Mobile Pictures

Tree at All Saints. My HOA would have cut this down years ago.


I was actually in this photo taken 4/13/1986. Don't recognize myself though.


View from Traders.


Going into Fairhope.



A view from the Bayway


Bankhead Tunnel


The Riverview



Friday afternoon traffic



The trees are beautiful

Down in LA for a few days.

I'll try to post some pics and observations later.

First observation: Airport Blvd in Mobile is a bleeding hemmorage of an abortion. If the city doesn't have a traffic engineer, they should hire one. If they do have a traffic engineer, maybe they should find a different one.

One toke over the line, sweet Jesus...

This one's too good to miss.

Also, commentary re: GM

From Eric Felten's De Gustibus column yesterday

.....

With General Motors fresh out of bankruptcy, veteran GM exec Robert A. Lutz took to the Internet this week to do some crotchety cheerleading in a chat at the company's Web site. One questioner had the temerity to write: "In my group it is just uncool to drive a GM car -- even if they are as good as the imports." He asked Mr. Lutz how he planned to turn that attitude around.

"I guess it depends whether you have your own personality or whether you are a lemming-like follower of current trends," Mr. Lutz grouched. "I think an audacious and bold person with a mind of his or her own would go to a dealership and see that our new vehicles easily trounce the foreign competition. . . . It's uncool to drive an import." Some salesmanship.

.....

The sad little South Korean Daewoo subcompact that Chevy markets as the Aveo is slated to be replaced in 2011 with the Chevy Spark, another Korean product. The Spark has the hyperactive angularity common to small Asian autos. What, other than that nervous grin of a grill, makes the car a Chevrolet? Where's the "Heartbeat of America"?

......

What an irony for GM, a company that made its bones by selling cars with better looks than its competitors. In 1926, GM honcho Alfred P. Sloan wrote to the head of the Buick division to emphasize "how much appearance has to do with sales; with all cars fairly good mechanically it is a dominating proposition and in a product such as ours where the individual appeal is so great, it means a tremendous influence on our future prosperity." GM keeps saying that it has rediscovered the joys of being good mechanically, but the appearance part of the old Sloan equation still eludes them.

.....

Excerpt from Peggy's column

I'd say, pretty much, spot on.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124777884829553723.html

<<<<<< >>>>>>

The Sotomayor hearings were unsatisfying and relatively unilluminating. She was moderate in tone and manner, said little, will be confirmed, and over the years, decision by decision, we will find out who she is and how she thinks. They're all a mystery going in and then, paradoxically, cover themselves in a long black robe and reveal themselves. The Republicans questioning her never seemed to gain purchase, never quite succeeded in making the interesting (the Ricci case) interesting. Looking at things shallowly, and let's, Sonia Sotomayor seemed weirdly overrehearsed, speaking v e r y s l o w l y, gesturing with her hands in a way that was no doubt supposed to look natural and warm, like grandma in the kitchen, but instead came across as artificial and mildly animatronic.

Associated Press

Sonia Sotomayor

She took refuge (as did some of her questioners) in the impenetrable language of the law, and in what seemed (and this is becoming a regular strategy in politics) to be the deliberate jumbling of syntax, so people at home won't be able to follow what is being said. To be clear and succinct is to look for trouble. Better to produce a mist and miasma of jumbly words, and sentences that do not hold. You're talking, so you'll seem alive—in fact people using the syntax dodge are often quite animated—but as to meaning, you can leave that to the TV producers, who'll wrestle around trying to get something that makes sense and then settle for the Perry Mason soundbite. (Well, in truth the Perry Mason soundbite is pretty much what they want.)

I suspect the hearings added to a general sense of Washington's surface comity and essential sketchiness.

Simple pleasures

A night time view from the stoop.

life imitates science fiction

Saw a photo from John Paul Gaultier's couture show yesterday.

The model had all this dark mask looking eye makeup on.


I was immediately reminded of Pris, the Daryl Hannah character, in the 1982 film Blade Runner

I've... seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhausser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... Time to die.

/////////////////////

Pris

Played by: Daryl Hannah

Replicant

INCEPT DATE: 14 Feb, 2016
FUNCTION: Military/leisure
PHYS: A
MENT: B

To have and to have not...

Not my composition, but I came across this tonight and I've always liked these lines.
Looks like it's more "have" than "have not."

Living a little, laughing a little.

The opinion piece from yesterday's WSJ resonates with me somewhat.
I urge you to read the article in full, it's short and worth reading.

Primarily, the big hub-bub over Mark Sanford's indiscretions (or betrayal of his sacred marriage vows, if you choose) was a well placed kick to an opponent that was down, hoist by his own petard as a "family values" guy. Other than that, it is just sport, in which I, too, have participated. Generally speaking, I don't care much for these Whiskey Tango, holier than thou, family values types.

But as usual, again, this time, it kind of reminds me of a song which is excerpted below:

Laugh everyone at the fool with his heart in his hand
Still, he can't quite understand that he's less than a man
Lost somewhere deep in his shell, there's an ember of pride
Watch how he tries hard to hide that he's dyin' inside

Laugh at his comical tears, as he thinks of the years…

Living just a little
Laughing just a little
Ain't easy

Lyrics by Linda Creed

///////

• OPINION: TASTE
• JULY 3, 2009

Our Pryin' Eyes

By JENNIFER GRAHAM

Back when we all thought Mark Sanford was channeling Thoreau on the Appalachian Trail, The State newspaper reported that a 23-year-old South Carolinian had been arrested for peering in a woman's apartment on three consecutive nights. He was charged, police said, with "peeping and trespassing."

Later that day, in a glorious stroke of irony, the newspaper engaged in a little peeping and trespassing of its own, splaying the South Carolina governor's personal emails across the Internet, and, in the process, making perpetrators out of us all.

We spied on Mr. Sanford (a public figure) and his paramour (not), just as we peered in the ambulance as Michael Jackson died, just as we thumbed through his autopsy records, just as we look up our neighbors' home prices on Zillow.

Forget swine flu; we have a Peeping Tom pandemic.

The moniker is centuries old. It comes from the story of Lady Godiva, the English noblewoman who, according to legend, agreed to ride naked through the streets of Coventry in the interest of tax relief. While most citizens shut their windows and averted their eyes, a fellow named Tom succumbed to prurience and bored holes in his shutters so he could watch.

The original Peeping Tom at least had enough dignity to gape covertly. Modern-day voyeurs, many of whom appear on cable TV, just throw wide the shutters and leer. And they've had plenty to leer at of late.

Consider The State's beautifully choreographed document dump; the newspaper dribbled out a few tantalizing excerpts June 24, so we'd return the next day for the rest. According to Editor & Publisher, which covers the industry, the newspaper's Web site had the most traffic ever: 1.7 million views the day the emails hit.

Great marketing. Cheesy journalism. And I say this as a former reporter for The State.

Executive Editor Mark Lett defended the mass voyeurism as an exercise in democracy. "Some of the e-mail content is messy and unpleasant, to be sure. But in the end, we chose to publish the e-mails rather than deny citizens information about a man they twice chose to guide the state," Mr. Lett wrote, thus invoking journalism's sacredest of cows, the reader's "right to know."

Surveying recent coverage, we may assume that a rental-car agent in Pamplico, S.C., has the right -- yea, the need -- to know about an Argentine woman's tan lines, the contents of a dead singer's stomach, or the minutiae of anyone's divorce. Clever wordsmiths can justify any revelation, no matter how embarrassing or trite. But newspapers ignore the human cost at their own risk.

When I was a religion reporter for The State, I wrote a lengthy profile of a new pastor at a prominent church. I was nearly finished when I happened to scan the week's property transactions and spotted the price of the pastor's new home. It was far beyond what most journalists could afford.

I idly mentioned this to an editor, and he insisted I include the price in my article. I balked. I thought it too personal and invasive; this was long before Zillow.

No matter: I was overruled by many layers of editors who explained the importance of a pastor's home value and how an exceedingly personal detail was the business of the masses. I was young and needed my job; there was nothing I could do, save resign. So I added the information to my story and called the pastor to warn him. He was, not surprisingly, angry and avoided me for years. And for what? Who was helped by that detail, save the local gossip mill? And will The State's paid circulation rise because of the love letters it published last week?

Newspapers are in decline because of the Internet, but there are few mourners outside of their newsrooms. Too many smart and decent people have had their "Absence of Malice" moments: mornings when they opened their newspapers and saw something written about them that made them want to run through the neighborhood, picking up every newspaper they saw.

Jay Severin is a radio talk-show host in Boston who was recently suspended for incendiary remarks. He once mooed at a female caller who made the mistake of telling him her weight, and he said Mexico's leading exports were women with mustaches and venereal disease. But Mr. Severin said that not only would he not read Mr. Sanford's emails on the air -- as many of his colleagues have done -- but he would not read them himself.

Hear, hear. Offered a look out the peephole, at least one man deliberately averted his eyes.

And the original Peeping Tom? He was, according to legend, struck dead for his crime. Purveyors of peeping, take note.

Ms. Graham is a writer in the suburbs of Boston.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W11

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved