Where you can see the Inauguration

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Useful set of links.

After the president takes the oath of office and delivers his Inaugural address and following the departure ceremony for the outgoing President, he will be escorted to Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol for the traditional Inaugural Luncheon. This is the menu:

Er, the first course will be served on replicas of the china from the Lincoln Presidency, which was selected by Mary Todd Lincoln at the beginning of her husband’s term in office. The china features the American bald eagle standing above the U. S. Coat of Arms, surrounded by a wide border of “solferino,” a purple-red hue popular among the fashionable hosts of the day.

How do I know all this? Why I visited the relevant Senate web site.

Joel Meyerowitz on street photography

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Some interesting craft knowledge onveyed in this YouTube video. He uses a Leica M6, which has an onboard exposure meter that is much too fiddly for rapid use. So he takes a reading off his hand (using a Weston meter) and then leaves the camera set on this. (Good trick: I’ve used it from time to time.) What he doesn’t deal with in this clip is how to focus manually at a pace that’s quick enough for what he’s trying to do. My hunch is that he uses a 35mm or 28mm lens set to f8 — which gives enough depth of field that anything reasonably central in the frame will be in focus.

Small change in Zimbabwe

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From Reuters.

HARARE, Jan 16 – Zimbabwe’s central bank will introduce a 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollar banknote, worth about $33 on the black market, to try to ease desperate cash shortages, state-run media said on Friday.

Prices are doubling every day and food and fuel are in short supply. A cholera epidemic has killed more than 2,000 people and a deadlock between President Robert Mugabe and the opposition has put hopes of ending the crisis on hold.

Hyper-inflation has forced the central bank to continue to release new banknotes which quickly become almost worthless.

There is an official exchange rate, but most Zimbabweans resort to the informal market for currency transactions.

In addition to the Z$100 trillion dollar note, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe plans to launch Z$10 trillion, Z$20 trillion and Z$50 trillion notes, the Herald newspaper reported.

Every time I think that things can’t get any worse under Mugabe, they do.

The bean-counters’ sword

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This morning’s Observer column…

In the summer of 1978, a Harvard student named Dan Bricklin was cycling along a path in Martha’s Vineyard, when he had a big idea. As an MBA student, he was being taught to do financial planning using a large sheet of paper ruled into a grid pattern. One entered numbers corresponding to sales, costs, revenues and so on, into cells on the grid, did some calculations and entered the result in another cell. This was called ‘spreadsheet analysis’ and it was unutterably tedious because the moment any of the numbers in the sheet changed, everything else that depended on it had to be recalculated – manually.

Bricklin’s big idea was that all this could be done by a computer program…

Footnotes:

John Dvorak’s engaging rant is here.

Dan Bricklin maintains some enthralling pages about the background to VisiCalc.

Just think…

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… that this is the last weekend the Bush regime will be in power.

Alexander Cockburn, for one, will miss him. Here’s his valedictory message, from Counterpunch:

I’ve always been a fan of George Bush, on the simple grounds that the American empire needs taking down several notches and George Jr has been the right man for the job. It was always odd to listen to liberals and leftists howling about Bush’s poor showing, how he’d reduced America’s standing in the family of nations. Did the Goths fret at the manifest weakness of the Emperor Honorius and lament the lack of a robust or intelligent Roman commander?

On Bush’s Jr’s fitful watch Latin America edged nervously out of Uncle Sam’s shadow. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia boldly assert their independence and thumb their noses at Uncle Sam. Twenty years earlier, and even when Bush Sr sat in the Oval Office, the “strong leadership” craved by Americans of all political stripes would have seen Chavez and Morales briskly toppled, their estimable reforms swiftly aborted and the kleptocrats handed back the keys to the presidential office by the CIA and their local right-wing allies…

Thanks to Kevin Horgan for the link.