Posted on by mwhybark

heatwave

Fresh Air for today (Thursday – August 15, 2002) is featuring Eric Klinenberg, author of the just-published “Heatwave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago”, about the horrific heatwave of Summer 1995.

I’m listening to it right now. It’s selling the shit outta the book; I’m definitely gionna pick it up.

Funny thing about me: when others read horror novels or true crime (a pox on the serial killer entertainment genre, a pox, I tell ya), I prefer to read journalism or history about catastrophic failures of systems generally designed to provide for our collective safety.

Watching Chi-town writhe and die under God’s magnifying glass that summer was, at the time, both horrifying, and a complete vindication of my abandonment of the Midwest. The weather back home, quite literally, was NOT habitable.

Every summer, when I was a child, I would wonder what failure of self-preservational instinct led pioneers to stop in Indiana and Illinois. GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN!

OK, I’m kidding, kinda. Better you than me, I guess. And I miss the hell outta fall. But be sure to spit on the snow for me.

Posted on by mwhybark

Sixth and Grant

Anne Zender proffers a short piece on house at Sixth and Grant in Bloomington, Indiana, my homwtown and where Anne went to college.

This house is about two doors from the Runcible Spoon, a former employer of, um, really, everyone I knew in Bloomington, at one point or another.

Perhaps you worked there as well.

And on Saturday we’ll greet Chris Dent and Sabrina here in Seattle, direct from the muggy hills of my homeland.

Right now, I think I might walk down to the edge of the Hill to watch the ships come in.

Posted on by mwhybark

Spidering the garden

web_spider.jpg In the summer sun, they’re riding their webs like tars in the yardarms of the trees. Their webs bellying and snapping in the breeze, these fine ladies will shortly double in size – late August often shares a brood of wind-riding gems, each an inch or two across.

web_spider2.jpg
Posted on by mwhybark

Attention GEEKS!

Slim Devices, Inc. makes and sells the ~$250 SliMP3 (I choose to say it ‘slimpy’) – a dedicated network port for accessing your MP3s from your home LAN.

No word on a wireless model. But it uses perl!

I guess the limitation that I see is drawn from that tiny display – paging thru 5000 songs might take some time.

From a strictly economic perspective, $250 buys a LOT of CDs to burn mixdiscs on -and your $89 DVD player does MP3, right? You geek.