No Comments Local station KOMO had a fire this morning. We drove past the truck trailer generator today.
The building also housed a data center and about half Seattle’s startups went offline. Heh.
No Comments The Times - Grieving families to get new Elizabeth Cross military award
The families of thousands of Armed Forces personnel who have been killed on operations or died as a result of a terrorist attack since the Second World War are to receive a new military award.
Around 8,000 families will be eligible for a special silver Elizabeth Cross emblem and a memorial scroll signed by the Queen.
The decision to honour the next of kin of servicemen and women who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as previous wars including Korea, Malaysia, Kenya, the Falklands and Northern Ireland, was in recognition of the “lifetime grief” they had to endure, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, the Chief of the Defence Staff, said today.
In a broadcast to the Armed Forces on British Forces Radio (BFBS), which was recorded from Windsor Castle, the Queen said: “This seems to me a right and proper way of showing our enduring debt to those who are killed while actively protecting what is most dear to us all.”
“The solemn dignity which we attach to the names of those who have fallen is deeply engrained in our national character,” she said.
It will be the first time that the name of a reigning monarch has been given to a new award since the George Cross was instituted in 1940 by King George VI, although it was emphasised that the Elizabeth Cross is not a medal but an emblem.
The Victoria Cross, or Vickie X, as I like to call it, is famously apocryphally?) made from gunmetal from a Russian canon captured at Sevastapol, but so far this has only been said to be made out of sterling silver.
2 Comments I think it’s rather sweet that they bothered with ballot stuffing at all. Almost makes it a real election they were stealing.
No Comments Jackson’s claim to greatness is more prosaic. He sold a lot of records. He may have competed with the Osmonds as a kid, but he outran them, outsold them, outlasted them. Indeed he outsold everyone. I think the right judgment on Jackson’s career is that he was a magnificent entertainer, a thriller (sorry), but not someone who shaped pop history.
And it is worth calibrating that judgment finely — spending a little time on it — because it prompts bigger questions. Why, given his status, did Jackson’s death make such an impact? Why was it covered wall to wall in upmarket newspapers as well as downmarket ones? Why did it attract more serious attention than the passing of Elvis and John Lennon, both of whom were undeniably more culturally important?
Or maybe the media has become crass and venal.
No Comments I did say the other day that I’d have to go cram on Honduran politics since their coup, but I confess, I never really did…
Wheat & Weeds - Obama’s First Foreign Policy Failure
Lots of folks have noticed the President’s decision to stand with OOOgo & Fidel against the Hondurans, who chose in the past few days to send their usurper president packing. Former President Zelaya tried to alter the Honduran constitution to become President For Life. The Honduran constitution can only be altered by people’s referendum, but Zelaya ignored that and illegally called for a referendum himself. The Honduran Supreme Court and the people and institutions of Honduras Just Said No to that and invited their dictator-wanna-be to step down.
President Obama’s calling it an illegal coup.
Read the whole thing. And elsewhere, I’ve found:
No Comments The Times - Victoria’s age is the greatest in our history, by Michael Gove
In a meeting last week a colleague mentioned, in passing, a report he’d read that referred to an institution’s “Victorian” approach. Was that, another colleague asked, intended as a compliment? The laughter was spontaneous, loud and long.
Well, harrumph. Read the whole thing.
No Comments The moment of truth for the death of the Islamic Republic came when Ayatollah Khamenei broke with tradition and declared Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the victor in the election even before the polls had closed. Over the past two weeks he has ignored demands for a rerun of the controversial election or even a complete recount of the votes, insisting that Mr Ahmadinejad is President not because the people elected him but because the Supreme Leader says so.
Well there you go. Time to update the CIA Factbook, I guess.
The government-controlled media have highlighted the change in the nature of the regime. They now refer to Ayatollah Khamenei’s speech endorsing Mr Ahmadinejad’s re-election as “Fasl el-Khitab”, a theological term that means “end of the discussion”. Propaganda now refers to the ayatollah as “Emir al-Momeneen” (Commander of the Faithful), a title initially used for Ali ibn Abi-Talib, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law and the first imam of Shiaism.
An editorial last week in Kayhan, whose editor is appointed by the Ayatollah, put the new situation in graphic terms: “Imam Ali is back, the Commander of the Faithful. But this time he is not alone!” The editorial said that Iran was now ruled by “the Vicar of Allah” in a “pure Muhammadan system”.
The new system that seems to be emerging in Iran appears to be modelled on two Islamic states of recent times. The first is the imamate in Yemen — in which a descendant of the Prophet through Imam Ali ruled the country, with the Koran regarded as the imamate’s only Constitution. That was ended by a military coup in 1960.
So, the concept of “backfire” did come to mind, but then he says the Basij is made up of a bunch of country boys who are easy to recruit to the protesters sides. But then he says they could call the Revolutionary Guard, who might then grab power for themselves. So hey, at the times, they are a-changin’.
2 Comments Brett McS sent this to me a little while ago and I never got around to it (ah, remodeling), and then I found it somewhere else and thought, ah hah! So anyway, here it is:
In 1963, America learned a painful lesson when Pennsylvania Station, an architectural treasure that Senator Daniel Moynihan described as “the best thing in our city,” was torn down and replaced with a dreary complex that includes an office building and Madison Square Garden. The rail station, to this day the nation’s busiest, was moved underground into a claustrophobic warren of artificially lit passageways and bleak waiting rooms. While there has been an active campaign since the 1990’s to rectify the mistake by creating a new and worthy station a block away, the $1 billion-plus project remains stuck in political gridlock.
But the sad saga of Penn was by no means an isolated incident. Almost like a rite of passage, cities across the country embraced the era of Interstates, Big Macs, and suburban sprawl by tearing down their train depots. (Frequently, they just did the Joni Mitchell thing and put up a parking lot.) But time and experience are showing that train stations are vital organs in a healthy city, and removing them deadens the entire organism. The lesson is especially stark at the moment, as cities around the country face the challenge of rebuilding the infrastructure for regional high speed rail networks. Chicago–once abundantly blessed with grand stations–is today bouncing around ideas for a new high speed rail depot.
One lesson of this legacy is that what replaces a well designed and centrally located rail depot is rarely of equal worth to the city. Following is a tour of 10 great depots that were lost to demolition orders–plus one more that might be still–and what stands on those sites today.
Gah.
Philly (home of 30th Street Station!) has this place called Reading (”redding”) Terminal Market, which used to be Reading Terminal Station, whose headhouse, according to Wiki, “the Italian Renaissance style,” and whose trainshed “was one of the largest single-span arched-roof structures in the world” and is “now the world’s oldest such structure and the only one left in the United States.” It was also declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976. Presumably this was carried forward on the shoulders of the bicentennial (ahh, Philly), but it’s just 13 years after some idiot in New York decided it would be a swell idea to tear down Penn Station. Incredible.
No Comments I love these visualizations of government, and tend to watch a lot of them, but this… this… And he doesn’t even say how pointless it all is! (Unlike, say, WWII)
Curtsy: Daniel Hannan, who points out that Gordon Brown is spending even more, per capita, than we are.
No Comments Corner - Mark Steyn: Congratulations, it’s a …cross-border incident!
[F]rom Hamilton, Ontario:
Hamilton’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) was full when Ava Isabella Stinson was born 14 weeks premature at St. Joseph’s Hospital Thursday at 12:24 p.m.
A provincewide search for an open NICU bed came up empty, leaving no choice but to send the two-pound, four-ounce preemie to Buffalo that evening.
Well, it would be unreasonable to expect Hamilton, a city of half-a-million people just down the road from Canada’s largest city (Greater Toronto Area, five-and-a-half million) in the most densely populated part of Canada’s most populous province (Ontario, 13 million people) to be able to offer the same level of neonatal care as Buffalo, a post-industrial ruin in steep population decline for half-a-century.
But wait! The fun and games are only just beginning. When a decrepit and incompetent Canadian health bureaucracy meets a boneheaded and inhuman American border “security” bureaucracy, you’ll be getting a birth experience you’ll treasure forever:
Her parents, Natalie Paquette and Richard Stinson, couldn’t follow their baby because as of June 1, a passport is required to cross the border into the United States. They’re having to approve medical procedures over the phone and are terrified something will happen to their baby before they get there.
Once Buffalo enjoys the benefits of Hamilton-level health care, I wonder where Ontario will be shipping the preemies to. Costa Rica?
Yuck.
I happen to know for a fact that if you’ve forgotten your passport they’ll still let you across the border, with at least a little interviewing. I mean, it could have all changed after June 1, but I doubt it. I mean, come on.
No Comments This is from last week, but oh well:
The Times - Past notes: Should princes be seen and not heard? By Graham Stewart
The Prince of Wales has done it again. Hundreds of locals campaigned against the erection of uncompromisingly modern buildings opposite Sir Christopher Wren’s Royal Hospital in Chelsea. Yet it was the Prince’s appeal to the site’s Qatari owners that is credited with ensuring the withdrawal of the scheme.
Lord Rogers of Riverside, the offending architect, has spluttered about “an abuse of power”. Claiming that the Prince has acted unconstitutionally, he is demanding the formation of a committee of experts to pronounce on whether the Prince can ever again get involved in such contentious matters.
Rogers may not regard historical setting as relevant to his own designs but he ought to accept that the past produces the precedents in any debate about what royalty can and cannot do. This bodes ill for those who believe princes should be seen and not heard.
I think those who hate historical precedent in architecture (and the people of Chelsea wouldn’t be so pissed off if he was a classicist) aren’t likely to be great fans of historical precedent in people disagreeing with them.
1 Comment The Sunday Times - RIP Michael Jackson: your passing has shown the power of Twitter, by India Knight
I’d gone out to supper last Thursday and came back at about 11pm, made a cup of tea and logged on to Twitter, as you do, whereupon I found hundreds of people were posting about Jackson being taken to hospital, being in a coma, possibly being dead.
I turned on the television but that didn’t give me any new information at all. Ten minutes later someone posted on Twitter that the Los Angeles Times was confirming that Jackson had died. Meanwhile, the news networks were still speculating; it took them a good 20 minutes to catch up and call in the talking heads — people who had met Jackson twice 15 years ago and who spouted the most hilariously inane platitudes such as, “Of course, he was a tall man. Over six foot.”
Back on Twitter — I very nearly wrote “back in the real world”, because that is what Twitter now feels like — people were doing what twitterers do best: engaging with each other and passing on news, thoughts and information.
Los Angeles residents were reporting that the sky had blackened with helicopters, describing the crowd outside the hospital, discussing the television commentary, making playlists of Jackson’s work, expressing sorrow, saying how stunned they were and making jokes. Hundreds and hundreds of jokes. The death couldn’t be blamed on the sunshine or moonlight, which left only the boogie (everyone); “Let’s all turn our Twitter pictures white. It’s what he’d have wanted” (@wardytron); “Reports of MJ’s death are incorrect. He was found in the children’s ward having a stroke” (@ivan007). And so on.
The jokes, as off-colour (see what I did there?) as you might expect, came within minutes of the announcement of Jackson’s death, swiftly followed by everyone wondering whether Elton John would once again nobly volunteer to record another reworking of Candle in the Wind.
Heh. Yes. Thursday was a lot of fun. I was trading awful puns with a coworker of Peter’s as well as with Peter and on the Twitter. The BBC was live streaming its news coverage, as it does in cases of terrorist attacks, deaths in the royal family, or, apparently, the need to put a Michael Jackson Fan Club president on. Streamed and broadcast around the world, the hang-dog expression of the 22-year-old with nothing interesting to say was seen by how many people, I wonder, tuning into the world’s greatest news organization. Then they cut to the press conference from the police too late (because the fan club president was telling them how important Michael Jackson was to his own life) and only caught only the “I have nothing else to tell you folks” at the end. Then they went live to an affiliate station interviewing people gathered on the lawn of the hospital, including one fat chick who said, visibly thrilled, that she’s “A big fan of popular entertainment!” and that’s why she had to be there.
Then by the time the rest of the media caught up with TMZ, they’d managed to scrape some “experts” together, everyone was solemnly pronouncing on the man’s business genius. He sold more copies of an album than the next runner-up by a factor of two and a half and owned half of the Beatles catalog. I think with that kind of income, Bubbles the Chimp could have run a musical career simultaneous with a children’s fairground. The fact that he had that kind of income and ran both into the ground, dying $400 million in debt (if not more), and 2 weeks before finally making some money of his own for the first time in about 15 years means that I think we might want to solemnly pronounce on the man’s moon-walking and leave the finances out of it.
Then by Friday, it emerged that Jesse Jackson had positioned himself as the spokesman for the family. By Saturday it was evident that the family hadn’t managed to plan a funeral, but they had started on a “tribute” tour. And by yesterday it was set in stone that the children, orphaned because of how screwed up their father was, was going into custody of the family that made him that way. And I’m a little tired of having Black and White in my head. God what an awful song.
And I just have to post this:
8 Comments No, go on then: if you think his music is that great, try humming me Thriller. You can’t. The melody goes nowhere. It’s a dirge. The only thing that propels it along is the jerky backbeat, which you could only dance to comfortably if you spent every waking hour with a choreographer. Most of Jacko’s stuff is like that: dance music that only he could ever actually dance to.
A couple months ago I was looking at Wiki’s list of top selling pop albums internationally. I was curious how many of them were American, and was surprised how far down you had to go to get to one (that is, a solo artist) who was British or Japanese*. But I didn’t pay much attention to the copies sold. Yesterday I looked it up again, curious about the whole BEST SELLING ALBUM OF ALL TIME talk about Thriller. It sold 109 million copies. The next best-selling one, AC/DC’s Back in Black (never ‘eard o’ it) sold 45 million. So that stupid Thriller album sold two and a half times more copies than the next best-selling album. I mean for heaven’s sake.
* Friggin Alanis Morissette, Shania Twain, and Celine Dion are up there though. And #2 is AC/DC which just now I’ve discovered to be an Australian band?!
No Comments It’s Friday again! Time to go to church and hear about God’s love for his flock (à la iranienne)!
Times Online - Hardliner says Iran protesters should be punished ‘without mercy’
A hardline cleric seen as a mouthpiece of the Iranian regime today demanded that opposition demonstrators be punished “without mercy”.
Even as Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami delivered his uncompromising message at Tehran’s Friday prayers, foreign ministers of the world’s leading industrialised nations issued a statement deploring the regime’s violent crackdown on the protestors and demanded it “stop immediately”.
Mr Khatami’s televised sermon came at the end of a week in which the regime has brutally suppressed all streets protests and rounded up hundreds of opponents for daring to question President Ahmadinejad’s re-election. It conveyed the unmistakable message that no dissent would be tolerated, and that the crackdown would, if anything, intensify.
His response to Michael Jackson’s demise has so far been untranslated in the English press.
