Juxtaposition of Rich and Poor

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Working from this BBC story on Philippine poverty, Deebeedee posts a bunch of his own photos showing the stark contrast between rich and poor on his recent visit to the Philippines. It’s a sad and shocking juxtaposition: shanty towns beside mansions, squatters beside business centers.

We Filipinos, unfortunately, have grown rather jaded to it all. Poor, ragged children begging at city street corners are not uncommon, and the averted eyes and nonchalant “nothing-for-you” double knock on the window are part of a learned daily routine for most in our social stratum. It’s a huge problem which grows with the population; the country gets poorer and hungrier everyday, and it’s not something you can fix by just voting in a better president or switching to a parliamentary form of government.

More from CountryStudies.us.

Closeups of Tethys

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Cassini flies by Tethys and Hyperion, and the photos so far have been awesome and weird! I especially want to point out this fascinating view, which, if you look at it closely, reveals what appears to be a string of small impact craters, in a straight line over older terrain. What kind of meteor impact could have produced such an excellent formation of craters?

Update: On Metafilter, freedryk mentions Shoemaker-Levy 9, the comet that broke up as it crashed into Jupiter in a series of linear impacts. Similar forces may have been at work in the line-of-craters on Tethys.

Update: Hyperion photos are coming in.

Kokogiak’s got backup in case the JRUNS strike. More from Planetary.org. Also crossposted to Metafilter.

Accordion Guy and the Redhead Get Hitched

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Congratulations to Joey “Accordion Guy” de Villa and his lovely bride, Wendy “The Redhead” Koslow, who were married last Saturday in a mixed Filipino-Judaic ceremony which I would have loved to see. Joey wore his Barong Tagalog, as he said he would, and I think it a good sign for my own future plans to someday marry a redheaded Polish girl as I wear my own Barong.

More from Reverend AKMA, who introduced them, and The Velveteen Rabbi, who officiated the ceremony.

Solanum quitoense

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Those of you who were wondering what the thorny green-and-purple plant here was, I asked about it on Metafilter. It’s called the Bed of Nails plant, or Naranjilla in Central America, scientific name Solanum quitoense. I don’t think I’ll be growing any of those soon, as they would probably be a literal pain to repot.

Amykow v2

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I’m happy to announce that Amykow.com is back in action. Amy wanted to start with a clean slate so she could focus more on her art, so the older Blogger entries are now lost to the ages.

The site now runs on WordPress, with a template I specifically designed to act as gallery rather than weblog. This meant dispensing with comments and trackbacks (so as to avoid the travails of spam and community moderation) and moving most other conventional weblog trappings — date-based archives, categories, and search — down and out of the way, to draw focus to the current piece. Hence the bottom-positioned “side” bar.

Amy thought a black background would accentuate her work, and I agreed, having seen a similarly vivid sharpening effect in a book on Vermeer paintings which used glossy black pages. However, I still don’t think I’ve done enough for the design to visually center on the art; the text and link colors seem to compete too much with the painting, though for readability’s sake, the font cannot be made any smaller or darker. For now, I’m okay with this, and I’ll have a tweaked version of that theme up for other WordPress users desiring a similar layout.

(P.S. Note that I formulated this footer-oriented layout well before Powazek’s “Embrace Your Bottom.” In this case, it was the Flickr “Fruit at the Bottom” approach I had in mind.)

Hurricane Rita Approaches

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Scarcely a month after Hurricane Katrina, now we have a new Monster from the Gulf: Hurricane Rita. (Well, from the Atlantic, actually, via the Gulf, but it’s the warm water in the Gulf of Mexico this time of year that feeds these beasts so they grow monstrous.) Texas and Louisiana are at risk, but having seen the havoc wreaked by Katrina, millions have evacuated. (What’s being done for the NOLA evacuees at the Astrodome, I wonder?)

Houston, which is right on the coast, and Galveston, a shield island jutting out into the Gulf, are going to be hit hard by this storm; but a direct hit may now be avoided as the storm veers east, and Rita is weakening from Category 5 to Category 3. Sad to say, New Orleans is getting pounded once more: weakened, patched-together levees are breached again, and parts of the city are re-flooding. The only reason New Orleans will be spared massive destruction this time is because the city already lies in ruins from Katrina.

Satellite and radar imagery:

More news and links:

Update: Rita came and went, and the impact was not quite as bad as Katrina’s, probably because it didn’t hit as flood-prone an area as New Orleans. There was damage, still, however, but oil seems to have dodged the bullet.

A Brief History of Yahoo Acquisitions

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You know what really bothers me about the whole Yahoo-Flickr deal? Take a look at each of these sites:

All of them were bought by Yahoo sometime between the late 1990s and early 2000s. Do you sense a common thread? What happened to each one after being bought by Yahoo? I’m not aware that Yahoo has ever allowed any of its acquisitions to maintain a unique identity. What, then, does that bode for Flickr?

Update, Feb 2007: This entry has been linked a couple of times (okay, once by me) in the official login merge thread, and I’ve added links to a few more acquired companies that have been brought up. It really is looking unavoidable that Flickr will be turned into a subdomain within the next few years. They better not break my <img> links. Also see the list here and the Wikipedia list of Yahoo acquisitions.

Update, 2008: Yum, crow!

Belated “Blogiversary”

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I forgot to post about this last week, but last Tuesday, September 13th, marked this weblog’s fifth year. HNBP is now a super-senior.

It all began with “Think,” a spare directory in my old Hypermart space (gone now) where I could tool around with various things — in this case, Blogger — as I reacquainted myself with the joys of hand-coding my own HTML, after years of being spoiled by Adobe Pagemill and Macromedia Dreamweaver. Back then, it was black backgrounds, table-based layouts, and <ALLCAPS> <TAGS>. (I still get a bit embarassed at myself when I look at the code on my old sites.)

Over the years, “Think” (later to be called “How Now Brownpau” in an obvious pun on my online handle) would cycle through a long and painful series of free web hosting services before I got my own credit card and was finally able to buy my own domain name and paid web hosting. The site has been demolished and rebuilt several times, quite often around its anniversary, so don’t be surprised if new changes appear sometime soon. ‘Tis the season.

Trees on the Mall

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(Trees.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)

It was nice enough out that I could amble home from work today, so I opted for the “scenic route” along the National Mall. I had to stop at one point and just admire how twilight shone through the trees as a warm northwest breeze rustled the canopy. A heavy sense of history seemed to settle over me, as if all the generations that had trod this place through the years had left a palpable aura, so thick you could almost smell it.

Or maybe it was the contractors’ porta-potties as the workers dismantled the tents from last week’s National Black Family Reunion.