DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Thanks to C-SPAN, I heard and watched part of Condoleezza Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 committee on Friday. It was an intellectual battle. People on both sides of the issue feigned cordiality, but once the questions and answers got rolling it became apparent where the hostilities lay.

BEN-VENISTE: Good morning, Dr. Rice.
RICE: Good morning.
BEN-VENISTE: Nice to see you again.
RICE: Nice to see you.

I think it’s safe to say both Ben-Veniste and Rice were lying. Within a few minutes, the questioning became tense.

BEN-VENISTE: Did you tell the president, at any time prior to August 6th, of the existence of Al Qaeda cells in the United States?
RICE: First, let me just make certain…
BEN-VENISTE: If you could just answer that question, because I only have a very limited…
RICE: I understand, Commissioner, but it’s important…
BEN-VENISTE: Did you tell the president…
RICE: … that I also address…
(APPLAUSE)
It’s also important that, Commissioner, that I address the other issues that you have raised. So I will do it quickly, but if you’ll just give me a moment.
BEN-VENISTE: Well, my only question to you is whether you…
RICE: I understand, Commissioner, but I will…
BEN-VENISTE: … told the president.

And within two minutes, Ben-Veniste forced Rice to reveal the classified name of a classified document that Rice and Bush would prefer had never been made public. Rice wanted to elaborate, to diminish the impact of the damning title, but Ben-Veniste wanted to stop her.

BEN-VENISTE: Isn’t it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6th PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?
RICE: I believe the title was, “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.” Now, the…
BEN-VENISTE: Thank you.
RICE: No, Mr. Ben-Veniste…
BEN-VENISTE: I will get into the…
RICE: I would like to finish my point here.
BEN-VENISTE: I didn’t know there was a point.
RICE: Given that — you asked me whether or not it warned of attacks.
BEN-VENISTE: I asked you what the title was.

The spin on this document is remarkable. The title of the document is a smoking gun, but the contents are a lot less interesting.

If you want to accuse the Bush Administration of not being prepared for a terrorist attack, this document serves as clear evidence: four weeks prior to 9/11 Bush received a briefing document titled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.” What more evidence would you need? The Guardian took this approach in a piece unambiguously called, Bush given hijack alert before 9/11

Fox News took (to no one’s surprise) a different approach. They focused on the Bush Administration’s official stance, in a story called Bush: Terror Memo Lacked Specifics. This story contains the damning PDB title, but it’s stuffed down in the 4th-last paragraph.

The news media is not impartial. Simply compare the headlines above.

To some degree, news consumers gravitate toward media sources that are compatible with their own views. Others consume whatever is convenient.

I’m not immune, of course. I read the SF Chronicle because it’s local, and because its coverage of political issues seems balanced — a sure sign that it’s not.

I don’t read Fox because I usually read the news at breakfast, and reading Foxnews.com often makes me ill.

Fortunately, in the case of this specific Presidential Daily Brief, the entire text has been made public, so everyone can make up their own minds about whether its warnings were “actionable.”

Actor Billy Bob Thornton and two others from the cast of The Alamo went out for celebratory tattoos. There was a mishap.

So I went to a tattoo parlour in Austin. I took Kevin Page, who plays my right hand man, Micajah Autry, and another actor, Robert Prentice. And Kevin kind of became the Charlie Brown of the group because the guy messed up one of the letters on his. He was showing us the tattoo and it says ‘Rememler the Alamo.’ The rest of the shoot, we’d say things like, ‘Hey, is your birthday in Septemler?’

I can imagine getting a tattoo. But I can’t imagine getting one with a typo. That has to suck.

This panorama of San Francisco was assembled from 14 photographs, taken from the shore of Treasure Island last weekend. I wanted to capture the entire skyline, from the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate Bridge.

It was an overcast and somewhat gloomy day; the original pictures turned out dismally flat. I stitched them as-is, then corrected the resulting panorama.

The large number of input images made the assembly difficult. ArcServ’s PanoramaMaker 2000 could not cope with the task. A newer version (PanoramaMaker 3) fared better, but still crashed during output — just after saving the TIFF, fortunately, given that the assembly and tweaking took an hour. The TIFF measured 63 MB.

An aggressive curve correction in Lab mode restored color, removed much of the haze, and corrected the red cast that is annoyingly typical of my CoolPix 995. At this point, the image seems too blue and too dark, but not offensively so.

The biggest problem is that it’s much too wide to be of any use — nearly 9:1. If I were to print it three feet wide, it would be about as tall as a postcard. At a height suitable for mounting, it would span a wall (and cost a fortune).

Stories about people who can sip a glass of wine and tell you the varietal, the country of origin, the region, the year, and sometimes even the vintner:

• Noses Seek Wine Geekdom’s Biggest Prize, a NYT article about students preparing for the “Master of Wine” certification, administered by the Institute of Masters of Wine in London. “There are only 244 Masters of Wine worldwide.”
• A Man with Great Taste, a VIA magazine article about Larry Stone of San Francisco’s Rubicon, one of only 106 “master sommeliers” in the world, according to the London-based Court of Master Sommeliers.

We’ve attended blind wine tastings — even hosted a few. I know from experience that I am generally unable to distinguish flavor components. When I hear someone say “vegetal,” I can taste vegetal, but if nobody would say the word I would be unable to come up with it alone. I’d probably enjoy a component-tasting class if I felt I could free up a months’ worth of evenings to study and drink wine. Hmm, actually that might not be a bad thing.

More stories about Larry Stone:

• It’s 4 a.m. Do You Know Where Your Sommelier Is?… about A-list San Francisco sommeliers getting together to blind-taste wines after work.
• The Day-to-Day Life of a Sommelier… a chat with Larry Stone that has little to do with his day-to-day life, but answers some good questions like “can wine be sent back, and should the customer be charged for it?”

If you know nothing about wine but want to sound like you do, just memorize a few of these aroma words and component flavor words. Flinty or stemmy? Steely or coppery? Maybe just having a vocabulary of possibilities at hand makes it easier to identify the flavors.

The audio commentary track to Something’s Gotta Give, the recent comedy with Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton, answers a question I’ve wondered about since I was 17 and legally able to watch R-rated movies: how do male actors control their erections during sex scenes?

I mean, maybe I’m abnormal, but if I’m naked under the sheets with an actress, and she’s naked, and we’re “pretending” to fondle each other, I’d be sprouting wood like a bamboo forest.

Are actors picturing something non-stimulating, like their grandmothers or Nicole Kidman? Does the presence of 100 stagehands and extras dull the sensation of hot nekkid flesh? Have they tied themselves down so as not to betray natural impulses?

The answers, according to Jack Nicholson, are no, no, and no. Respectively.

The following exchange concerns the scene pictured above. Nicholson’s character is about to get it on with Amanda Peet’s character. (She’s the one on top.) The commentary track features Nicholson and Nancy Meyers, the writer and director of the film.

Jack: I miss what you edited at the end of this particular scene, here.

Nancy: You mean where you sat up in your underwear?

Jack: Yeah, with a huge, you know…

Nancy: [laughs] That’s why it’s not in the movie, Jack.

I like this one a lot. It seems more intelligent and less cute than most romantic comedies. And the acting, as far as I can tell, is really wonderful.