What struck me about this story was that it validates the deeply unlikely premise behind a mediocre 1974 TV movie called The Day the Earth Moved. In it, an aerial photographer takes pictures of desert landscapes using a flawed film that reveals where earthquakes will strike due to a red line running down the middle of the fault zone. Naturally, the pictures reveal that a quake will strike a local town, and the usual race against time ensues.
So congratulations to writers Jack Turley and Max Jack. You were one of those thousands of shotguns firing in the dark that actually hit something.
At lot of people, faced with record floods, would leave.
Then there’s this guy. He built a sandbag wall, then expanded it to a moat and a berm, with pump in the moat, all the way around his house and barn in DeValls Bluff, Arkansas. It’s not a work of particular complexity, but it works, and it looks like it took a Herculean effort to build.
Bonus: At about 1:30 into the second video, it sounds like Boomhauer from King of the Hill is in the boat with them…
Actual story: FBI declassifies document in which an agent reports that some guy claimed there were flying saucers found at Roswell.
It’s been known since the 1990s that the crash debris at Roswell came from balloons used in the classified Project Mogul, an attempt to monitor Soviet nuclear testing via atmospheric acoustics. While this explanation fits all the actual known data about the incident, most conspiracy theorists ignore it because a crashed balloon isn’t nearly as cool or interesting as crashed aliens.
Look, I know a lot of what appears on Slashdot these days is just flamewar clickbait. But do you think you could avoid actually lying about the link in the header? Is that too much to ask?
And speaking of Ofunato City, here is footage of the tsunami coming in there:
Someone has put up a series of videos called “people trying to escape from the tsunami,” some of which I’ve never seen before, and all of which look entirely too close for comfort.
Here’s entirely-too-close footage of the tsunami coming in, including large tugboats and a van trying to escape, right before the cameraman decided he really needed to get to higher ground:
That’s the tool chest of 19th century piano maker H.O. Studley. I originally saw this linked from Fark, and knew I had to put up a video of it, if only to show Howard Waldrop (a man deeply appreciative of fine woodwork) the next time he’s somewhere near a computer.
I’m sure this is very old news to some people, as there have been many articles written about it in woodworking magazines. I think my jaw actually dropped open when they showed how the individual fastening drawers slid back and forth.
He actually lists exactly how much he made off the e-books edition of his short story collections Tides from the New Worlds (which, I should point out, I have one print copy of left over at Lame Excuse Books). His conclusion as a solid mid-list writer: You’re not going to get rich. Also, the magic 99¢ price point isn’t necessarily the profit-maximization point.
This was also pretty discouraging: “Collections are hard to sell in print, and I know from some discussions that many collections sell for $500 – $1,000 advances to medium or small presses, if you can sell them at all.” I know that short story collections aren’t going to make anyone rich, but I that that anyone who could actually sell a short story collection to serious small press (Subterranean, Golden Gryphon, PS Publishing, etc.) would be able to garner a (still paltry) $3,000-5,000 advance.
Slashdot posted a story linking a highly speculative piece in The Guardian saying that high levels of radiation might be a sign that molten fuel has leaked through the reactor vessel (not the containment vessel, as the Slashdot summary breathlessly announces). I have not seen any confirmation of this speculation, or indeed seen this speculation repeated outside Slashdot and a few other newspapers in the UK, and it is not confirmed by the most recent IAEA report.
Things are plenty bad at Fukushima, but (with the caveat that I am not even remotely a nuclear engineer) I see no solid evidence to suggest that there has been even a partial meltdown, much less that the core has melted through the reactor pressure vessel, much less that the containment vessel has been breached. Indeed this statement from the IAEA report would suggest a better cause for the radioactivity spike recently observed: “The Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan suggests that higher activity in the water discovered in the Unit 2 turbine building is supposed to be caused by the water, which has been in contact with molten fuel rods for a time and directly released into the turbine building via some, as yet unidentified path.”
Japan suffered a real tragedy, with over 11,000 confirmed dead from the earthquake and tsunami, and Western journalists and bloggers seem unnaturally fixated on a serious but limited nuclear accident that hasn’t claimed any lives yet.
Airplane!, The Exorcist, The Empire Strikes Back and The Pink Panther are all great films, arguably among the top 100 ever made. I believe it was K. W. Jeter who said that the student version of THX 1138 was much better than the theatrical release, so I’ve always been curious to see that. Strangely enough, I’m also curious about Saturday Night Fever, despite my loathing of disco, as many critics (the late Gene Siskel among them) consider it one of the great films of the 1970s, and National Review‘s John Derbyshire says it’s one of the best films about blue collar American life ever made. I also remember Dwight being impressed with Malcolm X, despite not having seen Malcolm I–IX.
Of course, a lot of these are notable only for being early examples of the form rather than gripping cinema, such as Newark Athlete:
Or A Trip Down Market Street:
Let There Be Light is John Huston’s pioneering documentary on the treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder following World War II:
And Our Lady of the Sphere is sort of like Terry Gilliam’s work on Monty Python, but not as interesting:
Then again, it was made in San Francisco in 1969, so there’s nothing about it that can’t be explained by the phrase “Dude, I was so high…”
I know it’s already been linked from Slashdot, but this interview with former Apple CEO John Sculley over on Cult of Mac is fascinating reading. It talks about Steve Jobs design-centric perspective, and how it’s lead to every important Apple product. Required reading for anyone interested in high tech, design, or business.
(I should note that I too had a problem activating my iPhone, but that my problem was considerably less severe and I was in the Apple store at the time.)
