Month: May 2003

Apparently the losses at the Iraqi National Museum are not as bad as originally feared. If I’m reading this right, the really special stuff — the items kept in the glass cases, for all to see — were taken to “special secure repositories”, whose locations we are now keeping secret so as to protect them. This is good news. But I’m afraid I don’t take much solace in the fact that looting was apparently largely confined to the basements where “more commonplace” items were kept, because it’s later admitted that most of that stuff was not cataloged or photographed.

That means that we really don’t have any idea what the hell was down there.

History is replete with all manner of precious, even priceless, items sitting unnoticed in uncataloged library archives, all over the world. Just recently, some manuscript work by JRR Tolkien was found in precisely such a state. So I have to say, even if it’s not as bad as originally feared, it’s still pretty horrible.

And I’m not sure what to make of the fact that we now apparently know the locations of Iraq’s art treasures to a much greater degree of precision than the locations of those WMDs that we invaded to find in the first place.

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Charles Stross’s SF-writing brother-in-arms, Ken MacLeod, has a blog. He apparently doesn’t update all that frequently — probably because he’s an actual published, working writer. Thus, I hate him.

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A standard fixture of urban downtowns used to be the big, multi-level department store. It still is, actually, in many of the larger cities — Macy’s, Filene’s, Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh, etc. — but in Buffalo, the downtown department store closed years ago. It used to be AM&A’s (which stood for “Adam Meldrum and Anderson’s”), which was then bought out by the chain Bon-Ton. Bon-Ton still exists in the region, as anchor stores in most of the malls, but the downtown Buffalo location was finally closed six or seven years ago. The building was bought incredibly cheaply by a Buffalo businessman named Richard Taylor, who tried opening a new store; but he couldn’t attain profitability in Buffalo’s current downtown climate when the only real shoppers are the downtown workers coming in during their lunch hours. So Taylor’s closed, and the building’s been dormant ever since.

Well, in the absence of anyone wanting to run a store out of that building, now there is movement to convert it into a school. This would actually be a special school, called a “charter” school, and there is a waiting list to get in. It would cater to talented and gifted students, would have a partnership with Buffalo State College, and would bring about 400 students plus the teachers and staff to downtown on a daily basis. Just about everyone admits that what downtown needs to get revitalization going again is people for more than just a few hours on weekends for special events. Just about everyone.

Everyone, that is, except a few business people who have suddenly decided that the building would be better served being demolished and replaced with a spiffy new office tower.

Just why this need suddenly exists now, when the school is trying to get set up for the 2003-2004 academic year and when the building has sat unoccupied for most of the last decade, isn’t exactly clear. Just why a new office building is needed at that site, as opposed to any of downtown’s many other vacant sites, isn’t exactly clear. Just why these businessmen think that schoolbuses and such near the school would add to the currently non-existent downtown congestion isn’t exactly clear. (Check this downtown webcam sometime to get an idea of what traffic is like during business hours in downtown Buffalo. This isn’t the same street the school would be on, but it’s very close, and it’s what traffic is always like downtown.)

Cities that thrive do so by giving their children reasons to stay. Cities that wither and limp along, from decade to decade, do so by continually ignoring the future in favor of short-term projects that benefit a few rich people and by continually giving their children reasons to leave the nest.

Buffalo needs to decide which damn type of city it wants to be.

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Kevin Drum complains about unopenable cereal boxes, which makes me wonder what’s going on in Orange County. Here in Buffalo, the cereal boxes are very easy to open — you just slide your thumb in there, in the middle, and then slowly move your thumb toward the side, thus breaking the spot of glue holding the box shut on that side. You then repeat this action, on the other side. Voila — an open cereal box, no fuss, no muss.

But we’ll exit this topic right now, before I move onto the #$&%*!!! plastic bag inside the no-fuss cereal box.

(Actually, Kevin’s framing of the question reminds me of all those “If we can put a man on the moon…” complaints, which connected with the “sealed food” issue in the first place reminds me of an excerpt from MAD Magazine‘s parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey:

BOWMAN: What’s for dinner tonight?

POOLE: There’s a glass of steak, a glass of corn, a glass of potatoes, and a glass of bread with butter.

BOWMAN: Anything to drink?

POOLE: Yeah — a piece of coffee.

Ah, to be ten again and reading MAD Magazine….)

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Time for a few random notes….

:: My ISP had some trouble with the servers this morning, which is why the template was buggered for a bit. For once, this wasn’t because I forgot to pay them. Things appear to be back to normal, though.

:: My RSS feed is now up and running. And despite the fact that I now have a functional RSS feed, I’m still a little bit fuzzy on just what an RSS feed is supposed to do. My understanding is that it’s useful to people who use something called an “aggregator”, which turns out to not be a device used to clean out clogged bathtub drains, as I had previously believed.

:: According to one search engine, Byzantium’s Shores is number five on this search. Purely accidental, obviously, but still — I’d love to know just what this search subject is about — it sounds like a cross between a special episode of Dateline and a James Patterson novel. Anyone?

:: SDB has finally returned to writing about what drew me to USS Clueless in the first place: the logical genesis and ramifications of atheism.

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OK, I tried adding BlogMatrix‘s RSS feed to Byzantium’s Shores yesterday, and the thing still isn’t working. Can anyone else who’s using this service speculate as to why it’s not working? Sean, maybe?

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I’m all for the onward march of technology, but…well, in the words of Jerry Seinfeld, “Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason.”

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Is there any stupid thought about the left that Glenn Reynolds will leave unsaid? (It’s his very last line.)

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The Cigarette-Smoking-Man to my Agent Mulder is annoyed at the lack of respect in the entertainment media these days for withholding spoilers. While I’m generally not obsessive about staying “spoiler-free” — I don’t actively seek out spoilers for movies, books and TV shows, but I don’t automatically shy away from them, either — he’s definitely got a point. People seem to think nothing of dropping the big news in articles, such as the TIME article about the upcoming Matrix sequel that my CSM cites. And it goes a lot farther than that.

:: TV promos advertise when shows have surprise endings, completely ignoring the fact that much of the impact of a surprise ending stems not just from the surprise, but by our discovery that there’s a surprise in the first place. “Don’t miss the last five minutes” is always a disclaimer on NBC, as if anyone’s going to watch fifty minutes of an hour-long show and then say, “Oh well, we’ve seen enough. Let’s check ESPN.”

:: When Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace was still a month away from release, the soundtrack CD was issued. So Star Wars fans went out to buy the new CD, and when they glanced at the track listing, they find titles such as “Qui Gon’s Noble End” and “Qui Gon’s Funeral”. Annoyance galore.

:: Book blurbs these days increasingly spoil a book’s contents and plot points, or the book’s cover art will depict a climactic event that’s pretty essential.

It would be nice if we could restore at least some of the thrill of discovery to our entertainment.

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I may have posted this before, but I honestly don’t recall, so I’ll do so again. Joseph Duemer taught a class this past semester in which one of the requirements was that the students therein write a blog. They can all be perused here.

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