Category: observations

I used to get notes for JK Rowling: looks like someone else is getting celebrity comments.

I am Christopher Paolini, and this is his email by Elliott Back

[This post seems to have attracted some traffic lately. Looking at this, I’m surprised to learn that fifteen months later, it’s only a coupla bucks cheaper.]

Deal of the day: Seagate Barracuda hard drive for $90 | News.blog | CNET News.com:

This hard drive offers great features for its relatively inexpensive price point. And it’s an even better deal on sale at Newegg this weekend. A coupon code takes an additional $5 off and shipping is free.

• What: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB standard hard disk drive.
• How much: $89.99 after applying $5 coupon code, “buybarracuda”
• Shipping: free
• Where: Newegg.com (via Techbargains)
• When: Through this weekend only

Broke as I am, this is tempting. A pair of of them would be even better as a backup solution, but one is certainly a good start.

Finding this and having a paper bag to hand, I tried this.

HOW TO – Make a paper bag book:

Simple how-to on making a book out of paper bag – “For centuries, people have made books from all sorts of materials and in all shapes and sizes. While most books today are printed in large numbers and are bound mechanically, some are made by hand. A handmade book is special in that you probably won’t find another one like it anywhere in the world. It is a special art form for telling stories, expressing feelings and sharing ideas. Here are instructions for making a simple book out of a paper bag” [via] – Link.

[Read this article] [Comment on this article]

As I held it in my hand, I realized this might be how real books and magazines are laid out and printed. Some stitches and glue along the folded part and some cuts to create still more pages once the stitches and glue are in, and you would have 16 pages. I have some large sheets of poster paper, as well as some rolls of art/drawing paper. Some projects may result.

I agree with the esteemed Retardo Montalban: excerpting this would be criminal.

Rolling Stone : THE LOW POST: Why the Democrats Are Still Doomed:

Let’s be clear about what we’re dealing with here. These people are professional communicators. They don’t repeatedly use words like “purge” and “fundamentalist” — terms obviously associated with communism and Islamic terrorism — by accident. They know exactly what they’re doing. It’s an authoritarian tactic and it should piss you off. It pissed me off. When I called the DLC about the editorial, Kilgore was not available, but they put Will Marshall on the line.

Marshall is the president of the DLC’s Progressive Policy Institute and owns the distinction of being the first public figure to use the term “body count” in a positive sense with regard to the Iraq war (“Coalition forces still face daily attacks but the body count tilts massively in their favor”). He wasted no time in giving me the party line: “What we’re seeing is an ideological purge,” he said cheerily. “It’s national effort by the left to get rid of somebody they’ve decided to demonize . . . we have concerns about narrow dogmatism. . .”

We went back and forth for a while. I noted that his conception of “narrow dogmatists” included the readers of Daily Kos, a website with something like 440,000 visitors a day; I also noted that recent Gallup polls showed that fully 91 percent of Democrats supported a withdrawal of some kind from Iraq.

“So these hundreds of thousands of Democrats who are against the war are narrow dogmatists,” I said, “and. . . how many people are there in your office? Ten? Twenty? Thirty?”

“Well, it’d probably be in the thirty zone,” sighed Marshall.

I asked Marshall if there was a publicly available list of donors to the DLC.

“Uh, I don’t know,” he said. “I’d have to refer you to the press office for that. They can help you there . . .” (Note: a DLC spokeswoman would later tell me the DLC has a policy of “no public disclosure,” although she did say the group is funded in half by corporate donations, in half by individuals).

“So let me get this straight,” I said. “We have thirty corporate-funded spokesmen telling hundreds of thousands of actual voters that they’re narrow dogmatists?”

He paused and sighed, clearly exasperated. “Look,” he said. “Everybody in politics draws money from the same basic sources. It’s the same pool of companies and wealthy individuals . . .”

“Okay,” I said. “So basically in this dispute over Lieberman, we have people on one side, and companies on the other? Would it be correct to say that?” I asked.

“Well, I guess if you live in a cartoon world you could say that,” he said.

The DLC are the lowest kind of scum; we’re talking about people who are paid by the likes of Eli Lilly and Union Carbide to go on television and call suburban moms and college kids who happen to be against the war commies and jihadists. On the ignominious-sellout scale, that’s lower than doing PR for a utility that turns your grandmother’s heat off at Christmas. And that’s pretty bad — but with enough money and enough of the right kind of publicity their side still might win in the Lamont/Lieberman primary on August 8th.

Which tells you just about everything you need to know about the modern Democratic Party. Why is anyone surprised that the Republicans never lose?

Buck the establishment, Democrats: it’s the only chance we have.

Ubuntu Gimp Intelligence:

And then there’s performance: the Gimp on a 2.6GHz Sun Ultra 20 stomps all over Elements on the PowerBook.

But I bet it’s hell to get one in your briefcase.

The last Megnut post I’ll read is excerpted below:

Foie: One chef’s response:

When I was a young chef, I spent about a week on a foie gras farm in the Dordogne valley in France. I spent days force feeding ducks.

The experience I had in France is that they fed the ducks a warm mash of corn, water and duck fat that was administered through a funnel.

The funnel had a wire in it that helped to expedite the mash from the sides and through the tube. The wire moved when you pressed a peddle with your foot. Sort of like a sewing machine.

I sat in a comfortable small straw lined corral with 6 ducks in 6 corrals on a small stool. The warm mash was poured into the funnel. I held the duck under one of my legs and extended its’ neck upwards and gently opened its’ mouth and inserted the tube to about the top of the chest. As I pressed the machine with my foot, I gently pulled the funnel up until the bird’s throat was filled with mash. The funnel moved across the ceiling from corral to corral.

It was an extremely gentle and intimate experience. The animal does not have a gag reflex. They always waddled away perfectly happy and full and ready for a nap.

As you know, I’m sure, ducks naturally gorge prior to migration. They are genetically programmed to make sure they are full for their ultimate flight. People who are taking issue with this have attacked a very small artisinal industry that is easy to target. I am actually heartsick that they have made such inroads. What will be next?

Reluctantly posted under food: this is not about food so much as politics. I don’t favor bans, but I have to wonder at one’s affection for a food that requires such a vigorous defense. I don’t know that the gentle pastoral imagery in the excerpt makes me think any more fondly of force-feeding ducks.

Dogs will also gorge, given the opportunity: would a description like the above with dogs replacing the duck be just as acceptable?

Unsubscribed.

Declaring Victory:

When Americans think of satellite surveillance and the National Security Agency, they are likely to imagine something out of the TV show 24: a limitless set of eyes in the sky that can watch everything, all the time. In fact, even today’s amply funded NSA can watch only a limited number of sites. “Our overhead imagery is dedicated to force protection in Iraq and Afghanistan,” I was told by a former intelligence official who would not let me use his name. He meant that the satellites are tied up following U.S. troops on patrol and in firefights to let them know who might be waiting in ambush. “There are still ammo dumps in Iraq that are open to insurgents,” he said, “but we lack the imagery to cover them—let alone what people might be dreaming up in Thailand or Bangladesh.” Because so many spy satellites are trained on the countries we have invaded, they tell us less than they used to about the rest of the world.

I read this and the image that came to mind was at the conclusion of the Return of the King: the assembled armies of the West are fighting at the gates of Mordor to buy time for the Ringbearers, under the watchful eye of Sauron. The gambit works and too late, he sees the real threat.

Makes you wonder what Osama might have in mind while the Sheriff of Crawford is out clearing brush on his non-ranch.

[tip]

A friend’s book has just been published.

“Windshield Wilderness: Cars, Roads, And Nature in National Parks (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)” (David Louter)

WINDSHIELD WILDERNESS
Cars, Roads, and Nature in Washington’s National Parks
David Louter
Foreword by William Cronon
(University of Washington Press, $35.00 clothbound, July 2006)

In this engaging book, National Park Service historian David Louter explores the relationship between automobiles and national parks, and how together they have shaped our ideas of wilderness. National parks, he argues, did not develop as places set aside from the modern world, but rather came to be known and appreciated through technological progress in the form of cars and roads, leaving an enduring legacy of knowing nature through machines.

Louter traces the history of Washington State’s national parks — Mount Rainier, Olympic, and North Cascades — to illustrate shifting ideas of wilderness as scenic, as roadless, and as ecological reserve. He reminds us that we cannot understand national parks without recognizing that cars have been central to how people experience and interpret their meaning, and especially how they perceive them as wild places.

Looking forward to getting a look at the finished work: it has been a couple of years in the making, much of it sorting out photographs to illustrate the beauty of the book’s subjects — the parks we’re fortunate enough to have so close and accessible.

film question: your experiences/insights? – f295: The Art of Lensless Imaging:

Yep. This is the golden age of BandW, in some ways. Sure, paper suppliers are dropping like flies and we’ve lost two film manufacturers in the past couple years (AgfaFoto and Konica-Minolta, via different routes), but I can *still* buy more different kinds of BandW film than I had access to in the 1970s, and some of the least expensive are as good as anything I could get back then. And I can still get good, easy-working papers, even with Kodak packing in their lines (and again, some of the least expensive are as good as anything I could get, at any price, 30+ years ago).

If Foma were the only BandW manufacturer on the Earth, things wouldn’t be *too* bad — they’ve got a nice line of middle-of-the-road films, very good papers, and they cover the formats pretty well. Same is true of Forte, and their products are distinctly *different* from Foma. Efke, also good, and different yet again. Fuji doesn’t even sell us Americans some of their most interesting stuff, and they’re still top drawer. And as long as we have Ilford, we won’t miss Kodak much. Give it another few years, and there’ll be two or three Chinese brands in regular distribution here (Lucky is pretty decent, and I’ve been hearing good things about Shantou Era, though the Shanghai is on the cheap side).

This illustrates the point I was trying to make here and to some extent here, as well.

Accidental double-exposure on two different cameras.

The smaller person — me — with the umbrella was taken behind my house on my cigar-box camera. I somehow neglected to flip the film holder before dropping it into a camera loaned to me by Ralph Young of the f295 group and exposing a shot of this truck. Both shots were in the 60 missippi range and it’s surprising how little of this got blown out.