Category: Uncategorized

That’s a headline I always wanted to get into The Examiner, especially when a predicted deluge turned out to be an hour of drizzle. But the last few days, the National Weather Service forecast a big storm, and this morning we got one. But it was of the “fast moving Pacific” variety: We had a big blast that started just before dawn and was pretty much spent by 10 a.m. Streets in the Greater TechTV area were flooded by a combination of heavy rain and high tides that overwhelmed storm sewers. The top picture was taken by another TechTV guy across the street from our building about 9 a.m. The bottom photo is a phone-camera shot I took about 3:30 this afternoon.

February hasn’t been a banner blogging month, despite the recent association of www.infospigot.com with this here page. Isn’t that exciting.

I was going to write something in connection with Samuel Pepys’s birthday, which was yesterday, the 23rd. It might be au courant to call him the first blogger — though not really, because he was the only one and didn’t want anyone to read what he wrote, and both of those conditions are about direct opposites of what we are up to now. But what I would have written about is that Garrison Keillor does an email/audio writer’s almanac by way of Minnesota Public Radio. The almanac includes a brief essay on one of the writer’s born on the date. The audio version features Keillor readng the mini-essay aloud. Kate and I have noticed he’s given to occasional, slightly goofy misreadings of the text. Yesterday’s piece was on Pepys (pronounced just like the popular marshmallow-based holiday-centric animal-shaped confections, a fact I didn’t pick up on until an English lit doctoral student of our acquaintance filled me in). Talking about Pepys’s personal life, the essay mentioned that, “He was continually resolving to quit drinking, but he never did.” But reading it, Keillor says, “He was continually resolving to quit dancing, but he never did.”

Amusing, eh?

Nah, but it’s the best I can come up with tonight. Unless I get started on Bush and gay marriage and constitutional amendments. I won’t. That’d be an all-nighter.

There’s a good short  piece in the Trib today about the FBI putting word out that it needs to hire 900 new intelligence analysts. I was intrigued — I think everyone secretly wants to be a cop at some time or other, or at least I do — so I looked for the jobs on the FBI’s site. Since the analyst openings require a top-secret security clearance, that means a deep background check. So I took a look at the “final background application” page to see what sort of information the bureau would want from and about an aspiring G-Person. But checking out the application means disobeying this directive:

“Do not download this application unless you are advised by an official FBI Representative who will provide you with a mailing address or fax number.”

But I clicked and downloaded every page. Nothing to do now but await the repercussions.

… is only that the Radio UserLand software with which this blog is published is stupid and user-unfriendly. Not that I’m a genius, but here’s the current case in point: I write an item. I get ready to post it. I go to check one of the stupid category pages I’ve set up for parallel posting of my sapient observations, but instead of hitting the check-box, I hit the link to the category instead and am taken to that page. Not a problem. But oh, no! Going back to the previous page, where I had written my post, it’s gone. Again, not that we’re talking about the Sentences that Transformed the Way We See the World — someone else must have written them — but it’s *&%$& infuriating.

Isn’t it?

Speaking of the “triangle of wonder,” there’s an actual song on an actual record about an actual place there: “Tolono,” by Utah Phillips. It’s a melancholy train song, but you can tell (I think) that he really went through there.

“I got off at Tolono, just below Champaign,
A flag stop on the edge of yesterday.
The whistle blew a song,
I whispered so long,
And waved my hand and slowly walked away.

“No round-trip ticket, you’re on the final run
This Cannonball is never coming back.
Tomorrow she’ll just be
another memory
And an echo down a rusty railroad track.”

Of the town itself, it can be reported that the public library owns one book by Al Franken (“Why Not Me?”) and one recording of that book, and not a single volume by Bill O’Reilly. So much for those stereotypes about what’s going on in The Heartland.

And to mark the occasion of the 16th president’s birthday, here’s an offering from the Chicago Tribune on a reputedly ugly — very ugly — Lincoln memorial:

“ASHMORE, Ill. — It turns out the world’s tallest statue of the tallest U.S. president, six stories of fiberglass and steel abandoned and vandalized in a shuttered campground, has another distinction. It is probably the world’s ugliest memorial to Abraham Lincoln.”

A check of online maps shows Ashmore to be just down, or up, the road from Embarrass, sitting in the triangle of wonder outlined by Champaign, Decatur, and Terre Haute, Indiana (a lesser land of Lincoln).

Well, I’ve saved up 28,953 or so absolutely no-good spam messages just to “analyze” them. The saving’s easy. The analyzing, like about everything else in my life beyond the involuntary functions these days, is hard. But while I’m waiting for that magic moment when synapses fire and I break free of inertia and begin spam analysis — it could happen this year — I see a story from last Thursday’s The New York Times (already in the paid archives) on one of my favorite spam subjects: The names of senders:

“Yours Not So Truly, J. Goodspam
By Lisa Napoli
“PURPOSES L. XYLOPHONIST sounds like my kind of man. Unique. Creative. Focused, with a hint of formality. … There is no way to be certain that Mr. Xylophonist is, in fact, a mister. Actually, it is a pretty safe bet he is not a person at all. …”

[Later, much later: Well, here it is at the end of October, and the spam analysis never happened. When TechTV shut down earlier this year, and I got booted out with almost everyone else, I simply deleted that wonderful storehouse of spam. On the other hand, I get plenty of new junk messages to ponder each and every day.]

On February 10, 1897, The New York Times adopted its new slogan: “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” thus launching 107 years of ever-intensifying nitpicking by everyone who doesn’t toil for the Times. A relatively old example:  Lies of Our Times; shockingly, it’s a print publication. And a much newer one: the Wilgoren Watch; it’s dedicated to the pursuit of sloppiness and half-truths committed to print by the Times reporter covering the Howard Dean fiasco.

It’s not too late to say “happy birthday” to James Joyce, who would have turned 122 today had he not died at the age of 59. As he once wrote:

“Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roes. Most of all he liked fried mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”

There is, of course, more where that came from.

When Iraq wasn’t a threat

The way Colin Powell told it in February 2001, a while before the Bush administration decided the United Nations had done nothing to reduce the menace of Saddam, the U.N. sanctions had pretty much taken care of the big bad dictator:

“… Frankly they [the sanctions] have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq. …”

Link by way of a colleague.