Archive for March 2014
unavoidable oversight
What the end of the world will look like, as observed in Greenpoint USA.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Manhattan’s recyclable paper and plastic went up in flames in Greenpoint the other night, when a blaze began at the Rapid Processing Center on Humboldt St. and Greenpoint Ave. at around 7 p.m. on March 18th. The operation was in the Waste Transfer Station Recycling business, acting as a depot for the unloading of the DSNY’s white packer trucks which perform curbside pickup of paper and plastic materials.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In the end, it took 200 firefighters and all of their arts to fight this four alarm fire.
Almost as soon as it started, social media sites like Facebook began to light up as well with comments and queries offered by community members about the fire and the possible hazards of being exposed to its smoke and effluents.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It seems that the torrents of water used to combat the blaze also flooded the streets, and news reports described a lake of water on Greenpoint Avenue, which carried garbage off the site and allowed it to move around with the wind as flotsam. As you can see in the shot above, puddles of unusual size persist, and carry a sheen of something on their surface.
These shots were captured yesterday, March 23rd, and the mound of material was still smoldering.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The structure is a total loss, obviously, and I did observe air quality monitoring equipment at work. Directly following the fire, FDNY announced that there was nothing, air quality wise, for the community to fret about.
Of course, there was reportedly NO air quality monitoring going on during the fire when a plume of (probably) dioxin laced smoke was infiltrating into the neighborhood.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There was talk following the flooding of Hurricane Sandy about prepositioning environmental sampling kits around Greenpoint, so that actual “time of event” samples could be captured, but that seems to have been forgotten.
Green Infrastructure, instead, is the buzzword of the present day.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
During the fire your humble narrator was safe and sound and upwind in Astoria, but a point was made of interjecting myself into their lively debate to adjure the Greenpointers to call 311 and complain of the smoke, as this would have compelled DEP to set up air monitors DURING the event. No one listened, and no monitors were set up, so everything is fine and nobody was exposed to anything bad.
If you smell something, say something, and call 311.
New York City would not acknowledge the presence of an elephant in the City Council chamber room unless a statistically relevant number of 311 calls were received about it.
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gently undulating
It’s only the third most hated company in America? @twc_help
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The whole Time Warner Cable situation has me down.
Here’s the story – which is being said out loud just for the sake of sanity – back in January, the Internet service started cutting out sometime between 10 p.m. and 12:30 A.M., eventually re asserting itself after a random interval. The first week or so, I chalked it up to TWC upgrading something upstream from my connection, or performing some sort of maintenance. After the 2nd week of interruption, I called in and reported the issue. As it continued into February, I began to time my calls so that the TWC rep could remotely “ping” my modem and visualize what was happening with their network diagnostic tools.
from wikipedia
In the case of uncertainty, expectation is what is considered the most likely to happen. An expectation, which is a belief that is centered on the future, may or may not be realistic. A less advantageous result gives rise to the emotion of disappointment. If something happens that is not at all expected it is a surprise. An expectation about the behavior or performance of another person, expressed to that person, may have the nature of a strong request, or an order.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The network “pings” revealed that something was causing “48% packet loss” which is a technical term that refers to a sort of interference wherein two connected devices (server and modem) are having trouble communicating. It’s a bit more complicated than that, of course, but basically the modem is unable to supply a network connection which will allow my gizmos to connect to the web. TWC decided this was puzzling, and after forcing me to do their whole “unplug the modem, restart the computer” nonsense, agreed to send out a technician. Two missed appointments later, somebody showed up and replaced the modem. The problem persisted despite this.
from wikipedia
A delusion is a belief held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary. As a pathology, it is distinct from a belief based on false or incomplete information, confabulation, dogma, illusion, or other effects of perception.
Delusions typically occur in the context of neurological or mental illness, although they are not tied to any particular disease and have been found to occur in the context of many pathological states (both physical and mental). However, they are of particular diagnostic importance in psychotic disorders including schizophrenia, paraphrenia, manic episodes of bipolar disorder, and psychotic depression.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Part of the reason I hate this organization as much as I do, and I am not alone in this ennui, is that in order to solve the problems which manifest from their end the customer has to manage the situation. From my first call, I asserted that the problem was not within my walls, rather it was an issue emanating from outside of them. They sent out a “Tier 3″ guy who was afraid of the dog, who confirmed my assertion and ordered a lineman crew out. The lineman told me “yeah, the unit on the utility pole is working fine, as is your modem. The issue is actually with the wires running between the pole and your house, which show all the signs of water infiltration.” He arranged for the wires to be replaced.
Yesterday, when the “replace” guy showed up, he neglected to bring a ladder, and TWC somehow intended for one guy to replace wires hanging 40 feet over the pavement that stretch 100 feet across a busy Astoria street all by himself.
from wikipedia
Time Warner Cable Inc. (TWC), formerly Warner Cable Communications and sometimes colloquially referred to as simply Time Warner, is an American cable telecommunications company that operates in 29 states and has 31 operating divisions. It is the second largest cable company in the U.S. behind only Comcast, which has agreed to acquire TWC pending regulatory approval. Its corporate headquarters are located in the Time Warner Center in Midtown Manhattan, New York City.
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soared lonely
Deep thought in today’s post.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This is being written while waiting for representatives of America’s very worst corporation, Time Warner Cable, to show up. This particular drama, one which has been intermittently causing late or missed postings at this and other blogs throughout 2014 and part of 2013, crystallizes the horrors of allowing a services company de facto monopoly status with zero municipal oversight. If ever there was a company’s which needed “looking into” by regulatory agencies, Time Warner Cable is it.
from wikipedia
Self-ownership (or sovereignty of the individual, individual sovereignty or individual autonomy) is the concept of property in one’s own person, expressed as the moral or natural right of a person to have bodily integrity, and be the exclusive controller of his own body and life. According to G. A. Cohen, the concept of self-ownership is that “each person enjoys, over himself and his powers, full and exclusive rights of control and use, and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else that he has not contracted to supply.”
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Under the rule of the Little Big Mayor, companies such as this were allowed a somewhat free hand in their operations with little municipal oversight. Remember the Astoria black out of 2006, when ConEd was allowed a pass for not getting the lights back on for an entire week by the former Mayor? That was standard operating procedure for better than a decade, hopefully under the new Big Little Mayor, things will be different – but I’m not that hopeful about it. This is about Internet service, by the way, not TV.
from wikipedia
Existentialism is a term applied to the work of certain late 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual. In existentialism, the individual’s starting point is characterized by what has been called “the existential attitude”, or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world. Many existentialists have also regarded traditional systematic or academic philosophies, in both style and content, as too abstract and remote from concrete human experience.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Intermittent is how you’d describe the problems affecting my service. It’s what I told them on the phone. They sent a guy out to replace the cable modem. Problem continues. They send out a higher level tech, who says that the problem isn’t with the box. They send out a line guy. The line guy tells me that the problem isn’t on the pole, rather its the wires itself that are faulty. Today, as this is being written, I’m waiting for the wire guy.
Comcast, do you understand what kind of a turd you’ve bought?
from wikipedia
In philosophy, “the Absurd” refers to the conflict between (a) the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life and (b) the human inability to find any. In this context absurd does not mean “logically impossible”, but rather “humanly impossible”. The universe and the human mind do not each separately cause the Absurd, but rather, the Absurd arises by the contradictory nature of the two existing simultaneously. Absurdism, therefore, is a philosophical school of thought stating that the efforts of humanity to find inherent meaning will ultimately fail (and hence are absurd) because the sheer amount of information as well as the vast realm of the unknown make certainty impossible. And yet, some absurdists state that one should embrace the absurd condition of humankind while conversely continuing to explore and search for meaning.
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recumbent head
Hell in a hand basket, lords and ladies, and tongue held firmly in cheek.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Nothing can cause a humble narrator to fly into a rage faster than encountering a vehicle parked on the sidewalk. This is a big problem in western Queens, where the law is enforced subjectively at best, and especially here in Astoria with its population of expatriates and immigrants who were generally too uncontrollable, troublesome, or irascible to stay in the country which they were born in.
Just the other day, on my way home, this scene was spotted on 35th avenue in the 40’s.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
These people… Sheesh. They come here with aspirations of building a new and better life, form a lasting relationship with our relatively non tyrannical government, and this is how they thank the natives? When I was a boy, people who parked on the sidewalk would find themselves swinging from a tree or lamppost, or just fed to a pack of wild junk yard dogs. It’s obviously the fault of real estate developers and our elected officials that this sort of thing is allowed to continue.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Worst of all, this isn’t even an American made car. How does some newcomer afford a foreign sports car anyway? Can’t be from earning it… next you’ll tell me it was a gift. Grants and subsidies and social welfare programs set aside for immigrants that’s how. Can you imagine how much revenue the City loses, only enforcing the parking laws on its native born citizens?
Feh, satire bites
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wildest speculations
In today’s post – it’s the Goyem.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Last year, I got to photograph the Irish Language Mass at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral on Mulberry street in Manhattan, as described in this post from march of 2013.
Opportunity to capture this year’s event presented itself, so I got on the train from raven tressed Astoria to the Shining City and headed over to the House of Dagger John.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This time around, your humble narrator decided to move the camera about a bit more, while still attempting to document the mass itself. As mentioned in the past, one is captivated by the pageantry of the Roman Catholic practice, despite having been raised in the Jewish tradition.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A bit of attention was paid to swapping around my lenses this time around, which runs counter to my normal practice of choosing an “omnivore” lens with which I handle an entire event. Normally, these days, I’m using my Sigma 18-35 or Canon 24-105 for most everything. I’ve got a Canon 70-300 which is somewhat unreliable, but it found its way onto the camera as well during this event.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The issue with the 70-300, a “consumer” level zoom lens, is that I find it to be a bit soft and prone to “back focusing” in the focus department. Its an intermittent thing, mind you. I’ll pop out three exposures and the one in the middle is sharp while the two surrounding it are soft. This sort of unreliability causes me to use it less and less, as photography is all about freezing a moment and there are no “do overs.” I’ve got my eye on a lens I want, but it’s going to take a LOT of summer walking tour revenue to pay for it.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
The Newtown Pentacle 