"Waste Not, Want Not"

"I need five hundred buses, man."

That was Ray Nagin, Mayor of New Orleans, in a sound-bite just now aired on CNN.

Memo to Nagin: Here are about two hundred of them, you incompetent dink.

Just shut up, already. Start looking for another gig.

Things You Wouldn't Believe Unless You Were Living The Endarkenment

"The new rules, introduced under the European Physical Agents Directive, are aimed at cutting the estimated two million injuries of 'hand-arm vibration' or 'whole body vibration'. The rules will also limit the use of machinery such as pneumatic drills, chainsaws and farm equipment."

The British Ministry of Defense is going to get down on its hands and knees and beg an exemption from the rules for its armored combat vehicles, ladies and gentlemen.

Churchill's ghost glowers, while the sensible mind reels.

What the fuck next?

Action

That's a military relief convoy rolling through the flooded streets of New Orleans.

Personally, I've found it interesting to follow its progress with the (pre-disaster) imagery of Google Earth. (Also: Google Earth is posting Katrina imagery for overlays.)

Cue History

Below, I noted a late-70's/early-80's New York state bar-band called 805.

Thinking about them, I want to get this down:

Think about the sort-of 'tick-tock' percussive opening to Pink Floyd's "Time", from "Dark Side Of The Moon" (1973).

As 805 opened that song that way, they ran up six instruments ("lights", to most of you) on two mirror-balls hanging in the upstage behind the band: low, at about shoulder-height. Fifteen hundred watts of light, I think (three 500w PAR 56's, I believe), taking each mirror-ball from below and each side. The balls weren't turning, so as the fade ran up under the introduction to the song, the whole room was pierced with these intensely still shafts of white light crossing motionless, everywhere, through the smoke from previous pyrotechnics.

The first note in "Time" is that F-sharp on Gilmour's guitar. (Think about it.)

Precisely on the strike of that first note, an 805 crew guy struck the little gas-pipe rack from which the mirror-balls were hanging so that they began to swing and bounce randomly on their suspension wires. That's what happened in the merely physical context. In a very different context, the one for which this was designed: the whole room began swaying wildly as those previously dead-still beams suddenly shook with an intensity that increased with their radius from the source-points. This happened right crisply on the first note of the song. The effect was staggering. (I'm not kidding: drunks would fall right over.) And, as I analyzed it, I was amazed at how simple it was. It was an object lesson in the craft of applied imagination, reaching as far as it could with what it had at hand.

I've been working with stage-lights for twenty-eight years now, and I still remember that in the top five of the best lights cues I ever saw, anywhere, far & wide and top to bottom. It happened at Lou Cataldo's Arcade, in front of about fifteen hundred people, in Ithaca, New York.

Right, then. Back to bed.

Stopped Clockery

It was the only sensible thing that I ever heard Dennis Hastert say.

Cannibals At The Pot

I wonder how it would go if hordes of New Orleans survivors made their way to Alaska, tore Rep. Don Young's head off, and "stuffed it like a turkey".

Here is something about which I wonder far less: how many people can understand the implications bound up in those two links.

Every fucking creep with a modem and a text editor likes to swoon over "democracy". What they don't get through their block-heads is how it necessarily sets people against one-another in a declining political spiral of grasping and grabbing, all while the spine and spirit are leeched out of them to the point where they extend their arms to the skies in helpless supplication of helicopters while their American forebears tumble in their graves at being the ancestors of such outright punks.

What a show, ladies and gentlemen. Wotta show.