Hey, why Labor Day?
Saturday, September 5th, 2020
The Department of Labor website says:
Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.
The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union. The Central Labor Union held its second Labor Day holiday just a year later, on September 5, 1883.
The Wikipedia entry tells you more about the origins and also discusses the whole Labor Day vs May Day thing, which intersects even more workers’ celebrations and the push for an 8 hour day.
Me, I’d like to see a push for a living minimum wage tied to Labor Day as opposed to this weekend’s celebration, which in many places seems to be “let’s just pretend that ol’ pandemic isn’t there any more.”
Spoiler alert: it is.
A strenuous denial.
Friday, September 4th, 2020
The New York Times (mostly in the persona of Maggie Haberman, who co-wrote this piece), gave Trump one of the most charitable interpretations of his reactions to Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece in The Atlantic, which quoted him as saying America’s fallen servicepeople are “losers.” (And much more. You’ve heard the quotes.)
“He strenuously denied it.”
strenuously | ˈstrenyo͞oəslē |
adverb
in a way that requires great physical exertion: drink more if you’re exercising strenuously.
Yeah, that seems like a dubious word choice to me.
This very Times article “reports” “Moreover, people familiar with Mr. Trump’s private conversations say he has long scorned those who served in Vietnam as being too dumb to have gotten out of it.”
Meanwhile, reporters for AP and Fox News (so far) have independently verified most of the quotes in the Goldberg piece. This is not a small thing. It is, however, a small but telling look into the very messed up brain of a very small man.
Speaking from the 404.
Thursday, September 3rd, 2020
I was reading a little piece that covers the humble HTTP status code, the code that is returned when something goes wrong…or right in the process of transferring the stuff that makes up a web page from point A to point B.
200 OK
That’s the one that gets sent from the server when everything has gone just right, or right enough. There’s lots of them…
301 Moved Permanently 307 Temporary Redirect 401 Unauthorized 402 Payment Required 414 URI Too Long 500 Internal Server Error
And then there’s the one which shares a number with Atlanta’s longtime area code:
404 Not Found.
That means you’ve asked for a page and this server does not have anything at that address. The spec says you return ‘404’ and ‘Not Found.’ So many web-connected Atlantans grimace when they see gigantic ornate or elaborately animated 404s on websites which would like to entertain you in addition to supplying basic server information. We know exactly where the 404 is! You’re soaking in it.
But I guess this sort of cross-numerology could have different contexts if you lived in, say, Maryland, the 301 area code…moved permanently?
Or out in Wyoming…temporary redirect?
By the way, there is a site ‘devoted to the history of telephone service in the Atlanta, Georgia area.’ It’s a safe bet serving web pages via HTTP and HTTPS will not be covered at all.
Wednesday afternoon.
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2020
I just got back from errands outside in the heat, and am happily settled in my cluttered office, with various spinning-platter hard disks making noises and the sunlight coming and going outside through the clouds.
(Wow, that paragraph represents a general upbeat tone that somehow seems to evaporate with the sun as the day draws to a close. Hi. It’s several hours later. Nighttime!)
Maybe it’s my (careful, discriminating) perusal of the headlines of the day. Look! More behaviors you can’t control, except, of course, by voting in 60 days or so.
We had soup for dinner this evening. It manifested no threat to local law enforcement. I think if we hurled it at them, the tofu would cushion the blow.
Oh, and I did come cross one tweet from former NPR host Todd Zwillich, who managed to distill the challenges of 2020 election coverage and the stand-up. open way to deal with it into a tweet:
News outlets covering election night live should tell viewers/listeners/readers in advance how they plan to handle it. What the standards will be; how they’ll treat premature victory claims; or claims of fraud w/out evidence; when they’ll call a state. Transparency & expectations
Yep.
Sigma September.
Tuesday, September 1st, 2020
We started this year visiting Seattle’s Living Computers Museum. It subsequently closed during the pandemic lockdown and remains “closed for now,” an apparent victim of the economics of pandemics.
The letter Σ (sigma), can be, in mathematics, a symbol for summation.
Σ[1,2,3,4,5,6] = 21.
Wikipedia of course has all kinds of arcane uses for sigma.
Σ is the capitalized Greek letter, by the way. The lowercase one is apparently σ but ς in the final position of a word. I really never want to learn Greek.
9, of course, can refer to the ninth month of the year. We’re starting it now! Last chunk of 2020! We can do this!
This particular computer ran for years handling medical billing, well into the era of the personal (desktop) computer. It’s very very large and very very heavy and who knows where it will end up now.
Lizard-witness news.
Monday, August 31st, 2020
There’s this story:
Georgia officials trying to stop large, invasive lizard that eats ‘anything they want’
The Argentine black and white tegu [..is a..] lizard that tops 4 feet long, sprints at nearly 20 mph and gobbles up everything from grasshoppers to young gopher tortoises, a rare native species.
Researchers caught one at a farm in Toombs County earlier this week, the sixth one documented in Georgia this year. Researchers caught three of them themselves, collected one that was a road-kill and were handed another two that a resident shot.
and then this photo and story:
AP photo: Godzilla (aka Gojira) appointed Shinjuku’s tourism ambassador in April
Godzilla finally gets citizenship in Japan
Shinjuku has a population density of about 17,000 people per square kilometre but undeterred by this it has granted citizenship to a new resident, who only goes by one name – Godzilla.
…and I’m trying to cleverly thread the two together but I think they’re only funny inside my head, so maybe that’s where the connectivity should stay.
Storm will pass.
Sunday, August 30th, 2020
I spent most of the day off of Twitter and Instagram, so I missed that the current occupant of the office of President apparently unleashed a storm of tweets…and you know what? If you don’t sit there paging hypnotically through them, but instead have a day that is more positive and affirming…well, the storm passes without affecting you in the slightest.
I should say that this “just turn away” philosophy does not work with a global pandemic or with any of the other real issues in the world…but tweets from a lunatic? Ah, they were here and now they’ve evaporated into the steamy ether.
Adding fuel.
Saturday, August 29th, 2020
I do wonder sometimes if the raw BTUs of social media rage could be harnessed, would we finally have a source of clean energy that could surpass thousands of spinning windplants and acres of solar arrays.
The thing is, of course, is that anger, which by my amateur measurement has been building every week and every month throughout 2020, is not really “clean” by any spiritual or karmic measure. It’s full of dirt, and interleaved with duplicity, and egged on by the thousands of…let’s say entities, real and synthetic, who take the 280-character ball and run with it, expressing their agreement or contempt or…just expressing that they too are here on the planet and would like to have a moment to be heard.
So. Very. Angry. And then hurt. And then angry some more.
When actor Chadwick Boseman died—was it only yesterday?—I prepared my eyeballs for the reactions, the “takes”, the attempts to express emotion in original ways when the call for emotions has come so frequently this year that, well, what’s left in the tank?
Much of the memorialization was quite poetic and beautiful, but there was some that just communicated a certain “I’m numb, so cmd-c copy, cmd-v paste, I’m going to lie down for a while.” That’s OK too, of course, but when the copy-paste amplification attacks our neighbors, our fellow Americans who may or may not also be in pain, well, that’s energy I’d sure prefer to divert elsewhere.
Chadwick Boseman.
Friday, August 28th, 2020
If you go back through the Twitter feed of the late Chadwick Boseman, who died on Friday, you feel the energy, the fervency he was trying to pour in to getting people to the polls in 2020, right up until a very few days ago.
This while battling colon cancer. And working, over four years, on films as diverse as Avengers: Civil War, Marshall, Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, 21 Bridges, and Da 5 Bloods. Before that, he portrayed a memorable Jackie Robinson in 42.
But I think my favorite is Thurgood Marshall, because Marshall was probably my favorite Supreme Court justice, and Boseman truly brought him to life on the screen.
Boseman was a young man. A 2000 Howard University grad. Born in Anderson, South Carolina (not far across the border from Georgia.)
In 2018, he delivered the Howard commencement address, saying in small part, “Everything that you fought for was not for yourself, it was for those who came after you.”
“I don’t know what your future is,” he told the graduates, “but if you’re willing to take the harder way, the more complicated one, the one with more failures at first than successes … then you will not regret it.”
Avoidance maneuver.
Thursday, August 27th, 2020
I’m not the first person to testify to this (plenty of Twitter people and the commenters on Nancy’s blog are saying much the same) but…even though I come from a family who watched both conventions from gavel to gavel and soaked in the raw politics of it all, I am going extremely out of my way to avoid what they’re calling the 2020 Republican National Convention.
It’s not easy though. I fire up the YouTubeTV (y’know, what passes for cable these days) and, holy crap, pasty fervent mask-free sputtering white folks fill the tiny icons up and down the dial (that was a WKRP in Cincinnati reference).
If it looks like a channel might be covering the damage from Hurricane Laura or the brutal shootings in Kenosha, I might punch it up for a few seconds, but even BBC World News and France 24 are taking this superspreader Hatch Act violation from the South Lawn of the White House live as if it means anything.
You know, it doesn’t mean anything. I’m getting more out of a rerun of Beat Bobby Flay (remember to de-vein your shrimp!) than any of this multicast drivel. Hey, the week’s almost over.
In the gulf.
Wednesday, August 26th, 2020
Way, way, way back in 1999 I did some spinny blue turbulent hurricane promo graphics for KTRK, Channel 13 in Houston so if a hurricane threatened Houston or the Gulf Coast generally, the TV station would be prepared with flashy graphics that were, well somewhat sober because people’s lives were at stake.
I remember that they started with the matter-of-fact “there’s a hurricane in the gulf.”
Well, tonight there’s a hurricane in the gulf, designated ‘Laura’ for reasons meteorlogical, and it’s headed right for the small towns and low, surge-susceptible bays of Louisiana, just east of the Texas-Louisiana border.
Laura is supposed to make landfall past midnight, and I’m thinking of the many folks in those towns, making their living growing sugarcane, repairing boats and ships of all sizes, and, of course, from the petrochemical industry that is tucked away in the bays south of Port Charles and along the coast into Texas.
We drove unhurriedly through the towns on back roads and US 90 in December of last year headed from New Orleans, skirting the top of the Houston megasprawl, to Austin. Be safe, Louisianans, Texans, and others in the storm’s path.
A long temporary.
Tuesday, August 25th, 2020
I remember a time when the yellow signs above the freeways admonished us about driving, not public health.
One mom of two told me the other day she explained to her son that all this was temporary, but a really, really, really, really, really, really, long temporary.
That seems like a good explanation.
Lightweight.
Monday, August 24th, 2020
News sites love to push out tons and tons of tracking code, giant logos, and fancy animations and video along with their web pages, but I know when I find myself in, shall we say, a bandwidth-constrained location, where the data speeds are just about at 1995 dialup levels, well, then you’d certainly appreciate a site where the headlines are simple, the text is easy to read and the ads are mercifully nonexistent.
CNN has one, as does NPR. There may be others, but these will get you through a data drought and reassure you that the idiotic stuff that you thought was happening (and yet couldn’t bring yourself to watch)…well, yeah, that stuff is happening.
I like to think this as a public service of these massive news sites. It might be possible that it’s just a script running on a server somewhere that people have forgotten and when they spot it, they’ll yank it down with force.
But I sure hope they don’t. Words, just words. Sometimes that’s the essence of what the news is.
The things we have to lose.
Sunday, August 23rd, 2020
The current President likes to toss out the phrase “what do you have to lose?” as a sort of salesman-y “just give it a try” challenge.
Vote for Trump—what do you have to lose?
The Twitter universe being what it is, the urge to answer his rhetoric with a substantive list of just what we have to lose results in thousands of tweets; taken together, what we have to lose seems to dominate the universe of online discourse.
So much we’ve already lost. So much new, larger, vast swaths of potential losing in areas of healthcare, employment, and, of course, a path toward living within and through the pandemic.
If any time calls for a choice that is the opposite of “what the heck, give it a shot”—it is now.
Because in the days remaining before the election, even simply listing all we have lost and will lose would take up all the time. But we don’t have to do that. We feel the loss every day.
Droplet patterns.
Saturday, August 22nd, 2020
We returned to an Atlanta in its familiar late summer pattern: rainy, sometimes very rainy late in the afternoon, just in time for commuting drivers to find small lakes on the city’s interstates.
Since I’ve never really had to commute to a job, I have no real read on whether there are fewer folk out there having to fight with this on the freeways, but I can report that in our very intown Virginia Highland neighborhood, on my way back home with a takeout dinner, I saw more than a dozen bicyclists soaked to the bone, including a dad with two first-grader-ish protegés off his starboard beam, heading down Virginia avenue, looking very much as if they were biking through a swimming pool.
The kids were not distraught, however. (I might have been at that age.)
Trucking on.
Friday, August 21st, 2020
I typed the keyword truck into my fancy database of all my (and Sammy’s) Instagram pictures, and here’s what instantly came out. Some of what came out. These are all my pics (she has a few fine truck images as well.)
So…why? Is Friday truck day? Do I simply need a cleanse from the week of politics, pandemic, and paying our bills? That’s probably it.
Hope you have a good weekend.
