Saturday, November 01, 2003
Saturday in the Park
Shorts weather in November. We spent the day at Central Park and the Natural History Museum. I went camera happy with the Treo. Check out the pictures - mostly posted live - at Buzznet.
Friday, October 31, 2003
Thursday, October 30, 2003
Just in Time for Halloween: I'm a Ghost
Seems that new feature at Amazon is working again. I just used it to scan my married and maiden names. Unfortunately, I'm dead.
SoCal Fire Coverage
Should have thought of this before: Rough & Tumble has a great roundup of all the fire coverage in California newspapers.
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Santa Ana Winds
Here's the first paragraph of Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem."
This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country. The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific, but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves. October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. it is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows."
I read the book years ago, but I remembered Didion speaking poetically about the wind. The good news is I could use Amazon's new full-text search function this morning to find which book it was in and on which page. The bad news is, Amazon isn't showing you the page like they were a few days ago. (I own the book, so typed the quote from that.) I saw a story a few days ago that booksellers were saying the Amazon deal is stomping on copyrights or something. Shame. It was an awesome research tool.
Update: Apparently it's the Authors Guild that doesn't like the Amazon thing. Here's the background.
Audience as Assignment Editor
I was just reading Henry Copeland's post about Josh Marshall raising nearly $5,000 in 24 hours to blog from the New Hampshire primary and I was reminded of something Matt Welch suggested a year ago. Matt proposed Targeted Blogger Fundraising and I did my own little rant on it a few days later.
Since then I've seen several blogger appeals to readers after a laptop dies, or server fees needed to be paid, but I'm not sure how often readers have paid to send their favorite bloggers to cover an event - along the lines of the audience becoming the assignment editor/publisher offering the paycheck. I think it's still a good idea.
Fire Bloggers, Pt. II
Following some links from my comments below, I found that the San Diego bloggers have answered the call of the fire. It looks like Joe Crawford is the man behind San Diego Bloggers. He's made a list of more than 50 blogs that have posted about the fires. Though still no way to check them all to which ones have posted anything on say, the Paradise Fire.
And I say that not to take a swipe at SD Bloggers. Since the economy still sucks and companies aren't throwing money around, it takes a real crisis of sorts for people to develop answers for needs, rather than idle wants.
San Diego Joe points out the San Diego Union Tribune has created a blog-formatted file for fire updates. "Note 'blog' in the url," he says. It's a great idea. A lot of newsrooms have files like this they use internally and it's smart to make it available publicly.
It would be extremely cool if they had someone reading all the blogs and coverage from other papers and wrapping it up in a blog the way Jeff Jarvis was doing with blackout coverage in August for the Advance.net sites. (Though I can't find it archived anywhere, Jeff.)
This is an incomplete thought, but I'll stop for now and pick it up later.
Monday, October 27, 2003
Google Pop-up Blocker
OK, has anyone else been using the Google pop-up blocker on their new toolbar? I started using it a few months ago and it's been great. It stops pretty much everything. But last week two ads opped up when I was at the Chicago Tribune site. Just now, I got one from the New York Times. I e-mailed Google last week and they told me I must have spyware on my computer. Though I'm pretty certain I don't. Just ran AdAware over the weekend and all other ads have been blocked.
The NYTimes ad is for the South Beach Diet http://www.nytimes.com/ads/October4popunder.html
Pretty sure the Chi Trib ads were for Chi Trib products. Anybody else getting anything like this?
Collyers and Chinatown
Two interesting bits on New York history in the NY Times on Sunday. First, the oldest business in Chinatown closed last month. Sadly, it's the lack of business since Sept. 11 that closed their doors.
Mr. Lee's grandfather, Lee Lok, opened the store in the heart of Chinatown in 1891, calling it Quong Yuen Shing & Company. Although it was a few years after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese laborers from entering the country, Chinatown was already a bustling enclave.And there's a new book coming out about the crazy Collyer brothers.
His grandfather sold medicinal herbs, groceries, restaurant supplies and silk brocade for ceremonial clothing, Mr. Lee said. But like other shops in the area, he said, Quong Yuen Shing functioned as much more than a store. At that point, Chinatown was essentially a bachelors' society because immigration law forced men to leave their wives in China. They gathered at the shop to pass the time. Those who were illiterate could get help writing letters home. Many used the store as a postal address. Safes were kept for immigrants because Chinese were barred from opening bank accounts. In the back, workers slept on wooden shelves.
The Collyer brothers' saga confirms a New Yorker's worst nightmare: crumpled people living in crumpled rooms with their crumpled possessions, the crowded chaos of the city refracted in their homes. It's not that Gothamites hoard more than other people; it's that they have less room to hoard in.and ...
Langley was buried in an avalanche of rubbish in 1947 when he tripped one of his elaborate booby traps while bringing Homer dinner. Thanks to my father, I knew all the particulars: how Homer had starved to death, how Langley's body had been gnawed by rats, how the police had searched the city for Langley for nearly three weeks while he lay entombed in the debris of his own house.
Sunday, October 26, 2003
No Fire Bloggers?
Hey folks, a good friend of the family has a home in Valley Center, just outside Escondido, and she's trying to find info about the Paradise Fire. Supposedly it's within three miles of her place. Pretty big. Surprising how little info is actually on the Web. My dad and I have been on the phone/Web simultaneously trying to find blogs or news sites with details about evacuations and maps. Oddly can't find much that is precise. North County Times has something but even skimming through San Diego Bloggers didn't produce much more than reports of ash and dark skies. Daypop produced nada. If you have any suggestions, please jot them in the comments section. Thanks.
You Say Midtown, I Say Hollywood
So if you were taking a SAT-style quiz and had to compare neighborhoods of New York to Los Angeles, would the list look something like this?
Midtown – Hollywood
Upper West Side – West LA
Upper East Side – Bel Air
East Village – Silverlake
West Village – Santa Monica
Greenwich Village – Los Feliz, Westwood
Tribeca – downtown LA
SoHo - Venice
Chinatown – Koreatown
Financial District – Century City
Chelsea – West Hollywood
Harlem – Compton
Lower East Side – East LA
Hamptons – Montecito
N.J. and Brooklyn – San Fernando Valley
and the bonus:
Washington, D.C. – San Francisco
Clearly too much time on my hands this weekend.
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