While all the preparations and parties are fun, I do believe that we need to reflect, even if only for a few moments, on the fact that what we are commemorating here is not just a date or what happened more than two centuries ago in Philadelphia. What we are celebrating is something that many of us here in the United States take for granted and that much of the world desperately wants to have. What we are really celebrating this weekend are all the freedoms that we and our families enjoy on a daily basis.
Such as the freedom to be executed sans trial or even a sporting “Think fast!” by some human and/or robotic agent of HopeChangeDemocracy Empire, or the freedom to drink an entire bottle (or whatever it takes) of Zicam Cough MAX?
Happy 4th (plateau) and remember – there can be no free association without the freedom to disassociate.
Caught the Cyclops chapter at Harp and Fiddle, which has a very nice deck where you can smoke, in the Strip this evening. Both readers performed magnificently and this one lady’s intro and outro were rad.
Here’s the bibliomancy.
A bat flew. Here. There. Far in the grey a bell chimed. Mr Bloom with open mouth, his left boot sanded sideways, leaned, breathed. Just for a few.
So, this incident sort of listenscarefully to the days of, you know, segregation, almost? Even had Crooker used “harks back”, he’d still have to answer for his abuse of “almost” (I’d have gone with “not at all”).
He was humble, and said that indeed Portland is an interesting place to work; he said it is very hard and trying at times as he deals with murderers and gang members and drug addicts on a regular basis. People hear about the unfortunate police shootings, but rarely do they hear about the day in and day out reality of police putting their lives on the line and saving people.
As I was just starting to tell him how I agreed with him, and had a specific example – our friend who lived in North Portland, a 14 year old Sudan-refugee boy, who was shot at by gang members in North Portland and then called Portland Police who saved him – one of the owners of the cafe came over to us; I figured he was just going to say hello, but instead, what came out of his mouth shocked me.
Seigneur’s in good company with victims of the electric chair and the folks Tasered to death since those (you know, less than lethal, almost) weapons bumped billy clubs for pride of place in police arsenals. There are so many funny things about Seigneur’s post, from her inconsistent capitalization (of “police”, in particular) to her closing paragraph, which implies she and her daughter found a place for police toget, not just coffee, but her and her daughter as well. (If this type of humor is to your taste, Seigneur keeps going and going and going.) Comments are pretty awesome too, especially one from this morning by JS, which begins, “Let it be known that the red and black cafe is a sanctuary for anarchists, conspiracy theorists, malcontents, losers and morons.”
We here at Pittsburgh Α to Ω have long labored to provide a safe space for the above groups, and salute the Red and Black for leaving us in the dust in this regard. Losers and morons of the world, ituneuntie unite! Anyhow, upshots of all the press appear to be, for the Red and Black, a big spike in biz, and, for some cops, a bunch of free coffee. At a press conference, Red and Black’s John Langley gave some reasons why the segregation comparison is so odious, but Roderick Long did so far more pithily in the comments thread of his own post (which initially tipped me off to this story). He writes, “A cop walking into an anarchist outfit is like someone walking into a black restaurant wearing a Klan outfit, or walking into a Jewish deli wearing a Nazi uniform,” and, “It’s not like droids wanting to be served in a cantina, it’s like slavecatchers wanting to be served in an abolitionist cafe.” Straight up.
Whatever his faults as an orator, Langley’s concern for patrons’ safety (or that of the merchandise/café itself) makes sense not only in light of “the day in and day out reality of police” (which naturally includes having it in for their most principled critics), but, specifically, in light of two recent instances of police blowing up food. And, while there’s no evidence Crooker had any intention of getting all Liberty Avenue on the Red and Black’s vegan pastries, it’s like Nate Harper said about the Pittsburgh Marathon ravioli detonation: “We rather err on the side of safety than err on the side of not taking anything serious … and have something terrible go on.”
She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed; it was labelled “ORANGE MARMALADE,” but to her great disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear of killing somebody underneath, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell past it.
“Well!” thought Alice to herself. “After such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they’ll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn’t say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!” (Which was very likely true.)
Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? “I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this time?” she said aloud. “I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth.”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Though the cause of the sinkhole is not yet known definitively, leading theories suggest that a burst pipe or storm drain likely hollowed out an underground cavity. Then, when Tropical Storm Agatha swept through the city, the water further weakened the ground above this cavity, causing it to collapse.
What happened there is a “piping feature,” says Bonis, not a sinkhole.
Sinkhole semantics
Daniel Doctor, a geologist with the US Geological Survey, doesn’t agree. The Guatemala hole is “an open hole into which the surface has collapsed,” making it a sinkhole, Mr. Doctor says.
“It is an exceptionally appropriate term for what happened,” he adds, suggesting that, by Bonis’s definition, true sinkholes could form only in very particular terrain made up of limestone, gypsum, or salt – known as karst.
Yet in some ways the Guatemala sinkhole is peculiar – and not just because of its potential connection to human activity.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ever bike down Liberty Avenue? Yinz chapines tenéis nada on our potholes Agartha access points!
Update, 6-10-10
Hyperbole aside, every hole in this photo series is way more intense than even the most diabolical of Pittsburgh potholes – not that that lets Pittsburgh potholes off the hook or anything. Via Roderick Long.
