Ginger_sister’s Neighborhood

• 08:03 Whoo! I got my mom on twitter! #

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A couple of interesting things in the news this week about geology. First, the funny but sad one:

The "Leaning Tower" of South Padre is being demolished. What is that, you asked? The Leaning Tower of South Padre, also known as the Ocean Tower condominium [1] complex,  is a 31-story tall building with neighboring parking garage that was built on South Padre Island. Padre Island (North and South) is of interest to geologists as the longest barrier island in the world. Barrier islands form from sand that is swept down the coast under the influence of tides, waves, and storms; being sand, they are unstable and do not last very long. Thus, only an idiot would build on one [1] and only a true imbecile would build a large hotel on one (or buy a condo there!).

Amusingly, the Ocean Tower began to demonstrate the  foolishness of its investors even before it was finished. With only half the floors finished, it began to settle, cracking the beams and causing enough structural damage that it must be demolished. The investment firm behind the project is suing the architect and engineer for $125,000,000. Personally, I think that they should sue the county commissioners who allowed the project to go ahead, but who expects intelligence from a government employee nowadays?

And now the just plain cool one:

Scientists have calculated the time it took the Mediterranean Ocean to fill [3]; based on their calculations, it took between a few months and two years for it to go from a salt-floored basin to a water-filled one. This was known as the Zanclean flood, and it happened about five million years ago. The flood changes the geography and climate of the Mediterranean basin. It also changed the flow of water through the world's oceans. Because the water that escapes from the Mediterranean is very salty and hence is very dense, it can be tracked for thousands of miles after it leaves the Straits of Gibraltar [4] and goes into the Atlantic.

To put this into perspective, you would have to empty the equivalent of the Great Lakes every four days for two years to fill up the Mediterranean. World-wide, the sea level dropped ten meters (about thirty-three feet) when the Mediterranean filled up, and the water rose in the basin at ten meters a day for two years. The waterfall from the deluge stretched more than a hundred miles long, was more than two miles wide, and spilled more water every second than 11,000 Niagara Falls. Not that is entertainment!

[1] Please, oh please! follow the link so you can see "real estate speak" at its most amusing!

[2] Yes, Galveston, I'm speaking to you!

[3] What? You thought it had always been there? Heck, no! The Med was formed after Pangaea broke apart and two of the pieces (Africa and Europe) crashed back together. When they came together, they enclosed part of the Tethys Sea and formed a mountain range running from the Alps to Iraq. The enclosed basin had more evaporation than rainfall, and so the water levels dropped, forming salt deposits. As the pieces continued to move, they formed the Straits of Gibraltar whihc was a low-lying place that allowed water to trickle through until it wore down enough to become a flood.

[4] Interestingly, the Straits of Gibraltar are one of the few places in the world with a steady dual-layer flow system. At the surface, water flows out from the Atlantic and into the Mediterranean. As it circulates to the east, water evaporates, increasing the salinity. The denser but warmer water sinks and flows out into the Atlantic along the bottom of the Straits. So which direction the water flows depends on what depth you are at!

I'm not really looking forward to the next week..at all. In fact I've been putting it out of my mind and hoping that I'll just wake up on Friday, next Friday not tomorrow. I am pretty much a bundle of nerves...anxiety...meh. I get to see The Princess and the Frog tomorrow night with my sissy though..

Christa

The O2 Arena is the biggest venue they've ever played according to lead singer Brian Molko. Bless. They sounded great, Molko's voice in particular but having seen Muse in the same space last month the lack of experience was telling.
First the choice of songs didn't work up the crowd as well as they could have. Too much new stuff and obscure stuff and not enough of the 'hits'.
The crowd around us didn't all stand up until very near to the end when one of their old popular tracks was played and there were some notable omissions. I mean REM might get away with not playing Shiny Happy People because they hate it but not playing Nancy Boy? Come on Placebo.
Then there was the stage. A few big screens which mainly had live feed of the band plus a few images. Not really tower blocks rising up and down with all sorts of images projected on them.
OK so maybe Muse is an unfair comparison they have got plenty of experience under their belt and can design a whole tour around the bigger venues but I'm sorry, dropping a sheet to reveal the band as an opener is just so well, Brixton Academy, in fact that's what Skunk Anansie did there a couple of weeks ago (and at least Skin danced around in something that looked like Big Bird's brother for the first song).
Still we had good seats close to the stage and spoilt only by some bizarre piece of technical equipment that looked like a box on the end of the pole that obscured Brian perfectly when he was at the mike.
Managed to work around it as much as possible and got some pics I'm pleased with.
Last gig of the year on Sunday: Florence and The Machine - ooh aren't I trendy (probably not but its the first band I've seen in a long while that only has its first album out.)

They cause too many problems.

Some clients' email systems convert everything to a non-proportional font, so a link that's too long for a line wraps to the next line and, therefore, doesn't work.

Some clients' IT departments block external websites, so again the links don't work.

Some people have spam filters for crap like this, so they don't get the emails in the first place.

Ugh! I'm so sick of these things! I thought I was finished with the project when they finally went out yesterday, but people are still having problems.

I see a lot of mags/sites are breaking out their “Best of the Decade” lists, but I can’t be doing with that. Amélie remains my favourite film of all time, so it follows that it’s my fave of the decade... beyond that, there are too many likely candidates to calculate. Still, I think I can just about manage a “Best of the Year” list...

Film: Inglourious Basterds

I’ve been a Tarantino fanboy ever since I first saw Reservoir Dogs at the cinema, back when it was still banned from video release in the UK. Hard to imagine in our post-Saw, “torture porn” era, but the censors seemed to think that a scene (sort of) showing a policeman getting his ear cut-off was the height of horror. All I remember is thinking how cool and funny Steve Buscemi was, and to this day I maintain that Mr Pink made it out alive. Until I see a body, I’m counting him as the sole survivor, so nuts to you. It’s hard to say if QT has grown much since those days... he still has a taste for tense stand-offs, and if anything his stories have gotten a little sloppier. But he has broadened his cultural/historical frame of reference, and when it comes to arresting images and colourful dialogue, he always delivers. This flick didn’t turn out to be quite what I’d been expecting from the trailer, which suggested a Jewsploitation take on The Dirty Dozen... there are certainly elements of that in there, but the “Basterds” aren’t the sole focus of the story, and the other characters make for a more expansive experience, although the incidental scenes do tend to drag a little. Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) still impresses as a strong, smart heroine, even if she does forget a golden rule of dealing with movie villains. One thing you can always rely on with QT, even as the clones try to play catch-up, and the accusations of his own pop-cultural pilfering come flying, is that there’s no one else making movies like him right now... and that’s a shame.

Honourable mentions: Star Trek and Drag Me To Hell, both of which were big, pulpy fun. I had high hopes for Marina de Van’s latest, Don't Look Back (Ne Te Retourne Pas), starring Sophie Marceau and Monica Bellucci... but when it was screened out of competition at Cannes, it dropped like a lead balloon, so it’s unlikely to get a big release in this country.

Album: It’s Not me, It’s You by Lily Allen

Some of the lyrics may have proven to be slightly less sardonic than they first sounded (she’s since gone topless for a magazine photo shoot, making the “I’ll take my clothes off” line from ‘The Fear’ a bit prophetic), and its hard to sympathise with a pop-star who buys a beach and then complains that she isn’t making enough money, but I’m still impressed by how biting and satirical her deceptively cheerful ditties can be. I haven’t heard any other artists drop the F-Bomb with the sugar-coated venom Allen does on “F*ck You”, which puts most modern punks to shame. Not every track is a keeper, but then with today’s technology it’s easy enough to swap some of the syrup out for caustic B-sides like ‘Kabul Shit’. And no one romanticises the mundane details of dating like Lily does, bless her.

Honourable mentions: Jigsaw by Lady Sovereign, which was quite catchy but lacked the spiky spontaneity of her debut (and had far too much auto-tune on it for my liking) and Do You Want The Truth Or Something Beautiful? by Paloma Faith. 21st Century Man by Luke Haines would probably be a strong contender for the top spot too, but it only came out the other week, and I haven’t heard it enough times to really comment.

Book: Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse

True, it was first published way back in 1927, but I don’t read a lot of new books, and this nifty little novel deserves a nod for achieving the seemingly impossible task of making me feel like an upbeat, adventurous optimist! It didn’t last, but for a few days there I was flying. Along with the Bhagavad Gita and Teach Yourself Happiness, this has been a pretty positive year, reading-wise.

TV: Coming Soon

Sad to say, but the best television I saw this year was actually from 1999, namely the three-part series Coming Soon by Annie Griffin. Her latest offering New Town could have been a contender too, of course, but it was aborted after only one episode, so who knows how it would have turned out?

Honourable mentions: Lost (S5) and Ugly Betty (S3) both had their high points, but they also had plenty of lows. The way the Lost writers have treated Locke since the second season is disgraceful, and that resentment taints everything else that happens around the poor sod. Boo, I say! Ugly Betty has become so predictable with its tragedy and melodrama... “Oh look, a new girlfriend for Daniel... wonder how long she’ll last?”, “Oh, a fancy job offer for Betty... wonder if that will fall through somehow?” The whole thing would work much better as a family/workplace sitcom, imho. Make it so! I really wish I’d watched Misfits from the beginning, because that looks like it could be pretty good... I only caught the first half-hour of the third episode, but I already have a slight crush on Lauren Socha (love at first head-butt, you might say!). The premise of a gang of random juvenile delinquents gaining superpowers is a strong one, and they seem to have a great cast for it. I’m strongly considering taking a blind punt on the DVD, which is a very rare impulse for a miser like me. Meanwhile, I’m still addicted to Judge Judy, but let’s not talk about that.

And if you read all of that, give yourself a cookie. You earned it. :)

• 23:52 @placeboworld need to take some lessons from bigger bands when it comes to playing arenas. Sounded great though. #
• 23:53 Placebo pics tomorrow. Need some editing and am way too tired now. Last day of work 2009 to get up for tomorrow... #
• 18:13 Holidays start here- large glass of white and a bit of zac efron 'being serious' on the big screen #

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I was up til 3am finishing a work project. I have zero motivation today, but still yet more to do today -- as in, NOT tomorrow.  So what did I do? Took the kid to school, came home and went back to bed for 3 hours. When I got up, got all ready for the day, and started working, realized I forgot to put my shirt on.

I do a lot of things these days that don't make sense. WTF?

Thinks the jogger will beat me homee

I was in my car.  Sitting at a stoplight.  Fake drumming to a $2 CD by a band called the Pooh Sticks.  I looked over to my right and saw a young woman pumping gas.  It was about 30 degrees out and she was obviously very cold.  She was doing a little stay-warm-by-shuffling-back-and-forth-thing.  You know, putting all her weight on her right leg and then switching over to her left.  Back and forth over and over again.  The interesting thing is this: she was moving in perfect time to the song I was playing.  If she'd been listening to the exact same song at the exact same moment, she couldn't have possibly displayed superior rhythm.  She couldn't have danced any better.

Please pardon the language, but I live for shit like that.