I'm a lasagna boy!

In which the honey is in the vac

The Los Angeles Times has a series on the Oceans, and the latest instalment describes a new water-treatment facility in Santa Monica, SMURFF.

ALTERED OCEANS

Slowing a tide of pollutants
Runoff from land dwellers -- urban and agricultural -- harms coastal waters, but there are solutions.
By Kenneth R. Weiss
Times Staff Writer

December 25, 2006

CALL it the slobber stopper.

It looks like an elaborate fountain. Water gurgles through a series of red-tiled pools, spillways and chutes within sight of the pedestrian walkway that connects the bluffs of Santa Monica with the Santa Monica Pier.

The Santa Monica Urban Runoff Recycling Facility, or SMURRF, is the only thing preventing 350,000 gallons of urban runoff from coursing into the Pacific every day.

The $12-million contraption is at the forefront of efforts to curb the torrent of pollutants that threaten the world's oceans. Sitting near the mouth of the city's largest storm drain, it collects and treats the frothy flow that trickles out of a seaside metropolis day after day from sprinklers, washed cars and drained pools, bearing with it cat and dog waste, spilled engine oil, lawn chemicals, brake dust, bacteria and viruses.

The liquid waste, called "urban slobber," is filtered; sterilized with ultraviolet light; and recycled to irrigate Palisades Park and a city cemetery and to flush the toilets at police headquarters. Styrofoam cups, plastic bags and other solid debris are scooped out and hauled to a landfill.

Yet such farsighted ingenuity remains the exception rather than the rule. SMURRF is the only urban-runoff recycling plant in the country. Efficient as it is, it captures a tiny fraction of the runoff flowing into California's coastal waters.

Urban runoff is the fastest-growing source of ocean pollution. The storm water discharge, combined with partially treated sewage, agricultural waste, and pollution from smokestacks and vehicle tailpipes, is changing the chemistry of the seas.

Industrial civilization is overloading the oceans with nutrients — compounds of nitrogen, carbon, iron and phosphorous. Algae, jellyfish and other primitive life-forms are thriving in this new environment, while corals, marine mammals and many fish species are struggling.

Scientists say society has only recently begun to grasp how what happens on land affects the sea. It has taken decades to get to this point, they say, and it could take just as long to reverse the trend.

"We have millions of people who live near the water and whose waste contributes to degrading the quality of coastal waters," said Dave Caron, a USC biological oceanographer. "It's only common sense that we should take care and treat this like it were our backyard."

Government and industry officials, with the benefit of scientific studies, can now pinpoint the multitude of pollution sources. They also know how to fix the problems, said Paul Faeth, executive vice president of the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C. "We've got the tools," he said, "but need the political will to get it done."

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, often has failed to enforce the Clean Water Act's requirement to stop pollutants from entering U.S. coastal waters deemed impaired, except when forced to do so by federal courts.

Drainage into the Santa Monica Bay and other Southern California waters is regulated under a judge's orders to reduce the trash, bacteria and other contaminants.

Still, dozens of cities have spent years and more than $1 million battling compliance requirements in court. In the meantime, many of the simplest and least expensive cleanup methods have been ignored — including the use of street sweepers to follow trash trucks and scoop up spills.

With its civic image and tourist industry tied to picture-perfect beaches, Santa Monica didn't need a court order to tidy up its coastline.

SMURRF, which began operating five years ago, has already shown results. The big storm drain empties onto the sand next to the luxurious hotels Shutters on the Beach and Casa del Mar. The popular beach used to get failing grades from ocean monitoring groups because contaminated waters threatened public health.

Now, with SMURRF intercepting and treating the runoff, the beach gets mostly A's.

"This is incredibly important to Santa Monica," said Craig Perkins, the city's director of environmental and public works management. "We get 3 [million] to 5 million visitors a year. It's logical to assume that they would prefer the beaches and ocean are safe and clean."

Santa Monica diverts most of the flow that SMURRF can't handle to a sewage treatment plant. Still, there are limits to what the infrastructure can do. In heavy rainstorms, the runoff from storm drains can overwhelm treatment plants and risk spilling raw sewage. City engineers have to release these polluted floodwaters into the sea.

That has prompted Santa Monica and other cities, including Seattle and Portland, Ore., to focus on stopping runoff at its sources: the rooftops, roads, sidewalks and parking lots that shed water.

On a recent tour of Santa Monica, Perkins showed off a newly built Spanish-style house on 7th Street. The five-bedroom home was nearly finished, except for a giant pit in the frontyard. It looked like a small swimming pool — filled with rocks. Rain gutters and thick plastic pipes will direct rainwater into the pit so it can percolate into the ground.

"It's a common, simple way to keep more water in the yard and less spilling into the street," Perkins said.

For more than a decade, the city has required new construction or substantial home remodels to maximize permeable areas or set up other ways to keep water from running loose.

It's an attempt to reverse 125 years of engineering and landscaping design. Now, parking lots and driveways are being built from pavers or porous concrete that allow water to pass into the soil. They are lined with planters, built below grade to collect runoff, with trees and shrubs that soak up rainwater.

So far, about 1,200 parcels, about 5% of the city's total, have been reconfigured so that during 0.75 of an inch of rain, 6.1 million gallons of rainwater feeds topsoil or recharges groundwater instead of being whisked to the ocean with the other 110 million gallons.

But even in Santa Monica, 95% of the city has yet to be updated. "We're making progress," Perkins said. "Over the next 50 to 60 years, we could be close to retrofitting 90% of the city. We have to look at the cumulative benefits over time."

*

FIFTY miles from the shores of Santa Monica, in the Chino Valley of San Bernardino County, Mark Lambooy is focused on a cleanup of another kind.

Every day, a two-man crew maneuvers a giant vacuum tanker to sweep the feeding lane at Lambooy's Dykstra Dairy, nudging aside black and white Holsteins jostling for another mouthful of hay.

With a giant squeegee and powerful suction, the tractor-powered "honey vac" scoops up a green-brown slurry of manure, turning a waste product into a commodity that will be used to generate electricity and then spread on fields as fertilizer.

Dykstra Dairy is in the vanguard of a movement to clean up waste from livestock compounds. The goal is to keep the nitrogen-rich waste out of creeks, rivers and ultimately oceans.

It's an unusual chore on a dairy farm otherwise preoccupied with maximizing milk production, said Lambooy, the co-owner. Nowadays, he said, "there is a lot more attention on the rear end of the cow."

A great deal more attention is being paid to all types of agricultural runoff. That includes the stuff that washes out of feedlots in rainstorms and off farms.

One of the toughest tasks has been to discourage the excessive use of cheap chemical fertilizer, which is manufactured by stripping nitrogen out of the air and altering its chemistry.

Although such fertilizer has brought America an unprecedented bounty of corn and other crops, it has also caused serious damage to the oceans by creating "dead zones."

In one of the largest lifeless zones, off the coast of Louisiana, fertilizer residue flowing down the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico stimulates riotous blooms of algae, which then die. During their decay, they consume the available oxygen in the water, making it impossible for most sea life to survive.

These anoxic zones are proliferating around the globe, tracking expanded use of chemical fertilizers.

Nancy Rabalais, a Louisiana scientist who studies the devastation off the mouth of the Mississippi, tries to persuade Midwest grain farmers to fertilize in the spring rather than the fall. That way less fertilizer would be swept away by winter rains and snowmelt.

"Most farmers won't do it," she said. "They stick with what they know."

Midwestern farmers worry that springtime conditions may be too wet to allow them to apply fertilizer and work the land.

Farmers know that too little fertilizer — just like too little water — can limit the growth of their crops. To reduce their risk of decreased corn yields, they apply more fertilizer than crops need. That increases the amount of nitrogen that comes off their land.

None of this is a surprise to the EPA, which spent four years developing a plan to shrink the "dead zone." The plan was finished in 2001. But little progress has been made putting it into action.

The EPA has the power under the Clean Water Act to mandate reductions in agricultural and urban waste entering the Mississippi — something it has been reluctant to do.

*

ONE way to ease the effect of agricultural waste on the oceans would be to restore some of the millions of acres of marshes and streamside forests that absorbed and recycled nitrogen before the land was cleared for farms.

Scientists in Ohio and Louisiana estimated that if just 2% of strategically located farmland in the Mississippi drainage basin were returned to wetlands, it would significantly reduce the nitrogen that races into the Gulf of Mexico.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture encourages such restoration, and the idea has proved popular with farmers. Yet thousands of those willing to set aside wetlands or plant buffers of grass and trees are turned away each year because of a shortage of funds.

So for the time being, progress will depend on the efforts of individual farmers like Lambooy to keep waste from spilling off their property.

The EPA has calculated that the manure generated by all animal feeding operations is about 100 times more than all the sewage sludge processed by the nation's municipal wastewater treatment plants.

In California, the nation's leading dairy state, 1.7 million cows on 2,100 dairies produce 65 billion pounds of manure a year.

Ammonia, a form of nitrogen, escapes from manure into the air and travels up to 30 miles before falling back to Earth and enriching surface waters. Manure also releases methane, a greenhouse gas.

Some dairy farms use manure to fertilize crops, but many others, including ones in the Chino Basin, lack enough acreage to spread the manure around. For years, they would pile it up on their property; large storms washed it into the Santa Ana River and coastal waters off Newport Beach. A large mound of manure sits by the side of Euclid Avenue in Ontario, adorned with the sign "Free Bulk Fertilizer."

A lawsuit by the Natural Resources Defense Council spurred state regulators to began enforcing rules to corral manure and related wastewater on site.

Dykstra Dairy decided to join other dairies in an effort to wrest energy from excrement. That's where the "honey vac" comes in, scooping up 36 tons a day that goes to a "methane digester" at a regional utility.

The Inland Empire Utilities Agency heats the slurry in enormous tanks, causing bacteria to break down the manure and release methane, which the agency uses to generate electricity. Residual dry manure is composted and sold as a fertilizer. Leftover liquids are flushed for treatment at a sewage plant.

More than 100 of these methane digesters now operate nationwide. The key is to collect manure early, so the gases can be harnessed before they escape into the environment, said Martha Davis, an executive at the Inland Empire agency. "The fresher the better."

James Brown

James Brown died.

In which the lights in the city are art

The New York Times's Elain Sciolino ran a profile of François Jousse, the man responsible for lighting the fantastic buildings and avenues of Paris.

December 23, 2006
THE SATURDAY PROFILE; As the Sun Sets, a Parisian's Masterpiece Comes to Life

By ELAINE SCIOLINO
FRANÇOIS JOUSSE paced along the south roof of Notre-Dame, chain-smoking French cigarillos as he waited for darkness to fall.

Suddenly, the southern facade of the cathedral lit up, its pillars, gargoyles and flying buttresses adorned in white.

''Ah, this gives me such great pleasure!'' he said, warming his hands in one of the spotlight canisters. ''I truly am blessed with the most splendid job.''

Indeed, Mr. Jousse, a 64-year-old engineer, is the troubleshooter for the City of Light. As chief engineer for doctrine, expertise and technical control, he is responsible for lighting 300 of the monuments, official buildings, bridges and boulevards of the French capital.

Working with a staff of 30 decorative lighting specialists at a City Hall annex, Mr. Jousse helps create new lighting projects, lectures experts, negotiates with powerful players like the Roman Catholic Church and resolves technical problems at sites throughout the city.

One recent evening, Mr. Jousse was summoned urgently to an alleyway filled with garbage in a gritty neighborhood in the 19th Arrondissement. He had tried to mount a projector to shine one of his creations -- images of six decorative windows he had photographed -- onto a bare concrete wall there.

One was half-opened, with a red drape; another showed the silhouette of a black cat from an iconic late 19th-century poster.

But the images needed to be enlarged to match the real windows nearby. The deputy mayor of the neighborhood wanted the wall ready for Christmas. After a struggle to mount a different lens, he settled on a temporary compromise: the windows were enlarged, but two of them had to go because the existing lens could accommodate only four of that size.

''Oh, no, we can't lose the cat!'' he said. ''It's back to the lab.''

MR. JOUSSE became one of the world's foremost urban lighting experts by accident. A native of Paris, he landed a job in 1963 with the city's engineering division after graduating from college, helping widen and deepen the city's canals. He later had jobs supervising 3,000 garbage collectors and creating pedestrian streets.

In 1981, a supervisor asked him to change course once again. ''He wanted someone who would not be caught up in daily work and could think about light,'' Mr. Jousse said. ''I knew a little bit about electricity, and I was an amateur photographer. So he invented a job for me.''

At the time, most of the Paris monuments were either unlighted or only crudely illuminated with big spotlights that shone directly onto the facades. Mr. Jousse sought out urban architects and theatrical lighting experts for ideas and technical training.

He eventually created a research laboratory for the city of Paris, where he and a team began to create fixtures and to experiment with the color and intensity of light. The city now spends about $260,000 a day on its lighting.

But that does not mean everything runs smoothly. The $2.1 million project to redesign the lighting of Notre-Dame -- most recently the lighting of the south facade, which was inaugurated last week -- has involved heartbreaking compromises.

For half a century, the only hint of light on the south facade came from spotlights on the far side of the Seine River. The new lighting scheme was intended to allow spectators to discover the cathedral's facade slowly, through the power and drama of the details.

But as a national monument, Notre-Dame belongs to the French state, which has the right to veto any design decision. Stones could not be moved, walls could not be drilled. All material and equipment had to be moved in and out of Notre-Dame at night to avoid annoying tourists.

A bigger headache came from the Catholic clergy. The designers had planned to light the facade's rose window from within, so that it could be seen in full color by passers-by. The priests called the idea sacrilegious.

''They said we wanted to perturb the faithful,'' Mr. Jousse said. ''They accused us of trying to turn Notre-Dame into Disneyland.''

Then, just days before the inauguration of the new lighting of the south facade, Mr. Jousse realized it was marred by what he called ''holes of blackness.'' The solution came to him on a trip to the annual lighting festival in Lyon.

Lyon has its own school of lighting, a pointillist approach that uses small spotlights to highlight the details of its Baroque architecture for dramatic effect. The Paris school, by contrast, takes a holistic approach that bathes structures in warm, even light.

Urgent consultations followed. Until late into the night before the inauguration, electricians were busy bolting in makeshift light fixtures.

''Now, the light is stronger at the top, so that you feel that you are moving closer to heaven,'' he said.

MR. JOUSSE certainly does not have the look of a senior City Hall bureaucrat. He keeps his gray and yellow beard long and bushy. He does not remember the last time he wore a tie. He prefers to drink a dark French beer with his workers than to sip fine wine at City Hall soirees.

Tooling around town in a small, white Renault sedan with a special plate in the windshield, he parks wherever he wants -- even on the cobblestone walkway at Notre-Dame and on the quay in front of the Musée d'Orsay.

He rattles off details about lighting history: how the adorning of Paris in light began in the 14th century when Philip V the Tall ordered candles to be lighted in three sites every night, how the Paris lamppost was invented in the 18th century, how one way Paris earned the nickname City of Light was from the artificial electrical light displays at the Paris Fair of 1900.

He recalls the time a few years back when he and a team were experimenting with light on Sacré Coeur Basilica in Montmartre and colored it mauve. ''The priest came running out and ordered us to turn it off,'' Mr. Jousse said. ''We just wanted to have some fun. But Paris is a very serious city.''

The 20,000 flashing lights of the Eiffel Tower (they dazzle for 10 minutes every hour on the hour until after 1 a.m.) are, for him, ''a visual clock, like the bell of a church -- every hour the light sounds the hour.''

He shrieked when he saw for the first time that the Grand Palais, which belongs to the state, not the city, had been lighted up in bright blue-green. He stopped the car, pulled a camera and tripod out of the trunk and started taking pictures. ''I hope it's only for Christmas!'' he said. ''It's so Las Vegas!''

By contrast, he shows off the lighting of the Petit Palais, which belongs to Paris, just across the street. Its spotlights have been hidden in the tops of the streetlamps. He attracted pedestrians to the ominously dark sidewalk along the Boulevard de Bercy under the A4 highway, lighting it in bright blue.

Mr. Jousse's goal is to steep the city's structures in history and integrate them into their surroundings rather than to treat them as individual jewels that should be showcased.

''The secrets are very simple,'' he said. ''Blend light with the surroundings. Don't annoy the birds, the insects, the neighbors or the astronomers. If City Hall gave me money to do whatever I want, I'd teach people about the beauty of light. I'd make Parisians the owners of their light.''

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

In which moths drink your tears while you sleep

An article in New Scientist describes howcertain moths have adapated to drinking the tears from sleeping birds. This is the sort of story one expects Rosamund Purcell to photograph.

Our band could be your life

God bless YouTube. I found dozens of short pieces of Minutemen concert footage, including a seafaring concert, "Joy at Sea", in gorgeous sepia-toned grainy video; the video for "This Ain't No Picnic" (with the antagonist airplane pilot, Mr Ronald Reagan!); and some amped-up concert footage. The site has a slightly confusing but very pretty acoustic version of "Corona" -- confusing because of the Mike Watt spiel at the beginning and subtitles in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. Plus seeing George Hurley sitting in front og a pair of bongo drums on the floor is kinda unsettling. (I first saw him play on my twenty-first birthday, at Lounge Ax; he was part of the Red Krayola touring ensemble. No stranger than Mike Watt picking up bass and hitting the road to Iceland with The Stooges.)

Joy at Sea was a concert-on-a-boat based from San Pedro (but of course!) on June 15th, 1984. Our Band Could Be Your Life is a book by Michael Azerrad about the American punk-rock scene, and takes its name from the Minutemen song "History Lesson Pt. II".
I made a small update to punkrock dot virji dot net (old page here) and will take advantage of the ample bandwidth that YouTube has.

Tomorrow is Mike Watt's forty-ninth birthday (Happy Birthday!). Rumour has him talking with Greg Ginn about a reissue of the original, forty-five track "Double Nickels on the Dime", including all three covers and all four "car jam" bits. Oh, and "Little Man With a Gun in His Hand." That would be all sorts of swell.

In which we enter Safe Mode and screw the pooch

I have had some trouble getting Firefox to trim certain built-in toolbars. I want to maximize the screen space I have, eliminating the Bookmarks and Navigation toolbars (but keeping the Status bar -- I could not cheerfully browse without the "Connecting to ..." messages!). Each time I load the program, I find that I had to make the customization; the changes would not persist across restarts. I looked through the various .js bits in my Profile, but could only find the incantations to make third-party toolbars go away (and these worked, curiously). I looked into the userChrome.css file, and mucked around with user.js, to no avail (I had to guess at element names). I looked through the Mozillazine Knowedgebase and tried making the changes in Safe Mode; that didn't do the trick. Someone helpfully pointed me to the workaround for a localstore.rdf bug, and this worked like a charm. Yay: another 24 pixels.

Bye the bye, the magnificent expression "Screwed the pooch" comes from Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff":

The phrase 'screw the pooch' itself was derived from an earlier phrase that was quite familiar to those of us in the service in WW2. I was a Fire Control Computer technician (Fire Controlman) in the US Navy 1944-1946. Anyone who has ever been in the military has spent an inordinate amount of time in a 'stand-by' formation waiting for someone to get the orders to start some activity. Many man-hours were spent in an activity that was commonly known as 'Effing the dog.' [Note: They didn't really say, 'Effing,' but I'm sure you can figure it out.] Back home in civilian life this was cleaned up to the slightly more acceptable 'screwing the pooch.

In which we may have beluga barf!

A woman in Long Island may have received four pounds of whale vomit, ambergris worth about $18,000, as a gift from her landlocked sister. She almost certainly cannot sell it, though, as the US Endangered Species Act prohibits trading in ambergris and other whale by-products.

I'm pretty sure I first learned about ambergris through the adventures of Encyclopedia Brown, boy detective (RIP), in "Smelly Nellie and the Ambergris".

In which I pine for Da Burgh on Da Bag

This bag design, from Zugster Bags, is my new favourite:

yum.

Name that Dictator!

A game I enjoyed as a young 'un was "Name that Dictator!" The Radar Report (gotta love palindromes!) has a feature on autocrats and their trappings of power.

paraphernalia

Salim's tips for holiday merriment: Asking about the number of rs in paraphernalia makes a great way to break the ice at a party. Almost as good as the classic opener, "Do you know if 'banal' rhymes with 'anal' or 'canal'?".
paraphernalia comes from phern?, the Greek word for dowry, and para, "in addition to", and describes the possessions a woman brings to the marriage. Historically, this included a water bong, roach clip, and baggie full of uncut Turkish hashish.

A-propos of Greek whatnots, a new bookstore opened on Hayes St., between Gough and Franklin: Symposium Books. Run by two St. John's College graduates, it sells "classic" books, or the Great Books, or Greats as we Oxonians know it, and the window has a very attractive (and, as it turns out, seasonal) display of Loebs. The red and green spines drew me in, actually, and I was pleasantly surprised at the warm atmosphere and pleasant seating areas in the shop.

Nature Girl

Carl Hiaasen's latest takes the reader through a romp in the Everglades with a dysfunctional cast of characters: a conflicted half-Seminole, half-Irish runaway with a propensity for inadvertent kidnapping; an odiferous, lecherous fishmonger with a disfigured hand, the result of a botched plastic surgery, itself the result of a vengeful attack; a drug-running vice-mayor, on a quest to protect his trippily unstable ex-wife from the fishmonger's affections; the ex-wife herself, the novel's protagonist, Honey; and the half-witted unwitting couple she has snared in order to teach a lesson in manners, all brought about as the result of an unwelcome telemarketing call that interrupted her dinner.
Into this tableau wander a private eye seeking triple-X-rated evidence of infidelity on behalf of the telemarker's pizza-heiress wife; a rambunctionous co-ed who wants to stick it to her family; and Honey's twelve-year-old son, wise beyond his years. The plot is at times painfully contrived, at times delightfully hilarious; the book has engaging characters, honed by years of Hiaasen's reporting for the Miami Herald. Next to Pittsburgh, Florida has the weirdest collection of criminal misfits and nutcases in North America.
Hiaasen's writing is as giddy and easy-on-the-eyes as Elmore Leonard's or Damon Runyon's, and inhabits much the same world of happy-go-lucky misfits and haphazard criminals. Without pretenses to literary excellent, Hiaasen achieves in his writing what almost every November novelist sets out to: a memorable read.

Man bites dog

This song is called pump it up, as in standing. Up. Up. Up!

Area man hits seven-legged hermaphrodite deer; a Mongolian man (world's tallest!) operates on a dolphin; does news get any weirder than this carnival atmosphere? One can almost hear the barker: "Come see the bearded dwarf woman! The man with three eyes, who sees into the beyond!"

And so on.

UPDATE: The dolphin saved by the Mongolian Massive was not this, now-extinct white river dolphin.

The Importance of Being Earnest

I read one of my favourite plays on a round-trip bus ride to work: The Importance of Being Earnest is at turns hilarious and provocative, and is at all times very silly. Point the first: I wonder if Michael Bond took the creation story for Paddington from Oscar Wilde's class satire? Point the second: I always have to look up the pronounciation of chasuble when reading Act II.

In which it's not against any religion to want to dispose of a pigeon

I am notoriously uncharitable towards pigeons, and am delighted to see that others share my distaste for these foul creatures. The comments in the story, about the need to cull the pigeon population in Kingston, illuminate the community's disposition towards the bird:

I agree with this action. Pigeons carry all manner of diseases like AIDS, malaria, rabies and mad cow disease to name but a few. They are also very aggressive and I can vouch for this as I was attacked by a flock and pecked severely while on my way home from flower arranging classes. In fact I would be more than happy to help in the killing of these evil creatures. Well done Kingston council keep up the good work.

Why not just round these flying rats up in a big net? Surely the council could find some practical use, for example setting up a tasty pigeon pie stall in the centre of town. I for one would be grateful to see these horrific beasts removed from the Royal borough altogether! They are a nuisance, and also the flying wizards of Satan. There, I've said it.

I think the correct solution would be to hack the wings off as many pigeons as possible before joining them together to create one large wing. This could be wafted at the pigeons by any member of the townsfolk when numbers got too high. Children could also shelter under it at times of heavy rain or possibly loud thunder.

The opposing viewpoints:

Pigeons can be very intelligent creatures. This is because they are actually bred from dolphins and can travel vast lengths underwater as well as through the air. I warn you now Council folk, if you so much as dare remove or cull any pigeon from Kingston or the surrounding local I shall withhold my council tax! I'm prepared to go to prison to save these beautiful specimens of birds so just forget it ok?

Continue reading and laugh.

In which I celebrate, or, I am a mean, petty man

Taking delight in the misfortunes of others is one thing, but to celebrate when someone dies -- that is another level of ill-tempered selfishness altogether. I did not let anyone stop me polishing up my dancing shoes when Ronald Wilson Reagan finally kicked over. Seeing the inexplicably long-lived members of his Cabinet also go to meet the dust of the earth that they have despoiled also makes me happy.
And I get a little chuckle as I see a tow truck pull a car away from in front of a fire hydrant, out of a handicapped spot, or away from a Baptist double-parking zone -- indeed, my afternoon bus ride takes me past the San Francisco Auto Return, and that offers some vicarious pleasure.
That pales, however, because one of the reasons that I never will believe in an Almighty or any sort of Divine justice is that people like Augusto Pinochet lived and fluorished. He brought more than enough evil into the world to compensate for a continent filled with the M K Gandhi and Mother Teresa; with Jimmy Carter and with Bill Gates; with St Isidore and with whoever invented Cheddar cheese. In short: a great but mixed joy comes from reading that Augusto Pinochet has died. Aram said it well last week, when Pinochet was expiring:
"Here's to hoping Dante underestimated all that you will suffer, you bastard."
For the curious, Dante would place Pinochet (and Hussein, and Kissinger, and the various and sundry dictators this country has propped up over the years) squarely in the Ninth Circle. That is The Ninth Circle, for traitors to their country; for betrayal to one's love; and for those who perpetrate crimes with great historical and societal consequences.

In which our hero triumphs over the OS

I finally corralled my music, all of it, onto a modern version of OSX.

This all came about because OSX cheerfully upgraded the firmware on my iPod to a version that was incompatible with the verison of iTunes with which it synchronized. No problem: a subsequent run of Software Update helpfully told me to update iTunes. The two still would not talk to each other, and a little poking 'round in Apple's Knowledge Base uncovered the problem: I needed the shiny new iTunes 7, which does not happilly coëxist with OSX10.2, which, you know, isn't broken so why should I fix it?
I painstakingly backed up the old g4, and gingerly set up a brand-new Mac Mini (the dual-core Intel version). A few hours of rsync later, I had all of the metadata from the g4 copied to the Mini, and had connected the music-containing hard drives.
Amazingly, nothing blew up. Everything worked! The iPods sync'd happily, music continued to play, and life seems swell.

In which we have fun with Disk Futility

Thanks to a tip from Greg, I set my Crash Reporter preferences to "Developer", and was able to attach a debugger to a crashing Safari:

Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)
Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS (0x0001) at 0x017fe7dc

Program received signal EXC_BAD_ACCESS, Could not access memory.
Reason: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at address: 0x017fe7dc
0x901d134a in TAATAcceleratedMorph::SetupTableData ()
(gdb) bt

This suggested a memory problem, which could be the stuck i/o that I saw earlier. Processes would remain in the process table forever, with the kernel waiting to complete some sort of network, disk, or, as it turns out, memory, operation. I opened up the OS X Disk Utility, and found hundreds of problems when I asked it to Verify Permissions on the startup disk, /. (Frustratingly, the Verify and Repair Permissions are separate buttons but produce similar output, concluding with "The privileges have been verified or repaired on the selected volume." Several passes later, many things seem to be working well. One curious artefact: the disk-repair effort revealed that the /usr/standalone/i386/boot.efi file had read-only permissions (fixed) and that it contains the stern admonition "This program cannot be run in DOS mode."

In which we use ktrace and kdump

OSX just works, right?
No. Lately the number and variety of problems afflicting my relatively new Mac Book Pro feels like the tasks of Heracles have beset me. Or, worse, that I can only solve problems such as the Finder going away by rebooting. That feels icky. Or, more technically, it is ass-backwards.
Most intriguingly, processes, even native Apple applications like Mail and Safari, go out to lunch and never return. Forcibly quitting them, either through the Force Quit dialog, is effective but unsatisfying.

I cannot type more than four characters in an HTML form without Safari entering a death spiral (I call this a spiral, although the call graph provided by Activity Monitor shows nothing, nothing).

Reading through the ps man page teaches me a lot about wayward processes in BSD, but I am still not convinced I know what is happening. The moribund E state that some processes find themselves means that the kernel is waiting to complete some i/o for the process; perhaps network, perhaps disk. What sort of i/o would Quicksilver get hung up on?

In fact, while I was looking for more information about debugging tools for OSX, Safari crashed in a spectacular way.

In which we, finally, restore sessions

A combination of the hints in this blog and this blog led to adding four user preferences in Firefox 2.0 in order to enable the Session Restore feature.
To edit the config, either hand-edit the user.js file in your profile directory; or, through the browser's about:config URL, manipulate or add the following items:

browser.startup.page 3 [1 is the default Start Page]
browser.sessionstore.enabled Type: Boolean Value: true
browser.sessionstore.interval Type: integer Value: 30000 [the Value sets the time between restores, in milliseconds]
browser.sessionstore.resume_session Type: Boolean Value: true

Easy as pie, really, but why this is not exposed through the Preferences | Tabs widget I do not know.