piratz!

yes, they do exist, and this year has been a particularly bad one. mostly they operate off the somali coast in the gulf of aden, which borders the red and arabian seas, with yemen and somalia to the north and south, respectively. almost all cargo going to europe from asia must pass through the gulf, since it is the passageway to the red sea and the suez canal.

in this instance, they seem to have gotten their hands on some serious weaponry. might be beyond their capacity to use all the tanks, but there is an as yet undermined amount of light weaponry onboard, which can't be good for the situation in somalia, as it's already in crisis.

silence is golden

but the chatter will be missed, nonetheless.

one of many?

when this all started, i intended to have a series of posts about my neighborhood (see for example the title and URL), several of which are still mulling around in draft form here in blogger. i published a couple about columbia height, but not many.

well today i got sucked into reading a bunch of random posts about my locale via the Prince of Petworth, which is the kind of website i avoid for various reasons (time suck, triviality).

but i had been wondering about some restaurant goings-on the other day, and i found my answers, sort of. and i found out we're getting another crappy chain, this time a restaurant.

i can't really get into all of my sentiments about DC, columbia heights, gentrification, etc., but i will say that so much about this process is baffling. not so much how it happens, but how seemingly clueless people are about it. the ramifications are always glossed over or unacknowledged. but that seems to mirror so many things in our contemporary society.

but then again, the comments here left me with the feeling, as is often the case, that people are pretty clueless in general. so maybe this isn't the exception that proves the rule, just another example of the rules in action. at least part of it, in retrospect, is the audience of the blog, gentrifiers all and proud of it it seems.

oh, and PS, seems there was a big shooting three blocks from my house last month. who knew?

before we begin

i actually watched some of SNL saturday for the first time in ages. and apparently i missed the only funny part:

almost at a loss for words...almost

this video on the daily show perfectly encapsulates the hypocrisy of the modern republican party and the pundits who populate the "liberal media."

craigslist best of

stay away from it. hilarious but a huge time suck. if you've got the time, have at it.

highlights:
http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/nyc/804253499.html
http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/780311954.html
http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/det/794605266.html

last.fm back in effect

when streaming tracks (scrobbling in their parlance) to last.fm, i always used only the scrobbling feature (via an iTunes plug-in), and never downloaded the actual last.fm application. this was pretty much only because I was an early adopter, and had started the whole scrobbling thing before their was an actual application for your desktop.

eventually, last.fm stopped issuing updates or support for the scrobbling plug-in. this move makes sense by last.fm, from a business perspective, since presumably the value of their service is enhanced by people having and using the physical application. they were bought (twice?) recently by an established conglomerate, and with a lot of companies struggling with how to monetize these web 2.0 assets (i.e. facebook, myspace, etc.), i guess this move wasn't unexpected.

at some point earlier this year an update to iTunes rendered the plug-in inoperable. and although i downloaded the last.fm application, for a variety of reasons i never installed it, and last.fm sort of faded from my usage. today i installed it, and am "scrobbling" again.

the OCD portion of me will end up listening again to those artists that over the last 6 months i played heavily, to make my last.fm "accurate." why i'm willing to do this but don't care that last.fm doesn't reflect my cd/vinyl listening (which is mostly what i do at home), i don't know, but i'm fine with it. it remains to be seen whether i'll pursue ipod functionality. i used to have that, but it was a huge pain. we shall see...