NO FUTURE!

I have no idea what this means, but it fills me with a mixture of horror and grim satisfaction that words can not describe. Apparently, Jeb Bush has announced that he has no future, which (of course) immediately brings to mind the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen." More irony after we spend a moment contemplating the lyric.

God save the queen her fascist regime
It made you a moron a potential h bomb !

God save the queen she aint no human being
There is no future in englands dreaming

Dont be told what you want dont be told what you need
Theres no future no future no future for you

God save the queen we mean it man (God save window leen)
We love our queen God saves (God save... human beings)

God save the queen cos tourists are money
And our figurehead is not what she seems
Oh God save history God save your mad parade
Oh lord God have mercy all crimes are paid

When theres no future how can there be sin
Were the flowers in the dustbin
Were the poison in your human machine
Were the future your future

God save the queen we mean it man
There is no future in englands dreaming

No future for you no future for me
No future no future for you


Ahhh. So, the story from Reuters says that Jeb Bush told a Spanish-speaking audience that he has no future in politics, basically because brother Dubya screwed the pooch. The Bush clan's power-grab over the last 30 years (going way back to when Bush père was head of the CIA) has culminated in one of the most corrupt and vapid Administrations in US history. And the victim: Jeb. (Jeb was the heir apparent, years ago, but somehow that simian creep from Texas took over the family business. Imagine Christmas with the Bushes this year! Whoof!)

Jeb Rotten lives!

Feh. To hell with these people.

meme: 10 weird things about me

For as long as I've been online, doing the web thing, the email thing, the chat thing, and now the blog thing, I haven't done much of the community thing. One of the community things I haven't done much of is follow a meme. But I've been tapped to follow a meme by my sweetest one, so herewith is my attempt to follow through and provide...

10 Weird Things About Me.

The rules are deceptively simple: "Each player of this game starts off with ten weird things or habits or little known facts about yourself. People who get tagged must write in a blog of their own ten weird things or habits or little known facts as well as state this rule clearly. At the end you must choose six people to be tagged and list their names. No tagbacks!"

Caveat #1: As I begin, I'm not sure there even are 10 weird things about me, despite my loveliest's assurance that there are.

Caveat #2: These are not in order of weirdness. Not all of them seem weird to me.

1. I have to eat. I absolutely must eat three meals a day, just about exactly according to the ol' food pyramid (though consuming far less animal protein), or else I feel like complete and total crap.

2. I have lived for 8 or more years in 4 states (Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and California).

3. I played ice hockey for a couple years (sadly only a couple) in Ohio when I was a kid. I played goalie. And I was a holy goddamn terror, though I played for the worst team imaginable (we won 1 game, the first game). I usually saw 30+ shots a game, and usually allowed 4 or 5 goals a game, which gave me the highest goals-against and the highest save percentage in that league. I slashed more ankles than God can count.

4. I own several vintage manual typewriters dating from the 1920s to the 1960s. I love 'em. I wrote a few hundred pages of notes on my dissertation on two of them (and my dissertation was under 200 pages).

5. I floss. You should too, but you don't.

6. From what I've gathered, I was the youngest person ever to complete the requirements for a Ph.D. degree at Duquesne University. I get this second hand. My grad school pal Paul Swift told me that when he filed to complete his Ph.D., the folks in the graduate school told him he was the youngest ever to complete the degree. He finished his the same spring I finished mine, but he was older than me. Q.E.D. Being the youngest, and having a buck and a quarter in your pocket, would get you a bus ride in Pittsburgh.

7. I dream in color, in stereo, lucidly, with taste and smell, and in pure abstract concepts. That last one is what really throws people, perhaps because I can't explain what it's like. Once, when I was reading a hell of a lot of (German philosopher G.W.F.) Hegel for a period of a few days, I dreamed what seemed to be my understanding of the way Hegel makes concepts fit, work, and fight together. It was amazing. I woke up, tried to get some of it down, went back to bed, and in the morning, my notes made (you're expecting this) absolutely no sense whatsoever.

8. I'm terrified of thunder and lightning. More than anything else except vicious homicidal gangsters and my ex-wife, I am stone-cold afraid of thunderstorms. The only thing to do is curl in the fetal position, preferably under the bed, while covered with blankets and cuddling our stuffed bunny or the cat. My fear of thunder and lightning is, as far as I can tell, my only true phobia.

9. My oldest friend, Bob, has been my friend for 32 years. We spent lots of our childhood together in Maumee, Ohio, making ridiculous tape recordings of TV and radio parodies under the auspices of radio station WDUM. Bob was the host of "This Stupid Program," which was (he would say, as the only content to the show) 32 and one-half seconds, even though in fact it only lasted about 12. I wrote ads for products from a conglomerate called Krazy Kooks Inkorporated, which sold flavored puke, manuals on such topics as how to read, and basically anything else that came to mind.

10. Unsightly stains!

The rule is, I have to tag 6 people. There's no rule that they have to participate, but I think if they don't, that means I lose. I'm not sure. Back in the day, memes didn't have rules, you were just in the grocery store and somebody said "where's the beef?!" Newfangled contraptions!

Tag:
Bobo, the Wandering Pallbearer
This Girl I Used To Know
Lancelot
You Gotta Be Kidding You
Bob, whose blog really puts this in perspective
Lascivious Polyphony, aka KOM, because KOM seems to need the boost.

two more new tunes!

Whew. I don't get much chance to record stuff. But here are two more new tunes:

Christina Sorting Records and Raechel's Song.

I'll be getting a round bajillion papers over the next couple days, so we took the opportunity to put down some tracks. A whole freakin' set to come. Cazart!

dumb ads; brain mush

We got TV for hockey season. We watch all the games we can (which aren't many), and The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Hockey games are mainly brought to us by Dodge and by the US Postal Service (or as we call it for reasons too complex to go into at the moment, Ground Chicken). Their ads share in common that they're incredibly stupid.

For the Postal Service, this is no doubt due to the fact that, as a large bureaucratic organization run by the federal government, its decision-making processes are broken. Things are bound to go wrong. In fact, you should consider yourself lucky if your mail arrives at all (although, considering the quality of mail we mainly get, maybe unlucky is the more appropriate feeling). The ads depict inanimate objects speaking in accented voices to one another. In one, the water cooler talks to boxed pairs of high-tops about how the Postal Service will handle sending them. The shoes say it's no problem, as a young female in a postal uniform enters with a clipboard, because "the lady drives a big truck." That there are only four boxes, and that she has to leave her clipboard behind, shows us just how practical and thought-out the whole process actually is. Why in blithering hell does she need a big truck to carry four boxes of high-tops? (I bought a pair of high-tops recently, and there's also no way my high-tops would have fit into one of those boxes. Are they being sent one shoe to a box?)

In the case of Dodge, the stupidity of their ads is definintely central to their sales strategy. The only car advertised during hockey on Versus is the Dodge Nitro. The whole range of dumb Nitro ads is displayed. I hate the one where the guy in the parking lot needing a jumpstart has his car blown sky high by the Nitro giving him the jump. I hate it so much I can barely refrain from screaming at the TV when it comes on. Then there's the one where the Nitro is dropped accidentally from a crane that was lofting it for no reason, and falls through the earth's crust, through a cartoon hell with a cartoon devil and a cartoon monster, arriving unscathed in (of course) China, all to what sounds like a Tom Jones loungesong. I do scream at the TV when that's on, because I am sure that if I don't, the pressure will damage my brain. Here's how clever Dodge really is: these ads are a surefire way to capture the attention of people who would think these were funny situations. That's a particular demographic group: dumb guys. Indeed, the protagonists are all men, the situations are generally manly, and as previously stated, scintillatingly inane. Dodge is cornering the dumb guy market! And marketing execs at Ford and GM are sleepless these days.

These are not the main reasons my brain is mush. I was compelled to comment on them because I am watching the Sabres/Devils game on Versus, because my brain is mush. My brain is mush because I spent 4 hours in committee meetings today. They're important committees, and I'm committed (or committeed) to them, but they mush my brain.

But now, I have to pack a Dodge Nitro in a box, so Ground Chicken can come in a big truck and pick it up.

new tunes!

I recorded a couple tracks today. At least one of these will have a lyric soon, but both of them could be recorded again. I just had a compelling desire to post these.

"It's Usually Tomorrow There" gets its title from something Lauren said to Raechel on the phone, about Australia. The tune had already been written, and I'd been playing it a while, but this seemed like the time to append an arbitrary name on it.

"Looking Down On J St. From The 18th Floor" is not an arbitrary name, because this bit came to mind while I was, in fact, looking down on J St. from the 18th floor.

These aren't the best recordings. I'm working on that, as best I can. I'm not a recording engineer, I'm the philosopher-chef! I roast wisdom! I'm saucier than thou!

what could go wrong?

Recently, CSU Stanislaus received a large donation in exchange for naming the new science building after the donor. During Academic Senate, the question was raised, with no hidden agenda, where the family got their money. No one knew for sure off hand. The questioner then noted that at an institution she'd previously been affiliated with, there was some sort of issue related to the way the family had gotten its wealth, that made the donation a little less than savory.

I wanted desperately to say aloud (but instead muttered sotto voce) "Well, that could never happen here, could it?" Because, near the end of the tenure of our previous president, the university accepted a donation in exchange for naming the gym after a company called DreamLife, which was supposedly a mortgage firm. Well, yesterday the president of DreamLife pleaded guilty to 122 felony counts of fraud. Good times. We sure miss Marvalene around here.

the end is near

The Semester That Wouldn't Die is about to.

At some point, I may write about some of the Internal Turmoil™ and other Serious Stuff™ that made this semester such a treat for my inner masochist. But last night, the more important agenda, after class, was to slough off a massive amount of stress.

Let it be said throughout the land: It's especially difficult to teach Foucault on 2 hours' sleep, because he's dead.

I had to miss yet another meeting yesterday of the University Instituional Review Board, because the board decided to meet on Mondays this semester, when I couldn't come. Today's calendar includes a rollicking Academic Senate meeting, where I'll be called upon to say something intelligent, or at least audible, about the meeting of the ad hoc Committee on Constitutional Amendments. (The CoCA Committee - sing it to the tune of "Copacabana" - met Friday, when I couldn't come, but due to the miracle of Letting Students Run Their Own Group Discussion™ I went anyway.)

It looks like the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (proposed motto: "It beats flipping burgers") may make cultural studies a focus for development, which might mean the formation of a Cultural Studies Committee, which might mean another opportunity for me to be on a committee!

But seriously, no.

In other news, Lauren abides concussive, her main symptoms last night being giddiness, occasional pain and physical disorientation, with a side of unfocused perception. I had a couple concussions as a kid, but I don't remember them well enough to say whether she's on schedule or what. She's reportedly enjoying the experience (at least, the giddy part). Hey, you know what? She should get on a committee!

Michel Foucault: magnificent bastard

Different philosophers' writings strike me very differently. I want to say there's a certain feel to their work, and I want to say that that particular feel is the feeling of their thought. At the same time, I have grave reservations about saying that. If it's folly to declare what some philosopher is really saying, then it's even sillier to say how some philosopher thinks. My ascription of these feelings to the philosophers' works and thoughts might mainly be a description of my experience of reading and thinking about what they wrote. I could make the weaker claim that I'm only describing my experience, but nah, that doesn't sound right. There really appears, somewhere in the relation between the words, my brain, and the brain of the author, something like that philosopher's thinking. We really do get glimpses of that, and it's pretty thrilling when we do. (And some philosophers thrill us more than others for that reason. For me, it's G.W.F. Hegel, Aristotle, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Michel Foucault. As much as I love Jürgen "Mad Dog" Habermas and Edmund "Fast Eddie" Husserl, I don't get that thrill from reading them.)

I'm reading Foucault this afternoon, prepping for Monday night's Theory of Knowledge class. I selected a couple chapters in the first section of Archaeology of Knowledge to read, because I love that book, because most people don't pay as much attention to it, and because I haven't read it in a while. I may be alone in this assessment, but I've always thought it was Foucault's most Foucauldian book. At some points he literally out-Foucaults himself (oooh, but couldn't that be a multi-layered pun), for instance, when he criticizes his own earlier work for being somewhat naive. He gets there by doing the thing that makes me so excited about Foucault, a feeling I describe sometimes as walking a tightrope, and sometimes as perversion. And if that says more about me than about Foucault, I'm fairly sure he'd think that was highly amusing, and so would I.

The tightrope: Foucault uses the phrase "neither... nor" a bajillion times in this book, tracing out the narrow path he's following. His attempt to account for discourses of knowledge requires him to deny himself ground, foundation, or, really, justification. He lays bare how discourses follow immanent rules in forming objects, but the complex relations that lead to those objects' formation are not to be confused with the objects themselves. So he's not performing a kind of Marxist de-fetishizing of objects. He also denies himself the phenomenological option of returning to the things. He also denies himself the option of linguistic analysis. It's not clear he has a method, or could have a method, for doing this. In the book, he is attempting to say what that method is, but it's more of a denial of method than a theory.

Perversion: If you apply that non-method to his own work, it becomes evident that either it's impossible for Foucault to explain how he does it, or it's impossible for him to actually be doing it, or both. And he leaves you there. This is rather alarmingly like certain kinds of SM play, and it thrills me immensely. It does feel to me very playful, about as playful as a philosopher can get, and not only perfectly in keeping with the content of this book, but also with what I ascribe to Foucault as his way of approaching his work and his life. That self-consistency, and the way that self-consistency impels him to be self-inconsistent in this book, is nothing short of kinky. (It's well-documented that Foucault was a pervert. I'm not referring to his homosexuality, but to his very bizarre sexual practices, which, sadly, almost certainly led to his early death. And yes, I adore the fact that Foucault was a pervert, and adore him for having been a pervert. That means I like perverts, I suppose - at least, those who don't deliberately harm anyone.)

One of the oddest things about Foucault's work, and one that led me to pick Archaeology of Knowledge instead of the more likely suspect The History of Sexuality is that The History of Sexuality is less kinky. In fact, it's hardly kinky at all, in the way Archaeology of Knowledge is. I think by then he'd formulated a more theoretically grounded method, and although it's also a great book and fun to read, to me it's just a little less of a thrill.

Foucault would reject all this, of course. To analyze his discourse as though it were his would make very little sense to the author of Archaeology of Knowledge. To him, discourse isn't a phenomenon of expression but of discursive relations that issue subject positions in the context of various institutional sites. As an occupant of such positions, there may be a "Foucault," but that's not to be confused with the French pervert who died in 1984. So you see, Foucault - the Foucault that Foucault would want me to say I'm describing - really is a bastard. Woo-hoo! Cheezy Petes, I love this stuff!

Stockton Thunder 3, Long Beach Ice Dogs 1

Long Beach looked flat in the first period, and were outshot through the game nearly 3 to 1, something like 38 to 13. Stockton skated faster, played a very good puck-control, aggressive game, and never really let up. Their best player, Mike Lalonde, scored a goal and assisted on another, on his birthday.

We went to a couple Thunder games last year, and I was impressed with how disorganized their play was. This year is completely different, perhaps because most of the team was overhauled (in third-tier pro hockey, there's a pretty high level of turnover in personnel, as you might expect). A couple of their defensemen were notably good, one for being solid, big, in position, and good at making opposing players sit down suddenly (Tim O'Connell), the other for being very smart and moving the puck well but not being big enough to make all of his ideas become realities (Jeff Lang). But Lauren and I were most impressed tonight with Liam Reddox, all 5-10 180 pounds of him, because he has attributes we both adore in hockey players - speed, aggression, and (Lauren's particular proclivity) diminutiveness.

Fun stuff. We were three rows behind the team benches, at exactly center ice (my seat straddled where the red line would be). $16 seats - nearly the most expensive. Yep, I go all out, spare no expense. When we go again, we're going to try for seats one or two rows behind where we were, to get a slightly higher perspective on play.

all a-twitter

I've been busy again.

But two of this morning's headlines have re-affirmed my hope for humanity, so I thought I'd share.

First of all, Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack announced that he would be a footnote to the 2008 Presidential race, by declaring his candidacy. It's so cute. But, ahem,... Hillary Rodham Clinton! Barack Obama!

Meanwhile, it turns out that the only sane course of action is to colonize another planet. See, because if we can't find somewhere else to befoul, we'll have failed to live up to our evolutionary destiny. Thanks, Stevie.

It may not be immediately clear why these two nooz items in particular re-affirm my hope for humanity. It's because it's impossible to take humanity at all seriously in light of them. The best thing about the human race is silliness.

video from the CFA protest at the CSU Board of Trustees

Apparently, someone involved in the protest action organized by CFA at the CSU Board of Trustees meeting captured some video of the event. What you'd be seeing if you'd click the links, are the protestors making a hell of a racket, and then the more direct civil disobedience action, where some of my colleagues put a pledge* in front of each member of the Board, sat down, and the Board eventually left, leaving my CFA colleagues behind, to hold a shadow meeting.

I think the reactions of the members of the board and the chancellor (he's the - pardon me for saying - largish bald guy who keeps pretending there's nothing going on) speak for themselves.

CFA intended to prevent the Board from conducting business as usual. The video clips show us the Board calling the roll, and then abandoning the room when the protestors' chants keep them from doing anything. In other words, the protest worked perfectly. Whether this will help us is anybody's guess; in mediation, the CSU has already reneged on tentative agreements made this summer. CFA didn't fail to expect this, but in collective bargaining settings, taking back what you'd already tentatively agreed to is deeply weird.

*The text of the pledge is as follows:

“Pledge for the Future of the CSU.”

Our nation’s largest four-year system of public higher education — the California State University
— faces extraordinary challenges that threaten to undermine broad access for students to a
quality public higher education.

Every year 400,000 California students look to the CSU as their hope for a college education. The
CSU provides opportunity to vast numbers of students who might otherwise not be able to pursue
higher education.

The CSU fuels not only California’s economy, but also our quality of life and our democratic
institutions. This understanding was enshrined in 1960 in California’s Master Plan for Higher
Education, a document that set out the creation of our state’s public higher education in a new
way not before attempted by other states.

That goal means, among many other things, keeping the CSU affordable even for those with the
least means, and guaranteeing a strong, stable teaching force with effective student services in
an environment conducive to learning.

We pledge to preserve this vision of public higher education by adopting policies and acting in
ways that best serve this primary mission of the CSU – the instruction of our students.

We refresh our commitment by joining in this pledge to rectify the system’s inequities; we seek a
new direction that will preserve the basic concept of public higher education in the 21st Century.

We begin by committing to:

1. End immediately excessive perquisites for executives present and past;
return the money to the CSU

2. Roll-back student fees to 2002/03 levels

3. Negotiate a fair contract with the CSU faculty and all CSU employees

To accomplish these ends,

We will advocate persistently and devotedly for the necessary resources to fully fund the CSU.

We will seek to reach a fair and equitable contract with the teachers, librarians, coaches,
advisors, counselors, and all of the staff who make the university work every day.

We will adopt policies that protect California’s taxpayers from abuse, fraud or waste of the
precious dollars devoted to the CSU.

We will work hard to restore the trust placed in us by the students, faculty, staff, alumni and
people of California to ensure a well-managed university system able to guarantee a vibrant,
successful future for the CSU.

the difference between normal people and the CSU Board of Trustees

According to police estimates, 1200 people - mainly faculty, but also staff, students, alumni, and other supporters of public higher education - spent several hours outside the CSU Chancellor's office in Long Beach yesterday. Meanwhile, inside, the CSU Board of Trustees was meeting, and moreover, meanwhile, the CSU and California Faculty Association are in bargaining impasse. CFA's position is the CSU refuses to bargain a fair contract, and has defrauded the public by misappropriating funds, in part to pay exorbitant raises and benefits to exectuives (including salaries drawn after leaving employment). So 1200 people yelled, chanted, sang, waved signs, and in general raised hell directly outside the building, and a smaller group of faculty inside the meeting raised a banner and chanted to disrupt the meeting.

Now I'd have thought that ordinary, normal people would find it disconcerting to have 1200 angry people yelling at them while they tried to hold a business meeting. Ordinary normal people would be curious why they were being yelled at, and might consider whether they were doing something to enrage all those people outside.

If, when you went to work, you saw hundreds of people carrying signs, marching around, and in fact telling you that you were making them furious, I think you'd take note of this. Really I do.

"Hmmm," you might, for instance, say to yourself. "That's actually a large number of people who are angry at me. I wonder why." You might contemplate your life, at least to the extent of comparing what's happening to you this moment - to wit, a crowd of hundreds of mad people making lots of noise right outside where you're having a meeting - to other times in your life, when things were going somewhat better, at least on the being-yelled-at-score. Perhaps you'd consider whether your policies were affecting them in this way, or something you'd said. You'd be motivated, if you were an ordinary, normal person, to create a situation in which 1200 people were not shouting at you for hours straight.

There is little indication that most of the members of the Board of Trustees has this kind of curiosity or takes this sort of interest in their surroundings.

can't talk

Ah, to be alive and awake at quarter til 5 on a Wednesday morning in Turlock ("Land of a Thousand Smells")!

But we gotta go. More later, I am fairly sure.

By the way, happy birthday to Bobo this week. I never get birthdays quite right. I'm working on an I Don't Care package for him. More on that later too, I am fairly sure, though somewhat less sure, not because I have anything against Bobo (he's my pal, after all), but just because I'm not sure how much more I'll have to say about it, especially since it's supposed to be a surprise (like spring snakes out of a peanut can, or like flowers).

Key-rist it's early!

homebrew

My student, Joshua, asked a couple months ago about home-brewing beer. We brewed a batch of porter (my choice; sometimes you gotta make the big decisions) two weeks ago, and today he came over and we bottled it. Bucking years of tradition, I named the beer before tasting it, based on its fermentation location in the Harry Potter Memorial Cupboard Under the Stairs: Harry Porter. As we were rinsing the last of the bottles, I noticed a bit of Lancelot fluff on one of the bottle necks, so the name is now doubly à propos: Hairy Porter.

And indeed, it looks to be a fairly puts-hair-on-your-chest kind of beer. I love me a porter, I do. In its raw, unfinished, uncarbonated state, it had a good balance of malt and hop; the aroma hops we used (again, my selection), Fuggles, were a tad on the flowery side, but this will moderate. I think it's going to be exemplary.

We also played guitars a bit, and Lauren and I performed a couple songs of ours. After Joshua left, Lauren and I dashed hither and yon through the rainy afternoon, doing the odd bit of shopping (jeans for her, cloth to cover a wall and to make a tablecloth and placemats, fruitless bass shopping and a quick peek at the acoustics at Guitar Center for me, etc.), but mostly looking at the gorgeous clouds and pointing them out to one another. Then the Penguins lost to Carolina, rather miserably it seemed, taking penalty after penalty in the third period. But I'm roasting a chicken we may well call Fröderich, and I'm going to mash potatoes and cook green beans, and there's not a damn thing anybody can do to stop me, because this is America, where we roast chickens with impugnity. Okay, that's getting a little off topic, if not off kilter.

Last night, I gave up and tuned my Takamine 12 to open G major (DGDGBD), and started to write a (so far simple, but not likely to remain so) tune that I now officially have dubbed "Homebrew." If everyone's very very good, I'll post a recording of it soon.

And tomorrow is still only Sunday. Four day weekends are a wonderful idea.

how to vote

Not everyone understands the steps involved in voting, so I thought I'd put together a handy-dandy guide on how to vote.

1. Be, or become, a US citizen.*
2. Avoid conviction for a felony.**
3. Register to vote.***
4. Go to the polls.****
5. Using whatever machine or other voting device is in place, vote for the ballot initiatives and candidates of your choice.*****

* Also, be sure to look like an American. And remember, although it's not a crime to vote if you're a naturalized citizen who immigrated from another country, you are subject to intimidation by people who would rather people immigrated from a different country than you did, or would rather no one immigrated at all.
** Also, be sure your name isn't like the name of someone who has been convicted of a felony. In many states, voters are purged from the rolls based on roughly accurate lists of convicted felons, and occasionally, mistakes are made. I recommend carefully reviewing all felony convictions in your state several weeks prior to Election Day, so that you have time to legally change your name and re-register to vote to assure eligibility.
*** See above. It may be necessary to register repeatedly. For instance, in some counties I could name in California (where there's a "Motor-Voter" act that gives people the option of changing their voting registration when they change their addresses with the DMV), voter registration can only be guaranteed by registering more than once. But this could also make your vote ineligible, depending on (a) whether you vote, (b) how you vote, and (c) whether elections officials want you to vote.
Also, remember that in many states, it becomes more difficult to register to vote depending on how you intend to register and how much like an American you look. In some cases, choosing a different party or plastic surgery may be necessary.
**** Generally, these will be conveniently close to your home residence. Some people have received notice that their polling places have been moved, when in fact they have not. Some people have been told their polling places are closed, or that they will open late, or that they have run out of ballots or machines. In some polling places, there are very long lines as a result. During the 2004 elections, voters in several precincts in Ohio and elsewhere were unable to vote because of such factors. But you have to expect some inconvenience in a democracy.
***** Some touch-screen voting machines are known to create inaccurate records of votes. This is only a problem when you want to cast your vote for a particular candidate, and the machine changes it to a vote for another particular candidate. In many places, the machines also produce a paper record of your vote that you can check against your intended vote, which lets you know right away whether your vote was counted as you intended it. Other voting machines can apparently be broken open or hacked into in a couple minutes and altered to change all sorts of votes. No technology is foolproof. And there is no evidence to support the rumor that some Diebold machines are armed with touch-screen tasers.

relief - for me at least

I finished the mid-term papers, finally, and returned the last class worth of them today. Wow, do I feel better.

Increasingly over the last couple years I've been disenchanted with the whole business of grading papers. I don't think it's due solely to the numbers and time (100 papers takes a loooong time to grade). It's also not boredom, although despite writing new assignments for each class each semester, the papers tend not to be terribly novel (this is largely because I mainly teach general education classes to people who don't at all necessarily want to take them).

Nah. It's because it's painful. And I am starting to think it's painful because, at the level of these classes, there's something deeply artificial about the whole process. I doubt that many of my students take up the spirit of the assignments when I pitch them as entering serious and live debates. Students also don't have the interest or experience to be self-starters in the field. This isn't thought through, but I wonder if it's something to do with the feeling of insularity I get from the papers, as though philosophical discussion belongs only in philosophy class, and is otherwise not very important, not part of the world. I resist this all the damn time, by showing the worldliness and everydayness of the concerns we discuss, but it is hard to translate that into paper assignments.

I had a couple nifty responses from Contemporary Moral Issues. An option for the essay was to take an online ecological footprint quiz, then discuss their results and the moral issues raised by their results in the context of our class discussions and course materials on environmental ethics. But in that case, it might have been a self-selecting thing: those with a particular interest in thinking about their environmental impact opted to do so, and because they were already interested, they wrote more self-directed papers. Some students probably chose the essay they could do with least trouble, and I don't see a way around that at the moment. I just know I want to get around that.

Anyway, at least I'm not Richard Pombo. Pombo is the US House rep from the district including Tracy and bits of San Joaquin and Alameda counties. He's a right-wing Republican, detested by environmentalists, and his seat was regarded as perfectly safe a few months ago. But he's having to spend a bunch of money this year, and he's even needing the help of Laura Bush, who came in to pinch-hit in one of the very few Congressional districts in the country where the Bush Administration is still popularly supported.

Oh! And we're having tilapia and black bean & jicama salad for dinner. Cazart!

AND tomorrow we're GOING TO THE PENGUINS-SHARKS GAME IN SAN JOSE!

coupla items after long absence

If you imagine there's a direct inverse correlation between frequency of my posts and how busy my life is (as measured, say, by the number of student papers to grade, grievance meetings, union meetings, etc. I've had lately), then DING! DING! DING! DING! You win the prize!

And the prize is a pair of news items from the San Francisco Chronic-ill ("America's Sickest Paper").

The British government says failing to pony up around 1% of GDP to fight carbon emissions is likely to cost us a major economic depression.

Meanwhile, the international Slow Food movement has been having a confab in Italy. It strikes me as slightly ironic that people are flying from all over the place to go to a rather globally-pitched event as part of an anti-globalization movement. But the article also informs us that plans are in the works for a Slow Food dingus in San Francisco.

confessions of a committee whore

It was a good weekend, if a busy and exhausting one, in Sacramento, where we went to attend the CFA Assembly (Lauren always comes with me, because, as she describes herself in introductions, she's the "union groupie"). Before we left, I agreed to be nominated for an ad-hoc committee on the faculty constitution at Stanislaus. I've been on Academic Senate for 5 years now, and I want to be part of this committee in order to continue to push for broader governance rights for lecturers.

We took off early on Friday so I could get to the CFA Elections Committee meeting at 3-5 pm (I only met my class about half an hour and then had them break into groups to work on coming up with social justice arrangements à la John Rawls). The next morning I had to be up for the 7:30 am Faculty Governance and Lecturer Recognition Subcommittee, that I co-chair and that I instigated about 18 months ago. At that meeting we came up with the proposal to start another subcommittee, on lecturer employment status, permanency, conversion to tenure-track, etc. At the Lecturers' Council meeting I moved to start that committee, and that was approved.

The Assembly did a lot of business, most of which I'm not yet at liberty to discuss. This morning I had to get to the Assembly promptly at 8:30, because of the elections. We nearly beat to death with amendments a resolution, but I jumped onto the speakers' list for discussion and moved to close debate and call the question. I never received an ovation for a parliamentary maneuver before. On the way back to my seat from the microphone, I pumped my clenched hands over my head victoriously to the cheers; one delegate leaned back and told me I was her hero. The Vice President and the Treasurer of the union both shook my hand in thanks.

The Assembly completed work just before noon, and we got home about 1:30 or so. Since then, I've already written and sent out a draft of the charge for the new subcommittee and nominated myself to be the initiating chair. Lauren chuckled at this. I complain, a lot, often, about having too much going on - some days I can't even tell what day it is. I promised not to chair any other committees at the same time, and she chuckled at that, too. But she does it in a loving and supportive, if also slightly ironic, manner.

Philadelphia

I had a decent time in Philly. The conference went well, I survived both the red-eye and general lack of sleep, and aside from some minor hallucinations due to exhaustion, I've come out of the whole trip in one piece. I also managed to get in a walk around the Independence Hall and Society Hill areas.

I don't normally take good pictures, I don't really know why. But this turned out well. The building in the foreground is the Independence Living History Center, a National Parks joint. The brick tower thingy (my pal Dennis described it as "quasi-Bauhaus") and the reflecting glass wall are utterly out of step with the surrounding Colonial and early American architecture, for instance the revivalist First Bank of the US that it reflects in the picture. Weird. And in the background is the Art Deco 1935 US Customs House.

More of that part of Philly seems to be 19th century rowhouses...

... like this one.
Where these have been torn down, to a satisfyingly great extent they've been replaced by buildings that fit the scale, and many,...

... like these, that mimic the spatial configuration. This is part of a long block of rowhouses, built as one big building without variation in roofs or fronts, except for the colors of the front doors. But it felt right, across the street from the old rowhouses.

Triskaidekadelphia

Yes, the City of Thirteen.

I leave tonight for Philly, to attend the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. I'm taking a red-eye, which I booked because it was about $100 cheaper, and because it will shave a night's stay off the $150 hotel room.

I'm presenting a paper on phenomenology, pedagogy, and technology. I think the idea of the panel was to present papers offering phenomenological descriptions of teaching with technological devices, but I'm not doing that, at least, not in the expected way. I'm presenting a paper interrogating phenomenological approaches to pedagogy (that is, I'm working up a critique of phenomenology itself) and interrogating myself as a working piece of teaching technology. That, and I'm looking at the paradoxical relation of teacher to students when someone attempts to break down the usual institutionally-sanctioned way that relation is supposed to run.

Well, we shall see how it goes. I get to present the paper on however much sleep I can manage on a plane between Sacramento and Atlanta (since, in addition to a red-eye, I'm also changing planes in Atlanta to get to Philly. Say what you will about air travel in the US; it sucks).

And I've been sick for a few days now, in the usual manner for me: I feel rotten, but other than that, I have no identifiable symptoms. And Lauren won't be with me.

And I don't even like Philly. And I hate the Flyers. Maybe I'll bring my vintage Penguins Jaromir Jagr jersey to wear, just to cheese them off.