DeaneBarker.net

Hats off to these guys.

An Italian cruise ship with 1,500 people on board fended off a pirate attack far off the coast of Somalia when its Israeli private security forces exchanged fire with the bandits and drove them away, the commander said Sunday.

Cmdr. Ciro Pinto told Italian state radio that six men in a small white boat approached the Msc Melody and opened fire Saturday night, but retreated after the Israeli security officers aboard the cruise ship returned fire.

The pirates prey on people weaker than themselves.  Do the math.

Letter from California: Jumpers: Haunting article about jumpers from the Golden Gate. The attraction of the bridge is very scary. It has something to do with the fact that where it sits — at the mouth of the bay between it and the vast Pacific — makes it some gateway to the beyond.

Mary Currie, the bridge’s spokeswoman, is an intense woman with short dark-blond hair. Last February, she went on a foot patrol with five Golden Gate patrolmen so that she would understand that detail better. Currie told me that her group stopped to assess a handsome middle-aged man who’d been at the south tower for two hours. “He said he was just taking a walk. But we all had a feeling,” Currie said. “Still, you can’t gang-tackle a guy for taking a walk. Five minutes after our last contact with him, he walked to the mid-span and looked back. We all took off after him; I was only twenty feet away when he went over. We saw him go in, feet first.

[...] “I went to this guy’s apartment afterward with the assistant medical examiner,” he told me. “The guy was in his thirties, lived alone, pretty bare apartment. He’d written a note and left it on his bureau. It said, ‘I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.’ ”

An interesting look back on Columbine and what we’ve learned since the tragedy. Apparently, a lot of what has filtered out in the intervening years has been untrue.

The killings ignited a national debate over bullying, but the record now shows Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold hadn’t been bullied — in fact, they had bragged in diaries about picking on freshmen and “fags.”

[...] Harris and Klebold weren’t on antidepressant medication and didn’t target jocks, blacks or Christians, police now say, citing the killers’ journals and witness accounts. That story about a student being shot in the head after she said she believed in God? Never happened, the FBI says now.

[...] the bombs Harris built fizzled.  “He was so bad at wiring those bombs, apparently they weren’t even close to working,”

I worked at Hardees in high school — back in the 80s.  Hardees is a fast-food chain specific to the Midwest, I think.

At the time, I didn’t recognize how high-quality the food was.  I don’t whether this still holds true, but let me give you a couple examples of how good the food really was.

• We got a big truck once a month with supplies — the bags and cups and ketchup packets and stuff you need to run a fast food restaurant.  But the vegetables came on different trucks, much more frequently.  The vegetable trucks looked somewhat local.  They weren’t big semis with a Hardees logo on the side, they were smaller trucks driven by what I imagine was a farmer.  The veggies weren’t frozen or anything.  They were boxes of actual vegetables that looked like they had been packed a couple hours earlier.
• We cut up the vegetables, by hand, just-in-time for insertion into other food products.  For the salads, we actually washed the lettuce and the tomatoes, and we sliced them up and put them in the salad container.  I think we even grated the cheese.  I was making a salad at home the other day, and I got to thinking that the salads we made at Hardees 20 years ago were fresher than the salad I was making in my kitchen right then.
• The tomato slices on your Big Deluxe?  They were sliced too — a couple hours before you took your first bite, they were a whole tomato.
• I made the biscuits in the morning.  Were they just frozen and nuked?  Nope.  Here’s how it started out: 10 pounds of flour, two sticks of shortening, and four quarts of buttermilk.  To this, I added a “Biscuit Kit,” which was a little package of all the incidentals — a tablespoon of baking powder, a pinch of salt, etc.  That was the only pre-packed thing in the entire process.  I kneaded it all up, rolled out the biscuits, and put the in a big oven.  In the end, I melted a stick of real butter in the microwave and painted it on the top each biscuit with a basting brush.

I shudder to think how fast food has probably changed. Hardees food was great, but it was inefficient to make.  And inefficiency is the bane of a mass-produced anything.  Remember, we didn’t defrost biscuits, we made them by hand, probably much the same way your grandma does (sure, she didn’t have a Biscuit Kit, but the intent was the same).  This process would drive an “efficiency expert” insane.

Towards the end of my fast food career, things were becoming different.  Instead of cooking a burger real-time for an order, we were pre-cooking them and storing them in some steamy storage box.  That was a march toward efficiency that I’m sure has continued unabated with some probably un-appetizing results.

The other day, David and I met a colleague at the Queen City Bakery in Sioux Falls (it’s new, it’s awesome).  I ordered a hot chocolate.

Me: “This tastes weird.”

David: “That’s because it’s real hot chocolate, not a chemical designed to taste that way.”

Sure enough, after I got a little used to the flavor, it was amazing.

I stopped and talked to the owner on the way out.  Turns out he uses fresh milk that was in a cow about 24 hours earlier on some farm just north of Sioux Falls, heats it, and then crumbles up an actual block of dark chocolate and lets it melt in the hot milk.

Score one for real food.

A showdown is looming on American Idol which I think is going to be pretty interesting to watch.  The top two contenders — the two I firmly believe will fight it out in the last episode — could not be more opposed in terms of lifestyle.  We have…

• Danny Gokey, a widowed church music director from Milwaukee.  The big story on him was that his wife died a month before his first audition for Idol.
• Adam Lambert, a quite-gay singer from West Hollywood.  Various internet searches will reveal Adam singing in gay cabaret shows, dressed in drag, and open-mouth kissing other men.

There is no question that these two guys are most talented contestants on the show.  Neither have been in the bottom three yet, and week after week, they knock songs out of the park.  Danny has an incredbly strong voice and the world seems to sympathize with him.  Adam is enourmously inventive and has more vocal range than I’ve ever heard.

So, when these two get to the final (and they will), how long will it take for it to become less about their respective levels of talent and more about their lifestyles?  How long will it take for the Idol vote to become a referendum on contemporary culture, rather than a reflection of who is the best singer?

I have little doubt that outside groups will get involved.  Conservative Christian America will rally behind Danny, and Gay Supporting America will rally behind Adam.  Both demographics will attempt to prove that they carry the most sway in American culture.

On the one hand, it will be somewhat sad that we’re not talking about singing talent anymore, but it’ll be awfully fun to watch this unfold.  I can’t wait for the histrionics, on both sides.  Pass the popcorn.

This is a riveting account of “The Dark Side of Dubai.”  Dubai is crumbling in front of our eyes, given the economy, but it was apparently never a paradise to begin with:

“The thing you have to understand about Dubai is – nothing is what it seems,” Karen says at last. “Nothing. This isn’t a city, it’s a con-job. They lure you in telling you it’s one thing – a modern kind of place – but beneath the surface it’s a medieval dictatorship.”

[...] There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here.

Warning: if you start reading that article, you will read to the end.  And it’s long.

You know the comma before the “and” or the “or” in a list?  Like this:

A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y.

That comma after “U” — did you know that has a name?  It’s a “serial comma” or an “Oxford comma.” Some people don’t use it, like this:

I know Tom, Dick and Harry.

I use it, and get annoyed when others don’t.  But there’s apparently little agreement on it.

There is no global consensus among writers or editors on the use of the serial comma.[4] Most authorities on American English recommend its use, but it is not so frequently used in British English [...]

The Wikipedia page has lots of arguments for and against its use.

Cory Doctorow gives up this handy piece of advice about writing.  You don’t stop to check facts, or you will get distracted.

Instead, do what journalists do: type “TK” where your fact should go, as in “The Brooklyn bridge, all TK feet of it, sailed into the air like a kite.”

Why?  What does TK stand for?  Nothing.

“TK” appears in very few English words (the one I get tripped up on is “Atkins”) so a quick search through your document for “TK” will tell you whether you have any fact-checking to do afterwards. And your editor and copyeditor will recognize it if you miss it and bring it to your attention.

I always wondered what the purpose of “basis points” were.  I knew that there were 100 basis points in one percent, but I couldn’t figure out why someone wouldn’t just use decimals for that.

I have since learned what basis points are for, and I am here to share that knowledge with you, lucky reader –

Basis point are for specifying a change in a relative number.  A percentage is a relative number.  If you want to describe a change to a percent, it can get very confusing trying to use percentages to do this.  You are trying to specify a change a percentage with another percentage.  So, does the change affect the base number as a percent, or as an absolute?

An example –

Your profit margin in Q1 was 13%.  Someone tells you that Q2 numbers are “2% better than Q1.”

So, is the profit margin for Q2 13.26% (13% x 102%), or 15% (13% + 2%)?  Therein lies the problem.

With basis points, you don’t have to worry.  Let’s say that the profit margin for Q2 was actually 15%.  Then you would just say that Q2 was “200 basis points” better than Q1.  Since basis points are absolute, there’s no confusion.

This is just another example of Deane learning something late in life that he really should have learned in college.

This Metafilter post confirms what I suspected: people are shooting each other like crazy these days.

It’s shocking enough that 90 people have been killed in mass shootings in the US in the past 2 years. But it’s even more shocking that 44 of those deaths have occurred within the month since March 10, 2009 [...]

The post details all of the recent shootings, complete with links.