The US Iraq administrator Paul Bremer remarked that “The French have never forgiven us for liberating them.” What’s the story behind that comment? For the majority of the war, the United States had intended that France be part of a post-war American protectorate without national sovereignty once the Germans were defeated. The United States went as far as to begin negotiations with the pro-Nazi Vichy government before reversing it’s intentions and officially recognizing De Gaulle as head of the French government in October 1944. Read on…
Author: Chris Barrus
Sometimes you just can’t say anything
Soldiers without blood
Defense Tech reports on a DARPA project that’s so weird, I can’t make a snarky comment
Darpa, the Pentagon’s research arm, has already started to investigate ways for soldiers to fight without sleep or food. Now the agency wants to see if G.I.s can carry on without most of their blood.
“The vision for the Surviving Blood Loss (SBL) Program is to develop novel strategies that delay the onset of irreversible shock and allow an injured warfighter to survive with significantly reduced oxygen delivery for extended periods of time,” a Darpa solicitation reads.
Get Out Of Town Tiki!
I absolutely adore Los Angeles and will always defend it from the same stupid attacks that have traditionally been the targeted at it, but recent news items have emphasized just how well, things suck right now. And I’m not just referring to yesterday’s earthquake prediction…
First of all, 1 million people have moved to Southern California in just the past three years. Transportation infrastructure has not increased to match that. You do the math.
The second news story is a heartbreaking story about my beloved Union Station.
For several weeks now, the front parking areas of the station (obscured from Alameda by high hedges) showed the occasional glimpse of heavy equipment. Most people just assumed the parking lots were being repaved or perhaps that an underground garage was in the making.
So it came as quite a jolt to make my twice weekly pass-by the Station before jumping on the 101 onramp on Alameda to see that the south lot had sprouted a three-story (so far) matrix of steel girders! Goodbye, unobstructed view, approaching from the south.
The Downtown News published a story a couple days ago to the effect that the next shocker would be in the north lot, on the southeast corner of Alameda and Cesar Chavez.
A few hundred lucky yuppies with bucks to burn on trendy living spaces and a few more in a just as trendy office building (that’s the best scuttlebutt so far) will have exclusive views of Union Station that used to belong to all of us.
Last week I saw the Anthony Mann double-header of Raw Deal and T-Men at the Egyptian Theater. T-Men specifically was chock full of old vistas of Los Angeles, including Union Station and the Farmer’s Market at 3rd and Fairfax and though there’s obviously been lots of changes over the 50 years, it was remarkable to see what hasn’t changed – including the Union Station area. Sigh…
And in insult to injury, Aaron Spelling discovers LA hipsters ten years too late:
It’s the same old story. Move into a down-on-its-heels neighborhood for cheap rent, boho charm and like-minded camaraderie. Then – WHAM! – gentrification, and the whole vibe starts to change. Next thing you know, Aaron Spelling’s army moves into a house two doors up the street, and Silver Lake, the TV show, is upon you. Please move your car before we tow.
…
The idea for the show, from what I could glean from others on the set, is something along these obtuse and convoluted lines: Main-character guy Dennis, played by Kerr Smith, starts seeing ghosts as a kid, and since no one believes him, he is forced to take medication to prevent these trite and hackneyed cinematic visions from ruining his life too much. He gets older, a family member dies, and our protagonist comes into some money, with which he buys not just a record store but “the No. 1 used-record store” in Silver Lake. Dennis gets a great product-filled haircut and a cool 1970s Citroën which, this being Silver Lake, gets booted all the time (not cool). He goes off the medication, moves in with his twin sister, Julie (Hedy Burress), who also has great hair, and then he starts to see them ghouls again
There’s a hollow voice echoing underneath Southern California and in true Amityville fashion it’s intoning “GET OUT,” “GET OUT” at me.
Tap tap tap…
Is this thing on?
Still in the middle of moving everything over to the setup at John Companies. I haven’t had to deal with Red Hat since version 3 or so and I’m still fumbling my way around here. I still wish I had a place to park my G4, but what are you going to do?
Housing FUD
It didn’t take long for all the smiles and back-slapping that accompanied record low interest rates and skyrocketing housing values to enter a death-spiral. Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt from MetaFilter and Scalzi questions why families live in cities under these conditions. Either way, SatireWire totally nails it.
Bottom line: I’m glad I rent, travel light, don’t own a lot of possessions, and have no desire for a family.
On cars and Q-ships
A couple of weeks ago I had an opportunity to visit both the basement vault of the Petersen Auto Museum and Jay Leno’s private car collection. Lots of rare and significant autos all of them in the zillion dollar range, but what caught my eye were the automotive Q-ships – non-flashy cars that look like something you would see marooned in some distant vacant lot. Only they’re packing some ridiculously high-horsepower engine that can accelerate the scrap heap to orbital escape velocity in a couple of seconds.
This supercharged Thunderbird in the Petersen vault is a good example. The only clue that there’s something extra hiding under the hood is the set of supercharger gauges stuck somewhat inelegantly on the steering wheel.
I like the relative lack of chrome this has compared with your typical late 50s fin-encrusted behemoth, but it is still a vintage Thunderbird that’ll get all kinds of attention from even the occasional car freak. The clear winner though is this 1966 Dodge Coronet Hemi at the Leno collection.
The Dodge is your basic box sedan, but so timeless and clean that I couldn’t help but notice it in a building filled with flash. The California Highway Patrol still speaks reverently of the late 60s Dodge Polara which held the record for the fastest police car ever tested by the CHP for 25 years. About the only thing you can add is Radio Birdman’s “455 SD” and you’re good to go.
Besides, the Chrysler Corporation had the grooviest ads ever.
Oh, and the obligatory “mirror project” photo.
Johnnie’s Pastrami
Mare Quisquiliarum: The Sea Of Garabge
Lying in between Japan, North America, and Hawaii, the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre is at the center of the large circulatory currents in the northern Pacific Ocean. There’s not much wind there and little current so few sailors cross it. One who did discovered a floating patch of garbage that not just dwarfs most civic landfills, but is truly planetary in size.
I often struggle to find words that will communicate the vastness of the Pacific Ocean to people who have never been to sea. Day after day, Alguita was the only vehicle on a highway without landmarks, stretching from horizon to horizon. Yet as I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic.
It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments. Months later, after I discussed what I had seen with the oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, perhaps the world’s leading expert on flotsam, he began referring to the area as the “eastern garbage patch.” But “patch” doesn’t begin to convey the reality. Ebbesmeyer has estimated that the area, nearly covered with floating plastic debris, is roughly the size of Texas.
RFIDs in US Passports soon
A couple of the regulars from WFMU’s “Off The Hook” show went to the CeBit conference in Germany and reported back some interesting information with respect to biometric and RFID chips. Specifically, one company is currently in negotiations with the US government to provide RFID chips for inclusion in US passports beginning next year. (story begins 24min 30sec into the March 24 show)
Background information on RFID-implanted passports from EFF and Privacy International. Meanwhile, beginning in October the US will be requiring RFID or biometric-encoded passports from visitors entering the country and the EU is complying.