WTF Breakout?

Marc Maron's WTF popped up as a number 7 of the top 10 funny things(?) of the year in Rolling Stone and is the subject of an article in The New York Times. This is in addition to the minor appearances in other places such as Jewcy and Re:Comedy. The slideshow at the NYT has a few new pictures, too. I knew WTF was getting more listeners, but I'm a little surprised to hear Brendan McDonald say 200,000. It still feels like there are 200 or 2,000 of us listening.

WTF'in' around with QR-codes

I've been listening to WTF with Marc Maron, as mentioned in a previous post. I've gone through most of the backlog and have to conclude that this is a better situation for Marc in that he is producing better, more timeless and higher-quality comedy-centered content now.

I tried to integrate a QR code into the (existing WTF) show graphic, so I could learn how to use the G.I.M.P. a little more, and maybe even contribute something back to Marc.

I used the Google chart API to make a URL like this or this with error correction level H (allowing 30% of the code to go missing).
My first idea was to go with Marc's face. Hmmm. It's not great but I suppose his face would be enough to remind people what the link was for.
My second attempt was the weirdo-at-the-screendoor effect, in 2 versions. Git yer gun, Pa!

(click for full size)

It doesn't really work unless you see it at full size; the grid doesn't scale.
I tried this blue 600 pixel hippie gif because I didn't like the Huck Finn quality of the existing letters WTF.
I'm not really satisfied with any of these. All of this "code" may be out of date soon as you can apparently just point your cellphone camera at buildings and things and have them recognized.

BTW, since I was working on this in the presence of a 7-year old, WTF now stands for Where's the fish?, What's that fish?, or What's that for?

This final one looks like it wouldn't work, but it scans in very quickly.

The GIMP is better than Photoshop. It's almost the same ease of use (if you start from zero), is cheaper at 0 yen vs $700, and is guilt-free for pirates. And although I personally like the gimpy-sounding name, I would propose the next version be called "The PIMP", Photographic Image Manipulation Program, or Professional Image Manipulation Program, to satisfy the people who are uncomfortable with the name. Hell, why even wait for someone else to change the name? Change the branding yourself just for your own personal use. The Windows version should go with the WIMP as the name, and perhaps The ChIMP would be appropriate for Christians or anyone who can think of a good acronymical reason for that.

Marc Maron WTFpod meta-talk

Cat Power

Chan Marshall at KCRW (Morning Becomes Eclectic) February 29, 2008:


"New York"

Few favors for feathered friends from frequent fliers

In contrast to the fuss made over the occasional bird or bat accidentally killed by wind turbines, birds unfortunate enough to nest near airports are systematically exterminated as pests, and the question asked is "Are we doing enough to kill the birds?"

The accident also raised questions about whether airports around the country are doing enough to deal with bird flocks.
The agency that operates New York City's major airports said it has a multimillion-dollar program to chase birds off its property, but can only do so much to protect planes once they are in the air.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said it kills thousands of birds every year in the marshy waterways and tidal flats that surround its two major airports in Queens, and uses guns, pyrotechnics and hawks to drive away birds.
Among the other tactics: Bird eggs are coated in oil to prevent them from hatching. Nests are removed. The agency also plays recordings of bird distress calls, and landscapers remove any shrubs and trees that might be attractive to certain species.

Source: AP news article in the IHT

A network of maglev trains connecting the major cities will work so much better than the jet-propelled, winged aluminum canisters careening through snow, sleet, rain, and flocks of seagulls that we have today, even though the wind turbines and concentrated solar collectors to power the maglevs may whack or roast a few birds, too. Perhaps you could shave a few hours off by flying, if it's coast-to-coast across the continent, but the carbon tax may be prohibitative.

Acquitted

As hard as it is to believe three detectives can pump 50 bullets into an unarmed man in New York City, it is much worse to find that the legal system can find no fault with that act.
NYT.

April 26, 2008
3 Detectives Acquitted in Bell Shooting
By MICHAEL WILSON
Three detectives were found not guilty Friday on all charges in the shooting death of Sean Bell, who died in a hail of 50 police bullets outside a club in Jamaica, Queens, in November 2006. The verdict prompted calls for calm from the mayor, angry promises of protests by those speaking for the Bell family and expressions of relief by the detectives.
Detective Michael Oliver, who fired 31 bullets the night of the shooting and faced manslaughter charges, said Justice Arthur J. Cooperman had made a “fair and just decision.”
Justice Cooperman delivered the verdict in State Supreme Court at 9 a.m. Describing the evidence, he said it was reasonable for the detectives to fear that someone in the crowd that night carried a gun. He added that many of the prosecution’s witnesses, including Mr. Bell’s friends and the two wounded victims, were simply not believable. “At times, the testimony of those witnesses just didn’t make sense,” the judge said.
Several supporters of Mr. Bell stormed out of the courtroom, and a few small scuffles followed outside the courthouse. By midafternoon, there were no suggestions of any broader unrest around the city. Mr. Bell’s family and fiancée left without making any comments and drove to visit his grave at the Nassau Knolls Cemetery and Memorial Park in Port Washington.
The verdict comes 17 months to the day since the Nov. 25, 2006, shooting of Mr. Bell, 23, and his friends, Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield, outside the Club Kalua in Jamaica, Queens, hours before Mr. Bell was to be married.
It was delivered in a packed courtroom. Mr. Bell’s family sat silently as Justice Cooperman spoke from the bench. Behind them, a woman was heard to ask, “Did he just say, ‘Not guilty?’ ” Detective Oliver and the two other defendants, Detectives Gescard F. Isnora and Marc Cooper, were escorted out a side doorway as court adjourned.

Better Dead than working-with-gays?

There were so many things wrong with the thinking behind this story of the dismissed gay Arabic-speaking linguists (May 23) that it is hard to even count them. First of all, the people doing the judging are the failed military administrators who are responsible for all of the smart planning (and mega-deaths) for post-war Iraq, while our best guess as to the culpability of the ones who are being judged is that they experienced some kind of prenatal hormonal imbalance that predisposed them toward homosexuality. Secondly, although they were discharged under the Clintonesque "Don't Ask! Don't Tell!" policy, they did not disclose their preference, nor were they asked, but their communications were intercepted and read. Technically it may not be unreasonable search and seizure since it was a government computer, but it is a little like collecting DNA samples and fingerprints from employees by CSI analysis of their work stations. Third, the information gathered in this way was used prejudicially to dismiss only those who sent gay-sounding e-mails. Heteros were let off with a warning. Fourth, it is unlikely that the soldiers in the field would prefer to have their limbs all blown off or die
rather than face having a gay person working in the organization somewhere. These linguists aren't necessarily trained field soldiers but may just be translators working in offices. Overall, the very idea that a branch of the government would have as its official policy this refusal to even allow someone to work and serve on the basis of something like sexual preference is really a shockingly regressive policy. It seems that ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, and other factors beyond the control of the person should not be grounds for dismissal.

How would a nut-winger defend such a ludicrous position? I got to see one in action. Former NYC mayor Julie Rudiani Judy Ruliani Rudolph Giuliani defended the policy of discriminate-and-dismiss by saying that allowing gays in the military is a social experiment that should not be performed in the middle of a war. Think about that for a second. We can't have experiments in a time of war. That would be like… The Manhattan Project, the U2 rocket, or the development of the jet engine. We wouldn't want to have anything like that. Why of course not. In World War Two they didn't try anything different from World War One. There were no social experiments at all at that time. No women in the workplace or social change of any sort. Certainly no Blacks or Asians were allowed into the military in a time of war! Baka yaro!

That statement alone should disqualify Adolf Rudolph for further consideration as a pre-mental candy-date.

Update: I see from the actual transcript that Julie-Annie never said the word "experiment" in his response, but just said that nothing "disruptive" should be tried. My comments still stand. Wolf Blitzer, an actor who plays a newsman on TV, embedded misinformation in his question when he said that these people had "announced" that they were gay. In at least some cases, according to the reports, they did not announce it, but they were spied on as they used military computers and were found out that way.

BLITZER: Mayor Giuliani, recently we've learned that several talented trained linguists -- Arabic speakers, Farsi speakers, Urdu speakers -- trained by the U.S. government to learn those languages to help us in the war on terrorism, were dismissed from the military because they announced they were gays or lesbians.

Is that, in your mind, appropriate?

GIULIANI: This is not the time to deal with disruptive issues like this.

Back in 1994 we went through this. And it created a tremendous amount of disruption. Colin Powell, I think, was still the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before he left at the beginning of the Clinton administration.

He came to the view that this was a good policy.

And I think in time of war, in a time where we're trying to deal with this transition to a new kind of warfare that we have to be fighting -- and we haven't gotten all the way there yet. We need a hybrid army, we need to look at nation-building as part of what we have to teach our military. I don't think this would be the right time to raise these issues.

BLITZER: Thank you.

GIULIANI: And I think we should rely on the judgment of our commanders in a situation like this. They know what's disruptive and what's not. And at a time of war, you don't make fundamental changes like this.

BLITZER: Thank you, Mayor.

Message received: We will happily torture the hell out of your grandmother if we think it could save New York City from a "dirty bomb" but God forbid we should ever allow a gay person to be allowed to work for the military. We would rather die. That makes about as much sense as George Bush's cruel prank of creating a new federal Homeland Security agency to confiscate your nail clippers before you fly while allowing an estimated two million people to slosh back and forth across the border and one-half of one percent of containers coming into the US to be inspected.

googlemaps streetview in Loisaida

I was able to see my old place at 647 E. 11th St. on Google Maps Street View. I had wanted to see this place again sometime and thought of asking someone to take a picture. I checked out zooomer a few times. I didn't expect Google to do this. My room in the top corner of this walk up had a great view of the World Trade Center. Most of the surrounding buildings were burned-out and/or abandoned in 1981. There used to be a fire burning in a steel drum near the corner where a lookout kept watch. The door was plexiglass painted black with another guy there to ask to see your tracks. The users bought the junk on the steps and sometimes shot up there, too. I think the rent was around $200-something a month this deep into Alphabet City, while over on 1st Ave or Avenue A a studio would run closer to $800 or $1000. A friend and I shared it. There were 2 bedrooms. We furnished the place with discarded furniture we lugged up the stairs, such as a sofa with a broken leg and a heavy hardwood chest of drawers that would later fly out of the window in a gravitational experiment that reduced it to chopsticks and axhandle-sized fragments. We were not mugged but burglarized a few times before the place caught fire for the second time, and part of the (slate!) stairs collapsed. With six(?) flights of stairs, many of which were missing, and some landings missing, too, I moved out to my girlfriend's place before concluding that Manhattan was not a good place for me to be at that time (if not a hopeless hellhole unfit for human habitation).

So this area of the East Village or Loisaida looks quite different now with what appears to be functioning cars parked on the street and actual trees growing there. There had been some trees in the project thing across C and community gardens at C and 10th St. The population of the city has risen but I wonder if it makes even less sense to live in Manhattan now than it did then.

What are the rental prices now? Maybe $1600 to $3000 a month?
http://placeeasy.com/property/help_search
or
http://www.corcoran.com/agents/listings.aspx?userid=GES&Region=NYC

NYC streets paved, potholes filled with 9-11 victims' remains

According to a Reuters news story reported March 24, ashes and bone matter of victims of 9-11 were recycled into the streets of the city.

9/11 remains possibly used to pave roads
By Edith Honan
Sat Mar 24, 1:14 AM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Debris that may have contained bits of bone from victims of the World Trade Center attacks was used to fill potholes and pave city roads, according to court papers filed on Friday.
The charge was made in an affidavit filed in Manhattan federal court in an ongoing case filed in 2005 by family members of those killed in the attacks against the city. They say the city did not do enough to search for remains, denying victims a proper burial.
Eric Beck, a construction worker employed at the Fresh Kills landfill in the borough of Staten Island, where the rubble was taken after the Twin Towers fell, said in his affidavit that the process of sifting through the debris was rushed.
Beck said he saw sanitation workers removing small pieces of debris containing possible bone fragments and loading them "onto tractors, and using it to pave roads and fill in potholes, dips and ruts."
The WTC Families for Proper Burial, the group that filed the suit, has also battled the city over how to honor the 2,749 people who died in the attacks on the Twin Towers.
Some relatives of victims have opposed any effort to rebuild on Ground Zero, calling it sacred ground and saying it would disrespect those who perished there.
Construction of the planned memorial and skyscraper has repeatedly been delayed, in part due to concerns expressed by victims' families.
The remains of about 40 percent of the victims were never recovered, and hundreds of bone fragments have been discovered in and around Ground Zero in the last six months, the lawsuit says.

Great news for the Rudy "Adolf" Giuliani campaign. Amerika's mayor, a man who knows how to get things done. Rudey can't fail.

Fiddy Bullets in NYC

On Saturday, November 25, five police officers in Queens fired fifty bullets into a car carrying 23-year old Sean Bell as he left a bachelor's party. He died. He was to be wed later that day. This story has been extensively reported in the media, and I have little to add but to refer you to Democracy Now, which you can read or listen to. I suggest you subscribe to the podcast. Al Sharpton said exactly the right things. I would point out that these things always seem to happen in America, never Belgium or Singapore, although there is an American tradition of air-dropping bombs on weddings in Afghanistan and Iraq. It also seems to me that if the Al Capone school of policing is being employed, the police may have other resemblences to the famous criminal. Face it: New York City cops are notoriously crooked and some of these may have had a reason to off Mr Bell, but we will have to wait and see if it was complicated by corruption or just simple brutish incompetent fatal gun violence by the peace officers. Premeditated murder, or just murder on the impulse of the moment? I made the above collage, unable to resist the symbolism of the number 50.

11th and C

In 1981 I lived in Manhattan at the corner of 11^th and Avenue C, at 649 E. 11^th Street, on the top floor of a walk-up. The building apparently pre-dated the invention of the elevator. I had a corner room with a good view of the World Trade Center over the burned-out building across the street. The building had a spray-painted black plexiglass door with an peephole area that had been scratched clean with a razor blade. The dealers kept a doorman there, another guy on the street next to a barrel of burning wood scraps or trash, and another guy at the corner as a lookout. A couple of flights up the stairs they would be dealing, mostly junk, and sometimes the dealers let the customers shoot up there, candle, spoon, the whole works.

Why was I there? I was bored of the midwestern small university town and shocked by the murder of John Lennon and election of actor Ronnie Reagan. New-York based punk rock musicians and leftist political philosophies may have influenced my choice to be there. Cost-wise, there was a sharp devaluation from 1^st Ave. to Avenue A and then down to C that made it extremely affordable to venture farther east, about a 75 or 80% discount over 2 or 3 blocks, if you wanted to live in Manhattan rather than Queens or Brooklyn.

The neighborhood was mostly Spanish-speaking Puerto-Ricans, poor native New Yorkers, and small numbers of artists, musicians, and punks. I shared the living room with my friend, Pete. I separated my room with a California Republic flag I had found outside a suburban San Diego police station, and slept under an American flag from the same source. Sorry, officers. Youthful indiscretion. Statute of limitations is expired, isn't it?

We furnished the place with stuff off the streets: a sofa with a broken leg, artificial christmas tree, plaster madonna with broken-off head, a chest of drawers. Yes, we carried this stuff up 8 flights of stairs. I turned 18 while I was there. When we got sick of some furniture, like the chest of drawers, we would wait for the street below to get really quiet late at night, and then hurl it out the window.

We would sometimes be asked to show our "tracks" before being let in, and have to tell the doorman that we lived there. There was never any violence, as I remember. There was crime; when the dealers were not there we usually got broken into. Occasionally someone in the neighborhood would try to hold us up with a knife.

I never ventured far from Manhattan in the year I was there. The farthest I went was probably Jones beach and inside the crown of the Statue of Liberty. I was an avid urban hiker already then, walked all over the city, through the Bowery and Chinatown down to Wall Street and Battery Park, through midtown and to Central Park. From 11^th to Central Park is really too far, though.

Within a year, it was clear that I wasn't going anywhere, and didn't have much more to learn from this place. I thought NYC would always push me down, too many rich and too many poor. The clincher came when the building caught fire, twice. The first time we discovered it in the apartment under ours. The second time alot of the doors were broken in with axes, windows were broken as people got onto the fire escapes, and some of the slate steps collapsed. Some of the steps were then holes, which you could step over, but some of the landings also collapsed, which made going up or down 8 flights pretty weird, as you had to hold onto the railing and swing your body 180 degrees over a huge drop. Then I think they cut off the water, so you had to visit friends just to bathe, and most of the residents went on a rent strike and were demanding that repairs be made. I didn't stick around to see how it all turned out. I stayed at my girlfriend's until I could go back to university, where I was still an honors student from the 4.0 GPA I somehow got in my first semester. I got this new idea that maybe getting a loan to go to university really was better than working for minimum wage and living in a slum. (I tend to learn by doing. I got to feel it in my gut.) Within less than a year, I had moved on to Los Angeles, but that is another story.

The reason for this story? I have never been back to New York since I left in 1981. I have wanted to see a picture of that neighborhood for a long time, if I can't go there. I decided to google up 649 East 11^th Street for the first time in… maybe ever, and googled 647 instead. Why did I do that? Somehow "647" has a stronger trace in the universal mind matrix, I guess. I then discovered that there is now a Japanese sake bar called Kasadela on the site next to where I lived. Kasadera means Umbrella Temple, and it is a temple-town on the Tokaido near Nagoya. I also learned that the musical Rent is supposed to take place at 11th and B, and that Dustin Hoffman, Jane Curtin, and the Black Liberation Army have a history on Eleventh Street. (Not all together as part of the same incident, though. They all lived there.) I found some decent pictures of the restaurant interior and exterior here. Although they don't have sushi, they do have grilled eel over rice, Unagi-don on the menu! I want that and plenty of sake to wash it down. Unfortunately, I am 11 (or 13) time zones away. If I am in the neighborhood, I will stop in.

"The Alphabet" had a pejorative sound in those days. We called it the Lower East Side and sometimes Loisada(?). "Alphabet City" seems to have decent connotations now (but what do I know). It is a major mental hurdle to imagine the neighborhood has changed that much. We were the pioneers, I guess. The few, the proud, the idiots.