The article about an anti-war historian getting accosted by cops sent me thinking back to November of 1999…

Here’s a fairly representational account. At one point the mayor of Seattle declared downtown to be a No-Free-Speech Zone. Like, really and for real.

During the day, it was union marchers, guys on stilts, giant puppets, people dressed as sea turtles, and even loggers sharing the avenue with Earth Firsters in a show of semi-protectionist solidarity. By night time it was cops ‘attacking’ the Capitol Hill neighborhood in a phalanx of tear gas and rubber bullets, taking the conflict outside of downtown.

The image above, by the way, is hardly representational. There was one dumpster that ended up burning at one intersection, away from buildings.

Also, it’s difficult to find a lot of definitive material about the protest, because it happened at a time before ‘blogs. If it were to have happened yesterday, the archives of blogger and xanga and whatever else would be crammed full of images of police spraying people in the face with pepper spray. I couldn’t even find images on indymedia.org, which was the hub of communication for WTO protestors at the time. Link rot and poorly-maintained servers wipe out the history.

I subscribed to baldmike2004, who comes back and asks me why I subscribed without commenting.

So here’s the answer, and I’m making it a general entry because I think it’s sometimes interesting to talk about why we do the things we do.

I’m horribly forgetful. Or more accurately, I don’t so much forget as revert back to ways of thinking which I’ve already thought. So if I encounter a ‘blog I think will be interesting to read some other time, I’ll subscribe to put it on my ‘sites I read’ page, or at the top of my recently subscribed list where I’ll see it.

Eventually, it’ll work its way into the general morass of my perception, and over time the comments might very well start coming forth. I should note that I’m really horrible about not saying hello if I don’t have to, because, well, that’s just how it is.

I don’t think it’s that unusual for people to subscribe without commenting. Lurkerism rears its ugly head… Or doesn’t, as the case may be. I’m OK with people reading my site in whatever fashion, because that’s what it’s for.

This has been a topic over at sean’s xangathingie for the last few posts. Folks might be interested in reading what he has to say about the way people might be using your ‘blog. Here’s the expletive-filled first draft, and the much more calm re-cap, if by ‘calm’ we mean featuring a video of a burning Tickle-Me Elmo doll.

Not just anti-war historians, but anti-war historians being beat up by cops for jaywalking.

I haven’t watched all the videos of the anti-war debate, but it’s pretty interesting. For instance, Staughton Lynd who had urged the AHA to resolve itself against the Vietnam war in 1969, speaking against the Iraq war.

Arnold Schwarzenegger knows which way the wind is blowing. The thing is, I don’t want to make a big deal out of it, and I suggest other lefty-liberal-types don’t either, because then the reactionary right in California will perform a total recall on Arnold!

So with that in mind, I’ll talk about this picture:

Remember back in the ’80s when Gary Trudeau combined Ronald Reagan with Max Headroom in ‘Doonesbury?’ Well, here we have another California actor in politics who’s gone one step further in that direction. Max Schwarzenegger as Jesus at the last supper.

The Geostationary Banana Over Texas.

Perhaps to go along with The Orange Show.

Via BLDGBLOG, which you should be reading anyway.

Update: Ok, so there’s this huge monster comment section here with a bunch of really thinky stuff. And I want to point interested/confused readers to where the real discussion is happening: Over here on CaptainScurvy’s site. Pack a lunch.

Xanga kind of sucks for that kind of discussion, by the way.

59761.

Note that it’s just east of Big Hole National Battlefield. What did we learn there?

I’m coming at this because I want to go skiing at Lost Trail, on the spine of the Bitterroot range. Not so much because I enjoy skiing, but because it would mean going there.

Because I know at least one of my loyal readers will enjoy this: Devil’s Dictionary for the publishing biz.

Via metafilter, I end up at Phonoarchive, which is a Russian site with a zillion MP3 downloads of really good orchestral music. Almost at random I end up listening to the first movement of Bartok’s Music for string instruments, percussion and celesta Sz. 106. Which is lovely. I really appreciate good 20th century orchestral music, and the site has MP3s of everything from Bach to Reich. Check it out, Leonidas: Carmina Burana.

But this got me thinking about the Seattle Symphony, which I’ve never seen. I thought about the time I joked to some friends of mine that we should become intoxicated on illegal narcotics and go to the symphony some time, and almost instantly realized that it was an actual possibility, and that at least one or two of them might think I wasn’t joking.

But it turns out that the symphony’s current season kicks ass. I’m linking to that guy’s blog because while their season might kick ass, their web site is down. And I like the way he’s got it laid out.

For instance, in this Feb. 15 concert:

Rimsky-Korsakov: Russian Easter Overture
Pärt: Tabula Rasa
Sibelius: The Swan of Tuonela
Sibelius: Symphony #7

…’Tabula Rasa’ is marked as ‘polarizing.’ I happen to think it’s wonderful. And maybe especially so under the influence of illegal narcotics. Or something. But seriously: Who wants to go on April 12th and hear this:

Stravinsky: Feu D’artifice
Prokofiev: Piano Concerto #3
Messiaen: L’Ascension
Debussy: La Mer

And since you made it all the way down to the bottom of this entry, you get to hear Art Of Noise deconstruct the Debussy piece just mentioned, from their CD ‘The Seduction Of Claude Debussy:’

PerceptiveTravel.

We like, because it is to travel writing what SmokeLong is to fiction. OK, maybe the articles are a little longer, but they’re typically dense with ideas.

Via: Tranquilo Traveler, who makes me happy because I had forgotten about the term ‘tranquilo’ and then he reminded me.

So I was searching around to see if anyone’s made any good free IPTC/EXIF tagging software since I last looked, but it was not to be. And then I was looking to see if someone had bridged the gap between geotagged photos on flickr.com and Google Earth, but no luck. (Google Earth has some kind of deal with Panoramio at the moment, and I was hoping someone was running a server doing similar stuff for flickr images.)

But! I did find this guy who works at flickr, and is working on their flickr map project. And *he* linked to another project which I think is pretty kewl: SPi-V, a Flash-based panorama viewer, which, it turns out, you can use to display your panoramic flickr images.

Unfortunately, it’s not open source or free. Mostly, panoramic images are used in for-profit applications, like real estate walk-throughs and so forth, so the FieldOfView guys want their cut.

Meanwhile, back in IPTC-land, I managed to get exiv2 to compile. I could do some funky scripting and create a new workflow for myself. The problem: I want too much. I want to batch annotate Pentax PEF files, both from the command line and through viewing a lightbox-type interface. Helas.