I came out of it almost without injury and am fine, but yesterday I had my first collision with a car while riding my bike in San Francisco—a span of more than seven years of near-daily cycling.
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I went to a Naomi Klein lecture this evening. She was promoting her new book, The Shock Doctrine. I haven’t read it yet, but certainly intend to now that I’ve been to this lecture. The overarching idea she put forth is that corporatist ideas are pushed through after disasters in order to take advantage of public confusion, and that the psychology of shock is applied deliberately by elites in order to push their agendas.
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I’ve always been a fan of utilitarian clothing, and a lot of the time that just means pockets. Useful, numerous, accessible, capacious, well-designed pockets. So when I first read about ScotteVest‘s line of jackets, I had to try them out.
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This story about two Saudi Arabians “indecency monitors” getting pepper sprayed by a young girl they reprimand strikes me as too hilarious not to share.
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When the iPhone came out a few months back, I had no desire to get one. It was massively hyped, but I’m not really an Apple fanboy, and there were too many downsides. The first downside, of course, was the $600 price tag. Apart from that, I couldn’t stand the fact that it’s so locked down, both in terms of the SIM card and the contract with AT&T, and in terms of the software applications. I already don’t like AT&T (who were Cingular back then), and want to get out of my contract so that I can get one that’s better tuned to my fairly sparse use of cellphone minutes—so having to sign up for a more expensive plan for an additional two years doesn’t sound good at all.
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The commander of CENTCOM, Admiral William Fallon, claimed in an interview that he doesn’t believe that the current situation will lead to war with Iran. I really hope he’s right, and also hope that it might be a good sign that such a high-ranking military officer is coming out publicly against a US attack Iran.
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Apparently the NSA is going to assume the role of monitoring the communications infrastructure of the US… no, technically they’re not supposed to be doing that already, and this new move is aimed at “protection” rather than “surveillance”—but it’s hardly a welcome step.
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Today, Dianne Feinstein joined another twenty-one Democrats to vote for a ridiculous Republican resolution censuring MoveOn for their ad attacking General Petraeus.
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The story about a University of Florida student being tasered by campus police at a John Kerry speech is all over the net at this point. It’s fairly grotesque, although I think the UCLA campus library incident from last year was even worse. As then, however, one of the most disturbing things about it are the commenters who emerge to justify the violence perpetrated by the authorities.
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There’s some of this in other automobile-centric countries too, but somehow it seems worse in America. A significant proportion of drivers here seem to really hate cyclists. I have a hard time understanding it, but I’ve encountred a lot of articles recently where commentary is virulently anti-cyclist, to the point of advocating violence against people on bicycles.
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So a Swedish newspaper has gotten involved in a controversy over depictions of Muhammad, culminating in heated diplomatic exchanges, threats of boycotts, and bounties on the heads of the cartoonist and the editor. This is somewhat reminiscent of the Danish Jyllands-Posten uproar from late 2005, which led to death threats and fatal riots.
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Was there ever any doubt about how General Petraeus’s reports to Congress were going to go? Did anyone really believe there was any chance that he’d stand up there and say “it’s not working, we need to leave immediately”? He was always going to say what the Bush Administration wanted him to say. He slipped up once, when he said that he didn’t know if the Iraq War was making Americans safer, but swiftly corrected himself given the chance.
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This is all anecdotal, and hence statistically useless, but I’ve noticed far more bad driving correlated with cellphone use recently. Some of it was in Dublin, where I think cellphone use is still higher per capita, but I’ve seen a lot of it around San Francisco also. I think every case of notably bad driving that I’ve encountered in the last month turned out to involve a driver using a cellphone.
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Six years ago, I first heard about the planes on SlashDot. I thought it was a hoax, someone hacking their submission system, at first. I wasn’t as accustomed to getting my non-tech news online, then, and went to cnn.com, and from there to CNN on television, to find out that it was no hoax.
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It probably wasn’t a good idea to start the day with this piece on Fred Thompson trying to pass himself off as a “regular guy”.
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As expected, Roger Federer today won his fourth US Open title in a row, his twelfth Grand Slam title, his eleventh Grand Slam title in four years. He won in straight sets (7-6 (4), 7-6 (2), 6-4), and yet the victory seemed somehow quite unimpressive. Federer seemed off his game for large stretches of the match.
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I went by Modern Thai yesterday, and it turns out that they’re not closing after all.
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I haven’t been watching the US Open live, but I’ve been catching highlights online. And once again, it’s the Roger Federer show. I’ll be pretty stunned if he doesn’t win it. If you think someone else will win, go put money on them, I’m sure you can get good odds… Andy Roddick played what was apparently some of his best tennis against Federer on Wednesday night, and still lost—in straight sets.
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This is almost too nuts to be true, but: Larry Craig is reconsidering his resignation. Earlier he stated that he’d resign at the end of September, but has changed his mind. This seems to be a pattern for Craig, who pled guilty to “disorderly conduct” for his interaction with a police officer in a Minneapolis-St. Paul airport toilet—and then later said that he regretted the guilty plea, having made it merely in the hope that the whole affair would then go away quietly (which it almost did).
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At dinner with my parents yesterday, I had salmon. This is quite common, I often eat salmon when I’m at their place. But after dinner, my father commented “That might be the last of it.” At first I thought he meant that we’d eaten all of the salmon they’d bought, although I’d thought there was about half left… then he explained that he meant that it might be the last I’d have with them because salmon might no longer be available.
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I took my clix 2 on a couple of long plane journeys recently, and was quite pleased with it. The earphones (Sennheiser CX300s) were quite good at screening out sound—in fact I used them as earplugs without playing any music when the guy across the aisle was audibly singing along with his music player.
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