Ooh! Could Blaisdell Polytechnic get reciprocity, at least in the cafeteria and staff lounge? We have a professor of Anathematics and Uncivil Engineering, and the other Obelisk and I co-chair the department of Egyptology, and so forth.
Joint faculty party, perhaps?
Graydon said:
Currently, there are three disturbing trends.
One is the emergence of corporations which deny that the common burdens apply to them; they're readily modeled ecologically as predators on labour, and they are fundamentally against innovation, because innovation threatens their relative success. [...]
Another is the emergence of a strong political faction within the United States which prefers the corporate power structure to the public power structure of the United States, and sees looting the latter to benefit the former as a virtuous act. [...]
Third is one of the very specific means of looting; using the military power of the state to force market access. [...]
So the book we're in is FRIDAY crossed with LORD OF THE FLIES crossed with... what?
Stefanie: Yes, yes, and yes again. (And you wanna go out for lunch soon, or something? It's my turn to e-mail you, so I will.)
Hm. Two things:
"well you lot are OK but all those other people are big fat doodyheads."
The real problem seems to be that we are not properly grateful when we are told that we write just as good as a man. Er, as a literary writer.
Secondly, I now have an image stuck in my head of Yngve as one of the Ladies from the Ladies' Betterment League, trying to bring us charity bags of carnage for our own good. (See, now, if we were worthy, we'd know how to be grateful. We'd be the very spiffy poor, and perhaps not so dreadfully skiffy.)
I sent some money via PayPal to "Flowers for Al and Don", which is doing bulk flower buys and volunteer delivery people. They've raised more than four thousand dollars so far.
Dagnabbit, the World's Largest Replica Cheese link should be http://www.roadsideamerica.com/map/wi.html
but I dunno how to make it show up right. Sorry about that.
Ulrika's unifanned theod feory -- er, grand crocheted unification of thread is lovely, and I shall rest there in blissful contemplation, except to add one tiny note for Kip W's delectation:
Kip, you said "Smith felt that the controversy was significant enough that the two parties should still be at it somewhere, calling themselves the "Plasters" and the "Reals," but, alas, could find no sign that they really were." Well, perhaps not in London, but maybe in Wisconsin there were. Or at least, there were until somebody kicked the cord of the "Reals" refrigeration unit, and the "Plasters" triumphed. See World's Largest Replica Cheese.
This whole thing started with Patrick mentioning his sadness. I recognize that sadness, and have some of it myself.
If anybody's still not sure why someone might feel that sadness, I commend unto them these useful sentences from Lydy:
Sapir-Whassname aside, things can exist for which you have no names. However, if you strip a noun away from a thing, you make it harder to find, and make it more difficult to see. If you then mix it in with several other, like things and use the same noun for all, then the distinctions get badly blurred, and many things become invisible that used to be visible. That's what seems to be happening to me and mine. We're being invisible-ized. It's not a matter of thin skins, or rabid protection of the intellectual worthiness of the text, it's not an attempt to keep ourselves apart as better than other people. It's just that it feels like we're being written out of the histories.
Hence, sadness and also ow. Because, you know, it really is/was a cool thing, and when nobody makes a noise about the accuracy of the words used any more (either because they are all dead/tired, or because making a noise on multiple prior occasions has not produced any sign of Getting It from the simplificationist-revisionist historians), then maybe it really will be gone. And it being gone is not something some of us can look at without wanting to mourn. And the revisionist-simplificationist historians are crafting a future in which someone will ask me why I am mourning a way of life in which I stalked James Doohan.
At which point I will probably start doing my mourning with an axe.
Lydy mentions that binding powers of attorney may be useful for gay or poly people, but that hospitals sometimes ignore POAs anyhow. Back a few years ago, when I had three partners, I went in for some surgery. When we were filling out the forms, the intake person and I came to the section asking for the name of the spousal unit. I said, "Well, actually, I have three partners, and I'd really like them all to be on the list, since they'll probably take turns sitting with me for the next couple days here." She said, "Well, is one of them legally married to you?" I said, "Well, yes, Juan and I are married, but...." and then as I saw her begin to write down the one name in the space provided, inspiration struck. I put on my best "I've worked with official paperword too, and I'm On Your Side Here" manner, and said, "Well, you can put down just the one name on the form if you really have to, but it won't be accurate. But, you know, do what works out best with the form."
She stopped, paused a moment, and then asked for the other two names (Mike and Pamela) and wrote them in as well.
No guarantee that that would work with everybody, but the simple truth about accuracy seemed to bring us to a meeting of the minds. Accuracy is also a much more comfortable topic to meet upon than any of the social issue debate topics, at least when one is filling out paperwork, in my experience. (If anybody else tries this, do let me know how it works out, OK? Thanks!)
Pardon me for coming in late to the party, but a couple of comments dovetailed neatly with some reading I've been doing lately about the history of California. (Well, I'm actually reading about the history of mineral strikes and swindles, which is why I have a copy of THE GREAT DIAMOND HOAX AND OTHER STIRRING INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF ASBURY HARPENDING, (c) A. Harpending, 1913, edited by James H. Wilkins, and published by the James H. Barry Co., San Francisco. Mr. Harpending does spend a considerable amount of time on his military experience, at least in the portion of the book I have read so far; he begins with his attempt at age fifteen to run away and enlist with General Walker. "The objective," he says, "was the conquest of Nicaragua." but he got stopped. In late 1860, when Harpending was nineteen or twenty, he arrived in San Francisco, California, and thereby hangs the tail of the dove.)
Kevin Andrew Murphy:
"Famous Civil War battlesites of California? Anywhere?
"We didn't have any Civil War battlefields."
Claude Muncey:
"Nope, no major battlefields. [...] But two 'battles' were fought in CA -- the economic battle of paying for the Union war effort (think gold) and the battle of keeping California in the Union."
There almost was a battle, though. Without quote marks, and with guns and everything. Harpending says, "I am now going to relate for the first time the inside story of the well-planned effort ot carry California out of the Union and by what a narrow margin it finally failed of accomplishment when success was absolutely assured." He calls himself, "young, hot-headed, filled with the bitter sectional feeling that was more intense in the border States than in the States farther north or south. It would have been hard to find a more reckless secessionist than myself. I moved among my own people, got off all sorts of wild talk about spending the last dollar of my money, and my life, if need be, to resist the tyrant's yoke, and so forth, and was actually about to leave for my home in Kentucky to be ready for the impending struggle, when a quiet tip was given me that more importtant work was cut out where I was." He signed up and took oath with a band of thirty; of this band, he says, "Our plans were to paralyze all organized resistance by a simultaneous attack. The Federal army was little more than a shadow. About two hundred soldiers were at Fort Point, less than a hundred at Alcatraz and a handful at Mare Island and at the arsenal at Benicia, where 30,000 stand of arms were stored. We proposed to carry these strongholds by a night attack and also seize the arsenals of the militia at San Francisco. [...] All of which may seem chimerical at this late day, but then, take my word, it was an opportunity absolutely within our grasp."
They did not succeed in the attempt, because they didn't attempt at all. They were beaten before beginning by two things. General Albert Sidney Johnston was one of them. According to Harpending, "General Johnston only figured as a factor to be taken by surprise and with force. We wished him well, hoped he might not suffer in the brief struggle, but nobody dreamed for an instant that his integrity as a commander-in-chief of the army could be tampered with." In January 1861, Harpending and two others set up a 'social visit' with Johnston to find out how much damage the indiscreet talk of one of the conspirators might have done.
Answer? A lot. According to Harpending, Johnston's opening remarks to his visitors were delivered with courtesy and civility, but nevertheless struck home: "Before we go any further, there is something I wnt to mention. I have heard foolish talk about an attempt to seize the strongholds of the government under my charge. Knowing this, I have prepared for emergencies, and will defend the property of the United States with every resource at my command, and with the last drop of blood in my body. Tell that to all our Southern friends."
Harpending says he and his pals "sat there like a lot of petrified stoten-bottles," which is a comment that charms me not least due to a spelling for Stoughton bottle I had not hitherto encountered. And shortly after, the second factor put the quietus on the notion of organizing a "Republic of the Pacific" by this particular band of thirty. (No doubt many of them got into the fray in other ways. Indeed, after Texas seceded, Johnston himself made his way to the Confederate army and died at Shiloh. And I'm only up to the point in Harpending's tale where he gets himself a captain's commission in the Confederate navy, a vessel, a couple of cannon, and some letters of marque, and sets himself up to turn privateer and nab a couple o' three gold shipments on eastbound Pacific Mail steamers at the first opportunity, so I expect there to be all sorts of excitement before we get anywhere near the Diamond Hoax that was this reader's original quarry. I think Teresa might enjoy this book a lot, as might many here; it's got ladies sewing secret dispatches into their petticoats, and )
I'm not sure, now, what else I started out to say, but it had something to do with Harpending's comment that "I am mighty glad now that my efforts to disrupt the Union failed and still gladder because it has been my good fortune to see the awful heritage of hate that so long divided two brave and generous people die out and disappear." On the other hand, he also says that "the text-books of our schools are still deformed by a spirit of intolerance and prejudice, most unfortunate and misleading in an age that has happily outlived the bitterness that divided us in the past." I'm not sure who all he means his "us" to include. Then again, he did help Grant out of his financial difficulties in later years in New York -- he mentions this by way of explaining where he got his quotes of Grant on Johnston and Shiloh.
Anyhow, yes, California was saved from the desolation of war by Johnston, if Harpending is accurate -- but it might have been a near thing indeed. (Fascinating stuff to one who was raised in a Lutheran jar and never taught much history; maybe this is old hat to everybody else. Reading accounts from people who were there is starting to make some sense of some patches of North American history to me. I still cannot unbraid and unsnarl all the things that led to current attitudes about the past, though, and doubt that I ever will, but it sure is educational trying.)
Thanks for the link; that article is ... well, gentle and sweet. Nicely done. A fitting tribute. Especially the last line.
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