Here’s iron-clad proof that people should never tell me “hey, there should really be a web site that does X” at about 9 p.m. Because then I stay up until 2:30 a.m. making said web site.
So here it is: KatrinaCheckIn.org, a place for people to (a) say they survived the hurricane, thus lifting a gynormous weight off their friends’ shoulders, and (b) try to track down info on the missing.
For those of you with blogs, I would really appreciate a link to KatrinaCheckIn.org. The more people who are posting to it, the more useful and effective it will be.
31 August 2005 |
9 comments
Speaking of losing faith in humanity.
“Law enforcement efforts to contain the emergency left by Katrina slipped into chaos in parts of New Orleans Tuesday with some police officers and firefighters joining looters in picking stores clean…
“Some officers joined in taking whatever they could, including one New Orleans cop who loaded a shopping cart with a compact computer and a 27-inch flat screen television.
“Officers claimed there was nothing they could do to contain the anarchy, saying their radio communications have broken down and they had no direction from commanders.
“‘We don’t have enough cops to stop it,’ an officer said. ‘A mass riot would break out if you tried.’
“Inside the store, the scene alternated between celebration and frightening bedlam. A shirtless man straddled a broken jewelry case, yelling, ‘Free samples, free samples over here.’
“Another man rolled a mechanized pallet, stacked six feet high with cases of vodka and whiskey. Perched atop the stack was a bewildered toddler.
“Throughout the store and parking lot, looters pushed carts and loaded trucks and vans alongside officers. One man said police directed him to Wal-Mart from Robert’s Grocery, where a similar scene was taking place. A crowd in the electronics section said one officer broke the glass DVD case so people wouldn’t cut themselves.
“‘The police got all the best stuff. They’re crookeder than us,’ one man said…
“At least one officer tried futilely to control a looter through shame.
“‘When they say take what you need, that doesn’t mean an f-ing TV,’ the officer shouted to a looter. ‘This is a hurricane, not a free-for-all.’
“Sandra Smith of Baton Rouge walked through the parking lot with a 12-pack of Bud Light under each arm. ‘I came down here to get my daughters,’ she said, ‘but I can’t find them.’
“Some groups organized themselves into assembly lines to more efficiently cart off goods…Inside the store, one woman was stocking up on make-up. She said she took comfort in watching police load up their own carts.
“‘It must be legal,’ she said. ‘The police are here taking stuff, too.’”
30 August 2005 |
1 comment
Sometimes you lose faith in humanity.
“WWL-TV was reporting that a law enforcement officer was shot in the back of the head Tuesday afternoon on the west bank. The officer reportedly approached the looter near the intersection of Wall Boulevard and Gen. DeGaulle and, while talking to suspect, was shot in the back of the head by a second looter.”
30 August 2005 |
No comments
Scariest thing: We’ve seen and heard almost nothing out of southern Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes. Those are the low-lying areas near the mouth of the Mississippi where erosion was already eating away big chunks of land. They’re closer to the coast, and they’re even more vulnerable in a lot of ways than New Orleans.
On the WWL-TV feed online, they just said all of Plaquemines is under 15 feet of water. Which means anyone who stayed there is probably dead.
Horrifying tale from a Plaquemines school teacher who got away in time.
“Tanya went on to say what she worried about most — her students at Buras High, where she taught eighth grade English and literature. As an educator, she knew that many of the families had no mode of transportation…’[M]any of my students have never ever even been to New Orleans. They walk everywhere. They are poor, so poor,’ she sobbed.”
30 August 2005 |
4 comments
The vultures begin to circle: “Our barge casinos were hit hard by the hurricane. So, Mississippi government, we demand that you immediately legalize land-based casinos via emergency legislation! It’s not like you have anything better to do!”
(That said, I’ve never understood the reason for the silly legal distinction between land-based vs. river/lake/water-based casinos. If you’re going to legalize gambling, it seems silly to say it’s only okay if the gambling happens in a floating structure. Particularly since most of them are fastened to the river or lake bottom and functionally immobile.)
30 August 2005 |
1 comment
Jesus. The news out of New Orleans keeps getting worse. Water still rising. The Ninth Ward and the whole east part of town are, in essence, destroyed. I can’t even begin to think about the long-term impacts of all this. The extraordinarily poor people who live in much of that area will have nothing. Most of them are older homes, and I’d bet good money they don’t have homeowner’s insurance. They’ve become refugees — people without homes and without belongings, wandering.
I mean, Jesus.
Today’s New Orleans Times-Picayune is available online. A few journalistic thoughts:
- First of all, bravo to everybody at the T-P, who did amazing work in impossible circumstances. I know it’s cool to slam the network guys who do stand-ups in their windbreakers by the shoreline. But most of those TV guys skipped town during the worst of it — which is why you saw a lot of Mandeville and inland Mississippi at the storm’s height. The newspaper folks, who have no camera-ego to feed, stayed hunkered down in the city and just got the news.
(Not that the TV guys have anything to be ashamed of. Jeanne Meserve filed this terrific report of the devastation. I hope everybody who thinks it’s cool to reflexively hate the media saw it.)
A particular thank you to the T-P folks since their building is being evacuated at the moment. The “-30-” at the end of that post — the traditional reporter symbol for “the story ends here” — is heartbreaking.
- Reading the T-P makes you realize the strength of newspapers in this sort of situation: All the facts, edited down and synthesized in a useful, communicative way. Look at the photos in the PDFs versus the endless slideshows you see on something like Yahoo News — the photos are more powerful because they’ve been whittled down through the editing process.
- That said, a newspaper comes out once a day. There’s no doubting that a blog is the absolute best way to communicate breaking news in a situation like this. You’ve got a lower threshhold to write, so you end up sharing more information. A blog can have a more personal, human voice — the sort of thing people need and want in a situation like this. (Although the main T-P blog mostly maintained a sort of journalistic distance — not how I would have done it. The posts where the human voice broke through were the most effective. It’s why parts of the T-P’s on-the-scene blog were better reads than their [much more informative and more frequently updated] main blog.)
The other good thing about a blog’s format is that it’s easy to tell what’s new — unlike a wire writethru where you have to search for what’s changed from the last version. (CNN.com has been particularly bad on this front. They keep updating the same main story, drawn from wire and CNN sources. They’re trying to create single summation of all the news — essentially a newspaper model. But the result is that, if you check in on the story again an hour after reading it, you have to rummage for the three new facts buried deep in a 2,000-word story.)
Today’s T-P coverage does fall into some of the story-bunching problems newspaper coverage can bring — like stories broken out for geographic rather than thematic reasons and end up repeating material. (Stories that say, in essence, “By the way, it’s also really fucking wet in this neighborhood too.”)
- At the risk of being picky: The T-P is, for obvious reasons, not being delivered to homes today. It’s only being distributed electronically. With that as a given, it doesn’t make much sense to me that they’re still laying it out in broadsheet form. Reading broadsheet PDFs online is awkward, and you can’t print them out easily without shrinking the text to levels below legibility. If they’re going to go through the process of laying pages for online distribution, it might be worth reformatting them to 8 1/2” by 11”, or at least tabloid format.
I mention this only because I think online distribution will be the way the T-P gets read for weeks, if not months. So if you stick with broadsheet format, you’re sticking with it for a long time.
- Finally, if you want to see prescient reporting, check out the T-P’s five-day series from 2002 essentially predicting the events of this week. Including this great graphic. I wrote about this series back when it was published.
30 August 2005 |
3 comments
Best Louisiana-related hurricane quote: In 1992, in the middle of Bush/Quayle vs. Clinton/Gore, Second Lady Marilyn Quayle was visiting Louisiana shortly after Hurricane Andrew. She asked if there was “anything we can do to help you all.”
Edwin’s response: “You can withdraw from the race.”
I miss Edwin. I may have to visit him someday.
29 August 2005 |
1 comment
This is the first image I’ve seen online of the damage to the Superdome roof.
29 August 2005 |
No comments
Well, it’s amazing to think that the level of destruction New Orleans is experiencing could be good news — but compared to the extinction-level event that could have been, it feels like good news.
Apologies to the folks on the Mississippi coastline who took the brunt of Katrina after the storm took an ever-so-slight turn to the east. Good news for New Orleans, bad news for you.
The Times-Picayune web site is not being updated logically (like all Advance newspaper sites, it looks like ass), but here and here are the two weblogs they’re keeping on the storm.
Not to talk sports at a time like this, but I wonder what kind of impact this will have on the Saints’ future in New Orleans. A move to Los Angeles has been the buzz for some time now — in part because team owner Tom Benson claims the Superdome is a piece of crap and in part because he could sell the team to L.A. investors for, oh, a billion dollars or so.
The state has been unwilling to renovate or replace the Superdome, mostly because it’s not the piece of crap Benson says it is. Well, after today, it will be that piece of crap — chunks of the roof are already being ripped off. On the other hand, Benson will soar to All-Time Asshole status if he (a) tries to milk big payments out of the state after a natural disaster or (b) tries to skip town with the city’s beloved franchise at New Orleans’ lowest point. National and local stories about a Saints move to L.A. would have been negative before; now they’ll be downright vitriolic. We’re talking people showing up at his door with pitchforks and torches.
29 August 2005 |
No comments
Jesus — I hope New Orleans survives this. That’s battlefront-level destruction they’re forecasting. I can only hope they’re wrong.
(For those who have wondered about my family, they’re farther to the west and almost certainly out of harm’s way. But losing New Orleans — and that’s the sort of phrasing people are using, “losing” New Orleans — would be an almost unmatched disaster. Been watching the Weather Channel, and even their guys are so freaked out they’re already 40 miles inland.)
28 August 2005 |
3 comments
“Men felt that intercourse was debilitating and male sexual strivings were thought to be a result of eating massive amounts of potatoes.”
26 August 2005 |
2 comments
Interesting summary of the legal back-and-forth that led to the firing of Bob Huggins, coach of the University of Cincinnati’s men’s basketball team.
I have hated Huggins for a long time. He specializes is recruiting talented thugs with daunting criminal records, telling them they don’t have to attend class, and using them until they were either thrown in prison or drop out.
(From one Internet post about the firing: “My favorite memory is when the player punched the police horse. No, it was when the one player used drugs and never got booted off the team. No, it was when the one player duct taped his roommate to the chair and beat him up. No, it was when the one player beat up his pregnant girlfriend and didn’t get booted off the team. No, it was when the one player stole the University phone charge number and ran up a big bill and never got booted.” Which doesn’t even mention Huggins’ own recent DUI conviction. Nor does it mention his graduation rate, annually one of the worst in Division I basketball. Which is like saying he’s a particularly short midget. Cincinnati went a multi-year span in the 1990s with a zero percent graduation rate.)
John Cheney, the coach of Temple, also recruits a lot of borderline case kids. But he does it with a real eye toward rehabilitation and pushing the kids toward graduation. As a result, he’s beloved by many. (Although he’s getting a little crazy in his old age.) Huggins is the mirror image: a user, a thug who spins through felons to get wins. I’m glad he’s gone.
Oh, wait — Nick Lachey likes Huggins. Didn’t realize that. Never mind, then.
25 August 2005 |
No comments
I’m pretty sure the assassination-is-okay-for-socialists doctrine is somewhere in Leviticus.
23 August 2005 |
4 comments
Here’s my column from today’s paper.
Number of minutes after I woke up this morning that I got my first angry phone call from a senior citizen: 6.
22 August 2005 |
No comments
Sufjan Stevens live on KCRW. I link to it only because he reveals which states he’s considering for his next geography-driven album — Oregon, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. (At 22:00 in the video.) And, more importantly to me, he reveals that the New Jersey album will be a musical about the exits on the New Jersey Turnpike.
That is awesome primarily because, when that comes out, I will seem retroactively extremely cool. Because for several years in the mid-1990s my email signature was:
“Thomas Edison! Grover Cleveland! John Fenwick! Joyce Kilmer! Clara Barton! Vince Lombardi! Walt Whitman.”
I knew those names as the ones Jon Spencer yells out at the end of “Big Road,” on the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s Extra Width. (Which, by the way, was probably the first “indie” record I ever bought, back in 1993.) At the time, I didn’t know those names, aside from being fine citizens of New Jersey, were also all service areas on the Turnpike, along with Woodrow Wilson, Molly Pitcher, and James Fenimore Cooper.
(It may be a sign of my impending blog bankruptcy that I’ve been reduced to recycling posts from 2001. Not sure. Also, I’m using more italics these days, it seems.)
21 August 2005 |
No comments
Hell yeah! My wee Cajun colleagues from Lafayette, Louisiana are kicking ass in the Little League World Series.
They played their first game Saturday and fell behind to the New England champs from Maine. They were down 2-0 in the bottom of the sixth inning. (Little League games only go six innings instead of the traditional nine.) So, what happens? Three runs! In the bottom of the sixth! Cajuns win!
(Coach: “This little team is a very confident club. They never lost their composure.”)
Today was game 2. Things weren’t looking good — the boys from Owensboro, Kentucky, took a commanding 8-1 lead in the third. Did Our Heroes wilt in the face of pressure? They most certainly did not! They began to chip away at the deficit — one run in the third, two in the fourth, then four more in the fifth.
In the bottom of the sixth, Owensboro retired the first two batters. Down to their final out, Our Heroes…bunt! And reach base! And advance to third on a timely single! And…throwing error! That’s a run! Cajuns win, Cajuns win!
These guys rock. They’ve got good Cajun names like Duplantis and Toups and Romero and Bergeron. As if that weren’t enough regional cred, they’ve got a sweet old grandma they call Nama who blesses them with a quick sign of the cross on their foreheads before each victory. (It doesn’t get much more Cajun than that, friends.)
Up next for Our Heroes is the villainous Rancho Buena Vista. Their star pitcher, Kalen Pimentel, just tied a Little League World Series record by striking out 18 batters. (For those good with math, 6 innings x 3 outs per inning = the dude struck out everybody.) And that’s just his pitching arm: he’s the “Barry Bonds of Little League,” who was recently batting .756.
I know nothing of this Kalen Pimentel boy. But I assure you that on Tuesday night at 6:30 p.m. Central Daylight Time, on ESPN2, he will feel the mighty pincers of our crawfish-fueled Cajun heroes.
If not, I say check his pee for steroids.
(By the way, best part of any of these stories:
One thing the team and coaches have had to adjust to is the local cuisine. The first night the team sat down to supper, it was served what [head coach Mike] Conrad described as mashed potatoes on what looked like a waffle, all covered with a light tan gravy.
“They were all just staring at it, not one of them had a fork in his hand,” Conrad said.
Conrad said he’s been told help is on the way today, when families and other supporters travel north with boudin and cracklins. The coaches are hoping to see some Community and Mello Joy coffee coming up as well because the local java just isn’t measuring up. “Whatever this stuff is, we still haven’t figured out what it is yet,” Conrad said. “It doesn’t even wake you up.”
Trust me: a team high on boudin cannot be stopped.)
Finally, a shout-out to Buddy Guirovich, the “godfather of Lafayette Little League” and my middle-school gym teacher.
21 August 2005 |
1 comment
Things you don’t expect to run across on Wikipedia: “Other related modern theories involve Hitler having escaped to the Antarctic, where he joined with a subterranean dinosauroid master race, with whom he now travels inside UFOs underground, generally beneath the South Pole or throughout the center of the hollow earth, but sometimes to a Nazi moon base as well.”
That’s the crazy p.o.v. of one Miguel Serrano, who actually held positions of some authority in various Chilean totalitarian regimes of the last half-century. “He believed that Hitler was in Shambhala, an underground centre in Antarctica (formerly at the North Pole and Tibet), where he was in contact with the Hyperborean gods and from whence he would someday emerge with a fleet of UFOs to lead the forces of light (the Hyperboreans, sometimes associated with Vril) over the forces of darkness (inevitably including, for Serrano, the Jews) in a last battle and inaugurating a Fourth Reich.”
I’ve always been fascinated by white supremacists who try to bolster their craziness with made-up religious beliefs. I wrote my senior essay in college on a guy names Charles Totten who was sort of an 1890s bridge between British Israelism — the idea that the lost tribes of Israel somehow got confused, moved to Manchester and became the Brits, allowing the English to claim “chosen people” status — and Christian identity — the big-in-Idaho varient that claims white Americans are the chosen people, too. Both schools think the people who call themselves Jews are actually “mud people” descended from Satan.
Like I said, nutcases all. They love getting wrapped up in faux history — City of the Medes this, tribe of Khazars that — when their real interests are more along these more prosaic lines: “A relatively new tenet gaining popularity among some radical Christian Identity believers justifies the use of violence if it is perpetrated in order to punish violators of God’s law, as found in the Bible and interpreted by Christian Identity ministers and adherents. This includes killing interracial couples, abortionists, prostitutes and homosexuals, burning pornography stores, and robbing banks and perpetrating frauds to undermine the ‘usury system.’ Christian Identity adherents engaging in such behavior are referred to as Phineas Priests or members of the Phineas Priesthood. This is an appealing concept to some Christian Identity’s members who believe they are being persecuted by a supposed Jewish-controlled U.S. government and society and/or are eagerly preparing for Armageddon.”
Bonus Fact I Would Have Included In My Senior Essay Had The Internet Been As Built Out In 1997 As It Is Today: Charles Totten is the father of fencing at UMass, whose athletes have won two recent national championships.
18 August 2005 |
1 comment
Teacher and the Rockbots, a lame attempt to out-“Schoolhouse Rock” “Schoolhouse Rock.” Quoth the press release: “This 13-song CD reinforces American history and government lessons in a kid-friendly way with humor, modern rock music and commentary from a robot!”
Someone’s been listening to mid-period Clash records. Although I’m not sure whether it’s appropriate to fake a British accent when you’re singing about the American Revolution.
18 August 2005 |
No comments
An introduction to Cajun English. Cajun English, not Cajun French.
Some of the elements are awfully familiar to me. I’ve always said “get down” to mean “get out of a car.” (Much to the amusement of people riding in the car with me. “Do you want to get down?” is not typically an invitation to dance.) It’s “a” coffee, not “some” coffee. And my grandmother used to always say “zink” instead of “sink.” Throw in some “was” leveling and “-ed” absence, and throw in some loss of interdental fricatives, double subject construction, and extra definite articles and you’re getting there. (“Dem, dey was so tired uh dat ol’ dam dog they kill da ting”)
An LSU prof who’s studied it calls Cajun English an ethnolect: “varieties of a language in which the expression of ethnic identity is maintained in an adopted language after loss of the ethnic language.” A la AAVE, or as the Oakland school board would call it, ebonics.
The author advances an interesting theory: That as Cajun French dies out, the ability to speak Cajun English — with its passel of linguistic holdovers from the mother tongue — is the key social indicator of ethnic identity. “Why would a dialect which was considered a mark of ignorance until very recently be heard on the lips of Cajuns young and old?…To be a Cajun these days, the necessary and sufficient condition seems to be that you must speak Cajun English.”
That would be an interesting twist on the view, advanced by Zachary Richard and others, that Cajun culture can only survive if “the language” survives. They mean Cajun French as “the language,” but maybe the accent of Boudreaux jokes is enough.
Finally, a bonus quote on anti-Cajun discrimination in the early 20th century.
17 August 2005 |
No comments
Reader poll time: Settle this dispute.
The fingers of a human hand can be distinguished by the following names: thumb, index finger, middle finger, ring finger, pinkie finger.
Question: Are there similar names for the toes of a human foot?
In other words, would big toe, index toe, middle toe, ring toe, and pinkie toe be accurate terms? Is “ring toe” appropriate despite there being no great cultural legacy of putting rings on said toe? Is “little toe” or “baby toe” more appropriate than “pinkie toe”? Is “index toe” sane?
Your thoughts in the comments, please.
17 August 2005 |
4 comments
Kick ass: Zombies Walk!, an unspeakably awesome mix of Sufjan Stevens and Kanye West, the two reigning kings of unique-first-name music. (Stolen from Gorilla vs. Bear.)
16 August 2005 |
1 comment
Orange roughy — the lovely-tasting fish that forms the core of the delish ceviche tostadas at Gloria’s — doesn’t even start to breed until about age 25 or 30. The ones caught are often over 100 years old.
Which means (a) that when I chow down on those ceviche tostadas, I may be eating a fish older than my great-grandmother, and (b) orange roughy stocks worldwide are near depletion because the species doesn’t have time to recover from overfishing.
16 August 2005 |
2 comments
Names seriously considered for the young Canadian nation, 1865: Mesopelagia, Superior, Albionora, Tuponia (as in The United Provinces of North America), Efisga (England, France, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, and Aboriginal lands).
15 August 2005 |
No comments
While I’m thinking of Cajun food: a little recipe for after your next Thanksgiving. Starring one cup bacon fat!
And while I’m thinking of Cajun things: I’ve always loved this description of the Savoy Saturday morning jam session outside Eunice. “All are invited to join in, no permission or approval is needed, but we ask only one thing: Please, no more than ONE triangle player at a time. If you’re wondering how to find the music center, just look for thirty cars lined up Hwy. 190 between Eunice and Lawtell. We are open for business, and admission is free, but a small box of boudin or cracklins would make you the most popular guy in there for about 2-3 minutes.”
15 August 2005 |
1 comment
Happy holidays!
By which I mean, happy Acadian National Day, the national holiday of my people. (The Acadians, careful readers of crabwalk know, were the French Canadians who evolved into the Cajuns of south Louisiana.) August 15 was chosen in 1881 at the first National Acadian Convention in Memramcook, New Brunswick; the day was the Catholic feast day for Our Lady of Assumption. It was chosen in part to separate the Acadians from the Quebecois and other French Canadians, who celebrated their day on June 24.
I don’t know what’s going on in Canada today, but this is a big year in Acadian history. It’s the 250th anniversary of the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia by the treacherous and villainous Charles Lawrence, which was happening right around this time of year in 1755. (Lawrence’s order came on July 28; the first wave of expulsions lasted through to September. Which reminds me: I need to finish A Great and Noble Scheme soon.)
So, celebrate by having some crawfish today. Actually, crawfish are out of season at the moment, and the only ones you can get are frozen tails imported from China. So…have an andouille sausage poboy instead. Maybe some catfish courtbouillon. Or some corn and crab bisque. Or some tasso jambalaya. Mmmmmmm.
15 August 2005 |
1 comment
The prez and his iPod. “He likes to bike with an iPod Shuffle and let the beat of country music pace him. He jokes that he can be alone even when he rides with someone: ‘I just crank up the Shuffle.’”
Seriously, though, that story is a P.R. man’s dream. Whoever arranged that outing for the White House got exactly what they wanted from the reporter.
15 August 2005 |
No comments
Good description of the overhyped Jack radio format: “You can expect anything, so long as you only expect stuff that’s been played at proms and wedding receptions within the last 30 years.” I love their billboards around Dallas, which are supposed to show the enormous range of music they play — everything from the Cars to the Fixx! Wow, what range!
Here’s my story from Friday’s front page. I would have linked to it Friday, if my web host hadn’t gone through ANOTHER server crash and erased all of crabwalk.com AGAIN. Luckily, I had a backup and lost nothing. Now, just to find the time to transfer to my other host…
Friend Of Crabwalk Molly is blogging from Ghana, where she’s on a three-week reporting trip, the lucky ducky.
The Failed States Index. Unsurprisingly, Africa’s a big mess by this measure, but I felt a sort of pride when I saw Zambia is apparently at no risk for governmental collapse. (On the map, it’s the butterfly-shaped black smudge in south-central Africa, surrounded by a sea of reds, oranges, and yellows.
15 August 2005 |
No comments
Music roundup:
Sufjan Stevens covers R.E.M. (To so-so effect.)
Sufjan Stevens covers the Beatles. (And kinda kicks ass.)
Sufjan Stevens plays a full concert, now illicitly available for convenient download. (And covers Francis Scott Key again.) Better sound quality at this show.
16, Maybe Less, the first track to leak from the inconceivably anticipated (by me, at least) Calexico/Iron & Wine collaboration. I think Sam Beam’s voice and John Convertino’s drums were meant for each other.
Jeff Mangum lives! This can only be good news, since it brings us ever-so-incrementally closer to the day that a followup to “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” hits stores. Krappy video here.
Newish Decemberists song, “Kingdom of Spain.” And, for the hell of it, “The Bandit Queen,” originally planned for the last album but declared too silly. (This version, from a live performance on Austin’s KUT, is the only I know to exist.)
Dallasites, prepare for the arrival of the Wrens on August 27. Decemberists and Built to Spill in September, and Calexico & Iron & Wine in October.
Finally, it’s about time someone created a Katrina Kerns Appreciation Society, in honor of the finest fashion model/Sufjan backup singer of All Time.
10 August 2005 |
1 comment
Unusual: Visitors to the No Child Left Behind page on the Texas Education Agency’s web site are greeted with a quote from Emma Goldman. It’s a fuzzy little quote about kids, but Emma Goldman? The “anarcho-communist known for her anarchist writings and speeches”? On a Texas state government web page? Unusual.
10 August 2005 |
1 comment
What business can learn from open source. “I suspect professionalism was always overrated— not just in the literal sense of working for money, but also connotations like formality and detachment. Inconceivable as it would have seemed in, say, 1970, I think professionalism was largely a fashion, driven by conditions that happened to exist in the twentieth century.”
10 August 2005 |
No comments
We Stand on Guard for Thee: Canada’s Comic-book Heroes. Including Canada Jack: “This acrobatic adventurer first appeared in the March 1943 issue of Canadian Heroes, a comic published by Montreal’s Educational Projects. Jack was athletic, but wasn’t endowed with superhero-level powers; he fought evil as an accomplished gymnast, horseback rider and jiu-jitsu expert. Unlike Johnny Canuck, most of Jack’s adventures kept him on the homefront fighting saboteurs, kidnappers, firebugs, and POW escapees. He was helped by members of the Canada Jack Club, a children’s group organized to support the war effort.”
10 August 2005 |
No comments
I’m back!
For those who didn’t figure it out, the web hosting company that is home to crabwalk.com was befallen by a very unfortunate circumstance about two weeks ago. That unfortunate circumstance was letting its servers go too long without preventative maintenance and watching the whole shebang crash — without there being any backups of user data.
In other words, crabwalk.com was gone.
The hosting company told us customers a data-recovery process would bring back “95 to 100 percent” of the files our web sites are built on. After two weeks of delays, it turned out that, in my case at least, the more precise number proved to be zero percent. The big goose-egg. That includes crabwalk and five other sites I run, all toast.
The only saving grace was that the underlying database that runs crabwalk was untouched, so I could rebuild a big chunk of the site with some techsweat. And judicious use of search functions, the Wayback Machine, and every last corner of my hard drive has brought back nearly every last byte of crabwalk. (As far as I can tell, the only thing irredeemably missing is a scary old photo of Suze Orman. Sadly, it appears lost to the ages.)
Anyway, poke around and let me know if there’s anything that seems off. Over the next few days, I hope to get my other sites back online.
And, oh yeah, I just got back a few hours ago from vacation in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. It rocked. Perhaps more about that later, including my secret plan to become Uruguay’s benevolent philosopher-king.
08 August 2005 |
8 comments
