Belated Sunday Update

On Sunday, I read most of Amelia Earhart's Twenty Hours, Forty Minutes, went to a company function at the Coliseum, walked along the river bank for a bit, drove up to Shelby Bottoms and hiked around the short loop (alas, no bunnies), then went home and watched The Restaurant.

My grand housecleaning ambitions for the weekend basically fizzled. Oh, well, at least I'm taking advantage of the no classes thing while I can.

  

   

Unbelievable...

As if the Bush defense department wasn't fucked up enough, it now basically wants $8 million to set up an online betting website so that people can place wagers on whether or not terrorists will attack or political figures will be assassinated. Proponents claim that the free market is better able to predict the future than intelligence analysts, so why not set up a "terrorism futures market."

One of the two senators, Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota, said the idea seemed so preposterous that he had trouble persuading people it was not a hoax. "Can you imagine," Mr. Dorgan asked, "if another country set up a betting parlor so that people could go in — and is sponsored by the government itself — people could go in and bet on the assassination of an American political figure?"

And meanwhile on the homefront, the administration is busy trying to dismantle what remains of the nation's passenger rail system, creating record-breaking budget deficits, and coming up with tax cuts for the rich.

Sorry for the political benders lately, but a times I get very frustrated about some of these things, and blowing off steam here seems more constructive then yelling at the computer. For my next post, I promise something more fun and decidedly non-political.

A principled position

Today's Washington Post Magazine has a great piece on John Brady Kiesling, the US dimplomat who resigned his post with a blistering letter criticizing the Bush administration's Iraq juggernaut.

In his April 25 speech at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, a couple of weeks after the fall of Baghdad, Kiesling made an explicit attempt to rally the internationalists. Princeton, he told the 200 or so students, faculty and foreign policy professionals in his audience, "used to be the heartland of a brilliantly successful foreign policy coalition" that shaped American diplomacy for most of the 20th century. It was a bipartisan alliance between liberal "Wilsonian idealists," with their humanist worldview, and the kind of conservative pragmatists who used international institutions to advance American economic interests. But the coalition now "lies in tatters," he said, and he offered his views on how this had happened:

September 11 offered a golden opportunity for anyone "savvy and unscrupulous enough to manipulate public fears," and the advocates of "hard-nosed neoconservatism" promptly seized it. They adopted "the power politics of the schoolyard as their model of human interaction" and reduced a complex moral universe to a permanent face-off between "the forces of light and the forces of darkness." They used "lies and half-truths" to build a case for invading Iraq as "a step toward a more complete power grab." As the neoconservatives began to drive American policy, old-school internationalists tried to come to terms with them, hoping to retain influence. But accommodation has proved no easy task.

"This is an administration at war, and you are with them or you are against them," Kiesling said.

[...]

Among Kiesling's former State Department colleagues you can find a variety of opinions on the need to forcefully remove Saddam Hussein. But there appears to be near-consensus on one point: American foreign policy in general has been dangerously militarized, and the diplomatic point of view devalued. [...] Chas. Freeman, the retired ambassador, is more direct. "We have a national mentality now that says, if you see a problem, shoot it! Because we know that we're very, very good at shooting things."

Free beer!

Well, sort of... We went to the second annual Music City Brewer's Festival, held in the park between the Gaylord Entertainment Center, the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Hilton, and the future site of the new Nashville Symphony Hall.

The deal is, you pay $20 to get in, and then you get a "bottomless cup" that lets you sample beer from a bunch of different brewers arrayed around the outside of the park. There is also live music, and part of the proceeds go to Second Harvest.

Altogether, a pretty great way to spend an afternoon. (The beer is free, but you have to pay a buck for the water!)

We hung out at the festival for most of the afternoon, then went and had dinner at Jack's Bar-B-Que, which serves the best barbeque in Nashville (in my opinion, that is!).Then back to the beer festival for a while longer. We finally closed out the night at Robert's Western World. Oh, and we took a few more catfish photos, too!

I walked from my house over to the park, which I like to think compensated in some small way for drinking beer all afternoon. The refurbished Shelby Street Pedestrian Bridge is scheduled to reopen next week, which will make it a lot easier to hike from one side of the river to the other. (Right now all the working bridges are clustered on the other side of downtown.)

Here are some photos:

  

  

  

You can check out some more right here.

Comptroller blames TDOT road fixation for poor air quality

This story appeared in the Tennessean this morning. Well, it's about freakin' time someone in government pointed this out. Hopefully this will lead to some more rational development and mass transit planning in Tennessee.

Nothing like a hard day's work...

The friend's closing was postponed due to building codes hassles. So there's more time to finish the various remaining projects. My contribution for today was to show up, gaze at the half-finished hearth tile that he was working on with another friend, and then go out to dinner with them.

Bumper Wit

A while back, someone over on the west side of the river had bumper stickers printed up saying "37212 -- It's not just a zip code, it's a way of life." Now one of the East Nashville listservs is buzzing because someone wants to print up matching bumper stickers for our side of the town. People are throwing out all sorts of suggestions. My favorites so far:

• 37206: My zipcode can beat up your zipcode.
• 37206: We'll Steal Your Heart AND Your Lawnmower.
• 37206: The Police don't know where it is either.
• 37206: We're the neighborhood your Mamma warned you about.

Heh. I love East Nashville, even if you do have to tie down your lawn furniture.

FUNY W3B SIET!!!111!1 WTF

Following on the heels of automatic language translation services like Google Language Tools and Babelfish, The English-to-12-Year-Old-AOLer Translator can transform your writing so as to make it understandable by the average 12-year-old AOL junkie.

Of course, you've been able to use Google in your favorite language for years. Choices include Elmer Fudd, hacker, Pig Latin, and bork, bork, bork!

Paint and plaster dust

Another late night, this time helping a friend out with crazy home repair projects. He just bought a new house and moved into it. Now he has to close on his old house on Friday. Only he sort of never really quite finished some of the renovation stuff that was supposed to completed before the sale. So we spent several hours cutting and painting shoe molding to go around the interior of the house. We had to work around massive piles of dust, since his previous project was grinding down a concrete slab to even it out in preparation for tile.

Tomorrow I go to work, and he goes back to frantic home improvement land. If I can escape work at a reasonable hour, I'll probably head back over -- he has a real problem if he can't get everything shipshape by Friday morning!

Late night cinematic ramblings

Just watched Fellini's Roma for the first time. And most of it for the second time. It's quite bizarre, entirely plotless, blurring the lines between movie and documentary -- a collage of clashing imagery and jarring noise. For the most part, it's a dark and almost apocolyptic vision of the city and the world. I've only seen two Kubrick films, but this reminded me of his style. The film was made in 1972, and the conflicts of society at that time are very much in evidence.

Gore Vidal appears as himself, speaking in English dubbed in Italian and then subtitled in English. He says:

Rome is the city of illusions. Not only by chance, you have here the church, the government, the cinema. They all produce illusions, like you do and like I do. We're getting closer and closer to the end of the world because of too many people, too many cars, too many poisons. And what better city than Rome, which has been reborn so often? What place could be more peaceful to wait for the end from pollution and overpopulation? It's the ideal city for waiting to see if it will really come to an end or not.

For me, the most striking of the many disconnected scenes in the film portrayed the entry of the film crew into a subway tunnel being dug under the city. Rome has only two subway lines, and they don't service many of the most popular destinations. This is because it's almost impossible to dig tunnels without running into important archeaological finds. Fellini uses this as a device to make a statement about art and progress. We descend through a roaring wasteland of subterranean pipes, tunnels, and ruins until we reach the forefront of the excavation, where giant robotic claws are eating their way through the earth. The work stops because a another cavity has been detected. The guide is exasperated -- work will have to stop for another two months while the archaeologists get involved. One of the foremen looks ill. The team starts up the insect-like claw and begins burrowing a tiny hole through the loose dirt. Suddenly the hole opens up and air begins roaring into the cavity. The team climbs through and finds a perfectly preserved, 2000 year old Roman house, filled with beautiful sculptures and frescoes. The camera lands on a figure bearing a striking resemblance to the sick construction foreman. The explorers continue to wander, witnessing mosaics covered by luminous pools of water, and come to a room with even more brilliant lifesize artwork. All this time, air is roaring into the cavern. Suddenly, though, the frescoes begin to dissolve, destroyed by the air. The very act of witnessing the art has destroyed it.

I didn't appreciate the movie at first. It rambles, and it's not the sort of movie that yields a clear message without a lot of thought. But the more I watched it, the more I got in the groove of Fellini's bizarre worldview.

While we're in the foreign film vein, I guess I could also offer my thoughts on L'Auberge espagnole, which I saw with my mom and brother in the newly-restored Avalon Theater in DC when I was home a few weeks ago. Unlike Roma, this movie has a very clear political message -- in fact, you walk out of the theater feeling like you've been beaten over the head. The tone reminds me of the sort of proletarian epiphanies found in radical novels like Jews without money and Germinal.

In this case, however, the utopian vision is not of a socialist paradise, but instead of pan-European unity brought into being by the youth of the continent.

This no doubt sounds heavy, so I should back up and say that this film is, first and foremost, a very amusing comedy about a bunch of college students in a cramped apartment in Barcelona. In fact, you could easily mistake it for a feature length version of MTV's The Real World. The residents of the apartment are from many different countries, and despite their initial stereotypes and squabbles, they end up becoming fast friends. But the movie also functions at a more allegorical level (true to form, the British characters end up literally in bed with the Americans), and its position on the development of a trans-national European identity are clear. In some places, the film has been released under the English titles "Euro Pudding" and "Pot Luck," which pretty much sum up the director's vision.

Today's Washington Post has an article about the exact phenomena chronicled in the movie. It seems young people in Europe are traveling between countries and breaking down cultural barriers like never before. It strikes me that Bush's myopic foreign policy is probably giving wings to this trend -- it's easy for people from many cultures to find common ground in their dislike for American unilateralism and military posturing.

In any case, I recommend this movie. If you're looking for a light comedy, you can enjoy it at that level. If you want something to think about, it's got that too.

All right, enough of this. I'm going to bed.

Les français fous

France has banned the term e-mail. From now on, official documents are required to refer to electronic messaging as "Courriel."

Unclear on the concept

I just got my second diet Coke bottle cap in a week offering "buy a dozen, get a dozen" donuts at Krispy Kreme. I wonder what part of diet Coke they don't understand.

Please excuse my dear aunt sally...

Which stands for parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction. A mnemonic for the order of operations in equations. I'm having 8th grade math flashbacks. Scary.

ACME - For all your anvil needs

Matt over at Scrubbles points out that someone took the time to create a comprehensive catalog of every product ever produced by the ACME company, the favorite vendor of celebrities like Wile E. Coyote and Elmer Fudd. It's all in there -- from "Hen Grenades" to "Triple Strength Battleship Steel Armor Plate"

Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm supposed to be working on my exam. Can't a fella goof off just a little?

But what would G.I. Joe say?

A Seattle company is introducing a librarian action figure, complete with "Shushing action!" The figure is modeled after real life librarian Nancy Pearl. Nancy joins the ranks of other action figures from the company, including "Jesus, Sigmund Freud, Rosie the Riveter, Nico the Barista and a striped-shirted hipster/philosopher named Fuzz."

Stressin'

Busy trying to extricate myself from academic peril this week, so not posting a lot. (I really should not have gone home last weekend!) The class is over -- one way or another -- next week, so things might be a little more lively around here after that.

This just in:

Britney Spears Says She's Not a Virgin. I'm just in a state of shock. Good thing we have a free press to get the word out on this sort of thing.

Pictures!

  

  

  

You can check out some more right here.

Oh, yeah. Tracy, this one's for you!

Independence Day - Reader's Digest Condensed Edition

Just got back and am dead tired, but I'll give you a quick version of my Fourth of July. Many fun photos to come when I get around to uploading them. In the meantime, here's what I did today:

• Got up early (by my standards) and went to see our hometown parade with my family, my brother's girlfriend, and her sister. The Takoma Park parade is always a fun and amusing spectacle. Basically, take politicians, old cars, clowns, horses, peace activists, the VFW, environmental activists, drag racers, gymnasts, anti-fur activists. Add in a bunch of bagpipers, a reel lawnmower brigade, and a steel drum band on wheels, and you get a sense of what we're talking about. Much fun!
• Then back to the house, where we all got drafted to prepare various parts of dinner. This was more fun than it sounds -- highlights include our discovery that pinapple crowns can be converted into fun, stylish hats with some strategic use of aluminum foil.
• A bit later my grandparents and long lost cousin showed up, and we ate all the traditional cookout essentials. (Homemade potato salad with my mom's secret recipe -- yum!)
• After eating and spending time digesting, looking at pictures, etc., my cousin and I decided to go downtown to see the fireworks at the Washington Monument. (The rest of the family went to the smaller, less crowded show in Takoma Park.) We drove over to the Metro (back in the land of subways - yay!) and went down the the Mall, and after strolling around and people watching for a while, we settled down on a hill almost directly in front of the Washington Monument. Great location, and when the fireworks started a bit later we could see them really well with the monument in the foreground. Afterward, we sat around for a bit to avoid the crowds, and then hiked about two miles around the city looking for a place to hang out. (We sort of missed the first two metro stops we were looking for, which explained some of the wandering. We ended up going to one stop, realizing we would need to ride one stop and transfer, walking to the next stop instead, and then getting stuck because the trains had gotten backed up. So instead we hopped a train going the other direction and barhopped in the Chinatown area for a bit. (Funny story about that -- I'll tell you later.)
• Eventually we grabbed a train and headed home -- just got back a few minutes ago.

Definitely a fun day. Now I've got to buckle down and work on schoolwork for the rest of the weekend. Ugh.

Evidently my commenting software got moody after the upgrade to the new Blogger. Supposedly I've fixed it now, so we'll see if things work right on this entry.

Update: Yippee -- I think it's back to normal now!

Homeward bound

In DC now, after spending a flight mashed between two people, one of whom was holding a crying kid who grabbed everything in arms reach.

Off to do fun Independence Day stuff tomorrow. Maybe I'll even have some cool pictures to post. Stay tuned...

Texas

Mil Millington is sad that the recent supreme court ruling has apparently turned Texas into a ghost town:

Before I start, I feel I ought to mention how sad it is that the Texan readers are no longer with us. As you know, the notoriously irresponsible Supreme Court has seen fit to tear down the safety barrier protecting society and thus Texas is now like a ghost state. Machinery lies idle; offices are silent; the streets of Dallas shimmer motionless in the summer sun. No one goes to work nor chats with friends nor watches television nor even browses the Internet. Because, whooping atavistically that the police are now powerless to stop them, the entire population of Texas has, since last week, been ceaselessly engaged in endless consensual homosexual sex in private so as to bring about the extinction of the vital institution of marriage.

Oh, and let me make it clear that I'm not just some dull-witted, homophobic idiot here by saying, "it's the children I'm concerned about".

This case was an impressive example of the Supreme Court doing the right thing. But don't even get me started on this little declaration from one of our esteemed senators. The court ruled that the government should respect individual privacy and not regulate homosexual acts. Frist somehow believes that this is a horrible ruling because -- get this -- people should have a "zone of privacy [...] in their own home." So he wants the government to regulate what people can do in their bedrooms because he wants to preserve their privacy. Huh?

There is water coming out of my ceiling. This is not a good thing.

Don't mess with the canned meat folks

The Hormel company is suing over the use of the term Spam to describe junk e-mail. More specifically, it's complaining about a company called Spam Arrest, LLC. According to the Washington Post, "[t]he company [said] that Spam Arrest's name so closely resembles that of its lunch meat that the public might become confused, or might think that Hormel endorses Spam Arrest's products."

My day

• Woke up late.
• Called my parents.
• Booked a plane ticket to go home for the Fourth.
• Did a load of laundry
• Dozed off.
• Saw a blimp.
• Paniced when I realized how far behind I am in reading for my class. Read for quite a while, but am still very behind.
• Gave my bathroom a very cursory cleaning.
• Drove by a whole lot of Corvettes!
• Went to see Charlie's Angels with a friend. About as vapid as you might expect, but amusing all the same. (Anything with Drew Barrymore can't be all bad!)
• Grabbed a late dinner at Chapel Bistro with friend. (great food, highly recommended!)
• Got home at 11:30, goofed off on computer.

As long as I'm in deep with Homeland Security anyway...

While in Italy, I started snapping pictures of all the anti-war signs and graffiti. (There was a lot -- Italians weren't too happy with the war even if their government was going along with it.) Both of these are from Venice. The one on the left declares that "Italy Repudiates the War." The one below is pretty self-explanatory, I think. There were also rainbow-colored PACE (peace) flags everywhere.

Freaky homeland security news of the day

Remember those X-Ray vision glasses you could buy out of the back of magazines when you were little. The illustrations always promised the ability to see through clothes -- to either the underwear or skeletal level depending on the advertising standards of the publication. If you ever tried these contraptions, however, you know that all you really saw was a slightly distorted version of the other person.

Well the homeland security folks want to start using the real thing to screen folks at airports. And the difference is that they've finally perfected the technology. Susan Hallowell, the Director of the TSA's security laboratory, demonstrated the thing by letting a machine strip her naked in front of a roomfull of reporters with cameras. Her point was that, in addition to a very clear rendering of her various bumps and curves, the machine was able to clearly show images of bombs and weapons she had stashed under her clothing. "It does basically make you look fat and naked — but you see all this stuff," Hallowell said Wednesday during a demonstration of the technology.

I think this is pretty freaky, and apparently so do other people. (One of the next projects being contemplated is software to create a "virtual fig leaf" to preserve the modesty of travelers.)

The complete story is here.

Meanwhile, let's see what Ashcroft and his cronies are up to. The usual, it turns out: trying to send a guy to jail for holding up a protest sign. When President Bush came to Columbia, SC last year to speak to a Republican gathering, Brett Bursey decided to show his displeasure by standing in a public part of the airport with a sign reading "No War For Oil." Shortly before the president arrived, a Secret Service agent told him that he had to move to a "free speech area" about a half mile away from where the president would be speaking. Bursey said that he thought he was already in a free speech area -- the United States of America. This got him arrested, although the charges were quietly dropped shortly thereafter.

But local US Attorney Strom Thurmond Jr. couldn't leave well enough alone, and decided to charge Bursey under a rarely-used law that allows the Secret Service to restrict access to areas the president is visiting. If convicted, Bursey could face six months in jail and a $5000 fine for holding his sign. (Bursey points out that the Secret Service didn't do anything about the crowd of people holding pro-Bush signs in the same area.)

The funny thing is, this is deja vu all over again. Bursey was arrested at the same airport in 1969 while waiting for a visit from President Nixon and holding a sign protesting the Vietnam war. That case was thrown out by the South Carolina Supreme Court when it ruled that protesters could not be charged with tresspassing if they were on public property.

Eleven members of congress (including a Republican and members of the Homeland Security and Judiciary committees) have already sent a note to Ashcroft asking him to put an end to this travesty. They pointed out that "no plausible argument can be made the Mr. Bursey was threatening the president by holding a sign which the president found politically offensive." But so far, the case is proceeding in court.

Sure catching terrorists is important. But a guy holding a sign isn't a terrorist. The administration has continues to take advantage of post-9/11 security concerns to stifle dissent and destroy the civil rights we are entitled to as American citizens. This really infuriates me.

(What with the new rules and all, I'll be expecting a homeland security van outside my house a few minutes after I publish this post. If you haven't seen one of my usual gripes by Monday, can someone please call the ACLU?)

Woah! I'm finally on the new blogger -- and it's pretty wild and crazy looking!

Kevin O'Hara wrote a great post on the East Nashville Listserv about a tap dancer loose on the streets:

There's been a rift in the space/time continuum in the vicinity of Douglas Avenue.

I glanced out my window last night reacting to a melodic cocktail of jazz, salsa and hip-hop. At first I thought I saw a mariachi on the horizon, clearly spirited away from Rosepepper on the lovely evening breeze. But after a quick rub of my lenses, my vision fixed on the heppest cat I've seen since Don Cornelius was still hosting Soul Train. This guy was decked out in a white, circular brimmed hat, wrapped with a red ribbon. He had on a red shirt with the kind of sheen one has on their face after a visit to Prince's. The shirt was offset by white pants that were so fresh and so clean.

Now if I were to stop here in my description of this cat, you'd be ready to move on to the next post to be further dismayed by news of the latest yard elf theft. But the next two items with which he was adorned confirmed that at least a small rift, if not a large whole, had torn in the fabric of space and time....

Read more >>

In Passing, Nashville Style

Overheard on Saturday evening while I was frantically working on my computer science exam on the patio at Caffeine, the new coffee joint on Demonbreun:

Gal 1: We should come up with a picking your nose book for dummies.
Guy 1: Yeah, we could have one of those ads in the back of a magazine. You know, "send 2.95 plus postage and handling..."
Gal 2: We could come up with a new chapter every night we go out. You know, picking your nose when you're at the beach, picking your nose in the shower...
Guy1: Then we could have pictures!
Gal 1: The first rule has to be for real dummies -- don't use your tongue.

Then a bit later, from another guy, who evidently owns the place:

I've been trying to leave nashville since I got here.
How long you been here?
6 years.

I've only been trying to leave Nashville for five years, so I guess this guy's an old pro compared to me.

Argh! If the good Lord had wanted us to think in binary, he wouldn't have given us 10 fingers. That's all I have to say about that.

Bill, a friend from high school, is currently living and working at Disney in Japan. He's been posting occasional chronicles of his Japanese adventures online, and right now he has a picture on his site that, at least in my mind, makes him look exactly like he stepped out of a TinTin comic book.

While looking for a picture of TinTin to compare with, I was a bit shocked to come across this image and this image. Turns out that some of Herge's early works had something of a racist, colonialist slant on things. This in itself does not entirely surprise me. He was a product of his times, and at the time Belgium was still a colonial power subjugating the Congo.

What surprises me is that I remember reading some of the TinTin comics as a kid and not picking up on any of this. The same thing happened Little Black Sambo, by Helen Bannerman, which I remember reading in a storybook that was handed down from my mom. LBS was actually one of my favorite stories, partly because in the end the family uses the melted butter made by the running tigers to make a big batch of pancakes -- my favorite childhood breakfast food. I was shocked later in life to realize that some people considered the story racist because of the names of the characters. This had just never occurred to me as a child. (The story itself is actually not really that racist, and it seems likely that the names were picked more for their exotic ring than because of any racial agenda. The illustrations are a bit more questionable, perhaps, but still not grotesque. Apparently other editions were published in the US with more stereotypical illustrations.)

I think this points out what an artificial construct racism is. Kids aren't born understanding it, and it is only after society exposes them to it that they can comprehend what it means.

Stupid Corporate Tricks, Part II

I'm still trying my best to remember the new cell phone number I received when I switched from Sprint to Verizon. Then I saw this in today's Business section:

WASHINGTON - The Federal Communications Commission can create area codes specific to mobile telephones, a U.S. appeals court ruled, rebuffing a challenge by Sprint Corp.

[...]

Sprint argued the FCC plan could allow the agency to inconvenience current wireless customers by forcing them to switch their 10-digit phone numbers for entirely new ones, while landline users kept theirs.

I had no idea the cell phone companies were so worried about people having to change phone numbers. Why it seems like just yesterday I heard them yelling and screaming about what a bad idea cell phone number portability was. Despite being told by the FCC to make this happen in the mid-90s, the cellular industry has been whining and dragging its feet for years. As Stewart Alsop makes the point:

Question: What do Andrew McBride and Muhammad Saeed al-Sahaf have in common?

Answer: They're both loyal lackeys of corrupt administrations willing to say anything in order to justify their existence.

Muhammad Saeed al-Sahaf is the now infamous Information Minister of Iraq who insisted that the Iraqi army and government had control of Baghdad and were massacring coalition troops right and left. "I triple-guarantee you, there are no American soldiers in Baghdad," the minister was quoted as saying just as Americans were entering the city.

Andrew McBride, on the other hand, is a lawyer for Verizon Wireless, the largest cellular operator in the U.S., and for the Cellular Telephone Industry Association. McBride has taken on, somewhat enthusiastically, the job of justifying the cellular industry's base interests as being the most desirable for consumers. He was quoted as testifying in court to the following point of view: "It's very speculative to say this [number portability] even offers consumer benefits."

Get your story straight, guys! If you're so convinced that it will hurt consumers if their numbers change, why have you been so busily fighting cellular number portability for the last five years? Sheesh.

My younger brother is buying a house. My friend Aaron just bought a house. Layne bought a house. Another friend from work is buying his second house, after tearing his apart and rebuilding it for the last four years.

Meanwhile I'm still sitting here waffling about whether I'm going to at last settle down in Nashville, go live the hip urban life in Boston, head back to my old haunting grounds in DC, or just maybe go find some sort of job that lets me travel to interesting places like Lithuania, Siberia, or South America. So instead of making hard decisions about this stuff, I sit here in the middle of the night listening to the best of the 40s, 80s, and 90s on MP3 and plagiarizing blog passages about atom bombs. I lack direction, so I avoid thinking about it by wasting time on things that don't matter.

Joshua wrote:

When an atomic bomb goes off, there's a massive release of energy; an explosion of light so intense it vaporizes steel, turns concrete into glass and boils the water out of aquariums from miles away. There's a nanosecond pause after the explosion, where everything is exactly like it was a moment before, only a million degrees hotter. Then everything does what comes naturally: it explodes. That's the part you usually see.

Read the rest. It's chilling.

Chasing Cats

This weekend was the kickoff of the Cat Fish Out of Water city art festival. To help increase awareness of the Cumberland River watershed, the Cumberland River Compact is coordinating the placement of 51 giant catfish throughtout the city.

After getting my oil changed today, I took a detour to Centennial Park. I walked around the American Artisan festival. Then I noticed my first Catfish:

Catsup, by Trey Mitchell, sponsored by (of course) McDonalds

So then I hiked around the park a bit and found three more:

Spider Cat, by Kern Studios/New Orleans, sponsored by Rock Harbor Marine

Classic Black Catfish, by Margaret Krakowiak, sponsored by Vanderbilt University

Speed Catilac, by Susan Rainey, sponsored by Andrews Cadillac. Above one of the exhaust pipes, it says "Body by Fisher!"

According to the map, it looks like there may be three others in the park that I missed.

Stupid Corporate Tricks

In U r sakd: Is there a nicer way to fire?, The Economist describes how most of the staffers at a British company were fired by text message on their cell phones:

There are, Paul Simon once sang, 50 ways to leave your lover. There may be fewer ways to sack your staff, but most are unpleasant — though rarely as nasty as the method chosen last week by Accident Group, a firm that specialises in personal-injury claims, after Amulet, its Luxembourg-based parent, ran out of money.

Accident Group’s 2,500 staff received a series of text messages on their mobile phones, telling them to call a number.

There, a recorded message from the company’s insolvency administrators at PricewaterhouseCoopers informed them that, ‘‘All staff who are being retained will be contacted today. If you have not been spoken to you are therefore being made redundant.’’

The new CEO of VodaFone evidently saw this story in the news -- a clause in his contract prevents him from being fired by "electronic mail or any other electronic messaging service."

Everyone else ( link, link, and link) is getting transferred to this spiffy new version of Blogger. But mine looks the same as always. I think I have software envy.

Random Wednesday Happenings

After a number of false starts, I finally met up with an acquaintaince from high school in Maryland who moved to Nashville with her husband last year and is now randomly running for city council! We hung out for a few hours at a Chili's out in Hermitage, which is so far outside of my normal downtown Nashville orbit, it's scary. We gabbed about all the old band gossip, who's now living in strange foreign countries, what we've been up to for the last ten years, etc. Got them interested in the UFO club at Flying Saucer. Now I'm not just drinking my way to fame, I'm helping spread the word!

I might end up using my pickup truck to help them move sometime in the next few weeks. And two weeks ago I made a run with a friend to drop a load of brush at the city composting center. I'm actually starting to feel like I'm doing my part to live up to the pickup truck image.

On an unrelated note, I just got the missing pieces that let me use the new phone as an MP3 player -- which is pretty cool. I loaded about three hours of music onto it, and can listen skip-free while carrying the phone around. The headphones even have a button that will mute the music and let me talk if the phone ring. I'm starting to feel better about the small fortune I had to shell out to get this thing. I'll be even happier when I get all my assorted rebates and refunds back.

Tomorrow and Friday I've got a professor from the university I visited for a week in November coming to see how I do my job. I think he's going to find that it's much less exciting and glamorous than he thinks.

"The presentation on P.T. Barnum was especially helpful." - Farouk Bakoh

It's not too late to register for the The Third Annual Nigerian Email Conference. Sessions this year include:

• Keynote Address: Dr. Hamza Kalu's adds some historical perspective in his keynote address: "From Postal Scams To Email Scams: We Have Come a Long Way Infant Child.
• Debate: Attend a lively debate between Lady Mariam Abacha and Mr. Godwin Oyathelem. Topic: "The effectiveness of using all UPPERCASE characters."
• Economics: A round table discussion: Is email now Nigeria's top export?

Registration is, of course, via a confidential money transfer.

Link via MacInTouch

And now, from the "Greek to Me" department...

I'm currently taking what I consider to be the first "hardcore" computer science class I've taken since I started working on my Technology Management degree. (I took a database class and a networking class, but I don't consider those to be hardcore since I already knew a lot about those topics.) So in this accelerated summer session, I'm getting to read scintillating material like:

Each check bit operates on every data bit whose position number contains a 1 in the same bit position as the position number of that check bit. Thus, data bit positions 3,5,7,9 and 11 (D1, D2, D4,D5,D7) all contain a 1 in the least significant bit of their position number as does C1; bit positions 3,6,7,10, and 11 all contain a 1 in the second but position, as does C2, and so on. Looked at another way, bit position n is checked by those bits S_i such that Σi = n. For example, position is checked by bits in position 4,2, and 1; and 7=4+2+1.

Riveting stuff, no? I can't wait until Hollywood gets ahold of it.

I'm starting to remember why I majored in English.

Culture Shock

West coast habitue Margaret Berry is currently perambulating through the South, enjoying its unique ways and culture. She writes:

We crossed the border into Virginia late last night and spent two hours this morning trying to find a place to get an Internet connection. Finally we found WebCity. I'm currently sitting in a dark room with five guys who've been talking about how much ammo they have stored, how much they got paid for not killing that one guy, and so on, for the last hour.

Pretty Colors

This weekend was Fan Fair, Nashville's annual country music festival. That means lots of traffic and tourists, but also occasional fringe benefits like fireworks you can watch from your kitchen window.

(And other than a quick grocery run, that's about the most exciting thing to happen to me this weekend.)

Tracy posted a scary cat picture, which inspired me to post my own example of feline photography. In this case, the cat thinks I'm nuts.

On a totally unrelated note, there seems to be something malfunctioning badly with permalinks to blogspot blogs. This is the second time in the last day or two I've tried to use a permalink, only to have it not work. Very odd.

I can blog from my phone now -- expect an increased number of pointless posts from boring meetings. Like this one.

New Phone

Some of you may remember my little cell phone mishap back in October. Since then I've been lugging around a massive prehistoric phone that required an extra set of suspenders. I've had my eye on one phone in particular, and this week I finally broke down and bought it.

So my new Kyocera 7135 arrived today. It was hideously expensive, although I managed to get $130 in rebates from Verizon. But it will supposedly work as a phone, Palm, and MP3 player. So if it lives up to its billing, it should be worth it.

The phone does a million things and it's going to take some time to figure it all out. But I'm already comtemplating how to blog from the phone. And I've managed to hit 88 lines in Tetris.

Happy Blogday to Me

While republishing my archives after one of Blogger's periodic barfs, I realized that this blog just turned one year old on Monday.

Croatoan

Layne, of Plain Layne, has mysteriously evaporated from the Blogosphere, taking her entire site with her and leaving only the cryptic message "Take very good care of you." Layne is one of the most expressive writers out there. I've only been reading her blog for a few months, and our only direct contact has been to e-mail and comment back and forth a few times. Yet it's like a close friend has suddenly vanished.

Several people written about this, including Gudy and Daintily Dirty. DD's post is especially thoughtful, pondering on why we blog and the strangeness of feeling connected to someone you only know from a few electrons flying through the ether:

Maybe taking down her blog was what she needed to do. Does she owe us anything? Do we owe each other anything as bloggers? I guess that depends on what you want back from your readers. Are we friends? If so, I would never disappear without saying good-bye and letting people know why I was leaving. It feels like a betrayal of a friendship to do otherwise. If Layne comes back, I will be less likely to invest much of myself into that relationship, and maybe that's what she wants, readers less invested in her life.

[...]

Maybe I shouldn't care that a blogger I came to consider a friend has disappeared, but I do. I wish her well and hope the decision she's made is one that will bring her more happiness and a fulfilling life.

I'll add my voice to the chorus in wishing her well and hoping that she's ok.

I wonder what it would take to get 100%

We were trying to figure out how well the new spam filter on works on our office e-mail system. So my friend sent this message. Note that it only got a 73% spam rating.

-----Original Message-----
From: Some other guy
Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2003 2:57 PM
To: A. Coworker
Subject: [SPAM: 73%] Herbal remedy

Hot sexy teen virgins loading inkjet cartridges just
for you.

Out inkjet cartridges have only the finest herbal
supplements that enhance and boost your printer's
natural tone.

Robin Hood, in reverse

The Washington Post reports on a study showing how Bush's tax cuts benefit the very rich the most, and the middle class the least.

Three successive tax cuts pushed by President Bush will leave middle-income taxpayers paying a greater share of all federal taxes by the end of the decade, according to new analyses of the Bush administration's tax policies.

[...]

Citizens for Tax Justice found that for the lowest fifth of taxpayers -- those earning below $16,000 -- federal taxes would fall 10 percent between now and 2010, while federal taxes for those in the second quintile -- earning between $16,000 to $28,000 -- would fall 12 percent. At the other end of the scale, the decline for the top 1 percent of taxpayers -- those making $337,000 and up -- would be 15 percent.

In contrast, for taxpayers earning between $45,000 and $337,000, the decline would be 7 percent, less than half the cut reaped by the very wealthy.

[...]

Figuring out whether tax policy benefits the wealthy or the poor is a hotly disputed subject. Liberals favor a progressive tax system in which households pay higher tax rates and a higher share of their total income as they climb up the income ladder. By that measure, the Bush tax cuts have made the tax code less progressive. By 2011, the poorest taxpayers' after-tax income will have risen only 0.3 percent, according to the Tax Policy Center, while household income for the richest 1 percent of taxpayers will have jumped 8.6 percent.

Strange box seen at work

Hmmm.... Don't break the box, keep the box dry, and whatever you do don't let gnomes with funny hats near the box!

A crack in the Redmond empire?

Munich, Germany's third-largest city, has announced that it will replace its 14,000 Windows NT desktop computers with systems running Linux and OpenOffice. IBM and SuSE helped prod the city into the move, while Microsoft exec Steve Ballmer reportedly interrupted his ski vacation in Switzerland to fly to the city and schmooze the Mayor. Evidently it didn't work.

About my weekend

This weekend was a whirlwind tour of New England, precipitateed by my brother's graduation. I left Nashville on Thursday afternoon and flew to Washington, then on to Boston. Then I rented a car at Hertz and wandered across the city to my friends' apartment in Cambridge. (And I do mean wandered -- apparently Hertz's NeverLost system hasn't yet figured out the Big Dig.) Finally arrived, and stayed up talking for several hours. The next morning, I left and picked my brother up. (He had flown in a few hours before me and spent the night with a friend from his college.)

We headed north into Maine, and arrived in Brunswick. My parents and three of my grandparents were already there, and had been killing time on campus. (The school has a museum dedicated to arctic explorers Robert E. Peary (Class of 1877) and Donald B. MacMillan (Class of 1898), and also an art museum.

The first big item on the agenda was the Baccalaureate ceremony. Afterward, we stopped by the president's reception, and then walked through the rain to get to the massive tents on the athletic fields for a the traditional lobster dinner. . After dinner we stopped by my brother's house, then headed back toward the Maine coast, where we had comamandeered a vacation house belinging to friends of my parents

Saturday morning dawned grey and wet, just like Friday. We drove back to campus and ate breakfast in the main dining hall. Then we headed over to the Quad, which was practically underwater. But Bowdoin has been having commencement exercises outdoors on the quad since 1806, and they weren't going to let a little rain stop them. (They had a backup plan to have it in the field house, but apparently there had to actually be a foot of standing water for that to happen.) The school was handing out ponchos and hot coffee. (See below for another picture.)

After getting drenched, we posed for the obligatory group photos. Then we headed back to the house and goofed off for most of the afternoon. (There are worse places to be stuck in a rainstorm than a house with a view of the sea. In the evening, we all piled into two cars and used the NeverLost gizmo to almost find our way to a restaurant in Portland, about 40 minutes to the south.

Singing in the rain: That's my brother singing the national anthem behind a sea of umbrellas at his graduation, Maine. May 24, 2003.

The next morning, I departed Maine and drove about 5.5 hours to get to Albany, where I met up with a bunch of my northern friends. Everyone had gone to Albany for the weekend for a party to celebrate Aaron's graduation from medical school. So I joined up with them just in time to play trivial pursuit, gorge on party leftovers, look at Italy slides, and stay up late playing cards and, err, taking care of the surplus alcohol problem.

The next morning, I got up very early, shook off a slight hangover, and drove three hours back through the pouring rain to catch my plane in Boston. And then back to Nashville. All-in-all, a very action-packed weekend, at least by my standards.

I'm back from up north. My brother is 100% graduated, and there is much to say about the weekend. But for the moment I'll just leave you to ponder this: it appears that Exxon is being remarkably upfront about its environmental record! :-)

Exxon Sign, Brunswick, Maine. May 25, 2003.

Sorry I've been slacking a bit on the posting lately -- things have been busy. Right now I'm in New England to attend my "baby" brother's graduation from Bowdoin College. Then I'm probably going to try to escape Sunday to visit friends in Albany, then back to Nashville on Monday.

Things they don't tell you at the tourist information office

I just watched a fascinating show on PBS about the sinking of Venice. The most startling revelation (to me) was that the city has no public sewer system. So most of the sewage just gets dumped directly into the canals!

But the show was also gave a really interesting explanation of why the city is sinking, what they are talking about doing about it, the potential effects of climate change, etc. The city is sinking more slowly now that nearby cities have stopped pumping water out of the aquifier underneath it, but it is still heading down as the sediments are compacted. In the old days, when the water got too high, Venetians would just lay down more stone and raise the height of the streets and building floors. Or they would demolish buildings and rebuild them slightly higher. But for the last 200 years or so, no one has wanted to destroy or change the beautiful archictecture of the city. So things have stayed at the same level despite the fact that the city is now something like 8 inches lower than it was 100 years ago. The result is lots of flooding -- in 1900, St. Mark's square flooded 7 times, and in 1996 it flooded 99 times.

The TV show discussed a plan to build giant gates that would rise across the entrances to the lagoon when high water is expected. That's what the sign we saw in a square in Venice was talking about. After watching the show, though, I think that whover put it up was a bit of a crackpot.

That said, there are some interesting issues associated with the gates. For one thing, if global warming causes significant changes in weather patterns or sea level, they could be entirely ineffective well before the end of their projected 100-year life. And there is concern that if the water level continues to get higher, they might end up being closed so often that pollution in the lagoon would become intolerable. (Remember what I said about the lack of sewers!)

All of this relates to another problem -- the city of Venice is becoming a museum rather than a living city. Millions of tourists visit the city each year, and the number of permanent inhabitants has dwindled to 70,000, driven out by the high prices and flooding.

Definitely a beautiful and fascinating city, but one with its share of problems.

Some guy in the UK is auctioning off his Macintosh computer made of Legos. He notes that the system does not include "the Lego man or his plants (but he's available from any shop that sells Lego, and anyway, you'll want to populate that nice green space with your own Lego people and things. It will be exciting for your Lego people to live so close to such a wonderful technological marvel)".

Now that the semester is over, I'm partaking in a guilty pleasure and reading the John Grisham novel I picked up a few months ago. That and battling a massive infestation of itty-bitty ants.

The Last Page keeps finding great stuff. The latest is this story. Researchers in England decided to test out the theory that infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. But they only had six monkeys and one month. The results, unfortunately, failed to prove anything about the literary prowess of primates:

LONDON - Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, the theory goes, and they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.

Give six monkeys one computer for a month, and they will make a mess.

Researchers at Plymouth University in England reported this week that primates left alone with a computer attacked the machine and failed to produce a single word.

"They pressed a lot of S's," researcher Mike Phillips said Friday. "Obviously, English isn't their first language."

You can read the complete work of the monkeys (helpfully translated into four languages) right here

Random visit

Jay, my college roommate, was in town for his brother's med school graduation. He was last in Nashville when a bunch of my friends came down for New Years a few years ago -- and it was snowing then! So this was his opportunity to see that Nashville actually is actually a bit different from Boston!

We met up for breakfast this morning at Bongo Java. (They have catered breakfast on Sundays with yummy caramel apple french toast.) Then we drove around downtown a bit and headed over to Bicentennial Mall, which is one of my favorite places in Nashville. We hung out there for a while, walking around the fountains, farmers market, etc. We even got yelled at by the park ranger for climbing on the rocks. Then I took him to the airport, and now I'm back at Bongo supposedly working on my final exam that's due tonight. Although at the moment I guess I'm not technically working on it. But when I'm done with this blog entry I'm going to be crazy productive. Yeah, that's it!

The bathroom at Bongo Java -- there's actually a lot more you can't see in this picture. This really has nothing to do with the visit except that I happened to have my camera with me.
Jay being a tourist at Bicentennial Mall.	Nifty bouncy river fountains at Bicentennial Mall.

Sunday's New York Times contains a stunning article about how 27-year-old reporter Jayson Blair frequently fabricated articles during his five year career with the newspaper. Blair used reports from wire services, photos from the paper's internal archives, and telephone interviews to create the impression that he was traveling around the mid-Atlantic region reporting stories, while in reality he was camped out at his home in New York. Remarkably, despite a history of known accuracy problems and the fact that Blair's expense reports didn't match his supposed work assignments, no one at the Times caught on to the depth of the deception until another paper lodged a plagiarism complaint. Since then, a team assembled by the paper has found significant problems with 36 of the 73 articles the reporter wrote since last October, including major stories about the DC sniper and the rescue of Jessica Lynch.

I find this amazing from many angles. I have trouble understanding the thought process that would make someone behave this way. And it's hard to imagine how a young reporter could pull this off in such a way as to not arouse suspicion from his editors or others at the paper. I wonder if there is a cultural bias where editors assume that someone good enough to work at the Times must be an accurate reporter. Plus, I'm amazed that members of the public who were misquoted in the paper or who obviously knew that the reporter was lying failed to contact the newspaper and let it know about these problems.

Thanks to The Last Page for the link.

-----Original Message-----
From: Kumquat, Newton
Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2003 3:43 PM
To: Coworker, A
Subject: italy pics



You can see my mind-numbing pile of pictures at http://www.clubphoto.com.  Put "DMD" in the album search box to find my stuff. (Note that you click to get into the actual albums, and that there are two pages of them.)

I'm planning to put together a "best of" album, but I haven't done it yet. My friend went in and started captioning a few of them, but most have not been captioned. I can fill in the blanks, though!

-NK

-----Original Message-----
From: Coworker, A.
Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2003 4:43 PM
To: Kumquat, Newton
Subject: RE: italy pics


The naked tourists and don't ring the bell and double bra signs are a hoot

What's up with the bag of chips?




-----Original Message-----
From: Kumquat, Newton
Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2003 8:37 PM
To: Coworker, A
Subject: Potato chips

Just being silly!  :-)

They are actually Worcester Sauce Potato Chips. When we left my friend's aunt's house in Monaco, she packed a bunch of food for us to take. We eventually ate everything else, but neither of us could quite stomach the idea of worcester chips. So instead we started taking pictures of them instead. They traveled to all sorts of interesting places, including:

Venice

Naples

Pompeii

Florence

The Vatican

When we got to the Vatican on the last day of the trip, we decided that time was up and we had to finally eat them. They weren't as bad as we expected!

Aaron thinks we should send the photos to the company.

Reasons not to have kids...

I was just reading the instructions that came with a Pelican case we purchased to transport computer equipment. At the bottom is the following warranty note:

Pelican Unconditional Lifetime Guarantee of Excellence

If for any reason you are not satisfied with the quality or performance of any PELICAN product, we will gladly replace the product or refund your money (at your option) within 30 days of purchase through the original retailer/dealer. PELICAN PRODUCTS will continue to guarantee the product directly for a lifetime against breakage or defects in workmanship. The case is guaranteed to be watertight when properly closed with O-ring in place and undamaged. (Replace O-ring annually or when damaged.) Any liability, either expressed or implied, is limited to the replacement of the case and not its contents. This guarantee is void only if the PELICAN product has been abused beyond normal and sensible wear and tear.

THE ABOVE GUARANTEE DOES NOT COVER SHARKBITE, BEAR ATTACK, OR CHILDREN UNDER 5.

Based on the behavior I've seen from some three-year-olds, I think the case might stand a better chance against the bear!

The weather service has determined that at least 10 tornados struck Tennessee in a 15 hour period on Sunday and Monday. This included the F-4 tornado in the Jackson area, and a number of smaller ones. (Tornados are rated on a scale of F0-F5) There was also major damage in Montgomery County, where 100 homes were damaged, and in Springfield, where about $5 million in damage was recorded.

And it's still raining. So flooding is becoming a big problem. Even the normally-tamed Cumberland River in Nashville has risen to the point where it's causing problems. Equipment from this weekend's "Riverstages" music festival is now underwater, including lights, generators, Porta-a-Potties, and a Budweiser beer truck loaded with 600 cases of beer was stranded beneath the water. A team tried to fish out some of the stuff yesterday afternoon, with partial success.

Images from Jackson

Road to Jackson, Monday, 2:21 PM: After driving through pouring rain, strong winds, and grape-sized hail, suddenly the sun broke through the clouds.

Downtown Jackson, Tuesday, 11:40 AM : Onlookers gaze at the remains of the Mother Liberty Church.

Downtown Jackson, Tuesday, 11:45 AM :Overturned postal trucks lay strewn about a parking lot near the post office.

Downtown Jackson, Tuesday, 12:57 PM: One of many demolished buildings in the city.

Tennessee got steamrolled by intense storms last night. Our company has a division in Jackson, TN, which was struck by at least one tornado. Most of the city is without power, including our office. So I got called in with a van-load of computer equipment to help set up temporary quarters.

I'm in a hotel room in Jackson right now. I happened to pick up a Sunday copy of The Jackson Sun. I was slightly amused to see most of a page devoted to the important civic issue of whether or not Hooter's should be able to open a reastaurant in as fine and upstanding a place as Jackson.

Here are two of the many letters printed on the page:

I think it's wrong for women to look "sexy" instead of settling down with a good husband and raising a family. They, and whoever brings that restaurant to Jackson, should be ashamed and will have to answer for their actions someday.

Cletus Barnes
Paris

Sounds plum wonderful! Them ladies are good people, just waitresses. I say we should let them work if they want to.

Shane Heart
Newberry

Hmm... It appears there is some disagreement about this issue. Will the good people of Jackson allow such a vile establishment in their midst? Will Hooters destroy the moral fiber of yet another city? Are people named "Cletus" for real? You'll just have to tune in next week for the exciting conclusion of this little drama!