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Sunday rapid fire
- Big Lebowski Fest – I peruse Wikipedia trying to find the population of Louisville and find their entry on the annual Big Lebowski festival.
- A fine post by Dave Kopel on the current gun grabbing in New Orleans.
- And would you believe that a Hot Brown isn’t a term for some vile act?
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Jane Galt at her best
From one of several posts recently about poverty and culture
In other words, middle class culture is such that bad long-term decision making also has painful short-term consequences. This does not, obviously, stop many middle class people from becoming addicted to drugs, flagrantly screwing up at work, having children they can’t take care of, and so forth. But on the margin, it prevents a lot of people from taking steps that might lead to bankruptcy and deprivation. We like to think that it’s just us being the intrinsically worthy humans that we are, but honestly, how many of my nice middle class readers had the courage to drop out of high school and steal cars for a living?
I’m not really kidding. I mean, I don’t know about the rest of you, but when I was eighteen, if my peer group had taken up swallowing razor blades I would have been happily killed myself trying to set a world record. And if they had thought school was for losers and the cool thing to do was to hang out all day listening to music and running dime bags for the local narcotics emporium, I would have been right there with them. Lucky for me, my peer group thought that the most important thing in the entire world was to get an ivy league diploma, so I went to Penn and ended up shilling for drug companies on my blog.
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Friday rapid fire
- The Laws of Cartoon Physics
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Do you believe that no one can voice support of the IRAQ war UNLESS they are willing to serve in it?
YET when it came to the flood, you readily assumed an expertise in crisis management within hours of the disaster? - Interesting post on the previous strife between the NO mayor and the LA govenor.
- Useful post on disaster preparedness.
- This is bad
- Commercial geo-coding of photographs makes it’s first appearance.
- Very good article in the NYT on the legal issues of using the National Guard and regular army troops in disasters.
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Water bleg
Do any of my vast legions of readers have any thoughts on water purifiers? Comments are open. To my knowledge there is the Pur filter system and one other brand, but I don’t really know anything about the topic.
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Quotes of the moment
“Credit you give yourself is not worth having”
Irving Thalberg“We don’t’ want our slickness and professionalism to overwhelm you.”
Norman Blake. -
Reactions to Katrina
A person’s reaction to Katrina seems to vary in direct proportion to their average daily time spent with people. The more time with people, the more likely one will see it as a human problem, either with Bush or the N.O. Residents. The less time one spends with people, the more likely to see it as an engineering (both physical and social) problem.
Oddly, I’ve been hearing the idea that we should not rebuild New Orleans (at least nowhere near as it was) from some surprising quarters, including me. For a good summation of the main argument, see Josh Trevino’s article.
For more literal reactions, see the Agitator’s post on what WalMart has done so far. It’s quite staggering. The business community has done a great deal already.
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Reunion photos are up
One the whole I think they turned out fair. There were about 35 photos (mostly from the reunion but a few from the day before) that turned out very poorly due to my mistakes with the Auto Exposure Lock (AEL) feature of the camera. I need to read up a bit on how to use that.
Most of the AEL problems occurred when I was trying to photograph people in the shade while still capturing a lot of the sunny landscape. I deleted the over/under exposed photos from the gallery. Very little retouching has been done to the photos.
When viewing the gallery please note that clicking the main/large image will take you to the next image in the series.
With no further ado
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As it should be
Just got back from the vet to pick up Drex. He seemed very calm and good spirited and had has his nails cut (which makes me think they drugged him). All is back as it should be here in Steveland. It’s amazing how much of an empty space is created when pets aren’t there.
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I’m back
Expect mucho photography to come.
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Back in a bit
I’m off to the old country. Expect lots of photos.
Update: I’ve added word verification for commenting. Everyone keep following the saga of DirectNic vs Katrina.
And before you complain about “gouging” please read this post from Jane Galt..