Random thoughts:
1) It was interesting to see the photo, since from my usual walking paths to/from work, you can't get that sort of view, just a distorted glimpse of the lower part of the ad.
2) My office, for those who care, is on the other side of the building.
3) I'm still wondering how the window air conditioners got past the Landmarks Commission (probably because they are technically temporary, but still).
4) Not only do I have to deal with the scaffolding/sidewalk shed at work, there's one around my apartment building too, we're having facade work done. When they put it up, they didn't bother to block off any of the building's exits, so my daughter and I walked out into the middle of the work crew and a large pile of metal support rods.
5) I want that ad gone!
Spoke with a conservative friend today who voted Nader (in NYC). He is disgusted with both parties right now; he hates what "conservative" has come to stand for. He is a true conservative--fiscally responsible, believes in small govt and in govt. not getting involved in people's personal lives (in other words, he supports a woman's right to choose and doesn't think it's government's job to define marriage).
He hates that "conservative" has become right-wing, he hates that his moderate stances are considered liberal in many quarters. He's voted for centrist/moderate candidates before, including Clinton (twice), but voted for Bush in 2000, largely because of his education policy. Not this year.
But he couldn't vote for Kerry either; he didn't like Kerry's stance on military bases around the world (my friend wants to close the bases in Germany and Japan) or on taxation (my friend thinks rich people should be taxed even more than Kerry does, lol, and thinks that Kerry's plan didn't take where you live into account in defining "rich"--as he says $200,000/year doesn't got far in NYC if you have a couple of kids, especially college age).
It was an interesting conversation. He's really pissed, as much as the liberal Dems. I know.
My daughter's current school does not have a student council like the one Alison describes, though her old school did (however, you had to be in grades 3-5 to participate, even though the school was Pre-K-5th).
At the current place, the 6th grade seems to do a lot of the work a student council would, as part of the school's overall "service" program. The 6th graders also form the Penny Harvest council, deciding how to donate the money the school collects, and they run the annual coat drive. Not sure what the lower grades do, as we have only been there since September and I'm still learning the school's culture.
Larry: I stopped voting Liberal, even to elect Democrats, when it became clear just how corrupt and worthless the NYC Liberal Party was. WFP is so much better!
Julia: Many places--just about everywhere outside of NY--do not allow candidates to be listed on more than one party line. You're stuck with your official party. Some friends report that their communities, which used to allow cross-listing, no longer do so.
Kate: The class president and vice president help the teacher in various ways. They are responsible for: turning the computers on and off at the beginning and end of the day, handing out announcements and making announcements (not all announcements, obviously), keeping order in the classroom when the teacher is out of the room, etc. Most interestingly, class officers are expected to mediate disputes between classmates and make sure they're all treating each other fairly--which led to my daughter interrupting a lunchtime food exchange where one student was trading away his entire pizza to a couple of other kids in return for a few bits of chocolate. While I don't particularly want my kid to be the food police, I was glad she did this; the child who was being victimized has some sort of apparently mild developmental disability. It's likely that dd would have stepped in in any case, as she likes this boy, but I'm sure that having the additional authority of being class president helped her feel confident about acting.
Jason: I doubt there is a NY ballot online, probably because there are so many NY ballots--gazillions of individual ballots for individual precincts. IIRC, this morning I saw columns for Republican, Democrat, Conservative, Independence, Working Families, and RTL candidates. Many candidates, especially candidates for judgeships, were listed in more than 1 column.
I got an email from WFP a week or so ago, but was already planning to vote their line. I'm so glad they have moved up to Row E (the death of the Liberal Party helped).
Like Kathryn, I use the RTL listing to help me avoid candidates.
I was #155 at about 9 AM; had to wait about 8 people's worth of time, and there were about that many behind me by the time I got to the booth. Lots of people had brought their kids and were taking them into the booths.
My 8-yo is tall enough to reach the very top levers now, so she is technically the one who voted. She's met some of our local pols, so was excited to flip those levers. She will probably vote twice today, as my mother will take her to the polls again. Mom and I vote at different polling places; though we live only 4 blocks apart, we are in different precincts.
In other election news, my daughter was elected president of her third-grade class yesterday, which was a big deal for us as this is a new school and she's known these kids only since mid-September.
This was niggling at me all weekend. Way up the thread, FMguru said
> The last ballot I marked featured Gallagher, Gary Coleman, porn starlet Mary Carey, and a barely-literate bodybuilder all running for public office. So, in light of this new bit of information you've revealed to me, I'll treat Will's opinions with the same gravity and respect as I would those of the stars of "Diff'rent Strokes" and "Asses In The Air 4". Fair?
What this made me wonder is who FMguru (or others) think _should_ be running for political offices. Without debating the specific or individual merits (or lack thereof) of any of the candidates cited above, why should appearing on a tv series at some point (of whatever quality) or writing a novel or being a comedian or a schoolteacher or a homemaker disqualify one for political office?
Sarcasm aside, isn't it possible that people other than lawyers or ivy leaguers have something to offer, politically speaking? Yet there seems to be a sort of caste of "professional politicians" in this country, and here in NYC, there are still machine politics and people "bequeathing" seats to their friends or children.
And fewer people I know would even consider running for office because almost everyone I know has something in their past for an opponent to fasten on and blow out of proportion. An off-the-books nanny, for instance, which is common in NYC.
PNH:
Alas, Gov. Pataki vetoed the minimum wage bill, just yesterday. Not sure what the legislature will do next; they have their heads up their collective asses in so many ways . . . .
I'm feeling grouchy about the state budget, as usual. The legislature wants to delay today's deadline on school funding, which has me frothing at the mouth.
BSD:
Given the option, I vote on the Working Families line too. I was quite chuffed to see them moving up the ballot after the last election and the final death of the "Liberal Party."
And avoid any candidate listed as Right to Life like the plague.
I like NY's messy ballots. I like seeing which candidates are endorsed by which smaller parties. Sometimes it helps me make up my mind, in races where I don't know all that I want to know about a candidate (like judgeships).
I'm not ready to give up being a registered Democrat because I think it's important to vote in the primaries, but I think Working Families is an important option in the general elections.
For those interested, see:
http://www.workingfamiliesparty.org/
Patrick, it's too bad you and Teresa weren't with Claire and me and the kids at yesterday's Mets game--that was some _ugly_ baseball (even though we won). You'd've seen classic Mets-type stuff, though performed by members of both teams. At one point, each side had walked in a run. We were dying.
Rachel, I think you're lucky--though I will agree that _most_ of the anti-Semitic stuff I hear is from people who don't know that I'm Jewish (and who make matters worse by apologizing horribly once they find out; they don't realize that those sorts of apologies merely confirm their bigoted attitudes).
In Cleveland, when discussing the nice price I'd gotten on some item at a flea market, a fellow college student said to me, "that was because you Jewed him down, wasn't it."
Excuse me?
This was in the mid 70s, btw.
But Mary Kay, didn't you know that Israel was actually behind the September 11th attacks? After all, all the Jews who worked in the Towers were told not to go to work that day, so none of them died. The secret Jewish cabal got the word out.
I heard that a lot for a while, though not lately.
Oy.
Nancy, you have my every sympathy. For whatever comfort it gives you, you are not alone. Every Jew I have ever known (including me) has had similar encounters, and in some cases encountered far worse.
I wish you much luck and joy in discovering your mother's--and your--heritage.
In the same issue of _Newsday_, the opinion pages carried this, by Esther Jungreis:
http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vpjun263819035may26,0,3308956.story?coll=ny-viewpoints-headlines
Pertinent excerpts:
What is happening in the world today is scary - and it's even more scary that most people are asleep, unaware there is danger looming everywhere. We have become accustomed to catastrophe, so we do not react as the terror escalates and becomes global. But that is exactly what has happened in the wake of the scandal at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. And the worst of it is that it is we Americans who are giving life to it. America bashing, military bashing, president bashing have become the vogue. The media have seen fit to focus on nothing but the perverse acts of a handful of soldiers in Abu Ghraib while totally ignoring the honor and integrity of the U.S. Army, which sacrificed and continues to sacrifice to bring freedom to a beleaguered nation.
How, you might ask, could a responsible media in time of war publish those photographs, knowing full well that such publicity could jeopardize the entire war effort as well as the lives of innocent people? And more, how can responsible leaders of the American government, like Sen. Edward Kennedy, make the most obscene analogies, comparing the unmitigated evil perpetrated by Saddam Hussein to our valorous American troops?
[snip]
Surely, these media people and politicians realized that it is an obscene travesty to compare what occurred in Abu Ghraib to the horrific evils perpetrated during Hussein's despotic regime. The inmates at Abu Ghraib are not Boy Scouts. They are not innocent civilians, but include vicious killers who made a career out of torture. This is not to say that there is any justification for what transpired at Abu Ghraib, but at the same time, let us not forget that we are at war and those Abu Ghraib prisoners are a threat to the civilized world.
[snip]
These savage terrorists succeeded in overturning the government in Spain. The question is, Will we allow them to succeed in the United States as well? This is a time for all those who believe in America, who cherish freedom and democracy, to rally around our armed forces, our government and our flag.
Me: Reading this piece made me feel ill. And also weird, because, wasn't this the Republican line of a couple of weeks back? Haven't we moved on to another part of the spin by now?
Imagine me trying to explain that front-page photo of the man in black to my 8-year-old, and tell her that what "our guys" were doing was wrong, and why there are supposed to be codes of conduct for prisoner treatment.
Yeah, that was fun.
I am so not enjoying this government and all its works, large and small.
All I can tell you is that to some children, at least (okay, at least one child), this was a wonderfully eye-popping announcement that revved up all her "Space is cool!" engines. Of course, my daughter, not quite 8, appears to be a geek-in-training.
At any rate, when I picked the kid up from school yesterday and told her about the water, I hadn't even gotten to the point of explaining that we didn't know how much water or where it was, and the kid was already dancing around and yelling, "Water! Water! That means there was life! Aliens! There are aliens!"
To which I responded, "Maybe microscopic ones," but she refused to be dimmed.
What really impressed me was that she went from "there was water" to "there might have been life" in about 2 seconds flat, without any input from me.
I haven't shown her the pictures of the black hole eating the star yet, but she's been asking all kinds of questions about black holes lately, so I must do that next, and perhaps it's time at last to see the planetarium show at the Museum of Natural History . . . .
The fashion photography sidebar was interesting especially because Scavullo died a few days back. Newsday's obit this morning reproduced a number of Scavullo photgraphs and Cosmo covers, and what was most striking about the images (or at least those chosen for this half-page feature in a semi-tabloid) was their sameness.
I understand from an editorial and marketing standpoint why the Cosmo covers needed to look very much the same, but all the women look very much the same, all posed similarly and made up similarly, even dressed similarly.
These are not all women who look that much alike IRL, and to an extent the look in the photos was representative of the time, but it was interesting to see how Scavullo seemed to be reducing women to an archetype of his choosing. Alas, the only woman of color included was represented just by a headshot. I would have liked to see if Iman could really be made to look like Brooke Shields.
After reading the beginnings of this thread yesterday, I went and had 2 Nathan's hot dogs and waffle fries for lunch. I like wiffle-ball fries better, but these were piping hot and agreeably mashed-potatoey on the inside. The dogs were perfect, with a real snap when you bit into them and a spurt of hot liquid. Totally yummy with just a little mustard (when I get a street dog, I always have sauerkraut, because so few street dogs are kosher these days. But if you can find a kosher dog, or Nathan's mustard is all that's needed, IMO).
To those who are wondering how I got to Coney Island from the Flatiron Building for lunch, I didn't--there's a Nathan's stand in the new food court in the vertical mall on 32nd street and 6th. I was shocked and very pleased.
I highly recommend to everyone the PBS program called something like "The Hot Dog Program," all about the supposed best dogs in the US. It's a few years old now, but it comes around several times a year, at least in NYC, and is worth watching. The same production people have done an equally good program on ice cream.
Gak.
Urk.
Eep.
Um, I don't know what to say.
Except this, maybe . . . I read a lot of articles about Rwanda at the time, and I recently read a harrowing book about the genocide, and one thing that was perfectly clear from all of that coverage was that the Hutu and Tutsi "races" were a construct, that they were do intermarried and intermingled that if there had _ever_ been a real physical difference between them (something that was debated to begin with), it was long gone. The supposed "prettiness" of one race was created by government propaganda in the first place.
(As an aside, can I tell you how tired I get of the whole "funny, you don't look Jewish" thing? Guess all Jews are squat, dark, hairy people with great hooked noses; they look more like apes than human beings. It's the same sort of idiocy.)
On the milk thing . . . we had a metal milk box outside the door of our apartment, in NYC, when I was pretty small. I always thought that was pretty keen.
Now, I buy organic as much as possible, and milk without rBGH when I can't find organic. My dd prefers 2% to 1% but will drink either; neither one of us cares much for skim, which was also made in my childhood home from powder, and to this day my mom keeps a box of milk powder in the pantry, for "emergencies" (not really sure what a milk emergency might be in this era of the all-night convenience store).
The latest milk news tidbit I have is that Monsanto is suing some organic milk producers because their cartons say their milk has no rBGH in a way that Monsanto considers defamatory. Monsanto says the wording on the cartons "makes consumers fearful" of milk with rBGH.
Yeah, that's it. I don't buy milk with hormones because the organic carton scared me.
This morning's Newsday included a map (which I can't link here, sorry) giving the # of dead from each state (not the names, just the #s, and as of a day or so ago, IIRC). California and Texas have the largest shares of the not-quite-350 dead, followed by New York.
It was a stunning visual in its own way.
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