“I don’t know what we would do without it,” said Jason Wells, 28, whose girlfriend, Gina Valencia, commutes most every weekend from Pocatello, Idaho. “You need alternatives to driving and flying.”
A large chunk of Wyoming has lost Greyhound service.
A history of recording media…all the way back to the days when the Gramophone Disc battled the Edison Cylinder.
“This October 1900 advertisement for the Gramophone emphasizes how 52 discs can be stored in the space of 8 cylinders.”
Holy shit. Thirty percent of Cleveland now below poverty line.
I received an inspirational email forward today. I don’t think it’s inspirational the way the forwarder intended, exactly, but it picked my spirits up nonetheless.
> 6. The tears happen.
Endure, grieve, and move on. The only person who is with us our entire life, is ourselves. (Jane says,” I disagree. If we have received Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, He is with us always. He has promised, I will never leave you nor forsake you.”)
Out of the great roiling mass of names through whose hands this bit of treacle passed, Jane decided to add her own editorial comment. I’m not being patronizing here–Jane has broken the new rules, after all, considering that this text, if it isn’t already under copyright, could easily be claimed as such if the anonymous author had the lawyers.
Before 1998, Jane could cite the 1886 Berne Convention in her defense. Initiated by Victor Hugo (!), the conference laid the foundation for international copyright law and included rudimentary protections for fair use. But in the post-1998 Mickeymouse era, looks like Jane’s a rebel….
I was privileged to be near a Demographic Moment on the bus the other day…two young women were (in English) dissing a third woman (not present); “She likes the dumbest movies, she’s all, have you checked out the latest new releases?” (laughter) “Like, Home on the Range, with the, you know, cows and…I mean, it’s not worth the time, you know, from my life–if I want to watch cartoons I’ll watch Pixar.” And 3,000 miles away Michael Eisner maybe turns really pale and has to lie down.
“‘One well-stocked 7-Eleven could knock out thirty Iraqi stores; a Wal-Mart could take over the country.’”
Here’s a sad article, by Naomi Klein, about the deluded CPA economists who expected to play John Galt in Iraq–designing a “model free market” for cities without a country, lacking reliable electricity and sewage.
Reminds me of the George Orwell line about economists needing an explanatory footnote for the concept of “hunger.”
“In December the union representing oil workers was negotiating with the Oil Ministry for a salary increase. Getting nowhere, the workers offered the ministry a simple choice: increase their paltry salaries or they would all join the armed resistance. They received a substantial raise…Workers fear job loss as a death sentence, and managers, in turn, fear their workers, a fact that makes privatization distinctly more complicated than the neocons foresaw.
“Bremer has failed these young men, and everywhere that he has failed, Moqtada al Sadr has cannily set out to succeed. In Shia slums from Baghdad to Basra, a network of Sadr Centers coordinate a kind of shadow reconstruction…the astronomical rise of the brand of religious fundamentalism that al Sadr represents is another kind of blowback from Bremer’s shock therapy: if the reconstruction had provided jobs, security, and services to Iraqis, al Sadr would have been deprived of both his mission and many of his newfound followers.
“…Hamid Jassim Khamis, the manager of the largest soft-drink bottling plant in the region, told me he can’t find any investors, even though he landed the exclusive rights to produce Pepsi in central Iraq. ‘A lot of people have approached us to invest in the factory, but people are really hesitating now.’ Khamis said he couldn’t blame them; in five months he has survived an attempted assassination, a carjacking, two bombs planted at the entrance of his factory, and the kidnapping of his son.”
Okay, the comment spam really seems to have reached some inflection point, and at this point, we’ve gotten far more comment spams than actual comments here at vector. As of right now, I’m disabling comments on new entries, at least I get around to upgrading to MT3.x or WordPress.
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