2013/07/08

  • A Photo
    Fierté gaie / Gay Pride 2011
    Sur la base/On the base: Cônedom / Conedom
    © Serge Chapleau – La Presse
    (repeat post)

    Scènes de Montréal – Montreal Scenes

    Slowly sinking…

    The Photo Update thingie does not work anymore. My take is that the server doing the upload, and not the one storing the pics, was a rented service and they just didn’t renew the lease on July 1. This combined with long waits all weekend when accessing other functions like Sign in, Footprints etc shows that Xanga may be officially scheduled to hit the toilet on July 15, the flushing has already begun.

    It is sad for those who thought Xanga might survive, but this will not happen. The best reason for this I found in a comment somewhere: Even if the site still exists after July 15, and regardless if current users are willing to pay, no new user will want to pay to open an account. The rest is obvious, it’s called attrition. Economically it’s a no-brainer.

    Masturbations of the mind

    I woke up at around 3h30 this Saturday morning, from a dream in which I was realizing that in the word “atmosphere”, sphere most likely refered to the roundness of the celestial objects equipped with such. Astounding discovery isn’t it? But “atmo” hey? What about “atmo”? Like Friend said, when you don’t know where it comes from, it probably comes from Greek, the ancient one that is. My first take was that maybe it meant something like “around”. Since I couldn’t sleep, I got up and frigged at the computer. Now, for remembrance, I did win the first prize at the “Procrastinator of the Year” awards held last year, and all the other years since I stopped potty-pooping. So, as it should be, I had forgotten about “atmo” in just the time it took to walk from my bed to the computer.

    However, as every true-blood procrastinator knows, not done also means not gone. The “not done” comes back regularly to haunt us. It did so in late afternoon. Since I was alone and nobody could stool on me which would hinder my chances of getting this year’s award, I took on me to cheat and to check in my “Le Robert – Dictionnaire historique de la langue française”. So here it goes (my translation):

    ATMOSPHERE n.f. is a learned compound word (1655) formed with the Greek (Ha!) atmos “humid vapor” (of uncertain origin; not related to the sanskrit ātmán “souffle”) and sphaira “celestial sphere” [..]

    Notes: The French “atmosphère” used to be a little boy but is now a little girl since 1740. No reasons given. Also the French “souffle” has many English translations including “souffle” so I left it as is.

    At least I will be able to go to bed tonight with this out of my mind. I hate waking up in the middle of the night to answer futile questions that my mind pops to me.

    Paolo Conte is not dead

    He was brought back to my mind very recently in an article in that I read. It also reminded me that I hadn’t heard about him in some time, so I wondered if maybe he had died or something. Wikipedia says he’s very well not dead yet. So that’s another worry out of my mind.

    Boom!

    Last night Early Saturday, at around 01h00, an 80-wagon runaway train carrying oil originating from South Dakota derailed and exploded in the small city (6000 p.) of Lac-Mégantic in southern Québec, near the American border. Half the downtown area was pulverized. Up to now, there are 5 confirmed deaths, but 40 persons remain unaccounted for. It will be a hard job finding them since they have been, essentially, cremated.

    Stephen Harper, Mr Oil Himself, Canada’s Prime Minister and part-time dirty oil salesman, came to visit the site, having to temporarily leave his beloved Calgary Stampede. Being intellectually limited to this sort of thing, he equated what he saw to a war zone. He (and his government) wants to turn a current and old gas pipeline into a dirty oil one, reversing by the same token its current east-west flow into a west-east one. It is owned by Enbridge, the same company wanting to build that Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to Texas and to which Obama seems reluctant about. I don’t know why, accidents involving oil transportation never happen, everyone knows that.

    Bang!

    This Saturday afternoon, a Boeing 777 banged on the runway in San Francisco, losing its tail in the bay and much of its roof somewhere else. From the last news I read, only two persons died in the crash, or was it a splash? It’s a good thing theirs was a Bang! rather than a Boom! elsewise (is that a word?) it would have turned into another, and much greater, cremation ceremony.

    Personally, I don’t understand why a plane of that size was instructed to, or the pilot chose to, land on a runway where the GlidePath instrumentation was out of order for a few months. A 777 is not a Cessna, and those pilots have a lot of experience, but still the same… A Glide Path is a set of transmitters which project a signal of a specified angle, 2,5 degrees I think, and there’s a meter in the cockpit telling the pilot (automatic or human) to either get lower or higher if the plane does not follow that landing angle. This time around, the pilot(s) flew “visual”, period. For the edification of the masses, there is another similar transmitter called the Localiser, and which tells the pilot(s) if the plane is off course with regards to the runway centerline. Practical when you’re right on target as per the landing angle, but are heading straight to the adjoining fields. I learned about this technical stuff when I worked in an airport decades ago, along with Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta Echo Foxtrot Gulf Hotel India Juliet Kilo Lima Mike November Oscar Papa Quebec Romeo Sierra Tango Uniform Victor Whisky X-Ray Yankee Zulu. Knowing the phonetic alphabet used in aviation worlwide is a requirement to get a license to drive a vehicule on a runway or the tarmac because you must contact the control tower and identify yourself by the vehicule number to get permissions.

    Burp!

    One of our cheap networks (“V”) is having this week a “Semaine catastrophe”. For the whole week, they are programming in the afternoons movies featuring catastrophes. Is this what we could call ‘bad timing’? If we’re in a craze for catastrophes, all we have to do is switch to an all news channel and it’s catastrophes, real ones, wall to wall since Saturday and for most of this coming week assuredly. The guy who changed my bandage this morning said there was another one in Alaska. I haven’t looked it up yet. I’m on the verge of a catastrophe indigestion, not to mention the one I’ve been involved in for almost a year now.

Comments (3)

  • Paolo Conte is now bookmarked on my YouTube. It’s getting almost impossible to get around on Xanga now. Everything takes forever. Anyway, I’m glad there’s WordPress to go to. I can take the catastrophe coverage for one day but after that I don’t want to see anymore. There’s so much going on in the world but so few news stories.

  • A wet ball.Could be the lack of experience fkying manual.The planes are full of intruments and modern pilots are not very familiar with manual flying.Theiy train a lot,but it is not the same as having long experience.Disaster can be in a detail. Former father inlaw was pilot instructor ifot the Klm.I saw the train dsaster.Awful.Well, it is not to be blamed on terrorist….Paolo Conte like to be discreet.He must be old too. Some of his songs date back to the sixthiesI agree with Xanga. If does close now, it will be later.Chasing away the blood of the free riders will leave them with aserious anemy.We are the stnes of the Xanga building (2001;without us the building will crumble down.

  • A propos d’ atmosphère  je te joins un extrait du film Hôtel du Nord ( 1938) avec la fameuse déclarartion d’Arletty ” Atmosphère , atmosphère , est-ce que j’ ai une t^ete d ‘ atmosphère “  iciNous avons tous été frappés par la tragédie du train -brûlot au Québec ,et voici que c ‘ est en France qu’un train de voyageurs dérailleEn ce qui concerne Xanga , chacun est libre de faire ce qu’il veut .AmitiésMichel

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