This is very interesting.

Yellow Arrow is a sticker art/collaboratively authored viral narrative project. Project participants post a yellow sticker pointing to something they think is important in the urban landscape, and then send a short email description to the yellowarrow.org server via their phone. Each sticker has an individual ID. When other users encounter the sticker in the public space, they then can send an email to yellowarrow.org to retrieve the description the tagger left behind.

Be sure to browse the yellowarrow gallery.

[Via Grand Text Auto]

Click here.

At the Republican National Convention in New York City just a little while ago, there was a great deal of romanticizing of 9-11-01. It was a day, we heard, that demonstrated the best in America. And in many ways it was. But 9-11 as a great triumph of the human spirit isn't the 9-11 I recall on the ground. I remember it as a terrifying, horrible, confusing day followed by several terrifying, horrible, confusing weeks.

I don't know how it felt out in the vast American Expanse to the south and west of New York City, but for those of us -- a very large proportion of America's political, intellectual, and media elite -- whose roots and physical existence are and were in the Boston-Washington corridor it was a time spent under seige. On the day in question, no one quite new what was happening. It seemed inevitable that there would be more attacks, and soon, very possibly on slightly lesser cities like Boston. And with the coming of the Anthrax Scare it looked like there were more attacks. The country was mobilizing for war in Afghanistan, a war that -- at the time at least -- raised the specter of being a real war of the old school with high casualties and all. And if that's what it took to win, most of us were prepared to accept it. But for those of us under 40 it was the prospect of something we'd never experienced and it was destined to occur in a far-off land of which we knew little.

For many of us under-30s, the attacks were just about the first time in our adult lives that we were confronted with real fear -- the paralytic fear of events that are barely within our comprehension, let alone our sphere of control. With the cold war burned out, I remember, in the 90s, that random plane crashes kinda scared me.

Read the whole thing.

9/11 brought some heroes out. Here's another:

Only 12 survivors were pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center after the towers fell on Sept. 11, despite intense rescue efforts. Two of the last three to be located and saved were Port Authority police officers. They were not discovered by a heroic firefighter, or a rescue worker, or a cop. They were discovered by Dave Karnes.

Karnes hadn't been near the World Trade Center. He wasn't even in New York when the planes hit the towers. He was in Wilton, Conn., working in his job as a senior accountant with Deloitte Touche. When the second plane hit, Karnes told his colleagues, "We're at war." He had spent 23 years in the Marine Corps infantry and felt it was his duty to help. Karnes told his boss he might not see him for a while.

Then he went to get a haircut.

I was deeply touched by this article.

Click here to read it in full.

Answer: This company has a workforce of 17,000 people, whose average working year is only four months long.

Question: What's the alleged Final Jeopardy answer that supposedly brought down "Jeopardy!" uber-contestant Ken Jennings this week, according to reports that started circulating Wednesday?

Here.

Here.

and here.

I am in agreeance. Message control! Message control!

The ACLU and the Justice Department are engaged in a prolonged struggle over the legality of the Patriot Act.

The Justice Department redacts portions of the ACLU's briefs that it deems inappropriate to release publicly for national security reasons. [To redact is to render portions of a document unreadable, often with a large, black marker, for confidentiality or national-security or other purposes. -ed]

The Justice Department redacted the following quote from an ACLU brief:

"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."

The quote is from a Supreme Court case.

Is this a joke?



[via Orcinus. More at the Memory Hole]

A brand-new policy here at Salto:

We encourage commenting!

All one would have to do is click that little "comment [0]" link below. And then type, type, type away!

It's that easy!

Time to check in with those intrepid defenders of privilege, the Billionaires for Bush:

Call us hopeless romantics, but we're still walking on air from last week's Republican National Convention. Never before was there a a more glorious convergence of power, privilege, and money. And never before did the Billionaires, unsung heros of the class war, shine so brightly. "A billion points of light!" exclaimed an awestruck George H.W. Bush.

The champagne corks were already popping as our Limo Tour arrived from the midwest in a stretch Humvee Saturday night, plowing over the rank bodies of scruffy justice-loving freaks gathering to heap scorn upon our Grand Old Party. "How's that for free speech?" roared Limo Captain Monet Oliver d'Place with a joyful tear rolling down his right cheek. "By God, it's good to be home!"

Billionaires gathered bright and early on Sunday for a delightful morning of croquet, bandminton, and other lawn sports in Central Park. The unsightly rabble-rousers were nowhere to be seen, thanks to fellow billionaire Mayor Bloomberg's ban on protests int he Park. As City officials explained, the grass was too expensive for the feet of mere commoners.

By midday hundreds of Billionaires representing over 30 states had gathered in front of the Plaza Hotel to kick off the Million Billionaire March. We proceded down 5th Ave, guarded by paramilitary escorts from the NYPD, provoking jeers, guffaws, and waves of class envy amongst the 500,000 anti-Bush marchers as we stole their media spotlight...

Go take a look.

Stuff from my trip will continue to bubble up here for a while.

This was taken at the historic Cyclone rollercoaster in Coney Island:



Pas/Cal and the Disappointment and Of Montreal and My Favorite and the Essex Green can go on the Cyclone for free.

Cradle of Filth, however, must pay full ticket price.

AP: 'U.S. death toll in Iraq passes 1,000 mark' ... 4:27 PM, Sept. 7th, 2004

AP: 'Ridge: Terrorists hope to disrupt election' ... 4:40 PM, Sept. 7th, 2004

Timing!

Here.

More here.

Opening scene of movie:

Capsule with precious cargo returns from space voyage, detaches from mother, and hurtles down towards Earth. The cargo? Extraterrestrial samples! Two Hollywood stunt pilots, Buzz and Jax, are employed to try to catch the sucker as it falls. But the parachute fails! The capsule crashes in the desert!

Close-up on capsule. A tiny green feeler probes tentatively at the crack in the capsule...

Typical bad slash good slash bad sci-fi movie, right? Except everything in the first paragraph is true. Except the names of the pilots, which you may attribute to creative license...

The internet is, at times, just fuckin' gorgeous.

Hey. My name is Matt. I'm writing this near the end of August in the year 2000. I just turned twenty-four years old. You are reading this because recently a lot of people vanished from the face of the earth. Perhaps their clothes and jewelry just fell to the ground, their bodies disappearing without a trace. I'm sure you are wondering what happened, why it happened, and can it happen again. You're reading this because you were not one of them. You are one of the people remaining on the earth. I'm writing this because I'm one of those who disappeared, and I want you to know why.

There are a variety of other important resources at Rapture Ready.

But these letters are a pretty good place to start. Especially if you're a big ol' stinky sinner, like ME!

And -- oh dear! -- check out these pictures of signs of the End Times! Praise be!

Maybe you should think about going outside and registering some voters?

This site makes it, like, way too easy.

I know that I have a massive Iowa/Missouri/Arkansas readership. Hellooooooo? C'mon, guys!

Here's a lil' 411:

Driving Votes is a grassroots organization committed to reclaiming American democracy by ensuring that Democrats in swing states vote. The Driving Votes website at www.drivingvotes.org makes it simple for anyone to plan a grassroots voter registration drive. The Driving Votes website has voter registration packets for each swing state, information on which local groups to partner with, and how to find areas with a high percentage of Democrats.

[via the FC]

Oh dear.

The image has shocked, sickened and outraged people. But more importantly, it has captured the imagination of young men and women all around the world who don't give much of a shit about anything. The result is a new craze called "doing a Lynndie". If you aren't "doing a Lynndie" now, you soon will be.

So what does doing a Lynndie involve? Here are the basic instructions:

Find a victim who deserves to be "Lynndied".

Make sure you have a friend nearby with a camera ready to capture the "Lynndie".

Stick a cigarette (or pen) in your mouth and allow it to hang slightly below the horizontal.

Face the camera, tilt your upper body slightly forward but lean back on your right leg.

Make a hitchhiking gesture with your right hand and extend your right arm so that it's in roughly the same position as if you were holding a rifle.

Keeping your left arm slightly bent, point in the direction of the victim and smile.

Ideally, you should refrain from telling the victim what you're about to do. Victims who are unaware, bemused or angry make for a Lynddie that is more in keeping with the original.

The pics. Check the pics.

Hey.

Don't read blogs right now.

Turn the computer off and go outside or something.

That is all.