The friend of a friend has started a health
and fitness blog that looks promising. Give it a glance!

My friend Kent Peterman sent along some thoughts on Jewish Buddhism.
They are all over the net, so I'll just point you to them here
and offer a sample: If there is no self,
whose arthritis is this? Be here
now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?

The critical analysis of the stupid Verizon propoganda the New York Times
obligingly ran is improving and growing in quantity: Comcast,
Verizon Editorials Distort True Picture of U.S. Internet Service,
Experts Say

Long-time colleague Richard Dalton checks in with this article on High-Resolution
Displays by my former boss, Mike Elgan, and adds:

Long time friend of this column Marjorie Wolfe steps into the
controversy over the spelling of the Yiddish word for Matzoh Ball in, You
spell it 'knaidel,' I spell it 'kneydl'

Kevin Sullivan sent along this very amusing link: 11
Wacky "Laws" Named for People. I generally
attribute Hanlon's law to Napoleon, which is the way I learned it, and
I think Brooks' law applies to many human endeavors besides
programming. Most committee work, in fact.

Dan Grobstein File

• NYC
  Lays Out $20 Billion
  Plan to Combat Climate Change
• The
  Quiet Closing of Washington
  . It is so much cheaper to buy a state legislature.
• Shaun Coffey (@ShaunCoffey) If
  bees go extinct, this is what your supermarket will look like

Apropos of last week's We the People item, Joe Edwards notes:

Dan Grobstein File

• Op-Ed
  Columnist
  Who
  Needs Reporters?
  By FRANK BRUNI
  You
  do. No matter how awful we've been. But more politicians are finding
  self-flattering ways around us.
•     David Axelrod
  (@davidaxelrod) 6/2/13, 2:40 PM
  This is truly idiotic.
  Our competitors around the world must be laughing!
• The
  Special Interest Group Who Writes Your Daily Newspaper

• Critic's
  Notebook

  Supreme Court's DNA Ruling
  Tests the Scriptwriter's Art

  By NEIL
  GENZLINGER

  What's
  a police-procedural writer to do when DNA testing is no longer a dicey
  issue?

• Water
  fountain or bubbler? Lightning bug or firefly? Pop or soda? Take the
  linguistics test
• Bob
  Fletcher Dies at 101; Saved Farms of Interned Japanese-American
• Robbing a Gas Station: The
  Hacker Way – NYTimes.com
  
  

  By NICOLE
  PERLROTH

  A security consultant discovered that by taking advantage of a software
  vulnerability, he could pop open a cash register with a smartphone.

• Waving My Tweak Flag High –
  NYTimes.com
  
  

  By JEFFREY
  LEWIS

  Even
  for the likes of Dylan and Jagger, a tiny lyric change can often make a
  big difference.

• 0p-Ed
  Columnist

  How to Monetize Plagiarism
  

  By JOE NOCERA

  So
  Jonah Lehrer has a book deal. This is a column about second chances.
  Earned or not.

• Is
  this who runs Prism?

• How
  To Sell Coke To People Who Have Never Had A Sip
  Coca-Cola
  is returning to Myanmar after 60 years. They'd been kept out of the
  country by international sanctions. This week they officially opened
  their new plant outside of Yangon. 

Spoiler-intensive
(and snarky) Star Trek Into Darkness FAQ

Buster Keaton's most amazing stunt: a two-ton
house front drops "on" him

Robert Malchman notes "another
giant passes" with the death of WaPo's Haynes Johnson.

Dan Grobstein File

• Battle Over 'GIF'
  Pronunciation Erupts – NYTimes.com
• 'The Vanishing Deficit'
• Republicare
  In A Nutshell
• The
  fraud of voter fraud
• 1949:
  MIT's Norbert Weinter imagines robots
• Strategic
  Ignorance and the Census
  By
  THE EDITORIAL BOARD
  Republicans are trying to restrict vital information
  with bills that would curtail and ban surveys by the Census Bureau.
• Daily Deals Propel Older
  E-Books to Popularity
  By
  JULIE BOSMAN
  Flash sales have taken hold in the book business,
  helping older books soar from the backlist to the best-seller list.
• New
  York Challenges a Coffee Shop Logo
  By
  ANDY NEWMAN
  Not only was Everyman Espresso, with storefronts in
  the East Village and SoHo, served with a cease-and-desist letter for
  its store mark, but the state wants compensation, too.
• The most
  embarrassing graph in American drug policy
  (a  tweet by Derek Newton)

I have been informed that kittens who resemble Hitler (Kitlers) are now
an internet
meme. Or, more likely, they were a meme six months ago and I
am just catching up.

Dan Grobstein File

• Billie Sol Estes, Texas Con
  Man, Dies at 88
  By
  ROBERT D. McFADDEN
  Mr. Estes's life captured America's imagination, with its tales of
  business scams, political payoffs, covered-up killings and White House
  conspiracies.
• You
  could look at it as losing your public school, or you could look at it
  as gaining a free tablet
• Mountain of Petroleum Coke
  From Oil Sands Rises in Detroit 
  By IAN AUSTEN 
  Refining Canada's petroleum-soaked oil sands produces petroleum coke,
  and the question of what to do with it has found at least one answer in
  Detroit, where a large coke pile covers an entire city block.
• Greg Mitchell (@GregMitch) Don't miss: Letter of the Week, from Tim Weiner to
  The New Yorker re: Drones, CIA killers and blowback. 
• billmon (@billmon1) I'm sure OK Republicans will maintain
  their principled stand against fed emergency funding not offset by cuts
  – on the Bizarro Planet.

From Bob Nilsson: Game
Change: Cheney Opens Himself to Subpoena Regarding 9/11, Iraq, Torture
and Valerie Plame
When a
former member of the Executive calls for Congress to subpoena another
former member of the Executive, it is a game-changer. No longer can he
rely on "Executive Privilege" to block his own testimony.

Dan Grobstein File

• Transbay
  construction photos

• Faces in the Crowd, Printed
  in 3-D
  By
  NANDI RODRIGO
  An artist creates life-size masks of people she's never seen before,
  using DNA they leave behind on cigarette butts.
• E Pluribus Me – NYTimes.com
  
  By TIMOTHY
  EGAN
  Ted Cruz and the politics of selfishness.
• Alice E. Kober, 43; Lost to
  History No More
  By MARGALIT
  FOX
  An unknown language in an unknown script, and the forgotten woman who
  found the key to deciphering it.
• The Cloud Factories
  North Jersey Data Center
  Industry Blurs Utility-Real Estate Boundaries By JAMES GLANZ
  
  Bland New Jersey buildings are commanding rents four times as high as
  Class A high-rises in Manhattan, but it isn?t the space that attracts.
  It's the electrical capacity.

Daniel Dern makes a discovery for Robert Benchley fans (including
myself): he was in a
movie with the late Deanna Durbin. He also found Game of
Thrones Season 3 – "Princess Bride Promo"

Dan Grobstein File

• I have that
  "Commissar Vanishes" book. It's fascinating. There was a story not too
  long ago about China. Today's students know nothing of the Great Leap
  Forward or the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. And here in the U.S.
  Fox News in a very Stalinist way rewrites history constantly.
  [Ed. Note: My college newspaper now faces this issue constantly, just
  like the NYT.
  Op-Ed Columnist
  Erasing History in the
  Internet Era
  By BILL KELLER
  In the age of the almighty search engine, do we have a right to be
  forgotten?
• It's
  their country, we just pay for it
• Remembering
  the founder of McPaper
• RT @EJDionne: Check out http://t.co/GKebBzOY01
  to find out if your ancestors could have gotten into US under current
  laws. Great idea from @bend_thearc. [ed. note: mine couldn't]
• RT @TheTweetOfGod: "The George W. Bush Library" has the
  same awkward ring to it as "The William Howard Taft Gym".
• About time. This DeMarco
  guy is a Dubya guy. I just don't understand why the President keeps
  poaching Democrats from the Congress. It isn't like there's an
  overwhelming majority or anything like that.
  Obama to Name Melvin Watt to
  Oversee Fannie and Freddie
  By ANNIE
  LOWREY
  President Obama plans to name Representative Melvin L.
  Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, as the overseer of Fannie Mae and
  Freddie Mac, a White House aide said.
• As Amtrak Aid Ends, States
  Face Decision on Local Routes
  By RON NIXON
  
  Under pressure to reduce its dependence on federal subsidies, Amtrak is
  looking at either closing 28 short-haul routes or getting 19 states to
  share the costs. [ed. note: a slow-motion train wreck, as it were]
• Train
  passes through Bangkok slum (wait for it…)

Daniel Dern: Here's
Robin Williams' appreciation from the NYTimes

The best source in
the world for the MIT parts of last week's events was my old
newspaper, The Tech.

Dan Grobstein File

• In
  New Home, Exploratorium
  Widens Its Interactive Appeal
• Tattoos
  Peek Out At Some Offices

A friend of mine at San Jose State had his program tweeted by (wait for
it…) Bill Gates!
Great idea:
@SJSU offering “battery
university” for this fast growing & critical industry.

Sic transit gloria mundi. Daniel Dern reports on the successor to my
old employer, CMP.
Layoffs Begin at UBM's
Tech Group – B2B @ FolioMag.com

In late March FOLIO: reported that the print editions of
InformationWeek
and CRN, housed in UBM's Tech Group, were to be shut down as part of
the
company's ongoing efforts to shift its strategic focus on events and 
digital. The layoffs predicted in that story have begun today, say
several
sources…

Update: According a release, UBM Tech will stop producing print publications as of July 1, 2013. InformationWeek will continue online.
Test and Measurment World and Advanced Trading will be shut down and
the
group will also close four smaller events.

One of my friends was laid off a few months short of his 20th
anniversary with CMP/UBM. So now we know how long it takes to drive a
billion-dollar company into the ground: 14 years.

Dan Grobstein File

• Manager of Tick Tock Diner
  Held in Murder Conspiracy
• The Antisocial Network of
  Bitcoins
• U.S. Visa Delays Put Safety
  Out of Afghan Interpreters' Reach
• The Military Prep School Scam
• From Dan's son Spike, a lot
  of fun: Subways of North
  America

Daniel Dern notes a
sexist obit, and adds "The Grey Lady should know better… if
not the writer, than
the editor." Both of them, when asked by the Times' public editor, say
they see nothing wrong with the original.

Dan Grobstein File
    

• NPR
  to Drop ‘Talk of the Nation’
  By BRIAN STELTER
  NPR will end the call-in show “Talk of the Nation” this summer and urge
  radio stations to replace it with the Boston-based program “Here and
  Now,” which has a magazine style.
•  Papers
  Worldwide Embrace Web Subscriptions
  By ERIC PFANNER
  Online advertising, once seen as the great hope for the future, has
  begun leveling off, which is accelerating the push for new Internet
  business models.
• Queen
  goes on austerity footing, receive mere £5M pay-rise from the taxpayers
  via Boing Boing
  by Cory Doctorow on 4/2/13

  At only £36.1M from the public purse (up £5M from last year), the poor
  Queen is positively
  underpaid. After all, she was divinely chosen to be monarch.
  God will be angry.

• RT @DKThomp: 19 of the top 25 most-underlined passages in
  Amazon Kindle history are from a "Hunger Games" book https://t.co/aQ3G7yMJ1E
• Study Points to New Culprit
  in Heart Disease
  By GINA KOLATA
  
  Research showed that the association between red meat and heart disease
  risk might be related not just to fat but to bacteria that thrive on a
  component of red meat.
• For
  Scientists, an Exploding World of Pseudo-Academia
  By GINA KOLATA
  
  A parallel world of pseudo-academia, with prestigiously titled
  conferences and journals that will print seemingly anything for a fee,
  has the scientific community alarmed.