Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
I got a nice surprise in the mail today: Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light, by Patrick McGilligan, from someone (a reader, I’m guessing?) in Italy.
Many thanks, Giovanni!
iTunes: “Always Something There to Remind Me” by Naked Eyes from the album Living in Oblivion Vol. 1 (1983, 3:41).
Sirens.
More sirens.
Wow, that’s a lot of sirens. Maybe I should take a look…
And with those thoughts to wake me up at 7:45am today, I found out that the Jensonia hotel, right next door to my apartment building just off of 8th and Seneca, was on fire. Again.
This time was much bigger than the last one I saw, though — tons of trucks, police, and firefighters all over the place. Streets have been blocked off for a few blocks around, from at least Spring to Pike on 8th, and from 9th to 7th on Seneca. Multiple ambulances, a few tanker trucks, and two ladder trucks with their ladders out and extended to the roof of the building.
When I hopped out onto my fire escape to keep an eye on things, there was smoke billowing out the windows of the top floor. I could see one man on the roof of the building, and two pairs of feet sticking out of a window on the top floor, waiting as the firefighters maneuvered the ladder of the first ladder truck into place. They were brought down safely and ushered to an ambulance, and the guy trapped on the roof was brought down just a moment thereafter.
The firefighters have been working on the fire since then. It looked to me like it was mostly contained about half an hour ago (8:45am) — at the very least, the activity level dropped off a bit, and smoke stopped coming out of the building — but as of now (9:20am), all the trucks are still there, the ladders are still extended to the roof, and there are still a lot of emergency workers milling around in the street. My guess is that the main blaze is out, and now they’re just dealing with the cleanup work.
I’m really starting to wonder just how much longer the Jensonia is going to be habitable. There was the fire I saw in January, apparently there was one I missed last week, and now this one. How many fires can one building sustain before it’s out-and-out condemned?
Here’s the two reports I’ve found on today’s incident so far:
From KIRO (courtesy of Ermac in my LJ Seattle Community thread): 9 Hurt In 3-Alarm Fire Near Downtown Seattle
Nine injuries are reported from a 3-alarm fire near downtown Seattle.
Five women and four men were treated for minor smoke inhalation and eight were taken to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, fire department spokeswoman Helen Fitzpatrick told KIRO 7 Eyewitness News.
The fire was reported at 7:45 a.m. at the 7-story Jensonia Hotel, a 1920s vintage residential hotel on 8th Ave. at Seneca in the First Hill area near downtown.
When firefighters arrived, flames were coming out a sixth-floor window. The fire was under control by 8:41 a.m.
More than 80 firefighters in five engines, five ladder trucks and medic units and other cars converged on the scene.
And from KING5: Nine injured in downtown Seattle apartment building fire
Witnesses said some residents were clinging to windows trying to get out of the building.
“It looked like they kept hanging out further and further,” said Heather Young, resident. “Everyone down at the bottom was screaming ‘don’t jump, don’t jump’ because the smoke was just billowing out behind them just really, really thick. People were worried they couldn’t breathe.”
Firefighters used ladders to evacuate some residents since smoke filled many of the stairwells, preventing many elderly residents from leaving the building.
Shots from Sky KING showed several firefighters attacking the blaze, which reportedly started on the sixth and seventh floors, from the roof of the building. Firefighters doused water and flame retardent on the blaze and contained the fire by 8:30 a.m.
I’ve uploaded a gallery of sixty-three images I took this morning, mostly from the fire escape out my window. Enjoy!
iTunes: “Fire” by Hendrix, Jimi from the album Radio One (1967, 2:43).
Major fire next door, close to the intersection of 8th and Seneca, right now. More soon.
Jacqueline pointed out The Truth Laid Bear‘s Weblog Ecosystem, which ranks weblogs by how many links point to them. Similar to Technorati, really, as far as I can tell. Not that that’s a bad thing, of course…just something I noticed.
Of course, I had to sign up.
As I’m brand new to the system, I’m currently an “Insignificant Microbe“. In theory, after they do a scan and figure out how many other sites link to me, I could move up a bit…we’ll see how that goes.
iTunes: “This House is Cursed” by Altered Ego from the album Radikal Techno Vol. 2 (1992, 5:17).
I can hardly wait until this is finished enough for the ‘download’ link to be active: IE7, a hack to force IE into behaving like a modern browser.
This is an attempt to make Microsoft Internet Explorer more compliant when it comes to web standards.
Web developers are becoming increasingly frustrated at the lack of convergence of the major browser vendors. We need a level playing field!
CSS is a powerful technology. Many of it’s more advanced features go unused by web developers because of Explorer’s poor support of CSS standards.
IE7 provides support for most of the important CSS enhancements. A full list is available on the compatibility page.
About time someone figured out how to do this, since Microsoft doesn’t seem to want to bother…;)
iTunes: “You’re Gonna Get Yours” by Public Enemy from the album Yo! Bum Rush the Show (1987, 4:05).
There used to be a stupid little prank you could play on unsuspecting Mac users (running System 8 or 9 — if I remember correctly, the required utility wasn’t included in previous systems). Normally, when you were done using the computer, you would choose Special > Shutdown… to turn the computer off. However, apparently too many people had difficulties with that, so Apple started including a small utility that lived in the Apple Menu called Shutdown that would…shut down the computer.
So, if you wanted to annoy someone and had a moment at their Mac when their back was turned, you could copy that Shutdown application from the Apple Menu Items folder into the Startup Items folder. Once that was done, every time they started up their computer, as the system went through the Startup Items, it’d find that program, and shut right down again. Simple, and wonderfully annoying.
Tonight, I found a similar prank for Windows XP in Tech TV’s ‘Best Computer Pranks Ever’, and was fairly amused to see how convoluted the process was to get the same result!
To recap — on the Mac:
On Windows XP…
- Right-click the Start menu.
- Select Explore Users.
- Navigate to Programs > Startup.
- Right-click the file windows and select New > Shortcut.
- When the window pops up asking for the location, enter “
%windir%system32shutdown.exe -r -t 00“.
On the one hand, it’s “only” five steps versus two, and I could have broken the Mac list into three steps (by splitting the first step into two). But even beyond that, there’s that cute little text string that has to be typed in to get the program to execute correctly.
Okay, yeah. So maybe it’s a good thing that — at least in this one instance — it’s harder to annoy someone under Windows XP than under the Classic Mac OS. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t amuse me, though.
iTunes: “Moon Over Greene County” by Zanes, Dan from the album Natural Born Killers (1993, 2:19).
For those of you (if there are any, of course) that use an RSS newsreader and occasionally check into the Hanscom Family Photo Gallery, there is now an RSS feed available to notify you of updates, courtesy of the Gallery RSS Generator.
(via Lockergnome’s RSS Resource)
iTunes: “Television” by Rollins, Henry from the album Think Tank (1998, 12:42).
This makes me cringe just thinking about it…Shakespeare re-written in modern prose, as today’s kids can’t seem to comprehend it as it was originally written.
“Et tu, Brute?”
Not anymore.
“And you too, Brutus?” is what students read in a new genre of study guides that modernize the Elizabethan English found in “Julius Caesar” and other plays by William Shakespeare.
These guides move beyond the plot summaries found in other study aides by providing line-by-line translations in modern-day English.
Once barred from school, the new translations now are being used in classes across metro Atlanta.
Ugh.
Ugh, ugh, ugh.
Or, more appropriately, in the words of Isabella in Measure for Measure — “Thy sin’s not accidental, but a trade.”
Or even better, Falstaff, in Henry the Fourth, Part II — “You scullion! You rampallian! You fustilarian! I’ll tickle your catastrophe!”
Admittedly, I may be an odd case — after reading the abridged version of Les Misérables in high school, I fell so in love with the story that I went out and bought the full, unabridged version, and it’s remained one of my favorites ever since. So for me, hacking something up is bad enough…but re-writing it like this?
Truly a travesty.
The one possible good point I can see is if the kids are captivated enough by the stories that they may someday go out and find the original versions — but I don’t think I’ll be holding my breath on that count.
(via Ben Hammersley, with help from the Shakespearean Insult Generator)
iTunes: “I Hold a Prince” by Poems for Laila from the album La Fillette Triste (1991, 3:07).
Tori Amos has a new “greatest hits” collection available at the iTunes Music Store called ‘A Tori Amos Collection — Tales of a Librarian‘. Normally, this wouldn’t be terribly interesting to me, as I already have a very large Tori collection, and therefore wouldn’t have much need for a compilation album. However, this one caught my eye for two reasons.
Firstly, there are two exclusive tracks included only if you purchase the full album through the iTMS: Putting the Damage On (Reconditioned) and Pretty Good Year (Live from Sound Check). Secondly, all of the songs have been ‘reworked’ or ‘reconditioned’, which made me curious.
So far, I’m fairly impressed with what I’ve heard. None of the new versions are entirely new — in fact, on some of them, the changes are so subtle as to be almost unnoticeable, and I was initially starting to wonder if they had simply used ‘reworked’ rather than ‘remastered’ as a term and had just re-issued the original tracks. However, there are some definite changes to the tracks, usually in the form of a few extra instruments here and there, an extra vocal track or harmony line…slight edits and additions that flesh out the tracks a bit more.
One noticeable exception to the rule is the ‘reworked’ version of Professional Widow, which actually appears to be an edit of Armand van Helden’s dance remix of the track!
Overall, it’s not a must-buy for most people, but for a collector or for someone (like me) who gets a kick out of listening to a track’s production, trying to identify how it was all assembled, the collection is definitely worth the download.
iTunes: “Professional Widow (Reworked)” by Amos, Tori from the album A Tori Amos Collection – Tales of a Librarian (2003, 3:47).
Okay, so we’re not performing the ceremonies yet, but it’s a start. Mayor Greg Nickles issued an executive order today declaring that the City of Seattle will recognize gay marriages.
“Seattle has often been in the forefront of protecting all its citizens regardless of sexual orientation,” Nickels said at a news conference announcing the order. He also proposed an ordinance to extend protections for gay married couples throughout the city.
At the same time, six couples prepared to file suit to force the state to reconsider its discriminatory “Defense of Marriage Act” and allow them to marry.
The six couples here applied for and were denied marriage licenses Monday morning in King County, which includes Seattle. Ron Sims, who is the King County executive, a supporter of gay marriage and a candidate for governor, participated in a staged event encouraging the couples to sue him and other county officials. They did so, filing a challenge to Washington’s 1998 Defense of Marriage Act.
“I have always said I will follow the rule of law,” Mr. Sims said. “I will not issue licenses, but I thought it was appropriate to have a challenge through the court system.”
Lisa Stone, executive director of the Northwest Women’s Law Center, one of the legal groups representing the six couples in the suit, said she thought it was more effective to mount a legal challenge to the state law, rather than encourage city, county or state officials to issue marriage licenses in defiance of the law, only to have them legally challenged later.
iTunes: “Ocean Size” by Jane’s Addiction from the album Nothing’s Shocking (1988, 4:19).