My email was broken but now is fixed. If you have emailed me since yesterday (Wednesday) afternoon, I didn’t and won’t receive it. Please re-send. Sorry for the trouble.

Hostgator, my usually excellent web host, reports that “there seemed to be some problems with the shadow files that store the passwords for your account”. That somehow led to the temporary deletion of my email accounts and the temporary malfunction of some aspects of the website. Everything seems to be restored again.

The Mariana Trench is spectacularly deep. I know because I looked at this.

I love that the subtitle of this Detroit Free Press article…

Survey finds third of Detroit lots vacant — John Gallagher

…is:

Positive news uncovered, too.

How is it possible that Boards of Canada‘s Music Has the Right to Children still sounds like it’s from the near-future, almost 12 years after it was released?

(I would like to embed a music player here so you could listen to the album, but it looks like imeem.com has disappeared into the horrible maw of myspace, and I can’t find another web service that allows full-length track streaming.)

11 Western Democrats object to Feinstein water delivery plan — Michael Doyle, McClatchy Newspapers

“The escalating fight pits region against region, and some of California’s most influential politicians against one another. It’s already splitting fragile alliances among California water users, who in recent years have inched toward comity.”

Is global warming to blame? Who knows. The entire southwest of the US has been going through unprecedented droughts and water shortages for nearly a decade now. It could be that slightly increased prevailing temperatures have contributed a difficult duck to a dangerous row. It could be that precipitation would have dropped off in California even without an increase in worldwide temperatures. It could even be the case that global temperatures actually haven’t risen much yet. One thing is for sure: this is a template for the conflict we’re going to see even in western countries when resource scarcity and unpredictability does ramp up in our climate irked future. These days you don’t have to look around too much to spot quite a collection of those templates.

Anyone who liked The Boat That Rocked might also like this wikipedia article about Radio Caroline — the ship-board pirate radio stations that (presumably) inspired that movie. It’s quite a remarkable history.

Note that although The Boat That Rocked was set in 1966, Radio Caroline was actually pop-centric station until they switched over to album rock in 1974.

You can still tune in an internet descendant of Radio Caroline populated by many of the marine-era djs, if you don’t mind your classic rock mixed up with ads for real estate agencies and gift shows.

Please turn your helicopters off.

regards, Hugh

In the Shadow of the Olympics — Greg Bishop, New York Times

“By bidding for the Olympics, Vancouver invited the world to visit. Now city officials are trying to redirect the international news media spotlight from this blighted neighborhood in the shadows of the picturesque North Shore Mountains.”

This is what they were worried about, I suppose. As far as I can tell, which isn’t very far by any means, the streets are not deliberately being cleared of the homeless. I would imagine there have been a number of more-or-less subtle bylaw and policing changes to quietly draw down the level of action. But from my very surficial vantage point as an occasional passer-through, it would appear that life in the DTES is more or less unchanged here on the cusp of the opening ceremonies.

OK, WELL, half-way through writing that sentence a troupe of 10 horse-mounted police clip-clopped two by two past my window. That’s not normal.

See also: Quatchi Tours Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Flickr set by The Blackbird.

Me and Sherwin are sparring over the value and democratic character of those disappearing newspapers. We’re pretty much not talking to each other because of it, which is sad, because he’s like, one of my best friends ever. Still, he’s wrong so what am I supposed to do? And now Jesse Brown has turned on me as well.

You’ll miss those newspapers when they’re gone, I swear to god. All of you.

I love those “send an email of protest” web pages that so many activist groups have now. They do all the minutes and minutes of research that I would never get around to, to figure out what the pertinent email addresses and salutations are, and you just enter your name and (optionally) update their suggested email and presto, your email goes off and changes the world, to some degree. My unrigorous research as a former Amnesty letter writer and current Government Scientist suggests that letters and even, yes, emails, do actually make an impact at institutions caught in the uncomfortable light of controversy. And those web pages make it so damn easy. You just get to rant into a text box, and off it goes to make a difference.

Here, for instance, is today’s rant at Google via the ACLU:

The road to being evil is a moderately long and asymptotically creepy one, and by entering yourself into an alliance with the NSA you have placed yourselves squarely on it. The NSA overcollects. This is known. Google defends itself against accusations of overcollection by suggesting that the data is only ever automated and aggregated. This is known.

NSA-style overcollection + Google-style overcollection =/= happy Valentines Day. It = me getting very nervous around my Google account. *Especially* if you’re planning to go all “social network provider” on us.

Stay away from the NSA.