Comedy Central is playing episodes of That's My Bush. Election-season tomfoolery, or do I just never stay up this late? I thought they yanked it, totally, after 9/11.
Occasionally, I mention that one piece or another in a given issue of The New Yorker has particularly struck me. In general, though I try to avoid doing so, mostly because the magazine appeals to me so consistently that if I did not deliberately choose to exclude it from my blogging, I'd be repeating myself weekly.
This week, however, in addition to the previously remarked upon first-ever presidential endorsement, several other worthwhile pieces were published. Richard Avedon's election year portfolio (not online, alas), the photography series that he was working on at the time of his death, looked to me like images of Americans at the dawn of photography, the keepsake photographs of Union and Confederate soldiers. I found the photographs deeply touching and nearly unbearably sad. A surprisingly flattering profile of Paul Wolfowitz and John Updike's engaging reflections upon the language of the Bible rub shoulders.
But the pieces that prompt this entry are two works of critical appreciation. First, New Yorkers, please go to the Guggenheim to see “The Aztec Empire,” reviewed and - I am amazed - apparently grokked by Peter Schjeldahl. I am a profound, long-time admirer of pre-Colombian Mesoamerican art, from the earliest known works produced by those we call the Olmec to the work highlighted in this show and associated with the Aztec empire. Yet that art (even the Olmec, despite Schjeldahl's assertion that the earlier work is less blood-soaked) is profoundly hard to grasp for persons who are products of a Western sensibility. The ideas and religion that produce the metaphorical armature the art operates within are predicated upon the concept and practice of human sacrifice.
Schjeldahl faces this squarely in his review, and draws a direct line between the Aztec and our world.
“Oddly, the alien and alienating viciousness of Aztec culture makes it more accessible than that of other bygone and tribal nations. It provides dramatic focus. Confronting such things as a blackly humorous skull mask, made from a real skull, we know exactly where we stand with the Aztecs: aghast. The supreme quality of their supple, sensitive, elegant arts may be the scariest thing about them, because it testifies that a civilization based on slaughter steadied and inspired human genius.”
He concludes by implying that he's talking about some unpleasant current events in the Middle East. The review is carefully written, though. It's clear that he's also discussing the ways and means of empire, the cost of imperial scale.
One page later, a loving celebration of the Clash, penned by Sasha Frere-Jones sails into view, headed for port. The occasion is the $30 release of a deluxe edition of London Calling, long the rock critics' canonical choice as the high point of the band's career. The record, of course, is all about the costs of empire. In so far as many people have reviewed the record in prior incarnations, Jones' choice is unremarkable. However, deciding to review a record which your peers universally acknowledge as a definitive masterwork presents a particular challenge. A critic must feel that they have something new to say about a piece to make the writing worth doing, and in the case of a masterwork, you can say one of two things, essentially. You can disagree and have fun with the project of willfully defining your stance in opposition to your peers' consensus. Or you can agree, and attempt to craft the definitive encomium on the work in question.
It's far easier to pursue the first option. It's much less about the work under consideration, though, and more about building personal reputation. As such, the subject of the review is not the artist's work; rather it's the reviewer's artistry.
Jones decided to take on the harder option. I'm thinking it was a success. I have read a fair amount of praise for the Clash, and a fair amount of praise for this album. This album is not my favorite Clash record (that's Give 'Em Enough Rope). Despite this, Jones somehow captures the sweep and energy of a great Clash song. I found myself nodding, muttering “Yeah!” and “Yes!”
“And what can you call this generous mountain of music, this sound that levitates around its own grievances like a plane on fire?”
By the end of the essay I was anticipating references and points of argument, in the manner that one anticipates a cymbal splash or drum fill at the bridge of a song. If it were possible to have been playing air pen, I would have been scribbling furiously in midair. Jones does this, in part, by citing lyrics from three of the record's best songs in three out of four of the essay's closing paragraphs. By citing the music directly in the expectation that the reader knows and loves the record, he effectively samples the music, and sets his words to theirs, and to our emotional experience of the music in question.
One hopes he chooses to continue the exploration. A book by Jones about the Clash along the lines of Marcus' Mystery Train on Dylan would be welcome reading indeed.
Viewropa, a eurocentric group blog that grew out of some discussions on MeFi, is now open for business.
KUOW is continuing the delightful tradition of broadcasting the famed Mercury Theater on the Air Halloween broadcast of The War of the Worlds tonight. It seems, no matter how many times I have heard it, just as successful (script link) in creating an atmosphere of credible tension and urban apocalypse. Listen.
Now I look down the harbor. All manner of boats, overloaded with fleeing population, pulling out from docks.
Streets are all jammed. Noise in crowds like New Year's Eve in city. Wait a minute... The... the enemy is now in sight above the Palisades. Five — five great machines. First one is crossing the river. I can see it from here, wading... wading the Hudson like a man wading through a brook...
A bulletin is handed me...
Martian cylinders are falling all over the country. One outside of Buffalo, one in Chicago... St. Louis... seem to be timed and spaced...
Now the first machine reaches the shore. He stands watching, looking over the city. His steel, cowlish head is even with the skyscrapers. He waits for the others. They rise like a line of new towers on the city's west side...
Now they're lifting their metal hands. This is the end now. Smoke comes out... black smoke, drifting over the city. People in the streets see it now. They're running towards the East River... thousands of them, dropping in like rats. Now the smoke's spreading faster. It's reached Times Square. People are trying to run away from it, but it's no use. They're falling like flies. Now the smoke's crossing Sixth Avenue... Fifth Avenue... a... a hundred yards away... it's fifty feet...
Vote2004.eRiposte.Com tracks reports of voter-suppression incidents. They are keeping pretty busy.
Hello Mac land!
I'm trying to track down a second power adapter for my 15“ aluminum series Powerbook. I'm having a hard time tracking down the scuttlebutt on the available adapters.
Small Dog apparently only carries the Apple OEM variety, and hoo-boy, people hate it. The MacAlly PS-AC4 looks as though it should work (the marketing pic shows it connected to a 15” aluminium PB), but I'm having a hard time determining from the copy if this is accurate. Additionally, while the price is right (about $35), the form factor is clunky. I'd much prefer the iadaptor2, but it looks like it's been out for at least a couple of years. This concerns me because that means it was released before my model of Powerbook came out.
I should note that the only problem I have experienced with the Apple adaptor is that one of the little flip-up ears for cord-management has a broken pin, from me dropping it. The reason I'm looking for an adaptor is that as a part of my accelerated senility program, I keep forgetting to bring the adaptor with me when I leave the house. So I want a small one to just leave in my bag.
So sock it to me, Mac web! What's the scoop on third-party adapters for current gen PBs?
As I proposed here, pursuant to no object-icons from the peanut gallery, Danelope and I invite Mefites, Mofites, and PNW bloggers in general to descend upon the capacious Elysian in my beloved, if down-at-the-heels, Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle.
7p, Saturday November 6
The Elysian
1221 E. Pike St.
Seattle, WA 98122
Phone: 206-860-1920
The Elysian was the location of the prior MeFi hoo-hah and suited all parties to a tee, with wifi and food both available. Ye mappe.
I had intended to set up some sort of evite-like check-in attendance list, but instead have decided the easy thing to do is make a page at the Metafilter wiki.
Interested persons can just sign in there, no muss no fuss, and no required use of pesky time-based identifiers. Or here in the comments, either way - I'm not taking attendance.
I've asked mcwetboy to add the event to his MeFi calendar.
Alas! For this was proposed before NaDruWriNi '04 was graven into the stone of the Internets. B^2, mebbe a monkeypile will occur and I can describe that while drunk!
In eclecticism: Lunar Eclipse tonight, Michael Hanscom thoughtfully provides some borrowed diagrams and definitions concerning tonight's lunar eclipse. I recommend looking closely at the diagrams and evaluating them with a critical eye. They are unique in their genius.
Marc Perkel Rantz: Download Fahrenheit 9/11 Here. Really. That's it. I guess it will be up for about 2 weeks.
frontline: rumsfeld's war. For a chaser, howsabout a nice New Yorker presidential endorsement?
SBA and Palo Alto Software: business plans. More from Score, U of Colorado. Write one online. SBA guidelines. Startup info.
Since the Cartoonist got two in a row, so then must things, which linked to a cardmodel pumpkin at Canon. Inspired, I found a skeleton. The skeleton came from here, which, I'm happy to report, offers a family of Frankenstein projects!
things delivers a spooky audio roundup today, focusing on radio and sonar anomalies after disposing of the various hums heard 'round the big ol' world.
*distant tinkle*
Whuzzat?
Bill Clinton just called me.
Okay, so he was a phone-bot. But let me tell you, when you pick up the phone and hear “Hello, this is Bill Clinton,” it's still noteworthy. For the record, my response was to burst into laughter and listen closely to the whole thing to see if they'd figured out some way to do personalization.
Moonlight on the new snow reveals the mountain and the plume of steam around eleven last night.
Seven a.m.
Eight a.m.
Man, the images are so beautiful sometimes. I wish the camera had a higher resolution or a crisper CCD - the visual appeal of these thumbs is sometimes not met by the full-size imagery, owing to artifacts in the image itself.
Lat night, I looked out of the windows of a building that exists only in my mind, at the windows of another building. The facing wall was old, and brick, and the windows set in the brick were dark. Multiple layers of glass blurred the reflections I saw in them.
The curious thing was that the windows did not reflect the viewer's image, peering from the facing windows. Rather they reflected two black and white photographs, images I've never seen previously. I only recall one clearly, and it appears to be an image from a series of pictures found in my sister's camera after her death. The series of images shows her taking candle-lit self-portraits in a mirror; the film containing these images was developed a month or so after she died. The photographs I dreamt of do not appear on the film roll, and presumably my subconscious whipped them up in response to the ghostly time of year and Suzy's incipient birth anniversary, October 28.
On aspect of the images that was a bit odd was the presence of a white-handled Xacto knife; it's a knife I have seen and held in real life. I don't recall if it was among Suzy's possessions or not. I do know that at times she engaged, like many depressed adolescents, in cutting; it's possible that she had taken up the practice again at the time of her death.
I've been puzzling over this a bit today and I think the dream may also have been prompted by the death, in Boston, of a young college student in the street celebrations that followed the Red Sox win in the American League playoffs. The young woman was hit in the eye by a pepper-ball pellet, a one centimeter diameter plastic ball used as rounds in contemporary crowd control by police. I myself have scars on my ass and thighs from being struck by this kind of round during the events surrounding the WTO meeting held here in Seattle a few years ago.
Contrary to published manufacturer's claims that the pellets do not break the skin, the pellets that struck me tore through three layers of clothing before opening bloody, three-quarter inch sores on my ass and legs. To the best of my understanding, these pellets were being used in accordance with the manufacturer's operational training, which specifies that they should be directed at the lower body of persons in a crowd being herded. In the Boston fatality, it seems that the officer who fired the weapon into the crowd was not aiming low. When you own the equipment, you will certainly find the opportunity to use it. Each use increases the possibility of misuse.
Following her death, the Boston Herald, a tabloid-format paper, published a Friday edition with a cover photo of the young woman being tenderly cradled by her companions as she dies. The cover image ignited a firestorm of criticism and was followed up by a Saturday apology from the newspaper. I remain puzzled by the controversy. I found the image tragic and beautiful, in that it clearly records the fact of the love the dying woman was receiving. I dearly wish that I had such an image of my sister in the moments after her fatal impact on the station wagon windshield.
Jimmy Akins, a Catholic Evangelist, attends the world premiere of Jack T. Chick's new film and meets the reclusive cartoonist. Of course, Catholics are the tools of Satan, in Chick's worldview. It's not hilarity that ensues, really, but I still found this fascinating. [via Monkeyfilter.]
Max Hunter Folk Song Collection, at Southwest Missouri State University.
An old fave, forgotten due to sloppy bookmarking. Rediscovered when searching for versions of that great old folktune "Gathering Flowers for the Master's Bouquet," penned by Marvin Blumgardner.
I suspect this of being a nom de guerre considering the song's subject matter and central metaphor. The lyrics begin, "Death is an angel sent down from above, gathering blooms for the one that he loves*" and continue in that piously morbid vein for a tidy 2:54. The song has been recorded by several old hands (including the fantastic version by the Stanley Brothers that was my introduction to the tune).
Of course, "Blumgardner" could simply be a transcriptionist's slip, considering that Marvin Baumgardner is also credited with the song, in more authoritative contexts.
*Actually, that's how I recall the lyrics. In reality they run: "Death is an angel sent down from above; sent for the buds and the flowers we love."
Wired News: I Love Bees Game a Surprise Hit. Anonymous ARG puppetmasters run three month game in support of Bungie/Microsoft game release Halo 2. Can Danelope catch up?
I had a dream that I could see Mount Saint Helens from a public park here in Seattle. The mountain was steaming as it has been but also burping up rocks and ash, which you could see flying into the air and dropping down the sides of the mountain. Oddly, the mountain was visible through a break in a mountain range. More mountains appeared behind the volcano, in contrast to the volcano as it appears in real life.
The park itself was on a gentle slope, and seemed to be based on some of the pocket-sized parks built on scraps of land I've seen in cities like Boston and London. It was a traffic island type, an oddly shaped sliver of land defined by two converging streets. The surface of the park was contained and defined by a roughly built terrace of yellowish, flinty granite. On reflection the stonework appears to have been drawn from the now-shuttered ranger station at Mount Baker we visited this summer.
At the narrow tip of the park, the statue of George M. Cohan that resides in New York's Times Square looked out over the shallow Seattle valley.
Saturn V paper model - all eight feet, available for download.
[via, geez louise, The Cartoonist again!]
Exposition Le Monde de Franquin - Cité des Sciences, a companion site for an exhibition exploring the technological imagination of one of my favorite cartoonists, the incredibly hilarious André Franquin. [via The Cartoonist.]
Franquin was one of the giants of francophone comics and cartooning, but has only rarely been published in English. Naturally enough, the few pages of his work I've seen in English were published in the late eighties in a Fantagraphics comics anthology.
Tuesday night at dinner, the subject of what to do while in Los Angeles came up.
I described a few of the interesting sights found at the celebrated Museum of Jurassic Technology to our guests. The Museum has been the subject of a book, and a radio piece, and apparently published a book cited in this 1995 issue of Wired. The book covers an exhibition that I have seen, “No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again: Letters to Mount Wilson Observatory 1915-1935,” a collection of the writings of cranks over the long years to the Mount Wilson Observatory. Others have written or posted about the place as well.
Kyle Marquis, in particular, did the legwork, unearthing this tale of a visit.
MonkeyFilter | Curious George: Who is John Stewart?
A monkey who lives under the proverbial rock wants to know what all the fuss is about. Fellow simians muddy the waters, with such gems as flashyboy's explanation, fingerng Tucker Carlson as rock singer and Stewart as a small-time actor.
Reverse The Curse | CafePress: a joint project of pfrank industries and yours truly. Based on a pic of a Boston roadsign. Buy early, buy often.
What was that other submission-based tee shirt site?
I finally got around to taking a whack at Manny's pork and pears or pork and apples recipe. I had expected to do the apple and calvados version, but to my surprise, we only had pears in the house.
The recipe calls for whipping cream and lots of buttah. I used the buttah and skipped the cream, using nonfat milk and yogurt at the finish (I mostly don't care for high-fat foods). But I blew my timing and the yogurt curdled. Still, it was very tasty. Mindful of Manny's concern for the shallots, I used a few less and added a quarter of a regular onion.
I was also a bit lazy and did not pound the meat, choosing to use a slightly more tender chop cut and to slice it in quarter-inch strips.
Viv says “It was very peary.” And so it was, it was yummy.
Pix still in camera, to come.
NaDruWriNi 2004 is a-formin.'
In this entry, I linked to all my stuff from last year - but where'd it go?
Oh, say, some of it's at archive.org.
Gumby Bare. The Black Crowned Night Heron, Part I. Bum Poo. Bum Poo 2. Nevermore, props to Matty! Chloe. Xombies. Uncoded.
I really gotta make a local archive of this stuff.
Also, it's so weird that I think I can't write fiction. I mean, really, this stuff is lightweight, but look! Character! Situation! Setting! Plot! Challenge! Resolution!
Okay, maybe not always in the same story, but still.
Finally!
A break in the cloud cover reveals it is as we have suspected! MSH is now Mt. Doom.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! [via BoingBoing, and so certain to be widespread, but too good not to share.]
Tonight I'm serving tasty salmon to Adam, Chris, and Sabrina. Also on the menu are a bunch of Spanish goat and sheep cheeses found, of all places, at Safeway. Not only did Safeway have these improbables, but also a long-adored rarity from the Alps, raclette. Now I must find the cornichons.
Thus, webtime is short.
A Western Theme Park Turns Into a Ghost Town [NYT]:
"We sold the stagecoaches, the buggies, the trains and the tracks," said John Gokey, the auctioneer and owner of Gokey's Trading Post. "We saved the first three rows for people who went to work back there in the 1950's."
A self-writing post-modernist folksong lies buried in the sad frontier town tale of boom and bust - in rural New York State, between 1950 and 2000. Written as a straight news feature, hints emerge of the savor with which one Donna Liquori approached the piece. Donna, I have friends in the city. They'll buy you a drink. Tasty work.
Honking Duck is a realaudio archive of several hundred 78s. I posted this to Monkeyfilter, in the hopes of keeping an apparent theme on the roll.
Yesterday we went thrifting. This place, J. T.'s Attic, is up on Greenwood near 85th. It's only open on Saturdays from 1 to 5. It's a real mixed bag, and the store suffers from that overstuffed, cluttery feel that some secondhand shops can fall prey to. It's easy to get snagged on something and wind up pulling a lamp off the shelf. While such places are hazardous and hard to take in, they are also my favorite kind of secondhand shop, because the noise of the clutter means things get overlooked, and suprises can be found.
This Cue Cat, marked as a “computer mouse,” is five dollars. It was the only dot-com excess item I noted. It looks like that's about right, going by eBay.
This old Singer, in nearly-new mechanical and cosmetic condition (you should see the finish), hideaway sewing table included, was fifty bucks. Needless to say, we now have a new sewing machine. The table's finish is extremely rough, but other wise it's in great shape. It looks as though the machine and table were folded up and stored somewhere dry but prone to chemical spills for fifty years. We'll need to get the cord on the machine replaced, though, as it is pretty chewed up. The actual machine itself runs like it was serviced yesterday, though. I haven't researched the serial number of the machine to see when it was made, though.
I'm pretty sure it's a Model 15. Here's the manual as a PDF (!).
Someone has some doubts about the man behind CherryOS. Pear PC users are pretty suspicious, too.
Yeah, yeah, more than four trees, and I'm standing on the mountain, OK?
Having Mt. St. Helens up in the upper right corner of this page is proving interesting in ways I did not expect. For example, two days ago, I was up before dawn and happened to see dawn break over the mountain. A tiny bright spot in the silhouette of the mountain told me what I heard on the news an hour later. Lava had broken through the dome and was glowing in the night.
The image is also interesting in less volcano-related ways. I work in a garage which is entirely underground, and my house never receives any direct sunlight through its' windows. My home office area's windows look out on an alley and high fence. As the shadows swing across the mountain's flanks I find myself gauging the time of day based on the picture. The image of the mountain is my most regular exposure to the light of day.
Finally, the images, in sequence, (as spottily as I look in upon them) create a long-form pseudo-narrative, akin to both comics and film, to Monet's Rouen Cathedral or his Haystacks. It's a rare chance to do some long looking, something I deeply enjoy. It's unexpected to me that long looking is proving subject, in this case, to time-slicing, miniaturization, and distribution.
CherryOS is a fully-functional Mac OS X hardware emulator for the PC. You'll still need a copy of Mac OS X, but apparently it otherwise works just fine - at least until Apple brings in the lawyers. I don't have any hardware to tinker with this on, but sure would love to check it out.
However, the website makes reference to "pre-orders," so it remains vaporware for now. My understanding is that the site has been hammered since they did some press, and that has prevented me from more thoroughly exploring the site.
Hmm. On further investigation, pinging "cherryos.com" returns "unknown host," at least from here. Maybe the lawyers are already up and at 'em. A WHOIS records an active record for the site, and the listed nameservers are both up, so I assume they are just down at the moment.
Over at the Cult of Mac, Mr. Kahney has apparently laid hands on a copy, however.
MonkeyFilter and MetaFilter are having another debate party slash comments race. So far MeFi is out the gate early with a link to debate bingo, a drinking game proposal, and some background chatter about the Sox-Yankees game. Stay tuned, and click-click-click!
Moving drives and cards around as a part of the machine migration. That's Socrates on the left, and Bellerophon on the right. Bel is the machine serving you you bits at this moment.
Manny and I have been corresponding about pork and pears, or pork and apples, and apple and pear brandy.
These are portraits of a fine pair of calvados, now sadly departed from us. I find them heartwarming.
Arguments for and against Armageddon, one of an infinite series.
Heated political discussion on the shores of Green Lake. Evidence in favor of a healthy democracy. Argument against!
Topic of the argument: war in the Middle East involving Americans, Israelis, and Arabs. Argument for!
Verdict: A draw.
An in-store display of orange, green, and purple pumpkin-shaped trick-or-treat lootbags. Argument for!
“Anarchy in the Pre-K” baby tee shirt in window of hipster children's store. Argument for!
A battery-powered inflatable fat-suit sumo costume, $22.00, batteries not included. Argument for!
Final verdict: We are so doomed.
The Volcanocam site at MSH has just added movies of the past week's eruptive behavior. Additionally, last week, NASA flew an infrared photography mission over the mountain, just prior to the eruptions.
The lava dome has been growing at a frantic rate - 250 feet in the last week - and the weather's cleared, revealing that the mountain is now snow-capped, and awfully picturesque, what with the curl of steam shining in the Sunday morning sun.
Ken and I were discussing the apparent volcano frenzy at the open visitor's center the other day. I've also been keeping my parents up-to-date, as understandably enough the volcano is perceived as a local story. Therefore, it does not get the full-court-press coverage we see in the Northwest.
Both facts are totally understandable. Vulcanologists and seismologists have widely quoted in the press as expecting any event to be smaller than the 1980 eruption. Especially in the early coverage, experts emphasized that any eruption would probably only have a localized effect on the area of the mountain. People have interpreted the authorities' decision to keep the Coldwater Ridge center open as a seal of approval and assured safety.
Of course, recent statements have been more guarded, such as this: “Still, scientists cautioned that the mountain remained restless. 'Escalation of unrest could occur suddenly and perhaps lead to an eruption with very little warning,' a statement from the Mount St. Helens Joint Information Center said Thursday.” But what's the lead in this story?
“Helens' crater has risen 50 to 100 feet since Tuesday while earthquake activity remained low, signs that magma is moving upward without much resistance, scientists said Thursday. Despite the swelling, scientists said there was no reason to raise the alert level around the 8,364-foot volcano in southwest Washington.”
So, despite the scientific personnel cautioning against the literal truth and accuracy of their predictions, the news coverage reflects - inaccurately - a perception of safety, encouraging the visitiors.
The P-I ran a series of stories the other day recounting survivors' tales of the 1980 blast. Unsurprisingly, none of these folks are especially eager to see the mountain blow again. 81-year-old Leslie Davis survived with her husband in a pickup truck whose grill “melted.” Her daughter has some thoughts on the visitors now flocking to the mountain:
“I think of these idiots up there right now,” said Church, 55, shaking her head. “There are quicker ways to commit suicide. They're going up there for picnics because they've never been in that situation before. I mean, if they had been here in 1980, they wouldn't be within 3,000 miles of it.”
Here's a map. The Coldwater Ridge visitor's center is the red circle labeled “CRVC.” The brown area with the radiating lines is the 1980 blast zone, the area in which most people died as the eruption's shock wave passed over them, traveling over 100 miles an hour. Here's some more on the 1980 eruption. In 1980, it took the eruption's blast less than five mintues to envelop the location where hundreds picnic today.
In 1980, the people working on the mountain did not expect such a large eruption either, and while they knew one was coming, they had no way to predict when. Today, we can watch seismic activity on the mountain, and observe the curling steam in the bright morning sun, from the comfort of our living rooms and offices. But predicting eruptions is not a cold science.
So, let's review. Large numbers of people are traveling to a location near the geographic center of a massive prior eruption's blast zone. Scientists caution that while they don't expect an eruption on the scale of the previous one, they are by no means certain, and their interpretation can change at any time. The mountain is growing rapidly. The shape of the crater from the previous eruption would direct a large blast directly at the visitors.
I believe over the next week or so we may see some evidence of professional volcano watchers speaking out about the predictable distortions the inverted pyramid form forces onto coverage of their pronouncements. It's unlikely that the coverage will change, however, as the rules of news insist that positive statements and hard quotes trump caveats and cautions. In this case, it's a basic conflict between the rules of scientific presentation and news presentation.
The crater carved by the earlier eruption faces both the Coldwater Ridge visitors center and the closer, evacuated Johnston Ridge center (the location of the Volcanocam). David Johnston gave his life - and his name - on the mountain in one of most dramatic deaths in the 1980 blast. As the blast wave rolled toward him, the young man's final radio transmission was recorded, seconds before he was swept into history: “Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it!”
The Johnston Ridge location was renamed for him to memorialize his death in that location. (Confusingly, it had previously been known as Coldwater Ridge). When we look at the ubiquitous Volcanocam image, we're seeing the mountain from his vantage point. In a sense, the web is looking through the eyes of a dead man.
Implant could free power of thought for the paralyzed, [P-I, from the Boston Globe].
Coming soon: meatbeast hax0rz.
MonkeyFilter | the debate: realtime groupblogging. Can the server survive?
UPDATE: Mefi, same deal.
Whoo, adrenaline. Time for some turkey meatloaf.
America is currently choosing Mofi over Mefi, 367 to 228.
Steroids may be deadly for head trauma [SFX, AP].
Well.
Note to self: never request my sister's medical records.
Personal Page of Satan. See the political TV spot. Apparently affiliated with something called "The Dave Hill Show." Probably not this one. Of special interest to internet video freaks, I think. Via the good people at everlasting blort.
Completely unrelated, but also from blort: Instant Mess.
A day or two ago, I received this note in the comments to The Wreck of The Shenandoah.
Thank you very much for this very informative site. I have a picture taken of the Wreck of the Shenandoah. The back of the picture says Ava, Ohio, the wreck of The Shenandoah. Sept. 3rd 1925. I believe the photo was taken by my late husband's grandfather, Ray C. Shear of Lore City, Oh. It very much resembles one of the images on the sheet music, the one on the top right. I would be glad to scan the photo and send it by jpeg to anyone interested.
...
Thank you,
Karen Shear,
Wooster, OH
I corresponded with Ms. Shear, and she sent the pic along. She inherited the shot from her husband, but sadly has no further details. Click, as ever, to enlarge.
B^2 follows up the unholy fascination with Max Raabe. Five tracks, kids, including "Let's Talk About Sex," and "Oops... I Did It Again," all performed in Rabe's inimitable eye-rolling nineteen twenties crooner style. It makes me feel... dirty, in a good way.
*snaps fingers*
Waiter! Schnapps, and a side of bunderflesich!
Mount St. Helens blog :: spokesmanreview.com.
What can be said, except perhaps "hurrah!"
Note embedded seismograph.
Personae dramatis
BOB, a meathead sports announcer out of central casting
GOLDIE, a person of ethnicity with a background in sports bookmaking
Setting: The television coverage of a second-rank mid-size purse wrestling match, with a title at stake, sometime in the nineteen-seventies.
--
BOB: Goldie, who's your pick here tonite at the big Veep Smackdown? We've seen that “Big Dick” can wield some pretty menacing vocabulary over the past four years. But he's thought to have developed a short fuse - and don't forget that ticker!
GOLDIE: Well, Bob, I heard that the Dick line of thought has been, “If I'm sitting, I might look less frightening and more grandfatherly.”
BOB: “Big Dick”'s challenger, “The Kid,” is a huge favorite with the ladies!
And before he stepped in to the ring, he had an unbroken string of victories
against some real heavyweights!
(Shuffles papers, taps pen)
Goldie, you're the man we turn to here on Political Wrestling when it comes to matters of the book. You can let us in, buddy - what are the oddsmakers saying in Vegas?
GOLDIE: Well, Bob, the conventional wisdom says that Edwards should just keep trying to scare Cheney. We're all hoping to hear him be, like, “Well, my esteemed opponent has many years of serv--*BOO!!!*”
BOB (starts, nearly falls out of chair): OHMigod.
(Grasps chest) Oh, I see, the Angina Gambit!
GOLDIE (Rolls eyes, looks skeptical): Yeah.
BOB: What can you tell us about “Big Dick”'s weigh-in stats, Goldie? Did you get a chance to take a look in the locker room and eyeball the guy in his towel?
GOLDIE: He should lay off the fried foods.
BOB: Better him than me!
(Both sportscasters share a manly chuckle)
GOLDIE (clearly directed at BOB): *BOO!*
BOB: AUUGH! Will you stop it! What, are you trying to kill me?
(Grasps GOLDIE by the collar, hisses sotto voce): Lissen, ya yutz, if you do me in, you can't collect, see?
BOB (using normal, hearty voice): Was he looking fit and ready for battle, or peak-ed and doughy? Was he smoking fat cigars?
(“Big Dick” steps into the ring, unexpectedly)
GOLDIE: He's clutching his chest, Bob!
BOB (Standing up, chair clatters off camera): Oh my god!
GOLDIE: He was banging cocktail waitresses two at a time! Look at the size of that man! And Edwards comes out wearing only a towel and a smile!
BOB: What's his wind like, these days? Can he go the distance? Edwards is looking pretty polished there, Goldie. He defintely has his moves down! LOOK AT THAT SMILE!!!
GOLDIE: He's smiling like a man possessed!
...
GOLDIE: There are definitely Two Americas in this room tonight, Bob.
BOB: “Big Dick” doesn't seem very impressed, Goldie. He seems sort of... snarly. Still, he's taking his time. OH! Edwards has “Big Dick” in in a Halliburton lock! Look at those bulging subpoenas! Oh, what a move!
GOLDIE: Oh, who wouldn't want some Johnnie Walker Black faced with paperwork like that!
BOB: OH! Big Dick used the National Security Reversal - And he's got his hands firmly locked over Edward's most formidable weapon, his gleaming teeth!
...
The part of BOB was played by Mike Whybark. The part of GOLDIE was played (unwittingly, to an extent) by Ken Goldstein.
The All Eighties Cover Version Mix Tape, featuring Max Raabe & Palast Orchester, on whom B^2 has an open plea for more info.
(On the Raabe site, navigate to Max Raabe > film for a bit of uncanny eye-rolling croonery.)
This is a link-collection entry for quick access to Mount Saint Helens stuff.
Mount St. Helens VolcanoCam: already linked in the temporary image seen in the sidebar. It's interesting to note that Johnston Ridge Observatory, which hosts the camera, has been evacuated.
US Geological Survey MSH site. USGS MSH Current Activity page. Northwest Interpretive Association.
Gifford Pinchot National Forest Special Conditions: A catchall for stuff happening in the GPNF, such as an imminent volcanic eruption. Come back in a year, and the info will be different.
University of Washington Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network.
USGS/Cascades Volcano Observatory.
Valerie Smith's MSH site.
Seven days, 8170 words, eight posts, and hundreds of links investigated. This lighter-than-air stuff makes a man's arm sore. Posting will be light for a bit.
I don't think I mentioned it here, but I was running Blimp Week - Monkeyfilter edition all week over there, too. The posts there were short and generally drawn from the longer posts here, but not in all cases.
The posts were, in order:
- Zeppelin rides. In Switzerland.
- Stereoscopic Images of Lighter Than Air Flight
- Zep Sims!
- From Rio to Akron aboard the Graf Zeppelin, 1933
- Your Zep: Buy it or Build it?
- Zep-plans.
In the fifth link, fellow-monkey anagramophone pointed out both Nagy Airships and the striking spherical craft of 21st Century Airships Inc..
You know, I have this feeling that I'm gonna sound like Donald Duck all next week. Oh well, better to have a bit of helium in the lungs than nitrogen in the joints, I always say.
Regarding the beta of ecto 2: the only way to get to the old photo-sizing dialog now is importing from iPhoto, which I guess I can live with. It adds a step to asset wrangling for the kind of folders full of internet finds I was doing this week, though, and so I'm still gonna have to rule it a feature loss, not a best practice for software development.
I may more closely review ecto 2 beta this week, because it does some stuff very differently than ecto 1, and while I think I grok the dev logic, I'm not entirely happy with it. It's still great at what it does and I have a hard time imagining a competitor product. This makes it unlikely we'll see any shortcomings in the final product definitively addressed, especially if they stem from underlying structural decisions.
So far, I'm happy to report, the peculiar perl-killing problems I saw associated with ecto 1 on my server have not reappeared.
Did I mention my forearm hurts? Ow, ow, owie.
This is the final installment of Blimp Week II, folks, and I'm playing a couple of requests. Soon-to-be parasite on society Paul Frankenstein (he's famous, you know) IMs, suggesting the title above. Ergo:
1. Go to Google Image search.
2. Enter the word “zeppelin” and hit the submit button.
3. Steal as many zeppelins as you'd like.
Thank you! I've been here all week!
Seriously, I looked for as many variations on this as I could, and I got bupkis. I did find an online steampunk tale, Queen Victoria and the Zeppelin Pirates, and brief references to a stop-motion film by one Karel Zerman called The Stolen Airship, but as far as I can tell, no factual incident of airship theft has been recorded, an astounding wrinkle in the gasbag.
Despite this, the early history of airships is rife with attempts to reverse engineer the technology or to obtain it by force of arms (there was a war on, after all). I've never encountered a detailed discussion of wartime espionage, but the themes play a big role in the ho-hum 1971 film Zeppelin, starring Michael York and Elke Sommer. York is a British spy sent to his duty in Freidrichshafen, where things get out of hand. I can't recall if he attempts to steal the airship but we can safely state that it came up during script development and thus I rule it in bounds.
The creators went to great extents to make the ship convincing on screen, and as far as I could tell when I stumbled into it on the tube late one night, the interior control-deck seen in the film is quite accurate. Alas, the mediocrity of the film is apparently so great that even on the internet, no hard-core of obsessed admirers has surfaced to liberally sprinkle the darkweb with illict screen captures and grainy Quicktime video. At least there is some sort of collector's market.
At the other end of the spectrum from technicolor films I've seen by directors I've never heard of, Dirigible was made in 1931 in black-and-white and directed by Frank Capra. I've never seen it, but it has a much cooler poster than that seventies monstrosity, I'm sure you'll agree. It's my understanding that the film also features the USS Los Angeles in her only starring role.
As usual, John Dziadecki has done the legwork on the topic of airships in film generally. His list is really the best collection of information on the subject I have seen on the net.
Mr. Frankenstein also sought information on the scene in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow in which the Hindenburg III is moored to the airship mast of the Empire State Building, and the passengers debark via a rickety nose-mounted gangway, high above the city. He wanted to know if the mast had ever actually been employed to moor an airship, and if so, if the depiction was accurate.
I had a hard time sourcing the details, but I know the answers off the top of my head, so here's my un-researched skinny. The mast was added in the throes of a height race with the builders of the Chrysler Building, and its' primary purpose is to add footage to the obelisk. The decision to design and promote the tower as an airship mast was largely driven by the desire for publicity. Shortly after the building was completed, of course, the airship era was brought to an abrupt and explosive close. However, even if the Hindenburg had not exploded, it's unlikely that the Empire State's mast would ever have been used.
At the time that the mast was conceived, there were two kinds of masts in common use on airship bases around the world. One, a mast low enough to the ground to allow the base of the ship to touch the ground and to allow people to board and debark directly, was less employed than another. The other, the high mast, is the approach which the Empire State's mast emulates.
The high mast was, as the name implies, much taller. The moored airship's crew would indeed primarily enter and leave via a nose-mounted gangway. If I understand the details, mooring a ship to the high mast was easier, faster, and required less crew, and therefore only if it was absolutely needed did a ship moor to the low mast. However, around 1920 (I think), a series of accidents occurred which led to the abandonment of the high mast generally, well before the Empire State building was completed.
The essential problem is that an airship is a great sail in the wind, and when the ships were tethered to the masts, wind could cause breakaways which severely damaged the craft and often occurred with only a skeleton crew aboard. The vessels were symbols of national pride and terribly expensive, and so it was rapidly learned not to expose them to the risks of the open air while moored.
So, amusingly, the most improbable aspect of the Hindenburg III sequence in Sky Captain - the absurd, apparent risk inherent in walking a plank while a quarter mile in the air - is also its' most and least realistic element, simultaneously. It's an enigma, a chinese puzzle box of the cinema, I tells ya!
I think we can fairly argue that the failure of humans to practice the second-oldest profession with regard to lighter-than-air aviation is also a mystery, and since this is a wrap up I can use that to transition into a couple of interesting anecdotes. Solidy in the realm of documented mystery along the lines of the Marie Celeste, the mystery of The Ghost Blimp generates a new story every few years. I believe the image below, of the pilotless vessel's crash landing, originally ran with the linked story in print.
Well, if that doesn't satisfy your appetite for fearful phenomena, may I suggest a careful, late-night perusal of The Mystery Airship of 1897, in which a rash of Victorian airship sightings in the midwest appear to presage our own darling UFOs and flying saucers. Triangulating airships and the UFO subspecies of delta-shaped craft brings us to the intriguing backyard engineering group JP Aerospace, whose mission is to develop a high-altitude lighter-than-air craft as a launch platform for spacecraft, or as they put it, “ATO - airship to orbit.” Widely reported this summer to be preparing a test flight of a 172-foot V-shapped craft, the Ascender, I found no meaningful follow-up and surmise the flight did not take place this year.
And so Blimp Week II sails into the enveloping fog of the internet, her graceful lines gradually losing definition in the digital mists as she succumbs to bit rot. Thanks for sailing!
I regret that the source of this image is forgotten, but if I had to guess, I'd say it's the R101 and that it came from the Airship Heritage Trust site.
Man, am I beat.
Thus, some brevity, in theory.
Let's set things up for a ruminantive journey by peeking in on FROM BABYKILLER TO ART DECO ICON: images of the airship, authored in 2002 and concluding with a paragraph that looks ahead to the coming hypercapitalist celebration of the airship. Having digested that (and franked the letters as apprpriate) we shall turn back the hands of time to the innocent age of 1994, where we confront The Great Pink Floyd Airship Mystery, a conundrum that continues to inspire analyses such as Organization as the Message. For those, like me, who were unaware that in 1994 promotional blimps cruised the European skies, scaring the unwary and pleasing the archetypal bong-toting Floyd devotee, it is worth reproducing the images of these artships.
The European version
The American version
The art on the US machine (lost, like so many blimps and dirigibles, in a storm) was created by one Burton J. Dodge, who, it seems, holds what may be a world record for blimps painted, 17.
Of course, there's always been loads of photos of the blimps and dirigibles. Often the ones that get reproduced emphasize the looming bulk of the items via an extreme foreshortening, or juxtapose the ship, in the near foreground, with an impossibly large item in the near distance. For example, there are aerial photos of at least the Macon and the Akron (and I had thought the Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg) off the shoulder of Manhattan, looming in the viewfinder to cover most of the Lower East Side.
These images are striking, and fantastic, and the sheer impossibility of the sight - how can something that big be in the sky? - accounts for a good portion of the wonder and interest that the blimps and dirigibles exert today.
Of course, it's good to think contextually, as well. The great semi-military dirigibles of the U. S., Britain, and Germany played a role in the interwar period much like the space program. Technological wonders and simple awe helped convey the idea of progress, of the future. One day, millions would slide from continent to continent in grace and style, Bertie Wooster attended by Jeeves aboard the Vickers Transoceanic as a dance band serenaded the passengers beneath the balmy mid-Atlantic stars topside.
An interior view of the deck configuration aboard the British airship R-100, from the Airship Heritage Trust.
But if you've ever seen the Goodyear, or Fuji, or Sanyo blimps in the sky, you may have noticed that however big the blimp may be, the sky is much larger. When looking at these things with your eye, your brain communicates the scale to you in myriad ways. But the quantifiable degree of visual space the ships occupy in the vast reaches is quite small. The techniques employed in the images described and cited above counteract this fact to communicate scale.
What would it look like if a photographer consistently framed the great dirigibles against large objects on the ground, from the ground?
Theodor Horydczak did just that. In several of his many aviation-themed photos, he framed the Graf Zeppelin in the upper center of his viewfinder over a city street and above the Capitol. The Los Angeles over (and through) the Lincoln Memorial.
Graf Zeppelin over the Mall, near the Capitol.
USS Los Angeles over the Lincoln Memorial.
USS Los Angeles from within the Lincoln Memorial.
Is he constructing a meaning here? I guess that his intent was simply to juxtapose the old (the horse and cart) with the new; the accomplishments of America past with America future. The implicit ironic threat of an Art Deco envoy of the Nazi state hanging over the Capitol with all the shining grace of Damocles' sword may not have come clear until 1940. The subtler juxtaposition of the Los Angeles (and, although I do not reproduce it here, the Goodyear-manufactured Akron) with the Lincoln Memorial is likely only to strike the paranoid dyslexic as a warning of looming civil war and dystopian threats to democracy developing from the structural pressures of hypercapitalism. Happily, Mr. Horydczak's images cast the Memorial as a redoubt and temple from within which we peer at the emblem of industry securely.
One day in 1906 another American (I presume) set about to fly the airship Eagle in the fair city of Chicago. The crowd gaped.
Eagle, Chicago, 1906
About twenty-five years later, on August 28, 1929, crowds gathered in Chicago's Grant Park to see the Graf Zeppelin on a stopover in her record-setting round-the world flight. They came, of course, to look at the Zeppelin.
Graf Zeppelin, Chicago, 1929
