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This plaque is on the Banana Republic near my house. It’s the first bronze plaque I’ve seen with a URL. It was put up 110 years after a researcher at the NY Historical Society determined that Hale was hanged near this spot in September 1776. The British Army camp where he was executed sat in front of The Sign of The Dove, a tavern on the Old Post Road, at the five-mile marker. Or, as it’s known now, 3rd Avenue at 66th street.
Hale’s dying words, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” are part of the American Revolution’s historical fabric. But I’m sure not one Banana Republican in a thousand knows they’re shopping at the spot where Hale uttered them.
This comment in the Times reminded me of the plaque: “‘[A memorial at the WTC site is] trying to remember something on the very ground where it happened.'” It is faced with an “inescapable specificity…meaning that people died here.”
I fear–and the WTC memorial finalist designs make me even more certain–that a memorial centered on the twin towers’ footprints marks precisely the wrong thing: the buildings, not the people. I hope it won’t take 200 years for future historians to realize this error.

It’s a question Bush might ask, were he the inquisitive type.
According to the BBC Online (which often reads to me like USA UK Today) British protestors (redundant, I know) are putting down their papier mache puppets and picking up their moblogging tools, using SMS to chase Bush along his itinerary and disrupt the carefully crafted backgrounds of Bush’s stage-managed photos.
“”We have been described as a second generation smart mob,” says co-organiser [sic] Richard Wilder. But he doesn’t let that get him down. “We are trying to spoil the PR, so we are not doing anything directly, but encouraging people to turn their backs in press photos so they can’t be used.”
Wilder sweetly believes that the extras in the White House’s Sforzian Backgrounds were not handpicked and hand-placed. What island has he been living on for the last three years? The URL for these protestors, who have bush-league written all over them: Interwebnet.org. [thanks, BoingBoing]
[Update: At the gym this afternoon, I caught a few minutes of FoxNews, and they were eviscerating some crumpet-nibbling, protesting Brit (not Hume). My prediction: UK protests may be entertaining, but hopelessly outmatched into irrelevance. Yet again, the rest of the world relies on the resolve of the American people to save its ass from the imperialist hegemonic threat.]

It looks like Nick’s not the only one building a portfolio of weblogs.
Variety has launched bowed three entertainment-related weblogs so far, and is looking to launch more. [I swear, writing my videocam felony post in feeble Variety style was not intended as an audition. Golly, Mr. Bart, just give me another chance; I know I can sing.]
The roster so far [Fimoculous featured the first one]:

Outside the Box by Jim Hames is the Gizmodo of movie swag, rating the promotional flotsam that washes up on Variety’s shores.

Bags and Boards, written by Tom McLean and Jevon Phillips, follows the comic book business.

Wicked Little Town by Rob Kendt, in an ice-to-eskimos move, posts news of acting in Los Angeles.
Where Nick’s weblogs aim for the g-spots of online subject matter, Variety’s weblogs are like some new playmates in the mansion. Either way, it makes for a great party. Meanwhile, my own little knot of weblogs are more a way to clean up my desk. Maybe I should steal some of the ideas Choire came up with as he was emptying his master’s litter box.

First, singing for my lunch: I had a great time with Paul Myoda’s media/technology/art seminar Wednesday at City College. A bunch of very cool folks. Paul, of course, is one of the designers of the Tribute in Light, and quite a bit more, as you can see at his NY gallery, Friedrich Petzel.)
Then, singing for my supper: I was just checking my Amazon Associates reports, and I found some eye-popping results:

The Lost in Translation soundtracks are practically flying off the page. It’s nice that people are digging it, but I didn’t expect my Sofia Coppola material would be such a shopping catalyst.
I can see how mentioning something more obscure, like A Notebook on Cities and Clothes (Wim Wenders’ Yohji Yamamoto documentary), might tempt people to shop (or at least window shop). But the soundtrack seems like an intentional purchase; you’d just go to Amazon directly. No complaints, just many thanks.
The real surprise, though, was seeing the impact of variations in commissions for a soundtrack or DVD (usually 2.5-3.0% now) vs a classic book (up to 15%). You’re buying 20 soundtracks for every catalog of Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle or every book/DVD of David Byrne: E.E.E.I. (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information) about PowerPoint art, but those books easily rack up 10 times the commission.
It almost makes me want to become the Gizmodo of art tomes.

From Bootlegs by Jon Routson, image: teamgallery.com
If camcorders are illegal, only criminals will have camcorders.
Yesterday, Sen. Diane Feinstein (D for Disney) and John Cornyn (R-Tex, an anagram for T-Rex) held a press screening for their newest starrer, which they said is set for an early 2004 release. It’s a pirate fiction fantasy directed by MPAA prexy Jack Valenti. Here’s the one-line synopsis:
They are sponsoring legislation that will make it a felony “to use or attempt to use” a video recording device to copy a film in a movie theater.
The first offense would carry up to a five-year jail sentence, with up to ten years imprisonment for the sequel. If your state has a three strikes law–like California–recording a trilogy could get you life.
As if you needed another reason to avoid Matrix Revolutions…
Related:
Baltimore-based artist Jon Routson, who uses camcordered copies of movies as his artistic medium
my Times article about video art bootlegging

The Meadowlands are ready for their closeup, Mr. Malick…

Slate points to an entire brigade of documentation of George W. Bush’s military career during the Vietnam War, including his request for early discharge in order to attend HBS.
As Bush so eloquently read today, “From the moment you repeated the oath to the day of your honorable discharge, your time belonged to America; your country came before all else. [And that dedication enabled me to disappear for a year without telling anyone and then check out early.]”
Related: AWOL Bush, and Chasing George W. Bush and the F-102

Now you can find out. Gothamist has launched an Events listing page in collaboration with upcoming.org. Jason calls it the future of the web. I haven’t been so aware of all the cool things I’m missing since Time Out came to town.

“I’d tell him make a short first, and finance it himself,” [an unnamed] producer said. “He’s got to have a reel. No financier is going to risk $30 million on someone who’s never made a film.”
And, I would add, get a weblog, get your name out there, meet a few people. This unsolicited advice is meant for one Tom Ford, who is considering a new career in film.

It’s the meta-Tarantino that bothers me. (Lynn, I’m talkin’ to you.)

Shocked, shocked that Libeskind wants to build over the footprints image:nytimes.com
Welcome to the party, Herbert. Perhaps displeased with his own irrelevance in the design and rebuilding process of the World Trade Center site, the Times‘ Herbert Muschamp proclaims, “the time has come to examine in some detail the ground zero design process as it has unfolded in the last two years.” [I was going to say he “quixotically proclaimed,” but I’m a fan of Don Quixote; Muschamp wishes he was quixotic.]
What roused Muschamp from his critical slumber: extremely specific and unpleasing drafts of Daniel Libeskind’s “master plan,” which would formalize many controversial elements of Libeskind’s concept and foreclose a lot of future architects’ flexibility for the buildings they’re supposed to design.
Libeskind’s vision is for a skyline crowned with”glitzy, structurally inept towers,” which would look more appropriate in Houston. That’s not a compliment. Of course, it wasn’t a compliment when Paul Goldberger talked about it in July 2002, and it wasn’t a compliment when I flagged it last year as the endgame of a decade of the Houstonization of Manhattan.
The Libeskind plan had significant flaws from the beginning, but it’s the fruit of the poisoned tree that is Gov. Pataki and the Port Authority’s commerce-laden program for the site. This has all been known, if ignored, by the critical powers that be. Muschamp’s disingenuous cry is too little, too late.
The last significant chance to influence or change these guidelines is the Memorial Competition. The only credible refutation for this impending Houstonization is a memorial design that demands a recalibration of the priorities set by PA/Pataki/Silverstein and Libeskind. It may hurt to hear it, but any memorial design that accepts the Libeskind plan on its face means the suburbanists have already won.

If Jason hadn’t put this in his sidebar, I might have missed it. Thanks for the heads up.
Like many former adherents to a non-traditional religion, David Edelstein is disillusioned. From the sound of his review, the imagined endings from the Kottke-ites’ comments thread are far more interesting.

This is the shock-and-awe kind of awesome, not the SoCal kind of awesome.
From the San Diego Union Tribune:
Cedar Fire from Mt. Laguna
Mt Woodson