Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
A Seattle Flickr Meetup is in the works, folks — first one is Thursday, July 28th at 7pm, at the Six Arms Pub. Stop by and say hi!
the Meetup.com page,
and an Upcoming.org listing for the first meetup.
“Ich Bin Ein Auslander (Fun-Da-Mental)” by Pop Will Eat Itself from the album Two Fingers My Friends! (1995, 5:34).
A few shots of the International District Summer Festival, since I went back with my camera yesterday. ;)
“Bless You” by Orlando, Tony from the album Pop Music: The Golden Era 1951-1975 (1961, 2:09).
After getting a call from my optometrist letting me know that my new sunglasses were ready to be picked up (I lost my old pair a few weeks ago), I got ready to go. On my way out the door, I looked at my camera sitting on my desk. Should I take it?
I debated back and forth for a couple seconds, then decided not to. As I’m wearing my mocker kilt today, which doesn’t have the big cargo pockets that the original does, I’d have had to strap the little camera case onto my belt, and I didn’t really feel like carrying that with me. Besides, I was just running about a mile away into the International District and back.
I should have known better. It’s some sort of corollary to Murphy’s Law; by leaving the camera at home, I was virtually guaranteeing that I’d later wish I had it with me.
After picking up my shades (so nice to have those again!), I decided to take the long way home, heading down through the International District, up through the Financial District to Westlake Center, up Pine, and then up 8th back to home. It was a nice day, I was in the mood for a walk, and hey — with the sun out, I needed to break in the sunglasses.
As I walked down Jackson through the International District, I noticed that one of the streets was blocked off, and it looked like there were booths set up in the street. Some sort of festival going on? Indeed it was, as I found when I headed over to investigate — I’d blundered right into the Chinatown/International District Summer Festival. Kicking myself for not having my camera, I spent a pleasant few minutes wandering through a marvelous mish-mash of color, culture, and language (one where my fair-skinned, kilt-wearing self was definitely in the minority).
Thankfully, the festival is going on all weekend, so I’m hoping to head that way tomorrow to see what I can get shots of.
After leaving the festival and continuing down Jackson, I hung a right on 4th and started working my way towards downtown. A few blocks up, I noticed police bikes on the street corner, blocking off a section of sidewalk next to a construction site where a building is being demolished. It didn’t look like anything had gone wrong with the demolition, though, as midway down that side of the street were a couple vans, a small crew of people, and what looked to be a fair amount of film camera equipment.
I couldn’t quite puzzle out what was going on, as there didn’t seem to be much activity at that point. There were a couple guys sitting on the corner that looked to be part of the crew, so I asked them if they could tell me what was going on. “Sure,” one of them said. “They’re filming a Chevy commercial.” I didn’t get more details than that — the conversation soon switched to my Utilikilt — but apparently, a Seattle construction site may be featured in a future Chevrolet commercial at some point in the future.
Just across the street from the film crew was a fountain that two teens had stopped to cool off in. As I walked by I looked up, and the guy called to me, “Hey! Good to see you!” Turns out that he’s a guy I’ve seen around town from time to time — I took a shot of him and a friend at the Pride parade — and he was showing a friend from Canada around Seattle. They’d just missed the Underground Tour and were killing time for a while when I came by, so we ended up chatting for a few minutes.
After letting them continue on with their day (which, when I looked back, started with them getting absolutely drenched in the fountain), I continued up 4th, through Westlake Plaza, up Pine, and then up 8th until I got home. All in all almost a four mile walk over the course of just under two hours. Not too bad, and a very pleasant afternoon.
Tomorrow, though — I’m bringing my damn camera.
Today’s headline of the day award (even though the headline’s a couple days old, thanks to me being a bit behind in my newsreader, as always…) comes from CNet:
Toss in a few hot dogs and some potato salad, and we’re set for a summer picnic!
“No Secret” by Liquid Jesus from the album Pour In the Sky (1991, 4:47).
(Photos taken a couple weeks ago at Golden Gardens Park. Layout done with Comic Life — neat little program!)
A few shots from tonight’s ‘Electric’ Seattle Photobloggers exhibition at Art Rage Studios, as part of this month’s First Thursday Art Walk in Pioneer Square.
“Skin Trade” by Duran Duran from the album Decade (1986, 4:28).
Yikes.
Witnesses saw the top ripped off a double-decker bus near Russell Square close to King’s Cross train terminal, and three more apparently coordinated explosions caused carnage on packed subway trains as Londoners made their way to work.
Security sources told Reuters there were fatalities at all four bomb sites, and Sky Television said at least 45 people had been killed. A further 150 were seriously wounded, and hospital staff said some were unlikely to survive.
“I was on the bus,” said one dazed passenger. “I looked round and the seats behind me were gone.”
“You could see bodies on the road outside,” said another eyewitness, Peter Gordon. “There was smoke everywhere. It was carnage.”
Paddick said the first explosion had come at 8:51 a.m. BST (O351 ET) near Liverpool Street, Aldgate and Aldgate East Underground stations, where seven were confirmed dead.
At 8:56 a.m. there was a second explosion on a Piccadilly Line train near Kings Cross and Russell Square tube stations, where 21 were confirmed dead.
At 9:17 a.m. there was an explosion on a train traveling into Edgware Road station, affecting two other trains, with five confirmed dead.
At 9:47a.m there was an explosion on a bus at Upper Woburn Place near Tavistock Square. Fatalities have been confirmed, but the number is unknown at this stage.
There were 700-900 people on each of the affected trains at the time, he added.
Flickr: Photos tagged with ‘london’, London Bomb Blasts Pool, London Explosions Pool
Metroblogging London and Londonist are both covering events.
I got curious how many other people had participated in the meme, and did a Google Search for one sentence in the post.
Google returned 162 hits.
However — and this is what made all this funny to me — Google also suggested that maybe that wasn’t really what I wanted to search for. Maybe I really wanted to search for the phrase, “She still had the training wheels on as she wobbled and struggled to paddle.“
It’s amazing how different the results are when you change one little letter.
It’s entirely possible that some of you may have tried to leave a comment here in the past few days and gotten an error message instead. Turns out that there’s currently a nasty little conflict between Movable Type and CPanel (a webserver administration package) that’s hitting me.
If you are experiencing intermittent “500 Server Errors” while using Movable Type and are using MySQL for your database, we are aware of the cause of the prblem: a nightly CPanel update of a buggy version of the DBI and DBD::MySQL drivers. See this post on the Professional Network Weblog for more details.
The MT engineering team has been actively working with developer to help him rectify the problem. We apologize for any inconvenience and will keep you up to date on our progress as well as post here when the problem is solved.
Until that’s fixed, things may be a little tweaky around here. Unfortunately, it’s hitting me, too — I’ve got my next mix ready to Podcast, but I haven’t been able to get MT to rebuild and actually display it yet. I’m not even sure if this post is going to make it up immediately.
In any case, the problem is known, and — I hope — will be rectified as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!
The fourth of my old collection of mix sessions that I’m putting up for download and podcast. This one starts a few that move away from the “Difficult Listening Hour” series to explore some other ideas I had running through my head. It’s shorter, not quite half an hour long, and has something of a ‘spy music’ theme.
Standard disclaimer: All the mixes I’m posting were mixed ‘live’ — running a Pioneer dual CD mixer directly into my computer and recording straight to .mp3 — and have had no post-mix editing done in the computer. As such, they’re not flawless, but they’re not bad, either, if I do say so myself.
Here’s the link: Mission Accomplished (27m 41s, 31.69Mb). Tracks included are: