The Wall Street Journal buried the lead.
This is the type of scandal that would have completely unseated any politician just a few years ago and certainly ruined a presidency. Where has our national morality gone?
Reads
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
👓 Project Gutenberg blocks German users after court rules in favor of Holtzbrinck subsidiary | TeleRead
The global Internet and highly territorial real world have had a number of collisions, especially where ebook rights are concerned. The most recent such dispute involves Project Gutenberg, a well-respected public domain ebook provider—in fact, the oldest. It concerns 18 German-language books by three German authors. As a result of a German lawsuit, Project Gutenberg has blocked Germany from viewing the Gutenberg web site. The books in question are out of copyright in the United States, because at the time they passed into the public domain US copyrights were based on the period after publication rather than the author’s life. The three authors involved are Heinrich Mann (died in 1950), Thomas Mann (1955) and Alfred Döblin (1957).
Some interesting thoughts on cross border intellectual property and copyright. Even if a site blocks the content, there are easy enough means of getting around it that local jurisdictions would need to enforce things locally anyway. Why bother with the intermediate step?
👓 How 4,000 Physicists Gave a Vegas Casino its Worst Week Ever | Physics Buzz
What happens when several thousand distinguished physicists, researchers, and students descend on the nation’s gambling capital for a conference? The answer is "a bad week for the casino"—but you'd never guess why. The year was 1986, and the American Physical Society’s annual April meeting was slated to be held in San Diego. But when scheduling conflicts caused the hotel arrangements to fall through just a few months before, the conference's organizers were left scrambling to find an alternative destination that could accommodate the crowd—and ended up settling on Las Vegas's MGM grand.
Totally physics clickbait. The headline should have read: “Vegas won’t cater to physics conferences anymore because they’re too smart to gamble.”
👓 Philando Castile charity wipes out school lunch debt in district where he worked | CNN
A charity that honors the memory of the late school nutrition supervisor has erased the lunch debt of every student in public schools in the St. Paul, Minnesota, district where he worked before his death by a police officer in 2016.
A new meaning for Philanthropy.
I find it unconscionable that school districts would penalize the poor this way and prevent them from getting the services that the schools should be encouraging. This is simply morally wrong and is a prime example of a negative feedback mechanism that drags society in general down instead of improving it.
👓 Exclusive: Florida Public School Teacher Has A White Nationalist Podcast | Huffington Post
Dayanna Volitich suggests Muslims be eradicated from the earth, believes anti-Semitic conspiracy theories ... and teaches middle school social studies.
We need a whole lot more reporting like this to get people out of the dark corners of society.
👓 ‘Pure madness’: Dark days inside the White House as Trump shocks and rages | Washington Post
The president has fumed about news coverage of scandals and remains furious with his attorney general, while friends worry that he is becoming too isolated.
👓 ‘Miss Minnie,’ one of Johns Hopkins University’s longest-serving employees, dies at 96 | JHU Hub
She came to Hopkins as a cafeteria worker in 1946, retired as assistant to the president in 2007
👓 Amazon flaw costs Apple accessory maker nearly $100k as counterfeiter takes over legitimate listing | 9to5Mac
Amazon has come under fire in the past for its lackluster approach to handling counterfeit products. Now, the online retailer is facing a broader problem, with counterfeiters going as far as to take over a company’s legitimate product listing… BuzzFeed News highlights the problem in a report, explaining how a counterfeit maker of the popular from Elevation Labs overtook the company’s own Amazon listing.
📖 Murilla Gorilla and the Lost Parasol by Jennifer Lloyd
A rainstorm has passed through Mango Market. Parrot is upset by a missing parasol at his parasol stand. It is up to Murilla, the disorganized, messy and seemingly hopeless detective to solve the case. Can she do it? Of course she wants to help her friend, but first Murilla needs to find her magnifying glass.
The world Murilla lives in its pretty consistent. We see a lot of characters and things we saw in the first book. Messy Murilla looks for a mop in her stove with with reasonable comic effect.
Here there are no footprints on the ground and it’s a good clue about what happened to the missing parasol.
Rating: 3 of 5 stars
📖 The Thank You Book by Mo Willems
Gerald is careful. Piggie is not. Piggie cannot help smiling. Gerald can. Gerald worries so that Piggie does not have to. Gerald and Piggie are best friends. In The Thank You Book!, Piggie wants to thank EVERYONE. But Gerald is worried Piggie will forget someone . . . someone important.
They’re were some interesting misdirections here with a few cute reveals. Only the sharpest reader will anticipate the last one.
How are there already 25 of these books?! It was nice to have some crossover with Willems’ other books.
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
👓 Coming Soon: Reclaim Video | bavatuesdays
The idea of running a video rental store has been bouncing around at Reclaim Hosting for over a year now. When we started renovating the CoWork space/Reclaim Headquarters over a year ago we realized we would soon have a vacant strip mall storefront at our disposal. I started floating the idea of a video rental store to Tim, but given he was knee-deep in actually designing and building CoWork with Lauren, those discussions were postponed. At this point it was not clear how it related to anything else we already do, namely run Reclaim Hosting and CoWork—it was just a fun idea.
This is an awesome sounding idea. I’d love to hear more about it. I know that folks like Kevin Smokler and David Dylan Thomas are going to flip over it.
Despite the fact that it seems like a lot of fun, I’m curious how they’re going to make sure it doesn’t bring down the bottom line and put anything else in jeopardy. I certainly get the fun part, but the minimal break even portion doesn’t sound like it’s quite there to me.
The tough part of the physical media game is that these are magnetic tapes. While many of my 90’s VHS tapes are relatively fine, my VHS from the early 80’s are in worse shape. Tougher is having machines to play these successfully on. This post reminds me a lot of the difficulties I’ve heard from UCLA Film & Television archivists doing work on tapes themselves.
👓 We Want Your VHS! | bavatuesdays
If you have some old VHS hanging around the house, yet have gotten rid of your VCR long ago—it might be high time to let Reclaim Video take them off your hands. Rather than letting them sit around collecting dust...
Interesting…
👓 Trump spends 100th day at golf club as president | CNN
President Donald Trump reached a presidential milestone at his Palm Beach County, Florida, golf club on Saturday: One hundred days in office at a golf club that bears his name.
👓 Trump was angry and ‘unglued’ when he started a trade war, officials say | NBC News
Frustration on several fronts aided the president's tariff decision
A bit of a click-bait headline, but the general coverage of the lack of planning around this is astoundingly inept. Stories like this shouldn’t exist in the opening days of an administration much less a year in. His one primary campaign platform was that he was such a great leader and it seems to be his worst possible attribute.
👓 ‘I Live Paycheck to Paycheck’: A West Virginia Teacher Explains Why She’s on Strike | New York Times
We spoke to Katie Endicott, a high school English teacher, about why teachers are not returning to the classroom, despite a deal that offered them a 5 percent raise.
This is just painful to hear. We really need to double teachers’ salaries and create some competition in the market to improve schools. We really can’t afford any more uneducated people in this country.