PBS’ American Experience tells us about The Fly Girls:
“During WWII, more than a thousand women signed up to fly with the U.S. military. Wives, mothers, actresses and debutantes who joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPS) test-piloted aircraft, ferried planes and logged 60 million miles in the air. Thirty-eight women died in service. But the opportunity to play a critical role in the war effort was abruptly canceled by politics and resentment, and it would be 30 years before women would again break the sex barrier in the skies.”

Since her breakthrough design of the Vietnam Memorial while still an undergraduate at Yale, Maya Lin has continued to create beautiful, thought provoking works of art. She was also selected to create the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Her versatility goes beyond stone monuments; she has designed a beautiful wave landscape of soil and grass for the François-Xavier Bagnoud Building at the University of Michigan College of Engineering. Her creation at the Wexner Center for the Arts is “a landscape of mounds of shattered glass slightly varying in size.” She’s been a member of the Presidio Advisory Council and was the subject of an Academy Award-winning documentary, Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision.

Exceptionally detailed: How to Write Telegrams Properly. “If the telegram is packed full of unnecessary words, words which might be omitted without impairing the sense of the message, the sender has been guilty of economic waste.” Tsk tsk tsk! There is a section on the correct way to send telegrams to someone on a train. Wow. Getting a message delivered to a train! That’s cool! (via memepool)

While Americans are remembering those fallen in combat tomorrow, people in Gloucester, England will be chasing an eight-pound wheel of Double Gloucester cheese down a very steep hill. In recent years, this has proven to be a dangerous event with eighteen people injured in 1997, including an innocent bystander who unsuccessfully tried to dodge a bouncing cheese. The race was cancelled in 1998 and revived in 1999 with crash barriers and a noon starting time (so participants would not have had as much to drink). So why chase the cheese down the hill? It’s a 200 year old celebration of commoners rights to the land, according to this article.

Negativland is playing in Palo Alto, CA on Sunday at Cubberly. In keeping with their attitudes about copying, I will now lift from their web site a topically amusing story:

Note: The track “Michael Jackson” from this Fatboy Slim CD samples from the Negativland track “Michael Jackson” from our 1987 release “Escape From Noise” on SST Records. Stupidly, Fatboy Slim went to SST Records to get permission to use this sample. SST charged him $1000, which they are keeping all for themselves, of course. Besides the fact that Fatboy could have kept his $1000 and taken the sample from us without permission and we wouldn’t have cared, the Negativland sample he used was itself appropriated by us without permission from a religious flexi-disc originally issued in 1966. (In fact, a Negativland member LITERALLY stole this record from the basement of a church in Concord CA.) The Fatboy Slim track has now been licensed by Fatboy to be used in a Coca-Cola commercial!!! So Negativland now finds itself to actually be in a REAL cola commercial and Coca-Cola unwittingly engages in copyright infringement ( or is it a fair use?)…..too bad it wasn’t Pepsi…….

I’ve been penciling in all the local festivals going on this summer into my planning calendar. Along the way, I found the California Festivals web site, which lists a bunch of ’em all over the state. The dates haven’t been updated for 2000, but many of the listings include links to active web sites. The cutest one I found was the LambTown Festival held in Dixon every July. They have “sheep dog trials, spinners and weavers, a mutton busting contest, (where kids actually get to ride the sheep), and a shearing competition.” And, of course, a lamb cook-off (I think the people cook, not the lambs).

Is this giant duck story for real? “A 15 foot giant bird-beast, closely related to the modern duck, may have ruled the Earth after dinosaurs died out, scientists believe.” I’m picturing a Jurassic Park-like movie with computer renderings of giant duckies. “Quack! Quack!” they squeal as a scared geek girl in front of a monitor says “I know this! It’s like the Linux penguin!”

Recurring computer nightmares:

• I follow a link to a web page which is supposed to contain some piece of information I’ve been looking for. The page is infinitely long and I start searching for key words while it is loading, they are never there and the page keeps loading and loading and loading….
• I fix a bug in some code, compile, and run. The bug is not fixed. I go back to the code and the fix I made has disappeared. I fix it again, compile, and run. The bug is not fixed… [repeat ad infinitum]
• I keep breaking and buying an infinite number of ethernet/modem dongles on the laptop.

(OK, I warned you I’d be griping about my DSL install.) So, as I previously reported, my loop is 16,900 feet. That’s within the 18,000 maximum which most people talk about for ADSL. But Covad apparently won’t do over 15,000. That’s better than PacBell’s 12,000, but doesn’t do me any good. Since I have to go through the technically-challenged ISP customer support people, I have to plead and wait for a direct answer about whether Covad has actually tested my line and found it unsatisfactory, or if they just looked at the 16,900 number, did the arithmetic, and said “no way”. All I’ve gotten so far is typical bureaucratic ambiguity. Soon, I may have to make the IDSL or stay-with-56K decision, and go back to calling AT&T;@Home every couple weeks.

Smith Corona has voluntarily filed for bankruptcy to facilitate a buyout by Carolina Wholesale Office Machine Company, a wholesale distributor of office equipment and supplies. Carolina Wholesale plans to “organize Smith Corona as a separate operating entity with a strong focus on the core typewriter and supplies products”. So the name will live on, and it does have brand impact, so it should. The press release includes interesting historical information about Smith Corona’s bumpy ride along the typewriter obsolescence trail. Smith Corona had previously filed Chapter 11 in 1995 and came out of it in 1997, having successfully reorganized from a manufacturing company to sales and marketing, obtaining all products from third party sources. But that success was short-lived. This past April they were delisted from Nasdaq because they no longer satisfied the financial requirements. The stock is at $0.34, with 3,220,180 shares outstanding among 450 holders. For more nostalgia, I found this page full of typewriter links, including a 1996 Popular Mechanics article on their 130 year history.