Still Funny, Even Though John Cleese Didn't Write It

The "Axes of Evil" essay that is attributed to John Cleese was actually written by Andrew Marlatt. Another Python, Terry Jones, wrote a political essay for the Observer where he applies Bushian logic to the man on his street who "gives him queer looks."

Yes, I was looking through Snopes this evening.

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Fun for Dogs

Via Metafilter, comes the link to Dog Island. Per Snopes, this is a hoax. But it's a great one.

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Ancient Pleasures

A woman who lives in one of those "big old Victorians" on Ocean View is selling out the contents of her attic on eBay. Yesterday I bought a little book called "Games and Amusements," 1889, formerly owned by Mrs. J. R. True. I wish we still played games like these at parties. Game playing among adults has deteriorated to those cruel and stereotypical exercises at "showers." More...

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Consciencious Objectors: The Next Generation

The Santa Cruz School district trustees decided yesterday that they will not give military recruiters children's contact information unless parents give permission. They have interpreted Bush's "No Child Left Behind" law such that this is a discretion allowed to the local board. The district lawyer said this could cost $500K in federal grants.

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How Do Gay People Count?

Deb Price writes a weekly syndicated column about gay issues for, well, for straight people, I guess. I usually can't finish reading one, but this week her column is about gay families and the census, and I couldn't resist the statistics. More...

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The other reason I've been gone

Is because my computer is away having a CPU transplant. When it comes back, it will be a sleek black "pismo" powerbook with a 500 MHz G4. yum.

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Where Have I Been?

We went on a road trip to Northern California. More stories and photos soon.

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Worker-Owned Factory Makes Money

In an extraordinary story in the Mercury, we read that Argentinian workers bought their own copper factory, are making a profit, and are paying themselves around $100 more per month than when it was owned "privately." I say extraordinary because we rarely read anything about unions except that they are threatening to strike.

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Telemarketing the Left

I just got off the phone with a solicitor from the People for the American Way. I wanted to know how she got my phone number, and she said it must have been from the "don't approve Ashcroft as Attorney General" web site.
"And look how that turned out." More...

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Three Changes Around Town

While on errands today, I noticed some new businesses. More...

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The Truth about Eleanor

I just love that feature, The Onion in History.

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Juxtaposition

I didn't hear about this story until this month's Harper's arrived, with a draped "Guernica" on the cover. Last month, as reported in CommonDreams and elsewhere, after Colin Powell made that powerpoint presentation to the UN, he appeared on TV outside the Security Council chamber, and the tapestry of Picasso's Guernica, which has hung outside that room since 1985, was covered with blue drapery and the United Nations seal. More...

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UCSC loses racial discrimination suit

I often hear details and rumors of many employment discrimination suits at UCSC. I don't think that UCSC's management is particularly racist or sexist. Sometimes people are hired for their skills, who also happen to be supervisors. Since UC doesn't train or oversee supervisors very well, poor supervisors make mistakes, and some eventually commit crimes of illegal discrimination. In other words, their incompetance is the environment where discrimination can grow. More...

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Bad Science Mythology

David Weinberger wrote an article in Salon about the myth of radio interference, based on the work of David Reed, an internet architect. The article is interesting in a technical way, because it explains how our property-theory applied to the EM spectrum is based on 100-year old technology. He says that "radio interference" is an artifact of radio receivers, not physics. Once the spectrum is made available to any device, people and things could communicate via energy through space. I read this and thought "Wow. We could be like gods: omnicient, omnipresent. "

It is also interesting in a political way, as it ends with this by Reed:

"The best science is often counterintuitive, and bad science always leads to bad policy."

People who build networks need to understand this principle. Fortunately, I get to work with people who do. Unfortunately, we have to work with people who don't.

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What Time is It?

I heard that UCSC Journalism Instructor Conn Hallinan noted the other day that none of the students these days wear watches. "They're just like you," she said, "Everything they use has a clock on it."

Which is true. I don't wear something on my wrist when I have a computer, phone, and Palm starting back at me at almost every moment of my day. And since I have TiVo, there's no need to "catch" programs. Imagine: a world without watches.

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Colonialization

What would Santa Cruz be like if people came from another place and liked what they saw here and just took over? What if any physical contact between the new people us made us sick, and most of us died? What if they took us into their part of the city and made is work for them? I think about things like that sometimes. More...

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Rough Patch

I've started a few entries this week, but haven't been able to finish them. My astrologer, Judy Havey, says that this week:

We feel we're laboring toward the Full Moon and Spring Equinox, as the Sun squares Saturn, and Mercury squares Pluto and Saturn, March 10-17.  Try as we may to get our act together, it's so hard, there's so much to do. The adverse angles to Mercury, which is our filter of understanding, give us a dose of negative thinking, worst-case scenarios.

Maybe that's why. Lots of stress at work, yet none of it related to actually working. But it all should be temporary. On the other hand, at UCSC, "temporary" means five years, and everything is temporary.

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Swords to Plowshares—sort of

Fort Ord on the other side of Monterey Bay used to be an army base. I went to a protest there as soldiers left for El Salvador. Or Nicaragua. Or somewhere we didn't belong.

Anyway,the army base was closed in 1990 and its facilities are being "repurposed." A portion of it is now a California State University, another is a UC Santa Cruz Natural Reserve, and another, a "regional development initiative" called UCSC MBEST.

And someone has turned the old military stockade into a place you can shoot your friends: Jailhouse Paintball

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Capitola Wharf Arch

I saw an arch for the Capitola Wharf on the back of a truck downtown the other day. I'm not familiar with the wharf out there to know if this is a new or an old arch. More...

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Activist

The Sentinel today has a story about my neighbor Paul Martin. Paul not only paints the tags off the bridges, he mows the field next to his house so the strip near the sidewalk doesn't fill up with trash.

Other folks in the neighborhood are keeping the tags covered too, but no one works as hard as Paul. It's so much better down here these days.

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History is a Helix

This week's Metro contains yet another rehashing of the same old information about Charley Parkhurst that we've heard for years. Parkhurst was a nineteenth-century Santa Cruzan who was born a woman and lived as a man. More...

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Corporate Branding at Bay Street

The Dream Inn became the West Coast Santa Cruz Hotel. And now it has another name. Even worse. More...

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UC Unions story from Santa Barbara

Three employee unions representing about 1,500 of UCSB's 8,000 employees are working without contracts while slowly negotiating new ones with the Unversity of California. More...

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College Pranks

The mascot of UC Santa Cruz is the indigenous gastropod, the banana slug. About twenty years ago, a small group of athletes decided that the official mascot was the sea lion. There was an uneasy period of dual mascots, but eventually the mollusk won an election 15 to 1.

For decades, a sculpture of a patriarchal family of sea lions has rested behind the Thimann lecture hall. Recently it lost an election. More...

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Fire from Ice

Too cool. How to make a lens of ice so you can start a fire. via idletype.

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The Solution to Weddings

Dave Barry's column today is pretty funny, and includes the final solution to the wedding problem.
Well, not the wedding problem where straight people's weddings are legally recognized and mine isn't, but the other problem.

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Quail Hollow Photos

We went to Quail Hollow Ranch again, even though this is the High Tick Season. More...

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Photos: University Labor United Feb 26, 2003

I took a few photos at UCSC's version of the statewide Union Solidarity Rallies last week. More...

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"People Will Die; I Might Die"

While I'm relieved that Buffy will be able to end with the plot finished up properly, I can't shake the dread that the writers are going to kill Willow.

On the other hand, perhaps then we would have a lesbian revolution. What the women of The Kitten might do.

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Statewide Union Rallys

Last Wednesday, UC unions statewide held solidarity rallies. The UC Santa Barbara rally is reported by the campus paper . The Berkeley rally is reported here.

The Sentinal didn't cover the rally at UCSC, but KSBW did. As the unions arrived at Quarry Plaza from different parts of campus, a modern dance class performed dances choreographed especially for the rally.

UPTE UCSC President Lynne Sheehan invited us all to call the chancellor's office and ask her to support UPTE's proposal. We passed the phone around and pretty much filled up her voice mail.

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Thousands of Pictures

Thursday I went to a talk about the new "Images of America: Santa Cruz, California" by Sheila O'Hare and Irene Berry. They have a web site at the library about it, and this summer there will be an exhibit. More...

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