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Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Not pretty 
| | So here's the challenge: Ever thought about engaging in a little back and forth with some any -- of the women in your most recent post? Try it. Pick an argument once a week with a woman writer. Boost her traffic, get her noticed. Break out of the boys club and talk to someone besides Anna Marie Cox who is a gifted and smart writer but not exactly adding to the quality of our political discourse. |
Relate or else
| | These days and for the forseeable future (and the past for that matter) the profit in business comes from relationships with customers. If a potential customer wants to deepen the relationship by subscribing, the wrong answer is "RSS is for geeks." That would be like saying that business cards are for people with phones. |
Gonzeulogy
| | You didn't have lunch or dinner with Hunter Thompson. You attended an event at mealtime.... |
| | I invited him to dinner at a swell restaurant in Aspen and a performance at the Big Tent, where the conference was held. My soon-to-be wife, Sheila, and I gave the waitress our dinner orders. Hunter ordered two banana daiquiris and two banana splits. Once he had finished them off, he summoned the waitress, looped his forefinger in the air and said, "Do it again." Without a moment's hesitation he downed his third and fourth banana daiquiris and his third and fourth banana splits, and departed with a glass of Wild Turkey bourbon in his hand. |
| | When we reached the tent, the flap-keepers refused to let him enter with the whiskey. A loud argument broke out. I whispered to Hunter. "Just give me the glass and I'll hold under my jacket and give it back to you inside." That didn't interest him in the slightest. What I failed to realize was that it was not about getting into the tent or drinking whiskey. It was the grand finale of an event, a happening aimed at turning the conventional order of things upside down. By and by we were all ejected from the premises, and Hunter couldn't have been happier. The curtain came down for the evening. |
| | Yet he was also part of a century-old tradition in American letters, the tradition of Mark Twain, Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, comic writers who mined the human comedy of a new chapter in the history of the West, namely, the American story, and wrote in a form that was part journalism and part personal memoir admixed with powers of wild invention, and wilder rhetoric inspired by the bizarre exuberance of a young civilization. No one categorization covers this new form unless it is Hunter Thompson's own word, gonzo. If so, in the 19th century Mark Twain was king of all the gonzo-writers. In the 20th century it was Hunter Thompson, whom I would nominate as the century's greatest comic writer in the English language. |
Required linking
| | The best Santa Barbara blog isn't a blog at all (no RSS, no reverse chronology, no apparent interest in anything blogular), but something much more old (say, '96-'98) fashioned: a daily online journal. A 'zine, to borrow the antique vernacular. |
| | It's edhat. I've written about edhat before, though barely. |
| | Edhat is so much better than the local paper (not a bad one, though it's hard to tell either way if you don't get the fishwrap, since they bury their old "content" behind a costwall so fast you'd think the goods really were fish) and the local radio (no news station, no in-town NPR station — and with a UC here, no less), that I'm amazed that none of those institutions have started to leverage the service. It has more practical, complete and useful information about Santa Barbara than the rest of the bunch put together. Or so it seems. |
| | And it keeps getting better. Today's edhat on Coffee and Computing is one of the most useful blog(like) posts I've ever read: a detailed rundown of the local coffee shops that feature wi-fi Internet access. Dig the Coffee Shop Map, and the local detailing involved. Even the prices for 12, 16 and 20 oz cups are provided. True, there are a few missing suspects. DeAngelo's on Gutierrez isn't there, and it's arguably the best coffee in town. (I'd still argue for Peets, but then Peets is my brew standard, so that may not be fair.) And it shows a price for wi-fi at Muddy Waters, on Haley. Actually, Muddy only charges that for people who rent interface cards. For self-equipped laptops, access is free. Still, edhat lists six coffee shops with free wi-fi, just along State Street downtown. Nice research, that. |
Movement
Where else?
| | Yesterday's Wherezat? was, while beautiful, so generically The West that asking folks to identify specifically verged on cruelty. |
| | Glowrocks guessed Leadville and Royal Gorge, both in Colorado. Bubba guessed Valley of Fire, near Las Vegas. Dirk De Bruyker guessed Mesa Verde or Colorado National Monument. |
| | In fact I have pix from planes of all those places, but alas, this was none of them. |
| | One reader wrote to guess the Snake River canyon. That was pretty good. |
| | The river is the Powder, and the state is Wyoming. The FAA sectional chart for Cheyenne (one of the many I consult when I fly by the window — a practice I recommend highly to curious passengers) identifies the town of Barnum along the river there, which led me to discover the ePodunk database. Nice. Here's the shot I took, in the plane, of the sectional, rotated to match the picture I posted yesterday: |
| | Interstate 25 runs north-south through the map and the shot, but is nigh invisible in the latter, which is unusual. Divided highways are normally obvious, or pretty close, even from 34,000 feet, which was my elevation at the time. (Yes, I keep track of that too.) The best match-up between map and photo is the bend in the river, near the right edge. There's a sharp escarpment inside the bend that must be a nice landmark from a boat or a raft. |
| | Today's picture, up top of this post, should be a lot easier to identify, especially for folks familiar with it. I'm guessing the readership here has more than a few of those. |
Still talking, but no longer listening
| | Dr. Scott does not receive e-Mail. If you want to get a message to Dr. Scott, you'll have to get in line. |
| | You can call and leave a message by calling the Voice of Faith lines or writing him a letter! |
There are responses to this message:Re: Wednesday, February 23, 2005, Ugo Cei, 2/23/05; 1:10:53 PM Re: Wednesday, February 23, 2005, Matt Volk, 2/23/05; 1:08:06 PM Re: Wednesday, February 23, 2005, Effern, 2/23/05; 1:07:08 PM
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