Dove's Eye View

Lebanon News from The New York Times

The most interesting thing about the linked page to follow is that it features that Blogrunner feed I mentioned last week. Whenever I post something with a Lebanon tag, it shows up here: Lebanon News - Breaking World Lebanon News - The New York Times.

At the moment it's showing my grandmother's bulghur and tomatoes recipe. ???

Frankly, the page is quite static except for the blog feed, so I don't see the point in checking it regularly. But I'm just showing off. The NY Times Lebanon page features Dove's Eye View! Wow, all I had to do to get published regularly in the New York Times was blog for four years.

And by the way, I did indeed write this post in my pajamas and bathrobe. But I set it to publish after my bedtime, so it looks like a fresh item for April 22, when Beirut is just waking up. Good morning, Beirut!

The New York Times is watching me

I was kidding in a previous link about the NY Times stalking me. But now my referral log shows that the Times is running a link to my blog today: Guatemala News - Breaking World Guatemala News - The New York Times.

According to the little pop-up window, the editors of the Times monitor my blog and link to it intermittently, perhaps using a "robot" triggered by key words. I can only assume that a robot picked up my John Yoo post for their Guatemala page because I kept mentioning Guatemala and torture.

I'm tickled. They're paying attention to me! I have a strange psychic link to the Times, ever since I worked in its legal offices on 43d Street back in the '90s. I used to have epic dreams set in the Times building, and even years later, in California, I would find myself taking a night-time elevator to the board room. The most memorable dream while I worked there was when the elevator kept on going above the fifteenth floor penthouse and hovered over the building. ??? You can imagine the Times lawyers thought this dream was pretty wacky - because of course I shared it with them in the morning. I was a very fast and efficient legal secretary and I tried to express my intuitive side on the job, just to keep everybody awake.

In those days the boardroom was plastered with photographs of New York Times company owners back to the nineteenth century, meeting and greeting famous men (and women). I remember a picture of Herzl on a bridge. There were enormous color portraits of Sadat and the Shah, placed on a sideboard flanking an almost life-sized crystal swan. This was in early 1992 or so, and President G.H.W. Bush's portrait had its own spot at the head of the room next to an American flag. Sulzberger Sr., an ex-Marine, was the chairman of the board then and the photo placements were his doing (that and the candy dishes on the board table). To me these pictures say it all about the Times and its perceptions of the world.

So my feelings about the Times and its journalism are profoundly ambivalent. The Shah, Sadat, and Theodore Herzl are definitely NOT in my pantheon of history's heroes. Still I think it's cool that a little blog run by an obscure novelist and housewife in Oakland gets monitored by the editorial wizards at the Times website.

The internet is changing how information spreads.

Visitors to Dove's Eye View

Referral statistics tell what websites send people to your blog; I like to look at them -call it vanity or curiousity. People all over the world use Google or other search engines to ask for all kinds of things; some of them turn up here at Dove's Eye View. Welcome!

Just a sample from today:

Google searches:

Hummous
Red Lentil Soup
How to cook red lentils
Kibbeh
Arabic love poetry (from Google UK)
Lebanese mezze
Lebanese mezze (Google.be, Belgium)
Arab women writers
Arabic food (from Google.se, which I believe is Sweden)
Arab food (from Google.co.cr, Costa Rica)
Lebanese style green beans with tomatoes
Akhbar aloud (Google Netherlands)
St. George Dragon Essay
imagination non-violence Middle East

From Yahoo:

Settlers Haaretz Hebron reconciliation

Also:
Lebanon blogs (dormant site, still brings traffic)
Israel/Palestine blogs
Sabbath Meals blog
Somebody's Technorati Faves

And last but not least, my favorite food blogger, Mark Bittman of the New York Times, shouted me out today for my fabulous comments. Yippee!

Posting Too Much?

One of my best and most loyal readers is a family member who also has my phone number. He read last week that I was going to swear off the news for a week to protect my blood pressure. So when I posted a bunch of (peace-related!) news items he called me and said - what happened to your promise? I thought you weren't going to read the news?

This morning he called to ask why I was up posting at midnight and then again at nine this morning. Well I have an answer for that one - The "God Bless This Mess" post was actually composed at about 8 pm on February 5. I saved with the instructions to publish later, after midnight on the 6th of February. I wanted a fresh item for Wednesday morning, and I wanted my Arab world readers to see it early in their day. (i.e around 10 a.m. Beirut time) Then I went to bed at 10 pm, and TypePad published my post while I slept.

Sometimes when a blogger posts at midnight, it's because she composed the items earlier and timed them to post while she is sleeping. If a blogger is really organized, she can compose a series of posts before her vacation and time them to publish every day in her absence. This takes planning ahead.

Comment here if you think I'm posting too much. OK I will log off now and work on my novel. 1,000 words.

I am really tickled that my relative loves me so much that he's monitoring my internet activity! Hah!

Update: Dear cousin: I wrote 1,260 words, about four pages, this afternoon on this novel. OK? And my temperature is normal. I gave my poor character a fever, to explain why she's hearing all these voices when she's back in her house in her village after the war is over. I inflicted on her some of the symptoms I had this week when I was sick with a virus. Use everything in your fiction...

Energize America

While Bush fiddles and the world burns, citizens have been organizing via the internet to create and implement an energy plan that will alleviate many of our most pressing problems: Energize America.

Energize America is a comprehensive and compelling 20-point plan developed by informed citizen activists to wean the U.S. from its fossil fuel addiction and provide the U.S. with Energy Security by 2020, and Energy Freedom by 2040.

2. What are Energize America’s goals?

By 2020, Energize America will enable the U.S. to:

* reduce both oil imports and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 50%,
* generate 25% of our electricity from renewable sources, and
* create 2M new energy-related American jobs and save 1M ‘at-risk’ auto jobs.

The Dove is the daughter of an engineer and firmly believes that good old-fashioned ingenuity, technical and organizational, can solve our climate change and energy problems. I also worked in economic development in my 20s and I happen to believe that solving energy and climate problems will create new jobs. I live in Northern California. We are rich because we follow our visions to new technology, no matter how much the dinosaurs complain.

Read about the High Speed Passenger Rail Acthere:

Energize America has been working on draft legislation to help America reach energy security in the face of peak oil and our over-dependence on the Middle East, and to address concerns about global warming through efficiency and energy alternative measures. This week saw the delivery of several legislative proposals to congress. Among the commentary and responses there has been one issue that stood out to me: increasing support for rail, both passenger and freight.

The following is a first draft of a new "High Speed Passenger Rail Act", based on Act V - "The Passenger Rail Restoration Act" of Energize America version 5.

The High Speed Passenger Rail Act - Background

Energy Implications

Passenger air travel in the US in 2005 got about 45 passenger-miles per gallon of fuel [thanks to freelunch for the correction!], emitting 140 million tons of CO2 in total (1). Passenger cars on highways traveled over 1.5 trillion miles with an average of 1.59 occupants, at about 44 passenger-mpg, emitting about 750 million tons of CO2. Both air and automobile are heavily dependent on liquid fuels whose future supply is uncertain.

Successful high-speed rail systems, implemented in Japan and Europe, particularly the French TGV system, run on electricity with an efficiency equivalent to 300 to 500 passenger-mpg. And electric power is the easiest form to generate from new energy sources such as wind and solar energy. High-passenger-load high-speed rail would dramatically reduce the impact of the passenger transportation sector on energy consumption and CO2 emissions.

If you are a Daily Kos member (free sign-up), you may comment on the draft. This legislation as well as the Energize America plan were developed collectively through blog comments such as the ones you will read. While the Republicans are complaining, dragging their feet, and fighting useless wars to secure dwindling oil supplies, regular citizens are busy creating solutions - on their own time.

Leila Abu-Saba podcast on Radio Tahrir

I'm on Radio Tahrir's first podcast: Radio Tahrir podcast. Check out the December 25, 2006 show.

The other two writers on the show are Syrian-American writer Mohja Kahf and Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan. It's an enormous honor to be included with those two. I can't quite believe it.

For those of you who don't know what a podcast is - it's just radio archived on the internet. Go to the link, click on the show you want to hear, and if your computer's media software is running properly you should hear it.

Etel Adnan and I both have pieces in a new anthology published this week:

Homelands: Women's Journeys Across Race, Place, and Time edited by Patricia J. Tumang and Jenesha De Rivera.

My essay in it is titled "Heartbroken for Lebanon." For the Barbara Aziz interview, however, I read an old piece about a Palestinian boy in a Lebanese orchard in Sidon.

Spell With Flickr

(letters from Spell with Flickr by Eric Kastner)
(Hat tip Stephen Frug)

I Love RamPurple

In my previous post I made some comments that I want to revise.

The Lebanese blog aggregator run by Rampurple is a major public service. Yes it runs every single post by every single blogger, Lebanese, half-Lebanese, visited Lebanon for a while. Yes the posts can be dizzying in number and diversity. But if you care about Lebanon and you like to read, well, you can find treasures there. Rampurple runs this aggregator as a service, and without it, our understanding of Lebanese blog world would be much poorer.

I discover new blogs on it all the time, and then have to remember to bookmark the individual blogs so I can find them again.

The aggregator publishes descriptions of the demonstrations that I would never get in either the mainstream or the alternative media I read. So Lebanese Blogs is an essential part of understanding the situation.

Thank you, Rampurple.

Wwwnoknokjoksdotcom

How does a kindergartener who just learned to read find knock-knock jokes online?

wwwnoknokjoksdotcom

I am so proud!

I had just used Google to find a list of the jokes & read them aloud, to the delight of kindergartener and his younger brother. (Younger brother asked: Mommy, what's Google?) Then kindergartener got bumped to an unconnected computer so I could do something else, probably blog. So he went into his MS Word software and typed the above. He asked me how to spell "com", but the rest was his idea.

He figured out this WWW stuff himself from watching PBS, I think, and from looking over my shoulder.

I'll have to explain to him about browser software next.

Wikipedia

How many of you knew that Wikipedia, the online free encyclopedia, is written entirely by the public? Anybody can post to Wikipedia and anybody can revise anything on it.

Since I started grad school at a small, selective liberal arts college, I've been staggered at how many people, students and faculty alike, use Wikipedia as a reference. The head reference librarian, trying to help me find out something about Islam, searched Wikipedia. Classmates and teachers pass around links to Wikipedia definitions.

Well, folks, try looking up some subject about which you know a great deal. Choose something that's a little obscure. Months ago I happened to look up the country of Lebanon, and found that the entry covering my hometown seemed to have been written by an Israeli. One tipoff was he insisted on spelling the name in an Anglicization of the Hebrew, and gave three different Hebrew versions. By the time you read this, the entry will have been edited. If you click on "discussion" you will see my disgusted critique. If you click on Edit, you can change the entry at will.

What if I decided to write up an entry for Lod*, Israel? I have lots of Palestinian friends from Lidda, the town's name until 1948. Never mind that I'm not an historian or scholar, and that I have my own particular Lebanese-American point of view. I could click over right this minute and write up whatever I want about Lod. Perhaps some alert Wiki-minder might notice the change, and if it's egregious, they might change it back. But if the town or the country or whatever the topic is obscure enough, perhaps not.

I love Wikipedia, don't get me wrong, but the way people use it leads me to believe that many don't understand its true nature.

The software for Wikipedia, and any other wiki, allows anybody to contribute, edit, revise or delete anything. Do you understand what that means? Any entry in the place can be slapped up by anybody. There is no editor in charge, only lots of busybodies who look at changes to see if they're malicious. It's the collective mind at work.

This can sometimes lead to good information. It can sometimes lead to weird information, or bad information.

In Wikis, as in anything else, let the reader beware.

Rebecca Blood pointed me to the Guardian article that sparked this: can you trust Wikipedia?

*Lod, Israel, according to Wikipedia, is the hometown of St. George, the patron saint of my father's village. Which may explain the name of one of its infamous sons. Read about him if you want a sample of the Wikipedia way.

You gotta love Wikipedia - but carefully.