Last night I went out at almost midnight to deface a political flyer. People are free to believe whatever poisonous nonsense they want to, but just as they’re (somewhat) free to post those ideas I’m free to counter-post against them. The flyers are offensive on any number of levels, but using swastikas is either irresponsible stupidity or a calculated, manipulative use of hatred to try make a point. I don’t much care which it is, if they’re in my neighborhood, I’m going to go out of my way to scratch them out.

Then on the walk home something wonderful happened, a cosmic/kharmic reward or whatever. I bumped into Anil and Matt. These kinds of things happen all the time, and are never any less wonderful. A few hours prior, I emailed Matt about meeting up this week and he hadn’t even gotten the message yet. I used to intentionally misspell coincidence as ‘coincidance’ because ending with ‘dance’ often seemed more apropriate. This would be one of those times.

Miracles emerge from debris from the USA Today series 9-11 A Year Later

Tonight I made the mistake, or maybe it wasn’t a mistake, of turning on the TV. Planning I suppose, to flip around, but when it came on there was footage from September 11th on MSNBC. I had planned on avoiding the media frenzy, fearing it would be nothing more than a montage of slow-motion, American Flags, somber music and other emotionally manipulative pap. But this was mostly just footage, and nothing MSNBC did could diminish the memories. Considering that it’s Rosh Hashana I guess this was appropriate.

It’s the little things; knowing so many of the stores in the background. Interviews on the corner near a friend’s house. The look on a man’s face in the background, staring into a video camera recording people crying on the sidewalk. I still wonder about the detachment that lets someone point their camera at other people while this was going on, but then I’ve never really aspired to journalism. Usually I carry a camera with me wherever I go, but on September 11th I didn’t take any pictures, or for a week following. Until Lila was born in March, I had almost stopped taking pictures completely. Those I did take were mostly of friends and their kids, with a few occasional attempts to do something creative again.

My screensaver of Lila photos came on and distracted from the TV every five minutes. In just our little circle of friends, seven new people opened their eyes since last September.

For the past six years I lived around the corner from Ladder 11 (and Engine 28). They lost six men and both trucks on September 11th. I didn’t know any of them personally, but we used to see them in the market all the time (Key Foods on 4th St & Ave A). Ladder 11 is a fixture of the East Village. When we first moved into the neighborhood, I kept hearing “Low Rider” blaring from a car but could never figure out who was playing it so loud. It turned out to be the PA system of the fire truck. All fire trucks in NYC tend to get customized in one way or another, Ladder 11 had a sign on the side of the ladder with an airbrushed “Ladder Eleven” and a hand-painted pair of dice. The sign, partly burnt and twisted, was recovered from the truck and mounted outside the station.

It took me a week before I went past the station. I remember wanting to say something but having absolutely no words. I stood there for at least half an hour staring at the photos of the missing men. Someone left a pair of dice near the flowers.

At the time I was also walking by the Ladder 9 “Bowery U” station on an almost daily basis. Now I live across the street from Engine 5. Engine Company 33 & Ladder 9 lost 10 of 11 men and both trucks, Engine 5 lost one man although I remember pictures of six or seven. We’re also very close to Ladder 3, which lost 11 men. Every time I see photos of September 11th with a fire truck in them, I try and see if it was one of ours. For reasons I can’t explain, I really want to know where they were and how far they got.

This might have been Ladder 11.

Most all of the lost trucks have been replaced by now, and Ladder 11 is once more serenading the East Village with the intro to Low Rider.

Engine 5 Manhattan

Photos of all rescue workers lost in the World Trade Center collapse:
New York Times Rescuers Memorial Page

Thank you to Charles Johnson’s for his posting about Ladder 11 firefighter John Heffernan, which led me to post this. Station photos taken September 18, 2001, Ground Zero fire engine photo taken September 25, 2001. What I was posting during that time: Site Notes Archive – September 2001

I just noted my fourth or fifth hit in the past few days searching Google for ‘LGF’ and ‘racist’. These disturb me because the results are going to be deliberately slanted, reflecting the presumed intention of the searcher. Searching on foregone conclusions is an effective means of enforcing one’s preconceptions. Try searching on the opposite of what is believed, ideas with merit will survive scrutiny.

This reminded me of an interview with Rupert Sheldrake I heard a few years ago, one of his points seems completely appropriate:

The universe is reflexive — in other words, it reflects what we are looking for. If you believe that the most important thing in the universe is polarity, you can see it everywhere — you know, heads and feet, north and south poles, roots and shoots in plants. If you think that the most important thing is trinities, threes, you can find threes everywhere you look. If you think that it’s fours, you find fours — the four points of the compass, squares, corners, and so on. You’re always meeting people who have philosophies where the secret of life is this or that, and you can find plenty of evidence for all of these philosophies.

To illustrate my point, I checked Google for a few other potentially loaded searches related to LGF:

 480 hits: Google Search: LGF racist
1170 hits: Google Search: LGF caring
4470 hits: Google Search: LGF right
3040 hits: Google Search: LGF left
2760 hits: Google Search: LGF love
1800 hits: Google Search: LGF hate
1570 hits: Google Search: LGF truth
 870 hits: Google Search: LGF lies

I swear I thought of this when I was 11:

The photodetectors on the rear surface are used to record the intensity and color of a source of illumination behind the object. The light emitters on the front surface then generate light beams that exactly mimic the same measured intensity, color and trajectory. The result is that an observer looking at the front of the object appears to see straight through it.

What next, mag-lev pavement? (you remember, don’t you Mark?)

Lots of hits via Google looking for information about re-installing MySQL under 10.2. Here is my posting, which adds a little bit to Marc Liniage’s MySQL update and installation instructions.

side note: Today I noticed that 10.2 seems to install a mysql system user by default, which explains why my MySQL user login is no longer showing in the startup list. Even if you don’t have MySQL installed, you can confirm this by checking available users in the Ownership & Permissions section of the Get Info window. Maybe this means future versions of OS X will pre-install MySQL by default. That would make a lot of people happy.