He jgumped upt onntp the kpbbrd and sat dwn befpre helping with this entry.
Takeover
A minor issue
The September 12 issue of the New Yorker arrived today. The issue features a deal of writing concerning the flood in New Orleans, as may be expected. However, the cover, depicting a sax player on the roofs of the French Quarter, is quite weak by comparison to Speigelman’s amazing black-on-black cover of four years ago, depicting the memory of the World Trade Center. I acknowledge that the New Yorker is by design focused on New York. But seriously, couldn’t someone have picked up the phone and asked him to come up with something that similarly reflects the shock and pain of the nation in the wake of this year’s autumnal catastrophe?
As an aside, New Yorker, will you puh-leeze get with the twenty-first century and at the very least offer Google-based searchability or a consistent linking protocol? I had to hack the 9/11 essay link out of a 404 from a four-year old link on a non-Conde Nast website.
Free Conference Calls
TidBITS covers FreeConference.com, a free conference-call service.
Annual
Chris Dent reflects on Glacial Erratics: One Year in this rainy clime.
Hand brake
Sometime between 1970 and 1972, I think, my mom drove my sister and I to the nearest grocery store, a Marsh’s, in West Lafayette, Indiana. I think she was driving the family car, a 1967 Pontiac Tempest in flake sky blue. The top was up, and Mom left my sister and I in the car. The store was located on a slight rise above the parking lot, and Mom wheeled the car into the spot nose first, the car’s front angled up by the rise, facing the store’s front doors. She must have been intending to run in and pick up just one thing, because she decided to leave us in the car.
No sooner had she closed the driver-side door and started to cross in front of the car when the car began to roll backwards. My sister and I immediately began to yell in fear at the top of our lungs. Mom must have heard us because she ran top the car and got the door open in time to grab and set the parking brake.
I don’t know why, exactly, but that memory has been rattling around in my head for the past couple of weeks.
Chopper
On September 2, Rocketboom posted 10 minutes of semi-raw footage from a helicopter flying over the deeply-flooded neighborhoods of New Orleans. The footage includes radio chatter, and the longest segment captures a military Huey picking up a group of survivors from a rooftop. The pilots of the various helicopters struggle to establish radio contact and when people on the roofs are spotted find themselves relaying GPS coordinates to ground control in Baton Rouge.