Ron's Log

Flickr Photos of Freeway Collapse

Photos of the collapse of the section of highway in Oakland seem to be being tagged with 880, 580, MacArthur Maze and/or Overpass Collapse.

Bill Moyers & Jon Stewart

You haven't caught me linking to Bill Moyers before, but here he's got a good interview of Jon Stewart. Warning: I think PBS.org uses a two-cycle lawn mower engine to power their videos, so select the small version, regardless of how fabulous your internet connection is, and allow yourself a half hour to watch it through. Trying to pause it or to go to another window or task is just going to hang everything.

Shootings At The Ward Parkway Mall

My main interest in this is that the Ward Parkway Mall in Kansas City, Missouri, was the first of the now-ubiquitous enclosed malls built near me. It must have been built in the mid-sixties, before they had the formula totally resolved. It did have two anchor stores, J.C. Penney and Montgomery Wards, and while Wards was at the north end, Penney's was not all the way at the south end, so you had a sort of dead south stub, plus they had this odd little extrusion to the side where they put small shops. You had to go down a set of escalators to get there and they called it the "Lincoln Mall." I'm sure they've done away with that now, but for awhile that was where the local branch of the county library was (along with the Hickory Farms store).

So anyway, the news from this shooting is that it seems that Target now occupies the Montgomery Wards space, Dillards is still at the south end (a third anchor store appended to the south end), and I'm sure J.C. Penney's left years ago. Probably replaced by a Big Lots, or something. The cinemaplex used to be two screens in the north end when I lived there. Now I guess it's more, and somewhere else.

Here's a straightforward news account.

Mosqueda

I won't be the first to suggest that soon the conspiracy nuts will be all over the place asking "Why, if it was a gasoline tanker truck can we find no remains of the truck?"

"No sign of the truck remains at the scene. One Caltrans worker there early this morning held up his thumb and forefinger an inch apart to describe how big the tanker is now."

And then there will be the real nut cases who point out that the truck driver's name is a concatenation of "mosque" and "qaeda."

Monday In An Office Cubicle?

Get your headphones. Via Good Evening (THE John Hodgman), via The Sound Of Young America, here is Brass Eye, a British television series from some time before the re-unification of Germany, I guess. Episode one, Animals had me laughing out loud, even though I'm all by my lonesome in my bedroom as I watch it.

Episode two.

Episode three.

Episode four.

Episode five.

Episode six.

And an elusive episode seven, which seems to deal with "paedophilia."

Possibly can be bought here on DVD in PAL format.

Solar Powered Palmwood?

In this press release from Landmark Properties, the developer of Palmwood, is the claim that Palmwood "will be the first master-planned community in the world to be completely powered by solar energy." Completely solar powered? So no need to build any access to the power grid and no need for gas lines or propane deliveries?

Possibly due to an editing error the press release failed to mention the streets in Palmwood will be lined with candy trees, the golf courses will have taps dispensing California wine on every green, and trained hummingbirds will hum recognizable tunes while visiting the flowers of the development.

Foods Named For People

A long list of food, drinks and fruits named for people. Some are obvious (Napoleon Brandy), others less so, like German chocolate cake. Some surprising: "Salisbury steak - Dr. James H. Salisbury (1823–1905), early U.S. health food advocate, created this dish and advised his patients to eat it three times a day, while limiting their intake of 'poisonous' vegetables and starches."

If nothing else, this list will get your appetite going and inspire you to try some new dish.

Gravel

This guy's interesting.

When you check out his bio (he was born in Springfield, Mass.) you'll see he left the Senate in 1981 and after that things are pretty vague. Where's he been? He answers that in this video where he says that for ten years he lived "under a rock!"

Half Million Views

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