Entries Tagged 'general' ↓

I have the “urge for goin’” as Joni sang, and was appeasing it with my flickr collection.

I snapped these girls doing a rubbing of a gravestone at Gettysburg last summer. It was during steamy hot August, in the late afternoon.

Well, something still seems a bit off.  I welcome your critique of the new banner photo.

I like the new Extended Live Archive.

And comments are now working again.

Whew!

Okay, I have not been blogging much lately. That’s an understatement. But I recently went into the old cPanel and updated my Wordpress. And found I needed a new theme, because the old one was messed up. High time, so no trouble.

I kind of like this theme, though I miss my subway-banner. And I love the Extended Live Archive. (Um, correction: I loved it until it disappeared!) And where did my blogroll go? Links are still in the admin section of the account, but I cannot see them displayed. This is what I get for doing a hasty upgrade. If I used to link to you, be assured, I will be again soon!
Anyway, I need a theme with widgets. Widgets are cool, widgets move with you, when you change the wallpaper, if the mixed metaphors of that are not too much.

Update 2/4: Missbhavens has pointed out that the comment function has also gone awol. Yikes. I hate this! I need time to come in here and sort it out. Please bear with me!

Would someone also explain why, since my comment function is not working, why I just had to go in and delete 38 of the nastiest comment-spams you ever read from my spam filter? Just curious…

Trapped in a plastic bag, in the way back, bottom shelf of the fridge, of course, growing those antlers. Poor Rudolph.

I usually find documentary footage taken by real people to be more powerful than what professionals dish up. This 2.5 minute film of what missbhavens saw as she was driving around the city is no exception. Add on the Tom Waits soundtrack, and it’s even more depressing.

I have a terrible cold.
But I mustered up enough energy to check my email today and
this, this made me very much more cheerful than before. I salute this young man, so enthusiastic. So much joie de vivre.

Note to Marketing gurus in charge of new products: Sushi Pork is much, much worse an idea than blue frozen french fries. Or neon yogurt in a tube. Or, for our Scottish friends, deep fried Mars bars. Sushi Pork is the bad marketing idea that kills. Okay, I am pretty sure deep fried Mars bars also kill. But they are doubtless tastier and you will die a long slow artery-clogged death, not from a quick painful bout of food poisoning.

Hmmmm… I know someone was just goofing off. Or perhaps got their vowels mixed up. But I liked the sign. Nevertheless, despite knowing as I do that it’s a gaffe, the idea of sushi pork still makes me kind of nauseous.

Okay. Security is important. But is there any evidence that this will increase subway security? Sure, it can’t hurt subway security. But look at the airport analogy: there’s supposedly no racial profiling (yes, if it’s true, and I’m not sure it is, then that’s definitely a good thing in my book). So what happens is that random people are searched. Is there any evidence that anyone has been caught with anything (besides that fifth butane lighter that is forbidden)? What we are going to get in the subway is the equivalent of 80-year old grannies being searched.

Here’s my suggestion, New York: those big black garbage receptacles in the subway? Serious security risk. Bags on the subway? People need to learn not to leave them. I lived in the UK during the IRA bombing campaigns and many a time encountered public transit shut-downs while police investigated abandoned parcels and suitcases. Seriously annoying? Yes. But it was necessary. But we all have to get a clue and realize that people can attack our subways without being suicide bombers. And we need to start paying attention to unattended stuff.

More police presence is a good thing. People looking around on subways and buses is a good thing. Bomb-sniffing dogs are a good thing. Other means of detection–whatever these may be–are a good thing. But I don’t think that random searches are going to make a big difference. Especially with those darned big black opaque garbage cans.

And I doubt that random searches will turn up anything. Any more than the guy who searches people at the library keeps folks from bringing in beverages or gum or Lord-knows-what they’re looking for.

Update: Magikthise has a great posting and an active comments thread on this very issue. Check it out!

I hope I don’t startle you, gentle reader. You aren’t used to much from me lately, and now it may seem as if I have glued myself to the chair in front of the computer. Not so. But I want to draw your attention to the Freeway Blogger. I like this idea a lot. I’d like to link to some of their awesome photos, but I don’t want to suck their bandwidth (I know, I know, I have 10 readers, but still.) So you’ll just have to visit them yourself. One of my favorites: “Nobody Died When Clinton Lied.” Another: “We’re all wearing the blue dress now.”

John G. Roberts may not be the worst possible nomineee Bush could put forward for the Supreme Court. But he’s living in their neighborhood. The Democrats called him a “Friend to Big Business, the Mining Industry and Ken Starr.” The Family Research Council like him. He’s argued for prayer at public school graduations, against the Endangered Species Act, and given lots of money to Bush’s campaigns (his law firm has given over $92K in the 2006 cycle alone). I’m with Bicyclemark on this. Can you buy a seat on the Supreme Court? What a country!

I am loving this site called Book Coolie. The author says, “We are a gang of people who like books and carry them like coolies;” count me among you.

A glance at the blog calls up descriptions of Joyce walking in Trieste, an interview with Jamaican writer Geoffrey Philip, a review of Selvon’s Lonely Londoners (one of the most important books in my world, as some of you know), a blurb on Bass Culture, and an interview snippet with Linton Kwesi Johnson.

Check it out.

According to Nedstat I had 62 page views last week and one of the last ten visitors was logged in at Halliburton. Surely they have more profitable things to do than read extremely-low-volume blogs with messages about tweaking Wordpress Templates and being disappointed by the driving-music-of-choice of animated middle-aged white men.

It’s a strange, strange inkernet, folks. That’s all I’m saying.

1. 16 July 22:27 University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, United States
2. 17 July 11:50 NTL Internet, Luton, United Kingdom
3. 17 July 14:27 University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, United States
4. 17 July 17:02 Road Runner, United States
5. 17 July 18:08 Comcast Communications, United States
6. 18 July 06:04 Philippines (logisticsoftware.ph)
7. 18 July 10:17 Halliburton, United States
8. 18 July 11:40 The J. Hopkins Med. Inst., Baltimore, United States
9. 18 July 11:45 The J. Hopkins Med. Inst., Baltimore, United States
10. 18 July 13:23 Eozaen GmbH, Usingen, Germany

Bear with me– I just upgraded Wordpress, and am working on customizing a new theme.
In the meantime, I am using the the vanilla-boring “Kubrick” Wordpress default theme. I also lost all of my little tags and links, outside of the blogroll; that’s okay. They were getting kind of cluttered anyway.

But Kubrick also is set to default on summarized articles, and does not load pictures for old postings. Let’s see what we can do about that.

Update: Okay, customized photo now in title banner, albeit not mine–for now (see footer)–I am feeling a bit better. Kubric really is easy to modify, or at least using Kubrickr to add a photo from flickr to the title banner is easy. Now, I should really get back to reading and writing, eh?

I was chugging along the Long Island Expressway today at a glorious 12-15 mph, when a man zipped by me in the right-hand lane. (Yes, on a bumper-to-bumper LIE, the right-hand lane is the fast lane, but oh, watch out for those disappearing lanes and merging vehicles.)

The man in question was middle-aged, with ginger hair and freckles from here to Tipperary, and he was blasting a lovely tune, and jammin’ away, dancing and singing loudly. “Got to admit, it’s getting bettah, it’s a little bettah, all the time. It can’t get no worse!”

Ahh, I thought, the Be-atles, as Ed Sullivan would say. I loves me some Beatles (as Ed Sullivan would not say.) I turned off my beloved Hugh Hamilton to hear my only-slightly-more-beloved Beatles (sorry Hugh, truly–you’re just a millisecond behind, really.)

And I basked a moment. Then the man jutted ahead, and I popped Hugh’s “Talkback Live” back on, WBAI (Pacifica Radio NYC). He was, as he always is, balanced and fair (note, I did not say fair and balanced), and he was tempering some over-zealous caller’s unsupported rant, with decorum, style, grace, intelligence, and that damned fine Guyanese accent.

If you don’t know Hugh Hamilton, you should. He does the best radio call-in show ever, and he’s progressive, but never lets things get cheap or sleazy or stupid. Unlike some.

A little later, the right lane slowed, and the happy singing freckled man returned to my side. And he was still singing, but this time it was “Band on the Run.” And I realized, with some dismay, that he was not listening to the Beatles at all. It was Paul McCartney and Wings. It was a concert and the road was loud, so it is not surprising that the former song sounded right.

What a disappointment, freckle-man.

I smiled again, but this time the smug smile of a true Beatles fan. I cranked Hugh up as he threw down another crazy caller, propped up another wise one, and kept everything just so.

I hope to blog more frequently soon, as Hugh says when he signs off every day, “The Good Lord Willin’, and the creek don’ rise.”

Hmmm… I looked under international jobs for writers (you never know), and the following popped up between Tech Writer gigs in Iowa and Calgary:

INTELLIGENCE POSITIONS

Description & Details
Location:
Iraq, Iraq
(Is that like New York, New York?)

Description:
INTELLIGENCE
Please send resume with salary requirements to ***@***.com. Be sure to indicate the position that you are applying for.

Please refer to the How to Apply section (found below) for more detail.
(Editor’s note: The How to Apply section did not load.)
Job Function:
Political Organization/Lobbying

Applications for this position will be accepted between 6/18/05 and 7/18/05.

I once screened baggage for an airline. Perhaps my screening skills are relevant?
Hotjobs.com indeed.

What are the ten most dangerous books of the 19th and 20th centuries? Oh Dear. Those aren’t all the ones I had in mind. Having said that, Mein Kampf makes sense. But it was not number one.

This, of course, is not surprising. Phyllis Schlafly is scared of The Feminine Mystique and The Communist Manifesto. They’re right up there with Mein Kampf. I mention Phyllis because I am happy to report I have not heard of most of these other distungished judges. Do look at the list of runners up, including such dangeous cats as J. S. Mill and Rachel Carson.

This reminds me of how G. Gordon Liddy is parading around in a little smokescreen talking about how horrible Deep Throat is–how he’s such a traitor and a criminal. Hello! G. Gordon Liddy is a criminal! Are these people mad?

(Don’t worry, that was a rhetorical question.)

And this reminds me of David Horowitz’s cranky “Discover the Network” website
where he profiles the members of “the Left”–everyone, in his mind, from convicted members of Al Qaeda to Louis Farrakhan to the Weathermen to Bill Clinton and John Kerry. Reading it is almost comical.

And Horowitz sets out to expost the left “networks.” You can even look at image maps of how everyone fits together.

Note, this did not work for me on Mozilla, which does not surprise me, since Mozilla is a commie pinko search engine. And it will take up to five minutes to load on IE. And once it loads, it will be well-nigh mind-numingly boring to wait for the “connections” to load, once you move beyond the Ford Foundation and try to find out about a group or individual. Too bad because I was interested in this mystical network.

Um, what do Sheik Omar Adbel Rahman and Roger Ebert have in common? Evangelical Lefty Jim Wallis and Barack Obama? Al Qaeda and Bill Clinton and the Weathermen? Jimmy Carter and Mumia? What Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon has taught us is that it’s easy to link people if you’re trying to. Michael Berube has written a much more detailed and useful critique of the Networks site.

Think what would happen if we played connect-the-dots games with “Right.” As we all know, Bush would be directly linked to Bin Laden via the latter’s family. No hocus pocus or imagination needed. Funny that.

MinJungKim has a nice entry yesterday about the life cycle of a blogger…. she seems to omit several steps I’ve taken recently: a) get busy and stop blogging and reading blogs (with no fanfare); b) come back to blogging and apologize profusely for not blogging; c) stop blogging again with no warning.

Dear reader, this is step d): I am back again, but I won’t apologize again. I know you’ve survived just fine. Though I do hope you’re still there.

Me, I’ve been busy. I expect to be busy for the next month, too, but I’ll be around from time to time. I did miss you, you know. What’s new?

Hello Readers–

I will be writing soon about blogs and education, in a few days when I have time to dig up some relevant links.

In the meantime, The NY Times has a new 4-part series on class. Those without accounts can use Bugmenot to avoid those pesky logins.

Check out the interactive chart which tells you where you stand class-wise in regards to four factors: occupation, education, income, and wealth.

Two very interesting quotes:

1. “One surprising finding about mobility is that it is not higher in the United States than in Britain or France. It is lower here than in Canada and some Scandinavian countries but not as low as in developing countries like Brazil, where escape from poverty is so difficult that the lower class is all but frozen in place.

“Those comparisons may seem hard to believe. Britain and France had hereditary nobilities; Britain still has a queen. The founding document of the United States proclaims all men to be created equal. The American economy has also grown more quickly than Europe’s in recent decades, leaving an impression of boundless opportunity.”

This puts to bed many Americans’ cliched notion of the US as “the country where anyone can be President.” And,

2. “Being born in the elite in the U.S. gives you a constellation of privileges that very few people in the world have ever experienced,” Professor Levine said. “Being born poor in the U.S. gives you disadvantages unlike anything in Western Europe and Japan and Canada.”

I knew my instinct to move to Canada or Sweden was a good one.

I was on the platform waiting for a 5 train at Grand Central on Saturday: going to the last of a series of workshops that I was co-teaching on blogging for teachers.

A young-forty-something blond woman was with (presumably) her early-twenty-something daughters. I jumped to this conclusion since they all had identical big-but-straight blonde hair, really light and bright. And mom had blue mascara and eye shadow up the wazoo. Unlike the hair, the blue mascara and eye shadow did not seem to be genetic. (Perhaps the father had a gene for a more neutral palette of eye make-up?)

You see a lot of these family groups: kid who seems to live in New York with wide-eyed, loud-talkin’ parents from somewhere much less busy. What follows is a loosely-remembered conversation:

Mom (Holding up a gold-colored coin): Is this good here?
Daughter: What do you mean?
Mom: This coin. Can you use it here?
Daughter: Um, that’s a dollar! That’s a dollar coin!
Mom: Oh–
Daughter: That’s a U.S. dollar!
Mom: Oh?
Daughter: They came out with that a while ago.
Mom: Oh!
Daughter (Laughing, good-naturedly): Where do you think you are, anyway?

Poor Mom. She’s not the first person to have thought NYC was another country. Thing is, if it’s one other country, it’s 100 other countries. For example, today I took a wee detour on a work errand, and stopped off at Flushing Main Street.

As I used to say to my dad, before I ever set foot in Flushing, “Flushing: it’s not just a neighborhood in Queens, it’s a toilet verb.” Fortunately, I haven’t thought twice about the unfortunate name since I first visited.

It is a strange name, though, isn’t it?

And I was reminded of how Flushing can be, like the Midnight Mailman show, “for fun and learning.” It’s the meeting of worlds. On the one hand, it’s home to the oldest Quaker meeting in NYC (which also held the public school and first racially integrated school in NYC: they were one and the same), but also to the most recent immigrants from many parts of Asia. And from lots of other places too. Many stores, cafes and bars, have signs in Korean or Chines or Japanese, with no translation. And I have a hunch that you can buy just about anything East Asian here. (The traditional NYC Chinatown thrives in lower Manhattan, but Flushing is buzzing with activity.)

I went into one all-kinds-of-Asian-stuff store, and bought 3 fragrant soaps for $1 (one jasmine, two sandalwood. I do loves me some sandalwood, but no-one can say I don’t try something new when the opportunity presents itself.) They had jar upon jar of medicinals and edibles, including lots of things I could not identify (though assumed they were either medicinal or edible or both), and others I could. I was very tempted by black rice. But not the dried seahorses.

I went to another shop and got some cheap fruit, and I got my train.

And here I am, oddly enough, blogging in public for the first time: at a new wireless-equipped teashop in my own ‘hood. It’s a lovely day in Long Island City. And though there’s nary a dried seahorse to be had, we still love our neighborhood.

A ruggedly ragged and weathered-looking fellow outside the open window was just carrying on an animated conversation with an invisible someone who must truly be very small indeed, since the man was sitting on an 8-inch concrete ledge, slouching, and looking way way down, as he spoke softly and gesticulated in an animated fashion.

Their conversation presumably ended, the man came through the open window (I should say, to his credit, the window was actually a full-length window, and the most relatively together of patrons might have to think for a moment before deciding instead to use the proper door, also provided). He came in, wandered around, bought a coffee, and was off, for now.

I was going to write a post about writer’s block. But I realized I have both writer’s and reader’s blocks. Basically, no trouble filling my day reading something. But I have been getting nothing done as far as reading or writing for my dissertation. Nor have I been keeping up with your blogs. (Sometimes I have lurked, but I haven’t commented. You know who you are.) And I have missed it.

And although usually in the past I’ve found that writing a nice wee blog entry gets the old gears working, and serves as a warm-up for the writing I’m supposed to be doing, somehow, the last few weeks, I haven’t written anything at all.

I have cast out a few nets for dissertation fellowships, and am waiting to see if any of them come in. The hopes are slim. As the time to finding out about them approaches, I have been mega-stressed-out to the point of intellectual paralysis (thank you, Mr. James Joyce) by the process of waiting to see if I will have a fellowship or a new job for next year. (My current job ends in August.) This is not to excuse what is, at the end of the day, procrastination. But I am trying to figure out its cause, and I think I’ve got it.

I don’t like waiting. This happens on a day-to-day basis: if I have something to do later in the day, something exciting (whether it’s teaching a new workshop, or hosting a public event), it’s really hard for me to focus on doing anything substantial in the meantime (rote, mindless work is just fine, but nothing involving the whole brain). It’s as if my adrenaline stores are already gearing up for later, and I’m caffeinated before I even walk towards the espresso machine.

I have noticed this for some time.

But I had not recognized the fact that this inability to focus in the face of an upcoming event–in this case, news of my future financial status–can occur over a period of weeks or months.

It’s darned frustrating.

As an aside, I had a wonderful dream a few weeks back (before a trip to the dentist), in which a dentist did all of my tooth x-rays, then showed me the curve of my teeth along the jaw, and pronounced me as having ADD, based on this. In the dream, I said, “Ahh, that makes total sense.” Of course, I have never been diagnosed with ADD. But I liked the idea that dentists could see something of your personality through their bite-wings. And, coward as I am, I preferred being told I had ADD to being told I needed dental-work.

My few regular readers have probably thought I’ve lost my marbles: first software reviews, and now self-analysis. What next?

I note that I won’t be apologizing, dear readers, for the slackiness of my posting, and then–when I do post–the non-blogginess of it all (I resisted posting two more NYT articles today.) I know I am letting you down, but I am nonetheless eschewing the self-inflicted guilt-trip. Though I did begin an apology, before deleting it.

Apparently you have to take what you can get. Call it a potluck of a blog. (Oh, we Quakers, we love our potlucks.) Bear with me! And if any of you has any part-time jobs on offer starting in about September, let me know. I only get writer’s block with my own work…