Salon.com > Amy Standen

Carl Pope

Mon, 29 Apr 2002 19:00:00 +0000

On Thursday, after weeks of heated debate, the Senate passed a controversial energy bill. Roundly condemned by environmental groups, the bill made major concessions to nuclear and fossil fuel producers while abandoning nearly every attempt at conservation.

The Senate bill "takes us backwards," says Carl Pope, the former Peace Corps volunteer who has served as executive director of the Sierra Club since 1992. And when the Senate goes into conference with House members (who will bring along their even less environment-friendly bill) to draft a final version, the result could be still more disastrous for many environmental issues. As if to sprinkle more salt in environmental crusaders' wounds, on Friday the administration announced it was getting set to allow the coal mining industry to dump dirt from mountaintop mining into waterways and valleys.

On the prowl with the secret bomb dogs

Mon, 04 Mar 2002 20:00:00 +0000

Smell works the same in both dogs and people: Molecules of odor are inhaled, and then dissolved in mucus. Traveling upwards, they are picked up by olfactory receptor cells, which then send the message on to olfactory bulbs which communicate directly with the part of the brain that stores emotions and memories. Dogs have 20 to 40 times more receptor cells than we do.

This is not news, but it's why, since Sept. 11, dogs have lolled in the spotlight more than any time in recent memory. It was a miniature poodle that took home this year's Westminster Best in Show but the part of the ceremony that everyone remembers best is the tribute to the NYPD search and rescue dogs that sniffed through the rubble at ground zero. Then there's Sirius, perhaps the most famous bomb dog of all, and the only one to die in the Sept. 11 attack.

Sept. 11 forced on us the realization that despite our cleverness with technology, there are certain things that are best left to dogs. What's more, those dogs actually enjoy their work: There is no greater demonstration of vocational happiness than a bomb dog on the scent of something explosive. And it's lucky for us that they love it like they do.

Too Bizzaro for words

Wed, 20 Feb 2002 20:00:00 +0000

When Delta Air Lines passenger Richard Bizzaro was led off his Feb. 9 flight in handcuffs and accused of interfering with the flight crew -- a charge that could earn him 20 years in jail or a $250,000 fine -- most people took him for just another nut oblivious to post-Sept. 11 airline decorum. Indeed, defying federal air marshals seems to border on insanity. But in our haste to purge the skies of kooks and crackpots, we might well have overlooked a significant possibility: Richard Bizzaro displayed nothing less than patriotism, vigilance and heroism -- the very qualities we've all cultivated in ourselves since air travel changed forever five months ago.

It started in the bathroom. Bizzaro, the CEO of an herbal supplements marketing company, was on his way to Salt Lake City and had gotten up to use the lavatory. In conjunction with the tight Olympics security, a new federal law forbids passengers from leaving their seat during the first and last 30 minutes of all Salt Lake City flights. Bizzaro entered the lavatory about 25 minutes before landing, and as he left it, he was confronted by a flight attendant. According to the attendant's account, Bizzaro -- who is 6-foot-2 and weighs about 220 pounds -- silently stared her down. Then he returned to his seat, at which point things took a turn for, well, the bizarro.

Whatever turns you on

Wed, 30 Jan 2002 20:33:00 +0000

You may not think you have sexual fantasies, but Dr. Michael J. Bader says you do.

According to Bader, author of "Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies," everyone -- from the ortho-fetishist to the secret harborer of elaborate rape fantasies to the writer of sneeze erotica, right on down to the woman who likes guys in cowboy hats or the guy who likes guys in cowboy hats -- has a fantasy. And each of these fantasies, however mundane or bizarre, works in exactly the same way: to compensate for the guilt or fear or worry each of us carries over from childhood.

Bader is a general psychotherapist and psychoanalyst by trade, but over the years it's his conversations with patients about sexual fantasy that have proved to be the most revealing. Ask someone to tell you what turns him or her on and, chances are, you're cutting to the quick of that person's basic fears and anxieties.

“In Cold Blood”

Tue, 22 Jan 2002 20:32:00 +0000

"In Cold Blood" began, as the story goes, when Truman Capote came across a 300-word article in the back of the New York Times describing the unexplained murder of a family of four in rural Kansas.

"Holcomb, Kan., Nov. 15 [1959] (UPI) -- A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged ... There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been stolen. The telephone lines had been cut."

Capote seized on the grisly story and went down to Kansas to turn it into a book. He spent six years researching "In Cold Blood," and claimed to have invented a genre, the nonfiction novel; later, Tom Wolfe and others would include "In Cold Blood" in their own movement, known as New Journalism.

Both inventions are old hat now, and, more than 35 years after its publication, "In Cold Blood's" radicalism is a lot less apparent. But still the book stands out as a masterfully controlled recounting of murder and its aftermath and the people involved.

Peter Kurth

Mon, 12 Nov 2001 20:00:00 +0000

When Isadora Duncan finally sat down to write her memoirs, she received a much needed advance from the eager publisher, along with a telegraph: "ENOUGH WITH YOUR HIGHFALUTIN IDEAS SEND LOVE CHAPTERS MAKE IT JUICY." Luckily, biographer Peter Kurth was not forced to make that choice. "Isadora: A Sensational Life," his new 652-page book about the world's first great theatrical dancer, not only catalogs the tempestuous antics of Duncan and her numerous lovers, but it does a terrifically engrossing job of chronicling a life devoted to art and beauty.

"Isadora" is pieced together from a vast archive of love letters, magazine clippings, diaries, drawings and photos -- to the extent that Kurth's job occasionally appears as much editorial as biographical. It's a good thing he took this approach: Many of the papers quoted in the book were lost in a 1999 fire that consumed the Manhattan apartment belonging to Duncan's great-niece. "Isadora" took 10 years to write, a period full of tumult in Kurth's own life, and it's easy to see why he feared he might never finish it. But the real challenge, he says, was learning to sympathize with his subject.

Roger Payne

Tue, 30 Oct 2001 16:06:00 +0000

In 1971, biologist Roger Payne and his family embarked on what would be the first of many trips to Argentina. Sleeping in tents and eating at a wooden picnic table, the six Paynes spent three months living high above the Patagonia coast. Roger, his then wife, Katy, and their four children spent their days in the ocean, paddling the waves in kayaks, or above it at camp, peering out through binoculars. And at night, sleeping in army tents pitched a few yards from the cliff, the Payne family could hear the leviathan snore of southern right whales who had migrated there to mate.

It was on one of these trips that Payne, swimming in the shallows beneath the family's lookout, came across a female right whale and moved in closer. "She was asleep," he recalled recently in a phone conversation from his home in Vermont, "but after a while she opened her eye and looked me all over. You could see her eyeball rolling in her head -- the eyes move very well -- and then she closed her eye again. Basically, the whale was just saying, 'Well, if you've seen one of these, you've seen them all.' And I thought, Oh, that's the greatest compliment I've ever been paid by a whale."

Rumi: No. 1 in Afghanistan and the USA

Fri, 12 Oct 2001 19:00:00 +0000

Coleman Barks, 21st century poet, likes to point out that Jelaluddin Rumi, 13th century poet, is both the bestselling poet in the United States and the one most often played on Afghan radio stations. Given the current situation, it's unlikely anyone will be able to confirm the latter. But it is fair to say that one thing currently binding these two warring nations is a poet born in a time when neither country existed.

It would be a dissapointment if there wasn't a story about how Barks became the country's most popular Rumi translator. Rumi lore is studded with stories marking beginnings and endings and revelations. Nothing gradual happens to mystics. Life-changing events are spontaneous and total. Insight flashes; Teresa de Avila falls into an ecstatic trance, a crash, an explosion and everything is different.

The story of how Barks, Southern-born poet and University of Georgia English professor, became a Rumi scholar begins in 1977. On the night of May 2, Barks dreamed he was lying in a sleeping bag on the banks of the Tennessee River, near where he grew up. Suddenly a flash of light lit up the sky and, as Barks describes in the introduction to his new book, "The Soul of Rumi": "A ball of light rises from Williams Island and comes over to me -- revealing a man sitting cross legged with head bowed and eyes closed, a white shawl over the back of his head. He raises his head and opens his eyes. I love you he says. 'I love you too,' I answer."

Holding up the rear

Tue, 07 Aug 2001 19:30:00 +0000

By the time the dot-com economy had begun its quick and dirty descent, Jack Lewis was working as director of development for a large game company in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area. Lewis, an experienced programmer born and raised in San Francisco, could probably have made more money at a start-up, but the game geek and former punk rocker was unmoved by the new industry springing to life around him. "I kinda looked down my nose at it," he says.

Lewis doesn't want his real name used. He worries that describing his investigation into the plush world of high-end office furniture, conducted during working hours, might give the impression that he and his friends were slacking on the job. Now that he's a freelancer he has his reputation to consider. It's only after having detailed the grueling days and the nights spent curled up in a cubicle at his old workplace that Lewis is willing to admit that he and his co-workers needed a break. "When you're working 12- to 14-hour days, you're trying to break the flow. You'll build weird little abstract hobbies."

Burning down the house

Fri, 27 Jul 2001 08:00:00 +0000

Homestore.com CEO Stuart Wolff, like a lot of people tracking the tech industry these days, is a fan of the evolution metaphor.

"If you put deer on an island and give them food," he told BusinessWeek Online in March, "the population of deer explodes. When winter comes, there's a crash, and only the strongest survive. The Internet isn't revolutionary, it's evolutionary."

Darwin-speak works well for Wolff. While other dot-coms drop like flies -- at least 555 since January 2000, according to one estimate -- analysts and the trade media are trumpeting Homestore as one of the few dot-coms with a serious, working business model.

Homestore, a real estate dot-com that offers home listings and other services, has far outgrown its competitors, including MSN's Home Advisor, which features fewer than half of Homestore's property listings and attracts less traffic. Homestore has delighted Wall Street by forming high-profile partnerships with giant corporations such as AOL and Cendant, and recently shook off a Department of Justice antitrust inquiry. While other dot-coms are declaring bankruptcy or losing their NASDAQ listings (including former Homestore competitor Homeseeker.com), Homestore stock is currently selling for $28.50 -- down from a high of $55 last September.

Bill Gates’ problems aren’t over

Fri, 29 Jun 2001 08:00:00 +0000

Salon Technology's writers discuss the latest news in high tech and give their opinionated takes on the biggest technology stories of the week. On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals handed down its long-awaited opinion on the Microsoft antitrust case, sending journalists and other observers on a mad scramble to make sense of a complex decision.

Andrew Leonard says that what looked at first like a victory for Microsoft is actually a damaging defeat. And that those who follow the open source movement suspect that Bill Gates has a lot more to worry about than monopoly allegations.

The saga of Sucks.com

Mon, 25 Jun 2001 21:29:00 +0000

Michael Bloomberg couldn't stop Dan Parisi. Lockheed Martin couldn't either, and hundreds of other companies haven't even tried -- yet, that is.

Parisi, working from a small office in Secaucus, N.J., is playing an increasingly important role in the ongoing debate over Web addresses. On Tuesday he won the right to the domain name MichaelBloombergsucks.com, which he's owned since 1999, despite the efforts of the New York mayoral hopeful to stop him. ICANN -- the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers -- the international nonprofit corporation that usually oversees such disputes, was also helpless.

If ICANN is a ship lost in the stormy seas of domain registration, Parisi is the shark circling below. A sharp critic of the much maligned organization, Parisi only surfaces when one of the domains he owns, like MichaelBloombergsucks.com, comes under fire. Meanwhile, while others debate the merits of certain suffixes, and wring their hands over who would own what URL, Parisi simply collects them.

Cruising for teen boozing

Wed, 13 Jun 2001 19:47:00 +0000

It's 9:30 on a Friday night and the narrow road heading down Pleasanton's Knothill Knolls is filling up with cars. Parked haphazardly in front of Dr. Neil Proctor's Tudor-style house with a curving driveway is a Jeep Cherokee, a Nissan truck, a low black sports car and at least two other late-model SUVs. Teenagers parked farther down the street have climbed the hill and are milling about, boys on one side of street, girls on the other.

"It could be entirely innocent; they could just be planning their evenings," says police officer Scott Rohovit while surveying the crowd. But he and his partner, Alex Koumiss, get out of the Taurus anyway -- it's one of those unmarked police cars that fool nobody -- and head down the hill to the Proctor residence.

The kids see the cops coming, and immediately there's a rustling on the margins, as five heads duck down and scurry sideways behind the thick bushes that surround the Proctor house. Matt Proctor and his friends appear to be tossing beer bottles into the hedges.

My own private space station

Thu, 07 Jun 2001 16:32:00 +0000

If you're interested in the possibility of life after death; if you've had an encounter with aliens, or believe that UFOs occasionally conduct drive-by surveillance of unsuspecting earthlings; if you blame extraterrestrials for the rash of freakish cattle mutilations that a New Mexico rancher discovered in 1998, then you are probably familiar with Robert Bigelow.

Bigelow, who made his fortune running Budget Suites, may be the United States' largest funder of research into the paranormal. The owner of a chain of hotels in Nevada, Texas and Arizona, Bigelow bought a ranch in Utah where residents had reported unearthly lights and other strange occurrences and staffed it with a full-time veterinarian and two scientists to monitor any alienlike activity. He founded the National Institute for Discovery Science, which sponsors research into UFOs and other paranormal phenomena and collects accounts of sightings and other unexplained events from the public.

Why Yahoo pulled the plug on porn

Fri, 11 May 2001 08:00:00 +0000

Salon Technology's writers discuss the latest news in high tech and give their opinionated takes on the biggest technology stories of the week.

When Yahoo suddenly dropped out of the sex industry last month, a small group of right-wing media moralists declared victory. Now, with the NASDAQ tanking and Internet companies in a struggle for survival, the anti-porn patrol is poised to keep on winning. Hear why, from Damien Cave and Amy Standen.

Is the FBI tracking online protesters?

Wed, 02 May 2001 19:41:00 +0000

On April 21, protesters from across the U.S. and Canada were gathering in Quebec to protest the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit meeting. While police amassed tear gas and riot gear, protesters hatched plans to take down a two and a half mile-long fence erected to keep them out of sight and sound during the meeting.

At the same time, thousands of miles away in Seattle, activities at the Independent Media Center were winding down after a long day of coordinating a joint protest in Blaine, Wash. Only around three people were left in the office at 7 p.m. when a knock came at the door.

"FBI agents came in and flashed their badges," recalls Devin Theriot-Orr, an IMC volunteer and legal team co-coordinator. "They wanted to ask us some questions. You don't get visits from the FBI every day, so people were definitely pretty freaked out."

All hail Neil Cicierega

Thu, 26 Apr 2001 19:26:00 +0000

Neil "Trapezoid" Cicierega, who has at times described his occupation as "Youthful Dipwad," may not be a household name yet (he is, after all, only 14), but judging by his emerging track record, he's destined for great things.

He's the creator of the animated movie Hyakugojyuuichi! which stars, among others, PeeWee Herman, Hello Kitty, Harry Potter, Elton John and Jay the Jetplane, all set to the lively tune of a Pokémon anthem. His movies may be just bizarre amalgamations of randomly chosen objects (a Budweiser logo, a thumping pacemaker, Justin Timberlake's head), but they can easily be viewed as biting satires of the American media, trenchant observations about consumer culture -- or, at the very least, clues to unlocking some of the universe's deepest mysteries.

What seemed at first to be just another baffling Web phenomenon turns out to have come from a real-life, Lucky Charms-eating, home-schooled kid from Massachusetts. And here he is.

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The execution will not be webcast

Thu, 19 Apr 2001 17:42:00 +0000

On May 16th, Timothy McVeigh will be taken into a room with a one-way mirror at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind. Strapped down onto a gurney, arms outstretched, McVeigh will watch as prison technicians insert a catheter into each of his arms. After a brief injection of saline solution, they will begin to give him a series of lethal injections. The first -- a muscle relaxant, sodium thiopental -- will protect McVeigh from the pain of death; the second two -- pancuronium bromide, which will stop his breathing, and potassium chloride, which will induce cardiac arrest -- will kill him.
David Marshlack, CEO of Entertainment Network, Inc. thinks that you should be able to watch the execution pay-per-view, right from your computer. In a special one-time-only theatre-of-death spectacular, Marshlack wants to sell you the Oklahoma City bomber's last minutes for the low, low price of $1.95 (all of which will be donated to charities benefiting the bombing's victims). And we thought the Net couldn't get any sleazier than Rotten.com.
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Death to the AMT!

Wed, 18 Apr 2001 19:30:00 +0000

Vince Bowey never realized that stock options could nearly bankrupt his family. He left PriceWaterhouseCoopers in 1998 to join a customer service software start-up and took stock options as part of his incentive package.
Bowey knew that some of his hoped-for profits would be gobbled up by the alternative minimum tax, or AMT -- a complicated tax provision that can, among other things, trigger a 28 percent tax on the difference between an option price and the value of the stock the day of the purchase. In other words, Bowey -- whose options allowed him to buy 13,000 shares of his company's stock for $1 apiece at a time when the stock was trading at $75 -- was looking at an AMT tax bill of about $269,360, 28 percent of his "paper gain."
Bowey knew that by exercising his options but not selling his stocks he made himself vulnerable to the AMT, but he assumed that the eventual gains would outstrip the tax liability. Even if the stock dropped by half -- which seemed unlikely at the time -- he figured that he'd have more enough money to pay Uncle Sam.
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Kate Bush

Tue, 20 Mar 2001 20:38:00 +0000

The first thing about Kate Bush is her voice. If you hate her, that's probably why. It's childish and prickly, and she sweeps through her four-octave range with all the inhibition of someone taking a shower in an empty house, seemingly oblivious to the fingernails-on-chalkboard effect a voice like that can have. Maybe Bush knows this and maybe she doesn't. It doesn't matter, she'll sing anyway.
Catherine Bush was born on July 30, 1958, to a doctor and his nurse/dancer wife, in the town of East Wickham in Kent, England, 50 miles from Stonehenge. The woods around East Wickham, at dusk and in the early morning, take on a misty eeriness that carries the scent of something creaking and pagan and scary. And the farmhouses there, like the one Kate Bush grew up in, are old, 17th century old, and large and drafty and suggestive. It's not hard to imagine that people have died in rooms like those from tuberculosis and consumption and childbirth, that torrid love letters were urgently delivered and ghosts rattled the windows at night. And if you are a bookish teenage girl, and you have the kind of imagination that fills in the gaps that life leaves open for you, you will, in a place like East Wickham, have a little Kate Bush in you.
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