RIP

Stephen Schneider has passed.

Bye Bye Bytie

I find this article on the digital Rushdie archives distressing. Here I thought I was bequeathing a legacy of photos and half-baked thoughts to my great, great grandchildren, but I’ll I’m leaving them is a digital attic that they’ll never look through.

Tweetle Dum

Count me as bummed. Too cool, I thought last week, that Jürgen Habermas is on Twitter. I don’t know anything about twitter, but if “der grösse Jot” is on Twitter, it may well be worth signing up for an account. Too bad it’s been revealed as a big hoax.

Huey, Dewey, and Louie

Freeman Lowell is friggin’ weeping at the sad state of affairs for Biosphere II. Photographer Noah Sheldon offers this nice collection of images sixteen years after Hobbes came to life. Nice commentary here.

Wondering what to do this cold Sunday? Snuggle in for a short orbit around Saturn, that’s what.

“On Earth, everywhere you go, the temperature is 75 degrees. Everything is the same; all the people are exactly the same. Now what kind of life is that?”

Tainted Meat

A very nice bit of video reporting from the New York Times:

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/10/03/health/1247464978948/tainted-meat.html

Here’s the accompanying article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/health/04meat.html?_r=1

“I ask myself every day, ‘Why me?’ and ‘Why from a hamburger?’ ”Ms. Smith said. In the simplest terms, she ran out of luck in a food-safety game of chance whose rules and risks are not widely known.

Disturbing.

Your Mother’s Uncle

Well, my mother’s uncle Doug, actually — which I guess is my great uncle, something-something removed — has just passed away.  He was a pretty influential theater critic in New York.  Here are his obits.  I didn’t really know him at all, though I do know his two sons, who are related to me in some obscure, rhizomatic way.  Douglas Watt lived a productive and fruitful life, which you can read about for a few points of relative interest.  (Hah!  I slay me.)

Rest in Peace.

Douglas Watt in the New Yorker.

Douglas Watt in the New York Times.