Nice follow-up to the Tribble article -- The New York Times' "Career Couch" features Write All About It (at Your Own Risk). Bloggers just can't get a break (emphasis mine):

Q. You've embraced the daily catharsis of blogging, but given the recent spate of blog-sparked workplace controversies, you're worried that posts about work may jeopardize your job. How can you pontificate about your career in a manner that doesn't end with an unemployment check?

A. The safest way to approach blogging about work may be not to do it at all, said Nancy Flynn, executive director of the ePolicy Institute, a training and consulting firm in Columbus, Ohio.

"Blogging is such a subjective form of expression," Ms. Flynn said. "What you think is a silly little comment could get broadcast into cyberspace, hurt the wrong person's feelings and put you at risk of reprimand or something worse."

[. . .]

Q. What about seemingly harmless musings?

A. Posts about everyday issues like cubicle cohabitation or communal office refrigerators should not cause much trouble. Sometimes, however, it does not matter what you write - the mere act of opening up could cost you a job.

[. . .]

Q. What about blogging anonymously?

A. If your employer can prove that you wrote critical posts, it may be able to dismiss you.

[. . .]

Q. What if you don't use your blog to discuss work?

A. Keeping work issues off your personal blog does not mean that your employer won't hold the blog against you. "It doesn't matter if you blog about skydiving or pornography," said Daniel M. Klein, a partner at the Atlanta law firm Buckley & Klein. "If your employer feels the blog makes you a poor representative of their corporate values, the executives have the freedom to disassociate themselves from you."

Laws prevent employers from acting against employees on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex, age, religion or disability - and, in some places, sexual orientation. Many workers have few other protections, employment lawyers said.

I don't know what to say; I can only sputter something containing the words "free speech, technically, I guess." Unbelievable.

Here's a sampling from my new Jean Ritchie CDs, Mountain Hearth & Home and Jean Ritchie and Doc Watson Live at Folk City, both of which you should buy right now:

What'll I Do With the Baby-O (lyrics) (I hope that in a few years, I'll be playing and singing along to this song in the middle of the night, dancing around in an effort to soothe my fussy baby. Maybe Jodi can use it now. :-))

Jubilee

O Love Is Teasin'

The L and N Don't Stop Here Anymore (very sad)

One More Mile

I've decided to use this disclaimer from G Zombie:

MP3 files are posted for evaluation purposes only. Availability is limited: usually 24 hours. Through this site, I'm trying to share and promote good music with others, who will also hopefully continue to support these artists. Everyone is encouraged to purchase music and concert tickets for the artists you feel merit your hard earned dollars. If you hold copyright to one of these songs and would like the file removed, please let me know.

The more I explore H20 Playlists, the more impressed I am. Prepare for proselytization. You can search the playlists for a specific term and then subscribe to the results via RSS. You can also subscribe to individual playlists if you want to be notified when new items get added. It's clear to me that they want this to be kind of similar to Open CourseWare; many of the playlists are associated with courses -- so far I'm seeing Stanford, Princeton, and Harvard represented a lot. Also, each item on a playlist has a box next to it that you can check. You can add checked items to your library and then make your own playlists from them. They want us to mix up these readings in all kinds of ways!

Here are some of the many neat playlists I've found so far:

User Innovation

Open Education

Public Spaces/Public Spheres

Introduction to Social Anthropology

Cyberlaw

UPDATE: More:

Wayne Marshall's Music Playlist (Good hip-hop and reggae links)

Digital Cities: Urban Processes and Urban Futures in the Information Age

Community Based Production

Women In Business Resources

I'm excited about H20 Playlists:

H2O playlists are more than just a cool, sleek technology -- they represent a new way of thinking about education online. An H2O Playlist is a series of links to books, articles, and other materials that collectively explore an idea or set the stage for a course, discussion, or current event.

H2O Playlists make it easy to:

transform traditional syllabi into interactive, global learning tools

share the reading lists of world-renowned scholars, organizations, and cultural leaders

let interested people subscribe to playlist updates and stay current on their fields

promote an exchange of ideas and expertise among professors, students, and researchers

communicate and aggregate knowledge -- online and offline.

See also their philosophy. They take basic tagging and kick it up a notch; notice -- here's a sample playlist -- how you can leave comments on others' lists, view derivative playlists, rate playlists' influence, and view playlists with the same tags. I love it. Even though I created my own playlist but it wouldn't let me publish it ("An unknown error has occurred."). Oh well, it's still in beta.

UPDATE: It works for me now, and my first playlist is up.

Via Copyfight.

At the ATM in my bank, I found this:

I thought, cool, a find, I'll blog about it. So then I went to Hollywood Video, because I had a coupon, and, despite having never before bought candy at a video store, I was overcome with a craving for a Sparkle Jerry Cherry Laffy Taffy. I grabbed it, paid for it, and opened it as soon as I got in the car. Then I looked at that envelope on my passenger seat, mocking me. I ate the whole 42.5 gram bar of taffy in under a minute.

The Mountain Goats, "This Year." As if it could be any other song.

Okay, okay, it could also be MC Hammer's "Turn This Mutha Out."

Yesterday I installed Firefox 1.0.5 and, like a dolt, didn't keep 1.0.4 around. I'm having the most infuriating problem, one that they're talking about on the forums: I can't open links in new tabs. When I right click and select "Open in new tab," nothing happens. I can't open links in new windows either. I have to copy the URL, open a new tab, and paste it in. I don't know if I can take this anymore. I've tried selecting the option that makes all links open in new tabs, and that didn't work. I tried installing the new version of Tabbrowser Extensions, and that didn't work either. I've looked online and can't find an earlier version of Firefox to download. If you can find a link to a place where I can get 1.0.4, please post it in a comment here. Or maybe they'll fix the problem in this imminent new release.

In a related story, SpreadFirefox.com was hacked.

Three good essays I've read recently:

1. Via Feministe and Strangechord, the article by Vandana Shiva in Ecologist Online. A couple of excerpts:

   If I grow my own food, and do not sell it, then this does not contribute to GDP, and so does not contribute towards ‘growth’. People are therefore perceived as poor if they eat the food they have grown rather than commercially produced and distributed processed junk foods sold by global agri-business. They are seen as poor if they live in self-built housing made form ecologically adapted natural materials like bamboo and mud rather than in cement houses. They are seen as poor if they wear garments manufactured from handmade natural fibres rather than synthetics. Yet sustenance living, which the rich West perceives as poverty, does not necessarily imply a low physical quality of life.

   [. . .]

   Because of dumping and trade liberalisation, farm prices in India are tumbling, meaning that the country’s peasants are losing $26 billion each year; this at a time when ‘development’ is all the while creating markets for costly seeds and agrichemicals. Unable to exist in the world that has been created for them, these now poverty-stricken peasants are committing suicide in their thousands. Patents on medicines increase the cost of Aids drugs from $200 to $20,000, and cancer drugs from $2,400 to $36,000, for a year’s treatment. Water is privatised and global corporations profit to the tune of $1 trillion by selling once free water to the poor. So, too, the $50 billion of ‘aid’ trickling North to South is but a tenth of the $500 billion being sucked South to North thanks to interest payments and other unjust mechanisms in the global economy imposed by the World Bank and the IMF.

   I'm much inclined to trust Shiva's expertise, but I'd be interested to know what sources those numbers came from. At any rate, it doesn't seem right to equate sustenance living with poverty. I would appreciate hearing a libertarian's take on Shiva's essay; I'm thinking here of that exchange between Laura and Megan McArdle a while back.

2. What We Know, by Noam Chomsky. Good stuff that exposes some flaws in the reasoning of some occupants of positions of power. One example:
   

   In 1991, the chief economist of the World Bank wrote an internal memo on pollution, in which he demonstrated that the bank should be encouraging migration of polluting industries to the poorest countries. The reason is that “measurement of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality,” so it is rational for “health impairing pollution” to be sent to the poorest countries, where mortality is higher and wages are lowest. Other factors lead to the same conclusion, for example, the fact that “aesthetic pollution concerns” are more “welfare enhancing” among the rich. He pointed out, accurately, that the logic of his memo is “impeccable,” and any “moral reasons” or “social concerns” that might be adduced “could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization,” so they presumably cannot be relevant.

   The memo was leaked and elicited a storm of protest, typified by the reaction of Brazil’s secretary of the environment, who wrote him a letter saying that “your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane.” The secretary was fired, while the author of the memo became treasury secretary under President Clinton and is now the president of Harvard University.

3. The Power and the Glory: Myths of American exceptionalism, by Howard Zinn. In it, Zinn historicizes "American exceptionalism," the idea that "the United States alone has the right, whether by divine sanction or moral obligation, to bring civilization, or democracy, or liberty to the rest of the world, by violence if necessary," reminding us that it's a long-standing tradition that goes way past the George W. Bush Administration. Chomsky's essay provides some other "okay, but we're exempt from this rule" examples and is a good complement to the Zinn piece. I'll confess, I haven't read any Zinn, but I'd guess that this essay (based on a talk he gave recently at MIT) is a standard representation of the other work he's done. Is that the case?