Last weekend, Viv and I were wandering about Capitol Hill, and stepped into the Red Light on Broadway, purveyors of fine vintage threads to our urban hipster nabe. Red Light is an odd store - there are at least two locations, and they generally have very high quality stock, sometimes of surprising vintage.

I once found a beautiful men's suit there with tailoring details such as inset ivory or bone cuff stays in the sleeves. These stays are like little spurs that face the wearer's wrist, and which would allow the wearer to fasten separate hard linen, celluloid, or whatnot cuffs directly to the inside of the suitcoat. This would obviate the necessity of a long-sleeved formal shirt, saving time and money and making the wearer a modicum cooler, I assume.

Separate cuffs and collars for shirts were introduced in order to increase the amount of time a man could wear a shirt before having it laundered; instead of changing the shirt, one changed the cuffs. Imagine, if you will, acting in the capacity of an accountant in the 1800's; you'd probably drag your cuffs through a great deal of ink, and the detachable cuff would be a great convenience.

The suit itself was in imacculate condition except for the waistcoat, whch had been torn, recently it appeared, along one shoulder. Despite this problem I would have bought the suit; but it had been made for someone about six and a half feet tall. So I left it. I'd guess that the suit dated from the 1840's to the 1850's.

So the Red Light can sometimes yield treasures, yet it seems to undervalue them (I suspect the torn vest happened in the store, and the suit hung, unsold, for nearly a year); at the same time it's not unusual for something I can't stand (seventies shimmery image-print nylon disco shirts, for example) to be hugely overpriced. Who knows.

Thus, when Viv walked up to me holding a round-crowned hat (right), I was quite prepared to give it my attention. At $25, it was priced just as hundreds of other similar derbies or bowlers are priced on ebay and in thrift stores. However, even a brief look at the hat made it clear to me that it was very well made, with only slight wear to the right interior of the brim, and a sprung bit of some plant-stalk material at the base of the brim where it meest the crown of the hat. The interior was fully lined with very high quality material, and the interior hatband was made of very thick, very soft leather.

Adding to my interest was the old-fashioned logo stamped on the lining (closeup at right), which read "Lock & Co, Hatters, St. James's Street, London - Established 1759". So I bought the hat.

I have had a turn-of-the century American bowler or derby for some time (right - note its' straight sides as compared to the slightly tapered sides seen above; interior view below; it's unlined), and in terms of quality of manufacture, this Lock-made hat far surpassed it. It was also in excellent shape, and so I resolved to find out as much as I could about the hat, and indeed, about derbies and bowlers in general.
So, first, what's the difference between a bowler and a derby?

Well, as far as I can tell, in 1888, an Earl of Derby (probably the 15th, although this source says it was the 12th, since the 14th lived from 1799-1869, it's unlikely that it was the 12th) visited the United States wearing the style we now call a derby, in blind recollection of his visit.

However, in Britain, the same style of hat is known by two names: the bowler, which of course we yanks know of, and the Coke hat, which we ignorant colonials have never heard of.

I stood in ignorant solidarity with many of my readers on this matter until I began to investigate that intriguing logo in this newly-acquired derby or bowler. Turning to my highly-paid and wildly efficient team of information research scientists, I beseeched them to toil day and night until information concerning the logo was discovered.

I hadn't long to wait, and within moments was looking at this site featuring the exact same logo I had noted in the hat I now own. Indeed, there's a tiny icon of a bowler on the main page! But the category - "Top Hats and Coke Hats" mystified me. Clicking through, I noted the same hat I held in my hands, available for a mere 189 British Pounds! XE.com reports that as of this writing that's a stunning $289 USD.

Woof! Well, Lock & Co. must cater to some wealthy folks, I guess. In fact, they are holders of the right to make hats for everyone's favorite dysfunctional family, the Windsors, and have apparently been the place to go for reputable headwear since, um, 1676. I have yet to turn up an explanation concerning the discrepancy bewteen this date and the one stamped upon my hat. And alas! No note concerning the peculiar terminology employed by the hat merchants was to be found.

A bit more digging yeilded this citation of a book, "The Man in the Bowler Hat: His History and Iconography" (entertainingly, an acquaintance of mine who works for the publisher may have designed the cover):

The first bowler hat was designed by the hatters James and George Lock of St. James Street in London in 1850 for their client William Coke II, later the Earl of Leicester.

"The Locks sent their design across the Thames to the hatmakers THomas and William Bowler, who had a factory in Southwark and were Lock's chief suppliers. William Bowler produced the prototype, which bears his family's conveneiently descriptive name to this day, although Lock's has always insisted on calling it a 'Coke' hat. 'On the south side of the river, the thing was naturally called a Bowler, because Mr. Bowler had made it. In St James's Street it was equally naturally called a Coke, since Mr Coke had bespoken it.' No doubt the commercial rather than the aristocratic appellation won out because of the hat's bowl shape.

And so it became clear to me that this bowler was not only a coke hat as well, it was in essence, the bowler. I began to seriously investigate the hat for clues as to its' age; the lack of synthetics at first made me think it was possibly pre-WW1; when I turned the interior hat band and found the date "2/11/65" for a moment I had hopes that it was from 1865. Hoever, looking more closely I found a paper label under the lining near the date inscription which was typeset in a condensed Futura font. that font was designed in the 1930's, and therefore the hat must have been made or sold on or about February 11, 1965.

In considering the hat's overall excellent condition when compared to the significantly older companion hat, it became very clear to me that the hat must be from the 1960's. At any rate, I was very pleased by the opportunity to learn remarkable things concerning its heritage. Larger versions of many of the photos seen here are available at pix.whybark.com/gallery/bowlers.

So, I forked for the Adobe Photoshop upgrade (with the rebate it's less than a hundred bucks) and mmm, I da no.

First, the most time intensive thing I do in photoshop is color and orientation correction for batches of digital photos. In Photoshop 6, a "save" command issued upon a jpeg resulted in the file being saved. In PS 7, the default has been changed to - for every file and save instance - a dialog in which you are prompted for the compression level of the jpeg. Even if you accept the default, a one-keystroke action has just become a two-keystroke action.

More aggravating, even you choose to automate the save action, the dialog still apears.

Second, I have to admit, I see NO speed gain, and the lack of speed appears to be associated with the silly demoware gewgaws Apple has incorporated into the OS interface.

The most egregious example is translucent windowbars. PS opens large numbers of files concurrently in a step-and-repeat pattern on screen; each step, then, creates a compositing task for the OS which apparently robs the system of what might otherwise be respectable speed gains.

Finally, there's the by now traditional remapping of tool-keys, a persistent annoyance across all software upgrades. Curiously for me, Adobe has added color correction tools to the Image->Adjustment menu selection which are directly accessible via keyboard, Auto-Contrast and Auto-Levels; but my preferred manipulation tool, Curves, is denied a default direct keyboard shortcut. That's easily fixed via Actions, however.

I have yet to pick up or concoct a truly trying assignment that will push the complex image management tools of photoshop to the edge, but I hope to soon.

Xerox Revises Revenue Data, Tripling Error First Reported

A HA HAA HA HA HA heh heh hah HA!

Oh man! This is gettin' GOOD! Who's next?

Xerox too? Copycats.

And I have been informed via crypto-Masonic corespondence that I am obligated to clarify my anti-Economist outburst of recent days: said outburst was purely self-satirical in nature and was in no way intended to be a sexual invitation to the news magazine The Economist, employees thereof, or readers.

Besides, I heard the guy they have covering our meltdown (yes, I said meltdown; more to come, he says), and I found him to be the most informed and reasoned person on the subject on the show; all the Americans clearly had too much at stake politically to accurately address the issues.

For instance, did you know that the head of the SEC raised concerns about these issues following the collapse of "Chainsaw Al" Dunlop's eviscerated Sunbeam in the spring of 1998? And that the accounting firm employed by Al there was ... Andersen? And that the accounting industry marshalled forces and closed down efforts to legislate safeguards against these kinds of tricks? And that the very folks we are seeing, red in the face, on TV, calling for greater, um, accountability, the folks that sit on Joe Lieberman's Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, are the peple that the accounting industry made sure to take very good care of come campaign time.

Recently I made note of Frontline's monster season.

Well, a week ago, the topic was this: Bigger than Enron. The title is a prediction. Less than a week later, we've seen what is poised to be the fulfillment of that prediction.

One long-term point to keep in mind, if there were any way to get this on the board in congress: if AOL Time Warner, Disney, and/or Sony have engaged in similar accounting chicanery (a distinct possiblity, yes?), there may be some possibility of addressing the unfortunate extension of both the life of copyright via the Mickey Mouse bill and additionally, an opportunity to weaken the strictures of the DCMA.

In what I can only assume to be continuing fallout from Enron, the dot-collapse, et al - PriceWaterhouseCoopers Consulting has chosen a new moniker. I'll let Anne Zender fill you in - go on, I'll be here when you get back, waiting.

What can I say? At least it's a word.

Of course, it seems to me that if someone were to whip up a web poll (you know who you are) concerning posible days of the week one might wish to name a consulting firm after, there are other, more accurate and descriptive choices, such as "Beer Friday" and "Tuethursday" (this last of course describing the we-must-ship-the-software-now-no-one-may-leave-the-premises-until-someone-dies-or-the-project-is-done business practice sooo beloved in tech - ooh! triple overtime!).

I wonder, did they hire a consulting firm?

Of course, after reflection, I realize that the name is intended as an antidote to the wild-eyed spend-spend-spend world of accounting and consulting practices that closed Andersen recently.

That, and they can license a fine The Mamas and The Papas song. I don't think they'll buy using the Boomtown Rats song, though.

---

Mmmph. Self-annoyance! I meant to post this (well, duh) on Monday. Dagnabbit. Ken no doubt figures it's john barleycorn wuz the causin' of it all, but it wernt.

Naturally, I no sooner get bellerophon restored to her normal, sweetnatured self when I hear of things one and two.

thing one

Movable Type has released 2.mumble of the very fine content management system which helps provide these pages, and it changes the back end from perl and flatfile - based databasing to perl and MySQL, very good news indeed for me, at least. I rather imagine that the cutover should make saving and rebuilding a bit snappier. I do hope they stick with the cold HTML-based output though - very nice for backup.

I suppose I should schedule that project for Monday.

thing two

OpenSSH has a security hole in it which means I can either demonstrate my manly prowess with open-source software updates, or wait until Apple fixes it and distributes it via Software Update. Hm, which one would you choose?

I think I'll schedule my masculinity-demonstration session for Monday as well.

And just for giggles, the image which adorns this entry came from an eleven-page thread at The Comics Journal discussion board in which, as nearly as I can make out, some comics collectors who feel that Chris Ware's scathing, brutal depiction of their species in the just concluded "Rusty Brown" segments of his work means he should by no means be allowed to produce collectibles that would appeal to their ilk.

The object in question appears to be a Rusty Brown lunchbox first released a few months ago.

At Apple.
I've read no advance on the flick, except remarks from Braga and Berman concerning story development and casting made in January; it appears that Data's brother Lore is back, possibly in a supporting role, and that the Nosferatu people menace the Federation. Something about the bad guys makes me wonder if they tie in to the Temporal Cold War plot thread on Enterprise.

Data is shown flinging himself into the void at a run, as a Suliban character did on the new show, as well.

This is to be the end of that hearty franchise, TNG, I guess.

in his longish entry for June 26th Paul says everything I wanted to about the recent supreme court decision that ye Prez has termed "ridiculous". Congressional defiance of this decision simply underlines the growing distance between political reality and the one we actualy happen to live in. But then, we all knew the constitution was in serious fucking trouble during the election, and naturally, subequent events have done much to bear out this knowledge.

SPQR, indeed.

Pursuant to the remarkable admission of Ken Goldstein's secret identity and the subsequent discovery of photographic evidence concerning Mr. Goldstein's apparent agelessness, we here at mike.whybark.com moved with the lightning reflexes of the distributed, all-digital startup and despatched crack teams of research associates to photo libraries the world over in hopes of finding further traces of Mr. Goldstein's Zelig-like footprints throughout history.

This week's entry in our growing log of KG imagery places the cagey ("Cagey" - get it?) freelance technical writer and sponsor of Girls are Pretty in the crowd of advisors behind the big three at the historic Yalta Conference. There was no associated textual information concerning the boyish six-footer, who retains his youthful exuberance and occasional fits of needy, insecure demonstrativeness in addition to his ageless appearance.

Can ya dig it?

I'm a cat person, okay? Independence and so forth over slavish love any day. That said, it's come to my attention that there are some peculiar sites concerning felinity afloat about the net.

Bonsai Kitten

via Everything Burns. "Who has not been stricken with the expressive grace of Japanese Bonsai? Though once the sole province of Bonsai masters within Japan, Bonsai plants have been available to fortunate consumers throughout the world for some time. With this in mind, we are proud to now offer to you the animal complement of this art form; the Bonsai Kitten."

Cat Boxing!

Reference forgotten. "Welcome to Cat Boxing.com! Blow by blow, swap by swap and growl after growl! Round after round of feline fighting!" Honest, much less scary than you think.

My Cat Hates You Dot Com

David Fortney referred me via email. Currently running competition to find "the EVILEST CAT" ever. "This cat hates with such a hot hate, she can't even stand to be in the house when dorks come over. There are some loser-cooties that can't be licked off or hocked up in a hairball."

And, of course, who can forget the notorious Twisty Cats. Sadly for lovers of the bizarre and unfortunate in human behavior, the proprietor of the Twisties seems to have removed the great majority of the skin-crawlingly freakish and yet undeniably cute and harmless images of these triumphs of human intervention in animal reproductive activities.

My own cat, Chloe, wants you to know that there will be NO other cats allowed near her or in her house and that she, and she alone, shall be the sole feline in the house who is permitted to sleep on the bed. We try to ignore these rules when possble.

Apparently, the World Cup engaged in some accounting chicanery. I don't get it. First, how can soccer generate the kind of dough that is being described as missing? Second, I thought that the tournament was over. Boy, was I wrong!

So, does the winning team have to make up that $3.8 billion?

Also, why is the stock market acting like this is the end of the world? It's not like the World Cup provides long-distance, cellular, and internet service to hundreds of thousands of people, or as if there was actually stock for the tournament available online to any direct investor that happened to read George Gilder's soccer newsletter back in the day.

I mean, what's next? Will news of a fixed world series plunge the globe into hyperinflation?

And, man, you gotta hand it to the accountants: they some gangsta! The ladies luuv the bad boyz! Woo hoo! Everybody fightin' to get the accountant at the party! Yeah!

And let me state for the record: The Economist can blow me.

Wait, am I drunk?

A letter to Summer

Dear Summer,

Why are you so fucking hot, summer? I hate your guts. You think you are so great, don't you? Direct sunlight on your hemisphere. Big fucking deal. I can do that. I'm doing it right now, as a matter of fact.

There is much more!

Whilst in California, I ran short of reading material, and happened upon a paperback edition of the celebrated Joseph Mitchell omnibus, "Up in the Old Hotel", beloved to many. I anticipated reading it with glee.

Encountering Mitchell's extended elegy for the coots, crannies, crooks, and coke cellars of Old New York was lovely, as enjoyable as I'd expected. What surprised me was his insistent focus on the waterways of the greater region itself. This grew more powerful with the passage of time, as though Mitchell pursued the event horizon of pre-industrial New York. The watermen of the metropolitan area or the failing villages of near-in rural counties, their cemeteries overgrown with wildflowers within sight of the booming heart of Manhattan, increasingly occupy center stage.

His interest in the water and the men who live and die upon it is in keeping with my summer reading theme, leading up to the great Tall Ship Bout of '02 to be held upon Lake Union in August.

Mitchell is a standard bearer of that standby of American general interest reportage, podunk journalism, whereby the urbane voice of mainstream American News brings us the true and half forgotten voices of our fantastically surreal nation. In turn, he handed off to Charles Kuralt and others; and as has been quite thouroughly discussed, quit writing in the middle of his career apparently in response to having deveopled a long piece concering the writings and life (or lack thereof) of one Joe Gould.

After I read the book, I of course became curious about Gould; making anyone's task in researching it on the net considerably harder is the digital detritus of the marketing for the Stanley Tucci - Ian Holm film, "Joe Gould's Secret", which overwhelms any search request results. Despite that I've located several resources of interest to the curious:

Donna Kossy, of "Kooks" fame, hosts the Professor Seagull Exhibit. The Village Voice covers the discovery of undiscovered Gould diaries in April 2000. Not least, I found a portrait by e e cummings (to the right) and also the 1933 Alice Neel portrait (warning: genitalia) Mitchell describes somewhat inaccurately.

So why did Mitchell quit writing in response to covering Gould's secret? It seems very much as though he lost faith in the future and the past at the same time, seeing Gould no longer as a charming rapscallion of an artist but as a fool and tragic failure; by extension, then Mitchell's work was as much a scam, and as pointless, as Gould's.

I think there's another aspect of Gould as a persona that should be considered. During the time that Mitchell was covering Gould (in the forties) the butt-ends of a thousand cigarettes and joints coalesced to provide the worldview and modus operandi of the Beats, of Burroughs, Kerouac et al. Now, it's clear that they produced something; it's also clear that they attempted to build their creative lives upon the same practices that Gould had. Where he may have failed, they succeeded.

I have to wonder, is it possible that Mitchell wasn't stumped by Gould's lack of production; but more by Kerouac and Ginsberg's profusion? In Mitchell's role as interpreter to the bourgeoisie, the comforting lesson to the audience is that the boho scamster dies penniless and alone; Mitchell's abandonment of his pen troubles even contemporary reviewers because it rebukes both their lives as also penniless and alone.

Good man.

ADDENDUM: A parting thought: the beatster who I was most reminded of in reading Mitchell's descriptions of Gould is Harry Smith, the man responsible for the Folkways/Smithsonian Anthology of American Folk Music. Smith came to New York in the forties, about the time that Mitchell was first writing about Gould, and began his pursuit of a life of eccentricity and scmming poverty as colorful as that of Gould. It's intereting to note that Gould's time on an Indian reservation paralells Smith's teenage ethnography, recording songs and ceremonies on Washington State's Lummi indian reservation.

He is best remembered for the Anthology, a work which was in point of fact similar in concept to Gould's oft-described "Oral History of our Time"; the music in Smith's collection was arranged by him into four sets, one for each of the medieval humors and was visualzed by him as a magic incantation though which the same qualities that fascinated Mitchell - regionalisms, cussedness, peculiar customs, unutterable horrors, legends, and so forth - might be transmitted in to the developing post industrial state. Smith, of course, suceeded beyond his wildest imagination, and his Anthology is probably the most influential recording ever released.

But Smith was just as crazy a coot, and just as peripatetic, as Joe Gould. It simply appears that Smith, a generation younger than Gould, was able to conceptualize his great work of bohemian history in the media of his period, where Gould was wedded to the preceding technologies and was unable to master them.

I just received this hilarious spam (links deleted!). I found it about the funniest spam I've ever read. The lines concerning laziness are what made me laugh the most.

We are not looking for people who are self-motivated.

We are not looking for people who join every 'get rich quick' scheme offered on the Internet.

We are not looking for class presidents, beautiful people, career builders or even college graduates. We don't even want union workers or trade school graduates.

We want the laziest people that exist - the men and women who expect to make money without lifting a finger.

We want the people who have a hard time getting out of bed before noon.

We want those of you who think that getting out of bed to go lay on the couch is an effort that is best not thought about.

If you meet this criteria, just click HERE and send us an email. BE SURE TO TYPE IN THE Subject Line the following words... "I do not want to work". In fact, if you are so lazy that typing those words in the Subject Line is too much of an effort, than just type "work sucks" and we'll get the picture.

2. In the body of the message, type your FIRST and LAST name.

3. In body of the message, type your email address.

Either way, we will be absolutely certain that you are the kind of person we want to be associated with and we will make sure that you get the information to bring you home with us.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, we want the kind of people who DO NOT take risks. If you are the kind of person who will consider doing something that's NOT a 'Sure Thing', then do NOT respond. This is too easy a way to make money and there's no challenge in it.

If you can ever find the energy to make it to our website, you will be able to see the first home business in history that requires practically no work. NONE. By opting in and asking for the link to our website, you will be telling us that you want to make enough money that you can quit your regular job and sleep all day, not to mention some serious movie watching - if that's your thing. We are not looking for a commitment from you and we don't even want your money at this stage.

As a matter of fact, we don't even want to hear from you if the idea of making lots of money with very little effort does not interest you. So my friend, this is the first and last email we will ever send you. Just click the link below and then go back to daydreaming or whatever your current hobby is.

So, if you haven't heard (and I bet you have), wireless LANs are the Next Big Thing. So is Broadband.

For the last few years, wireless community networks have been popping up, which are all-volunteer efforts to provide wireless broadband internet access via public announcements of wireless access points and areas of coverage.

A related practice has been the development of wardriving (etymology: derives from old-skool hacker wardialing, the sequential automated dialing of huge blocks of telephone numbers in search of one hooked up to a modem), which entail driving or walking around a dense neighborhood in search of WiFi access points.

On June 24th, Cory Doctorow at boingboing posted a link to the warchalking proposal, a system to mark located wifi access points in public, explicitly derived from hobo signs.

On June 25th, Matt at the warchalking site posted his first pic of someone employing the symbology in the Real World.

Keep an eye on this.

As I've discussed over the last few days, I've been performing hardware surgery on bellerophon, the server that provides you with this website. All has gone reasonably well, but not ideally, and so I brought her into the office here to work out the booting problem that was puzzling me.

I had employed the highly-regarded Carbon Copy Cloner, an Applescript-based drive duping utility, to mirror old to new, but the new boot drive was not playing nice. So. Testing matrix in, um, head, I began to experiment with boot settings this morning. Unfortunately for me, shortly thereafter, the main boot drive, the one with six months of tried and true tinkering and mind-bending installation trickery (are you listening to me, Image Magick?) refused to acknowledge my desires.

So... bellerophon was booting only into OS9, which can work well enough to serve static content but, for example, my Gallery-based photo site, which depends on PHP and MySQL, wouldn't couldn't won't work in OS9. And this blog, which employs the perl-based Movable Type, would serve static content well enough, but new content would have to be hand-embroidered, the way macho men crank the code. (There may, in fact be some sort of Yatta tie in).

So I was looking at the "torn folder" icon, Mac OS X's new way of saying, "you are screwed", when the phone rings.

It was a prospective employer, checking to make sure I hadn't gone and gotten a job or anything, because they wanted to reactivate me as a candidate for a position.

"Is this the producer/coordinator position?"

Naturally, it's a technical position performing web work. I thank the pleasant fellow. He had the decision-maker vibe. I go out on a limb (a short one, really - who do you think is the most influential economic force in the Puget Sound region) and ask if they are .NET-based or headed in that direction. Yes, why yes, they are.

So... I have an immediate economic imperative to get bellerophon back into the sky. A bit of poking about reveals that Apple is pretty insistent upon a full reinstall to a clean disk in this variety of failure. And so began my afternoon.

At Radio and internet Newsletter, site scriveners Paul Maloney and Kurt Hanson publish a letter from legendary internet grump Mark Cuban, founder of broadcast.com.

It's interesting reading. Cuban describes the deal between Yahoo (who bought Broadcast.com) and the RIAA as having been explicitly crafted to close down the indies. This is the deal that was used as a template for the stinkin' no-good backstabbin' lyin' sorry excuse for a sack of potatoes "compromise" announced last week.

(via Seattle's sweetheart, Wendy at Slumberland)

The weekly original art I've selected is from a series of xerox flyers made in the summer of, um, 1987. In fact, it appears to have been made in June of 1987, when the Korean government first suspended the constitution, and faced massive popular unrest before backing down by June 29th, with the Korean government announcing major democratic reforms in response to the public pressure. As with all of my Monday images, clicking on it will produce a greatly enlarged image.

(In looking for linkage pertaining to the topic at hand I noted this interesting essay concerning the roots of the Korean democratic movement.)

The unrest at the time generated incredible images - little old ladies smacking Samurai-Vader riot cops with rolled umbrellas, walls of cops standing in sheets of Molotov cocktail flame - and at the time I knew nothing of Korean politics save the bare info that it was one of the many repressive governments around the world that the US equipped and trained. I was just interested in recycling the imagery as a means of expressing the general excitement I felt at seeing the shape of the static global politics of the day challenged - calls for democratic reform were being heard in China, in Korea, in South Africa, in Chile, in the socialist countries.

Later, my parents adopted a Korean grad student as a family member, and my dad worked with a lot of Korean auto-industry and business prof types, so I became more interested in the background to these images.

In my reading about it, the event that was of most interest to me was the 1980 Kwangju uprising and massacre, covered at length in an issue of Granta for which I could find no good links. The link here is to an article in The Nation which concerns itself wth the extent to which US officials knew in advance about and may have approved the use of the Korean military units that performed the suppression of the uprising.

Fortunately for me, the Indiana University daily paper had published an ill-advised coupon for "50 free copies" at Kinko's - the coupon did not have the usual "limit one per customer" or and expiration date printed on it, so a band of my friends and I systematically harvested the downtown area for these coupons and squirrelled them away for use all summer long. I believe in the end I designed about 40 or so flyers. Most are similar to this one, in that they express a political opinion but are not polemical.

Just about two years later, I watched the events in Tiananmen Square with interest that escalated to concern as I realized that my parents had left the US to fly to a conference in Shanghai and were to arive there on the 5th of June. The army moved on the Chinese students while my parents were in the air, and let's just say that media coverage combined with information I was getting from democracy-supporting Chinese students at IU gave me concern.

There will be more of these flyers seen in this space over time.

This Yatta! site, via a link from this "fanimutation" via yesterday's guest star explains why there are silly Japanese men singing while wearing fig leaves.

Lyrics here.

And since I first heard of Yatta! via Paul Frankenstein not very long ago, I should mention that he noted, before I did, that my ID of Moffet Field from I-5 was a bit off geographically.

In point of fact, I was looking at the blimp hangars of the now-mothballed Tustin Marine Base. Moffet is way further north in Cali, nearer to San Jose and the Bay area.

I will do a real Blimp Week Followup on this, HONEST, but the credit was overdue.

In other news, I can now play the ukelele!

via RRE and the blog Spitting Image, "Shake Hard". Flash-based.

Before Kirk shouted "K-H-A-AAA-NNN!" he cried "FINN-E-GAAAN!"

Apparently, fighting is in the genes. Chris, if you ever read this, I know a SHITLOAD of Irish tunes. Whyncha pick one out to take home (um, note: "Finnegan's Wake" not included in this offer until I've had a chance to brush up "..mmmph hmm hmm irishman mighty odd... hmm hmm tongue both rich and sweet"...) Thanks for the hilarious stories (well, I thought it was hilarious, but then I can match your tale of physical violence, except for the tale part), and, I'm a tiny, short man that you OR your brother could squash like a bug. So please pick on my east-coast colleague Ken instead.

CHAPTER ONE

"Last night, I dreamt that I beat the shit out of Mike Norton in front of the Lil' Peach. This marks probably the 250th time I've had this particular dream."

CHAPTER TWO

"When we last left our story, Mike Norton was motioning for me to leave the safety of Lil’ Peach in order to receive what would probably be a thorough pummeling."

CHAPTER THREE

"I walked outside and stood on the sidewalk in front of Mike Norton’s pick up truck. What followed was a classic game of ‘questions’, as popularized in Tom Stoppard’s masterpiece Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead."

CHAPTER FOUR

"'We’re fucked.'

Watching the truck back across the parking lot, it was all I could think to say."

POSTSCRIPT

Too brief to excerpt.

Well, the Wallstreet's T-board came in, and I performed the requisite surgery. I swapped the drives, as promised, and Bellerophon boots properly. However, the duped OSX boot drive is not behaving as it should, and the T-board does not appear to have solved the invisible battery problem - so more fiddlage to come next week, pursuant to rule #2:

No hardware projects allowed during weekends!

And, I'm trying out blogrolling.com as a linkmanager; it's pretty slick. Unfortunately, it works via embedded javascripts, which creates refresh problems on my browser, what about yours?

...And tomorrow is the Fremont Solstice Parade and art car fiesta!

Here's a route map. Apparently there's some sort of pageant at Gas Works this year as well.

The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Capatin Kidd by Robert Zacks. ISBN: 0786865334.

Zacks is also the author of "An Underground Education", kind of contrarian trivia book that I had read and pretty much forgotten about - one of those mind-candy trivia books that includes details about inessential but interesting bits of historical trivia such as the role that Edison's dirty marketing played in establishing electrocution as a means of capital punishment. The subtext to that book, in line with my extant belief systems, is that the powerful and wealthy play dirty and for keeps. (So do the rest of us, but when you're powerful or wealthy such behavior inevitably kills people - the rest of us don't always murder, just frequently.)

"The Pirate Hunter" continues this theme. Zacks paints a picture of William Kidd that is unmistakably sympathetic. Kidd, a Scot who settled in early New York and distinguished himself in a naval militia of sorts during a conflict in the Caribbean defending British colonial interests, had parlayed that success into a career as a well-to-do merchant in New York City. He'd married the most beautiful girl in town, helped in the construction of the original Trinity Church building at Wall and Broadway (yes, that church, although the building presently on site was built in the 1850s), and generally had made an important man of himself.

Alas for him, the sea and danger called, and he shipped out to London with some idea of obtaining a Royal Navy Captain's commission in order to fight the dirty French on the bounding main. At that time, however (the 1690s), you had to be a member of the nobility to be an officer in the British military, so he struck out.

A shady acquaintance from NYC, who had connections to influential members of the King's court, hooked up with Kidd, and concocted a scheme whereby Kidd would be granted an unconventional privateer's license to pursue pirates. A privateer was a means of inexpensively extending a nation's military power - something like a bounty hunter. Privateers were granted licenses that allowed them to act as agents of military interdiction against specific nationalities, in time of war, or pirates, in time of peace. These licenses generally required the privateers to capture the target and then immediately turn the prize over to the justice system of the day, where the captured goods would be parceled out to interested parties, including, in the case of piracy, the original owners of the pirated goods.

Kidd's license, however, was distinct from the run-of-the-mill licenses in that it was backed directly by the King, rather than by the Navy, a colonial government, or a colonial corporation such as the East india Company. The theoretical advantage was that the goods which Kidd seized did not have to be turned over to the appropriate system of adjudication but were regarded as under the direct control of His Majesty, King William. Given that state of affairs, the King could then assign the goods directly to the backers of the mission.

The license turned Kidd into the equivalent of our contemporary drug-interdiction units, who are empowered to confiscate and impound property in association with drug-seizures whether or not there is a conviction in the case. Kidd's backers stood to profit in direct proportion to the success of the pirates caught.

However, things did not go as planned. Kidd had ill luck finding legitimate prizes, and his penurious backers had refused to allow him to pay wages to his crew, insisting instead that they could only be paid from proceeds of the voyage - much like pirate practice, in fact. With this restriction in place, Kidd had a tough time getting any crew but former pirates, and as soon as it was apparent the mission was in trouble, the crew began to agitate to turn pirate.

Kidd apparently resisted this strongly, and at one point in the voyage, most of his crew left in order to pursue piracy, with greater succes than Kidd had at privateering. In the end, Kidd took two ships under the rules of his license, but because of a number of unfortunate events, he'd already become the poster boy for notorious piracy on the high seas - not the least of these was the fact that Kidd's royally-derived grant had become known in Parlaiment and was seized upon as a means of weaking the royalist party.

In the end, of course, it was in the political interests of the King and colonial powers to make a great example of this man, whose legend, even before his death, had made his name synonymous with black-hearted teachery and greedy adventure. In the end he was hung, and his body was placed in an iron cage at the edge of the Thames, and left on display for nearly 100 years, as a lesson to those who would turn against the Crown, and now, as a lesson to those who would deal with merciless and corrupt forces that far outweigh them.

This is the best pirate history book I have ever read. Zack's detailed research and clear, unornamented writing allow the complex story to emerge clearly. One gets a distinct sense of the fascination and joy with which Zacks waded through the crabbed, blurred handwriting of his primary source material; as his immersion in the documents increased, his ability to discern, or project, personality into the inky traces left by our ancestors increased, and I came away from the book with a vivid sense of the personalities of many of the players in the book. Zack's dry, ironic wit helped him, as well, to isolate details which throw his story into relief; and in the book's closing scenes, as William Kidd is brought to the gallows through the teeming, stinking streets of a Londaon execution day festival, he brings life to his grotesques via vivid, echoing sensory description that brough to mind Borges, Hogarth, and Breughel.

An excellent, satisfying read. Arr!

http://cgi.liveauctions.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1834314676

Yes, that chair. Set to go for over $100k.

Hloy cow, look at the whole collection! The Geek King needs new shoes!

Spock's Ears! Captain Picard's first season uniform!

My god, this collection shouldn't be sold off in bits and pieces, it belongs in an academic library! Look at the production notes!

Due to the recent critical information concerning the identity of Deep Throat, my previously scheduled coverage of our trip to California has been delayed. I really want to get to this, both so I can write about it while it's fresh and because I want to finally write my "Pirates of the Caribbean" essay - It's Walt's last word, his valediction, and the news wasn't good. Lucky for us, it's a great work of art as well as a kooky summer thrill.

In miscellaneous other news, I just heard from Eric White, who has several pages of Walking Ruins videos online, and I will be heading into a major server upgrade soon.

The server upgrade will entail changing the Wallstreet's "T-board", a two-part component which is responsible for getting charge power to the battery, and swapping the current 10-gig internal drive for a 40-gig drive while mounting the 10-gig in an expansion-bay case.

Once I have that under control I'll get to learn about the wild and woolly world of OSX drive duplication utilities via hard experience. An unfortunate characteristic of OSX is that GUI-level copies of mounted volumes may not duplicate all the dtat on the volume, a consequence of unix-style user management and permissions, and inversely, tarring volumes may not preserve old-style Mac metadata.

Thus, backup under OSX has remained an evolving practice.

I may or may not temporarily migrate my site content to my desktop machine (Socrates; the Wallstreet server is Bellerophon) and employ it to serve the material in the meantime - I don't recall how far out of synch the two configurations are, but I doubt, for example, my gallery server at pix.whybark.com or the extended features of Movable Type will be enabled on Socrates.

(I saw that Ben and Mena, Movable Type's developers, were asking for beta testers on mySQL integration, which I look forward to with anticipation!)

I believe my first stop for volume duplication will be Carbon Copy Cloner, discussed here on Mac OS X Hints. There was a roundup on backup for OSX on TidBITS recently, but their site search is down at the moment so no cite here.

NEWS FLASH!!!

An anonymous source high within the executive hierarchy of the "least grating" of the NYC/NJ blogs, Ken Goldstein's Illuminated Donkey, has revealed to mike.whybark.com that Mr. Goldstein (or "Kenny-Boy" as he would be known to President Bush if they ever meet) is hard at work defending his claim to be Deep Throat as covered here yesterday.

Our source, while requesting anonymity, is of the highest caliber, and, indeed, one might even say that the source is unimpeachable.

When pressed to explain the shocking role that fellatio appears to have played in both the serious and troubling events of Watergate and the frenzy of sexual condemnation that nearly wrecked the Republican party before it was saved by a judical coup, our source looked up at the concrete beams of the parking garage and ignored the question.

Former President Clinton, probably somewhere in New York State, did not answer questions asked concerning this matter by your faithful correspondent at mike.whybark.com.

Former Nixonian Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, wanted for questioning by human rights tribunals for his role in the murderous 1973 Chilean coup led by General Augusto Pinochet, also did not respond, no matter how loudly we repeated our queries.

Also emerging at press time were ties between Robert Redford, featured as a news reporter in the events that brought down President Nixon, and fictional bandits Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Further developments in this line of investigation include the heretofore unexplained role of Mark Twain in the publication and promulgation of the original Watergate investigations.

Worthy of note in this line of thought is Twain's "Mysterious Stranger", in which a Deep-Throat-like figure provides Twain with information concerning the world's ills, and in the end is strongly implied to be the Prince of Darkness.

Mr. Goldstein's curious agelessness remains unexplained.

UPDATE: the briefly-rumored public statement has been released, including Mr Goldstein's revelation that he may also be Joe Friday and that he has an "upcoming e-book, available exclusively through Salon’s Deep Throat imprint" - which validates rumors we've been hearing at mike.whybark.com for months concerning Salon.com's imminent move into web porn.

Mr. Goldstein, in a private email again, also pointed out that if we're looking into the Robert Redford-Mark Twain connection to Watergate, we'd be remiss in not noting the admitted involvement of WNYX lovable bigshot Jimmy James, who has repeatedly admitted to being Deep Throat, as well as having been D. B. Cooper.

Does this then indicate that Mr Goldstein may also come under suspicion of in fact being Stephen Root or perhaps Milton from Office Space?

Only time will tell. Guzzizah, my brothers.

P.S. the site "NewsRadio and the Comedic Art" is, well, pretty dense.

In a startling development to the evergreen "Who was Deep Throat" mystery, veteran blogger and beloved trencherman Ken Goldstein, of Jersey City, New Jersey, admitted to this writer in a personal email that he was in fact Deep Throat, the secret inside source that catapulted cub reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Redford to national prominence in the mid-seventies Hal Holbrook vehicle, "All the President's Men".

"Okay! Enough already! It was me, I admit it, ME! GOD, it feels good to get that off my chest!" typed the possibly intoxicated 30-year-old copywriter and technical writer in an email exchange concerning the various candidates-du-saison that are currently being flacked in such moneygrubbing endeavors as the University of Illinois three-year journalism class project which fingered Pat Buchanan, or John Dean's latest impeccably objective investigation in to the who, what, where, when, and why of Watergate.

The perpetually 30-year-old blogger, seen here in an undated file photo on Nixon's epochal China visit, refused to comment upon speculations that his agelessness is the result of either bathing in the blood of virgins or his preference for Air Jordans on the court.

A random youth, accosted in the street near my apartment, characterized "All the President's Men" as "boring" and wanted to know why the character of the President had not at least pursued personal sexual gratification instead of shredding the constitution in the name of national security. He then speculated on what sort of "action" President Bush might be "getting", assuring me that he had great faith in the current President's ability to learn from his predecessors.

It is of interest to note that fellatio, in name or in deed, appears to have had a profound effect on the course of late 20th-century United States Presidental politics.

Mr. Throat could not be reached for comment.

This is the view of the headlands at north end of Laguna Beach, specifically Main Beach; I drew this on May 27th of this year. I believe this opens Vacation Week here at mike.whybark.com, where I'll try to write about things that I did while we were in Southern California.

I finally was able to lay hands on a copy of Jason Webley's new CD Friday night. There are twelve songs, and it's called "Counterpoint". Word is that time's been too short for comprehensive site updates chez Webley, so here's a scan of the cover, and the songlist:

You can order the CD here via paypal.

I'm still listening to it and will write more about it when the time is ripe. I was very happy to see that Train Tracks is on this record. The interior cover of the CD is fairly elaborate with linocuts by Jason which were reproduced on a large scale at the CD release party.

My wife remarks that she wants to hear a recorded version of the song which includes the line "I am not your lover, I'm the map you use to find her", which appears to be too recent a song to have made it onto the record. I wonder if Baby Bok Choy recorded the CD release show, and if that song was performed there?

The show in Olympia was quite enjoyable, and was sort of the usual Jason solo deal: a few guitar numbers, a few accordian numbers, then a big audience piling, singing, into the street to find a parking garage.

I always enjoy visting Olywa; it reminds me of Bloomington, my hometown, but has a larger downtown area. After seeing Jason, we strolled down the street o a bar called "Charlie's", where good pal Chuck Swaim was doing karaoke with a bunch of his buddies. He looked great, sounded great, and it made me very happy to see him, rocked in the bosom of his community.

Here's links to Chuck's old magazine, "the Arm's Extent", and to more current stuff of Chuck's here.

via Romenesko's freakin' indispensable Obscure Store this very long story at Spike covering the process, evidence, and results for a three-year investigation conducted by University of Illinois journalism students into the identity of Deep Throat, the secret source for Woodward and Berstein's epochal Watergate coverage.

the June 14 Dateline NBC will apparently be devoted to the story.

After reading the whole thing, I wanted more clarity concerning why the investigators selected Buchanan rather than others mentioned as possible candidates (the story mentions seven in total).

Who do you finger? Groundless speculation encouraged!

Artist's Fame Is Fleeting, but Dog Poker Is Forever

Cassius Marcellus Coolidge was an entrepreneurial whirlwind with a painter's eye who seemed born to his nickname, Cash. After leaving the family farm here in the early 1860's, he bounced around the northeastern United States and Europe, trying his hand at myriad trades: he ran a drug store, founded a bank, painted street signs, drew cartoons, taught art.

His creative genius was evident, but scattershot. He wrote a comic opera about a mosquito epidemic in New Jersey. He designed comic cut-outs — "Fat Man in a Bathing Suit," for example — for people to stand behind and smile for the camera. And, at some point, he hit upon the idea that would define how he is vaguely remembered today: painting everyday scenes in which dogs behave like human beings.

Having used eBay as a research tool to ID this fellow in order to procure one of his finer prints as a wedding present, I couldn't be happier to see this story in the NYT.

Anybody else noticed the astonishing material on Nova and Frontline this past year? Last night's Frontline was about the siege in Bethlehem, which ended, um, on May 22!

The most compelling show to date in this season of Nova, was, naturally, "Why The Towers Fell", which was a truly fascinating look at the physics of the 9/11 disaster. The conclusions presented on the show were the early conclusions I recall reading about in February and earlier, but the oomph of visual info made it that much more compelling.

Frontline's season, however, has been nothing short of fantastic in both timeliness and depth - in particular, the Israeli-based producers the show has been able to hook up with have been providing absolutely remarkable coerage from both sides of the unfolding disaster there - as noted earlier in this post, the production turnarounds for this sort of news documentary has been really amazing.

Highlights for this season have included "Inside the Terror Network", "Battle for the Holy Land", and "Terror and Tehran". I also recall a show which focused on the Kurds and Iraq in very early spring, but don't know if that was on Frontline.

Additional topics covered include American meat production (the news is, well, bad: the industry is so centralized that outbreaks of regrettable food are pretty much unavaoidable), "American Porn" (hey! How'd I miss that?), and "Dot Con".

As you have undoubtely figured out, these shows all feature sweet, sweet websites backing them up. The 2001 season also features the same sort of timeliness and topicality.

Anyway, I'm glad it's on.

Uh, I really didn't mean to spend more time on this.

But I did. Nets fans, think of this as a consolation prize.

Here's a way, way too-dark quicktime movie of the object in action. I don't know why it's so dark. Maybe the horse I brought in to work on the soundtrack was blocking the light or something.

Update: I figured out how to lighten the movie and adjusted the soundtrack.

via the ever-lovin' Spencer Sundell: La Cucaracha - The Music Of The Spanish Civil War

I have a Christy Moore rewrite of Viva la Quinta Brigada that's both moving and embarassingly cheesy. You know, folkie earnestness. Here's links to a Christy Moore broadcast, "Christy Moore Uncovered, which includes his rewrite.

I also saw both Steve Gardner, a poet who mostly wrote about baseball, and JP Darriau, a professor of sculpture and a favorite teacher of mine, sing "Ay Carmela" at ages of about 65 around an upright piano at a party in Bloomington - apparently they both learned the song in NYC in the 30s when they were kids from parents and elder social acquaintances, some of whom had gone to Spain to fight in the Lincoln Brigade!

The Spanish Civil War will always be a part of European and 20th century history that holds special interest for me, becasue of my family's long realtionship with Latin culture - I lived in Santiago, Chile in 1969, and was very troubled as a child by the military overthrow of Allende's government, a US-sponsored act of state terrorism which was clearly and explicitly modeled on Franco's initiation of civial war against an elected government in Spain.

My marriage to a child of Cuban emigrants further complexifys my realtionship to these events - my family itself is built on the history of revolution and war in the Latin world.

Observing the curious events in Venezuela recently led to some reflection on these matters - but no conclusions, only rumination.

via groups.google.com, I excavated a long-lost essay about a pleasant summer evening dandled by in the Seattle neighborhood of Fremont, MUCH changed these days. I originally wrote and posted this on or about July 29, 1996:

This Sunday, a friend, my sweetie, and I went a-crawlin (for a bit) in the republic of fremont.

The short of it is: Eat at El Camino. Walk by the canal when you visit Fremont. Have a drink at The George and Dragon. And don't forget the Dubliner.

First stop was the new Latinesque joint, El Camino (look for the red neon version of the car logo). We started with drinks around, a margarita (tart! but strong) a Red Hook ESB (as good as a block from the brewery could make it, and served at the micro-approved temperature of not quite chilled) and of course a Negro Modelo.

Dinner was two fish tacos and a plate of Chicken Mole. The fish tacos were the special, grilled swordfish, and arrived as separate elemnts attractively assembled on the plate: shredded goat cheese, yogurt, whole baked/boiled (?) beans, rice, a salsa-thingy (not the salsa but the spicy veggies/onion/pepper deal, kinda pico de gallo), and hand patted corn tortillas.

Didn't try the mole but the sauce was rich in color and aroma and was devoured quickly, as were the fish tacos.

The topic of the origin of mole came up and my pal said he'd heard it was invented on the occasion of a visit of a Spanish king to Mexico from fear that his Highness might not be able to deal wit the spicy fare. Any comments?

The crowd was Fremont hipsters, a mix between aged hippies and aging post-punks; the staff was gracious if busy, and the decor and ambience of the place made me wish I had worn a large straw hat as I drank tropical cocktails. There is a deck, but turnover was minimal, and so we stuck in the bar (which is distinct from the dining area). Spendy, tasty, worth it.

Next, we headed to the redoubtable Dubliner and found it redoubtable again. For those not in the know, the Dubliner was Seattle's premier European expatriate's bar for some time. A no-nonsense beer-drinkin atmosphere predominates, leaning just a tad to the "60's music dominates the jukebox" theme. I try never to miss a visit when in the Republic. A beer or two later we went for a stroll.

Our stroll brought us to the banks of the ship canal where we watched boats and ducks. A couple shared a bottle of wine by the banks of the calm and shallow body of water, its poplar-lined banks bringing memories of early childhood in Boston unaccountably to my mind. Sharing a bottle of wine there with a sweetie seemed like a superior experience, but the mission we were on soon returned to our minds.

Strolling up the hill by the Trolleyman, the Redhook Brewery's on-site pub, showed us it was closed, but we were not disheartened in the least. We continued on in search of an out of the way joint known by the name of the George and Dragon.

Formerly a haunt of fear known as the Midget Tavern (I have no idea, but I'd like to know, ok?) the George and Dragon is a couple blocks out of the way from the normal Fremont beer-belly zone. Head up 36th towards Ballard, and a block or two before the street angles over, but after the kink at Bitters Co. and Rudy's, a parking lot, deck, and pub appear, looking vaguely industrial.

We walked in, and I noticed two things:

More UK brews than I recognized (a surprise and treat) and more drunken British, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh expatriates than I was inclined to shake Proposition 187 at. We had scored. This was the bigtime in a pub crawl, the local joint that defies expectations and exceeds reasonable standards with out currying the favor or the trade of loafer-wearing yuppies.

The crowd was mostly from the UK (I had trouble understanding the English spoken by a couple of people there), mostly working-class, and mostly rowdy, but in a different way than the good people at the Midget Tavern used to get rowdy (or so I favor myself by presuming); I did not ever feel a serious fight was about to bust out while we sweated on the deck, savoring or brews: a striking light bitter featuring a nitrogen tap for the creamy-fine head we associate with Guinness, called "Green King".

I thought it was appropriate to drink that brew in the former Midget Tavern as I must presume that the Green King is the leader of the Little People.

All in all, the G&D was a remarkable bar, and I unhestatingly recommend it to those among us who savor taverns and pubs. It manages the tricky feat of being everyday and extraordinary all at once, and deserves your trade...

See you in Fremont, where you can find me looking for the Lenin statue...

P.S: the Pacific Inn will get the treatment soon! I swear!

So, we finally saw Attack of the Clones tonight, at one of the few digitally-equipped theaters nationwide (I heard, but, like, don't quote me on this, that there are only two on the West Coast: Mumble's [formerly Graumann's] Chinese, in Hollywood, where the film premiered and one of the places we visited while in Cali, and the Cinerama here in Seattle, the place to catch SF and epics here in town, with a full cinescope setup).

My experience was marred by technical flaws, both within the film and in the screening: the film seemed dim throughout, as though I were watching it through sunglasses, and there were several times when the soundtrack became at least a quarter-second out of synch with the actor's mouths, giving the impression of a poorly dubbed foreign film.

Additionally, and truly trivially, there was a visible moment of MPEG blocky corruption in one shot. But damn, this was supposed to be the poster child for digital projection! Once I'd been tenderized by these warts I was sensitized to every problematic use of digitally-derived FX in the movie, from the jerky motions of the digipuppet riding the herd-tick in the meadow to the inexplicable decision to shoot Princess Amidala's recovery from a tumble to the sand with digital sand and shadows that failed to properly meet the lovely Ms. Portman in motion, causing that irritating "floating" appearance.

It made me grumpy.

As reported, the romance is a fine time and place to take a nap - I couldn't begin to tell you why, but I yawned and yawned and Y-A-W-N-E-D.

Other than that the vastly more positive blog-world feedback you've undoubtedly noted is by and large borne out. Mostly, the big scenes go over well. The battlecruisers taking off in the final moments of the film, for example, was a perfect realization of the scope and power of seventies SF art that partially hooked me on SF to begin with. Also, the only time I actually felt emotionally involved in the film was in the climactic scene involving Yoda; again, as advertised.

So, I guess my take on it is, go see it on film, screw digital. At least the soundtrack ought to remain in synch.

Although seeing Christopher Lee reprise his role as Sauruman so soon was interesting, to say the least.

Astute and/or assiduous readers will have realized that I spent the last two-and-a-half weeks in sunny Southern California with family, attending a wedding, lying on the beach, going to Disneyland, missing out on getting drunk with Ken Goldstein while he visited Seattle, and taking lots and lots of photos.

What better way to end a visit to the greater metropolitan area of Los Angeles than with this two-hour human traffic jam at LAX? That's about half of the outdoor line to get through security. The other half is behind me, and I'd estimate that there were about as many people actually inside waiting as you can see here outside.

As it turned out, I made my flight, but only becasue they were so foolish and/or kind as to hold the flight for a full twenty minutes, something I learned to my surprise when I sauntered around the corner to my gate, expecting to be put on standby for a morning flight.

On the plus side: it was a reasonably thorough, if unreasonably slow, inspection. I have no idea why the jam developed; I can't say I saw any security people working particularly slowly, and there were six to eight security portals, the same number I saw at SeaTac on the way out.

There was some poor line management conducted by airline personnell, however. At one point we were instructed to form a new "express" line for people with departure times between 6 and 6:30 - naturally, that line immediately became longer than the non-express line.

And, just to keep things fun, this was much, much longer than any of the lines we encountered at Disneyland.

Currently:

The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd by Robert Zacks.

Tasty! Me timbers are shivrin' to this exhaustively researched historical recounting of how the good Cap'n, one of the leading lights of the striving bourgeosie of 1680's New York City was, er, tarred with the brush of piracy. See, Kidd started out on a voyage of pirate interdiction, armed with a commission that allowed him to sieze pirate cargo, and then, via various mishaps and miscalculations, found himself prosecuted for the very offense he sought to eliminate.

Did he deserve it? Mr Zacks stoutly defends the seafaring Scot, but reading the book actually created more questions for me than I had coming into it.

UPDATE: D'oh! I left it at me in-laws in Laguna Beach! Arrr!

Published by Theia, an imprint of Hyperion, in 2002.

Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck, by Paul Collins

So perfectly up my alley, I grabbed it and finished it in about two days. Collins originally published some of the book in McSweeney's, and this book can be found in the rapidly expanding McSweeney's section of your local booketorium. You can recognize the works by their McSweeney-derived typographical cover design (centered, wide-justified Times or Century type with a single illustrative element subordinated to the type).

Thirteen kooks of varying obsessed success, only a few of whom I'd ever heard and none of whom I knew anything in detail. Amusingly, those that I had heard of I learned about via short, short capsule stories in a book that got me a-readin' as a child, the Reader's Digest book of >Strange Stories, Amazing Facts. Yummy!

Come to think of it, I believe I first read of dirigibles AND Captain Kidd in that same tome.

Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms by Steven Jay Gould.

Saddened to hear of the death of this entertaining essayist, when I saw this collection I glommed it and look forward to it. I always enjoy Gould's prose and his joy in linking the diverse into tales that reveal the structures of human society or the natural world. The flashiness of his ability in so doing is something I still take a child's joy in.

The Mummy Congress, by Heather Pringle

A survey of the underfunded and eccentric world of mummy studies, including info about the mismatch between the public's fascination with mummies and the scientific establishment's rather arms-length relationship to the topic.

"Noodles... I... slipped!"

I flipped into what I thought must have been the last 30 minutes of Leone's spaghetti gangster epic (make that matzoh gangster epic, the only pasta in the pic is De Niro's character name, Noodles). Oops!

The film actually starts with a grisly scene that turns into a transition from flashback to 1968 NYC, with virtually no dialog for the first 40 minutes of screen time. It had been so long since I'd seen it I'd totally forgotten it.

Anyway, it turned out to be the super-extended dance remix of the movie, and nearly four hours later, there I was, watching a big Mack truck drive off through the Long Island night. It was pleasant to see again. It's a pretty undisciplined film at four hours though - extended sequences of great brilliance followed by tone-deaf schmalz. But I did notice that, yes, just as Ken Goldstein once wrote, Jennifer Connelly as the younger sister of Fat Moe is an attractive screen presence, even years ago.

There are many reasons people choose to live in Orange County, California. This is one of them.

Here, the charming mug of Jersey's favorite Rutgers grad beams in happy welcome to yours truly in the parking area of JFK. This is the shot on which the cartoon Ken was based.

Originally executed circa 1991 in sumi brush and ink. Any resemblance to a celebrity is purely coincidental, I assure you.

From the mid-twenties until the beginning of World War II, the Navy had at its disposal two fully-equipped LTA bases from which the great dirigibles could operate. These were, and remain, Lakehurst in New Jersey, the first of these bases, and the lesser-known Moffet Field in Sunnyvale California, just south of Anaheim (just south of the newspaper offices of that bastion of God, guns, guts, abd development, the Orange County Register).

I was pleased to see it as we drove by on our way back to Laguna Beach from a wedding in Pasadena.

The low structures I've indicated with brackets are the great hangars.

Molé is, of course, the sweet-hot dark sauce found in eaterias all over el Norte, and of course in many fine kitchens and on many fine tables throughout Mexican America. I assume you're familiar with the celebrated "Chicken en molé" and ready to learn more about the mysterious fusion of chile and chocolata.

According to many scholars of legend, molé was first prepared by the nuns of a convent in Puebla, Mexico, a suburb of Mexico City just to the north. Taken by surprise by the impending visit of an unspecified important personage, they hit the larder to learn what ingredients might be available which could prove suitable to the person's rank.

Among others, they found turkey, chocolate, and chiles.

It's no coincidence that the chocolate and the chile were both employed liberally by the Aztec and the Maya in the long and glorious history of Precolombian Latin America - both as a sacred potion and as a recreational concotion.

Molé is in many ways the most direct transference of precolombian Mexican culture to our society that we have. The story of the nuns, above, sounds to me very much like the tale of La Virgen de Guadelupe, in which a Mexican peasant shortly after the conquest experiences a visitation of the Virgin Mary - one accompanied by winter-flowering roses and sporting a deeply tanned skin.

A skin the color of chocolate and chiles roasted together.

Mexican culture is full of such transferences, in which beings, myths, words, and foods come into the new culture formed by the conquest and are assigned a sort of passport of validation which diguises the essentially Native American character of the transformed thing.

As Anglo culture and Mexican and Latin American culture draw ever closer, I find it amusing and fulfilling to be aware of the Native roots of so much of the culture from the hot places of our continent - molé is just one of innumerable examples.

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http://www.ramekins.com/mole/

http://www.unam.mx/voices/1996/june/taiboi.html

http://www.igroupsonline.com/laavenida/table.htm