Felicity at Goliard Dream posted a long memoir of her youth as the child of anti-war activists in Berkeley in the sixties.

I found it very interesting. I guess I might, in fact, enjoy that memoir of my mythical hippy house on Polk, circa 1968.

In the future, have at least one meal prior to drinking several pitchers of beer with Spencer.

Phew!

Didn't even break sendmail.

Apache had some directive syntax changes, and experimentally enabling mod_dav generated repeatable crashes. But on the whole, painless.

Tomorrow I believe I'll tackle the miscellaneous other upgrades.

I'm not feelin' it today, I gots to admit.

Need to move a bunch of crap around in my office, but I also have a raft of server upgrades due - I started to work on it at noon, but the software kept getting checksum errors when I'd download it. So finally, by the time I had what I needed, there was not gonna be enough time to wrap the upgrades before dinner.

The major piece is a system upgrade to bellerophon, which, according to MacinTouch is likely to break PHP and sendmail at least, and possibly more - some of the problems seen outside these kinds of apps are a bit unsettling as well, involving inabilities to go online - although via modem primarily.

Therefore, I REALLY want a clean 8-hour block ready to fix things.

I wonder, should I dry-run on my desktop box first? Mebbe.

...

I am kinda putting off a review of Coloring Outside the Lines, by Aimee Cooper. It's a memoir of time spent in the nascent streetpunk scene in L. A. around 1980, and I really enjoyed the book.

A full review is forthcoming, but I'm also looking to try to place a piece so I'm sort of dawdling in this venue.

Lowdown: if you're an ex-punk or currently are, or if you have an abiding interest in subcultural histories, go pick it up. It's pretty good. Kinda raw, but enjoyable. I have no actual idea how it might play to someone who wasn't on the inside.

Good points: namedropping is strictly limited, and focuses on the stupidity of namedropping, or at least the futility of celebrity. In fact, music is not at all what the book is about. It's about one of the ways that young people come together to define themselves when the traditional structures made available by society don't operate as intended.

At least one other reader of the book complains that the narrative is about no-one famous, and that these people apparently interact with the music scene in a peripheral way. Well, yeah, but that's why I thought it was interesting. I mean, somone else already wrote those books, and I'm not interested.

Would I enjoy memoir of a hippy house on Polk Street in 1968? Maybe. On the other hand, it might really irritate me.

Libeskind Plan Chosen for World Trade Center Site (NYT) - which pleases me, I must say. The design struck me as head-and-shouldrs above he other designs. I thought I'd blogged the designs back in December, but apparently not.

In a reading experience simply PACKED with synchronicities, last night, after watching a terrifying NOVA devoted to the charmingly low-tech "Dirty Bomb," which featured unsettlingly high-quality visualizations of a bomb-blast in London's Trafalgar Square, I opened my March issue of Smithsonian to find a story (full text PDF) about the same thing.

A few pages in, and here's a comprehensive profile of Daniel Libeskind.

And here we are, a day later. What's next, a stunning revelation about Macchu Picchu?

Modern Drunkard's propaganda posters pick up on the WWII poster remix idea.

Sadly, the level of wit in the copy on these leaves something to be desired, even if the imagery does not: see "Fight for Your Right to Party" in the lower left corner.

Caterina.net: From the Taittiriya Upanishad

O wonderful! O wonderful! O wonderful! I am food! I am food! I am food! I eat food! I eat food! I eat food! My name never dies, never dies, never dies! I was born first in the first of the worlds, earlier than the gods, in the belly of what has no death! Whoever gives me away has helped me the most! I, who am food, eat the eater of food! I have overcome this world!

He who knows this shines like the sun.
Such are the laws of the mystery!

This was found via a random click into Caterina's site from dear pal Anne Zender's blogroll.

I LIKE it! Screw the context, I have no idea about it - I am FOOD!

(Today I was a delicious coq au vin.)

Same Difference is a 16-part online comic focusing on a Bay Area friendship between two twentysomethings. Jerry pointed it out, and it's been getting citations for a few days, as the story arc just completed.

It's really quite excellent - not standard webcomics fare, which can tend to reflect the demands of the web by presenting condensed, efficient bursts.

This well written and thoughtful, and the script takes its' time in moving from point A to point B. Additionally, considering the work technically, the author, Derek Kirk Kim, has a strong grasp of comics craft.

In several passages he uses the story to display this command. While these presentations felt tentative, as though it was the artists' first use of the method or that a given technique was being invented as the page was designed, they are uniformly successful.

In this thread, he's invited reactions to and discussion of the 2-year project.

The horror of blimps:

"Using the artificial convection of my central heating, the blimp stealthily departed my office. It moved silently through the living and drifted to the staircase. Gliding wraithlike over the staircase it then entered the bedroom where my wife and I lay sleeping peacefully."

I laughed, and laughed, and then I laughed some more. Then Viv came in to look worriedly at me, and my stomach hurt. Then I laughed still more.

Via email from Paul Frankenstein.

Boing Boing links to a Washington Post article that reveals links between the GOP and America's largest manufacturer of duct tape.

Which made me think of a few things I joked about, why, just the other day!

Another Poster for Peace has some really cool poster designs, only one of which I've seen previously ("No Blood For Oil"), but where? A design yearbook like Graphis, I think.

I love poster designs in general and when i was doing poster designs for the Boxers, I would often steal wholesale from designs I saw at the Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age exhibition.

This fellow has really set the standard for design "remixes" though. I laugh and laugh at most of this stuff, although sometimes I think the volume of the project overwhelms the cogency - editing would have helped keep his quality high, and one supposes, his powder dry.

I think everyone's seen this by now, correct? As I recall, the first version I saw lacked the "run like hell" tag, which I think makes it stronger.

I shouldn't neglect Alfred E. Bush or that Mad Magazine "Clone of the Attack" poster, now should I? Alas, the Mad image apears to not be easily linked (and their site a poster child of bad corporate web presence, blecch!).

I really love this sort of thing, where a design suddenly serves an unintended purpose.

Geez, when did I start making art like this? I must have been 14 or 15. Unfortunately I don't have any examples from back then.

The idea, I later learned, was generally known as "detournement," which, in cheese-eating surrender monkeyese, roughly means "turning back on." The idea was associated with the May 1968 revolts and a both pathetic and influential group of radical intellectuals called the Situationists. They were pathetic because they are the poster children for the left's tendency to splinter - by the time leader (some say "Pope") Guy Debord died, he was the only person that he thought had the right to use the label (this assertion is, um, ungrounded, because I haven't bothered to go research a source).

Not that anyone cared, because the technique had escaped his grasp and was busy producing all kinds of interesting things, including, according to Greil Marcus, punk rock itself.

Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet from James Grimmelmann on LawMeme takes a long look at a fascinating thing I've been watching bubble away on MeFi...

I'll let James tell the story.

Well, maybe I'll introduce it.

What if you emailed a letter to some pals detailing an interesting time you had among some very wealthy, powerful people, who had invited you partly based on your skill as a writer, and partly based on your discrection?

What if someone you mailed it to (let's be charitable and invoke the proverbial Mom clause here) forwarded the message, and it ended up as the subject of a debate as to the authenticity of the note in a public forum such as MetaFilter?

Oh, it's plenty interesting.

Columbia investigation update for February 16-22

The investigation into the reentry breakup of STS-107 continued to garner coverage this week. Audio recordings of the last few minutes of transmissions between the doomed shuttle and NASA controllers were released (NYT). Authorities continued to request the participation of the public, both as potential sources of unaired photographic data and in the search for fragments of the shuttle.

It appeared certain that the craft's disintegration had begun by the time the shuttle was over California (NYT). No debris from that far west has yet been located.

NASA added non-NASA personnel to the investigative panel amid concerns that the original constituents were all too closely linked to the space agency (NYT).

In a peripherally-related development, on Thursday, NASA released basic specification requirements for a shuttle replacement, a four-person space plane.

By February 14, The panel had released a preliminary determination that concluded a small rupture in the shuttle's left wing had allowed superheated plasma to enter the structure of the wing on re-entry and led to the temperature readings and eventual structural failure (NYT).

As the week began, serious consideration of an orbital impact with space junk, the results of the past few decades of spaceflight launches, was highlighted as a possible cause of the posited hole. Impacts with even very tiny particles at orbital speeds have long been known to pose a threat to spacecraft.

By week's end, however, it had been reported that investigators were returning to an examination of the external fuel tank insulating foam which was seen to strike the wing at liftoff. Charges had emerged of off-the-books maintenance performed by subcontractors to the foam, and NASA had begun to examine alternative methods for applying and maintaining the insulation prior to the flight (NYT).

As I write this, an AP report disclosed that a Boeing-authored analysis of the liftoff incident states that three chunks of foam, not the single one previously reported, were observed to have impacted the orbiter. The report is "dated eight days before the spacecraft broke apart Feb. 1 over Texas." Much to my irritation, the Yahoo! link content changed after I wrote this. Here's a link to the story on an AP wire subscriber's site - maybe it will hold still long enough to be read.

The New York Times reported "NASA Had Planned Changes on Shuttle Foam" on Thursday, and also "Disagreement Emerges Over Foam on Shuttle Tank" on Friday. This latest story alleges that the foam, if cut or unsurfaced, can absorb water and therefore, the chunk seen to hit the wing could have been denser than NASA has estimated. The Times' coverage, which so far has been excellent, is rounded up here, although this may be a transient link as the naming scheme is not subject specific, and as I recall, it looks very similar to the 9/11 roundup URL.

Spaceflight Now ran an article noting that the main fuselage of Columbia remained intact for "at least a half-minute" following the last voice transmission from the craft, and also introduced a round-up of their own, the Investigation Status Center. The site also noted the probable location of the wing breach, and reported that investigators have indeed seen U. S. Air Force imagery taken from high-powered telescopes based in Hawaii.

Alas, I still haven't found my mythical NASA blog (now, of course, this entry will appear in the searckh i just linked). Space folks, if you know where such a thing might be, pass it along!

I awakened to find my ISP engaging in their apparently contractually-obligated incompetence provisioning, whereby my access to their DNS is provided only on a sporadic basis, unaccompanied by any form of notification or explanation to customers.

Naturally, my primary desktop machine chose this as the optimum time to experience repeated hard crashes necessitating a day's worth of diagnostic activity. Viv and I had a 1pm appointment at the diabetes clinic so I set the disk utilities to start a-grindin' and headed off.

I mention this mostly so that I can link to an article that appeared in the New Yorker, in the February 10 issue, "The Edmonton Protocol", by Jerome Groopman, a layperson-oriented overview of what appears to be, in fact, the cure for insulin-dependent diabetes.

The catch? Well, insofar as the cure is concerned, it's wholly dependent on a specific cell type, islets, which diabetics no longer produce and which the rest of us produce in small quantities. It's a transplantation procedure. Which means that donors are required. But don't rush out to make an appointment - you gots to be dead.

So in essence, the cure is here, but only a small, small percentage of insulin-dependent diabetics can ever be granted it.

Remember the ban on fetal cell culture harvesting from back in pre-9/11 days? The article, ever so non-confrontationally, points out that that policy has more or less kept experimentation from progressing insofar as human cell cultures are concerned. Astute observers will have no difficulty guessing my emotional state as I added this particular equation up.

I've been aware of the protocol since just prior to the inauguration of large-scale trials (10 people participated in them at Viv's care provider, and I discussed with her the possibility of participation, something we decided against before ever contacting someone there), I was happy to see a long, clear exploration of the procedure and status of the trials today.

Sadly, this site notes (page search for "Edmonton Protocol") that the article is under embargo from reprinting until April 4, and the New Yorker website does not apparently have a copy of it hidden away someplace.

However, a Google search reveals someone had it up at one time - it's since been removed. Close examination of the Google search results may reward the determined, although discretion is advised.

I spent a considerable portion of my recent leisure reading time recently with one of three recent American collections of Jorge Luis Borges in fresh translations (by Eliot Weinberger). The Selected Non-Fictions, according to the volume proper, are relatively less well-known than his fiction writing.

Given that's true, allow me to commend your attention to these works. Amazon is also selling it at 63% off as I write this.

In "The Total Library," he traces the genesis of his most famous image, the infinite library. Presented without contextual notes, it's not apparent to me if this essay predates or follows the appearance of the image in Borges' fiction. He identifies Aristotle as the inventor of the idea of the infinity of conjunctions (in a passage on his theory of atoms) and cites a passage from Cicero's De natura deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) which will ring familiar to all:

I do not marvel that there should be anyone who can persuade himself that certain solid and individual bodies are pulled along by the force of gravity, and that the fortuitous collision of these particles produces this beautiful world that we see. He who considers this possible will also be able to believe that if innumerable characters of gold, each representing one of the twenty-one letters of the alphabet, were thrown together onto the ground, they might produce the Annals of Ennius. I doubt whether chance could possibly even create a single verse to read.

Cicero is directly citing the Aristotelian idea and dismissing it. When I saw that passage, it was a shock to see the legendary Shakespearean monkeys peering back at me from ancient Rome. Already they are hard at work on their typewriters as Gutenberg's type literally spills onto the floor of the Pantheon, an argument to resist the godless.

The theme of coincidence and prefiguration is wound throughout the essays in the book, and the next series of examples that Borges introduces which struck me with similar startlement is his investigation of the naissance of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous, often cited poem, Kubla Khan. The essay's title is "Coleridge's Dream."

Coleridge famously smoked some opium, snoozed, and experienced a literal moment of ingenuity in which the "stately pleasure dome" entered his mind, apparently full-formed. As he sat down to transcribe this inspiration, he was interrupted by an unexpected visitor.

Then the phone went dead.

He was never able to reconstruct the missing portion of the poem.

The dream hit Coleridge in 1797 or 1798; the resultant fragment emerged in print in 1816.

Borges claims that twenty years later, in Paris, "the first Western version" of a fourteenth-century Persian universal history, the Compendium of Histories by Rashid al-Din, was published. He quotes the following:

"East of Shang-tu, Kublai Khan built a palace according to a plan that he had seen in a dream and retained in his memory."

He then interprets these curiosities.

A Mongolian emperor, in the thirteenth century, dreams a palace and builds it according to his vision; in the eighteenth century, an English poet, who could not have known that this construction was derived from a dream, dreams a poem about the palace. Compared with this symmetry of souls of sleeping men who span continents and centuries, the levitations, resurrections, and apparitions in the sacred books seem to me quite little, or nothing at all.

He continues by noting that he, personally, sees these events as evidence of an executor, and predicts another dream with a similar periodicity and effect.

In "Dialogues of Ascetic and King," Borges directly recounts literary incidences of the form described in the title, where a poor, usually unknown outsider is brought before a ruler and court, and a conversation ensues. He presents the following, without direct source citation.

In the court of Olaf Tryggvason, who had been converted in England to the faith of Christ, an old man arrived one night, dressed in a dark cape with the brim of his hat over his eyes. The King asked him if he knew how to do anything; the stranger answered that he knew how to play the harp and tell stories. He sang some ancient airs, told of Gudrun and Gunnar, and then spoke of the birth of Odin. He said that three Fates came, that the first two pronounced great happiness, but the third, in a rage, said, "You will not live longer than that candle burning by your side." His parents put the candle out so that Odin would not die with it. Olaf Tryggvason didn't believe the story; the stranger, insisting that it was true, took out a candle and lit it. As others watched it burn, he said it was late and that he had to leave. When the candle was consumed, they searched for him. A few steps from the King's house, Odin was lying dead.

In the last section of the book, a selection of edited transcriptions of extemporaneous lectures from late in Borges' life is presented. One is entitled "Immortality." He examines, at leisure, not the theme of immortality, but of death, dwelling with languor on Socrates' last moments.

In essence, however, this supremely metaphysical writer holds forth a philosophy of death which is purely, austerely materialist. While acknowledging the essential unknowability of what happens to consciousness or the soul at death, he states his personal desire in a sentence with which I must say I concur:

I don't want to continue being Jorge Luis Borges; I want to be someone else. I hope that my death will be total; I hope to die in body and soul.

He expresses this as a sort of interest disclaimer, so that his listeners will understand his orientation as his stately examination of theories of and attitudes toward death proceeds from Socrates to Schopenhauer and Shaw.

Some of his final sentences in the lecture reflect my own belief system with a precision that, if odd, is only appropriate.

To conclude, I would say that I believe in immortality, not in the personal but in the cosmic sense. We will keep on being immortal; beyond our physical death our memory will remain, and beyond our memory will remain our actions, our circumstances, our attitudes, all that marvelous part of universal history, although we won't know, and it is better that we won't know it.

Oscar Pool 2003: A Pith Production proffers the possibility that you might pick the Oscars!

As I have a longish Oscars piece all ready to go, let's GET READY TO RUMBLE!

We saw Chicago on Saturday, too. I lack the musical theater gene, so I felt that it was... OK.

I sure don't think it's 13 Oscar nominations worth of film. On the other hand, I didn't see anything wrong with it - the cinematography was excellent, the actors did actually emote through the songs (John C. Reilly's "Mr. Cellophane" being my personal favorite), and, well, I can't argue with a couple hours of dancin' ladies in their skivvies. Especially when it pleases the wife.

That said, the Academy is voted by theatrical professionals, and the story at Chicago's heart appeals very deeply to that audience.

So:

Chicago is up against The Hours, The Two Towers, Gangs of New York, and The Pianist in both Best Picture and Best Director. Pedro Almodovar is up for Director for Talk to Her as well.

The musical also received Best Actress (Zellweger) and Supporting Actress/Actor nominations (both Queen Latifah and Zeta-Jones; and Reilly, respectively).

Although Reilly's nomination may be deserved, he's given more compelling performances in the past. The sad-sack cop in Magnolia comes to mind, if I recall correctly.

Of the other nominees for best actress, I've only seen Meryl Streep in Adaptation, and although I adored the film, I must admit to some puzzlement over her nomination for the performance (as is the case for Chris Cooper's nomination in the same vehicle). So from what I've seen, Zeta-Jones might have a shot, but I can't really say.

So looking now at Zellweger, um, it was quite a show. And since the whole movie is basically a long exercise in how her character re-imagines her fate as a Broadway musical with her as the star, it's hard not to imagine that somehow, Renée Zellweger holding the damn trophy is the last scene in the movie, one that was somehow cut.

So I predict she's gonna win it.

Now, I've not seen The Hours, and I have no doubt that Kidman's performance is something remarkable. But Hollywood ain't gonna slap someone on the back for making a movie about suicidal depression, any more than they will Peter Jackson for this year's installment of The Lord of the Rings.

Speaking of films that won’t win, I'm thinking movies about the plight of Jewish artists during the Holocaust might not be the right kind of big-ticket ring-a-ding-daddy picture that moves the herd to vote either. At least this year. And if the film's directed by the world's most famous pederast, in the year that Pee Wee Herman is fighting child porn charges, well . . . Let's just say that Hollywood has a shameful history of acting in response to guilt-by-association pressure. So scratch The Pianist, unless Polanski makes some kind of public appearance linking his film to resistance against the war in Iraq and makes it stick. Which won't happen.

And sorry, Pedro, you're really not in the running here, as far as I can tell. Of course, I speak from ignorance here, and really mean see your film one of these days. Just like many, many of the voters for the award.

So who's left?

Ah, Martin Scorsese and Gangs of New York.

(crap, I wrote a whole essay about Scorsese's film that I DID - NOT – SAVE. Time to write it again.)

If you read any reviews of Scorsese's film, I'm not going to add anything to the discussion, honest. Allow me to summarize: the film is sprawlingly huge, immensely ambitious, and almost at every level, a failure. The failure comes as a result of Scorsese's overreaching.

In the whole film, there was only one time that I felt a specific poor filmmaking choice was made – in a gang battle seen near the opening of the film, the soundtrack suddenly introduces a thumping techno beat, which immediately vanishes. For the duration of the film, the musical soundtrack is composed entirely of music one might have heard in the streets of mid-19th century New York, much of it drawn directly from the American Memory archive I mentioned here recently.

The film's center is Daniel Day-Lewis' performance. However, it feels as though this is some sort of error, as the plot of the film presents Leonardo DiCaprio's character as the protagonist, with whom Scorsese wishes us to empathize and identify. Unaccountably, this emotional connection never materializes.

To cut to the chase, this film is far from the best work that Scorsese's ever done. Of course, famously, that's likely to remain Raging Bull. So what's Marty doing on the list this year?

In essence, the nomination comes in recognition of the scope of Scorsese's ambition in the film, and as an amelioration of the obvious injustice of Scorsese's never-won-an-Oscar status. That's right. This director has never won an Oscar for Best Picture or for Best Director. This alone should be evidence of the political, rather than artistic, nature of the Oscars.

So, can Gangs of New York win in a horse race with Chicago? I think it's possible. But the award would go to Scorsese not for the film itself, for the specific artistic and technical accomplishments of the film. In the end, Chicago is a better film, one with no depth, but perfectly executed. As far as I can see, it is nearly ambitionless, grounded in nostalgia and an effort to right another wrong, Bob Fosse's inability to bring the piece to the screen himself.

But, combined with the appeal of the worldview it espouses to the voting membership, it will be the big winner. Before the jury votes to acquit his client, Richard Gere's Billy Flynn sings, "How can they see with sequins in their eyes?"

So, here are my picks, then:

• Best Picture: Chicago
• Best director: Rob Marshall or Martin Scorsese
• Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis
• Best Actress: Reneé Zellweger
• Best Supporting Actor: no pick – I haven't got enough of a sense of the contenders
• Best Supporting Actress: Catherine Zeta-Jones
• Best original screenplay: Gangs of New York
• Best adapted screenplay: Chicago (or Far From Heaven, or My Big Fat Greek Wedding - but I doubt it.)

Mind you, I'd rather see Adaptation win for best adapted screenplay, but there's no way in hell producers are going to vote for a picture about how a screenwriter out-clevered 'em. I do feel constrained to note that the screenplay for About a Boy was really just remarkable – in another year, it might well have won.

It should also be noted that The Two Towers was up only for a handful of awards this year, and among the major categories only in best picture. This is largely because the Academy ruled it ineligible in several of the categories (so that under 'makeup' this year, you'll find only Frida and The Time Machine - The Time Machine! - nominated).

Anyway. Here's a link to the nominations list hosted by the Academy.

Wanted: Traffic Cops for Space: [NYT] - um, wow.

Gotta make a joke here folks, there's no passin' it up. See headline.

Thought number two: is the UN really the body to regulate orbital litter?

Thought number three: if it is, won't the Bad Mens(tm) step up to the plate to make sure it's powerless, a la Kyoto (moustaches twirlin', chargin' rent, etcetry)?

Oh, it's tizzifyin'.

Also.

Note to headline scribe: "Wanted: Cops ..." is, perhaps, not precisely the meme you were looking for here.

Frankenstein invites y'all over for soup, titling it White Lines, referring to the Grandmaster Flash side that was the B to The Message on the Sugar Hill 12-inch, back in the day.

Uhm-hunh. some fond memories involvin' the ladies ensue. unh-huh. Well, one lady anyway.

Wha? Oh, sorry. Soouup.

Anne brings it. Oh, baby, it has aready been brungen. Let the soup be steamin'!

Meanwhile, my own previously acclaimed recette for Guiness Beef Stew aside, we've been eatin' Smoked Salmon Chowdah chez nous these past few days.

These past few sunny, fifty-something, cloudless, walk-to-the-market-for-fresh-vegetables days.

How is it done?

I cheated and looked in Sunset, which featured a smoked salmon chowder on the cover - but they both portioned it for a huge party (with about seven pounds of raw ingredients) and requested 3 pounds of fresh fennel heads, which honestly, I might be able to pick up at the Pike Place Market. But dude. Uh, not this time. Walkin' to Safeway, OK? Not drivin' the damn Jag.

So here's theirs:

Leek and Fennel Chowder with Smoked Salmon

and here's my variation.

• halve quantities in the Sunset recipe (except for the salmon).
• screw the fennel, substitute a tablespoon or so of fennel seed. Grind it – I used a mortar and pestle.
• Green onion stalks are a good substitute for the chives.
• Use whole milk. Yum.

Heat the broth (at half quantities, that's about 2 and 1/2 cups) in a deep soup pan. Add the bay leaf and transfer the limped greens to the broth. Rinse the saucepan.

Cut up yon taters. If you want to add some vegembles, do so. I added chopped carrots and corn. Add to broth-pot, which should be merrily a-boil. Let it rock for a moment, then turn it down to a simmer.

Prep the smoked salmon by slicing into strips, unless it's already sliced (if you bought the lox, for example).

Here's the tricky part. Add 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon pepper to the flour. Add a bit of milk to the flour in a mixing bowl. Whisk until smooth. Add the rest of the milk – total should be about 2 1/2 cups.

Once you have this smoothly whisked, add to the simmerin' stock. Cover the salmon to the cats don’t get at it, and grab a beer or some vino or somethin'. Come back in about 20 minutes.

Serve with the salmon on the side – tossing it into the chowder will make it quite salty, and it's extremely rich. Let your soup feeders dose themselves.

Soup out!

The Beeb just bannered the EU turnabout with the phrase "EU leaders put on a show of unity over Iraq" which I heard as "EU leaders put on a show of lunacy over Iraq."

Which made me pay some attention, I must say.

US to punish German 'treachery': in a poorly sourced story, the Observer reports that

The US will withdraw all its troops and bases from there and end military and industrial co-operation between the two countries - moves that could cost the Germans billions of euros.

which echoes the long excerpt from Jim Henley's site that Scott ran the other day.

I'll wager this trial b'loon from Defense gets a big, BIG BIG thumbs up in Germany.

One question, though: Does the U.S. get to keep Daimler-Chrysler? Seems like maybe an end to "industrial co-operation" might make it hard for Benz owners.

AND ANOTHER THING - even if pulling the troops would set off a depression in Germany (the apparent goal of the threat), um, didn't Europe have a traumatizing few years in the wake of the last time punitive measures were taken against Germany's economy? Oh, that's right, it led to a fascist state.

Hilarious. I suppose after Iraq we'll just have to "fix" the broken democracies of France, Germany, and - OMG - Britain, which obviously needs military reinforcement after this weekend. Of course, it takes a long time to fly a million people out to the North Sea in helicopters and pitch 'em in, a few at a time - but what was tried and tested in Chile is gonna work for Rummy, by God!

Somehow, I doubt that there are gonna be massive troop withdrawals from Germany.

Smithsonian Folkways Dusts Off Titles With New Technology [NYT via MeFi]. Ooooh yeah baby. That's the way to do it. Especially if as a label you have a huge backlist and archivists already on the case.

Interestingly, Spencer and I discussed this quite a bit back a couple years ago, when the depth and success of the LOC's American Memory site became apparent. Spence combed through the digitized field recordings to select the songs that remain the base of the Wretched Bastards' repertoire (such as Influenza of a couple days ago), wrote up some detailed liner notes that included links to other info about the tunes - as I recall, located elsewhere - and then burned some CDs.

Anyway, I saw that and had visions of Dover Music - you know, like Dover Books, reprints of public domain material repackaged for various purposes - collage, scholarship, so on and so forth.

Smithsonian Folkways has been one of my favorite labels for years now, specifically because of the breadth and strangeness of the music therein. I just love the idea of JIT music delivery for this long work of quixotic idealism.

I also love that the music belongs to you and me, under the terms of Moe Asch's bequest of the label to the Smithsonian. The majority of WPA's power projects have been cynically privatized by the bad mens, as I recall. I hope they won't be dropping by Moe's ol' place twirling their moustaches anytime soon. They'll take to raising the rent, wavin' papers around, scarin' the wimminfolks and gents of delicate constitution such as yours truly. Keep a pitchfork handy!

Google buys Blogger: what can possibly be said about this that hundreds aren't already saying?

It's a milestone. Blogger service-disruption issues and ad-based hosting plan were significant determinants in driving me to investigate self-hosting... I may have service outages but I'm not helpless before them, and I can keep ads off my content.

An additional decision point was that I wanted to be absolutely clear in my publication title to the material I would post here - publishing it through a third party system, even a company as apparently altruistic as Pyra, leaves a copyright and reproducibilty hole that any decent publisher would not hesitate to drive a delivery truck through should the opportunity manifest.

Anyway, it's big news, Google is without a doubt the most trusted online brand, and that goes far to mitigate many of the concerns that led to my selection of Movable Type. Does that mean the end for MT and other self-hosted blogging solutions?

I think it probably cuts their projected future growth, and might (if Ben and Mena see this) drive them toward developing a commercial licensing model. Last time I checked, they explicitly disavowed such a thing, specifically because they derive revenue from helping people set up the application. That's practically the definition of short-sighted because of the way it limits their install base and bases revenue on labor rather than licensing.

Google's extended services have been interesting to watch as they mature, as well. Google News, at first, was a fantastic aggregator of news, including news from oddball, unreliable sources that I was overjoyed to see - Middle-Eastern papers that have an explicitly critical agenda on U. S. foreign policy issues, propaganda papers, papers espousing religious kookery of all stripes, blogs, you name it.

Now, however, after much refinement, it's lost a great deal of this diversity unless you force the issue. So instead of seeing a Palestininan paper and Ha'aretz covering the same events in that sad and bloody place, you just see the Ha'aretz link (I'm generalizing here, people, and the example is quite possibly inaccurate).

Obviously, this insulates Google from the criticism that followed the implementation of Google News, but I'm less well served by this - I want to see what people who DON'T write for a Euro-American audience have to say about things in the world, and Google News appears to have deprecated those sources compared to the early days.

This is true outside of world politics as well. As the online news editor for Cinescape, Google News was a great way to dig up stories that did an end run around the efficient publicity machine of the film studios. The studios so effectively dominate entertainment news that many days, it's difficult to find a story about anything other than Hollywood stars and Hollywood films.

At first Google News was a reliable source for these unconventionally sourced stories - nearly as reliable as blogs. Now, however, the same stories, often from the same wire sources, are seen in Google Entertainment News as are on Yahoo!'s AP and Reuters feeds.

How will this homogenization effect - a predictable consequence of designing for-profit services to take advantage of economies of scale - affect blogging now that it's entered the Googleocracy?

Yesterday's entry was a faithful, unembroidered recounting of a dream I had Friday morning, February 14, while NPR was offering live coverage of the UN Security Council 'debate'. Confrontation is a better word for it.

At any rate, I fell asleep just as Blix was speaking and awakened with a mighty shout of terror as the small child ran toward me crying.

In writing the piece I found it extremely difficult to keep focused on the task at hand - describing the dream - and keep my own personal politics out of the writing. I found it very interesting that Eric was reminded of the exploding baby vietnam anecdote.

I believe that means I successfully kept my personal politics out of the piece and kept it open to personal interpretation.

Additionally, since it's a dream, there are some very clear elements in the dream that I can elaborate on.

I couldn't find my wife, indeed, I was separated from her, because of an act of war (or something much like a full-scale aerial bombardment of the city I live in). Today, (Saturday) we kept a date to see The Two Towers one more time before it melts away from theaters. The film's showing coincided with the peace march here, which is where I really wanted to be, felt obligated to be, and kept thinking about, squirming and sweating, throughout the whole film.

When I had discussed this with Viv, she had expressed, in the wifely manner, her disinterest in attending the march. That is to say, she would only say "If you want to," while her body language forcefully indicated her absolute distaste for such a thing.

She is the child of people who fled a country in the wake of a socialist revolution, in fear of her father's proclivity for talking back to, oh, cops and emigration officials. She's been very effectively led to fear and doubt the motives of progressive activists in the wake of our WTO experience by nothing more than a lack of courtesy displayed toward her for her political ignorance on globalization issues. My paranoia, fear, and hatred of the political leadership of the United States, both the specific crew in DC at the moment and in general over the course of my life, have not improved her willingness to see me express my political perceptions in any meaningful way.

In response, I have actively choked off my outrage and political analysis, which, really, if you knew me personally in the past, is sort of like hearing me say I've stopped eating, or joined the church.

So we went to the movie.

The exploding children are as clear and direct a depiction of my feelings toward the idea of parenthood as might ever be concocted.

The other elements in the dream are all drawn directly from a mishmosh of things we've experienced via the media or directly. In my case, the happy, chattering crowd on the hillside is clearly the crowd awaiting the implosion of the Kingdome early in the morning of my birthday a few years ago, an event which obviously echoes another einsturzende neubauten that happened not too long ago.

I do recall in the dream believing that what I was witnessing was a punitive strike by the Air Force against Seattle, that we were the recipients of that "Shock and Awe" crap that surfaced in the media last week or so. Which raises a further issue - I fear the dissolution of our country under the weight of the divergent political perceptions that have been unleashed, and I don't doubt that such a dissolution will end in fire and blood.

I stood on the steeply inclined hill's sidewalk, looking into the center of downtown Seattle in the grey light of the late afternoon. The lowering clouds seemed darker than usual, as though something had blackened them, echoing the inky fogs of mid-century London. The air, however, remained free of the distinctive tang of burning coal and I rapidly forgot the oddly darkening cloud cover.

The crowd of people I was standing in was chattering and happy – friends catching up with friends and people looking for the hook up on their cells. I couldn't tell what exactly had brought us out here on the sidewalk, spilling into the quiet street. It seemed that possibly there was an art opening in the building we were clumped before. I nibbled at my cheese and crackers.

I became disinterested in the crowd and determined that a glance into the gallery was in order. In the background, the lightly accented voice of Hans Blix murmured, barely distinguishable from the crowd's blended chitchat.

Just as I stepped into the low, wide, blond-wood space, the sounds of happy chatter outside intensified and changed into exclamations, loud questions and conjecture.

I returned to the street to see that the darkening clouds over downtown appeared to be in motion – the heart of the clouds was distinctly darker than the edges, such as the clouds above our location. The center of the clouds had also begun to drop, very quickly, toward the center of the city. The edges of the clouds appeared to be cascading down at differing rates as though they carried loads of coal dust, from the center out, widening.

The shape of the downward-charging cascade was the same as that of one of the broad tornadoes of my mid-western youth – a quarter of a mile across and three quarters of a mile from ground to the cloud deck.

As the leading edge of the falling mass approached ground level, subunits of the collapsing coal dust rebounded, erupting upward again in showers that formed flat arcs. Curiously, just at the edge of visual acuity, the arcing curves seemed to reveal the winged forms of orca and dolphins for less than a fleeting moment before the cascades of fine matter resumed their hurtling journey to earth.

As the crowd exclaimed, Colin Powell's voice had replaced that of Blix, murmuring yet with strident inflections that lent urgency to the crowd's increasing unease. As the first of the columns touched the earth bright orange flashes illuminated the city followed seconds later by the cracking thumps of distant explosives being detonated.

The first of the buffeting shockwaves arrived with the sound, as the flickering oranges of the first explosions had become a continuous wave of flaring orange light. The shockwaves carried a bitter, stinging smell that immediately generated at first a wave of shrieks followed by painful, repeated coughing. A single voice cried "It's acid! There's acid in the air!" and the crowd turned to flee as one in pandemonium.

Behind them, the intensifying wave of explosions transmitted its sound and shock as well. The continuous roar of the wind and the overlapping thumps of the events became a wave of painfully loud white noise that obliterated the human voice. The city behind the orange and black cloud of acidic dust was rubble.

I turned back inside again to grab my camera and some other material that I had stashed in the gallery as we'd arrived. I sought my wife, hopelessly, unable to hear my own voice. The howling wind had reversed direction and was being drawn to the advancing perimeter of the explosions. A firestorm was forming. Seattle had become Dresden and Coventry, but I would not live to see the political repercussions of the event. A pity, I thought.

The wind and the shockwaves had made it nearly impossible to stand. Thankfully, the heat was being kept at bay by the suction. I noticed that a bank of televisions was tuned to a local news channel, covering the events and helplessly speculating, repeating what everyone in the city already knew. On the crawl at the bottom of the screen, the news appeared. Apparently, though some unknown means, the cloud was producing the spreading firestorm at the center of the city. Tiny human figures were walking out of the fire, apparently impervious to it, crying for their parents. Somehow large numbers of toddlers and preschool children had survived.

The black cloud and firestorm's naissance and meaning remained unclear. Was it an act of god? Was it an attack? Had some secret weapon gone awry or had aliens arrived, parking over the White House and blowing it into flinders? No-one knew.

The news cut to footage of firefighters and police approaching a group of the toddlers. A flash, and the camera stabilized on a street strewn with limbs. The children were a part of whatever it was that was happening. Avoid children, any children, at all costs.

I ventured back to the sidewalk, now marked with acrid scorch marks from who knew what. The perimeter of the firestorm had stabilized, curiously, but the heat was extremely intense. I drew back around the corner of the building. I glanced back into the building, and I saw a child, crying, his clothing partially burned away and tears streaming down his agonized, soot-caked and raw burned face. He ran toward me, obviously crying out in extreme trauma and fear.

MT Plugin Directory: own domain, better organization than the subdomain at blogstyle/kadyellebee.

and Chris, look:

WikiFormat

Oh, MT gets me all wiggly!

And what's this? MT 2.6 is out? Well, smack me upside the haid and label me a cheese-eating surrender monkey.

Lawsy.

I whipped up a new look for Ken over at the Illuminated Donkey a day or two ago… I think it's an improvement, perhaps you will too.

Greg and Spencer and I had practice yesterday evening – seemed like we were both really rusty and coming along nicely. Three more evenings and we should have an idea of a setlist.

Here's one of the songs we sang last night. I thought of duct tape, and wondered who sits on the board of Duct Tape USA, and are they on an advisory panel to the Department of Homeland Security? I suppose we'd need a FOIA request to make a definitive determination, but it's my understanding that FOIAs are deprecated these days.

Influenza

(Sung by Ace Johnson, Clemens state farm, Brazoria, Texas, April 16, 1939.)

In nineteen hundred and twenty-nine, men an' women sure was dyin',
From the disease what the doctors called the flu.
People was dyin' everywhere; death was creepin' th'ough the air,
For the groans of the sick sure was sad.

Space.com noted yesterday that the blurry photo presented at a news conference last week, previously reported as stemming from Air Force equipment, was actually produced at an Air Force base by hobbyist-quality equipment, including a 3 1/2 inch telescope and a Macintosh over a decade old.

Spaceflight Now covers the revelation yesterday of a NASA email outlining disaster scenarios with a peculiarly apologetic headline, "What-if email explained"; the story covers both the agency reaction to the email ('nothing to see here, move along') and also covers a telemetry reading which reported landing gear deployment at 8:59:06 am, 26 seconds prior to the loss of communications with the doomed craft. The sensor reading is described as the result of a sensor failure rather than a factual record of landing gear deployment at 12,500 mph.

Other developments have included positive identification of the crew's remains, a revised timeline released by NASA today, and a public call from NASA for more amateur images in the wake of yesterday's news concerning the blurry 'Air Force' photo.

A reasonably thorough search for blogs that are specifically oriented to space and NASA today did not turn up any. I believe I need to dig deeper – surely there's a blogger out there writing about some of these issues from the inside.

FRYER'S KINETIC CARD KITS - Paper engineering Based in the UK, this site offers one of my grails of cardmodeling - the paper clock.

The kit is based on a working seventeenth century wall clock. I once passed up a chance to pick one of these up, possbly from a different manufacturer, and have really regretted it since.

BONUS: Fryer offers a free trebuchet model as well.

Generally speaking the kits seen here are of a fairly high degree of refinement.

This post is the result of a desultry search for a free zep kit, not that I expect to turn one up.

College porn stars film their own punishment is the headline to Richard Roeper's hard-hitting big thumbs down on Shane's World, Vol. 32, Campus Invasion, the pro-am porn film shot in Bloomington last year to the delight of media professionals everywhere.

Not to worry - it's not a serious review of a porn film. Heaven forfend that the Sun-Times, or most papers and large circulation printed news sources, would ever run something thoughful about porn. After all, they tried back in the mid-seventies, and look where that got everybody.

But, as far as fish in a barrel goes, it's pretty funny.

The film runs 2-1/2 hours, and for the most part it's about as sexy as a military educational film about transmittable diseases. Basically you get porn stars with ugly tattoos, bad teeth and been-around-the-block-a-million-times faces mingling with drunken-fool college students in pig sty apartments. It's mostly pathetic and depressing.

One mope who meets the porn stars outside his dorm invites them back to his room. Another guy, toting a backpack, allows the women to fondle him in public and then says, "Awesome! OK, I gotta go to class." There are several party sequences, with the porn stars putting on shows for the crowd and occasionally hooking up with young men.

Go I.U.! We're number one! We're number one!

(Really, this is about as far as I go with the whole team spirit thing.)

STS-107 Mission emblem and notes covers every little design element on the Columbia mission emblem, in excruciating detail.

The particular thing I'd been wondering about was, "What's the odd alphabetic symbol in the center of the design?"

It's the scientific symbol for microgravity.

via Deckchairs on the Titanic.

I was curious about this more more than casual reasons - for several years I designed the emblems and logos of a great number of local labor unions throughout the Pacific Northwest, and the particular needs of large, committee-driven organizations for visual symbology that can be worn is something that still interests me.

The level of detailed, unbelievably literal symbology in this instance is by no means atypical. It's exactly what the market for such designs requires - every design element must be specifically accounted for and approved. It's a peculiar and sometimes frustrating aspect of developing this sort of thing.

I would direct your attention to my Blimp Week chestnut, The Wreck of the Shenandoah and Blimp Week Followup Pt. III, in which the lyrics to a song commemorating the loss of the airship are reproduced.

I had just drawn a connection in my own mind with the loss of the Columbia to the loss of the Shenandoah when comments began to appear on the older story noting the parallels as well.

For now, I think the most interesting points are the relative similarity of the role of the great airships and space travel in the public imagination of the day, and the fact that both ships were named after mythological figures that also happen to be great American waterways.

I have also reverted to the former colorscheme here, as the black-themed one was intended as a mourning scheme. However, I believe the darker, more contrasty colors looked better than the current bright reds and expect to be experimenting wth additional color choices this week.

SHUTTLE INQUIRY UPDATES

Weekend news concerning the shuttle inquiry boils down to two developments: NASA had previously identified leading-edge wing failure as a potential cause of re-entry catastrophe, and on a previous shuttle mission, a wastewater vent located near the left wing's leading edge had developed a basketball-sized lump of ice.

Subsequent to the ice-forming incident, the vents on the shuttles were fitted with heaters.

Some speculation emerged in the context of the leading-edge wing failure story concerning the possibility that Columbia might have collided with a particle of space junk, possibly as early as the second day in orbit.

Spacefllight Now: NASA studies telemetry for signs of orbital impact

NYT: Shuttle Testing Suggested Wings Were Vulnerable and an interactive with a nice graphic cutaway of the wing's structure.

Oakland Tribune (AP story): Investigation focuses on possible ice chunk on vents (I saw this in the Seattle P-I, but they didn't have on their website – silly paper!)

The Ken Goldstein Project features two stunning views of Ken Goldstein from the winking shutter of one Paul Frankenstein.

One in particular is simply a standout, a sheer marvel of the Goldstein watcher's art. Monumental, one might say. Inspiring. Majestic. Planetary.

Sadly, no photographic record of KG masquers was in evidence.

Orange alert? head for Poulsbo, WA!

Regular blogging will resume sometime Sunday.

BABBlers, post pix! I insist!

In Upon Silence, Paul Frankenstein hints that perhaps he's got a touch of the blues, and rather poetically dances around what he ought to do about it.

I feel for him. Paul, you'll get through. A shrink is an acceptable route.

---
(Argh! Multiple trackbacks! Why must you plague me so!)

Air Force imagery confirms Columbia wing damaged is the topper today, at Spaceflight Now (an Aviation Week story).

The Chronicle is continuing to build on the purple-lighting-bolt story, including a detailed discussion on upper-atmosphere electricity discharges that's interesting in its' own right.

In the story iself, the image to the left of the headshot is a link to a larger graphic that includes photos of the sort of phenomena the reporter and scientist are exploring in the story.

UPDATE: NASA examines Air Force Photos of Shuttle, notes the NYT. The story includes a photo of the image on a large screen over the shoulder of a NASA official, and there appears to be an irregularity in the shape of the left wing (which appears on the lower side of the image).

However, it's not at all conclusive, and more analysis of the photo is sure to be forthcoming.

UPDATE 2: Spaceflight Now has the image as a discrete graphic. Their article backs up my initial impression above. However, the NASA briefing photo seen at the Times appears to have some minor differences, probably reflective of the conditions the image was displayed under.

Interestingly, the NYT story cites the Aviation Week story seen at the top of this entry. The later story, also at Spaceflight Now, quotes James Dittemore, whom I beleive to be the official in the NYT photo.

He says, in part, "I'm aware there may be some of you who are saying this photo is revealing. We have looked at it, we had it during the week, and it's not tremendously revealing to us yet. I'm not an expert at looking at these types of photos and so we're asking experts to do an evaluation of the photo ... to help us understand if there's anything wrong with the left wing."

Just prior to the news of Columbia's loss this week, the black humor of the universe arranged for David at Surfaces Rendered to link my posting of the long email interview we did that became the basis for a short Cinescape piece.

As I was perusing Columbia-related links, I noticed an interesting section within Dan Shippey's Delta 7 Studios site. Dan is the gent that made his very nice cardmodel of the Columbia available as a kind of memorial.

Delta 7's models appear to have a relatively high degree of detail along with a clarity of construction that leads me to describe them as elegant. I was examining his wares, thinking, "Boy, I wish I had time to build that," when I noticed this subsection on his site amid the models of historic and designed-but-never built spacecraft:

Retro Rockets is the home of Dan's collection of golden-era SF rocket models, including as may be seen here, the very Saturn Shuttle that figures so prominently in David's Man Conquers Space project.

There's a passel of other cool ships here as well, including the obligatory free model, "Rosie Retrorocket."

ABCNEWS.com : Parrots Take Over Seattle Park

Chunky chum Scott Chaffin points me in the direction of the lost parrots of Seward Park. I'm thinkin': now that's a fine use for a city park. I'm off.

CHICAGO READERS PLEASE NOTE: There be parrots in your fine city too. Arrr.

(grmbl, counterintuitive trackback UI, grmbl)

Cinescape went with my X-Men set visit story (think all the way back to October, not once, but three times.) for one of the mag's covers this month.

I'm pleased to report that the story ran more or less as written, although there's the obligatory irritating edit. In this case, it comes at the very end of the article and adds the prefix "Almost as if" to a sentence which is clearly a metaphor, weakening it. There are a couple of other changes that I'm not pleased with (notably a "Meanwhile" that turns a true sentence, "so-and-so said this", to a false one, "Meanwhile, so-and-so...") but that's the way the cookie crumbles.

Sadly, there's neither a permanent link to the story nor the whole thing online, but for right now you can read the first two paragraphs or so at the home page of the magazine.

I will not be posting the backing material here, as I have done with other projects, because the material is about four hours of audio tapes which I did not fully transcribe.

Mysterious purple streak hitting Columbia 7 minutes before it disintegrated in unreproduced photo: SF Chronicle opens the floodgates.

The day that this story is published, it's worth noting, NASA explicitly downplayed [NYT] the leading "tank foam debris" theory.

Sure will be interesting when this photo is finally published.

UPDATE: Rob Falk notes further coverage of the West Coast photographic evidence at the Chronicle.

Rob is an amateur astronomer and avid skygazer, I bet his insights will be helpful to me over the next few months on this matter.

(Click images for a 640 w px view of the clipping; click that view for a 1500 px view)

In 1981, the United States launched the first space shuttle into orbit. Named Columbia, she succeeded an earlier test model never intended for orbital flight named Enterprise, in a partial bow to a sustained fan campaign from the Star Trek camp.

In an earlier cross country flight aboard an absurdly modified 747, an issue had become apparent with respect to the intended first orbital shuttle's myriad ceramic tiles. At airspeed aboard the back of the 747, Columbia had shed a large quantity of the ceramic tiles intended to safeguard her and her crew during re-entry.

Amid handwringing, a solution that addressed the wholesale tile shedding was implemented, and in April, 1981 the first orbtial space shuttle, Columbia, roared skyward, opening, it was thought, a new era in space travel, with up to 30 annual launches of a fleet of the new "space truck."

Concern about the new shuttle's tile performance was proved justified, as up to sixteen tiles were lost at liftoff. NASA apparently employed certain national security resources to examine the belly of the craft while in orbit.

After this examination, the determination was made to attempt a landing, and so it happened.

As the article notes, "millions" helped bring Columbia back. I recall our teacher in my freshman drawing class arranging to have a television brought in that we could watch. The images were strangely boring, which surprised me at the time. Of course, boring was what the space shuttle program was intended to be, and routine is what was hoped for.

As we all know, it didn't quite work out that way. When Challenger exploded in 1986, the year prior had seen a record number of shuttle flights – nine or ten, if my non-rocket scientist memory serves. The program was never to approach the projected 30 annual round trips, and of course is even less likely to now, in light of Columbia's loss.

Embedded images are from, respectively, Time Magazine, the first page of the section in Columbia's inaugural launch, in the issue dated April 20, 1981, and the Bloomington, Indiana Herald-Telephone, April 14, 1981, and April 16, 1981. I do not reproduce the entire Time Magazine article.

Phil Spector held in murder - body found at home.

Spector is the legendary - and legendarily volatile - record producer behind "Be My Baby", the Righteous Brothers, and the classic Ramones album, "End of the Century."

Tales have circulated since the Ramones gig of his holding singer Joey at gunpoint in the studio until the lanky frontman delivered a take to Spector's taste. These tales may have been exaggerated, but Spector's temper is a matter of record.

Jerry Kindall notes that there are depths yet unplumbed on the Columbia disaster.

So, why hasn't the Shuttle been replaced? begins MeFite costas.

Naturally, he provides a thicket o' links.

Just what I was wondering.

I'm still intending to scan some clippings from 1981 about the first shuttle orbital mission - flown by Columbia, as it happens, and marked by the loss of heat-resistant tiles. However, my scanner is balking, so I may postpone it for a bit. Here's some card models to tide you over.

From NASA: Shuttle Card Model - free

Columbia Shuttle Card Model, by Dan Shippey, free, in memoriam. Normally Dan sells this at Fiddler's Green for a more than reasonable $3.00.

The NASA model is very considerably less detailed and easier to build. It's also one of the first card models I recall building – a die-cut version was bound in to an early issue of National Geographic World, a kids' magazine that regularly featured interesting card models, including the shuttle, a truly elegant globe, and a flying pterosaur model that was simply exquisite.

Challenger's launch plume, I was fearful of all these things - it signified the potential for the end of space, without even the surrogate of computers.

Today, it's a different story. Although the Russian space program is regarded as something of a straw man in the U. S., it's a valuable space resource in its' own right, with drastically differing traditions and a wealth of expertise in, for example, making do with tight budgets.

The presence of the ISS in orbit, combined with the American fear of unemployed Russian rocketeers, means that even though shuttle-based delivery of construction modules will be on hiatus for a good long time, the ISS is likely to continue as an ongoing space program.

I'd be remiss in failing to note that American satellite launches, often on conventional, solid-fuel rockets rather than the more expensive shuttles, have proceeded apace and are likely to continue.

Meanwhile, the Ariane 5 fleet is grounded on suspicion of a design flaw.

Despite this, I expect the ESA to clean up the problem with some speed - there's money to be made, and Airbus has not finished Boeing off quite yet. Since Boeing's ill-starred entry into the satellite biz with the acquisition of Hughes has been costly for the formerly Seattle based company (no, I'm not bitter- just underemployed), it seems to me unlikely that the ESA will be allowed to dither about endlessly.

So that leaves (drumroll please) China, on the United States' shortlist of useful bugaboos - er, um, valuable trading partners - once we're done cleaning up the axis of evil, and India, a state which has repeatedly lurched to the brink of nuclear war with Pakistan over the disputed Jammu and Kashmir area.

Do I lose sleep over Chinese astronauts or Indian misslemen heading to orbit? Far from it. In fact, I wholeheartedly root for them.

Neither state is likely to see the loss of Columbia as a reason to slow down; I'd rather guess it will act as a spur, on several levels.

One, it demonstrates that American technical expertise is by no means a guarantee of perfection (something the Chinese know already from our smart-bomb obliteration of a Chinese embassy in Belgrade a few years back).

One, it demonstrates that American technical expertise is by no means a guarantee of perfection (something the Chinese know already from our smart-bomb obliteration of a Chinese embassy in Belgrade a few years back).

Two, as with any developing technology in the years before it is used on a large scale in war, persons drawn to the technology feel a great sense of comradeship for others involved with similar technologies. The Chinese and Indian space programs will also be driven to honor the memories of those who perished yesterday morning.

So I'm filled with much less angst and fear today than I was on that dreadful January day sixteen years ago. We're still headed for space. I remain saddened by the loss of the unfortunate crew and feel for their families, but rather than projecting my worries about a loss of space to humanity, my concerns are directly and exclusively focused on the individuals and their families.

I honor their loss, and hope sincerely that their families' knowledge of the crew's connection to what they were doing will ease the pain and shorten the suffering of their loved ones.

Space Shuttle Columbia lost in flight: NYT index to coverage.

The Space Shuttle Columbia, flying mission STS-107, broke up in flight over Nacogdoches, Texas at about 9 am Eastern time this morning. All aboard are presumed lost. Nacogdoches is near the eastern, Louisiana border of the state.

Not my favorite way to start a Saturday. I recall only too well the loss of Challenger. Color scheme changes here are in temporary recognition of the loss.

(The picture is of Columbia in a 1990 night launch. The spacecraft first flew a mission in 1981. Which I must say I find to be of interest. As I finish this entry, I see the NYT has added the item "Ship was fleet's oldest" to the pre-news conference head. )

UPDATE: (2p PST) I just found a huge stash of clippings I've had since April, 1981. That first mission that Columbia flew in 1981? It was also the very first orbital mission for any shuttle. I will look through the clippings and scan a few, I expect.

UPDATES - added immediately following initial entry, circa 1pm

In the 3pm EST news conference, NASA personell described telemetry data indicating anomalous readings originating on a left wing elevon (a wing flap) and spreading to indicate loss of tire pressure on a landing gear. Unfortunately I did not think to take notes, but I recall thinking, "Oh."

MetaFilter coverage begins at 6:23 am, less than ten minutes after the initial reports of the loss of communication with the shuttle.

links from that thread include:

a mirror of the pulled eBay auction (see below)

an animated gif of the debris problems noted on launch of the mission and the article it's related to

a photo from a gound onlooker - not verified

an IRC feed excerpt which includes this commentary from a participant:

02/01/03 09:00 AM Re: re entry visibility [re: astronaut23]

They got some tire pressure messages..........I hope not the left main gear, that is about where the ET foam hit the tiles.........

Space.com's STS-107 thread

the planned landing paths from NASA

The Nacogdoches Daily Sentinel

Some interesting links from BoingBoing:

NOAA radar debris track

Debris rains on Nacogdoches

Dave Winer's roundup

Steve MacLaughlin's roundup

eBay debris listings (appeared by noon EST, discussion at Fark)

The New York Times on the Web gets a new layout, I think. I may be wrong.

It seems like I've lived this day before...