Well, in my last post I pondered how I might evacuate a city if I had no car. The Greyhound seemed the best bet. Apparently that wasn't an option in New Orleans:

"People are saying that those stuck in New Orleans now are those that wanted to stay, but that's not true," said Danelle Fleming, a New Orleans-based social worker. "They wanted to leave, but they couldn't."

She said that the city's Greyhound station was closing Saturday afternoon -- even as people without cars were trying to leave.

Of course, many people wouldn't have been able to afford a Greyhound ticket. The government desperately needs to provide ways for the poor and the elderly to evacuate.

I have an answer to my question about what would happen to prisoners given the massive flooding, courtesy of CNN: "Inmates from a flooded parish jail were relocated to a freeway on-ramp, where they sat out in the sun, under the watch of armed officers." I guess that's the best that they can hope for, given the seeming lack of planning for an event of this magnitude. The federal government really needs to come up with mass evacuation plans. Looking at the images of people still in New Orleans, most appear to be poor, though of course how can you really tell just by appearances? If my parents didn't live in the area, I would have a difficult time in a mandatory evacuation. Am I supposed to leave on a Greyhound bus?

The best three-second segment of a song is clearly Soundgarden's "Ty Cobb" at 2:52. I haven't listened to that song in years but now I can't stop listening to it, especially that part from 2:52 - 2:55 when Matt Cameron explosively brings the drums in after a nice long interlude. Ah, so good.

Wow, the American Red Cross website is down, presumably because people are now racing to donate funds after seeing how bad the hurricane hit parts of the South. I went to bed nervous on Sunday but my nervousness turned to relief yesterday as it seemed as though the storm wasn't as bas as it could have been. Today everything changed with the breaking of the levee and it seems like some of the worst nightmare scenarios are coming true. The city won't be inhabitable for a month, some say. And the looting:

With much of the city emptied by Hurricane Katrina, some opportunists took advantage of the situation by looting stores.

At a Walgreen's drug store in the French Quarter, people were running out with grocery baskets and coolers full of soft drinks, chips and diapers.

When police finally showed up, a young boy stood in the door screaming, "86! 86!" - the radio code for police - and the crowd scattered.

Denise Bollinger, a tourist from Philadelphia, stood outside and snapped pictures in amazement.

"It's downtown Baghdad," the housewife said. "It's insane. I've wanted to come here for 10 years. I thought this was a sophisticated city. I guess not."

I'm not sure it's appropriate to determine the sophistication of a city based on the actions of a few in the face of overwhelming flooding. Yikes:

In addition, bodies were seen floating in the rising waters, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin reported. But it was not immediately clear whether they were victims of Katrina or corpses unearthed from the above-ground tombs of the city's cemeteries.

Pretty terrible stuff. (Photo source.)

I'm reading Jérôme Carcopino's "Daily Life in Ancient Rome" and it's making me want to visit Italy pretty badly. I love the accounts of the simple tasks of everyday life nearly two thousand years ago: how people cut their hair, what jobs existed, when people woke and how they kept time, what public spectacles took place, how people used the public baths, etc. The stories of gladiators a la the Russell Crowe movie are quite well known, but this was new—and horrifyingly scary—to me:

The gladiatores meridiani, whose account was squared at the noon pause, were recruited exclusively from robbers, murderers, and incendiaries, whose crimes had earned them the death of the amphitheatre: noxii ad gladium ludi damnati. Seneca has described this shameful procedure for us. The pitiable contingent of the doomed was driven into the arena. The first pair was brought forth, one man armed and one dressed simply in a tunic. The business of the first was to kill the second, which he never failed to do. After this feat he was disarmed and led out to confront a newcomer armed to the teeth, and so the inexorable butchery continued until the last head rolled in the dust.

That the mind can become so numb to human violence and sacrifice is quite amazing.

This isn't too surprising, but I figured that maybe Tulane and the University of New Orleans might have backup servers located in a far-away geographic area, but that apparently isn't the case. Both sites are down now. Though I guess that when such a strong hurricane hits only every couple decades, systems administrators don't plan for such events. Remember the Y2K scare?

Despite the horrific context, this is a funny quote:

Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard said some who have ridden out previous storms in the New Orleans area may not be so lucky this time.

"I'm expecting that some people who are die-hards will die hard," he said.

I also wonder: What do they do with prisoners when they evacuate cities?

I'm about to go to bed but, for the historical record, I want to write some final words before a potential disaster occurs. Presumably I will wake up tomorrow and Hurricane Katrina will have hit New Orleans. Some crazy notes from a CNN article:

• Some 25 feet of standing water is expected in many parts of the city -- almost twice the height of the average home -- and computer models suggest that more than 80 percent of buildings would be badly damaged or destroyed, he said.

• "So, imagine you're the poor person who decides not to evacuate: Your house will disintegrate around you. The best you'll be able to do is hang on to a light pole, and while you're hanging on, the fire ants from all the mounds -- of which there is two per yard on average -- will clamber up that same pole. And, eventually, the fire ants will win."

• "You're going to have enormous waves develop on that lake, especially with as much as 14 hours of hurricane-force winds." Those waves will erode the levees, raising the possibility of their collapse, he said.

Sounds extraordinarily scary. I wish the best for the people in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. I had briefly entertained the idea of visiting New Orleans in November to hear John Kerry speak at the American Public Health Association annual meeting. I decided not to pursue that, but here's hoping that the city will be in fine shape to hold that event.

This is a weird email that I received on Friday, August 19:

Regarding your website: insete.com
From: yoysearch@yoysearch.com

Hello,

We want to add your website insete.com to our search engine/web directory (www.yoysearch.com) on such topics as "bush,thai,administration,the president,nude pictures,today,against,these,made,way".

In order to add a description and review the keywords we selected for your website please use this submit form:

http://www.yoysearch.com/add.cgi

.. And if you like our website please reciprocate with a link from your site, like this:

<a href="http://www.yoysearch.com/"> YoYsearch </a> - a web portal with ten types of search <br><br>

Thank you

Yours,
Kurt Stahel

I've never heard of this search engine and the fact that they are essentially spamming me is not a great thing. Further, searching the YoY directory for Kurt Stahel yields nothing, which is also not a good sign. Anyway, I enjoyed the search terms that they think I would most desire. Presumably these are terms that are commonly searched for. "Bush," "Thai" (prostitutes, probably), "nude pictures," and "administration" make sense (as I have used these words), though I hardly think that they characterize my site. Indeed I blogged about Thai food and I might have mentioned nude pictures sometime, but my site doesn't, as of now, regularly feature nude bush shots of Thai girls. Some bloggers participate in "Friday cat blogging," or some variation on that. Maybe I can do Friday nude Thai bush blogging. Or not. Those other search terms make no sense, and I don't think this search engine will meet with much success if they think that I want people who search for "today" and "way" visiting my site.

As evidenced by my last post, I do love civil liberties and unqualified free speech. So I enjoyed the site Freeway Blogger, especially this highway sign:

I'm 98% sure that the image is Photoshopped, but it's still cool.

"Get the fuck off my bus!"

Some bus etiquette that can also be applied to elevators: Let people leaving the vehicle exit through the doors before trying to board. I know this rule and follow it, but today there was a slight complication. Two people were getting off the 28B (to King Street) at West Falls Church. The woman got off fine, but the man lingered around, talking to the bus driver. So I boarded, thinking I could swipe my SmartTrip and pass by without inducing obnoxiousness. As soon as I stepped up I realized that the man and the bus driver were arguing. I believe the man probably had used a transfer to board the bus and was asking for a new one as the one in his hands presumably had expired. The bus driver rightly denied the man, who then tried to swipe at the transfer dispenser and grab one for himself. This obviously enraged the driver, who already had verbally quarreled with the man. So as I was boarding the bus the driver gets out of his seat and exchanges further harsh words with the man (the above quoted comment). The man had equally castigating responses. The bus driver was in the right, so I sympathized with him, but I didn't enjoy being essentially sandwiched between two large men with the driver posturing himself to physically evict the man from the bus. Fortunately, all was resolved as the man left and claimed that he would see the driver again soon and take action against him. The bus driver said that he would welcome such an encounter. High drama and bravado on the metro!

The majority of my bus trips are from the apartment to work and back. I ride with blue- but mostly white- collar workers. The riders present themselves professionally and appear thoroughly honest. Taking the bus on a Saturday night is another story altogether. Quite a few people were trying to get on the bus without paying the full fare. One guy tried to sneak on using a weekly bus pass to board, even though the pass isn't active until tomorrow. One paid a half-fare and then, with the bus driver not letting him on, had to call his friend to borrow some money. Ridiculous. I understand that $1.25 is probably a lot to many of these riders, but don't come on the bus drunk and then claim that you don't have enough money for the ride!

Speaking of cursing, today I finished the book "Defending Everybody: A History of the American Civil Liberties Union" by Diane Garey. It was a fine short read, though I was annoyed at the number of language errors in the book. Also, it appeared to be written for a high school audience, which was a bit tedious. The book was about 200 pages, and of the thousands and thousands of words in the book, there is one curse word, part of a quotation, found in one of the last couple pages. The quotation was something by Dennis Miller about how the ACLU doesn't have "a fucking A-C-L-U-E." Why, after going, say, 198 pages without any curse words, would you recount that "joke" with two pages to go? Obviously, given that I'm reading a book on the ACLU, I support free speech, but it seemed so pointless, especially given that the book appeared targeted for a young audience. I hope the ACLU gets to sue some school library that refuses to shelve the book due to that one word.

Three things that annoyed me today:

• This from an AP story, Think Your Gas Costs A Lot? How About President Bush?:

  Bush is one of the nation's most-traveled presidents. He has visited 46 countries, some of them several times, during his presidency. He has been to all states except Vermont and Rhode Island.

  What is a good reason for Bush not having visited all fifty states? I don't know the historical precedent; maybe Clinton didn't visit all fifty. But still, given that Bush had to campaign heavily in New Hampshire back in 1999 and 2000, why didn't he just visit the next state over. Same goes for Rhode Island. New England is so compact. His advisors should have thought about the fact that it now appears that there is a reason that he is avoiding those states. Is he ashamed of Vermont's independent (socialist) congressman, soon to probably be a senator? Does he have a rivalry with Brown University from his Yale and Harvard days? Though the states are small in landmass, Rhode Island is number 43 and Vermont number 49 in population. Maybe if I knew why Bush visited Wyoming (the least populous state, though it did produce Dick Cheney) I would forgive him for not visiting Vermont, but as is, there are 1,657,146 (as of the 2000 Census) people waiting for a visit from the 40%-approval-rating president.

• At my apartment complex I shared an elevator with a security guard with an American flag patch on his right shoulder. The flag was the typical orientation, with the starry blue field on the top-left. Too bad that's wrong! The number of super-patriotic people who don't know how to display a flag bothers me to no end. On Fort Myer, a military base, I see people flying the flag incorrectly. Really, I see it all around. Probably more often than not the flag is displayed incorrectly on moving objects. Police officers often wear it incorrectly, as do fire fighters. So frustrating. An easy rule for clothing is: "To wear our country's flag properly, the field of stars should be worn closest to your heart." More precisely, when the flag is placed on a moving object the starry blue field should be facing in the direction of forward movement, to imitate what would happen if the flag were flown on a pole. People also often fly the flag improperly when displaying it vertically, but there's only so much that I can get worked up over.

• And finally, this USA Today op-ed from travel guide extraordinaire Rick Steves (whose last night I like to pronounce such that it rhymes with "Weenis," and not because that also rhymes with "penis"):

  From Norway to Naples, it seems Europeans have a relaxed attitude about public displays of nudity and sex. Even prim, churchgoing German hausfraus seem to accept that the human body and sexuality are facts of life, and displaying or talking about it in public is no big deal.

  Meanwhile, in the USA, there has been a strong reaction from a dedicated minority to limit sex and nudity on TV and the airwaves. First, it was Janet Jackson's Nipplegate during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, then fines placed on shock jock Howard Stern's freak sideshow, and tape-delay broadcasts elsewhere to edit out profanity.

  Now I've found out that my own travel shows — which feature timeless classics of art such as Michelangelo's (nude) David and Titian's (nude) Venus— are being broadcast on PBS in some cities along with the disclaimer: "For mature audiences only."

  Gah! I need not comment but to use this as yet another example of America's decline into a pitiful shell of its once mighty potential.

After my last blog entry I suppose some of my readers pitied me. And by some I mean that there is evidence of at least one reader of this blog. An email:

Hey greg,

As an FYI you are def not the only reader of said blog... I am a shameless stalker and reader. haha, I hope you're doing well!

Most excellent, a college friend reads my blog. I remember a similar incident with this guy last year when I moved my web page over to Lunarpages hosting. I enjoyed using the Webalizer statistics generating program to learn about which of my pages were most visited. The program also listed the IP addresses of people visiting the site. The program used Reverse DNS Lookup to convert the numerical IP addresses to something more interesting. For instance, my current IP address is 69.143.45.184 but the "pcp0010129176pcs.alxndr01.va.comcast.net" lookup is much more informative.

Last year, having recently graduated college, most of my web visitors were friends from school. University of Maryland on-campus IP addresses were in the following format: computername.student.umd.edu. For instance, when I had a web server the address for my site was http://insete.student.umd.edu/. The computer name was determined by the student. Some didn't choose a unique name and thus that part of the address defaulted to their numerical IP address. Anyway, a good portion of the visitors to my site did have computer names so I could easily tell from the Reverse DNS Lookup who was visiting my site, and how frequently. Probably no one's behavior would have changed had they known that I could track their traffic, but who knows? Needless to say, the guy who just sent me this email was one such person that I could track by his computer name.

Was it stalking? Sure, but they were coming to my site after all. I'd say I was acting more like a guard than a stalker. Good times.

A note to the one reader (i.e., myself) who reads this blog: I'll be on vacation starting today, August 13. I return on August 24 and will have plenty to report at that time.

I just finished T. R. Pearson's "A Short History of a Small Place," a wholly unique book compared with my recent reading fare. The book captures "small town America" at its finest and provides enough wacky flavor to keep the slow, Southern narrative style very interesting. This passage is both hilarious and nicely sums up the "I've got a story for everything" nature of the book:

Naturally we all looked at Itty Bit's shithole, and sure enough every time she barked it popped open which was a matter of great wonderment to all of us until Daddy commenced to explain it away. He said the activity at Itty Bit’s rear section was simply an illustration of one of Mr. Newton’s laws of nature, a law that had not been formulated specifically for terrier’s shitholes but would work there as well as anyplace else. According to Daddy it was all a matter of balanced thrust. The barking tended to knock the dog backwards and the shithole kicked her forwards so the both of them served to cancel each other out. "Now if Itty Bit could just work her shithole without working her mouth," Daddy said, "why then she could skim along the ground like a jet."

Well, it doesn't feel like a copyright violation when an article is so short, so here it is in its entirety. Contactmusic.com:

MARTIN REFUSES TO MEET BRITISH PRIME MINISTER

COLDPLAY frontman CHRIS MARTIN has snubbed British Prime Minister TONY BLAIR's invitation to meet him at his London residence - because the YELLOW star feared it would damage his image.

A galaxy of stars, including rockers OASIS and SIR ELTON JOHN, have accepted invitations to Blair's Downing Street home.

And Martin respects the British premier, but does not want to be seen publicly socialising with the leader of the Labour party, for fear of offending his fans who may disagree with Blair's political goals and stance over the war in Iraq.

He says, "I'm not going to go. I really like Tony Blair. He's interested in the same things as I am - he plays the guitar and he always gives the impression of doing what he can to help.

"But I don't particularly want to be photographed with him at the moment."

My roommate hates Coldplay. I have no reason to dislike the band, and I'm fine with Chris Martin naming his child Apple, but really, his actions in this article make no sense. I would think he were awesome for not meeting the prime minister if he didn't like the guy, that would be taking a stand. But not doing something out of fear of the fans is idiotic. Maybe he should stop cursing because that offends some fans, or stop performing "Yellow" because certainly I'm sick of that song. And his stand is also nonsensical: By not meeting with Blair (and by this becoming a public story), he could potentially alienate his pro-Blair fans, who probably outnumber the anti-Blair contingent. Idiocy.

Commenter "fairy" outraged me more than Chris Martin, though: "I am really weary of being lectured to by millionaire rockers telling me to give my hard-earned money to their causes--while they fly on private jets, receive tens of thousands of dollars in free gifts to perform 'for free,' and further behave like spoiled, self-centered children."

1. Do you, fairy, give all your money to charities and such? I bet the percentage of money that Chris Martin spends on private jets is the same percent that you spend on (not really needed) electronic gadgets or "Left Behind" books.
2. Is Chris Martin "lecturing to" you simply because he is involved in a cause? Was Martin Luther King, Jr. lecturing to you, and was Ghandi lecturing to you? Drop your persecution complex and ignore them if they cause you such concern. Stop reading the tabloids. Stop watching the "G Block" on Fox News.
3. According to you advocating vegetarianism and fair trade is acting like a "self-centered" child. Are all advocates self-centered? Is George W. Bush self-centered because he brings up the war on terror all the time? He receives hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to fly around the country in his private jet (Air Force One) lecturing to you and me about terror and Social Security. What a self-centered jerk!

Idiots, them all.

On Saturday I went to my first Washington Nationals game. I was very pleased with the way they have configured RFK Stadium into a place suitable for baseball playing and watching. Likewise, the ticket prices also suit me nicely. It was a fun evening, despite the Nationals losing to the San Diego Padres 2-3. At the game I learned that three megapixel 2x optical zoom digital cameras clearly weren't designed for non-macro shots at baseball games.

Leaving the game, however, I became annoyed while listening to a conversation being shouted amongst a group of thirty somethings. The idiots were joking about their penis sizes, with one white man bragging to a woman that he was hung like a black man. Another man refuted the comment that one friend had a large penis by remarking that it only looked large because he shaved his pubic hair. So then they started talking about shaving. The whole conversation was held in veiled words and such, but still, think of the children! Actually, there happened to be no children around, but still, hold off talking about penis sizes and pubic hair until you get in the car. What annoyed me more than their loud voices was their age. A guide:

• Fifteen-year-olds joking about penis sizes: stupid, but understandable and tolerable.
• Twenty-five-year-olds making the same jokes: immature, but understandable if the jokes are made in private.
• Thirty-five-year-olds making the same jokes: Unacceptable under any circumstances. One, it's just lame that you're living in a teenage mindset, and two, you're too old to be thinking that way. Stop trying to be "hilarious" and raise your children or something.

So I was annoyed by these fools. Then the next day I was at Tysons-Pimmit library and was getting pretty desperate trying to find books to read on my upcoming trip. As I walked back and forth past the bank of Internet-ready computers, I noticed a sixteen-year-old looking at hardcore porn. Granted, I'd rather a sixteen-year-old look at porn than the pubic hair thirty-five-year-olds, but still, not in a library! Again, think of the children.

But then I got to thinking. The kid looked like be probably belonged to a lower class strata, and so he might not have had Internet access at home. Is it fair not to allow poor Americans access to porn, while middle- and upper- class Americans enjoy the fruits of a hugely profitable industry? (Clearly the question of whether or not sixteen-year-olds should be looking at porn in the first place is not worthy of debate or concern to me.) Maybe I can go further: If the poorer classes had more access to online pornography, would the teenage birth rate decrease as frisky boys would go online for fun rather than trying to find a girl for a bout of unprotected sex?

Upon reflection I believe that the solution is this: Sixteen-year-old boy, you can look at porn in the public library, but just be smart about it. Open up multiple browser windows and be aware of your surroundings. Learn about the beauties of the Alt-Tab keyboard combination, or the Windows Key-D desktop shortcut, or even just Alt-F4. Then happiness will be widespread: The children won't suffer, I won't be annoyed, and your libido will be more than sufficiently tapped.

One of my favorite activities at work is my involvement with the summer internship program, when students in or recently graduated from college come to the Washington area for a ten-week internship. At the end of the summer every intern has to give a ten-minute presentation on what they did during the previous couple months. Most of the presentations are great, and none are awful, but this year I was struck by something: an obliviousness to time. Fortunately, the problem was rare: Of the 26 interns only two greatly exceeded the time limits and had to be signaled to wrap up.

One male spoke for twice the allotted time. Afterwards I was joking with him about the length of his presentation, but he couldn't believe that he had gone long. He was a good sport and we made many jokes at his expense, but it was an interesting phenomenon that someone can, whether from nervousness or excessive comfort, go on and on in front of a crowd with no awareness to passing time.

Yesterday I loaded a female's presentation on the laptop and said, "You sure have a lot of slides!" She responded with her fear that her presentation would be under time. So she thought that she would talk for less than ten minutes. Nope. She was up at the podium more than twice her allotted time.

What is this disconnect!? I can understand running long and being aware of it, but how can 25 minutes seem like ten? The female also had an interesting technique: On PowerPoint slides full of data she would, rather than summarize the contents, read off every single data item. It's a classic stalling technique, used if you think the rest of your presentation is running short. But no! She ran long, she didn't need to read me every single item that a criminal purchased off eBay, and she didn't need to explain to me what an iPod and a PDA are! It was irrelevant to the rest of the presentation.

Alas, it's easy to criticize, but my public speaking skills are hardly exemplary. And despite the length, I enjoyed both of the interns' presentations. But still, time doesn't run at half speed when you're in front of a crowd!

I read the expression "has a face for radio" recently. That always seemed like a nice way to confusingly flatter someone for a second until the meaning of the words sink in. From thinking of the expression my mind worked in mysterious ways and I got to thinking of Kelly Knight, one of the top DJs at DC101 before she was fired years ago. As I recall she hosted the "Top 10 at 10:00" program, which I listened to quite frequently. A good new song would come out and I had to stay up to listen to the show to hear it, as listeners voted the top songs. My dream website would chronicle all the top ten lists from my middle and high school days. Anyway, Kelly Knight had an incredibly sexy voice, and of course as an adolescent I formulated a fantastic image of her in my mind. Eventually I saw a picture of her online and was terribly disappointed. She was hardly repulsive, and for all I remember she was probably quite attractive, but she didn't look as I imagined. It forever changed the way I thought of and listened to her, so my advice is: Whether you have a television, a radio, or an unacceptable face, don't become a publicly visible personality if you want to maintain a mysterious aura on the radio.

Since January when I moved into the apartment I have gotten most of my news from Fox News, which is sort of aggravating but always fun. I rarely watch the network news anymore. I used to watch Tom Brokaw, but when he retired and Brian Williams took over, I felt no desire to maintain an allegiance. I felt bad for Dan Rather since he was constantly under attack from the paranoid Right, so I watched his show occasionally. Then he retired, to be replaced by Bob Schieffer. Years ago I used to watch Peter Jennings quite often, but in recent years ABC has been my least watched network (excluding my brief romance with "Desperate Housewives"). So Jennings' death from cancer on Sunday was quite the odd trifecta of the past year. The major network news stars, all of whom had been around for ages, left in one way or another within a nine-month period. Weird.

This is one of those ambiguous emails that leaves me wanting to know the back story behind the oddness:

Hi everyone,

These really are the "Dog Days" of summer. Two very surprising issues have popped up recently:

1) It has come to our attention that some people believe it's okay to bring their dogs into the office. Sorry, that is completely untrue. NSF allows working dogs on the premises (e.g., for the blind, with the police, etc.), but, other than that, no dogs or other animals are allowed. This includes during evening and weekend hours. This is not an arbitrary NSF policy; it is a Federal regulation.

2) And while we're on the issue of dogs, we've had recent reports of dogs being locked all day in cars in the parking garage. The garage can get quite warm, and it's a very unhealthy environment for the poor dogs. When we get such reports, we will contact the authorities immediately.

Thanks for your cooperation....

Given my love of penguins, I enjoyed this story, written as a comment to a Washington Monthly blog post about "March of the Penguins":

I was to a Pittsburgh Penguin hockey game years back, and in one of the intermissions, before the Zamboni, came out they put five or six real penguins on the ice and before you knew it they were going crazy at being surrounded by people in the rink which got the people to hootin' and hollerin' and carryin' on so that the Penguins got more frenzied and it escalated to a point I thought the penguins in their anguish were going to have nervous breakdowns in fear until the people realized the horror of the scene and started to simmer down and hushed mummurings while the penguins still carried on in fright, then the trainers that put them on the ice came out to try to round them up, and that turned into another horror show, and after awhile the crowd began to boo the way the trainers had to handle the penguins to get them off the ice which made the penguins even more agitated with the booing sound ..... oh my god it was just awful and everybody with a heart felt like shit for the rest of the game and for the rest of their lives anytime they thought about it, although some people laugh, a kind of nervous laugh, but it wasn't funny, it was cruel, deep insightful cruelty that made you ashamed if you were there. God awful time that was.

Quite the interesting article in today's Washington Post, on front page no less: "Why the Red Delicious No Longer Is." I particularly enjoy that the reporter describes the quoted Lee Calhoun as "an apple historian and retired orchardist." I suppose that he probably has done research and possibly published research on the history of apples, but could I be called a Pearl Jam historian simply because my knowledge of the band is quite immense? The key passage:

In the 1980s heyday of the Red Delicious, it represented three-quarters of the harvest in Washington state, epicenter of the apple industry. By 2000, it made up less than half, and in 2003, the crop had shrunk to just 37 percent of the state's harvest of 103 million boxes. Red Delicious remains the single largest variety produced in the state, but others are ascending in market share as rapidly as Red Delicious is dropping, notably Fuji and Gala.

Ever since I went to Cherry Hill Farm in October 2001, I have loved Fuji apples more than any other variety. I love the firmness of the fruit and I enjoy that they are generally smaller than some apples (which take about two meals to finish). Cherry Hill Farm also sells the best apple cider doughnuts. So for four years I have loved Fuji apples and I would be more than happy to see them overtake all other varieties, including Red Delicious, as the leading apple variety.

Do you remember the bulge? After one of the Presidential debates last year a lively conservation overtook (typically liberal) parts of the political blog world. What was on Bush's back? It certainly looked like it was a piece of electric equipment. Was Bush being fed answers? Some came to his defense, asking why the feeders of answers would have provided Bush with such gibberish. Counterpoint: Maybe it was so Bush could maintain his "everyday man" pose. Others speculated that Bush had suffered a stroke or some other medical mishap. By that logic Bush's long vacations were actually surgery and recovery periods and he was wearing a medical device on his back. The White House quashed some theories by issuing a statement that Bush was not wearing a bulletproof vest.

With an anti-Bush, or pro-humor, zeal, Internet sleuths scoured collections of photographs of our President and compiled an impressive array of pictures of the bulge, including some going back to the early days of the presidency. The above picture was one of my favorite discoveries, taken on Bush's ranch as he was "clearing brush," I believe in 2001. So it was a delight to visit the AOL homepage today to be greeted with the famous picture. The bulge is making a comeback. (It is also good to see that the ACLU is suing New York over the ridiculous subway bag searches.) For more memories of the Bulge, visit this site or bushwired.blogspot.com.

Speaking of the Ben Harper shows: Instead of drinking beer on stage as so many (younger and poorer) bands make a habit of, Ben Harper's band drank Gatorade. After three hours of sweet music (including particularly brilliant bass solos on "Brown Eyed Blues") my throat was parched and my body was crying out for morsels (drops) of any quenching drink. So each night after the show I had to seek out the delicious drink. After the Washington show I had to make an unexpected turn to get to the 7-Eleven, running over the curb, all for some Lemon-Lime Gatorade drink. After the Philly show I stopped in Delaware and the gas station convenience area was closed so the attendant fetched the drink and handed the Fruit Punch Gatorade to me through a bank-like deposit receptacle.

Since the shows my obsession has been intense. My obsession comes with history, however. For about half a year I used an old Gatorade bottle as my drinking instrument at work (filling it up with water). By the end of its life the rim of the bottle smelled so rank, surely teeming with potentially disastrous microbes of all types. I went to Costco today hoping to purchase Gatorade powder so that I could save myself an incalculable sum not buying individual bottles. Unfortunately I couldn't find the powder. Tang, Crystal Light: yes, yes. Gatorade, no. If I don't find it soon, it's going to become a desperate situation. I suppose I'll have to walk to the nearby REI, though in Washington's August heat I'll need some quenching agent when I arrive at the store, which the Gatorade in powder form won't provide. Such a quandary...

From July 22 to 28 I was in concert bliss. I saw the 2 Skinnee J's twice in Baltimore on Friday, first at Artscape (pictured) and then at Sonar. On Saturday I saw the band at the 9:30 Club in Washington. Two days later I saw Ben Harper at the 9:30 Club, and then three days later, on Thursday, I saw the final show: Ben Harper at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia.

When I thought of my prior experiences with the bands, I realized that the previous time I saw both groups was two years ago: Ben Harper in June 2003 and the 2 Skinnee J's a month later. 2 Skinnee J's "retired" one week after my July show, and Ben Harper went on a Mid-Atlantic hiatus, never playing at venues close enough for me to attend. 2 Skinnee J's put on a couple reunion shows this summer, and Ben Harper is playing small clubs due to the demise of the Zooma tour. So it was a nice coincidence to see the bands in the same week after a two-year absence.

Ben Harper played for slightly more than three hours on both nights. At the non-Artscape 2 Skinnee J's shows the band played for about 100 minutes. I loved all the shows to no end, and it was interesting to compare the crowds at the shows. On Saturday I went all out at the 2 Skinnee J's show, drinking beforehand, standing near the front, jumping up and down, belting out the lyrics, etc. I fit right in with the others in the front, getting hit and slammed from all sides. It was such a contrast two nights later, in the third row at the same club for Ben Harper. Ben Harper has a very devoted following so I expected people to sing along with more gusto than at the 2 Skinnee J's show. I was so wrong. The Ben Harper crowd was very chill, barely moving about and at the loudest singing slightly above a library voice. It made me think that the crowd wasn't as into the show as the 2 Skinnee J's crowd was, but I'm sure that wasn't the case.

It was an interesting contrast. I wouldn't want to go to a Ben Harper show where everyone was jumping up and down, or a 2 Skinnee J's show where people were barely singing along. Additionally, as much as I like the J's, I think a three-hour show might be a bit much on a regular basis. So the take-away lesson for musicians is: if your crowd doesn't look like they're enjoying the show, it could be that they are exhibiting natural reactions for the music that you play.

At the beginning of each month I download my website log file and then process it with a simple program that I wrote, GLOG, that compiles some statistics for me. The most interesting data set is the group of web pages that link to parts of my site. I generally check out the referring pages to see why they are linking to my site. Usually they are music blogs linking to shows that I post. Sometimes I get interesting search queries, often they point to my trading list. Many of my search engine referrals are for the picture section of my site. It is interesting to see who is looking up my friends, or what friends are looking themselves up. (Or what friends never get looked up.) However, I figure that some friends might not like their name appearing in the search engines so recently I enabled the "no index" meta flag on that page, meaning search engines should not list it.

Anyway, it's fun to look at the sites that refer to mine, and following is a collage of a sampling of pictures from such pages:

My college roommate, Andrew, adored pandas. It's unclear why. I think he went to the zoo one day, fell in love, and came back with a panda stuffed animal and a new obsession. Either way, I love them too, especially the zoo's new baby:

Generally I hate the Beatles. Back in high school I would quarrel with Harold, and others, about how terrible the band was. Earlier in high school, Harold and I had classic conversations, debating the better band: Pearl Jam or Nirvana. We each lined up behind our favorite band and rarely granted points to each other. Anyway, I own the red and blue Beatles greatest hits albums, so no one can argue that I haven't given their music a chance. Admittedly a lot of their songs are good, but I don't love the production of much of their work. Compare "Day Tripper" to, say, Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze." Both were popular songs but Jimi's track has aged so much better.

Anyway, I was happy to see this Pitchfork article about a new Beatles tribute album. This one "is a track-by-track run through of the Beatles' 1965 masterpiece" Rubber Soul. I enjoy Yonder Mountain String Band and Ted Leo, and I can live comfortably with some of the other artists on the disc. I'm most excited about Ben Harper's track "Michelle." That song was the one track off the greatest hits albums that I absolutely fell for. It's so cute, with the nice bass guitar line and the simple French lyrics (which I enjoyed deciphering with my high school French skills).

So the point of this blog entry is that I am so fortunate. If Ben Harper, one of my favorite artists, had to cover a (second) Beatles' song, how lucky I am that he chooses my favorite track.