Against Terrorism Against Racism Against War
Originally uploaded by Beatnic.
Original Title: Against Terrorism Against Racism Against War
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Monthly Archives: July 2005
Honk! Honk! Goose Jam
On my way in to work this morning, I saw a car whip around a turn just in front of me, then come to a screeching halt. Why? Because a large gaggle of geese was waddling slowly across the street (several breeding pairs and their progeny).
Traffic backed up. People got impatient.
“Honk! Honk!” said the cars. “Honk! Honk!” said the geese.
It was pretty pointless, like much of the debate to come in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Somebody’s going to get mowed down eventually, once the honking stops.
Vigil
BBC NEWS | In Depth | london explosions
Watching the vigil at Trafalgar Square right now.
UPDATE: The speakers have been impressive, the theme is the same – diversity is strength. The variety of religious and secular leaders calling for unity is inspiring. And a really cool thing that may interest ginmar: Anthony Stewart Head seems to be the MC. Text will probably be available at the Beeb news site later. For now, I’m listening with half an ear while I get tickets issued and fix stuff that didn’t get issued yesterday, and take calls, and help people with changes and questions.
It’s just a normal day, but I’m there in London too.
Trafalgar Tonight/Tube Challenge
A vigil will be held in Trafalgar Square (that’s in London, y’all) tonight at 6pm GST, which I think works out to be about 10 or 11am my time (argh, it’s not Eastern Standard Confusing Time here, but it’s something like that). I’ll be there in spirit, and I expect there will be webcams running feeds at various news sites.
Oops, gotta go to work. I’ll check in later with more information and maybe some pictures of Trafalgar to aid in visualizing a world without terrorism.
Oh, to be in London in August:
We Are Not Afraid – Tube Challenge – GeofftechKen Livingstone shortly announced afterwards an official Relief Fund for families of the victims of the bombings, and so because of this, here is what we are doing:
A mass team tube-challenge attempt, for all of us to get round the entire network in a day.
We’re not trying for the record – as we recognise that chunks of the system (e.g. the central part of the Piccadilly Line damaged in the attacks) will not be open for a long time, but we want to do it soon – whilst the memory of what has happened is still in people’s mind.
We don’t want people running around like nutters making connections in the fastest time (like we normally do!). Like I say – we’re not out to break records, we’re just out to complete the system. If you think you’re unfit doesn’t matter – you can walk between stations to make connections. You can even stop casually for toilet breaks, a quick half in a pub and then carry on if you really want, although if you want to get round the whole system you’re advised not to stop for too long.
This means we are going to get experienced tube-challengers and novices alike, to meet up … start in the same place, and travel the whole tube system in a day i) For charity, and ii) For defiance.
These two main reason are important:
i) Charity. People often do this and raise a few pounds & pennies. This time everyone gets sponsored in aid of the bomb relief charity and we really go for it. Let’s get thousands of pounds this time.
ii) Defiance. Solidarity. Togetherness. We are not afraid, and we well get back on the tube – the whole tube – and prove that we are more than happy to ride it. We say “Fuck you terrorists”, and we will do the thing that we do best – ride around the tube system.
When & How
We intend to this at some point during the last week in August of 2005. We are not being specific about the date at the moment.
If you you wish to participate (whether you have already spoken to me or not) I need an official email from you, so that I log you and work out how many people are going to do this.
Please send an email to -> notafraid@geofftech.co.uk
Shields Holding, Iris Secure
My husband David's been getting a lot of spam emails, and so have I. The trickiness is that we can't just mark the emails "spam" and forget it, because they're spoofed to appear to come from our domain. They're getting stopped, but we need to figure out some filters to refuse them completely.
It's still amusing to continue to get emails from our "staff" telling us our computers are "zombies." In light of the preceding link, does this mean that we're bound to get all medieval on the zombies' decaying asses?
For the first time Blogula had a lot of comment and trackback spam; fortunately the combination of "no spam for you" plugins we're using is working well. That is, when I remember to check the moderation queues. Thus I was mildly shocked to find a couple of hundred fake comments… which were ludicrously easy to filter and delete quickly once I got there. So for now they can all just go "splat" against the titanium iris before they even have a chance of rematerializing on this side of the event horizon.
[tags]Stargate[/tags]
Cruisers
Photos from Saturday’s car show: don’t know if this Gallery plugin still works…
Okay, really it was a fun day but also it was a grueling one; I was scheduled to switch back and forth on tasks and I just couldn’t do it because the other task was much more in the sun. So I made change and tried not to think of how my brain was slowly frying. At one point I misplaced an important list and totally forgot that I’d put it away – no one was more surprised than me when I got home, after figuring out an agreement without the all-important list, and found the damn thing in a box of tchotchkes. On the one hand, I couldn’t run around and make connections with the photographer from the local neighborhood paper, and on the other when I did run around taking pictures of my own, I dropped flash cards and thumb drives from my open photo-bag all over the site.
Also, I was really frustrated that the two measly raffle items that I’d finally gotten as donations (after fretting about it for weeks) got left at home, DAMMIT. And the crap that I gathered for the “goodie bags” got thrown out by mistake, probably by the cleaning service, dammit DAMMIT. However, the goodie bags had plenty of goodies in them; the problem was that we had 50 goodie bags and only 34 registrants for the big “fundraiser.”
I’m not sure why, but the turnout was not good. There was plenty of publicity via the car-club sites I posted on 2 weeks prior, after realizing that the show organizer hadn’t done anything about putting the event up online anywhere. I got dozens of hits, and 30 people looked at the show registration form I linked to the church website, and blah-de-blah.
Perhaps in the interests of publicity we women of the church should have stripped to the buff when the Pioneer Press photog was up on the fire truck lift platform, and run around directly below him, going “woogedah! woogedah! Woo woo woo!”
That would get us some ink for sure.
If I sound frustrated, it’s because I am. A lot of people, starting with Colleen and Katie and Cherry, worked really, really hard. Some of the rest of us also worked hard, although I can’t say I did much more than post stuff and witter about how I could never get stuff done during work, or after work, or on the weekend. And it’s all supposed to have been a fundraiser because we’re struggling to keep it together, and yet again it was pretty much a disappointment.
Well, I’ve got more procrastinating to do tomorrow, I’d better get started on it right away.
And yet, it was really cool. The cars were neat. It was great when the fire trucks rolled in. The music was… better in the afternoon. The morning’s selections were along the lines of “Crying in the Chapel” and other slightly embarassing and over-the-top examples of how not to do church (rock). But we threw away food, we had trophies left over because there were whole classes of cars that weren’t represented that had been expected, and the overall winner left the site with the rest of his club before the final trophy was announced. That part was weird.
Another weird thing was the neighbor lady who came over and cleaned me out of change. I thought she was one of the PT Cruiser Club members, but actually she was just setting herself up with change for the day for her garage sale. We had gone to all the neighbors and given them flyers suggesting they have garage sales, and talked up how the wives of the car guys would go shopping… then hardly anyone went shopping. Last year, apparently, there were tons of ladies itching to go shopping, but not this year.
And this neighbor… well, she had this walk, see. No matter where she went, all eyes followed that walk. It came with its own soundtrack: the “bum-ba-da-bum” music from Star Trek’s “A Piece Of The Action,” when the gun moll would traipse over from JoJo Krako’s desk and massage Kirk’s shoulders, then traipse back.
I had never seen a woman traipse so successfully over uneven, weedy dry grass in flat leather flip-flops. I thought that to traipse one needed the shoes of the pointy-toed fantasticness and a runway uncluttered by models.
Come to think of it, she moved exactly like a cruiser dragging the Strip, checking out and being checked out. Maybe we should have given her that leftover trophy.
Leeds
BBC NEWS | UK | ‘Ordinary’ lives of bomb suspects
My God, they came from an ordinary British city, they were ordinary British subjects. But then Timothy McVeigh and Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski were ordinary people from ordinary places. What made them become extraordinary? The British will be debating the root causes of these attacks – whether it’s religious mania, hatred of “people not like us,” alienation, mental illness, and so on. Just as we did with our home-grown “mad bombers” – and we’ve never found the answers, either.
My husband David and I have been to Leeds, and we’ve taken the train between there and King’s Cross. So when I read the latest news, I picture the train station at Leeds and the terminus where the line ends in London, and the banality of our routine travel that day seems very strange by comparison.
Race Stuff (Bad Post! Bad Post! No Publish For You!)
If you’re a fan of “The Amazing Race,” you’re in luck. The cable network GSN will begin broadcasting all eight seasons of the show, in order, on a nightly basis starting at 8 p.m. Monday.
“There are tons of people who came to this show in later seasons, and they’ve never seen these [early] episodes, because unlike dramas, reality shows don’t usually repeat and don’t hit syndication as quickly,” said Linda Holmes, an attorney from Bloomington, Minn., who, under the moniker Miss Alli, has recapped every season of “TAR” for the Web site TelevisionWithoutPity.com. “For people who missed those seasons, it’s like an entire new season of the show is airing in the middle of the summer. It’s a huge thing for fans of the show who came in late.”
The last couple of nights have been TAR fan Heaven, because I missed the first two seasons and the opening episodes of the third. It’s interesting seeing how a show evolves, too – there are elements of editing and of storytelling that I’ve always taken for granted in TAR that weren’t there in the first season. I’ve read all of Miss Alli’s recaps so I know what happens, for the most part, but hearing about a hilarious edit (reaction shots during the “swing, you fat bastard” abseiling adventure in Africa, etc.) is nothing compared to watching and hearing it. Geez, no wonder the lucky first-season fans loved these people.
Although the element of surprise or suspense isn’t really there for me, it’s still enjoyable frickin’ fabulous to see how it began. I got to see Joe (or Bill?) wipe out on the Paris mat. I got to see the Tokyo Stompers. I got to hear “these flies are like lobsters.”
UPDATE: Bah, I don’t know what was wrong with the original post, MT barfed or something. An honorable commenter posted:
“A tad brief, don’t you think? :-)”
You are absolutely correct. Thank you for keeping me honest, sir. 😉
I have no excuse for leaving a crappy incomplete post up for more than a day other than [insert obligatory my-job-screws-up-my-blogging-career whine here]. But in one of those weird coincidences, yesterday morning when I got in there was a fax for a promotion for Continental Airlines (something about business class fares) where they were offering “3 FREE LOBSTERS!” with a helpful little graphic showing 3 buglike crustaceans. My first thought was “Oh my God, those lobsters look like flies.”
Let’s try this again, shall we? Because I need to get to work.
NOT the Mama!
Dorothea Salo wonders about how it works that one is perceived differently by different people. She has enthusiastic admirers, and there are also people from the far end of the lunch table who dislike her writing or her forthrightness and opinions. And there are some who criticize her not for what she writes, but for what she is: childfree.
One blogger considers me anathema (is there a word stronger than anathema? if there is, this blogger would use it of me) because I don’t make any particular secret of not liking ill-behaved children and not wanting children of my own (ill-behaved or not).
Remember, Dorothy, you’re not anathema, you’re a notthemama.
I’ve never understood the hostility and scorn that is reserved for anyone that professes they don’t like children. I also don’t like Brussels sprouts, but I don’t get criticized for my avoidance of them.
I’m with British TV and film producer Verity Lambert, who once cheerfully claimed, “But I can’t stand babies–no, I love babies as long as their parents take them away.”
Needed
Okay, so I was running around doing errands before the big classic car show (“The Holy Rollers are coming, aiyeee, et cetera”) at Holy Moly tomorrow, and I passed this sign.
Now, previously we’ve always been focused on pledges and budgets and can we afford this and that and “we’ve always done it this way” each year, and not really doing much to actually HELP people less fortunate than ourselves. Because to put it baldly, compared with some of the people and charities we’ve been talking about supporting, we’re rolling in dough. Yes, comparatively, and that’s in a year where we’re worried we might not be here at all after next spring or so. And Father Ted has been challenging us lately to step up to the plate and find a need in the community that we can fill. Yes, he’s worried about his future, too, but he’s also concerned that we weren’t doing much for anyone else except having our nice little churchy ways just so every Sunday.
Well, after the hoopla is over with the car show, we’re going to be talking about giving more than lip-service support and literally a small amount of pocket change to the Schaumburg Food Pantry, which is about the only local charity we’ve been sending money. On a monthly basis, one of our guys collects little “pence” cans that we’re supposed to put pocket change in. Also, most weeks some people bring food to donate, something I’ve never gotten involved in before. But tonight as I drove by, I spotted the sign and decided, “Okay. Next stop is the grocery store anyway. I’m picking up some of the things on that list and taking it to church tomorrow to be taken up to the altar with everyone else’s Food Pantry donations.”
So I bought a couple of big jugs of Prego sauce, several boxes of spaghetti, several cans of tuna, and a big jar of peanut butter. I figure someone else will be donating jelly and paper products, so I’m covered.
Another charity we’re going to kick around is supporting part of Women For Women International, because Colleen the Bishop’s Warden (Episco-translation: she’s the lay leader) saw something on it on Oprah a while back, and it’s been haunting her ever since.
And another thing we might discuss for a future project is kind of a no-brainer: Father Ted is doing some side work with a counseling service, and they’re talking about doing a fundraising walk for AIDS next fall. Apparently some or most of the clients are HIV positive, so getting a number of us involved in that would be a good thing.
I’ve blogged at Holy Moly about a couple of other possibilities. I’m interested in seeing how we can help out PADS – we kicked around the idea months ago of seeing if we could volunteer at the nearest PADS location, which is at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Schaumburg. We’re not capable of getting a PADS shelter program up and running, but we might be able to make a few dozen sandwiches and put together dental goodie bags.
There are other worthy causes – micro-loans for for widows in developing countries, the Heifer Project, Little City, and many more.
We ought to worry less about the money, and do more for other people. It might be nice for us to realize that we’re needed, too.
Originally uploaded by GinnyRED57.