So, I hear tell it's hot.
How hot is it?
Here, they're doing a land office biz in frozen salmon on a stick.
Okay, that is just a lie. Make up a lie for me about how hot it is where you are, and please include one semi-plausible link.
There is little in life that offers more potential for embarassment than concluding that your father has undertipped, realizing you don't have cash on you to make up the difference, and concluding that you must mention it to him, only to realize after you call it to his attention that he has not, in fact, undertipped.
In the bathroom of my childhood home, an image of one of these formed an element of a full-room magazine-clip collage dating to summer 1974. Since we moved into that house in 1976, I have wanted to know what the hell it was. Now, I do.
Things posts a link to the back story to a series of the most striking images of aerial misfortune I've ever seen. I think Manuel linked to a picture of it a while ago - an A-6 aviator's ejection seat went off in flight, partially ejecting him though the canopy of the plane. The link is about the incident and how he survived.
Devoted filmist and friend of SIFFblog Alice Dee passes on a line to note an event of interest to us all:
For two weeks film archivist and historian DENNIS NYBACK will be residing at THE GRAND ILLUSION CINEMA showing 27 programs in 14 days consisting of over 100 films! Week one features some of his rarest and most entertaining films and programs and week two is a side-splitting slapstick film festival. More info at dennisnybackfilms.com
Sadly, neither he not the Grand Illusion website nor Mr. Nyback have a clear link or referecne to which two weeks this event may be occurring, so I'm assuming it's current as of today. Mr. Dee also happily reminded me that the Paramount is featuring Buster Keaton next month in a festival during the five-week run of this season's Silent Movie Mondays. The festival features no less than FIVE double features and begins on August 22, running each Mondays until September 26. Winter sees a change at the Paramount, moving the silent series to Sunday nights. This is extremely welcome to me, as Mondays have proven inconvenient to me of late. Silent Movie Sundays will feature some of Cecil B. DeMille's epochal epics, beginning with The Ten Commandments of 1923 on January 8, 2006 and running (with a break) through February 6's showing of the 1926 The Scar of Shame. Summer 2006 sees a return to Mondays as the adventure series kicks off with 1926's Don Juan, and runs until August 28 with The Iron Mask, from 1929.
[crossposted from SIFFBlog]
A while ago, when Amazon introduced their interesting block-by-block street-level photo map, I noticed with amusement that our sun umbrella was open and on the deck of our current apartment when the photo was taken.
Yesterday, I happened to zoom in very close to a satellite view of our deck - the same view that Google Maps uses - and there was our sun umbrella. I squinted but couldn't make out our deck furniture.
"It's sort of like hearing someone say that their love for Molly Hatchet and The Yes Group grew out of their youthful enthusiasm for Negative Trend and Throbbing Gristle. " -- The Greatest Bus Driver in the World on my enthusiasm for folk and traditional music.
What he doesn't know is that I have in fact played covers of Allmann Bros. tunes, "Silver Dollar" in particular. ;)
Jim points out this loving reminiscence of the Last Exit on Brooklyn at Seattle Wiki.
Britain Says Man Killed by Police Had No Tie to Bombings. [NYT]:
"LONDON, July 23 - Scotland Yard admitted Saturday that a man police officers gunned down at point-blank range in front of horrified subway passengers on Friday had nothing to do with the investigation into the bombing attacks here. The man was identified by police as Jean Charles de Menezes, a 27-year-old Brazilian, described by officers as an electrician on his way to work."
Fantastic work, 007.
RSS subscribers may find an even less politic remark that I regret. As someone who in his youth fled at high speed on foot from police officers, it will be no challenge to decipher my sentiments here, although I do feel sympathy for the police officer who executed the man in good faith. I do use the phrase 'good faith' mockingly, but not the word 'sympathy.' To my surprise, at 39, I find I have friends and relatives who have chosen law enforcement as their career. My sympathy is genuine.
Awesome! I just noticed that Google Maps has a new view labeled "Hybrid" that lays their streetmap over a satellite view!
I have passed the road test portion of my driver's license certification and between the time I began to write this sentence and the time I write this word they shot my license photo.
On Monday I will celebrate the first of many Drive Your Car To Work Days.
Viv and I had the pleasure of attending a show by the notable X spinoff band The Knitters Friday night at the Showbox. The Knitters were a semi-joke band that featured Exene Cervenka, John Doe, and DJ Bonebreak of X as well as the remarkable songwriter and guitarist Dave Alvin. They recorded a record, Poor Little Critter in the Road, which was released in the last days of Slash Records, around 1985. The record featured a mix of irreverent covers of American country songs and some jokey originals (cf. the LP's title). Since then the band has released another record and become a primary touring vehicle for the musicians.
Poor Little Critter in the Road is without question the first time that I actually listened closely to country music and realized how much it had in common with punk rock, the music I came to the record from. Without it, I rather doubt I ever would have taken up the mandolin. Doe and Cervenka's songwriting and music, like that of Dale Lawrence, helped form my worldview and musical taste. I expect to listen to them with the same interest interest twenty years from now as I did twenty years ago.
I saw X once the year Poor Little Critter in the Road came out, and they were on their last legs, bickering onstage. This made me sad, as the depth of my love for their first two records, Los Angeles and Wild Gift, burned bright in my nineteen-year-old heart and has never flagged. Since moving to Seattle, I have seen X a couple more times, but had missed the last couple visits by the band in the guise of the Knitters.
The addition of Dave Alvin to Doe and Cervenka's songs is a happy one. Alvin moved to L.A. from Texas just before X formed, as I understand it, and so the players have known each other for some time indeed. Alvin's amazing band at the time, The Blasters, remains a personal favorite. As I watched him crank out blistering solo after blistering solo tonight, I realized I had somehow overlooked to see him performing electric guitar live, although as I admire his songwriting very much, I have seen him more than once in acoustic settings.
The show opened with John singing "Silver Wings," and they worked their way though a mixed set of country and old-time covers and both Knitters and X originals, happily for me including "This Must Be the New World."
We met our friends Patrick and Kara at the show; Kara's cousin Johnny plays bass for the band and had arranged for comps for us, kindly enough. I like buying tickets for shows, though, and so I prematurely did so in this case. Too bad! Ah, well, it's a classic case of poor planning anyway - I should have brought my old X and Blasters and Knitters vinyl for inking, but it did not occur to me.
Jon Konrath passes along a link to the Google Maps satellite view of the Breaking Away quarry and the nearby complex of quarries. The linked review is a must-read, by the way. I thought it was interesting that he located it by searching for "Empire Mill Road," as it was a staple of Bloomington folklore that Bloomington limestone is the stone used in the construction of the Empire State Building. I wonder, could these be the quarries that stone came from?
I have many memories of stumbling along a narrow path through the woods on our way to these quarries, the cleared areas of stone glimmering bluely in the cool light of a full summer moon.
August 28 will see Brian Wilson performing Smile live at the Paramount, and I must miss it. For those of you heroes and villains who like vegetables, it seems probable that you know what to do.
Hard at work.
Holding forth on the subject of mattress copy.
Pointing out a possible error in historical attribution.
Sparked by Editor B's remarking upon my Google Maps and Indiana post of yestereve, a denizen of the Hoosier state drops a line:
It is interesting how the term "satellite imagery" is thrown around fairly casually these days. Google would lead us to believe that all their imagery is satellite imagery. In fact, the Indiana images are part of a statewide aerial photography project that was undertaken by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2003. Indiana looks different at small scales because this aerial photography is much different data than the majority of the course-scale satellite imagery displayed on Google Maps. Note the difference in resolution and color when you look close at an area near the state line.The Illinois image probably has a 30-meter spatial resolution (each pixel is 30m x 30m), whereas the Indiana imagery has a 1-meter spatial resolution. This has a huge impact on the ability to view detail at large scale and the overall color of the image at small scale.
Note also that some areas of Indiana and other states have some areas of even higher resolution imagery.
I suspect much of this higher-resolution data is aerial photography--not that it matters much to the casual user.
You can view the same imagery for Indiana which runs on IU's Research Database Complex.
Simply zoom in near Bloomington and turn on the 2003 Aerials (also need to turn off the 1998-1999 aerials).
Hope this clears things up a little.
The correspondent has been invited to provide self-attribution in the comments; if he does not, it's due to privacy concerns.
One cat:
Several golden plums:
The tree has fruited this year more than any since we've lived here, over ten years.
Huzzah for Paul Frankenstein's Boingage!
(FWIW, he says it's a bubble and we should keep renting, citing Hong Kong and Tokyo as historical precedents.)
I was amused on zooming way out in the satellite view of Google Maps to note a possible reason for my having left Indiana as a young man.
Well, after a very intense six weeks of househunting (I estimate we've now viewed about one hundred separate homes), other obligations require us to take a break for a week or two. For those keeping score, we bid on two houses, the one I blogged about that was located in South Park, and another I have not yet mentioned here.
The Redfin listing for the South Park house can be seen here; I believe it's still on the market, and considered simply as the house, it's quite a deal. However, the combination of South Park's specific urban challenges with the introduction of PCBs to the mix really rules it out for us, despite our conclusion that the home itself is unlikely to be directly affected by the chemical.
The other place we bid on is located in South Seattle near a new development called Othello Station, to the South of Seward Park. It is a lovely home. We understand that the seller has accepted another offer.
There is a certain incredulous desperation to my personal feelings in this hunt, sparked and confirmed by the year-by-year evidence of resale prices so easily accessed via a neighborhood search of prior sales. In Capitol Hill, for instance, a cursory examination of prior sales to the South of Madison, near Seattle University reveals multiple large homes form the first three decades of the 20th century which sold at prices between $150k and $250k as recently as five years ago.
Here is an example of just such a home that Vivian and I considered at the time of its' prior sale, in 2000. It had been a rental, and was a wreck, but reasonably affordable at $250k. Today, the home is just in the process of closing at a projected $475k. Kudos to the foresighted persons who purchased and renovated the house. Knowledge of impoverished failure tastes alkaline in the mouth; impending exile looms like a freight train in the night.
I literally feel as though I am obligated to conduct this search in order to avert actual death by violence, as though I am hunted by men with guns, and I awaken in the night with soundless screams dying in my throat. Adding to my personal sense of horror at the situation is the clear evidence that the housing market here is direly inflationary, a direct result of the dramatically increased liquidity of capital for this purpose. A recurring image in my dreams is a photograph of a starving urchin in the Weimar Republic, carting the proverbial a wheelbarrow full of marks.
It will be a relief.
Creepy: The Greatest Bus Driver in the World on the 'depression epidemic'. As anything he writes on the topic of depression, well worth reading.
While this cool Gmpas hack, Google Maps (Unofficial Standalone Viewer) - Most recent Seattle 911 incidents, seems to work, I was unable to get the multi-address input at MyGmaps to work.
This AskMe post points to some methods to enable multi-address mapping in Google Maps, via PiggyBank and MyGmaps.
Plunkthumping presents aan interesting thesis regarding the relationship of old-time guitar picking and banjo frailing.
This MonkeyFilter post notes that the San Bernardino company Sanswire has successfully floated their first Stratellite, intended as an LTA satellite alternative, specifically to provide wireless internet services. The ship has an interesting pattern of ridges implying a dirigible-like inner structure, as well as a unique double-wide hull.
Seattle still most-overpriced U.S city, says Forbes. Take that, NYC! We're number one! We're number one! [via Eric.]
I think you'll agree that the only sensible response to today's Burton/Depp Charlie is to rent the 1972 original. No one comes in, and no one goes out.
Cringely takes a second look at the Apple-Intel deal and thinks he sees a video pod in the future. Of course, he would, having just announced his podcast-like video series, NerdTV, but you know what? I think that's what's behind the addition of podcasting to the iTunes Music store. Podcasting is the dry run for video-on-demand, for reals this time. The differences and usability issues between providing two-track time-based media and multi-track time-based media is negligible.
Do I see a vPod down the line? Well, no, and neither does Bob - he makes his patented absurd prediction by positing a retinal-scan headset as the playback device for the vPod, which is just silly, although it would be kinda cool. I can easily visualize Apple setting up to contro; the market for distribution of video on demand and letting others - such as Intel - bear the burden of entering the low, low, low profit margin world of video components.
I'm thinking, I'll hold off on any television technology purchases for a few years.
In fairly unrelated news, I ordered a refurb Airport Express from the Apple Store online when my second original Graphite Airport BS croaked last week and once again, Apple beats their own TOS. Free shipping within five business days, they said - the item shipped the day after I ordered and is sitting on my coffee table this evening.
Interesting AskMe post requesting the crew to explain the poster's mitochondrial DNA, as reported by the Genographic Project.
Barring a change in circumstances, we're passing on the house.
Our offer was pretty aggressive and intended to spark a negotiation, but the counteroffer was not responsive enough. We could go to a second offer, but given our sense of uncertainty about the vicinity have opted not to pursue it.
The P-I, again today, has a passel of stories of interest relating to South Park and Georgetown. I guess the paper was also interested by the response to their call for disappearing Seattle institutions, because they devoted a full page to it in the front section of the paper edition today.
Drowning their sorrows? Nope, they're after crime: this story picks up that Stranger piece I linked to earlier regarding the adoption of The County Line as an unofficial venue for meetings of the South Park neighborhood association. The County Line is located in a slice of riverside property which is not in incorporated Seattle, but remains county. That section of the neighborhood is slated to be annexed by the city, but the plan has hit a snag, as the accompanying story, linked below, notes.
(It's interesting to note the geographic relationship of the slice of county to the distribution of PCB hotspots mapped in yesterday's coverage.)
Damaged bridge holds up South Park annexation: The 14th Avenue bridge leading north out of South Park into non-residential Georgetown and onto Marginal Way about halfway down the side of Boeing Field needs to be rehabbed or rebuilt, if I understand this story accurately, and the city and county are fingerpointing over who should bear the funding burden.
Boeing Field neighbors stirring up own noise: (Ugh! what a terrible subhead: "Plucky Georgetown residents upset by plans to remake airport." Plucky! My god!) Southwest Airlines is talking to Boeing Field about moving there from SeaTac, which would add to the volume of air traffic at Boeing. Georgetown residents are understandably peeved and concerned. The info-graphic accompanying this story includes the tracks of all the major approach-ways for both Boeing and SeaTac. I found it interesting and maybe a bit tragic that the section of that map just south of the pointer to Boeing field contains the intersections of approaches to both facilities and every single one of the approaches to SeaTac (although the map notes that in this case the red tracks are departures). Earlier in our house-hunt, Viv and I looked at a stunningly beautiful house located right there - we went to it and hung out in the back yard for bit. During the time we were counting and timing, a period of fifteen minutes, eleven inbound over-flights went by at an average altitude of 250-300 feet.
Regarding our bid in South Park, we did not hear back from the selling party yesterday, which means we're beyond the offer expiry date. We may yet hear back but we have no legal obligation to accept the reply.
The P-I blog opens up a can of crusty Seattle nostalgia which I am surprised to find myself sharing. I have been coming here my home whole life and have lived here for fifteen years. It's clearly the early '90s pre-grunge landmarks that tug my heartstrings the most.
The P-I's front page story about PCB contamination in the South Park neighborhood is assuredly not the sort of fornt-page news one wants to see about an area in which one has just put an offer on a house. The good news is that the contamination is in the river-bottom area of the neighborhood, on the other side of the freeway. The bad news is, well, I know a little bit about PCBs, heath risks, and the related spectacular collisions of industry, local politics, class, and bureaucracy.
One item that really gave me the willies in the article is the offhanded note that the PCBs came from "the waste oil that Malarkey Asphalt bought from City Light as a cheap energy source in the 1970s." Apparently, the company was burning the oil as fuel. But not in a high-temperature incinerator. Presumably, the oil was burned in convential ways, which would have had the effect of creating multiple airborne plumes of presumably-intact PCBs. It's interesting that this use occurred here, as in Bloomington, the primary issue was dumped transformers form the plant that built them. I can't recall any anecdotal information about people using the oil as fuel.
I guess the next thing for me to do is learn about the prevailing winds and to what extent the City or EPA has done soil sampling up-slope, near our potential house.
Here's the City's research and activity report, and here is the site of the Duwamish Cleanup Commission. This PDF is the city map that was the basis for the P-I's graphic embedded in the story linked at the start of this entry.
Mother Earth News hosts a fascinating narrative from Bloomington in 1976 concerning a family that inadvertently fertilized their farm with sludge contaminated to the order of 300 ppm (parts per million), resulting in soil contamination levels of 50 ppm. By comparison, the Washington state cleanup level is 1 ppm, and some of the sites sampled along the Duwamish exhibit levels greater than 50 ppm.
Time to look at hosting again. This looks good, and so does the hosting provider's detail page. Sadly, though, no MT listed (sensible enough, I suppose). What'sthe scoop over at the support site for the provider? Well, nothing, in a word.
Well, Google to the rescue, with this cached entry originally recorded as found here.
Dated October, 2003:
My webhost (which is now my former webhost), WebHostingBuzz.com, decided on Wednesday night that they would ban the Movable Type software which I use to run this blog.
So, ah, no, not them, I'd say.
The blessed and indispensible Things blogs the living heck out of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, exposing my mind to the odd fact that Ian Fleming's absurdist flying car was a) based on a real car and b) that said car was powered the engine of a WWI era Gotha. Thus, she flew.
City of Seattle South Park Neighborhood Plan. I believe that this plan may be one of the plans disavowed by Mayor Nickels as a consequence of his stiff-arming the neighborhood planning process subsequent to taking office.
You all know of Google Maps. Did you know of the USGS Seamless Map?
Click to zoom, as you might expect. But under the disclosure triangle "Elevation," try looking at an area you're geographically familiar with with the selection "NED shaded relief (1/9 arc second)" set. I turned off the road labels but kept the roads on, under the "Transportation" triangle.
Some news and information regarding the neighborhood of South Park in Seattle. Recently, the Stranger featured a charming tale of the neighborhood association's new meeting spot, a watering hole known as the County Line. Prior to that, the P-I featured not one but two stories concerning gang-related killings and community response in the one-square mile neighborhood directly to the south of Georgetown. In 1999, the P-I's Regina Hackett also contributed a sunny survey of the neighborhood's future.
The neighborhood association's old-school website contains links to information about a number of things including some interesting historical data from the City of Seattle and Historylink.org.
Venerable statesman of the networked and nerdly Robert X. Cringely announces his entree (or is that re-entry) to the media-blog-o-sphere, introducing a new version of the always-entertaining and often influential I, Cringley that will somehow tie into his PBS-slash-online TV show, NerdTV. What's interesting about this is:
a) he terms the new show "videoblogging," which seems a stretch, but who knows
b) I, Cringely as a blog is clearly the Right Thing if maybe Several Months Late and
c) he promises "plenty of interesting guests."
Based on Bob's track record of provoking discussion, headshaking, and worse, this has me more-or-less excited. Maybe the time is now to write about the incipient adoption of online distro for video - cf. Galactica, I gotta say. Gaah! I hope I have time for this!
Chloe just knocked my after-work martini to the floor, thankfully not breaking the glass. But alas for the gin!
As might be expected, sumit says some sensible and determined things about today's events.
Another day, another five houses.
We saw two really pretty places, relatively close in, each well under 1000 square feet. Both were presented as two bedroom homes but realistically they were one bedroom places. In each case they were priced at $300k.
We also saw two more places a bit further out which we will be seriously considering. One is just over 1000 square feet and very nicely remodeled with a deck and a pleasant, non-maze like interior. The other is larger but underwent a misguided 1970's makeover that has got to go. Viv and I will be discussing both seriously.
This week, we have looked at thirty houses. It's getting to where I'm confusing details in my head. I have been taking a camera and snapping my fool head off in an effort to replaces actual remembering, but it's not a completely satisfactory solution. For one thing, I don't take pictures of homes I don't like at all. For another, often, if it's a place I like a lot, I get too interested in looking at the place to think about shooting.
This weekend, I will be borrowing the camera we just got at work, a D70, and trying to shoot with vigor in order to learn the camera. It will be interesting to see if that experience teaches me to think systematically about shooting during a house visit.
SciFi's running a marathon of Ron Moore's Galactica and I'm finally able to take the time to watch. It is, as has been widely reported, pretty darn good. I have noted with amusement some clearly deliberate nods to Bungie's beloved Marathon - as a small flight of ships drops out of jumpspace into a swarm of Cylon ships, a voice shrieks, “They're everywhere!”
It's a definite bonus to be able to see a bunch of this highly serialized show at once, too. The first one and a half were fairly dense even for me, but once I sorted out who was who and what was what and so forth, I started to really enjoy it.
oldtimey will shortly become one of mathowie's many shirt-tail relations.
Washington Phillips invented his own soundscape with his inventive modifications of the early-twentieth century stringed instrument, the fretless zither.
June 30, 2005
To: Mike Whybark, Seattle
FINANCIAL INSTITUTION WITHHELD has been notified by FINANCIAL INSTITUTION WITHHELD of a theft of records from a third party credit card processor. ... Unfortunately, your card number is among those potentially at risk.
Please note that no personal data, such as your name, address, social security number, or member number was involved in the theft of data.
To protect your account, FINANCIAL INSTITUTION WITHHELD will block your FINANCIAL INSTITUTION WITHHELD card from further transactions effective DATE REDACTED. On that date a new FINANCIAL INSTITUTION WITHHELD card will be issued to you.
Unfortunately, there will be a time delay between blocking your existing card and receiving a replacement card. If you have pre-authorized transfer or payment arrangements, you will need to propagate the new card number and expiration date.
FINANCIAL INSTITUTION WITHHELD regrets the inconvenience.
Sincerely.
NAME WITHHELD
Manger
POSITION DELETED
FINANCIAL INSTITUTION WITHHELD
(Abridgements, exaggerations, redactions, deletions, and withholdings by me.)
You know what? I wish gmail and Outlook would let me do the down-arrow to scan content and right arrow to open in-window tab, just like NetNewWire. Man, I sure do wish that, lazy, lazyweb.
Viv and I have been consumed, eaten alive, devoured by househunting. On Saturday, before enjoying some sprawling dinner and drinks with Greg and Stacey, we saw no less than fifteen houses in an all-day marathon. Some were good, some were bad, none were it.
I particularly liked a 1947 house in near-ish southwest Seattle near a golf course, to my surprise. It was quite suburban, and even on a cul-de-sac-ish loop street, much like places I grew up and basically loathed for their isolation. It's amazing what a few years of break-ins and bum feces will do to a man. The house is vetoed, however, as it's under the approach for one of the primary runways at Sea-Tac, and while the constant thrum of jets is essentially music to my ears, Viv has a different opinion. We counted ten 500-foot overflights in one fifteen minute period this weekend, against the suburban quietude of the hushed neighborhood.
We have looked at any number of homes advertised or described as 1000 square feet that strike me as smaller, all in the 250-300k range. Some have not struck me as particularly habitable, no matter what the size. Most common among these have been homes where a prior steward felt the need for self-expression, and consequently created a sort of architectural maze via successive unrelated remodels, mistaking confusion and entrapment for comfort and security.
We have been particularly struck by four of the houses, and I believe we are passing on two of the four for various reasons. Two are under continued consideration. One requires a massive unremodeling. I would move the house off of its' full basement foundation onto a new full basement. The new location would be at a 45-degree angle to and several dozen feet away from the old location. Oh, and in addition, we'd need to ungraft and move a staircase from it's prewar remodeled location to the original location within the house. Among other things.
Viv pointed out that these plans were pretty persuasive evidence that I did not really want to live in the house, not as it stands. She's right.
I toss and turn and grind my teeth about this now, losing sleep, obsessively clicking the various regional sites that provide mapped views into the various MLS databases. They all suck, too.
The ones with the most base data do not share details, often stinting such crucial considerations as street address. My favorite, Redfin, clearly sometimes posts listings that are totally wrong. Today, for example, we wanted to see a home listed for sale in upper west Seattle. Our agent found the listing - but the Redfin listing was an inaccurate reactivation of an old listing that sold in April. This is troubling, and while I love Redfin's data transparency, inaccurate data transparency only makes it harder for me to apply heat to the soles of my agent (who appears to be doing a pretty good job, but alternative information sources equal greater leverage).
I have realized that some of my tossing and turning at night is my verbally-oriented mind, yammering away at top speed, analyzing this and discussing that about our househunt. I've decided to blog the hunt, to an extent. It will help me to burn off that chattering analyst in my head and at the same time provide a record that I can review to develop and sharpen our goals and strategies. It will be a bit tricky, though, I think. I'm uncomfortable posting pictures of most of these houses, for example, and equally uncomfortable mentioning specifics such as addresses or monetary amounts, so I'm afraid the blog may come out as impenetrable as the Regency memoirs of any given Madame X (as penetrable as she may have been).
Oh well, at least Ken is coming out here soon.
Heartwood Guitar, in which Seattle-based guitar instructor Rob Hampton blogs a bunch of guitar lessons, and stuff. Funny and useful.
Ol' Danny Barnes has a new record coming up. He's got some free music to download in celebration. Git that banjer.
I had an amazing dream last night in which I was on the phone in a friend's incomplete, under renovation house. I was speaking to Scott Colburn and Joey and Johnny Ramone on the telephone, when enormous hailstones began to fall from the skies outside. I got off the phone and rushed to grab my new camera, which at first was a digital Leica and then became a D70. By the time I'd rounded up a memory card and figured out that the camera's battery was not fully charged, the hail had shrunk in size to a fine mist, a slurry of water and ice, which blanketed the landscape to a depth of three inches, but which was rapidly melting.
A couple days ago I dreamt I was driving around the perimeter of the site of the Seattle World's Fair of 1932, which had been unaccountably abandonded for many years. The muscly art-deco buildings were proudly incised with cheerful bombast such as "A SEA OF TOURISTS AWAITS THE FUTURE VISTA" and "LET US GO FORTH AND MINE OUR FELLOW MAN," but the cheap concrete surface of the stubby towers flaked with age, the white paint peeling in strips.
Broken windows and twisted frames drooped like the eyelids of a dead man. Around the base of the buildings, baking in a noon sun, weeds, rippled asphalt, heaving slabs. Debris festooned the empty lots behind rusted chainlink fences.
Kenko posts some resources on MetaFilter. They tend to, but are not exclusively about, international 60's garage-psychedelic music, a la Nuggets and beyond. Added presumably for flavor is a link to Nurse with Wound influences.
As the new iTunes podcasting integration requires one to turn on the music store access in the app, I must say: fuck that shit.
Also, what the fuck is up with the visual overload in the store UI, people? How on Earth can anyone with the visual sensibilities of sea cucumber possibly understand when, how, or if they are purchasing something? It's like plucking your eyeballs from your head and dunking them into a molten pot of lead, eyestalks distended but intact, transmitting the sight of the sparking bright orange surface into your brain right up until they fry horribly in the liquid metal.
Gawd. I have no idea how you people can put up with that crap.
From the Greatest Bus Driver in the World: Poultry notes, featuring a thoughtful exegesis of soon-to-be-ex Justice Connor and her memorable career in the entertainment industry. His Back to the Blog combines some excellent writing on antidepressant medications with careful observations of Jon's cat and the environment.
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, B^2 breaks radio silence with one of his patented, remarkable comicstrip remixes. This time, it's a melancholy reflection on memory and loss cast as a Mark Trail Sunday strip. Genius! He's a freaking genius! He does seem to be feeling rather down, I'm sorry to say.
A thank you to Chris for his link to SuperDuper, and I note with pride a link to the ineffable IOCNM.
Finally, Editor B has been chronicling his passage upcountry, from the Mississippi delta (which, as you all know, shines like a National guitar) to my hometown of Bloomington. In today's entry, he hooks us quickly with a tale of dining in a cave before moving on to celebrate the peculiar and kind ways of this vast and contradictory land on the eve of its' birthday celebration.
Virtual Banjo Lessons at Plunkthumping. Genius. Maybe this will prompt me to get past the five basic chord shapes.
Seven months later, my Hopkin Explained post is still generating interest and links from large collaborative sites. Every other month, on average, someone links to it from a high-traffic link-collector, and I get another day of several thousand site visits to the page. Just today, MetaFilter, a site in which I actively participate, linked to this page - again. A commenter there chucklingly suggested I should link to the thread, and so I have.
Another commenter in the MeFi thread is curious about a link in a comment posted here after the initial publication. In that link, citizenkafka recounts calling Terry's mom about two weeks before I did, and mentions a) Terry's mom knew about lostfrog.org and b) that Terry has a new frog. These recollections appear to contradict things in my initial post which Terry's dad told me. I don't necessarily see them as contradictions.
I did not speak to Terry's mom, but to his dad. The family is of an ethnicity that often emphasizes patriarchy and the adults clearly speak English as a second language. I didn't want to step on toes by grilling Mom or Sis or Granny.
Terry's dad told me what I recount - he was unaware of the web's interest, and so was Terry, and that was a good thing as far as he was concerned. I specifically asked if other people had been calling, and he indicated that no-one had.
However, not mentioned in the thread comments is yet another story of someone calling Terry's family. In this story, a forum participant (possibly affiliated with the very first site to post the image) called and spoke with Terry's sister. I can't recall the details of that interaction, but the poster noted that he was encouraged not to locate and give a new frog to Terry.
Finally, Terry's dad did tell me that he has a new frog. Although I don't recall this explicitly, I believe I must have asked if the frog was called Hopkins. Terry's dad emphasized that the frog was different. I was surprised to note that I had not included this detail in the original post, presumably a result of having determined that the new frog was not Hopkin.
I believe that in all probability the other members of the family just never mentioned the calls regarding the appearance of the flyer on the web - remember that Terry was actively posting these flyers for at least six months, and that they included a phone number. Others must have called before the web got hold of it.
So in my mind, the different narratives associated with Terry's family boil down to internally consistent perspectives, despite the apparent contradictions. It's possible, of course, that Terry's dad actually was aware of the internet hubbub but chose to deny it in order to keep our conversation brief. Of course, over time it becomes more likely that the family will become aware of it, as well.
