My paid job is doing tech-support work and I often have to convey information to users over the phone. To make sure we’re on the same page with spellings, I use the NATO phonetic alphabet. But, I can never remember certain letters. One solution would be to just remember the NATO alphabet. Or, I could just write a Firefox extension that lets you select text, click on “Show NATO Phonetics” in the context menu, and get a popup of the phonetics for the selected text.
Category: Uncategorized
climate change is so cool?
Their new “global warming ready” campaign seems too surreal to be true, and it’s pretty disgusting. Diesel is promoting the work of an organization called Stop Global Warming. Their ad campaign website offers such “useful” tips for things that you can do like “Eat Steak at a Restaurant” (it reduces both refridgerator energy consumption and bovine methane emissions) or “Have Sex” (energetic sex creates warmth thereby reducing heating bills).
When I see things like this, I try really hard to not just think “it’s fucked”, because of course it is. I want to try to think “what does this say about us as a culture” and where in that frustrating, ugly picture can we find the beginning of something different.
Link to comentary about the ads on Daily Kos
Link to Diesel’s website (click on “Collection->Advertising Campaign” to view)
Girls Gone Wild @ Jakes. 9p-2a.
Update: This event has been cancelled due to pressure from the city and IU’s Gender Incidents Team.
From a HT article about the cancellation:
This time, complaints to the IU Gender Incidents Team spurred an investigation into “Girls Gone Wild,†Mantra Entertainment and owner, Joe Francis. Quickly, a petition began circulating this week, urging the nightclub owners to cancel the event. It mentioned numerous criminal complaints filed against Francis and Mantra Entertainment and threatened a remonstrance against Jake’s liquor license for failing to “maintain a high and fine reputation in the community†when the license comes up for renewal.
In an e-mail circulated among the petition’s carriers, Mayor Kruzan wrote that he considered the booking of “Girls Gone Wild†to be “unfortunate†and pledged to have Safe & Civil City Director Beverly Calender-Anderson and Economic Development Director Danise Alano meet with Kubiak to discuss the appropriateness and desirability of hosting such an event. Kruzan attended the meeting as well.
…
McCord said the Gender Incidents Team routinely reviews allegations by students who complain that they got drunk unintentionally from free-flowing alcohol provided to them and were taken advantage of. She worries that “Girls Gone Wild†fosters that kind of atmosphere and that women who participate in a moment of bad judgment could be haunted by the videos as they pursue jobs or other endeavors later in life.
Before the event was canceled, Melanie Castillo-Cullather, another member of the Gender Incidents Team, said, “What we’re saying to Mr. Kubiak is, of course you are free to do this, but you should be conscious about your responsibilities to the community. Do you really want this kind of business to infiltrate this town?†she asked. “What kind of Bloomington do you want to live in?â€
Corinna posted this on K.I.T:
“Girls Gone Wild” is going to be at Jake’s in Bloomington this Friday.I first heard about this on Sunday night, but since then I’ve been inundated by postcard sized flyers featured gape-mouthed girls in tiny tank tops all over campus.
A little background: there was a very illuminating article in the LA Times about Joe Francis, the creator of “Girls Gone Wild” videos, over the summer. The article exposes him as being a very aggressive sexual assaulter who preys on vulnerable (mostly young) women. Here’s the link:
Joe Francis: ‘Baby, give me a kiss’
Additionally, he has since been charged for not documenting the ages of the girls in his videos. He is on probation, but apparently that doesn’t stop him from producing new videos.
It has been suggested that folks go out and hand out information on consent and sexual assault at the taping. It has also been suggested to dressas a “girl-gone-wild” and infiltrate the crowd to get people talking about what a sleaze he is. Both sound like good angles.
Anyway, just a head’s up…
The LA Times Article linked above is pretty disturbing and paints GGW founder Joe Francis as a creep at best, and is documented as actually physically restraining the journalist who wrote the article by pinning her to the hood of a car.
The article gives some interesting insight into the motivations of two of the women featured in the videos:
When I turn to the flock of pretty girls, Jillian Vangeertry, a 21-year-old student, offers me a warm smile. I feel as if I’m in a bed of kittens. Why, I ask, is she here?
“Anybody enjoys the attention. T-shirts, hats—we got all the accessories,” she says. I ask if she plans on going wild for the cameras later. She shrugs. “If you do it, you do it,” she says confidently. “You can’t complain later. It’s almost like your 15 minutes of fame.”
and
I follow Francis and his bodyguard through the crowd to find Kaitlyn Bultema. She’s dancing on a podium and leaps off at the sight of Francis. She’s wearing a skirt-and-shirt ensemble that exposes her stomach, most of her breasts and much of her bottom. I ask her why she wants to appear on “Girls Gone Wild” and she looks me in the eye and says, “I want everybody to see me because I’m hot.”
It’s then that it hits me: This is so much bigger than Francis. In a culture where cheap and portable video technology lets everyone play at stardom, and where America’s voyeuristic appetite for reality television seems insatiable, teenagers, like the ones in this club, see cameras as validation. “Most guys want to have sex with me and maybe I could meet one new guy, but if I get filmed everyone could see me,” Bultema says. “If you do this, you might get noticed by somebody—to be an actress or a model.”
I ask her why she wants to get noticed. “You want people to say, ‘Hey, I saw you.’ Everybody wants to be famous in some way. Getting famous will get me anything I want. If I walk into somebody’s house and said, ‘Give me this,’ I could have it.”
though the article offers some broader social analysis:
I call Vicki Mayer, a sociologist and Tulane University assistant professor, for guidance. Mayer teaches a class on the nudity rituals that take place on New Orleans’ infamous Bourbon Street. She has studied and written about “Girls Gone Wild,” and she contends that it’s simplistic to say that Mantra takes advantage of women. “For some women this is liberating, for some women this is something they do on a goof or for a lark to show friends they can, for some it’s a way of flirting with the cameramen,” Mayer says.
Francis and his staff maintain that it’s the “girl next door” they seek out for their videos. In reality, the “Girls Gone Wild” girl is almost always slender and young, with nice teeth and very carefully groomed private parts. At the same time, Mantra recruits hard-working and attractive young men who will be able to sweet-talk women into taking their clothes off for the cameras. (Mantra has released several “Guys Gone Wild” DVDs filmed by female camera crews, but they have not sold as well.)
Mayer has studied the young cameramen, who, she says, often sign up because they hope to break into Hollywood. Usually, she says, they end up disillusioned after spending night after night with women who lose their inhibitions for a T-shirt. “As much as it would be easy to see this as a simple relationship of men treating women a certain way, there are mutual relations of exploitation. I kind of feel like both sides could be seen as exploited.”
She’s concluded that the winners are “the owners of these companies who are contracting cheap labor and free talent for a media product.”
tax deductions, healthcare, and state of the union
Analysis of the state of the union isn’t the nicest thing to wake up to, but in the 8am haziness, I thought this analysis was pretty interesting.
From NPR : Fact-Checking the State of the Union Speech:
Critics also say that a tax deduction will be of little help to low-income uninsured families. They typically don’t earn enough to pay much in income tax, so even with the deduction insurance would still likely remain out of reach.
Call for comment on parking study @ City Hall (401 N. Morton St.) 5:30-7:30p
Chris Colvard posted this over at Miff Muffered Moof:
Public is invited to talk parkingThe consultant studying downtown parking invites the public to comment and share ideas Thursday night at City Hall, 401 N. Morton St.
Walker Parking Consultants expects to present the completed study to the city next month.
People not able to attend the 5:30-7:30 p.m. meeting in council chambers can contact the public works department at 349–3411 to offer an opinion.
California prisoners likely to stay put
I posted this over at the Midwest Pages to Prisoners blog after seeing it on Corinna’s. This story, about a proposed plan by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels to transfer inmates from California’s overcrowded prisons, to vacant spots in Indiana prisons, shows some interesting things, including the massive number of incarcerated people in total, and especially in places like California. Also, it shows the connections between prison management and private industry. Finally, I think it shows the outlandish scenarios that happen when the industry of the construction of prisons comes before assessing the role that we want incarceration to play in our society. Noteably, that prisons need to be filled, one way or another, whether it’s creating laws that make it more likely for people to end up in prison, or actually shipping prisoners from one place to another. It also speaks the commodification of human lives, when people can be moved around to maximize efficiency, like so many widgets. And it’s hard really, because the reality of such decisions might stand to improve the day to day life of some CA prisoners, but, in the end, it speaks to the fundamental flaws of the system, that requires a change in attitudes and priorities instead of just a reallocation of resources.
From the Indianapolis Star:
Gov. Mitch Daniels’ plan to make money by opening Indiana prisons to inmates from packed California prisons has fallen short, with few convicts volunteering and what may be insurmountable objections and concerns from prisoner advocates and guards.
Despite the setback, Indiana Department of Correction Commissioner J. David Donahue said Saturday the state hasn’t given up on the notion of housing prisoners from other states.
He said Indiana is in preliminary talks with “another jurisdiction” that may be interested in sending its inmates to Indiana if the deal with California collapses.
Under the deal between Daniels and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, up to 1,200 California offenders would have been sent to the New Castle Correctional Facility.
Schwarzenegger in October declared a state of emergency in California after his state’s prison population had swelled to nearly 173,000 inmates crammed into a system designed to hold about 100,000.
Indiana was motivated to act in part because about 60 percent of the 2,400-bed Henry County medium-security prison sits empty, Donahue said.
Why Income Inequality Matters
I saw this article posted on /. of all places. Charles Wheelan writes about the rising gap between incomes in the US and brings up Brazil and their large income gap and the amount of violence in their society as an example of the ultimate negative implications of income inequality.
He invokes a stat called the Gini coefficient for measuring income equality. Which I hadn’t heard of before.
The most convenient statistic for measuring income inequality is called a Gini coefficient, which measures a country’s distribution of income from 0 (absolute equality, with each person sharing the same amount of wealth) to 1 (absolute inequality, with one person controlling all of the nation’s wealth).
Here’s what that statistic looks like for a handful of countries, including contemporary and historic figures for the U.S.:
* Japan: .25
* Sweden: .25
* India: .33
* The United States 1970: .39
* The United States 2005: .47 (Note that a small fraction of the increase over time is due to a change in the methodology for calculating the Gini coefficient; still, income inequality has climbed steadily by this measure over the past four decades.)
* Brazil: .58
He states that income inequality might have advantages because it “motivates risk, hard work, and innovation” but that “income inequality doesn’t motivate anything good when there’s no hope of sharing in the pot of gold.”
I’ve spent enough time in inner-city schools to wonder if we’re really providing an opportunity for the motivated and gifted to make their way from the projects to Wall Street.
Yes, it happens — you can watch Will Smith do it at your local multiplex in The Pursuit of Happyness, which is inspired by a true story. But how often does it not happen?
I’m convinced that part of what’s going on in Brazil is that the socioeconomic ladder is broken. There’s no real path from favela to bulletproof apartment, and some people with guns have decided that they don’t want to play by the rules made by the people in those apartments.
He also points out an interesting psychological effect where people would rather have fewer resources as long as they have more stuff than their neighbors. So, the motivations for income inequality could actually motivate less advantageous situations for everybody.
In other words, we care less about how much money we have than we do about how much money we have relative to everyone else. In a fascinating survey, Cornell economist Robert Frank found that a majority of Americans would prefer to earn $100,000 while everyone else earns $85,000, rather than earning $110,000 while everyone else earns $200,000.
Think about it: People would prefer to have less stuff, as long as they have more stuff than the neighbors.
women of color blog: the institution of prison is haunted by slavery
There’s a youtube video about the Angola 3 that looks interesting that was posted on the Women of Color Blog. I haven’t had the chance to watch it yet.
The blogger draws the relationship between slavery and the prison system, which was an argument made by Vivianne in her excellent talk at this past summer’s Plan-It-X Fest workshop. This image that was posted is pretty telling.
Glenn Ligon’s Annotations, Runaways; Slavery in Cumberland County and Relative History
I went to the Warhol Museum while I was in Pittsburgh, recently and saw an exhibit of work by the artist Glenn Ligon. One of the works on display was a web-based photo album titled Annotations. It is one of the better uses of technology in art that I’ve seen because instead of being about bells and whistles, where the technical wizardry supercedes any other content, it uses really simple technology to create relationships between media that is familiar and low-tech. From the introduction to Annotations:
In Annotations each image in the twenty-page album leads to a second or third layer — a simple caption, other photographs, images of book covers, lists, narratives, a hand-written letter, and in a few instances, multiple page spreads — plus, (towards the end of the album), audio clips of music, including the artist singing a capella or with songs from the 70s and 80s. The potential for adding layers of materials behind a single image allowed Ligon to present his material in a manner parallel to the way memory works: when viewing a photo album that one knows, each photo invariably prods recollections or associations. In this instance, where the album is unfamiliar to the viewer, Ligon provides hints and suggestions to multiply the layers of possible interpretation.
…
The fact that the majority of the people in Annotations are African-American makes race a palpable factor in the reading of each image. Yet there is a feeling of recognition, even if none of the faces is known to the viewer, a familiarity that arises from our intimacy with the conventions of a family album — the proud portraits, new babies, special occasions, banal moments when a camera was in hand, the poorly centered or focused images that make their way past the editing process for whatever reasons.
You can view Annotations on the web. Link
I also saw pieces from his Runaways series, such as this one, where he places himself within the iconography of a runaway slave.
A few days later, when I was visiting my parents, I came across a similar graphic, this one from the 1800s and the township where I grew up:
I came across this image when doing some basic research about the underground railroad in Boiling Springs after hiking with my mom to Island Grove (pictured below) where Daniel Kaufman, the founder of the village of Boiling Springs, harbored people who had been enslaved and were escaping to freedom.
I found these images on a page that appears to be a class project by a Dickinson College student. Link
On the page, the author writes:
In a county that was small and fairly unknown, history was made. The people of Cumberland County took it upon themselves to follow their beliefs and assist in the abolition of slavery.
This seems to be a somewhat rosy view of history. In the book that I read while I was home, it suggested that Cumberland county’s close geographic ties to the south (with the valley and mountains extending to the south) made for a climate that, with few exceptions, was by no means anti-slavery. The Afrolumens project has a list of enslaved and slave holders in Cumberland county that seems to suggest that slavery was somewhat prevalent. I don’t know the historical context to compare this with other places in the north. The Afrolumens project also has this FAQ that provides some interesting insight into slavery in central Pennsylvania. The FAQ introduced me to the idea of term slavery which was a mechanism to abolish slavery gradually starting in 1780.
When Pennsylvania legislators decided to abolish slavery in the state, they knew that a complete and immediate abolition of the practice would cause a financial loss to slaveholders by freeing those persons that were already held in bondage. They also knew that this would be politically unpopular, and might not pass a vote in the legislature. So they decided on a gradual approach, setting a cut-off date, whereby all of the persons held in bondage as of March 1, 1780 would remain in bondage, but all children of slaves born in Pennsylvania after that date would be held in bondage only until age twenty-eight.
According to the FAQ, even this gradual abolition was abused.
The “hundreds of children of slaves” that were still around in 1850 came as a result of many severe abuses, misunderstandings and simple disregard for the law. Some of the most blatant and frequent abuses occurred in Lancaster County, where the children of slaves were themselves registered as children of slaves for another twenty-eight years. This practice obviously would have set up an endless cycle, which would have been contrary to the spirit of the law–yet few or none were challenged in court. Some of these abuses were possibly a result of a misunderstanding of the law, and some were justified by the slaveholders by the pregnancy of term slaves. In the latter cases, additional years were added to the terms of women in bondage who became pregnant while serving their twenty-eight year term, and their children were in turn registered as slaves.
So the generalization that the student makes about the people of Cumberland County and their attitudes about slavery seems to be a bit incongrous with other accounts of history. In thinking about this while I was in PA, I realized that the history of the underground railroad in Boiling Springs was only briefly touched on in history class, and the extensive history of slave holding in PA was definitely not mentioned. I realized that the heroism of those aiding enslaved people who had escaped is often identified by name, but that of the enslaved often remains anonymous.
Ladyman’s Cafe on Its Last Day
I just downloaded some video off of my recorder and found this clip that I took of Ladyman’s Cafe after I ate there on the last day that it was open. I really wanted to take video inside the cafe, to capture the crowdedness, the bustle, the overwhelming sense that this place really did mean something more to people than the space it inhabited or the food it served. But doing that felt like it would have been disrespectful, and a few seconds of grainy video can’t really save what we as a community have allowed to slip away.