The Stumblng Tumblr

“ This is the problem with blogs: You start blogging in an idle moment, and one thing leads to another and you wake up one day to find that you have readers. And readers, no matter how coolly disinterested they are nor how they are getting the deal free gratis for nothing, eventually become something like customers: they begin to have expectations. They expect frequent deliveries of new material. For the blogger—excepting, I guess, the fanatically driven or the logorrheic—the situation is like being a columnist, like one of our heroes at the great gray New York Bugle, with all the problems and responsibilities inherent, only you’re not being paid. You’re still bagging groceries to pay the rent, and that profession like all others has its seasons and its crises.
…
So anyway, postings have become scarcer around here, and they may well become scarcer still, as our unpaid author contends with a mountain of past-due obligations, each of them with a promissory note attached to its curly little tail.

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Luc Sante here sounds like he’s having second thoughts, doesn’t he?

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and in French? “le plus uber”
from here

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and in French? “le plus uber”
from here

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» [The US] Congress’s Contempt Power: Law, History, Practice, and Procedure

the linked-to paper (pdf) is from the Congressional Research Service via this
this will be of interest mainly to lawyers, historians and political scientists, but its subject does have the potential to blow up into big news in the next little while
whether it does blow up up will almost inevitably depend, not on matters of high political principle, as the actors will insist, but on assessments as to whether partisan political advantage will be gained by taking a particular stance
the image above from here is of Mae West; it’s said here that in My Little Chickadee, the following exchange occurred between a judge and Mae West’s character:

Judge: Are you trying to show *contempt* for this court?
Flower Belle: No… I’m doin’ my best to *hide* it!

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"Ask, and it shall be given you"

yesterday, the Stumblng Tumblr posted an item about the recent announcement of the finding of a bust of Julius Caesar in the Rhone river near Arles
he mentioned then two questions that the story he linked to didn’t answer
well, today they’re answered here
the bust is said to be the oldest known bust of Caesar; according to the story:

Luc Long, the archaeologist who directed the excavations, said all the busts of Caesar in Rome were posthumous.

(and presumably either no other bust has been found in the provinces or any found in the provinces were either also posthumous or at least newer than the Arles one)
Long also said:

I suspect the bust was thrown in the river after [Caesar] was assassinated because it would not have been good at that time to be considered a follower of his….

you will, of course, recognise the title to this post as coming from both Matthew 7:7 and Luke 11:9 of the KJV Bible; the image from here is of a denarius with Caesar on it

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Mavis Staples, performing Thomas A Dorsey’s “If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again”
a 1934 version of this song performed by Dorsey himself has just been added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress
this version is excellent

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the Stumblng Tumblr’s almost positive that he’s posted this before: it’s T-Bone Walker, performing his “Stormy Monday”
the Stumblng Tumblr’s excuse for doing it again is that a version of the song by T-BW has just been included on the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress (the same reason he gave yesterday for posting Art Tatum playing “Sweet Lorraine”; a couple more of the latest inclusions will appear later, if the Stumblng Tumblr can find acceptable versions of them on YouTube)

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when the Stumblng Tumblr saw the above image in this Wikipedia entry on hyperinflation, he just had to post it; he well remembers from his boyhood stamp collection German stamps from the 1920s like those in the image
here’s another image from the same entry:

its caption reads:Inflation 1923-24: A German woman feeding a stove with currency notes, which burn longer than the amount of firewood they can buy.the Stumblng Tumblr was looking at the hyperinflation entry in Wikipedia because he’d just read this story, which begins:Zimbabwe’s central bank has introduced 500 million Zimbabwe dollar notes worth just $A2.15 in the latest sign of spiralling hyperinflation, only a week after issuing the 250 million bill.The new highest denomination note would buy about two loaves of bread.it’s also mentioned in the story that Zimbabwe’s annual inflation rate is now about 165K%——

when the Stumblng Tumblr saw the above image in this Wikipedia entry on hyperinflation, he just had to post it; he well remembers from his boyhood stamp collection German stamps from the 1920s like those in the image
here’s another image from the same entry:

its caption reads:

Inflation 1923-24: A German woman feeding a stove with currency notes, which burn longer than the amount of firewood they can buy.

the Stumblng Tumblr was looking at the hyperinflation entry in Wikipedia because he’d just read this story, which begins:

Zimbabwe’s central bank has introduced 500 million Zimbabwe dollar notes worth just $A2.15 in the latest sign of spiralling hyperinflation, only a week after issuing the 250 million bill.
The new highest denomination note would buy about two loaves of bread.

it’s also mentioned in the story that Zimbabwe’s annual inflation rate is now about 165K%

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the above image accompanies this story about Swiss inventor Yves Rossy
the image shows him during a successful five-minute test flight he’s just made using his personal jetpack, after jumping from an aeroplane at about 2.3K meters
surprisingly, the story doesn’t contain the usual statement about how the jetpack will be publicly available “in five years”; it just limits itself to “in the future”; somehow, the Stumblng Tumblr finds such modesty re-assuring; maybe Rossy really has “the right stuff”
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the above image accompanies this story about Swiss inventor Yves Rossy
the image shows him during a successful five-minute test flight he’s just made using his personal jetpack, after jumping from an aeroplane at about 2.3K meters
surprisingly, the story doesn’t contain the usual statement about how the jetpack will be publicly available “in five years”; it just limits itself to “in the future”; somehow, the Stumblng Tumblr finds such modesty re-assuring; maybe Rossy really has “the right stuff”

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the above image from Der Spiegel here has the following caption in part:Under a new policy being considered by the European Commission, all print automobile advertising in the future would be required to carry prominent information about a car’s emissions and fuel efficiency.
the image, which is presumably a sample of what would be required under the policy, accompanies a tendentious article about the policy
one snippet the Stumblng Tumblr particularly liked:
Executives like VW marketing manager Jochen Sengpiehl say that … [i]f [print] ads were “turned into informational material” it would be “highly likely” that companies would be forced to restructure their advertising budgets [to reduce or eliminate ads in print media like Der Spiegel]….adverts supplying information? perish the thought!——

the above image from Der Spiegel here has the following caption in part:

Under a new policy being considered by the European Commission, all print automobile advertising in the future would be required to carry prominent information about a car’s emissions and fuel efficiency.

the image, which is presumably a sample of what would be required under the policy, accompanies a tendentious article about the policy
one snippet the Stumblng Tumblr particularly liked:

Executives like VW marketing manager Jochen Sengpiehl say that … [i]f [print] ads were “turned into informational material” it would be “highly likely” that companies would be forced to restructure their advertising budgets [to reduce or eliminate ads in print media like Der Spiegel]….

adverts supplying information? perish the thought!

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the image above from here is of a Predator drone

here via this is a brief (too brief really) story about their present use
the system of which they form the sharp end is the real-life equivalent of a video game, but with the added thrill of actual, rather than virtual, killing
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the image above from here is of a Predator drone
here via this is a brief (too brief really) story about their present use
the system of which they form the sharp end is the real-life equivalent of a video game, but with the added thrill of actual, rather than virtual, killing

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» Bird-Watcher | Thinking about Charlie Parker, every day.

this will be very interesting to those who, like the Stumblng Tumblr, are jazz fans, but it’s very sad at the same time
Phil Schaap is the peg from which the story hangs
some of the most disheartening snippets in the story:

Jazz today is responsible for only around three per cent of music sales in the United States, and what even that small slice contains is highly questionable. Among the current top sellers on Amazon in the jazz category are easy-listening acts like Kenny G and Michael Bublé.

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Just after starting as a d.j. [at the end of the 60s], Schaap began organizing musical programs, mainly at the West End, on Broadway at 113th Street. He managed the Countsmen—former sidemen for Count Basie—along with other groups made up of refugees from other big bands, and got them work. Older musicians, such as Jo Jones, Sonny Greer, Sammy Price, Russell Procope, and Earle Warren, who had known Schaap as an eccentric teen-ager now welcomed him as a meal ticket.

“When I was a child, I lived under the illusion that these performers, who put on such an excellent front, dressed to the nines and acting like kings, made real money,” Schaap said. He lost that innocence about forty years ago, when he happened to glance at a check made out to Benny Morton, a trombonist who had been with the Fletcher Henderson and Basie bands. “It was for fifty-eight dollars, and it was for a gig at Carnegie Hall,” Schaap recalled. … World-class musicians were scrounging for work. Performers who had enjoyed steady employment took second jobs as messengers on Wall Street, bus drivers, and bank guards.

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Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, and a few other giants of an earlier time still roam the earth, but even they cannot reliably sell out a major hall. Coleman’s concert at Town Hall in March was as thrilling a musical event as has taken place this year in New York. The theatre was at least a quarter empty.

the image above, taken in Lincoln Cemetery, Kansas City, MO, is from here

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Do you use Firefox? Have you tried but failed to figure out a way to get your bookmarks into alphabetical order?

the Stumblng Tumblr’s answer to both questions was “yes”
well, via this, the Stumblng Tumblr got to this article from Macworld
by all means, read the article, but the Stumblng Tumblr’ll just explain what, after reading the article, he did finally to get his bookmarks into alphabetical order in the current Linux version of Firefox (2.0.0.14)
he went to Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks… and got the Bookmarks Manager open; he then clicked on Bookmarks at the top of the left panel; having done that, he then switched to the right panel and selected a bookmark; having selected it, he then right-clicked on it and selected Sort By Name
after he did that, he closed the Bookmark Manager and found that, when he next opened his bookmarks, they were all in alphabetical order!
not bad; it only took him three years

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