Jules, Max and I just recently returned from one of over 1600 candlelight vigils held around the country in support of Cindy Sheehan and her quest for meet with the shrub. There were about 150 people there tonight at the University of Michigan Diag in Ann Arbor. There was also another gathering over on north campus.
I just noticed this item on boing-boing:
Ministry of Reshelving puts 1984 in its proper place
This weekend, prankster/gamer/performance artist Jane McGonigal and The Ministry of Reshelving launched an effort to put copies of Orwell’s 1984 in its “appropriate” section of book stores. From the rule set:1984Shelf 1. Select a local bookstore to carry out your reshelving activities.
2. Download and print “This book has been relocated by the Ministry of Reshelving bookmarks and “All copies of 1984 have been relocated” notecards to take with you to the bookstore. Or make your own. We recommend bringing a notecard and 5-10 bookmarks to each store.
3. Go to the bookstore and locate its copies of George Orwell’s 1984. Unless the Ministry of Reshelving has already visited this bookstore, it is probably currently incorrectly classified as “Fiction” or “Literature.”
4. Discreetly move all copies of 1984 to a more suitable section, such as “Current Events”, “Politics”, “History”, “True Crime”, or “New Non-Fiction.”
5. Insert a Ministry of Reshelving bookmark into each copy of any book you have moved. Leave a notecard in the empty space the books once occupied.
6. If you spot other incorrectly classified books, feel free to relocate them.
7. Please report all reshelving efforts to the Ministry. Email your store name, location, # of 1984 copies reshelved, and any other reshelving activities conducted, to reshelving @ avantgame.com. Photos of your mission can be uploaded to Flickr, tagged as “reshelving”, and submitted to the Ministry of Reshelving group.
Link to Flickr group
If you haven’t read 1984 I highly recommend going to your local bookstore or library and grabbing a copy to read. It is quite astonishing how the events of the last 5 years parallel the events of the book. Politicians (especially the republicans) perpetuating double speak, telling lies repeatedly until people believe it (eg. the connection between Saddam Hussien and 9/11, there wasn’t any connection there), perpetual war with a nebulous enemy (the global war on terror) etc.
Om Malik has a good post about how most of the digital music download services are doomed to fail. I wrote about this yesterday and Om’s post just reinforces what I wrote.
The services that I think will suceed in the long run (besides iTunes) are the likes of emusic.com
that offer music from independant musicians (DEATH TO THE RIAA!!) completely free of any drm. The service is easy to use, relatively inexpensive, and lets users listen to the music anywhere they want thanks to the lack of drm.