The armed individual with a vested interest in peace and quiet is a civilization’s first line of defense against barbarism.

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I started to say I didn’t want a reservation, I wanted to hand her $30 and move up one freaking row, but it felt like I was on the phone with Bangalore and couldn’t get a supervisor, so I just shut up and drank
. - Ed Cone

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Susan:  “I find poetry as I sort my life...”

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There are moments in a story, if you have read it or seen it or heard it before, when you feel sick because you know what's about to happen but the characters don't. They may have a sense of dread, but you know...

Today is May 13, 2008.  But May 13, 1940 would make a chilling scene in a movie...

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Getting the news late, as usual...

Adjust your bookmarks, people. We’ve shifted over here.

The new site - the shiny new Daily Telegraph site - is only an hour or so old as I write and very much a work in progress. No links yet to other blogs, nor do I have any idea how comments are meant to happen. Give it (and me) a few days. - Tim Blair, May 11, 2008: “Site Moved”

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Jeff Goldstein, on Obama’s “New Progressive Army”.

Tam reminds us that Waco wasn’t the first time.

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Stumbled across this while searching for recommendations for a CECB:

Don Bouldrey: Since I’m still dumb as a stick about this dtv, I've assumed [component over-] heating has been causing signal dropouts but now it appears as though it’s the wind causing that on the weaker stations. I use folded dipoles of different wavelengths hung in a cedar tree to pull from transmitters that are in three different directions and spread by 50°. Hey, it works fine for analog, even in a hurricane, but I’m learning digital is a different animal.

bdfox18doe (Charlotte, NC): You’re encountering dynamic multipath that the receiver isn’t fast enough to correct for. Nearby trees, especially when wet, will really affect ATSC reception, especially at UHF frequencies. And some receivers handle it much better than others.

Don Bouldrey: I can see that I’ll be rethinking my old antenna system. Even though my dipoles are tuned to frequency and aimed at the towers, this wind issue will be a pain. Otherwise, everything is about as good as it can get. Funny thing with the ATSC is the propaganda is really exploiting the safety and reliability of DTV and discussing the value of it for keeping people safe in emergency.... while showing footage of a hurricane in action. Like you, I'm thinking ATSC will be useless in a hurricane whereas the analog TV works just fine no matter what the conditions. When ’cane Ivan hit us @ 135, every time I saw the red doppler bands heading for our house, all hell broke loose. Our reception remained perfect all night long. I should say it was perfect for the one station that managed to stay on the air throughout the night.

I wonder if there's any contingency plan for reverting to analog when hurricanes are heading in. An inoperative television system just won’t fly in hurricane country.

Scooper (Youngsville, NC): I'd like to hear from some members in hurricane country right after a ’cane goes through to get the straight scoop on this. I've noticed that my reception is rather spotty with blowing, wet trees, but that is exactly what I attributed it to - blowing, wet trees. It doesn't do DBS any good either.

satpro (central FL): ATSC works fine in a hurricane, tested during trifecta hurricane season a few years ago during Charley, Francis and Jeanne in Orlando. What doesn’t work is when the stations don’t bother to have a generator with gas in it hooked up to the DTV transmitter or the cheap %^&&*(# choose to shut the DTV off to conserve fuel, shutting down distant cable companies who take the DTV feed.

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Chris Soghoian:

The United Kingdom has the most surveillance cameras per capita in the world. With the recent news that CCTV cameras do not actually deter crime, how can the local town councils justify the massive surveillance program? By going after pooping dogs.

• ...littering,
• ...misuse of a disabled parking badge.
• ...to identify a false claim for damages.
• ...to spy on a person who was working while off sick.

“It's been an utter fiasco: only 3 percent of crimes were solved by CCTV.” - Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville^[1], head of the Metropolitan Police’s Visual Images Office, as quoted by The Guardian

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Gee, shouldn’t there be an article on this page?








I wonder what would happen if...

more...

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“fillyjonk” posts an nicely discursive essay that ties together elitism, old books, and the absence of casual beauty for its own sake (“prettyness and unnecessariness”) in modern design. Pour yourself a cup of coffee, and go read.


Oh, and she’s knitted an elephant.

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