I'm a lasagna boy!

In which we are free, and open-source

It's hard to go wrong at a conference that has a beer menu. And doubly so when the conference is in Belgium, and the beers all local.

Ron Minnich gave a LinuxBIOS talk at FOSDEM. I didn't realise that Google was sponsoring this project: it makes me wonder about the extent of their dependence on BIOS efficiencies. This also makes me realise that the amount of time, energy, and computing cycles conserved on the scale that Google runs almost certainly equates to money.
Another way in which this project saves is through its use in the One Laptop Per Child project, which must needs save money on licencing.

I chuckled at the number of flash-bulbs popping at the beginning of Andrew Morton's talk on Trends in Linux Kernel Development. He discussed coming features and new instrumentation; changes to the core, including a rewrite of the ptrace support code; and approaches to efficient use of hardware. In fact, he addressed virtualisation and containerisation specifically; the first he called a "hack", and pointed at the latter as the proper way to provide separation between tasks. This is an especially intrguing problem for me, as a systems administrator on a distributed system. Providing clean, efficient separation between tasks sharing CPU and memory is a tricky problem; there be dragons. I like the idea of using XenClusters.
Also plenty of Jabber, including a good talk on the direction of libjingle, with outstanding XEPs for session-based features: voice, video, and file transfer. I wanted to listen to more of the gdb and SuSE talks, but so many interesting sessions took place simultaneously ... !

In which the currency gets local

The New York Times ran an article on a currency experiment in Western Mass: "... several dozen businesses agreed to include an alternative currency in their daily transactions and give a discount to those who used it.

"Now people can pay for groceries, an oil change, even dental work with currency bearing the likenesses of local heroes like Herman Melville and Norman Rockwell. ... Amazon [dot com] does not accept BerkShares, for example, but the Bookloft on Route 7 does."

February 25, 2007
This Land
Would You Like That in Tens, Twenties or Normans?

By DAN BARRY
GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass.

The scene could have been lifted from a caper movie:

An old Volvo station wagon zooms through the southern Berkshire Hills. Its nervous driver pulls up in front of a bank. But instead of pulling off some heist, her gang begins hustling boxes of freshly minted currency in, not out.

Once inside, they pause to admire the wads of tens, twenties and fifties. No $100 bills, though; no Benjamins. But there are some Hermans, and even a few Normans.

So began this area’s great socioeconomic experiment, one in which several dozen businesses agreed to include an alternative currency in their daily transactions and give a discount to those who used it.

Now people can pay for groceries, an oil change, even dental work with currency bearing the likenesses of local heroes like Herman Melville and Norman Rockwell.

Be forewarned, though: these bills do not travel well. Try paying a tab in Boston with a Norman and you could wind up in the Charles.

The central purpose behind BerkShares is to strengthen the local economy, perhaps even inoculate it against the whims of globalization, by encouraging people to support local businesses. Amazon does not accept BerkShares, for example, but the Bookloft on Route 7 does.

Five months into the experiment, some people embrace it, some endure it, some ignore it altogether. At the very least, BerkShares have reminded everyone just how complex this thing called community is.

The Volvo’s driver that day was Susan Witt, white-haired and 60, and her bank delivery had been a long time in coming. As the director of the E. F. Schumacher Society, which promotes concepts like regionally based economies, Ms. Witt had spent a dozen years refining the idea of a currency specific to Berkshire County.

She raised the money, gathered a band of like-minded people and secured the support of banks and the Chamber of Commerce for a one-year trial. By late September, a Massachusetts company that specializes in banknotes had printed the bills, complete with serial numbers and anti-counterfeiting features.

Then there they were, 835,000 BerkShares stacked on a bank table.

In addition to Melville on the twenties and Rockwell on the fifties, there was a Mohican on the ones; Robyn Van En, champion of community-supported agriculture projects, on the fives; and W. E. B. DuBois, a founder of the civil rights movement, on the tens.

“I cried,” Ms. Witt recalls.

Now people are walking into banks and exchanging federal currency for a different kind: 11 BerkShares for $10. The idea is that merchants will absorb the 10 percent discount, then use those same BerkShares to pay their own bills.

Theoretically, you would pay Roger the Jester with BerkShares for performing at your child’s birthday party, the jester would use the bills to buy food at Guido’s Fresh Marketplace, Guido’s would pay its vendors, and so on.

Steve Carlotta down at the Snap Shot camera store says BerkShares have strengthened customer loyalty. And Melissa Joyce, manager of the Berkshire Bank branch on Main Street, says they have led to something almost forgotten in this electronic age: lines of bank customers, all waiting to trade Benjamins for Normans.

“Our whole goal is the face-to-face transaction,” Ms. Witt says.

But the Great Barrington area, while simply beautiful to look at — cuddled in the Berkshire Hills, beside the Housatonic River — is a complicated place, with artists and affluent weekenders living beside farmers and blue-collar workers. And BerkShares have come to highlight the tug of war between the ideal and the real.

For example, the Berkshire Co-op Market took in an astounding 160,000 BerkShares in the first three months. But it soon found that many vendors would not accept the currency for large payments, which translated into a $16,000 hit in discounts. The co-op has since cut back on its participation.

Guido’s has become BerkShares central. But Rick O’Neill, the store’s customer service manager, says it absorbs the 10 percent discount by cutting back on advertising, which, in turn, hurts local publications.

That is why John Conlin, the owner of an entertainment-system store called Tune Street, deposits his BerkShares rather than spend them in other stores. Guilt, he says. “I don’t want to impose that 10 percent on another business owner.”

Then there is the unsettling side of BerkShares that goes beyond the suspicion that their popularity is driven more by the discounts than by any sense of community. Simply put: If you’re not with us, you’re dead to us.

Paul Masiero, the owner of Baba Louie’s, a restaurant on Main Street, whose family also owns Guido’s, says he did not immediately join the BerkShares program because of the extra bookkeeping. Then he heard that some were saying baba-phooey to Baba Louie’s.

“We felt they were bad-mouthing us around town,” Mr. Masiero says, half-smiling. “So, eventually, we signed up. And we’ve had a warm, fuzzy feeling ever since.”

He adds that his employees were already nudging him to embrace BerkShares because the principle is sound. So now he accepts them on his two slowest days, deposits them and takes the 10 percent hit.

Ms. Witt makes no apologies for avoiding places that do not support the program. “It’s an economic choice,” she says.

Sipping tea in the Neighborhood Diner, which accepts BerkShares, she talks of hoping to open a BerkShares ATM and smiles to show the handiwork of a dentist being paid in BerkShares installments.

The total job will cost about $1,000, she says. That’s a lot of Hermans.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

In which MUNI is second-class

The price of doing business in San Francisco, according to a FedEx spokesperson, includes citations for double-parking, for obstructing bus traffic, and for generally being above-the-law members of the community. When I read a MUNI driver's comments on what causes MUNI to miss its on-time targets, the number two complaint was "When delivery truck, UPS delivery trucks, cab drivers double- park on the street, the buses have to either wait for them or try to go around them".

Businesses that frequently collect tickets pay them off in bulk through the city, through the same Municipal Transportation Agency which oversees MUNI. For a fistful of pennies ($1.5 million annually, of the $85 million collected through parking citations overall), the city mortgages its bus service, increases congestion, and fails to encourage delivery services to find more efficient ways to run their businesses. Do other congested cities have similar programs allowing private delivery services to take precedence over public transport? This is backwards: Delivery services should be heavily fined until they find less-intrusive means of transport. The city should encourage the use of smaller trucks for downtown and the use of bicycles for the last mile.

In which we go to the Orangerie

The Orangerie at de Hortus is pretty fantastic. The cheeses come with attribution to the farmer; I ate a "mature cheese by Farmer Verdegaal" on some freshly-baked brown, really brown, bread. Not "whole wheat". Yum.
The Hortus Botanicus itself dates back four hundred years, boasts some three-hundred-year-old cycad specimens (the male; the female is a hundred years younger), and a Wollemi pine tree, an Australian conifer until recently known only as a fossil specimen. The Hortus also cultivated the coffee plant, and is thus directly responsible for the shakes I get when I don't have my morning cuppa. Fortunately, the Orangerie makes probably the tastiest coffee drinks in town.

In which we flip it for real

A circumzenithal arc, you say? Here is another, wraithlike photograph.

In which we kick it over with the sausmeesters

This is the photograph I utterly forgot to take last spring. I really like that this stall -- a kiosk in an alley, usually with a long queue snaking down to the adjacent pedestrian mall -- bills itself as the home of "sausmeesters" rather than simply frites makers.

leveret

levertn, a young hare, especially one under a year old; although as I read it, the term was used as an adjective; such is the endless malleability of the English.

tantivy

tantivy, adv: galloping, at full speed. According to World Wide Words the word is an archaic British hunting term. I read it in Kate Atkinson's charmingly neat social crime thriller, "Case Histories", which I bought on the strength of its cover (endorsements from Stephen King and Janet Maslin. I am easily swayed. Oh, the paper had a nice texture, too).

In which the weeks pass like hours

Wow, I received an email invitation to view an online photo album yesterday, and, because I did not recognise the sender, the name of the baby in question, or really anything about the message, I ignored the service's request to sign up.
Today I looked at the full envelope of the message, and realised: this is an old, dear friend of mine, and she has married, changed her name, and had a baby (a cute one, at that, and a year old now!).

In which the title says it all

The San Francisco Examiner, which grows more dilute and content-free by the day, ran a decent story with a grabber of a headline: Locals Flunk Parks in New Online Report. Yup.

According to the report, 1,621 complaints about 153 different city parks were submitted in 2006 — and 60 percent of them were attributed to vandalism such as graffiti, broken glass, trashed bathrooms and broken sprinklers.

“Vandalism is one of the biggest priorities for the department on a day-to-day basis, it is definitely eating up funds in the millions of dollars magnitude. It’s psychologically troubling for the staff and people who use the parks,” said Rose Marie Dennis, spokeswoman for the Recreation and Park Department.

ParkScan.org Technical Services & Outreach Coordinator Alfredo Pedroza said most residents reported unsafe conditions at neighborhood playgrounds to be their top priority. A “D” or “F” grade — based on national standards of playground safety — was handed out to 30 playgrounds in The City for their lack of cleanliness and maintenance. Of those 30, five have been closed or slated for renovations.

In which the weekend might have two days

The Fog City Journal has a précis of the issues surrounding Saturday road closures in Golden Gate Park.

Red Hook

Artie Cohen, the protagonist of "Red Hook", a piece of 21st century New York noir comes across as a latter-day successor to Rex Stout's hardboiled Archie Goodwin: a tough man of the street, knowledgeable about New York City in its infinite permutations. Artie, however, is sensitive and slightly nervous, less cock-sure. He screws up his loyalty, unevenly distributes his friendship, and anxiously calls in favors.
Author Reggie Nadelson's other mystery stories are not consistently available in the States (the recent "Fresh Kills", for example, is something I will pick up from an airport bookstall sometime).

I bought this book after reading the jacket copy, which includes an endorsement from Salman Rushdie. The title called to mind the rapidly-gentrifying warehouse area along Brooklyn's waterfront, and much of the action in the book takes place there, along the soon-to-be-redeveloped High Line, in the Meatpacking District, and at Hunt's Point. I have a delicious photo of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge somewhere, the bridge with a massive Evergreen container ship heading to the Bayonne docks perhaps.

In which the eaglets fly

Belltown, dateline Tuesday: eaglets appear next to Calder's Eagle. Seattle's attitude towards renegade art seems more enlightened than Beantown's.

In which we commute by cycle, or not

A report on American cycle-commuting habits, written by Mr Effective Cycling and published by the American Dream Coalition, notes that Americans who commute by cycle:

• Work in professions in which technical excellence is valued above conformity


• Prefer to think for themselves


• Think in objective terms


• Rarely have to be involved in persuading people (as opposed to participating in objective discussion)


• Are inclined to be physically active


• Are not frequently required to travel during the work day or for multi-day trips

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, "The Internet has revolutionized bike theft, just as it has done for dating, porn, and cat videos":

the San Francisco Bay Guardian has a lengthy article on the seamy bicycle-theft underworld economy in this fair city. I read about other forms of the underground economy last year in Eric Schlosser's excellent "Reefer Madness", but that didn't make me miss the gold Dutchess; the stolen-bicycles article did. Somewhere out there in a chop shop or being swapped for drugs is my favourite bicycle ever.

In which we suffer embarassmint

Another item on the list of things the United States Treasury could do better: dollar coins. The new coin, first in a series, features George Washington, our nation's first President; subsequent coins will feature the succeeding Presidents (including the ephemeral William Henry Harrison! the dictatorial Roosevelt! the disgraced Nixon!). The old, golden coin had a much-lambasted three-quarters (hah!) profile of Sacagawea.

Now, don't get me started on the Treasury and the problems with United States paper currency ...! The National Academies Press has a list of features that address currency accessibility issues. I am glad that Aram reminded me of the new coin this morning. (Did you know that he met a guy who had a spiritual vision?) And if you find yourself hankering for a golden dollar coin, head to that refuge of the disenfranchised and helpless: MUNI. MUNI dispenses dollar coins from machines in some of its subway stations, because it has neither the facilities nor the wherewithal to accept paper or electronic payment.

In which we move it maritime style

If you need to move a sea-going rig, a passenger ferry, or bunch of other ships, you will need one of these ships for carrying giant cargo. "... a semi-submersibile heavy transport carrier ... strong resemblance to the Servant class vessels..."

I saw a similar ship carrying 220-foot tall container cranes as it motored through the San Francisco Bay to the Port of Oakland.

Models, too (although no longer commercially available. Alas!). Via Metafilter.

In which we see through rose-coloured lenses

Eye glasses.

In which it's hard to be a cyclist

Neither cyclists in the city nor in the country are safe: the first, shot in the head while running errands; the latter, ploughed over by a BMW. Although the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition is lobbying hard to make the intersection of Octavia and Market safer, cycling in San Francisco feels distinctly less safe than it used to. Or perhaps it's all the jackasses on track bikes with freewheels.

In which we play by ice-cream-parlour rules

I spotted a stunning boneshaker at Crissy Field, and the owner indulged me with a couple of rides. I had never even considered riding a pennyfarthing bicycle, and had not the foggiest -- but Christian kindly and patiently helped me out. His pennyfarthing was a relaxed model, with a slightly smaller wheel (48") and more clearance, made by Rideable Bicycle Replicas in Alameda. It had a gorgeous (and comfortable!) sprung saddle.
I was like hell on wheels, careering all over the place, and I was very grateful that the many people enjoying a respite from the rain indulged me while I swerved all over the path.
This happened after the nice folk at the Blue Bottle kiosk told me they played by ice-cream parlour rules. I had just spilled a gorgeous, fresh macchiato, but they saw me pout and hooked me up.

Looking again at the illustration of the "Invincible" Bicycle, I wonder: who thought that a combination of the push-bicycle and odd-sized wheels was a reasonable idea? The modern bicycle, with two equally-sized wheels, seems a work of engineering genius.
And as we were leaving Crissy Field, we saw a unicyclist on a huge wheel -- it must have been 27" or larger.

In which we put a cork in it

Design Within Reach wonder what you might do with a champagne stopper -- cork, foil, metal cap, and wire.
I had a bushel of corks (all natural! no synthetics!) saved up from a few years' wine and whiskey; they went to Craigslist and disappeared. I thought of various things to do with them (add a pin and a piece of paper, and you have little boats! stick 'em to a piece of wood and make a bulletin board! throw them around the floor and watch the cat play with 'em!), but figured that someone else could make good use of my bibulous tendencies.

In which we see Eisenhower, simplied

It's the Eisenhower Interstate System, simplified.

Almost the opposite of Erik Slotboom's deeply technical and scholarly Houston Freeways book, which includs the history of each cloverleaf, weaving area, and off-ramp.

In which it's like a ring around a rosy

A portion of the David Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh collapsed under the weight of a pickup truck. Or something like that: the engineers are still sorting out how to extricate the truck from the mess.

"A 6-inch-thick section of concrete flooring in the second-floor loading dock of the David L. Lawrence Convention Center collapsed yesterday under the weight of a tractor-trailer, sending steel, debris and equipment crashing 30 feet down into a walkway and a water feature below. ... We have a crane company that we're talking to [about] how do we remove this [truck] or at least shore it up? But from a structural standpoint, it isn't going anywhere. It's lodged in there real good."

The American Institute of Architects published a list of "one hundred and fifty favourite buildings in America. The Golden Gate Bridge is high on the list.

In which he breaks the record

Josh Wolf is still in prison.

Josh Wolf, 24, spent his 169th day in a Dublin federal prison after declining a subpoena to turn over unaired videotape he shot of the chaotic 2005 San Francisco street protest against the G-8 summit happening a continent away in Scotland.

Wolf's stint surpassed that of Vanessa Leggett, a Houston-based freelancer who served 168 days in 2001 and 2002 for declining to reveal unpublished material about a murder case.

Wolf sold some of his footage from the event to local television stations and posted parts of the video on his Web site. He and his lawyers have argued that the First Amendment gives him the right to refuse the subpoena to turn over the rest of the tape.

But judges have repeatedly turned down motions for Wolf to be released, citing a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the U.S. Constitution does not entitle reporters to withhold their confidential sources or unpublished material in a grand jury investigation or criminal trial.

ailurophile

I have stupidly always figured that the scientific words for cat came from the Latin felix, for "happy"; no, the words from the Latin feles, felis, itself of uncertain origin, and meaning "cat, marten" (interesting conflation, that).

The Greek word for cat is ailouros, whence ailurophile: one who loves cats. So much for my expensive classical education.

In which we gild refined gold

Dick Cavett starts out picking at Bush's pronounciation and use of language, and works towards some interesting ideas about the devolution of English. Not only the oral form, but the written:

Certain misquotes are rooted in marble. It would take another act of Creation to restore “gild the lily” to Will Shakespeare’s “paint the lily.” (“To gild refined gold, to paint the lily.”) There are hundreds of these.

I don’t see the future as bright, language-wise. I see it as a glass half empty — and evaporating quickly. Almost daily irritants, like the dumb cluck’s beloved, “between you and I” will never be expunged, it seems. “Loathe” and “loath” will continue to change places, and “phenomena” and “phenomenon” will still be used interchangeably. But, finally, what the hell? It’s only language. It’s only what we live by.

I shudder at a lot of contemporary usage, and changes in the English language, but really enjoy watching the words evolve too: it's like watching a car wreck.

February 4, 2007, 2:22 pm
It’s Only Language
Being the offspring of English teachers is a mixed blessing. When the film star says to you, on the air, “It was a perfect script for she and I,” inside your head you hear, in the sarcastic voice of your late father, “Perfect for she, eh? And perfect for I, also?”

In these days of just about enough perils facing our nation, there is plenty of evidence around to conclude that our grip on our glorious language may be loosening. And the current administration, as in other matters, is not among the good guys. Let’s get everybody’s favorite example out of the way: the leader of the free world’s goofy inability to pronounce what is arguably the most important word in his vocabulary: “nuclear.” What is so hard? A school kid botching it Bush’s way — “nuke-you-lur” — would have to stand in the corner. Fortunately, an oval office has no corners.

(Does Bush’s atom have a nuke-you-luss? Does it work in reverse? Is Bush’s railway a foo-nick-lee-ur? Let’s bet.)

Andy Rooney tried to nail this matter on “60 Minutes”. Andy wondered as I do why the literate Laura doesn’t do something. Every time the president commits this verbal blunder, she must wince along with the rest of the world. Bush’s “the French have no word for ‘entrepreneur’ ” is guaranteed immortality.

The French make fun of him, of course, and by extension, of us. I say let’s irk them back by continuing with our clanging mispronunciations of their sacred tongue, such as: “Vichy-SWA,” “coo-de-GRAH” or “double enten-DRAY” — and best of all what we did to the French “chaise longue,” dyslexically turning longue (long) into “lounge” and chaise (chair) into “chase.” A fox hunter’s chair, perhaps? (Let Froggy puzzle it out.)

I think we’re just stuck with the president’s individualist English. This is the man who gave us, “I know how hard it is to put food on your family,” and who told Brian Williams, regarding his alleged Camus studies, “I have an ‘eckalectic’ reading list.” Until he was nice enough to repeat it, I was sure he had said “epileptic,” which at least would have been a word. I prefer the three-syllable version “eclectic,” but then he is The Decider.

Donald Rumsfeld and about half of his military pals seem to feel that hidden weapons are found in a “cash-AY” [cache: from Fr., hiding place; pron. kash], provoking further giggles from our busy French detractors. The cashiered secretary of defense is equally hard on his own language, as with, “It wasn’t wrong. It was just miss-CHEEVY-us.” “MISS-chuh-vuss” is of course what he was after. Oh, and with all due respect Mr. Erstwhile Secretary, a medal can be called a memento, but not a MO-mento. Princeton, class of what again?

Getting a little thing like words right, is it so important?

The right answer is: Yes. As when poorly worded road signs cause fatalities. Sloppy language leads to sloppy thought, and sloppy thought to sloppy legislation. And why not a sloppy war? What if someone big, issuing an order of earth-shaking potential, made the (tiny) error of confusing the last letters of Iraq and Iran?

Another whole category of language abuse is the stating of untruths which, when shown to be untrue, are repeated. As in Dick Cheney, the man who recently said to Wolf Blitzer, “We’ve had immense successes in Iraq,” adding “and we will have more immense successes.” Blitzer looked, well, blitzed. Instead of lowering a large butterfly net over his guest, he got his breath and, charitably, did not request examples. And what of Condoleezza Rice? The same Condi who was willing to contribute “a mushroom cloud” to the Scare America campaign now insists that an escalation be called an “augmentation.” What, in her new tea-time vocabulary, would she call the W.M.D. that caused the cloud? An “Instrument of Considerable Inconvenience”? What are the war dead in her sanitized lexicon? “The indisposed”? Or simply “those whose coffins may not be photographed.” Once dead, our brave soldiers are an embarrassment.

Incidentally, are Jews still Semites? Or are they suddenly “Semets”? For years now the boo-boo “anti-se-MET-ic” has gained ground, even among rabbis, as well as TV talking heads, big-name news people and the literati. Where did it come from? Listen for it. Try the Sunday morning shows for a likely catch.

And what about the various distortions of the easy word “heinous.” From lawyers especially you get “hayney-us,” “heeny-us” and even “highness.” Look, guys and gals, it’s easy. It rhymes with a well-known two-syllable word which some might consider not nice, but I guarantee will stick the correct pronunciation in your brain, especially if you compose a silly rhyming couplet. (“His behavior was heinous/ And … etc.” — which, by the way is not pronounced “ECK-cetera.”)

And then there’s the poor little “kudo.” It’s a word Variety has used incorrectly — as in “DeNiro received many kudos for his performance” — for enough decades that it is now forgotten that “kudos” (Greek for praise) was already singular. There never was a kudo. Will Variety eventually take the word “pathos” and extract a “patho”? Stay tuned.

Last week during hearings, at least two of our star-spangled generals spoke of a “dim-you-nition” (diminution, perhaps?) of troops. Does ammunition then become “ama-nyoo-shun”? Let it pass.

It’s gotten so bad for “lie” and “lay” that if a candidate got the votes of only those who don’t know the difference, it would be a landslide. Upon hearing, “He was outside laying on the lawn,” I remember being glad my dad thought I was worldly enough to get it when he asked, “And who was under him on the lawn?” Wouldn’t anybody just know you wouldn’t “lie it on the table”? Try playing it as it lies. It works just as well.

When the flight attendant would say, “We will be landing in Chicago momentarily,” I used to enjoy replying, “Will there be time to get off?” But I see the forces of darkness have prevailed, and this and many wrong uses are now deemed acceptable by the alleged guardians of our language, the too-quickly supine dictionary makers. Are they afraid of being judged “not with it”? What ever happened to, “Everybody does it don’t make it right”?

Certain misquotes are rooted in marble. It would take another act of Creation to restore “gild the lily” to Will Shakespeare’s “paint the lily.” (“To gild refined gold, to paint the lily.”) There are hundreds of these. And there’s, “The senator literally exploded with laughter.” Who cleaned up the mess?

Then there is that common ailment, the tin ear, and its possessor’s knack for rendering sublime quotations drab, often through insensitivity to the music of the words and their proper order. A good example is the great but frequently wounded quote of Mark Twain’s on writing, a quote that causes, when done right, my forearms to horripilate.

Here it is: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between lightning bug … and the lightning.”

Recently, an after-dinner speaker botched it. He got all the words in, but not in the master’s order, ending with “the lightning and the lightning bug.” I had to go out and walk around a while. Word order is everything. Anyone who doesn’t hear that it’s imperative to end with the majestic word “lightning” would probably argue that nothing’s wrong with “The Sierra Madre’s Treasure,” Milton’s “Lost Paradise,” “The Opera’s Phantom,” “Music’s Sound,” “The Sea and the Old Man” and, who knows, “The Island of Gilligan.” (Have I beaten the point to death yet?)

(Let us note: the hapless speaker was at the DAY-us — dais — not the DYE-us.)

But let’s be charitable. I soon learned it isn’t necessary to correct. I quickly learned to bite my English teachers’ boy’s tongue and let a lady guest refer to an “elicit” affair. But if I ever find myself once again with the senator who spoke of his “incredulous” experiences, I shall pop him one.

I don’t see the future as bright, language-wise. I see it as a glass half empty — and evaporating quickly. Almost daily irritants, like the dumb cluck’s beloved, “between you and I” will never be expunged, it seems. “Loathe” and “loath” will continue to change places, and “phenomena” and “phenomenon” will still be used interchangeably. But, finally, what the hell? It’s only language. It’s only what we live by.

In which the King is dead, but there is no usurper

Robert Christgau, the self-styled "dean of American rock critics", no longer writes for the Voice. I just found this out, which shows how often I read rock criticism these days.

In which we listen to more live rock

Fabchannel has all sorts of live rock shows, viewable only through their embedded Flash player. Still, this site plus some patience plus Audio Hijack leads to nice mp3s.
The Search widget is really nice. And the sound quality is great.

In which alcohol leads to killing people

Someone was shot in the head legs (nine times, according to this witness) at the intersection of Webster and Haight, just across from Rotee, a few days ago. A woman on the 71 pointed out the spot as we passed it, saying that it's a tough place to live; she got off at the next stop.
Our supervisor, Ross Mirkarimi, thinks that curbing alcohol sales in the neighbourhood will produce a corresponding drop in the amount of gun violence.
How about curbing the amount of drug sales? The blocks immediately around Webster have dealers lazing on stoops, double-parked at the meters along Haight St., running after each other with guns drawn.
Although alcohol and liquor stores may haves some correlation with people capping each other, it seems more likely that illicit activity, literally illicit activity like drugs that involve an element of paranoia and require special protective measure, is really what prompts the sort of killings we have suffered these past few weeks.
This is the same Mirkarimi who has acted reluctantly and slowly with respect to controlling the several medical marijuana dispensaries. The Lower Haight can be sketchy.

UPDATE: Greg corrected some details on the Tuesday shooting.