| Topical humor |
[17 Jun 2008|03:14pm] |
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The Whistler And His Dog |
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A Russo-Japanese War joke??
Today's "Get Fuzzy" cartoon
Thanks for throwing a bone to the history buffs in the audience.
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| Today's News in the United States of Atlantis |
[17 Jun 2008|11:35am] |
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mood |
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 ranty |
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The words "levee break" and news footage of cities under water certainly has a dread familiarity for those of us greater New Orleans. Our hearts go out to our countrymen in the Mid-West.
Midwest Flood News
Red Cross.org
Just a "natural" disaster?
"Authorities knew the aging levee near Birdland, a working-class, racially diverse neighborhood, was the weakest link among the city's levees. A 2003 Corps report called for nearly $10 million in improvements across Des Moines, but there wasn't enough federal money to do all the work." Des Moines Levee Fails (hat tip to jdquintette)
But of course we can't afford 10 million here and 12 million there to defend America when we have a 2.4 Trillion dollar war to take care of. (And Bush wants another 178 billion, saying "our men and women in uniform and their families deserve better". Indeed, so do we all.)
Besides, it's cheaper (not for the country, of course, but for BushCo) to just let citizens die and start a PR campaign to blame the victims.
I'm not saying defending Americans isn't on BushCo's list of priorities at all. It's probably somewhere down their list as a subset of potential public relations problems. Right around the note to make sure Dear Leader doesn't start massaging female foreign leaders when there are media cameras around.
Edit:
Is 'Mother Nature' Really To Blame for the Midwest Floods? article by Georgianne Nienaber. More on levees, politics, and Army Corps of Engineers follies.
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| On Wisconsin |
[09 Jun 2008|02:35pm] |
Condolances to our countrymen in Wisconsin.
Made the mistake of presuming the US Army Corps of Engineers were more competent than the Three Stooges? We in South-East Louisiana can identify.
Be prepared to have your state denounced as inherently UnAmerican and the population idiots for living there.
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| Rove, BushCo, and Katrina |
[08 Jun 2008|07:37pm] |
Salon.com article "How Karl Rove played politics while people drowned".
Lots of confirmation of stuff those of us who've kept a close eye things already knew, but some new details.
Favorite detail I didn't already know: Gov. Blanco personally gave President Bush a two-page letter detailing everything the state needed to cope with the disaster. Bush "lost" the letter. Ooopsie.
( Text mirror )
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| McCain said |
[03 Jun 2008|08:45pm] |
"We must also prepare, far better than we have, to respond quickly and effectively to a natural calamity. When Americans confront a catastrophe they have a right to expect basic competence from their government. Firemen and policemen should be able to communicate with each other in an emergency. We should be able to deliver bottled water to dehydrated babies and rescue the infirm from a hospital with no electricity. Our disgraceful failure to do so here in New Orleans exposed the incompetence of government at all levels to meet even its most basic responsibilities." -- John McCain
Applause. I'm not planning to vote for McCain, and I may never applaud him again, but he earned my applause for saying this.
Though he said it not "here in New Orleans" but 2 cities over in Kenner, Louisiana.
Also, contrary to the McCain campaign official transcript above, he spoke it as "deliver hot bottled water to dehydrated babies". Whatever.
And more importantly, as bad as the "natural calamity" was, the man-made one was very much worse.
And McCain twice voted against establishing a Congressional commission to examine Federal, State, and local response to devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. He also voted against emergency relief after the disaster, funding communications for disaster first reponders, and other relevent items.
Perhaps you think such proposals should be opposed on the grounds of keeping the government small.
Perhaps you think William Howard Taft was a damn Commie for authorizing the army to bring food and tents to San Francisco after the great earthquake.
Perhaps you think when the shit hits the fan, it is better to let our citizens die of from lack basic necessities than to spend government funds to save their lives. Maybe you have no problem with America being a country whose government leaves the corpses of its people who die unnecessarily bloated in the sun, to be eaten by rats and dogs.
If so, I disagree with you. But I'd have a modicum more respect for you had the courage to damn well admit it.
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| Indiana Jones and the Cheesy Contrivance |
[29 May 2008|10:27pm] |
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) mshollie and I saw the new "Indiana Jones" movie at the Prytania yesterday. It was fun mindless entertainment.
candid doesn't care for Indiana Jones; an interesting take I can't argue against intellectually. One needs to suspend logic if watching something like this. Don't expect it to be plausible or make sense. It is high budget cheese. Ms. H and I laughed both at and with it.
Well, we're former staffers of "New Orleans Worst Film Festival", so perhaps we have overdeveloped bad film amusement senses. Heck, I enjoyed "Aztec Rex" (AKA "Tyranasaurs Azteca").
Speaking of great moments in film, tongodeon introduced me to the silent film "Grief in Bagdad". It is a short parody of the Douglas Fairbanks feature "The Theif of Bagdad" (though you don't need to know that to appreciate it). This is a fun short, with what is probably some of the greatest acting by non-human primates in film history!
Watch on YouTube.
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| Photo of the day |
[29 May 2008|10:25pm] |
"Stop loss" in action: President Bush trys to physically stop a soldier from leaving the service after serving 6 terms of duty in Iraq....
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| Pick up line |
[16 Apr 2008|02:49pm] |
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Yesterday a guy was collecting scrap metal on our street. I asked if he wanted cans. He said yes. I took him to the back yard, where I had a stash from since the storm-- I didn't expect there to be no recycling pickup for this long. (Before the storm it was once a week. Now apparently it's about once every two and a half years, if you're lucky.)
At the bottom of the big bin were empty cans of "Floodweiser" emergency water and other post-K supplies.
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| Weblinks: New Orleans, BushCo |
[10 Apr 2008|07:46pm] |
Ms. Hollie went to Algiers RiverFest last weekend, and took some good pix of The Indians
Speaking of New Orleans pix, "W Magazine" apparently has a spread about New Orleans. I havn't seen the magazine, but some pix are on line. (I could do without the fashionista stuff, but enough local stuff to be worth a look.)
Harry Shearer's suggested headline summarizing the Federal involvement with the Katrina disaster from the ACOE levees to FEMA trailers: "Government Floods City, Then Poisons Survivors"
Speaking of Federal incompetence, Dear Leader Bush is the poster boy: Historians agree: Worst President Ever
"Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world's goodwill. In short, no other president's faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large."
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| Ancient Maya on NOVA tv tonight |
[08 Apr 2008|10:21am] |
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tv show "Cracking the Maya Code" schedualed to air on the PBS network tonight as part of the "NOVA" series. (Here in New Orleans, 7pm Central Time, rebroadcast at 1am)
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| Ashley Morris, RIP |
[05 Apr 2008|09:30pm] |
Damn. We lost New Orleans blogger Ashley Morris
Some of his impassioned & articulate rants in the aftermath of the Katrina disaster:
Fuck You, You Fucking Fucks (Warning: Contains the "F Word")
Sinn Fein
American Biafra
I only had a priviledge to meet him briefly at such events as the Krewe du Vieux and the big March on 11 January 2007. I'll miss his wit and wisdom on line.
If you hadn't encountered his writing before, check out his "greatest hits" on the website.
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| Listening to the OLD stuff |
[05 Apr 2008|08:41pm] |
Very cool: a bit of sound from 1860 has been played back. The 19th century phonautograph couldn't play back sound, but made a visual record of waveforms; for first time audio has successfully been extracted.
The folks who did it: FirstSounds.org
Selected press coverage (not including the particularly sucky examples)
NY Times article
The Age, AU
NPR
Short crunchgear article
The press coverage has been interesting. I first heard about this from a wacky short tv news piece saying something like "Scientists have discovered a sound recording from 1860 ... Almost 20 years before Thomas Edison invented the first sound recording!" with no further explanation. Ms. Hollie witnessed me making an exasperated gesture at the tv set and saying, "What, have they extracted sound from a phonautograph? Or what??"
I can remember speculation going back at least 20 to 25 years ago that someday someone would be able to figure out some technology to extract audio from a phonautograph paper. That the phonautograph predated Edison's phonograph was no secret to those with some interest in early audio. This is not to discount the significance of the scientific achievement of playing it back -- it is more an observation of how the media tend to report things. No doubt if something significant and startling was discovered in old presidential papers from a 120 years ago, we'd see examples presenting it along the lines of: "Historians have discovered that the United States used to have a president called ''Grover Cleveland'', who has been totally forgotten!"
It will be interesting to see what else might come of these developments. I hope we'll get to hear some of the Edison tinfoil recordings again.
I note FirstSounds.org/Sounds already has a few other things up, the only one earlier recognizable as something is a tuning fork from 1859. Regarding an 1857 phonautogram, "his recording methods were not yet sophisticated enough at this time to yield audibly recognizable results." I wonder if this is an absolute threshold or one of current reconstructive technology.
There have been suggestions at least since the late 1960s that pots on a potter's wheel just might accidentally record sound. "Archaeoacoustics". A few archaeologists have contemplated that, just maybe, somehow, we may be able to listen to bits of conversation from thousands of years ago, perhaps listening to spoken Etruscan or Linear A. And other archaeologists and historians have found this dream, while tantalizing, pretty funny.
(Hm, doing a quick google while preparing this post has turned up a few things I've missed, including an April Fool's Day prank claiming recordings from Pompeii a couple years ago, and an "X-Files" tv episode with a pot with a recording of the voice of Jesus! upen.edu language log; Pottery recording)
I've long wondered if eventually better audio fidelity might be extracted from early recordings by some sort of computerized reverse engineering to compensate for the audio strengths and weaknesses of early recording devices.
Speaking of extracting hidden data from early audio, a dozen years ago a friend told me he was playing around with a NASA sonar program on his computer and tried it on some snippets of acoustic recordings-- where there was a pure tone like a chime or bell, and making a 2-d image. He said in a few cases he'd get a circle pattern, a few others a square. He thought he was getting a sonar picture of the inside of the recording horn.
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