Khalid Jarrar, a Global Voices blogger, has been detained. Global Voices reports:

Khalid’s family are calling for his release, or at very least that he be charged and tried for something. Raed [his brother] says: “Our goal now is to ask the mokhabarat to take Khalid to court and reveal what exactly he is being charged with (if anything).”

…

Please show your support for the Khalid Jarrar by posting supportive comments at Raed‘s and Khalid‘s latest posts. If you’re a blogger, please help spread the word by linking to them.

At Raed’s blog you can share the family’s joy when they discover, after two days, that Khalid had been taken by the secret service, which “would be considered a disaster and a violation of human rights” anywhere else.

[Technorati tags: globalvoices iraq blogs]

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John Davison, at the gamer’s site 1up.com, explains why he walked off of Donny Deutsch’s “The Big Idea” show on CNBC after it was apparent that he’d been lied to and set up. Go, John! (Link from Jeff Jarvis.)

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List of films ordered by uses of the word fuck. (Thanks to Mark Dionne for the link.) [Technorati tags: wikipedia]

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Jenny Attiyeh is starting a series of weekly podcasts with academics and scholars. Take a look at the great list of upcoming programs…

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On the way back from the play, our daughter Leah pointed out that an accurate description of Camp Jabberwocky — something like “It’s a summer camp where counselors come and care for severely disabled folks” — doesn’t convey any idea what it’s like. First, the disabilities range from people with full cognitive powers but bodies twisted like rubber bands to those with upright bodies but narrowed bands of thought. Second, the counselors, all unpaid, don’t “care” for the campers. They are friends who delight in them. And as for the story of the camp itself, for fifty years it’s run on ridiculous hopes and reliable miracles. Its story is beyond belief. Couldn’t happen.

This year’s play was F00tl00se. (I’m misspelling it because I don’t know if they paid for the rights, although the version was loose enough that I’m not sure it would count even as a derivative work. For example, I’m pretty sure that there were no penguins in the original.) I could be accurate about the show, but that wouldn’t tell you the truth. Jabberwocky gets your good intentions out of the way so you can see, and seeing means being overwhelmed, so here’s just one moment, when a man with cerebral palsey held the stage:

Two counselors lift Larry,
his body like a burnt matchstick,
out of his wheel chair
and lay him on the stage
so he can spin himself
horizontal to gravity.

Who knew he was such a show-off?

The girls discuss the hot new boy

After the play, the actors are feeling pretty good

(Here are some photos of the Camp’s float in the Fourth of July parade.)

Every time I write about Jabberwocky, I hear from people who want to get their children in. I’m sorry I can’t help you because there’s only room for 35 campers per month and the list of people trying to get in is much much longer than that. There isn’t even a known admissions process. There’s a working phone number during the summer, but I don’t know what good it will do you to call it. There’s no web site. There’s no email. This place just doesn’t operate by normal rules. I’m truly sorry I can’t help you. [Technorati tags: CampeJabberwocky Jabberwocky] poetry]

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Warren M. Myers in the ACM magazine Ubiquity wonders about the effect the rectangularity of monitors has had on UI design. He suggests that if they were circular, instead of thinking about UI design in terms of a Cartesian grid, we be thinking in terms of polar coordinates and wedges. A snippet:

An entire system can be developed wherein the main interface, the buttons that allow you into different segments and levels of the system are based on concentric rings. The middle circle will bring you to the top level of the system. Festooned about the center circle can be wedges that describe the different segments of the system.

As he says, he’s definitely thinking outside the box. (Thanks to Kurt Starsinic for the link.) [Technorati tags: gui]

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Here’s a post from August 2004 where the always-one-step-ahead Jerry Michalski proposes that PR start thinking in terms of public relationships, a term I’ve been bandying about for the past few months, often stating that I don’t know where it came from.

Maybe now I do… [Technorati tags: PR JerryMichalski]

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Mark Federman, whose most excellent comments on this blog often come from his McLuhan-steeped perspective, has moved his blog here: whatisthemessage.blogspot.com. [Technorati tags: MarkFederman McLuhan]

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Michigan State University has hundreds of historical clips with a nice interface for letting you view them side by side. It’s called EASE History (“Experience Acceleration Support Environment”…yech) and there’s tons of stuff to poke around in. For example, you can see Eisenhower and Stevenson’s campaign ads from 1952… [Technorati tag: history]

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This butt-ugly site (and I say this as someone who apparently thinks there can’t be too much orange on a web page) publishes each of Shakespeare’s sonnets along with a first level of “what this line says” commentary and a whole bunch of further analysis. The home page is hard to parse, but it gets better when you hit the sonnets themselves. (Note: I am not a Shakespeare expert and can’t vouch for the scholarship.) The site is generous in ways into the sonnets, allowing text searches, giving an index of first lines, etc.

There’s also a companion site for Pushkin’s poetry, which has translations of his work but no commentary.

Thanks to OxQuarry for providing all this. Generous indeed. [Technorati tag: shakespeare]

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