Referral briefs*

• roboshop washington: The Shop 2000 in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. It seems the automaton is not that orginal: back in 1959, Florida resident Ben Bush operated a similar contraption, the Selecto-Mat, at St. Petersburg. He even ran into the same issue of convincing local authorities his creation was a vending machine and not a full-fledged shop. Bush sold his operation to a third party that went belly-up afterwards. The Selecto-Mat operated for a total of two years.
• "sometimes a good cigar:" Ah yes, that old quote attributed to the father of psychoanalysis. "Sometimes a good cigar is just a good cigar." Or was this search from a client of Freud Tobacco?
• "on english" safire: Must have been looking for "On Language," Safire's column for the NY Times Magazine. Yesterday's was on Bush's colorful regionalisms while regarding Hussein ("For 11 long years, Saddam Hussein has sidestepped, crawfished, wheedled out of any agreement he has made... He is stiffing the world").

* not "underpants"

Last night I watched on TV an airing of Bell, Book and Candle, a romantic comedy with Kim Novak and James Stewart which was originally released the same year as that other film where they famoulsy paired up. In case you haven't seen this film, the summary would read something like this:

Hip witch (Novak) living in Manhattan, bored on the eve of Christmas, puts a spell on her publisher neighbor (Stewart) and makes him fall for her. Hard. So much so that he finds himself in love and asks her to marry him. She accepts but, being a witch, doesn't (cannot) love him. Or so she believes. When the publisher discovers the hex and undoes it with a counter-spell, she goes on a fit trying to bewitch him again, only she can't this time: she has also fallen in love, turning her human and taking away her magical powers. Eventually, the publisher finds out her human condition and love for him. Film ends leaving them in a passionate embrace, sure to get married soon after.

A review I read says of the film it "[dallies] with the fantasy of the free, playful, capricious woman, although ultimately [it is a] divided [film], caught between carefree silliness (represented by the woman) and sobriety and social responsibility (the man). Invariably the plot involves the woman sacrificing her powers and accepting the ultimate arbiter of masculine subordination — marriage."

Yet from the beginning the movie seems to equate the world of witchcraft with the era's hipster scene: The main place of reunion for Manhattan's witches and warlocks is the Zodiac, a nightclub Novak describes at some point as "a dive." Novak's character makes a living selling African curios, and her brother (played by Jack Lemmon) plays the bongoes in the Zodiac's band. Weight that against a monologue delivered by Novak explaining how witches lead lonely lifes, being unable to fall love due to their supernatural condition, and the movie seems to talk with a condescending tone about those cool cats listening to those crazy new rythms. Were/are hipsters really so above it all that they were/are uncapable of any emotion? "Ring the bell, close the book, snuff the candle."

A funny bit from Farhad Manjoo's article on anti-globalization activists recycling old computers:

When you build a machine out of old parts... problems are certain to crop up. The computer that [Eddie] Nix built in front of me, for example, doesn't show any signs of life when he attempts to boot it up -- the screen is blank.

"Must be a bad video card," Nix smiles, and goes off to find a new one. A minute later, he's back with a new card, and, after searching for the right screwdriver for a minute, he fits the card into place.

He starts up the computer, looks at the screen ... still nothing.

"Alex," he yells to someone walking by, "where's a stash of semireliable video cards?"

"There aren't any, man," says Alex.

"Great," says Nix. "Here's Mr. Salon coming to see our project and we don't have any video cards."

Let's see the people at Wired News report something as fun as that.