Category Archives: General

General, Philosophy, Social Commentary

Connections

11 Comments

…some meditations:

I’m thinking: no dog, no bag hoarding instincts, no barf-containment. No iPod location mystery, no sorting through the glove compartment, no instantly-available barf bag. The reason this day didn’t end with a stinky car can be directly traced to the moment I walked past a pet shop in Uptown in April 1996, looked in the window, and saw my dog.

Wife took him for a walk later. He was slow. Very slow. “He’s not going to be with us much longer,” she said. Resigned. Then hopeful: “But I’ve been saying that for three years.”

“You saw him when the food showed up. Annoying as a puppy. Where did he take you tonight?”

“Well, I let him go where he wanted, and we went up the hill to the water tower, and then back down, and when we got home he didn’t want to go up the steps so he went down the street, and I thought he would go up the back steps, but he looked at me, like ‘I’m not done,’ and we walked east and around the neighborhood again. But it was dark and he can’t see anything.”

“But he can smell.”

Nearly deaf and nearly blind, and the world is still a story, every scent a character, every strong odor a twist in the plot. The dog walks outside and the world is his iPod, and it’s always set on shuffle. So it is for us all, really. If you have a dog you know how they come to the door and stand there waiting for you to let them out. Standing at the glass door. The wall that keeps the odors out. They can see, but they can’t smell. Daily life for us is just like that. If you’re lucky someone opens the door and all the glories rush over you.

It’s days like these that you realize how much you miss. For once, you saw all the connections. You suspect there are just as many threads between the now and the then every other day. Probably more. Would you go mad if you considered them? Would you exult to discover how everything braids itself together, fear for the action ten years gone that will explode down the road, anticipate the bloom that grows from a casual act last month? Sure. All of that. All these things. You can’t act if you remember everything. You shouldn’t act if you remember nothing.

What a writer. And he does it almost every single day.

General, Science And Society

Still Bad

4 Comments

…but Irene may not be as catastrophic as it appeared yesterday. It looks to me like the most likely major consequence, beyond flooding, will be a lot of power outage. Regardless, you should always be prepared. As Frank J says, it’s a hurricane, not a procrastinate-cane.

[Update a while later]

If you want to support relief efforts, both in the Bahamas and (next week) on the east coast, this is probably a good organization.

General, History, Humor, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Pompeii

17 Comments

A tour from Lileks:

We visited some houses, saw the CAVE CANEM mural, the word WELCOME embedded in the stones in front of a house. And above it all, Vesuvius . . . venting.

“Are those clouds?”

“It’s a cloudless day except for one cloud coming out of Vesuvius? I don’t think so.”

“Is it going to explode?”

“Some day. But not today.”

Some day it will, and there will probably a tour group in progress, and a few people will think “now that’s a good tour. They even give you the volcano” while others stare in horror: well, can’t say I wasn’t warned, but jeez, what are the odds.

It’s actually part of a series he’s been running all week, on his European vacation.

[Update a couple minutes later]

This is great, too:

On the ship it was Pirate Night. We got Pirates of the Caribbean bandanas in the restaurant. The menu was pirate themed. (It was also the best meal we’d had on the ship.) There was a pirate dance in the middle of dinner. There will be fireworks on board tonight; the Disney ships are the only ones entrusted with fireworks. Then a dessert buffet and general piratical merriment. I arrred well and hard at the maitre d’ when we entered: it’s table nine I’ll be wanting, me hearties – but once Bradford, our waiter, asked me if I would be dressing up, I explained that my sympathies were with the colonial administrators, just trying to get the money to the mother country without losing it to some thieves. Pirates are interesting, but not admirable, no matter how you gussy it up with yo-ho-hoing and avast-ye-matey exultations of a life unbound from convention and oppression. As all the waiters danced around the room, wearing pirate costumes, I had a vision of a ship 400 years hence, with all the waiters dressed up for Al-Qaeda night, wearing suicide vests and waving automatic weapons.

Sadly, he’s probably prophetic. Or maybe not so sadly. I’d feel a little more optimistic if we’d actually solved the pirate problem. We did for a while, but then decided to try a new, non-effective approach.

General, Political Commentary

A DC Earthquake?

13 Comments

I’m seeing lots of tweets from DC folks.

Actually, while I have a lot of friends there, a Richter 10 would solve a lot of the country’s problems.

Seriously, there’s a lot of old unreinforced colonial masonry there. A good shake could do a lot of damage in Old Town Alexandria, and the district as well.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Wow, a 5.8 in Virginia, a few tens of miles from DC. Pentagon and Capitol being evacuated.

[Update a few minutes later]

Apparently people are reporting it from New England, including a Fox reporter in Martha’s Vineyard. Here’s a Free Republic thread, with a report from Cleveland. Instapundit has a report that they didn’t actually evacuate the Pentagon, but that some rapidly exited on their own. It’s been declared safe now.

[Update a few minutes later]

Hmmm…Obama is out of town, can’t blame him. Must be Bush’s fault.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Looking at the map, it’s just east of Charlottesville, toward Richmond. Let’s hope it’s not a foreshock.

Even if it’s not, it could still be a bad week. Irene seems to be targeting the same area, with an arrival this coming weekend.

[Update a couple minutes later]

I’ve heard that cells are jammed. Folks, text, don’t talk. That will free up bandwidth for the first responders.

[Update]

No, it’s not too soon. Quake humor: “Krugman says it wasn’t big enough.” Hey, didn’t I say that, up above? Stopped clock, I guess.

Also, social media is faster than seismic waves.

[Update a few minutes later]

See what I meant about unreinforced masonry? “The historic Smithsonian Institution Building in Washington has cracks in the interior walls by the earthquake.”

That’s the red stone “castle” on the mall, the original Smithsonian Building and now its headquarters. A bigger shake, closer to the DC area, would do a lot of damage, because it’s not designed for earthquakes (even the new buildings). East coasters are way too complacent about this. They think that because it hasn’t happened in their lifetimes, that it can’t happen.

[Bumped]

General

Christchurch

19 Comments

Things sound pretty bad there, from the reports I’m reading. Usually these things hit in lesser-developed countries, and in the US, we could probably take a hit that big, at least in the west, with relatively few fatalities, because we’ve long had building codes for it, but it sounds like there was a lot of unreinforced masonry in the town, and the epicenter was very close.

But people on the east coast should be aware that it could be just as bad if one hits there, and while it happens a lot less often than in California, it can still happen.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Here’s an interesting animated map showing all of the temblors today, most of which were aftershocks, and big ones. It looks like it’s on the Greendale fault.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s all the coverage at the New Zealand Herald.

[Update about 10 PM PST]

CNN is reporting at least sixty five dead. I suspect the toll is going to be quite a bit higher when they clear the rubble.