Divorced. Maureen died.

sigh

New avatar, of sorts

Filed under: app,art — Towse @ 10:28 pm

I’ve been playing around with a fake picture for twitter using the Face Transformer at St Andrews that I found over at Grapes2.0 the other day.

Decisions. Decisions. Should I use

Modigliani

or

Botticelli

or

Manga?

Manga. For now. …

[I really wanted the El Greco morph (View of Toledo has been a fave since I was about nine.) But the El Greco morph is only available for males and if I change my “sex” to male, the El Greco morph gives me an El Greco morph complete with nice Spanish facial hair.

Not really me. Alas.]

I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? ?

Filed under: timewaster,URL — Towse @ 8:44 pm

Talk last night turned to timewasters. e.g. the way a click at Grapes2.0 to an amazing YouTube video (a masterpiece of morphing called Women in Art) can lead to a similar morph based on Caravaggio work and then on to Picasso and then Matisse (all justifiable because they are art and educational) and from there to GeorgeW and (a couple wasted hours later) you come out of your zombie state to find you’ve wasted how much time? watching Barats and Beretta YouTube videos and the like.

“Happen often?” I was asked.

“Oh, hardly ever,” I answered. “That’s why it gave me that oh-shake-it-off-yick feeling that I used to get years ago when I’d overdosed on Barbara Cartland.”

So what do I do today? I hied over to popurls (which I mentioned a while back — Wednesday, to be exact) and starting poking through Digg’s hot hits.

… and found a click to Schrodinger’s LOL cat which led me to I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? ?, the weirdest collection of LOLcats I’ve ever seen.

[as defined on Wikipedia: Lolcats, a compound of lol and cat, are photos of cats with humorous captions]

I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? ? has seventy-five pages worth of pictures with captions (not all cats). With, perhaps, ten pictures with captions per page, we’re talking a lot of pictures. I started to get that queasy overload feeling long before I got to page #75.

What kind of pictures are we talking about? Something like ALICE CAT FELL DOWN

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Sweet!

His nibs came over and was standing behind me to see what I was snickering about.

“Remember the conversation last night about time wasted on the Web?” I said.

[note: As I was rummaging through Grapes2.0 to find the link to the "Women in Art" video on YouTube, I realized he'd covered I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? ? recently ... like just this immediate past Wednesday! That's three days ago! Guess I should pay more attention to the plethora of entertaining links he collects on his blog. I could've been wasting time earlier this week, instead of today.]

[URL] San Francisco Herb Co.

Filed under: food,San Francisco,shopshopshop,URL — Towse @ 7:13 pm

As mentioned in the post immediately preceding this one, I came across the San Francisco Herb Co. today while searching for a source of Long Life Tea (my supply being about four mugs-worth from the bottom of the bag).

San Francisco Herb Co. is local. The 26K sqft warehouse is located at 250 14th St. The small retail operation at the front of the warehouse is open M-SA 10-4.

San Francisco Herb Company provides Wholesale prices on the highest quality culinary herbs and spices, extracts, teas, dehydrated vegetables, nuts, seeds, botanicals, essential oils, potpourri ingredients and fragrance oils.

You can browse through the available stock, which is sorted into the following categories:

  • Herbs and Spices – Baking
  • Herbs and Spices – Botanicals
  • Herbs and Spices – Miscellaneous
  • Catnip
  • Green Tea and Other Bulk Tea Products
  • Dehydrated Vegetables
  • Essential Oils
  • Extracts
  • Fragrance Oils
  • Nuts and Seeds
  • Potpourri – Ingredients
  • Potpourri – Pre-Mixed
  • Potpourri – Recipes
  • Spices
  • Spice Blends

The bulk of their business is mail order. The online catalog is worth a look. I’m planning a field trip to the retail outlet. Soon.

[URL] Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages

Filed under: food,science,URL — Towse @ 6:58 pm

Web wandering brought me to Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages.

I’d had the brilliant idea two days ago of creating a Web site called wherecanifind.com/ where, f’rex, if I wanted to know where I could find Long Life Tea in San Francisco, I would go to wherecanifind.com/sanfrancisco and type in my request.

Handy helpful w2.0 folks would swarm the site, providing searchers with solutions.

Alas. I went to godaddy.com and every single wherecanifind.* has been snapped up, except .mobi and …

Well, another brill idea up in smoke.

But I still wanted to know where I could find Long Life Tea in San Francisco, so I searched and came across the San Francisco Herb Company down on 14th St. which had not only a HUGE inventory but also a small retail operation. (A later post.)

Rambling through the SFHCo site, I came across a reference to Nigella sativa, which I used to have growing in our old front yard. SFHCo was selling it as a cooking spice. Who knew you could use the seeds for cooking? (I always saved them to scatter the next spring …)

But was the Nigella sativa really the one I’d been growing in my front yard?

Check Google images!

No. Turns out I’d been growing Nigella damascena AKA Love in a Mist.

Ah, well. Still curious, though, a further search took me to Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages where he gave me the lowdown on N.s. in great and gory detail.

What a site. Depth and breadth about spices.

solid information on (currently) 117 different spice plants. Emphasis is on their usage in ethnic cuisines, particularly in Asia; furthermore, I discuss their history, chemical constituents, and the etymology of their names. Last but not least, there are numerous photos featuring the live plants or the dried spices.

The Center for Justice and Accountability

Filed under: causes,San Francisco — Towse @ 6:19 pm

Had dinner with friends last night.

Asked one, “So how long have you been at the new job?”

“A year and a half, almost two years.”

“So what is it again that your nonprofit does?”

She answered with an impassioned explanation of what they do and who they do it for and what they accomplish. Check out the Web site. Good cause: The Center for Justice and Accountability

The Center realized it could use the Alien Tort Statute (1789) to accomplish its goals. Who knew?

The Alien Tort Statute (ATS), adopted in 1789, gives survivors of egregious human rights abuses, wherever committed, the right to sue persons responsible for the abuses in U.S. federal court. Since 1980, the law has been used successfully in cases involving torture (including rape), extrajudicial killing, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and arbitrary detention. The Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA), passed in 1991 and signed into law by President Bush in 1992, gives similar rights to U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike to bring claims for torture and extrajudicial killing committed in foreign countries. The perpetrator generally must be served with the lawsuit while they are present in the United States in order for the court to have jurisdiction.

June 1, 2007

Fiddling with Twitter

Filed under: app,blog — Towse @ 8:19 pm

Fiddling with the Twitter app. (see right sidebar)

Mount Madonna School Dream House Raffle

Filed under: California,life,real estate — Towse @ 8:02 pm

Tomorrow’s the big day: the drawing for the Mount Madonna School Dream House Raffle.

If all 32K tickets had been sold (or even if 26,500 tickets had been sold), the Grand Prize winner would have had to make the choice of either a home (appraised value $1.8m) in Santa Cruz, CA, or $1.5m cash.

TPTB just got back to me to say that the school sold over 19K tickets (at $150 a pop) and so, didn’t meet the minimum for the house prize. Instead the lesser cash prizes will be awarded tomorrow, starting at 2 p.m., and at 4 p.m. the Grand Prize winner will be awarded half the net proceeds. My correspondent estimated that, after expenses and lesser prizes, the Grand Prize winner will walk away with approximately $1 million (before taxes).

Which means, of course, that the school gets the other half — $1 million — to help pay off the debt owed on their new campus and to use for expanding the “educational opportunities for students.”

Sure beats a bake sale.

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