Items

These items reposed on the face of a giant hunk of Manhattan Schist, in a narrow undeveloped lot between two high-rises on Bennett Avenue north of 181st Street in Manhattan. I shot them through a chain-link fence on 27 May 2019.

Death sells. So far today, this blog post has had 13 visits. Meanwhile, Radio’s Death Knells has had 356. Since I need to go out, I’ll call it a day and put a picture on top. See what happens.

What was Indiana thinking? These days sunrise in Bloomington is about four hours before noon, and sunset is about eight hours after noon. Without Daylight Shifting* Time, sunrise is five hours before Noon and sunset is seven hours after Noon. And yet most of Indiana decided, long before we got here, that they’d rather not be sensible and stay on Central time. (Not much) more data here. *Shift is a better ver than save for what moving clocks forward and back do.

Because a little head is better than none. I’m playing with boldface one-liners, such as the sentence fragment preceding this one, to see if those work something like the subheads did on my ur-blog. I just looked, and I think they work. By the way, this stylistic convention is derived from the old Esquire Magazine‘s yearly Dubious Achievement Awards, the best of which were published decades ago, and all of which appear to be paywalled.

King Archives Court. This WaPo story about disappearing photo archives is close to homes for me. I have about a hundred thousand photos online, mostly archived at Flickr. Most are at one called Doc Searls and a bunch of others are at one called Infrastructure. They tend to get more than a thousand views a day. The first one, which has been up since 2004, has had 17,603,689 views so far. The shots you don’t see are private ones for family and friends. (I use Smugmug for that now. And I thank Smugmug every day for saving Flickr back in 2018.)

Loyalties. When I was a kid, my favorite sports teams were the Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Knicks, and the New York (football) Giants, in roughly that order. But the Dodgers were on top, by a long way. I became a Mets fan (as did all New York non-Yankees fans) when they showed up in 1961. My favorite radio team—back when such loyalties were a Real Thing—was the WMCA Good Guys. I tell a story about that on my old blog, here.

Breaking News. No time to look for today’s collision (between a tanker and a container ship) in the North Sea, but maybe you can find it at MarineTraffic: an amazing map and service.

And which realm has the dragons? Are we being colonized? This paper makes the case.

Doesn’t smell good. My most-visited blog post of the last couple of weeks is Radio’s Death Knells. I have a feeling those visits are more from people in the business than from people who listen to radio.

Lost but not de-listed. Sad but interesting to see how many listings on my old blogroll (frozen in Augst 2007) are from people now gone: Rex Hammock, Craig Burton, Chris Locke, Ronni Barrett, Bernie DeKoven, Kim Cameron, John Perry Barlow, The Head Lemur. And those are just some I know. I’ll fill in the links later when I have time (which I won’t, but I’ll make some).

Hey good lookin’. An argument for mixed-reality glasses. Note that the best smart glasses I know about are ones thought up more than eleven years ago.

A unicorn yet unborn. The next portable personal device is one thought up almost twelve years ago. Its name was (and might yet still be) Omie. (I currently squat on omie.fun and omie.my. Just in case.)

Back to real blogging. My current defaulted writing method for this blog is to write all day in Wordland, then adding an image to the top of the post after I’ve moved on to another post. (And maybe to do some additional editing, as I do with most of my posts using WordPress’ composing window—or whatever it’s called.)