Although I was told that the baby grand piano of David's Coffee Place would be replaced by an upright piano at Babycakes, the latest that I'd heard is that they'd since determined not to do this. Now, I'm not sure that they've really determined against it; it may be merely that they are postponing installation of the upright piano until after renovation of the south room (in which the baby grand piano used to be).

I don't actually know where the mass of opinion is amongst the present customer base. Chris, the regular pianist, used to do 90-minute medleys, drawing largely upon popular music from the age of Gershwin and Porter. Some people find it hard to connect to such music, and for them it was made harder still because Chris chose other than dance arrangements. Many people are only comfortable with music with the rhythms of dance, even if no one is going to be dancing.

The other thing that has happened, musically, at Babycakes, is that they are drawing on a different sort of music for the sound system, and playing it much louder. I was told that this change was because they now sell beer and wine, as opposed to being just a coffee place. I'm not sure how to interpret this reasoning unless the idea is that, because they sell some of the same product as would a bar, they feel that their music should be more like that of a bar.

On this score, I can tell where the mass of opinion is amongst the present customer base; it's mostly negative. People want to be able to converse without raising their voices, and they're not pleased to have the sins of the '70s and '80s return.

Now, I refer to the present customer base, because the new owners presumably want a larger customer base, and that may mean a very different customer base. None-the-less, I don't think that many people are particularly going to want to shout over Olivia Newton John as they sip merlot or nibble on raspberry tarts.

(Underscore mine.)

Also, it takes increasing amounts of money to buy stuff. And prices are going up.

A few days ago, Phillip asked to just what the term Midwest refers (this question leading towards a more vexing question). I told him that the region was somewhat vaguely defined, but that in my mind it included the states from Ohio to-and-including Nebraska, and those to their north.

(The more vexing question is then of why it should be called the Midwest, when it is geographically centered to the east of the geographical center of even just the contiguous United States.)

In the course of our conversation, I consulted a 1975 edition of The American Heritage Dictionary, which said that the Midwest ran roughly from Ohio through Iowa, which is one state to the east of Nebraska (thus centering the Midwest even further to the east). Later, I discovered that the United States Bureau of the Census includes Nebraska in the Midwest. Further, some would include West Virginia and Kentucky, and some would exclude Missouri.

For now, it is the Question of Nebraska that exercises me. I have placed a poll at my 'blog.

I often pass this granite building: Erected in 1912, at the south-east corner of the intersection of Robinson Avenue and Third Avenue, it was originally the First Church of the United Brethren in Christ. According to what I've read, it served a Free Methodist congregation from 1950 until the late '60s or early '70s. (In 1946, the United Brethren in Christ had merged with the Evangelical Association to form the United Evangelical Church; perhaps they'd consolidated places of worship.) From 1971 until 1988, the building housed a gallery for art (with a theme of the American West), and still has doors carved to read Thackery Gallery. In the late '90s, it was turned into six apartments.

In the interval since I installed a new Linux driver for my AMD ATI video adapter, I have had fewer incidents of being logged-out when using Firefox, but there were still a few pages such that I would be logged out of my Linux session when I attempted to scroll through them with Firefox.

Yester-day or to-day, AMD ATI released a newer version of the driver, which seems to have resolved the remaining problem.

[Addendum (2008:08/27): Ah, I wrote too soon. The frequency of the problem has dropped further, but Firefox will still cause me to be logged out of the linux session when I scroll at least one of those pages.]

The same apartment building that has the doubtful balcony of which I provided a picture on the 14th also has a questionable staircase: In fact. the staircase is collapsing rapidly. Here is a picture from the 18th: with a support having come free of the banister; and here is a picture from the 19th: with the support now lying on the ground.

Nor is this the only problematic staircase of the building. Here is another: This staircase has developed a discernible lean.

The balcony could be quickly repaired. In the short-run, all that is needed is to pull the base of the cocked support back into its original position. And this repair should be effected before the weight of the balcony and of the potted plants on it cause it to fall into the alley, potentially damaging persons or property.

The staircase shown in the first three pictures should be immediately torn-down. It cannot safely be used, nor is there a good way to block access from its base. The other staircase may have some life left to it; but, given that the one needs to be removed quickly, it would probably be most cost-effective to dismantle the other now as well.

The building seems to be crumbling about its tenants. Perhaps some of them simply don't care enough to move, but perhaps others cannot afford a better place. Generally speaking, even a home in such a poor state is better than no home. But eventually the bills will have to be paid, rents will be increased, and some of the tenants may have to leave.

The media is buzzing with the meme that Barack Obama has chosen or is on the cusp of choosing his Vice-Presidential running-mate.

I think that Obama has taken far longer than was in his interest to make this choice. Although it developed that there would be a second-choice advantage for the two major-party Presidential candidates in their selection of running-mates, each had to make a selection before or during their respective conventions, and the Democrats had already scheduled their convention before that of the Republicans. While there may have been some tiny hope that the McCain camp would toss-away the advantage, the principal effect of Obama's delay has been to allow Hillary Clinton to hold onto attention that would otherwise have gone to his choice of running mate (on the assumption that it were not her). And the Clintons plan to exploit the Convention as much as possible for their own aggrandizement, not-withstanding the costs to the Obama campaign in particular and to the Democratic Party more generally.

Hillary Clinton might be Obama's running-mate. Certainly, if he delays until the convention is under-way, the Clintons will do everything in their power to make it seem as if she has a sort of right to that spot. But Obama will look even more like Just Another Politician if he selects her. Perhaps the buzz about him nearing announcement of a running-mate comes from an awareness on the part of his camp that he needs to head-off the convention.

He has been encouraged to select a Yeehaw as a running-mate, the notion being that this would balance the ticket; I think that it would be a major mistake. A integral aspect of Obama's appeal is that he's not a Yeehaw.

Part of the reason that the Democrats have been comparing Obama to John F. Kennedy is that they want to look past the last three Democratic Presidents — Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and Lyndon Johnson. There had been a sort of forced nostalgia for Bill Clinton, but once Obama came over the horizon, Democrats became more willing to look critically at Clinton and at his Presidency; Jimmy Carter was an even more incompetent than is the current President; and Johnson is largely remembered for the Viet-Nam War. Looking past those Presidents to Kennedy is looking past three Yeehaws (the most distant a Cowboy-Yeehaw) to a Yankee. It doesn't do much good to point-out that Kennedy chose a Yeehaw as his running-mate, 'cause that running-mate was Johnson, later one of the Democratic Presidents past whom these Democrats now want to look. And the highest profile Democrat Yeehaw under some consideration this time was John (Epic Fail) Edwards.

Meanwhile, for the last 14 or more years, the public faces of the Republicans have been largely Yeehaws — men such as Jesse Helms, Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, and of course G.W. Bush. (Karl Rove is arguably a faux Yeehaw, but he manages to sound like one.) Democrats are alienated from these Yeehaws because they are Republicans, and Democrats, Republicans, and Independents are alienated from these figures because by a great many measures they have been very great failures. When Republicans look back, it is to Reagan, a man who liked to play the Cowboy, but who was raised in the Midwest and rose to importance in California.

As far as balancing the ticket goes, Obama isn't in a great spot. While many Yeehaws really themselves don't want a Yeehaw, they also don't want their nose rubbed in the political mess. Obama might do best to choose a Cowboy, as Yeehaws tend to blur the distinction (hence, for example, the conflation of American country music with that of the Old West), though the rest of the country doesn't place Montana or Arizona in the South.

McCain, who has long positioned himself as a Cowboy, can more easily balance his ticket. Regionally, he can choose a Yankee or a Yankee-Midwesterner. He probably shouldn't choose a plain-vanilla Midwesterner, as then his ticket will be mocked as white-bread.

Amongst other things, I've been hacking at the theme for this 'blog, fixing bugs and simply tweaking things more to my liking. While I'm at this task, visitors are occasionally going to find the 'blog either cosmetically flawed or just plainly dysfunctional. (And, tragically, they may find it thus after I'm finished.)

In the course of my hacking, I wanted to use the PHP function file_exists() to check amongst files within the theme directory. One possibility would be to hard-code a relative specification of the theme directory (the theme slug appended to wp-content/themes/), but that approach isn't robust; it would increase the ways in which the theme could be broken by external change or by cloning.

While WordPress has a function call to return a specification of the directory, it does so in the form of an HTTP URL, notwithstanding that there is a call that explicitly requests the theme URL, to the same effect; meanwhile, PHP function file_exists() will choke on a URL. I went prowling around the WordPress documentation, and did some code-diving, but didn't find a function call or global variable for anything more like a relative specification of the theme directory.

However, there is a function call for the URL of the 'blog — get_bloginfo('template_directory'). My hack to get the relative specification, which could preface file-specs that could be usefully handled by file_exists(), was

substr(get_bloginfo('template_url'),strlen(get_bloginfo('url')) + 1)

The + 1 is to account for the fact that returns to queries to get_bloginfo() for directory URLs don't have a terminal slash.

In conversation last night or this morning, the Woman of Interest noted that cannibalistic killers are at elevated risk for brain disease, whence we got onto the subject of kuru.

Many people have heard or read of kuru, a form of prion disease noted amongst a people of Papua New Guinea, as a result of cannibalism, but I noted to her that there are a few twists to the story which which most people are not now unfamiliar.

The south Fore people, who were the people in question, seem to have picked-up the practice of eating the dead from a neighboring people who did so for religious reasons. But the Fore only adopted the practice, not the religion. The women were just having a little nosh as they prepared the bodies, and were sharing with the children.

An acknowledgment that kuru was caused by cannibalism — which acknowledgment later helped scientists and policy-makers to recognize how other prion diseases spread — was impeded because, in the 1970s and '80s, an anthropolgist, William Edward Arens, had with remarkable success made politically correct the denial of culturally based cannibalism. That is to say that the existence of cannibalism wasn't altogether denied, but it was claimed to be always an extraordinary act of deviance or of desperation. (On at least one occasion, Arens took a researcher to task for noting the physical evidence for cannibalism amongst a vanished people, instead of working to promote the virtues of their extinct culture.)

Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on identifying the cause of kuru, was in Papua New Guinea largely for the boys. He was a child molestor.