September 30, 2005

Chatspeare: Macbeth I.vii

Posted by cronopio at 01:16 PM

September 29, 2005

Fuck Saab

Three years ago, I blogged about a Dr Pepper-sponsored Web site in which one of the cartoon characters on the site was anti-consumerist.
Several Subservient Chickens later, the trend still hasn't changed: over at Maintain Your Identity (ooh, a .net site, how alternative), Saab, a multinational car company, urges us to hold on to our individuality. It offers us the chance to put our own quote online and have it float around in a Flash movie, or submit a photo or even a movie.
How all this ties in with a faceless corporation that produces millions of identical consumer products is a bit of an enigma to me. Big business isn't about individuality; it's about conformity. This site is like Brian of Nazareth shouting: "You are all individuals!" and the crowd responding "Yes! We are all individuals!" And I would be the one guy going, "I'm not!"
Reality Check for Saab: sirs, if I want to voice my opinion, show a picture or even distribute a movie, I can do it without your Web site. I have this thing called a weblog, that lets me do all those things and more. Just get back to building safe and nice-looking cars, and keep your nose out of my individuality.

Posted by cronopio at 01:19 PM

September 28, 2005

Debunking the Middle Ages

Ever since (and before) he directed "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" with Terry Gilliam in 1975, Terry Jones has had a keen interest in all things medieval. Recently, I came across an episode of his "Medieval Lives" series in which he debunks a medieval myth that has been particularly persistent: the notion that people in the Middle Ages thought that the earth is flat.
As Jones shows, this was not at all true. Seafaring people from across the European continent had been well aware of the fact that high buildings, boat masts and mountains always appear first when you approach them from the sea. Only a curvature in the earth's surface could explain that. In fact, medieval scholars even imagined a range of weird creatures known collective as Antipods, who supposedly lived on the other side of the globe.
So why do we all think that medieval people believed in a flat earth? Because the 19th-century American author Washington Irving, writing a highly dramatized account of Columbus embarking for the New World, invented church officials who tried to stop Christopher from proving the heresy that the world may be round. Nothing could be further from the truth, but the lie persists to this day.

Posted by cronopio at 12:53 PM

September 27, 2005

Bite me!

For all you hungry RSS users, snowstone now proudly offers a fully functional RSS feed! Actually, there was an RSS feed all along, but I just didn't notice it. If you don't know what RSS is, read this.

Posted by cronopio at 01:50 PM

September 26, 2005

Peter Rhodes, hero citizen


Many people, when faced with bureaucratic nonsense in government or the corporate world, complain about it to people around them, fume silently and grow an ulcer, or write irate but ineffective hatemail to the party responsible.
Those people should read this story. It is the story of one Peter Rhodes, a citizen of the town of Wanaka in New Zealand, who "was frustrated with the Queenstown Lakes District Council's regulatory contractor, CivicCorp, and with the 'bureaucratic nonsense' he had to deal with while trying to subdivide his property", as the New Zealand Herald reports.
So when Mr Rhodes received an electoral roll confirmation form for the New Zealand elections, and saw that there was an additional form for eligible voters who had been "inadvertently overlooked", he did the obvious thing: he signed up his dog Toby for the elections. In keeping with their bureaucratic incompetence, civil servants overlooked the fact that the signature on the form was a dog's paw print, changed the voter's occupation, listed as 'rodent exterminator', to 'hunter', and allowed Toby to vote.
Election day has come and gone and neither Toby nor his boss have voted. But I think that the mere fact of a Jack Russell terrier being allowed to cast a vote in the national elections (and the ensuing press) sends a clearer message to the New Zealand government than any filled-in ballot could.

Posted by cronopio at 01:07 PM

September 23, 2005

The Spanish Prisoner


5 out of 5 snowstones

I love movies that make me think about them afterwards, especially the puzzle-like ones such as Memento and the best Hitchcocks. Such movies are rare gems these days, when entire websites are devoted to movie mistakes.
In this genre, "The Spanish Prisoner" by David Mamet is a real treat. Like most good thrillers, it has a lot of plot twists and unexpected surprises, but nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, the plot seems disjointed at times, and seasoned viewers of these movies might find mistakes. To see if I 'got it', I went to IMDb and checked out the user comments. Most reviewers found it a so-so thriller, ok in its genre. But one reviewer remarked mysteriously that 'almost no-one really understands this movie'. Intrigued, I went looking for more info and found a site that attempts to explain it all. Warning: I strongly advise against visiting this site if you haven't seen the movie.
To me, it shows courage for a director to make a movie that almost no-one understands. Ridley Scott (possibly inadvertently) did the same with Blade Runner, a movie with a secret that is never explicitly revealed. But there, the dazzling visuals and intriguing main story line greatly helped the movie. In Mamet's case, the viewer must dig deeper to appreciate the hidden gem.

Posted by cronopio at 01:35 PM

September 22, 2005

Artichokehold


For the first time in my life, I tried to cook a dish that involved real and actual artichoke. You know, that pizza topping you don't like.
The experiment was a total and utter disaster.
Taking my cue from the Disrobed Chef, my helpful ally in many such an occasion, I went to work on four of these monsters. Look at that top left image and tell me that this things wasn't an extra in "Day of the Triffids". It's like a rose disguised as a cabbage.
Anyway, I cheerily went to work halving the artichoke and "clicking off", as Jamie put it, the green outer leaves. The more I clicked, the more I noticed that green leaves were almost all it was. Mr Oliver then instructed me to remove the choke in the artichoke's core. What my unsuspecting dessert spoon found in the heart of this vile vegetable, I can only described in one word: hair. That's right, there I was, sitting at the kitchen table, scooping whole handfuls of hair out of a vegetable.
I should have realized there and then that this was a lost cause. But I marched steadily on, filling the hollowed-out core of the heartless thing with a mixture of breadcrumbs, almonds, parsley and mint. It was not until 40 minutes later, when I took the artichokes out of the oven, that I realized why I was supposed to do this: it was the only edible thing in the oven. The Nude Head Cook, normally always so keen to point out how to deal with the uncommon vegetable, was utterly silent on which parts to eat, but my girlfriend an I soon found out: nothing of the vegetable looked even remotely edible. The few yellow leaves surrounding the filling had scorched into a tough, charred set of teeth-like triangles. The stems of the 'chokes did not seem like they were supposed to be eaten. In short, what we ate was the filling and not much else.
I am, of course, an unforgivable barbarian for not knowing how to eat a roasted artichoke (I vaguely remember once sucking the life essence out of some of those leaves, but that was a different type of dish). If anyone has any idea of what I did wrong, be sure to let me know (click Respond at top left).

Posted by cronopio at 01:15 PM

September 21, 2005

Unintelligent Design

Much has been made of the Kansas Board of Education's upcoming ruling about whether to teach "Intelligent Design" next to evolution theory in schools. Generally thought to be covert creationists, the ID crowd argues (and I use the word loosely here) that some mechanisms in nature are so complex that they could not have come into being through the randomness thought to be so inherent to evolution. Rather, they argue, some unnamed "Intelligent Designer" (three letters, starts with a capital G) has been responsible.
Here's how the ID people are wrong:

  • ID is a hypothesis with no actual empirical data to back it up. In contrast, Darwin's concept of natural selection has received strong support through the discovery of DNA: randomly mutating building blocks of life.
  • ID was born out of an assumption, not out of a problem. Darwin tried to find out why; ID attempts to prove "because".
  • As a scientific theory, its backing by the scientific community is less serious than, say, the idea that HIV does not cause AIDS.
  • ID argues that evolution is 'just a theory'. And so it is --just like, for example, gravity.
  • How can the Designer be Intelligent if He (let's be honest, it's that He guy, isn't it?) designed the appendix and the tailbone? Why did He create animals that can smell or hear thousands of times better than we can, even though we are obviously the cream of the crop?
But one argument, in my opinion, outranks all of the previous ones by far:
No Intelligent Designer would ever have allowed such a blatantly stupid group of people as Intelligent Design advocates to be born.

For further reading, see: how Douglas Adams argues that intricate things in nature disprove God's existence, and which other 'parallel theories' must be considered.

Posted by cronopio at 01:59 PM

September 20, 2005

Xenophobia in the Netherlands

Muslim Web site El Qalem (only in Dutch) did some enlightening research into how immigrants (read: non-Western immigrants) are treated in the Netherlands in their search for employment. The experiment was set up professionally: two groups of 75 (nonexistent) job applicants each, one with a Dutch name, one with a 'foreign sounding' name, applied for the same types of jobs. The resumés were drafted by HR professionals, and students were prepped for any follow-up interviews.
The results are shocking: of the 75 Dutch applicants, 51 got a job offer; of the 75 non-Dutch applicants, 2 (that's two) got a job offer. Note also that the non-Dutch applicants were deliberately given better resumés than their Dutch counterparts.
El Qalem offered what it called its "Corporate Shitlist", a list of companies that scored worst when it came to hiring foreigners. I'll be happy to reproduce the international players in the list here:

  • Saturn Corporation (car manufacturer)
  • Ford Credit (car financing)
  • Kraft Food Europe (food products)
  • Rank Xerox (document management)
  • Shell (oil; imagine an oil company turning down people who speak Arabian!)
  • Reed Elsevier (publishing)

Posted by cronopio at 01:12 PM

September 19, 2005

Against All Enemies - Richard Clarke


You might think I'm a bit late in reading Dick Clarke's "Against All Enemies" (2004), the counterterrorism czar's scathing condemnation of Dubya's bungled response of 9/11. Clarke argues, amongst others, that Iraq is unrelated to Al Qaeda, that the Department of Homeland Security sets back counterterrorism efforts, and that Clinton committed more money, expertise and resources than Bush jr ever did, even after 9/11.
However, one excerpt is not only eerily prophetic but also proves that Clarke is not an alarmist with a hidden agenda:

In 2000, I asked DOD and FEMA to determine what units would be needed to deal with a small nuclear weapon going off in a midsize U.S. city. Both agencies said I had to be more specific, so I chose Cincinnati because I had just been there. The kind of federal plan and units needed to help metropolitan Cincinnati officials deal with such a calamity simply did not exist. Nonetheless, many city officials assumed that there were federal units somewhere that would come to help them in an extreme emergency. They also noted that it is the first 24 hours in which the injured can be saved, and most local officials I spoke with doubted that the U.S. Cavalry would appear that fast. In fact, many of the kinds of federal units that city officials assume will help them will never show up. Large MASH-style military field hospitals are no longer in the force structure. Military Police are in short supply and stretched with overseas deployments. (Now, because of Iraq, many National Guard units are also overseas, taking with them mobilized police and fire personnel from cities and towns. The new Northern Command created to assist in homeland emergencies has not developed a single new field unit to meet domestic requirements; it merely has the ability to plan to call on units that already happen to exist and are still in the homeland.)
Hmmm... let's summarize here, shall we? A major U.S. city falls victim to a disaster. Local officials expect federal emergency agencies such as a certain FEMA to step in. Such agencies cannot respond within 24 hours, are dangerously understaffed, have no effective response plan, and have lots of able-bodied personnel fighting overseas in Iraq.
The value of a theory is often said to be found in its predictability. The Katrina disasters -unfortunately- proves Richard Clarke right in his assessment. Makes you wonder what else he's right about...

Posted by cronopio at 01:30 PM

September 16, 2005

Fame and Fortune

I may have mentioned before on this weblog that I'm not a great fan of the paranormal, belief in UFOs and other such hocus pocus. So when I read an article in Metro, one of my home country's biggest newspapers (distributed for free), about some astrologer, I felt the need to protest in some way. She cast the horoscope of the reporter, who was amazed at the results. So was I, but not in the same way. So, on a whim, I decided to e-mail a response.

Metro on 7 September fills a whole page with a story about astrologer Hanneke Lageman, who cast the horoscope of reporter John van Schagen and drew some shocking conclusions: this employee of the biggest newspaper in Holland is someone who "determines his own destiny and takes initiative himself." He also loves justice (something most people, after all, dislike) and has "a strong urge to achieve something special." It's amazing.
How can someone with common sense believe that the way in which heavenly bodies move through the cosmos has anything to do with our characters? A new planet has recently been discovered in our solar system; did Ms. Lageman take that into account in her calculations?
If this journalist were a real skeptic, he would have come up with a waterproof test. Why not, for example, turn things around: Van Schagen (or rather, a complete stranger) tells what kind of person he is, and Ms. Lageman guesses his sign. Or, submit a wrong birth date and check if the horoscope is still correct. Astrologers, with or without a diploma, are consistently exposed as frauds with these kinds of tests.
I understand that in summertime, when there isn't much to report, you need to fill your newspaper, but why not then interview a skeptic (from the Skepsis Foundation for example) instead of legitimizing nonsense?
To my surprise, the entire letter was published in the paper the next day! Deciding to open the door when opportunity came a-knockin', I forwarded the epistle to James Randi ("The Amazing Randi"), a magician and skeptic who awards $1,000,000 to anyone who can demonstrate paranormal powers under controlled test conditions. Sure enough, I got a reply and here we go, I'm in this week's newsletter.
Howevers, rumors that I will soon be hosting a national talk show about skepticism are exaggerated. Unfortunately.


Posted by cronopio at 01:11 PM

September 15, 2005

Tourist Mobile


When we were on holiday, my girlfriend and me were ringing up quite some costs with our mobiles. Remember that if you're staying in X and you live in Y, a call placed to a number in X costs as much as a call from X to Y and back from Y to X. Also, we were constantly trying to find numbers of tourist agencies, boat rental companies, etc etc.
Which got me thinking.
Why not have a tourist mobile phone? This phone would be a local phone, so the costs of calls would be low. It would be loaded with a prepaid card and, what's more, the phone directory of the mobile would be filled with all kinds of local numbers: hotels, museums, restaurants. Rather than find out the number, the user would just select the name of the place they wanted to reach and press Dial. The user would have to pay a deposit or insurance premium to cover loss or theft.
I really wonder why nobody thought of this before.. or have they?

Posted by cronopio at 04:49 PM

September 14, 2005

Modern koan

A Buddhist monk having a vegetarian broth in a Chinese restaurant motioned for the waiter to come over.
"Yes, how may I help you?"
"There's something wrong with my spoon."
Without looking at the table, the waiter responded: "It's bent, isn't it? Well, you probably did that yourself, Uri Geller. Just give it to me and I'll bend it back."
The monk shook his head. "Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead ... only try to realize the truth."
"What truth?"
"There is no spoon."
"There is no spoon?"
"Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself."
The waiter thought about this for a second, then made a courteous bow. The monk smiled approvingly. The waiter apologized and went to fetch a spoon.

Posted by cronopio at 01:30 PM

September 13, 2005

Note to self #4123

While waiting to pick up your girlfriend from the airport, do not read Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies", a book full of nefarious Muslim fundamentalists blowing up airplane after airplane. I tell ya, about 15 minutes after the plane had (allegedly) landed and she still hadn't appeared, I stopped reading, lest I'd start running in circles yelling "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!" at the top of my lungs.

Note: When reading the above, remember that I've just had my poetic license renewed.

Posted by cronopio at 01:40 PM

September 12, 2005

Spider-Man 2


2 out of 5 snowstones

I was mildly enthusiastic about the first installment of our arachnoid superhero, but part 2 of the series doesn't bring much more to the concept. Director Sam Raimi deserves some credit for avoiding Bruckheimer-type, apocalyptic "let's detonate Manhattan" scenes, choosing instead for rapid action scenes, often in tight spaces. But the boring and predictable storyline dominates too much over the action scenes, which themselves often have very detectable CGI.

Posted by cronopio at 12:58 PM

September 09, 2005

Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000


0 out of 5 snowstones

Several years ago, in the cinema, I watched a trailer for a new science fiction movie.It starred John Travolta and was, the bellowing announcer informed me, "based on one of the most successful science-fiction novels ever made". Throughout the rest of the trailer, I kept wondering which book it might be, and especially who wrote it. I had to squint my eyes at the end to read the name of none other than L. Ron Hubbard, the inventor of that freakiest of cult religions, Scientology.
Yesterday, "Battlefield Earth" aired on TV and I started watching it, trying to find out what Travolta (who also produced the movie), a self-confessed Scientologist had done with his mentor's book. The answer: he'd turned it into the most successful anti-Hubbard campaigns ever produced. This movie is so amazingly bad that it's a miracle that Travolta is still taken seriously in Hollywood.
I've seen a lot of movies in my life, and I know that there are various elements in a movie that work together to produce the end result. If the acting is lousy, the script might still be decent; great editing and cinematography can often save a basically bland storyline.
It is rare, then, to see a major Hollywood film failing in absolutely every respect:
  • Acting: The acting is ludicrous, and the best proof for this is not even Travolta himself, hamming like there's no tomorrow, but all the other actors and (surprisingly few) actresses, none of whom I'd heard of before. And for good reason.
  • Script: Aliens called Psychlos have taken over our entire planet in 9 minutes, but after 1000 years of oppressing the humans (or "man-animals" as they call them), they still haven't stripped the planet clear of gold, which is for some reason extremely valuable to them. The humans, reduced to a caveman existence, manage to stage a revolt that involves destroying the entire Psychlo homeworld (demonstrating what is so quintessentially human about the human race: their ability to rise up from oppression and nuke the hell out of their oppressors).
  • Editing: In a traditional movie, tilting a camera indicates confusion, things being "out of whack". Apparently "Battlefield Earth" is full of confusion, because virtually every shot is taken at an angle.
  • Cinematography: This movie is shot almost entirely in the dark, which combines with the bad editing to produce a confusing jumble: half the time, you have no idea what the hell is going on.
  • Costumes: These aliens look totally ridiculous, wearing rastafari hairstyles and sporting breathing apparatuses that look like nipple clamps with tentacles.
I really, honestly can't say anything in this movie's defense, except of course for its unintentional hilarity. Seeing Travolta cackle in villainous glee, or hearing him say "Crap-lousy ceiling! I thought I told to get some man-animals in here and fix it" is truly campy entertainment at its best.

Posted by cronopio at 01:32 PM

September 08, 2005

Two Katrina stories

In the course of one day, two separate news stories from the Katrina-struck state of Louisiana affected me deeply. One almost made me cry; the other almost made me puke.

The first one is spreading over the internet quickly and it's from September 4th, when the rescue wasn't underway yet. The speaker is one Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, just by Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans, being interviewed on NBC's Meet the Press. For people who are saying that this is no time to point fingers, Mr Broussard has the perfect answer:

Why did it happen? Who needs to be fired? And believe me, they need to be fired right away, because we still have weeks to go in this tragedy. We have months to go. We have years to go. And whoever is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chain-sawed off and we've got to start with some new leadership.
Excellent point: if we can all agree that what happened in the first few days after the levees broke (read: nothing) can be categorized as a grade A fuck-up, why are the lunatics still running the asylum? Surely things can't get much worse than this?
Broussard continues, saying also that
FEMA needs to be empowered to do the things it was created to do. It needs to come somewhere, like New Orleans, with all of its force immediately, without red tape, without bureaucracy, act immediately with common sense and leadership, and save lives. Forget about the property. We can rebuild the property. It's got to be able to come in and save lives.
Another good point. Geraldo Rivera, standing in the New Orleans Convention Center with a black baby on his arm, begging Fox News reporters to explain to him why there was a checkpoint on the bridge preventing these people from getting to food, water and medicine, made the point implicitly: property is apparently more valuable than human life. If I lived in New Orleans and was lucky enough to have gotten out, I would have urged any of my fellow New Orleanians to break into my home, take my supplies, steal my car and drive it the hell out of there.
But wasn't local government also to blame? Why didn't the mayor of New Orleans evacuate everybody well in advance? Again, Mr Broussard has the answer.
MR. RUSSERT: Hold on. Hold on, sir. Shouldn't the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of New Orleans bear some responsibility? Couldn't they have been much more forceful, much more effective and much more organized in evacuating the area?
MR. BROUSSARD: Sir, they were told like me, every single day, "The cavalry's coming," on a federal level, "The cavalry's coming, the cavalry's coming, the cavalry's coming." I have just begun to hear the hoofs of the cavalry. The cavalry's still not here yet, but I've begun to hear the hoofs, and we're almost a week out.
As we know now, those hoofs did not belong to the cavalry, but to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And as a first sign of the horror that was to follow, Mr Broussard had the following story to relate.
The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management, he's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, "Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?" And he said, "Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday." And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night. Nobody's coming to get us. Nobody's coming to get us. The secretary has promised. Everybody's promised. They've had press conferences. I'm sick of the press conferences. For God sakes, shut up and send us somebody.
This death cannot be attributed to meteorology or to an act of God. This man's mother died because of gross incompetence or, to use another term, as some have suggested, criminal negligence. And there will be thousands of stories like this. Is this not a time to point fingers? Like hell it isn't. People died by the hundreds, maybe thousands, through sheer incompetence. The issue is not preventing such mishaps in the future, the issue is bringing the assholes responsible now to justice now.

On to the next story, this one a bit less known. The small city of St Gabriel, Louisiana, population 6000, is home to a makeshift morgue in a local warehouse. CNN's Christiane Amanpour reported that refrigerated trucks full of bodies were driving into town. Not all the townspeople were happy with this development, citing a possible drop in property value, as well as health risks, as reasons. Personally, I'd pay good money to live in a town that did its bit in the disaster relief. Or rather, I might have, until Amanpour interviewed one Ms Theresa Roy, owner of a small grocery store. Ms Roy remarked (video here):

I'd rather have them here dead than alive and, you know, at least they're not robbing you and you don't have to worry about feeding them.
That's true. The dead three-year-old girl being driven to your town in a truck might otherwise have held you up at gunpoint and forced you to hand her all the chewing gum you had. It's a good thing she's dead, isn't it.

Ms Theresa Roy, it is a rare thing for me to hate a fellow human being, what else a total stranger, but you have managed to make it happen. Your remark was revolting in any context, but at a time like this, it is particularly loathsome. What you said next was ironic in the most bitter way possible:
They have to go somewhere, these are people's families. They have to have, they still have to have dignity.
They do indeed, Ms Roy. But you just took it away from them. I hope the ghosts of all of those dead people come to haunt you in your dreams.

Posted by cronopio at 01:10 PM

September 07, 2005

Celebrity


3 out of 5 snowstones

Woody Allen makes actors work for their money. In this movie, Kenneth Branagh is a womanizing, somewhat younger replica of the neurotic protagonist of almost all other Allen movies. His marriage falls apart and we follow both him and his ex through various stages of their lives. On the way, many renowned movie stars of today (Leo DiCaprio, Charlize Theron, Winona Ryder) make their appearance and show off their talent --or lack thereof. To see them engaged in normal conversations in everyday situations instead of sailng on large steamboats or murdering people is refreshing and makes me hungry for more. But I do have to admit that the movie is fragmentary.

Posted by cronopio at 01:01 PM

September 06, 2005

Movie Trivia: The Wilhelm Scream

If you compare films as they were made fifty years ago with the films of today, almost everything seems to have changed. It's not just that, obviously, there are different actors and directors around, the technology of movies has also jumped forward, with all kinds of CGI, supersized IMAX film formats, and Dolby Surround or THX sound systems.
However, one man, whose identity may be forever a mystery, has persisted throughout all these decades of movie making. He is commonly referred to as "Wilhelm", and his contribution to the cinema is called the Wilhelm scream. The Wilhelm scream is simply the sound of a man screaming in what sounds like mortal agony, and it was first used in a movie in 1951. Over the decades, sound engineers for movies have used the same sound over and over again, and in 1977, sound engineer Ben Burtt, working on a little movie called "Star Wars", included it in that blockbuster. It was Burtt who gave the scream its name, since he had found a movie in which a certain Wilhelm utters it. Since "Star Wars", using the Wilhelm scream in a movie (where appropriate) is almost a must, and it appears anywhere from "Reservoir Dogs" to "Howard the Duck". So have a listen and be on the lookout (or 'hearout' rather).
Click here to hear the Wilhelm scream.

Posted by cronopio at 01:42 PM

September 05, 2005

Don't Touch That Dial (Smash Your TV Set Instead)

Rarely has a news event thousands of kilometers away created such powerless rage in me as the 2005 Katrina Hurricane and its gruesome aftermath. I'm almost dumbstruck at the ugly mix of bureaucratic inefficiency and political indifference that unfolded over the past couple of days.
There was also a marked contrast between CNN, which mostly showed heroic rescue workers herding refugees into helicopters and distraught white people returning to what, if anything, was left of their rural homes, and BBC World, which was on the scene at both the New Orleans Superdome and the Convention Center and focused on the logistical ineptitude of the local, state and federal governments. When CNN reported about corpses -which was rarely- they were strangely apologetic about it, as if it was an unpleasant reality that the viewers of a worldwide news channel would rather not hear about.
But what most definitely took, eat and shit the cake in my book was a CNN anchorwoman saying: "Up next, which numbers should you call to get in touch with your loved ones? That and more, right after these messages." I'm sure that a starved mother who had lost all of her earthly possession, arriving in a refugee center and seeing a working TV set for the first time in 5 days, would be more interested in the comfort of flying Singapore Airlines business class than in which number to call to find out if her children were alive or dead.

So I took my news from the Beeb whenever I could, and I followed the live reports on the Survivors of New Orleans weblog, one of the very few communication lines of any kind coming out of the city (yay for diesel-fueled generators). The hosting company that is behind this weblog also used to host the famous Something Awful site. SA, instead of reviewing clown porn or insulting 'furries', showed its true colors in a beautiful piece of biting commentary:

Who is responsible? Who should be blamed? All of them. This is a colossal failure of our government to care for and protect its citizenry on every conceivable level. The heroes are the men and women on the scene doing their utmost to help those in need. Coast Guard rescue workers plucking people to safety and Red Cross workers feeding people from emergency kitchens are heroes. The man who commandeered a bus and got people out of New Orleans when the government was woefully impotent is a hero. The woman who smashed the glass on a convenience store to loot bottled water for fifteen kids who should have been absolutely inundated with supplies by then is a hero. The doctors and nurses hand-bagging ventilator patients 24 hours a day in dark hospitals are heroes. In the ineloquent but true words of the Mayor of New Orleans: "Don't tell me 40,000 people are coming here. They're not here. It's too doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something, and let's fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country." CNN was better prepared to deal with this disaster than FEMA was.
I am ashamed of my country's government in a universal way right now. Republicans, democrats, opportunists, it doesn't matter; they're all guilty in this situation. In a magical world where justice is actually served most of these people would not have jobs in a month or two. Instead the people without jobs will be the millions who have lost everything and found their government with its back turned. Remember that people are still dying because of this incompetence. Remember that when each and every one of these fools appears on TV for a photo op or complains about "placing blame later," because placing blame now is the only hope America has to change the situation.

Lesson learned: the next time a disaster threatens the U.S., you're on your own.

Posted by cronopio at 01:06 PM

September 02, 2005

Tell-tale Signs

I really love signs. Especially those very basic signs with stick figures, whose meaning often eludes you. Luckily, for people like me, there's a dedicated Web site: SwankSigns, where you can check out a photograph of a sign and try to say what it means. The results are often hilarious.
Not to be outdone, I took the time to photograph a number of signs on the passenger ship I was on during my holidays, and I'll be posting them one by one. Here's the first, my personal favorite.

This reads, of course, "Press button to set ship on fire."

Posted by cronopio at 01:32 PM

September 01, 2005

Benefit Concert Canceled

HOUSTON, TX -- A rock band that had planned to give a free concert in the Astrodome in Houston to provide some much-needed entertainment to the displaced citizens of New Orleans has met with fierce opposition from the Big Easy refugees.
Just as the MC finished announcing the band and they started playing their upbeat 1980s hit "Walking on Sunshine", the audience started booing them off the stage. Guitarist Kimberley Rew was pelted with several unidentified objects. "You'd think these people would appreciate something to distract them in this terrible ordeal," he commented. Band member Vince de la Cruz was equally baffled over the angry reception of the crowd. "Far be it from me to be judgmental about people who have experienced a horrible tragedy, but I can't help feeling that it's a bit ungrateful."
The band's singer stated that "if the crowd doesn't want us, we won't force our music down their throats." Ms Leskanich said that her band, Katrina and the Waves would be continuing on their Texas tour as planned.

Disclaimer 1: Like everyone, I am horrified at the disastrous events surrounding hurricane Katrina. This posting is not meant to belittle that tragedy. But as George Bernard Shaw pointed out, "Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be
serious when people laugh."

Disclaimer 2: This story is completely and totally fictional. None of the band members ever said any of this, nor did they plan a concert. The worst thing Katrina and the Waves have ever done is win the Eurovision Song Contest.

Posted by cronopio at 01:17 PM