Dowbrigade

BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) – Pope John Paul II is being
reborn in a Colombian comic book as a superhero battling evil with an
anti-Devil cape and special chastity pants.

The first episode of the "Incredible Popeman" is about to go on sale
in Colombia and shows the late Polish pontiff meeting comic book legends such
as Batman and Superman to learn how to use superpowers to battle Satan.

"The pope was a real-life superhero, of flesh and blood," said Colombian
artist Rodolfo Leon, a non-practicing Catholic who has been working on the comic
book for about a year.

Like any self-respecting superhero, the Incredible Popeman has a battery of special
equipment. Along with his yellow cape and green chastity pants, the muscular
super-pontiff wields a faith staff with a cross on top and carries holy water
and communion wine.

Sometimes an idea comes along that is just so perfect that you can’t
believe it isn’t all part of some vast, multi-leveled marketing scheme.
This is sure to be a collectors item, and with the current mania for
turning successful comics into feature motion pictures, can a Hollywood
blockbuster be far behind.

We will do our best to get our hands on a copy of this publication,
so that we can translate and review more of it for our readers. We
have contacts in Colombia, who are always looking for an excuse to send
stuff to the States…….

from Reuters

The browser
wars refuse to die. After being a very satisfied two-year monagomous
relationship with Safari, recently we have been having an on-again, off-again
affair with Firefox. Now Safari, perhaps aware that her sheen and sparkle
had started to fade, has come back with a vengance by embracing today’s
sexiest new technology – RSS! Check it out:

Apple has turned Safari, the Mac OS X Web browser, into an RSS reader.
Combining RSS with the browser makes overwhelming sense, because you
don’t have to flip back and forth between the headlines in one program
and the full articles in your Web browser. (Firefox, an outstanding free
browser for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, integrates RSS feeds in a very
similar way, although without as much flexibility as what you’re about
to read.)

Here’s how life with Safari works. Any time you see an RSS logo appear
in the address bar, Safari is telling you that you’ve stumbled onto a
Web page that offers an RSS feed. (That’s handy, because it’s not always
easy to tell if a page does or not.) Of course, you can also seek out
RSS sites using Web sites like Feedster.com and Technorati.com.

If you click the RSS button, you enter Safari’s RSS-reading view: a scrolling "front
page" containing all of the tidbits (articles, blog entries) from
that Web page. A clever Article Length slider expands or shrinks all
entries simultaneously, from full-length articles, with photos, to headlines
only. Searching and sorting controls await at the right side.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. Exactly as in Firefox, you can
bookmark this RSS feed. From now on, your Bookmarks menu (or Bookmarks
bar) lets you know how many new articles have been published on the Web
site you subscribed to – you’ll see, for example, "NYtimes.com
(7)" – so you don’t waste time visiting pages where there’s nothing
new.

If you drag several of these bookmarks into a single bookmark folder
– because they’re all on one related topic, like tech gadgets – you gain
a new option: a View All RSS Articles command that sprouts from that
folder. Now ALL of your RSS subscriptions appear on a single, neatly
consolidated page. On my Safari bookmark bar, for example, I have a folder
called Tech that shows me, at a glance, all the new entries from Engadget,
Gizmodo, NYTimes.com and, of course, my own Pogue’s Posts – all
on a single page.

But wait, there’s more! Suppose you now search this master page for something
that interests you: "Treo," or "HDTV," or whatever.
Safari hides all entries except those that match – and now you can bookmark
THIS page.

In essence, you’ve now built yourself a self-updating, personal clipping
service. With one click, you make Safari display all the articles, from
the Web sites you consider relevant, that pertain to a topic that interests
you. It’s a fantastic way to keep tabs on a sports team, movie star,
company or whatever.

We’re not sure we understand all that, but we are raring to try, especially
since our Manila RSS aggregator has been misbehaving something awful
lately….

from an
email from David Pogue

Pogues article on the new Mac OS – Tiger

A
disturbing item came across the news desk this morning, from the quasi-communist
government of Hong Kong, via the New
York Times, claiming
that
"eating many kinds of dim sum regularly may be bad for your health".

This has caused consternation and confusion in restaurants all across
the city, and now, thanks to the Times, all around the world. Turns out it
is not
Dim Sum per se that is harmful, but rather certain kinds of
dim sum, eaten in excess.

Dim sum, which means "touch of the heart," is usually eaten at
breakfast or lunch and includes steamed or fried pastry dumplings stuffed with
anything from pork and beef to shrimp and egg custard. Many other savories,
like mango pudding and egg tarts, are also dim sum.

But based on laboratory analyses of 750 dim sum samples, Hong Kong’s Food
and Environmental Hygiene Department found high fat and salt and low calcium
and
fiber in everything from fried dumplings to marinated jellyfish. The report
suggested that local residents eat these kinds of dim sum in moderation,
and choose more
dim sum like steamed buns and steamed rice rolls.

Regular dim sum diners should order plates of boiled vegetables to go with
their meals, the report said, and should beware of some steamed dim sum for
which the
ingredients are fried, like bean curd sheets.

Plates of boiled vegetables! We might as well go to a Hare Krishna joint
for the free come on in spread! Seeing as Sunday Dim Sum has become something
of
a tradition for the Berkman
Blogger’s Group, should this report hold up we
may have to consider alternatives.

The Dowbrigade suggests instituting Sunday "Pachamancas", a delicious
Peruvian tradition which involves wrapping goat, sheep and guinea pig meat
in banana leaves
and burying them 3 or 4 feet underground, together with potatoes, yucca, camote
and red hot rocks. After three days you dig it all up, wash off the dirt,
and chow down. Delicious!

We could make a Pachamanca pit in a corner of the garden in front of
the Berkman Center. We would have to do the prep work, heat the rocks, wrap
the
meat, and bury the booty after our regular Thursday
night meetings, in order
to have it be ready for Sunday. But it would be worth it. Especially delicious
with abundant Chicha, Andean corn mash beer….

from the
New York Times

Bonus: click on photo for filmclip