|
|
Michael Pusateri loves to come up with weekend projects, into which he often drags his friends and family. He also works for Disney, which has a completely different take on Pluto.
Keep this in mind when reading Pluto is a Planet Protest.
The LA Daily News has a story today by Kerry Cavanaugh regarding 184 pages of logs that delves into some specifics of the materials destroyed at the site. It's not pretty.
I quoted a lot because the story will disappear completely in a few days:
After decades of secrecy, Boeing officials have revealed that the former owners of the Santa Susana Field Lab destroyed napalm, dioxin and other highly toxic materials in open-air burn pits, documents obtained Monday show.
The 184 pages of documents that Boeing delivered last week to the Department of Toxic Substances Control include logs detailing how Rocketdyne detonated and destroyed hundreds of thousands of pounds of toxic liquids and gases at the so-called Area 1 burn pit.
The list includes 50 gallons of napalm burned in 1969, three gallons of dioxin burned in 1971, and the destruction of flammable waste in 1990 that resulted in a 10-foot-high fireball.
Concern about the potential health hazard to workers prompted state officials to postpone a planned cleanup of the pit.
"With this new information we think we may need to fully characterize this burn pit to figure out what went in there and what was burned there," DTSC spokesman Ron Baker said. "We can't move forward with a big question mark."
State officials have ordered Boeing to cap the pit with clay or grass to prevent runoff from carrying contaminated soil off the hilltop lab. That will give Boeing and state officials more time to investigate the contamination in the pit.
The documents were prepared by the Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell International, which was later purchased by the Boeing Co. They show that Rocketdyne's Canoga Park facility also sent material up to the lab for disposal - information that surprised state regulators.
Boeing spokeswoman Blythe Jameson said DTSC officials had requested records of the burn pit and that the company is compiling even more historic documents on the pit usage.
"This site was primarily used to destroy rocket fuels, chemicals to support rocket engine tests and other rocket engine waste," she said.
The Santa Susana Field Lab is a 2,800-acre facility at the top of the Simi Hills in Ventura County, near the Los Angeles city limits. Beginning in the 1940s, the Department of Energy experimented with 10 nuclear reactors, one of which experienced a partial meltdown. The lab also tested rocket engines under contracts with the Department of Defense and NASA.
The Daily News first disclosed serious concerns about contamination at the field lab in 1989, including questionable practices involving disposal of toxic materials in the burn pit.
...
The documents include workers' notes on how they burned the materials - pouring chemicals on sawdust, igniting the mixture, then observing the smoke.
In one test conducted at 8:40 a.m. April 29, 1989, workers burned a blue cylinder containing unknown material. A handwritten note on the log notes: "Still off-gassing at 12:30! Probably F2," a reference to fluorine, a poisonous, pale yellow gas.
...
That letter says workers burned 13,810 pounds of reactive metals, such as sodium and magnesium; 450,000 gallons of fuel, including hydrazine; and toxic gases such as chlorine.
The pit was supposed to close in 1971 because there were concerns about air pollution, but records show that employees burned waste through 1990.
Musicians are like everyone else, prone to fall into habits and comfortable places. If you get good (and successful) at doing a particular sound, it's unlikely that you'll try something else unless you're desperate or just a little bit crazy.
You'll find segments from two songs (below) from a recent CD by a long time American musician who seems to defy the trend. He's not Zappa (a voice we're all poorer for because of his early demise), but he's got some of the same chameleon like tendencies without Yankovic's need to mock (and add an accordion).
The last bits of the second snippet make it a whole lot easier to identify, but hey, I didn't want to make it impossible.
The Ventura County Reporter is celebrating thirty years of operation in this weeks issue. My hat's off to them! I hope they continue for another thirty and beyond.
An anniversary issue is an interesting proposition and, logistically, there are two ways you can approach it. It’s technically our anniversary, so we could fill every page with stories about the VC Reporter and everything that has happened to it over the last 30 years. Or we could look out into the community and explore what has happened here in Ventura County over the last 30 years. We chose the latter (which doesn’t mean we didn’t have fun looking back at old issues and covers of the Reporter — see Saundra Sorenson’s story on page 9), for a number of reasons, which means I can feel justified in talking a little bit about the paper in this space.
The story by Saundra Sorenson is where things take a strange twist...
When the editorial staff at the Ventura County Reporter began preparing for its 30th anniversary issue, they were surprised to find that their paper’s history, in-house, went back only five years. The oldest issue archived didn’t even pre-date the current presidential administration.
After scouring the paper’s archives — housed in a small, unnaturally warm room behind the production department — the go-to guy seemed to be film critic, calendar editor and 30-year Reporter veteran John Larsen.
And, at one time, Larsen was able to supply the first ever Reporter. Five years ago, he brought his impressive collection to the paper’s office, where old headlines would be quoted, covers scanned and reprinted. But a quick flip through the 25th anniversary Reporter shows no evidence of these vintage papers, and they appear to have been lost in some bizarre, intra-office black hole around the time the last anniversary edition was published. Whether it was negligence on the management’s part, or a sentimental employee pocketing what amounts to nearly 1,300 papers, the disappearance of Larsen’s personal archives remains a mystery.
John Larsen (thirty years at the same job, wow) takes his own tour down memory lane including this anecdote...
After a short hiatus, Elton John returned to recording in 1978 with the single, “Ego.” To trumpet the release, the label shot a short movie (music videos were still several years away) and premiered it at the National Theater in Westwood. Robert Emert, a friend since high school, and I headed down Highway 1 for what seemed like an innocuous event, a five-minute film with free popcorn. On the way there, we rear-ended a car, crushing the front end of Robert’s little Honda. Since it was mostly cosmetic damage, we decided to carry on. What was supposed to be a little goof turned into a major goof, at least for us. Imagine our surprise when we pulled up to the National Theater to hundreds of screaming fans, who stood behind velvet ropes to catch a glimpse of rock and roll royalty. We were escorted out of our crushed little car by the valet, walked down the red carpet (who the hell are they?), and entered the theater. Inside was a Who’s Who of rock and roll, a packed house choking down packets of Pop Rocks followed by Champagne chasers.
They've also finally dealt with the issue of keeping their articles online which is more cause for celebration (if a story link dies in less than a week it's pretty useless in a link dominated medium). I tumbled to the changes that seem to have occurred last December (all issues from December onward seem to be there) while I was updating my local news sources page last week (adding the Santa Paula Times [Topix is really fond of them] and the overlooked Camarillo Acorn).
With these changes, I'm hopeful they won't be stuck trying to figure out where the next thirty years of stories and features went.
The long drawn out disposition of former Adelphia customers in the wake of the Rigas family fraud indictment and subsequent corporate bankruptcy (2002 was quite a year) finally happened last week. It came on rather quickly for something which had dragged on so long I nearly forgot about it. The last time I'd talked to anyone about it was Summer of 2005 when I was trying to pump a Comcast engineer to find out how the division of spoils was shaping up.
In less than three weeks the situation went from complete silence to implementation. As of last Tuesday (August 1), we're Road Runners (or something). I may someday need to do a GTE Americast customer timeline (we've been passed around a wee bit) but I was off melting in Atlanta and would normally have had nothing to add.
Time Warner had other ideas.
They'd not carried the NFL Network at all before, having failed to reach an agreement on price. The obligations from deals struck by Adelphia provided a new twist. On day ONE of ownership, TWC lobbed the first round by turning off the network to 1.6 million households (Deadspin had a take we can endorse) and the FCC responded negatively. Probably because of this.
Concerned that Time Warner and Comcast would have more clout, the FCC included several conditions in its approval. The companies will be prohibited from trying to lure viewers by refusing to distribute their regional sports channels to rival providers such as satellite TV systems. In addition, independent programmers will have the right to binding arbitration if the cable systems decline to carry their channels.
By the time I arrived home on Friday afternoon, we had a new Time Warner Cable logo and NFL Network is there (I can't say if it left and came back). It may not be staying too long.
Because we still do not have a contract with the NFL Network, we have also begun the official 30 day-notification period with an on-screen crawl that began running last night at midnight alerting our customers that the network may be withdrawn again should we not be able to conclude an agreement with the NFL Network, Harrad said.
As pointed out elsewhere, this year there are real games being carried plus all the pre-season hoopla. Everyone is going to be a little prickly if this isn't sorted out come November.
Long term, this is about a lot more than NFL Net. The deal for broadcast rights to "Sunday Ticket" is going to open up in the next couple years and cable is going to play a big part (a dish or our wonderful trees? hmmmm) My best guess is that the NFL is resisting proposed pricing (especially unbundled price points) and language regarding distribution rights.
Baseball and Basketball both fell in line with 'game channels' even if it doesn't make too much sense; with longer seasons came more games, it works out reasonably well for all but the fan who wants to watch the hometown announcers call the remote game. Subdividing a regular season comprised of 16 games over 17 weeks is tough. I would love to have a single division package (at a significant discount of course) so I could watch all the NFC North games. Others might want anything from two to six divisions. Some will want to order the occasional game.
How that breaks down, what the league gets and what it costs customers are the league's likely talking points. What it costs Time Warner and what kind of breaks they get on licensing other media materials for use within other parts of the company is where things get interesting and TWX starts pushing it's weight around.
Time Warner just got a bit bigger and they've got some other properties (Sports Illustrated and HBO) where they hype the NFL with wild abandon. They won't settle for the deal Adelphia had and they're likely pushing for a better deal than Comcast, because of the exposure they can bring elsewhere. TWX isn't quite the size of Comcast as an operator, but they're not just another buyer. They're a seller and a reseller, which adds a whole new level of licensing hell and they use a lot of different media in ways that make them more like Disney, Viacom or FOX when it comes 'simple' broadcasting contracts. Who knows what kind of tangled web of agreements already exist? If they're looking long term, they're trying to negotiate a blanket contract that covers all known and new media types. Really nasty business there, a royal battle between kingdoms of minutiae.
The NFL isn't exactly undermanned in the legal department (except when it comes to Al Davis) and once again has anointed a lawyer with a PR background as the next commissioner. That's no accident.
There are no innocent parties here and perhaps we should just keep mum while the elephants wrestle as Tom Hoffarth originally suggested but he couldn't resist (and where did round 2 go?) Still, I'd like to know the details. Especially since the TWC marketing department has gone a bit overboard, their welcome advertisement is everywhere. At this point, the only people who don't know about the transition don't turn their televisions on.
History is a jigsaw puzzle put together over time. Vanity Fair has a new piece by Michael Bronner (an associate producer on the film United 93) that melds small snippets of 30 hours of recordings from the Northeast Air Defense Sector with interviews in 9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes.
It's a fascinating reconstruction of the events that morning, told by those who couldn't see nor control what was happening. Go read.
Many know of (or might recognize) the motto of the postal service:
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
As a Californian (how long must I live here to say that?), I've been aware of some missing attributes; fire, flood, earthquake and more recently power outage. More importantly I've been aware of some serious shortcomings in regard to swiftness. Lisa Friedman of the Daily News takes on the subject today [via LA Observed]:
The internal report for May 4 obtained by Waxman showed at least 78,000 pieces of first-class mail were delayed at the Los Angeles plant on May 4, 2006. The plant had estimated only 1,000 pieces of mail would be delayed.
That underestimation resulted in delays of up to six days, though it is unclear what percentage of mail was delayed that long.
Similarly, periodicals were delayed 10 days.
Periodical delivery is abysmal. I'm not about to blame the South Los Angeles processing center for my problems, I think the whole region is broken.
I subscribed to a technical journal published in Westlake Village for many years. I can hop in the car and be at their offices under all but the worst conditions in less than ten minutes. I'd don't believe they actually do the print run here, but as I recall it's somewhere in SoCal. Routinely, I was the last one to see the latest edition. At one point it got bad enough that people from Europe were remarking about articles in the most recent version before I saw it. That always bugged me.
More recently, I've been getting Sports Illustrated (I got signed up somehow, it does make good rest room reading material until the day when bathrooms come with built in browsers). At best it gets here on Friday (four days), often enough to notice, it shows up the next week. That pre-event feature piece is pretty much useless when it shows up after the event is already over.
As far as I'm concerned those bathroom browsers can't get here fast enough.
