Month: September 2002

Movin’ to Ireland

Craig points to this judgment from an Irish judge saying that you should assume slow drivers who hold up traffic are idiots. The article concludes, “Judge Harnett said that either slow drivers enjoyed holding up other people or else they were incompetent or their cars were in poor condition.”

Having driven on Irish roads myself, I would include another alternative: the driver was afraid that at any minute an enormous cow would pop out of the hedges and wreck their car. Nevertheless, it cheers me that this judge is standing up for common sense and the rights of the leadfooted like myself.
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BBC sniggers over “stiffing”

BBC: Stiffing: Deceived and confused. The BBC elucidates the American “folksy idiom” behind President Bush’s recent utterance, and can’t resist pointing out that stiff “already has a number of slang definitions. The word can be used to mean a corpse, an erection, a dull person and to describe a strong alcoholic drink.” I will leave out the obvious, though salicious, comment about which of these applies to the warbloggers and their baying for Saddam’s blood.
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Sample code for Google search from VB

MSDN: Using Visual Basic .NET to Access Google’s Web Service. Article in MSDN giving instructions and a sample executable for using the Google web service from VB. Looks like the support for XML web services is pretty strong in VB.NET. Another development environment to learn.

Nits: There are no active hyperlinks in the document to Google, including the one that should point to the location for downloading the web toolkit. Not sure what’s up there.
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Photo essay on Argentina in New York Times Magazine

Susan Gotthelf: What They Were Thinking: On Barely Getting By in Argentina. Photos and interviews with three Argentinian women about their situation. One is photographed digging through garbage for her children. Another ran a soup kitchen until her family became unable to feed itself. The third has lost all her savings but still has a house, and is “still in the top 10 percent of the income bracket in Argentina — just because I have a job and I haven’t had my salary reduced.”
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An apology

An irate reader left a message on my discussion board (registration required) to complain about a news item from January on the Argentinian crisis. He writes:

“Sorry, but what fun can you find in ?Quiere Ser Presidente de Argentina?…People is passing a very hard time here, some (not few) are hungry and eating from the garbage.

When you suffered the terrorist attack (in which people from Argentina also died) we showd our pain and demonstrated in massive meetngs with all religions and personalities here. We know how it is to be a target for terrorists, we had two mayor blastings in Buenos Aires.

A few points:

  1. Antonio is right on: the posting was insensitive. It showed no sympathy for the very real sufferings of the Argentinian people.
  2. The post was also, until I figured out how to use the inverted question mark (¿), badly punctuated; I will note that Fortune magazine, the original source, never did figure out the latter.
  3. However, Antonio completely missed the point.

The post was written following the series of nominations and withdrawals for the presidency of Argentina, after the collapse of Fernando de la Rúa’s presidency in December 2001. It did not seek to mock the Argentinian people. It sought only to call attention to the severity of their political situation. It did so by pointing to a humor article in a US magazine.

I acknowledge that using humor may create misunderstandings, particularly on topics so sensitive as this–and particularly when this blog’s visibility in Google may surface my writing to a larger audience. However, I refuse to relinquish humor. It is frequently the only defense available against the absurdity of the cosmos.

That said, I still feel the need to become more deeply engaged in understanding Argentina’s situation. Look for more posts about Argentina in the future as I find out more.

Loving life in Seattle

Looks like we got our extra biomass cleared out just in time. It was raining this morning–for the first time in weeks–but stopped by lunchtime. Got to love Seattle. Yesterday when we were watching the Mariners game, it started raining in about the second or third inning. I learned two things: (a) the roof on Safeco Field takes about four or five batters, depending, to move over the entire field; (b) Labor Day really does mark the end of summer, in a very real way, in Seattle. They’re calling for intermittent showers all the rest of this week…

Bumbershoot Part II: Sonic Youth

I arrived outside Seattle Center and found a parking space less than two blocks from the gate. Then I got in line to go into the gate and saw the line going the other way into the stadium. The line kept going and going. In fact, it stretched all the way across the Seattle Center grounds. I had been looking forward to catching another act before I went into the stadium, but I grit my teeth and hopped in line. Fortunately, it moved along pretty quickly and before long I was inside listening to Modest Mouse. I’m not really a fan, but I noted that their singer seemed to be trying to do a Jim Morrison with a little bit of his baritone yelp, that is when he was singing instead of yelling.

When all the Modest Mouse fans started leaving the stadium, I made my move–all the way up front to within about 15 feet of the security guards in front. Reached in my pocket for my earplugs–oops, still at home. Hoped that the sound system wasn’t as deafening as it was at the 9:30 Club, where I had last seen Sonic Youth in 1998–before all their gear got stolen, before Jim O’Rourke joined, before they released the mostly throwaway NYC Ghosts & Flowers and the brilliant Murray Street.

A commotion. Lee Ranaldo had hopped on stage to check some of the gear. We yelled, “Lee!” He turned around and grinned as he headed back offstage. A few minutes later, the band came out and plugged in. Thurston started with a few chords. “Kotton Krown.” Then “The Empty Page.” Then “Drunken Butterfly.” People started really getting into this one–crowd was moshing and some people started crowd surfing. But the energy was really good. Amazing, in fact. Then someone cut in front of me and just stood there. But the nice geek next to me (with whom I had discussed SourceForge prior to the show) and his girlfriend (who looked uncannily like Rory Gilmore) helped me get rid of him.

More incredible music. I don’t remember the order, but “Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style,” “Candle,” “Sympathy for the Strawberry” (Lee played keyboards and broke two guitar strings!), “Rain on Tin” (Jim O’Rourke got to do some amazing feedback), “Plastic Sun.” A few I’ve forgotten. Then Kim stepped up to the mic as Thurston hit “Kool Thing.” I thought the crowd had been going before, but I was wrong, wrong. The song didn’t miss Chuck D, and it had a nice moment where Kim said, “You gonna free us girls from male, white, corporate oppression? … We have this friend. She had to take most of her clothes off to sell records, her label said. Then the label said, ‘Mariah? You’re half naked, you need a makeover!’”

The band went offstage, then came back on and played “Disconnection Notice.” After the rest of the set, it felt somber and almost valedictory. This was the last set of their tour. Wind came up into Lee’s hair. They left the stage. I left the stadium and drove home.

Ouch

Spent the first part of the morning waterproofing our fence, then trimming the fifteen foot hedge that separates us from our loud neighbors. Ouch. My muscles are still sore. We also removed some low hanging branches from the trees in the front yard. Those three activities were supposed to have taken us the morning; they took us all day–at least, until I left to go back to Bumbershoot. Lisa had had enough of the crowds and didn’t come with me, but I was on a mission. I had to see Sonic Youth.