First Looks category archive

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).

At Philly Weekly.

Earlier excavations there (Gesher Benot Ya’aqov archaeological site in Israel–ed.), carried out under the direction of Prof. Naama Goren-Inbar of the Institute of Archaeology, showed that the occupants of the site – who are identified as being part of the Acheulian culture that arose in Africa about 1.6 million years ago — had mastered fire-making ability as long as 790,000 years ago. This revelation pushed back previously accepted dates for man’s fire-making ability by a half-million years.

Archaeologists theorize that it was the ability to make fire that gave early humans the courage and means to migrate to less hospitable climes.

This was substantially before 4004 BC (or BCE if you are hung up on PC).

Afterthought: If God didn’t believe in science, he wouldn’t have given us carbon-14 dating.

The Republican Party was feeling down and out and depressed. It was disgusted at the debauchery around it.

Horrors! Gay folks wanting to leave the closet where they rightfully belong. Women wanting to be not-barefoot and not-pregnant-all-the-time. Teenagers learning about sex before the baby comes.

Men peeing sitting down!

It just wasn’t like it used to be back in the good ole 1950s 1940s 1890s Republican daydream of what life used to be like.

Against its predilections, the Party decided to take a chance on visiting a shrink.

This wasn’t one of your new, up-to-date cognitive therapists. This was an old line Freudian. Anything after 1950 was far too cutting edge for the Republican Party.

So the Republican Party settled down on the couch. The shrink, being an old-line Freudian, decided to start with the Rorschach test.

He held up an inkblot. “What does this remind you of?” he asked.

“Sex,” answered the Republican Party.

He held of another inkblot. “What does this remind you of?” he asked.

“Sex,” answered the Republican Party.

This went on until the entire library of inkblots was exhausted.

After a long pause, the shrink stroked his goatee (I said he was an old-line Freudian) and said, “I think you are obsessed with sex.”

“Me!” screamed the Republican Party, jumping off the couch.

Wait for It

The comments to this are just priceless.

In this week’s column.

Tonight and every Tuesday, Triumph Brewing Company, 2nd and Chestnut, Philadelphia, Pa., 6 p. m.

It’s safe to attend. I won’t be able to make it.