Photographs of our condo at Dolphin Point (West Bay)

This picture reflects my first glimpse of our building. It was taken from Northwest Point Rd.


The next pic is a close-up of the front of the condo. On a positive note, it still does have a beautiful oceanfront view.


This is the back of the condo. What was here before was a cement wall (that was, in theory, a buffer against the waves), a cement path (that led to the pool), and a green lawn.


This is what remains of the central courtyard and swimming pool. The pool was previously surrounded by a cement patio, a cement bbq area, and cement pavilion.


This is taken from the road. In the empty space, where you see the ocean, there used to stand a 8 unit cement apt. building. It was completely demolished by the hurricane.

Post-Ivan Photographs

These two pictures were taken adjacent to the Hyatt Hotel (on the 7-mile side of West Bay Rd., for those familiar w/ Cayman).

From the balcony of our hotel room...



A family pic, just prior to Steph and the boys departure back to Chicago (Tues., 14 Sept.)...

We Survived

I caught the last flight out of Cayman today and I am presently stationed at the the Miami Holiday Inn. I am sad but relieved to be off the island. It has been a life-changing experience, one which I will share in much greater detail once I get cleaned up and eat a warm meal.

I return to Chicago tomorrow afternoon. Steph and the boys caught a flight out yesterday, and are presently residing in Chicago with her sister Monica, and of course eagerly awaiting my return.

We lost everything, with the exception of one car (which a friend let park in his garage) and a couple changes of clothing. I have post-Ivan pictures of our condo, which will take your breath away. The island will take a very long time to recover. So where do we go from here? I have no idea, but I am very happy that we are all safe and sound.

Stormcarib.com

This website has some really good info on hurricanes. This link takes you directly to info on Ivan. What is really useful, for me at least, are the tools: "how close is it?", "how close can it get?" etc. Mom et al. might find this link interesting, in the event I fail to call or you cannot reach me. It is a message board where locals report on the action from the front lines. Its interesting, e.g., to read what people out on the Brac and Little Cayman are thinking and doing to prepare for Ivan.

On Grand Cayman, preparation for the storm is all encompassing, well at least amongst the neophyte ex pats that run in my circle. Its all Steph and I have been thinking about or talking about for the last 24 hours. We call our friends to ask advice and hear their plans. Then we call them back an hour later and repeat process. The locals, on the other hand, seem much more calm and collected. Two that I spoke with yesterday seemed rather fatalistic and derived much humor from my questions and worries. The more I speak to people, be they locals or ex pats, the more I realize that no one really knows what is going to happen. Its one big jumble of uncertainty and anxiety.

Oh hi, can't talk right now, we're busy preparing to save our lives

From HurricaneTrack.com:

The forecast track again places the center of Ivan right over Jamaica and then western Cuba- possibly over Havana. If you know people down there- call them, email them or radio to them that they need to prepare to save their lives. This is a very bad, dangerous and intense hurricane. Stress that point to anyone who you know lives in Jamaica or Cuba. You just might save their life.

Category 5

The headlines reads: IVAN IS A CATASTROPHIC CATEGORY FIVE HURRICANE- AND IT IS HEADING FOR JAMAICA ...and, by the way, we are just northwest of Jamaica. This is what the article has to say:

History is being made today as Ivan has become a member of the rare 'category five club'. This is now 'as bad as it gets'. And the news for Jamaica is not good either- Ivan is heading right for the Cairbbean island. The latest NHC track forecast puts Ivan over Jamaica tomorrow afternoon- hopefully just under cat-5 strength. Once past Jamaica, Ivan is forecast to pass over Cuba and then slam in to southern Florida- coming straight up the peninsula. This would be very bad indeed and I hope that people take this more seriously than they have taken anything in a long, long time. We are looking at a potential horrific disaster- especially since Ivan is forecast to track right over the Florida Keys. There is only one way out- U.S. 1- so when officials tell you that it is time to go- you go! Listen to what the local authorities are telling you and follow their directions closely. There are no other alternatives to riding this thing out should it follow the projected path. Also- GET GAS as soon as you can- fill up DOT approved containers with extra gas. Be ready- Ivan is coming and it could be very bad. I will have another update here in a little over an hour.

Lying, cheating bastard

The Boston Globe reports that "Bush fell short on duty at Guard." There seems to be some good reporting here. Check it out:

In February, when the White House made public hundreds of pages of President Bush's military records, White House officials repeatedly insisted that the records prove that Bush fulfilled his military commitment in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War. But Bush fell well short of meeting his military obligation, a Globe reexamination of the records shows: Twice... Bush signed documents pledging to meet training commitments or face a punitive call-up to active duty. He didn't meet the commitments, or face the punishment, the records show....

Army Colonel Gerald A. Lechliter, one of a number of retired military officers who have studied Bush's records and old National Guard regulations.... ''He broke his contract with the United States government -- without any adverse consequences. And the Texas Air National Guard was complicit in allowing this to happen," Lechliter said in an interview yesterday. ''He was a pilot. It cost the government a million dollars to train him to fly. So he should have been held to an even higher standard."

Even retired Lieutenant Colonel Albert C. Lloyd Jr., a former Texas Air National Guard personnel chief who vouched for Bush at the White House's request in February, agreed that Bush walked away from his obligation to join a reserve unit in the Boston area when he moved to Cambridge in September 1973. By not joining a unit in Massachusetts, Lloyd said in an interview last month, Bush ''took a chance that he could be called up for active duty. But the war was winding down, and he probably knew that the Air Force was not enforcing the penalty."...

Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of defense for manpower and reserve affairs in the Reagan administration, said after studying many of the documents that it is clear to him that Bush ''gamed the system." And he agreed with Lloyd that Bush was not alone in doing so. ''If I cheat on my income tax and don't get caught, I'm still cheating on my income tax," Korb said.

Why is this only now being reported? Will any of this matter? It saddens me to think that it probably will not.

Hurricane Ivan

An Alert has been issued for the Cayman Islands.

This link is the NOAA's projected track for Ivan as of 5am this morning. (Note that we are the speck that is northwest of Jamaica.) Here is a useful article with some links.

Ivan's most recent victim was Grenada, where three people died and the Prime Minister's home was demolished, among other things. This is what a recent AP article has to say about it:

Hurricane Ivan made a direct hit on Grenada, killing at least three people as it turned concrete homes into piles of rubble and hurled the island's landmark red zinc roofs through the air.

The most powerful storm to hit the Caribbean in 10 years also damaged homes in Barbados, St. Lucia and St. Vincent, just days after Hurricane Frances rampaged through and went on to cause massive damage in Florida.

Ivan strengthened even as it was over Grenada on Tuesday, becoming a Category 4 storm and getting even more powerful as it headed across the Caribbean Sea on a projected route to bear down on Jamaica late Thursday.

Boyakasha

I googled Ali G for no apparent reason and came up with this nice link. For your enjoyment I've pasted below one of the many interview transcripts provided therein.

Topic: Women

Ali : Boyaka-sha. Check dis. Today we is talking about the women. I is with none other than Sue Leetch. She be none other than director of the centre for gender research and we is going to talking about ladies.
Ali: Now, one in two people in the country is "a women", so we has got to know about this. Women. They is important aren't they?
Sue : They indeed are, very important, as important as men.
Ali : Which is better? Man or Woman?
Sue : Well equality is not about who is better.
Ali : But which one is better? But one must be just a little bit better.
Sue : In what way?
Ali : Like, in the way that somefin is worse and somfin is better.
Ali : Do you think there will ever be a female Prime Minister?
Sue : There has been one.
Ali : Who?
Sue : Mrs. Thatcher.
Ali : Yeah but she wasn't a real Prime Minister. Do you think they'll ever let another one slip through?
Ali : Do you think that a women should be able to 'av any job?
Sue : I think so yeah.
Ali : Yeah, but would you feel safe thought if you new a women was flying your plane.
Sue : Would you feel safe then? Do you feel safe being driven by a women?
Ali : Nope. Would you not be scared though that she might start nattering or what ever or start finking about fings and then forget to
fly the plane, and get angry with somebody?
Ali : A lot of boys me know are trying to get their girlfriend to try a bit of feminism, do you think that if right?
Sue : Yeah I do actually I think it's a good thing.
Ali : Do you think all girls should try feminism at least once? Do you think it's right that they should try it when they is drunk at a party or what ever with one of their mates?
Sue : What is trying feminism?
Ali : You know try a bit of feminism and when they is sober wake up in the morning and get back with their boyfriend?
Sue : What do you mean?
Ali : When they kiss a women.
Ali : Me uncle Jamal say that he is tri-sexual. That he will try anything that is sexual. What does that mean?
Sue : There are a lot of people who would like to have sexual relationships with men and women.
Ali : So you think that he is saying that he is having it with blokes?
Sue : Yes.
Ali : Ayyy?
Sue : It would suggest that or that he is interested in it, but maybe not done it. It depends what done it means.
Ali : So you fink my uncle Jamal is a botty boy?
Sue : I don't think he is a botty boy but...
Ali : So you think that he just like it in both pipes?
Sue : Not necessarily.
Ali : So you think that it is a joke? Coz he is a joker. Coz if you call him that to his face he'd probably kill ya.

Some more cool pics

I do like to crop. My favorite crop technique is the vertical swath. Aren't these nice...

Saturday afternoon at the Burnstein abode

Laura snapped this one. I like it.

The Burnsteins have some visitors

Laura left yesterday and that concludes the visitors, for the near term. It started with Steph's sisters, Colleen and Monica, who were on island the last week of July. Next on board were Steph's friends, Jason and Meegan. Then Kath and Talal touched down for a week, and three days later in rolled Laura. I've memorialized Kath, Jason and Meegan's stay with the pictures below. And I previously posted a pic of Monica. Unfortunately, I have no pics of Colleen, Talal or Laura at my disposal, but I will add their mugs to the blog of shame when I get my act together.

Friday night sunset

Did I mention that we have nice sunsets? Steph took this one.

Sam's First Day of School

Don't you love Sam's uniform! This was taken in front of our apartment, before Sam's first day of school, last Wednesday (1 Sept).

Review of John Gray's book "Heresies"

Seems like an interesting book. Here are some excerpts, from the Guardian's review of it:

[Gray] is richly dismissive of the Bush administration's neo-conservatives - "Washington's new Jacobins", he calls them - who believe that it is possible to eradicate evil from the world. "The danger of American foreign policy," he writes, "is not that it is obsessed with evil but that it is based on the belief that evil can be abolished." Such foolishness, he points out, is far removed from the wisdom of America's founding fathers, for whom "the purpose of government was not to conduct us to the Promised Land but to stave off the recurrent evils to which human life is naturally prone".
...
Gray sees our faith in progress - "the Prozac of the thinking classes" - as the illusion that underlies the most egregiously mistaken political and social policies of the present day. Certainly there is such a thing as progress, but it is a fact only in the realm of science, while "in ethics and politics it is a superstition". Throughout his work Gray hammers relentlessly against the notion, first advanced in the Renaissance and reified in the Enlightenment, that history moves inexorably in a straight line, and that human nature will necessarily improve as our knowledge accumulates. He grants that in some areas things do get better: we have abolished judicial torture, for example, and modern dentistry is a great boon. The mistake, he contends, the wilful, foolish and tragic mistake, is to imagine that more dental implants and fewer thumbscrews will make us into better beings. "Human knowledge grows, but the human animal stays much the same."

Clear thinking is always a bracer, but does Gray as Cassandra have anything to offer other than an injunction to look all gift horses in the mouth? He is a stoic and, on occasion, even a meliorist, though a highly cautious one. All we can do, he declares, is to try to curb the wilder hungers of Homo rapiens and work away piecemeal at containing the forces that seek to destroy us. The so-called war on terror, in which "Dr Strangelove has joined forces with Dr Billy Graham", he takes as one of our more dangerously deluded enterprises. Granted, al-Qaida is a threat to the very continuance of our liberal values in the west, but it is the height of foolishness to pretend that we can defeat it by force of arms. Instead of invading Iraq and making threatening noises against Syria and Iran, the sensible policy would be to address regional conflicts, such as the Israeli-Palestinian blood feud, and separate them from the activities of al-Qaida with the aim of returning terrorism to "more historically normal levels". The new crusaders in the White House and the Pentagon, of course, would be contemptuous of such a gradualist approach.

Link

Contact with ALIENS!

New Scientist notes "mysterious signals from 1000 light years away." What does that mean exactly? Was the signal originated 1000 years ago? Whats a "light" year and is it the same as a plain old regular year? Anyway, I digress. The interesting part of the article is the following:

The team has now finished analysing the data, and all the signals seem to have disappeared. Except one, which has got stronger.

This radio signal, now seen on three separate occasions, is an enigma. It could be generated by a previously unknown astronomical phenomenon. Or it could be something much more mundane, maybe an artefact of the telescope itself.

But it also happens to be the best candidate yet for a contact by intelligent aliens in the nearly six-year history of the SETI@home project.

Link

Addendum: Never mind. Its all hype. Link

More on the good jobs vs. bad jobs debate

Jeff Madrick, in today's "Economic Scene" article in the NYT, explains, by reference to Wal Mart and some nice cites to the literature, why technology is resulting in so many "bad" jobs:

Critics are compiling evidence that Wal-Mart's success, while entrenched in the brilliant management of new technologies, is dependent on low labor costs...

A new study by Arindrajit Dube and Ken Jacobs of the University of California, Berkeley, has produced clear evidence of Wal-Mart's comparatively low wages. The researchers calculate that in the San Francisco Bay Area, the company's average wage, about $11 an hour, is roughly 30 percent below what unionized workers get in local grocery chains.

...most Wal-Mart critics say a crucial way to improve conditions is to change laws to make labor unions easier to organize. Mr. Lichtenstein says a substantial raise in the minimum wage - back to its 1980 level, before inflation eroded it - would have still more impact.

Economic theory would say that low-skilled workers are not going to earn high wages. If you force employers to pay low-skilled workers high wages, then employers will hire fewer low-skilled workers. They will substitute highly-skilled workers and capital.

Economic theory also would say that Wal-Mart's use of low-skilled workers as a way to hold down costs has benefits for others in the economy. Consumers benefit from lower prices. Shareholders benefit from profits.

Madrick says that other companies could try to imitate Wal-Mart, and he implies that this would be bad news for low-skilled workers. But it would be good news for low-skilled workers. The more competition for low-skilled labor, the higher will be their wages!

What low-skilled workers and everyone else needs is more Wal-Marts.

Link

The F-Bomb

Some funny stuff here about a lawyer's voicemail, with links to some funny emails as well. Note that this phenomena of mocking people's inappropriate and/or stupid professional correspondance is the product of technology, e.g., email and VoIP. With respect to VoIP, one's voicemail messages become *.wav documents that can be easily and, and in some cases, eagerly attached to email. Bottom line? Don't be a stupid fucker; be careful about what you fucking say in your digital correspondance.

Link

Addendum: It turns out this incident was reported in a Sun-Times article. Lesson learned, I'd say.