| Pick up line |
[16 Apr 2008|02:49pm] |
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 Scrappy |
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Yesterday a guy was collecting scrap metal on our street. I asked if he wanted cans. He said yes. I took him to the back yard, where I had a stash from since the storm-- I didn't expect there to be no recycling pickup for this long. (Before the storm it was once a week. Now apparently it's about once every two and a half years, if you're lucky.)
At the bottom of the big bin were empty cans of "Floodweiser" emergency water and other post-K supplies.
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| Weblinks: New Orleans, BushCo |
[10 Apr 2008|07:46pm] |
Ms. Hollie went to Algiers RiverFest last weekend, and took some good pix of The Indians
Speaking of New Orleans pix, "W Magazine" apparently has a spread about New Orleans. I havn't seen the magazine, but some pix are on line. (I could do without the fashionista stuff, but enough local stuff to be worth a look.)
Harry Shearer's suggested headline summarizing the Federal involvement with the Katrina disaster from the ACOE levees to FEMA trailers: "Government Floods City, Then Poisons Survivors"
Speaking of Federal incompetence, Dear Leader Bush is the poster boy: Historians agree: Worst President Ever
"Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world's goodwill. In short, no other president's faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large."
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| Ancient Maya on NOVA tv tonight |
[08 Apr 2008|10:21am] |
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tv show "Cracking the Maya Code" schedualed to air on the PBS network tonight as part of the "NOVA" series. (Here in New Orleans, 7pm Central Time, rebroadcast at 1am)
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| Ashley Morris, RIP |
[05 Apr 2008|09:30pm] |
Damn. We lost New Orleans blogger Ashley Morris
Some of his impassioned & articulate rants in the aftermath of the Katrina disaster:
Fuck You, You Fucking Fucks (Warning: Contains the "F Word")
Sinn Fein
American Biafra
I only had a priviledge to meet him briefly at such events as the Krewe du Vieux and the big March on 11 January 2007. I'll miss his wit and wisdom on line.
If you hadn't encountered his writing before, check out his "greatest hits" on the website.
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| Listening to the OLD stuff |
[05 Apr 2008|08:41pm] |
Very cool: a bit of sound from 1860 has been played back. The 19th century phonautograph couldn't play back sound, but made a visual record of waveforms; for first time audio has successfully been extracted.
The folks who did it: FirstSounds.org
Selected press coverage (not including the particularly sucky examples)
NY Times article
The Age, AU
NPR
Short crunchgear article
The press coverage has been interesting. I first heard about this from a wacky short tv news piece saying something like "Scientists have discovered a sound recording from 1860 ... Almost 20 years before Thomas Edison invented the first sound recording!" with no further explanation. Ms. Hollie witnessed me making an exasperated gesture at the tv set and saying, "What, have they extracted sound from a phonautograph? Or what??"
I can remember speculation going back at least 20 to 25 that someday someone would be able to figure out some technology to extract audio from a phonautograph paper. That the phonautograph predated Edison's phonograph was no secret to those with some interest in early audio. This is not to discount the significance of the scientific achievement of playing it back -- it is more an observation of how the media tend to report things. No doubt if something significant and startling was discovered in old presidential papers from a 120 years ago, we'd see examples presenting it along the lines of: "Historians have discovered that the United States used to have a president called ''Grover Cleveland'', who has been totally forgotten!"
It will be interesting to see what else might come of these developments. I hope we'll get to hear some of the Edison tinfoil recordings again.
I note FirstSounds.org/Sounds already has a few other things up, the only one earlier recognizable as something is a tuning fork from 1859. Regarding an 1857 phonautogram, "his recording methods were not yet sophisticated enough at this time to yield audibly recognizable results." I wonder if this is an absolute threshold or one of current reconstructive technology.
There have been suggestions at least since the late 1960s that pots on a potter's wheel just might accidentally record sound. "Archaeoacoustics". A few archaeologists have contemplated that, just maybe, somehow, we may be able to listen to bits of conversation from thousands of years ago, perhaps listening to spoken Etruscan or Linear A. And other archaeologists and historians have found this dream, while tantalizing, pretty funny.
(Hm, doing a quick google while preparing this post has turned up a few things I've missed, including an April Fool's Day prank claiming recordings from Pompeii a couple years ago, and an "X-Files" tv episode with a pot with a recording of the voice of Jesus! upen.edu language log; Pottery recording)
I've long wondered if eventually better audio fidelity might be extracted from early recordings by some sort of computerized reverse engineering to compensate for the audio strengths and weaknesses of early recording devices.
Speaking of extracting hidden data from early audio, a dozen years ago a friend told me he was playing around with a NASA sonar program on his computer and tried it on some snippets of acoustic recordings-- where there was a pure tone like a chime or bell, and making a 2-d image. He said in a few cases he'd get a circle pattern, a few others a square. He thought he was getting a sonar picture of the inside of the recording horn.
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| Will we be singing "Hoppy Days Are Here Again"? |
[28 Feb 2008|09:25pm] |
Leap Day will mark the start of "The Year of the Frog"
I choose to take this as a good sign.
Meanwhile in politics:
Photographic proof! Calvin Coolidge actually a sleeper agent for the Red Menace!
One of the things I'm amused at is the Republicans attacking Obama as someone who glosses over complicated issues with optimistic generalities-- while at the same time the Republicans kowtow to the idol of Saint Reagan.
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| Krewe du Vieux 2008 video |
[22 Jan 2008|09:06am] |
Local Carnival pundit Erroll Laborde made an apt observation that unlike such parades as the Rose Bowl or Macy's Thanksgiving, New Orleans Mardi Gras Season parades are designed as participatory experiences, not to look good on tv.
Still, I enjoyed watching this and some of you might too:
Krewe du Vieux parade video on NOLA.com
[edit]
More nifty pix:
http://entheos93.livejournal.com/141570.html
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| Sound as a Dollar |
[22 Jan 2008|08:46am] |
My great uncle recalled going downtown and being part of a crowd watching the numbers on a huge chalk-board during the crash of 1929. Thanks to generations of progress, we can be seated comfortably at computers.
And remember BushCo still has almost a year to screw yet more things up.
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| Carnival Time |
[19 Jan 2008|11:45am] |
Since my last update, I've played a "jazz funeral" parade for a dog... (If one of your thoughts when your beloved dog dies is to get a brass band to parade around a circuit of your dog's favorite neighborhood places while inviting friends to dance in the streets in your dog's honor, you might be a New Orleanian. I think this city can get more life out of a dead dog than some places manage from a year of holidays.) There have already been few early Carnival celebrations, but this evening is the Krewe du Vieux parade, the first sizable parade in the city's Carnival calendar and always a highlight.
A sneak preview pic:
Float: David Vitter's Family Values Meal
Hee hee....
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| Happy New Year |
[30 Dec 2007|08:28am] |
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| Holiday Cheer |
[23 Dec 2007|06:25pm] |
Happy Holidays!
Santa hands out Mardi Gras beads at a neighborhood party in the Esplanade Ridge section of New Orleans.
The big news of holiday cheer around my section of the city: The oldest streetcar line is back to it's original destination, as the St. Charles line has reopened up to the Riverbend at Carrollton.
Photo from earlier today
Yay, Progress! We've made it back to the 1830s! Or, they're electric, so the 1890s I guess!
I'll believe we've made it back as far as the 1990s when recycling returns.
Merry Kid Ory's Birthday to everyone! Or Solstice, Christmas, Kwaanza, Mister Binglemas, or whatever you celebrate!
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| Wave your bagette: It's Po-Boy Fest! |
[20 Nov 2007|12:17pm] |
Sunday was the first ever "Po-Boy Fest" on Oak Street here in the Carrollton section of New Orleans.
Three blocks of Oak Street were blocked off, with music stages at both ends, food and drink tents between, along with children's games (including "FEMA Bucket Toss" and "Shopping at K&B") and arts & crafts.
It was quite a success-- more so than the organizers expected, with substantial crowds and places running out of things. They plan to do it again next year spread in a larger area.
My favorite New Orleans moment in the Festival:
( Short description with 5 more pix (also posted at nola_photos) )
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| Links: obits, obsolete audio |
[20 Nov 2007|11:17am] |
Two short musical obits I posted elsewhere on LiveJournal:
John Arpin, amazing ragtime pianist
Doc Paulin, trumpeter bandleader; over 100 years old (he may never have been sure when he was born himself).
Speaking of things musical and dating back more than a century:
Via ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) keeper1st: Recording and playing back a ragtime piano performance on pre-1903 style phonograph cylinder YouTube video
And for more video of old audio technology, check out a way nifty film clip of Duke Ellington making a record in 1937
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![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c2/L9WardBargeBusLong.jpg/400px-L9WardBargeBusLong.jpg")