Author: Chris Barrus

Keeping up with the Finns: Embassy upscaling in D.C.

Embassy Row in Washington D.C. is transforming into a weird amalgamation of the World’s Fair and the Las Vegas Strip.

One recent sticky summer evening, the Swedish ambassador welcomed his guests with chilled vodka and what he called the most important news of the year: Sweden had just received permission to build a new embassy here.

“This is the most powerful country in the history of the world, and we need a showpiece for Sweden,” said the ambassador, Jan Eliasson.

Then, to underline the seriousness of the venture, the ambassador pointed to a successful Nordic rival, “Like the Finnish Embassy.”

[via Red Rock Eater]

My new heroes: Davoli

I’ve become a big fan of the music video show on World Link TV – a satellite network that broadcasts a lot of foreign television, independent news productions, and totally off the wall stuff.

Anyway, the music video show apparently broadcasts anything that remotely falls under the “world music” category… French rappers from Algeria, “super-happy” pre-fab Japanese pop, hip-hop from Ghana, vaguely Bjork-like singers from Sweden, South American jazz, a spastic song about the Basque National Sandwich by a gang of Basque Madness fans, a group of Romanian Hank Williams fans – pretty much anything goes.

Not surprisingly, most of what’s on the show is light years better than any video shown on MTV in the past fifteen years. Apparently music video production in the rest of the world is happily stuck in 1981 with all of its new wave charm and goofiness intact.

Case in point: Davoli. They’re from Croatia. I finally got around to dumping their video off of the TiVo last night…

[youtube]VP2u7n1In5A[/youtube]

Is Bin Laden a Cthulhu Cultist?

State of the art bulldada for your Sunday evening…

It must be understood that the identity of the statues is highly suspect. There were two large guardian Buddhas, with distorted quasi-Chinese features; as many people recollect, Buddha was Indian, and there was only one Siddhartha Gautama Buddha. A strong hint of the eldritch influence over the creation of these stone collossi comes from the fact that the particular emperors which constructed them ruled over the Indian cities of Sarnath and Mathura (which sounds more than a bit like Cathuria.) These were not meant to represent Buddha, but the gods that Barzai espied on Hatheg-Kla before he was snatched up unspeakably by the Other Gods.

Yet Lovecraft himself had interesting things to say about stone collossi, most notably in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. In it, Randolph Carter seeks Mount Ngranek to behold a carven visage of one of the terrestrial gods, in order to find the bloodline of those descended from these immortals. These unusual features, including slanted quasi-Chinese eyes and pendulous earlobes lead Carter to the villages surrounding the forbidden plateau of Leng. Unsurprisingly, this leads us to recognize that within what we today call Afghanistan is the plateau of Leng, the Cold Waste, and somewhere in the most forbidding mountainous regions Kadath itself.

[via Aleph]

The Secret Life of AAA

Like a lot of folks, I belong to AAA and yes, they’ve bailed me out on more than one occasion. I’ve always considered them to be one of the cheerful good guys – a sort of throwback to old days of service stations with service. Little did you or I know, AAA is also a political group that’s been lobbying against every environmental or auto safety legislation for years.

On the subject of highway congestion, AAA can be found on the opposite side of the fence from both environmentalists and urban planners. In recent years, land-use planners have asserted that new roads actually worsen congestion because they open up more land to real estate development, which in turn puts still more cars on the roads. But AAA’s position has not substantially changed from the late 1980s. It argues that bottlenecks are a major cause of automobile pollution — so more roads must be built to eliminate them. Its 1988 “six-point strategy” for relieving congestion relied principally on new highways and outer loops around metropolitan areas. Twelve years and many miles of new road later, with congestion so bad that “road rage” is now part of the national vocabulary, AAA’s byword is still “increased roadway capacity.” Comments Paul Billings of the American Lung Association, “Building more roads to solve an air pollution problem is like buying a larger pair of pants to solve an obesity problem.”

…

Critics see an essential hypocrisy at AAA’s heart, for it poses as a consumer advocate yet opposes laws that would lead to cleaner air and a healthier environment for those same consumers. They also cite its history on safety. AAA says it promotes road construction and repair for the sake of its members’ safety — but when it comes to car safety, the story is different.

One of the most notorious examples was the airbag law. AAA came out against mandatory installation of airbags in cars. It released a nationwide survey showing that 67 percent of those questioned preferred laws mandating seat belt use, and started lobbying for those laws in state legislatures, weakening the airbag campaign.

In place of AAA, the Better World Travellers Club seems like a good alternative. Plus it appears to be less expensive too.

Two articles on Minority Report

I saw Minority Report on opening night, but didn’t get prompted to comment about it until after I read these two articles:

The first from the Village Voice:

Minority Report is the new lord of the allegories, dethroning that movie whose screenplay was basically rants from Society of the Spectacle with the word “Spectacle” crossed out and “Matrix” written in in crayon.

Difficult to imagine Cruise or Spielberg, avatars of wealth, privilege, and domesticity, lasting more than five minutes in a Philip K. Dick worldview. Dick, like Burroughs and Kubrick, is all about the disintegration that occurs when doubt unravels belief in a Perfect System. Dick didn’t believe in systems or in Mom and apple pie, which is why he seems so prophetic now, when the corporatization of consciousness has become such a totalizing, repressive, and relentless force.

And the second from Slate…

Minority Report has virtuoso grit, but it wipes off with one swipe, like waxy buildup in a commercial. Philip K. Dick’s original hero dreads noir betrayal by his dame; Tom Cruise’s wound is the morally irreproachable loss of a child. (Cruise says boosting the kid theme was his big script contribution.) Cruise is great, huffing street drugs like the Bad Lieutenant – but his grief lets him off the moral hook. What’s his depraved kink? Watching 3-D home movies of his angelic son and his perky ex blushing coyly in a PG negligee.

Sure Minority Report pushed the right tech buttons and will give nightmares to the Adbusters set, but it didn’t sit well with me. It’s basically a wind-up toy movie. Events happen for no other reason than to advance the plot. After stewing on it for awhile, I’m now convinced that the movie ended when Anderton went down for the count in the stasis chamber and that everything that transpired afterward was his dreaming.

Still it’s nice to know that Broguiere’s Dairy will still exist in the future – and that it’s milk will still be sold in glass bottles

Five hours with OS X 10.2 installed

Finally got some face time with a 17″ iMac (awesome machine) and low and behold there was a set of 10.2 discs inside the box. Couple of hours later, I’m running it now on my Titanium/800.

Couple of notes:

  • It’s fast!
  • Build number is 6C115
  • Most of my menu bar add-ons (Classic Spy, Massinova, ScriptMenu) are broken. No big deal – probably the API for the menu has changed and everything needs an update
  • The GPG and SpamCop bundles screw up the menus in Mail.app. Again, just needs an update here.
  • Retrospect client fails. Work around is to script a cron job until Dantz can get their shit together. Will they? Not sure as their OS X support has been dodgy at best. Irritating as I’d love to update the OS X users at work to 10.2 as soon as possible. Anyone want to bet if an updated client is released along with 10.2’s release?
  • The client for CorporateTime fails on launch. This is more problematic as work uses it and I’ve got a pretty big list of stuff up there. At least there’s the web front end to CT so I can get at my events. Complicating factor is that Oracle just finished buying out Steltor and there’s been no mention of how the coding force is being divvied up. Not looking forward to importing it all into Palm Desktop. Wish iCal was released already.