Month: February 2006

The Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project hosts Pack-A-Thon

On Thursday, March 2nd the Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project is holding a Pack-A-Thon at its space next to Boxcar Books and Community Center at 310 S Washington Street, near the corner of Third and Washington Streets, across from Third Street Park. The event will start at 5pm on Thursday and go all night until 5am on Friday, March 3rd!

The Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project currently has a backlog of book requests from prisoners that spans nearly three months. With the help of Pack-A-Thon volunteers, we hope to reduce that backlog to two months!

Volunteers at the Pack-A-Thon will be reading letters sent from prisoners, filling requests for books from our collection of books donated by members of the Bloomington community, and packaging those books so that they are ready to be mailed. No prior experience is necessary, and training will be provided to new volunteers on the hour, every hour.

While we hope to get a lot of work done, this will also be a fun and festive event, so bring music, snacks and beverages to share, as well as everyone you know!

For more information, contact the Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project at midwestpagestoprisoners@yahoo.com, pagestoprisoners.org, or 812.339.8710.

For those unable to attend this special event, Pages meets several times every week to help send books to the imprisoned. The regularly scheduled meeting times are Mondays from 7-9pm, Thursdays from 7-11pm, and Sundays from 2-5pm.

The Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project is an all volunteer effort that strives to encourage self-education among prisoners in the United States. By providing free reading materials upon request, we hope to aid in the rehabilitation process and stimulate critical thinking behind bars.

The Midwest Pages to Prisoners project is an organization made up of volunteers working in their spare time to provide free books to prisoners. Our volunteers are concerned citizens and activists interested in rehabilitation, rather than punishment.

The project exists to alleviate pain, boredom, and attrition and to provide a direct opportunity for self-education. Additionally, we exist because prison libraries sometimes fail in this respect, and are understocked, or are only able to be patronized during specific and limited hours.

podcast on postal workers

I’ve recently finally gotten into podcasts. I’ve thought they were a cool idea for a long time, but never really use them. I bought a dvd-rw drive so I could make a dvd slideshow for the last disaster show. I now use the slick (and multiplatform) juice to manage my subscriptions and then use the slightly clunky but still functional xcdroast to burn the podcast mp3s to a cd-rw disc. I bought a portable CD player that will play MP3s years ago, and it works fine for this purpose. No need for expensive iPods! I’m still trying to find interesting podcasts, though I’ve found a few. I’ll post my OPML file eventually.

One podcast that I found that I really like is Morning Stories from Boston’s public radio station WGBH. On this weeks podcast, there is a great profile of a Boston postal worker. Between Defiance, Ohio distro orders (though Ryan does most of that these days) and sending packages for the Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project, I spend a lot of time at the post office. The postal workers in Bloomington are great. One carrier is involved with a lot of activism around Bloomington and even recorded this report on Pages to Prisoners for the local community radio station. The others who work the counter are always helpful and pleasant, even to us when we send hundreds of packages, or to the long lines of other customers who act as though they’ve never sent a package before in their life.

Anyway, you can listen to the radio piece here. I want to keep it around for possibly using it in a disaster show.

Another interesting note – my friend Leanne came through Bton recently. She used to be a postal worker who sorted mail that had illegible addresses. I’m not positive about this statistic, but I’m pretty sure that said that she said that when she started working there were 45 mail sorting facilities like the one she worked at around the country. When she quit, there were only 5, mostly due to people sending less mail.

thoughts on the band on the label, the band in the basement, and the new Defiance, Ohio record

This is something that I posted in the comments section of the Defiance, Ohio website:

To comment on a few things that others have posted:The new record, like all our releases will be available as a free download from our website. I don’t know how No Idea feels about this. As far as I know, it wasn’t something we had to argue about or anything like that.

Personally, I’m not sure when the record will be out, whether its March or May. Ryan might know.

Its been a little distressing to read comments here, and that I’ve seen and heard elsewhere to the tune of “you deserve to be on a label like No Idea”. While I appreciate the support for the band, I feel like it creates the impression that Defiance, Ohio, or any band for that matter, should have aspirations of success in terms of the popularity of your band. If there’s one thing that frightens me about releasing a record on a label that is more visible, its the thought that people might think that writing songs that are seemingly only relevent to your life, your friends’ lives, and the place where you live, releasing cd-rs and tapes with photocopied covers yourself, having fun writing songs that you keep saying how bad they are (but keep playing anyway) in the basement, and playing in your friends’ kitchen are all means to this end rather than ends in themselves.

Certainly, I’m glad that people other than the folks in Columbus circa 2003 have found our songs to be relevent to their lives; and I’m glad that I’ve gotten the opportunity to travel all over, meeting interesting folks from all states and continents, while playing music. Certainly, Its nice that we were able to put out an actual pressed CD ourselves and have people like Friends and Relatives, Plan-It-X, Anti-Creative, and now No Idea! put out records for us. But, I strongly feel that being able to do these things comes as a result of trying to write songs that feel honest or challenging to us and enjoying making music with each other. Moreover, even if all the tours and all the records had never happened, the feeling of starting Defiance, Ohio and the experience that we shared with our friends in Columbus would have been something to remember.

I listened to more well-known punk bands when I was growing up: NOFX, Rancid, Operation Ivy, The Dead Kennedys among others. But the first punk bands I ever knew, the ones that made me want to play music, and the ones that made me think that there was a way of supporting and participating in music that wasn’t just buying records, listening to the radio, or watching a video, were bands like Thistle Pink and Lost Cause, who never strayed far from shows in the back of Prodejas record store in Carlisle, PA.

Perhaps small-town, obscure punk bands wouldn’t exist without their more well-known counterparts. Maybe we need that first, naive inspiration, or maybe we need that disappointment of seeing the bands we love sell out and lose substance and the idea that we can do things differently, more sincerely – better. In any case, I don’t want to live in a world without bands that never play shows outside of their town and only matter to their twenty closest friends.

Defiance, Ohio isn’t that band anymore, at least for me, but I don’t want to think that anything we do will ever discourage others from being the band in the basement.

backing up my mail with isync

In the event that I switch mail providers, its good to have a backup. I found the isync program that seems like it will do a good job with this. Here is the command line I used to do the backup:

isync -1 -M mail_backup/ -L -s imap.myisp.com -u imap_username -a

Hello world!

I’ve moved my blog over to a WordPress MU-based blogging system to begin testing out the system for use in a Bloomington community blog similar to Urban Honking or G-RAD.

You can view an archive of my old blog by clicking on the “ancient history” link above.