From Joshua Clark, a resident of the French Quarter’s daily column “Apocalypse N.O.” in Salon:

Last week, the 10 of us holed up together in the commune formed an organization to start cleaning the Quarter: New Orleanians Eliminating Negative Debris (NO END). Our motto is “Less Weeping, More Sweeping.” In keeping with our motto, we constructed a sign and hung it in front of St. Anthony’s Garden behind the St. Louis Cathedral. In the center of the garden, smack-dab in the center of the French Quarter, stands a 20-foot-high statue of Jesus with his arms stretched high and wide — a city icon known lovingly as “Touchdown Jesus.” The sign, now locally (in)famous, says, “Jesus Swept.”

I really like the whole idea of the iCalendar format. It’s probably second only to RSS as the niftiest format around (though i guess good ol’ HTML should be number 0 on that list). So in that spirit, I just whipped up a calendar of the upcoming shows we know we’re going to in iCal and published it here. (If you’re on a mac, you can just click here to subscribe).

For those of you who care about such things…

After major hardware failures on my work laptop in July, I tried only installing the software I needed for as long as I could hold out, and posted the results of my experiment, a list of my desert island software.

After 4 days on the new mac, here’s my desert island list so far:

• Safari sucks, so Firefox replaced it instantly.
• NetNewsWire, as an RSS reader. (Not free, but probably worth it)
• ecto, superb blogging software (Again, not free, but probably worth it).
• TextWrangler, a pretty nice and free text editor. (If it doesn’t work out, emacs is already installed).

One thing I’ve noticed that’s true of Mac software, and with much else about the platform, there is less choice, but much much higher quality.
For my other needs, so far, I’m using the default Mac software (Mail.app, iTunes, iChat). I’m still exploring iMovie, but it’s not that interesting without a video camera, truth be told; I’m not sure what I’ll do with it once I’ve created my cinematic masterpiece with the dinky 5-second videos I’ve made on my point-and-shoot camera.

iPhoto is OK. Not much better than the built-in stuff in Windows XP. All I really want to do is import stuff, view it at full screen and page through with the arrow keys, and post the good ones to Flickr. I have about 1200 photos that I imported to start with, and it’s already slow.

Dashboard gets a big “so what”. Expose rocks. Windows’ lack of it makes me feel amputated at work.

Still to explore: iCal, iDVD, Automator, and all the rockin’ built-in Unix stuff. I don’t think I’ve ever bought a computer with Perl pre-installed. That’s cool.

I’ve mentioned Turkish novelist Orham Pamuk a couple of times in the blog. Not a huge fan, but I now feel compelled to point out that he may go to jail for 3 years for the “public denigrating of Turkish identity” for his relatively factual comments on the Armenian genocide. This ultimately may jeopardize Turkey’s process of joining the EU. If you agree that this is BS, you can write to Turkish leaders & ambassadors.

I have been resisting the urge to just post links, but I can’t not point to this auction of monkey space pants on eBay. via Boing Boing

It’s offered to your attention the “space pants” for macaque small monkey to wear it during the experimental space flight. This pants has been used for animals (monkeys) experiments in 1950-s – 1960-s in the USSR Institute of Biomedical Problems (IMBP, Moscow). The monkey’s “space pants” are designed with many clasps to fit bigger or smaller monkey. Below are the front and the back views.

It’s been a whirlwind weekend, not so much because it was chock full of good things, but rather, things both good and bad.

Bad: My glasses broke Saturday afternoon in a way that made repair impossible. My only backup was one pair of daily disposable contact lenses, which expired in 2003. We had just been preparing to leave the house, so our first stop was Parrelli Optical in Porter Square. Good sub-item: they were open. Bad sub-item 1: They wouldn’t sell me contacts since it’s been several years since my last checkup. Bad sub-item 2: No doctors were there to get an emergency check-up. Bad sub-item 3: They dropped my vision insurance plan (VSP) and I had to find a new eye doctor.

Good: We were headed to the Cambridgeside Galleria anyway, to go to the Apple Store, and there was indeed a VSP eye doctor located there who had a cancellation for 4:30pm. I took them up on it, and got a trial pair of contacts, and ordered a pair of glasses. I was hoping for a big fat Le Corbusier-style pair, but the pair I found were much along the lines of the old ones.

Good: I finally got the new PowerBook!

Bad: I haven’t had much time to play with it because…

Bad: I had to work most of Sunday on a project from Dullsville and I’m not even totally out of the woods yet.

Good: As Terri reported so well, we saw Of Montreal at the Middle East on Sunday night.

Bad: It was an all-ages show, and they were only intermittently enforcing the no-beer-in-the-main-area thing, so I did not realize this because nobody stopped us from bringing back our beers at first. When I went to get refills, I bought two, thinking I was stocking up for the rest of the night, since we were standing right in front of the stage, Terri’s fancy new camera in hand. Security guy stopped me. I made the less-than-good decision to just chug them both, despite having just had one, and I guess I should count the couple I had with dinner… I tell you, I have not been so violently and copiously ill (to quote Vyvian) in years.

Good: Again, I’m very happy with the new ‘Book! I may go into it in more detail when I’m not so witheringly tired.

I know it’s screwed up to want to mourn a TV bumbler and beatnik when so many thousands of people died in such horrible ways last week, but I can’t help but link to these two Slate articles:

Like Maynard G. Krebs, Gilligan was an endearing if hopelessly inept dreamer—in fact, 11 of the show’s episodes were structured around Gilligan’s dreams, in which he imagined himself, Walter Mitty-style, as a prince, a vampire, a caveman, or a secret agent. In episode after episode, the castaways’ elaborate escape plans were foiled by Gilligan’s clumsiness and sloth—when the crucial moment came, he always seemed to be off napping in a hammock somewhere. Did Gilligan even want to be rescued?

and

there’s something sweet about this story: the image of the then 59-year-old Mary Ann acting as Gilligan’s [marijuana] supplier; his loyalty in refusing to name her in court; and most of all, the image of an aging Gilligan/Maynard G. Krebs, still dreaming away in his hammock or jamming on his bongo drums, smiling, a little high, and not quite ready to leave the island yet.

I’ve felt I had little to add to the Katrina blather, but, after the feelings of sympathy and amazement at the devastation and devolution have passed, my lasting impression remains what today’s Onion totally nails: “God Outdoes Terrorists Yet Again“. I thought pretty much the same thing after the Iran earthquakes in 2003 and last December’s Tsunami. When God shows how he can wipe out thousands of people in any corner of the world with such casual ease, how can anyone either be a terrorist or seriously fear terrorists? I mean, this is not a being who needs help from his followers when he wants to do some serious killing.

Right now, if I’m Osama, I’d have to wonder if maybe even thinking I can come close to matching God’s murderous capacity is just blasphemy and self-flattery. And right now, if I’m me, I’m thinking, I’ve got no problem riding the subway everyday, but being so close to the Atlantic is maybe not such a great idea.

Thanks to Wikipedia, I just found out that I live about a mile away from “Grandfather’s House” (I always thought it was Grandmother’s House) of the famous American poem/song “Over the river and through the woods,” by Lydia Child, herself quite remarkeable.