philly

I read just now in the Denver Post of a WORLD GEOGRAPHY teacher put on leave for – hold it – displaying flags from around the world in his classroom. This heresy and traitorism which will obviously lead to more burning of American flags [which is the proper way to dispose of threadbare American flags] and turing heterosexual married couples into god-hating gays is actually a statute in the bass ackwards state of Colorado. Colorado Revised Statute 18-11- 205:

Any person who displays any flag other than the flag of the United States of America or the state of Colorado or any of its subdivisions, agencies or institutions upon any state, county, municipal or other public building or adjacent grounds within this state commits a class 1 petty offense.

Good god that landlocked state seems like it's over compensating a bit, eh? But they do have an exception. From the article:

It says an exception to that law is "the display of any flag … that is part of a temporary display of any instructional or historical materials not permanently affixed or attached to any part of the buildings … ."

So, I guess teaching a class on WORLD GEOGRAPHY doesn't classify, in the state of Colorado, as "instructional" those fuckers.

These are the kinds of stories I expect from The Onion, not The Denver Post.

via Lady >> Huffington Post

National Geographic News reports on some of the improvements in New Orleans in the last year through then and now photos mainly by Getty Images photog Mario Tama. It's not all bad news down there. But I'm not gonna say that it's even a majority of good news, it looks mostly bad. But there are some spots here and there which seem to be starting to move towards some sort of normalcy, or as 'normal' as you could be after your entire life is washed away and your government, for the most part, completely ignores you unless you're some Republican dude named Rockey.

Looking at the before and after photos which are just about the same perspective, I couldn't help but think of how digital photography can help in recreating images later on in time for more or less exactly the same except for the time lapse. I'm gonna assume that the Getty Images photogs were all using digital cameras. All the EXIF information is stored within each shot. The camera model, the lens, the focal length, the ISO, the shutter speed, the aperture, the optimization settings and if you have a GPS attachment [which many many photojournalists use], the exact coordinates! You can head back to the same spot, take out the appropriate camera body and lens combo, dial in the settings and presto, you've got your before/after shot perfectly. Technology… it's grand.

And Matt points to the 1115.org blog and corresponding flickr stream. Matt Cohen of 1115 is down in New Orleans investigating how much has changed as far as he can see. His first post titled "Unimaginable" leads with a photograph of a piece of stickerart which reads There is no real intention to rebuild New Orleans. And follows with three short sentences:

You have no idea how bad it is down here.

The President plans to swagger down here on Monday to brag about how he’s keeping his promise to the people of New Orleans.

I'm going to bring you reality.

It's gonna be an interesting read and the photography is really nice as well.

Moleskines have been a part of my life for several years now. I've loved them for many years now and I finally broke down and bought one about three or four years ago and haven't looked back. I've gotten other people hooked on them too. They're just awesome. Small, handy with a hard back to write on without a proper surface like a desk. And that handy dandy accordion folder in the back to hold random slips of paper from your daily travels. And last year, they came out with the planners. Weekly or daily, small or large. I wanted one so bad. But I waited too long [around September/October] and all the stores in town were already sold out. Chroist.

But I got mine early this year. Lady and I trekked to Old City and I picked one up Wednesday night. The pocket daily planner. I was going through it last night filling in some birthdays and some addresses in the accompanying mini addressbook in the back. It feels lucious in my hands. So much nicer than an electronic facsimile.

Sadly, the pages are slightly thinner than the pocket square-rule notebook that I normally use. The ink of my fountain pen bleeds through a bit. But I guess they had to make them a little thinner so that they wouldn't be ridiculously thick. A compromise I can live with.

I haven't had a paper planner since my old Filofax I got in high school and used through college. I gave it to Lady to use, which she did for a year or so, but it has been retired. It's downstairs somewhere now I think. It's a rubberized zipper one. Still rocks and is perfectly usable, just a little too bulky. I got a solid five years out of that thing I think plus another year of use from Lady. Great planner/organizer.

So in 2007, it should be interesting how my electronic planner [Google Calendar] and my paper planner will co-exist.

Photo jacked from moleskineus.com.

I guess this honor box across the street from Dirty Frank's and The Last Drop is becoming an installation destination? A few weeks ago this was up there and sometime last week, an artist put up thirty stickers of a black eyed Susan looking stenciled flower.

Jeeeezus Chroist. Jr.'s lead on Man on Dog is a measly five points according to a Daily News poll. Holy shit. Writer Catherine Lucey may have had one of the understatements of the year in her story. She wrote:

Part of Casey's problem may be that he lay low this summer while Santorum launched an aggressive television ad campaign.

His problem is that he's a god damn sandwich bag filled with lukewarm Vaseline and crushed Valium. He has done jack shit to get people excited about his campaign and from the national level down, the party has done just about everything in its power to turn people away from this race. Next week's Meet the Press debate is going to be a massacre and the big, snarling, dog-fucking fantasizing junior senator is the one doing the killing.

Also noted in the article:

Analysts say Casey, the state treasurer, needs to start selling himself, and fast.

Note to analysts, I fucking hate you all. You're idiots. What Jr. needs to do is grow a set and not "sell" himself. He shouldn't have to "sell" himself. His stances should be able to stand for themselves. The right-wing neo-cons have been very good at firing up the base and getting their side excited about things. Batshit crazy things like gay marriage will turn straight people gay and ruind their straight [50% divorce rate and climbing] marriages and sex ed is evil – what's evil is only funding abstinence programs in schools. The spineless Dems have resorted to "selling" their positions and their candidates. All those well-groomed "viable" candidates.

You cannot just be the anti-candidate and win. I think the Casey campaign knows that.

Said Jon Delano, political editor for KADA TV in Pittsburgh. I don't think so. They have done jack shit thus far. Their "campaign" has been to let Man on Dog run himself into the ground. And while he's seemingly been doing a good job of doing that, he's also firing up his batshit crazy followers. Being the anti-candidate x does not work. Jr.'s got two months to turn things around. I think he's sat around too long and Man on Dog hasn't even hit his stride yet.

This shit makes me sick. But it's like a car wreck and I can't turn away.

According to this AP story, in Alaska's primary on Tuesday, the returns were bogged down by failures in Diebold's eVoting machines forcing officials to hand count totals. You gotta sorta love the pompous assholes when they have the audacity to say things like this when their systems fail:

Just because they're not being uploaded doesn't mean they're not being recorded accurately.

That's what Division of Elections Director Whitney Brewster had to say about the fuckup. Well, when votes are recorded and then thrown away, that doesn't mean that they weren't recorded accurately, just that they were never counted! That's the logic this person is using.

I'm not saying that eVoting isn't the future or that it's inherentley bad. I think it is the future and advances in technology allowing those with disabilities to vote without assistance from another person are wonderful. Just that the fuckwads at Diebold, ES&S [who just settled for $750K in Indiana] and the other idiodic eVote companies with fat contracts aren't the ones who should be handling it.

Look forward to more nationwide shennanigans come November 7th.

via /.

My former employer, Philadelphia Weekly has just put out a Green Issue with this cover story by Gwen Shaffer discussing, in large part, City Hall's efforts and lack thereof:

Philadelphia City Hall lacks a department of the environment or a sustainability director, like many progressive local governments have created. To date, few efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Philadelphia have originated in Mayor Street's office.

Former City Councilman David Cohen made Philadelphia a pioneer as a city in regards to recycling laws way back in the day and as of 2003, according to this [.pdf] report by the Clean Air Council, the city's recycling program is saving ~$2M/year [I didn't see anything with more current numbers]. Recycling is a fairly easy way to get involved. But the City has to step it up and do more than set up pilot programs in the richest neighborhoods in the city.

And somehow, in spite of a lack of a cabinet-level position overlooking environmental/sustainability concerns, Philadelphia ranked #8 in SustainLine's 2006 survey. Philly placed #2 for overall transportation, #3 for local food/agriculture and #5 for energy and climate policy. Air quality and recycling were two really shitty ranking areas.

Also, PW is kicking off their annual Cocnerts in the Park series tonight at 7p in Rittenhouse Square. For the next four Wednesdays, the free concerts will be filling up the park with plenty of Philly-area talent on stage. And there should be a PW table across from the stage giving away some schwag manned by my former co-workers. You may even catch McQuade liveblogging it all.

It was even better than I thought it would be. I really liked this film. It is in no way a pro-war/anti-war pro-Bush/anti-Bush film. It is a film that is raw and unpolished. It shows the mundane periods of time in between mortar attacks. It shows the frantic nature of a live firefight. The camera jostling from side to side, everything a blur, but the sound coming through crystal clear.

I wasn't really prepared to see some of the gruesome scenes of dead bodies which were somtimes charred, sometimes bloody, sometimes torn apart – but how can you be. I think that these are the kinds of images that should be brodcast every single fucking night on our television screens, appearing on our computer screens and on the front pages of our newspapers.

As I mentioned before, the film opens here in Philly at the Ritz @ the Bourse on Friday the 25th so there will be plenty of screenings to catch it. It's slowly rolling out nationwide, the schedule can be found here.

It was a treat to have Sergeant Zack Bazzi, a Lebanese-born, Arabic-fluent, my-age New Hampshire National Guardsman with us for a Q&A session immediately after the film. He is incredibly articulate and a self-admitted political junkie who subscribes to The Nation, but puts his personal politics aside to fight in this war. The following are my rough notes of what was asked by the audience and his answers, all paraphrased as best I could manage.

Q: What are the reasons an intelligent person to enlist in the Army these days with all the evidence that this war is wrong?
A: I was probably just an easy target as I enlisted at 18. People have all kinds of different reasons for enlisting whether it be financial, educational or to be able to travel all over the world. Being in the Army is the best job in the country right now with the best camaraderie. It's an incredible melting pot of race, geographical location, politics – or lack thereof. Some do it for the educational benefits, some for the veteran's benefits afterwards. One group which does not enlist are the trust fund kids, they definitely don't, that socio-economic class is missing.

Q: What is your reaction and the reaction of the soldiers there in regards to Halliburton's war profiteering?
A: I'm not mad at them. I have bigger things to worry about like the soldiers I'm responsible for [as a sergeant]. The Army cannot expand right at the time of war to take on all the duties of catering, laundry, transport… The use of private contractors, KBR among them, is useful and necessary. And they're getting killed too, it's no free ride.

Q: Having Arabic as your native language, after speaking with the Iraqis, what is their view of us?
A: First off, don't ever believe anything people from the administration or Generals say, it's PR spin. Those people cannot possibly know how the Iraqis feel. Iraq is not a country as we understand the word. Iraq is three nations: the Kurds in the north, Shi'a in the south and Sunnis in the middle. They are all a tribal people and while they may dislike and even hate each other, they value the notion of revenge even more. The adage of "Me and my cousin vs. the enemy, but me and my brother vs. my cousin" holds true here.

Q: What do you think about the notion of calling what's going on there now a Civil War?
A: It's a low-grade Civil War going on over there right now. There is still a minimal level of governmental functioning there. But if we were to pull out overnight, it would evolve into an all out Civil War.

Q: What do you think of the Iraqi Constitution?
A: [I didn't catch the beginning of his response] …Sunnis have nothing and are fighting for a more centralized government. The oil is north and south with nothing worth anything in the Sunni's mid-Iraq area. With a centralized government and a proper revenue sharing plan, the Sunnis would be happy.

Q: What do you hope to accomplish through this documentary?
A: Realistically, to shatter the myth of the monolithic soldier. That all soldiers are different and diverse and representative of the general American population. We're not all some stereotype.

Q: How did you handle the camera while in the middle of all that hectic action?
A: Sergeant Pink, who is a skilled carpenter [his actual profession], helped to construct a makeshift camera mount for the dashboard of the Humvee allowing me to mount the camera before we left the safety of the base. Only when we were in relatively safe areas did I shoot with the camera in my hand.

Q: Compare the possible carnage in Iraq following a troop withdrawal with what actually happened in Vietnam.
A: Vietnam was a much simpler war with all Vietnamese being Vietnamese, one race, one ethnicity. In Iraq, you have the Kurds, Shi'a and Sunni with long standing histories between them all; that alone complicates things a lot. If we were to withdraw, Turkey, the only Muslim nation member of the U.N. and U.S. ally, would immediately invade the Kurdish land in the north; Iran would invade the Shi'a south. The end result would be like Somalia with military fiefdoms taking root.

Q: There is so much money being poured into wars overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan while education programs here in America are not properly funded [rambled on without really asking a question...]
A: I'm not going to get into the political rights and wrongs – everyone is entitled to their opinion. Bill O'Reilly's opinion is no more valid than Michael Moore's – each has the right, as an American – to voice their opinion as they see fit and each American has their own valid points to make.

Q: Was there anything left on the cutting room floor or didn't even make it to the editing room as a result of military censorship?
A: As far as I know, the only tape [out of ~500 hours of footage from Iraq] to not get clearance to be in the film was one where Sergeant Pink takes his camera onto the battlefield after a firefight with several Iraqis and proceeds to yell [presumably racial slurs] at the corpses. We were lucky in that the tapes did not have to go through the Department of Defense. The tapes were simply all sent back to the NH National Guard offices and were cleared by their internal PR office. If the DoD were the ones giving the okay, there would've been much more footage lost. We were lucky in that it was the NH National Guard's PR office which had the final word.

Partly related to Lady's birthday, we did some apartment fixin up over the last week or so and things are a changing. Lady bought us a new sleeper sofa. It's pretty boss. I'm lounging on it right now, quite comfortable. A whole lot better than the futon I bought two years ago for my studio apartment. That futon has since moved downstairs into Lady's office and hilariously, it instantly made the room look like a dorm room.

We hung up several prints we bought at the Punk Rock Flea Market a couple months ago down there as well to make it a little more un-dormy. And finally, I helped Lady mount and hang three silkscreened prints by local artist Steven Rambo above the futon.

For Lady's birthday, I got lady a new duvet cover for our comforter and a pillow for her new dorm couch, adding to the changes.

I still have to get a frame or some foamcore board for the silkscreen print I bought at the auction for a new non-profit for Philadelphia's public school art programs. I'm gonna put that up right by my corner office space.

Lookin good.

My friend Liz passed along this link to an absolutely incredible multimedia story from the Chicago Tribune. Five different well put together and much better than YouTube quality flash ~5min videos [probably the best compression I've seen for a widely available video like this from a large paper], accompanying photographs for each video segment giving more depth to the video and the plain text articles making it into the dead tree edition. They even include a link to a 33-page, 2-column .pdf of the print edition, complete with charts and photos, of the whole story if you want to print it out and not loose the feel of the story as you do when you print out a story online which normally doesn't include all the graphics and charts within the printout.

It's from the end of July and it's about oil, specifically Pulitzer winner and Tribune correspondent Paul Salopek's journey to find out what goes into the tanks of people's cars from a Marathon gas station in the 'burbs of Chitown in South Elgin.

I can't recall ever seeing anything coming close to how slickly put together this series by the Tribune is. This is engaging on so many levels and the load times aren't too shabby either indicating that they've either cut down on digital bloat or they've really opened up those internet tubes Ted Stevens is squaking about lately, or both.

I've watched all the videos and gone through the photos, during that time, the US has consumed some 800K barrels of oil according to a ticker at top left. Now, on to the text.

This is the future of news/media. Absolutely incredible.

And of random trivia note, the first oil well was drilled in PA.