The Penultimate Word

So I recently picked up an Apple iPhone 3G, and for the most part I really like the phone. It does many things well, but some things it does badly, and some things are downright ugly. For most of the bad and the ugly, there are workarounds.

Complete review after the jump.
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For all my trip photos, check out the Photo gallery

I took a short vacation last week to Boston and New York for no other reason other than to get away for a few days. My friends Cheryl and Joe, their daughter Katherine, and another friend of ours, Tess, were taking a car vacation through the northeast and I joined them in Boston for a few days. Another friend of ours, Jim, was to have joined us in Boston, and then Jim and I were going to take the train from Boston to New York where Jim lives. The plan was for me to stay with him in his apartment in Astoria, Queens. However, Jim’s work schedule clobbered that idea and he wound up in Michigan the week I was in Boston and New York. But, Jim graciously gave me the keys to his apartment before I left so I didn’t have to sleep under a bridge or someplace when I got to NYC.

This was the first time I had been to Boston and had some time to properly see it as previous visits were business trips with no time for anything but work. A couple of things stood out. First, it is fairly compact and easy to get around either on foot or by public transit. Second, the city has made a real effort to preserve old buildings and architecture while adapting them for modern uses with things like air conditioning, good lighting, etc. I liked Boston a lot.
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Hollywood descended upon Ann Arbor, if only briefly, these past couple of weeks. It was in town filming Youth in Revolt, starring actors you have actually heard of: Michael Cera, Justin Long (Mac in those Apple commercials), Steve Buscemi, Ray Liotta, and others. This was a direct result of a package of incentives offered by the State of Michigan to woo film productions, which includes rebating up 40% of the business taxes paid by the studios, plus an additional 2% if the production is filmed in any of over 100 “core communities”, of which Ann Arbor is one. Your tax dollars at work, subsidizing some millionaire actor’s payday.

Scenes from the movie were being shot just a block from my office, but the streets were blocked off and it was difficult to see what they were doing much of the time. Mostly it seemed like a lot of people standing around all day. A lot of security was provided by the Ann Arbor police, plus a lot of rent-a-cops. They also completely took over one parking lot and much of another, making parking even more difficult than it normally is.

Yesterday, they burned a travel trailer, causing much excitement for passers-by. The picture at the top is the end of the fire, the picture below is off the Ann Arbor Fire Department mopping up.

Button for sale at the state convention of the Texas Republican Party.

(Via Marc Ambinder)

Tis a map showing the generic names for soft drinks by area. Interesting that “soda” is bi-coastal, but not much used in the interior.

I once visited a client in New Jersey who asked me what I wanted to drink. I told her I wanted a pop, which prompted her to ask me if I was from Kalamazoo. Apparently in her experience only people from Kalamazoo called it “pop”.

(Via Sullivan)

The group I sing with is leaving shortly to perform JS Bach’s Mass in B Minor with the Wilmington, NC Symphony, so we are in heavy rehearsals to prepare. In the bass sectional today the song Fly Me to the Moon came up (don’t ask), and our director remarked that it was originally written in 3 but most arrangements are in 4. I remarked that I have a copy of Astrud Gilberto doing it in 3, but discovered to my embarrassment that she did it in 4 as well. Still, it is a nice arrangement. Naturally, someone has posted it on YouTube.

Steve Novick, a junior high dropout who enrolled in the Harvard Law School at age 18, is running for Senate in the state of Oregon. He has the most, umm, startling political ad I have ever seen. Take a look:

Another one for Plenipotentiary to swipe.
From the Times of London.

By Daryl Cagle

By stick figures.

And more clearly than most newspapers do.

(Via Making Light)

This diagram sorts it all out. More detail here.

What happens when over 200 people freeze in place for five minutes in Grand Central Terminal? Watch the video and find out.

[via Crooked Timber]

There are some jobs I could never do, and I am thankful for people who do them. What I killed today is the blog of vet tech who has to euthanize animals. It is a sad but touching site.

a 13-year-old basset hound in kidney failure. she was so kind and licked my face as i carried her in from the car for the owner. he was a sweet old man with tears in his eyes. i fed her an entire bag of treats and she kept eating ferociously even after the injection. her chewing slowed down and then she was gone.

(via Boing Boing)

Detroit-based blogger Sweet Juniper! has a photoset up on Flickr of the Detroit Public Schools book depository, apparently abandoned in the 1980s. The photos are at once sad, strangely beautiful, and infuriating. This is his blog post about them. I had no idea this place even existed.

The building is located near another more famous ruin, the Michigan Central Station. In a real city, this wouldn’t happen.

The Library of Congress has started a project where it is putting images from its photo archives on Flickr, and inviting any and all to add Flickr tags to them. The photos have no known copyright restriction on them. Right now, there are over 3,000 photos, with more to come.

This is really cool for so many reasons. It makes all those images freely available to anyone, anywhere. People can add their own tags, so no one is forced into whatever system the archivist uses. It should encourage other archives to open theirs up. Congrats to both the LOC and Flickr for doing this.

Some guy has rated the flags of the world based on their aesthetic value. These are the criteria he used. I don’t agree with all his high grades - I would rate Finland’s and Botswana’s highest. But the lowest graded flags are truly awful.

I did find it a bit tough at first to separate out my feelings toward a particular country from my opinion about the aesthetics of its flag. Somalia and Pakistan are pretty much at the bottom of the list of countries I would want to visit, but their flags are attractive.

My favorite flag is the flag of Wales. That dragon is just awesome.

A short story.

(via Making Light).

(via Schneier)

This story has fascinated me since I first heard it.

World War I was one of the bloodiest wars ever. Hundreds of thousands lost their lives. Britain lost almost an entire generation of young men. The conflict was up close and personal - much of it was fought with soldiers dug into trenches sometimes only 30 yards from each other, close enough to see and hear the enemy. The trenches were absolutely miserable places to be. Wet, muddy, freezing in the winter, sometimes collapsing, sometimes filled with the decaying bodies of the fallen, it was not difficult for the soldiers to have some sympathy for their counterparts on the other side but so close to them.

On Christmas Eve, 1914, British and German troops informally and in defiance of orders from their superiors arranged cease-fires so they could celebrate Christmas. The sounds of carols being sung and gifts being exchanged led soldiers from each side, hesitantly at first, to leave their trenches and venture into no-man’s land to fraternise with their opponents. They serenaded each other and exchanged small gifts and tobacco (the currency of the soldier), played soccer, exchanged addresses, buried their dead.

Their officers, having no use for nonsense like “Christmas”, “Peace on Earth” or “Goodwill Towards Men”, issued orders for fraternisation to stop. But the truce held, mostly, through Christmas Day.

For more on the Christmas Truce, see this article. Military historian Stanley Weintraub has written a well-reviewed book about the Christmas Truce called Silent Night.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Can’t wait for pork loins - perfect for Ramadan!

(And this was in New York. Via NacyKay Shapiro).

Some outfit called the CQ Press issued a report calling Detroit the most dangerous city in the U.S. This caused much outrage from Detroit city officials. CQ Press says it publishes these rankings to encourage local conversations, which is nonsense, of course - they do it to sell their publications. Have you ever heard of CQ Press before? (This is CQ’s response to the criticism.)

These one-number rankings generate more heat than light. While the statements by Detroit officials denouncing the study are self-serving, they are also correct in pointing out that the average visitor to the city has nothing to fear if he stays out of areas he has no business being in. I go into Detroit frequently, for Tigers and Red Wings games, concerts, the opera, and, lately, jury duty, and have never had a problem or even felt uncomfortable. There is a lot of new development happening downtown as well - both commercial and residentia.l But it is also true that life is really grim for people who live in the high-crime neighborhoods, and denunciations of the study by the mayor and police chief don’t change that.

(Updated 21 November - fixed some typos)

Making Light hipped me to a blog called The War on Photography, which chronicles amateur and pro photographers taking perfectly legal pictures being harassed by law enforcement types in the name of homeland security. This post is about a British tourist threatened by NYC police for taking pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge. Given the vast numbers of picutures available of the Brooklyn Bridge (here are some of mine), no one is going to stop terrorists from doing their worst by stopping people taking pictures. All the authorities are doing in cases like these is harassing tourists and acting like total idiots. It is shameful.

(Updated 21 November - fixed a typo).