7/4

instant karma.

No, no, no.... They're unhappy because East Germany was poor and reuniting the country sucked money out of West Germany. A new wall couldn't cost that much...maybe this time they could go with something a bit more economical like a chain link fence.

Let's hope she doesn't sober up before she removes that tape. Ouch!

NY Times September 8, 2004 Space Capsule Crashes in Utah By MARIA NEWMAN and KENNETH CHANG A NASA capsule bearing precious atomic specimens that Hollywood stunt pilots were prepared to catch as it came into earth's atmosphere crashed into the Utah desert this morning after a parachute that was to supposed to slow its fall failed to deploy. It was not clear immediately whether the crash had destroyed the probe's cargo — bits of solar matter painstakingly collected over two years that could provide scientists with clues about the origin and evolution of the solar system. Television footage this morning showed the capsule, an inflated disc slightly smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle, hurtling through the air like a runaway hubcap, then crashing into the desert. In a few moments, as the probe lay half-emerged in the hot sand, its round casing cracked open, investigators approached gingerly, circling the probe before they began taking photographs. The plans for a derring-do capture had enlisted the help of two Hollywood stunt pilots who had practiced their mission for five years after military pilots declined to attempt the rescue. The pilots of the two helicopters were prepared to use a giant hook to latch onto the probe's parachute as it slowly descended to earth. The probe's cargo is the first extraterrestrial material that NASA has brought back to Earth since Apollo 17 astronauts collected rocks from the Moon in 1972. Scientists hope the material will tell them about the solar system's primordial building materials of gas and dust that later turned into planets. First, though, scientists had to make sure the material was protected as it made its way to earth after the capsule detached from the probe, Genesis. By Tuesday morning, Genesis had traveled to a spot within the orbit of the Moon. At 5:50 today the 450-pound capsule containing the solar wind samples was scheduled to detach from the rest of the spacecraft, which remained in space. After the capsule entered the Earth's atmosphere, traveling at 25,000 miles an hour, an initial parachute was to deploy at a height of 21 miles. It was not clear yet if that took place. A few minutes later, at an altitude of four miles, the main parachute, a winglike parafoil, was to deploy, and the capsule was to glide over the Utah desert. The two helicopters were waiting in the air over the landing target, an ellipse 23 miles long and 15 miles wide at the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Cliff Fleming, the pilot of the lead helicopter, was to make the first attempt to snag the parafoil with a 20-foot hook in the back of the helicopter. Mr. Fleming said that except for one deliberate miss as a test for the other pilot, Dan Rudert, he successfully caught the parachute in every practice run. "We did not ever miss one," Mr. Fleming said on Tuesday. "I feel quite confident." If the parachutes had functioned properly, the pilots would have had enough time to make four attempts to capture the capsule before it hit the ground. Dr. Donald S. Burnett, the mission's principal investigator, said on Tuesday, "By recovering that composition with Genesis, we will be able to compare the starting composition of all planetary materials with what they are today." Launched in 2001, the probe traveled 930,000 miles to a point where gravitational forces of the Earth and the Sun cancel out. There, it deployed 55 hexagonal plates made of a variety of materials, including silicon, sapphire and diamond and waited as bits of solar wind — charged atoms, traveling about a million miles per hour, that the Sun continually spews out — embedded themselves in the plates. After 850 days of collecting, Genesis packed up in April and headed back toward Earth. The mission cost $260 million.

WTF? Instead of a water landing, they were going to grab it while it was landing.

September 8, 2004 Space Capsule Crashes in Utah By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 12:35 p.m. ET DUGWAY PROVING GROUND, Utah (AP) -- The Genesis space capsule, which promised scientists potential clues to the origin of the solar system, crashed to Earth on Wednesday after its parachute failed to deploy. It wasn't immediately known whether the cosmic samples had been destroyed. NASA officials believed the fragile disks that hold the atoms would shatter even if the capsule hit the ground with a parachute. ``We're going to get the pieces out,'' said Roger Wiens, a payload leader for Los Alamos National Laboratory. ``It's going to be a lot tougher to sort out the pieces of broken material.'' Hollywood stunt pilots had taken off to hook the capsule's parachute, but the refrigerator-sized capsule -- holding a set of fragile disks containing billions of atoms collected from solar wind -- hit the desert floor without the parachute opening. The capsule was returning after three years in space as part of six-year project that cost $260 million.

As far as I know. I saw that band at the Knitting Factory.

Uh oh...last time he was at DMG, there was a huge blackout.

real dark now...uv=0

dark, strong hint of night.

Used to happen all the time on NJ Transit. I just started taking the train into NYC again, but over the years it wasn't unusual to take a late train and be delayed while they cleaned things up. edited fer spelling

as if Charles Ives didn't exist...

He's a local guy. Or so he'd like to think. The Trenton Avant Garde Festival has been celebrating his birthday for years. Don't know if they still do. I heard Ballet Mécanique at Bang on a Can a few years ago. Wow!

I have the Muddy Waters & Howlin' Wolf Chess boxes.

John Shirley - Gurdjieff: an introduction to his life and ideas

75, cloudy, chance of showers, but I don't see any on the radar.

NY Times September 7, 2004 N.Y.U. Student Is Killed in Fall at Tisch School By GLENN COLLINS A 23-year-old graduate film student at New York University fell to her death yesterday from the roof of the Tisch School of the Arts in what school officials said was apparently a suicide. It was the seventh high-profile death of an N.Y.U. student in a year, and the second death of a Tisch student in less than a week. Yesterday, the holiday before fall classes were to begin, the second-year film student, Joanne M. Leavy, was found in the street outside the rear entrance of the Tisch School at 286 Mercer Street, the police said. The school building from which she fell is across from 11 Waverly Place, where, they said, she shared an apartment with her father, Lee. The police were still investigating the cause of death, though an N.Y.U. spokesman called the death an "apparent suicide." Including yesterday's death, six N.Y.U. students have died in falls from heights since last September. Five of those cases were determined to be suicides. Early last Wednesday, a 19-year-old sophomore at Tisch, Spenser Kimbrough, reported feeling ill in the university residence hall at 80 Lafayette Street. After calling 911, he was taken to New York University Downtown Hospital, near City Hall, where he died at 3 a.m., police said. The medical examiner is investigating the cause of death. "These two deaths are unrelated, other than that both were students in the Tisch School of the Arts," said John Beckman, the N.Y.U. spokesman. "Each involved very different circumstances, but for the N.Y.U. community, and the Tisch School in particular, these two deaths, coming so close together, compound the sense of sorrow we feel and strengthens our resolve to do all we can to insure the well-being of all our students." Yesterday, students clustered about the campus at the school of 40,000 and tried to make sense of Ms. Leavy's death, at the end of the freshman orientation the university calls Welcome Week. Students were mystified that the death occurred at the beginning of the semester, well before the cold, dark days of winter and the pressure of school assignments. "The fact that there have been so many suicides is bizarre," said Jason Schneider, 20, an acting student who had just transferred from a small school in rural Missouri. "What's so surprising is that class hasn't even started yet, and we've already lost two people." According to witnesses, Ms. Leavy left her apartment hastily a few minutes before her death about 10:30 a.m. Edward Dhanpat, a doorman in the building for 22 years, said that Ms. Leavy had left the building running, "and she was wearing no shoes," and added that her skirt and shirt appeared to have been put on hastily. Mr. Dhanpat said he thought she had muttered something like, "Don't tell my father," as she passed. Mr. Dhanpat described her as a pretty woman about 5 feet, 8 inches tall with dark reddish hair. He said she had been very serious "and never said hello." She lived in the building for 8 or 10 years, he recalled, and he also remembered that she had sometimes come into the lobby with cameras and film equipment. Mr. Dhanpat said she headed from the building at the northwest corner of Mercer and Waverly Streets and went east toward the Tisch building. There, she is believed to have turned right onto Broadway, and entered through the polished granite pillars flanking the bronze letters that announce the school's name at 721 Broadway. Ms. Leavy's body was found in the street, next to the patch of sidewalk across from the Tisch school's rear entrance, where plastic garbage bags from the building had been piled on the sidewalk. She was pronounced dead at the scene. Her distraught father was interviewed by the police at the scene, but asked for privacy when questioned by reporters on the street. Mr. Beckman, of N.Y.U., said, "These deaths are a great matter of concern to the university administration." He said the school had expanded counseling hours for students and had established a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week hot line to connect students to counseling or health services. "There's an understandable desire to deduce a single cause or conclude that there is a single phenomenon at work," Mr. Beckman added, "but we are not in a position to say that. Each of these deaths has its own history and motivation and circumstances." The parents of Mr. Kimbrough, the student who died last week, have called for an investigation of his death. In a statement, Mr. Beckman said that "any suggestion that the university has been less than forthcoming is wrong and unfair," adding that the school had cooperated with the police and had made counseling available to Tisch students who were concerned about Mr. Kimbrough's death. Colin Moynihan and Patrick Healy contributed reporting for this article.

Amoeba Music is worth checking out just because it's such a huge store.

I hate the crappy Windows mouse, which is designed for righthanded people, forcing a lefthanded person to have to figure out how to reverse the buttons. As usual, the single button mac mouse is highly effective and simpler to use. (My mac-expert friend looked at me in justified puzzlement when I first got my imac and asked how to change it from right to lefthanded.) And why wouldn't you go into Control Pannel -> Mouse and switch the buttons?

I find it totally disturbing. Any death is fucked up.

The real question is why they thought they needed a nekid guy on the cover?

Sound familiar? From 1010wins:

Maybe they're tourists?

Hey! I was walking down that street on Friday afternoon!

Wow. I know there were a couple of suicide jumpers at NYU last school year. That's a NYU neighborhood, isn't it?