DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

On Jan. 31, 2000, Alaska Airlines Flight 261 crashed off the coast of California, killing 88 people bound for Seattle. Subsequent analysis implicated:

• a possible design flaw in a part called a “jackscrew”
• insufficiently-frequent inspections of this part
• pilot error

As with all disasters, blame and finger-pointing and lawsuits abounded.

On Friday, the Chronicle reported that Alaska Airlines and Boeing Co. have settled all but one of the lawsuits resulting from this crash. Settlement amounts to heirs and families “ranged from a few million dollars to $20 million.”

Plaintiff’s attorney Kevin Boyle said, “They were above and beyond the amounts in usual cases. It’s not perfect justice but it’s the best our legal system can provide.”

I would love to know what Kevin Boyle considers “perfect justice.” Should the courts have sentenced the airline executives to death by plane crash? I mean, what was he hoping for? Nothing anybody can do at this point can bring back the 88 people who died. This wasn’t a malicious act on anyone’s part, or even a criminally negligent act by the people who maintained the airplane. I’m certain that everybody at Boeing and Alaska Airlines would much rather this disaster had never happened.

So what is “justice?” As far as I know, justice is about fairness. It’s sure not fair that 88 people died in a plane crash, but is there any way to make it right afterwards?

Maybe Boyle had some ideas that didn’t get quoted in the newspaper. I like to think so, because the alternative is that he was just spouting soundbites, feigning indignation for the sake of the press. A back-of-the-envelope calculation puts his piece of this settlement at (6 plaintiffs x ~$5M apiece x standard percentage of 30% x 50% split with his partner) about $4.5 million, enough to pursue real reform in airline oversight, travel safety, or even “perfect justice” if that’s his thing.

On a related note, the transcript of the cockpit voice recorder is terrifying.

Bim sent a moistened remix of my Levi’s billboard image. I laughed out loud.

So long as I’m on the subject, here’s my color-corrected version:

• 600x450 preview (105k)
• 1152x768 15'' powerbook desktop size (324k)
• 1280x1024 (376k)
• 2048x1536 (976k)

I don’t know what it is, but I always stop to stare at old-time billboards painted on brick walls. I think it’s not nostalgia, because most of these signs are older than I am. I sure as heck would not have wanted to live 50 or more years ago — if you think it’s hard for server-side web engineers to find work today, just imagine how tough it would have been before, say, they’d discovered electricity.

Anyway, we found this Levi’s wall in Jacksonville, Oregon. I don’t know whether it is a real antique advertisement or a carefully-faded reproduction.

My unretouched photo is a lot less interesting than the wall is. An attempt to restore the image to what I imagined it may have once looked like led to the rekindling of an old, forgotten passion: Photoshop image manipulation. I used to spend entire days doing that. Four years ago I put some of the more finished images (which then were already five years old!) into an online gallery: the pretentiously-named Gallery of Experimental Art. Caution: if you can’t stomach the heavy-handed application of Photoshop filters, don’t follow that link.

I normalized, saturated, and posterized the Levi’s image, then applied four layers of gradient-masked lighting effects, employing multiple edge-detection and texturing filters. The result appeals to me strangely, just like the wall did. A subsequent version, in which I’ve reduced the blue cast of the “copper riveted overalls” lettering, is on its way to the print service for enlargement. I hope I’m as fascinated with the printed version as I am with the digital.

There’s a shop at the Oakland airport called “www.news.gifts.oakland”.

Is that just about the dumbest thing you’ve ever seen? I mean, beyond the fact that URLs ceased being trendy and cool and became utilitarian and generally uninteresting in 1999 is the fact that that URL doesn’t work. Go ahead, try it out: http://www.news.gifts.oakland

Why doesn’t it work? Specifically, because ‘oakland’ is not one of the handful of approved Top Level Domains. But more generally, because the marketing-class flunkie who decided to name his newsstand after a website wasn’t attempting to create a real or useful web address — he or she was simply trying to be cool by association. But it’s dumb. It’s like naming a salon “The 2004 Mitsubishi Haircut GXE”. It sort of means something in a wholly different context, but on the other hand it’s just stupid. The car doesn’t exist; the website doesn’t exist.

The shop doesn’t even sell computer or networking gear. It’s just another seen-one, seen-‘em-all airport media-and-kitch market, memorable for no other reason than the dim-bulb appellation.

I’d bet that the person who picked the name “www.news.gifts.oakland” had a previous job designing book jackets, but got fired for putting ‘@’ signs in place of the letter ‘a’ in the titles. “Well, the author mentioned the Internet in chapter 6, so I figured…”

“Tucked within a circle of jagged cliffs, the lake’s blueness is so improbable that, according to local lore, it prompted one first-time visitor decades ago to write an angry letter to her congressman, accusing park rangers of lacing the lake with dye. It’s that blue.”

The National Park Service has a page of news, events, and information regarding Crater Lake.