The Phantom City

Go Jawad!

It appears that Voyager I, still sending back data, crossed a boundary between our solar system and deep space back in December. The boundary is called the termination shock, where the solar wind slows down and begins to mix with interstellar materials.

Be careful out there, Voyager. Make sure to write or call.

Wow, so I guess we’re just going to let the hurricanes win, huh? What happened to our President? Where’s the War on Hurricanes?

Why Am I (Still) A Republican?

I’ve been wondering that about myself, recently. Not so much whether I am a Republican. I switched parties a while back to have some choice in local elections. However, I grew up Republican, and I’m amazed at the capacity of this administration to make that seem puzzling and embarrassing at the same time.

Update: I’m getting rid of the picture. images.quizilla.com seems to be working really slow right now. Here’s the text:

You’re Querl Dox, Brainiac 5!

You’re smart and you know it. Somewhat smug. You treasure work and don’t always maintain friends well. You either synch with people or you don’t. Analytical.

Which Legionnaire are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Unfortunately, it asks for a fair amount of knowledge concerning the Legion of Super-Heroes, which has to be hard, given the fact the title has been relaunched a few times. I think I preferred the Legion of Substitute Heroes.

Apparently The Gap, along with subsidiaries such as Old Navy, shut down their online stores for two weeks to launch a much-improved ecommerce solution.

Their site is kind of slow right now, and I didn’t use it in the first place, so I can’t really give much of a critique of how the shopping experience improved.

…Oops, I guess they’re not selling short-sleeve casual shirts right now: “We’re sorry, but the page you are looking for is no longer available.”

…I do notice that the touted QuickLook feature doesn’t appear to be working with my Firefox 1.0.6 setup. It’s not even showing that a popup window has been blocked.

…Never mind. I think their site crashed.

Anyway, I find the idea interesting, because I know in my various workplaces over the years that we would have been filleted for completely shutting down the online store for two weeks. I don’t understand that development process, but they must have had one heck of a conversion process going on with the backend system.

Strange Horizons comments on utopian/dystopian ideas through the centuries:

The Ten Stupidest Utopias!

The Industrial Revolution gave the world a new idea of the ideal society. “Try sniffing the abominable stench behind the piles of books,” wrote Japanese Futurist Hirato Renkichi in 1921. “How many times superior is the fresh scent of gasoline!”

The Ten Sexiest Dystopias!

Roll down your window: see the metaphors go by. There’s Zhora the replicant, smashing through plate glass windows; there’s Jake lost in Chinatown, and Tod Hackett running through Hollywood, bloody faced, chased by a mob. “Los Angeles is probably the most mediated town in America,” writes Michael Sorkin, “nearly unviewable save through the fictive scrim of its mythologizers.”

Link courtesy of Boing Boing

So, I guess there’s a level closer to Kevin Bacon than one degree, and Colin Firth is heading right for it.

Pearls Before Swine, today.

In the meantime, as the evacuation efforts started, about 100 New Orleans residents decided to grab the school bus that was just sitting abandoned in their neighborhood and drive to Houston’s Astrodome. Eighteen-year-old Jabbor Gibson took the wheel, never having driven a bus, and drove the flood victims seven hours to the Astrodome, getting there before any of the official buses.

Naturally, the authorities weren’t thrilled about that. (Why do I have a feeling an SUV convoy would have been welcomed more?) While I can see the point that the evacuation effort needed some organization to it, I have to applaud the initiative and bravery it took to do so.

So, is government work in Jabbor Gibson’s future? Because I think we found a better head for FEMA than the current one.