Crikey.

Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin killed. And the tributes pour in. I’m sure I’m not alone in praying for Terri and their kids.

And thanks to Irregular Webcomic, who have been running a Steve and Terry (sic) tribute feature since the earliest days of the strip, for their tribute today. You may need to know that in the strip, there’s an incarnation of Death for every possible way to die, and all of them have been going after Steve, and having to let him go, for many years.

The news is shocking because Steve Irwin did cheat death for so many years to bring happiness and knowledge to so many people. Rest in peace, Steve.

Brackbill picnic photos

kids flying a tractor

New on Flickr, a set of photos from the Brackbill picnic. I was in more of a hurry than last year, since I had a long drive ahead of me, but I managed to capture a few things.

One that surprised me was how many kids there were… and how grown up they were. This shouldn’t surprise me; there are a bunch of the kids of my generation (who I still remember as being, at most, teenagers) who, like me, are over 30 and married. One part that surprised me was the children of my mother’s cousins who were now entering their teens… and holding down conversations… and clearly having a blast hanging out with each other. But the smallest kids were the most fun to watch, as the photoset indicates.

Speaking of Pump Up the Volume…

pumpUpTheAchewood.gif

Achewood’s brilliant series of Great Moments in Cinema, “brought to you by Roomba! the Robotic Floor Vac,” just tripped across that great Christian Slater teen film. You have to see it to believe it—and perhaps you have to have seen the movie to get the last panel, but oh boy, Samantha Mathis should be blushing somewhere.

Other wonderful moments in the series:

Special bonus: the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, as brought to you by Roomba! the Robotic Floor Vac.

Friday Random 10: On the map

It’s a slow Friday before a holiday weekend. Tomorrow will bring Elvis Costello with Marian McPartland at Tanglewood; Sunday and Monday some more kitchen demolition; Tuesday is back to the working week. So I’ve been catching my breath and organizing a few things.

For instance: my Flickr photos are now geotagged, allowing you to find them on the Flickr world map. So there’s that. (It’s a pretty damned cool feature, actually.)

So enjoy photobrowsing while this week’s random 10 plays:

  1. Miles Davis, “Selim” (Live Evil)
  2. Funkadelic, “Music for My Mother (Single Version)” (Funkadelic)
  3. Lionheart, “Veste nuptiali” (Paris 1200)
  4. Cathode, “Gravity” (Sleeping and Breathing)
  5. Ayub Ogada, “10%” (En Mana Kuoyo)
  6. Squirrel Nut Zippers, “Anything But Love” (The Inevitable)
  7. Hilliard Ensemble, “Alleluya. V. Nativitas” (Sumer Is Icumen In)
  8. Pulp, “Seductive Barry” (This is Hardcore)
  9. Sufjan Stevens, “Holland” (Greetings from Michigan)
  10. Sting and the Radioactors, “Digital Love” (Nuclear Waste)

Eliminating stuttering in iTunes for Windows

I’ve been plagued by intermittent stuttering in iTunes playback on my work machine. Until today I lived with it, figuring it was just a bug or a problem with my machine. But today on a hunch I Googled the problem and found what appears to be the fix: switching to “Safe mode (waveout only)” in the Audio tab of the QuickTime preferences. This fix for stuttering iTunes for Windows playback comes courtesy of Technovia, where the comments also have some more advanced things to try, including the DMA settings on the hard drive.

I should note one caution: in my tests, I didn’t close iTunes before I changed the setting. After changing the setting, iTunes finished playing the song and then closed abruptly. After reopening, it has been stutter-free. I would suggest closing iTunes first as a general rule.

We will not walk in fear, one of another.

Funny what happens when you’re out of the country for a week. I totally missed Donald Rumsfeld going off the deep end and claiming that critics of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war were propping up fascism. Huh?

It’s a type of criticism we’ve heard from this administration and its toadies before: we must live in fear. We must not question the president, regardless of the evidence; to do so is treasonous. It’s the same message that got a pass from the American people for the last five years.

How astonishing, then, that MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann was able to turn Rumsfeld’s syllogism around on him, comparing Bush’s government to Neville Chamberlain’s in their certainty of their command of the situation and impugning the integrity of their chief critic, Winston Churchill. It’s six and a half minutes of some of the finest display of journalistic integrity and courage since Edward R. Murrow, whom Olbermann invokes to good effect:

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.

We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.

Indeed. See also Slate’s roundup of reaction from both sides of the blogosphere.