The lengths to which reviewers from all over the country, representing publications of various ideological shadings, have gone in order to diminish the specifically gay element is striking ...

It seems clear by now that Brokeback has received the attention it's been getting, from critics and audiences alike, partly because it seems on its surface to make normal what many people think of as gay experience— bringing it into the familiar "heart of America." ... The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they're not really homosexual—that they're more like the heart of America than like "gay people"—you're pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed.

—Daniel Mendelsohn, New York Review of Books

The (bad) president of Harvard resigned under pressure.

Notes from Toyota-Land, Darius Mehri.
Darius Mehri provides a book version of his diary from three years spent as an engineer at a company in the Toyota system. His writing is very readable, but a bit shaky in structure: it reads just like a diary expanded to a book. The near-total lack of narrative makes it a bit disjointed but even more credible; nothing seems to have been massaged around to make a better story.

His thesis is that the Japanese factory system does not deserve much of the praise and envy directed towards it: the admirable statistics are built on falsified numbers, such as unpaid overtime and dangerously high line speeds coupled with coverups of injuries and deaths. His Japanese workplace is depicted as racist, hierarchical, utterly sexist, and stubborn-minded. In other words, it's roughly like anywhere else, and substantially behind the times in some areas.

I would recommend the book to anyone remotely interested in the subject, or about to get on a plane; it's short, easy to digest, and a page-turner despite its flaws.

Nekropolis, Maureen McHugh
As is standard for McHugh, this is a stunningly humane story. It's fairly short; it's about people in trying situations; and I was very glad to have read it.

86 evangelical Christian leaders have decided to back a major initiative to fight global warming, saying "millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors." ... The statement calls for federal legislation that would require reductions in carbon dioxide emissions through "cost-effective, market-based mechanisms" — a phrase lifted from a Senate resolution last year and one that could appeal to evangelicals, who tend to be pro-business. The statement, to be announced in Washington, is only the first stage of an "Evangelical Climate Initiative" including television and radio spots in states with influential legislators, informational campaigns in churches, and educational events at Christian colleges.

Drawbacks:

• You have to edit X files and restart X
• The bezels between screens are thicker and include buttons and lights
• The moust cursor is about double-sized, for no apparent reason.

1. Prerequisite: Dual monitors as my earlier post about dual monitors.
2. Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and put these lines in the Section "Device" section:

   # Use LeftOf for landscape orientation
   #	Option		"TwinViewOrientation" "LeftOf"
   # Use Below for portrait orientation
   	Option		"TwinViewOrientation" "Below"

3. In KDE Control Center > Peripherals > Display, set "Orientation" to Left (90 Degrees). You can also accomplish this with the nvidia-settings program that is part of the driver install package.
4. Restart X
5. Physically rotate both monitors to portrait mode. Watch out for the cables while you do this.
6. Get some new wallpaper that fits.

On Thursday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld drew a parallel between Chavez and Adolf Hitler.

"He's a person who was elected legally — just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally — and then consolidated power," Rumsfeld said in a National Press Club appearance.—Associated Press