Global Nomads

/ Austin

On Saturday night, a friend, Cinque, staged a sort of new-media art installation event thingum at Republic Square Park called We Are All Global Nomads. For the past month, people around the world have been uploading their pictures to the site, along with brief observations of “what’s outside my window.” At the event, these pictures and observations were projected on half a dozen or so improvised screens in the park, rotating at random.

To be honest, I was afraid this was going to be a total wankfest. Weather that threatened rain didn’t help. But the weather cooperated in the end, and it actually turned out to be a nice event. I’m sure that artists cringe at the thought of their work being considered “nice,” but it was, and there’s nothing wrong with that. No surprise that a disproportionate number of uploads were from people in Austin, but there was one by a woman in Tuvalu, another by a woman on an oil rig in the North Sea.

Copycat

/ tidbit


Pictured above is the new Mazda RX-8. You don’t have to be Jean Dixon to predict that this is going to be an extremely popular car. Apart from a Wankel engine, the notable thing about it is that it is a sports car with four doors, the rear doors being half-sized and reverse-opening. Snazzy design, with sharply pronounced front fender bulges.

And in the white corner is a Subaru concept car, the evocatively named B11s. Now, I like Subarus. I own a WRX. Subarus, however, have never been noted for good styling–if anything, the company has seemingly gone out of its way to design dorky-looking cars. This is obviously a new direction for the company, if they actually build it. It’s a good looking car. But it’s somebody else’s good looks. Same shape, same unusual door configuration, similar fender bulges.

Gwen suggested it should be marketed as the “WRX-8.”

Shallow thoughts

/ tidbit

David, the soup peddler, had a second-night-of-pesach dinner last night, at which I was present. A very new-agey type of affair. Following are some ideas that cropped up during conversation:

  1. It used to be that Americans of any political stripe could make fun of the French and feel good about it. Since GW2, the right wing has co-opted this practice. Yet another reason to be anti-war: I resent the fact that I can’t feel good about ridiculing those cheese-eating surrender-monkeys anymore.
  2. Jewish holidays are a downer: “this is the day God didn’t kill the firstborn male child of each household”; “this is the day of atonement.” Jesus! The Christians did a much better job of co-opting the fun aspects of pagan holidays. Why don’t Jews have days for collecting brightly-colored eggs, decorating indoor trees, etc?

Full moon night

/ Austin, fire, personal

Last night was a full moon. Quite amazing to see as it hung low over the horizon. The air was positively pungent with the smell of chinaberry blossoms (thanks to Jenny for identifying it). Apparently the chinaberry is considered a pest tree, not native to these parts, but it smells fantastic–somewhere between jasmine and bluebonnet. Everywhere I went last night, I could smell it. Amazing.

It being a full-moon night, there was a drum circle in the tunnels. This is one of those hidden aspects of Austin that make the place what it is. Some of my fellow fire freaks decided to meet down there for a firenight. Despite some trouble finding the place by those living outside Austin, a good time was had by all. As I sat there watching a friend spinning frenetically to the miasmic throb of the drums, the chinaberry perfume drowning out even the stink of burning fuel, it occurred to me that we were experiencing a Baraka moment.

Gwen and I headed out around midnight–right when the second shift was arriving.

I take it all back

/ current events

Every word of it. Every skeptical, accusatory thing I said about the war in Iraq. Because it turns out that, yes, Iraq was harboring terrorists. Well, one terrorist. Abu Abbas. Remember him? I thought not. He hijacked the Achille Lauro and killed one of its passengers. In 1985.

This is not to trivialize the crime, but we didn’t invade a country, kill and maim thousands of civilians, allow over 100 of our own troops to die, and spend $75 billion and counting to round up this guy. Oh yeah…I remember hearing something about weapons of mass destruction a few weeks ago. Did they find any of those? Nope.

Macintouch gets with the program, sort of

/ net stuff

Macintouch, the best Mac news site, is finally publishing an RSS feed. Excerpts only, which is fair: they need to get people to come to the site, since they’re advertising-supported.

A bigger problem is that Macintouch never had permalinks for individual stories, and yet an RSS feed requires a permalink, or something like it. The solution Macintouch is using appears to be very ad-hoc: there are indeed anchor tags for individual stories, but they don’t seem intended to scale: they read like <a name="itools7">. This is adequate for one day’s worth of news, but not for providing a permanent ID. I’m guessing that Macintouch has been running on a homebrewed content-management system that wasn’t designed with permalinks in mind; now Ric Ford is locked in, and retrofitting newfangled contraptions like permalinks is turning out to be hard.

How not to fix a problem

/ net stuff

Blogshares seems like a fun idea that has attracted quite a bit of attention. Unfortunately, it includes a ticker–a mere frill–that is coded in Javascript that causes all Mac browsers (at least, that I’ve tried) to lock up. If you use a Mac, the only way to visit the site is to disable Javascript first. This has been mentioned repeatedly on the discussion board there.

The brilliant solution? A “ticker on/ticker off” switch. Implemented in Javascript. The only way to turn off the ticker is to turn Javascript on. If you do that, the browser locks up, making it impossible to turn off the ticker.

I think Joseph Heller wrote a book about this type of situation.

Art Car Parade

/ Austin

It seems incredible that a soul-sucking wasteland like Houston would have a fantastic art car parade, sponsored by the Orange Show, and that Austin would have none. Well, no longer. Yesterday was Austin’s first art car parade. Did I get pictures? No. Am I an idiot? Yes. There were some wonderful creations there–my favorite, if I had to choose one, would probably be the Aero Car, a brilliantly adapted BMW bubble-car. The add-ons and paint were flawless; the interior had an altimeter fitted to the dashboard; the propeller spins.

Other notables included the Roachster, twinkle twinkle, Student Driver, Iron Maiden, the bookmobile, and of course the Objet Dart. I wish I could scare up a link for the scorpion–it was amazing.

[update: Someone else got some pictures.]

The war and the bigger picture

/ current events

One of many, many disturbing aspects of the U.S. invasion of Iraq is what the broader ramifications could turn out to be. Howard Dean has suggested that China may feel emboldened to “liberate” Taiwan. For that matter, India might decide to “liberate” Sri Lanka (but perhaps not Kashmir, because Pakistan’s got nukes). Yeehaw! I got yer New World Order right here, pappy.

A few articles in the paper today struck me as interesting as repercussions of the war. North Korea is sounding more conciliatory. So is Iran.

I suspect Bush apologists will look at these two data points and smugly declare that it was the strategy all along with Gulf War II to make an example of Iraq and get these other Axis of Evil honorees to play nice. And I’ll even allow as how, just maybe, such really was the intent all along. But I would argue that any similarity between that goal and these glimmers of possible outcomes is completely coincidental. These outcomes are completely unpredictable, as Cuba’s current crackdown on dissent suggests. No word on any actions, provocative or conciliatory, taken by unindicted co-conspirator in the Axis of Evil, Syria.

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