et in Arcadia egoboo

ever-evolving spam

2009-08-14T15:00:14Z

I just received "Subject: Dating 101: Dealing With the Race Factor".

The spam itself is boringly the same, but the header definitely caught my eye. (Not in tyhe way intended.)

Rothbury -- summary

2009-07-08T20:22:10Z

Last spring there began to be serious advertising for a rock festival in Rothbury, Michigan. That's up the other side of the lake (beyond Saugatuck, if you know the general area). The headliners were to be The Dead, Dylan, String Cheese Incident, and Willy Nelson, with a page-long list of more, from King Sunny Ade to Ani DiFranco to Toots and the Maytalls.
WOW!!
The tickets were $250, to set up a tent next to your car, with more luxurious packages priced in line . . .
WOW!!
Ah, but the fine print giveth and the fine print taketh away. They were recruiting for at least two pools of warm bodies, one to sort garbage on the Green Team, and one to be generally necessary all over the place. Work three six-hour shifts, and your ticket is free.
WOW!!

So I have a narrative of the long weekend to do, including getting there and back, and a variety of notes on current pop culture(s).

King Sunny Ade: Finally got to see him live. Way fun. solid
Femi Kuti & the Positive Force: Perhaps the least exciting act I caught, but that's only me.
Flogging Molly: They kick names and take butt.
String Cheese Incident: One of the most important appearances of the show, since they haven't been playing lately. They have an enormous, fun following, but they just don't do it for me. I do not mean to insinuate they're bad, but for me, personally, there just isn't that much excitement.
Zappa Plays Zappa: Dweezil does do an excellent job of reproducing his father's complicated music, but, again just personally, it was like the best cover band in the world. It is a great band, all excellent, but I felt really odd about the performance. I wonder if other fans who saw Frank live have similar feelings.
The Dead: It's not quite the same band, it's not quite the same repertoire, and the show isn't organized quite the same way, but it's the real thing. THEY ARE HOT.
I lost most of the second set to my overnight work shift (to be detailed in a future episode), but the very second song was "Eyes of the World", which totally does me, so I was ok. And I did get to see the fireworks, since they were perfectly framed by the entrance to the mess tent where I was doing light cleanup.
The schedule had said 8 - 12. The two sets were 8:30-10:30 and 11-1. When I Googled “"the dead" rothbury setlist” the next morning, there were almost 2,000 hits. It's up to about 4,000 now.
Toots and the Maytalls: He's getting old.
Does every African diasppora group have a couple of women over on one side of the stage being hot? All three I saw at Rothbury did.
Matisyahu: I didn't catch his set, but he was right before Ani DiFranco, so I did run into the Chabadniks who were there harassing unobservant Jews to lay tfillin, just this once, right now.
Willie Nelson and Family: I really enjoyed being able to watch his fingers closely on the jumbotron. He doesn't need me to remind people, hey this guy is good
Ani DiFranco: My own biggest takeaway. I'd never seen her live; I now will at every opportunity. Now I understand how outside boundaries she is. Her lyrics are well within the general area I'd expect from a "singer-songwriter", ranging from purely personal to ragingly political, and she mostly was playing a big acoustic guitar. She leaps and jumps and athleticizes like a big-time rocker, at the same time. Just whatever she likes. A seriously hot performance.
Bob Dylan and His Band: The ruin of a once-lousy voice.
He still puts his old lyrics to completely different arrangements, sometimes. Actually, I could put "still" into most of what one might say.
He was in some sort of black suit and top hat, with his five-piece band in matching white jackets, strongly suggesting a big band.

Little Brother, the play, on in Chicago until July 18

2009-06-17T14:36:40Z

I just heard about this from today's bOINGbOING, but it opened a week ago.
Is there any word-of-mouth on it?

Chicago Riot Cops Reunion

2009-06-11T14:29:07Z

"The time has come that the Chicago Police be honored and recognized for their contributions to maintaining law and order - and for taking a stand against Anarchy."
"The time was the hot summer month of August '68. The Democratic National Convention was about to start and the only thing that stood between Marxist street thugs and public order was a thin blue line of dedicated, tough Chicago police officers."
"For decades the collective Left has white-washed what really happened during the riots of 1968 and 1969. Chicago Police officers who participated in the riots continue to endure unending criticism - all of which is unwarranted, inaccurate and wrong."

"If you were a Chicago cop who was in the Chicago riots - we want you!"

http://www.chicagoriotcops.com/

"Chicago Riot Cops Reunion"
"DATE: Friday, June 26th, 2009"
"LOCATION: Chicago FOP Lodge"
"TIME: 7:00 pm."
"KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Superintendent Phil Cline, others TBA"
http://www.chicagoriotcops.com/3.html

Fraternal Order of Police
Chicago Lodge 7
1412 W. Washington Blvd.

a different thought on the dying newspapers

2009-06-07T22:11:48Z

This is prompted by reading yet another blog post about the problem of the reporters being much too chummy with the reported on. "Stockholm Syndrome" "the Villagers" etc.
And careful news readers already know that the real financial problem was the takeover by Wall Street. Newspapers were making very nice profits. So they got bought up by leveraging maniacs who demanded that profit margins go up every year, year after year. An insanity more prominent in other places, but no less destructive in journalism.

But there's something else, beneath those. Being a newspaper reporter used to be a job. Somehow, it got turned into a profession. Mike Royko, one of the most famous reporters to come from Chicago, grew up over a bar. Now there are fancy degrees in journalism. I very strongly suspect that a lot of the fire went out when the class of the job-holders changed. (I dunno. Maybe I should ask Abe.)

"Tell me about your mother superior"

2009-05-04T02:10:37Z

It's a long-standing puzzle to me that it seems so much clearer to me than to many other people that one of the basic drivers of the right-wing program is sexual hysteria. "Anti-abortion"ists want to punish sexually active women. Homosexuality is so deeply provocative that it can't be talked about rationally at all.

But I just ran into another angle, which hadn't occurred to me before, on the wonderful blog Mind Hacks —

Tell me about your mother superior

I found this fascinating aside in a 1969 article on 'Psychiatric Illness in the Clergy' about a group of monks who underwent psychoanalysis, causing two thirds of them to realise they were "called to married life".
The Pope immediately banned psychoanalysis from the priesthood as a result:

[Bovet] suggests that many clergy would benefit from psychotherapy during their training. This was attempted in Mexico when in 1961 a group of 60 Benedictine monks underwent group and individual psychoanalysis. However, of the original 60 monks taking part in this experiment, only 20 are still monks ; and of the 40 who have left the monastery it is reported that "there are some who realized that they were really called to married life" (Lemercier, 1965).
The Papal Court answered this "threat" the following decree: "You will not maintain in public or in private psychoanalytical theory or practice, under threat of suspension as a priest, and you are rigorously forbidden under threat of destitution to suggest to candidates for the monastery that they should undergo psychoanalysis" (Singleton, 1967).

This was not be the last time psychotherapists cause stirrings in the faithful.
The book Lesbian Nuns, Breaking Silence contains a chapter by the former Sister Mary Benjamin of the Immaculate Heart of Mary convent in California.
Psychotherapists Carl Rogers and William Coulson arranged for the nuns to take part in encounter group, essentially a form of fashionable 60s group psychotherapy aimed as well people rather than patients for 'personal growth'.
The effect was disastrous for the convent, with hundreds of the nuns defaulting on their vows, and several, including Sister Mary Benjamin, discovering repressed lesbian desires.
The convent eventually collapsed and was closed in 1970.
There's an brief online article that also recounts this story and I was intrigued to see a footnote at the end:

Having abandoned his once lucrative career, Dr. William Coulson now lectures to Catholic and Protestant groups on the dangers of psychotherapy, with a particular emphasis upon the "encounter group" dynamic.

There's a whole novel right there in that footnote.

Link to summary of 'Psychiatric Illness in the Clergy'.
Link to online article about Dr William Coulson.

JG Ballard in Shanghai

2009-04-21T19:35:10Z

A more unusual note, from James Fallows, a journalist I admire and whose work I follow, who lives most of the time in China:
JG Ballard in Shanghai.

Marie Equi Day

2009-04-07T16:02:50Z

Well, I only missed Ada Lovelace Day by a week, but I did have an icon of her since I started this lj account.
Actually, I was just running around grabbing neat icons, until I discovered I had already maxed out what a free account is allotted, but whatever.

Anyway, I had two picks for Ada Lovelace Day, neither of which I saw anywhere else through my peephole into the lj universe.

First are the thousands of women who worked at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works. Cicero borders Chicago on the southwest, and one of the L lines goes right past where the plant was. I remember the building. Big mother!

It was the workers at the Hawthorne Works whose behavior suggested to industrial psychologists that people work better if someone actually pays a little attention to them. “The Hawthorne effect”, “a form of reactivity” was deduced from data gathered in the late 1920s – in the 1950s. Those psych guys are really on the ball!
“Thus these experiments were among the first indications that any productivity model must factor in intangible attributes such as human behavior.”

My other personal honoree is the redoubtable Caroline Herschel (1750 - 1848).
Born in Hanover, a severe childhood illness stunted her growth to four foot three, so her mother prepared her for a life as a maid. When her brother William got a job as an organist in England, she went to live (and study) with him.
She followed her brother's interest in astronomy, giving up a career as a singer, and became his assistant in his lens-grinding and telescope business.
On August 1, 1786, she found her first comet, Comet Herschel (C/1786 P1) (of, eventually, eight).
At her brother's request, she indexed the two-volume star catalog of John Flamsteed, including errata and an additional 560 stars.

After William discovered Uranus and became Royal Astronomer, Caroline was put on the royal payroll as his assistant, with a pension of fifty pounds, the first time that a woman was recognized for a scientific position.

After William's marriage, she eventually returned to Hanover, to live with another brother, Dietrich. The catalog she produced of her and William's work led to her becoming the first woman enrolled in the Royal Astronomical Society. The Kings of Prussia and Denmark gave her medals.
No errors have ever been found in her catalog of twenty-five hundred nebulae.

After he died she went back to Germany and went on making observations and calculations; no errors have ever been found in her notes. She catalogued twenty-five hundred nebulae and discovered eight comets. She died at the age of ninety-seven.

another inflation-adjusted 2 cents worth on the Watchmen movie

2009-03-21T23:06:06Z

[cross-posted from General Technics]
I saw it a couple of days ago, at the $5.50 matinee. (My local mongo-plex designates the first showing of anything of the day the "matinee".)
I had always thought the neologism "graphic novel" was foolishly self-important and pretentious – until I read Watchmen. Clearly, one of the major challenges in filming it would be editing out a movie-sized piece which is still recognizable. I think the writers did a good job.
By now, there's an accumulated body of work translating comic pages to the screen. Watchmen shouldn't have posed any real challenges there, and it didn't. Nice job.

That leaves the few original bits . . . Rewriting the ending seemed unaccountable and gratuitous, and I still have no idea what the point was. The new ending is alright, but I don't see any improvement over the original.
Adding some currently fashionable kung-fu ultraviolence seemed pointless. Especially since the movie seemed willing to challenge some of the more facile assumptions about what a comics-movie ought to do.
Which leaves me with one last question: If this movie is supposed to be so Eighties, why was almost all the music (mostly well-selected) Sixties? While I came out of the theater reasonably satisfied, when I reflect that one of the high points for me was My Chemical Romance's punked up version of Dylan, that doesn't really seem to reflect well on the overall artistic success of the movie!

Numerology

2009-02-14T23:52:50Z

When people have strong emotional reactions to birthday years ending in zero, my stock response has been, “I’m not into numerology.”
I wasn’t especially excited one way or another about my own 30th, 40th, or 50th birthdays. 60 turns out to have been more significant. I am now looking at having collections of prescriptions and of annoying physical complaints in perpetuity.

On the other hand, I’m finally moving on a different uncomfortable number. Every few years, in periods of especially high stress, my weight would go up a couple of pounds. Not necessarily a lot, and not all that frequently, but without ever getting back down.
I discovered a real transition at 200 pounds. Below 200, I could see a couple of pounds difference. (My weight ordinarily fluctuates in a several pound range.) Past 200, small changes were no longer obvious. And I’ve been up to a ceiling of 210 for a year or so.
Well, being housebound (it’s been a pretty severe January in Chicago) and slothful (even when I’m working at home, keyboarding isn’t much exertion!), it’s been easy to just not be all that hungry, and I’ve gotten back down to 195 and counting. I can see the difference, and I’m happy with it. I want to get down at least another 15, but there’s no deadline.
And just in the last week or so, I’ve had unexpected confirmation and reinforcement. I actually can’t eat as much as I even recently could. I just get too full. I can’t get through every single dish (except the eggplant, which my innards can’t abide) in the Indian buffet, and I really can only finish the regular size pho, not the big one.

I have a new little kitchen trick which I’m pleased with, too. One of my staples is granola and yogurt. ((Who the hell is it in the Food Industry who decided that Americans don't want yogurt with the consistency of yogurt? I don't want pectin, tapioca, modified food starch, agar, gum arabic, gelatin, or carageenan in my yogurt!)) I get cheap granola, and put in a little trail mix, which I call “granola helper”.
The last couple of years fruit juice mixtures have taken hold in the supermarkets, so, of course, there's one brand which is owned by Pepsi and one which is owned by Coke, and neither is very exciting. But, oddly, one of our local chains has a house brand which is not only 100% juice, but cheaper than the two big brands. So I've been using some of them for flavorings in the cereal. A whole new horizon in granola helper!

(This is another slice of the not-fanzine mentioned last post.)

Happy Ground Hog's Day

2009-02-04T00:43:36Z

. . . or, more formally, Midwinter.
We're up to a daily increase of 2 ½ minutes of sun a day in Chicago. Though the temperature hasn't been above freezing for more than a few hours this year.
I started my winter lights early, on a whim, and I'm intensely glad. It has probably helped save me.

I'd meant to publish some sort of status report last summer, but it took most of the summer to pull out of last winter's blues (for good and sufficient reason!). Or "greys", more precisely. And differences among "old" and "new" media have been showing up to my mind. I don't mind sending out several hundred [paper] copies of my current inmost secrets to most of the people who have ever heard of me, but to Reveal All to the entire universe is more than I'm up for.
And, of course, I think in terms of actually producing an artifact, rather than some Content and Formatting . . . A very different production cycle from "journalling".

So the situation is, I'm still here (sometimes more Just Barely than others). I'm doing my best to get enough sunlight, and striving to continue to meet the rent (insert general commiseration here). I may at long last be taking off some of the weight which has been gradually accumulating, which would be a Very Good Thing, though the technique of being sluggishly housebound is, uh, problematic.

I want to get to the annual sale at Hausermann's, regardless of whether I can afford anything. If my current gig works, I may make it to potlatch. If it really really works, it may send me to Zambia in a few weeks. It would be nice for one of life's endless surprises to be positive for a change.

My LJ Username

2008-08-18T15:36:21Z

Why did you choose your user name? Is there any special meaning or story behind it?

Submitted By lilbananapie

View 502 Answers

I happened to finally give in and get onto lj around the time that Robert Anton Wilson was dying.
He(and Arlen!)’d always been both important and generous to me. Here he was, the first person to name *BOTH* a planet and its moon, just the latest bizarre accomplishment, and he was dying in poverty.

return of the sun

2007-12-23T16:17:22Z

Daylight today is nominally 4 seconds longer than yesterday, at Chicago's latitude. Although it takes a month and a half to add up to a whole hour. We've gotten from just over 9 hours now to just over ten hours by about Ground Hog's Day.
I toasted my face with hot lights this morning; being depressed, I don't get to it every day. And I've been getting better with my Kegels, which are supposed to help the "incontinence". It's amazing how sick you can get of diapers how fast.
Here's a Red Meat I liked.

comin’ along

2007-11-19T12:09:26Z

The surgery went as it as supposed to.
I checked in to the hospital last Wednesday morning (after a rush appointment with a cardiologist, since that somehow hadn't been checked off on my pre-op stuff.  possibly no one told me one office had made the appointment with another office for me.)
I went under the anesthesia, and came to in my room.  I don't even remember the recovery room at all.  A variety of temporary additional plumbing had been installed . . .  I don't think people want a lot of up close & personal anecdote . . .  I intermittently watched a lot of TV.
Anyway, I was released per "schedule" on Friday . . .  about 2 in the afternoon, instead of the nominal 11 a.m., since it took a couple extra hours for the paperwork to pass through the necessary black holes, and my sister drove me home.

Where I have been since.  I have been sort of "off the clock", since what difference does it make?, but in a few hours, when offices are open, I'll call the urologist to schedule my appointment Wednesday to have the catheter removed.  And call the oral surgeon I saw to gripe about the bits he missed.  And call the possible work-from-home gigs I was working on lining up, now that I can more realistically project my capabilities.

One step done and another begun

2007-11-07T01:23:47Z

If I don’t do this, it won’t get done . . . When I started mentally composing this, a week and a half or so ago, it was almost entirely different.

The move was completed on Wednesday, October 24. My target date had been a week earlier, but it was still within my allotted margin of error; and it cost $25 dollars less than what had been my very rough estimate.
They didn’t seem to bother with the labels on the boxes declaring which room each was supposed to go into and it’s ALL in the living room. But the big furniture (complete dining room, and eight more bookcases) is all exactly where I wanted it.

It was disorienting, the following weekend not to be packing. It took me most of a week to realize that at least one of the very next tasks/changes is to stop neglecting my sleep, nutrition, and (food) budget so much. I had decided explicitly that, for the short run (very few weeks, +/-), I wouldn't pay much attention, since I just didn’t have the attention. Overall, I think I’ve been successful in budgeting my attention and energy, but it is an ongoing juggle. At any rate, that can’t be allowed to slip further. Which is well illustrated by its taking me several days to notice.

Bridging this particular transition has been four solid weeks of work . . . in Oak Park. If you’re not a Chicagoan, I’m now in Evanston, the first suburb north of the city on the lake, and Oak Park is the first suburb due west of the city . . .
At least it started out as four weeks . . . First was the problem of getting there. It turns out that the suburban commuter train I now live next to goes to the same big terminal downtown that the train to Oak Park does (hooray!). Station to station (and it’s only a block or two walk at either end), it’s precisely an hour. The evening is worse, since the counter-commuting inbound train doesn’t get to Oak Park until 5:29, and is always late. At least once a week, it’s so late it screws up the connection. But aside from that . . .
Except, after two weeks, there was some sort of decision somewhere not to go on. Except that by the end of week two, it was decided to add week three after all. (Except I already had a doctor’s appointment for my pre-op physical, so it was a four day week.) And by the end of week three, week four had been added back, too. (Except I had a job interview that Monday, so it was another 4-day week.)
And today, while I was waiting for the train back from Waukegan (I had to go show myself to some people in Gurnee, which is near Wisconsin (seriously. It’s 10 miles from the state line.)), I got a call from the guy I’d been working most closely with, asking where I was, because they want some more time, he just hadn’t actually explicitly said so. Which is great, but there are about three days before my surgery that are available. But it’s a little more money, and if they get their act together, I can work from home.

*** *** ***
My surgery is scheduled for next Wednesday, November 14.
*** *** ***
For those who missed previous episodes, I have prostate cancer at literally the earliest stage at which it is detectable at all. So the good news is that the prognosis for the surgery is as good is can be. The bad news, obviously, is having my prostate removed.

But wait! There’s more!!
Last Friday, this . . . is it linear enough to be called a “narrative”? got yet more color.

My bus card stopped working. A couple of years ago, the Chicago Transit Authority went to a farecard system, and one version of card (there are at least three or four, of course) registers at the turnstile or farebox and deducts from your checking account all on its own. I have the monthly version: flat fee, unlimited rides. If I’m working (and taking the L or busses to work, rather than the suburban commuter train, like the last couple weeks), it pays for itself very well.
But last Friday, my card just gave me a message to “SEE AGENT CODE: 57”, or something like that. The code for stolen card, confiscate it.
Huh?!
My card never did work well. The machines couldn’t detect its chip one time out of three or four, and it’s now a couple of years old, so it’s sort of shabby. The CTA had announced that for October they wouldn’t charge the $5 replacement fee for old cards, so I tried to take advantage of that.
They don’t tell you that as soon as you apply for the replacement, they turn off the old card, as they did with mine. The clock is still running on your payment for it, of course, and if you’re dogged enough to chase “Customer Service” for a couple of days, you can actually get that information. “It’s in your terms of service.”
So I’ve been paying double or triple (busses don’t give transfers at all any more for cash fares), and will for another week or so.

That is probably overshadowed, in the longer run, by the crown coming off a molar Friday afternoon. Overall, I am very grateful for my genes, but the one exception is that I have my mother’s teeth. So yesterday I had an emergency appointment with the dentist. (It’s been a few years; turns out the last dentist I had has been gone for a couple of months.) There’s nowhere near enough left down there to put anything on top of it. The dentist recommended an implant, and a couple of people to do it.
I called the first one on the list just after office closing yesterday, so I called again this morning, and I go in tomorrow morning . . .

Oh, about Gurnee . . . Gurnee is known for two things. Great America amusement park and a very large amazingly generic mall. Though the second-hand computer place is pretty good. Half a mile south of the mall is a company which does specialized institutional lighting which is redoing its web site. I don’t have any idea how, but they’re using a designer who’s in Mill Valley, California, and need someone who can drop in occasionally for face time to actually realize the PHP & MySQL. So the designer went to the agency I’ve been working through, and this weird pavane of telephone tag has been going on, in stages, for probably a month now.
But it looks like paying work from home, which is a Good Thing.

Especially since I found out how long the convalescence from my surgery might be. Just for openers, I can’t count on being able to do ANYTHING for two or three weeks (e.g., “don’t lift anything heavier than eight pounds”).

And now (in a couple days, technically), I’m off to Windycon. Where some lunatic has scheduled me on one two three four five six SEVEN panels!

belated update

2007-10-07T17:34:15Z

I sent a Change of Address to everyone whose email address I have, but there may be people here that doesn't include. (There may also be people who don't actually know me in "meat space" -- I have added occasional "friends" simply because their posts are interesting.

By the end of last May, I was so broke (a total of about a half year's work in two and a half years) that I asked my parents for a loan for the first time since I lived with them.

Then Suzy asked me to move out, asap.

That was about the time I was diagnosed with (very early) prostate cancer.

Then my father went into the hospital, seeming terminal from early on.

The only good news is that I have finally started to get work. So I was working two half-time jobs, each with full-time potential, and spending weekends with my family in Joliet . . . It was no time for the news that my marriage was over, to add to the stresses . . .

My father died the last day of July.

I have just moved. And told my mother.

I expect to schedule my surgery for late October, after the second installment (the books and kitchen, mostly) of the move. (Having gotten second and third opinions.)

** ** ** **

Since then, I went to one of the jobs fulltime . . . and the company my immediate employers were contracting to went through yet another management coup over the project and all the consultants were out. (I spent most of last week on another, smaller project for them, and while I was there, got a call from a headhunter to go out into The Land Beyond O'Hare for the same project, at headquarters. It was a good laugh.)

Tomorrow I start what I hope will be a four-week assignment in Oak Park. (It's a weird commute -- the commuter train I'm now two blocks from downtown, and then out from the main station downtown. It can be made to work, though.)

Which will lead almost up to Windycon, which I don't want to be hors de combat for, so I've scheduled my surgery for the week after. Next step is the pre-op exam from my regular GP.

The move proceeds apace. Most of the books are packed; the kitchen is the biggest thing left, and that's this afternoon. I figure to have the movers do the second, more massive half, in a bout a week and a half.

It's not an accident that I don't have an email contact in LJ, but anyone who know me can find me, I figure, if you don't have my Evanston address.

Herbert L. Rest 1920 - 2007

2007-08-06T00:52:26Z

My father died early last Tuesday morning.

He had astonished doctors for twenty years, but a lot of things all fell apart at once, and after a couple of weeks of very painful final decline, he is gone. The funeral was Thursday. Shiva followed at my brother's, on the North Side where the cemetery is, and last night and tonight at my mother's.
One of the practical complications for me has been starting two new jobs at once, at almost exactly the time he went into the hospital, so I haven't had a weekend in over a month . . .

I could say so much, and all together it would be so incomplete.
He was drafted a week before Pearl Harbor, was being shipped to Singapore when it fell, and ended up with Stilwell, spending much of WW II effectively as part of the Kuomintang army. He was a medic, saw three years of nerve-shattering hideousness, and seems to have come back the same humane, moral, humorous stoic as when he left.
His mother once told me that when he got home, he went down into the basement and put his uniform into the incinerator, came back upstairs, and called my mother.
They were married three weeks later.

No one on the outside really knows a family, and I could go on about, uh, "problematic" aspects of my childhood upbringing, but between themselves, my parents were utterly devoted to each other. I may never have seen a better marriage.
They were married 62 years.

Last spring, my youngest sister's daughter was bat mitzvah, and since my father couldn't travel, I was the first aliyah, which was unsettling. And now I'm officially the eldest of the line.

His memory for a blessing.

"green sexism"

2007-06-14T21:35:59Z

At the Chicago Reader, our venerable free weekly, there's a wonderful putter-out-of-perspective-changing-info named Harold Henderson.
He’s just posted an item he called “Green sexism”, about a paper No Sustainability without Justice: A Feminist Critique of Environmental Citizenship (pdf).

It makes me wonder, think, and ask questions I hadn't asked before. Those are *very good* things . . .
So I’m sharing here.

Wiscon: half room available; Chicago ride needed

2007-05-07T20:53:05Z

What the Subject says -- I can't really afford it this year, but don't want to let that stop me.
I have a room, and will happily sublet half of it.
I could really use a ride from Chicago (preferably Friday-Monday, of course).

webmeme, free for the hauling

2007-04-03T15:57:08Z

What neurotransmitter are you?
(Partial credit for inspiration to Lydy)

anybody got a better description than “non-profit”?

2007-03-08T00:11:05Z

dot-org, who blogs about “being a non-profit business professional” says We need a new name,

this sector still hasn't found the right label for itself.
"Non-profit", or more formally "not-for-profit", is a lousy name . . .
I wish I had heard a better idea for a collective label, but if there is one it's not crossed my radar. Any pointers would be welcome. (emphasis in the original)

Well, I/we know a lot of word people, and this is an interesting challenge. So I'm propagating it.
(& while I'm at it, is there a particular HTML tag which is the consensus LJ default for quotes/cites?)

a good start to a grey day

2007-02-26T15:53:24Z

People in cities in the upper Midwest have been seeing ads for "megabus", a British no-frills long-distance bus company which has now expanded here.
The deal is, there are no bus terminals. You make your reservation on-line, or by toll-free call; the bus picks up passengers at the curb at some central point; and passengers debark onto the curb at the destination.
So I checked them out as a way to get to Minicon. The Chicago-Minneapolis fare is $20. Yes, twenty dollars. And there's an overnight, so I can leave Thursday night and arrive in Minneapolis on Friday morning, and return overnight Monday night.
But it turns out that they only take reservations for five or six weeks in advance. (I haven't figured out the system on that yet.) Yesterday, the date drop-down on their web page only went to April 1. This morning, it's to April 10. So I jumped on it.
Another reason I've been . . . breathing down the neck of the website is too tortured a turn of phrase, but a saner replacement doesn't immediately come to me. Anyway, one of their gimmicks is that the very first seat on any bus is $1.
So I just got my seats, round trip, to Minicon for $2.50. Including "reservation fee".

In the internet, every meme will be famous for fifteen minutes.

2007-02-17T21:35:25Z

I get sent links to goofy Which Phylum Are You? quizzes only occasionally, though from the looks of it, there are orders of magnitude too many out there. And I only bother playing with a couple of those. I do find a strong preference for the percentages rankings sort, rather then just one "answer".
A couple of weeks ago, I somehow ran into, or was run into,

Which religion is the right one for you? (new version). The result is startlingly good! (now lessee if I can get the HTML pasted in . . . )

You scored as Judaism.

Your views are closest to those of Judaism. If you are not a Jew, do more research on Judaism and possibly consider becoming one; however, realize that conversion to Judaism is difficult. Judaism was the first of the Abrahamic faiths; it precedes both Christianity and Islam.

Judaism

75%

Islam

71%

agnosticism

67%

Paganism

46%

Buddhism

42%

atheism

42%

Hinduism

38%

Satanism

21%

Christianity

17%

oh, yeah -- who is this anyway?

2006-12-28T16:22:27Z

Apologies to people who have been puzzled at being added to my list.
I don't always know how obscure I'm being, and I'm not especially acculturated to LJ yet, anyway. Why do so many of the little personal icons have bits of text painted over? (& why does the LJ spellchecker flag 'LJ'?)

So, trying to identify myself without being explicit enough for worms or harvesters: I'm Neil, most lately signed "Neil in Chicago", formerly "Neil with the hair".

If that leaves you cold, you're one of the minority of the people on my list I found link-hoping and was intrigued by. If you're ever in Chicago, I have a good reputation as a native guide.

LJ “friends”

2006-11-27T01:55:58Z

Experimentally, I’ve added a few more . . .
My criteria are an arbitrary mix of how much I care about you, how infrequently you post (I’m online insanely too much already), how your posts strike me, and whim.
So there are people important to me who aren’t there, and people who have never heard of me who are (hey, there, RAWA fan! I’ve been involved in relief since the early 80’s, starting with the Afghan Refugee Fund).
As soon as I’ve seen how this list works, and I’ve accumulated some more {plural of alias}, I’ll probably re-do it again.