A Donkey on the Edge

Jed just sent me this. As ever, MM says it best…

Friday, September 2nd, 2005

Dear Mr. Bush:

Any idea where all our helicopters are? It’s Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted. Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a drag.

Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do like helping with national disasters. How come they weren’t there to begin with?

Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then but it was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there were still homes without power. That night the weatherman said this storm was on its way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody tell you? I know you didn’t want to interrupt your vacation and I know how you don’t like to get bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear. You sure showed her!

I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of flying to Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business peeps. Don’t let people criticize you for this — after all, the hurricane was over and what the heck could you do, put your finger in the dike?

And don’t listen to those who, in the coming days, will reveal how you specifically reduced the Army Corps of Engineers’ budget for New Orleans this summer for the third year in a row. You just tell them that even if you hadn’t cut the money to fix those levees, there weren’t going to be any Army engineers to fix them anyway because you had a much more important construction job for them — BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ!

On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home, I have to say I was moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the clouds as you flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of the disaster. Hey, I know you couldn’t stop and grab a bullhorn and stand on some rubble and act like a commander in chief. Been there done that.

There will be those who will try to politicize this tragedy and try to use it against you. Just have your people keep pointing that out. Respond to nothing. Even those pesky scientists who predicted this would happen because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is getting hotter and hotter making a storm like this inevitable. Ignore them and all their global warming Chicken Littles. There is nothing unusual about a hurricane that was so wide it would be like having one F-4 tornado that stretched from New York to Cleveland.

No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It’s not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C’mon, they’re black! I mean, it’s not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don’t make me laugh! Race has nothing — NOTHING — to do with this!

You hang in there, Mr. Bush. Just try to find a few of our Army helicopters and send them there. Pretend the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are near Tikrit.

Yours,

Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
www.MichaelMoore.com

P.S. That annoying mother, Cindy Sheehan, is no longer at your ranch. She and dozens of other relatives of the Iraqi War dead are now driving across the country, stopping in many cities along the way. Maybe you can catch up with them before they get to DC on September 21st.

I still love the internet after all these years

• Scorpio. Interests: Reiki, Capoeira, Fishing, Zen Buddhism
• “Beta” is the new 1.0.

Well, I feel a whole lot better now that the White House website is covered with pictures of the sensitive couple hugging refugees…

Anyway, I was reading some knitting sites (as you do) that last one described how lots of folk are donating knitting and sending cash to the red Cross.

Sounded like a good idea, what with children bunking-up with cadavers in the heartland of freedom so I went on over to the Red Cross site and donated some dollars.

If you’re feeling the same, the place you need to go to is here:
http://www.redcross.org/

A nice feature they have enabled is to make your donation a tribute or a memorial.

I took the liberty of making mine a tibute to the The George W. Bush Emergency Preparedness Award

Of course, I asked that the letter of confirmation be sent to:

George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

So that an impersonal, mail-opening computer can chuck it in the bin. No but seriously, maybe you’re not a sarcky liberal like me, maybe you’ve lost someone dear in a similar event or even to Katrina herself. Whatever the case, you should make your donation a tribute to something you care about and send the notice to George.

Very smile-inducing voyage back to 1985 on engadget:

One day in the future we’ll all work at 200MHz tower desktops with 9600 baud modems, but until then we’ll just have to keep dreaming.

and

After all, the music we want comes out first on records, so why wait longer and pay more for a CD — other than the fact that the record industry says they’re scratch-proof and will last forever?

are two favourites:-)

Apoa and Kiloh bond with the rozzers at this year’s Notting Hill Carnival :-)

Ohna just sent this:

And another American Pie:

Note for Falby family: Clementine’s swimming pics are now in a flickr set so you can view them as a slideshow.

So we have a very large bath.

As far as I can tell, the thing must hold about one-and-a-half cubic meters (1.5 tonnes of water). It’s not so much huge as deep, like a plunge pool (it was marketed as a ‘Japanese’ bath). Clemmie and I have been taking baths in there pretty much since she was born. A big part of bath play used to involve me going “1,2,3” and then plunging her underwater, and this has continued at the swimming pool where from very early on I let go of her and let her sink. An instructor at the pool in Leighton explained that it was OK to chuck your child in the water as long as you looked comfortable, and that through any gasping and wheezing, you always maintained a beaming smile (as in: gosh, wasn’t that fun) which apparently communicates to your baby that all is well.

So fast-forward eight months. I took a gig in Salisbury and ended up commuting five hours a day so essentially never saw Clem on week-days. Our regular pool sessions faded off and she’s now much to big to dunk.

Nicki has taken our little Ariel to proper swimming lessons and what a star! Clemmie can effectively swim. I say effectively because there’s no actual coordinated kick-and-stroke going on, but she’s diving off the side of the pool, diving to the bottom to pick up rings and pushing off from he side of the pool and gliding face-down like a rocket.

I am actually really, really, impressed and am officially a very proud father:-)

Spent the whole day at IKEA (both Wembley and Edmonton) not buying a mattress.

The day was made bearable by imagining Michael Corleone’s entourage getting bogged down in circular arguments with IKEA store staff as they try and find the goods so they could ‘go to the mattresses’. The thought was prompted by a shop assistant saying why yes, we have 21 in stock and me thinking of Luca Brasi’s relief:-)

Just love this picture. Not sure why exactly, but it’s something to do with the freshness of the whole thing.

Took Clemmie to Whipsnade yesterday and had my second “I’ve lost her” moment in the playground. Tom, Isac and Clem took off over a hill at high speed and I went running after them. Just as I was catching up with Tom and Isac, Clemmie and Tom made a break in different directions. Looked behind me and saw Isac’s dad Les catching up with us so tried to point out Tom and Isac to him while keeping an eye on Clem. Turned towards Les for one second with Clem entering the playground in the corner of my eye and then she was gone.

I ran into the playground and scanned all the slides and climbing frames but nothing.

It must have taken a good two minutes of nervous searching and calling (scanning the distant horizon in all directions for a little red-headed girl) before I finally spotted her. She had climbed right to the top of the highest tower and was hiding behind the clapboards and looking at me through a gap in the planks.

Damn.

Well, don’t get me started on the bloody ‘brushed metal’ look… OK, on the whole I’ve been impressed with most of Apple’s UX work. The iApps however are just plain shit and this little gem just about sums it up for
me.

A screen is a fixed-width grid. A photograph is a fixed width grid. If you want to decide how large or small an image should be in a window it’s really very simple. Depending on the resolution you’re running,
you want 1-up, 2-up, 3-up or more. What you don’t want is the ability to resize in infinite increments. What this ‘feature’ actually achieves is that you can never get the image to the size you want — the largest size which allows the display of x images in a given window.

In the pre-Nextstep, Apple design team, the slider you can see above would have been a drop-down, or a slider that snapped to the 1-up, 2-up etc sizes.

Grrrrr…

It’s funny, I’ve been tidying up my iTunes library and tracking down some of the more obscure cover art. On a couple of occasions, I’ve come across reviews of Miss Kittin albums and amusingly, even the more metropolitan reviewers censor the lyrics slightly. Which is kind of daft really, as electroclash lyrics are pretty much verbal genitalia…

Salon writes of the First Album — link fixed June 2008, MK’s not a big web-standards chick;-)

It contained the single “Frank Sinatra,” on which Hérve, backed by cheesy 1980s synths, conjured one of the more succinct images of fame and power, deadpanning, “To be famous is so nice, suck my dick, kiss my ass.”

It’s a crazy song which I love because it reminds me of Paris discos in the late seventies. It’a long time ago and I only remember bits. I have this memory of Pliny’s older sister Leslie shooting these monumentally silly films on 16mm with two gorgeous women looking very Nina Haggen-ish. Don’t remember where we were, but I remember playing this one very Kittin-ish track over and over while we were shooting… Ohna showed us some 16mmm footage from college the other day—very weird but nice, wonder what Leslie’s up to these days…

Anyhoo, here are some more of the lyrics

Mother-fuckers are so nice
Suck my dick, lick my ass
In the mix we have sex, every night with my famous friends

Oh, and on the same note, foolishly bought the new Stephane Pompougnac partial album preview (Costes 8) and it sucks. Must really listen more carefully before clicking the magic iTunes button:-(

Well, those boffins over at Carnegie Mellon University are working on a new kind of collaborative, mobile broacasting they’re calling roadcasting. In a nutshell,

Roadcasting provides a set of methods to transform radio into a community-driven interactive medium. Using collaborative filtering technologies, it enables rich passive and interactive experiences for ‘DJs’ and listeners in a way that has not previously been possible.

The website explains all and there’s even a demo video for those with a decent connection. What I find interesting about this initiative, is that it’s yet another example of how the ease of copying earned by us through technological progress makes it apparent that society should negotiate a new deal on copyright.

I went to see Richard Stallman at the LSE last year and the way he put it was that we made a deal which was fair in the context of the times. When copyright legislation was first written, it was difficult and expensive to copy documents. In the 17th century, the only way an individual could make ten copies of a book was to write them out by hand or hire a scribe to do the same. Clearly, there was not going to be a rash of bootleg copies of The Leviathan being flogged at carriage boot-sales. So individual citizens agreed to give up a right to something unobtainable in exchange for having improved access to knowledge (access to affordable books).

That was the deal. It wasn’t about protecting creativity or specifically protecting those businesses who would invest in publishing equipment. Ultimately, Stallman’s point is that the deal we made then is no longer fair today. In giving up the right to something easy to do and very beneficial to us (copying) we are getting screwed (I’m sure he put it more elegantly).

Hopefully the growing tide of personally published media will help get a new deal, or at least make some cracks in the old one. (thanks Label:Life)

Clementine had a great afternoon today. She was totally terrified by the Museum of Natural History’s T-rex model (it lunges and roars and comes complete with dry-ice and mood-lighting) but couldn’t break away.

It’s that funny thing that kids actually like getting scared. It must of taken Nicki and I a good twenty minutes to drag her away form the exhibit:-)

Well, until about five minutes ago, I had absolutely no idea that Levon Helm and Robbie Roberston played with Bob Dylan.

Rick Danko, Helm, Robertson and Garth Hudson went on to become The Band