|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
|
|
|
|
|
|
Friday, February 21, 2003 :::
I'm not really responding to this entry at the KC -- it just jogged my memory.
I'm not really a fan of make-up, and I've generally assumed that most women weren't, either -- I assumed women went to the bother of putting on make-up because they thought it'd make them more attractive to others. But a female friend of mine recently told me she resents drag queens. She says she feels that make-up is her compensation for biological and social disadvantages of being a woman, and that the drag queens get to be men but wear make-up too. It seems unfair to her.
I don't really have anything intelligent to say regarding this -- I just thought it was different, and possibly worth passing along. If any women are interested in responding, though, I would be interested in:
- Do you wear make-up? and
- If so, are you trying to look pretty for other people, or just for yourself?
::: posted by Steven at 9:39 PM
(0) comments
Lily Malcolm reports that Carol Mosley-Braun doesn't remember her college major. Dean, Kate, anyone else connected to Illinois -- is she just basically stupid, or is this out of character?
She thinks she can be elected president when she couldn't even retain her Senate seat -- my money's on stupid.
::: posted by Steven at 5:38 PM
(0) comments
I'd just like to ask, before this Rhode Island fire -- did anyone realize that "Great White" was still playing?
Actually, I knew someone who saw KC and the Sunshine Band a couple years ago. And I've been to a Four Seasons concert (by which I don't mean Vivaldi). I guess a lot of the old bands are still going, just at a lower profile.
::: posted by Steven at 3:38 PM
(0) comments
Bachelor party last night; these seem, in my experience, to be defined by the all-male constituency, the late end times, and a certain perfunctory misogyny.A man and his wife are out playing golf, and they get to a hole where there's a barn in the middle of the fareway. "I'll tell you what, honey," said the woman, "we'll open the door on this side, and I'll go open the door on the other side, and you can shoot it through the barn." So they opened both sets of doors, he fired his shot through the barn, and it bounced off the back door and struck his wife, killing her.
A year later the man was at the same course with a friend. "Well," said the friend, "we can just open both sets of doors and go through the barn." "No, no, no," insisted the man, "you really don't want to do that. The last time I tried that I got a double bogey."
I ended up back at the couple's place at 3AM, which is actually earlier than my worst fears going in; I awoke shortly after 7, several minutes before my alarm was to go off, and fewer minutes before the bride wandered out. I got to take a shower, which was something of a pleasant surprise to me.
::: posted by dWj at 1:00 PM
(0) comments
The Rhode Island Fire is already being compared to Monday morning's events here in Chicago, and there are obvious similarities, but the essence of the Chicago incident — and a major component of the historical fires mentioned in this blog earlier this week — is that in each of those situations, if you ran them a couple thousand times with three or four individuals at a time, everyone would almost always have probably made it out alive. It sounds like the crowd contributed something to this incident in Rhode Island, but it also sounds as though the fire itself was much worse than in the Iriquois Theatre or the Cocoanut Club. (A somewhat more recent really big bad fire that also lacks the crowd component was — and this is some lazy linking here — the fire at Our Lady of the Angels Elementary School back in 1958 on Chicago's west side. That fire managed to sneak up on classes until the victims were trapped in their rooms, while the fire last night made up in speed what it lacked in surreptitiousness.)
::: posted by dWj at 10:01 AM
(0) comments
Hey, I know this Camenker guy Dreher's talking about. I don't know him well, but I've met him a couple times. More the social conservative than I, but there's a lot of common ground.
::: posted by Steven at 5:41 AM
(0) comments
The BBC has a summary of New Europe's responses to France. Link from the Corner.
::: posted by Steven at 5:35 AM
(0) comments
Have I plugged Lileks lately? I don't believe I have.
::: posted by Steven at 3:19 AM
(0) comments
Fire Injures 'Large Number' at Rhode Island Club
This will probably have developed further by the time you read this, but I'd just like to say, nuts.
::: posted by Steven at 2:34 AM
(0) comments
Thursday, February 20, 2003 :::
Professor Volokh writes favorably on "duck and cover".
::: posted by Steven at 2:33 PM
(0) comments
More Instapundit on Chirac. Tony Blair has sent a letter to a lot of New Europe, playing on Chiraq's alienating comments from earlier this week.
::: posted by Steven at 12:57 PM
(0) comments
I've out-lowbrowed Kate Malcolm!
Dave Barry, you're next.
::: posted by Steven at 12:42 PM
(0) comments
Wednesday, February 19, 2003 :::
Hit & Run: "I Didn't Realize What All Was in It"
The New York Times has a hilarious story describing how members of Congress are only now discovering, to their dismay, the requirements of the "campaign finance reform" law they voted for last year.
Link from Instapundit.
::: posted by Steven at 4:45 PM
(0) comments
There's an Inflatable Church available for purchase or rental. I think that's pretty something. Link from Dave Barry.
::: posted by Steven at 3:50 PM
(0) comments
New Europe is getting uppity. Good for them.
::: posted by Steven at 3:00 PM
(0) comments
Ananova - Penis extensions most popular plastic surgery for men
More than a third of plastic surgery patients in 2002 were men, and the most popular procedure for them was a penis extension.
I would have guessed the nose job, if only because of Michael Jackson skewing the averages.
::: posted by Steven at 2:36 PM
(0) comments
Tuesday, February 18, 2003 :::
Is this too good to be true? Link from the Wall Street Journal's "Best of the Web". Me, I think the guy's an infiltrator making fun of the rest of the crowd.
::: posted by dWj at 6:11 PM
(0) comments
A friend in the Boston area asserts that a storm that hit Chicago in 1999 was worse, too.
::: posted by dWj at 6:10 PM
(0) comments
This storm doesn't seem as bad as the April Fool's storm of '97-or-so.
Maybe it's just my own circumstances -- I was out near the beginning of the snowing yesterday, but between then and getting groceries this afternoon, I didn't leave the house except to step outside and say, "yep, still snowing". The evening of the big storm six years back, I was in an MIT shuttle-van, which got stuck, and I had to trek toward shelter on foot. The snow was about as deep as it is now, and it seems like it was blowing a lot more.
Getting the car out this afternoon to go shopping took a little while, but it wasn't all that bad. I'm a little irked, honestly, that my test tonight was postponed.
::: posted by Steven at 5:16 PM
(0) comments
My brother at one time suggested to me that I start regularly posting academic papers here. I mentioned the Microwave Anisotropy Project last week; this week, a review paper on black hole thermodynamics. The two aren't terribly relevant to each other, though it's worth noting that any black hole of more than a trillion metric tons or so has a temperature that is cooler than that microwave background, so that black hole "evaporation" is probably of limited practical importance. (You thought it was just brimming with practical importance, didn't you?)This probably won't become a regular feature, but if you'd like to know where I'm chipping away my ignorance these days, this is one of those fronts.
::: posted by dWj at 2:58 PM
(0) comments
Kate Malcolm. We think we've pushed back the jungle, but we haven't.I think I've become more fatalistic in the past year and a half. There are things we can do, and we should do them, but we need to recognize that certain goals — such as Daley's predictable assurance that we can make sure "nothing like this ever happens again" — aren't literally, strictly in reach. So we make trade-offs, because that's the best we can do. If we let our awareness of reality become enervating, we're in real trouble, but if we allow it to open options for us because the ones we were previously willing to accept are off the table, it will help us mitigate the risks that we will never be able to eliminate.
::: posted by dWj at 2:48 PM
(0) comments
My brother mentioned Chicago's Iriquois Theater fire -- the Boston equivalent was at the Cocoanut Grove.
::: posted by Steven at 11:43 AM
(0) comments
I'm not quite as excited about "Signs" as my brother, but it's a beautiful movie, much like Sixth Sense was. It has some sloppily thought out bits which bothered me, but it's well worth the show.One more thing: the promo clearly wants you to think that the title is a reference to crop circles. If you still think that after watching the movie, boy weren't you paying attention.
::: posted by dWj at 10:07 AM
(0) comments
My brother has the same take on North Korea as I do. This may surprise one or two people in Burkina Faso.
::: posted by dWj at 10:03 AM
(0) comments
Sunday night, the top local news in Chicago was the death of Mayor 'M's mother, the widow of Mayor 'J'. Then, six hours later, it wasn't.
In case you've not heard, 21 people were trampled to death at the E2 dance club above the Epitome Lounge. A fight broke out, causing a small rush for the main exit, and then tear gas or mace was sprayed to try to break up the fight, causing a large rush for the main exit. The coat check was near the top of the stairs, probably compounding the problem. All those killed died near this front stairway. (Early reports of dead near a back entrance were due to a lack of communication within or among the emergency response teams; some dead were removed to that location and later found there by others.)
During the press conference at 4:30 P.M. (CT) it was reported that there was a court injunction, obtained last July, forbidding the club (on the second story of the building) to be open. The injunction was granted for 11 counts of building code violations, most of them really probably irrelevant, but at least one dealing with egress problems. This was not a normal event, but a special party put on by a promoter that had hired out the club for the evening; it's not clear how regularly the injunction was being violated. (The owners of the club seem to assert that the injunction applied only to part of the club, perhaps the third floor, though the city's lawyer has asserted that it is not reasonable that the defendant would believe this; the club also says that the security was provided by those hiring out the space, not by the club.)
The maximum occupancy of the second floor of the building was, therefore, 0, but I never heard the question as to what it might have been before July answered (though I did hear it asked). The occupancy on the lower floor was 327; early estimates were that the crowd upstairs numbered 1500, but Terry Hillard (superintendent of Chicago police) doesn't believe it was that high, and it sounds like a lot of other "smart money" doesn't believe it either.
The Chicago fire department, as this broke out, was responding to an expiring pregnancy on the first floor, and was therefore quite present as things began; they quickly called for backup, aware that something was going on but not able to do as much as they might have liked. What exactly was going on will hopefully become clearer when a chance is taken to look at what Mr. Hillard termed "high-tech video" in possession of the police.
I believe it was Mr. Trotter, the city's 911 coordinator, who asserted that the city can't police these court injunctions because it doesn't have the resources. It may be that it wouldn't be worth having police go from place to place checking on these things, but it would seem to me that the civil penalties would be high enough to offer a bounty that would have enticed one of 1500 people to let the city know about what was going on. How to get an appreciable number of the 1500 informed of the injunction — indeed, it's quite possible people would be wary of attending an event at a location for which such an injunction existed — is a moderately more difficult question, but especially if, as was reported, such events were being promoted on the radio, it seems like posting lists on the web or handing them out to churches in the area would surely attract the attention of enough people for enforcement to take place (possibly even without a bounty).
Incidentally, insofar as history doesn't repeat itself, but rhymes, this event seems to rhyme with the Iriquois Theater Fire, which resulted in many of the building code requirements that were being violated on Monday morning.
::: posted by dWj at 9:53 AM
(0) comments
You remember the little kid in grade school who always had to be the center of attention? Here's what happens when he grows up and gets a nuclear bomb.
::: posted by Steven at 1:13 AM
(0) comments
Chirac is getting panicky.
I've stolen a quote from the story for our banner. He isn't technically refering to us, but I figure someone is saying it about Dean and me.
::: posted by Steven at 1:02 AM
(0) comments
Monday, February 17, 2003 :::
We're getting some snow. Some of you have already had it -- others of you are getting it now, too. It's pretty, and it was surprisingly easy to find a parking spot on a nearby no-plowing street. (I'm parked on Clinton Street, one street over from here.)
::: posted by Steven at 2:18 PM
(0) comments
Colby Cosh provides some guidance to the alert levels. You can tell that it's not a real government document from this part:
Remember, the government can only protect you from terrorists, not from yourself! (N.B.: government protection from terrorists may vary in quality.)
I would love to see the government not trying to protect us from ourselves, but I don't think that's going to happen any time soon. Cosh lives in Canada, which is worse about that than our own government. Actually, it's worth remembering that pretty much every government is worse than ours (very few, sadly, are better than Canada's).
::: posted by Steven at 2:10 PM
(0) comments
In all this discussion about NATO coming to Turkey's defense, I took it for granted that Turkey is not a member of NATO. I was wrong.
Now I'm confused. We shouldn't need a resolution for this. What happened to "an attack on one is an attack on all"?
::: posted by Steven at 12:48 PM
(0) comments
|
|
|
|
