News – Page 3 – p i x e l s c r i b b l e s

Satellite images of Katrina damage

I have to admit, what with dealing with losing all my possessions and trying to adjust to living with the in-laws and getting used to my new job, I haven’t been extraordinarily attentive to the situation in the Gulf. It’s been in my periphery–I was aware on an academic level that things were terrible, but I had never truly comprehended.

This totally blew my mind.

Just look at that. Zoom in on it. The houses are like little islands in a sea. Look at the bridge surfacing out of the lake that is New Orleans, then slipping back under the water.

It’s horrific.

(And yes, it is much worse than what I’ve been through, as several people have mentioned.)

I have a friend who was living in Biloxi, MS last I heard. I don’t know what the situation is in that city, or even if she is still there. Margaret, I have no idea if you ever read this thing, but if you’re out there I’d appreciate a note–I’ve lost your email address.

A few more news items

Lynda Carter talks about her feelings towards acting in Sky High, Disney’s blatant rip-off of Robert Kirkman‘s Invincible. (Okay, I don’t know that it’s a rip-off, but you have to admit the setup is similar, and anyway Kirkman’s married to my sister-in-law’s best friend, so you know where my loyalties lie.)

Somebody’s planting trees! Secretly!

Blondie is set to celebrate 75 years of Dagwood sandwiches. Well, sort of. Actually, Dagwood wasn’t a major character until he and Blondie fell in love in 1932. So…73 years of Dagwood sandwiches, we can assume.

When the strip debuted on September 8, 1930, its heroine was Blondie Boopadoop, who was pretty and single. Dagwood was the playboy son of a railroad tycoon and one of her several boyfriends.

Blondie was popular at first but interest in a strip about rich characters declined as the Depression spread.

In 1932, Chic Young had Blondie and Dagwood fall in love. They were married in 1933, but Dagwood’s parents disapproved of Blondie and disinherited him, forcing him to go to work and live a middle class life.

Boopadoop = Best. Name. Ever.

Local officials want to tax already cripplingly expensive downtown Augusta real estate in order to pay for cleanup and improvement efforts. Good idea? Bad idea? I have no idea, myself.

"The couple said they are slightly irked at hospital staff…" Yeah, I would be too.

Calif. Woman Delivers Baby Boy in Toilet

The couple, Leah and Richard Robles Jr., said they spent five hours at Presbyterian Intercommunity Hospital on July 9 but went home after they were told she was not ready to deliver. Fifty minutes after arriving home, Leah had the baby in the toilet after feeling the urge to use the restroom.

The baby, Richard Robles III, is healthy.

You know, Mom almost had AJ in the toilet. But she was at least at the hospital. :>

A very productive lady

Great-Grandmother Gives Birth to Twins

Christian Kaczur Hart and Diana Rose Angelina, conceived through in vitro fertilization, were born April 20 at UAB Hospital in Birmingham four weeks premature. Swain and her husband, Jay, brought the babies home to Fort Payne on Friday.

The couple, whose youngest child, Jimmy, is 6, said they did not want Jimmy to grow up as an only child.

“There are lots of options out there for older women like me,” Rosee Swain said. “And women shouldn’t give up hope without exploring all their options.”

In addition to the twins and Jimmy, the Swains have two grown children; two other children are deceased. They have six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

From the article, it sounds like the twins were born into a good family. I hope all goes well for them. I personally can’t imagine having to deal with teenagers at the age of 75, but you never know what you can do until you try, I suppose.

Journalism, and how to fund things without advertising

Interestingly enough, Den Beste recently wrote about the decay of journalism in the United States…I just read his piece.

I don’t know how I would solve the problem either, but I think turning all news organizations into nonprofits would be a good start. Of course, I’m not sure how this would be accomplished while allowing the organizations access to the technology and travel they need to get the story. I hesitate to say that they should be government subsidized, but I’m not sure that advertisers would approach them in the same way if they were nonprofit…and to be honest, I don’t think the news should have advertisements, and this change would certainly destroy their budgets.

It’s gotten to the point where I really just hate advertisements of all kinds. With the Internet, I can pretty much find whatever I need, via informative websites or word-of-mouth on forums or from friends. I can’t actually remember ever seeing an ad, thinking “Hey, I could use that!” and then buying something.

Most of the time I ignore ads completely. I throw away the coupon books and flyers we get in the mail, too. Coupons are a huge scam; they give you discounts on things you didn’t want in the first place. You’re not saving money, you’re wasting it on stuff that clutters up your house, or food that will sit and rot in the fridge because “it was such a great deal!” and yet no one wants to eat it.

I don’t need to even start on how annoying pop-up ads and spam are.

For some time now I’ve been thinking that advertising needs to be eliminated, or at the very least transformed. But I’m not entirely sure how, and that is why I can’t solidly recommend a way to take advertising out of the news.

I’ll probably post more about this later, but my lunch break is over now, so…ta-ta!

Yet another reason why politics and the media suck ass.

This is the story of a young woman who was lied about by reporters wanting a story and politicians hoping to smear John Kerry. It is also an example of why I would never go into politics.

There’s an interesting quote towards the end:

I started out as an ambitious young woman inspired by politics and the media. I’ve ended up disenchanted with both. If I had been an ambitious young man, this story would not have happened.

She’s right.

(I should mention that I had never heard of this story until I read this article. Am I just really out of it, or was this not as big as it seems?)

Newness

I’ve added a comments feature to this page, using BlogKomm. (Who knew?) And so, from now on, I won’t be updating my LiveJournal or Xanga sites. They will, like my unknown Blog-City account, fade into obscurity and nothingness.

I’m going to try to move the comments from both sites over to this site eventually. For now my main goal is to redesign this page to make it look a little nicer, and to make the comments fit better. I also need to add my new RSS (Atom) feed as a link on this site.

The main reason I’m posting now is because I’ve started using Bloglines to subscribe to pretty much everything I read…and through Bloglines I’ve been reading a lot more news. Because of that, I have six links I want to share…so here they are!

U.S. county bans all marriages
Gay marriage a thorny issue for reporters in terms of writing objectively and fairly
Actress gaffe highlights pension problems (this is a funny Japanese news story)
Pierce Brosnan may not be Bond anymore; odds on who will replace him
Publicity for Spider-Man 3 begins before Spider-Man 2 even hits theaters…and why not?
Group suspends terror threats to France “while it improves its ability to carry them out”. France deserves terrorists like these ;>

And that’s about it. I’m sure I’ll find more links soon though…Bloglines is going to suck my life away, I just know it.

Life on Mars

This has fueled silly, half-baked science fiction tangents all afternoon. Among the questionable things I’ve said:

“See, humans used to live on Mars, until we destroyed the environment there and had to move to a new planet, Earth. It’s so obvious! This is why humans are (apparently) the only intelligent life on this world. Earth is at an earlier stage than Mars. Don’t you see? When we came here we lost our old technology due to being unable to refine metal with the equipment we had, and now our extraterrestrial life lives on only in myths and legends that have become severely warped over time!”
“Hey, I could write a novel about my crazy speculations in (1)!”

Don’t worry, though…I don’t have it in me to write a novel. At least not yet :P