Like Big Wooden Mushrooms...

What's up with this picture? It's a view from the fire escape at Underscore Central Command. Upon visiting the roof, I found that a great number of buildings in the area still maintain wooden water tanks on their own roofs.

Several people have asked me about them and their purpose. While I have some plumbing experience, I've not had to use those skills since I moved to Manhattan several years ago (unless you count the sinks I tore out in my apartment and replaced). However, I know a bit about these tanks.

Essentially, they're an ingenious yet simple way of dealing with the problem of maintaining water pressure in tall buildings during peak water usage times. Street pressure isn't enough to push water up to your bathroom in your 33rd floor apartment, so modern skyscrapers employ booster pumps throughout the building to help boost the pressure. Older buildings, however, use tanks like the ones pictured here.

Rather than house giant pumps in the basement of the building in an attempt to keep water pressure constant, smaller pumps fill the water tanks during off-peak hours (at night) when demand for water pressure isn't great. Once in the tank on the roof, gravity lends a helping hand when demand picks up. So when everyone in your building is taking a shower at 7:30 AM, you're less likely to experience a drop in pressure. The force of gravity pulling the water down helps keep the pressure up.

Now you know. (And knowing is half the battle.)

The Spoons Experience's Handy Chart

Spoons has a chart posted to his weblog that compares the emerging Oil-For-Food scandal to the Enron and Martha Stewart scandals. I've got my own. Enjoy.

- -	Enron	Martha Stewart	Oil For Food
The Villain	Corporate raiders who deceived investors and deprived many of their life savings	Self-centered, greedy woman who thought herself above insider trading rules	Various foreign government officials, the UN, others TBD
The Victim	Hard-working investors who believed Enron's bogus financials and outlook and thought it a good investment opportunity	People of average means who play by the rules and don't have brokers that feed them insider information	The Iraqi people who were supposed to be getting food and medicine, Anyone who has faith in the UN's ability to keep the interests of its officials from eclipsing those of the Iraqi people
Who gains when the scandal is reported?	People who are sick and tired of corporate thieves stealing their investment capital	People who are sick and tired of celebrities and other well-connected people thinking that the rules don't apply to them	The Iraqi people, who should be compensated if the assertions made to date are actually true. The Bush administration, which wants the rest of the world to think the UN is corrupt and useless.
Who loses when the scandal is reported?	Hopefully, the bastards who deceived investors	Martha Stewart, scumbag brokers who trade on insider information	The UN, various officials of foreign governments, anyone who profited illegally and unethically from the Oil For Food program (caveat: Let's see the evidence first and THEN make a judgment, thankyouverymuch)

WTF? Why Isn't Anybody Talking About This?

Go read this article and come back. Are you back? Good.

If there is indeed a paper trail that implicates UN officials and foreign heads of government (not to mention Scott Ritter), why the heck isn't everybody going apeshit over it? Here are some high-ranking UN and government officials lining their pockets with money that was meant to help the Iraqi people and the news stories from the mainstream news media amount to a fart in the wind? Has all of this been debunked somewhere and I've simply missed it?

This could be one of the biggest scandals in history and so far I've seen only a few blog posts, a couple stories in Australian newspapers and a couple editorials in the Washington Times. WTF?

Happy Birthday, Dungeons & Dragons

D&D is 30 this year, which makes me feel old. While countless millions have derided Dungeons & Dragons and ostracized people who play it, I'll stand and be counted as someone who absolutely LOVED the game back in the early '80s. Furthermore, I'll go out on a limb and say that if the game is played by the rules and people actually play their characters instead of doing whatever the heck they feel like doing, there's no better game on the face of the planet.

Go ahead. Make fun of me. I don't give a shit. Truth be told, I think playing D&D extensively on rainy days was a great thing to do when I was younger. First of all, the game boosted the hell out of my 8-year-old vocabulary at the time. How many 8-year-olds do you know that run around slinging words like "ethereal" and "polymorph" about? Secondly, I think the game did a lot to foster imagination. It is played with nothing but paper, dice and a few rulebooks. Instead of mind-numbing computer graphics, players have to actually use their imagination to envision dark towers, weird monsters and such.

Yes, count me among the D&D enthusiasts. I don't mind.