Fiat Lux

According to the WaPo:

The Smithsonian Institution is entering the highly competitive world of music downloads by offering the Smithsonian Folkways collection of ethnic and traditional music in an online music store.

...

The Web site, www.smithsonianglobalsound.org, will allow searches by artist, geographic location, language, cultural group or instrument. All of the Folkways archives, including photographs, can be downloaded onto a screen. Also in development are scrolling translations of some of the music for use on a personal computer.

I'm looking forward to checking out their offerings.

No joke, to the best of our knowledge Gimi was born at the SF SPCA one year ago today.

Gimi has grown into a large and affectionate cat whose personality is still quite kittenish. His latest obsession is the trash can in our office, which he loves to climb into, paw at, and otherwise scour for bits of paper he can pull out and play with.

UPDATE: Fixed - Gimi's photo was not appearing in all browsers.

It was a year ago this week that Scott and I were in Rome. Even though we're Jewish, I'm more than a little envious of my sister, who's currently living in Rome. She gets a more or less front-row seat for all the Papal festivities.

It's fascinating to watch one of the world's oldest and largest institutions change hands. She'll probably find it more of an inconvenience than anything else (stores closing, streets being shut down, even larger than normal throngs of tourists, etc) but we'll see.

Orcinus has an update on the ongoing mess that C-SPAN is making out of trying to cover Deborah Lipstadt's book "History on Trial: My Day in Court With David Irving". he also points to an article at Salon (sorry, registration and/or watching a commercial required) whith this nice graf:

Sooner or later, every Jew who perceives anti-Semitism as an encroaching danger gets described as hysterical or paranoid. The flattering self-deception at the root of that reaction is a way of consigning anti-Semitism to the past, of saying, "Surely we've become more civilized than that." "History on Trial" makes the case, as did "Lying About Hitler," that we have not become so civilized we are above tolerating David Irving.

Indeed. I also note the following news item today:

A professor who taught history this semester at Fairleigh Dickinson University made disparaging remarks about blacks and Jews on an Internet broadcast and is an active member of a group that calls itself "America's Nazi Party."

The university last week relieved Jacques Pluss of his classroom duties, but not because of his white supremacist views. Officials at the Teaneck campus said he missed too many classes.

Pluss said his membership in the National Socialist Movement, the largest neo-Nazi organization in the country, did not color his teaching. The derogatory remarks were made during a Web cast he hosts called "White Viewpoint" on the organization's site.

On the one hand, I recognize that is it somewhat suspect to fire a professor for holding unpopular views. That's an approach too easily abused. But still, the fact the that University had to fire the guy for missing too many classes instead of because he's a racist, anti-semitic bigot is just a little nuts.

Wow. Getting blogrolled by Kevin Drum has done some amazing things to my web traffic. I think I'm wearing out my free SiteMeter account, but I'm not quite ready to shell out $59 for the upgraded account. Time to start researching alternatives.

Woke up this morning with severe pain on the left side of my neck. I've had this problem on and off for years but this is a particularly bad episode. Advil isn't doing it for me, but I have class today, so I'm not trying anything stronger.

While trying to keep my head from moving too much, I dedcided to review my current blogroll. I do this roughly every month to check on what I'm enjoying, what I don't much care for, and what I click on out of a sense of obligation. And I've noticed an interesting pattern developing. More and more, I'm cutting group blogs out of my daily read lists.

It's not that I think the group blogs are "bad". It's just that what really keeps me at a blog is the personal voice of the writer, and in many group blogs that personal feel just isn't there. The group blogs often have a lot of interesting news items, good writing, and thoughtful insights, but I find I need something more than that to keep me excited about coming back to a blog over the long haul. A touch of personality -- be it cat blogging, talking about your latest trip, or even just a Friday iTunes mix -- makes a difference. At least for me.

There's a related point I've been thinking about, which is, why I think "business blogs" are both a dumb idea and doomed to being either boring or short-lived, but that's a post for a different day.

My ongoing neck pain is really slowing down my productivity this week. However, here's more on the US gov't and passport silliness. As if the RFID chip proposal wasn't bad enough, this one is, pun intended, a real pain in the neck.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S announcement that U.S. citizens are soon going to need passports to get back into their country from Mexico and Canada, is being played as a way to keep Americans safer. But like most everything else this president has done in the name of security, the only things there will be more of if this measure goes through are bureaucracy, hassles for Americans who don't have passports and never needed them before to travel to Mexico or Canada, and bad feeling between the United States and its neighbors.

San Francisco's mass transit system, MUNI, announced a triple whammy today: driver layoffs, service cutbacks, AND a fare increase. Suckage all around. Scott and I rely on MUNI to get both to work and to school, so now we get to wait and see if the lines we ride will be affected, plus pay more for less service.

What a stupid, short-sighted move this is. There are not many cities that have the geography and urban density to make living without a car a real option, and San Francisco is one of them. SF should be increasing, not decreasing, the amount of mass transit coverage it has. Otherwise you're just making it harder for people to get around and encouraging more car use.

Yes, I know that budgets have to be balanced, yadda yadda, but there's got be be better ways to do it than this.

I haven't blogged on this issue yet and I should have. Fortunately the good folks over at the All Spin Zone kicked me in the butt and reminded me that I need to.

The recent rise in rhetoric about bad things happening to judges who don't make the "Right" decisions (and I use that in both senses of the word) is very troubling. Without a fair and honest judiciary, one that can make decisions without fear that they'll be second-guessed by someone with a gun, this country is in big trouble (if it isn't already).

Here's a key point, from a WaPo piece on a recent gathering of conservative leaders in Washington DC:

...lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that [SCOTUS Justice] Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, "upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law."

Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said.

The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary.

Indeed.

By way of PVP Online, I found this completely depressing news item: Sesame Street's Cookie Monster will not be singing "C is for Cookie" anymore.

How thoroughly depressing. Yes, I know, American kids are fatter than ever and need to learn healthy eathing habits, Blah blah blah. I don't care. I loved the Cookie Monster exactly the way that he was and I'm sad that the next generation won't get to grow up with great, catchy kid's songs like this:

C Is For Cookie

"C" is for cookie
That's good enough for me
"C" is for cookie
That's good enough for me
"C" is for cookie
That's good enough for me
Oh.........cookie, cookie, cookie starts with "C".

"C" is for cookie
That's good enough for me
"C" is for cookie
That's good enough for me
"C" is for cookie
That's good enough for me
Oh....cookie,cookie,cookie starts with "C".

Hey,you know what?
A round cookie with one bit out of it looks like a "C",
A round donut with one bit out of it also looks like a "C",
but it's it not as good as a cookie!
And oh the moon sometimes looks like a "C" but you can't eat that

Sooooooooooooo.........

"C" is for cookie
That's good enough for me...Yeah!
"C" is for cookie
That's good enough for me
"C" is for cookie
That's good enough for me
Oh....cookie, cookie, cookie starts with "C"
Yeah!
Cookie, cookie, cookie starts with "C"
Cookie, cookie, cookie starts with "C"

MmMmMmMmMmMmMmMmMmMmMmM...

Andrea Dworkin, dead at age 58.

I can't say that I agree with some of her more extreme positions on the relationships between men and women, but she made some highly valid points about how pornography dehumanizes women in the eyes of men. And I have a lot of respect for the courage it took for her to step up and talk about these issues, despite decades of being decried as a man-hating lesbian and worse.

We had to rush Tasha to the nearest all-night animal hospital around 1:00AM after discovering that she had a ruptured abscess near her butt. She was bleeding and leaking pus and other yukky substances.

The doctor at the All Animals Emergency Hospital seems to think she's going to be OK, but we won't know for sure until at least 7:00 am. I don't think we'll be getting much sleep tonight.

UPDATE: She's home but she is not out of the woods. The abcess was deep and serious. We have to give her a high dose of antibiotics for the next 10 days and bring her in for a re-check in 2 days.

I've had a ton of work for school this week, hence the light posting, but at least Tasha is doing much better. To celebrate, here's a favorite photo of her:

She's the least evil cat you can think of, but this photo (taken while she was yawning) make her look like Evil Incarante. Or something.

James Wolcott is hilarious today. Here's an except, but go read the whole thing, especially if you're in the mood for a good snarky laugh to help cheer you up after filing your taxes:

Limbaugh seemed to be implying at the top of his voice that blowjobs are an integral part of the liberal agenda, an argument which he may want to rethink. The popularity of blowjobs is difficult to metric but undeniable; they cause little harm and zero unwanted pregnancies. If the plentitude of blowjobs is part of the Clinton legacy, millions owe the former president a debt of gratitude and an annual pilgrimage to the Clinton Memorial Library in Arkansas.

Yet, like so many products and pleasures, blowjobs aren't evenly distributed in society. It's a renewable natural resource not everyone gets to enjoy, and I was struck by the vehement tone of Limbaugh's tirade. He sounded bitter. I've seen this rancor inflict so many middle-aged men. Reading about all the oral sex young people are presumably having, they feel envious and resentful.

A number of female bloggers have rolled up their sleeves, dug in, and done the hard work necessary to get a conference off the ground. BlogHer will be held in nearby Santa Clara in late July of this year. Kudos to them for doing the work, but I won't be there.

It's a curious place to be for someone who considers herself a feminist. Part of me feels that I ought to go to show support for fellow women bloggers, but I can't summon any enthusiasm at all for the event. Perhaps it is because after having spent the better part of a decade working in the technology world, the concept of "wow, let's have an event where all the techie women can get together" has lost its freshness for me.

But even more than that, I think it is because I resist being labeled as a "woman blogger". I am a woman, and I have a blog. But Fiat Lux is not a "woman's blog" any more than it is a "Jewish blog" or even a "political blog". It's just MY blog.

I write about some women's issues, and some Jewish issues, and some political issues, because all of those things interest me. But I strongly resent being pigeon-holed into a specific category of blog based on my gender, religion, or choice of subject matter. Above all else, this is a personal blog. As Walt Whitman said,

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then. I contradict myself.
I am large. I contain multitudes.

Still, I wish the BlogHer women good luck.

Time to remedy that. I'm swamped with classwork & haven't time for anything original right now. And Digby, as usual, hits the nail on the head. The day Ann Coulter makes the cover of Time magazine as anything other than an object of derision, is a day to worry.

Ann Coulter is not, as Howie Kurtz asserts today, the equivalent of Michael Moore. Michael Moore is is not advocating the murder of conservatives. He just isn't. For instance, he doesn't say that Eric Rudolph should be killed so that other conservatives will learn that they can be killed too. He doesn't say that he wishes that Tim McVeigh had blown up the Washington Times Bldg. He doesn't say that conservatives routinely commit the capital offense of treason. He certainly doesn't put up pictures of the fucking snoopy dance because one of his political opponents was killed. He doesn't, in other words, issue calls for violence and repression against his political enemies. That is what Ann Coulter does, in the most coarse, vulgar, reprehensible way possible.

Moore says conservatives are liars and they are corrupt and they are wrong. But he is not saying that they should die. There is a distinction. And it's a distinction that Time magazine and Howard Kurtz apparently cannot see.

Two bits of health-related news today:

1) It's OK to be a few pounds overweight. Woot!

2) the USDA are a bunch of wankers. Their MyPyramid website is slow as hell and gives insipid, confusing advice to boot.

Russell Beattie has some interesting thoughts about the Treo, and by extension, the PalmOS world. His point that although Silicon Valley loves the Treo, it's statistically nonexistant in the greater universe of portable devices.

It was empirically obvious, most of the people in the room had a Treo, so it must be a really popular platform, right? Wrong. If you've got a Treo you might be a cutting edge technologist, but you're in the backwater of mobility. Trust me. (Actually, don't trust me, just look at the frigin' numbers.)

Now, I will admit that here in the U.S. Palm is doing better that its competitors. The numbers I've seen show that Palm phones actually outnumber both Symbian and Windows Mobile phones here by a double. But honestly, out of 170 million American subscribers, the total smart phone numbers are still ridiculously low, so I wouldn't pay much attention to this. The fact is that Palm is a niche player in a niche market (there are more cell phone subscribers in China - 300m - than there are *people* in the U.S.) as time goes by they will increasingly become less relevant as a platform, not the opposite.

I think he's being a bit too harsh about the potential future of PalmOS and the Treo, but he's not completely wrong either. Given how much PalmSource is struggling to maintain any kind of relevence in the US consumer market, given the declining number of big-name licencees and the declining number of PalmOS devices available in the market, there's signifcant reason to worry about the future if you're a PalmOS aficionado.

And yet -- people are passionate about their Treos for a reason. They're great devices. My Treo 180 died over a year ago and I still miss it. If I could afford a Treo 600, I'd have one. The power of a small, yet dedicated market -- especially when key sections of that market are VCs and other players -- should not be ignored.

Unbelievable. Apparently, per David Brooks, the entire poisonous political climate of today is all Justice Harry Blackmun's fault, for writing the Roe v Wade opinion.

His "logic" (word used advisedly) seems to be: If a court makes a decision that some people (read: right-wingers) don't like, then it's not a 'legitimate' ruling. SCOTUS should let the state legislatures decide these controversial issues, because of course nobody has ever disagreed with what a state legislature has tried to pass into law.

Orcinus also has a piece today on the rising tide of nastiness towards the court system. And it's getting scary. The judicial arm of government was created precisely to act as a check on the legislative and executive arms of government, and this all out assault on the courts strikes me as a sign that the other parts of the system don't want the inconveniences of balance.

Color me nervous.

We're off to NYC this afternoon to celebrate Passover with the families, so blogging will be light until Tuesday. In honor of the trip, and because Kevin Drum is catblogging Rome, here's a nameless kitty from the Palatine Hill in Rome:

Ciao!

I hate sleeping on fold-out couch beds. They all suck. I haven't had a good night's sleep since I left SF. Fortunately, we go back to SF and my oh so comfy plush-pillow-top bed tomorrow.

There's stuff going on but I'm too tired to comment coherently. Just wanted to check in.

That last post was Post #500, according to my Activity Log. Wow.

So as it happens, Scott and I were on the United flight diverted to Chicago today. In fact, the guy pulled off the plane was in the seat right next to Scott.

Long story short, it was much ado about nothing. We weren't scared at all; the guy was obviously big into holistic/Chinese medicines, but he didn't make us nervous at all. It seemed more like a big misunderstanding than anything else. I hope DHS doesn't treat the guy too harshly.

We've been in Chicago for about 2 hours, waiting for them to get everything sorted out. I have to reboard now. Will post more when we get to SF.

I slept 9+ hours in my blessedly comfortable bed last night after a very long day... and am still pooped. I might even take a nap before class tonight. I have a few things bookmarked over the course of the trip that I'd like to comment on but I'm too tired.

Following up to yesterday, we got interviewed by the local ABC affiliate as we were collecting our bags at baggage claim & made the nightly news. You can see the report here if you really want to (but it's an 8+MB download, be warned).

Sorry about the continued silence. I'm catching up from the trip & still pretty tired.