cos

I'm flying to Colorodo tomorrow, and returning Monday night. That was my plan. Except that my round trip flight is from TF Greene in Providence (because it was cheap from there), and someone just rear-ended my car half a block from home and it got towed away to a body shop. Gack!

I seem to have a ride offer for tomorrow morning (though if any of you feel particularly enthusiastic about getting up early enough to get me to Providence in time for an 8am flight and save someone else the trip, lemme know...)
Anyone wanna pick me up in Providence at 10pm Monday night and bring me back home?
-- Cos

I have several Real Posts(TM) bubbling around my head but never seem to find the time to write them, so in the meantime, here are a few brief pointers to other things...

dr_memory is on vacation in Vietnam (with mir_nyc), and he's been posting long but very fun to read travel stories on his LJ, starting here and continuing to the present (and near future, most likely).

ginmar, a soldier serving in Iraq, started a new closed community rania_s_gate where she will be posting some of her "harder" stories, that she doesn't want to post for the general public. I've found some of her posts fascinating. If you want to join the community but haven't participated in her LJ in the past, you need to send her email letting her know who you are before she'll approve your membership. Her address is in the userinfo.

Help Granny D! She's the woman who, at age 89-90, walked 3,200 miles coast to coast for campaign finance reform. Now, at age 94, she's running for the US Senate from NH. I posted some stuff about her here, including links to speeches so you can see how cool she is :) but right now, if you only have a few seconds free, you can help her by voting for her in this DfA Senate poll. Two winners will get highlighted in an email by Dean to his mailing list, which could be a big help. The poll closes on Monday, and as of last night she was in 7th place.

If you like Granny D, please re-post that to your own LJ this weekend! Thanks :)

Anyone interested on volunteering for election protection poll watching or response, including training, for the upcoming election, sign up at voteprotect.org. You can also give them information about any useful skills or experience you have, and they've got separate tracks for tech and legal volunteers. The tech track is being run by VerifiedVoting.org and focuses on new electronic voting machines.

And for a silly diversion: Someone called up LiveJournal's founder and offerred him sex in exchange for unsuspending some of her friends' accounts. Then, she posted an mp3 of the voicemail, and he posted a link to it:
her post
his post, with the link
Listen through the mp3, it gets funnier near the end.

I'm volunteering with a group of people collecting signatures for a civil liberties ballot question in Massachusetts. The whole thing was actually my idea to begin with, that came out of a conversation I had with someone at a Dean meetup a few months ago. I brought him to the next monthly meeting of the MA ACLU Civil Liberties Task Force, where we presented the idea, they were enthusiastic, and we formed a group to do it, officially called the Massachusetts "Citizens' Initiative for a Safe and Free America". You can read more about it at http://aclu-mass.org/ballot/

It took us over a month to figure out the rules and procedures for this kind of petition, get the wording of a question that the deputy attorney general said he would approve, develop materials for people to use in gathering signatures, and get those materials out to volunteers. By the time we really got going, in early June, we had only a month to go. The deadline is July 7th.

This question will get on the ballot in any state house district where we gather 200 or more valid signatures, from registered voters who live in that district. We've got a good shot at getting on the ballot in a number of districts in the metro Boston area, including some in Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, Arlington, Watertown, and Belmont. But the deadline is looming very close, and it's very likely that we'll come close but not quite make it in a number of those districts.

Fortunately, we have a great opportunity: Fahrenheit 9-11. On Sunday I and a couple of other people spent 6 hours in front of the movie theater in Harvard Square and got hundreds of signatures (though, obviously, they weren't all for the same district). Another group of people had similar luck at the Coolidge Corner theater. Today I went back to Harvard Square with someone else and got a lot more signatures. If we can keep this up, we will qualify for the ballot in a good number of districts.

Unfortunately, to be able to keep it up, we need more volunteers. This is something that's fun to do in groups of 3 people but nearly impossible to do alone. To get small groups of 2-3 people petitioning together, we desperately a few more volunteers within the next 7 days - that will make all the difference in how many districts we get on the ballot in.

If you can help, call me, or email me, any time. Please also email Marilyn at the ACLU office, cltf2004@yahoo.com

Help help help! We're so close, we can do it, we just need a few more people to volunteer some time.

[ I originally sent this post in by email, and it got stuck in LJ's queues. Sometime within the next week or two, they'll notice that post-by-email is broken, they'll fix it, and my original version of this post will reappear in my journal. When I notice the duplicate, I'll delete it. ]

P.S. Wednesday we'll be petitioning outside the theater in Harvard Square, on Church Street, 4pm-11pm. Ken Thomson will get there around 4pm to start, I'll join him not long after, and we'd love to have other people join us, even only for a couple of hours. The more of us there are, the more fun it is. We register voters, too.

If you've got a lot of Boston area people on your friends page, you've probably seen a lot of posts in the past couple of days about the big gay marriage at Cambridge City Hall. If you haven't seen enough, wanna read some more stories, or don't know lots of Bostonians and are looking for these entries, I collected all the ones I've come across so far under the memory keyword gay marriage.

Here are some photos:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/being_homeless/465498.html
http://www.livejournal.com/users/heresiarch/86776.html
http://www.livejournal.com/community/nikkinewsnet/164925.html
http://suspensionofdisbelief.org/photo/gaymarriage
http://www.englishchick.com/gaymarry/
http://cml.harvard.edu/~antilles/05_16_2004CambridgeCityHall/index.htm
http://web.mit.edu/smalpert/www/marriage/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/rcantilles/504026.html
http://www.livejournal.com/users/laurens10/173671.html
http://www.livejournal.com/users/ladytabitha/1117301.html

And this one has photos from Northampton: http://www.livejournal.com/users/lizsybarite/173311.html

... still waiting for mangosteen's photos to show up ...

(Does anyone have photos from Provincetown?)

P.S. Dean wrote an op-ed piece in the Globe about gay marriage and Vermont's experience with passing civil unions.

With the help of a cute little program called WireTap, I recorded a bunch of radio programs from NPR and other sources and burned a disc for my roadtrip to the March for Women last weekend. One of the programs I put on the disc was Who's Canadian - notes and stories about the Canadians among us. It's my favorite episode of This American Life, and one of my favorite radio shows ever. The first portion of the show talks about how many of the prominent people in American culture are actually Canadian, and in this clip (about two minutes) a Canadian talks about how Canadians always know who the other Canadians are. It's as if they have a Canadian-recognition chip implanted in their brain, he says.

Off the top of my head, I can think of several Canadians on my LJ friends list: bassringer, choucroute, ert, jasonkelly, ladymondegreen, emerlion... I got to thinking, who else is Canadian? Are there any on my friends list who I don't realize are Canadian, or I've just forgotten? They do tend to blend in.

So, come on! You Canadians on my friends list should be able to tell me who the other Canadians are, right? Fess up and reveal yourselves and your countrymen!

From Tom Segev's foreword to The Other Israel:

Gabriel Stern, one of the more decent - though lesser known - journalists in the history of Israel journalism, once told me of a traumatic but formative experience that occurred during his military service. He was thirty-five at the time, having come to Israel from Germany a decade previously. He had studied Middle Eastern Studies at Hebew University and participated in Judah Leib Magnes' and Martin Buber's peace activism. Stern was not a pacifist, but he was extremely fearful of any form of violence. In 1948, during Israel's War of Independence, he was drafted and posted on guard duty at the Italian Hospital, located in close proximity to what would later become the line dividing Israeli West Jerusalem and the eastern, Arab part of the city. As he wandered aimlessly around the deserted hospital one day, he suddenly came face to face with a uniformed man armed with a rifle. The man was standing at the end of a long, dim corridor. Stern did not know how the man had got there, but he sensed his life was in danger: One of the two was bound to open fire. Stern looked the man in the eyes; the man looked back at him. Stern raised his rifle; the man raised his, finger on the trigger. It was clear to Stern that he who shot first would live. The other would die.
( He pulled the trigger... )

What was cause, what was effect? What signaled danger to him?

(This book is a collection of chapters by different contributors, that I saw at a store this evening. I looked at the list of contributors on the back, and some names jumped out at me, particularly: Shulamit Aloni, Meron Benvenisti, Amira Hass, David Grossman. Then I read the foreword. Then I bought the book. I haven't read it yet, but you can consider this a recommendation.)

Some years ago, I was at a party, and several of us got to talking about how bureaucratic the colleges we had gone to were. We shared some stories, and by the end, everyone agreed that it was a tie between Brandeis and Harvard for "most bureaucratic". For Brandeis, I told this story, the one I posted last week. Here is the story the guy from Harvard told us.

(Note: This is not my story, I'm retelling it as well as I can remember it, but can't guarantee accuracy.)

He worked for Harvard University, and his office was located in a building owned by Harvard. All Harvard-owned buildings are managed, he said, by the Harvard Real Estate Office. When any tenant wishes to move into space owned by Harvard, they have to negotiate a contract with the real estate office. The standard procedure is that the tenant hires a lawyer to represent them, the real estate office hires a lawyer to represent Harvard building management, and the two lawyers negotiate a contract - even if the tenant is itself a department of Harvard University.

This guy said that he worked for the Harvard Real Estate Office, and that they had recently moved their office into new space owned by Harvard. They followed the same standard procedure.

[ I originally wrote this during my first semester of grad school at Brandeis. This is somewhat edited, but still very close to the original version. ]

Hello everyone, I'm a gradcreature now :-) This is my ninth semester at Brandeis University, and for the first time ever, I did not get a financial hold on my registration this semester! How, you may ask, did I achieve this impossible (at Brandeis) feat? Well, I don't fully understand, but I shall endeavor to tell you...

First, let's get something clear. You may have assumed, since I said I had no financial holds this time, that means my financial arrangements went smoothly. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is Brandeis we're talking about. In fact, things were more complicated this semester than they ever have been. Where I got lucky was, this time Brandeis managed to fuck with its own mind(s) more than with mine.

The story begins, sort of, sometime during my senior year, when I was still happily clearing a new financial hold each semester. Sometime early in the spring, I told the department administrator of Computer Science that I wanted to apply for the fifth year MA program. She asked me to submit a short letter declaring my intention, which I did, and the CoSci faculty voted to accept me.

Months passed. I never received any official acceptance or registration packet, even though I asked about such a thing on occasion. Finally, in May, the department discovered that I needed to fill out an official application and submit it to the graduate school. So, I got my application, and started filling it out. One of the things it required was a transcript... from Brandeis. Yes, they said, I did have to go to the transcript office, and make a request for an official copy of my transcript to be mailed to Brandeis University, and pay the normal fee. I guess this is as good as interdepartment communication at Brandeis will ever get.

Anyway, I went to the transcript office, where I discovered that I was not allowed to send out any transcripts, because, guess what, I was on financial hold. The school year was over, and I still owed Brandeis money. Great.

The next step was a trip to the Financial Aid office, to discover what all this money I owe was. One thing that puzzled them was that according to their records, I owed about half as much as my bill said I did. "Hmmm...", I thought, "what does the Bursar's office have to say about this?" It seems they had received one of my loan checks, but hadn't entered it into their records. How it got into Financial Aid's records, when it's the Bursar's office that gets the checks, I have no idea. There must be some high level espionage between these two rival agencies, because we all know they try their best not to communicate through normal channels.
Anyway...

Part of the money I owed was another scholarship, which wasn't Brandeis' fault. It was late due to a problem earlier in the year, but I had documentation proving it was on its way, so I got them to clear that part of it.

And then there was the third portion - my meal plan points from that year, plus a bunch of late payment fees that had accrued over the semester for the "late" loan and for the points I had not yet been billed for. I decided this small amount was something I could easily afford to pay. I had an on campus job, and once the school year ended I went up to 25 hours a week, so in several weeks I'd have the money I needed. Or so I thought...

... until I noticed that I wasn't getting any paychecks. It turns out that as far as Financial Aid was concerned, I had graduated. No longer a student, so, no student work-study job. What about the fact that I was still going to be a student for another year? Well, I got a letter from CoSci saying they had accepted me for the fifth year, but that wasn't good enough. They wanted an official acceptance letter from the Graduate School.

CoSci sent a letter to the grad school office asking them to accept me, but again, that wasn't good enough. The grad school needed me to submit a complete application. I handed in all the parts I did have, but the official transcript was still missing. Remember, the transcript office couldn't mail that out while I still owed money to Brandeis. Which I couldn't pay, because I wasn't getting any paychecks.

If I'd had to go through Brandeis to fix all of this, I might still be sorting it out now, but I was saved by two outside job offers. With three part time jobs, one of which was actually willing to pay me, I paid Brandeis off around midsummer, had a transcript sent out, and applied. I was "accepted" to Brandeis one week before the start of the fall semester. And now that I was officially accepted, I was finally allowed to apply for financial aid, something one usually does at the beginning of the calendar year.

As a matter of fact, I still don't have my financial aid, and probably won't for another month or two. How did I pay for the first semester? Well, I didn't. I got accepted so late, I didn't preregister for classes, so I wasn't registered for school until I went through the regular registration at the start of the semester.

Now, in case you don't know, a financial hold at Brandeis cancels your registrations for the semester, and if you don't clear it up by the end of the registration period and re-add all your classes, you have to leave school. By the time I registered, there were only a few days left before the deadline. In order to put a hold on me for this semester, the Registrar would have had to let the Bursar know that I had registered, and the Bursar would have had to generate a bill for me, and realize I hadn't paid, all in that short time. Nothing at Brandeis happens quite that fast, especially when it involves one department communicating with another.

As a matter of fact, it's two thirds into the fall semester, and they still haven't sent me a bill. Maybe they'll get around to it by the time spring semester rolls around, but by then I'll have my financial aid, right?

Killing a few minutes while I wait for laundry to finish...
... and because it's been a long time since I let myself waste time on the net doing silly pointless things :)

At first glance, the visited states thing looked as shallow in meaning as most of the quizzes that proliferate here (though the answers are often fun nonetheless, I don't find them worth posting). What does it mean to map out the states you've been to or haven't ever been to? The distinction between a state I never visited and one I drove through once, doesn't seem as significant as the distinction between a state I drove through once and a state I've spent weeks and done lots of things in. So I started playing with it to map out some things that might be more telling about my life, and came up with these:

(I consider all airports to be part of the separate state of Airport. If I've been somewhere only by being at an airport there, and never left the airport, then I don't consider it having been there, at all.)

---

First, the states I've never been to at all: ( states I've never been to )
States I've visited and actually done something in: ( visited states )

Some of those things I've done in some of those states...
( states where I saw live music )
( states where I spent the night )
( states where I dated someone )
( states where I've worked )
( states where I campaigned for Dean )
Did I leave out any categories I should have tried to map?

( oh, yeah... )

The surreal moment of the week was walking into a cafe/bookstore in Portland ME, trying to recover from having just seen "Monster" at the nearby theater, and hearing the Dresden Dolls playing on the bookstore's sound system. Missed Me is exactly one of the songs you do not want to hear when trying to get over "Monster", by the way.

(I sold three copies of the Dresden Dolls live album to the guy behind the counter and his friend :)

DHL tried to destroy the paintings by top Japanese artist Nobuyoshi Araki which were en route to the MEO gallery in Budapest. The gallery only found out the paintings had been scheduled for destruction after it contacted DHL to find out why the pictures had not arrived for the start of last month's exhibition.

Read the whole story: Courier nearly destroyed 'porn' artworks

Apparently, DHL has a history of doing this, and UPS has a similar policy. This article in Salon includes another DHL "porn" story, and an attempt to interview representatives from DHL, UPS, and FedEx: the shipping nudes

The last paragraph is my favorite:
Federal Express could make hay off being a Botticelli-friendly carrier. It would be a great TV commercial. The opening shot features a nice middle-aged woman looking appreciatively at a life-size reproduction of Michaelangelo's "David." She turns and faces the camera. "I tried to send this poster home from Europe to my son who's studying Renaissance art, but DHL and UPS ripped open my parcel and said it was pornographic. If it weren't for Federal Express, I would have missed his birthday entirely!" Cut to a shot of a Federal Express plane flying into the sunset, then her son unrolling the poster and beaming appreciatively, while a voice-over announces, "Federal Express: We take care of the shipping and leave questions of taste up to you."

This all reminds me of the recent controversy surrounding a certain painting at Vassar College, as told in the artist's blog here and here. nebel, who works next to the painting in question, ranted about it in this post

[Edited for people at work: The photos are behind a cut tag now. I'll un-cut in a week or two]

On Tuesday, I went to lunch with nchanter. When we got the check, I saw that it was for $19.70, and said "1970, that's the year I was born". She blinked and said "wait, I thought you were 32!". It's true, when I figure my age, I usually have to subtract 1970 then add a year because my birthday is so late in the year. I started to respond with something like, "Yes, I am 32, because my birthday is in late November so it hasn't come yet" but then I stopped myself mid-sentence.

I had started to figure how long it would be until my birthday, and realized, it was that very day - Tuesday was November 25th. Oops! nchanter was highly amused, and also paid for my lunch.

That evening, I went to dinner with her, to meet a reporter. The reporter bought us ice cream, and bought her friends an ice cream pie, and the total for our ice cream and her pie was also $19.70

I often forget my birthday, and I usually don't do anything for it. But this time the universe conspired to remind me, and it was a very amusing birthday experience.

(Yeah, seeing nchanter twice in the same day is pretty unusual. I'm not complaining!)

For those of you who don't read my other journal, cosmusic, there's a concert coming up tomorrow that I've put together, so I should plug it here in my main journal too. It's a concert to promote Howard Dean for president, featuring Molly Zenobia, Rachael Sage, Jenny Bruce, and Dean videos in between sets. Monday, November 24th, 7-10:30pm, at Club Passim in Harvard Square.

More information, links, online tickets, etc., in my cosmusic post:
Concert for Dean