Posted by Teresa at 09:44 AM * 68 comments
Some PR outfit sent me the following email. As our esteemed readers will no doubt recall, Going Rogue is Sarah Palin’s recently released book-like object.
from: Benjamin Kellogg (bkellogg@groupsjr.com)I replied:
to: gau@cnavk.pbz*
date: Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 3:19 PM
subject: Top “Rogue” movies to watch while waiting in line to hear Sarah Palin speakTeresa-
Thought this could be a fun list for your readers…
In honor of Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” book tour, mobile movie site zFcbg.pbz has put together a list of eight rogue-centric movies to watch while waiting in line to hear her speak.
8 Rogue Movies to Watch While Waiting in Line to Hear Sarah Palin Speak:Benjamin Kellogg | Group SJR | 646 495 9722Patriot Games
Braveheart
Mission: Impossible
The Hunt for Red October
American Gangster
The Sum of All Fears
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
Van Helsing
You put out a list of “Rogue” movies that doesn’t include the first X-Men movie? Epic fail.It’d be a fail under any circumstances to spam the world with a movie list that’s less than the sum of its parts; but jeez.
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 05:29 PM * 153 comments
Romance Writers of America (RWA) has reacted to Harlequin’s announcement that Harlequin has gone into the vanity publishing business in partnership with Author Solutions:
RWA Alert: RWA Responds to Harlequin HorizonsThey really do take their role as author advocates seriously over there.
Dear Members:Romance Writers of America was informed of the new venture between Harlequin Enterprises and ASI Solutions to form Harlequin Horizons, a vanity/subsidy press. Many of you have asked the organization to state its position regarding this new development. As a matter of policy, we do not endorse any publisher’s business model. Our mission is the advancement of the professional interests of career-focused romance writers.
One of your member benefits is the annual National Conference. RWA allocates select conference resources to non-subsidy/non-vanity presses that meet the eligibility requirements to obtain those resources. Eligible publishers are provided free meeting space for book signings, are given the opportunity to hold editor appointments, and are allowed to offer spotlights on their programs.
With the launch of Harlequin Horizons, Harlequin Enterprises no longer meets the requirements to be eligible for RWA-provided conference resources. This does not mean that Harlequin Enterprises cannot attend the conference. Like all non-eligible publishers, they are welcome to attend. However, as a non-eligible publisher, they would fund their own conference fees and they would not be provided with conference resources by RWA to publicize or promote the company or its imprints.
Sometimes the wind of change comes swiftly and unexpectedly, leaving an unsettled feeling. RWA takes its role as advocate for its members seriously. The Board is working diligently to address the impact of recent developments on all of RWA’s members.
We invite you to attend the annual conference on July 28 - 31, 2010 in Nashville, TN, as we celebrate 30 years of success with keynote speaker Nora Roberts, special luncheon speaker Jayne Ann Krentz, librarian speaker Sherrilyn Kenyon, and awards ceremony emcee Sabrina Jeffries. Please refer to the RWA Web site for conference registration information in late January 2010.
Looking forward to seeing you at the Gaylord Opryland!
Michelle Monkou
RWA President
Posted by Abi Sutherland at 01:11 AM * 263 comments
From my arsenal of quotes for dealing with SAD:
Those joys were so small that they passed unnoticed, like gold in sand, and at bad moments she could see nothing but the pain, nothing but sand; but there were good moments too when she saw nothing but the joy, nothing but gold.
Anna Karenina, book 3, chapter 7
Posted by Teresa at 07:28 PM * 175 comments
I just heard from Velma Bowen. She says it looks like Scraps—Soren de Selby—may be having another stroke. They’ve called 911 and are waiting for the ambulance to arrive.
I asked her whether there was anything we could do. She said “Prayer.” I asked her whether there was anyone she wanted me to tell, and she said “Everybody.”
I could use some help with the telling. Mention Velma in your prayers, too.
If there’s more news, I’ll add it here.
7:52: They’re at New York Methodist Hospital.
Velma reports that Scraps is compos mentis and furious (no details on that), and that his blood pressure is somewhat low. For all of which we are grateful.
9:36: Velma texts to say CAT scan soon; also, Howard is there, and he says “Due diligence to figure out what’s the matter.” I add, Howard knows this stuff.
I further add, IMO, things are sounding better than they might, but Scraps clearly needs to be in the hospital.
11:11: Velma says not to sit up all night. She’ll call if there’s news, and I’ll keep updating.
1:19: Helen, who’s also been at the hospital, says:
Howard and I just got back from the hospital. Soren did not have a stroke. At 7pm Soren had a seizure which lasted about 2 minutes, Velma called 911 and he was taken to the hospital. At 9:50 pm Soren had a second seizure while in the hospital which lasted for 2 and a half minutes.As Cousin Linkmeister observed, “it seems very odd to think ‘phew, seizure,’ but when the alternative is stroke, I guess that’s the appropriate response.”He was given medication to relax him and to stop the seizures. His blood pressure was on the high side while we were there. A CAT scan showed some abnormalities but those could be contributed to residual artifact from the stroke. He is probably going to be held 24-48 hours for observation, given anti-seizure medications, and then referred to his primary doctor for followup.
2:08: Velma posts:
It’s a bit after 2am, and I’m home. Soren’s in a room at Methodist, and the plan is to saturate his system with anti-seizure meds, have a neurosurgeon take a look at the CAT scans, and see what happens. He’ll be in the hospital at least until Monday or Tuesday.He has speech, though he’s somewhat disoriented by the hospital setting, and he’s unhappy and drugged-drowsy.
Thank you all for prayers, good thoughts, and spreading the word. I’m going to follow his mother’s directions and go to bed. I’ll try to be more coherent in the morning.
3:09 PM: Velma texted: “Keeping Scraps till Tuesday @ earliest. EKG will be tomorrow.” Patrick had a conversation with her about whether that’s an EKG or EEG. Velma said NYMH staff had initially been saying EEG, but now were saying EKG. She couldn’t tell whether they’d changed their plans or were simply misspeaking.
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 03:16 PM * 79 comments
It was the typo that had to happen. And happen it did, at CNN, just now today. The story is,
November 14, 2009
McCain Campaign Adviser pushes back on Palin book
Posted: November 14th, 2009 02:22 PM ET
 |
As you know, Bob, Sarah Palin’s book is called Going Rogue. The title is on the cover and everything. |
But observe on CNN just now: |
 |
The full page is here as a graphic, or read the original; maybe they haven’t corrected it yet.
Posted by Abi Sutherland at 02:08 PM * 104 comments
It’s evening now, here in Europe, so we’re really two decades from that night. I can’t watch even the announcement without crying. I never have, not since the first time I saw it live, and I don’t know if I ever will. I’m not sure I want to; when I can watch sundered families be reunited with dry eyes I think I’ve lost some part of my humanity.
The nuances of the fall of the Berlin Wall are being debated all over. Anniversaries are good times for awkward questions and complex analyses. Were the East Germans fairly treated in reunification? Has the victory of free-market capitalism been everything it promised, all things considered? How many half-truths and simplifications have buried the ambiguous complexity of that time?
I have nothing useful to add to the discussion, except that I live in a Europe that could not have existed with the Wall intact, and I think it’s a good place. I call it a night’s work well done.
I think I’ll have a drink. It’s a suitable matter for a toast. Anyone with me?
Posted by Patrick at 08:11 AM * 181 comments
Cory Doctorow writes about the kind of science fiction I find myself most wanting to read these days. As he says, “science fiction writers don’t predict the future (except accidentally), but if they’re very good, they may manage to predict the present.”
Mary Shelley wasn’t worried about reanimated corpses stalking Europe, but by casting a technological innovation in the starring role of Frankenstein, she was able to tap into present-day fears about technology overpowering its masters and the hubris of the inventor. Orwell didn’t worry about a future dominated by the view-screens from 1984, he worried about a present in which technology was changing the balance of power, creating opportunities for the state to enforce its power over individuals at ever-more-granular levels. […]All of which has something in common with Mundane SF, but it’s different in an important way. Cory isn’t prescribing rhetorical devices; he isn’t categorically dismissing as “wish fulfillment” stories that include time travel or warp drives. Indeed, Cory isn’t prescribing anything; rather, he’s pointing out how some of the most effective SF works.Some of my favorite contemporary speculative fiction is instead nakedly allegorical in its approach to the future—or the past, as the case may be.
Consider Bruce Sterling’s The Caryatids (Bantam, 2009), an environmental techno-thriller—Sterling once defined a techno-thriller as “a science fiction novel with the president in it”—set in a mid-twenty-first century in which global warming has done its catastrophic best to end humanity. Finally forced to confront the reality of anthropogenic climate change, humanity fizzles and factions off into three warring camps: the Dispensation, an Al-Gorean green-capitalist technocracy; the Acquis, libertarian technocrats who’ll beta-test anything (preferably on themselves); and China, a technocracy based on the idea that technology can make command-and-control systems actually work, in contrast to the gigantic market failure that destroyed the planet. The play of these three ideologies serves as a brilliant and insightful critique of the contemporary approach to environmental remediation. Sterling especially gets the way that technology is a disruptor, that it unmakes the status quo over and over again, and that a battle of technologies is a battle in which the sands never stop shifting. Casting his tale into the future allows him to illustrate just how uneven our footing is in the present day—and the fact that the book consists of humans getting by, even getting ahead, despite all the chaos and devastation, makes The Caryatids one of the most optimistic books I’ve read in recent days.
Posted by Abi Sutherland at 05:04 PM * 128 comments
I almost hate to distress our commentariat with the latest piece of stupidity to sully the aether. But I think there’s some value in discussing these matters, if only to discourage, with the prospect of mockery, journalists who are not motivated by more conventional goads such as professionalism, or truth.
Exhibit A: Marathon’s Headline Win Is Empty by Darren Rovell, a CNBC Sports Business Reporter.
The meat of the article is that the Men’s New York City Marathon winner may be the first American to take the prize since 1982, but it’s “not as good as it sounds.” Take it away1, Darren.
Meb Keflezighi, who won yesterday in New York, is technically American by virtue of him becoming a citizen in 1998, but the fact that he’s not American-born takes away from the magnitude of the achievement the headline implies.
The article goes on to explain how Keflizighi was born in Eritrea, and African runners are so poor that the measly money that one can make as a runner is “a lifetime full of riches”. But how is that relevant to Keflizighi?
He is an American citizen thanks to taking a test and living in our country.
That’s the usual way, yes. There’s an oath, too; some people do care about that. I’m guessing that Rovell isn’t Native American, so I bet he’s descended from similarly technical Americans.
Let’s do a trivial bit of research on the web and clear up a few facts. According to both Wikipedia and Sports Illustrated, Keflezighi came to the United States at the age of 12, and started running in seventh grade (about a year later, I guess). He was naturalized as a US citizen in 1998, when he will have been about 23. So he’s not a product of the African distance-running culture, and as a college graduate (UCLA, 1998), he’s not dependent on his running to fund his third-world life of poverty. Implying otherwise is—to put it mildly—completely incorrect.
Furthermore, the 1982 finisher whom Rovell cites as the previous American winner was Alberto Salazar, who was born in…Cuba.
(We won’t even go into whether Keflezighi got his citizenship as easily as “a ringer who (sic) you hire to work a couple hours at your office so that you can win the executive softball league” gets work. That level of ignorance about the difficulties of the American immigration process is a whole different field of fail.)
Exhibit B: What I got Wrong About Keflezighi, also by Darren Rovell, CNBC Sports Business Reporter.
The non-apology apology.
I said that Keflezighi’s win, the first by an American since 1982, wasn’t as big as it was being made out to be because there was a difference between being an American-born product and being an American citizen. Frankly I didn’t account for the fact that virtually all of Keflezighi’s running experience came as a US citizen. I never said he didn’t deserve to be called American.
Oh. That phrase “technically American” really doesn’t mean “doesn’t deserve to be called American.” I see.
And I’m a Dutchman.
Rovell is on a bit of a cleft stick. He can either say that the use of “technically American” in his original article was correct, and that American citizenship by adoption is second-class citizenship, or he can say that he did no research whatsoever on Meb Keflezighi, and conflated two unrelated English terms to boot.
He declined the racist2 option and went for incompetence:
It turns out, Keflezighi moved to the United States in time to develop at every level in America. So Meb is in fact an American trained athlete and an American citizen and he should be celebrated as the American winner of the NYC Marathon.
<Jon Stewart voice>It turns out? What, was it just revealed, just today, November 3, 2009? Then that Sports Illustrated article that tells the whole story of his childhood was, like, backdated to October of 2005?</Jon Stewart voice>
And then there’s the fact that, to make sense of Rovell’s argument, you have to read “American-trained” for “American-born”, the phrase he uses to differentiate Keflezighi from runners for whom he would “break out [his] red, white and blue.” For a professional writer, conflating two such terms is like a carpenter picking up a screwdriver to pound nails.
The irony is, there is actually a core discussion to be had about American runner training. But it’s covered in the muck of so many assumptions and errors that it’s not worth addressing. That would dignify said muck with too much legitimacy, and its the kind of stuff that damages actual human beings.
The point of all this
It’s useful and necessary to discuss these things, if only to discourage that level of stupidity. But there’s a deeper point than just the question of why this particular man, who has epitomized the American narrative, is being accorded second-class citizen status. Seriously. A man goes from being a refugee from a war-torn country to a college-educated world-class athlete. He demonstrates pride in his American citizenship; most other runners did not wear shirts with USA emblazoned on them. And yet he can’t shake the perception that he’s only “technically American.”
What does that make my children, who are natural born American citizens, but have never lived in the US? What about my cousin, born in El Salvador and adopted at 12 by my uncle when he married her mother? What will it make my niece, when my brother and his wife bring her back from China in three weeks? What does that make the members of our community who have chosen their citizenships, taken tests and oaths?
I get it all the time, as an expat; people want to lessen and belittle my Americanness when they disagree with my opinions. Leaving the US is apparently very unpatriotic; learning about other cultures is suspect, and moving abroad all but treason3. (And taking a second citizenship? Dear Lord, the reactions.) I recall one conversation where I only salvaged my right to an opinion on matters American by mentioning that I am required to file tax returns.
There are similar discussions in pretty much every nation on earth, of course. This deep question of identity is not specific to the United States. Europeans have been wrestling with it since the Moorish Conquest. The rise of the British National Party in the UK is symptomatic of England’s ongoing struggle to see even the Scots as fellow countrymen.
But the matter at hand is the American identity, and I’m relieved to report that the majority of the comments on both of those posts agree that Rovell failed this impromptu civics test. That, at least, restores some of my faith in my fellow Americans, technical and otherwise.
- Intentional, yes
- I’d have gone for nativist if he hadn’t made the race-specific argument about the value of runners’ cash prizes in Africa.
- And yet nothing cured me of my adolescent disassociation with American culture like moving abroad did. That proved to me that I am immutably American.
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 02:34 PM * 10 comments
They’ve got an article over at MSNBC today, 10 most heinous hoaxes on the Net. Their definition of “hoax” seems to be rather broad, ranging from the MySpace Suicide to Nigerian e-mails and Work-at-home scams.
There’s a survey on the second page, where you can vote for your choice of Most Heinous Hoax. But they don’t limit it to the choices they presented: There’s an “other” choice with a fill-in-the-box.
I used the fill-in. For me, it’s a tossup between PublishAmerica and Strategic Book Group as the most heinous hoax, but in the end I went with Strategic Book Group. Bobby Fletcher has been (according to the Florida Attorney General) scamming hopeful authors out of $600,000 per year for the best part of a decade. Compared to that, “Save Toby” is rabbit food.
Posted by Teresa at 07:19 PM * 34 comments
This one’s for Abi, but that doesn’t mean it’s only for Abi.
I was browsing some gift shop canvas booths at Madison Square, and met the people who invented Revolver bound books. You know that old-timey toy called a Jacob’s Ladder that’s made out of flat square blocks laced together with fabric tapes? Revolver books are made like that, except that there are only two blocks, and the “tapes” form the book cover.
Here’s their site. Look at the pictures. Watch the video. It’s a better way to understand the concept.
The inventors describe it as “a binding technique that allows the journal to turn inside out and back again around a floating spine.” I say it’s a way for a book to have two front sections, so you don’t have to choose whether your to-do list or your notes on your novel belongs in front, or your lined as opposed to your unlined paper. It also means your book can have two different covers.
I love this because, like mimeography, chimney-style fire starters, or the magic loop trick for knitting two socks at once, it’s a recent technology that could have been invented any time in the last millennium or so.
Posted by Patrick at 06:48 PM *
You may recall Alan Grayson (D-FL) as the freshman Congressman who explained that the Republican health care plan is “don’t get sick, and if you do, die quickly” and who told Chris Matthews that he sometimes has “trouble listening to what Cheney says because of the blood that drips from his teeth.” Naturally, having violated the Washington, DC rule that says that liberals are required to be thoughtful, high-minded, and terrible on TV, Grayson is now being cast, by the guardians of our political discourse, as History’s Greatest Monster.
Digby responds to one such guardian, Stuart Rothenberg:
You see, it’s one thing for Republicans to give speeches on the floor of the House saying that Democrats want to murder the elderly or that they plan to create sex clinics and force teenage girls to have abortions. That is simply folksy language these people use to communicate with their people. When Newt Gingrich blamed Susan Smith’s murdering of her own children on liberalism, Lady Frothenberg understood that it was harmless hyperbole. When Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and the rest of the conservative movement leadership say daily that Barack Obama is a black racist who hates America, it’s simply their way, and we all understand that it is just entertainment for the masses who require this type of crude stimulation.Sage advice. Why, if more Congresspersons talked like Grayson, who knows what might happen. Can’t have that.But when one calls a former Enron lobbyist a K-Street whore on an obscure radio show, one has simply gone too far, sirrah, and it will not be tolerated.
There will be a town hall meeting this evening led by Pastor Dick Cheney to discuss the possibility of witches in the village and what types of enhanced interrogation might be used to determine the breadth of the infiltration. Our deep sense of decency, morality and civility demand it. And thank you once again, Lady Frothenberg, for bringing this egregious breach of proper behavior to our attention.
Whatever the rest of you do, don’t encourage this miscreant Alan Grayson to do more of this boorish behavior by donating money at his crude web site: Congressmanwithguts.com. If you do, I certainly hope you don’t plan on being invited into the any of the finer homes and establishments in the Village because you just aren’t welcome there!
Posted by Patrick at 08:55 AM * 201 comments
John Keegan, author of the excellent The Face of Battle
Keegan has now published his own history of the American Civil War
The analytical value of Keegan’s geostrategic framework is marred by numerous errors that will leave readers confused and misinformed. I note this with regret, for I have learned a great deal from Keegan’s writings. But he is not at top form in this book. Rivers are one of the most important geostrategic features he discusses. “The Ohio and its big tributaries, the Cumberland and the Tennessee,” he writes, “form a line of moats protecting the central Upper South, while the Mississippi, with which they connect, denies the Union any hope of penetration.” The reality was exactly the contrary. These navigable rivers were highways for Union naval and army task forces that pierced the Confederate heartland, capturing Nashville, New Orleans, Memphis and other important cities along with large parts of Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas. Keegan acknowledges this reality later in the book when he notes that these rivers “offered points of penetration to the Union into Confederate territory.” Precisely.McPherson goes on. Keegan is confused about when North Carolina was first invaded by the Union; he’s off by two years about when the British government recognized the Confederacy as a belligerent under international law. He misrepresents Lincoln’s attitude toward visiting soldiers in the field and makes the jawdropping claim that the Gettysburg Address “refus[ed] to differentiate between the sacrifice of the North and the South.” He is comprehensively wrong about the condition of the United States Navy at the outbreak of hostilities. Most amazingly, and I confirmed this one by using Amazon’s “Look Inside This Book” feature, Keegan, an eminent British historian, appears to believe that Benjamin Disraeli was Prime Minister during the American Civil War. (It was Palmerston.)But Keegan’s grasp of river geography and other terrain features is shaky. He confuses the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers, seems to place the Confederate forts Henry and Donelson on the wrong rivers, has the Kanawha River join the Monongahela River at Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River (it is the Allegheny River that joins the Monongahela, while the Kanawha empties into the Ohio 150 miles southwest of Pittsburgh) and shifts the state of Tennessee northward, where he says it “gives on to” Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. The Confederates did not abandon their strong point on Island No. 10 on the Mississippi River; Union forces surrounded and captured it with its 5,000 defenders. Tunnel Hill at Chattanooga is not a feature of Lookout Mountain, and the battle of Cedar Mountain did not take place in the Blue Ridge.
All books contain errors; book publishers, even long-established book publishers with large nonfiction lists, don’t have staffs devoted to “fact-checking,” nor is it clear that the world would be better off if they did. Moreover, as a book editor myself (albeit primarily of fiction) I usually hesitate to point fingers; I’ve made enough mistakes of my own that my more usual reaction is a sympathetic wince. But it’s boggling that no reader at US publisher Alfred A. Knopf noticed that this distinguished historian, at the beginning of Chapter Nine, asserts that Tennessee shares borders with Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. It’s equally amazing that nobody at UK publisher Hutchinson remembered that Disraeli wasn’t actually Prime Minister yet in the years 1861-1865. As for the Gettysburg Address, it was entirely about the sacrifice of Union soldiers, the ones being buried in a Union cemetery, the dedication of which occasioned the speech. The address is ten sentences long. It’s not exactly little-known or hard to find. Against my better judgement and all sense of professional discretion, I find myself compelled to emit that cry of the outraged reader: Didn’t anyone at either publisher actually read this book?
Posted by Abi Sutherland at 06:34 AM * 126 comments
ItWaADaAStorNi. TheTriOrTreaWeGo. AsMidReaEaTiZo, ComWeTurOn, OutCon, OpSeWri. ChaStiACaToLi, EnWorSpraInEx, AndPloBeToUnLiSaiJuCaTheWi. ItWa, AsTheSa, AGreDiInTheFo.
NaNoWriMoHaBe. HeAThreToTeUsHoItGo. IfYouDoItBe, AdvIsWe. IfYouDoItNow, FeeFreeToPoWoCouATho.
AllCaVaIsEnTheReOfTheCoPo.
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 12:05 AM * 94 comments
Q: Why do demons and ghouls hang out together?
A: Because demons are a ghoul’s best friend.
Q: Why did the Fish and Game officer arrest the ghost?
A: He didn’t have a haunting license.
Q: Why does Count Dracula read The Wall Street Journal?
A: It has great circulation.
Q: What did the skeleton say to the bartender?
A: “Give me a beer and a mop.”
Q: When does a ghost eat breakfast?
A: First thing in the moaning.
Q: Do zombies eat hamburgers with their fingers?
A: No, they eat the hamburgers separately.
Q: What’s the ghoul’s favorite sport?
A: Casketball.
Q: How do you keep a monster from biting his nails?
A: Put him together with screws.
Photo: Creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike from jpstanley http://www.flickr.com/photos/jpstanley/58277555/ (CC) Found here: Geeky Jack ‘O Lanterns at Geeks Are Sexy.
Posted by Abi Sutherland at 05:47 PM * 68 comments
The internet is fantastic at getting distant people together. Here I type in Amsterdam, and my words are read in Japan and New Zealand, California and New York. But the net turns out to be a powerful lubricant for local cooperation as well.
Case in point: Freecycle, a clearinghouse for people looking to give things away and people looking for free stuff. It started in America, running on Yahoo! groups. A volunteer in a local area would start a group (and own that group, under Yahoo’s terms) following the set Freecycle rules, then be added to a searchable list of Freecycle groups.
Freecycling took off in the UK with the support of local councils seeking to reduce landfill usage. According to this article, “The UK is probably the most enthusiastic Freecycling country in the world, hosting just 10% of all the branches but handling 27% of all Freecycling activities.”
I believe it. I used to be a member of the Edinburgh group, and we got rid of a lot of things before our big move that way. The people we gave things to ranged from very keen to slightly unhinged with delight about it. I found it mildly addictive, myself, and had to use some discipline not to acquire as well as dispose.
In the course of human events…But there’s an eternal tension between central control and local independence. Over time, the American founders have centralized and standardized the Freecycle Network (TFN), applied to trademark the term “Freecycle”, and sued at least one person who contested their application. They’ve also sent takedown notices to others, according to Chilling Effects.
TFN has also been moving toward a hosted system under their control, My Freecycle, rather than Yahoo! groups. People who want to start a new Freecycle group (“apply for one” is the phrasing used) are now required to have a My Freecycle ID to even begin the process.
British Freecycle groups haven’t been universally comfortable with this kind of control, which has blocked local initiatives such as locum moderation from neighboring groups, a representative at the local tip (dump) with a laptop, and a proposal to add the ability to lend things out as well as give them away.
The relationship between the American founders and many of the British groups has gone badly sour this year. The British moderators formed a negotiating team to try to resolve the matter, but were not satisfied with the results. Andy Swarbrick, a former Freecycle moderator, has been running a fairly emphatic activist blog about the matter, which has been a useful source of their side of the story. He accuses TFN of inserting ersatz moderators to take over groups from rebellious owners, telling moderators who complain to quit, and forcibly migrating groups from Yahoo! to My Freecycle.
The first public split occurred early last month, when the Brighton Freecycle group became GreenCycleSussex. They released this statement:
Earlier this summer four leading members of the National UK Freecycle team resigned, including the director, in protest at the lack of change. Moderators around the country then formed an Independent Association of Moderators and again tried talking with The Freecycle Network [in the US]. Hoping to negotiate and find a positive way to continue under the banner of Freecycle. This has not been possible.
We acknowledge that what Freecycle does in the community is great. We just don’t agree that we should be dictated to from across the Atlantic and adopt inappropriate policies. We think the members and moderators make Freecycle great.
There has [sic] now been multiple summary expulsions of moderators who have asked for change from Freecycle. All UK moderators have lost their freedom of speech within the organisation. So here in Brighton we have decided to go our own way along with the majority of other Freecycle UK groups.
Then, on September 11 “hundreds of local Freecycle branches across the UK…declare[d] an orchestrated independence from their American parents.” Something like 170 out of the UK’s 509 Freecycle groups left at once, creating a new umbrella group called Freegle to serve as an index and clearinghouse.
TFN has taken a “more in sorrow than in anger” official line to this, though it does accuse the departing moderators of being undemocratic and seeking to profit from Freecycling:
“They simply took over and renamed local Freecycle groups in autocratic fashion and sought to manipulate the media into believing there was some US v UK split,” [Freecycle founder Deron Beal] said.The personal is political
“Freegle members did not choose to be Freegle members, and Freegle moderators and volunteers do not democratically vote on communal rules. They used Freecycle to build up membership, and then took the members for their own personal gain.”
I’m sure it’s no surprise that my sympathy lies more with the British mods than with TFN. I know and love the sort of people who volunteer to run these things, particularly in the UK, and they’re not very keen on marching in step. It’s part of their charm and their effectiveness, and it’s certainly true to the founding spirit of Freecycling.
(And, of course, I’m irresistibly attracted to the idea that the plucky and independent British rebels are breaking away from distant, rigid and unsympathetic American control.)
But it is, of course, important for mods to remember that “You own the space. You host the conversation. You don’t own the community. Respect their needs.” This goes for the local mods who moved their communities to Freegle without consultation as well as for TFN.
I guess that in the end, my support really goes to the ordinary members, like the folks I met in Scotland who took my leather scraps and gave me some of their seaweed as a gift, or the couple down our road who got our crib just in time for the birth of their first child, or the guy in Amsterdam who’s trying to find a home for his daughter’s rats.
That’s the real revolution, the turning of that cycle, and it’s going on every day.
Posted by Patrick at 02:35 PM * 22 comments
—at venerable Brooklyn dive bar Hank’s Saloon, where we’ve generally had good gigs. Moreover, thanks to this newfangled idea called “rehearsing”, we may even remember most of our notes and words this time. 8:30 PM, 46 Third Avenue in Brooklyn (corner of Atlantic Avenue), no cover.
Here, have some authentically muddy sound and video from last month’s appearance at Kenny’s Castaways:
Posted by Abi Sutherland at 04:14 PM * 947 comments
0131 is the Edinburgh telephone prefix. It was changed from 031 on April 16, 1995 (PhONE Day). When calling from abroad, one should drop the 0 and dial 131 after the country code (+44).
Such dusky grandeur clothed the height
Where the huge castle holds its state
And all the steep slope down,
Whose ridgy back heaves to the sky,
Piled deep and massy, close and high,
Mine own romantic town!
—Sir Walter Scott, Marmion
See also: a Marmion photoset.
There is no special loveliness in that gray country, with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains; its unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly looking corn-lands; its quaint, gray, castled city, where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat. I do not even know if I desire to live there; but let me hear, in some far land, a kindred voice sing out, “Oh, why left I my hame?” and it seems at once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise and good, can repay me for my absence from my country. And though I think I would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be buried among good Scots clods. I will say it fairly, it grows on me with every year: there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street-lamps. When I forget thee, auld Reekie, may my right hand forget its cunning!
—Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters
I don’t miss Edinburgh in the winter, when the darkness would seep into my very brain. And I don’t miss it in the summer, now that I live somewhere I can get a tan. But sometimes, of an autumn day, I would love a glimpse of pale golden sunlight on Georgian sandstone.
Posted by Teresa at 07:08 PM * 419 comments
This Saturday at the Tor.com meet-up, that is. I’ll just be dressed as me. It’s disappointing. I’d had a notion worked out in my head for a pair of non-labor-intensive steampunk goggles. Just needed a few things from Home Depot. And that’s where my new mutant superpowers kicked in.
I’ve been waiting a long time for them to show up. Always wondered which one(s) I’d get. Now I know: I’m invisible. Who knew that all it took was being middle-aged and female? But it’s true: I am apparently now invisible to Home Depot employees. I can walk up to one—six of them, actually, though one was a repeat—and say “Hello” or “Excuse me” or “Can you help me,” and have them look straight past me, or turn and ask someone else if they can help them.
It took me a while to believe it was happening. The first one I figured was busy. The second through fourth I figured were tired or overstressed or maybe just stupid. By the fifth one I was starting to get angry, in a polite and controlled way.
I’m usually pretty good at getting shop clerks’ attention, and this time I brought out the full battery: body language, eye contact, making my approach in his line of sight, and speaking clearly and politely. And by golly, it happened again.
I looked at the items in my cart. I was only short two things I’d wanted. Too bad. I abandoned my cart, walked over to Customer Service, and asked if I could have a comment form to fill out. The Customer Service employee—who, bless his heart, could see me—said they didn’t have a comment form, but he listened to my complaint. He seemed sympathetic. I think it was real. He told me that if I wanted to talk to the Assistant Manager—he pointed him out to me—I could deliver my complaint in person. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the Assistant Manager had been one of the guys who couldn’t see me.
What the hell. It was worth a try. I walked over to the Assistant Manager. When I was just a few feet away from him, I stopped, planted my cane, and looked directly at him. Damned if I wasn’t still invisible.
It was weird—he was a tall man, but when his eyes moved from one side to the other I could see them making an upward bump in their travel path when they were passing over me. He refused to look directly at me for even a second. I kept looking straight at him. There was no way he could have missed me.
When that got old, I walked right past him toward the door, staring directly at him the whole time. Still no acknowledgement. When I’d gone a few feet past him, I turned back around and stared even harder at him, hard enough that it would have been rude if I’d been interacting with a normal human being. He still pretended he couldn’t see me, though truly, he must have.
Home Depot used to be a good store, but in recent years it’s taken a real dive.