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Pooning (Dec 29 2003 23:17 GMT) - I don't think the term "'pooning" will ever catch on (too much 60's era sexual connotation?), but I do like Jim Moore's description of the piggy-backing on someone else's fame... |
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Pooning (Dec 29 2003 23:17 GMT) - I don't think the term "'pooning" will ever catch on (too much 60's era sexual connotation?), but I do like Jim Moore's description of the piggy-backing on someone else's fame... |
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- Neeltje Jacoba in bezit oudjaarsploeg.... |
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- After months of careful preparation and design, I've changed the permalinks so they point to a single page for each post, rather than using page anchors. You can still see the entries in their glorious original context by clicking on the "view in context" link below any archived post, but now at least you won't have to download sixty megabytes of Iceland photos just to read about the Wright brothers. Please report bugs, send cakes baked in gratitude etc. to the usual address. |
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- I will be in Poland for the first nineteen days of next year, and as always, I'd be delighted to meet any readers of this site. If you live near Warsaw, Krakow, Lublin, or the Tatra Mountains, drop me a line! (Mozna po polsku) Special thanks to the better half, who is once again putting up with a European absence, and lending me her digital camera. |
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- Foiled terrorist plot or major freak-out? The American and French press have been abuzz with the story of three Paris-Los Angeles Air France flights cancelled because of hijacking fears. On the American side, the story got play in the Washington Post and several Reuters pieces, but most of the details seem confined to the French press. Le Figaro describes the initial events that led to the grounding: Suspicion resting on Air France flights appeared at the start of the week, when American intelligence services intercepted a "chat" (dialogue over the Internet) between presumed islamists. |
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- A century ago today, the Wright brothers took turns steering one of the first powered heavier-than-air aircraft on a series of controlled flights, the longest of which lasted fifty-seven seconds. I say "one of the first" because there is a bit of controversy about who was first to fly, depending on how Clintonian you want to get about the meaning of "flight". If simply getting airborne is the criterion, honors have to go to the New Zealand eccentric Richard Pearse, who in 1902 built a giant flying table that enabled him to reach an altitude of several dozen feet and crash into gorse hedges. If powered flight without a pilot on board qualifies, then credit is due to Charles Parson's powered glider (1883) and Alexander Mozhaiski's steam-powered [!] monoplane (1884). |
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Rotterdam (Dec 29 2003 23:16 GMT) - I was predisposed to like Rotterdam sight unseen, on historical grounds. Rotterdam had been utterly destroyed in the Second World War, just like my own hometown of Warsaw, and had to be rebuilt from the ground up after hostilities ended. Unlike Warsaw, however, the job hadn't been done by Stalinists, and this had to be a good thing. Say what you will about the Germans, but when they set out to level an urban center, they don't cut corners. The city was flattened by an air raid at the very outset of the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. |
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Haarlem (Dec 29 2003 23:16 GMT) - The great oil painters of the past generally fall into two categories - those it would be great to have a beer with (Rubens, Manet, Breughel, Bosch) and those best left to drink alone (Gauguin, Caravaggio, Van Gogh, Degas). This has nothing to do with talent, and everything to do with a certain basic affability. For example, Vincent Van Gogh is a personal hero of mine, and probably the best colorist there has ever been. But it's hard to deny that he was a touch on the volatile side, somewhat creepy around the ladies (viz. stalker-like infatuation with first cousin), and prone to psychotic episodes. |
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Utrecht (Dec 29 2003 23:16 GMT) - On Saturday I went to Utrecht, home town of Marrije Schaake, the wonderful English-language book blogger who had sacrificed a precious day out of [Inter]national Novel Writing Month to show me around her city. Utrecht is about half an hour's train ride south of Amsterdam, and everyone from Amsterdam seemed to be going to Utrecht with me. Holland has zippy bright yellow trains that look just right under the leaden November skies, and I enjoyed my first glimpse of the Dutch countryside, squeezed in for five minutes between endless Amsterdam suburbs and endless Utrecht suburbs. It was all misty green fields with grazing cattle, a sight that would have looked just like a steam-pressed Vermont if not for the occasional windmill, the total absence of orange plaster reindeer, and the stately canal that ran along the railway, with banana-shaped barges each pushing along a fearsome bow wave. Utrecht looks like it was built in two phases - the first sometime in the seventeenth century, and the second in 1962. |
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- I knew that those troublemaker sunspots were rotating back into view this week, but I was still afraid to get my hopes up too high. The gate agent saw the geeky glint in my eye and was kind enough to reassign me to a window seat on the northern side of the plane. I was going to try to see the aurora. My last image of America was a silent television channel showing images of Michael Jackson and saying something about an arrest warrant. I thought to myself "boy am I glad I don't have to deal with this". |
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- Tomorrow morning I leave for Boston, where I'll have a fish supper with the curious frog (curious enough to slog all the way out to Logan!) before boarding a late evening flight to Reykjavik. From there on, it's another evening flight to Amsterdam, and from there a string of adventures that I hope to write all about on the site. The better half has lent me her digital camera, I've got a fresh new battery in the laptop, and I have firmly vowed not to touch email or the web except for purposes of updating this site. So for the next two weeks, this will be a write-only medium. |
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- The John Titor story has now popped up in a BMX discussion forum. Read the thread and decide for yourself if these guys wear helmets. I'm curious about how often specialist forums get invaded by these kinds of off-topic ideas, and more generally about the symbiosis between blogs and discussion boards. My own sense (based on my log files) is that the latter have a ton more readers, but I don't know where to find hard data. There's a thousand (really pompous) PhD dissertations waiting to happen in the space connecting IRC, blogs, email, mailing lists, discussion boards, and the commercial Web. |
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- I have an apache environment setup and cannot figure out how to access the log file via the web. ... |
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- ptime this last week, as measured by alertra.com, was 99.98%, average across all servers. |
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- Rangers shot to death a crocodile believed to have killed a 22-year-old man and plan to cut the animal open to search for his remains, police said Tuesday. |
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- http://babes. tweakzone. nl/index |
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- bonous paid on completionI need funbags, red clouds and the home clips sections replicated. I need a full set of administration tools that allows me to handle the images and vid (more...) Keywords:Perl,PHP,Cold Fusion,MySQL |
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- Dec. 29 - A defiant Michael Jackson maintains that there is nothing wrong with sharing his bed with children, and claims police manhandled him during his arrest. |
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- Dec. 29 - Economic news in 2003 had its ups and downs. The year was plagued by scandals and fraud. Andrew Schmertz looks at the year in review. |
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