new crowd control;

sonic crowd control used by the military against G20 protesters in Pittsburgh:

this is rock'n'roll!?

I need a bucket:

new google patent;

oh brother. google's new patent: a search box and two buttons on a web page.

apparently it took 5 years of legal haggling. assholism has no expiration date.

can we still nuke the world?

I grew up in the Soviet Union. In the 80s. A nuclear attack was something we were being prepared for in school. There were nuclear shelters around the city, and we all had to take a class or two about what to do in the event of a nuclear war. I remember watching The Day After and being utterly horrified (can you believe it -- they showed it on Soviet TV in the late 80s!?).

So what's up with the atomic bomb now?

Can the world still be destroyed with a push of a button or two?

Evidently, other people think the same paranoid thoughts. The Guardian just regurgitates a timeric graph. This is other than satisfying to the information is beautiful blog, so the folk(s) over there decided to figure out how many nuclear weapons would it take to destroy the world and whether we have enough.

rip joe maneri

Joe Maneri, the founder of Boston Microtonal Society, has died. Joe Maneri has been a musical innovator in mictrotonal music: from bringing us microtonal improvisation to invention of a 5 octave, 72-tones per octave electronic keyboard that has graced Boston Museum of Science since 1990:



i was extremely lucky to have met and spoken with Joe Maneri about 20th century eastern european literature, of all things! Here he is performing with Club d'Elf at the Knitting Factory in 2002:



Farewell.

Do check out the work of his son, a modern violinist, Mat Maneri.

russia is out of europa league

Dynamo, Amkar, and Zenit have all been eliminated from the europa league. The only team whose departure is other than embarrassing is Amkar. At least they managed to win a game. Ugh.

aerial photos of germany at the end of WWII

This is what Germany looked like at the end of World War II. My grandparents' generation fought in the war and had been affected by the war termendously. I guess these suppose to make me feel something like a victor (considering me being Jewish too). It makes feel sad and horrified:

homeland security office manipulated terror alert levels to aid bush in 2004 elections

USNews says that Tom Ridge wrote a book. The book is coming on September 1, 2009. Meanwhile the promotional materials for the book state that Tom Ridge was pressured by Donald H. Rumsfeld and Attorney General John D. Ashcroft to raise terror alert levels in order to help Bush win the 2004 presidential elections (terror Alert level was raised to 'high' from August 1, 2004 until November 10, 2004) :

Ridge was ... pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush's re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.

I guess this why he resigned shortly after the elections?

So now everyone, including Washington Post have swarmed all over this, and the "he said; she said" has began. Politico prints a Bush-based denial:

“Under no circumstance was Tom Ridge or anyone else directed to change the threat level,” Townsend said. “It didn’t work that way, and it certainly didn’t work that way in 2004. It was always an apolitical process.”

I am not surprised. I don't understand why this comes as a shock. Politicians often use governmental resources for political reasons. Bush administration did not strike me as the most ethical one.

russian teams in europa league; ugh.

Dynamo Moscow could not create anything even remotely interesting in their game against CSKA Sofia. The Bulgarian team wasn't anything special, and evidently neither is Dynamo. 0:0 is the final score, and while the game (and especially the second half) was disappointing, the result isn't exactly horrid.

Amkar had the hardest opponent. The team traveled to England to face Fulham. The Russian team was simply not physically ready to compete. By the time it was the middle of the second half, Amkar footballers were running out of gas. The result was predictable, a 1:3 loss, though to be fair Dimitar Dimitrov's men tried their hardest, and not all is lostwith this result. But with the current state of the team, Amkar is not likely to move into the group stage of Europa League. Might as well wave bye-bye now.

The biggest disappointment came from the 2007/2008 UEFA Cup winners, Zenit St. Petersburg. The team traveled to Portugal to face little known CD Nacional (Cristiano Ronaldo's home and first pro club). Zenit's performance was, once again, marred by wasted opportunities and absolutely horrific defense. With the St. Petersburg's team controlling the flow, the game ended with a 4:3 win for the home side. This certainly gives the Russian team ample opportunity to advance if they do win at home, but with the amount of positional mistakes from the defensive players, and Zenit's chronic inability to put the ball in the back of the net, I am skeptical that Zenit can accomplish anything reasonable this season.

UGH!

and now for something completely creepy.

Surgical masks to help you get more anxious than you already are sitting in that dentist chair waiting on that root canal.

great pacific garbage patch

Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a waste dump the size of Texas that's hanging around in the middle of the Pacific Ocean stretching from Japan to Hawaii. It has own website: http://www.greatgarbagepatch.org/

And how upbeat is the dude narrating this segment?



Best soundbite: There is no proof that eating plastic is harmful to the birds, but it certainly has no nutritional value

You are brilliant, you tool!

jarke is dead

Espanyol's captain Daniel Jarke - died

the slow disassembling of Zenit St. Petersburg

Good things never last... The players who had led the team to winning Russian Championship, Russian Supercup, UEFA Cup, and UEFA Supercup in the last two years are gone:

• Andrei Arshavin --> Arsenal (£16.5M)
• Anatoli Timoschuk --> Bayern Munich (€15M)
• Pavel Pogrebnyak --> Stuttgart (€4.5M)

Head coach is going to Belgium at the end of the season. He is currently bickering with the club in hopes that he'll get fired early?

... and who did the team get as replacements?

• Danny from Dynamo Moscow -- currently injured; out for the season
• Kornilenko from Tom'
• Rossina from Seria B

... and you wonder why Zenit has no game?

Ugh.

shameful!

Dynamo (Moscow) was knocked out of Champion's League by the Celtic. Dynamo gave false hopes to its fans by surprising everyone with 1:0 win in Glasgow, but, alas, at home they got intimidated, and a 90+3 minute goal by Samaras made it a 2:0 away win for the Scotsmen:



If this wasn't enough... Krylia Sovetov lost concentration and allowed two late goals by St. Patrick Athletic from Ireland. Who has ever heard of these folks!?

Russia is zero for two in the European club competitions this year. ugh... Four more clubs are going to enter in the later stages:

• Rubin Kazan' (CL/group)
• PFK CSKA (CL/group)
• Amkar (EL)
• Zenit St. Petersburgh (EL)

So there will be more shame for me to post about...

At least my Israelites are rocking it with the comeback game of the year (from being down 0:3 to a 4:3 win):