The New York Times has an unexpectedly good article today about election day in South Africa. I think it does a fairly good job of describing SA for people who are unfamiliar with it.
The NYT’s reporting on SA has left a lot to be desired in the past few years, with underreporting, misreporting, and just stupid stuff. If you’re looking for a vacation home and are wondering what you can get for under 6 million dollars in the Cape Town area, their Real Estate section editor loves the Garden Route and I’m sure has a few ideas for you in the coming weeks. If you’re looking for consistently good coverage of South Africa, though, the M&G is always a better bet. (And they have better cartoons, like today’s.)
[Picture is an ANC poster from 1994, via the ACE Electoral Knowledge Network]
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I remember the days of censored internet from high school. It’s pretty easy to figure out how to get around it for someone who knows what they’re doing, but this website (“Open Access for the Net Generation”) makes it easier for just about anyone.
[Image from Seth Finkelstein’s blog]
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Bizarre. Somehow I got on Diageo’s Republican mailing list. They even correctly identified me as a supporter of cheap Smirnoff Ice. Boy, anything I can do to help out “the world’s biggest alcohol beverage company” AND “protect hardworking Americans.” Here’s the text of the message:
“Thank you for agreeing to let us talk with you about issues that affect beer, wine and distilled spirits. Our goal is to provide you with information you can use – some just fun or interesting and some very serious like today’s message. In Vermont, the tax on flavored beer – like our Smirnoff Ice – could increase by almost 500% (some legislators are even looking at an almost 2,000% increase) unless you act now .
Lawmakers have proposed this huge tax hike, making it more expensive for consumers who like a little flavor in their beer to enjoy these products. Not only are they raising taxes, but they are setting the stage to further inconvenience consumers, small businesses and family-owned grocery stores by trying to reclassify these beers to call them distilled spirits.
Flavored beer is a malt-based, just like beer. It is brewed like beer, and contains about the same amount of alcohol as a beer. Calling it a distilled spirit instead of a beer so it can be taxed at a higher rate is not only silly, it is just wrong.
Legislators who believe they can replenish government budgets with tax hikes are misguided. And government bureaucrats who play with words – moving products from one category to another with without any scientific justification – don’t understand (or just don’t care) about the impact of their actions.
Please visit AxeTaxesNotJobs.com now to tell your Senator that an almost 500% (with some proposals up to 2,000%!) tax hike on flavored beer is a very bad idea that hurts consumers, small business and the economy. And don’t forget to spread the word through the site or by forwarding this email so your family and friends can take action too.
Thanks for your help, and I look forward to talking with you about our industry and our products. Diageo is the world’s biggest alcohol beverage company with brands like Smirnoff, Guinness, Crown Royal, Johnnie Walker, Jose Cuervo, Red Stripe, Tanqueray, BV wines, some awesome single malt Scotch whiskeys and a lot more. We’re also an industry leader in fighting underage drinking and drunk driving.
Cheers!
Guy L. Smith
Executive Vice President
Diageo North America”
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At work we’re attempting to stream an event that will be happening in a few days over the internet using Quicktime Broadcaster and a Sony HDV-HC1 camera. We were able to get Quicktime Broadcaster on a fairly new iMac running OS X 10.5 to recognize the HDV camera, but could not get Broadcaster on two separate MacBook Pros (one with Mac OS X 10.4.11 and one with 10.5.6, both with Quicktime non-Pro 7.6) to recognize the camera. iSight was recognized on both, but not the HDV-HC1. (The Sony camera was recognized in System Profiler on the Firewire bus and worked in iMovie.) There was a hypothesis that Final Cut Pro had codecs or something that were required for Broadcaster to recognize the camera, as only the iMac had Final Cut. We never followed up on this, so that may be worth trying. Our solution was to switch the Sony camera from HDV mode to DV mode. It showed up immediately in testing on both MacBooks in Quicktime Broadcaster. We don’t need HD video for this stream, so we’re satisfied with this solution. If you need HD video this tip is of little help, but if all you need is DV and all you have is an HDV camera, this should fix your issue. (As for switching the camera to DV mode, not all HDV cameras are going to be able to do this as far as I know, but our older HDV-HC1 camera was able to. Look in your user manual to find out how, on our camera it was in the “Standard Set” submenu, and some obviously named submenu in there.)
Last Updated on Tuesday, 14 April 2009 16:12
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“‘I achieved everything I ever wanted after my first spaceflight,’ [John Grunsfeld] said, wearing his space monkey hat. ‘To be the Hubble repairman is really just unbelievable.’”
[Via NYT]
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This is the last year that my taxes are going to be straightforward, and it’s the fourth year I’ve used TurboTax Freedom Edition. I can’t attest to how well it does complicated taxes (I’d guess if your taxes are complicated your accountant should be doing them for you, and if your taxes are complicated you probably make too much money to be using the free TurboTax), but for simple taxes, it works well and does it for free.
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Well, that’s handy. Here are the ABA routing numbers for Citibank.
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“The only way to defuse the political volatility of torture and to remove it from the center of the ‘politics of fear’ is to replace its lingering mystique, owed mostly to secrecy, with authoritative and convincing information about how it was really used and what it really achieved. That this has not yet happened is the reason why, despite the innumerable reports and studies and revelations that have given us a rich and vivid picture of the Bush administration’s policies of torture, we as a society have barely advanced along this path. We have not so far managed, despite all the investigations, to produce a bipartisan, broadly credible, and politically decisive effort, and pronounce authoritatively on whether or not these activities accomplished anything at all in their stated and still asserted purpose: to protect the security interests of the country.”
[From Mark Danner’s second of two articles in the NYRB on American torture. This is the first.]
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“The Vice President and Dr. Biden came out onto the balcony at 10:20, with the
Easter Bunny, complete with its large, purple eyelids. The announcer called the
bunny the Bidens’ ‘special guest.’ Two of Sasha and Malia’s friends were
standing in the press area. When the Bidens came out with the bunny, one of the
girls said, ‘Why did he bring the bunny?’”
[Via CJR and Lynn Sweet’s blog at the Sun Times. Another photo from the Boston Globe.]
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