DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I get flak from friends at mealtime because my preferred diet appears to be so restrictive. In reality, there are only a few types of foods I don’t eat, but because those foods comprise about 85% of the regular American diet, it’s common that I can’t find anything on a restaurant menu that I’m willing to order.

Recently I went out for pizza with a group of omnivorous friends. My entrée included a side salad, which I requested be made without onions, not so much because it’s one of the foods I’ve grown to find revolting, but because onions don’t agree with me.

Ordering the entrée was slightly more complex. This was my first restaurant pizza since my recent decision to stop eating cheese on pizza — the last application of dairy I made regular exceptions for. So I tried to brace the waitress. “I’d like to order a pizza, but it’s going to be strange,” I said, “because I don’t want any cheese.” She took it well. Often, especially outside California, I get an incredulous look, like opting out of cheese is like opting out of oxygen.

We worked through the restaurant’s peculiar ordering approach, which apparently allows for customized pies but requires nonetheless that the order begin with something on the menu. In other words, I couldn’t order “tomato sauce, tomatoes, basil”; I had to order “The #2 except without parmesan, mozzarella, or cheddar, with basil and sliced tomatoes.” I was tempted to find the most elaborate, top-heavy pizza on the menu and then individually subtract every topping in reverse order, leaving a bare crust upon which to construct my vegan masterpiece, e.g. “I’d like the saffron-chive-prawn and bacon pesto / roasted potato rosemary havardi egg combo pizza, except without the rosemary, egg, roasted potatoes on the one half or the saffron-chive-prawns or bacon or pesto on the other half, with a little marinara sauce and sliced tomato and basil, thank you” and then watch with a bemused grin while the waitress dutifully copied down paragraphs of pointless exceptions, just to prove the idiocy of the exercise.

Finally she moved on to the next person’s order. It came in one word: “supreme.” I had to laugh. The next order took only two words: “me, too.”

I laughed again later when my instruction-manual pizza was delivered exactly as requested, whereas the one- and two-word supremes, like my side salad, all had no onion. So much for ordering simply.

The odd thing is, I can’t order so easily in California either, not because I need to cross-examine the chef about hidden meat products, but because the granola restaurants I frequent offer lots of choices, specifically to accomodate neo-non-ovo/lacto-pescatarians, Soy Zonians, McDougall/Atkins/Hollywood dieticians, and even those most curious of all, the people who eat chicken on waffles.

Annoyed by the prospect of a massive new federal surveillance system, two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are celebrating the Fourth of July with a new Internet service that will let citizens create dossiers on government officials.

The system will start by offering standard background information on politicians, but then go one bold step further, by asking Internet users to submit their own intelligence reports on government officials — reports that will be published with no effort to verify their accuracy.

Source: Boston Globe, Website turns tables on government officials

Site: Open Government Information Awareness

Seen: at Macintouch

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.