Links

Stuff I find around the web that interests or amuses me.

The most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on!

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I love the internet.

I’ve been working my way through reading the archives of xkcd (“Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language [which may be unsuitable for children], unusual humor [which may be unsuitable for adults], and advanced mathematics [which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors].”), which just catapulted into the ranks of ‘favorite web comic’ after I stumbled across the Map of Online Communities yesterday. I just came across this strip…

The younger folk in the audience think this is a joke.

Embedded as a tooltip (the little pop-up text that shows when you hover over an image) was the text, “The younger folk in the audience think this is a joke.”

Curious, a quick Google search led me to this story:

On a fishing trip in Plains, Georgia, President Carter had an encounter with a “swamp rabbit”. This seemingly trivial event was seized upon by the press and became a sort of Rorschach test of the Carter presidency: reporters and commentators saw in this story whatever they wanted to see in Carter’s administration. Jody Powell, Carter’s press secretary, described the affair in his 1986 book The Other Side of the Story:

It began late one afternoon in the spring of 1979. The President was sitting with a few of us on the Truman Balcony. He had recently returned from a visit to Plains, and we were talking about homefolks and how the quail were nesting and similar matters of international import.

Suddenly, for no apparent reason — he was drinking lemonade, as I recall — the President volunteered the information that while fishing in a pond on his farm he had sighted a large animal swimming toward him. Upon closer inspection, the animal turned out to be a rabbit. Not one of your cutesy, Easter Bunny-type rabbits, but one of those big splay-footed things that we called swamp rabbits when I was growing up.

The animal was clearly in distress, or perhaps berserk. The President confessed to having had limited experience with enraged rabbits. He was unable to reach a definite conclusion about its state of mind. What was obvious, however, was that this large, wet animal, making strange hissing noises and gnashing its teeth, was intent upon climbing into the Presidential boat.

The President then evidently shooed the critter away from his boat with a paddle.

Carter and the Killer Rabbit

(Photo in the public domain, courtesy the Jimmy Carter Library.)

Edward Scissorhands in Seattle

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Edward Logo And ImageAnyone want a deal on tickets to the touring production of Edward Scissorhands, the “magical new stage adaption of the classic Tim Burton film” presented as a “musical ‘play without words'” (which I must admit, sounds a lot like something called ‘ballet’ to me, but who am I to question these things)?

Edward Scissorhands broke all Box Office records when it premiered at Sadler’s Wells in November 2005. The musical “play without words” enjoyed a tour of the UK followed by visits to Tokyo, Seoul and Paris prior to coming to North America where it opened for a 23-week run in November 2006. The North American tour will visit 12 cities, including Washington DC, St. Louis, Brooklyn, Toronto, St. Paul, Denver and Seattle.

Audiences of all ages have been captivated by this unique production, as well as by the humor and charm of the leading character, Edward, an innocent soul forced to find his way in a world that doesn’t accept him.

Thanks to a very kind offer from the touring company, I’m able to pass on word of a special ‘Young Professional’s Night’ discount for one show only, next Friday, April 27th…

Attend Young Professionals’ Night at the 5th Avenue Theatre on Friday, April 27 at 8 PM and see the new stage adaptation of “Edward Scissorhands”

Buy your advance tickets for this special event using promotional code: TOPIARY. This code will get you the best seats available (a regular $68 value) for only $40. You must be 39 or under to take advantage of the offer. Please have your ID ready as you enter the theater.

To buy your tickets, simply go to http://www.5thavenue.org, call 206-625-1900, or stop by the 5th Avenue Theatre Box Office in-person. Don’t forget to use the promotional code TOPIARY when ordering your tickets.

For more information, visit the 5th Avenue Theatre Website.

Just move it to the streets

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Nice rant on Metroblogging Seattle yesterday regarding the ongoing, neverending mess of a fight between Greg “Big Dig Seattle” Nickels, Christine “Viaduct? Vhy not a duck?” Gregoire, and the people of Seattle who just want this all over with…

But let me tell you anyway what I think, because damn it, I’m a Seattleite and I’m going to give you my opinion because I demand to be heard.

  1. Tear the goddamned viaduct down.
  2. Do all the multimodal work you should have done decades ago to hook the working port and industrial areas into rail and road.
  3. Make Alaskan Way into something like the Embarcadeo — with the Benson streetcar running down the middle of the boulevard, parking lots replaced with public parks, and a no-new-construction zone on the waterfront keeping Martin Selig and those other condo-building town destroyers from ripping down all that historic architecture.
  4. Lean on the state to fix traffic flow on southbound I-5 so I can get to the airport. You know, like MOVE THE DAMN 520 ONRAMP TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ROAD SO WE CAN STOP THIS DAMN MERCER WEAVE CRAP. Or fixing it so there’s MORE THAN ONE TRAVEL LANE THROUGH DOWNTOWN. The state can do this, and it will be CHEAPER than the $15 billion the tunnel’s now going to cost because Tim “when I was a third-grader I never learned how to carry a one” Ceis didn’t know that CONCRETE ISN’T BROUGHT TO CONTRACTORS BY THE MAGIC BUILDING MATERIALS FAIRY WHEN THEY LEAVE A PIECE OF BRICK UNDER THEIR PILLOWS AT NIGHT.

Looks like Dan Savage agrees.

Given that I think the Viaduct is ugly and intrusive enough as it is, and don’t really want to see a bigger one (good summary here, and that it seems like Seattle getting its own version of the Big Dig (and, apparently, a more dangerous version) seems pretty stupid, I’m keeping my fingers crossed for just getting rid of the Viaduct and moving everything onto the street. Sure, not easy, and will take some serious rearranging. But from what I’ve been reading, it sure seems to be cheaper, safer, and a lot more visually attractive once all’s said and done. Besides, as many have pointed out, that’s the option we’re going to have no matter what during Viaduct removal, rebuilding, or tunnel digging — so why not just commit to it as a permanent measure and do it right?

Are ‘diggers’ the internet’s neocons?

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A couple of disclaimers to start with:

  1. I don’t use digg (outside of setting up an account which has rarely been touched).

  2. The analogy is probably quite strained, and I keep bouncing between two ways of expressing it, neither of which I think are quite right:

  • internet : politics :: digg : internet
  • neocons : politics :: diggers : internet

That said…

Wil went on a rant today about diggers dragging the ‘net down to somewhere below the least common denominator.

I’ve been a Digger for a long time, and always felt like I could rely on Digg’s homepage to reliably and consistently direct me to interesting and useful content, accompanied by insightful, funny, and interesting commentary.

My, how things have changed in just a few months. The links (that make it past the bury brigade) are still pretty good, but for whatever reason, the maturity and behavior of the average Digger has evolved into, well, something resembling a middle school lunch room. While Digg has always been a great way to share your creation with a large audience on the Internet, the associated grief that frequently comes with being exposed to Digg’s userbase has lead to several sites blocking Digg, shutting off comments because of abusive Diggers, and using complicated .htaccess rewrites to send Digg’s traffic away.

This struck me as being the same basic premise of part of what Mike was talking about here (some of which I mentioned yesterday) only applied to neocons and the internet in relation to politics, rather than to diggers.

I think this is a specific result of the rise of neoconservatives to cultural and political power. Note that I don’t attribute this to conservatives or conservatism, but specifically to _neo_conservatives. I don’t believe that the neoconservative political or social culture is interested in conducting their affairs with civility or with any degree of compromise — and therein lies the problem, as it creates a culture of war. I may not have written about politics in quite a long time…but during that interim, I’ve constantly linklogged to neoconservatives’ actions throughout the American political and social culture, and they are always extremist and seemingly operating under the slogan of “no quarter given.” And although I had hoped this extremism might die with the end of Bush’s Presidency, it seems as if moderates are willing to metamorphose into extremists if it gets them the power they seek (McCain) or that other extremists are ready to jump into the situation the moment a void forms (Romney).

It’s that same all-or-nothing, no-quarter-given, us-or-them, black-and-white viewpoint that our culture is rapidly sinking into. No matter whether the arena is politics or the net, online or off, there seems to be no room left for people who actually want to talk to each other, even if they don’t agree. Respectful discourse, on the whole, doesn’t exist anymore — and how can it, when we’re too busy shouting down the opposition to actually listen to what they have to say?

Wanted: One Apology from the Seattle PI

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Generally speaking, I tend to like the Seattle PI better than the Seattle Times. However, when a crane collapsed in Bellevue last November, I was disgusted by the PI’s response: an immediate front-page article digging up and detailing five-year-old accounts of the past drug use of the poor guy operating the crane that day. As if this guy’s day wasn’t bad enough — he goes to work, climbs to the top of a tower crane, and then rides the thing down as it collapses into nearby apartment buildings — he then has to endure the ingominy and public humiliation of having his past transgressions dug up, splashed across the front page of the newspaper, and implicitly blamed as the cause of the accident. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t had a drug conviction in five years, nor that his employer required drug tests that he had reliably passed, nor that there was no indication of drug use at the time of the accident. What mattered was that he was guilty! Guilty, guilty, guilty!

This morning, the PI reported on the official determination of the cause of the crane’s collapse:

A poorly designed foundation was the primary cause of the tower crane collapse in Bellevue, a deadly construction accident that spurred state lawmakers Friday to introduce crane-safety bills that would rank among the toughest in the nation.

A three-month investigation into the crash by the Department of Labor and Industries has found that the crane’s steel foundation failed, and that the 210-foot-high structure would not have toppled if it had been bolted into concrete like most other tower cranes, sources close to the investigation told the Seattle P-I.

I, along with more than a few other people, feel quite strongly that the PI owes the crane operator an apology. Easy as it may have been to do, their public vilification of the crane operator — based on nothing more than sensationalistic items in his past, not through any verifiable current information — was a slimy, sleazy way to grab eyeballs and sell papers at the expense of his reputation. Trial and conviction should be handled in the courts, not in the headlines.

PostSecret

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If you haven’t run across PostSecret yet, check it out. The concept is incredibly simple: people write their secrets on a postcard and send them in. Every Sunday, a new batch of secrets is posted on the site.

They’re funny, sad, uplifting, heartbreaking — and incredible.

TagMaps

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TagMaps is a really cool little toy from Yahoo’s research labs that I just stumbled across. It’s using heavy concentrations of tags on Flickr and overlaying them on a map, allowing you to zoom around the map and see how people have tagged their city. Here’s the official verbiage:

TagMaps is a toolkit to visualize text (well, tags) geographically on a map. Check out the sample applications, where we use Flickr tags on a map to build a world exploration tool.

The World Explorer engine analyzes the information tied to the photos (such as location and tags) to find the main “attractions” in each location and in every zoom level and compute their “importance”. We use the tags, on the map, in varying font sizes, to represent these attractions.

Here’s a sample of the World Explorer, centered on Seattle…

(via Flickr Central)

Weekly World News

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Best discovery of the past couple weeks: the Weekly World News (sorry, Seattle Weekly and Stranger, but this is my favorite weekly newspaper) has an RSS feed.

I mean, really — how could I survive without knowing about this kind of breaking news?

Dreaded Hot Tub Kraken Menaces Hotel Guests:

A squid infestation has forced the closure of Hollerheim Suites’ flagship hotel.

“The creature is viscid enough to dart through the hotel’s narrow plumbing,” said squid abatement expert Erik Pontoppidan. “It surfaces in guests’ bubble baths, coils hapless bathers in its tentacles, and vanishes again in a deadly but invigorating whirlpool.”

So far, no guests have been seriously hurt, though one bather did emerge, wet and dazed, from a bidet three rooms down the hall from his suite.

“In all of these cases the kraken was successfully repelled with a loofah,” Pontoppidan explained.

Five Injured When Ouija Planchette Leaps From Board in Search of Semicolon:

Five people were injured last week when a planchette–the device which points to letters and numbers on Ouija Boards–flew violently out of a house in search of a semicolon.

The planchette went rogue when Kelly Smerton, eleven, and her sister Karen, twelve, inadvertently channelled the spirit of a deceased English teacher.

“Apparently he was a pretty mean one,” said Deborah Smerton, the girls’ mother.

At the end of an independent clause condemning the Smerton house as a “den of ignoramuses,” the ghost suddenly flung the planchette out of the girl’s hands, shattering the bay window of their bedroom.

Rainier and the Flood

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Looks like the scenery is going to be a little bit different next time Prairie and I are able to head down to Mt. Rainier for a weekend getaway. The heavy rains and flooding of the past weeks have hit Rainier National Park hard, including quite a few of the areas that we went through this summer.

All park roads and entrances remain closed. Crews continue repair work on Nisqually Road at Sunshine Point and on Longmire utilities.

Extensive damage to backcountry bridges and trails. Sections of the Wonderland Trail may be unusable next summer.

The suspension bridge and boardwalk damaged at the Grove of the Patriarchs. The Grove is covered in a thick layer of silt.

More than two miles of the [Carbon] road are severely damaged. There are washed out sections in at least four places.

The main channel of the Nisqually River is pushing closer to the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) building. Parking behind the building is gone.

The [Sunshine Point] campground, located directly on the bank of the Nisqually River, and the dike that protected it, is gone with the exception of a few campsites.

The [Longmire] main campground road is completely removed at the road fork immediately behind the Community Building.

About 200 yards of the [Nisqually] road is washed out and impassable at the former entrance to Sunshine Point Campground.

Both lanes [of SR123] are washed out at MP 11.5 to a depth of 60-80 feet.

And those are just some of the key, most recognizable areas (well, most recognizable to me after a whopping single visit to the park).

There’s a collection of images and videos surveying the damage on this page. Pretty impressive.