Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
It is always good to hear that Peter has gotten another story onto the AP wire out west. He called me on his way out of the second meeting, wherein things seemed to be leaning towards allowing the platting of a subdivision named Sinnerville, since there was this governor out there named Sinner... But the goods that got picked up by the wire:
Subdivision name raises some county eyebrows
By PETER GARTRELL, News-Record Writer
May 1, 2006
Religion and government don't often mix but there appears to be a holy controversy brewing over a subdivision name that could boil over in the chambers of the Campbell County Commission.
Commissioners on Tuesday will consider the final plat of a 42-acre subdivision north of Rozet called Sinnerville.
That's right. Sinnerville.
The subdivision, which is being brought before county commissioners by Jason Sinner, generated some controversy during a November Planning Commission meeting, which is usually a mundane affair.
“I expect there would be some discussion on that. However, the county really does not regulate the naming of subdivisions unless there's a conflict with another subdivision,” Chairwoman Marilyn Mackey said.
Sinner couldn't be reached for comment Monday morning but Barb Doyle, of Doyle Land Surveying, who has worked with Sinner on the subdivision, said he would attend Tuesday's commission meeting and fight any attempt to change the name.
At the November meeting, Sinner told planners that he is proud of his name and his family, which has among its ranks a former North Dakota governor, George A. Sinner, a Democrat who served from 1985-1992.
Peter is all over the place, churning out one thing after another: Lodging tax to get review from county, Wright. That must have been a sweet meeting. Wygen II plant on track to finish early, Few apply for 14 positions on various county boards, Court sides with county, says mine must pay $1.7M, Former mayor, senator eyes commission seat and best of all, Rural ballfield will become an open space.
Picked up in Grand Forks: Campbell Co. to consider final plat for 'Sinnerville'
Associated Press
GILLETTE, Wyo. - Pleasant, it may be. But just imagine the signs: "Welcome to Sinnerville."
Thank God P is holding it down out there for all us sinners!
Over the weekend, our man Peter got a story about retiring Wyoming mine workers picked up by the Associated Press & the Casper Star Tribune. Peter works at the Gillette News-Record these days. The last 14 days of Peter stories are here.
Aging in the coal mines
By PETER GARTRELL
The (Gillette) News-Record Monday, April 03, 2006
GILLETTE (AP) -- Meet Lee Yake. He has 25 years of experience working in Powder River Basin coal mines.
A couple of years ago, he decided he'd had enough of the long hours and that it was time to retire. At 59, he is his own boss after buying Industrial Alternators and Starters. If offered him a good change of pace, and provides him with a business he plans eventually to turn over to his son, Terry.
Standing in front of shelves filled with rebuilt starters and alternators for every size of vehicle from pickups to 300-ton haul trucks, Yake said many of his friends who began working in the mines during the 1970s are also considering retirement.
"There's a lot of people that started back when I did that aren't in the Social Security range," he said. "Most of the guys I've seen around, they've had enough."
When they leave, they will take with them a wealth of knowledge.
Meet Dave McElhiney. The 46-year-old former sheriff's deputy has been working as a mechanic for Powder River Coal's Caballo mine for the past four years. That's long enough to know that more than one of his co-workers is eying retirement.
"I got one that's retiring in March, one that's retiring at the end of the year and a bunch that are retiring in three to five years," he said.
He worries that when people like Yake begin to clock out for the last time, they will take with them critical knowledge. For example, not many new hires can modify older machinery and bring it up to code.
Also On NewWest.net, a blog-style site about the western US, notes Peter's contribution to ongoing discussions of the western coal industry:
Black Butte Coal Co. estimates the extra 1,400 acres would bring production up to 1.5 million to 3 million tons of coal over about 20 years. But, as Peter Gartrell from the Gillette News Record reports, the question remains: With many of the old-time coal miners nearing retirement, is there a new generation willing to take over?
Yea Peter, you go man!!! (file photo)
The flight went from MSP > Las Vegas > Tucson, so i had 35 minutes to kill in Babel. Look ma, i found the key to the Bush economy:
I lost $10 in the slots right away and decided I had mastered Vegas.
This is an avenue nearby Nick and Abby's. It rained the night I got there for the first time in weeks. Note the embedded trolley rail.
There is a pending bill in the state Legislature that would make it illegal for anyone to aid illegal immigrants. Many people in the area had signs that said "humanitarian aid is never a crime / no more deaths / no mas muertes".
Quality Nick Moments. He works at the Medicine Man Gallery and can be seen here forging an authenticity certificate.
Expensive developments in the foothills / nice cars around the neighborhoods. Old cars are much easier to preserve in the warmer climate than here in Minnesnowta.
Military presence: planes and helicopters buzzed constantly. This photo is upside down right now but it shows A-10 Warthogs cruising around above the University stadium. I will clean both these up and post properly later.
Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum outside of town: The mountain lion exhibit honors Barry Goldwater, naturally. Note the hummingbird.
More photos from the student protest. These guys are from Telemundo Arizona (Telemundo is owned by NBC Universal, I didn't know that). Actually that one on the right is a very funny video which I will put up soon.
Well that is enough for now. I have to go to bed and get up early to do the Morning Reports. More to come, including video...
My mom was nice enough to get me at 4:15 AM from the airport. I just walked in. We got breakfast at Mickey's Diner on W. 7th. I am going to sleep now. That is all. I will post lots of goodies later today!
I was wandering around downtown Tucson when I came across a protest in front of the federal building. Hundreds of area students walked out of classes and came down there to protest the immigrant situation and action in Washington...
Telemundo Arizona and the local Fox affiliate were there. I got some video clips too that I will put up later. More coverage of protest actions in Arizona can be found on Arizona Indymedia.
I might put more before I get back but likely not.
arizona daily star: Student throngs here walk out for 2nd day
Nearly 1,200 join demonstrations By Daniel Scarpinato and Jeff Commings
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 03.31.2006At least 1,150 students from across the city walked out of class Thursday and marched through the streets, the second straight day of protests against a national effort to strengthen border security and crack down on illegal immigration.
School officials and police officers rushed to manage the situation, delivering water, clearing streets and brainstorming ways to prevent the walkouts from continuing as classwork took a back seat to activism.
Those who walked out came from at least 18 schools. Groups of 100 or more students came from Catalina, Flowing Wells, Palo Verde and Tucson high schools. Elementary- and middle-schoolers also joined in the protests, with the largest group from Pistor Middle School.
The actions followed similar efforts in Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Diego as a divided Congress embarks on possibly changing immigration policy.
So I am chilling here in Tucson, and I got up hella early to work out with my hosts at the University club, so I am being productive for vacation. I'm going to wander around downtown in a bit. And I'm gonna put some pictures up later.
On the plane I read "Crashing the Gate" by Markos "DailyKos" Zuniga and Jerome Armstrong, both of them top liberal bloggers. They set out to look at where the Democratic Party needs to go, structurally, while looking at how Republicans keep stuff tamped down. It was worth reading to get a better understanding of the chokehold that DC consultants place on how local parties are run, and how the media buy commission game works. On the other hand, parts of it seemed to drag a bit. Especially since these guys have been writing paragraph-length posts for a few years, any book would be uneven.
It is laden with useful facts about how the Dems need to fix their field-level operations as well as generate some thick DC policy books - and a population of well-fed wonks to counterbalance Heritage/AEI/CATO - that can distill a sense of thought-out planning to a better-populated liberal talkers in the media. They note how Democrats can't match the Republicans' incubation structure of scholarship->College Republican>fat intern gig> corporation/ conservative grad program>think tank type pathway that churns out more and more little Ralph Reeds. This is where a lot of the Scaife-type money has been put since Goldwater and it's paid off, because it's a complete food chain that produces broad political power. So the Dems need one, "Crashing the Gate" is saying.
It was cool to look at how genuine Democrats can get going in states like Colorado and Montana (Gov. Brian Schweitzer and Sen. candidate Jon Tester figure big in the book) and win. I think that's really encouraging for more liberal people out in places that DC Democrats always write off as "permanently Red." There's a lot of criticism for how the Democratic Party seems to be piloted by the checkoff lists of its major constituent interest groups - excluding people who aren't cookie cutters. They note how the National Organization of Women's support of Sen. Lincoln Chaffee, because while they're feinting pro-choice, they're actually putting abortion MORE at risk, because Chaffee's just Another Republican that shifts power to the right.
There's a lot more to the book, so if you're an activist (of any party) it's useful for looking at the state of the campaign. It's a bit odd, but anyway...
American Theocracy:
When we look back on the three subsequent decades (70s, 80s, 90s), it is now possible to describe a much grander convergence of forces: (1) oil's ever tightening grip on Washington politics and psychologies; (2) the cumulative destabilization of the Middle East; (3) the rise of varying degrees of radical Christianity, Judaism, and Islam around the world; (4) the biblical and geopolitical focus on Israel; and (5) the reemergence during the 1990s of [the Great Game]....A summary of "American Theocracy", a new book from Kevin Phillips, the guy who brought out 1969's eerily prescient The Emerging Republican Majority, which created the term Sun Belt as a key pole of Republican power for the future. Since 1969 Phillips has gone further to the left, and American Theocracy is his comeback swipe at the current state of affairs. The NY Times review was interesting. Check the Agonist feature on it. The guy in Slate is pissed about it.
Bloggers get fucked by Associated Press: Media wants to discredit blogs while plagarizing the reporting: Huge surprise. Recently, Larisa Alexandrovna of RawStory.com did an in-depth story on a bizarre bit of executive branch regulations set by Stephen Hadley, the President's current National Security Adviser. The story was cloned by the AP, but the AP refused to give credit to RawStory. Here is Alexandrovna's response. (posted of course on the Huffy)
Her story took a while to get confirmed, checked, compared with old documents, run by another writer and a researcher, talked to people in the intelligence community. In other words, Larisa did the works and triple-checked everything like a responsible reporter. She is coming up with some interesting goods these days, including the tidbit that Valerie Plame's Brewster Jennings CIA front organization was doing clandestine research on Iran's WMD activities... (more on that here)
Anyway, so in this case, the new Hadley regulations had some bizarre implications for gay people, so Larisa sent the docs and notes to some gay advocacy groups. Their reactions were included in the story, and the groups gave the story and background notes to an Associated Press writer, and asked them to cover it.
So the day after the story was released on RawStory, an Associated Press reporter basically copied most of the story and claimed that the information had been dug up by the advocacy groups - and the AP adamantly refused to credit RawStory, saying that they don't credit blogs. The AP editor was pretty damn rude about it... So that's kinda fucked up.
Josh Marshall at TPM has also recently found that the mainstream press is repeating TPMmuckraker.com stories without giving them credit. (this one on the corrupt Cunningham-linked MZM defense contractor doing god-knows-what is good, for example)
This underscores how in terms of "actual journalism", blogs are doing some heavy lifting that the mainstream just can't fucking handle because they just suck so much. Alexandrovna cites a few websites that have done a hell of a lot more than anyone else to deal with certain scandals that CBS and the Rest just won't put together these days.
These are all blogs cited by Alexandrovna that I have linked to before, when looking at these various scandals. The mainstream media can't deal with the truly weird stuff, so it falls to the Motley Crue to straighten it out. The Left Coaster has the Truly Complete Dissection of the Niger forgery case - and the fake WMD generally. If you want the nitty gritty of how the Republican bullshit machine has covered up a ton of scandals, this will walk you through it, page by page. EmptyWheel at thenexthurrah also has gotten deep into the Plame case - far beyond anything featured on TV. Of course there is the BradBlog, which has gotten way inside the shady operations of electronic voting machines and Diebold. During the creepy time on Nov-Jan 2004, when the mainstream media refused to speak of the anomalies in Ohio, BradBlog was without a doubt the place to be. Wot is it good 4 has certainly tacked down more aspects of the Sibel Edmonds/FBI/Turkish Spies/WTF?! scandal than anyone else.
Well i just wanted to put some red meat bits up there. When my computing situation is better I'll put up some photos.
My good friend Andy Tweeten is out in Great Falls, Montana, working for the Jon Tester for Senate campaign. He sent out an email today to let people know where he's at.
He also takes care of the TesterTime campaign blog. Right on. Tester is something of a prairie populist, and he's in a neck-and-neck race with some DLC-style city slicker lawyer type for the Democratic primary. Tester's opponent in November (hopefully) will be the wildly unpopular Conrad Burns. It's a fight worth watching, and I'm glad Andy's around to get a handle on things.
Something completely different: Andy also alerted me to a tidbit about how Facebook is used by the Man to peer into our lives. Interestingly, one of the groups behind Facebook, the Accel Group, has been tied to DARPA. Including a nasty threat to the president that led to Secret Service visits for some pissed-off student.
The story has a sad little note at the end:
This is a revised version of this piece. An earlier version incorrectly implied that U.S. intelligence agencies were involved in Facebook and may have been read as suggesting that Facebook played a role in disseminating information to authorities. CampusProgress.org regrets these errors.
Well, if you post stuff publicly, and intelligence agencies use Facebook to find it, it's not exactly facebook's fault. If it would be bad for the District Attorney to see your facebook page, then you shouldn't have it there. But I wonder if facebook uses heuristics / AI methods to dig for incriminating stuff that people have posted themselves. And what of the private messages?
MySpace, on the other hand, is controlled by Rupert Murdoch, who will ultimately own all their poor souls. Kind of a pity.
Tester will have to come riding in at the last second to save the day. Go Jon!!
Nick in Southern Cone 2006. He is in studying abroad in a ritzy part of Old Palermo. Today: "no more excuses:"
so it went down like this: [......] a hopping place, but not really on a monday night. my other buddy lucho never shows up, so i am basically chilling by myself, and i start to get eyed by some argentines, who i now know are fucking busted ass broke no class dirty fucking shithead BITCHES.
I start shooting the shit with them a little bit, not very drunk at all, and they walked with me for the 4-5 blocks to my house. i was stupid enough to take my wallet out to buy a beer, and the only bill i had was 100 pesos. for some reason i put 20 of that in my pocket, after paying 8 for a huge budweiser i fucking shared with these kids. the kid who never said one word but had a chicago bulls hat on grabbed my wallet, i fucking cracked him in the face as hard as i could, just another kid tripped me and another pushed me down from behind. i was wearing sandals so they were fucking gone, plus they were fucking fast. luckily, when i cracked the motherfucker, he was only able to grab the cash out of my wallet and a whole bunch of my ID cards fell out, which was lucky as hell....
.......this country is fucking bogus, yáll. palermo is the third richest neighborhood in the city, behind recoleta and belgrano, and i couldnt even walk alone without getting jacked by a gang of 14-17 year old homeless kids. god bless the u.s. of a. for the first time i felt like going home, but there is no way i am sacrificing a semester´s worth of credits. now i know i cant fucking walk around buenos aires alone at night.
He will soldier on, and solve some local economic contradictions when he can.
On the Steps...
...Of the Wyoming State Capitol, where the illustrious vice president of the United States will speak with fanfare on the morrow morn. Peace Brother. Damn the torpedos.
--Peter
pgartrellNOSPAMPLEASE@gillettenewsrecord.net
Energy/County Reporter
Gillette News-Record
P.O. Box 3006
Gillette, WY 82717
Tele: (307) 682-9306 x211
FAX: (307) 686-9306
It is obvious that he is wearing his safety orange for the event, but from his high perch here he could be mistaken for a bird.
We are hoping for the best for Peter. O Very Unique JudeoChristian God of North and South Carolina, Keep his head down and the Kevlar tight.
*Amen*
Who's up for some motherfucking Olympic Games?
U.S.A... U.S.A... U.S.A...
Any takers?
Not me, and I would actually watch downhill skiing voluntarily if it were on the rest of the year. During the Olympics, though, with Bob Costas' reassuring voice punctuating the proceedings with international inanities, I just can't be bothered to slog through the coverage of sports like these:
I don't know if I am just jaded or if I no longer able to muster the proper pavlovian response asked of once every two years. The Olympics are supposed to be accompanied by a cold rush of patriotism and allow one to sweat out one's nationalistic demons by projecting one's hostility towards France upon their third-string skeleton rider (racer?) and wishing for his quick and effortless dispatch at the hands of a crack American squad (minus their best member- steroids). I can't get too worked up this year, though. For reasons ranging from Bode Miller's diplomatic ineptitude and general dickishness to the location (Turin? Whatever happened to the hustle and bustle of, say, Lillehamer? or Salt Lake City?) I just cannot muster the necessary amount of patriotic zeal. With the exception of wanting to see a couple of Minnesota girls hit the slalom course (Kristina Koznick and Lindsey Kildow) and Miller fall, I don't have much riding on this game emotionally. But does anyone? Outside of this little charade once every four years, does anyone, and I mean anyone, go to Skeleton events? Speed Skating? Luge? Where did these sports even come from, and who could possibly support themselves off the ticket sales? Who are these athletes and who taught them how to Luge? I don't remember that unit in gym class. Are there just teams of stern, grandfatherly Eastern Europeans who stake out key sledding hills and, upon seeing a bright young man in a cap and mittens deftly weave his way down the bumpy run and to the bottom, sidles up to him and tells him of his own days sledding, and how sledding led to luge and, if it hadn't been for his knee, but, well, you wouldn't want to hear about that...
As for figure skating, let's face it- it's the only aspect of the Winter Games anyone gives two shits about, and it's not even a sport. This is not to say that it is not an athletic endeavor requiring thousands of hours of diligent, painful study, but it is not a sport in the traditional manner. Sports derive from war games, and thus speed, strength, endurance and an ability to drive past or score on one's opponent are easily-comprehended goals. Whipping about on metal blades for the express purpose of spinning in the air and waving your arms around emotively is a more difficult-to-grasp skill on the bloody fields of Agincourt or Thermopylae. For some reason, it strikes a spider-vein in the female population of America and, despite the fact that your average American woman has never laced up a pair of skates and breathes heavily at the top of the stairs, several days of couch time are dedicated to watching starving children perform circus tricks on skates for the glory of their nation. Does the skater above look like she is capable of dealing a fatal blow? Even the curlers look more dangerous- at least they have sticks and rocks.
The worst part, of course, is the Maurie Povitch sob stories that accompany each athlete. Divorce, poverty, instability, scabies, arterial sclerosis and painful long-term surgical treatments haunt the pasts of these brave young Americans who, being between the ages of sixteen and thirty, have had a lot more time on their hands to grapple with their demons than I feel I might have time for if I were training six hours a day to compete in the zenith of human sport. Last night they appeared, young and vital-looking, and gave no hint of the physical and emotional ravishing they have endured. Somewhere in a US Olympic training facility, thousands of portraits stamped "B.Hallward" sit in protective sleeves. It is not the manipulation aspect that bothers me, particularly- I have grown weary and become acceptant of constant and intrusive media manipulation- it is the banality of the event that must be sensationalized through the hyberbolic tales of woe that gets to me. The endless seven minute sequences of sports you don't care about spliced in with Bob Costas' studio presence and those little athlete vignettes that always start and finish with the athlete, in their gear, looking brave and heroic in the face of such stiff competition and such long odds. Something along these lines:
Some Douchebag With Skis Had Sad Childhood, NBC Reports...
Well, Madison is still fertile ground. Jon is wrapping up his college days right now, and he's found a spot to draw a regular comic strip and the odd story illustration lately. Nicely done. This is a way cool Alito drawing (from this opinion bit). Madison's The Daily Cardinal is the venue of choice.
Jon has also been sketching a comic called Two Word Title. Here is the Jon Lyons media index. Looks Pimp to me!! Just wait until the first Jon Lyons New Yorker cover. You heard it here first folks.
With a little luck we will get some more goodies from the Lyons Residence up here soon. I am hoping to get contributions (anonymous or otherwise) because it is more interesting to hear from friends than my usual ramblings.
Werth (at left) is rounding out his time at Macalester with a huge tour of South America, and fortunately he'll be blogging it for us — in Spanish. Southern Cone 2006 at Blogger is Nick's tool to let us know what is going.
Nick is leaving on February 12. He is hitting Buenos Aires, Argentina; Montevideo, Uruguay; Asuncion, Paraguay; and Porto Alegre in northern Brazil. Sounds frickin' awesome.
We'll keep tabs on his situation. Maybe he should have a Babelfish translation link or something. My Spanish is ok, but hardly perfect. English is still the langua franca. But I like how his site already has Spanish-language Google ads running.
(HongPong.com file photo)
<Chairman Mao has a holiday report from the field for us. He is out in Colorado where his employer periodically accuses him of stealing (then find the cash in the office). We will have some other folks checking in soon as well.--Dan>
The season of seasons is here. Wintertime holidays. Thousands of people, who stay dormant within their houses for most of the year, flood the streets and shopping malls. Causing far more crime and mayhem than they're worth. Who are these people, you ask? They are your weird neighbors who never say hello and watch you from their windows. Or more often they are the millions of MTV drones who occupy what we conscious people call the 'Dead Zones.'
Little pockets of dense, stupid thought spread like a plague across the United States. Usually found around high schools and colleges. The people stuck in these daily routines of refusing to think wind up doing nothing more than sitting around watching tv, and maybe getting high, snorting Vicodin.
They see commercials advertising Christmas, making fun of Channukah, whatever. Sooner or later they will dare to set a foot outside to see what the fuss is all about. Inevitably making it no further than a few blocks before they collide with something at sixty miles an hour and blame it on 'black ice.'
However, despite the odds, some of these terrors on culture actually manage to make it to their destination, somehow... This is when the real problems start. If you have ever worked in retail you can probably identify the incompetent without even blinking. They wander around aimlessly and touch everything, refusing to read signs and accidently stealing merchandise. Oh well, happy holidays...
I promised Peter a while ago that I would post about his adventures (hence the "from abroad" topic) in Gillette, Wyoming. Peter was driving back to Oregon (i might have mixed up the details here) where he was working on an organic farm, decompressing after his illustrious Macalester career.
As he drove through Gillette, he picked up a newspaper in a gas station and thought, wouldn't it be a good idea to see about getting a job here? So he pestered them for a while in his usual polite yet indefatigable fashion, and the Gillette News-Record hooked him up with the cub reporter slot. Fortunately, rather than the cats-in-trees beat, he is now covering the energy industry (mostly natural gas), which is a very big deal out in those parts. He has spent a hella long time figuring out all these weird drilling techniques and stuff, going to visit drilling sites and hanging out with the roughnecks.
I think it is a very cool venture for him to go with, because what better place to get a grip on things than the most sparsely populated state in the country? I don't really have a lot more useful to say about it, but here are links to most of Peter's stories. i think the paper publishes like 5 or 6 days a week, so he's pretty darn busy.
My favorites were his recent major feature about new gas drilling technology & ventures, and the story of the gas technicians who rescued fifteen people from a trailer park that got wasted by a sudden tornado. So here is the set of Peter's stories so far, via the newspaper site's search function. Keep holding it down, P, that's Cheney country out there, and we need to keep an eye on 'em:
Pumped up Sep. 4, 2005 With rigs peppering the Rocky Mountain region, Gillette-based Cyclone Drilling s business has more than doubled since 2000. Rigs operate around the clock and they still have a hard time keeping pace with demand. We were running 10 (drilling rigs) in ...
Local gas prices climb to 2.90 Sep. 6, 2005 As gas prices rise across the country, drivers in Gillette are responding, as the average increased to 2.90, more than 1 higher than a month ago on Aug. 4. Felix Vondracek, on his way back to York, Neb., after visiting his son in Billings, Mont., s...
Latest Avenues of Art display includes 27 pieces Aug. 12, 2005 Standing next to his most recent piece of public art, Karl Saliter, his daugter and four Gillette Street Department employees smiled for a publicity photo as hail began to fall. The semi-circle of smiling faces cradled Saliter s work of granite, stee...
Gillette feels pinch of nationwide shortage of cement Aug. 28, 2005 When Basic Energy s cement supply was cut by 40 percent in July, Rod Geil called suppliers in Utah, Colorado, Texas, Iowa and Alberta, Canada, in search of more. Each time he was told the same thing: We don t have any. The drilling company is still i...
Scavenger hunt for new teachers Aug. 24, 2005 Campbell County s 58 new teachers spent Tuesday searching for cowboy hats, rhinos, toys and firefighters during a scavenger hunt that was part of new employee orientation. New teachers were paired with experienced teachers who are helping the new emp...
President declares Wright a disaster area Aug. 23, 2005 President Bush signed a disaster declaration Monday, making federal relief funds available for Wright residents affected by the Aug. 12 tornado that struck the town. The declaration came 10 days after the tornado destroyed or severely damaged 92 home...
Jacobs Ranch wins mine rescue contest Aug. 21, 2005 The blood-covered and headless body of a mine worker had fallen more than 30 feet off an overburden drill, and his co-workers were stranded. In Saturday s simulated accident, one worker was lying only feet from the smashed skull with a badly broken l...
Kids donate money from stand to Wright tornado victims Aug. 17, 2005 Logan Wasson and Ashlyn Pearson were selling juice and baked goods at their old-fashioned lemonade stand on Tuesday. But the money they make isn t for them. The Gillette fifth-graders will donate their profits to help the victims of the Wright tornad...
Rescuers pull 15 from the wreckage Aug. 14, 2005 Scott Lindsey, Bob Shock and Luke Reddy leapt from their rig and headed toward the voice of a woman screaming hysterically. She was standing near a mobile home that had been flipped over, a home so mangled that all the things that were on the floor w...
Latest Avenues of Art display includes 27 pieces Aug. 13, 2005 Standing next to his most recent piece of public art, Karl Saliter, his daugter and four Gillette Street Department employees smiled for a publicity photo as hail began to fall. The semi-circle of smiling faces cradled Saliter s work of granite, stee...
Head-on kills 3 Gillette men Aug. 30, 2005 Three people were killed and one is hospitalized after a two vehicle accident west of Wright on Monday afternoon. Anthony Vance, 21, of Gillette, and two passengers died instantly when their pickup truck, traveling northbound on Highway 387, drifted ...
Our feline housemate, Jane, vaulted through my busted bedroom screen sometime this morning, and went off the back porch into the great Merriam Park Unknown.
We put food on the back porch, in the hopes it will eventually return. How weird, I had a vision of an escaping cat yesterday... it's been plotting around that busted screen for a while, I can't say I'm surprised.
I only hope that the cat learned enough about cars from watching Selby Avenue from the porch. Oh Jane, where art thou, meow?
It reminds me of when I went to London, only a few days after the Madrid bombings. At the time, the whole system was on a terror alert, as they feared a reprisal. However, I walked right past heavily armed police onto the Tube, and it wasn't as if they were patting everyone down. "Al-Qaeda shadow looms over London." This was very similar to the Madrid attacks:
"Like the attacks on the Spanish capital, the targets in London were key transportation nodes: underground stations which intersect with main railway stations, feeding through hundreds of thousands of passengers an hour during peak time," says Dr Eyal.
"And, like in Madrid, the purpose was to kill as many people as possible, by striking at different targets at more or less the same time."
The London stock market plunged after the attacks but the FTSE 100 index came mostly back up. US stock markets aren't hosed. And oil is at a record high but for some reason eased off after this. I wonder if the Plunge Protection Team is rolling out? (London's Evening Standard on the PPT)
The Guardian has a news blog running with updates (General summary). The photo here came from flickr.com. There is a large collection of pictures tagged "London Bomb Blasts" that has a lot of original pictures. (BBC also has pictures and a map of the bombed lines)
Wikipedia now has a picture collection as well as large set of emerging information. Wikinews covers "Four bombs rock London" with many news links, including the surprising news that Netanyahu of all people had some kind of advance warning from the Brits.
The Israelis were tipped off minutes before the explosions?! WTF?
Netanyahu Changed Plans Due to Warning
By AMY TEIBEL, Associated Press Writer Thu Jul 7, 7:14 AM ET
JERUSALEM - British police told the Israeli Embassy in London minutes before Thursday's explosions that they had received warnings of possible terror attacks in the city, a senior Israeli official said.
Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had planned to attend an economic conference in a hotel over the subway stop where one of the blasts occurred, and the warning prompted him to stay in his hotel room instead, government officials said.
Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said he wasn't aware of any Israeli casualties.
Just before the blasts, Scotland Yard called the security officer at the Israeli Embassy to say they had received warnings of possible attacks, the official said. He did not say whether British police made any link to the economic conference.
Reporter Chris Allbritton put a translation on his site back-to-iraq.com, of a statement posted on an al-Qaeda linked website, www.qal3ati.com. The site seems to be gone for now, but this was the post:
Announcement on London's Operation 7/7/2005
Jamaat al-Tandheem Al-Sierri (secret organization group)
Organization of Qaeda't al-Jihad in Europe
In the name of God the most merciful...
Rejoice the nation of Islam, rejoice nation of Arabs, the time of revenge has come for the crusaders' Zionist British government.
As retaliation for the massacres which the British commit in Iraq and Afghanistan, the mujahideen have successfully done it this time in London.
And this is Britain now burning from fear and panic from the north to the south, from the east to the west.
We have warned the brutish governments and British nation many times.
And here we are, we have done what we have promised. We have done a military operation after heavy work and planning, which the mujahideen have done, and it has taken a long time to ensure the success of this operation.
And we still warn the government of Denmark and Italy, all the crusader governments, that they will have the same punishment if they do not pull their forces out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
So beware.
Thursday 7/7/2005
Jamaat al-Tandheem Al-Sierri (secret organization group)
Organization of al Qaeda't al-Jihad in Europe.
BTW Allbritton is releasing podcasts of his journalism over in Iraq. Nice.
Speaking of Afghanistan, an interesting BBC tale about American troops battling near the Pakistan border. As their Afghan ally put it, are mostly Arabs, Waziris from Pakistan and Chechens. Also, the Iranians are going to train Iraqi troops. What could go wrong?! "Will the US be asked to leave key military bases?" in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan & Uzbekistan?
In the evening of the aftermath, Financial Times analysts have published a harsh rebuke to the United States and its Global War on Terror:
Bush has to review strategy, say US experts
By Guy Dinmore and Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
Published: July 7 2005 18:16 | Last updated: July 7 2005 18:16
A constant theme of the Bush administration is that America and the world are safer because of the US invasion of Iraq and its anti-terror strategy.
That argument prevailed during the US presidential election campaign last year, despite even official US evidence to the contrary, but may have been finally buried by Thursday’s bombings in London.
Experts in Washington said following the blasts that it was time for the Bush administration to re-evaluate its strategy. Confronted by opinion polls showing his falling popularity and waning support for the war in Iraq, Mr Bush stuck to his guns in a speech to the military last week that characteristically showed no hint of change.
“There is only one course of action against them: to defeat them abroad before they attack us at home,” said Mr Bush in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Last September, at the peak of his re-election campaign, Mr Bush told the Republican national convention: “We are staying on the offensive striking terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home. Our strategy is succeeding. We have led, many have joined, and America and the world are safer.”
John Hamre, president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former deputy secretary of defence, said: “Clearly [the world] is not safer. I think this highlights the complexity of the problem.
“We must defend a vast infrastructure constantly while extremists get to pick the time and place with very limited tools. Obviously we must try to intercept the terrorists. But we must also address the broader socio-political context. We can’t solve this with a relatively limited dimensional model of counterforce. Being mighty is one thing. Being effective is another. This is a much more complex problem.”
Classified studies by the CIA and State Department leaked to the media last month concluded that Iraq had replaced Afghanistan as the prime training ground for foreign terrorists who could travel across the world spreading destruction. The Bush administration has struggled even to work out whether the world is a safer place or not.
A year ago, the State Department had to withdraw a report by the Terrorist Threat Integration Centre that claimed terror attacks in 2003 had declined sharply. The revised report more than doubled the numbers of attacks and deaths.
We have to keep on going, doing whatever the hell we are doing...
Hell, I'm finally back. My computer is acting weird which prevented me from updating the site earlier.... Anyhow...
We had a hell of a time in Colorado. I skied for the first time in eight years, so that was awesome.
God, I am too tired to deal with this right now. There were good stories. The National Security State came around at unexpected times. A guy told me that they know where Osama bin Laden is.
Our society seems to be obsessed with mortality, wall to wall Schiavo on the wretched airport CNN televisions that can never be turned off, as I found trying desperately to sleep on Friday before last in the Atlanta airport.
I have this weird psychological problem, which I think relates to my atheism. Simply put, I would say that we die every day, as some realities are brought about and other potential realities are crushed. As we move from one phase of life to another the old personality dies. But maybe not, maybe there is a firm and Profound bond between all the moments that make up a person's life, and it isn't all complex, random movements of inherently mundane and truly dead molecules.
Ugh, I don't mean to get negative. To be truly honest, I feel all right about where my life is going to go and I don't quite have the same level of anxiety that's sweeping through many of my classmates. We are moving on Real Soon, that's what's clear. The old social forms are ticking away, ready to go into the dust of these strange years of college...
Hey all,
It is Raining Like Hell on Sanibel Island, near Ft. Myers in the Voting Rights State. Apparently the weather will be better tomorrow. We are in a cafe right now, where last night I transmitted my midterm paper for Holocaust class to Kellan PoliSciPimp Anfinson... So it is fairly uneventful. I was hoping to get a tan and stuff but you can't really do that in the torrential rain.
There are hundreds of alligators on this island but I haven't seen one yet. Between our condo and the beach there is a brackish coastal swamp where the alligators are known to roam. Yesterday the Lucy Dog, who previously hadn't been afraid of going on the boardwalk over the swamp, was just terrified and had to be dragged across the boardwalk. She can probably smell the Rotting Flesh in the mouths of those nasty beasts, or something like that. There are strange noises at night, frogs etc...
We ate at the Lazy Flamingo last night and as we were going to the car, we noticed that raccoons were all over the dumpster. How many? Seven. I went in to tell the staff about it, and our waitress smiled and said, "Oh, there's more than that!" Ah Florida, always ready to let the animals forage as long in order to have to get rid of less garbage.
From what I have seen the Island is an excellent wildlife refuge and a low-key sort of spot, no nasty highrises etc. Really fairly nice, if not for this dicey weather. The Island has a strange post-apocalyptic feel to it--and you know how I like to feel post-apocalyptic--because it got hammered in those hurricanes last year, knocking down lots of trees etc. On the flight down here, i talked with an interesting young woman and she told me about how her and her friends went out to surf in the fifteen foot waves around the island as the hurricane came in. Then they got arrested. Naturally.
I'm lookin forward to a trip to Colorado with a good crew of people, starting this Saturday when I get back. Hell yeah!!
It is finally the end of 2004 and things look set for another strange year ahead of us. I have not had much time or impulse to write on the site for the last few days. I am doing some more web work for Andrew at Computer Zone Consulting. Andrew is himself Sri Lankan, and I saw him for the first time in a few weeks on Monday as the news rolled in from the tsunami disaster zone.
It's a hard thing to figure out the scale of this thing, to put it in a relative view that you can even comprehend. All those videos they've been playing on the cable news constantly—people washing and twirling away—is so incredibly unnerving and weird.
So anyhows, I'm trying not to get down about this whole mess, because the world is a messy place and we all end up muddling along no matter what. Of course, things are going weirdly in other places. By the end of January we'll have a sense of whether or not the situation in Iraq is going to screech off and out of control, or else fizzle down. Meanwhile in Washington they are getting hunkered down for another round of the Amazing Bush Administration and its Circus of Follies.
So it's a season of change for everyone now. I'm looking back at the things I have done and seen this year, and I think overall I did pretty well, but I still don't know what I ought to do when I graduate. It's kind of amazing that it's already time to get out of college. I have enjoyed the experience, but I do regret not studying abroad somewhere, as I think it would have given me a clean slate and fresh approach instead of those pointless months here... specifically the difficult experience of the Dupre Single days.
This year was a good one, though. I learned a lot of things about how the world worked, I talked with a lot of strange people. When I look back, I think that this was very much a breakthrough year in terms of just being willing to go out in the world and see what happens, for an often skittish person like myself.
January 2004 was pointless, so I guess we should skip to February. Back then, I advanced the story of the war, as I see it, in a worthwhile way, when I asked John Kerry during his visit to Macalester if the intelligence distortions (meaning the fake WMD and al Qaeda stories, mainly) should be considered a criminal matter akin to Iran-Contra. Kerry gave me one of those classic two-paragraph answers, but I would say, looking back almost a year on it, that he probably gave me the wrong answer.
My view of the matter is that Ahmed Chalabi and the neo-cons consciously knew they were providing bad information about Iraq, and hence deceived everyone in the government, and in particular our elected representatives in Congress. Kerry said that he had 'no evidence' that it was illegal, but he never really pursued the issue as a campaign matter, I suppose in particular because his campaign acted self-consciously 'tainted' by his position on the war early on.
But that's the key thing about it: Kerry could have weaseled out of responsibility for the war vote by saying that 'we wuz lied to!!' and provided the American public an entertaining tale about Chalabi and the rest of them, which would have drawn more attention to the malevolent incompetents running the Pentagon, forcing the frame of debate back to Bush's systematic deception and the war's managerial disasters. By the end of the campaign, Kerry was alleging that they were 'playing games' with intelligence, but that doesn't really mean anything to Joe Sixpack. They should have given us the spy story. It would have been cool.
Afterwards, in March I went to London for a week and stayed on the floor of Nick Petersen's flat. This came just a couple days after the Madrid bombings, and I thought that security would be escalated all over the place. It was my first trip to Europe and I made the most of it. I didn't obsess with seeing tourist attractions, and instead tried to wander all through town, a project assisted by Nick's encyclopedic knowledge of London architecture. On the first night, Victoria came back from her apparently horrible school in Wales. Vic's mom and siblings had also come to London for break, and they had a fabulous suite at the County Hall (Hotel?). The room had a little balcony high above the river Thames, and from there I could look right across the river at Parliament and the clock tower, as that huge Ferris wheel thing turned overhead. I saw the House of Commons meet, I went to the Prime Meridian and some museums...
Then I hopped the Eurostar (?) train to Paris, and wandered around there for a day, eating a Royale with Cheese on the banks of the Seine, and I even went in and saw the Mona Lisa and other places in the Louvre. Emi showed me all over town, and it was just a damn awesome place to be, like something out of a movie of someone else's life (this sense was helped along when I watched that recent Jack Nicholson movie, which ends in Paris, on the flight back to Chicago).
The summer was an interesting venture. I took an electronic art and journalism law classes at the University of Minnesota. Made some friends, picked up some useful information and put together a sweet DVD of many of my better photographs and videos.
After that stuff ended, I went to the site of the Republican National Convention with Dan Schned and Peter Gartrell. It was at times the most overwhelming experience I've ever had. When the police officer pulled his hat off to show us the photos of his friend who died at the WTC, or when the girl from Iowa showed us a video of anarchists setting the dragon on fire right next to her, or when we stood on a corner as AIPAC delegates to the convention streamed past, happily celebrating the renewal of the Likud-Republican political alliance that I so loathe. Or when we tracked down the bar where Dick Cheney was drinking, or when we chanted in the streets in an unlicensed march....
So, then, was it worth it? Was it worth the hassle, the arrests, the gasoline expended, just to go out there and watch people wave some signs around? You know, I think it was. I think that it helped me to ground some of the symbols that they manipulate in our minds—the WTC site, for one. These things become easier to understand once you see them, stripped of the media frames, the pretexts and moral arguments. Just to stand there and smoke a cigarette, then another cigarette, in the great important Negative Space in south Manhattan, helps to assert some control over the symbols they wield. It helped me settle the issue somehow.
After that we went down into the WTC subway stop. I walked over to one of the support beams and rubbed my finger on a bolt encrusted with sparkling reddish-brown dust. I rubbed the dust between my fingers and smelled it, a certain, dusty, burned smell, the torched synthetic substances from the offices, mixed with window and beam particles, had plunged down, and puffed into the tunnels under the city where no amount of cleaning could ever eradicate the traces.
I saw Bush himself a few days before the trip, as he made a campaign appearance in Hudson, Wisconsin. I saw him get off the bus and shake people's hands, and I could finally see what is so difficult to discern from home: that man is just the front face for a whole vast system of domination and control. It's a much larger problem than just that man. It's the administrative deception, the suppression of agencies like the EPA. We make the mistake of projecting perceived personality traits into understanding the political problems we have, without understanding how much of the issue is organizational.
School went pretty well this semester. I actually did something that I thought might not happen: I had a conversation with a really quite devious neoconservative that came to Macalester. For quite a while I wondered what might happened if I encountered Michael Ledeen at the Roundtable, but when I suddenly did, it was a surprise because he hadn't even given his speech yet. I ended up talking with the odd character over lunch, a bizarre twist. I gamely tried to suggest to him that the Iranians weren't determined to nuke Jerusalem the moment they developed the Bomb, but Ledeen would have none of it. A quixotic sort of notion to try convincing this guy that we shouldn't lose our cool about Iran, but of course he would never change his mind.
I learned a key thing about the people that run things from this encounter: They are very moody people. They are not well-adjusted low-key technocratic sorts of people. They are grim and weird. Ledeen himself admitted a manic depressive condition, and I think that whole kind of thing is what drives them to make their crazy decisions as much as any kind of Evil Agenda we might try to fathom from their actions.
And then the election. In some ways I barely want to hear about it, to hear about how such a vast section of the American public wholeheartedly embraced absurd lies about the situation, and how despite a sense that we were careening out of control, we were still destined to end up with these ridiculous cats for another four years.
I guess a sense of needing to refute that 'destiny' led me to place a shred of hope in the election-challenge folks, although of course it offends my sense of what it means to live in a democracy when I hear of a single vote damaged, lost, vanished or even potentially manipulated by our crappy system. At this point, we are hearing some interesting stuff out of Florida about Congressman Feeney and the usual Florida corruption, but it seems like we will never hear much of an articulation of how evil it was in Ohio when election supervisors implemented a strategy to direct voting machines away from heavily Democratic precincts into the suburbs. Is that really what we can accept as an element of a 'legitimate' election?
To round out this year end ramble, I would say that I am still much the same sort of person as when I began this year, but I think that I managed to advance my view of the world by talking straight to some of the important people, going into hazardous places like New York, and trying to express my own views of the world via this website, the campus paper, and just talking with people. I think I've tried to criss-cross some interesting slices of Americana this year and listen to what people have told me. As time has gone past, it seems more clear to me than ever that I still have a very long ways to go before things make sense to me.
The good thing is that right now I feel less like giving up than before. I don't have a sense that my energy is evaporating, but with the end of school coming around I have to try to pull together a new plan. Not easy for anyone... There is still a world of opportunities out there. I will have to spend a while poking around...
So here's to 2004. A year I got through by taking some chances and going new places. As for 2005, that's the year when things really better start clicking.
Of course, David has the AIM handle Chairman0mao, but he may have to offer it to Arthur... Also right above his head is a drawing of a Chinese dragon unfolding from a missile...
Just got back from the Cheng residence, watching pirated DVDs, some good, some fakes. Zzzzz....
I have been recovering for a couple days from my circuit around London, with an exciting day trip to Paris on St. Patrick's Day! I experienced so many things out there, it's still difficult for me to boil down at all. I saw a number of key things on the trip, but I didn't want to follow the standard tourist adherence to tour buses and rapid runs around cathedrals and Sites of Interest.
I wanted to try to really get the texture of the places, so instead I put on my New Balance sneakers and walked all over, assisted by my friends who knew the lay of the land.
In London, since my last message, I saw Parliament in session, the Tower Bridge, the Globe Theater, the Tower of London, Canary Wharf, places like historic Bank and Liverpool Street, the Greenwich Observatory (where I set my watch) and Downing Street, on the very day the Spanish announced they would ditch "Blair's war alliance," as the tabloids called it.
I took the Eurostar (Chunnel high-speed train) to Gare du Nord station in Paris, where I wandered into my first immersion in a city where I didn't speak the language. Following a map obtained at some difficulty from the gift shop, I ran into the Pompadou Museum and shortly thereafter purchased an all-important Royale with Cheese, which I ate on a quiet bench next to the Seine. Across from me was the Louvre, where I gazed at the glass pyramid and the grandiose adjacent garden.
Toward the Eiffel Tower, I wandered into an area full of embassies and ministries, eventually reaching Emmi via a confusing French phone card. I took too long to get ahold of her, so naturally she had afternoon class. I went to the Louvre and saw the Mona Lisa and other assorted art and antiquities. We met up in St. Sulpice with some other Mac kids, and sauntered over to the Luxembourg gardens, where we decided to visit the Church of the Sacred Heart on a hill overlooking the city (as featured in the happy flick Amelie). Then Emmi and I wandered off to see the Moulin Rouge on a classic filthy sex street, and finally the Arc de Triumphe. We also got around to the Notre Dame as well as the hangouts of Sartre and the Impressionists. I ended up at a youth hostel that night. One of the most magical days of my life.
I made some mistakes along the way but it mostly went smoothly until the return trip. I had problems getting ahold of people like Rob Beahrs in Paris--really wanted to hang out--and Boz and KJ in London. Telecom was really a pain.
Worst of all, I probably managed to destroy or severely damage 4 of the 5 rolls of film I shot, which is all but Paris in the evening and a couple pictures in London. This made me very sad, because there were tons of incredible pictures. Some people tell me that rolls in checked baggage have survived, but Alison says that they are pretty much certainly wiped out.
This photo loss (so far not confirmed) was because I, like a fool, didn't know that they use much more powerful scanners on checked luggage. At O'Hare, I was very stressed out, because I was already delayed many hours and trying to jump onto a departing flight. At O'Hare, a nice guy at the check-in desk tried to get me onto a flight just leaving for Minneapolis, but the horrible security people wouldn't let my big bag pass, and wouldn't even listen to me.
At that point I forgot that my film was in the big bag. When I gave it to the grinning Chicago bastards at the giant post-9/11 mega-scanner, they specifically asked me about the film, and I thought it was all in my backpack. My bag was fed into the machine and all those nice snaps of the Tower bridge and the Pompadou probably turned into another silver emulsified slate of sludge. Thanks, Homeland Security!
The tragic thing is that I might not have missed the first flight all along, if I hadn't forgotten my camera in Nick's room, then run back to get it, consuming several minutes. I might have been able to hop the previous Tube train to Paddington station, where another train, the Heathrow Express, took twice as long as advertised to get me to Heathrow.
So in other words, everything went well until the return circuit, where my Tube train "terminated" one stop before Paddington, delaying several minutes. The 11:10 Heathrow Express was supposed to get me from Paddington to the airport in 15, but instead it stopped dead and took 30. Then I got put on standby for a flight at 2:15, and I didn't make it on until 4:15. Had a beer at the TGI Fridays in the Duty Free lounge.
Cleared customs at O'Hare and nearly made it to a quick 8:30 flight to Minneapolis, but lost my wits a bit and willfully zapped my photographic record.
I will say that I learned a lot from how ugly that whole sequence was. Leave more time to get to the airport, and make sure not to check the film. How obvious.
But it only really rounded out once I got back to Minneapolis and the buses are still on strike. Upon making a withdrawal for a taxi, my bank account turned out to be wildly overdrawn, naturally. The suspenseful thing for Monday is to see if the money I dumped in Saturday night--to make my account well positive again--will be enough to avoid a whole barrage of overdraft fees. They'll have the last laugh, I'm all too sure.
Likewise, Nick's flatmates and other friends were all very gracious hosts who went out of their way to deal with my silly questions and late night showers. Seeing as how my pictures might be no more, I have only all those moments with them in my mind now, and I will never forget this exceptional adventure as long as I live.
(please forward this to everyone not on the list-i don't have my address book)
Hullo to all from the merry land of the Angles and Saxons!! I am having a great time here in London staying with my friend from high school, Nick Petersen, who went to the U of M before coming here for a year. We have been all over much of the city already.
Arun, you should get the hell over to this school, Queen Mary University of London (http://www.qmw.ac.uk/) because it is *mostly* British Indians. (although apparently the London School of Economics has a lot too) It also has the largest medical school in England. There's a canal which runs all around north London and goes right in front of Nick's hall. There is a little lock and dam and canal house right here. They look very old.
The neighborhood, Mile End, has a lot of Punjabis and Pakistanis as well as East Enders. It is ironic that the British partitioned India then the Indians and Pakis came around and partitioned the neighborhood!
You have to be very careful about the Pakis on Saturday night, as there are *a lot of fights* but little serious crime in this neighborhood, as they say. If not for the heavy traffic on the main road I might have had a bad encounter on Saturday night. They want to fight, so Arun, I think you would fall in love on the first day and then get knifed on Friday!
There are a lot of police cameras here and also a huge number of very polite instructions all over. In particular "mind the gap" i.e. the yellow line is written on the subways. The Tube is one hell of a piece of engineering. A weeklong pass for zones 1 and 2, the heart of town, is about 20 £.
When i arrived at victoria station downtown from the airport, i went into the tube and asked this little old guy in a traditional red station attendant outfit with brass buttons if the train before us with its doors open was the "district" line. He glared at me and sort of jumbled said "Yarr don talk ta me i'm not with the railway!!!" and i quickly backed off and jumped in the train. It turned out to be the right one. I think i've heard of this guy before. He may be sort of like the Wally the Beerman of the London Underground.
The pubs close at 10:30 on Sunday nights, which is extremely lame. Pints are about $3. Most things seem to be cost about as many pounds as dollars at home, so in other words dollars don't get too far. Nick and his friends and flatmates know how to stretch their money so it hasn't been too expensive too far.
We saw Starsky and Hutch at the movie theater in Canary Wharf last night and it was excellent, I highly recommend.
As a student of the geography of cities i have to say that the street layout is incredibly weird here. The main street in Mile End is called Mile End road here, but that name only runs about 2000 meters and then it becomes something totally different, and of course its sort of bendy. I feel that the roads are so convoluted so that A-the postal addresses rarely get above 100 B-because they didn't want to redraw the midaeval street system and divvy up property after the great fire C-it keeps people from trying to cut through neighborhoods because they know its impossible. In this sense the topology is a more like Woodbury than minneapolis, but there is far more mixed development and pedestrian walking paths between everything.
When i got here on saturday morning somehow the horrible winter weather completely ended and the sun came out. Everyone was happy and it must have been about 60 degrees fahrenheit. We went to a number of places in the middle of town by Trafalgar Square, then we went over the Millennium Bridge to the London Eye, a giant ferris wheel-type device that takes you above the whole city for 30 minutes, right in front of Parliament and Big Ben, the iconic part of the river. We had dinner with another friend from high school, Victoria Simmonds (who is in Wales instead of the U of M this semester) and her mom, little bro and sis who came to visit her for a couple days. Vics mom bought us dinner, the Eye tickets and nice wine. They were staying at the top suites in the County Hall Marriott, which is right across from parliament. The room on the 6th floor had this amazing little balcony with a perfect, basically textbook view of the whole night-time Parliament/Westminster Big Ben tower scene. That was awesome but it was too dark for pictures to work. :( But incredibly memorable!
I would like to complain that in this advanced part of western civilization, telecommunications is expensive and hard to get at. There is no internet in the dorms and no phones either, since flat rate local service doesn't exist. The library is inexplicably closed at like 7 on sundays and the computer lab won't let you in without campus ID on sunday. Yes this computer lab has Novell, too. It seems to be configured better than ours though.
Yesterday (sunday) i went to the Tate Museum of Modern Art, http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/default.htm which is in a former power plant across the river from the famous St Pauls cathedral. (apparently the plants smokestack, which is a huge brick tower, cooled the smoke and made it descend right on top of st pauls, polluting it very rapidly until the plant closed) there was this marvellous installation of a giant orange neon sun disc in a centralgallery several stories tall, with jets of fog making an all encompassing warm orange glow. There were wobbling mirrors on the ceiling that intersected the midlevel of the sun, so everyone laid on the floor looking up at the mirrors. One free gallery upstairs called 'ideals' or something started with classic Soviet propaganda, moved on to a Warhol room with Jackie Elvis and Marilyn Monroe pieces, art on Northern Ireland, the classic 'The Kiss' and other works by that sculptor. What a sequence! I might go back on a weekday to get into the pay galleries when it's quieter. The millennium footbridge which goes between the Tate modern and St. Pauls was very windy.
The weather reminds me of the north shore of Minnesota in the summer although its a little windier and the rain comes in very short bursts of fine mist. It was far better than this blustery snow we've been getting. It actually felt cleansing and refreshing to lean in the wind and get a little bit of water instead of that cutting cold.
|It is quite disturbing that apparently al-qaeda has been tied to the train bombings in spain. I saw news that said there was heightened security in the underground here, but i don't really see it. There certainly aren't cops around with M 16s like we feel we need to have in the US. If i get hit in a bombing please tell the news media that i blame richard perle for it.
Nick's friends and flatmates here are very nice people. Some of them are from MN, some from california and Whitman college, one from India via London and another from Kazakhstan.
Well i have to roll on now. I am trying to see Greenwich, the incredibly named Imperial War Museum (when will we get one of those in Washington?) and the National Art Museum today.
I hope everyone else is having a really nice break!!! I will be flying back Friday but probably won't be in until Sat. Afternoon around 6 or 7, i think.
Dan
