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| March 19, 2006 |
Discovered the basement trove of the main San Jose
library, been enjoying the periodicals -- great
having such ready access to old magazines. This
mirrored wooden sculpture covers two walls down
there, with low gray metal cabinets of microfilm
between. Clicking this one's a must.
|
| March 16, 2006 |
Thursday evening -- it's 'Game Night' for a some of my
most loyal readers, when they congregate at the purple
Wunderland house. But for me, it's become iconographic
for a rather different reason -- this is when I attend
Japanese class, one of the many evening offerings at
Palo Alto High School ("Paly" in the local argot, not
to be confused with California Polytechnic aka
Cal Poly, that state school
down in SLO with a satellite campus in Pomona).
Pre-class, I'm across the street at the open-air
Town and Country mall, having my usual cup of Peets
decaf after an $8 "Combination D" from the nearby
Sushi House. For any portion of the half-hour before
class spent driving, the car radio's tuned to the
weekly broadcast of
Pacific
Time. Paly's day-time Japanese classroom, where
we meet also, is decorated with pictures of Mount
Fuji, anime posters, and inscruitable
projects a bit beyond our level. Sensei is a
small, energetic woman from the southern island of
Kyushu, who's been in America for five years. I love
her, 'cept when she gets up real close -- then
she's kinda scarey. (Also, when she makes us sing.)
After the two-hour session I'm hungry again so the
Thursday tradition concludes with a double-burger
pause at the In-n-Out just off the 101 on the way home.
She's
from Away is a cartoonist from NC, now living in
Halifax.
The Girls Next Door in the current New
Yorker -- Joan Acocella reviews Hugh Hefner and
The Playmate Book: Six Decades of Centerfolds.
Previously posted Clooney link is gone --
explanation,
the Huffington apologizes for making it appear that
George is a blogger.
|
| March 9, 2006 |
Sleep
position gives personality clue. I'm somewhere between
the Yearner and Fetus. The Log and Freefaller seem very
uncomfortable -- when I was much younger I'd sleep on my
stomache, but never with a pillow; can't, anymore, since my
head turned 90° for more than a little while gets
uncomfortable.
Revenge
of the Nerds, an Akihabara update. When I was
last
there that Yodobashi was a construction site.
Hoping to return in October... and for this journey,
the trip outside Tokyo will be to Kanazawa, on the
Japan Sea.
Living
Without Television by Christopher Westley. Very much
like my situation -- they have a TV, for videotapes; what
they actually live without is cable.
Scenes We'd Like To See: Steve Jobs instructing the
Apple faithful to
"Get a Life!"
|
| March 8, 2006 |
The
Scarlet Plague is a short story by Jack London, a
tale of San Francisco set sixty years after the apocalyptic
depopulation of 2013 -- similar to the The Wild
Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson, and of course
Earth Abides.
Back in August 2004,
posted some linkage
concerning Dubai, the country in the news now because of
the ports deal the shrub's supporting, which many
Republicans oppose.
World-Beating
Buildings in Business Week is mostly
illustrations of models, planned projects in this
obscenely wealthy emerite. The last one is their
Space Port.
The Kansas Cosmosphere has just unveiled
a
stained glass tribute to the 17 fallen astronauts.
The
Nine Most-Wanted
missing Time Capsules.
|
| March 6, 2006 |
If
you're a moron, this is the time and place to
be alive -- Gore Vidal on the Academy Awards,
etc. (As usual, I didn't watch, could care less.)
Mark Ellingham, founder of Rough Guides, and Tony Wheeler,
creator of Lonely Planet, urge fellow travellers to
fly
less and stay longer.
The
Treasury and You is a followup on large transaction
reporting to DHS, an insider's details.
|
| March 3, 2006 |
We're already aware that any US bank transaction in
excess of $5K is reported to government entities, a
data flow inacted as part of WoD surveillance. According to
Pay
too much and you could raise the alarm, credit
card payments in excess of this amount could be
delayed, until the DHS approves. In Idaho,
DHS
hassles vehicle owner for bumperstickers. And
in the Capitol,
Senate
Rolls Over on Patriot Act.
For the Love of Big Brother
I postponed reading Nineteen Eighty-Four until the
year of its title, found it a thoroughly depressing experience,
definitely relevant in our age of perpetual war. To get
into the Zeitgeist I was searching for an image
of Big Bro from the John Hurt-Richard Burton film,
to use as the desktop background in order to make my
at-work monitor resemble Winston's. Couldn't find
anything adequate, the best one was cropped and anyway
it was too creepy, those eyes peering out. Interesting
what
comes up while searching on Big Brother -- to
Generation iPod he's all about the
Ridley
Scott Macintosh commercial 'everybody' saw during
the Superbowl. Seems the man ranting on-screen is
Big Brother (although he doesn't have any apparent attributes
I'd consider lovable) but Andy thought he could be the story's
Trotsky-esque Goldstein character. Requiring a refresher on
the novel's details, I naturally looked to Wikipedia.
· Nineteen Eighty-Four
· Goldstein's book
· the Macintosh ad
Since the version of the commercial I know (also courtesy
Andy)
is probably a copy of a copy, the resolution's kinda
murky; perhaps that's the reason I never perceived the Apple
logo on her chest -- to me, she's always symbolized the
LA Olympics. No, wait -- the wiki says it's not a logo
but a "Picasso-style picture of Apple's Macintosh computer."
Hmpf. Well, since I can't see that either, we'll just imagine the
Olympics
logo there -- a common sight on the commemorative license
plates, even three years afterwards when I moved to LA, but
now just a memory.
Chris Glass:
How
to catch a mouse without a mousetrap -- instead, use
Mr Cardboard Tube! Humane, too.
The Chicago Tribune's Steve Johnson posted his
50
Best Web sites, a list which includes Ask.MetaFilter!
Note his tasteful inclusion of Sherman and Mr Peabody.
|
| February 24, 2006 |
First noticed Saltair in a magazine article photo about
the
lake's mid-1980s flooding, which didn't identify
the curious, submerged building. Later, I saw the 1962
Twilight Zone-y cult film "Carnival of Souls" so got to
know the second incarnation, in its derilect state. Several
years ago the details were revealed via internet searching,
but that was before
Google
Images. Scroll down to the bottom of the wikipedia
page
for a pair of fascinating, external links -- the
full story, as related by locals. The first Saltair
must've been quite the experience, but that Giant Racer
roller-coaster -- incredible, and to have seen it blown
down -- the mind reels. What's irritating is my Dad says
we saw it -- must've been the time we went swimming in
the Great Salt Lake in 1964. I certainly remember that
swim but recall nothing of a big abandoned pleasure
palace on a pier. (Maybe I was too young for it to
register.) When I was driving across in '97 I approached
its
neighborhood at sunset. Pulling off I-80 and parking near
the third incarnation, now high and dry (and appropriately
deserted), I wandered 'round, but found no remains of the
previous structures. Back in the car, night had
fallen and I continued motoring west, accompanied by
comet Hale-Bopp, visible through my passenger window
out over the Bonneville Salt Flats. I interpreted its
pointing towards California as an auspicous sign.
Shedding
Light on Shadowland, the Truth About
Frances Farmer, by Jeffrey Kauffman. I too thought
the book was gospel -- now we know better, the
lobotomy story was bogus! (If you've never you really
ought to see her "Come and Get It" sometime.)
|
| February 21, 2006 |
What's that about owning a Mexican, but not a Canadian?
Details
at snopes: Leviticus & Dr Laura.
Suitable
for Framing by David Sedaris from the current
New Yorker -- Art, North Carolina, and
dividing up the parentals' estate.
The
Mystery of Duane Reade answers my Manhattan
question, noticed on my first visit in over a
decade: what's this store everywhere named Duane
Reade? (Still unsure about how to pronounce the
last name -- like "read"? Or ray-ah-de?)
|
| February 20, 2006 |
A pair of red sights from the weekend:
After passing the lit-up Oakland near the darkened
Paramount en route to a film in the
Naruse
festival at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, saw a
bicycling girl with one arm extended, carefully holding a square
Bo
Diddley guitar by its neck. On Haight Street the next day,
this pseudo-chav in a red tracksuit appeared in the open
doorway of Escape from New York Pizza, playing full-volume
static on his boom-box and screaming while I was
having my slice. A little later he was "entertaining" the people
lined up at the movie theater with a spaz dance and I said
"Loser!" when walking past, as we made eye-contact.
|
| February 17, 2006 |
Something Old, Something New -- a brief mention of the
current music. The clockwork sounds of Austin's
Ice
Cream Creatures (got their by-mail
new
CDR); and Hank Williams. Always heard about
him but never really had any direct exposure until now,
courtesy the library. What an amazing talent... lots of
the tunes are familiar, of course, from other artists'
covers.
A couple headlines, local news, East and West. In the
Washington Post,
Policing
Porn Is Not Part of Job Description -- who knew
Monkey County has its own Homeland Security Dept? And
with no terrorists handy, a couple of its eager beavers
performed a spot inspection of library patrons' internet
displays. Fortunately, saner heads prevailed. Out on
the Coast,
Surveillance
Cameras To Monitor Promenade, Pier -- 3rd Street
and the Santa Monica Pier will be wired and monitored
after suspicious people were observed taking pictures
of some of the facilities there. Related:
What
Happened To My Country? by atomic veteran Steve
Osborn. Also, Garrison Keillor says War on (Soft) Drugs
A
Foul Tragedy.
The tally on my
poll
had a big surge the past day or so. Mozzarella's knocked
Cheddar out of the number one position, and my current
fave Gruyere was in second place for a long time but no
longer. Note that as of this writing nobody's given
Havarti, Queso Blanco or Limburger a single vote.
|
| February 16, 2006 |
About
the Tom Corbett Series of science fiction from the
early 1950s. I know many have fond memories of these books,
but they weren't available to me, growing up. Later, I
struggled through the first volume while idling in the
waiting room at the Santa Monica courthouse (made famous
a few years later by OJ) until being rejected from Jury
Duty. (I'm always dismissed by the Prosecution.) The
dustjacket art, illustrations, environments and characters
all look promising, but what I found was a lot of faulty
science and bad writing. With Willy Ley as Tech Advisor,
how could this be? Dunno.. maybe author Carey Rockwell
improved as the series progressed but I don't care, would
recommend instead something like EE&nsbp;"Doc" Smith's
Lensmen
or a
Heinlein
juvenile. Alex Van Zelfden assembled a tantalyzing
summary of the Space Cadet, but I repeat: you have been warned.
When
Stupid People Won't Shut Up -- Scalzi on George
Deutsch, formerly of NASA.
|
| February 13, 2006 |
Probably the last photo from my no-longer-recent
jaunt to Europe to appear here. It's Berlin, in the
Potsdammer Platz, and I thought it was a
Dan
Flavin installation, but actually much more interesting,
since each fluorescent tube is a pixel! Unfortunately I
was a month early, SPOTS hadn't finished
City
Gaze yet. More info about it at
We
Make Money, Not Art.
In contrast, some historical German art --
pre-1933
Nazi Posters.
LA's
Future is Up in the Air is an editorial in the
Times by Ray Bradbury promoting monorails as
traffic solution. Hope it's still available for you,
their links usually expire in a week or two. The
accompanying futuristic illustration
(Get
Set for the 300mph Sky Train!) fascinated
me when I first saw it on the cover of a Sunday
supplement, while visiting my grandparents in 1963.
(The original's in color -- thought I'd posted a link
to it, somewhere, earlier, but havn't been able to
locate.) Related:
LA's
Worst Transit Decision. Not really related, but
also at monorails.org: another
backyard
project, this one for puppies!
|
| February 11, 2006 |
Dvorak on
the
new Crappy-Looking Olympic Medals. He thinks
"AOL" when he sees something resembling a Compact
Disc -- what a peculiar reflex. Sure, their disks
are ubiquitous, but just a teeny percentage of all
the rest.
Excellent
"Ask the Pilot" in Salon yesterday.
(Worth sitting through their commercial, easily
bypassed via the magic of tabbed browsing.)
[The LEO] makes sure to remind me ... that "we live in a
different world now." Not to put undue weight on the
cheap prose of patriotic convenience, but few things are
more repellant than that oft-repeated catchphrase.
There's something so pathetically submissive about
it -- a sound bite of such defeat and capitulation.
Airport security dislikes his taking pictures -- this
has become threatening now, suspicious;
I have also been
detained, briefly, for wielding a camera
(although not at an aerodrome). Question:
What was it exactly, which linked photography with
terrorism? Or even, just 'plain-vanilla' crime?
Cartoons
and Provocation -- John Sugg provides the story's
context: conservative Danish bigots fanning the
flames of hatred.
|
| February 9, 2006 |
Good
Jon
Carroll today -- he mentions that Garry Wills
piece I linked to last Tuesday. Also, the
Unasked
Question in the Domestic Spying
Debate, by Greg Mitchell.
As tax time approaches, you may be considering
charitable donations. Of course, they can find a way
to spend your money any time of the year, but if you
have concerns about where your donation actually goes,
this
tool can be quite useful.
|
| February 7, 2006 |
The
Art of Propaganda -- paintings from North Korea,
of Great [departed] Leader Kim il Sung, plus -- The
Great Mother. As you explore the two galleries here's
a pair of captions whose images I found especially
remarkable:
"Taking care of the foot soldiers" and
"She defeated a bad person who had been
harassing children."
Another quote (but I lost the source!)
If I wanted to be condescended to by someone less
intelligent than me I'd go to the indie record store.
-- a reaction to the shrub's performance
at the Capitol a week ago.
Technical enlightenment in O'Reilly Network's
'What
Is...' pages -- summaries of new stuff like
the BlackBerry, C#, Flickr, Greasemonkey, Ruby on
Rails, Skype, and a whole lot more.
All
Sojourners Can Feel Hua -- NY Times
article about Chinatown. In general, and specifically,
the old one in Manhattan vs. the new one in Flushing.
|
| February 6, 2006 |
About
George Deutsch, the Young Republican apparatchik
in NASA's Public Affairs Office. More about his installation
(as well as the caricatures of the Prophet) from John Scalzi, in
Prioritizing
the Idiots.
Kurt Vonnegut's
Blues
for America.
The
Peekaboo Paradox -- what to rent for your pre-K birthday
party in Maclean, or Ward 3 -- a bouncy castle or The Great
Zucchini? (Note that the bulk of this article's on the last
page.) Related, indirectly, and excellent:
Million-Dollar
Murray, by Malcolm Gladwell, in the current
New Yorker --
Why problems like homelessness
may be easier to solve than manage.
|
| February 5, 2006 |
Reading
Cruiser
Scout, Paul McKinley's fascinating auto-bio, a
sailor-aviator who shipped out on the San
Francisco just before Pearl Harbor, flew
in the battle for Guadalcanal and had a little
house with his wife in Oakland. Made me realize,
don't know the colors & shapes alphabet of the maritime
signal
flags, so getting familiar -- these spell out
R·A·S·H.
|
| February 3, 2006 |
The
outrage continues. Heard a British guy on the
BBC last night in dialog with some Islamic cleric,
trying to pin him down -- just what needs to
be done to satisfy the offended? The newspapers have
already apologized... no clear answer, in response.
First made aware of the problem in 1977; Erik Sofge
reports on the "The Message" and its discontents in
Mohammed
in the movies. Even with the taboo, the Prophet has been
pictured for centuries, a great many example at the
Mohammed
image archive.
Almost all of them valid,
Why?
Why? Why? -- we have questions.
My experimental first Mr Poll --
What's
Your Cheese? Vote early and often.
|
| February 1, 2006 |
Reminded of Charles Addams' "Death Ray,
Fiddlesticks" cartoon, but couldn't find online. Since
I recently photocopied a bunch out of a New
Yorker compendium from the library, scanned &
posted it -- because I
noticed this weird, vaguely-similar illustration in
some free New Age rag I picked up
("Vision")
and this one was easy to locate:
The
Healing Light. The artist,
Ray Ceasar, more in a
slideshow
of his work. (I liked his "Bubbles" also.)
Look to the Wikipedia for
blasphemous
Danish cartoon enlightenment, and uproar details. A
casual glance might read the title as "Mohammed's
Angst" however 'ansigt' means "face" or maybe,
opinion (as in die Ansicht, auf Deutsch). They've
frozen that page -- the devout keep deleting the
image.
Short, excellent, reprinted from the Miami Herald --
Avoiding
the Hard Questions by Robert Steinback. And yesterday,
Here's
What Really Happened -- Getting Busted at the
SotU by Cindy Sheehan.
Some
things you did not know about Japan... and
one more picture, for the season -- just a stranger's
random photo, posted on flickr:
Chinatown
New Years.
|
| January 30, 2006 |
The entrance to the Burbank, an inoperative movie palace
in an odd, unincorporated pocket of San Jose. Click, zoom,
and appreciate the hexagonal mirrors in the doors, and the
terrazzo.
Another view, of the
towering sign and marquee. Nothing else today, just
a couple quotes.
From Jared Diamond's short interview at the Sierra Club,
Societies
Choose to Fail or Succeed --
The most difficult values to jettison are those that have
helped you in the past. You're inclined to cling to them.
and from an excellent
review
by Garry Wills of Jimmy Carter's new book, Our
Endangered Values --
There is now an inverse proportion between religiosity
and sincerity.
|
| January 27, 2006 |
The
World's 12 Best New Buildings, at Artinfo.
In today's Slate,
Cinema
Purgatorio -- Bryan Curtis on the horrors of
art houses. We have Crinklers out here, too. In
fact, I got one to stop, once -- an elderly party,
seemingly doing it unconsciously, finally reined in
and disarmed by his companion, when she noticed my glare.
A trio of oddities from the news wire: Florida
Woman
Becomes Quadruple Amputee After Giving Birth. Der Spiegel
reports
on French right-wingers serving "identity soup" to the
local poor (pork being the key ingrediant of their broth).
And in Australia,
Falling
Banana Kills Woman -- not because it fell from a
great height, but because it scratched her. So
be careful.
Not in the news, although it should have been:
the Gonzales dissent at GU.
|
| January 25, 2006 |
An essay from 1995, by William Snyder:
Star
Trek: A Phenomenon and Social Statement on the
1960s,. More SF, kinda --
Time
Machine Cuba. Like me, William Gibson
found his way into science fiction via HG Wells in
Classics Illustrated although I think he
confuses the black-and-yellow Fallout Shelter symbol
with the triangular red white & blue Civil Defense
logo. Tom Sanders'
Conelrad
page has details and an example of a radio dial with a
variation but I recall the little triangles on AM
radios... ironic how it's similar to another
50s logo, for EC comics.
At the bottom there's a link to a 1999 Wired article
about his obsession with eBay, and collecting old watches.
'Sniping' is mentioned, a term I discovered only this week,
although I'm certainly familiar with the practice, from
my own biddings there. In other auction news, 'way back
in my earliest of bloggings there was
linkage about the
GM Futurliners, complete with a photo I snapped of one
parked off Ventura in the San Fernando Valley. Last Saturday
the completely restored Futurliner #12 went for $4.32M! A
great
site was created to publicize this offering.
In the Monthly Review,
What's
the Matter with Ohio? -- James Straub on Unions and
Evangelicals in the Rust Belt. Short answer seems to be,
Fear of Homos. Related: the Beast revamped his
Fifty
Most Loathsome Americans listing for 2005.
|
| January 23, 2006 |
Back from a fast trip south, mostly to see the
Ecstasy
show at the Temporary Contemporary. Its neighborhood
(adjacent to Little Tokyo) has changed a lot since I'd
visit the Museum of Neon Art down there, early on in my
California experience. (For a detailed flashback read my
1990 recollection of
A Trip Downtown.) Way
more buildings, no more vacant lots, and the
MoNA
has moved away. But this show was great -- the reason I
went was to inspect an
Erwin
Redl but was most glad to catch "City Glow" -- a
five-screen, seven-minute animation by
Chiho
Aoshima. Last year I 'just' missed the
Little
Boy show at the Japan Society, in New York; they
used pictures from her world for publicity
posters
in the subway. Gotta quote the show's
program, concerning the music:
a highly nuanced
soundtrack of ambient sounds and electronic
murmers. Accompanied by Shari who liked
Erwin Redl's piece the best, one of his Matrix
installations -- a darkened room filled with a
crystaline grid of LEDs, pale, old-fashioned green;
they looked like static fireflies. (The diodes were
strung along vertical strands, measured very
carefully.) Driving away, I passed the iconic Coke
bottling plant on Central -- since it was nearing
sunset, the golden illumination demanded this photo.
On my way home yesterday, paused again on the
Ridge
Route -- love it up there. Hung out for an
hour, pulled over, reading and knitting, another
vehicle going by every five or ten minutes. Highly
recommended, a half-hour detour for northbound
I-5 travelers. Just take the "Parker Road - Castaic"
exit and you're on it. Then, left onto the Templin
Highway, and you're back on the freeway.
But the Old Ridge Route is
closed, due to storms so severe last year an
adjacent electrical pylon was toppled; I wanted to
investigate this. If you keep going on straight after
the Templin, this barrier appears just after the "End
of County Maintained Road" sign, and the asphalt crumbles
away -- so glad I completed the journey through (to
the road to Lancaster), just before the '04 election.
Another pause, at a Burger King somewhere out in the San
Joaquin. Unlike McDonald's, I find their burgers (barely)
tolerable but this stop wasn't for food -- BK's the guaranteed
no-hassle source for boiling water, as the coffee's right
next to the serve-yosef soda fountain, and always has a
"Hot Water" spigot in addition to the "Regular" and the
"Decaf" taps. I fill my thermos and scram -- out in the car,
adding the green tea bag. Almost went back in with the
TV-B-Gone
from my glove compartment, on an errand of mercy -- what a
rude place to eat. Several monitors were hung from the ceiling,
all active and very loud, tuned to CNN where the newsreader
was practically hollering about Iran's Nuclear Threat!
|
| January 19, 2006 |
Matthew Brörsma distills the
Essence
of Geek. ADD, aesthetics, and Aspergers are
all mentioned. Related: the
Nerd,
Geek or Dork Test -- says I'm "Pure Nerd"
but with the ratios of 52% Nerd, 34% Geek, and
47% Dork, I wonder about that alleged purity.
According to the NY Times, Trader
Joes is opening their first Manhattan store this Spring,
in Union Square. Due to Empire State liquor laws, their
wine will be confined to a separate operation next door.
In other specialty gourmet news, I've been a fan of
Penzeys
Spices for several years now. Although I've visited
their St. Louis store, everything Penzey in my spice rack
came via mail-order. My latest shipment arrived yesterday,
and a study of the latest catalog reveals how they've
embarked on an aggressive expansion -- stores no longer
just in the midwest but Grand Central Station and even
LA! (Well, Torrance -- Del Amo, from the address.)
Another slideshow making the rounds:
End
of the Line. It's about the shipbreakers of
Bangladesh, familiar from those
Edward
Burtynsky photographs. A
Baltimore
Sun article describes the practice,
and some more photos of
Chittagong
with explanatory text by photographer Michael Reichmann.
|
| January 17, 2006 |
A Business Week slide show:
Ten
Wonders of the New China. Random China fact: the
country will be building 108 new airports between 2004 and
2009. Bonus (a random flickr image): the new
Mikimoto
Ginza 2 building, designed by Toyo Ito.
Shutting
Themselves In by Maggie Jones, about the agoraphobic
Japanese hikikomori syndrome. (After reading
that, I had to get familiar with Radiohead -- both copies
of "OK Computer" were checked out but the library had
a "Kid A" for me. I remember handling this disk in
Tower Records, when it was new, but deciding against
giving it a chance.)
Detailed,
Subjective
US-Germany comparison from 2004. (The peevish
author is a German who's been here since '92.)
|
| January 16, 2006 |
|
New Stuff:
Not a new product anymore -- in fact, no Personal Flying
Machine has ever really been available, but Bill Suitor
was the usual 'pilot' of Bell Labs' Rocket Belt. Brian
Malow tells his story in
Where
the Hell is my Jetpack? A pair of new developments,
possible alternatives: the Japanese
Gen
H-4 Minicopter, and the
Ultralight
Flying Scooter.
|
| January 14, 2006 |
Lack
of curiosity is curious -- J. Peder Zane on the
current crop of college kids.
It's not that they don't know, it's that they don't
care about what they don't know.
Reminds me of that brief interchange in George Pal's
"Time Machine" --
Rod Taylor, as the Traveler through Time:
Curiosity has died, perhaps even courtesy has
died, but I have come a long way, and there are
a few things I'd like to know.
Bored Male Eloi:
The
film's IMDb's trivia re: Woody Woodpecker -- who knew?
Say, whatever happened to SeñorWoody? I've been
whistling his theme song of late, for reasons
unknown -- they finally get to it on his
wiki
page if you scroll down far enough. Says he was
retired by Universal in 1972.
Picture him somewhere in Toon Town, playing cards
with Shermy, Yogi Bear and Joe Camel. Today's jolly
illustration, another corporate character, scanned
from a 1965 water bill unearthed during some holiday
clean-up at my parents.
According to the BBC,
researchers
at National Taiwan University have developed
fluorescent green swine! Says they glow in the
dark... I thought the new
Glo-Fish
were actually phosphorescent, too, but it
it
sounds like, no. They're glo as in
Day-Glo... but Sam I Am, those pigs are green!
Coming up on the 60th anniversary of the worst
maritime disaster ever, the sinking of the Wilhelm
Gustlof. Survivors are interviewed on this Radio
Australia programme. Guess at over 55 minutes and 25Meg,
its
mp3 qualifies as a podcast?
|
| January 12, 2006 |
Lots of interesting old sounds are available at the UCSB
Cylinder
Preservation and Digitization Project. Mostly music,
and it's a great thing about the internet today -- not
just the new stuff, but all manner of creaky old recordings
are seeing the light of day again. For example -- sure,
we're familiar with the voice of Franklin Delano, but what about
Teddy?
Easy to imagine TR's disapproval of this rational analysis
by Dennis Perrin, concerning patriotic veneration of the
armed forces:
Freedom
Granted, Freedom Won.
There's reviews of some great old SF
chestnuts in the
archives
of Stomp Tokyo's Bad Movie Reports.*
|
| January 9, 2006 |
A photo from my Euro trip -- Berlin on a sunny
October afternoon, in trendy Kreuzberg. Not only do
we wonder about the big red blob, but directly
underneath, the reason for the picture -- there's
 a guy swinging
through his open balcony doorway up there. (Both images,
click for biggery, natch.) I opened the shutter at the
outermost point of his swing.
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| January 6, 2006 |
Probing around inside
songfacts.com,
you're bound to encounter little nuggets like
The name of the group was derived from "We Seven," the first
book about the Mercury astronauts. They were a California group,
and the song first took off on LA radio station KHJ. It was not
uncommon that summer to be stuck in traffic on the way to the
beach and hear that song played at full blast from dozens of cars,
making it the first "road party" song. People would pound out the
last few drumbeats on their doors, and I watched one guy dent the
door on his Ford Comet doing this. If you remember the Comet, you
know how hard he had to be pounding. Their first album was carried
by this song, but while several other songs were respectable, none
was anything like this title track.
... from the comments to
You
Were On My Mind.
Transcript
of O'Reilly's appearance on Letterman, a couple days ago.
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| January 3, 2006 |
Truly we live in extreme times -- it rained on the Rose Bowl
Parade yesterday.
(LA Times
article) Usually the monsoon doesn't begin down there
until a little later in January, but the rainy season up
here's in full swing. Perhaps you've heard of the recent storms
pummeling Northern California? I love the winter rains but this
batch triggered a power outage starting New Year's Day and
ongoing -- after a day, the novelty of heating up tins of food
on the camp-stove out on the patio wears off.
Update: After 54 hours off-line, my piece of the grid was
restored.
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