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Darfurian badge
 Noticed that SaveDarfur.org doesn't seem to have an website badges, so I created one. Feel free to snag it, of course.
Something we (meaning you) can do for Darfur
You got your George "Booker" Clooney, you got your Barack "Barry" Obama, you got your Rally to Stop Genocide this Sunday in DC, down on the mall and starting at 2.
Go for that girl in the white frock, second in line. Let's call her, hmm, "Nyanath," a Sudanese name meaning something like "daughter of humanity." (Yeah, I looked it up.) Go for little Nyanath. Cause she can't. Seriously though, I tend think that the progressive rallies are largely pointless, but this one could actually make a difference. It's a chance to bring attention to a situation that desperately needs attention paid to it and it has a clearly defined focus. And if anyone starts yelling "Free Mumia," feel free to tell them to shut up.
Where are Wu?
 I've got a story up at the Personal Democracy Forum (have I mentioned that I have a story up at the Personal Democracy Forum? No? Sorry bout that -- here's a link) on the case of Gulliermo Fariñas Hernandez. He's the Cuban man who is in a hospital down in Santa Clara, because he started starving himself when the Cuban government cut off his email access. As I wrote it up, the heart of the story is the new-agey question of who controls the Internet. But in a real way, it's also the age-old story of man/woman against oppressive government.
So, different in details but quite similar in spirit is the case of Hao Wu. Wu is a Chinese guy with an MBA from Michigan who returned to China to do documentary film work and blogged about it as he went along. About two months ago, the Public Security Bureau (could that name be more chilling?) came and snatched Wu up. No one really knows what Wu did to tick off the PSB, and he hasn't been heard from since. Ethan Zuckerman is tracking the case on this blog and he's created some badges that you can use on your own sites like the one above (which may well say something goofy about me in Chinese, but I'm going on faith here). Rebecca MacKinnon, who worked in China with CNN for a number of years, had an oped in the Washington Post last week where she called Wu's sister's blog "a heartbreaking account of how China's regime eats its young," a practice one wishes everybody would really cut down upon.
Reporters without Borders has a write up and you can join the letter writing campaign here.
Fuera de la Revolución (de la Internet)
Now appearing over at the Personal Democracy Forum -- a story I wrote about Guillermo Fariñas Hernandez, a journalist down in Cuba who recently ended a two month hunger strike in protest of Castro/the government's blocking of emails he was sending out to the U.S.: Santa Clara, a town in the Villa Clara province just east of Havana, is a five-hour boat ride from Miami, but for Cuban Guillermo Fariñas Hernandez the U.S. mainland is just a mouse-click away. At least it was, until Fariñas, a psychologist-turned-citizen journalist, sat down in an Internet café in last January to email dispatches to his contacts in Florida. On this day, his emails bounced back.
The day before, Fariñas had been featured in a front-page Miami Herald story about a rise in violence against dissidents in Cuba. This is Castro's payback, he thought. Borrowing a page from the protest playbook of Mohandas Gandhi, he stopped eating. Fariñas later told the journalist-rights organization Reporters Without Borders that he was willing to die for the cause. "If I must be a martyr for Internet access," Fariñas said, "so be it."
It starts with Fariñas and online life in Castro's Cuba, but goes on to touch on the big questions of who really controls the Internet and its prospects for staying a truly global network(s) much longer. Hope you'll have a look.
Photo: Elephant Tree at Sagamore Hill
This tree outside Theodore Roosevelt's Oyster Bay, New York home looked just like the foot of a giant elephant to me. But that might have been because the decor inside the house was thoroughly early-conservationist -- lion-skin rugs, polar bear-skin rugs, mounted deer heads, mounted buffalo heads, rhino tusk decorative pieces, and the like.
Brrooklyn
While I certainly agree with Steven Johnson that Park Slope is generally lovely in the springtime, today it happened to be damn cold. So much so that when I went outside this afternoon to practice my new hobby of picture taking, the flowers (tulips? dunno) that were so ready-for-their-closeup yesterday were all curled up into themselves, the petals huddled together for warmth. Still, I thought that the colors turned out nice in this, but the framing and focus need a lot of work.
One-stop hurricane photos
I'd been wanting to pull together the bunch of pictures I took down in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina that lets me display them on my site but also make use of the magic of Flickr. The MT Hacks FlickrPhotos plugin I discovered today seems to do that quite nicely.
Photo: Ferry to the Statue of Liberty
Jane and I had quite the adventure this weekend, with what began as a trip to Coney Island (we've never been and wanted to see what the fuss is about) and ended with eating pizza and drinking hot cocoa in Dumbo, an area of Brooklyn that's evolving from warehouses and industrial space into what seems to me to possibly be an intriguing place to live.
What happened was that we (and by "we" I more mean Jane) missed the exit to Coney Island, ended up going over the Verrazano Bridge to Staten Island, and couldn't turn around, the bridge being closed Brooklyn-bound because of a jack knifed tractor-trailer. It was then that I realized that for all my years growing up amongst the highways and byways of New Jersey, I didn't exactly know what it means to say that a truck has gone and jack knifed. Jane explained it -- it's basically when the back of the truck somehow ends up in front of the front of the truck -- but added, "I just don't know why they keep doing that."
At that point, we decided to head back and explore Brooklyn closer to home, via Jersey. On the way, we drove past Liberty State Park, where the ferry leaves to go to the Statue of Liberty. On a crazy whim and despite the fact that it was now hailing, we decided to pay a visit to Lady Liberty. As it turns out, however, she was closed that day ("Give me your tired, your poor, Monday through Friday between the hours of 9 and 6"). Still, I took this photo of the ferry sign. I tweaked it a bit in Fireworks, gray scaling the background while keeping the sign red a la the little girl's red coat in Schindler's List -- which is a bit funny because I hated that part of the movie.
And they're even funnier with the accent
You learn the darndest things on Red State:
No, I'm not Jewish; just from New Jersey. State law permits me to use up to twelve Yiddish phrases/words without a license. Relic of the Florio adminstration; you can look it up.
Photo: Katz's Deli, Lower East Side of Manhattan
Took this while doing an audio
walking tour of the Lower East Side of Manhattan yesterday. Katz's is famous
both for its pastrami and for being the setting of the fake orgasm scene from
When Harry Met Sally.
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