Metacognitive Defibrillator & Nutwerx Squirrelizer; Surrealist Review of the World Nest (v2.3); Unofficial recycler of the disposable society; anti-judeo-christo-islamo-fascist-zombie-brigade resistance cell; Twenty Three Thousand Armed Buddhas; Nanobeachhead of Optimysticism; & future home of the manned mission to dwarf planet Eris. Nothing to see here, people; move along. Do not attempt to adjust your monitor. We control the html; we control the css. Submitted for your perusal. WTFWIT?
I dreamed that Korea invaded. They just sort of massed in the hills and mountains overlooking the city (the dream place looked a little like Kyoto) and then filed in. The young soldiers were polite and seemed a little sheepish, so you almost felt a little sorry for them. Since the occupation was non-violent, there was no violent resistance, either, but there were some arguments along the lines of "Hey! Whaddaya think you're doing? This is stupid!" Young women were deployed too as soldier/spokespersons for the occupiers. For some reason they had decided to use English rather than Korean or Japanese as the occupation language. I became busy talking with the Korean spokeswomen over how the meaning of various edicts changed when there was no article as opposed to the definite or indefinite article.
The science ministry has begun posting real-time radiation
levels on its website at 2,700 locations across Fukushima
Prefecture, including schools and parks.
To access radiation levels measured at 10-minute intervals, go
to http://radiomap.mext.go.jp/ja/.
Consider the maximum acceptable radiation dose for the
public from any man-made facility: 1 mSv/year.
1 mSv/year is 1000 μSv/year.
1000 μSv/year is 0.114 μSv/h.
(Based on 8766 hours in a year (24×365.25) and 1000
microsieverts(μSv) in a millisievert (mSv).
Therefore any place with over 0.114 μSv/h is questionable.
Japan set a limit 20 times higher, 20mSv/year, for Fukushima
residents.
Residents exposed at that level would reach the 350 mSv/lifetime
limit which was used to determine evacuation areas after the
Chernobyl disaster within 18 years.
Using the Chernobyl lifetime standard, calculating for a 10-year old
child with an additional 70 years life expectancy, 350mSv/70years =
5mSv/year.
Recapping, the 1 mSv/year international standard is exceeded by the
Chernobyl evacuation standard, which (if judged to be tolerable)
could conceivably justify 5 mSv/year for kids (twice that for
35-year-olds, etc.), and that was exceeded by the 20 mSv/year
Japanese Fukushima-only standard, which I believe was set at that
level for political reasons only, to set a standard that would avoid
the need to evacuate several large cities and partially sever
northern Japan from the south and middle.
Some selected ranges of readings for locations today, Sunday, April
29, 2012:
If you use the lifetime-exposure evacuation standard for Chernobyl
applied to children, all children should be evacuated from all of
the cities measured in eastern Fukushima prefecture, with the
exception of Aizu-Wakamatsu, which is more central, but which still
exceeds the 1 mSv/year international standard for the nuclear power
industry. Some sites in Tochigi prefecture also exceed the Chernobyl
standard and should evacuate children.
All of these prefectures in the Kanto region have at least a few
MEXT radiation measurement stations (which are very limited in
number outside Fukushima, by the way, 5 stations in Tokyo, 7 in
Chiba, etc) which record levels above the 1 mSv/year international
standard. By that standard, Kanto is barely tolerable.
Song set to SCRAP musician Nobu's pics of his abandoned hometown of Namie, including what looks like suiting up and going back in to extract belongings from his apartment.
Radiation spread reaches Chiba, Saitama prefectures - AJW by The Asahi Shimbun
» In Chiba Prefecture, the highest levels of cesium-137, between 30,000 and 60,000 becquerels per square meter, were detected in northern areas, such as Kashiwa, Matsudo, Abiko and Nagareyama. Cesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years. In the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident, areas with 37,000 becquerels or more of radioactivity per square meter were designated contaminated zones, while levels of 555,000 becquerels or more required forcible relocation. In Chiba and Saitama prefectures, the highest radiation levels were 0.2 to 0.5 microsievert per hour. In most other areas, the radiation levels were 0.1 microsievert or less.
Bad news in this map is that schools in Fukushima City and elsewhere with numbers up around 4 to 6 microsieverts per hour are far above the 20 MILLIsieverts per year the govt is setting as an evacuation threshold. Do the math: Anything over 2.3 MICROsieverts an hour will accumulate to more than 20 MILLIsieverts a year. They should err on the side of caution considering: the intl standard for added dose is 1 millisievert annually, not 20; these are children, not adults; there is a possibility of ingesting and inhaling radioactive particles; and emissions and deposition levels are continuing and accumulating. They should evacuate.
One argument against evacuation is that these levels may be temporary, and go down soon, but that is doubtful. Even if so, I think they should temporarily evacuate the cities of Fukushima (290,000ppl), Nihonmatsu (61,000ppl), and Sukagawa (80,000ppl), or, if that is impossible, evacuate at least the children. Note that our levels down here in Chiba are 0.055 microsieverts per hour today, only 1% of what is measured at some of those schools. (compare to 5.5)
If the govt keep to their stated standard of evacuating places with a risk of accumulating over 20millisieverts/year, then they will announce an evacuation. If they keep to their established precedent of moving slowly (and erring on the side of radiation), the announcement will come in about 2 weeks (and allow another month to take effect).
Using the slider on the school map also reveals wider investigations done on previous days. I guess they are not cumulatively added to the map because yesterday's measurements may have changed by today. There are 2 measurements: at 1cm (above the soil, I assume), and 1 meter.
Measurements of the known VERY radioactive areas were done mostly on the first day.
There are several audio players and managers in Linux which function as alternatives to iTunes. I started off using the default application (for Ubuntu) Rhythmbox but later switched to Banshee as Rhythmbox had a few unacceptable problems: not transferring tracks to an iPod on occasion, not downloading podcasts on occasion, and not playing music on occasion. I have also tried Amarok, Exaile, Songbird, and a few other minor ones but all of these failed to support iPods, podcasts, or my computer's audio. I need iPod support because I have a few iPods around and probably will for a long time, although the mass-storage USB is a much better way than the closed iTunes-managed corporate podware which crAAPL grants its devotees.
I recently misplaced the (2005?) 1st-generation Shuffle that never seemed to die, so I went to a second or third generation clippy Shuffle Emerald(?) that someone else didn't need. My needs are simple: just to be able to play 3-6 hours of podcasts and some music every day during my commutes. Banshee doesn't recognize it, so I've switched back to Rhythmbox. Rhythmbox seems to be working better than before, so far, although some podcasts seem to go offline much of the time.
One thing I noticed when I was giving Exaile a spin again was the excellent selection of internet radio stations. Because they are pre-installed in Exaile, you tend to use them. I decided to add some radio stations to the poor selection that pre-exists in Rhythmbox. Here are the URLs I added, in rough order from higher bitrates to lower. I can't stand commercials, so I selected mostly public and college radio.
If you don't find what you are looking for there, try radio-locator, which lets you search by city, zip-code, country, format (genre), or call letters.
Update: Rhythmbox still sucks. "...could not parse the feed contents..." Banshee chocked on the iPod mb229 a few more times but finally rebuilt the database without crashing and now is good. Banshee wins. Here's another way to rebuild the (Shuffle) database.
A few days ago I remarked to a friend how strange it was that Microsoft had come out with a new monolingual operating system in 2009, ten years into the age of multilingual operating systems. But after that I wasn't so sure if it had been 10 years --or more like 8 or so. Was I exaggerating?
Then I stumbled across a multilingual version of Windows 7 that only costs $219.99. OK, Windows IS available in a multilingual edition for a price. I suppose that's only for a single license, so if you had a few computers lying around, you'd need to multiply that by 2 or 3. Or by 20 or by 500 if you are a school. Too bad that most of the teachers in most of the world's schools barely make that much in a month--or a year.
Designed for people who want it all Windows 7 Ultimate is the most versatile and powerful edition of Windows 7. It combines remarkable ease-of-use with the entertainment features of Home Premium and the business capabilities of Professional, including the ability to run many Windows XP productivity programs in Windows XP Mode. For added security, you can encrypt your data with BitLocker and BitLocker-To-Go. And for extra flexibility, you can work in any of 35 languages. Get it all with Windows 7 Ultimate.
$219.99 also doesn't compare very well with the $29 Snow Leopard which you can slap onto as many of your Intel Macs as you like without much bother (just keep buying Apple hardware and they won't mind). It compares even less favorably to free Linux or BSD.
So how long have most operating systems been multilingual? A quick google at Apple Mac OS X in Wikipedia shows 10.0.0 was multilingual, released on March 24, 2001. Well, excuuuse me, that was only 8+ (but almost 9) years ago.
Mac OS X version 10.0, code named “Cheetah”, is the first major release of Mac OS X, Apple’s desktop and server operating system. Mac OS X v10.0 was released on March 24, 2001 for a price of US$129.
What about Linux? Distrowatch records Debian 1.1 as a multilingual operating system at the time it was released: 1996-06-17. So in this case it was over 13 years ago. Split the difference, and we're now roughly a decade into the multilingual OS era--with the exception of laggard Windows. Other Linuxes such as (Open)SuSE 6.0 was multilingual as of 1998-12-21, Mandriva (Mandrake at the time?) on 2000-01-14, and YDL 2.0 as of 2001-05-17, just behind Apple. As far as I can tell, BSD was a bit slower to catch up, but a multilingual FreeBSD 4.9 was out on 2003-10-28. These are just a few popular and older examples I picked at random.
What's more annoying about MS is that they market it as some kind of high-end luxury premium purchase, rather than a free and natural choice to use your own language(s) with no fuss. "Hey there, big spender!" "Yo, fancy pants, you want to pay for THIS!" The caption is "Designed for people who want it all". It's bundled with encryption. Right. Of course, people who want to use another language or more than one language must be arrogant, epicurean, big spenders, AND encryption freaks. Probably spies.
If you really "want it all", the ability to compute in your own language (or two), encryption, compatibility, interoperability, and your money and self-respect, get Ubuntu, Fedora, or one of the (gnu)Linux (or BSD) operating system software distributions referenced above. As always, I'd recommend a major distribution which is free and which supports a wide variety of processors and languages, and which has a user-friendly desktop environment. These conditions are not met by the Bills and Steves of the world who did us the favor of bringing personal computing to us from their garages in the 1970s and 1980s (and who reaped the rewards in the 90s and n00ties). We're grateful for that, but it's time to graduate to Linux.
Walking through Akihabara today, I noticed how the place is changing. Although there are bigger, newer buildings and train lines, the electronics stores are being replaced by more places to eat and stores selling anime-related items, game software, and kiddie-oriented stuff. It didn't look high-tech to me at all today. I could see it as more of an old, baroque Turkish market or something taken from the pages of a 19th-century Sears catalog. Here and there were computers advertised as having English (or sometimes "Enblish") installed. One store had a wordy, crowded signboard advertising its English computers. Another annoyance was the iPods everywhere. Shopkeepers, it doesn't distinguish your store if you have the same iPods in the window that the other 500 stores have. I was looking for a SanDisk player and would have spent time and money in any store that had one, but I guess I'll just save time and buy it on Amazon without checking it out in the material world first since the time I spend walking around looking for one to handle is getting to cost more than just buying one to try out. ThanXmas is on the way, so one can always give it away in the spirit of the seasoning. As twilight fell, the harsh ugliness of the city faded and the beauty of the contemporary and future e-waste and its fetishists in the city's autumn air began to emerge as the anthropogenic lights began to shimmer. I JRed home.
The whole 1982 film is on Google Video in what seems to be a fairly low resolution (because it's a very cinematic movie). You can download the whole mpeg4 after it loads in the browser, too. I think in Wikipedia or somewhere it was suggested that this was a "cult film". I must be a member of the cult, then. It isn't really about Hopi prophesy despite the title and some carefully selected Hopi wisdom. To me, it is a document of life in the United States in the early 1980s from an unusual point of view. Too cinematic and nonverbal to be anthropological, but perhaps it could be described as late 20th century America as seen and captured by a Hopi anthropologist visitor from an alternate timeline?
You may be able to find it on YouTube, but I'm informed it is blocked in my country "due to copyright restrictions." Too late for that kind of talk now that Google handed me the mpeg4.
B Is For Bob. Thank you, Facebook. Thank you, Ziggy. I'm not sure that I like that idea but I have bought and loved other music released by the dead Bob Marley. "Death is only the beginning," as mummy used to say.
I got to thinking, Barley Mob or Mob Barley would be a good name for a band. As I (one-mind) should have suspected, Mob Barley already exists. I haven't found out if they are any good yet, tho.
That reminded me that I was thinking about "Psycho Farm Ecology" and found that there is --or was-- only one result for that google search. I love your graphic! Wn wiy reform dh inglish speling sistm tu biy mor fnetik wiy'l haf tu remembr tu priysrv dha originl speling uv sum uv dhous homonimz tu avoid knfyuzhn. One thing led to another and I found myself here:
and then here:::House of Bamboo trailer (1955) Directed by Sam Fuller. Film-Noir. U.S. Army Investigator infiltrates a Tokyo crime syndicate and discovers fellow Americans running things. Starring Robert Ryan, Robert Stack, Shirley Yamaguchi, Cameron Mitchell, Sessue Hayakawa.
You can't tell much from the trailer, but this scene is so familiarly Japanese yet at the early postwar standard of living that I want to see it regardless of how corny it might be.
Might as well give away some key plot details here. I think I'd like to get this dvd just to enjoy the widescreen postwar location shots in Japan. Hmmm. The Japanese version of this dvd is available-- at only twice the US price. I'd pay that if it was in 3D.
February 1st, 2009 --Tokyo. Somebody finally broke "Kevin's" leg(s). I can't tell you how happy that makes me. I think it was the kid with the headphones that he was making such a fuss over back in July. Hey: it's a roaring train, full of drunk people talking loudly after work and housewives gossiping at a siren's pitch over the train noise most of the time.Then there's the sardine-packing, the bad breath and other body odors, the sneezing and coughing commuters, the brazen nose-pickers. Hello? If Kevin imagines that he can hear a faint strains of music of several decibels loudness destroying the inhuman industrial ambiance when the train stops, he should put on his own headphones and play noisy recordings of industrial machinery such as trains so he can be happy.
But having said that, the couple making sweet sweet choco-love in public in his chair should give it up for the dude with the creepy glasses.
Postscript: Scholars of Japanese urban rail manners posters will recall that the "Do it at home!" series follows a dubious series featuring Clifford the big red dog, and apparently aimed at the critical trouble-making 3-year-old demographic. Or they were thinking long-term, for when those kids turn 20. Or it was aimed at the inner 3-year-old encysted within each of us. But then they should have used Mickey.
This is a collection of stereoscopic postcards from the San Diego Historical Society. I keep waiting for stereoscopic digital cameras to come out, but it seems I'll have to wait a bit longer, perhaps for a cheap and high quality display technology.
In this screen shot of a frame around 1:59 in this video at the BarackObamadotcom Youtube channel, big brother Barry holds his sister Maya by the Golden Gate Bridge. I love this picture. Since Maya was born in August 1970, I'd guess this could be the summer of '72? I tried to restore my screenshot of the lo-res video of the faded photo to what I imagine the scene actually looked like. Despite some artifacts in the sky and under the bridge, I think this is about right. The shirt was (Vietnam) camouflage green, not (Desert Storm) brown, as it appears in the reddened photo. I used to have one like it around the early 70s, shortly after I ruined the paisley one by forgetting some chewing gum in the pocket. Some green light reflected off the shirt onto Maya's arm, Barack's face, and the side of Maya's face. Young Barack's hair was more of a deep rich brown with reddish highlights in the bright sun, if these colors are right, and Maya's hair was a lighter brown with a reddish tinge, too. They are both squinting under a bright late-morning sun. I guess they are in a spot Golden Gate Park, facing south. I don't know the area well. It's a really nice snapshot of (the universal) brother and sister.
1. Nationalism If 21st century Earth is a giant prison camp, nations are the gangs and their flags are the gang emblems. Watching people wave their banners is pretty depressing, just like watching what was that horrible movie Triumph of the Will? Why not allow athletes to compete as individuals? Alternatively, they could form teams based on blood type, favorite music, favorite color, or some other randomly chosen characteristic. Rotate it so while teams compete on the basis of blood type this session, they will go by favorite color four years from now.
2. Competitivism Technically, that isn't a word, but the religion of competiveness is an empty shell. Races are won on the basis of hundredths of a second. Instead of laughing and giving everyone a prize, they give out the gold as though the one hundredth of a second really meant something. That whisker of a win was decided by how well someone shaved, whether they packed the right razor, or whether their clothes contained streamlined microfibers or not. What this is telling us is that everyone is pretty much equal and that the whole basis of the medals and awards is bogus. Maybe we need some kind of cooperative games or it is just time to retire the whole concept.
3. Regionalism By regionalism I mean the egotism of the capital region. Beijing is an idiotic place to hold the Olympic games. Basically it is the center of an industrial complex. Maybe they could have gone out of town to somewhere more rural and unpolluted (less polluted, let's say).
4. Spectaclism Just watching sports drives me crazy. I immediately want to move and wonder why I am trying to hold still and watch a screen and the people on the screen get to move. This is a general criticism of spectator sports. Unless you are handicapped, you should get out and move yourself. For every two hours you are playing, watch a game on TV for an hour, maybe. I suppose you could learn to improve your game, whatever your game is. There used to be community leagues for all kinds of sports; many of these dried up with the rise of spectatorism.
In connection with this is the crappy and nationalistic coverage of the media, and the bizarre kinds of games that exist. Subjectively evaluated "sports" such as synchronized swimming, and even basketball (sorry) are not real games. These are subjectively evaluated, scored, and refereed. A true game should have simple and self-evident criteria for winning. This is true of foot races, shot put, javelin throws, etc. Anybody can see who arrived first, which went farther, etc. It should be possible to measure the results with a machine such as a scale, sensor, or tape measure. The medieval Olympic games degenerated into circuses, too, and we are following that natural path of development or devolution. These circuses also distract people from useful social work which could be done on a global scale.
5. Class and Oppression The Olympic games are usually a good excuse to tear down old buildings, throw poor people out of their apartments to renovate them to rent to visitors, beef up the police force, spy on citizens, fly lots of helicopters over the city, etc. I could come up with a few more things I dislike about them, the environmental waste, the runaway corporatism, and so on, but this will do for now. It may seem like a good idea in principle to get the world's athletes together every once in a while for a massive series of games, but it has got to be overkill from the point of view of many. So many games are going on and most of them will not be watched or televised. It would be better to have a series of small competitions the way the world cup in soccer and other sports is done. I could probably be persuaded of some good effects of the games, but overall I find more to disgust me than inspire me.
Watching the Olympics makes me feel I am watching a row of dogs chained to their kennels, straining furiously at their chains, perhaps to see which one can get the closest to a passing cat. All the chains are the same length, but the cat may venture a little closer to one and one dog may feel that he really scared it and got the respect of the other dogs. The dogs are just hurting themselves the harder they strain to get the cat. Similarly, athletes are driven to do unhealthy things due to the money and politics of the games. The spectator fetish led to the corporate interest and money in the game, which led to athletes doping themselves, ruining their health and setting bad examples with their prostituted short athletic suicide lives, hopefully bringing down the whole decayed system to be replaced with the old family/neighborhood/community good-natured sports model, except now it is played with a Wii.
I do like China, though. And Taiwan. And the Dalai Lama. Long live Tibet! Can't we all just get along? I'm glad that China got a chance to hold the games, if it is important to them (and it is).
Savage Republic is a Los Angeles band that I became familiar with during the 1982 - 1986 time frame of my life in Los Angeles. Legend has it they developed their sound in the steam tunnels and parking garages of UCLA. They have been playing together again since a 2002 reunion and even have a CD and EP out, 1938 and Siam. Since the band seems to operate somewhat outside of space, time, and culture, their 1982-1986 releases could have just as easily been 2002-2006. (Actually, it would be much more believable if they were.)
The crisis of our country is not caused by external forces. The danger lies within. And the forces are real. And the danger is ever growing. It lies within. The forces of oppression are a danger we all feel when you remove the ignorance. And you find the crisis is real. And the danger is ever growing. It lies within.
Lo-budge ways to mark Int'l Zombie History Week w/o leaving your secure undisclosed zombie-resistant location except perhaps to open the door to pick up the groceries you ordered on the internet --particularly well-suited for the rainy season--
I recently got the dvd for I Am Legend. No choice really. I like zombie films, science-fiction, apocalyptic scenarios, and Will Smith (though I am not sure he is really an actor, he is at least a person who people readily identify with, an everyman wise-guy).
I killed some time watching the animation on the disk while waiting for my son. Then I couldn't navigate back to where I thought the feature was. Ejected, re-inserted. It's back to a menu for the animation. Wrong disk? I popped in the other disk of the 2-disk set.
I hadn't really noticed the large lettering in Japanese that said this 2-disk set had the alternate ending. I just thought it was another bloated 2-disk set to try to justify the price. The second disk had no English subtitles, just subtitles for Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and a long list of Asian languages. I thought that was odd since Japan shares a dvd region code with the UK, not Asia. Whatever, though. Turn on Japanese subtitles. Play. At the end, my significant other, who wasn't really watching, having seen it on a plane, was shocked and said it was nothing like the ending she had seen on the plane. I eventually realized I had watched the alternate, (=original) ending, so we watched the theatrical (movie-house) ending after that. I appreciate having them both. My head was already confused by the fact that the scripts I read online had nothing in common with the newest movie. It's just a big branching tree of alternate versions in my head now. I think I prefer the alternate ending (on dvd to the theatrical version on dvd).
Like every known human, I agree that the CG hemacytes (or mutants or infecteds or vampires or zombies or whatever) were pretty badly done. Use human actors! Do the CG special effects in post-production later the way, for example, Haley Joel Osment's blinks were entirely removed for A.I. (Hey, HJO is 20!). I don't like the way I Am Legend has been reduced to a twitchy gotcha kind of horror thriller.
Unfortunately, I haven't read the original book by Richard Matheson, (82 and living in NJ), preferring to feed on the brains of the free online media over the costly cellulosic carbon versions (no known free e-text version of it yet), so I can't evaluate it in terms of being true to the original form. Obviously these versions have not been.
Prior to seeing the film, I had googled for the scripts one day and read quickly through them (though I haven't read The Omega Man version yet).
I was surprised and pleased to find the first movie version of I Am Legend, The Last Man on Earth, is in the public domain.
The Last Man on Earth (1964)
Based on the chilling Richard Matheson science fiction Classic "I am Legend" and later remade as "The Omega Man" starring Charlton Heston. This classic features Vincent Price as scientist Robert Morgan in a post apocalyptic nightmare world. The world has been consumed by a ravenous plague that has transformed humanity into a race of bloodthirsty vampires. Only Morgan proves immune, and becomes the solitary vampire slayer.
According to IMDB and most reviewers, The Last Man on Earth was better than The Omega Man. However, I have to agree that (what one reviewer called) the "fruity, overwrought" Vincent Price was horribly miscast for the role (although his voice in particular is uniquely suited for other roles), and Charlton Heston or Will Smith are both better choices for Robert Neville aka Robert Morgan.
I found what seems to be an illegal upload of the movie on a site with lots of small discretely annoying ads at http://media.putfile.com/The-Omega-Man-1971-Part-1 --findable via google-video. Having just watched some of that, I think it may be the best of the three film adaptations. I've mentioned Vincent Price and should also say the S-L-O-W "vampire" aspects seem a throwback to the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. The Omega Man downplays vampirism, blaming the outbreak on germ warfare between Russia and China. Charlton Heston is given an automatic weapon (of course), rather than making wooden stakes on his home workshop lathe. The colors and 1970s look are somehow light years ahead of The Last Man on Earth. Charlton Heston picks through trash and finds lots of dessicated bodies as he searches for the infected. It wouldn't have to be that way. I mean, Night of the Living Dead from 1968 and Dawn of the Dead, from 1978 were both well-done for their times despite the changes in film production values and budgets.
Classic Cinema Online and Flick By Flick have nice collections of copyright-free movies. Laurel and Hardy, Felix the Cat, Popeye, and various other sci-fi, horror, cartoon, drama, and films of assorted genres are there. Some of these are simply streamed off of Google video, but they are more organized and easier to find than the anarchic free-for-all at Google-video/YouTube.
This is by Herk Harvey, the Centron Productions actor, director, and producer from Lawrence, Kansas. Many of his educational and industrial films are in the Prelinger Archive. BTW I've noticed that Rick Prelinger has a blog: BLACKOYSTERCATCHER. Might be worth checking out.
Wind and water continue to assault Iowa, the Hawkeye state, the land between the rivers, the lakeland in the river. Reviewing video of the May 25 tornado in Parkersburg, I think the best records were those made by closed circuit television. There was this one, which shows the wind tearing apart a house in a manner reminiscent of a nuclear test blast:
There was another set of videos from inside the bank (First State Bank), which show what it is like to share a room with an EF5 tornado. And you thought your roommate (or work-mate) was messy, wasteful, and temperamental.
I am also monitoring the newest floods on the Cedar River, Iowa River, Shell Rock River, and other rivers from afar. I have been getting some firsthand accounts and pictures, which are very relevant but limited. For its broadly collected content, YouTube is a little better than the news sites in some ways. I can see videos minutes after they are uploaded and be among the first 5 or 10 people to see them. The Des Moines Register, gazetteonline.com, wcfcourier.com, Chicago Tribune, Iowa City Press-Citizen, Daily Iowan, and Minneapolis/St. Paul Star Tribune have done some good reporting on it, but from what little I can tell, it doesn't seem to be getting as much national or international attention as one might expect. Perhaps there is only so much interest and empathy until something breaks through to a Katrina level of apocalypse. Perhaps it is only incredible to me because I know the area I am looking at. Or maybe I am just one of a small minority of people who seek to get a better grasp of reality by seeing its extremes, what happens when it is stretched and twisted. It could be that reporters just naturally cannot get in to the areas they need to to report as well as YouTube users can. However, at the moment, the story has risen to the top of Google News.
I shouldn't make promises, but I will have a little more to say about this at a future time.
Fresh from our Beer Garden…
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You smell like Oktoberfest… Photo courtesy of Ryan Haynes. Spotted in
China.
The post Fresh from our Beer Garden… first appeared on Engrish.com.
Mix: The Best of Shibuya-kei, Volume One
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The time has been right for a new mix that showcases, celebrates, and
reintroduces the best tracks from Shibuya-kei’s peak years: dj david, mon
amour - “Th...
Five years, that's all I've got
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*NEW BLOG HERE*
Loyal readers of this blog, if there are any left, may have noticed that I
have departed from my original purpose in 2011 of writing about ...
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