prolific.org

These are my links for November 17th through November 18th:

• Ginger Anyhow: Text Messages – Embroidered text messages, mapping a relationship
• Marco Grob – Photographer – Beautiful portraits
• Steven Wells: Indie music could learn a lot from American Idol | Music | guardian.co.uk – "In real pop, pretty people who can't sing get pitch correction technology like Pro Tools, and they mime. In indie pop the audience are evidently too stoned, drunk or stupid to tell the difference."
• Alexei Sayle discusses his new novel, Mr Roberts | Books | guardian.co.uk –
• http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:tZ7U4v73isAJ:www.mute.biz/richardhawley/Downloads/Lyrics/Richard_Hawley_Coles_Corner.doc+going+down+town+no+flowers+no+smile&hl=nl&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=nl&lr=lang_en&client=firefox-a – Richard Hawley lyrics. Hmm.
• Martijn van Es – Class of 2001 – Waar zijn ze gebleven, die webloggers van toen?
• Balsamiq Mockups Home | Balsamiq – "Product managers, designers, developers and even clients can now work together in the same tool to quickly iterate over software mockups, before writing code."
• bourbonese qualk archive 2007 – to download

Bono – exercising some damage control – has written to the NME to say he thinks ‘Radiohead were courageous for ‘In Rainbows’ release’ in response to Paul McGuinness’ earlier comments regarding Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ pay-what-you-like release.

McGuinness, who controversially believes ISP’s facilitate music pirating and are thus robbing artists (“…entrepreneurial, hippy values seems to be a disregard for the true value of music.”), had claimed the experiment was a failure and U2 wouldn’t be following their example. Bono disagrees with his manager. According to him Radiohead are ‘courageous and imaginative in trying to figure out some new relationship with their audience.’ Now that’s an example U2 might want to try and follow. Perhaps they could pick Trent Reznor’s brain.

The full letter will appear in today’s edition of the printed version of the NME.

• People still use Corel Draw?
• My next book will be called ‘A small favour…’
• ‘Use drag and drop!’ ‘I don’t know what you mean…’

American citizen Katrina Leung (code name “Parlor Maid”) was born in China but moved to New York (via Hong Kong) when she was 15. She was first recruited by the FBI in the late 70s and became one their top counterintelligence assets.

In 2003 Katrina was charged with being a double agent for China. Her FBI handler J.J. Smith was accused of helping her. Nobody knew they were lovers for 20 years.

One of the bureau’s top Chinese counterintelligence agents, William Cleveland, was assigned to travel to China. It turns out the Chinese are aware of his visit. Cleveland had been betrayed by Parlor Maid. What the FBI didn’t know was that Cleveland too had been her lover for three years.

Even after discovering Parlor Maid was a double agent, both FBI men continued to share classified information with her.

Frontline producer Michael Kirk says: “This film illustrates the lack of management controls, the failure of safeguards, the ‘old boy network’ and the complexities of the relationship between sources and agents that is at the heart of what the FBI does.”

Frontline/PBS documentary: “From China with Love”