Where I’m @

20021022

In a big decision about the Web and accessibility, a Federal judge said that since Southwest Airlines’ website is not a physical place, and since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) does not explicitly mention websites, the ADA does not apply to it. Consequently, she has thrown out the suit. Read her full opinion. (NB: Requires a PDF reader.)

On the other hand, there’s the Atlanta case in which a judge saw things slightly differently. We can see where these judgements are not entirely incompatible, so the eventual merger will probably not be the train wreck some hope.
(Thanks to [WD] for both of these.)

The family was in the Washington, D.C. area this past weekend to make a pilgrimage of sorts to mom’s grave in Quantico, VA.

She’s buried in a National Cemetery, thanks to dad’s 22 years of Marine Corps service. Her stone has her first and maiden names together with her dates and the fact that she was married to dad. This last makes sense by itself, of course, but in a national cemetery, it appears that every stone has to show justification for its presence, what military servicemember provided the password. When dad dies, he’ll go in the same gravesite and her info will go on the back. We don’t particularly like that method, but again, he’s the reason they can get the free burial at all.

The cemetery has more variety than we thought it would. You see the images of national cemeteries from time to time and everything looks the same. Indeed, the stones are all the same shape and size, but there are subtle (and less subtle) differences that matter, perhaps the same way that all military personnel are seen as interchangeable to many civilians but are just as mutually different as anyone else.

There’s the religious symbol at the top of the stone. Mom’s got the standard-issue block cross, but we also saw the flaming Methodist cross, the Greek Orthodox one, an Irish Catholic one, one with nothing at all (an atheist or someone with an affiliation so unusual that they don’t have a blank for it?), and a wheel (not likely to be a Buddhist, is it?). No stars of David, but we’re sure you can find them.
There’s the message at the bottom. We didn’t even know you could have one; when we spoke to the VA this past winter, they never mentioned it. But some people did have one, and our favorite was, “Love ya, babe,” without any punctuation. We’re as in favor as the next of not making death overly somber, but that seems a little flip.
There was also a very odd difference, in that some of the stones had the letters painted black and some did not. We know that we were never given that option and don’t understand why someone would want one rather than the other.

Of course, there were some interesting situations that are, in our experience, common to nearly all cemeteries. Near mom’s grave is one for a person with the same two dates for birth and death. Not far away is one of a mother and daughter with the same death date. Next to them is an empty space, which we assume is for the father; the mother was not terribly old, so this man is probably going to be a long time suffering.

Someone wrote a message to a deceased in the dirt. (It’s a new section of the cemetery, so grass hasn’t grown up yet, especially considering the drought this summer. Not that that kept some individuals from planting grass themselves over their loved ones’ graves.)

Despite our firm belief that there’s no further terrestrial existence for mom, we still found ourselves glancing around and determining that it was an acceptable location, well, despite those powerlines there, and despite that the trees are mostly oak and so won’t turn good colors. Everyone has his or her determination of how to honor the dead; ours doesn’t involve flowers or other offerings, but we are glad to know that as long as the VA is funded, mom’s grave will be well tended. Though we prefer old municipal cemeteries, or better yet family ones, the long-term anxiety of wondering whether they are overgrown with weeds and such is best avoided.

20021018

Just to keep the meme alive, and because it looks like Google pulled the page from its cache, you should go look at Dave Winer’s screen capture of Microsoft’s pathetic (and, apparently, faked, if that’s not a double negative) imitation of Apple’s switch campaign.

20021016

We really want to continue being a fan of Netscape, but AOL is really making it hard.

1. Point the first: Earlier this year, AOL ran up the flagpole the idea of using Netscape as the default browser or at least Gecko as the rendering engine for the AOL browser. Apparently nobody saluted (or something more depressing and/or dastardly transpired), because they’re using the good old reliable GRBB.
2. Point the second: A hair to split, perhaps, but when you’re #2, you have to be cleaner than the leader. When we fired up an old copy of Netscape 6, our home page no longer existed and we were taken to the Netscape search page. At that page, we were confronted with the following affront to orthography: “Remove double quotation marks. Since double quotation marks specify an exact phrase, removing them will broadens your search.”
   (Emphasis added.)

20021014

NYFF 2002

A light year for us at the 2002 New York Film Festival (40th edition), since we only got to 5 films, and had only planned to see 6. That darn funeral kept us from seeing #6, but it was Auto-Focus anyway, so it’ll be out in theaters this Friday.

In order, the flix we saw were Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark, Im Kwon-taek’s Chihwaseon, Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten, F.W. Murnau’s Faust, and King Hu’s Come Drink with Me.

Let’s try to give some intelligent yet concise recaps:

Russian Ark: 90-some minute continuous take of a walk through St. Petersburg’s Hermitage museum. Wonderful for that strangeness and its subjectivity, its combination of an ethereal atmosphere and a serious review of Russian culture and Europhilia.

Chihwaseon: Fairly standard portrait of the artist (Ohwan, the most famous painter in 19th century Korea) as drunken lech, but none the less informative. Bumped up our knowledge of Korean history and art from nearly nil to something.

Ten: Highly interesting, polyvalent depiction of both the mundane and the profound in Tehran life. Through ten car rides, all steered by one woman, we see struggles of generations, of genders, of religiosity, of family. The final scene, one of very few in the movie when the car is not moving or about to move, is superb. The actress playing the driver’s friend is exquisite.

Faust: Beautifully restored print of Murnau’s 1926 attempt to film this story (and last movie made in his homeland of Germany). ‘Attempt’, because who can really do justice to the whole thing in a movie. This version runs two hours, and we’ve seen a three-hour play, and neither pauses much for breath. The new score, performed live by the Phillip Johnston Quartet, was rather literal and tended to simply reflect what happened on-screen rather than interpreting it and enhancing it. Gorgeous German Expressionistic lighting, solid (if sometimes dated) performances by all, classic UFA sets. (Though we can’t say with authority whether it was filmed with UFA sets, they have that look.) Not knowing the story as intimately as we might, there were a couple plot points that Murnau seemed to dodge or leave intentionally vague.

Come Drink with Me: In many ways, the high point. Very nicely restored 1965 print of this pic, one of the earliest (as we learned) to use camera movement and multiple cameras when filming the kung fu action; prior, it was nearly always filmed with a static camera, like a play. Cheng Pei-pei (known to most as the evil nurse/nanny in Crouching Tiger) was wonderful, both on-screen and off. The best intro to a film we’ve seen in a while and certainly the best Q&A after as well, perhaps ever. She was a STAH, fer sure. Best part of the Q&A was an audience member asking, “Is it true that you caught a fly with chopsticks during the filming of Crouching Tiger?” and Cheng answering, “Me? Did I do that? Yes, that was me. But it was only because the fly was so slow and my chopsticks were so fast!”

All in all, a good year, though not a great one. There’s a possiblity that it will have been our last year at the NYFF for a while, since we’re considering moving the family to another state. Que sera, sera, no? If you have a DVD, be on the lookout for Come Drink with Me, since these restorations often coincide with personal-viewing-media releases.

20021011

Just a reminder that the process to reassign the dot-org TLD is still underway, that ICANN will still post your comments on the matter publicly if you email them at mailto:org-eval@icann.org.

•

20021010

Recently, we’ve been reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, a superb book from one of our favorite authors. Pynchon has a way with paranoia shared by few writers. And perhaps it’s inevitable in a book the density of Gravity’s Rainbow, but there are some really cherce passages. One of the best so far is the words out of the mouth of a black market worker in Zurich, after his interlocutor has asked him where he can get some information:

Information. What’s wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world’s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?

And, we repeat, is it?

Good joke found on Greasy Skillet:

Two poets lying i' the sun.
One twas Browning, the other Donne

(Updates on the funeral and the New York Film Festival coming soon, really.)

20021002

Well, in a continuing great year for our family, our maternal grandmother died on Monday night. We were supposed to get info last night on the schedule of events in Florida, but it wasn’t until this morning that we got a call implying (not explicitly saying, for some reason) that the funeral is tomorrow. Looks like we’ll be needing our own advice sooner than we thought.