DBD 10.19.11 Drop your fantasy football team now!

This is the stupidest thing. Apple just sold its most phones ever. The iPhone 4S is a total success. They have more money than God. Its the Wall Street fatcats just being insane. Tim Cook is 99%!!!!!

Apple gives, and they give, and they give, and they give, and those mean ol’ analysts just keep expecting more and more from them! [sniff]

The analysts have no fucking clue.

Like no one realized until last night that there was other competition in the smart phone department. The market is fixing itself because some people think one thing and somepeople think another thing. Here’s my expert analysis:

Journalist: THIS IS A BIG DEAL – MUST GET MORE INFO
Analyst quoted: I’D BETTER NOT LOOK LIKE AN ASS IN THE WSJ.
Story: STUFF HAPPENED. THERE ARE POTENTIAL REASONS WHY.

Noooooo! Stop tempting me!

I need to get my stfu fatty *ss in better shape first.

This just took a turn for the Ohio!

Those tigers are going to be pissed off come Winter.

They’re still looking for 3 of the animals.

I have not been eaten by a tiger. Yet.

new

I kinda wanna go to this. BAM has a piece of photos of the devastation:

In October 1991, immediately following a catastrophic firestorm that struck the Oakland and Berkeley hills, renowned Bay Area photographer Richard Misrach ventured into the fire zone armed with his eight-by-ten-inch view camera. Working alone amidst the ruins, he roamed devastated neighborhoods, recording stark vistas and intimate details of destroyed homes. The resulting images are distinguished by Misrach’s masterful framing of his subjects: the compositions are dramatic without being sensational and incisively reveal a world transformed.

Out of respect for the victims of the fire—which killed twenty-five people, injured 150 others, and destroyed nearly three thousand houses and 1,520 acres—Misrach chose to keep the images in storage, showing them only rarely. Now, to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the fire, BAM/PFA and the Oakland Museum of California each present forty photographs from the series, including fourteen large-format images whose immense scale invites the viewer to enter into Misrach’s quiet elegies.

The Oakland-Berkeley Fire Aftermath photographs have shifted in their meaning over the past twenty years, from journalistic reportage to historical record. Visitors to the museum can participate in this recording of history by contributing their own recollections and reflections to a handmade book in the galleries, what Misrach calls an "elegy ledger," that will join the photographs as part of the community’s collective memory of the 1991 firestorm and its aftermath.

Oh good dog, I thought this was current news for a second. FREAKED ME OUT.

For the record, I was alive, but too far south. And probably still in girl scouts.

This fire broke in a massive way the day after the 1991 Washington game, which was at Cal Memorial. As FiatLux could tell you, the atmosphere was absolutely electric that day.

Getting to the stadium, we approached from the south. As we approached the stadium from Prospect Street, I looked up at the ridge above Strawberry Canyon. I could see a small plume of white smoke, indicative of a fire being extinguished. I thought to myself, “It’s a bad day and a bad place for a fire.”

What I and thousands of others didn’t know was that plume of white smoke marked the approximate location of the ignition point for the Firestorm that would sweep the Oakland Hills the very next day.

In the meantime, we had a game between the No. 1 Washington Huskies and the No. 5 California Golden Bears. I noticed one small part of Cal Memorial that was empty: about the lowest 10 rows of Section J (it might have been II). The official attendance count in the next day’s newspaper was 74,492, exactly 500 seats less than the then-official capacity of 74,992.

So, the morning after was a Sunday. As I walked down the stone steps to retrieve the Sunday paper, the wind blew out of the northwest. It was a hot Diablo wind and it reminded me of the descriptions of the wind on the day of the 1923 Berkeley Fire. I had a uneasy feeling as I walked back into the house.

Late that morning, I let our dog out onto the back porch. The porch is painted a light sand beige color. As I opened the door, I looked at the porch to watch Toby exit. The porch floor was orange. Oh shit. I walked out onto the porch and looked toward the south.

The sky was filled with the smoke of burning redwood.

I wish those of you who weren’t around the 510 before the fire could have seen the area. The hills were beautiful, and the architecture was a wonderful complement to the landscape. I feel like the affected areas are now full of terra cotta colored McMansions as people tried to rebuild as much as was allowable on their lots. I can understand why they did it, but it has taken away some of the harmony between land and home of the neighborhoods.

On the Sunday in question, I had gone to the Pumpkin Festival in Half Moon Bay, and as we crested the hill on 92 coming home could see the massive plume of black smoke and could actually see the flames. We promptly went home and I sat about 2 feet from the TV for the next 12 hours without moving. I think we watched the same house collapse about 20 times on the news. The saga of those on the narrowest, windiest streets was heartbreaking.