Month: September 2005

I recently received a strange spam from a sender with the (ahem) evocative name of “Mastiff G. Adulterating.” (Is that particular breed prone to philandering?) The subject line was “nice gift for everybody,” and the complete text of the email read:

balcony by uttering just two words: ‘Hang him.’ To drive the convoy away as
—–

[URL redacted]

——
in just the same way. To Annushka’s credit it must be said that she was
the depths of a seedy garden, separated from the sidewalk by a fancy
🙂

Lovely in a weird sort of way. Almost reminiscent of James Wright, the great imagistic poet I studied during my undergraduate days. (Back in the fall of 1996, my last heady autumn on an American college campus, when I still believed that the workings of the world could be encapsulated in a few measured lines — “Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” — I probably read this poem over 500 times.)

spam, poetry

A turning point in journalism?

War correspondent Kevin Sites, a veteran broadcast journalist, has been hired by Yahoo to “provide a unique, multimedia perspective on some of the world’s most troubled and dangerous places.” He’ll be embarking on a “yearlong journey as a solo journalist to cover every armed conflict in the world.”

Very, very cool. Blogs and independently-produced media can be much more effective — more personal, more hard-hitting — than traditional mainstream coverage. I expect great things from Sites.

Kevin+Sites, journalism

CNN:

Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Mike Brown, under fire over his qualifications and what critics call a bungled response to Hurricane Katrina, resigned Monday, senior administration sources told CNN.

FEMA, Brown

Daily Mail:

Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she ‘prayed for God to have mercy on her soul’ after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.

What’s the over-under re: how long it’ll take the feds to indict these docs? A week? A month?

Katrina, doctors

NY Daily News:

Catwalk chaos erupted last night as a bank of lights fell during the finale of Diane von Furstenberg’s Fall Fashion Week show, injuring at least two spectators.

Leggy supermodel Alek Wek and several other beauties were forced to scamper when the U-shaped lighting crashed down as they paraded in von Furstenberg’s studio in the Meatpacking District about 6:45 p.m.

Screw the Trans-Siberian Railway. The dopest train ride in the world will soon be in China and Tibet.

NYT:

GOLMUD, China, Sept. 3 – By the time the great railroad reaches this town from the east, it will already have traversed more than half of China, past the high desert of Qinghai, around one of the world’s great salt lakes, through the arid fastness of Gansu and over and around mountain ranges arrayed like endless sets of waves all the way to Beijing.

The biggest challenges, however, lie in another direction altogether, when the line heads south for a 685-mile run to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, over what is often called the roof of the world. For long stretches the railway, which is fast nearing completion, will operate at altitudes higher than many small planes can fly, huffing and puffing far above the fragrant mists that roll down the Himalayan slopes. Indeed, the train, whose engines will need turbochargers just to get enough oxygen to run, will often soar above the clouds.

One day soon, perhaps as early as next year, the train, equipped with cars pressurized like jet planes, will make its maiden voyage on its final southward route, chugging across permanently frozen terrain and making stops along the way at stations like Tangula Shankou, which at 16,640 feet will be the world’s highest. For those bored with the scenery, or perhaps just dizzy, there will be other diversions: first-class accommodations include health spas and fancy restaurants.

One thing about the Chinese: they think big. (See: Three Gorges Dam.) When the central government supplies the cash and is in charge of the labor force and the “environmental review,” shit gets done*.

*Actual technical term.

China, Tibet, railway