Bought a Mac. Dual G4 1.25GHz tower. First Mac in the house in more than 10 years.

Hideously expensive, but a gorgeous piece of engineering.

If I have an efficient day, I’ll put power to it today to make sure it’s not DOA. Then I’ve got a bunch of stuff to throw into it — memory, a second optical drive, another hard disk or two, and a D/A converter — not to mention pillaging and moving the homebrew tower that’s currently in its space. (Anyone want to buy a truly excellent steel full-height tower enclosure before it goes on eBay?)

Anyway, it’ll be a few days before I get the Mac in place and spinning. I’ll keep y’all posted.

New York is one of two finalists for the US bid to host the 2012 Summer Olympics. (San Francisco is the other. As if…) The city fathers are apparently spending the weekend filming a video to send to the Proper Authorities to show how wonderful a host Fun City can be.

To make the point, a faux torch run was staged today at three points in Manhattan, and full-dress ticker-tape parade is slated for tomorrow through the lower Broadway Canyon of Heroes. (What would they have done if the Yankees had prevailed, rather than engaging in an unlikely fold south of LA? Had two parades within a month?)

And tonight, without any advance publicity, there were fireworks in the East River. Big fireworks. Noisy fireworks. LOUD fireworks. Drew a lot of people, not all of them entirely sure when the barrage started that this was all for Entertainment Purposes Only. <sarcasm> After all, it’s not like there is any stock footage anywhere of fireworks going off over lower Manhattan. </sarcasm>

I think it’s a fine idea to have the Olympics here in 2012, and I’m looking forward to major fireworks off Lower Manhattan every day during the Games. Maybe by then my blood pressure will have returned to normal.

Yes, I’ve missed you, too. (Where has the time gone?) Stuff’s been a tad hectic hereabouts with the onset of Fall.

Anyway, more to come.

Back in 1952, composer John Cage wrote a piece of music called 4’33”, which consisted of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. Infrequently performed, it is nonetheless famous.

Far more recently, British songwriter (notice the semantic difference between “composer” and “songwriter”) Simon Batt recorded an original song entitled A One Minute Silence on an album by his classical rock group The Planets. The song was, sure enough, a minute of silence. In what was probably a tribute, Batt credited the song to Batt/Cage.

That was probably a mistake. Cage’s estate came after Batt for plagiarism. CNN says Batt wound up writing a six-figure check to the John Cage Trust.

From CNN:

Before the start of the court case, Batt had said: “Has the world gone mad? I’m prepared to do time rather than pay out. We are talking as much as ｣100,000 in copyright.

“Mine is a much better silent piece. I have been able to say in one minute what Cage could only say in four minutes and 33 seconds.”

The kicker: the piece has been released as a single. Would that it crosses over to American radio…

Later: The New Yorker goes into a little more depth, much of it along the lines of Mark Johnson’s comments to this post. The magazine expires links, but check this:

Batt … has tweaked the Cage people further by registering hundreds of other silent compositions, ranging in length from one second to ten minutes. “I couldn’t get four minutes and thirty-three seconds, obviously, but I got everything else,” he said. He is proudest of two of his registered copyrights: four minutes and thirty-two seconds and four minutes and thirty-four seconds. “If there’s ever a Cage performance where they come in a second shorter or longer, then it’s mine,” he said.

From the AP, via CNN:

WASHINGTON (AP) — There are more differences between a chimpanzee and a human being than once believed, according to a new genetic study.

The Museum of Sex opens next week at Fifth Avenue and 27th Street. The Catholic League is already upset.

Ad Age magazine is reporting that pop singer Lance Bass, booted from the Russian crew of an upcoming space station mission when his sponsors didn’t come up with the cash in time, is going after all. Corporate sponsors Radio Shack and, possibly, Pepsi have come into the deal.

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s beyond great that Radio Shack is sponsoring this. Who better to sponsor a geek dream but geek heaven itself? The only thing better would have been Fry’s Electronics — except that a lot of the parts for the Russian spacecraft probably already come from Fry’s….

I could have told you this was coming. Gruner + Jahr, the publishing arm of the German media giant Bertelsman, repackaged the failing 127-year-old McCalls magazine around the actress and comedienne Rosie O’Donnell. Rosie — host of a popular daytime chat show — appeared to be pretty involved (or as involved as a daily talk show host can be) in setting the tone for a new-ish kind of women’s magazine.

About a year in, Rosie ditches the TV show, comes out of the closet and seemingly stops taking her meds. She and G+J had some very public arguments about the direction of the magazine and the hiring of a new editor.

Finally, today, Rosie quit. The magazine, apparently, will fold. G+J, which entrusted a century-old title to her, is fit to be tied, and the vigor of its memo goes well beyond the “shocked, shocked” tone that one might have expected given the slow-motion nature of this crash.

[Later: the NYPost, whose coverage of the magazine industry is excellent, has this story about the folding. Must have been some morning. Note also the comments of Martin Walker, a highly clueful consultant who rarely speaks publicly.]

Giving McCalls to Rosie was a desperate move, tied to the popularity of someone in an industry evanescent by its very nature. That the arrangement blew up should not be a surprise to anyone.

Now the lawyers will get richer.

From ABCNews’s excellent daily political briefing, The Note (registration may be required):

Roll Call ‘s Henry reported yesterday, “Exercising his civic duty in Tuesday’s Democratic primary for governor, [Sen. Bill] Kerry [D-MA] showed up at a Boston polling place at 7 a.m. ÷ only to find people milling about because the machines weren’t working. An aide tells HOH that Kerry slipped on his eyeglasses, spent the next 15 minutes reading the manual for the voting machines and fixed the problem. With order restored, the crowd started clapping.”

Kerry for President! Remember: 41 didn’t even know what a bar-code scanner was….

More from The Note. You may well know that Arnold Schwarzenegger has become active in California Republican politics, no doubt horrifying his in-laws. The Note points to an L.A. Weekly item to the effect that Ah-nuld is testing the waters for a write-in campaign in November’s gubernatorial election.

The Note debunks the report, but misses the obvious. A write-in? For S-c-h-w-a-r-z-e-n-e-g-g-e-r? Against candidates D-a-v-i-s and S-i-m-o-n? How accurate does the spelling need to be on a write-in ballot, anyway?

I’m hesitant to even touch this subject because I know it’s far more complex than I want to deal with. Suffice to say that everyone agrees (or at least gives lip service to the idea) that breast milk is the preferred food for infants. The reality is somewhat different.

There’s an interesting story in today’s NYTimes about the maker of Similac formula putting its logo on 300,000 copies of a book from the American Academy of Pediatrics. The book, which will be distributed free to new mothers, advocates breast-feeding.

“For those of us who wrote the book, this is thievery,” said Dr. Lawrence M. Gartner, the former chairman of the University of Chicago’s pediatrics department and chairman of the academy’s executive committee on breast-feeding. “The impression that people have when they see the book is that Ross is a supporter. This corrupts efforts to promote breast-feeding.”

It turns out that this sort of thing is not unusual. Drug companies routinely put their logos of stuff that they give away to interested parties; the practice even extends to medical textbooks.

The World Health Organization and the pediatrics academy both have a policy that discourages hospitals from giving free samples of formula as going-away gifts to new moms. The policy is almost universally ignored.

There are three big players in the world of baby formula:

• Ross, a division of Abbott Laboratores, makes Similac


• Mead Johnson, a division of Bristol-Meyers Squibb, makes Enfamil


• Nestle makes Carnation Good Start

Breast-feeding advocates aren’t wild about any of them, but Nestle — probably because of its global reach and strong presence in under-developed nations — appears to have attracted particular wrath, including a long-running boycott.