Professor Gurule is quoted on the front page of USA Today this morning, in the top story about cutting off terrorist funding.

Ugh.

I hate O’Hare Airport.

And I’m not terribly fond of United Airlines at the moment, either.

Regular readers may recall my night as Viktor Navorski a few months back, when my flight from South Bend to Chicago was delayed for ages on the O’Hare runway, causing me to miss my connecting flight to Hartford, thus stranding me at the airport overnight. Well, this time, flying in the opposite direction — Hartford to Chicago to South Bend — I again got stuck in Chicago, this time missing my connecting flight to South Bend by about 5 or 10 minutes thanks to a multitude of delays both at Bradley and at O’Hare.

This is actually the third consecutive time I’ve had trouble while attempting to connect at O’Hare on United Airlines. I didn’t blog about it, but on Thursday night, I almost had a Groundhog Day-like rerun of my September experience, as another long runway delay casued me to come within a minute or two of missing my flight to Hartford. But I just barely caught that flight.

This time, however, a combination of weather delays at both ends (it was pouring rain at Bradley and windy at O’Hare) turned my 65-minute layover into about a 5-minute layover — and 5 minutes just isn’t enough time to get from the far end of Concourse B all the way to Concourse F. That terminal at O’Hare is ridiculously huge, and it’s very frustrating to have connecting flights — on the same airline! — so far apart from one another. In all three of my recent United Airlines experiences at ORD, I’ve had to run like hell across the entire length of two concourses in an attempt to catch my flight. (Another O’Hare pet peeve: getting to the Bus/Shuttle Center takes forever, and involves walking down two flights of stairs down, then riding back up one floor on an elevator, then taking a circuitous path that leads you through the corner of a parking garage before you finally reach your destination. It’s ridiculous, especially when you consider that people have luggage when they’re doing all this. The architect who designed that place should be fired.)

Anyway, I missed the last flight out, so once again I was faced with a decision: camp out at the airport, or stay in a hotel. Last time, I chose the former option; this time, I chose the latter, and am blogging now from the Best Western O’Hare. (A third option — calling up Becky’s cousin Jon, who had previously offered to put me up if I ever got stranded in Chicago again — didn’t occur to me until too late. Drat.)

United isn’t paying for my stay here, of course, thanks to their annoying policy, noted in my Navorski post:

United gave me a coupon for a discounted hotel room (they did not offer to pay for the hotel outright, because, they said, gate problems are not their fault, they’re air traffic control’s fault…)

I actually think their decision is more defensible in this case than it was back in September, when it was another United flight that gummed up the works by staying late at the gate, thus forcing air-traffic control to delay us. This time, it was the weather that messed things up, and certainly United Airlines doesn’t control that.

Still, I’m not happy. I explained to the United ticket agents that this had happened to me before, quite recently, and I indicated that I was not entirely satisfied with their “discount coupon.” They weren’t as vociferously sympathetic as I would have expected under the circumstances, instead mostly wasting their breath offering excuses and reiterating the company policy: they only pay for overnight stays if the delay was caused by a mechanical failure. I got a half-hearted “I’m sorry” as an afterthought, but all in all, the customer service left something to be desired, under the circumstances. (And it’s not like I was being nasty or anything. I actually didn’t put up nearly as much of a fight as I could have, because I’m exhausted.)

I plan on calling several other airlines to find out what is their policy regarding paying for overnight stays. Perhaps United’s policy is the industry standard, in which case I can’t hate them too much for it. But if I find out that Southwest or whomever has a more generous policy, you can bet United will be hearing from me.

Regardless, this has now turned from a “sh*t happens” one-time thing, into “hmm, twice in a row, that’s quite a coincidence,” into an unmistakable pattern: whenever I fly on United through O’Hare, trouble ensues. (Keep in mind, I’m a relatively frequent flier, and I almost never have problems like this on, say, Southwest, JetBlue, etc.) The circumstances were different in each case, and perhaps not entirely in the airline’s control, but the common denominator is United and O’Hare, so fairly or not, I’m now inevitably going to think twice before flying that route on that airline again. United may well lose my business as a result, simply because I won’t want to take the risk of this happening again. On the other hand, they may well have kept my business if they’d reduced my annoyance by ponying up the extra $50 for the (discounted) hotel room, policy or no policy. I hope the savings was worth it, guys.

Anyway… if all goes as planned, I’ll be back in South Bend at 9:50 AM tomorrow.

And now, I sleep. G’nite all.

Tonight at 9:30 PM EST, The Weather Channel airs Part 3 of its series “It Could Happen Tomorrow,” depicting the effects of various “not a matter of if, but when” natural disasters that will someday strike the United States. Tonight’s catastrophe du jour: an eruption of Mount Rainier.

Rich Gallagher, the TWC guy who e-mailed me to tell me about the series in the first place, sent me an advance screener DVD of this third episode. I watched it on the plane Thursday, and it’s quite good, giving an excellent summation of what happened at Mount St. Helens and how and why a Rainier eruption would be even worse.

I have a few complaints about the episiode, like how the cinematography sometimes moves too fast, rapidly zooming in and out in an attempt to be dramatic that’s really more annoying than anything else. The sound effects and music are also a bit over-the-top at times. (The same is true of the first two episodes as well.) Also, when it comes to discussing the nitty-gritty of what an eruption would do, the commentary focuses heavily on one particular suburban town, Orting, which is in the path of one of Rainier’s mudflows (a.k.a. “lahars”). As a result, I’m very educated about how Orting would fare in a Rainier eruption, but less so about, say, Seattle, or for that matter, anywhere else in the area. Early in the episode, a scientist makes the alarming prediction that “hundreds of thousands” could die in a worst-case eruption, but the episode doesn’t exactly demonstrate how or where that would occur. A broader overview, even a brief one, would have helped.

But despite its flaws, the episode, like the New York hurricane and Dallas tornado episodes before it, does a good job of communicating its main point: that the threat is real, the worst will happen someday, and individuals and governments alike need to educate themselves and prepare. It also has some really cool footage and pictures of the Mount St. Helens eruption. If you’re either a nerd or a Washington state resident, I’d recommend tuning in to TWC at 9:30 PM tonight.

Another electoral oddity for the weekend! (The first being Cindy Sheehan’s mulling over a Senate run.) From CNN:

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is famous for his ambitious promises, but he is unlikely to be called to task if he breaks his latest pledge: not to have sex before the April 9 general election.

Hmmm. An odd promise, although in a country of 58 million Catholics, perhaps not? Yet he is hardly the image of piety:

The twice-married Berlusconi, 69, prides himself on his physical fitness, and after a facelift and a hair transplant he looks younger now than he did when he swept to power in 2001.

…

In June he sparked a diplomatic incident with Finland when he said he had used “playboy tactics” to persuade its woman president to give up a bid to site the European Union’s food agency in Helsinki rather than the Italian city of Parma.

At 69, I think he’s deluding himself, but then again some women go for that swarthy Italian look. But how is he to use his Playboy Powers if he’s going to be saving himself for the next two months? Will Italian politics grind to a halt? :)

Posted by Brian (Briandot)

An ABC News anchor has been seriously wounded by a roadside bomb in Iraq:

“World News Tonight” co-anchor Bob Woodruff and his cameraman, Doug Vogt, were seriously injured after their convoy was hit by an improvised explosive device in Taji, Iraq, today.

Woodruff and Vogt are undergoing surgery at the U.S. military hospital in Balad. Both men suffered head injuries. Woodruff sustained shrapnel wounds and Vogt was hit by shrapnel in the head and suffered a broken shoulder.

Woodruff, Vogt and their four-man team were traveling in a convoy with Iraqi security forces. They had been embedded with the 4th Infantry Division and were in a mechanized vehicle when the explosive went off. The exposion was followed by small arms fire.

I’m tempted to start this with, “No, I’m not making this up,” but maybe I’m just biased against insane people.

The Washington Post is reporting that everyone’s favorite nutcase Cindy Sheehan may attempt to run for Senate against incumbent Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). From the article:

Cindy Sheehan, the peace activist who set up camp near President Bush’s Texas ranch last summer, said Saturday she is considering running against Sen. Dianne Feinstein to protest what she called the California lawmaker’s support for the war in Iraq.

“She voted for the war. She continues to vote for the funding. She won’t call for an immediate withdrawal of the troops,” Sheehan told The Associated Press in an interview while attending the World Social Forum in Venezuela along with thousands of other anti-war and anti-globalization activists.

Personally, I think that even Feinstein’s liberal San Francisco will be somewhat uncomfortable with Sheehan, although maybe not. (Having elected two actors as governors, I don’t put much past California.) This should be interesting to watch — for entertainment value, if anything.

Posted by Brian (Briandot)

UPDATE BY BRENDAN: For those who weren’t around during the marathon Cindy Sheehan comment-war earlier this month, click here to read my Jan. 8 post and here to read the many, many, many comments that followed.

Google says it decided to create google.cn — which required creating a “local presence,” which required following Chinese laws, which required censoring its search results — after asking “which course would most effectively further Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally useful and accessible” and concluding:

Filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world’s population, however, does so far more severely. Whether our critics agree with our decision or not, due to the severe quality problems faced by users trying to access Google.com from within China, this is precisely the choice we believe we faced.

Dartblog, unimpressed with Google’s defense, says it can be summarized as: “appeasement works because, if you do it long enough, fascists will decide no longer to be fascistic.” (Hat tip: InstaPundit.)

No, really! (Hat tip: Insty.)

“Potty-mouthed jerks have been part of Internet discourse since they hooked two UNIVACs together and the second accused the first of being a !$&(;? John Bircher.” –James Lileks

Heh.

Phoenix on Saturday did the polar opposite of what Seattle almost did earlier this month: it broke the record for consecutive days without rain, now at 102 and counting.

This is currently the top story on the Drudge Report. Matt Drudge, apparently seeking to illustrate the story with a stock photo of the sun, appears to have pulled from his archives a photo of the June 8, 2004 Transit of Venus, an astronomical event that is quite irrelevant to Phoenix’s long dry spell. Heh.

Both the Notre Dame men’s and women’s basketball teams may have lost at home Saturday, but the news wasn’t all bad for this Irish Trojan: the USC men won at Oregon behind 30 points from Gabe Pruitt. Woohoo! Nice going, Trojans! USC improves to 5-4 in the Pac-10.

The Trojans’ win was so impressive, it apparently shook the earth. :)

Also, Gonzaga won to improve to 7-0 in the WCC. With seven more WCC games plus a showdown with Stanford, the Zags are officially halfway through their conference season. They’ve won eight straight games, 16 straight WCC games, and 33 straight home games, tying Illinois and Southern Illinois for the longest streak in the nation (and, er, maintaining sole possession of the all-important “longest home winning streak in the nation outside the state of Illinois”).

Another valiant comeback, another dramatic finish, another heartbreaker at the Joyce Center. My thoughts:

1. What was Chris Quinn thinking, taking that loooong three-pointer on our final possession, with the game tied and plenty of time still left on the shot clock, without even making any attempt at dribble penetration? “Redick Lite” my ass. Terrible, terrible, terrible crunch-time possession. Just like the Marquette loss. Argh.

2. After Villanova took a 2-point lead with 1.7 seconds left, we had a timeout left. Why didn’t we use it? Why didn’t Mike Brey make it crystal-clear to his players during Villanova’s timeout that, if they score, and there’s time left on the clock, we need to call timeout!?

3. Why, oh WHY, did we inbound the ball under our own basket, thus forcing ourselves to take a desperate 70-foot heave (which was too late anyway), instead of throwing a long pass down to Villanova’s side of the court and then trying to get off a more reasonable shot? This isn’t rocket science, people! This is very basic stuff!

There’s a reason Notre Dame always loses close games — the Irish are 1-6 in the Big East now, with their six losses coming by a total of 22 points, including two in double overtime — and it’s not just bad luck. Our coach sucks at calling good plays at crucial times, and our players don’t have enough basketball sense to know what to do when the game is on the line (probably because our crappy coach doesn’t instill it in them).

Harumph. I’m all about loyalty to my school, but I’m beginning to regret buying season tickets. Following a team that plays well enough to win, but just doesn’t know how to finish, and thus consistently loses heartbreakers because of bad play calls and bonehead mistakes, is the very definition of sports hell.

P.S. Fire Mike Brey.

“Quinn is Redick Lite. He’s got Redick’s heart, just not his ability.” –ESPN announcer Rick Majerus, comparing Notre Dame’s Chris Quinn to Duke’s J.J. Redick.

Heh.

I’m sitting on the couch in my parents’ living room in Newington, watching the Notre Dame men’s basketball team play Villanova. The Irish are 1-5 in the Big East (though they’ve lost those five games by a combined total of just 20 points), so they desperately need a win at home over the #6-ranked Wildcats. Notre Dame led for much of the first half, but now they trail, 48-39, early in the second half. Argh.

Earlier today, also at the Joyce Center, the Notre Dame women were upset by South Florida in overtime — though I can’t say I’m surprised. The Irish are overrated, IMHO, as I indicated in my earlier post about the DePaul game.

In other news, the USC women lost to Cal yesterday, ending a five-game winning streak. So both the #21 Irish and the #23 Women of Troy will probably fall out of the Top 25 when the new polls come out.

Back on the men’s side, UConn won at Providence to defend its #1 ranking. In New Jersey, Rutgers “upset” Louisville, a team whose continuing ability to stay in the Top 25 is a remarkable testament to poll voters’ obsession with reputation. The Cardinals have no business being ranked. Seriously, look at their schedule and tell me how that’s the 22nd-best team in the country, even before today’s loss. Anyway, I’m not at all surprised the Scarlet Knights beat them.

Meanwhile, the Pac-10 continues to look quite weak as North Carolina crushed Arizona. Granted, the game was at Chapel Hill, but still.

USC plays at Oregon later tonight. Also later tonight, Gonzaga hosts Portland, aiming for their seventh conference win in seven tries.

 
[UPDATE, 8/22/06: For the latest, up-to-date commentary on Spike Lee’s film — which I was in — please visit my homepage or my Katrina category.]
 
 

Sorry for the lack of updates. I’ve been busily taking care of odds-and-ends in Connecticut: ripping my CD collection into MP3 form, searching for various old archived files that I need for Bloypedia entries, giving my parents a wedding slideshow, etc.

About my interview with Spike Lee yesterday… it was fun. When I walked into one of the conference rooms at the Park Central that the production company had reserved, I expected to be greeted by an assistant producer or something; instead, I was greeted by… Spike Lee! He was very pleasant and friendly. Immediately noticing my USC sweatshirt, he asked if I’d been to the Notre Dame game and what I thought about the Bush Push. Heh. We later chatted about Notre Dame’s struggling men’s basketball team and the restructured, massive Big East. (Spike thinks 16 teams is too many.)

Another picture of Spike Lee and me.

When it came to the actual interview, I was pretty satisfied with Spike’s questions and my answers. I have no idea what (if anything) he’ll use for the film, of course, but I thought the best parts were when I chronologically described what happened from my perspective during the days leading up to Katrina’s landfall, and when I answered his question about what lessons we should learn from Katrina. (I emphasized the importance of adequately preparing for predictable, ultimately inevitable disasters before they happen, e.g., a San Francisco earthquake, a Mount Rainier eruption, an East or West Coast tsunami, etc.) I also think I did a pretty good job pointing out how much worse Katrina could have been for New Orleans, if not for the “dumb luck” of a last-minute eyewall replacement cycle and a miniscule (but massively important) right-hand turn.

I touched on the racial aspect as well, explaining that I don’t believe there was any “racial animus” involved in Katrina — that the slow federal response was a symptom of incompetence, not malice. I said I think it’s preposterous to claim that the feds responded slowly because Bush “doesn’t care about black people.” And I pointed out that there’s simply no reason to buy into the idea that the government blew up the levees; the floods are perfectly well explained by what we now know about the levees’ shoddy construction. Again: incompetence, not malice.

Of course, I also emphasized the failures of the local and state governments. I was, as always, hard on Mayor Ray Nagin, explaining that I believe his administration’s failure to implement a timely and effective evacuation plan before the storm hit is worse than any of the multiple government failures after the storm, because, again, it was only dumb luck that prevented the storm’s immediate impact from being so horrifyingly severe and deadly that the slow response would have been almost a non-issue. There wouldn’t have been thousands of people waiting for days at the Convention Center, because the vast majority of those people would have died in the storm itself instead of being able to get themselves to higher ground while their city slowly drowned. And if those thousands of people had died, the focus of the blame game would have (quite rightly) centered on the local government’s failure to adequately prepare instead of the federal government’s failure to adequately respond. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and Mayor Nagin could have prevented a lot of the misery in the aftermath of Katrina if he had heeded the sound advice of those who knew better and ordered a mandatory evacuation earlier — and used the resourses at his disposal (like those drowned school buses) to help people get out.

In addition to interviewing me, Spike had me read several of my blog entries aloud on camera. He picked five posts: New Orleans in peril, Humbled by Katrina, Evacuate, The mayor of New Orleans is an idiot, and NHC urges N.O. mayor to issue mandatory evacuation. In reading the last one, I got to say the f-word. Hehe. :)

Anyway, because I was reading these posts off my computer screen, I used WireTap Pro to audio-record myself doing my dramatic readings. :) Here’s a clip of me reading “Evacuate,” including my infamous “get the hell out” line:

source file
MP3 File

I don’t know what Spike will do with the hour-plus of footage that he shot of me. I presume only a minute or two will be in the film, if that. I just hope my opinions and statements are treated fairly and accurately. Spike seemed like a really nice, intelligent guy in person. Here’s hoping his treatment of me in the film lives up to the high opinion I had of him yesterday.

Incidentally, as I was leaving, a member of the crew stopped me in the hallway and said words to the effect of, “I’m going to check out your blog when I get home. I haven’t heard of it before, but I really like you — you seem to be all about the truth. You don’t have an agenda, you’re just about the truth.” That was nice.

In other news, before meeting with Spike, I met up with Vicki, fellow former Trojan Hall resident and Becky’s ex-roommate from sophomore year. I hadn’t seen her in, oh, I don’t know, maybe five years? So it was great to see her and catch up. Here’s a picture of Vicki and me outside the Park Central:

Alan Jackson may not know the difference between Iraq and Iran, but it seems most Americans do:

Despite persistent disillusionment with the war in Iraq, a majority of Americans supports taking military action against Iran if that country continues to produce material that can be used to develop nuclear weapons, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found.

The poll, conducted Sunday through Wednesday, found that 57% of Americans favor military intervention if Iran’s Islamic government pursues a program that could enable it to build nuclear arms.

Support for military action against Tehran has increased over the last year, the poll found, even though public sentiment is running against the war in neighboring Iraq: 53% said they believe the situation there was not worth going to war. …

Support for a potential military confrontation with Iran was strongest among Republican respondents, among whom 76% endorsed the idea. But even among Democrats, who overwhelmingly oppose the war in Iraq, 49% supported such action.