First Looks category archive

Vet the vendors when buying from the classifieds, either on line or in print..

. . . a 45-year-old man responded to a Craigslist ad of a computer for sale. He was directed to the 3600 block of Stanton Street in East Falls, where at gunpoint he was promptly robbed of $700 and an iPhone.

He was one of several. The mopes were juvies.

I did recently have my first and first successful encounter with Craig’s List–finding a new owner (I found out it’s now called “re-homing”) for one of my dogs.

Triumph Brewing Company, 2nd and Chestnut, Philadelphia, 6 p. Tuesday.

Whether or not I make it depends on whether or not I get the family room painted.

Live charitably.

It seems to me that this arrest is a little over the top.

Elliot Madison, 41, from Queens, had his home raided and was put on $30,000 (£19,000) bail after he and Michael Wallschlaeger, 46, were tracked to the Carefree Inn motel in Pittsburgh during the summit on 24 and 25 September.

The pair were found sitting in front of a bank of laptops and emergency frequency radio scanners. They were wearing headphones and microphones and had many maps and contact numbers in the room.

Official police documents allege the two men used Twitter messages to contact protesters at the summit “and to inform the protesters and groups of the movements and actions of law enforcement”.

Stuff goes on that we don’t want to know about.

Secrecy is the enemy. The plain light of day is the friend.

Sauce for the gander. Elizabeth Day at the Guardian:

Just when they thought it was safe to go back to the office, working mothers were last week given yet another reason to whip themselves with birch branches in an orgy of self-imposed guilt.

It came courtesy of an Institute of Child Health study of more than 12,500 five-year-olds that suggested the children of working women are less active and more likely to eat unhealthy food.

The subsequent reaction was rather predictable.

There was the usual thrown-together media debate between muffin-baking housewives and BlackBerry-wielding career women and the stripped pine kitchens of middle England reverberated with the sound of rustling crisp packets as harassed nannies rapidly emptied the cupboards of junk food

But amid all the fuss there was a conspicuous silence from the nation’s men. Interesting though the findings were, it was striking that there was no comparative evaluation of what impact a working father might have on his children. In fact, the role of the male parent had been quite deliberately ignored: according to Professor Catherine Law, who led the study, there was no need to include them because fathers’ employment levels had not substantially changed whereas the numbers of working mothers had increased dramatically in the last few years.

I’m painting rooms. If you like to paint so I can annoy persons via the innertubes, apply within.

Breakers at Wise Point, Virginia, at the north end of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel.

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Keeping the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel full of clean air and empty of water. Follow the link to read the whole thing and see the slideshow:

The control rooms are the brains of tunnel operations. The facility has two, one at each tunnel. They’re perched on the top floor in two of the four ventilation buildings at the ends of the tunnels.

Quiet and spare, the only clue that they control a major transportation facility is the view out of a window of cars and trucks zipping by below at 55 mph.

From these rooms, operators monitor all aspects of the tunnel with 10 cameras at each tunnel, three computers, and a control panel of buttons, lights and alarms.

When water starts collecting somewhere and pumps start running, a light and alarm are activated and stays on until the controller walks around the desk, stands before the panel and turns it off.

As I pass through the tunnels today, I shall do so with different eyes.

So you think electrical service is a no-brainer, huh? They build their dream house, then found out that it was in no-man’s land:

Stan Blackwell, director of distribution and design for Dominion (Power Company), said the company logged a work order to provide electricity to the home Feb. 16. It discovered and confirmed that the home was in Community Electric Co-op territory within 36 days of that date, he said.

From that point on, the onus was on Community Electric, Penn said.

The problem was discovered seven months ago. Neighbors indicate that they have been willing to provide the required easements from the git-go.

They’ve been living in an RV since June 1 (at which time they had expected to be in their new home).

Supposedly the power was to be turned on by today.

Your non-government bureaucrats at work.

Read about it here.

There’s a neat, non-embeddable video that shows what it takes to get a ginormous aircraft carrier into a slip.

U. S. ammo makers can’t keep up with the demand.

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Down the road a piece things are constricted.

Addendum:

Just a big harmless ole snake.

Noz, Glomarization, and Mithras have all reminded me that this is the fifth anniversary of Drinking Liberally in Philadelphia. It was three years ago this month that I attended my first meeting there. For the first year or so I showed up sporadically, about every four to six weeks, but later became pretty regular, about three weeks a month.

Lately, my attendance has tailed off because my personal life has taken an unexpected and very pleasant turn, but I’ll be there tonight, if only to get away from my own cooking.

Triumph Brewing Company, 2nd and Chestnut (ample meter parking on Front), 6 p. m.

It’s downstairs tonight.

Good food, good drink, good fellowship.

At Philly Weekly, in which he holds his pinky out as he remembers a tea party.

Apparently, it’s the coming thing. A nugget:

Almost one third of the 256 cases studied by the Media Law Resource Center were dismissed by the courts and plaintiffs withdrew 33 cases after filing them. Plaintiffs have to demonstrate a post was an intentional, factual misstatement as well as prove damages, which is one of the “diciest parts” of litigation, Coleman said.

“You’re not going to inadvertently defame someone in the course of describing your lunch or how drunk you were last night or posting photos of cats with silly captions,” said Elizabeth Spiers, a founding editor of Gawker.com. “And that’s 99 percent of blogging.”

According to the article, you may be covered by your homeowner’s policy, unless you make money. In that case, the blog (or twitter or whatever) becomes a commercial enterprise.

The library at the Virginia Wesleyan University is selling off its collection of vinyl albums.

Megan Carpentier speculates at the Guardian about those who yearn for a return to the days when full participation in American society was summed up in the phrase, “free, white, and twenty-one”:

And so you get those who insisted he (Obama) was a Muslim, because Muslims are not Real Americans. You get the Birthers, who insist that Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency can only be the result of a decades-long, international conspiracy. You have the Tea Party folks, who call themselves patriots (and likely called liberals unpatriotic for questioning the Bush adminstration’s policies) calling Obama a fascist, a Communist, a socialist, all inherently un-American ideologies.

And you have folks like Joe Wilson, who decided that a presidency held by an African-American man didn’t deserve the same respect as one held by a white man and used his protected position in the political hierarchy to do what his ideological compatriots at town hall meetings could not: take the usurper, the pretender, the un-real American, as evidenced by the colour of his skin, down just a peg, back to where he supposedly belongs in America’s hierarchy. It could have been any issue: health care, taxes, education reform (and opposition like this has reared up in each case).