Category: What the…?

From The Logan Times: Serving the Airport Community, in a cover article about a trip to the French Rivera written by the paper’s Vice President and Executive (I reproduce this term loosely) Editor:

We left during the inception of TSA’s newly added physcological security component – a more intuitive screening of passengers as they pass by TSA officers on their way to boarding.

I liked that, too.

It is defintely the way to go. [sic all the way through -DP]

That kind of editing probably explains the prominent notice in the masthead:

The Logan Times assumes no financial responsibility for typographical errors in advertisements….

One can only hope that the TSA screeners are more accurate in their reading of “micro-expressions.”

I’ve gotta stop faking it
I’ve gotta start facing it
I’m gonna take my final bow
Then I’m gonna take my place in the crowd
I know I’ll get used to it
I’ve gotta stop acting like a clown

I’ve gotta start facing up to what I really am
I’ve got to realize I’m just an ordinary man
I think that I’ll just settle down
And take my place in the crowd
I don’t want to lie to myself any more

Am I just a face in the crowd? Is that all I’ll ever be?
I don’t want to be anything that isn’t really me
Mister can you tell me who I am?
Do you think I stand out?
Or am I just a face in the crowd?

—The Kinks, “Face In the Crowd”, Picture Book (compilation)

I noticed it on one of our very first ambles in Amsterdam, because it was literally on our way from the train station to the hotel we stayed at. If I’d known about it beforehand, I would have had to make reservations there, simply because of the name. Ten years have gone by and I still don’t know anything about this little hotel on Prins Hendrikkade other than I really like the sign.

This trip was, by the way, the first place we ever saw a smart car. It took me seven years to get one.

The Digitized Decade is a look back at the first year of my entry into consumer digital photography.

If there’s one thing I regularly do on trips it’s to get out on the water. Maybe it’s one of the corny DUKW amphibious landing craft tours of Boston, or it’s a whale-watching trip in Hawaii, or even the jet boat rides here at home on the Willamette River, but I love cruising through a town by boat. Amsterdam, of course, offers an array of water-related transport options, but when I saw that there were Russian-built Voshkod hydrofoils cruising between Amsterdam and IJmuiden-Velsen it didn’t matter at all that I had no idea where IJmuiden-Velsen was (it’s on the North Sea coast).

Barbara and I had been on a hydrofoil before, for the long ride from Seattle to Victoria, but the opportunity was too good to pass up. Half an hour out, half an hour back, along a heavily-industrialized canal, with IJmuiden-Velsen at the other end! We got out there with no real plan or idea of what we could do, managed to order some fries and wonderful curry ketchup at a stand (passed on the herring) at the dock, and headed back with another a tick off my checklist ten years ago today.

Call us troglodytes, we did not visit the Rijksmuseum. If you look at the prow of the Archimedes (now, apparently, retired from service) you’ll see a bunch of dents. I guess zooming through trafficed canals at 40mph can lead to problems.

The Digitized Decade is a look back at the first year of my entry into consumer digital photography.

Barbara and I flew from Glasgow to Amsterdam for the final week of what was only our second trip to Europe.Apart from a one-day train trip from London to Paris and back on a cold December day five years before, we’d never made it to the Continent before. But we got to Schipol Airport outside of Amsterdam on 1 May 2001.

Stepping off the train from Schipol at Centraal Station, we were rather surprised to see a pane of glass shattered near one of the front doors. Out on the square in front of the station, a telephone box was smashed, there was an incredible amount of litter on the streets, and what seemed like rafts of beer cans in the water as we walked to our hotel along the Singel Canal. While everything else looked like the tourist photos—bikes, trams, people walking everywhere—the garbage all around didn’t look quite right.

We got to the Hotel Singel (home of “Amsterdam’s Smallest Single Room”) and got settled in, then turned on the TV just in time to catch the evening news. We couldn’t quite make out what had happened the night before, but video from the night before actually showed someone breaking out the window at the train station, as well as a bunch of rowdy revellers. As we came to find out later, we’d unknowingly made it to town the day after Queen’s Day, a celebration of Queen Beatrix’s birthday that isn’t actually on her birthday. Remarkably, things got cleaned up pretty fast.

After the news was over, there appeared to be some sort of Amsterdam version of COPS that largely involved booting cars that had been parked too long (now, of course, we have Philadelphia-based Parking Wars).

And call me morbidly bashful, but I don’t think I would ever be able to use one of the portable “pyramid” urinals set up for Queen’s Day (and presumably other events) right on main streets in front of restaurants and other businesses.

The big event of early May in the Netherlands, of course, is it’s tulip season. Miles and miles of tulips in chromatic rows. More of that later. This shot was taken (I think) from a train.

The Digitized Decade is a look back at the first year of my entry into consumer digital photography.

After the wedding in southeast Ireland, we drove back to Dublin in our Fiat Punto and stayed for a couple of days wandering around the city at the height of its economic boom. This is Barbara on one of the bridges over the River Liffey, ten years ago today.

The Digitized Decade is a look back at the first year of our entry into consumer digital photography.

Happy 10th anniversary to Annie and Eric. This shot of them is from their reception at Waterford Castle.

The Digitized Decade is a look back at the first year of our entry into consumer digital photography.

Our first trip outside the US with the camera was to Ireland for the wedding of our friends Eric and Annie in Annie’s hometown of Wexford. It may be impossible to take an unlovely shot of Wexford harbor.

The Digitized Decade is a look back at the first year of our entry into consumer digital photography.

I’ve known for a while that my great-great-grandfather Plant was born in Cork, Ireland in the 1850s. The working theory—which we haven’t completely verified—is that his English father was involved in some sort of business there, got married there, then moved back with his young son to London in the 1860s.

What I hadn’t realized was that another member of the same genration of my ancestors, my maternal grandmother’s paternal grandfather, Thomas Armstrong, was also born on the Emerald Isle. Certainly, I would never have guessed from the name, because it’s about as un-Irish as Plant is, but apparently he came from a Methodist enclave in what is now Northern Ireland named Ballinamallard, which Wikipedia informs me is from the Irish Béal Átha na Mallacht, meaning “ford-mouth of the curse(s)”.

Bought a new hard drive for backups today, a 2-terabyte Seagate that cost me $99.95 at Office Depot. That’s 2,000,000,000,000 bytes, roughly. As I’ve mentioned before, my first Mac hard drive was 30 megabytes; it cost $300. The comparison there is pretty easy: The drive from 1989 was one cent per thousand bytes (300 / 30,000,000 * 1,000). The price of my storage this afternoon? 0.000005¢ per thousand bytes (100 / 2,000,000,000,000 * 1,000) or 200,000 times cheaper than it was twenty-two years ago.