Posted 11:50 PM by Angie Schultz

Beware the Purple Swirly!

UPDATE: Now with an image link to the dreaded purple swirly.

By the way, we're fairly confident that the hurricane was a non-event in our part of town. Laurence Simon, who lives well east of us, has been blogging up a storm (har), and reports that it was all a big nothin' where he was. (Stirring portapotty post linked there, by the way.)

Niles noticed that, in the satellite image the cable news networks have been showing, the purple swirly part of the hurricane never got west of Galveston Bay. If I could, I'd post the storm total precipitation map, which shows that the precipitation drops sharply just east of I-45 (the end of which runs along the west side of Galveston Bay). East of 45, they got something like 2-4 inches of rain; about ten miles to the west, there was less than an inch. In other words, the purple swirly bit of the hurricane packs the most punch. Fear it!

Niles called our answering machine today and it picked up, meaning that we still have phone and power.

So, given the testimonies of those sources, we figure we got off pretty light at home. I look forward to unwrapping everything we wrapped in plastic (the TV, the computers, the windows), and putting everything back in its place. I imagine, though, that will be little items that were tucked away in "safe" places that we'll never find again.

Posted 11:27 PM by Angie Schultz

Disasters, Natural and Otherwise

Fleeing the cyclone tyranny...hee hee, can't get enough of that...hapless refugees Angie and Niles drive a ragtag, fugitive rental car on a lonely quest: to see as much of the area as possible before returning home.

Our original plan, such as it was, was to drive the 450 miles to Tulsa, which was carefully chosen on the basis of being the location of the nearest hotel room Niles could find. I almost wish we'd gone there instead. Then there'd be no temptation to run around and see the exciting countryside, and we could spend the time in the hotel room, sleeping and watching the DVDs we brought and blogging and driving each other insane. Instead we feel compelled to get out and look around.

It's very beautiful here. I'm getting homesick for Silicon Valley, which is kind of like Issaquah, where we're staying. I'd move here. It's nice and cool and pretty and there are never any natural disasters, ever.

In other news, we went to Mt. St. Helens today...

What?

Speaking of things disappearing without a trace, my blog seems to be missing. All I get when I load the URL is some restful white space, which many would count as an improvement, I'm sure. Perhaps it's blown itself to bits and is even now covering Wonkette, say, with three feet of fine, powdery, ash. I'd like to think that, anyway.

UPDATE: Well, that fixed it. Wonkette is safe. For now.

Posted 7:03 PM by Angie Schultz

You Don't Have to Live Like a Refugee

Which in my case means sitting in a cool, comfy hotel room with a cold beverage by my side, blogging away and listening to Niles growl "Die, Geraldo! Die!" at the TV.

Greetings from beautiful, sunny Seattle. I don't know what the weather is usually like here, but today it was glorious, and the landscape is gorgeous -- lush with a thousand shades of green and the occasional gold and scarlet. And it's cold. God, it feels good.

We had planned to drive the 450 miles to Tulsa (which was the nearest place with hotel rooms, according to the web). But then we saw that people were taking 11 hours to get to Austin (150 miles away), and some were running out of gas on the highway, and some were giving up and coming home. So Niles got the bright idea to see if we could get a flight out on his frequent flyer miles. To my great surprise, this was possible (at about ten hours notice), and we chose Seattle, based on the facts that a) we had not been here before, and b) there were seats available.

We stayed up all night preparing the apartment and left at 4:30 am for our 7:50 am flight. I thought we'd left it too long. But there was hardly a soul on the highways. I-45, jammed earlier in the day, was empty. We did see a lot of cars abandoned on the shoulder of the road -- maybe a couple dozen. These presumably ran out of gas.

The airport was packed. I heard a man behind me tell someone that he was on his third flight -- he'd been given two others which had then been cancelled. He said another woman in line had been trying since 2am (this was at about six). They were cancelling connecting flights (I assume that meant connecting through Houston). We were fortunate that we were actually able to leave.

We got up to our gate, and there was only one business open in the food court -- the Starbucks -- and there was an enormous line. It was like the last cappucino out of Saigon. We weren't particularly hungry, so we passed. After all, our flight had a snack -- probably a pastry or something. (Cue the ominous music.)

Well, when we were nearly ready to leave, we heard the flight attendants saying that the plane hadn't been catered, and probably was not going to be: no snack, no soft drinks, no water -- not even cups for the water in the bathroom sinks. The flight attendants said they thought there was one catering truck and three employees working that day. We saw the truck servicing an aircraft by the side of ours, and Niles and I talked about organizing a posse to rustle us up some water. Apparently the flight attendants took care of that, because one of them came aft with a case of water and some ice, and we at least had a little water for the flight. Very little. I'm still parched, twelve hours later.

It was just like the hardships of the pioneers! Except I'm pretty sure the pioneers didn't get free headsets in compensation.

Once I woke from my doze to find a man, not dressed as a flight attendant, coming through the aisle handing out something. He turned out to be a passenger who had a bag of Dove chocolate candies -- kinda like Kisses -- that he was sharing with the plane. He came by again toward the end.

Speaking of dozing: I had about three hours of sleep Wednesday night, and no hours of sleep Thursday night, and couldn't sleep on the plane. I'm in hell.

We're keeping our eye on the weather radar, and so far it looks OK in our part of Houston, though Hurricane Rita has yet to make landfall.

Hurricane Greta, however, has landed and is mercilessly punishing Houston, but I am too tired to make further use of this joke.

Oh! Oh! Speaking of jokes, I'll just point out that we are fleeing the cyclone tyranny. Har! Thought that one up myself, could you tell?

Posted 8:19 PM by Angie Schultz

Bugging Out

It looks as if we will be bugging out ahead of Rita. We live 60 or 70 miles inland, and I don't expect flooding, but I worry that winds will knock the power out and we'll be stuck for a while with no power and no A/C and maybe no sewers, which would be dire.

I have had trouble getting Niles -- who has the only car -- to take this emergency seriously. He seems to think we're the only ones in the Houston area who might be thinking of leaving, so we can wait until the last minute.

We have new neighbors downstairs. They're from Mississippi. Guess why they came here.

Posted 11:51 AM by Angie Schultz

Avast, Ye Bilge Rats, and Take Heed

Arr! It be September 19, and you lubbers know what that means. Aye, maties: it's Talk Like A Pirate Day, one 'o me favorite holidays. Ye'll see that the Pirate Crew have a book out, their second, apparently. It be named Pirattitude!: So you Wannna Be a Pirate? : Here's How! Arr, I don't need no bleedin' instruction manuals, but if ye do, there's one. Contains an introduction by their close personal mate, Dave "Arr!" Barry.

Who, by the way, has his own blog, and will be observin' the day, like the black-hearted salty dog he is. Start here, blast ye, and page forward through the 19th. Or, er (errrr!), or else!

Now, ye may be thinkin' that there are no pirates these dull days, but ye'd be wrong. Take a squint at the Worldwide Threat to Shipping and the Weekly Piracy Report. Arrr, Weakly Piracy Report, they oughts to call it. Feast your eyes on this nonsense:

08.09.2005 at 2235 UTC in position 17:52.8N - 077:06.2W, Port old harbour, Jamaica.
Four robbers armed with knives and hooks boarded a tanker moored to buoy. Alert crew raised alarm and robbers escaped empty handed in an unlit speedboat.

29.07.2005 at Jakarta anchorage, Indonesia.
Four robbers boarded a bulk carrier. Alert crew raised alarm and robbers escaped empty handed.

Did ye ever see such lubberliness in all yer puff? O'course, they don't always get away empty-handed. They usually manages to take "ship's stores", whatever those may be. D'ye suppose the ships are storin' gold 'n silver? Arrr, no, beans 'n bacon more like. Most darin' pirate feat I heared of recently was in Chiny, or there'bouts, where they stole a whole ship full of tin, I b'lieve it was. spit Tin, I asks ye. What be the world come to these days?

This pirate argot be fun, but it's not the Caribbean cruise ye might imagine. It be hard to talk in a true pirate voice, especially for a squeakin' wench, and it be hard to write, and I reckon it's even harder to read. Arr.

In the next week, I hopes, I'll be blatherin' about the days when writers rejoiced in dialect, and the readers could like it or be damned. In plainer speech, I got a heap o' Kipling to tell ye about.

Afore that, though, we got a bad movie to gut and leave fer dead. I'd ha' done it today, but ye don't want to be readin' about coronal mass ejections in pirate talk. Arrr, sounds a bit dirty, don't it?

Until then, be ye recollectin' the wise words of Dr. Clayton Forrester: Look, you bombastic biscuit boy, any more of this faux Dead End Kids patois, and I'll teach you the real meaning of lexiphanicism!

Arr.

Posted 7:37 PM by Angie Schultz

Ending Your Career in Journalism

In one episode of the sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati ("Dear Liar", March, 1982), Bailey Quarters is doing a news report on a children's clinic. Overwhelmed by what she sees there, and uncertain how to proceed, she makes up a story about a little boy named Bobby, who is a "composite" of the patients. She types it up and leaves it on her desk, where newsman Les Nessman finds it. He thinks it's so good that he reads it on the air, pretending to have written it himself. Hilarity ensues.

In the aftermath, Bailey offers to quit, citing a similar case at the Washington Post. Andy Travis, the program director, tells her to forget it, saying, "There's Washington Post ethics, and then there's WKRP ethics," clearly implying that the latter are not quite as stringent as the former.

Well, that was the case twenty-three years ago, anyway. I thought of Andy and Bailey when I read this story over at LGF. Jill Bandes, a columnist for the Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was fired over a column she wrote supporting racial profiling.

She used some rather strong language and imagery...

I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport.

...and went on to say: And Arab students at UNC don't seem to think that's such a bad idea. She quoted two students and a professor as supporting racial profiling.

Naturally this provoked an outcry, and Bandes was promptly fired. Her editor, Chris Coletta, explains her dismissal like this:

I fired her because she strung together quotes out of context. She took sources' words out of context. She misled those sources when she conducted interviews.

...

This is the bottom line: Bandes told the three people quoted in her column -- students Sherief Khaki and Muhammad Salameh, as well as professor Nasser Isleem -- that she was writing an article about Arab-American relations in a post-9/11 world.

That's not what happened; that's a major problem.

Racial profiling was, in fact, part of their conversation. But it wasn't their entire conversation. At no point did Khaki, Salameh or Nasser ever think the only quotes Bandes would use would be their comments on the subject.

...

Now, I don't know if Bandes simply misrepresented herself or whether she intentionally fudged things when she talked to her sources. But either way, when I talked to all three of them Wednesday, they told me they felt not only lied to, but betrayed.

None of them support racial profiling. None of them want Arabs to get "sexed up" as they go through the airport. And none of them thought Bandes would use their words the way she did -- callously and without regard for their actual meaning.

There's some confusion here. Did the people quoted really say they weren't bothered by racial profiling? Bandes's article clearly states this. If they were just expressing a willingness to put up with random, intrusive searches, then she has certainly quoted them out of context and deserves to be disciplined, at the very least. But Professor Iseem is quoted as saying, "There were Muslims in those buildings [i.e. the WTC], too." Which seems to indicate he knew Bandes was asking about racial profiling.

If that's the case, then Bandes's crime is in making her case using stronger language than the people she quoted. Her language is very strong; sounds like she's of the write-to-shock school of journalism. Coletta had a chance to tone down the language before publication, and he didn't. Now he's in the middle of a shitstorm, so he cobbles up this "out of context" excuse to fire Bandes.

It's always amusing to see a university newspaper piously adhere to standards of journalistic ethics that are completely unknown at larger organizations. Imagine sources expecting to approve of the way a big-time reporter uses their quotes. Imagine them being miffed that a conversation they thought was going to be about one thing was actually about another (say, a conversation about welfare reform that actually was about Valerie Plame).

I hope editor Coletta is not set on a journalism career, because his tender regard for journalistic ethics is not shared by the major media. Take for example the case of Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi, covering the Cindy Sheehan circus in Crawford:

Within five minutes I was talking to store owner Bill Johnson, a fanatical Bush devotee with a striking resemblance to frozen-sausage king Jimmy Dean. I introduced myself as a Fox TV booker named Larry Weinblatt and told Bill I wanted to bring Sean Hannity down to do a whole show with Sean standing between the Ten Commandments tablets. Bill was all over the idea.

"We want to have that kind of godlike effect," I said.

"Right," Bill said, nodding.

"Secondly, Sean, when he travels," I said, "he brings his own Nautilus equipment. He pumps iron before he goes on."

"Does he really?"

"Yeah," I said. "We get a lot of demonstrators when Sean does his show, and so what he likes to do, when he finishes the broadcast, he takes his shirt off and flexes his muscles for the crowd. You know, rrrr. . ."

"Is he really built like that?"

"Oh, man, he's huge," I said.

See there? That's big-journalism ethics for you. I hope it's not too late for Coletta to switch to the philosophy department.