Tango y fútbol

Perhaps one would do better to bet on the Argies in the next match, one against the Germans.

San Telmo is a neighborhood with a big street market, on Sundays I believe. They really dance tango in the street. Pretty cool.

Hurricane season

Well, Alex's about to be licking at the toe of Texas, and we're in for a couple, three days of hard rain falling, it appears. If it comes in as predicted it won't be stirring the BP spill into an emulsion that eats the north shore of the Gulf.
From an article on Grist by our very own Diane Wilson:

There are politicians out there -- we've all heard them -- who say this oil spill is just one accident and one accident does not a case make. Heck, one plane crashes and you don't stop flying, do ya? Well, this isn't just one accident. This is the biggest flame among the thousands of fires set by Corporate America on its Sherman-like march across the Gulf.

Read all that one here. The miseries with oil will only grow in the coming years; it won't get any better with the petroleum situation.

Vuvuzela chorale

Everyone's complaint about the World Cup [besides the officiating] has been the incessant drone of the vuvuzelas played by the locals during a match. Some whimsical German classical musicians have undertaken to demonstrate the versatility of the vuvuzela by playing a Brahms chorale and the old chestnut 'Bolero.' Watch and grin. These boys are working hard.

Korea photos

There's been recently a gathering in Victoria on the Korean War, and way overdue it is. Here is a series of Korean War pictures that ran in Life magazine back in the day. Vets of that war are saying that attention must be paid. Texan T. R. Fehrenbach wrote a fascinating history of the Korean War titled This Kind of War. I used to have it, but I lent it out, and now I don't have it. I should; it's insightful enough that I believe it's required reading at the Army War College.

The blob that ate Florida

The videographer-narrator is a bit of a twit, but the film is righteously scary. Please, no hurricanes this summer. Poor Gulf. I'm just sick of the oiled-pelican pix.
Saw Internet chatter about plans to evacuate Tampa if oil gets into the bay there. Can't vouch for veracity, but it would seem like a good plan to have ready if things come to that.

Gooool! USA 1, Algeria 0, TimeWarner –10

For some reason, we got into the World Cup this year and have been watching matches for two or three days, enough to understand some of the pleasure. Yesterday, between the morning and afternoon matches, ESPN and ESPN2 disappeared from our TV stations. No World Cup. Seems TimeWarner just shut them down. I watched this afternoon's USA game on streaming Univision, which offers distractions and a small screen.
It sorta tore things for us with TW, an ongoing stone in our metaphorical shoe. Last fall, they somehow lost the last game of the World Series, and stations disappear all too often. We decided to cancel, and herself tried, first by e-mail, which is disallowed, then by phone, which is futile. After four or five stabs involving long waits, she finally got a human. Said human wanted her to present at Corpus, about 80 miles away, with some paperwork we didn't have. We get maybe three or four dozen channels when we get them and habitually watch about six of them. Mostly, chugging through channels, I see trashy people sitting around pools or in hot tubs making inane conversation and ogling each other. Then there are the bogus science shows, where the narrator says stuff like, 'Some say the noise may have been made by the creature' or 'Science hasn't yet determined ... [whatever goofy idea they're hawking].' We're still not disconnected, but we'll figure out how to do it. Then we may just live cable-free for a while and see how it feels. TimeWarner sux.
Addendum from the primo having his own TW problems out in the West Texas town of El Paso: 'Numerous phone calls, 3 days waiting for them to arrive to turn on service, and 2 trips to tw offices by biggs field. No service yet. Grrr.'

Learn to Operate a Linotype!

You gotta be pretty old to even remember the Linotype machine. It was invented about 1885 and revolutionized the printing trade, allowing an operator to do the work of several compositors setting type by hand. For a century-old ad in the LATimes offering Linotype instruction, look here. I was lucky enough to catch the end of the age of hot-metal printing. It was hot metal because it used a molten alloy of lead, tin, and antimony to cast slugs – the line o' type – that were used to print. It mostly replaced handset type, done by putting one piece of type after another in a composing stick, a little adjustable gadget, held in the left hand. When I started in the trade in 1962, handset was still in use for some big display work and top-quality ad work, where the compositor made aesthetic judgments about spacing between letters.
Benjamin Franklin could have walked into the Stilwell, Okla., Democrat-Journal, put on an apron, picked up a stick, and gone to work pegging type. The Linotype would have been exotic to him, but he would've loved it for its mechanical ingenuity, and the big press, powered by an electric motor, would have delighted him. We even had a little job press powered by a treadle, and on that Ben would've been right at home. Printing was a beautiful way to earn your daily bread back when it was a skilled trade instead of an office occupation. I wish I could do it all over; it was a very well paid, respected trade, and you could do it anywhere that printing was done.