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HarlanCountyDVD

HASTY REACTION: Harlan County U.S.A. (1976) Documentary by Barbara Kopple; watched on Criterion Collection DVD. Immersive, totally absorbing document of an Appalachian coal mining community’s more than year-long strike against Duke Power. The camera gets itself everywhere you would hope it could – the families’ homes, union meetings, planning sessions by the miners’ wives (who show at least as much grit as the men, often more), on the picket lines when the strikebreaking gun thugs attack, a mile underground in the mines themselves, at Duke Power shareholder meetings, and more. Unforgettable characters emerge, underscored by the raw honesty of the area’s indigenous bluegrass songs vocalized by subjects of the film. Parallels to recent WV mine explosion & 29 deaths are, unsurprisingly, present in several instances. A work of passionate storytelling, made at no small personal risk, richly deserving of its Best Documentary Academy Award, and absolutely among the great documentary films of the last 50 years. See it.

May 1, 2010 | 1 comment

My Ancestors: Naming Names

April 28, 2010 | Post a comment

Genealogy is a hobby similar to fantasy sports: the most interesting thing in the world is your own data/team, and the most boring thing in the world is hearing about someone else’s. With that in mind, I’m only bringing the subject up here on the blog because I found an angle that may be good for a few cheap laughs. That’s me, keeping it classy.

The silly aspect is that the 17th-18th century New England Puritans from whom I descend often gave their children first names that, suffice it to say, didn’t quite catch on. They’re strange or comical by present-day standards — but then again, we have been known to indulge in some creative nomenclature ourselves.

After the jump are a few of my favorites; let it never be said that my ancestors can’t take a joke (although I’ve found that dead people tend to be pretty good about that).

1736-map

Salmon Treat (1673 — 1746) of Preston, Connecticut; first cousin 9 times removed. The man for whom the tidbits you feed to your cat are named.

Cornelis Lambertsen Cool (c. 1585 — bef. Dec 30, 1643) of Gowanus (in Brooklyn), Long Island, New Netherlands Colony; 10th great-grandfather. A misnomer if ever I heard one. I don’t claim to speak for the rest of my family, but I have never been one of the Cool People.

Experience Strong (born c. 1650) of Northampton, Massachusetts; 8th great-grandaunt. She married Zerubbabel Filer, who probably worked his whole life to take the edge off his own first name. Her married name of Experience Strong Filer only compounds the hilarity. These two take the Couples Award, hands down. Read the rest of this entry »

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No Government Takeover of Public Safety!

April 24, 2010 | Post a comment

You remember Richard Clarke. He was the counter-terrorism adviser to Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and (briefly) George W. Bush. He’s the guy who implored the second Bush Administration in January of 2001 to keep a close eye on Al Qaeda, and move forward with measures to that effect which were still in place from the recently departed Clinton administration. In response, the Bush administration blew off Clarke’s warnings and demoted him to non-cabinet level status.

Richard-Clarke

photo: Aude/Wikimedia Commons

He was later made Special Adviser to the President on cybersecurity, but resigned from the G.W. Bush administration in 2003. A year later Clarke testified before the 9/11 Commission; the Bush White House, knowing that his testimony would reveal their fuck-ups, undertook one of their trademark Karl Rove-style campaigns of character assassination. Some would disagree, but I believe an objective eye would conclude that the smear tactics damaged the Bush administration’s credibility far more than Clarke’s.

These days, Clarke runs a security consulting firm and serves as an adjunct lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. This past Monday he was interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air, principally about his new book Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It. brief digression» After describing the serious threat posed by internet-based attacks, Clarke had this to say about the present state of our defenses against such attacks:

CLARKE: …Now, who’s defending us? Who’s defending those pipelines and those railroads and the banks? The Obama Administration’s answer pretty much is, “You’re on your own.” [The Pentagon's] Cyber Command will defend our military. Homeland Security will someday have the capability to defend the rest of the civilian government — it doesn’t today. But everybody else will have to do their own defense.

That is a formula that will not work in the face of sophisticated threats.

GROSS: When you’re saying everybody else is on their own, does that include the electricity grid, the power grid, banking…? Read the rest of this entry »

What the hell is up with this whole two-tier titling fad in non-fiction publishing? I do not get it. Do people looking for one of these books ever remember anything but the primary title (i.e., the part before the colon) and/or the name of the author? Hell, I can’t even remember the complete titles of a lot of these books even if I’ve read them! Here’s one I just looked up on Amazon: one of my favorite books of the past several years was The Island at the Center of the World. Or, as I guess they’d want me to call it, (big breath in…)The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America. Fuuuck me. You might as well have the title be the whole first chapter of the book.Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.4

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Outside The Map Room

March 21, 2010 | Post a comment

I’ve always dug geography and considered myself a map nerd. It seems, however, that one of the charter members of the C&B blogroll has proven me wrong. If I were a real map nerd, I guess I would care about the kind of stuff most often posted at The Map Room these days — stuff like the conflation of neogeography with GIS, or the upcoming BBC4 radio series On the Map. I’ll admit that I got a slight kick out of the news that there are now global maps of the Moon and Mars available as apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch, albeit a sarcastic one (I just know that the next time I’m on Mars and can’t find an ATM, I’m going to kick myself for not having an iPhone).

I had to scroll fairly far down the front page to find the kind of thing I used to see a lot more of at The Map Room: a link to this delightful set of map art by illustrator Christoph Niemann at his New York Times blog. As a cinephile, I suppose it’s natural that this one is my favorite:
casablanca

Thus it has come to pass that The Map Room must go without the torrential stream of traffic that surely resulted from its presence on my blogroll. I’m pretty sure he’ll be fine. To be clear, I have nothing at all against The Map Room — I’m just, as they say, not feelin’ it anymore.

As for the remainder of my “Niches” blogroll section, websurfers with or without a cartographic bent should find plenty of interest at the whimsical, wonderful, web-based world of Strange Maps. For example, check out this 1940 map by an Irish satirist endeavoring to make his country look maximally unappealing to possible Nazi invaders.

Or, if you’re both a history geek and a map geek (like me), you can frolic away the hours at the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection site. Read the rest of this entry »

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Bye Bye, Two Thousand

January 9, 2010 | Post a comment

Hallelujah. Somebody with a much bigger name than mine (in every sense) blogged this so I don’t have to. Now I can simply linkblog it, which is ever so much quicker.

Hendrik Hertzberg:

We can finally drop the “thousand.” Last year may have been two thousand nine, but this year, mercifully, is twenty ten. And next year will be twenty eleven. And so on until—well, until the year 3000.

Sing it, Rick. I for one am in favor of anything that signifies departure from the last decade.

Everybody got that? “Twenty ten.” Woohoo! Our long extra-syllable nightmare is over!

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