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Matthew’s Ghost Bike

In June, I posted about Pittsburgh’s Ghost Bike project, in which activists memorialize bicyclists killed by cars. To create a ghost bike, an old bicycle is painted solid white and chained to a pole along with a sign designed to raise consciousness of passing motorists.

A couple of months ago, Matthew’s widow and I retrieved the bicycle Matthew was killed on from police storage, and discussed the possibility of making it a ghost bike. Then last week, passing through Emeryville, I discovered that someone had already put up a ghost bike at the site of Matthew’s death. Asking around, I heard it had been up for a few weeks, but still have no clear idea who set it up.

To whoever set this up: A heartfelt thank you from all of Matthew’s friends and family. I snapped a couple of images of the bike today:

Ghost bike

(Note: This is not Matthew’s bike – I don’t know where this bike comes from. Matthew’s bike is safe in my garage, spookily undamaged, or almost).

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earth-spirit.scam

My mother owns a store – a gallery of Native American artifacts – in Morro Bay called Earth Spirit. After all these years, she’s finally decided to make an online play. She’s been hearing from neighboring shopkeepers that they’re doing better on eBay than they’ve ever done with walk-in business. So I went on a domain hunt for her, only to find that pretty much every variant of earthspirit.com, .net, .org, plus every variant of earth-spirit, not to mention the .biz and .info TLDs, were taken. Most of them not used, just taken. Trying to access most of these domains gets you one of those default homepages you get when you’re deep in squatter territory.

Curious, I wrote to a few of the domain owners to see just how deeply they wanted to scalp me (pun intended). I wrote innocent-looking notes offering “up to $100” for each domain. The response I got on earth-spirit.net asked for $999, to which I responded:

Hi –

To be sure, is that a typo below? Did you really mean $99 for earth-spirit.net? Or are you actually asking $999 for this domain? If the latter, all I can say is, “good luck” and, um, “Ha ha ha ha ha ha! You very funny man, Mark.”

Again, I’m offering $100 for this domain.

To which I received canned counter-responses listing the insanely high prices the pond scum had earned for “similar” domains in the past year. Only the examples weren’t similar – they were for .com domains without the hyphen – like comparing Beverly Hills real estate to a little lot in downtown Watts. I left it alone, and a week later received a message telling me how lucky I was – they were having a blowout sale, and earth-spirit.net was suddenly 20% off! Imagine that. Still, no way. Mum’s not going for it and neither am I. We’ll figure out some sort of creative, memorable variant that doesn’t support gravel-licking opportunists.

Music: Erik Truffaz :: Tahun Bahu
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Prestidigitation

How can you not love the protections of a quasi-govt. job? Bean counters tucked away somewhere in the bowels of UC Berkeley came across some particularly useful information for those of us putting our digits on the line for the cause of higher education. Summary:

Try not to lose the “thumb and index finger of the same hand.” You would only be entitled to 1/4 the principal sum of your traveler’s insurance. Losing four toes, on the other hand, gets you 1/2 the sum,but only if you lose those toes “through or above the metatarsophalangeal joints.”

Table of losses / payments broken down by number of digits on involved hands or feet follows.
Continue reading “Prestidigitation”

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Triangle of Life

After years of heading to snopes.com to check the credibility (or non-credibility) of forwarded emails making surprising claims, and politely reminding people that not everything one reads online is true, I just got snoped. An old friend forwarded a message from a seemingly very experienced earthquake and disaster relief expert with some very credible-sounding advice. Even though the advice ran counter to what most of us learned in school (it implores people not to hide under desks or in doorways but to huddle next to large objects instead, where triangular pockets will be formed by falling rubble), all of it sounded like good sense, and the guy’s experience sounded vast. So I forwarded it on to a bunch of friends.

As it turns out, “rescue expert” Doug Copp has a less-than-sterling reputation, the Red Cross disputes that techniques that may apply in 3rd-world countries will apply in countries with very different building standards, the scientific validity of his claims is in question, and he’s currently under investigation by a U.S. Department of Justice fraud unit.

I think part of the reason the article didn’t raise a bull flag for me is that it didn’t seem like anyone had an agenda at stake, anything to gain from giving bad earthquake advice.

Lesson learned: Snopes everything.

Music: Heidi Berry :: Queen
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MT3, Template Mods

Now that MT-Blacklist is available for Movable Type 3.1, decided it was time finally to go for it. But upgrading the back-end and keeping the old templates locks you out of some of the coolest new features. And I’ve been wanting to move to the new date/slug-based URL format (rather than entry ID-based), so that URLs are not broken when databases are re-populated (e.g. when moving to a new host, or running an export/import).

Rather than mess around upgrading old templates, decided to start fresh with all-new templates. Which in this case look shockingly like the old templates. A few tweaks remaining, but good enough for jazz. Apologies to anyone who tried to leave comments today.

Cosmetic changes aside (comments on the new look welcome), this change lays the groundwork to enabling MT3’s PHP hooks, so I’ll soon be making permalink and category archives, monthly archives, and comments dynamic, which will mean near-zero delays when commenting, and reduced server load on publish.

Most glaring remaining bug: Old comments are in the database, but not showing up attached to existing entries. Hrmmmm…

Update: I’ve found the comment problem – I wasn’t missing all comments – just comments dating from June, when I first updated to the MT3, then went back to MT 2.6. From that point on, the comments_visible field in the mt_comments table was NULL rather than 1. No idea why, but I fixed this with a quick SQL statement, re-exported, and the missing comments since June 4 are now visible in the export. Now I need to do some surgery: remove all entries since then, trim the export file to just the affected entries, and re-import just those. Tomorrow…

Update 2: Comments from June 4 to the present have been restored.

Music: Julieta Venegas :: Casa Abandonada
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The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld

In a not-so-recent piece at Slate, Hart Seely celebrates the accidental poetry of our accidental secretary of defense, the most famous example of which is:

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

This week, Studio360 features examples of Rumsfeld’s “poems” set to music (Real Audio link) by artist Phil Kline, surprisingly beautiful. “There’s a little bit of Gertrude Stein in him,” says Kline.

Kline has also set the poems that smoking GI’s often inscribe on the cases of their Zippo lighters to music.

Music: Jorge Ben :: Gilberto Gil e Jorge Ben – Quem a estrada anda
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circa1973, Osmosis

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes two new customer web sites this week:

circa1973.com: Photographs by Susannah Stromberg (Three | Surfaces | Something Beautiful | Offerings). Fine art photography, intensely rich. Color images, but with the poetry and dramatism most often associated with black & white.

osmosiscommunications.com: Vermont-based strategic public relations and marketing firm. “Osmosis promotes the “permeation” of information and ideas about your company–its goals, mission, promise and value.”

Music: Salif Keita :: Nyanafin
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Swaggart Would Kill Gays, Tell God They Died

How far out is the far religious right? Jimmy Swaggart is how far out. Video here (Windows Media).

Transcript:

“I get amazed, I can’t look at it about 10 second, at these politicians dancing around this, dancing around this, I’m trying to find a correct name for it, this utter absolute asinine
idiotic stupidity of men marrying men.”

(shouts from crowd)

“I’ve never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry.”

(shouts, applause)

“And I’m gonna be blunt and plain, if he ever looks at me like that I’m going to kill him and tell God he died.”

(laughter, applause)

“In case anybody doesn’t know God calls it an abomination. It’s an abomination! It’s an abomination!”

(applause)

“These ridiculous, utterly absurd district attorneys and judges and state congress and ‘well, we don’t know’… they ought to have to marry a pig and live with them forever.”

(laughter)

“I’m not knocking the poor homosexual, I’m not, they need salvation like anyone else… I’m knocking our pitiful pathetic lawmakers.”

“And I thank God that President Bush has stated,”

(applause)

“we need a Constitutional Amendment that states that marriage is between a man and a woman.”

(applause)

“Alright.”

Thanks Ethan.

Music: Laura Nyro :: Stoned Soul Picnic
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Living Room Candidate

The American Museum of the Moving Image is hosting an exhibition called Living Room Candidate — dozens of political ads spanning 1952 to the present illustrating how presidential candidates have used the medium of television to convey message through the years, and how those ads have mirrored the TV styles of their times. Most of the early ads seem so naive by today’s standards — silly cartoons of marching elephants, donkeys, and hard-working Americans, or pretty girls singing content-free political ditties. Some are just plain bizarre.

A surprising number feature life-long devotees of one party or another switching party loyalties, like this 1964 Confessions of a Republican (I hear this ad was later criticized for being scripted and played by an actor). Fast forward to 2004 – ads cover 5 subjects in 30 seconds, and end debating who still has shrapnel in their leg from Vietnam.

Anyway, the site is a great record of a half century of TV politics. The clips are like peanuts, hard to stop watching.

Music: Mazzy Star :: All Your Sisters