Category: Personal Page 37 of 59
And they get to the crux of it pretty well, right here:
Metro is the second-busiest transit system in the country, after New York. On several days, when no special events were scheduled, ridership exceeded 800,000 trips.
Metro is the only major transit system in the country without a significant reliable stream of funding. While transit systems that include those in New York, Boston, San Francisco and Philadelphia are guaranteed a portion of a gasoline tax, sales tax or other revenue to help pay costs, Metro must seek financial aid each year from the District, Virginia and Maryland.
A bill sponsored by Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) to authorize $1.5 billion over 10 years to Metro for capital improvements and maintenance was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives this week as an amendment to a bill authorizing funding for Amtrak. The Metro measure is to be matched by the District, Virginia and Maryland; all three jurisdictions have pledged matching funds.
Metro has been subject to some mismanagement in its history, to be sure. But the past few years (esp. under Dan Tangherlini, now City Administrator) have seen some solid improvements. But the best management in the world can’t overcome chronic funding issues.
maybe almost gone. Even though they’ve been going out of business for what seems like forever now (not their fault – it’s an everchanging landlord issue), it looks like Orpheus Records really are finally winding things down. Was just in there, and the stock is dwindling. Not so much that it’s not worth a trip, if you’re still into vinyl (I picked up a nice first pressing of Billy Preston’s Everybody Likes Some Kind of Music).
David Byrne – Don’t Fence Me In
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3p_Rf0AY6E[/youtube]
Johnny Cash – The Wall (live in Berlin, 1987)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpxQXAjbv5g[/youtube]
M.I.A. – $20
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sei-eEjy4g[/youtube]
With a bonus from Gogol Bordello, which I first discovered because some woman sitting in the same row as me on a CDG-JFK flight was wearing one of their t-shirts:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Jv3b0VKec8[/youtube]
I’m a pretty reliable defender of DC’s Metro system. The people that bitch about it either 1) don’t use it, 2) have never used another metro system in the US, or 3) are from NYC. Which means that its critics have no standing, by definition. But that defense got a little harder this week – a couple of near-shutdowns of the Orange line in VA this week, and apparently the Red Line is a complete clusterf(@k at this very moment. And who’s the only person in VA really trying to do something about this? Outgoing Rep. Tom Davis(R). Strange days. C’mon, Jim.
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SciFi site io9 asks William Gibson questions no one else does, and gets interesting answers as a result (imagine that):
None of us ever live in dystopia. That’s an imaginary extreme. They just live in shitty cultures. And these societies [in my books] seem dystopian to middle class white people in North America. They don’t seem dystopian if you live in Rio or anywhere in Africa. Most people in Africa would happily immigrate to the Sprawl.
I don’t think a writer can hit the dystopic key without being misanthropic. I’m actually not misanthropic. I think people are capable of wonderful things. I’m quite fond of them and enjoy their company.
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Speaking of Wonderful Things, the Directory Of pointed us to this gem yesterday:
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The New York Times is running a series on the them of American Exceptionalism, and this article on the near-absolutist take on free speech is excellent. I want to write more about that, but I thought I’d throw up the link now, lest it get lost in the ever-growing pile of drafts around here.
This evening I received a copy of the above mailer from the Singh campaign (which told me that one of its staffers received it in the mail today). Several quotes and positions are attributed to interviews published here at Blacknell.net. Of singular concern to me is the first bulleted statement on the top left of the mailer – “Amit said he will not vote for John McCain in November – Interview with Blacknell.net 3/26/08”. Nowhere on Blacknell.net will you find any statement or quote from Amit Singh that even gets close to implying such a thing, and at no time in my interview with Amit Singh did he make such a statement. The Ellmore campaign mailer is – in a word – false.
Political candidates are free, of course, to argue over and characterize each other’s positions as they please. They are not, however, entitled to make demonstrably false statements and source those statements to third parties such as myself. At the moment, if any voter who has received this mailing decides to look further into its claims by coming to Blacknell.net, the Ellmore campaign has created a situation in which it appears that one of us is lying (the campaign by its claim about what can be found here, or me at Blacknell.net by no such thing being here). This is unacceptable.
The Singh campaign has communicated to me that intends to do all it can to communicate to 8th CD voters that the statement at hand is false. I expect the Ellmore campaign to do the same thing.
(The front of the mailer is here. I personally altered it solely to remove the name of the addressee. That is the only change that has been made.)
Update: The Ellmore campaign contacted me – after some time – and acknowledged that the claim at hand was false, attributing it to a production error (i.e., a mixup while changing the claims and sources on the flier and making the final selection). I’ve pasted the campaign’s statement to that effect in the comments below. There has been much ado over the flier amongst Virginia Republican sites, and if you want details, well, that’s where to go. If you’re more interested in the issues, I have a my final pre-primary piece on the race up here.
I’d like to start out this Friday Note with a special go to hell shoutout to whichever sad soul on the planet it was that decided to use spoofed blacknell.net return addresses for what must have been an *enormous* batch of spam. Starting late Sunday night, I’ve been getting thousands upon thousands of bounce/spam filter messages, through which I have to sift to find my own mail. I’ve found most of it. I think. But anyway – die in a fire, please. And if anyone reading this is wondering why I ignored your email this week, this is probably why.
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Steve Thurston’s most excellent hyperlocal blog The BuckinghamHeraldTrib is going on hiatus for the summer. He’s been turning out a quality site for a while now, and I can’t imagine how much time that must have been taking. A big loss to the rest of us, but we all need breaks sometime. Thanks, Steve, and I look forward to seeing it pick back up in the fall. In the meantime, if any of you have ever been tempted to keep a blog focused on your own community, go over and check out what Steve’s done.
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Bruce Schneier, as usual, nails it. This time it’s about “The War on Photography“:
Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We’ve been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.
Except that it’s nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren’t being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn’t known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about — the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 — no photography.
Yep.
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The 1979 published Disco Handbook is now free for all to partake in its wisdom. From the glossary:
Camp. An ever-changing measure of hipness. Something so bad it’s funny is camp, but something that tries to hard to be funny and fails, is not. Going to camp is not camp, but reliving your camp experiences can be. Camping, as an activity, isn’t camp at all.
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And while we’re talking about amusing, newish cooking blog Veggin‘ explains the vegans’ reaction to the news that Canadian KFC’s will soon be offering a vegan option on its menu.
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Finally, good luck to Gwadzilla and all the other DC locals heading out to race at Big Bear this weekend. Wish I could be there.
Against all sensibility, the CSPAN coverage of today’s DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee has been on in this household. Most every speech and statement-in-the-form-of-a-question I’ve heard has helped steel my already hardened cynicism about humanity in general. But while CSPAN was waiting for the kabuki theater actors to get back from lunch, it ran the launch of the space shuttle Discovery live. And still, after all these years, it transfixes. It genuinely excites. For all of our failures, our weaknesses, our inabilities – we’re in space. And I am in awe.
Cibo Matto – Sugar Water:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=659LXeV9ZPQ[/youtube]
The Sundays – Wild Horses:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_CDuyw4nRE[/youtube]
Where Do We Go – cast:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZuZ8TkuTx0[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MctG8xuIaQ[/youtube]