badgerbag: messy, surly, full of books

Boasting on blogs; the perils of condescension

Help! I can't find the inscription that Ashurbanipal had in every room of his palace. It's one of those long recitations of boasting and praise, listing all the things he built in his cities, the places he conquered and how he puts his foot on the neck of his enemy and is like the wild lion of the mountains. It was at the end of the room with Assyrian friezes in the British Museum! Somehow I failed to take a photo of it and its translation.

I want it for nefarious purposes, to make an Assyrian inscription boast-about-your-blog generator widget.

Open Tech was fun; I met a bazillion people, got to see my friend cdent, saw D. fizz up with ideas and charismaticness on stage, and took notes on some interesting talks. I'll post my notes on Composite, but the strangest and most interesting talk was from a guy who does screen scraping on Khandahar airport, filters out the obviously legitimate commercial flights, compares them against lists of planes that have open credit to refuel at U.S. army air bases, and then somehow uses that (I don't think in any automated way) with other data from looking up airplane ownership and company records to help track down international arms dealers. So, somewhat to my amusement this was back to back with an eco-activist from Bristol who does some work on paths and public access (bike trails? foot paths? something) and while his work sounded very smart and effective I did marvel at his level of paranoia about government spying and infiltrating of his activist efforts -- in sharp contrast to the dude who reviles and stalks the scary thuggish illegal arms dealers' corporate activities, who just shrugs and says "Oh well, no one's come after me yet." It was explained to me at dinner that with all the strange monitoring and cctv and the power that local councils have, it might not be unreasonable for the Bristol guy to think his local cops are sniffing his traffic or tracking who he calls on his cell phone.

I missed most of the MySociety talks and regretted it... they're amazing and also are nice

I liked S.G, D.G, and L. and J. right away but most people are (surprise) reserved. Some people assumed I was not techie and was just "there with D." like some sort of fangirl escort, so that I was kind of ticked off -- was it not enough that I drip with computer equipment - and work in a startup and have been a computer nerd since 1980 just like the rest of geekdom - instead, often, condescending small talk about Travel while the rest of people in a group are talking about dorky computer stuff and gossiping about icann. I also had the problem at the conference of, whenever I'd wander up to people who I'd vaguely met, they'd leap to open the door for me assuming that I needed help to leave the room, when... actually... I was just coming up to hang out and talk. So it was nice to hide a while in the corner gossiping with cdent and recharging my batteries. But, all that was minor compared to the people who were interesting and friendly.

Actually the polite small talk about Travel (while puzzling as I never would whip that sort of thing out to someone from out of town who worked in my field who I met at a conference in SF) was far preferable to the open and obnoxious condescension from what's her name at the first thing I was at who after an entire dinner of me interestedly listening to (and sometimes commenting on) their talk of points of international law and the net, turned to me over dessert and said with a pitying smile "You must be SO CONFUSED by ALL THIS TALK." Oh!!! I could have smacked her! I thought of the million times I read Quilty's million-million page white paper on ISPs - and all the times I have had useful things to contribute to discussions that are out of my depth - and when they've been appreciated - and coldly analyzed this person's little gambit, realizing how many times *she* must have heard it in her career and lifetime - her loss that she chooses to apply it to other women.

I give up; I don't understand my body

Yesterday I felt like a minor athlete sucking in my gut, stabilizing my hips and back, and charging up and down the little flight of stairs like a determined beetle, even one time without holding onto anything. I wheeled around the sidewalks in Bloomsbury Square effortlessly, after a couple of hours in the museum. I was boasting to Rook and Zond-7 how the stairs have been awesome physical therapy and I fell asleep imagining myself walking all around on just a cane, with the wheelchair gathering dust in my shed, and of the years where I struggled up from the wheelchair before.

But now I've woken up after a reasonable night's sleep, destroyed, aching, crawling down the stairs on my butt to make coffee, a little scared of the day. Well, fuck you too, stupid body! Knees, ankles, every little joint in my feet, knuckles, all of y'all just fuck off! What a way to wake me up.

It must be the rain... maybe I'll unstiffen. Maybe it was the double dose of celebrex and tylenol I took yesterday morning and the day before. I don't have to go to this techie thing and I could just lie here, but that would be depressing and lonely so let's pour a little Celebrex and coffee down my gullet and see if the engine revs up.

Books! Sumerians 1, Egyptians 0

I scored two books at the British Museum as I rushed on through.

"Tales From Ancient Egypt" by J. Tyldesley. Oh. My. God. Why did I buy this! It's just what I don't like! On first glance it seemed like a book of tales and letters, backed up by some scholarly introductions. I had opened it up on "A letter from King neferkare Pepi II, Day 15 o fhte third month of innundation, Year 2. Written under the king's own seal." All in formal language, a letter thanking the king's scout that he has "obtained a pygmy from the land of the horizon-dwellers". Super awesome! BUT NO. That was the one good bit in a book that was like, the syrupy worst of re-writes of myths mixed with Cliff Notes, reading in a ton of crap that there's no way was in the original stories. The scholarly bits are embarrassing. I'm not a fan of inept popularizations!

Now onward to the good stuff. "The Literature of Ancient Sumer" by J. Black, G. Cunningham, E. Robson, Gábor Zólyomi. Maps! Footnotes! Line numbers! Comparisons! Actual words in Sumerian! Explanations of place names and variant spellings, ie. Nibru rather than the more familiar "Nippur"! gaps, question marks! Get real! Stories that you can piece together, that seem like stories other than we tell now, that don't follow our patterns or expectations. Formal language, and "foreignized" translation. If I wanted a girls' own bedtime story of Inanna and Dumuzi I'd go back in time to 1897 and scare one up! Instead I get the most delightful monologue of the fisherman to the fish.

The home of the fish

My fish, I have built you a home! My fish, I have built you a house. I have built you a store! I have built you a house bigger than a house, in fact a large sheepfold. Inside there is incense, and I have covered it in cloths for you: in this happy place I... water of joy for you....in the house, there is food, food of the best quality...In the house there is beer, there is good beer. ..
Let your acquaintances come! Let your dear ones come! ... Let your wife and children come!
Enter, my beloved son! Enter, my fine son! Don't let the day go by, don't let the night come! ...My fish, no one who sleeps there will be disturbed; no one who sits there will get involved in a quarrel.

I can't wait to read the bits about Sumerian poetic & literary forms. This looks so great!

I love invocations and formal histories, and very long praise names, and all strange literary formalities.

p.s. These are the rules to the first known board game!

Travel journal from a working holiday

I woke up in such pain. My arms could barely move and walking wasn't good either. Zond-7 massaged my neck and shoulder and right arm, I had coffee, stretched a lot, waited for anti-inflammatories to kick in, and now I can make a fist and can type and behave normally.

That's always a scary feeling!

All the curb-hopping is taking its toll.

Consider that even to go the 3 blocks to Old Street which seem so trivial on paper or on legs, I must curb-hop about 20 times. Each driveway or alleyway has its difficulties. I'll count today, and take some photos.

Yesterday I tagged along and worked from the ORG office which is itself embedded in Venda's offices. Had a drink with a bunch of them and talked sf and cyberpunk and hardware & mass production with G. We had unexciting dinner in Hoxton Square (could not get in to the nice place recommended by A.'s giant FAQ of the neighborhood) and on the way back passed a super fancy barbershop. Perhaps Zond-7 will become Highly Groomed today. We have discussed the way that there is a Hoxton Haircut much as there is a Mission Hipster beard-groomed-look, and their finer points of difference.

I'd like to work somewhat minimal hours and go to the British Museum, and play catch-up tomorrow. tonight is a comedy show which has a bunch of Zond-7's friends. Will I last out the day without collapsing or resorting to Vicodin and booze?

We haven't really had any "holiday" yet - aside from a day or two of sleeping for 12 hours. It's really ridiculous! But my work doesn't end, and then I have to do at least minimal blogging of my life or I feel perturbingly out of control of reality. Zond-7 is also working and has to write and practice and give like 20 gajillion talks and on top of that just like I have to lie down a lot he has to sleep extra or he just stops functioning after a few days. We have similiar patterns in that we can work like dogs and push ourselves for about a 3-4 day limit and get an insane amount of things done and feel really good about ourselves and then we just fall over half-dead. Anyway, I feel a slight pang of regret that I won't do at least a few touristy things while I'm over here.

As long as I hit the British Museum for half a day... though I could happily spend a week in there... and I'd like to spend another afternoon in the library with my feminist newspapers and Cuban poets... and I'd like to go work out of C.'s office and scan his bookshelves for my Bookshelf Analysis of Projected Contents of Brain.

Meanwhile I continue to enjoy the hell out of living in someone else's house instead of a hotel.

Every time I walk up the stairs (UGH STAIRS but good for me) I see a new painting or poster on the wall. I try to see them all every time, but each time there's one I haven't noticed before!

I also really love the feeling of getting familiar with the immediate neighborhood. I know where the big cracks in the sidewalk are, and how the men yell at each other macho-ly on the tennis court in the little square, the sounds of the trucks and people going by with the wheels of their wheely suitcase things bumping along, where to buy juice and coffee, the different routes to walk to different places... A week is nearly long enough to develop pleasant habits.

The other night coming back rather late we were walking behind an older couple who were hand in hand, and somewhat hunched over. I thought touchingly of how sweet they were and wondered if I would someday be old and lovingly supported by and supporting someone as we wandered homeward late at night. I was trying to make up bits of their lives as we continued down the block in the dark. As we both turned around the corner of Ashe Square (Ashe Garden? something like that) my illusion was partially destroyed as the hunched-over woman burst into a sort of rollicking song, boozily slurring, like some total cockney-movie cliche, swaying on her little high heels, straightening up from under her old-lady sweater. "Lips like cherries...." the song got louder and louder in rude defiant enjoyment of life & drunkenness. The man threw her arm down and began to cuss her out loudly - walking ahead - also drunk as hell. I think he might have said something even more amazing than the song along the lines of "Awww, shurrup, ya ol' bat!" From hilarity to being slightly appalled and madly curious about what if anything would happen I moved back to feeling sentimental about the old couple, trying not to outpace them so that i could hear the words to the song. Zond-7 said he knew the song but has forgotten what it was.

The mildest of adventures in London

Already I've lost track of the days but I didn't want to forget lying on the leather couch in the trendy-empty bar looking out the window at some blue sky and the brick building across the narrow lane. The bricks were sooty gold with red-brick stripes and the outline of what seemed to be a ghost building underneath. The window and door frames, dark green, strangely the same color paint as the bar's interior metal beams. I thought about the history of the building, and what it would be like to maintain it now as a facilities person or trying to run cable through it. I wondered why there were doors in a row on every story leading out into the street. Did there used to be a hallway? Zond-7 came back from ordering at the bar and said no - it was a factory and look up higher, there's a winch. For winching out the finished websites perhaps since that's what they make now, in the factories. We made up silly things, like the ftp man doing his rounds. "Bring out your files! Bring out your files! Uploads for downloads!" The telnetster in traditional garb, mostly superseded by the ssh man in his dapper uniform and neat-brimmed hat. Sad, really.

Later we figured out why that bar (so nice - called Cantaloupe) was empty - there are like 50 other trendy-ass bars but with patios and on hoxton square just a couple of blocks away. Not that that should matter since every ratty bar and pub is crowded here even on a Tuesday night.

We spent a whole extra day recovering and working from bed, only venturing a few blocks from the flat to grab some food. I have the very-local geography down, now, and know where to buy food and how to go find a taxi and the tube station and what other directions might be good to explore.

I am really enjoying c. and a.'s flat in every way. It's so cute and perfect and cosy! I did my conference call from the hammock. The next door kids are cute as hell and it cheers me to hear them playing. I enjoy their art and funny kitschy stuff... and how cleverly they store all their crap... their million-page FAQ about their house and office and neighborhood, and their lovely gleaming red espresso machine (kitchenaid) and let's not even go into how nice I think the damned washlet is. hahahah! Washlet!! I'm not super in love with having a million stairs, but on the other hand I can take my time, treat it as physical therapy, and it's probably good for me. I'm trying to think what I can do in return or what would be nice to leave them... stock them up with nice groceries... nice coffee etc. And in general I have good "letting people crash at my place" karma so really the thing to do is to keep passing that on.

Observation, people in Britain do not say Hello or anything at all to strangers on the street. They take this so far that they don't even look at you in the face, which makes it damned hard to tell which way to barrel forward in your speedy wheelchair.

Today I left Zond-7 sweating over his deadline while I ran off to the British Library for a couple of hours. I felt like I had to break a little barrier of going places by myself. Thought about taking the Old St. tube to St. Pancras or King's Cross or whatever but then realized it was a bit late, I was tired, screw it, it would then become all about sweatily going through miles of tunnels and ramps and being ill natured at railway employees' passive aggressive "help". So, a taxi.

London taxis are AWESOME! I said this before, but here it is again. If you are in a wheelchair and have money to spend like water then just take taxis everywhere. All the black cabs are mega-accessible. The back doors slide open like a van, a ramp comes out, there are hand rails, seats swivel and fold down if you need that, and the back seat is huge with a big empty wheelchair-holding space.The taxis stop for me! They don't fuss or freak out too much. A little bit, but not bad at all. I don't need the ramp and I can pull my chair up into the taxi, without having to take it apart or fold it up.

You see what I mean about mild adventures. Hey you're on your own in a strange city! What will you do! OH I KNOW I'LL TAKE A TAXI TO THE LIBRARY. Okay! Yes! In fact, that is what I always do!

Then I wander around and take photos of graffiti and street art and bricks and manhole covers.

The British Library (the giant new brick building) has very good wheelchair access. I especially appreciated the signs, big, high up, frequent, and very clear, pointing me to ramps and elevators.

So at the library I got my reading pass. They get you to line up and ask if you have ID and details of what you want to see. They don't really care what you want to see and you don't have to prove anything to them about your research project; they just want to know that you know that there's a specific thing in the library that they own, that you want to look at! So they ask "Do you have something written down or printed out" ... but mostly to rule out the people who should go to the public library to check out a mystery novel or look something up in the encyclopedia or whatever. I had jotted down the names of a couple of poets and began to open my notebook and they waved me through. If you don't have "details written down" then they shunt you over to some computers where you can look in the catalogue and come up with a list of books. After this queue I filled out a web form (nicely accessible computer with huge monitor and huge font) and then waited till my number was called. A few questions later and a photo... now I have a nifty 1- month card! So I will be looking at a bunch of books by (and about) Emilia Bernal, and some suffragist newspapers and I might also look for women's newspapers from 1830s France as I suspect they might be in there and it will give me a thrill.

I figured out by scouting it out physically that it will be easy to take the tube there and then harder to get back (because of having to come up the Old Street ramp) so it'll be better to take a taxi back.

After a bit more work at "home" we went out to an indian restaurant on brick lane. I took a lot of photos of great street art.

It's exhausting to wheel up and down all those curbs. they are oftn very low but even an inch up and down is tiring. My hands hurt like hell. Also... holy hell... bricks and cobblestones are hell on my back, it's like the vibrations from "Wages of Fear".

In the library as there wasn't enough time left to order any books, I went to exhibits. There was a great exhibit of chinese, korean, & japanese color wood block printing on the 2nd floor. I wrote down a bunch of them to look up later. A lot of the bird ones I wished I could show Minnie. Here are my notes

- Ten Bamboo Studio 1634
- Soken Sekisatsu 1768 Hojakuchu "Dazzling simplicity in ... prints"
- a literary and artistic gathering 1839 chikutenzan
400 artists and writers with names. i sat there a while and counted the women. there were 22. many facing each other or sitting in groups, not isolated from each other
- shin kawazu (..awase) 1820 New Poetry Competition of Frogs nifty anthology/collaboration
- kawa... bumpo = awesome
- The gifts of the seas umi no sachi 1762 mica used in ink for prints for fishy sheen!
- kimpaen's picture album 1820 (bumpo, same guy) Kimpaen gafu. Birds birds birds!!!
- Wang Cheo pictures of foreign things 1998 made me think of "woolgathering"

Then saw huge Ramayana exhibit which made me think of talking with Neha (nehavish) about Surpanakha (who i did not find in the exhibit though i didn't see all of it and she is perhaps not in every version) but mostly in this exhibit I was excited to see books written on palm leaves. One of those things I've often read about and wondered what it is really like... it is like thin flat fan blades about the size of an 8 inch ruler, with 2 holes drilled in rolodex style, polished smooth maybe with some varnish or sizing, and very small delicate writing.

Swooned at lovely book binding, maps, illuminated manuscripts exhibit. I thought of how lucky i felt when i worked at the geology library and dennis let me look at the super rare illustrated books he kept back in his office. amazing french books with taxonomy & botanical illustrations & fossils... The book that blew me away today and got me to tears was a persian one from 1610 ad , Anvar-i Suhayli which is a version of Kalila & Dimna / Pancatantra. written by Husayn ... v.... Kashifi (can't read my own handwriting!) for Prince Salim who became the emperor Jahangir. Now anyone who has bothered to read this for the last N years knows I'm obsessed with the Pancatantra and all its derivatives!

This might sound very exciting but consider that most of my time in London so far has been spent within a 3-block radius of this bed where I am lying 90% of the time peacefully Computing the same as I would anywhere else in the world, in the midst of a small mountain of used kleenexes and allergy meds, reporting intermittently that my legs and knees and back and hands hurt like hell and that I need more chocolate.

For Global Voices: About wheelchairs and mobility

For everyone I met and spoke with at Global Voices Citizen Media Summit I would like to pass on some information about mobility, disability, and wheelchairs. I got a lot of questions about my wheelchair and a lot of compliments on how well I get around. Here is my FAQ with some answers that people might like to know.

My wheelchair is a type called an ultralight rigid frame. It weighs 17 pounds (8 kilos) and though I am not particularly strong, I can pick it up with one hand. The wheels come off just like a quick-release bike wheel. I can take off the wheels in about 10 seconds, fold the chair, and put it into a car or into the trunk of a taxi.

A standard hospital wheelchair can weight 40, 50, 60 pounds (18-28 kilos). They are often designed to be pushed by an able-bodied walking person. With a lighter weight wheelchair, more people can gain independence.

The major manufacturers of ultralights are :

Quickie (Mine is a Quickie Ti)
http://www.quickie-wheelchairs.com/

Ti-Lite
http://www.tilite.com/store/

Colours
http://www.colourswheelchair.com/

But, these wheelchairs can be extremely expensive.

Here are two international projects to spread the availability of light weight, durable, low cost wheelchairs:

is an open source project meant to help people across the world to set up entire factories or shops to produce low cost, very durable & rugged chairs.

http://www.whirlwindwheelchair.org/

Free Wheelchair Mission is a project to ship very, very cheap and maintainable wheelchair kits to every possible country.

http://www.freewheelchairmission.org/thewheelchair.html

Getting the right size of wheelchair is also important. But, given a choice between the wrong size in a light weight, and the right size that's very heavy, I would take the lightweight chair.

Two good sources of information are Wheelchair Junkie forums, and Gimp Girl, a community for women with disabilities.

One more thing, to answer the other question that you all are asking me:

My hair is dyed with Special Effects Blue Velvet and Punky Color Plum. It's been that color for about 10 years. About once a month I put a little bit more purple to keep it bright.

Thoughts on Budapest

Not like I've seen any of it but the airport and the hotel!

Hungarian food is goddamned delicious! It's the best ever! The little pastries even beat the Belgium pastries!

There are billboards like crazy. It could have been Houston, getting off the plane. I noticed advertisements in London were oddly restrained and dorky. Brussels... what advertisements? Other than Antiquities and snooty-looking fashion and billboards for the opera I did not see any evidence of popular culture or the hopes and dreams and chains of regular people. But, the billboards in Budapest were all full of people bursting out of reality, leaping in the air in gravity-defying ways, living it up at water parks or wild with laughter and romance. The billboards were all along the highway next to row after row of identical enormous concrete block apartments stretching as far as I could see. The billboards seemed perhaps related to the feeling of wanting to escape, wanting some wildness, having the ability to get out of the concrete block. There was plenty of graffiti. It's scruffy like Beijing but not so full of earnest and callous Industriousness. A lot of women on the street have dyed bright red and purple hair.

I am happily ensconced in my swank hotel (Novotel Centrum) which is lovely & perfectly accessible.

I might go venture out by myself if I can't wake up Zond-7.

I blogged a bit of the conference and have notes on later panels but then I conked out completely, took a nap, had a bath, read Iain Banks, worked, slept again. I am walking okay, in fact I feel like I could walk a few blocks as I did yesterday with no problem, but my legs hurt a lot and I have the burning and buzzing down into both feet. So, I want to go out to see the city, and yet lying down for a while longer would help my legs feel a little more normal.

I'm sad that I won't see more - it is beautiful and interesting and jumbledy here

I have been feeling really grateful for my in-between-ness and ability to get around and yet also frustrated & impatient at not just being all the way better. It's hard because, what would you rather do, walk 5 blocks painfully and not be sure you could continue on with people going somewhere, or just give up and wheel... thus being set apart and judged and also an annoyance and yet freed to go as far as you want to go...

Thoughts on the geography & economics of cyberspace from the Brussels airport

I noted the shapes of houses as soon as we crossed from France to Belgium. Houses even built alone in the middle of a field go straight up in a narrow box shape, like a brick stood on end, and a pointy roof, as if built into an invisible row of narrow box townhouses crammed together. I wondered if they had been in a row over the years and fire, age, or war destroyed the others? Or is it the function of laws and the accepted size of a single plot of land and house footprint? Or style detached now from any of those things so that if you built a house in the middle of a field, it would be that obelisk shape like a slice of cake standing alone?

I noted in my 4am haze on the way to the airport that there were not many billboards. Our notions of wasted space, bare space, unused, *needing* colonization and exploitation. Once you start painting "Chew Mailpouch" on the side of barns and slotting tiny ads into parking meters, every informationless space is an opportunity. Our rush to ad-driven web is such a colonization. We don't put ads in the margins of books - but we do in magazines, which are replacing the book. Cyberspace was thought of by Gibson & Sterling early on as a sort of cave that paralleled our reality but underneath it or outside of it, using stuff it internally knew to build models of corporations, people, geographies, wealth and power. Relationships were not modelled that I can think of, other than as the flow of money - or were they modelled as information flow as well? But when I look at the world I am seeing it with *missing information*, missing overlays as in Spook Country or Stross's Halting State, with not just facts and advertisements but game systems and fiction, enhancements to objects and thus to geography. Already I notice that my own geography differs from other people in that (as Zond-7 and I just did) I head for a power outlet or a wifi hot spot, rather than a chair and a window. We compete with other little technocratic foraminifera for the most mineral-rich spot in our ocean, detecting currents invisible or unimportant to our fellow travellers.

As I consider information-rich areas as somehow attractive or nutritious I think of windows again, or televisions, or paintings and art.

The "wasteland" idea I was talking about in my last post: we invent the idea of wasteland or uncolonized space, as with Patagonia or Antarctica or "The West" or Mars, areas that are occupied in one way or another but that by circumscription of language can be made empty. I was thinking of this as I looked at the cultivated fields next to the strips of land (waste land) alongside the railway (and that exists also along highways) and wondered that it is not under cultivation. That ecological niche costs too much to exploit, it has a particular transaction cost and the economy is such that it is not "worth it" to produce goods from the strips of land. Then i thought of the fire prevention goats in my county, a flock of goats which is herded from area to area to eat the underbrush in dry weather, entire fields of thorns, weeds, tall bristly grasses. In an area where people keep goats in order to survive, the roadside and "vacant" area weeds would be a hot commodity. In ours, the county actually pays someone to feed their goats. The roadside could grow hay mowed and sold, or it could be mowed and composted (which perhaps it already is). The amount of things that it is less expensive to *throw away* than to use boggles my mind and seems inherently wrong. So I looked at the side of the road and thought "why isn't it being used?" and then realized that no -- the weeds provide seeds to birds, habitat for insects, unpaved surface for rain to return filtered to groundwater reserves, and other benefits I can't think or or see and which in fact drive me crazy when I see pointlessly concreted-over areas next to streams, where there could be useful weeds. When I was 17 or 18 I used to glue or wheat-paste little posters with poetry and stories on them onto parking meters, bus stops, bathroom stalls, or any places where people seemed to be waiting or liminal or stuck, as "OccuPations of Uninhabited Space" , OPUS for short, named after Takver's mobiles in The Left Hand of Darkness, as an attempt to counteract the information colonization by advertisements with a different kind of information -- the encrypted information, the steganography of fiction and poetry. My colonizations were invasive, were graffiti, were wrong, in a way that paid advertisements were not. Easy construction of web pages have made more space, more territory, for all of our information-emitting habits, our billboards to the future, our overlay of stories. I knew the instant I saw Mosaic for the first time that there would be enormous attention grabbing flashing colored advertisements not just colonizing the screen space of our machines but the internal landscape of our attention. A certain kind of space would be created in us that was not there before, for the organization and absorption of information.

Thus, the way it is "wrong" or colonialist/imperialist to look at the Patagonian landscape or a small town by quiet river and seeing it as empty and unused, full of potential, or misused, unfertilized (coded female and in need of impregnation) because not full of industry, mills, factories, garbage dumps, bustling workers and trains and tourists -- in that same way I would question our assumption that "the Internet" is an empty space with infinite ecological niches waiting (yearning!) to be discovered and exploited. What we are seeing as "the Internet" while obviously a real thing is also an idea and a geography. I thought of the roadside weeds, the in-theory-valuable growing power or living-space of the land by the train tracks, and the way that pay-for-recycling created paying work for people collecting cans and bottles from trash, and speculated that "there should be" a movement to find and expose and create infrastructures for people to step in and use tech tools to create entire economic niches. A way to use web tools to lower the transaction costs, for those flocks of goats or the opportunity to publish books on the seat backs of buses. I thought of couchsurfing.com, and the site that lets people register the fruit trees in their suburban yards, to get rid of a surplus of plums, lemons, apricots. There *are* many such niches. But is this approach doing harm in some way? We might say of course not as "the Internet" does not have previous inhabitants to be damaged or ecosystems destroyed but it is the potential I wonder about and what avenues become narrowed as we barrel down these particular highways. For example, everyone wants to publish a book. They have photocopiers, they have paper and pens, why don't they publish it in the sense of making it public by pasting it up on the wall somewhere public? It is not just the ambition of making it big and "publishing" 50,000 copies of that book because of the ways poets jockey and shark for their little 200-run letterpress hoo-ha dumpster-fillers or space-taker-uppers unread on their friends' shelves. It is also because of property rights; it would be illegal for me to paste up my novel's pages on the wall of the train station, even though it wouldn't be particularly offensive, it might entertain people waiting in line, it might be aesthetically just as pleasing or unpleasing as the bare wall. As we colonize our vacant planet of Internet we have to watch out for the pressures that then make every space owned, even potential space (consider domain names).

Okay. I'm ready for my overlay implants now.

Onward to Budapest!

Pastries and sidewalks in Belgium

New blog tagline, "History of Europe through sidewalk curb cuts and things available in cafes" since that is clearly what I'll be writing about.

I expected the tunnel under the British Channel to be different somehow and momentous rather than just a tunnel you barely notice even if you're looking. It should have some flashing orange lights and enormous stripey caution signs that go "WARNING! WARNING! YOU ARE UNDER THE MOTHERFUCKING OCEAN". Instead I thought vague thoughts about roadsides, railway right of way and land ownership, property rights, the San Mateo flock of fire prevention goats, eminent domain, ideas of waste and use and exploitation, geology, glaciers, farming, compost, and forestry. I expected somehow that Britain even by the railway would look more cultivated than the U.S. in the sense that the land has been intensively in use for farming and permanent buildings for so long. In other words that there would be not so many vacant lots and fields that don't seem to be growing anything or providing pasture or otherwise being used by humans to produce stuff. Once we got through the tunnel, France from the train looked a bit more like that and Belgium even more so.

I liked the train station at King's Cross/ St. Pancras. Giant Quentin Blake cartoon on building as you pull out of the station... (or really as you pull in as it is a "welcome" message). Odd moment when train station guy came up and accosted me and began to order me around. "No... really... we're just wandering around this mall for a couple of hours and getting lunch... if I need help I'll find someone and ask" "NO BUT OMG YOU HAVE TO... AND... " No actually I don't THANKS. The hostility that comes through is amazing.

We were in first class in the train because you're automatically put there if you are traveling in your own wheelchair. The expectation though seemed to be for me to be fairly completely unable to do anything. (Stories later.) The train was lovely and comfortable and the food was fabulous. I did feel strongly that the model of disability and being disabled is utterly broken as there were many frail older people or people traveling with small children who could have benefitted from being in first class and having help with bags, etc. when I just would like a bit more ramps and can walk up the train steps myself and even haul my wheelchair after me if need be. So again as with the broken model of AIDS education that most people got (if you are in a "high risk" category of person etc. etc rather than "if you do X then Y") it is about identification, instead of behavior, action, immediate situational needs. So the identity politics model works for some things and situations, but for this situation, it doesn't. The Eurostar staff was clearly trained to see "disabled person: this is what you do" but without any thought of "ask the person what they need" or "be flexible for anyone who needs it". It is wrong and vile to be treated as a sort of pitiable sub-elite. I notice it everywhere but more here than in the U.S.

Hotel - steps, ugh - amusing punch-card plastic door key that I swear I saw described in some ancient back issue of 2600 magazine - room nice - so happy to nap - no wireless in room, extreme hardship - dinner with Zond-7's Work People, at The Staff restobar (food fabulous, atmosphere perfect) talked of science fiction with G. who recommended the book "Godfather of the Kremlin".

Morning, Zond-7 went off to the meeting and I tried to work from the lobby (no wireless in room) but the wireless was far too slow for me to even download my 500 emails much less do web page testing or fixing and to deal with Drupal on any level at all. I set off down Avenue (?) Louise recalling various cafes. Everywhere had a lot of stairs and I can of course do stairs but it seemed daunting to do with all my paraphrenalia and then be trapped in the gravity well and I realized that while I can get into a cafe and its stairs I cannot hang out in it all day long when bathroom is even more inaccessible and just the navigation around the cafes I looked into was multi-level as well. I went a few blocks past Zond-7's meeting building and then realized everything was uphill; tried the cafe right next to it, which was nice but impossible to deal with; gave up and went to the office and just camped out trying to be oblivious that I was weirdly crashing this meeting that had nothing to do with me. (I did not go into the actual giant meeting but I did sit on the floor in the offices outside, ate their food and used their wireless and bathroom.) Oh well! Embarrassing! But I had to! I worked all day. Went back to hotel around 4 when I was starting to fall asleep sitting up. Oh,,, uphill up the horrible curbs and sidewalks of boring diplomaticky financial districty overpriced fashion-y clothes Brussels, it was really hell! I'm sure it's a nice city... somewhere that I wasn't! Napped. Read and got dressed again & Zond-7 came back & we went out to dinner at Brasserie Poelaert which was a lovely spot but not really great food. Worth it for the nice spot on the patio.

Our taxi got lost on the way there & we ended up in streets and streets of endless Antiquities and Tribal Arts and Anthropological Antiquities until I felt kind of sick to my stomach. Not like I come from anywhere that can hold its head up but, man, could you put some of Africa back where it came from maybe? OMG. Everything so reeking of wealth. The buildings I had been admiring with their amazing stone work seemed less beautiful and more signposts to colonial and capitalist horrors.

Dinner, I mostly listened and made occasional polite conversation because it was a very Worky Dinner involving what I think of as Global Foods (which I will explain again or link back to my explanation of but it is from Doris Lessing and I use it as my marker of U.N. cosmopolitan elite) and for me not being part of that world (though in my own technocrat one in parallel, in intersection, and perhaps in competition ultimately) to be there was a perturbation. So if you think of the job of that Global Foods job as being, absorption of tremendous amounts of detailed information and synthesis of it correctly and then telling people how to act, or trying to act collectively or in coalition -- it is a hard job and very thinky and talky and yet it is difficult for other people to see what the hell you are actually doing. And moments like this dinner are the moments which I see as people being like conduits for information, they are points or nodes which need to intersect and people have to talk with each other. It would be lovely to quantify and analyze and people of course do. But, I feel in those situations that it is best for me to shut up as much as possible so people can get on with talking with each other. I am also vastly entertained by cosmopolitan informational tidbit exchange ie chatter about one's favorite restaurants in various cities and tips on jet lag and how wearying Travel is but acceptable if the hotels are of the best. (All true. But nevertheless hilarious from outside of the upper class perspective.) I did explain myself and my presence a few times and had some nice conversational moments with GH and S. and the guy from Italy who explained to me about Article somethingorother which means the govt. has to consider open source software before it buys anything and how he is helping linux groups to band together formally in a way that the government can talk with. Interesting! I told R. from Germany about the way campaign contributions are public and were mashed up so you can see who on your street gave what, with google map info. (Shock and dismay!)

Tried to pack. Must get up and go to Budapest at 4am.

I forgot to say about the pastries. They were astonishingly great. Those little fruit sponge cake things soaked in liqueur, wrapped around custard, with a glazed egg yolk thing on top - was it actually a whole egg yolk? It stunned me. Well, Belgium does not know how to build a ramp, or a sidewalk, or have free wireless anyfreakingwhere, but its inner city roadways are very sensible and its food utterly rocks. (Also apparently it still knows how to loot the hell out of Africa and get rich off it, as i think of not just Antiquities but of Chocolate.)

London rocks for wheelchair access at least for me

So far things are totally rocking. I have taken three cabs and they've all been nearly instant to stop for us, and all been accessible for me as they're roomy, i can get in with the hand rail inside the back seat, then pull my (very light) wheelchair in after me, fitting it into the back seat without even taking the wheels off or folding the back down. There's been a few curbs and stairs but even with jet lag I can manage. So if you are in a powerchair you'd have to scout or plan but if you can pop a small wheelie or go up a curb backwards you will be just fine in London in a manual chair.

Down sides are cabs cost buckets of money. I was on one train so far - the Heathrow Express - and had to get someone to let me through a hidden gate - and then holy crap when they say Mind the Gap they sure mean it. I see you are supposed to get someone to stick a ramp across the gap for your chair. I made one "gap" ie ABYSS FROM HELL but the other at Paddington was ridiculous - I got up and walked out which fortunately I am able to do and dragged the chair after me.

Visited C and A to pick up keys. Held their soothing and sweet baby who is in the kicky using-muscles stage and also cutting first teeth. Bonded telepathically with Washlet. There are stairs. I will Deal. Most of the time we will be in Foxy Hotel (for the days it was cheap) but the 3 days at c's will save us like 1000 bucks (covering perfectly the days Foxy Hotel was insane like $350 a night rather than 80-ish).

Ate at Cantaloupe which seems like a vaguely latin american hipstery bar/burger/steak place. It was nice to lie back on soothing leather couches and contemplate the terracotta-red walls and green ceiling, and the hanging plants coming down. I had a mojito. There was free wireless.

Shoreditch/Hoxton seems the exactly right and fun neighborhood for me... We have space to work in next week out of c's office

Our hotel near Waterloo sort of blows. it's swanky and interesting but has only just begun to live. The supposed-to-be-fancy bathrobes actually suck, and mine has a funny tag on the lapel, a sticker that says "Rental..." with a price tag and bar code. The bathrobes are rented! Hahahah! And no one took off the price tag! I immediately broke an espresso cup, used all the bath towels (purpling one) and bled all over the sheets by accident when I fell asleep on first arrival. We have packed in a miracle of compact light carry-on-bag packing yet that means we have to unpack everything to find anything, so underwear and electronic gadgets are strewn all over the room. Later I will list our gadgets and cords for your amusement.

Passing out now. Wish me luck tomorrow on the Eurostar... I look forward to all this but very much to coming back to hang out in Shoreditch.

Weather is not too hot at ALL - it is springlike and mild - jackety in evening - I erred in unpacking my pajama pants and adding a skirt to sleep in - hotel has a/c

I am overlooking all the huge trains at Waterloo and can see st. pauls from bed

Taxi drove us past the Albert Memorial. I screamed uncontrollably with laughter for about half an hour - it was the Best Thing Ever.

Somewhere in the air over Greenland in the middle of the night

As we took off and flew over San Francisco Bay, Oakland, the sharp line of yellow hills and maze of rivers, I felt a sort of agony that we can't just leap up in the air and fly around. From above the world seems quick & beautiful and it's simple to be first in one place, then in another. We'd remember all the possibilities around us. Why don't we have anti-gravity! It's so sad.

Somewhere over Colorado I was in agony again that we don't have cities in the clouds and in space. Cathedral anvils! We should be zipping around them! Floating cities in layers, all over the place, with hanging gardens and impossible crystal palaces!

I had secret chocolate stashed away as a surprise and Zond-7 had downloaded the latest Dr. Who episode and brought a y-connector for our headphones so we could both hear it!

I messed around with eeebuntu some more on my eeepc. It's been a while that I've been itching to play around with Hardy Heron. I like it and am looking forward to customizing it and really merging with my little machine so that I work smoothly on it.

I'm listening to "Disco" by The Butchies, a little delirious!

Now going back in time to this morning, I was too scattered still to be that ideal mom and partner I had thought I would have time to be but have not been for a while. I miss Rook and Moomin already. Moomin was so awesome with his friend Dragonboy . They both had really big stuffed animal snakes and were running around with them, and were playing Godzillas.

A new song... "Rocketship" by Shiny Toy Guns fits my mood, with its countdowns, gay dance club energy, and cheesy sentimental lyrics.

I came back from the bathroom at the airport gate to find Zond-7 lying on his back with his head on a heap of bags, laptop propped up on his chest, industrious and casual looking, surrounded by stuff like a funny little pack rat, in torn jeans and a tshirt and a suit jacket. It was so exactly what I do in an airport that I burst out laughing. As I joined him he remarked that we would look as if we both fell out of the wheelchair. It was very cosy there in the middle of all the airport people in our little world on the floor with computers and conversation. I told him about the totally insane blogs that I had seen all about packing one's suitcase and travel, and the woman who declared exactly what one should and should not wear on an airplane with amazing snootiness as if there were some reason to all dress like bank tellers while riding in a damned airborne cattle car. As far as I could tell it boiled down to a whole lot of outrage over flip-flops. Who knew? I have never in my life thought of flip-flops as actively OFFENSIVE. We looked around at a crowd getting off a plane from Dallas. About 2/3 of those people were wearing flip flops. Horrors? Ahahahah! We tried to spot someone, anyone, dressed with the philosophy of this one blogger (who I'll link to when I have net again, but she's linked off Rose's comment in an entry on Badgermama), and saw maybe one woman but then realized she worked at the airport, and then a bit later one guy who was so overdressed in casually draped scarf and white sunglasses that he was clearly a gay supermodel. Everyone else was in sweatpants, and jeans and regular-person clothes.

Our flight was delayed, we missed the connection, but lucked out and got onto the next flight to Heathrow which was boarding immediately. I had been rebooked magically I guess from special cripple-fu. They put Zond-7 first on standby when it got to our turn in line I think also from travelling-with-a-cripple-fu. The flight attendants got us seats together with a bit of embarrassing fuss... It wasn't even really that stressful. I was in pain by that time but popped a vicodin as soon as I was sure we were staying on the plane.

The book I have to read, "Out" by Natsuo Kirino, is so annoying I'm not going to finish it! It seemed gruesome yet promising but I really don't like where it's going with the positioning of the rapist-murderer guy as the detective hero. I realize none of the characters are supposed to be likeable or ethical, and was able to read about the group of women chopping up the one dude's body which was quite perturbing but, I could deal. But the internal monologue of the rapist & torturer was too much for me to handle. I also was very annoyed at the normalization of rape -- the rapist at the factory is described by the women as a "pervert" and the narrator shows us that they are sort of turned on by the whole idea and were flattered or felt lucky to be harassed or in fear. So, that was beyond annoying to me. I could see it was heading towards a climactic rape-torture scene of the main female character. It is just the sort of incredibly annoying book they would make a big action movie out of.

I enjoyed the Dr. Who episode, "Turn Left"...

Minor SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

I have not seen all that many episodes of Dr. Who so I don't have a lot of context or background. I enjoy nearly every episode I've seen, old or new!

In this one my criticism is that Donna is set up to be all Special but her agency is undermined. (Denial of Agency!) She does something, but doesn't know what she's doing or why, and then doesn't remember it. She remembers little pieces, but doesn't know what they mean!

I liked Donna though and her bravery and attitude.

Did you notice how the monster is mostly unseen, but that makes it all the more creepy?

So, nearly passes Bechdel test, but didn't, because if you think about it Donna talks to the fortune teller (but about the Doctor, or because of him) and then with her mother (about Donna's hypothetical desire to meet a man) and then with Rose (about the Doctor, again).

While I noticed those things I still liked the story and it made me want to go back to see all the episodes I'd missed that it was referencing.

A city's soul and a fat rant

For the next three weeks I'll be traveling around! London, Brussels, Budapest, then London again. See you at Global Voices / Open Tech ! I've packed really well for the trip!

My tiny computer is very cute! I am still setting it up, but now it has functioning wireless and ubuntu on it! I described the process of installing eeebuntu on it!

Here's a very lovely blog I came across thanks to paraleipsis, beautiful & inspiring & clean & messy all at once, really a poet of vignettes & cities:

http://rocalberto.blogspot.com/

One of the things i like about this city ( and of course i didnt like everything, you can see in many ways how spoiled many americans are) is that being direct is a quality, its just an arrow that goes directly to your heart, somethimes you say ouch!! now THATS a quality, If you are like that you skip many many problems on the way. They have created the city of either you are strong, direct and fast or you are dead, and self consciusness is high .

I liked the photos and thoughts on all those rusting things, and also when he goes to be a fireman for one week in a fireman class and thinks, Fuck Art, this is much better.

Every once in a while I come across a stranger's blog and fall in love a little bit. Today I'm in also in love with Joy Nash and her Fat Rant #3:

I have a big juicy blog crush on justmylife and her dilemmas over her mom in law and swimming in the pool, and how her husband comes home from driving his concrete mixing truck and falls asleep in the recliner, and her potty mouthed bitching which I totally identify with and do all the time about every detail of my life complete with detail and overanalysis. There is something about the totally honest way she writes about the complexity of her extended family and daily life that I really admire. I think she is the secret-blog-friend I would most enjoy hanging out with in real life of all the hundreds of blogs I have seen in the last two months in my new job! She makes me miss Texas a bit... though I don't know where she is...

Today in Actual Real non-blog life I dropped Moomin off with my friend SuperT (You remember her from WoolfCamp?) and her son Hamster; I worked like a dog; I then had a nice gossipy lunch with Sarah and then we had a supposedly 1 hour meeting which was so productive we just kept going for several more hours. We do work well together! And she is a fantastic project manager! We were on the same wavelength or something and just cut through all sorts of confusions, design issues, usability, and all that stuff.

Then I drove back hauling ass through massive traffic to pick up Moomin and I got to hang out a little bit with SuperT! I gave her a cd with mashups and I showed her how to make music playlists in iTunes and how to organize bookmark toolbar in Safari! A little computer help is a birthday present too! We sat and sweated and talked about our lives! I miss hanging out with her.

And of course I am still completely fascinated by the Obama with roses and unicorns. I would totally get this airbrushed on my truck if I still had a truck. Hello! He's ejaculating roses! He has sparkles! What is he holding in his hand, I can't tell?

Action movie preview rant; racism in Indiana Jones

I went to my friend's steampunk beach wedding with Rook and Zond-7 and all and sundry!

Aren't they cute as hell?

Held a giant chiton (described in post below, but here's the photo to show how huge it was!)

Went to RoboGames! Drove all over hell and back! Drove to Oakland and hung out with Minnie and Moomin and small Mr. Screamypants!

I saw the Indiana Jones movie, loving it and hating it. I was steeling myself for an inevitable ancient-Harrison-Ford romance with a plucky yet needing to be rescued 24 year old actress, and indeed the movie had all the pain of Smurfette Syndrome, ie, a bunch of male characters of varying kinds and one plucky girl. BUT.... it had the saving grace of having TWO female characters. The plucky girl was older than one would expect from craptastic sexist ageist Hollywood, like actually old enough to have a young adult son, and old enough for it not to be completely stereotypically annoyingly prize-like for her to be involved with Indiana Jones. And she got to kick ass some of the time. The other female character was the totally awesome Evil Psychic Communist in uniform complete with shiny black gloves and obsession with aliens and mind control. She was okay.

There was a really stupid and unnecessary racist bit with the .... clay-covered "naked savages" springing out of the masonry to defend the temple. Why, why, why? Why was that necessary? "Insert mob of non-white naked howling irrational people here." What??? Why?! Covered in MUD! Wearing GRASS SKIRTS! HOWLING! I believe even ULULATING! Inexplicably kept alive for 5000 years! Fanatically DEVOTED! Mayan, yet Peruvian, yet grass skirt wearing yet wielding BOLAS! Then awe-struck, and bowing to the Artifact! Arrrgh. Rook and I sat there groaning and scoffing. Come on! More skulls, giant insects, sword fights, stone mechanisms rolling shut just a hair too late, waterfalls, yes, Racist Crap no. Anyway!

The pulp-like "ooo mayans" and "ooo nazca lines" and "ooo now we're in the amazon" was just funny and overblown. I didn't even get annoyed by it like I did with the weird stuff in Emperor's New Groove. It was so bad it was hilarious. Same with the "magnetism"!

Back to the villain - I enjoyed the bit where

SPOILER!!!!!

She was going, "I WANT TO KNOW" and staring at the alien skeleton and the aliens began to beam stuff into her head! Yay! I wanted her to know! Go, Hero of the Order of Lenin! Go, psychic scientist crazy woman! My higher level analysis was that her gender was being conflated with communism and the "hive mind" of the aliens. Manliness was the independent thought and maverick status of Indiana Jones and his little rebel boy sidekick. The communist villain spoke at length about her evil plot, which was to gain enormous psychic powers so that everyone in the world's thoughts would be like hers, they would be taught right thinking, but they wouldn't know it wasn't their thoughts. They'd think they were having their own ideas - but it would be communist mind control. Then, she ended up marvelling at the beauty of the alien hive mind, and merging orgasmically with it and squirting up into an interdimensional portal. You can see why I cheered. I don't think I was meant to and instead it was meant to be punishment or comeuppance and a fit ending. I think also the idea of women in authority, in positions of equality and authority, in communist countries, was mixed up with current (and past) anxieties about feminism, PC-ness, and women's rights, so that woman in authority = hive mind = evil.

Onward and backward to the previews!

The movie previews promised to be good since they would be action movies. I'm a HUGE sucker for explosions, chases, fights, and other action movie bullshit. Add space battles and I'm extra happy. So, no horrible "romantic comedy" previews I had to suffer through. Instead I got to admire the explosions, while bitching about the Smurfette Syndrome about 5 times in a row. "The Spirit" - Frank Miller movie, made fun of preview already, hilarious voiceover with superhero going "The city screams, she is my mother, she is my lover." Sooo that makes you a motherfucker then? *sigh* So stupid! So annoying! So unnecessary! Then yet another movie about a Man having Important Man experiences with women as peripheral sex prizes (some movie about a guy living backwards in time. I would prefer they just LEAVE WOMEN COMPLETELY OUT, thanks but no thanks. Give explosions and battles, keep nasssty chips.) Hellboy which looked fucking awesome!!!! Awesome! Hello! Just great! But again, is man having his Man Moments because hollywood if in an action movie has to show how being a Man is all about heroism and heroism is all about being a man! I am so annoyed. I bet if the female characters have any good fighting moments of bravery it will be only because they are defending their man, or their dad, or their brother, or carrying out their father's last wish, or some other annoying-ass thing whose subtext implies that women only exist in relation to men, especially when they kick ass. Then, Eagle Eye, which looked to be even more of the same. It is all about the profound experience of the lone man who in his lonely way has an Experience. Do I make myself clear, here? Why is this always the plot? It's like the Joseph Campbell sexist as hell Hero's Journey just mutated itself into every story possible.

Don't even get me STARTED on Wall-e. FFS. I mean, I want to see a fucking awesome movie about some robots. In space. Why must it get all messed up with gender stuff? Why not just put some eyelashes and lipstick on that rescue-screamy-flirty-sexy robot girl? WTF with the robot gender roles? You know, if I were a robot, I'd think the nicest bit of would be getting to be ungendered. Like we didn't go far enough with the movie where all the ants were heterosexual male/female couples (??) and the Bee one, and the one where the (male) cattle had udders? What?

Okay I'm glad I got that off my chest! Otherwise I had an intense few days (and nights) at work, a weekend packed with social events, I am concentrating hard on walking but it's very hard, and Rook and I gardened a little bit, which was super nice since it's been so neglected.

I have been noticing how my car is like my spaceship and everywhere I go is like an expensive gravity well. Some places, like the building I work in, or a grocery store, suck you into their enormous gravity well and it is hard to achieve escape velocity. For those, I need the powerful shuttlecraft of my wheelchair. For gas stations, small cafes, and places that can be traversed easily, I can achieve escape velocity handily with only the EVA jetpack of my crutches or cane. You think I am joking about imagining that those annoying slow wheelchair lifts are the airlock? No... I'm really imagining it and enjoying it with a slightly embarrassed smile in case anyone can read my thoughts. I prefer the Belter lifestyle without going near those annoying gravity wells where I am way too heavy, give me the asteroids any day. What this means in practical reality is that I go to the Carl's Jr. drive through a lot these days.

Waving out the window

As I drove in heavy traffic down Embarcadero halfway around the tip of San Francisco I noticed a really bored kid in the SUV in front of me and waved. Wow, he lit up! We began waving and making faces. He was excitedly telling the grown ups about it.

At the stoplights I would make horrible faces and give myself rabbit ears and pretend to be fighting my own fist. He was totally glowing with un-boredom and surprise, which made my day.

I like to think that years from now he will remember his family's tourist trip to SF as "that one time when the crazy stranger lady made the faces at me in the car"!

What will it take to impeach Bush and Cheney?

I am so sick and tired of hearing politicians and journalists shake their heads and say there is no way Bush will be impeached because we are in a war. Oh great ... so why not just go TEAR UP THE CONSTITUTION right now? If you're not going to actually uphold it, or uphold your goddamn oath to defend it, then what good is it to keep around?

I am so disgusted with Nancy Pelosi, with Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein and even with my representative in Congress, Anna Eshoo. What are they thinking? They just don't want to make Democrats look bad, politically, or something? What do they think they've been doing for all these years? Hiding like scared idiots.... Looking worse than bad. Why don't they make up their minds to do what is right?

I have been blogging since the war started that we should impeach Bush and Cheney, I'm not a powerful person, if I can say it, why can't they? What is wrong with my stupid political representatives? Don't they have the slightest particle of ethics aside from misguided "pragmatism" and covering their own asses? Would ANYTHING make them stand up and say something?

Seriously, WHAT would go over the line for them?

I really expected better of Nancy Pelosi than to see her up there saying that there is no way she will ever back impeachment.

No way at all? What the hell?

I would like an actual journalist to ask Pelosi, where is her line? What would be an impeaching offense? Can Bush just do anything he damn well pleases? Apparently so! What would make her say, like Rep. Cynthia McKinney did, that we should impeach Bush?

Thank you former Representative McKinney for doing that!

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2006

Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, I wish to enter the following into the CONGRESSIONAL RECORD:

ADDENDA TO A RESOLUTION INTRODUCING ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT AGAINST GEORGE WALKER BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND OTHER OFFICIALS: FURTHER ACTIONS BY THE PRESIDENT THAT WARRANT FURTHER INVESTIGATION AS POSSIBLE GROUNDS FOR IMPEACHMENT AS IDENTIFIED BY MANY SCHOLARS, LAWYERS AND CONCERNED CITIZENS

I. FAILURE TO ENSURE THE LAWS ARE FAITHFULLY EXECUTED

(1) Self-Exemption From Laws Upon Signing.

(2) Suspension of Basic Legal Proceedings.

(3) Promoting Illegal War.

(4) Promoting Torture.

(5) Promoting Kidnappings and Renditions for Torture.

(6) Use of Illegal Weapons.

II. ABUSE OF OFFICE AND OF EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE

(1) Obstructing Inquiry and Detection.

(2) Replacing the Veto With Signing Statements.

...
...
...

It goes on from there! And it doesn't end for a good long while.

I hope at least the Democrats and certainly some of the better Republicans will WAKE UP and realize, they can't cover their asses forever and we are NOT heading to police state USA.
The cold light of history will expose their complicity in Bush and Cheney's war crimes.

Write to Senator Boxer: https://boxer.senate.gov/index.cfm
To Feinstein: http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ContactUs.EmailMe
To Pelosi in her role as Speaker of the House: http://www.speaker.gov/contact

Just write to them and let them know your mind.

I don't know what good that will do, but let's do it anyway. I feel like blogging about it is more effective, and for me it represents how I feel a lot better, but I'm doing the direct emails too in the hopes that my drop in the bucket will count for something.

Invertebrate rescue and the Rights of Women

Happy birthday to me! Happy birthday to me! Happy birthday to meeeeee! Eeeeeeeeeeeepc!!!!

I got a tiny cute little computer for my birthday!

And pancakes and colorful drawings, and everyone being together, and the beach, and seeing the Kung Fu Panda movie (which I wrote up briefly this morning for Body Impolitic), and some fabulous zines, and Flora Tristan's The Workers' Union. (DROOOOOL, I love Flora Tristan so much! I've read her Peregrinations of a Pariah and her London travel journal and some of her political writing! But not this, ever. It's amazing.)

Rook made the pancakes and had also made cookies the night before. After the movie last night we all ran around Yerba Buena Park, went to the MLK waterfall, and it was super nice (but tiring). He and Moomin were doing fake kung fu and then I think for the rest of the evening and the next day they were playing they were superpowered kung fu animals. Rook and Zond-7 and I watched the two newest Doctor Who episodes and they were JUST GREAT and very disturbing.

Today! I almost wimped out on an Expedition. Went anyway.

Went to the beach! Everything on the drive down rt. 1 stunningly beautiful. My favorite tiny beach inside the breakwater! Kids rocketing around! They built a sand castle with me & ran around like wild things. Lucked out no traffic no fog, only a bit windy! Saw many moon jellies, harbor seals sticking up their heads from the water, grebes pelicans cormorants and terns. Rolled & walked rather a long way. (I am exhausted but aside from the pain in my leg am okay, it's more like regular exercise exhaustion, but I don't know how much I can do tomorrow physically).

Then when we walked to the point to sit on the wall, we saw a guy surf fishing. He pulled something out of the water with a gaff, inspected it, and threw it down onto the sand. He was far enough away that it was hard to tell what it was. But... it looked like the shape of a giant gumboot chiton and I saw a flash of orange underneath. I didn't have my crutches (having gone from the path to the wall on Zond-7's arm) and there was no way I could get to it. "You could find out..." "I won't know what it is!" "You could bring it to me!" "WHAT!!! Pick it UP???!!!!" I couldn't believe it when he really picked it up and started bringing it over. I mean, this is a thing pretty much as big as a human liver and kind of the same texture. Or, like, a liver mixed with a smallish nerf football. OMG I started bouncing around and going "YAYYYYYY!!!" Guess what, it was indeed the most humonguous gumboot chiton I have ever seen. It's my favorite kind! I saw the magnetite-tipped teeth of its radula! and they were super disgustingly creepily awesome! Anyway this thing had to be a foot long! We held it for a while and then Zond-7 was totally a hero and clambered out onto the rocks with it and dramatically threw it into as deep and rocky a spot as he could manage. I've never seen one at this beach and it seemed like a sort of fabulous omen for it to be my birthday and that I got to hold my favorite invertebrate.

The beach has become a mixture of sublime and boring, like that Berlioz opera.

I thought about how intensely my perceptions and experience have changed over the course of my life. When I was a kid, I loved the cold. It felt just cold, but not bad. There was an initial shock, then I welcomed the cold and felt like I was made of knives and wind. I'd breathe in the cold, or open myself up to the 50 degree sea water, and expand like the universe, jumping around, body surfing, rolling in the snow, whizzing down a hill on my flying saucer. My lips would turn blue and I'd shiver uncontrollably, and someone would make me come out of the water or into the house or car. But now, there is no way I can enjoy the cold, or even tolerate it without intense pain. I thought of times when I've heard people (talking to me, or others) cajoling, persuading, bullying: "Come on! It's not so cold! You'll get used to it!" They could say that to me now, and it wouldn't be true. Likewise, I thought of all the old people who I grew up around, and their constant horror at how cold I must be, and how impossible it was for them to understand that I was not suffering from cold air or water or snow, to the point of complete disrespect of my reported experience. I thought of how many experiences like this there are. Not just cold or heat, but pain, the tastes of food, emotional suffering, oppression, sanity, *reality*. People change over the course of their lives, and know, or should know, that it is possible to perceive the world and experience very differently and that cold DOES feel good, and that also, cold DOES feel bad and terrible, and there is a giant spectrum of true experience. In other words, I marvel that people don't respect others' subjectivity or reported experience. How can they not have learned some measure of empathy, merely from the changes they've been through in their own lives and the different people they were and are and will be? I said some of this to Zond-7 who replied that people are alienated from their former selves, their younger selves, and instead construct narratives in which they used to be wrong, and now are right. I felt like I was seeing in greater depth how it is that people lose or never develop a sense of that respect and empathy and how related it is (or can be ) to discontinuity of identity and self hate/disrespect. I realized that "self respect" has to include all your selves across time. Zond-7 went on to talk about the evening person (who stays up too late) dissing the morning person (your future self who you are screwing up by staying up too late) so that the morning person (future you) is really angry at past you from the evening before. (Hmm, I am still thinking about that and myself and my issues with health and driving myself too hard.) We made some remarks on how lovely it would have been in a way to have these thoughts in 1789 or something when we could have written "A Treatise on the Unities and Discontinuities of Human Consciousness and the Rational Social Mind" and been studied like geniuses hundreds of years later but instead it will be like "LiveJournal entry, ho hum, 2 comments". Hahaha! We didn't mean it and do believe it is a million million times better to have the net and have everyone saying this sort of thing in casual asides to ferment & propagate like letters but more discoverable.

I give you a quote from Flora Tristan, from the chapter "Why I Mention Women" in The Workers' Union, 1843, the book where she called for an international social justice movement and union to transcend existing governments:

Workers, in 1791, your fathers proclaimed the immortal declaration of the rights of man, and it is to that solemn declaration that today you owe your being free and equal men before the law. May your fathers be honored for this great work! But, proletarians, there remains for you men of 1843 a no less great work to finish. In your turn, emancipate the last slaves still remaining in French society; proclaim the rights of woman, in the same terms your fathers proclaimed yours.
"We, French proletarians, after fifty-three years of experience, recognize that we are duly enlightened and convinced that the neglect and scorn perpetrated upon the natural rights of women are the only cause of unhappiness in the world, and we have resolved to expose her sacred and inalienable rights in a solemn declaration inscribed in our charter. We wish women to be informed of our declaration, so that they will not let themselves be oppressed and degraded any more by man's injustice and tyranny, and so that men will respect the freedom and equality they enjoy in their wives and mothers.
1. The goal of society necessarily being the common happiness of men and women, the Workers' Union guarantees them the enjoyment of their rights as working men and women.
2. Their rights include equal admission to the Workers' Union palaces, whether they be children, or disabled or elderly.
3. Women being man's equal, we understand that girls will receive as rational, solid, and extensive (though different) an education in moral and professional matters as the boys.
4. As for the disabled and the elderly, in every way, the treatment will be the same for women as for men.

A footnote by the translator, Beverly Livingston, notes that Tristan had read Mary Wollstonecraft but probably not Olympe de Gouges.