julifolo

tyellas @ 3:46pm: My War With The Plants
Going into my 4th summer in this house, it's war. Me and all the grasses that are about to bloom, spewing forth potent allergens for two months? It's personal, this year.

Today I set forth to wreak plant carnage before hay fever season kicks in for me. My back porch now shelters a waist-high pile of chlorophyll-dripping corpses, mostly of my sworn enemy, tall grass. -thumps chest-

With three years to look back on, I can reflect on garden failures and successes, too. ( Read more... )

firefly67 @ 6:52pm: the leather blog...shoemaking
Moccasins, actually. These didn't go together all that badly until I got to the seam that attaches the insole/midsole to the upper. There's one bit of leather that is meant to be tucked inside & not sewn in this seam (it becomes the outsole that gets glued to the actual soling material). Despite my best efforts this edge kept getting sewn into the seam & I had to cut it out. Yuck. Better next time, I hope. I'm skiving pieces in a heavier weight, black bison, for my next attempt. It'll be harder to turn right-side out when the time comes, but it's nice and stretchy too, which helps a turned shoe conform to the foot. Fit of these is never going to be the same as fitting a shoe built on a last...

celandineb @ 5:04pm: ASSIGNMENT PWNED, and other things
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folo1 @ 2:49pm: A Sainted Discovery
In my research on ecclesiastical impressions, I discovered a wonderful and unusual site. It is by the Orthodox Church and lists the saints of Great the British Isles and Ireland from before the Schism of Latin and Greek churches: http://www.oodegr.com/english/istorika/britain/British_saints.htm

The illustrations--or icons if you prefer--are not provenanced, but some look as i they came from period British manuscripts (others look as late as Victorian). Certainly the list of saints is a valuable one for anyone doing reenacting of culture about the turn of the Millennium.

mrowe @ 11:06am: *sigh*

...to stop November from turning into NathNotWriMo, I'm setting myself the goal of finishing the first draft of ch.23 of the AU. After all, it's only been a year since I started it*...



*the chapter, that is; the AU is in its third year.

celandineb @ 8:51pm: Brain dead, and CSA
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telperion1 @ 7:11pm: a prodigious quote
On the bus they sometimes have quotes on panels where they usually post advertisements. And today's struck me as particularly appropriate, given yesterday's post.

"Every man takes the limit of his own field of vision for the limits of the world." (Schopenhauer)

What do you think? Do you agree/disagree? What impact does this have on the questuin I was circling around yesterday: if you don't have evidence in some claim, are you still free to believe in it?

(This is my version of escapism these days. RL is ucky, and I am starting to think seriously about dissertation reading lists, (wo unrelated points! But it makes philosophical musing, for its own sake and not some paper, very nice.

celandineb @ 7:53am: Happy birthday!
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bellatrys @ 7:26am: Either/Or: It's (Relatively) Simple --
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bellatrys @ 6:28am: Will we ever learn?
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lee_rowan, posting in gay_marriage @ 12:38am: Sun Tzu and the fight for Marriage Equality....
"Attack where they are not prepared, go out to where they do not expect."

I'm wondering now, after the Main defeat, WHY we keep fighting defensive actions. There is a built-in advantage to putting an initiative on the ballot.

This is a phenomenon that's been observed before. When an issue is "YES" or "NO," the "YES" has an automatic, built-in advantage. People are more likely to push a 'yes' button after a cursory reading. This is why the anti-equality forces always word the intiative so that the answer they want is YES. And they use all the weasel-words they can in order to make the actual purpose of the initiative not quite clear.

Why do supporters of equality for same-sex couples always wind up trying to DEFEAT initiatives that are worded in such a contorted manner that the voter may not be entirely certain what s/he is voting for?

WHY NOT EQUALITY INITIATIVES? Why not, "Do you support the right for two consenting adults to marry one another without regard to race, creed, religion, or gender?"

I remember reading that some people voted FOR Prop 8 in California under the mistaken impression that they were voting FOR same-sex equality. I'll bet the same thing is true here.

I think we should stop trying to defeat bigotry and, instead, initiate equality.

At this point, we can hardly do worse!

tyellas @ 2:23pm: When I Am A Burlesque Dancer I Shall Wear Purple
...yep, it's class time again. Burlesque 2 is a much smaller class with the same girly fun and lots of props. (I think there's 4 of us - we had attrition for Guy Fawkes). Last night, it was feather boas and feather fans, in our choice of pink or baby blue. Our lady instructor had raided the $2 shop, and by the end of class, I was covered with bits of pink feather, and the floor was frothy with pink and blue feather fragments. I learned quite a few things - the Bunny Dip, the Bettie Bump, and that I still look horrible in pink.

Also, I cracked and joined Twitter. Along with seeing the updates of some people I'm fond of, there are also the Air New Zealand Grab-a-Seat updates. They are playing the "$1 airfares" game via Twitter updates.

celandineb @ 7:05pm: Where did the day go?
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folo1 @ 3:33pm: Stages of Writing an Article
Stage 1--Get an Idea for an article
Stage 2--Start researching and writing an article
Stage 3--Research more
Stage 4--Keep on researching
Stage 5--Realize that there's so much more to re3search
Stage 6--Despair when you realize that you'll never research enough to write a good article
Stage 7--Continue to despair but continue researching as well
Stage 8--Suddenly everything falls into place
Stage 9--Finish your article and decide that it doesn't suck

Well, there's still one section to do, but I already had so much documentation for it that I never even despaired. I just have to go through the articles and books and pluck out the information!

Unless I find out there's so much stuff in there that asks new questions that I'll have to research to find answsers and so start to despair again...

azalaisdep @ 4:37pm: Happy birthday, julifolo!
Hope someone pampers you today :-)

folo1 @ 10:12am: Out of the Night When the Full Moon is Bright
I've been reveling in preteen nostalgia and want to talk about it.
( Hidden for those who think the bold renegade who carves a Z with his blade is Antonio Banduras )

celandineb @ 9:09pm: Dear Yuletide writer...
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telperion1 @ 7:01pm: absence of evidence, evidence of absence?
There's a saying you sometimes see tossed around by the intelligentsia: absence of evidence is evidence of absence. I've seen it attributed to Carl Sagan, though I can't swear to the truth of that.

What do you think? Is the fact that we don't have evidence of something proof that that something doesn't exist?

************************

( My thoughts behind the cut - feel free to skip. )

P.S. - There's a YouTube vid that looks at some of these questions. It gets a bit too critical of organized religion for my taste toward the end there, but the first three minutes or so put this all more artfully than I've been able to

Philosophy by NuclearRadio

misterc, posting in gay_marriage @ 7:16pm: Don't Tell Me Who To Love
If you haven't seen it, you really need to see the video of Ray Boltz's song "Don't Tell Me Who To Love" under the cut.

Today, it feels especially appropriate to keep Ray's beautifully-sung words, and the undying hope they represent always in our minds & in our hearts:

Now there always will be hatred and voices that condemn.
Oh, but I believe that true love is gonna make it in the end.

( As California goes, so goes...Maine )

celandineb @ 5:18pm: Because clearly I love lists
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bellatrys @ 7:23am: El Aurens spells it out in 1920
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queerbychoice, posting in gay_marriage @ 9:33pm: Marriage in Maine
With 84% of precincts currently reporting, it appears that a majority of Maine voters today voted to revoke the already established right of same-sex couples to marry. This is depressing for several reasons:

1. A bunch more couples have just their weddings called off by statewide vote today, just as happened with Proposition 8 in California a year ago.
2. The marriage equality side had a much bigger fundraising advantage in Maine than in California, but this doesn't seem to have offset the disadvantage that heterosexuals simply outnumber us, and a majority of them seem all too willing to throw us under the bus, at least when even the flimsiest scare tactic is waved in front of them.
3. The Maine No on 1 campaign doesn't appear to have done anything particularly stupid, unlike the California No on 8 campaign, which has been criticized for many things but in my opinion deserves the most serious blame for its failure to organize any serious get-out-the-vote efforts on election day. But it seems that the greater competence of the Maine campaign hasn't done any good.
4. Maine is in New England, where legal same-sex marriage began in 2004 and is now widely established. Maine is also located next to Quebec and Nova Scotia, which have both had legal same-sex marriage since 2004 as well. New England is smaller than California, and the result of all this is that nearly everyone in Maine has repeatedly visited places where same-sex marriage is legal. They should therefore have been able to see or themselves that the sky in those places has not fallen. But it seems that a narrow majority of them are too stupid or uncaring to notice or acknowledge this fact, even with the ample opportunities they had.

So what can we do about all this? Educate yourself about the San Francisco marketing/public relations company - Criswell Associates - to whom the homophobic Stand for Marriage Maine paid 62% of its entire Yes on 1 campaign budget. Criswell Associates, which may or may not consist entirely of Bill Criswell, subcontracted much of its homophobic campaign work to Amador Media, a marketing/public relations firm in Walnut Creek, California (near Oakland). Amador Media seems to consist entirely of one person, Kristin Amador, who works from home.

Criswell Associates does not have much of a website, but the video on its homepage implies that it is affiliated in some way with Coyote Films and has an advertising contract with Blue Diamond Growers. Amador Media has a bit more of a website and provides a list of its clients: Criswell Associates, Digital Chocolate, Dan Dwyer Productions, Franklin Templeton Investments, J. Stokes & Associates, Hill Holliday Advertising, Limelife, MacKenzie Communications, Madison Sproul & Partners, Motive Marketing Group, Inc., Palmer Advertising, Peet's Coffee & Tea, RBG Marketing, Inc., Robert Anthony Strategic Marketing and Design, San Francisco Symphony, and SwiftPartners.

Bottom line: These clients are paying money to the main benefactors of the homophobic Stand for Marriage Maine/Yes on Question 1 campaign - and if these clients stopped doing that, then Bill Criswell and Kristin Amador might find that the economic costs of working as professional homophobes outweighed the economic benefit to them, in the long run. So write to the clients and urge them to show Bill Criswell and Kristin Amador that being professional homophobes can cost them as much money as it makes them.

And while you're at it, you might also take a few minutes to add a statement of your support for same-sex marriage to the Marriage Equality Wiki. This is a place to share your personal story (in as few or as many words as you'd like) of why you support same-sex marriage.

telperion1 @ 9:58pm: In classic formulation for when I am zonked...

The Good:

Thank the Forms, the class I am teaching is through with Kant!

Okay, it wasn't that bad - nice discussion on the last day I lectured on him, and I think at least some people found him interesting (or at least troubling in the right ways). But damn, I'm ready to be done with him. He's interesting in his way, but I'm too much of a medievalist (read: Aristotelian) to be convinced on too many points. And he's exhausting to try to explain.

Also, the good #2:

I haven't thanked her enough, but every day when I see MEFA reviews up on my LJ page, I am reminded of how thankful I am that just_ann_now is posting them. It doesn't matter in the slightest whether I have reviews or not. I just love reading all the complimenting and positive focus, and it is definitely one of the brightest spots of my day lately, even just to be reminded that someone is quietly and consistently doing the legwork to get those posted.

*cheers*, Ann!
*cheers*, other MEFA volunteers, who are way too numerous to name one by one.

The Bad:

I have to have a tooth pulled. With no dental insurance. Not cool by any stretch of the imagination. Being a grad student, I don't have much in the way of actual savings, and so I am trying to figure out how to do that. I do have money in Germany (inheritance), but I am really not sure how I feel about touching that. Never mind that getting the banking details will either involve digging through papers I'd rather not dig through or calling family members I'm currently in a bit of a spat with. I am talking to the oral surgeon to see what they do about prorated work, payment plans, etc. (Roh: I checked, there are no dental schools around here that accept outside patients.)

Also: YouTube, what gives? Is it really necessary to force people to actually watch ads before we go to videos? Translucent banner ads at the bottom of the video are bad enough. Not cool.

The Ugly:

McDonnell won for gov. in Virginia. Even with his thesis. Some may point out that this was a long time ago. It was. What irks me isn't so much the particular views - notice "so much"; those do irk me, but other things irk me more - as it is the methodology, the implication that government should be protecting things like what he calls "covenant marriage." And whether this actually makes him a bad governor or not, the fact that he would get elected with those views being well-known is... disheartening, to say the least.

Also: A classmate asked me if I had heard about the murder-suicide in Fayetteville, NC (warning: video) - I guess because all the people in my state know each other? :-S Fayetteville is on the opposite side of the state. Anyway, it's not so extraordinary, the details, but there's something about the language used, the look of the house, the way the people are described... it's truly, truly unnerving.

Finally: What. The. Hell. Commemorating 9/11 by building some of the metal into a military ship just redefines bad taste as far as I'm concerned. You're supposed to beat swords into plowshares, not stronger swords.

Best to close on another good. enjoy Howard Shore's 'Passing of the Elves' song

celandineb @ 2:25pm: The day so far
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forodwaith @ 11:43am: Boo humbug
Just realized I can't post pix of Batgirl & Blue-Eyed Zombie Boy, since I let my paid LJ membership lapse and Dreamwidth doesn't have a photo-hosting app yet (though a recent update said they're developing one). I should probably just give in & sign up for a Flickr account like everyone else in the 21st century.

*

I think the reason I sometimes still don't feel I have a handle on this job is that there's very little tangible to it. When you handle books for the collection -- ordering, buying, or weeding -- you have a direct effect on the shelves. When you're on the public desk, you know how many questions you've answered that shift.

But at least 50% of my job these days is event planning, which is all phone calls & emails & room bookings & setting up mics & remembering a gazillion details. Even a really big event doesn't leave a physical trace after it's over and you've put back the chairs. But considering that I cold-called two people yesterday & landed them for programs in January, besides finalizing dates & times for three other programs, I guess I did accomplish something.

Possibly I'm grumpy since a member of the OLB just finished bending my ear about how awful this branch is: the noise, the creepy people, and so on and on. (I did not give in to temptation and ask why she ever came here, then.)

[This entry was originally posted at http://forodwaith.dreamwidth.org/184296.html, where there are comment(s).]