I’ve been watching this webcam (which seems to be getting a lot of hits–see also these traffic cameras showing region highways) that’s keeping an eye on Bourbon Street in New Orleans.  Things look empty and quiet there now, as of 8:46 pm.  But, of course, it won’t be like that for long.    There is some streaming tv you can view as well.  More links and such available on this Metafilter thread.

I’ve always wanted to visit New Orleans.  Now it’s looking as if I may never get the chance.  Here’s hoping for the best for the city and the region and everyone in the path of Katrina, as it  comes ashore this evening and tomorrow.

Well, it’s the beginning of the semester, and I’ve been busy.  But let me emerge from the woodwork just long enough to briefly bemoan the loss of a really excellent product–the late great Rio Karma.  The Karma’s successor products, poised for release, will now never make it to market.

Now, while no reader of tdq is especially likely to care, the company that produced what is by far the best digital audio player available has today gone out of business.  It’s frustrating, becuase hardly anyone even knew what a Rio Karma was.  And it’s frustrating not only because as in the contest bewteen vhs and beta the techincally inferior product was bested by marketing muscle and savvy, but becuase the ascendency of the iPod is the ascendency of Apple’s closed source and oppressive DRM model of software/hardware/music, that tries to lock customers into the apple brand by pushing them to buy music in formats that play only on apple’s music players.

The Rio Karma was notably superior to the iPod in just about every respect:

+it plays ogg vorbis (open source; better sound quality/smaller file size), as well as FLAC (lossless open source compression)

+Better sound quality, plus a five band parametric equalizer with adjustable bandwidths.

+And most of all, that it has true gapless playback. 

This last item, gapless, has become sort of important to me, and it would now be annoying to me to listen to (for example) classical music with little gaps in between each mp3 track.  It just seems weird that other players can’t manage to play an album back without inserting gaps between each track even when the tracks are supposed to be connected.

Ok, finally, what really gets me is the constant insistance by iPod fans on the brilliance of the iPod design.  From a purely aesthetic standpoint, the iPod does have a clean futuristic look.  But I’ve nver been overwhelmed by the wonders of the clickwheel.  To me, it seems awkward.  I mean, just watch people using their iPods–everyone uses two hands, because it’s really hard to use the thing one-handed.  It’s designed to look pretty, and not to be really functional.  The Karma can (unless you are really tiny-handed) be easily operated with just one hand.

Anyway, I just might try and buy a spare Karma, as I wait for the rest of the digital players to achieve the feature set the Karma managed a couple years ago.  (The Cowon x5/m5 players look promising but still fall short.)  If you too are thinking about a Karma, you’d better hurry, since now that Rio is closing, the supply of remaining Karmas (you can find them cheap now–maybe $160 on Ebay), will soon be depleted, and you will find yourself lost in a world without Karma. 

Unless you enjoy this sort of thing.  (.wmv file).

(more info)

Looks like another big union project.  I like the sound of it.  (If history is to be our guide, it’s likely to pay off hansomely for some).

Speaking (briefly) of labor, Zwichenzug today points the way to Toby Higbie’s Blog.  Pretty cool stuff.

These machines are never sated.

You know what’s annoying?  When things I think are words turn out not to be.  (see previous).

Your hear people use the world “overvaluting” from time to time.  Which seems like sort of a dumb word.  Because of the way it’s used, one always assumes it’s a corruption of “overvaunting.”  But now I find (googling on a dark suspicion) that “overvaunting” is even less of a word than its supposed corruption!

Grrr.

[Edit: ok, talking this over just now with a friend, I noticed that the OED does indeed include an entry for “overvault”: to be, well,  a vault-like thing overhead.  Or also to jump over something: “He overvaulted the couch,” I suppose.

But when you google the term, you can see that it’s most often used in the sense of “overvaunt,” which is a word that continues not to exist, as per my initial complaint.]

I was chatting with a friend the other day, about rhetoric and the web.  I’ve been putting together my syllabus, and wondering what to teach.  Wondering what sort of stuff ought to be on the syllabus in a course called “rhetoric” but really devoted to rhetoric in a quite limited sense of its use in the production of academic argument.

The real exercise of rhetoric in academic contexts can seem kind of limited or iffy, for a number of reasons.  And I was asking my friend whether rhetoric might be changing in ways that are sort of difficult recognize and acknowledge in classes founded on older notions of persuasion and argument. 

The thesis is this: Traditional instruction in rhetoric or composition assumes an audience acquired by virtue of authority.  You’re writing as the author of book, or for a magazine, or in a letter to the editor.  You want to look good in public, and conform to the norms that will get you into print.

But things are changing, of course.  When any slacker with access to the internet can “publish” to his five buddies, or to hundreds of thousands daily, what gains importance is the need to get attention.  Now, clearly here at TDQ we do not work feverishly for massive readership–but browsing the net, one can generally feel a deep and furious straining for attention.  Millions of voices fight for the light of reader eyes, such that one’s computer screen sometimes feels like the glass wall of a badly tended terrarium, with a forest of leaves and shoots pressing and twining up against the underside of the screen.

And who thrives in this situation?  Who scores the eyeballs?  It’s not the one’s following the rules in the New Bedford Handbook, I’m afraid.  Witness this article in today’s New York Times, on Dan Lee, AKA Rude Pundit.  And remember fuckthesouth?  And Ann Coulter?  The whole panoply of screaming green things, pressed up against the glass?  Punchy obscene language, self-dramatization, and a willingness give egregious offense characterize a lot of what takes root on the web.  What if anything should this mean for teachers of writing?  (And what does it mean that I like lots of bloggers picked Ebert’s review of Deuce Bigalow to link to here at tdq?)

I’ll be putting on my syllabus some essays by one such screamer, who I’ve mentioned here before.  Gary Breecher, aka Warnerd makes some excellent points in this essay, on “American Traitor” Victor Hanson while engaging in elaborate gestures of self-presentation and issuing clever invective (you might not be able to read Hanson’s traitorous column without registering w/the Fresno Bee).  Moreover, his essay keeps an eye on the difference between a suspect kind of old-fashioned academic authority, and the kind that one established on the net (though a few academics like to play this game as well).

While I won’t be encouraging my students to turn in “FucktheSouth” as a research paper, I do hope that putting some of this sort of stuff on the syllabus occasions some useful discussion, particularly about what makes for vigorous prose, and how far this can be achieved in an academic context.

Too busy today to write much—but not too busy to watch (multitasking) tonight’s episode of PBS’s History Detectives.  I cannot let the evening pass without noting my entire fascination with and dear love for this show.  It’s exactly what I used to wish for when watching the comparatively banal Antiques Roadshow—in which the final meaning of each item is disclosed in a ritualized monetary revelation.  The History Detectives, contrawise, tells stories—really interesting stories—every single episode.  As you may know, the idea of the program is to find an item with an unknown but potentially significant past, and try to authenticate, trace, and otherwise contextualize and explain said item.  A few history sleuth hosts  (who seem somehow like mobile intellectualized versions of the Trading Spaces decorators), work for the show–typically each segment follows one of them in their search for the historical Truth.  Which they finally convey to the item’s owner.

Take, for example, the episode I saw tonight.  The show’s final segment, about a birth-control device from the 1800’s, was even better than the first two, spirling out from the device itself (or, actually, from a box which once contained such a device), into a history of birth control and censorship in the the c19 U.S..  Particular attention was paid to the 1873 “Comstock” law prohibiting “obscene” material, including information relating to contraception, the consequences of this law, and the (successful) oppostion to this atrocious law by Margaret Sanger, as well as to the more tragic efforts of some of Sanger’s less-well-known predecessors, notably Ann Lohman.  A disturbing chapter of American history, that draws some interesting connections between speech and sexuality.  And (as the program itself noted, in closing) the Comstock Law not only remains technically on the books, but was expanded in 1997—an expansion of Comstock which could could be the first of many.  Not everyone is pleased.

Some of you have already been privy to some of my thinking on Roger Ebert, who I think has a small tragic significance.  Ebert’s clearly a smart guy, and was used to regard himself as such.  Ironic, then, that as he gained fame and fortune in the 80’s as part of the Siskel/Ebert duo on PBS’s “Sneak Previews,” he simultaneously acquired a reputation as the dumber one of the two–the sentimentalist, given to admiring pretty movies, and the recipient of gentle rebukes from the cerebral Siskel.  Ebert hated hated hated this.  Obviously.

And, so, with Siskel gone, and Ebert ready to make his television comeback, what does Ebert do?  Well, critic after critic comes and guests with the coy Mr. Ebert, each trying more delicately or furiously to maneuver his or her lovely little foot into Ebert’s outstretched glass slipper of fame.

But one by one, he rejects his suitors, except for one.  Even dumber than Jeffery Lyons, Richard Roeper was the perfect anti-Siskel—at last, Ebert would get to play the intellectual half of the dyad.  But of course, things didn’t work out as Ebert planned.  Given to making comments like—”Well, I just didn’t believe these characters,” and  such, Roeper—as Ebert soon realized–was only making him look dumber.  Instead of the brilliant critic, Ebert found himself an exasperated baby-sitter.  Ebert managed to become the intellectual one, at the cost becoming a terribly uninteresting television critic.  A certain poetic justice.

Ebert’s written reviews provide proof (as if it were needed) of how bored and uninspired he is on his television program.  He’s still that brilliant undergraduate editor of the Daily Illini, when he’s alone on the written page. 

Anyhow, you might have a look at a new list of Ebert’s most hated films.  And if you don’t have time for that, you must at least check-out Ebert’s review of Duece Bigalo: Male Gigolo 2. 

[Yes, this is my Saturday night.  Typing blog entries about Roger Ebert while watching Video Diner (always worthwhile—hosted this week by Angie Heaton).  Have you, incidentally, seen Yo La Tengo’s video for “sugarcube”?  The video is a few years old, but was new to me.  Super funny excellent stuff, although I don’t know where, aside from VD, you’d ever be able to watch it.]

[EDIT: I noticed today this interview at Powell’s.com with perennial crush Sarah Vowell, discussing Siskel and Ebert.  Who would say such things now about Ebert and Roper?]

I have to say, I love subways.  Places with secret entrances leading to various unknown destinations.  I’m sure that even if I were an urbanite, my enthusiasm would mostly remain.  Have a look therefore at these pictures of art and architecture from subways around the world.

Since the cool comics are all computer-generated now, you might as well get in on the action.

Here.

Or look at the past masterpieces of others.  For example.  Or, another example.

Supercool points to anyone who makes a strip.  I dare you!

Not that anyone should care in the slightest, but I’ve been managing to run a bit lately.  I’m no superhuman, but I did manage six miles today, which for me is pretty good, especially when its so hot and humid.  I used my new scientifically designed 3-mile loop:

One thing I’m not sure about, is how runners keep hydrated when running longer distances.  I mean, if one runs a marathon, somebody’s handing you water every few miles, but if it’s just you running, how are you supposed to manage this?  I could probably have used a bit of liquid today.  And at what distance does drinking (and, eventually, eating?) while running become something one really needs to do?  Any runners here can perhaps enlighten me as to your own practices.  Or not.

Finally, why is it that water from a garden hose water is always the best of all drinkable things?

. . . give it to me NOW!

So, I ordered a new (used) laptop.  They FedEx’d it on the fifth, and it was supposed to arrive here today (the 9th).  I hung around the department building this afternoon, waiting for its arrival.  But, of course, no computer.  In the evening, the FedEx tracker produced a revised delivery date: the 13th, which is a weekend, so really the 15th.  A week from yesterday.

Now take a look at the FedEx tracker, if you will, and note the progress of my computer from the 6th to the 9th.  Now, I’m sure they’re doing their level best with their non-union labor and all over at FedEx, but wouldn’t it be nice if they could at least move the thing in my general direction?