Sorry about the radio silence recently — the art show over the Labor Day weekend chews up an awful lot of time.
Anyway, it’s done, and it was every bit as pleasant as in the past. For a tiny little town they sure do conjure up a lot of volunteers. They put together a really mellow and supportive atmosphere for both the artists and the public. A little supervised “doggy park” where folks can tie their dogs, with fresh water and treats. Wandering docents who take the trouble to become familiar with each artist’s work, and who will tend your display so you can go get a bite to eat or take a little walk by the river to decompress.
They totally take care of security, and even have someone who sets up a cot in the display space (a huge tent) and sleeps with the artwork overnight. A minimal entry fee and they just take a 30% bite of the sales, which is lower than most any gallery. All profits go to scholarships for promising young artists in school.
And brisk business this year too — I sold almost 75% of everything I had in the show, which is unprecedented, and many of the other artists reported pretty good sales as well.
It’ll take me a day or so to pack everything away and return my workspace to something resembling order, then I’ll get back to reading the news again and see what that leads to.
Seems I completely missed one political convention, and some of a second one. Lucky me.
Meanwhile, at the Paralympics, I’m still trying to understand what the hell happened here;
The winner set a new world record in this event, the 200 meters, and also holds the world record in the marathon, something that leaves me comfortably speechless.
OK, one more. Table tennis this time. A game I played a lot when younger, and even became reasonably adept at it. This guy could have kicked my ass any day of the week though. Amazing.
You’ve not seen anything until you’ve seen blind soccer! And there were guys with just one leg competing in High Jump. Literally hopping to the bar and then throwing themselves over. Amazing and very humbling.
Whitehead’s just incredible. I don’t know why he has that very strange running mode, must be something to do with his kind of disability. It looks very painful on the hips to me. The other guy, well, everybody commented on that even more peculiar perch on the starting block. Nobody could fathom that at all. Everybody was sure he’d fall over.
Best friend was there yesterday, and has been enthusing madly about the architecture in the park. I’ll try to pinch a pic or two for the Squirrel Party page. She saw the blind 400 or 800m and can’t stop talking about it. Each blind runner had a sighted runner guiding him. She said they ran like Siamese twins.
(Apparently a French runner was disqualified, she couldn’t make out why, but he threw a real tantrum: screaming and kicking chairs and people, apparently. . .though minus ‘twin’ . . .)
The stadium was absolutely packed out. She had a seat just behind the press photographers, and said she missed bits of the action because they were jumping up and down such a lot. And we’re second in the medals behind China! Yay!
(To be honest, miles behind China really, but still . . .Russia’s a bit close with the Golds for comfort though, and the USA is sixth. Er, sorry ’bout that. )
Welcome back, and I’ve found another example of Congress people’s extraordinary historical knowledge:
“I would say to them, ‘Set me free,’” Clarke responded.
But free from what? The exploitative factory owners in the garment industry, perhaps?
And who was enslaving people in Brooklyn in 1898?
The Dutch . . .
Congresswoman Clarke is a Democrat, apparently. Who has served (Squirrel notes glumly) as chair of the United States House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, Science and Technology.
Normal? What’s that???
Squirrel,
What’s 204 years between friends?
Gunny,
Glad to hear you sold three-quarters of your stock, that’s a great weekend.
For our cosmonauts: I trust Neptune was as diverting as Jupiter.
Anybody know if the Dutch did have slaves in New Amsterdam? (It would seem likely there’d have been some; as household servants, anyway. They had a very bad history in South America.) Don’t remember that from either Washington Irving or my American history lessons.
(Can’t be bothered to look it up in Wikipedia. It’s more interesting to ask people.)
Bluth,
I simply had no idea how popular Neptune is around Labor Day. The traffic through the asteroid belt was something to behold: those Uranians drive like New Yorkers in bad need of a rest stop. May have to try it again when the brogofleeches start to turn.
And speaking of New Yorkers: not sure where you get 204 years. They didn’t officially abolish slavery until 1827, a mere six years before the English. But maybe Brooklyn held out? I’ve heard that it often does…
Squirrel,
Oh, sure. The Dutch West India Company didn’t let no grass grow under their feet, and they began importing Africans in 1626. But it took the English to really get it going and by the 1700s Manhattan was second only to Charleston as a hub of slave commerce. But during the Revolution both sides offered freedom to slaves who would fight for them and the traffic never really recovered after the war. By the early 1800s there were about as many free blacks as slaves in New York, the area had become industrialized and slavery became something of an embarrassment. This was aggravated as more and more escaped slaves from the south ended up there and, as usually happened, the trade became unprofitable enough to abolish. This happened by degrees, starting in 1799. Blacks in New York still couldn’t vote until 1870, though — the 15th Amendment, of course (see, e.g., Ron and Rand Paul, desirability of abolition thereof.)
Nat,
I thought the man said he wanted the Dutch to set him free.
Didn’t the Dutch lose their colony to the English in about 1664? (That’s how I counted 204, heading backwards from 1868…).
Hell yes you want to see those brogofleeches when they turn. If for any reason you mis-time it, get the locals to do a ‘The Trouble With Harry’ glue-em-back-on for your benefit. (Though you might have to say pretty please.)
Bluth,
Oh, okay, 1868. But to be fair about it, the Dutch, progressive as they pretend to be, still haven’t ratified the 14th Amendment*. Food for thought, and Yvette has every right to notice it in public.
* Although they did sorta-kinda abolish it in their colonies in 1863 (with a ten-year extension to soften the blow a little…)
Not sure what to make of Clarke’s remarks, but what I just couldn’t banish from my mind, while watching clips of the D convention, was how LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa FAILED THE BAR EXAM 4 FREAKING TIMES.
Who fails the bar exam 4 times? (And then goes on to become mayor of the 2nd biggest city in the country.)
We are doomed.
Even JFK Jr. passed on his 3rd attempt. (NY & CA are probably pretty comparable in terms of difficulty.)
Glad you’re back, gunnison, and that the show was a success. Presumably the digit is now altogether fine.
At least I’ve had plenty of time to exercise and brood – get the juices flowing again.
Bim,
The California Bar is supposed to be very very tough. For no other reason than the lawyers already in the Bar Association don’t want too many newcomers.
I’ve known some decent lawyers who failed the bar a couple of times at least. It’s not how I’d judge a man’s capacity for high office, in any case.
John Major famously failed the exam to be a London bus conductor. Bus conductor., mind you, not even driver.
But then he was a crap prime minister.
Bluth,
Gee, I don’t know. I realize some people aren’t great test-takers, and it’s not how I measure human worth or anything, but I do see some value in okay executive-function skills and a decent memory. I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve known and worked with plenty, including in California.
But hey, it’s probably just all this pent-up energy. Have I ever really claimed to believe any of my own opinions?
Bim, it’s an interesting question. Of presidents since the war… Reagan- pretty sure he’d never be able to pass a bar exam if he had gone to law school. Nixon- absolutely passed the bar. Clinton- passed the bar. Bushdaddy- yeah probably. Bush baby- never in a thousand years. Carter- sure, no problem. Ike- yeah, he took all kinds of tests to get where he got to when he was young. Bright as hell. Truman? maybe. Maybe not. LBJ, sure as hell. Ford? An easy bar somewhere quiet. JFK? Bright but lazy- and that’s the thing. You can fail once or twice because you are cocky & lazy and other wise occupied, but four times?
I’ve took a number of bar exams in my youth. They aren’t that hard if you have the right sort of mind. Can’t say I ever failed one, nor would I hire a lawyer who failed the bar 4 times, not ever.
So I guess I’m saying on reflection I’ve come round to your original thought. If that’s the best we got coming up, we’re doomed.
On the other hand the clever lawyer types haven’t so far managed to turn the ship of state around to a course that does NOT doom us, so…
Yeah, we’re doomed.
I’ve took Gosh, saw that one a millisecond too late. kinda killed my cred. oh well.
Ah – The man who ran away from the circus to become an accountant.
I’ve took? tooken? tooked? taked? – all comprehensible Bluthner.
Bluth,
Lawyers kind of run the show, which is fine, of course, though I wouldn’t mind giving somebody else a chance (accountants, physicians, engineers, humble computer programmers who spend their days pondering the differences between Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein when they should be coding). But, yeah, 4 times means you REALLY want it and still can’t do it. That’s when you go into real estate or marketing and just take solace in the JD after your name in the email sig.
OK, since few people can surpass my ignorance about how spam, specifically the automated viagra/paydayloans/etc kind of spam actually works, maybe some of you ‘umble coders can help me out.
I’ve noticed that such spam comes in waves, and will often key off of the title of the post somehow. For example, we had a couple of weeks with normal amounts of viagra/cialis sales pitches being caught in the spam filter. Two or three a day, something like that. That’s like background radiation around here.
Then, suddenly, a whole shitload of them deluged the post entitled “The Perfect Person”. And I mean a shitload too — hundreds a day, dozens per hour, and it’s still continuing — and all of them targeting that one post. Several thousand now, and still counting, and many of them duplicates.
It’s totally manageable, the filter is handling it just fine and they never make it through to become the “comments” they are intended to be, but I’m wondering what it is that trips the trigger. It’s happened before with post titles; for some reason certain words, or combinations of words, act like fucking catnip to those bots.
Anyone know what’s going on with that? Any way to know what kind of post titles to be careful with so as not to kick the hornet’s nest?
What with holidays on Neptune. . .a friend just rang and said she was doing the annual company returns to Companies House online, but they’ve changed it. There’s a box she usually has to check, but she couldn’t find it.
So she phoned them, and was sure she heard the bloke say “It’s now under ‘Extra Terrestrial’. ”
Turned out to be ‘Extra Territorial’.
gunny,
Maybe the bot is reading person in ‘perfect person’ as a synonym for ‘body’, so it ‘thinks’ it’s honing in on a blurb written for people with body insecurity?
What I wonder is has any human being ever, anywhere, ever once sent money in response to one of those type spams. Presumably they only need a hit rate of one out of ten million to make it worth their while, but still, one out of ten million seems impossible to me. X-ray specs sold on the backs of comic books way back when must’ve sold better. (Who, at aged 9, would not have wanted a pair of those!)
Gunny,
I wish I knew. I’m getting some that are slipping through into my main email account again. How, I cannot imagine, because the address bears no relation whatsoever to my email address.
But hundreds a day . . .my god.
I got very suspicious of cable in Brussels, where my friends had cable TV and a cable modem. I once bid on eBay for something and paid through my Paypal account there; and almost instantly their email account (which I’d never used!) got flooded with fake Paypal emails addressed, not to them, but to me. The only way, I thought, that could have happened, was someone at the cable company harvesting.
Bluthner:
Oh, they do. You’d be amazed.
I’ve come across a few (I thought) ‘sensible’ businessmen who’ve nearly fallen for them. (And they were ones who asked me to check them out as a journo! There must have been a fair number who didn’t; but obviously, they weren’t going to tell me, And I was never too sure anyway whether I wasn’t being asked too late, I heard a rather ominous silence on the other end of the phone more than once.)
I’ve had friends who’ve fallen for those phone text scams (the ones where you get a daily text that costs you a couple of quid or more every day) haven’t noticed for months, and have then asked me how to stop them. One got stuck with a particularly awkward one from Holland—we never worked out how—and I couldn’t work out how to stop them at all, and even O2 admitted defeat. She had to dump the Sim and replace it.
And then there are those who unthinkingly click on those “You need to change your password, click here’ emails. (I almost fell for one a couple of years ago: it was a particularly good fake and I hit the button automatically and realised what I’d done just a second afterwards. Spent an hour changing my passwords for everything immediately.
But I know there are a lot of people who virtually never really look at even their bank accounts or credit card bills, just pay up at the end of the month. Even a friend of mine who’s very cautious didn’t realise she was paying someone else’s subscription to some society of rose growers she knew nothing about for six months.
(And the bank never would explain just how they were paying that through an account with a name — and account number—that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the person who put in the direct debit to start with.)
Same bank let my credit card get wiped out through some dodgy transaction in Poland. I had a hell of a job getting out of that, even though I could prove I couldn’t possibly have been anywhere near Poland. I was getting threatening legal letters for months from the bastards. I’d been lulled into a totally false sense of security because they’d phoned me a couple of times before when I’d paid more than I usually did for a couple of things.
If they’d queried whether I’d really paid 80 quid in England, it never occurred to me they wouldn’t wonder why I apparently suddenly went totally crazy in a place in Poland even a Polish friend barely recognised and spent well over a grand in a couple of hours. I don’t have a credit card any more, and I moved to a different bank. No way am I going to go through that again.
I have a bunch of spam from someone called MR. TAN WONG, no subject. Anybody know of him? I’m not quite curious enough to open any of the emails.
This past weekend a friend outfitting himself with proper Neptune footwear had an interesting (to me anyway) experience with his charge card company. It apparently flipped out at a charge coming in from Neptune and called his cell phone immediately to put him through a bizarre (to me anyway) voice recognition process. Most commendable, if amusing (to me anyway.)
Bloot – Ed. Dom. at first took your “I’ve took” to be informal, colloquial. Normal stuff from those who write a lot of fiction/dialogue in their real lives.
Madame,
Thank you for the editorial toleration. I think it was more a matter of starting out “I’ve taken” and then changing it to “I took” but forgetting to delete the rest. But maybe not spotting it for the reason you mention.
If I buy something expensive, like a plane ticket, online, the very instant I press the enter key on ‘purchase’ my phone will ring with a worried person somewhere on the Asian subcontinent at the other end wanting to know was it really me who bought that item. Can’t imagine they can afford to do that for all their cardholders. Maybe it’s because I buy large ticket items about as often as your friend buys boots on Neptune?
I’m thinking Mr Tan Wong must be a naturist.
Madame, you tempt us with a link, but…. for me at least it won’t link to anything.
never mind, I got confused, it’s not a link it’s a happy face.
Bluthner – I am relieved that there is someone else (besides me) who is confused. Lately I can’t tell down from up. My misery craves company. I fear I may be in need of an inner ear transplant. Anyone got a spare?
gunny,
Can’t offer any insight into the spam problem. Keying off blog post titles? Kind of makes sense, I guess. But to test that theory you could throw something up entitled “Erectile Dysfunction” – or maybe “Bigger and Harder” – and see what results. A little Popperian conjecture and refutation. (I know…always the scientist.)
Madame,
maybe it’s just the rest of us who are off kilter, and only you are aware which way is really up, or rather that up and down is just an illusion and you have become disillusioned? Maybe the problem is less the sensor than the horizon which it senses?
If my daughters get earaches I warm up olive oil and drip some in their outer ears and get them to hold their heads still for half an hour, aching ear up, if I can. But that is to relieve pressure on the drum, but you aren’t hearing the beat of a different drummer are you?
I’m just being facetious, as you know. I really do hope your trouble goes away soon.
See you guys next week. I’m off where email doesn’t reach for a couple days.
Bim,
The really clever thing to do would be set a trap. lure the bot in and then, like a venus fly trap, snag it and dissolve it in acid. or better yet, snag it, and then turn it back against it’s creator, with a disruption bomb attached. Anyone who could figure out how to do that would be a real hero.
Bluth,
True! But I can’t even seem to manage my fruit fly infestation. They’re everywhere and it’s making me crazier than usual.