Monthly Archives: July 2007

BBC ON THIS DAY | 7 | 2005: Bomb attacks on London

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BBC ON THIS DAY | 7 | 2005: Bomb attacks on London

2005: Bomb attacks on London
A series of bomb attacks on London’s transport network has killed more than 30 people and injured about 700 others.

Three explosions on the Underground left 35 dead and two died in a blast on a double decker bus.

It was two years ago today that London suffered the devastating suicide bomber attacks on the Underground and on a bus. I was horrified, and set up a quick photo of a funny little mug that I bought on a trip to London many years ago that said it all for me and uploaded it to Flickr:

London

Flickr became very important to me then, because participating in the “London Bomb Blasts Community” after this picture was uploaded allowed me to show my support for Londoners in a direct and personal way. It was humbling watching the photostream for the group because so many people were out in the crowds, uploading pictures as fast as they could. Some photos got picked up by news services, and once again Flickr became part of the news reporting process – a raw stream of images, maybe, but there were a lot of effective pictures that came out of 7/7/2005 and its aftermath that really told the story.
[tags]Flickr, London, 7/7, bomb blasts[/tags]

Asphalt Heaven

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Hey! Last night we had a thoroughly compacted, gravel road with a clay base. As of 910am this morning, we suddenly have a strip of asphalt on our side of the street, and the steamroller has been going back and forth smoothing it down.

They started around 8am, I think, but it didn’t get noisy enough to bounce pictures off the wall and call our attention to their activities until just now.

If you check the webcam you may see some of the equipment going by. That’s the new mailbox we put together, lying on the driveway waiting to be installed when they’re done. And we’re hoping to have them pour a new cement driveway for us as a side project as some of the other neighbors have done – one of the neighbors gave us a phone number for the supervisor that’s been putting those little deals together.

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I don’t envy them – it’s already 82 degrees outside, and supposed to get even hotter and more humid as the day unfolds.

UPDATE:Wow! we can has a paved street!

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Baghdad Graffiti-To-Be

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Bush urges resolve on Iraq war – Los Angeles Times

West Virginia is a once-reliably Democratic state that for the last two presidential elections has been central to Bush’s victories, and Wednesday marked the fourth Independence Day he has visited the state since taking office.

But even here, where he won repeated rounds of applause in a gigantic hangar just completed for a new detachment of C-5 Galaxy cargo planes, there were hundreds of empty seats behind a towering American flag.

Offering a history lesson on the 231st anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence from Britain, Bush said, “We were a small band of freedom-loving patriots taking on the most powerful empire in the world.”

It was not his intent to evoke a comparison to the Iraq war, but some Iraqis who oppose the continued presence of U.S. troops in their country have made similar arguments. In an echo of his own warnings that the fight against terrorism will last years, Bush said that at the start of the fight for independence, “America’s victory was far from certain…. Citizens had to struggle for six more years to finally determine the outcome of the Revolutionary War.”

The “hundreds of empty seats” probably wasn’t too telling – all the military people that were in attendance were probably under orders to be there anyway. Perhaps it was simple miscommunication, as they may have gone on previous numbers of civilian, ticketed, hand-picked guests during the election years. And now there’s simply no point in inviting supernumeraries, perhaps.

Clearly, irony is lost on this Administration and its speechwriters, though. Watch for new graffiti to blossom on the sand-brown walls of Baghdad soon, in English and Arabic:

“We are a small band of freedom-loving patriots taking on the most powerful empire in the world.”

Progressive Political News and Information: Nevada Thunder

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Progressive Political News and Information: Nevada Thunder

Frank Rich of the New York Times (paywall) “When The Vice President Does It, That Means It’s Not Illegal”

Even now, few have made the connection between this month’s Cheney flap and the larger scandal. That larger scandal is to be found in what the vice president did legally under the executive order early on rather than in his more recent rejection of its oversight rules.

Timing really is everything. By March 2003, this White House knew its hype of Saddam’s nonexistent nuclear arsenal was in grave danger of being exposed. The order allowed Mr. Bush to keep his own fingerprints off the nitty-gritty of any jihad against whistle-blowers by giving Mr. Cheney the authority to pick his own shots and handle the specifics. The president could have plausible deniability and was free to deliver non-denial denials like “If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is.” Mr. Cheney in turn could delegate the actual dirty work to Mr. Libby, who obstructed justice to help throw a smoke screen over the vice president’s own role in the effort to destroy Mr. Wilson.

Boing Boing: Merlin Mann’s decluttering roundup

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Boing Boing: Merlin Mann’s decluttering roundup

From FlyLady.net:

The 27-Fling Boogie

We do this assignment as fast as we can. Take a garbage bag and walk through your home and throw away 27 items. Do not stop until you have collected all 27 items. Then close the garbage bag and pitch it. DO NOT LOOK IN IT!!! Just do it.

Next, take an empty box and go through your home collecting 27 items to give away. Suze Orman taught me this in her book, The Courage to be Rich. This will change the energy in your home and bring about good feelings. Every time I do this I feel better and my home is becoming decluttered in the process. As soon as you finish filling the box, take it to the car. You are less tempted to rescue the items.

Interesting. The rest of the website is full of useful tips, but the overall tone gets kind of icky-poo; it seems to be aimed at stay-at-home people who don’t work outside the home. But some of these suggestions seem pretty on target.

And yes, we’re pretty cluttered here. I’m just saying.

[tags]BoingBoing, declutter[/tags]

Blue: Sunny Red: Stormy

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mullentown » Blog Archive » If You Were the Architect

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Yay! It’s coming back, and it’s nothing to do with politics: it’s the Walker Bank sign in Salt Lake City. As seen in the comments at mullentown, it sounds like the old Salk Lake weather icon may be making a comeback.

In one of those weird Internets Tubes coincidences, my Uncle Charlie is mentioned on that Early Television site, as he was a long time radio enthusiast and tinkerer with new technologies in Salt Lake. In the 40’s and 50’s, he was involved with a lot of this stuff. I guess he was employed or connected with KDYL-TV in the early days, a fact that I vaguely remembered from family stories. KDYL-TV isn’t on the air anymore, but became KCPX /

Anyway, the Walker Bank sign was illuminated with 2 different sets of neon tubes: green for good weather, and red for stormy. I can’t remember if it flashed to show a difference between “rain” and “snow.” Mom and I used to spend a fair amount of time looking at the view of Salt Lake from my aunt and uncle’s house, and checking to see what the weather would be was part of this experience – green or red, fair or stormy. If you couldn’t see it at all, it was either foggy, or REALLY stormy (heh).

I’ve just emailed my cousin Bill to let him know about this Early Television site, he’ll get a kick out of it. I also found several other links online that lead to photo collections at the University of Utah to do with early television. I’d be willing to bet that Charlie took a lot of the KDYL photos – there’s something about the composition and the clarity of them that reminds me of Charlie’s photography. He owned a well-regarded Photo Lab in Salt Lake for many years, and Bill is also a very good photographer – he actually set up and took this photo of “damn sour pie” that we had for Mom’s memorial backyard bash.

Come to think of it, Charlie must have known this commerical artist I ran across, Pat Denner. Mr. Denner did ad and art work for Salt Lake businesses like Walker Bank, Dee’s, and Harman’s Cafe (a sit down restaurant that had a Colonel Saunders tie-in back in the days before the franchised take-out joints).  I bet Charlie took the photos of the food for the menu, because he always had a sideline in photographing food for print or television ads. I know for a fact he used to joke about how hard it was to make a burger from Dee’s look appetizing for the ads he did for them.

That menu pictured on the Howdy Pardner! documentary blog is so tantalizingly familiar… the old Harman’s restaurant was down on 13th East and 21st South, at the corner of all the completely redeveloped part of the old Sugar House downtown area. I still remember how good the rolls were with butter and honey, and of course the chicken was so much better when it was made to order and brought to your table on heavy, restaurant grade china by a waitress in a starched pink uniform and white apron. I also remember it was the first place that I saw those new-fangled hot-air hand dryers in the women’s room. Now there’s just a takeout KFC kitty-corner to the old location – there’s no such thing as a sit-down Kentucky Fried Chicken place any more.

Whoa.  Quite a stroll down memory lane.  All because of a freakin’ neon bank sign.

A Decision Made Largely By Rove (and Cheney)

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A Decision Made Largely Alone

President Bush limited his deliberations over commuting the jail term of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to a few close aides, opting not to consult with the Justice Department and rebuffing efforts by close friends to lobby on Libby’s behalf, administration officials and people close to Bush said yesterday.

Let’s see… on that short list would be Cheney, Rove, and maybe Barney. Possibly Laura, if she can take time off from her “No Regrets Tour.” Bush listens to no one else except that voice in his head that keeps telling him he’s doing God’s work.

January 20, 2009. Come on, already. Let’s get somebody else in who might have the wherewithal to buy a clue.

[tags]Libby, Bush, Rove, Cheney, Barney, Teh Evul One[/tags]