2020 Hindsight

Something....

Rest in Peace, George Harrison. (see Craig's Booknotes for more)

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Jason and the Topography-nauts Jason is on the lauchpad! T-minus 7 days and counting. And God willing and the crik don't rise, I'll be at the launch, shooting (and later blogging) it. :D It will also be webcast.

From the Nov 19 Press release: The Dec. 7 launch of Jason 1, NASA's newest oceanography satellite, will continue the mission started by Topex/Poseidon to monitor global climate interactions between the sea and the atmosphere.

Jason 1 will monitor world ocean circulation, study interactions of the oceans and atmosphere, improve climate predictions, and observe events like El Nino. Jason 1 is a joint U.S./French oceanography mission. [Read More]

10-day weather outlook for Vandenberg AFB; the showers we're expecting will be gone by the middle of the week.

Cold and Crisp What to do in L.A. during the California winter season (admittedly lightweight to those of you in colder climes, but hey; we feel the change here, too)? Ice Skating! In Downtown L.A. At an outdoor rink! For the last coupla years I've been saying, Oh, I oughtta go. I think that this is the year for it.

Color Magic Barbie

Why I love the web, reason # 20011129: I'm working on a little story of childhood Christmas, and thanks to Google, I've honed in on a little doll from my past: Color Magic Barbie. Aaah! that little harlequin checked bathing suit in this picture looks familiar. (page from whence picture came). More Color Magic Barbies.

Also: Barbie in the Sixties.

After the assassination of President Kennedy America was beginning to realize that the fifties way of life was quickly disappearing. Amidst the confusion and chaos of the new era, Barbie would not wear or do anything that did not portray a positive American image. Barbie modeled some fashions strikingly similar to Jackie O's until her marriage to Ari Onassis started a scandal within the American public. Her image was tainted, and Barbie could not be associated with that which would potentially harm her own.

Geez; I didn't know *any* of that. I just wanted a Barbie doll, and yearned after those little packages of clothes.

And I knew that Barbie was made by Mattel, and we'd pass Mattel on the way to the big Los Angeles airport. I always kept a lookout for those big Mattel buildings on the way.

Tuesday the 27th

Grrl: The Fucking System (No, this isn't about sex)

Post-Gazette: Abortion Foe Admits to Sending Bogus Anthrax Letters [via MeFi]

Women's eNews: Anti_Abortion Escapee Joins bin Laden on FBI List [also via MeFi]

BBC: Men, see The Vagina Monologues for free! "The London Arts Theatre is encouraging men to get in touch with their feminine side by offering free admission to Monday night's performances of The Vagina Monologues." Well, I just hope that The London Arts Theatre has more bathroom stalls in both the ladies' room and the men's room than the theatre where I saw it. [via WannaWrite]

Interview with Taliban Singles Online image creator

Taliban Singles Online Exclusive!!! When I got back from my Thanksgiving holiday and I checked email, one of the items there had a subject line, "Taliban Singles Creator." I groaned inside, thinking that someone misconstrued my posting of the Taliban Singles Online image with the notion that I was the one who created the image. Oh no, I'll have to set this person straight.

But no! What a pleasant surprise! I opened the email, sent from a person who claimed to be the one who created the image. The person (I'll call him TSO Creator) wishes to remain anonymous. However, as a sign of veracity, he sent along an image showing the steps of distortion and caricaturization that Osama bin Laden went through in order to go into the top left corner of the Taliban Singles Online image.

Here are some excerpts from the emails I received from TSO Creator (I wrote w/ a follow up question and to ask permission to quote the email without his name/email address)

Hi, I am the person who created the Taliban Singles Online picture on your site. I had to write because of

your very nice statement beneath the picture.

"I do not know who created this picture; it was sent

to me in e-mail and I was so amused, I had to share. I

am thoroughly jealous of the person who put this

together and my hat's off to you!"

Well, thanks for the compliment. I appreciate it

(though I don't think I'm anything to be jealous of).

Actually I never thought it would travel like it has.

I was on an Internet singles page when the idea popped

into my head. I did a little research on the net (I

wanted real names), found some pictures, and put it

together in about 5 hours with Photoshop. What's

amazing to me is that I only e-mailed it to 6 friends

on the 15th and 16th of October just for fun -- they

didn't even know I did it -- and maybe only 3, I found

out later, had e-mailed it any further. Then near the

end of October someone e-mailed it to me, that's when

I found out that it had gotten out.

Anyway, I just like staying anonymous, but I just had

to say thanks for putting my picture up. Also I

thought I'd send you some of the steps the head in the

upper left of the picture went through to turn it into

a caricature.

. . . .

2nd letter, with responses to my questions...

I wrote: "I think that it'd be interesting to learn a little

more about 'the person behind the Taliban Singles Online

website.'" and also I asked what it was like when you got the image sent back to you in email?

TSO Creator's reply:
Well not to much to tell, I am a Graphic Artist, who

specializes in Photoshop. Most of what I do is photo

retouching -- or manipulation, and special effects. I

am not someone who has ever posted anything on the

internet before. At work we would see all these

different 9/11 images that were being sent around and

rate them from 1 to 10 in 2 categories: idea and

execution (I guess that's what designers do). I

remember saying that one of us needs to come up with

something, and about a week later that's when I sent

it out to those six people. I honestly never thought

it would expand like it did.

Like I mentioned earlier when I came up with the idea

I was on a singles site and the notion crossed my

mind, if they had a singles site in Afghanistan there

would be no use for this "only people with photos"

check box. After that, as I was putting the piece

together, I realized that most of the Q&A wouldn't

apply either because the women aren't allowed

anything. So basically it's a satire stating that if

the Taliban had a singles page it would be pretty

pointless. Kind of like a "Taliban Dating Game" where

you have a partition up so you couldn't see the burqa

clad women on the other side.

Anyway, like you said it was a kick when I had it

emailed to me. I asked a friend at work if she had

seen it, and she said a coworker had passed it along,

and that coworker had gotten it from someone out of

state. I called another friend who works for the

lnternet division of our local paper and she told me

it had gone all over their office about a week ago.

She really laughed when I told her I did it.

About a day or two later it got really weird when I

found out it had been quoted in the Washington Post.

Since then I found it's been mentioned on CNN and the

New York Daily News by Rush and Molloy (actually I

rushed downtown and got the last copy of that a week

after it came out, as I don't live in New York).

Even more bizarre to me was that someone even started

marketing the image. I've seen mouse pads, cups,

t-shirts and sweatshirts. Yikes! Not to mention people

registering domain names based on Taliban Singles.

I also wrote and told him of a couple of emails I'd gotten expressing appreciation for posting the images, as well as told him that since this site has discussion group capabilities, anyone who wanted to post a note that TSO Creator could read could do so by responding to this message.

Content Editor Coool! There's now a thing called a Content Editor. Gotta check that one out. smore. Bryan Bell isn't the only one that's happy about that. But he said that he'd go and fly to various people's cities and do their dishes for a week. Let's see if he makes good, hmmm? ; )

Thanksgiving Week Past

Wow.... a week since I flipped the page. I guess I'm giving thanks for the fact that I'm not so addicted to blogging that I can't let it go for a bit. :D

Then again, there's nothing to kill a blog streak than to promise to post a bunch of pictures and then not doing so. (well, if I haven't posted those pix, I can't post ANYthing!) Doo Dah will show up eventually, and when it does, they'll go on the appropriate page.

Of course, Hal has a word (and image) on some of my whereabouts this week... family thanksgiving in Las Vegas. So I got to meet Ian.... who is soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo cute! (and yes, I also got caught in some traffic jams driving to and from Las Vegas, and on this trip discovered the wonders of The Mad Greek in Baker, California.)

All your Base...er, tourist... are belong to us What is this, internet humor fusion? As in Jazz fusion? First there was all your base, then the tourist guy, and now this!! (requires Flash) [Via Scoble]

"tourist dude"

speaking of internet humor.... heh..... I *may* —just may— have some more words of wisdom on some popular current internet humor! Stay tuned!

I've got to say that I'm rather proud of one of the items in the Daypop Top 10 searches list: Yet you still manage to have a social life. When the quiz was going around, I looked for those whose results were like mine. And this was my strategy, to put those words in a Daypop search string. Hmmm.. a little while later, guess what's in in the Top 10?

Doo Dah Parade, 2001

I flipped the page to post pictures from the Doo Dah parade. It may take a while to process the best ones and post 'em here. But I wanted to have a page entitled "Dooooo Daaaaaaah" right after the one called "eeeeeeeeee ooooooooooh"

eeeee oooooooooo

Omigosh! I get to blog myself!!! :D :D :D

AP: Leonid Meteor Showers Delight Many

``There are the little 'eeee' ones, then there are the 'ooooh'

ones - those ones you have to stand up and follow with your head,''

said Susan Kitchens, a writer and artist at the Mount Wilson party.

Well, I don't remember saying stand up, but definitely the big long streaks that you follow with your head.

UPDATE the story made it on CNN and CBS news and Canoe.ca too!

I asked Andrew, the writer of this story, if he was going to be covering Doo Dah. Yes. Turns out he used to work at the Pasadena Star News. He said, "When I left this town I thought I'd never have to cover another parade again." (Pasadena, besides the Doo Dah Parade, is known for that other parade, the Tournament of Roses, which takes place every New Year's Day)

Speaking of Doo Dah, this is all I'm gonna blog, and I'm waaaay sleep deprived, too. But I had to fire up the computer to make sure that my Camera flash memory was ready for Doo Dah action.

Taliban redux Grüss Gott! (I hope I spelled that right) I've been getting lots of hits from a German-language site about Taliban Singles humor. Here's the link.

More Leonids Apparently the CNN story made it to the Bryce email list; I was asked to describe the rest of it, so this is what I sent to them (some of it repeats or expands on what I noted earlier):

I was invited to a little star party on the grounds of the Mt. Wilson observatory near Los Angeles (Mt. Wilson is the highest of the mountains in the range to the northeast of L.A. -- it's about a 35 mile drive from my house). I got there a little after 10 pm (Pacific), met the friend who invited me there, and got set up in a reclining lounge chair. There were some 70 or so people in little huddles on a flattish area of ground by a building that I take to be the observatory proper. I didn't really look at the building.

The sky wasn't crystal clear, there were little wispy clouds ('very low amplitude' is how I described it to my friend in Bryce terms). But it was dark enough to see more stars than we see down in the LA basin, and clear enough to see meteors! We stayed there until just before 4 am; the shower peaked a little after 2 am.

At the peak, they were zinging and zinging and zinging brightly across the sky; we got a couple of bright exploding ones, too. Funny, at the outset, we'd say ooooh! in response to the one big one. If I missed one, because I was looking in another direction, I was a little disappointed. By the peak, though, there were too many to see, and so missing one (or some) was no big deal.

The most spectacular were the first ones, which streaked long across the sky--one clear across the whole sky (it has something to do with the angle relative to the earth's atmosphere, toward the peak they strike the atmosphere straight on, so they don't go clear across the sky). The quote in the AP/CNN story referred to one that we had to sit up and turn our heads for; don't know how he got "stand" but... well, the reporter was scribbling in the dark.

So, how was it that I got to be interviewed for this story? It had to have been oh, around midnight or 1 am. From time to time, my friend and I had overheard discussion from the other little clusters of people there. At one point, I had said (loud enough to be overheard), "this is riveting!" I got a laugh from some surrounding people. Then I saw the silhouettes of two guys, one of whom stood up and faced us all and asked if so-n-so was there. Did he lose someone or lose his way around the huddles of people there in the dark? I replied, "Elvis has left the building!"

Then he came over and said he was with the Associated Press and he was interviewing people; would I describe this for him for the sake of those who'll be reading the paper who missed this. Sure. I waved him back... Just don't stand in my line of sight. So he crouched down on the ground a little behind me to the right. I said, "cool, if you end up running my quote, I'll end up linking to the AP story and will cite it on my weblog!" Funny, this... Here I was, in a recliner chair, looking up, someone behind me, taking notes, and I was talking stream-of-consciousness, telling him whatever was on my mind about the meteor showers. (It was quite the psychoanalytic moment, but I didn't start telling him about my childhood.)

The AP reporter's name name was Andrew. I asked him if he was also covering the Doo Dah parade, a fun Pasadena parade that parodies the other, more official stuffy parade held in Pasadena (Rose Parade, at New Years), to take place several hours later (late morning) in Pasadena. It's all goof and spoof. Andrew said that yes, he'd drawn that lot, too. He said that he used to work for the Pasadena Star News (the local newspaper) and when he left the area, "I thought I'd never have to cover another parade." (needless to say, the Rose Parade is a big thing, locally... and the Doo Dah, too, to a lesser extent). We told him cool, we'll be there on the streets... I added, "but I don't know that we'll recognize you with your pupils un-dilated" (it was, of course, very dark during this whole interview!)

A little after 3 someone announced to us stragglers who couldn't get enough metoer sightings that the exit gate would be open for a little while but that in about 40 minutes we had to be *gone*. So we headed down the mountain, long with a whole bunch of other people who drove up the hill to park along the side of the road in places and see the meteor shower above the city. But lawsy! I didn't realize *so* many people had come up here... There was a traffic jam heading down the mountain at 4am. I mean, picture it, a single file line of cars, red tail lights, stretched out miles ahead..and it's 4am Sunday morning.. it cleared up beyond a car-in-trouble pulled off to the side.... That was bizarre, surreal, and more than a little frustrating.

Shawah Shawah

Star Shawahs tonight (tomorrow technically, but when it's after dark and before I go to sleep, then it's tonight).

Iridium flash..or is that flare? I learned that we in the area near Pasadena are gonna have another interesting celestial phenomenon at 5:40 pm pacific— an Iridium flash. One of the Iridium satellites will be positioned in such a way that its highly reflective antenna will bounce sunlight from the sun into Pasadena. Presumably it can be seen from other places in the southland, but not as brightly as here.

I have no idea how often these things occur, or where you can find out about the next Iridium flare in your area. Hmmm.. a search for Iridium flash on google didn't come up with anything; maybe the term I should have looked under is Iridium Flare. Aha! Here's a page with flare pix. Cool. Heavens-Above.com gives out flare predictions based on your location. Woo hoo. So actually, tomorrow morning at 5 am there'll be a bright one where I am, I don't have to drive a few miles to Pasadena to see it.

Scary Bush and the Constitution stories, redux Frank McPherson, in commenting on the NY Times editorial, Travesty of Justice, which discusses the "end run around the Constitution" by the Bush administration (Bush is the sole person deciding who should come before the tribunals), notes the following (gulp):

And what is even more scary is that this power is being given to the man who executed more people than any other man in our country.

Friday the 16th

Brief hiatus. Who'd a thunk it? Deciding to back up the computer after putting it off for too long, so that there was 4.5 gigs of material to update, and the razzum frazzum way that my DAT drive interprets 125 meter tapes (which should be good for oh, 6-7 gigs) as being capable of holding a mere 1.5 gigs on it, and my not deciding to babysit the process meant that I'd change a tape, go out for the evening, return home, change a tape, go to bed, then wake up and change a tape... it took damn near 18 hours and four tapes to do the backup. Talk about 'spensive tapes, too. Sheesh. I coulda done as well on cheaper 90-meter tapes.

Why I have not —nor will not—adopted the directory thang that I coulda done somewhere here on this Manila site. I thought about that SuperOpenDirectory thing that had all the great central Asia news sources. But I hate the fact that I can't fathom the top level of the structure. And that I have to click umpteen times to learn that really, I'm at a dead end.

I go to the beginning. Okay. Mind you, I'm looking for that Central Asia News Sources thing.

okay, it must be under publications. I click publications. new page loads......

They were news sources. So I'll pick News. I click News. new page loads......

Um, let's see... Central Asia. Region looks like the best one. I click Region. new page loads......

Asia. Cool. One more click, one more page load, and I'll get to where I want. I click Asia. New page loads......

NOPE! I'm screwed. Fooey. Fooey twice. Five (well, okay, four actually) clicks in order to find out that I can't find what I want to find. Bleah. Ick. Waste of time.

I think that Doc links to it on his blogroll side bar. I'll go load up his site to find the link.

But instead of doing that, I'll take screenshots and post a rant on my site instead. (Why don't you tell us how you *really* feel about this Directory thang, Susan?)

Same kinda problem here in Adam Curry's MTV Chronicles directory. Great stuff, let me at it, but don't make that alphabetical list such a barrier to me.

Why, why, why in Murphy's name can't I take a look at a page that shows me the whole damn outline view? Surely the technology is in there, hidden way deep? Any person who understands how humans operate will agree that Recognition is easier than recall; I'd rather look at the whole shebang and recognize the one I want, rather than having to recall stuff. The computer underneath knows all the stuff‚—it's just an outline, right?—why can't it let me see it in expanded form and have me recognize it? Why do I have to go clicking one at a time like a feeble rat in a silly maze? Can't I look at the maze from above and then reach in to grab my little pellet? Until I can, Directories are for other people. Not me.

I gotta get back to work. Web surf break time is over. I wasted it on this rant, not on finding some news from Central Asia.

Weird weekend coincidinces. Today a movie opens; it's the story of a boy who goes to a magic school, the main hall of which has a magic ceiling that lets you look at the sky. And then there's a biiiiig meteor shower this weekend, too. (nope, not gonna see movie 'till next week; weekend's too full of fun stuff, like meteors, Frankie Manning Swing Dance workshop and Doo Dah!! Oh yeah, and Nick Bantock --of Griffin and Sabine fame--is doing a booksigning at Vroman's in Pasadena tomorrow.)

Am I right? Misheard lyrics and song parodies. Mondegreens was a topic some time back on this site, but this Amiright site [via a friend, email] also has song parodies. Now you can know every variation of what everyone thought they heard to Elton John's Bennie and the Jets, and then some.

Love to hate Microsoft? Dave W on Scripting News pointed to this billboard, which was (ahem) editorialized by someone who really knew the truth about Windows XP.

I'm finally hearing mainstream news coverage about the implications of the so-called PATRIOT act that was passed in congress. Dubya sez, "They hate us for our freedom." Well, now that the bill has passed, they should hate us less, because we are less free. Dave W has lotsa good linkage about this.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. (There's fear and then there's fear. This is not "The terrorist are gonna get us!" fear.)

This is the kinda stuff that makes a person wish Attorney General Ashcroft a very, prolonged and painful death....when that time comes. [via Looka!]

Serious Cloudage

Not much to say here, except that I've been busy today doing graphic things rather than word things. A satisfying change.

After last night's rain and all, today was one of those splendid days of serious cloudage — clear, crisp skies, ice-cream-cone clouds in the sky, dramatic hues at sunset. I like this kinda weather. :D