I have to admit I hadn’t heard of this before, but Greg Allen just pointed me to Greencine, the “little guy/gal” alternative to the ever-growing Netflix.

GreenCine carries a select collection of over 10,000 titles, with an accent on indie, art house, classics, foreign, documentary, anime and Asian cinema. You can check out three titles at a time, with no due dates, no late fees…and we pay the postage! Hang on to them as long as you like. Return one…we send you the next one on your list. Only $21.95 a month, flat fee, with a portion of proceeds benefiting film arts organizations.

I suspect the member reviews are more useful to me than those on Netflix, which tends to get plenty of “Why is this film so boring — no action!” comments on a lot of interesting indie films.

Hmm… What about my 310-disc queue on Netflix?

All on one handy page, courtesy of Wage Slave: The George W. Bush Scorecard of Evil

Buried in this article in the NY Times, Bush ‘Compassion’ Agenda: A Liability in ‘04?, is this nice little quote from Joshua B. Bolten, White House budget director and formerly Mr. Bush’s chief domestic policy adviser.

“Even the president is not omnipotent,” Mr. Bolten said of the House opposition to the AmeriCorps money. “Would that he were. He often says that life would be a lot easier if it were a dictatorship. But it’s not, and he’s glad it’s a democracy.”

Often?

[via Tom Tomorrow]

I don’t completely hide who I am on this blog, but my real name doesn’t appear anywhere on it, since I don’t want it to be too easy to use Google to find it via my real name.

Searching on my real name now brings up Bloggy in the top 10 results. Interesting search algorithms they got working over there at Google…

I don’t understand this administration. They have plenty of money to spend on speechwriters and marketers, and we still get stuff like this, from Bush’s speech to the American Legion on Tuesday:

He did not repeat his administration’s prewar assertions that Mr. Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda, but made a general argument about the threat from those who hate, among others, “Christians and Jews and every Muslim who does not share their narrow and violent vision.”

India just had two bombs go off in Bombay that killed 51 people and injured over 150. They are the worlds largest democracy, and allegedly an ally. The odds are pretty good that most of those people were not Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, but I guess our glorious leader can’t wrap is head around yet another religion, particularly one that’s not one of the big three monotheistic ones. It also is “off message” to talk about any culpability from Pakistan, our partner in the War on Terror. Pakistan is also believed to have supplied nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea. Cognitive dissonance, anyone?

Mr. Flight Suit also used the speech as an excuse to taunt Al Quaeda and other terrorists for not having hit U.S. soil directly lately:

He made the case that failing to take the fight to terrorists wherever they are would expose the United States to attacks at home. “Our military is confronting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan and in other places so our people will not have to confront terrorist violence in New York or St. Louis or Los Angeles,” he said.

So we’re safer because we’re battling people overseas, including the mysterious “elsewhere”? I doubt it.

Maple Ave (Digimon) / Meredith Allen

I haven’t had much time to post lately, because I’ve been working on my new biz for hosting artist web sites. The working name for the project is “ArtCat”, but there’s nothing corporate to show you yet.

I have the beta version of the first artist site up — Meredith Allen. I wasn’t completely ready to launch, but something big was about to happen! Meredith’s photo on the homepage appeared this week in the September 1st issue of the New Yorker, as the illustration for a Dave Eggers story titled Measuring the Jump.

News Flash! It’s now on the New Yorker home page.

If any of you can link to her site or mention it in your weblogs, I would really apppreciate it. I’m trying to get it to show up in Google so that people seeing her image in the New Yorker will end up at Meredith’s site.

The site will have more content, images, plus some design changes over the next days and weeks. Her site is the test case for my new system, and I’m still working out some things.

I can’t recommend The current situation — my take on it from silipups highly enough. It is a brilliant summary of the current situation.

Rick Hooper died as he lived — trying to bring peace in the Middle East. (Photo by Robert Zash)

I have already written about the death of Sergio Vieira de Mello in the bombing of U.N. headquarters in Iraq. From the NY Blade comes the story of the death of Rick Hooper, an openly gay U.N. employee who was fluent in Arabic and had worked on missions in the Gaza Strip and Iraq.

Rick Hooper, a New Yorker who worked on peacekeeping missions for the United Nations, died on Tuesday, August 19, in the explosion of the U.N.’s headquarters in Baghdad.

Hooper, 40, lived in Spanish Harlem, where he had moved three years ago with his then-lover, photographer Robert Zash. The two were together for nearly five years before breaking up last December.

…

Once he began working for the U.N., he was quickly promoted as chief of staff to the undersecretary general for political affairs. Hooper, who spoke and wrote Arabic fluently (in addition to a working knowledge of French, German, Norwegian and Czech), became a confidant of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, whom he advised on Mideast issues and for whom he wrote several speeches on the issue.

He was in Baghdad to replace temporarily the assistant to Annan’s envoy to Iraq, Vieira de Mello. Hooper had planned on being there for two weeks before heading to Palestine for a long-delayed vacation.

…

He attended the University of California at Santa Cruz and graduated from Stevenson College (part of California’s public university system) in 1985. He spent a semester at Birzeit University on the West Bank, where he learned Arabic, and Nimes, France.

He received a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the University of Damascus. He also studied at the Center for American Studies Abroad at the American University in Cairo. He received a master’s degree in international diplomacy from Georgetown University. During his last semester at Georgetown he also worked in New York for the Lawyer’s Committee for Human Rights on Palestinian issues.

He immediately started working for the U.N. in the Gaza Strip. “He was such an incredible supporter of peace,” Zash said. “In the Gaza Strip during Desert Storm, he refused to wear a gas mask. During curfews, he would drive around in a U.N. vehicle so people knew there was a U.N. presence.”

I’ve had it with Bloomberg. He no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg says President George W. Bush shouldn’t be blamed if the Environmental Protection Agency downplayed the seriousness of airborne pollution after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The report, by the agency’s inspector general, concludes that the White House influenced the EPA to minimize air-quality concerns. “I know the president and I think he’s a very honest guy,” Bloomberg said before Sunday’s Pakistani Independence Day parade. “It would never occur to me not to trust him.”

Oops. I just realized I had a couple of blackout photos I never posted:

Sexy traffic director on Fifth Avenue

Bill Cunningham of the NY Times “On the Street” feature taking photos on Fifth Avenue