Joe Bad X Rides Again!!!
If you clicked on the arrow above you heard Joe Bad X’s newest video, his cover of Ozzy Osbourne’s Revelation (Mother Earth). Joe Bad X is the stage name of Joel Alan Badeaux, m.d., psychiatrist, #2 son, and some might say, chip off the old block. It was like three weeks ago that Joel flew to Houston for a weekend, rounded up his old friend Keith Silverstein to hold the camera, and together they shot video in front of the BP headquarters building here in Houston, and in Galveston and Louisiana, as they were looking for visual evidence of BP’s negligent incompetence.
YouTube brought him other images, of an oil covered pelican, of the explosion at the drilling platform, he even superimposed images of the mass of oil wells burning in Kuwait, during the first gulf war. Three weeks later the first of the two videos he hopes to get from the trip is up on YouTube. Joel has been on vacation since his graduation from residency in June. Now he is back and hard at work as a much higher paid staff psychiatrist at the hospital where he did his residency. §
US Finally Joins Hiroshima’s 65th Anniversary
Paper lanterns float in the Motoyasu River in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima to mark the 65th anniversary of the World War II atomic bombing. For the first time, representatives from the U.S. joined others from more than 70 nations at the emotional event. Photo: Toru Yamanaka-AFP/Getty Images
An elderly couple burns incense to mourn victims of the 1945 bombing, which killed roughly 140,000 people, at Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima. Photo: Toru Yamanaka-AFP/Getty Images
Shuji Kajiyama-ATsuyuko Nakao, 92, right, and Kinuyo Ikegami, 77, who both lost family members in the Hiroshima bombing, console each other at Peace Memorial Park. Photo: Shuji Kajiyama-AP
LIFE Magazine’s Photos of Hiroshima,
Nagasaki Finally Seen
As proof yet again of why we need an entity like Wikileaks to publish documents your government or your businesses don’t want you to see, we offer the five photographs below. They were taken by three of LIFE Magazine’s finest photographers, but the magazine never published them at the time.
In fact, they have not been seen until this week, when they finally got published by the Washington Post in its web edition. Why did we have to wait 65 years before people could see them?
Chances are the Military and the government convinced LIFE not to publish these images at the time, for fear they might have turned some Americans against the military’s dropping of the two atomic bombs, which the military hurried to drop as the Japanese sent out peace feelers, in order to test the bomb's efficacy as a weapon before the Japanese surrendered, after which such tests would have been impossible.
What do you think? Should LIFE have held these photographs back for fear of ticking off the military and the government? Even 65 years after the fact they are moving. §
One night several months ago I was googling John Hersey’s Hiroshima, and I got a Google reproduction of Hersey’s New Yorker article. Thinking it would be the perfect reading material to accompany the LIFE Hiroshima and Nagasaki photos, I once again Googled Hersey Hiroshima. This time I again got the article scanned from the pages of The New Yorker. An excellent way to compliment the experience of those LIFE Magazine photographs would be for you to google John Hersey Hiroshima, and read the article which filled an entire issue of The New Yorker for yourself, which you can do by pointing your cursor and clicking here!.
The GOP’s Arrogant Assumptions
Monumental is one of the many descriptive phrases you can use to describe the arrogant assumptions of the Republican right. They have been locksteppingly consistent in their opposition to anything Obama or Democratic. And in their mountainous arrogance, they think, or say they think, that the voters of this country think their way, and are going to reward them (Republicans) in the fall elections by putting GOP candidates in power, casting out their democratic forebears.
Is this really true? Or are the Mitch McConnells, John Boehners and their like whistling Dixie? In a Political Graveyard?
Take one Obama talking point, for example. When Obama lent money to GM and Chrysler because to let them go out of business as the capitalist purists and the dog eat dog libertarians would have had us do, such negligence would have also killed all of the parts providers, which would have also brought down the profitable Ford Motor Co.
Well, to make a long story interminable, these days both GM and Chrysler are showing profits, the American taxpayers have been, or are in the process of being paid back, and yet another Obama decision is seen in hindsight as having been absolutely right in his decision to use the power of the presidency to save two of America’s leading homegrown automakers, and more importantly saving the jobs of their workers in the car companies, and in the many suppliers which would have gone under had Obama decided to let the Big Two go under.
Obama is quite right using the analogy that Republicans want Americans to put them back into power, thereby giving the GOP the “keys” to run the country once again. But what would they do if given the keys again? Exactly what they did to run the economy into the ditch in the first place, starting with those famous Bush tax cuts for the very wealthy, which gave our most wealthy few a free pass past go in the funding of our two wars, and the not paid for drug relief for our seniors. Is the American voter really seriously thinking about putting Republicans back in charge? My god, I hope not! Don’t we ever learn? Stay tuned. §
Two Mac Programs I Can’t Live Without
There are two small application programs that I don’t think I could live without. iKey, which is a program that allows you to open applications or documents with key combinations, which saves you having to click on its icon in the dock to open them. iKey saves all kinds of time and eases frustration.
When I first considered iKey I was afraid I’d not be able to remember the key combinations. And so I standardized them. I used the Mac’s control key plus the letter key standing for the app. Control+P opens Photoshop, control+g opens graphic converter, etc. For combinations requiring two actions (opening a web browser, then opening an URL, I use the option key+shift key.
And iKey can also be controlled by the clock embedded in your computer. For instance, every morning at exactly six a.m. iKey wakes up my iMac from its nightly nap. Then at ten past six it opens up my primary web browser Camino (which comes from Mozilla, but unlike Firefox, which was made for Windows, Camino was developed specifically for the Mac). At ten after six iKey not only opens Camino but not stopping there, it goes on to open the Houston Chronicle online.
But the other program, which is even more useful when you’re writing or being creative, is called CopyPaste, and it allows you to both assemble a clip archive of your choosing (each item available in what you are working on with a single click), and another of its creations keeps track of every save you make to your clipboard, compiling a kind of history of your clipboarding experience. Each item in History is also available with a single click.
My main clip archive holds all of my html symbols, I keep the archive open, and as I begin a paragraph I click on the paragraph symbol, and it magically appears on the document I’m using to write out this week’s blog. I write my blog using Apple’s newest word processing program, Pages. At the paragraph’s end I click on the symbol which announces the end of the paragraph, and lo and behold it too appears.
If you have written in html you can instantly see how useful such a program could be. Having all of the html symbols that you need a mouse clock away rather than having to fill them in as you write, that is something that would indeed be a gift from the Gods.
However, lately writing with CopyPaste has been riddled with frustration. The problem, the program has been updated several times, but although I’m sure Peter Hoerster, who codes the program, is fine tuning it for both Leopard and Snow Leopard, the latest two incarnations of Mac OS X, the program has been playing a disappearing game in Tiger, the OS X that came with my iMac, and which I’m still using. And not once in awhile did it disappear, but again and again as I would be using it to write my blog.
Clicking on its icon in the dock would bring it back, no problem, but it stretched the hell out of your patience as it would take two to three minutes to make its comeback. And before you turned around it was gone again.
A couple of weeks ago my son Joel sent me an earlier version of CopyPaste, which is the version he uses. Of course I had to do over my html clip archive, this ancient version wasn’t about to recognize the clip archive I had made with my newer version. I played around with that ancient version for several hours, but finally threw in the towel when I could not get the early version to recognize that I had registered the newer version. And if I couldn’t register that earlier version my carefully crafted clip archive would disappear at the next restart.
To make a long story interminable, I went back to my disappearing C/P baby, dragging it off of my extra drive, and putting it back in my app. folder. I emailed Julian, who is Hoerster’s stateside rep, and he evidently sent my complaint on to Peter. Well, two weeks have passed by, and I got an email from Julian telling me Peter had done a new, beta version of CopyPaste, but one which should be more stable.
I downloaded and unzipped the beta version, removed my present copy, parking it on my backup disk, then I put this new version in my app. folder, and an alias of it in the dock. I pretty well forgot about it until a night later, when I spent three hours writing on my blog. And miracle upon miracles, not once during this three hour period did the app disappear.
What a lovely evening it has been, and can we dare believe that like the Gulf of Mexico, which BP has evidently quit fouling, the new improved CopyPaste is no longer the delicate, disappearing flower it once was, and Julian cared enough to think of me after Peter came up with his new version. And bless them both, the new version seems to be as stable as Plymouth Rock.
Moral, if you use a Mac, both iKey and CopyPaste will greatly enhance your computing experience. I don’t know what I would do if I had to be without either one.
And this goes double in the case of CopyPaste which used to play that most frustrating game of “see me now, see me not,” but now stays in position just like the faithful assistant it had been programmed to be.
Thanks Peter, and Julian, for taking such good care of one of your faithful users. You made our day, week, month! §
And so another weakly edition of the Little Eddy Blog spins out of control just before running off the rails. Nothing new to report on my health horizon, my next appointment with Dr. Rakkhit is August 20, and I’ll report anything he suggests in that week’s blog.
Meantime, with that tooth under control I’m feeling reasonably good these days. I am interested in what Dr. Rakkhit chooses to treat my condition, since I don’t have cml I don’t have to worry about that $3,000 a month Gleevec. But surely there’s something that will tone down my white corpuscles. I mean, take a rest fellas.
Thanks to the Washington Post as usual for our photographs. How ironic is it that LIFE Magazine's Hiroshima and Nagasaki photographs finally see the light of publication 65 years after the fact.
At any rate, we’ll be back again next week with a brand new blog which we will upload to Google on Saturday morning along with my coffee. Until then, bye bye, and don’t take any wooden Republicans.
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