San Francisco Trip

I’m on vacation in San Francisco with my family. It’s been a long time since we’ve been on a family vacation, and it’s crazy how, even at 27, and even if it’s been more than a decade since I’ve lived with my parents, how some of the roles and scenarios feel so repetitive or familiar when we spend time together. Maybe the best way to describe this trip is in the map that Tim and I have been using to navigate our way around the city and note points we’ve been to and points we want to visit.

Title: My Bay Area Map
Description: Map I made of locations relevent to my current trip to the Bay Area

View Larger Map

Exclusion Acts

In researching the details of a museum that my father wanted to go to on our trip in San Francisco, I read this.  It’s crazy that, more than 100 years later, the motivations for limiting immigration and the use of legislation to exclude certain classes of immigrants persists.  The faces of the undesireable immigrants is all that has changed:

During the 1870s, an economic downturn resulted in serious unemployment problems, and led to politically motivated outcries against Asian immigrants who would work for low wages. In reaction to states starting to pass immigration laws, in 1882 the federal government asserted its authority to control immigration and passed the first immigration law, barring lunatics and felons from entering the country. Later in 1882, the second immigration law barred Chinese, with a few narrow exceptions. Imperial China was too weak and impoverished to exert any influence on American policy. This law was originally for 10 years, but was extended and expanded and not repealed until 1943, when China was our ally in World War II. However, only 105 Chinese were allowed in legally each year, so the exception process actually continued into the 1950’s. Chinese were not on a equal immigration footing with other nationalities until immigration laws were completely rewritten in the mid 1960’s.

link

[tags]chinese,history,american,immigration,sanfrancisco[/tags]

Google Maps Icon

I’ve been playing around with building maps with Google Maps.  You can change the icons for placemarkers on your maps, and you can also create your own icons.  They have a lot of icons, but they didn’t have one for museums, so I made one:

Museum Icon for Google MapsDropshadow for Museum Icon for Google Maps

georgia multicultural school, many students refugees

Georgia School Melds a World of Differences – New York Times:

“The fact that we don’t have anything in common is what we all have in common,” said Shell Ramirez, an American parent with two children at the school….

“The mission,” Ms. Thompson [one of the founders of the school] said, “was never to create an enclave for refugees only because that would just separate them more.”

…

”

Harvey Clark, whose son Zade is in the fifth grade, is a veteran of the first Gulf War and a hard-core Nascar fan.

“They’re getting exposed to cultures that they normally would not be exposed to except in National Geographic,” Mr. Clark said of the American children. “Instead of my boy having to go off to war to meet foreign people, he can do it here in town.”

This reminds me of Ryan being stoked by What is the What, which I believe is partially set in Atlanta, hearing Kara Walker on Art 21 talking about moving from California to the Atlanta area and realizing what it meant to be a black woman in America, and thinking about multicultural education with regards to Florence and Oona.

[tags]refugee, education, multiculturalism[/tags]

Defiance, Ohio Audio Files

I finally posted audio files from the recent Defiance, Ohio record The Fear, The Fear, The Fear to the web.  After seeing how El-Iqaa distributed his recent release as well as the encouragement of others, I decided to make the audio available as both a free download of 128Kbps or Ogg/Vorbis files on archive.org as well as a donation-requested 320Kbps or FLAC file download where the proceeds get paypalled to the Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project.

Link

drupal contemplate module with postgres

I’ve been working on setting up a Drupal instance for work and have, for the first time been using Postgres for the database instead of MySQL. I was installing the Content Template module and got errors when the module tried to create the tables by default. I think the problem is with the fact that the CREATE statements in contemplate.install use MySQL-only data types.  It seems that others have reported this problem as there is an issue on the Drupal site at http://drupal.org/node/172775 .

I was able to create working tables manually with the following syntax:

CREATE TABLE contemplate (
    type character(32) DEFAULT '' NOT NULL,
    teaser text NOT NULL,
    body text NOT NULL,   rss text NOT NULL,
    enclosure character(128) NOT NULL,
    flags integer DEFAULT 0 NOT NULL,
    PRIMARY KEY (type)
);CREATE TABLE contemplate_files (
    site character(255) NOT NULL,
    data bytea NOT NULL,
    UNIQUE (site)
);

I made a patch to contemplate.install that fixed this issue. download

Once I got past the table creation, the module still returned SQL errors when I tried to update the template for a CCK content type. This seemed to be due to a problem with the SQL syntax. I made a patch to contemplate.module that fixes this in Postgres. I don’t know if it ends up breaking MySQL in the process. download

Oh yeah. I’m using Drupal 5.5 with contemplate 5.x-1.8 and Postgres 8.1.9

affordable healthcare for indiana residents

Enrollment to Start For New State Health Insurance Program – Newsroom – Inside INdiana Business with Gerry Dick:

Thousands of uninsured Hoosiers can now have access to affordable health care through the new Healthy Indiana Plan. Applications for the program will be accepted starting Monday.

House Republican Leader Brian C. Bosma voted for the legislation that created this program during the 2007 legislative session. “The Healthy Indiana Plan offers many working Hoosiers a solution to the high costs of medical care, and it could literally be a life-saver for some,” said Rep. Bosma.

“The HIP program provides basic coverage, including coverage for doctor visits and prescriptions, and it also helps subscribers make cost-efficient decisions when seeking medical care and purchasing prescriptions.” The application program begins Monday, Dec. 17, and coverage begins in January. To be eligible for the program, applicants must be between 18 and 64 years old, have a household income between 22 percent and 200 percent of the federal poverty level and must have been uninsured for at least six months.

[tags]healtcare,indiana[/tags]

Jewish-Chinese fusion

Even though I have no religious or family connection to Judaism, my first years of elementary school were at a Jerome Lipman Jewish Day School.  Chinese food has always been a principal way that my Chinese-American father has connected with his culture and its consumption has definitely defined itself as a tradition within my family.  I’m always surprised and a little delighted at the scale that cultural mash-ups can take on. 

Hot Dogs From Column A, Pastrami Egg Rolls From Column B – City Room – Metro – New York Times Blog:

One paper, by Hanna Miller, even goes as far to say that Chinese food is the ethnic cuisine of the American Jew, arguing that they identify more with Chinese food than the Eastern European food of their immigrant ancestors. And two sociologists, Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine, investigated the historical and cultural reasons for the Jewish Chinese culinary axis in their 1992 paper Safe Treyf [pdf].

So why is it that chow mein is the chosen food of the chosen people? Among the theories posited:

  • Chinese food does not use dairy (unlike the other two main longtime ethnic cuisines in America, Italian and Mexican), so when many more Jews kept kosher, Chinese food was easier to eat.
  • Chinese and Jews are among the two largest (if not the two largest) non-Christian immigrant groups, so they followed similar calendars. This is where Chinese food on Christmas may stem from, since Chinese restaurants were open.
  • The Chinese use of garlic, rice and chicken were familiar to an Eastern European palate.
  • Chinese food was not too expensive and involved family-style sharing.
  • Chinese food represented a way to become cosmopolitan.
  • Chinatown and the Lower East Side, where a significant number of the Jewish immigrants from around the turn of the century lived, bordered each other. Indeed, the Eldridge Street Synagogue, one of the oldest Jewish houses of worship in the United States, is now squarely in Chinatown these days. (It even has an egg roll festival.)
Published
Categorized as Bloomington

“Best Buy” schools

It’s so hard to find that something that seems as fundamental and universal to me, like public education, always gets viewed through a commercial context.

Report: South, Edgewood named best value schools: HeraldTimesOnline.com:

Bloomington High School South and Edgewood High School in Ellettsville have been named “Best Buy” schools by the Indiana Chamber of Commerce. Hoosier high schools that have excelled academically while providing good value for Indiana tax dollars were recognized last week by the Chamber of Commerce with the release of the ninth edition of the Indiana’s Best Buys report.

Published
Categorized as Bloomington

NYT blog post on community forum on gentrification in NYC

My feedreader brought me this interesting blog post about a forum in NYC about gentrification in neighborhoods.

A community leader once optimistic about development in Harlem said:

We want the gentry, because they represent people who can support the commercial businesses, and attract more. But we don’t want to be overrun by them. We don’t want to be smothered by them, and we want to make sure the working women and men we were concerned about are not run out of the neighborhood that they stuck with and fought for and even died for.

Errol Louis, a New York Daily News columnist who seems much more pro-development is quoted as saying:

“Terms like ‘oversuccessful,’ terms that get thrown around like ‘out of scale’ — even gentrification itself – these are terms of art,” Mr. Louis said. “These are differences of opinion. These are things that have to be fought out at the community level, frankly. It’s probably too late by the time you get to the public hearing.”

Sadly, the last sentence reads true to me, but I feel like whether it’s residents of neighborhoods in Brooklyn, or in Bloomington, it can be nearly impossible to become involved in the process of neighborhood development before it’s too late.

link

Published
Categorized as address