Posts tagged “Miscellaneous” from longer posts

I was reading the decision (that's a pdf) in Doe vs. Oberweis Dairy the other day in an effort to bone up on the legal precedent around the sexual harrasment of minors. When I was done, I remarked to Jane how every time you find yourself reading a well-written, humane, and ground-breaking judicial opinion on the more pressing issues of our day, it always seems to have come from the pen of Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals' Judge Richard Posner. See for yourself. Former Posner clerk Tim Wu and a web developer named Stuart Sierra have pulled together Project Posner, where the Judge's finely-crafted opinions are sortable by year and searchable by topic. (Didja know that, over the years, Posner has cited Hamlet 13 times and Franz Kafka 7? You do now.)

What I've been upta.

I have long had a deep-seated fear of the city by the bay, San Francisco. If you're a SF partisan, let me just tell you why, in a story just may frighten the pants off of you. It was 1999, I think, and I was in San Francisco for the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, a three-day event where the idea of a really good time is a biological anthropologist and a linguist getting together over lattes in the hotel Starbucks between panel sessions. I kid, but this is no South by Southwest. Maintaining my sanity meant using my meal breaks to get far far away from the convention center.

On this day, as I set out in search of lunch, a woman walked toward me on the street carrying a bag from Taco Bell. I regret to inform you that at this point in my life there were few things that I liked better than a couple of refried bean chalupas (like a gordita, only deep fried) from the Bell. I asked her where I could find some and set off.

I was a few block down the road when I heard the sounds of a street fight! Feet and fists hitting into human flesh, some yelling, and a low murmuring of general concern. As I turned the corner on to the main road, before me was this scene: a silver mime lying on the ground and curled up in the fetal position (one of those mimes who dress completely in silver and paint every inch of exposed skin with silver paint, like this). I admit, I hate those guys and their creepy metallic faces, but that's no excuse for what was happening to this one.

Standing one on the tummy-side and one of the back-side of the mime were two men, taking turns kicking him with such force that each kick lifted him them up off of the ground. In what was really quite a commitment to not breaking character, the mime lay on the ground in silence. As the men kicked, they yelled profanities, things that I just remember as "F--- you! F--- you!" I walked to the rather large crowd of people who stood watching and asked a lady what was going on. She said, "the mime hit on one of 'em" and rolled her eyes.

I still distinctly remember my thought at that moment: "damn, tough town." (This didn't end a la Kitty Genovese -- as I stood there, a couple cops arrived.)

I tell you all this now because Jane and I are planning a trip out to California this May and I'm looking for suggestions on places to go that don't include the land where gay mimes go to get their asses kicked.

Seriously though, I'm sure San Francisco is really a lovely city, but it doesn't really make sense to include it this time around, as we're starting out in San Diego to visit Jane's brother and only have 8 days for the whole trip. So we're thinking now that we may try to stay within the general San Diego, LA, and Big Sur (?) area and have started using out Rough Guide to make a list of some of the beaches and restaurants that we want to be sure to hit.

But neither Jane nor I really know much about California at all, so I'm looking for suggestions for some more knowledgeable people. So, if you had a car and a little more than a week to explore (Southern) California, where would you go?

Not ever day that my blog referrer logs show multiple hits coming in from RedState...

I know this is goofy, but it cracked me up each of the three times I walked past it this weekend. It's engraved in the walkway outside the fabulous Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont. Simple pleasures.

I go away forever, and only come back to ask a favor. Here's the deal. I'm in the market for anybody who has graduated from one of the Indian Institutes of Technology (knowns as "IITians") who might consent to answering a few questions for a possible freelance article that I'm working on on the social significance of the schools. The specifics are here and if you know of anyone who might be interested, please, of course, let me know.

I'm little embarassed both that it has taken me this long and that I've done it at all, but I've just gone and joined Friendster! If we're, you know, "friends," I'm hoping that you might consider making that public. As it stands, fifteen minutes into this experiment, my "My Friends" list is absolutely empty. UPDATE: Thanks, Ellen.

Alas, no posting today, as a couple work projects and a one slightly mullet-esque haircut kept me busy. I've put up a video of New Jersey farm goats as a peace offering. If you've never heard goats make their "baa" noise in real life, I think you might be amazed. I sure was. It's totally ridiculous.

It's official! I'm all booked and registered for my first ever South by Southwest Interactive, March 10-14. I'm so very excited about this, as it combines three of my favorite things -- geeky pursuits, warmish weather, and what I hear is super tex-mex food. If you're going to be at SXSW, we don't know each other but you think we might get along, consider getting in touch, and perhaps we can share margaritas or the like at some point during the festival.

Also, I'm open to any and all advice about what else to do while I'm in Austin, besides this. That's so already on the list. I've been hearing about those crazy bats since I was a kid.

Inspired by the redesign of TPM Cafe, big, big changes over here at nancyscola.com.

The first change is has to do with the overall structure of the site. I've instituted a new layout that combines short "link" posts (like the entries below on Brokeback Mountain and the NSA hearings) with these longer entries. The inspiration for this model is, of course, Jason Kottke, though folks like ThinkProgress are using it now as well. I tried it out in the past, but found that I wasn't updating the site frequently enough to have a two-kinda-posts system make sense. Now that I'm blogging more regularly, I'm hoping it will be an easy way to just highlight ideas and news that I find interesting or relevant. We'll see whether it works for this site. If not, it's out the door. Trial and error, that's how we make progress.

The second is that I've started to highlight the category tags -- like "Technology" or "Democrats" -- of these longer posts by placing them in blue boxes next to the comments. Conventional wisdom says that successful blogs have a tight focus. In my head, there's a strongly unifying theme to this site that has to do with culture and connectivity and the like; I'm hoping that theme will become clearer over time. But until that happens, I think that highlighting the general idea of each post will help serve as road signs along the journey.

And the third is that I've made the font a teeny bit smaller on these main posts. I've been writing longer posts than I thought I would, and I think the smaller font makes them more readable. There's no real reason for me to tell you that, other than that I like for things to come in threes.

It just occured to me that the picture of Lauryn Hill on the cover of Essence that I keep seeing in the supermarket checkout line might mean that her long-awaited new album is upon us. As it turns out, a Fugee reunion album is due early this year. And while I'm no Fugee fan, I'm a huge Lauryn Hill fan and will tolerate Wyclef's rapping/whooping noises to hear anything out of the mouth of the divine Ms. Hill that even approaches the genius of The Miseducation.

That said, her insistence on actually being called "Ms. Hill" and other strange behavior (see link above) raises questions of whether she is any happier or more grounded now than she was during those ugly MTV Unplugged days. And if that album is any indication, an unhappy Lauryn makes bad music (see, for example "Mystery of Iniquity"). I'm hoping for the best, but I fear that this might be a disaster.

UPDATE: The first single of the new album, "Take It Easy", is up on iTunes. From the thirty second preview, it's, um, not very good.

FYI -- I'll be at Drinking Liberally at Rudy's (on 9th, between 44th and 45th) tonight. UPDATE: I'll be at Rudy's right after I check out the 11th Congressional District candidate forum, at the Montauk Club at 8pm.

Comments were all ferkockteh, but should now be fixed now. They're still not pretty, but I'm gonna work on that. (If you're going to be coming by the site, you should maybe know that despite being an Italian-French Creole-American from New Jersey, I have a small vocabulary of Yiddish slang, like ferkockteh, which more or less means "messed up". My dad picked it up from the kids in the Brookline, Massachusetts neighborhood where he grew up and I grew up hearing it from him. It wasn't until fairly late in life that I realized that they weren't Italian words and phrases.)

All right, I know I'm obsessing about this "try and" thing, but this from the quite bright and perfectly capable of choosing words correctly folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston: "If Google continues to gather and keep so much information about its users, government and private attorneys will continue to try and get it."

I've been having buckets of trouble with this site this morning. No matter. Please consider donating to the Red Cross here.

Anyone else get the feeling that we here in official Washington haven't quite grasped the seriousness of what's happening in LA and MS? -- This is not a criticism of any one person or one agency. It's meant as a wakeup call to all of us. This could very well be the biggest natural disaster in this country's history; an entire city in ruins. -- If this happened in Washington, you wouldn't be reading this. There would be no electricity; there would be no light; there would be no phones (even cell service would be nearly non-existent); your Blackberries would get no email; there'd be no subway; there'd be no newspaper delivered or available; you couldn't reach your friends; your office wouldn't exist or you couldn't get to it; your home would be gone; there'd be no schools to send your kids to; the graves of your family would be washed away; electrocuted family pets; snakes and other scary creatures everywere; and you'd have to move somewhere for at least 3 months. -- And this is what life is like for those with means in New Orleans. MS is the 3rd poorest state in the union, according to a Census report released yesterday.
, Miscellaneous, New Orleans

August 31, 2005
Entourage Backstory
I need something to give my mind a break from thinking about Katrina. And I choose HBO's Entourage. Point no. 4 in this Slate article reminded me that I do think that the back story of Vince, Eric, Turtle, and Drama is quite muddled. For one thing, where is it in Queens that full-on-Irish Eric would have worked as 'pizza tosser,' as he has said to have done in several episodes? That we lack clarity on that sort of thing leaves us without a strong sense of where they came, which is strange, considering that four-friends-frome-New-York-making-it-in-LA is sort of one of the show's major themes.
, Miscellaneous

August 31, 2005
Wow
Editor & Publisher:

On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

, Miscellaneous

August 30, 2005
New Orleans
My mom's family is from Louisiana -- Avoyelles Parish, actually, smack in the middle of the state -- and this Katrina is getting me down. New Orleans has of course long known that it's built to low (see this Chris Mooney article for more) but its strange architecture is part of the reason that the city is so ridiculously fabulous. For example, because of the high water table under the city, they 'bury' bodies there above ground in crypts. (They tried burying them below ground for a while but then a big rainstorm would come and the coffins would pop right up out of the ground.) The result is 'cities of the dead' scattered around the city. The last time that I was down there, I wandered through St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 and got lost in the twists and turns of the cemetery. I'd find myself in some dead end, alone with a crypt tagged with voodoo markings and offerings like chicken bones scattered on the ground. That's part of what makes New Orleans so unique -- what feels to me about as far as you can get from Washington DC and still be in a major American city. It breaks my heart to think that we likely will have lost some of that.

Update: It looks like things are actually far, far worse down there than we I first wrote this. The point stands, though, that -- in addtion to the lost lives, the huge cost of rebuilding, and the suffering that those down there are going to be going through for a long time to come -- if we lose the unique blend of history, culture, architecture, and people that made NO such a spectacularly original city, that will be a damn damn shame.

Update: Oh, jeez. I don't say this lightly, but it seems as if some of the above ground crypts may have opened.
, Miscellaneous, New Orleans

August 27, 2005
Television Question
My generation: Beverly Hills 90210, Party of Five
Generation after mine: Felicity, Dawson's Creek
Generation after that: The OC?
, Miscellaneous

August 26, 2005
Anthropology of Marriage
I'm hopping around the old Internets and what do I come across but a recent National Review column by Peter Wood, my old grad school professor. In it, he takes issue with the AAA (the American Anthropological Association, not the auto-club people) for its declaration last year that:

The results of more than a century of anthropological research...provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution.

Wrong, he says, you "reflexive affirm[er] of leftist pieties." In fact:

[S]ome 150 years of systematic inquiry by anthropologists leaves little doubt that heterosexual marriage is found in nearly every human society and almost always as a pivotal institution. Homosexual marriage outside contemporary Western societies is exceedingly rare and never the basis of "viable social order." (emphasis added both times)

What Wood really must know is that no one is actually proposing that we throw out heterosexual marriage all together and build a new society based entirely on male-male/female-female unions. The idea is, of course, to augment the existing base of marriages with a wee sprinkling of same-sex ones. So I think the more interesting question is whether 150 years of anthropological research supports that that the idea of marriage now bandied about -- 'one man and one woman for all time' -- is always the foundation on which society is exclusively built. And I seem to recall from my studies that the ethnographic record includes a whole range of different ways that marriage is done. Off of the top of my head and to the best of my memory, it includes places where young people join together in 'practice marriages' that are dissolved after they reach maturity, where men inherit their brother's widows or marry their widow's sister, even where women marry their own body parts so that they might claim the social standing that comes with marriage. And, as far parenting goes, it includes societies where the maternal uncle takes the dominant role in raising his sister's kids. All I'm saying, the ethnographic record isn't crystal clear on just what marriage and family always means.

I would have hope that by now anthropologists would have in fact taken a comprehensive look at the different styles of marriage found out there in the world. One reason I think that hasn't happened might be because anthropologists traditionally make their bones working in one specific location -- many, in fact, base their entire career on a year or two fieldwork in one tiny village. I think that cross-cultural survey work is looked down upon. That's a shame, if true.

It also raises another question I've often wondered about. Where are all the public anthropologists? You hardly ever see any as talking heads on TV or writing op-eds. (Unless they're physical or forensic anthros and that's a whole different thing.) Anthropology is a unique field -- the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences, as the saying goes. We're vexed by problems that the big public disciplines like economics and political science aren't really helping to explain that well -- like religious fundamentalism, terrorism, even abortion and euthanasia. Why isn't the public getting the anthropologists' take on them? Part of it might be that anthropologists are, by nature or nurture, put off by the idea of self-promotion. I think that's a shame too.
, Miscellaneous

August 24, 2005
Change is Good
I've done a wee bit of a redesign, mostly of the top banner. If you're interested, the image is a slice of a map of West Africa, turned backwards. If you're not interested, it still is. No deeper meaning intended, just liked how it looked.
, Miscellaneous

August 24, 2005
Tipping Point
I mentioned here that I was anecdotally tracking the use of the phrase "tipping point" in the media. Here's one more: Oceans Nearing a 'Tipping Point.' (All this talk of headlines reminds of something I that cracked me up recently. It was about a comedy writer who sold his first headline to the Onion when he was just 17. The headline? "Hotcake Sales Brisk.")
, Miscellaneous

August 22, 2005
Conversation on a Greyhound Bus
The bus from New York City to DC yesterday was incredibly noisy. First off, the bus driver started playing the Frankie Muniz-vehicle "Racing Stripes" at what must have been full volume. But he started the movie at about two-thirds of the way in only because, as best as I can figure, he had started watching it on his first trip of the day and wanted to see how it ended. And then, several rows behind me, several people were conversing in Spanish at loud volumes, with a lot of back and forth and laughter. I turned up my iPod really loud. When I got tired of listening to music I put on the audiobook of Sandra Day O'Connor's "The Majesty of the Law." As I listened to her talk about how our system of government depends on people being willing to engage in public debate and forcefully advance their own opinions, this happened:

First Woman: "Would you people please shut up? You've been talking non-stop the entire bus ride!"

[Spanish talking stops]

Second Woman (soft-spoken): "They don't know. It's part of their culture. They're just loud people."

Man (Southern accent): "They don't even understand what you said. They don't speak English. What you're doing is not right."

First Woman: "They're so loud. I've a four-year old, and even she isn't that loud."

Man: "That's just not right. You're yelling -- you're just as bad as they are."

Third Woman: "No, she's not. She just said one thing. And they've been talking for hours. It's not the same."

Second Woman continues with "don't know any better ... just their culture ... loud people." This goes on for a bit.

First Woman: "Just their culture? Well, you know what? We learned. We all learned. They can learn."

[Murmurs of accession]

First Woman: "And today is lesson number one!"

Second Woman: "Yeah. You're right."

Man: "Uh huh. Yeah."

(above is paraphrased)

I love this country.
, Miscellaneous

August 19, 2005
Dolly Does Dylan
I saw Dolly Parton's Vintage Tour at Radio City Music Hall last night. And my, was she fabulous. She played an interesting set list -- there were her old favorites (I Will Always Love You, Why'd You Come in Here Lookin' Like That, Jolene, Coat of Many Colors, but no Joshua) but most of the rest were covers of 60s and 70s songs that she has recorded for a CD due out in October (Blowing in the Wind, Me & Bobby McGee, and Turn, Turn, Turn). It seems as if Dolly is feeling perhaps a little bit political. She referenced the 60s over and over, saying things like hippies had some right ideas, war is a bad bad thing, that sort of thing. She made a few too many practiced boobie jokes for my taste, but they were more than made up for by a cover of "Imagine" that was downright beautiful. It gave me the chills. I'm not kidding.

A note on the crowd. My mom and dad were originally planning on going to the show with some family friends. When I expressed interest in it, they bought me and Jane tickets for my birthday coming up in two weeks. I had thought that the crowd would likely be around the age and flavor of my mom and dad. But, well, no. While the the older suburban crowd was well represented, there was perhaps an even larger contingent of New York hipsters, sprinkled liberally with transvestites. Twas a beautiful thing.
, Miscellaneous

July 20, 2005
Random Crap
Life has got in between me and the several interesting things that came up yesterday that I had planned to write about. By life, I mean the SCOTUS doings and, well, late night Harry Potter reading (Who is this half blood prince? I don't even have a good guess. Also, a point on which I am confused -- are Hermoine's mother and father both Muggles or is she 'half blood' herself? There seems to be some ambiguity on this.) As today will likely be a busy one, I'm going to simply run through a few of these things quickly. First, behold the power of the the Internets -- they raised more than $100,000 in one day for Paul Hackett, a candidate in Ohio's second congressional district. Second, and strangely concerning Ohio, Grow Ohio seems a remarkable new thing. Third, CivicSpace-based and free Gatheroo has emerged as an alternative to Meetup. Fourth, Bobby Fischer's randomized chess game with 960 possible opening boards that is gaining in chess-world acceptance. And finally, Ezra Klein has laid out some intial thinking on one potentially reasonable way of approaching the John Roberts nomination. (Also, fun fact -- if Roberts is confirmed, six of nine sitting justices will have passed through Harvard at some point.)
, Miscellaneous

July 17, 2005
Potter Experiment: Amazon Success

Wild pony of Assateague Island, MD
Originally uploaded by nancyscola.

Okay, so this may not have been the most scientifically rigorously of experiments because I decided to go ahead with a planned trip to go see the wild ponies of Assateague Island and camp out overnight, despite the miserable weather forecast. But my Amazon-ordered Harry Potter was waiting for me in my mailbox when I got home on Sunday.





, Miscellaneous

July 16, 2005
Harry Potter Experiment
I'm doing a bit of an experiment. When it was announced last December that the new Harry Potter was coming out, I pre-ordered it on Amazon. I could have just gone to Kramers last night and gotten it right away, as they're open all night on weekends (I could have gotten a slice of cake too -- cafe is also open all night), but I wanted to see how quickly Amazon could get it to me after it was released on Friday at midnight. It's only 8:15 on Saturday morning so I didn't expect it yet, but I'm expecting to see it around mid-day.
, Miscellaneous

June 29, 2005
Swipe for Darfur

Swipe for Darfur
Originally uploaded by nancyscola.

I saw this set-up in the Harvard Law School cafeteria building last week. Students can run their Crimson Cash cards through the machine on the table and make an instant donation right to the Genocide Intervention Fund.

, Miscellaneous

March 23, 2005
The Schaivo Situation
I've been thinking about how faith fits into this whole Terri Schaivo situation. (It makes me uncomfortable to use her name like that, being as how I have never met her. I even had to Google it to make sure that I got the spelling right. I'm going to call her Ms. Schaivo.) And I started thinking about how marriage is an act of faith if only because it usually involves having someone sleep next to you every night, when you're defenseless and if they wanted to they could easily smother you with a pillow. Also, marriage often includes letting a person have access to your finances and allowing them to talk to your mother without supervision. These things are, to me, little leaps of faith.
, Miscellaneous