LATEST ADDITIONS

Well, Elizabeth is off to Italy. Ciao, bella!

<I>Big Rock Candy Mountain</I> ruminates on the immigration issue and posts MP3 files of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" and Billy Bragg's "Waiting For the Great Leap Forward." What a perfect post: Passion, good writin', and great polemics.

I read <I>The San Francisco Gate</I> every morning as part of my my get-ready-to-work ritual, mostly, I admit, for Jon Carroll's fine column, which teaches that wit and grace mean that you don't actually have to have anything to write about (but when he <I>does</I> have something to write about, it's always a corker). Now I've added the link below, which traces the adventures of reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, who had the audacity to break the BALCO juicing scandal.

Some unnamed genius has been blogging the Trojan War, and Achilles is now dead. Of course, he's been dead for centuries, but mother of Zeus, it seems so immediate this way.

I wrote this guy off back in the 1980s, when he essentially dismissed audiophiles as kooks&mdash;and this from a computer geek? But, by God, <I>this</I> is worth reading.

Being addicted, or even just a fan of <I>The New York Times</I> means you have to suss out the necessary assumptions and become expert at translating what's really going on there. Even overlooking the woeful sports section and regular incidents of pathetic pandering—a recent travel piece by Robert Kennedy Jr. comes to mind—the institutional psychoses and attitude, subtle as they may be, that the paper infuses, again ever so delicately, into everything is quite amazing.

John Marks sends along this article about the Fred J. Cooper Memorial Organ, a 32-ton, 6398-pipe, three-story organ that I, for one, am going to have to make a sonic destination. Be sure to visit the photo essay and other links while you're reading about the Cooper organ&mdash;there's a ton of fascinating information there.