“…allow me to be forgiving when I could be right.”
Archive Page 2
The feng shui notion that toilet seat lids should always be down except when in use or being cleaned immediately appealed to me. I had long before taken the “gentlemen lower the seat” feminist male ethic enthusiastically to heart, so it fit right in. But it’s a delicate subject to speak up about with many people, so I am still timider than I would like to be on the subject.
It’s as much an aesthetic as energetic prescription, it seems to me. Of course perhaps I’ve just trained my eye to be bothered by the sight of gleaming — or not so gleaming — porcelain. Perhaps that’s it — I don’t want to have to be put in the position of inspecting how well you clean your toilet.
Who cleans toilets is a big class thing, of which I was totally oblivious most of my life. Having grown up with housekeepers, then being a slovenly college student, then a hippie, and then a communard, it was not until I first had a real house with no one but us nuclear family in it that I became aware that toilets need regular cleaning, and that daily cleaning makes it easier to do.
It was Jimmy my Italian landlord who taught me that. Not that he did it himself — he explained how his wife did it, so that none of his toilets would ever look like ours did. I began to keep the toilet clean. His scorn certainly helped make the lesson memorable.
Evil Roots, Bitter Fruits?
The role of money in public life
A proposal for PVAC’s 2011 Calendar
Social networking as a concept has rolled like a tsunami through the blabosphere, but with little analysis of its context and purposes.
This is another example, like “digital natives,” of a concept which has a deceptive obviousness to it. On reflection, it’s actually complex and slippery. Is social here a term which refers to polite and superficial interaction? Or is it meant to bring in the sinister underbelly of human relations, like “social diseases” as a euphemism for sexually transmitted infections?
I actually feel more like an authentic digital native, despite my senior citizen status, than most teenyboppers, since I was using the net when it was a new and exciting space for open inquiry and authentic communication, before the commercial onslaught. Kids who grew up with the net as a sphere for marketing often know nothing of its real uses for knowledge enhancement and creative publication.
Social networking as a concept has rolled like a tsunami through the blabosphere, but with little analysis of its context and purposes.
This is another example, like “digital natives,” of a concept which has a deceptive obviousness to it. On reflection, it’s actually complex and slippery. Is social here a term which refers to polite and superficial interaction? Or is it meant to bring in the sinister underbelly of human relations, like “social diseases” as a euphemism for sexually transmitted infections?
I actually feel more like an authentic digital native, despite my senior citizen status, than most teenyboppers, since I was using the net when it was a new and exciting space for open inquiry and authentic communication, before the commercial onslaught. Kids who grew up with the net as a sphere for marketing often know nothing of its real uses for knowledge enhancement and creative publication.
To regard beauty as a stylistic after-thought is a flawed strategy. The phenomenon of human-digital technology interaction raises
the potential for captivation, enchantment and fascination
or frustration, distrust and doubt.
…the role of beauty in facilitating the engagement with digital complexity…
From:
All this useless beauty
Wallace, J. and Press, M. (2004) All this useless beauty. The Design Journal, Volume 7 Issue 2
http://homepage.mac.com/wallacejayne/abstract%20useless%20beauty.html
pdf download link:
http://homepage.mac.com/wallacejayne/abstract%20useless%20beauty_files/Wallace_Press_Useless_Beauty.pdf
Nina Paley has a great post at QuestionCopyright.org that ends,
“That’s our vision of Free. It’s not communism. It’s not capitalism as we know it. It’s definitely not monopolies. It is Free Culture, and Free Enterprise.”
Hoping soon to tie all this together with “The Gift” by Lewis Hyde….
It’s so bizarre that we were convicted at all and it’s even more bizarre that we were [convicted] as a team. The court said we were organised. I can’t get Gottfrid out of bed in the morning. If you’re going to convict us, convict us of disorganised crime.
FROM–BBC NEWS
Court jails Pirate Bay founders
A court in Sweden has jailed four men behind The Pirate Bay (TPB), the world’s most high-profile file-sharing website, in a landmark case….
When I was going to become an anthropologist, before I dropped out of graduate school to confront the draft in 1968, the group I had selected to study were the indigenous inhabitants of the island of Malekula in the New Hebrides, now Vanuatu. They were fascinating in part for the intrinsic interest of their elaborate and obscure rituals, and for their history of cannibalism, but mostly for the wild associations that came from the Jungian perspective of their “rapporteur,” John Layard. I never made it to Malekula, nor anywhere else in the South Pacific—I’ve never even been to Hawaii. But that smattering of acquaintance with the region played a key part in the saga of my broken front tooth.
When I lost my left front tooth last June, we were about to get on a plane the next day—and there was my snaggle of a tooth, broken off at the gum line, sitting in my hand. I called my then-dentist, a techno whiz I had switched to for his promise of less radiation and one appointment crowns, and he did an amazing job of cementing the broken piece back in place by gluing it to the teeth on either side with what felt like Shoe Goo. That temporary fix held for almost six months. When I finally got up the courage to ask him what he recommended, his dental technician said an implant was really the best solution, but a bridge was a little less expensive.
Today is Ronald Reagan’s second worst nightmare day. The worst, I suppose, would be a posthumous indictment from the International Court of Justice for murder and violations of international law and human rights, but that’s just a pipedream…
The victory of the FMLN in El Salvador marks the realization of a dream for a great many people, and one that has taken tremendously hard work, and cost great suffering–the estimate I heard today on Democracy Now! was that Reagan’s death squads murdered 70,000 people in El Salvador alone, at a cost of over $6 billion.
I have a small personal stake in seeing one of Reagan’s evil projects ultimately fail, since it provides some small compensation in the face of the injustice he visited on me personally, back when he was Governor of California. His vindictiveness against California’s teachers’ union was so vicious, he made it his personal project to deprive California teachers of the Social Security they had earned in prior employment. We California retired teachers are unique in many ways, but the one I rail against personally every chance I get is this one–we are the only group in the US not allowed to collect our rightful Social Security earnings (I stand to lose 60% of my meager Social Security pension).
That’s how I get to celebrate my birthday–resigning myself to never being able to right this petty wrong, and accepting a small injustice. That justice has finally been done in El Salvador is a wonderful counterpart to this, and I can take a tiny bit of comfort in it.
