In 1997 I had a very close call. I was living in Kansas City at the time. I went to the mall to get something you get at malls like underwear or light bulbs, and when I came out of a store I noticed lots of security guys and roadies, and something being set up that looked like a big stage. I asked what was going on and they said that current teen sensation “Hanson” was playing. I fled, and noticed as I peeled out of the parking lot that there was a mass of > 1000 teenagers being held in a sort of feeding pen in one corner of the parking lot about to be loosed into the mall. It would have been as bad as this disaster, I bet. I would have been turned into Chick Fil-A in moments.
Tag: doom
A thing I fear.
Podcasting is bad. I’ve bitched about it already. Mouth-breathing geeks droning about technology. Even the ones who are good writers (0.1%) are unlistenable like bad college professors. Fire it into the sun.
But something worse looms. The video iPod and its cousins, and the ease of making small downloadable portable video magazines, offers a future of what I’m sure they’re calling vodcasting. This unfortunately does not provide vodka, but may require it. The thought of tapping on my handheld video device and seeing Dave Winer or some person who has the best blog about Babylon 5 talk at me is, frankly, emetic.
My opinion is that mumbling, whiny, unsightly geeks who insist on being media personalities should restrict themselves to text like the other mumbling, whiny, unsightly geeks over the last 10,000 years and stay out of the public eye and ear. The reason we’re not all on the radio and the TV is not just that access to media is limited. It’s also that very few people have either the skills or the charisma to do either of those things without making others dizzy with loathing.
But I can deal with that just by not watching any of it. The second part of this is worse. Right now, blogging is a text medium, and I love it. I have maybe 200 RSS subscriptions to personal and institutional weblogs and weblog-like things and I get a lot out of it. I make fun of the bozosphere, but mostly it’s great.
Video may not kill it, but it’ll be a huge kick in the stomach. Video is seductive. It’s immediate and TV-like. It’s visual. It makes people feel like stars to be in videos. It’s dumbed down and easy. And it’s made for ad insertion. Video podcasting, when it gets to a certain point, will be adopted by just about all the commercially-run weblogs and a huge portion of the homebrew ones. And I see it as having an unpleasantly TV-like effect on the web. You might not think a three-paragraph blog update on one of the Weblogs Inc. or Gawker sites is a heavy chunk of ideas, but it’ll get smaller and dumber in a video. Instead of a galaxy of smart little snide magazine article squibs, we’ll have huge numbers of local news quality “segments” with stock footage and maybe 200 words of idea in them. Inevitably the commercial blogs will be done by prettier and prettier faces. And because there’s less money in blogging than in actual TV, the use of stock provided footage from commercial sources will be universal.
With luck, we’ll keep a core of text-based weblogging that has actual ideas in it, the way we kept an intelligent chunk of the Web after the flashmonsters and marketing droids ate most of it. But it’s not a good thing, not at all.
I hate video.
Oh hey, and speaking of doom
During the big antiwar demonstration and also during the First Lady’s appearance at the National Book Fair, sensors on the Mall picked up traces of tularemia, a deadly bacterial disease that has been weaponized. Choose your paranoia: was Big Brother trying to kill the antiwar demonstrators? Was Osama trying to whack Mrs. Bush? Who knows. But what happened then? They didn’t tell anyone.
Whether or not the sensors picked up a false positive (apparently this is likely), I can’t believe that it takes 72 hours to pick up the phone and ask the CDC to check it out.
Mad Science Update
I get these News Alerts on my Sidekick from CNN, MSNBC, and the Wall Street Journal. Usually they’re redundant and not too interesting: PRESIDENT MAKES SPEECH, or CELEBRITY RAPIST ACQUITTED AGAIN, 3 at once.
This morning I was beeped into consciousness by: NEWS ALERT: Researchers Recreate 1918 Flu Virus.
I sat up in bed and thought: what the fuck. Who did that? WHY? What the fuck are we fighting, fucking LEX LUTHOR?, as Get Your War On might say.
Sadly, the truth is a bit scarier than that, even. Apparently they did this in an effort to trace the mutations that brought us that superflu. And the results they got suggest that it began as a bird flu and spread to humans “without undergoing complicated changes”.
I should of stood in bed.
Globalization and its discontents: the adult film industry
From this week’s CDC Morbidity and Mortality Report: HIV Transmission in the Adult Film Industry: Los Angeles, California 2004.
The first identified case was in a man aged 40 years (index patient) who tested HIV-negative on February 12, 2004, and on March 17, 2004, through regular monthly testing of blood samples, but subsequently tested HIV-positive on April 9, 2004. […] During the time between his two negative tests, the index patient performed in film productions in Brazil, engaging in unprotected sexual acts. While in Brazil, he experienced an influenza-like illness that resolved before his return to California on or around March 10, 2004. According to LACDHS investigators, upon the return of the index patient to California, he participated in film productions in which he engaged in unprotected sexual acts with 13 female partners. Three of these 13 female partners subsequently tested HIV-positive by PCR after having tested HIV-negative during the preceding 30 days. […] During film production, all three of the infected female partners had engaged with the index patient in specific acts associated with increased possibility of mucosal tears. None of the other adult film industry workers or private partners with whom these three women had contact during the 30 days before their diagnoses subsequently tested HIV-positive. As of May 20, 2004, the index patient reported having had no sex partners outside of work since February 12, 2004. The person who was the source of HIV infection for the index patient is unknown. […] Production companies in the heterosexual segment of this industry have generally not required condom use for any type of sexual act.
(Emphasis added.) So, here’s the drill. If you want to be a porn star 1) don’t let any of your coworkers go to Brazil and 2) Do GAY porn only.
Three depressing links about the war.
- Here’s a first-hand account of what it’s like to be arrested and jailed by the secret police in Iraq right now. If you’re lucky, that is.
- We’re scouring our poor island colonies for recruits. Young people in places like Guam have no jobs and no future in our WWII leftover archipelago, so we’re sending them to the next colony. It’s the new Gurkhas.
- Counterpunch is a marginal news source (I don’t trust Cockburn so much). However, if we really did lose nuclear warheads off Somalia in 1991 and someone got hold of it, we’re about to star in a really bad James Bond movie. We’ve certainly lost nukes before, including a spectacular incident off Spain a long time ago.
I’m going to go outside and pet puppies now.
I’m a village explainer, which is fine if you’re a village.
In the market tonight a sixtyish man in one of those store-provided handicap carts was buzzing around the aisles, followed by a clerk who was helping him. (They’re really nice there.) At one point he lurched suddenly around a corner at me and I saw that the entire front basket on the cart was full of the largest possible containers of skin lotion. “You want all of these, really?” asked the clerk as she dropped a couple more in. Looking and sounding exactly like Jack Nance in Twin Peaks, he half-yelled “Yeah! I use them to PUT MY ARTIFICIAL LEG ON.” The bro dudes next to me, who were buying protein bars and vodka, looked stunned. I bet he has a fish in his percolator, too.
I think too much, I talk too much, I write too much. At least I don’t smoke, drink, or eat too much, so it’s more a problem for others than it is for me. Something I inherited from my father is the tendency to take over a conversation and deliver paragraphs, speeches, stories. Like him I have a compulsion, and like him I always feel later that I’ve overdone it. It’s like a miniature bipolar cycle in which I have the most! important! thing! to say! and then later on I bottom out and think “What the hell was I babbling about, and why were they so patient?” Stupid brain, can’t find a happy medium.
The new girl at Diedrich has a really forced-sounding Irish accent. I wonder what that’s all about?
Water scooter.. OF DOOM
http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml05/05210.html
Hazard: Hydrogen gas can build up in the battery compartment and cause the battery cover and the battery package to forcefully expel from the product, posing a risk of injury to the user or bystanders.
Incidents/Injuries: CSK has received nine reports of the battery cover and/or the battery package being expelled from the water scooter, including three reports of facial injuries such as lacerations and bruising.
Description: The Aqua Water Scooter is a hand-held, battery-powered product used to propel swimmers through the water. The product has either a yellow or red plastic enclosure, a black plastic handle and propeller and a shark face on the front.
Retirement collapse alarm
Are pension funds the next S&L crisis?
The Economist thinks they might be. Boy, wouldn’t that be fun!
The universal solvent
When Irish Dan and friendly_bandit worked at Disneyland, they got to use lots of interesting chemicals. This was partly because they were janitors, and partly because Disney was always interested in testing out new ideas, and manufacturers loved to send their cleaning supplies there for beta testing, so to speak.
There were all the weird orange colored ones, the ones that didn’t work, the ones that worked great but went away because they were “bad”, etc.
One of them was “Inhibisol”, which came in a small aerosol spray can. This stuff was truly amazing! If there was permanent Sharpie marker graffiti on a bathroom wall, you could spray it on and the ink would just drip on off the tile. Incredible. Of course if you got a whiff of it you’d be on your knees, and after working with it for a while a person really needed to sit down and rest a bit, but hey, it got rid of the Sharpie marks.
Later on Irish Dan worked at an experimental oil refinery in El Monte. This place was full of great toys: huge tanks of pressurized molten tire rubber, acids, caustics, everything that has ever been used to burn things, and big ol’ tanks of toxics. One of these was called “tri”. It was fun, he said, because if you put a glove on and forced your hand down in the drum it would pop your hand back out like it was liquid rubber or something!
Turns out Inhibisol and “tri” were the same thing: 1,1,1-trichloroethane, which is an incredibly dangerous chemical only now used for specialized cleaning of things like rocket engines, or for removing the last little bit of water from glacially pure ethanol, etc. It’s also not so good for the ozone layer.
And that’s how deadly chemicals saved Christmas.
Be My Blog 