Livejournal’s blogging software might not be that good as far as I am concerned, but they still have some of the best communities ever. Take, for instance, found_objects”>. It’s a community dedicated to pictures of interesting random crap, very much in the style of Found magazine. Of course, many livejournalers are not familiar with the concepts of “interesting”, “resizing pictures” and “editorial selection”, but overall besides the huge blurry pictures of absolutely uninteresting stuff (what, the community is called “found objects”, I found this) there’s much, much outstanding stuff. Here’s my selection for your lesurely browsing:
Alarming Songs
A few weeks ago I walked around Brooklyn and heard a loud bird singing in a tree. Something seemed peculiar about the song pattern, and it took me a couple of minutes of listening to it to understand what. The bird went “cheeerp – cheeuuuu, cheeeerp – cheeuuuu, chirp – chirp -chirp – chirp” – emulating the complicated sounds of those “Cheap-ass go off every ten minutes car alarmsTM” that emit tones of 4 or 5 different sirens. I really wish I had a voice recorder of some kind there with me.
Apparently it’s nothing new – apparently starlings and mocking birds are known to imitate just about anything, car alarms included. Some Brooklyn “artist” even created a car alarm that emits bird songs instead of sirens, thus completing the circle of mimicry.
RNC In NYC
Conventioneering Fingerlicans and protesting Tastycrats are out in full force, but so many New Yorkers got out of the city that the streets are almost empty (by New York standards of course). In honor of those who left the city the Empire State Building was yellow yesterday (despite the fact that the official website says that it’s in honor of US Open).
I’ve seen a lot of regular police officers and semi-military ones out before, but I haven’t seen such a concentration of police brass performing regular cop duties. There was a police lieutenant guarding the subway turnstiles, another lieutenant directing traffic and a captain guarding what looked like a normal transit bus with police “Christmas tree” on the roof filled with cages and lockers of assault rifles (and probably other stuff). They even posted a sergeant and a couple of cops to guard Victoria’s Secret (probably from Republicans who might want to find out what it is).
I took this picture because my wife was egging me on. Now she wants credit.
There was this cool bigbrothermobile driving around. Hey, it doesn’t matter if you are in a velo-rickshaw. You gotta get your 2 minutes of hate on.
Duct and Cover
Tom Ridge advised everyone to buy duct tape for bio and radiological protection.
Yeah, you should use anything but duct tape to seal ducts, but it works great on everything else. It’s good for automotive repairs, spacecraft fixin’ and many other things.
It’s so good, apparently “In Finland and Sweden, some folks (we are told) refer to duct tape as “Jesus Tape.”” I’ve heard that at NASA it’s called “engineering tape”.
Oh, I did not know it came in Beige, Black, Blue, Burgundy, Brown, Gold, Floral Green, Green, Olive Drab, Orange, Purple, Red, Silver, White and Yellow. Mmmm, purple duct tape.