Desmond Dekker: Musical obits/tributes:

-- Born Desmond Adolphus Dacres in Kingston, Jamaica, on July 16, 1942 - Passed May 25, 2006...Thank you to Desmond Dekker for some of the best Ska, Rocksteady and Reggae music.

The set includes a Toots & the Maytals homage, Desmond Dekker Came First.

With a default My Live Journal name, the blog is in Bratislava, Slovak Republic. The art here is vastly different from what meets our eyes. The Dekker post is one of the few in an alphabet readable by me.

--Yes Justice Yes Peace! links to the Jamaica Gleaner obit with, "Desmond Dekker has flown away."

-- you've got your mind set on a dream:

Jamaican ska legend Desmond Dekker dead of a heart attack at age 64. Depressing news to kick off a long holiday weekend, so let's celebrate the man's greatness (as I'm sure many other mp3 blogs also will) with a couple of great tracks by the Godfather of All Rude Boys.

At Armagideon Time, where you'll see Toots tunes just below this.

-- Historical context from from Pitchfork Media, with a video of "Israelites" to boot:

Unbeknownst to most record buyers, Desmond himself had first been introduced to a mass audience in 1968 as the inspiration for the Beatles' horrible plundering of Jamaican music, "Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da" ("Desmond works a barrow in the marketplace...").

Don't kill your tree with a flower bed: A lot of folks will be setting in plants this weekend, and some of you may be tempted to dig a flower bed around a tree: Don't. It will kill the tree. A former neighbor did it. He didn't believe me.

"I see roots all the way in the back yard," he said, and continued digging a circular bed around an ancient maple.

The following spring, the tree was dead, nary a leaf, and had to come down.

Real Roots is a public service of Purdue University:

If you cut off these roots, the delicate feeder roots that are growing beyond the drip line won't be able to pass rain water and soil nutrients to the trunk and leaves.

Be careful not to injure the bark with a lawn mower, either. A tree is a circulatory system, like Barbaro's ankle.

Home improvement blues: When plumbing came indoors, the owners of this old house tucked the facilities into a tiny pantry. Steep, narrow stairs make my upstairs usable only as an attic. There is one closet.

I'd love to add a real bathroom/laundry area (with storage!), maybe even another bedroom to the house, but I fear the size of the property tax increase that would follow. No sense making improvements if I'd have to sell the house to afford the taxes on them.

This feels all wrong. There should be incentives for improving your property while you live in it, not just if you sell it.

It's a cynical society whose tax policy counts on replacing residents with wealthier, more desirable people.

Hear it now: Bob Dylan: Live at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Fair Grounds, Acura Stage, April 28, 2006.

Hybrid map/satellite view of the area near
Rhode Island's Scarborough Beach South.

Summer map mashup: Take a look at the Southern New England beach map I'm making, using free Web services: Mapbuilder.net and a Google Maps API key.

I'll do a post later about "How I Made the Map" because you can do this, too. I'm a journalist, not a programmer. (A marble-go-througher of Dreamweaver, Excel, Mapbuilder and a text editor was involved.)

I have a set of little icons our designers made to represent beach facilities, but I can't get them to display. I suspect that images are part of Mapbuilder's commercial real-estate version. This is my only real disappointment with an otherwise excellent service. (I don't use the word "service" lightly here. It's free.)

Later: One other thing. These maps use version 1 of the Google Maps API. I want v.2. I've know I've zoomed in closer on this beach photo online (at Google itself?).

Watch me work. Heh.