A line grows in Virginia-Highland.
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2004
On an overcast but warm Tuesday morning, we strolled from the house toward the library, noticing more folks than usual on the streets—families with strollers, iPodded and cellphoned twentysomethings, and a sizeable crowd from the soup kitchen/homeless ministry around the corner on Ponce.
It’s election day, of course.
We vote at our local library, and are used to short-to-nonexistent lines, and we figured that voting at 9:30 or so would get us past the initial rush of folks who have actual jobs. That may have been the case, but we were greeted with a very long line that grew much longer by the time we left.
The line was convivial, and we made it through in 20 minutes or so, and our local pollworkers did absolutely everything they could to facilitate getting us in and getting us out. Once inside, of course, we had to face those annoying Diebold voting machines (I kept thinking ‘wouldn’t antialiased type make this a lot easier on folks?’) but Sam and I had both done our homework and it took seconds to poke the screen a couple of dozen times.
I’m proudly wearing my sticker. I feel empowered. Of course, in the greater scheme, I’m holding my breath. And the first stop sign we came to walking away from the polling place reminded us that change is possible.
Why indeed.
Thursday, October 28th, 2004
Well, it’s down to the final days and Sammy and I seem to turn away from political coverage in general…it’s all a bit much. So let’s vote already, and see where it goes.
I do wonder why, sometimes…simply…why.
So does Dan Wood, software developer and ponderer.
Arched eyebrows.
Thursday, October 21st, 2004
Hello from St. Louis, where Sammy is conferring with muchos archaeologists at a downtown Marriott, literally across the street from Busch Stadium, the home of tonight’s final NLCS playoff game. The big ol’ arch is a block away. Me, I’m checking in to our Holiday Inn Express a mile away, where I find two traveling folks who didn’t quite get a strong enough wireless signal last night in their room–ah, yes, another Titanium Powerbook.
Ryan and Natalie are from San Francisco, and they’re traveling to the battleground states with a multimedia presentation–a four-screen DV extravaganza shot in and around the Republican convention. “Here, have a copy,” Ryan said, grabbing a DVD off of a spindle. And so I have a copy…nicely done…edited and burned on his Powerbook, clean, with a surround sound mix…a true manifestation of the democratization of the technology of television.
The Portapak pioneers who tried this kind of guerrilla television (I have a book from 1971 with that very name) back in the day had a noisy, low-res black and white picture as a reward for toting the not-so-portable equipment around. Now, it’s all so much easier, and yet the subject matter (Republicans in the wild, gathering in massive, uninspired cocktail-swilling clumps) remains familiarly unpleasant.
* * * * *
Both places we’ve stayed on this trip have had wireless internet and a freely available PC in the lobby, and I’ve come to conclude there’s a vast number of travelers for whom an internet check is a crucial part of their morning ritual. Last night’s place seemed to skew older…the place today have lots of twentysomething wanderers. The documentarians, and a couple of guys traveling around promoting Sobe drinks…wandering america on two dollar a gallon gas.
Why this election matters, part XCMXV.
Sunday, October 17th, 2004
ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) — Fears of a terrorist attack are not sufficient reason for authorities to search people at a protest, a federal appeals court has ruled, saying September 11, 2001, “cannot be the day liberty perished.”
A three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously Friday that protesters may not be required to pass through metal detectors when they gather next month for a rally against a U.S. training academy for Latin American soldiers.
Authorities began using the metal detectors at the annual School of the Americas protest after the terrorist attacks, but the court found that practice to be unconstitutional.
“We cannot simply suspend or restrict civil liberties until the War of Terror is over, because the War on Terror is unlikely ever to be truly over,” Judge Gerald Tjoflat wrote for the three-member court. “September 11, 2001, already a day of immeasurable tragedy, cannot be the day liberty perished in this country.”
City officials in Columbus, Georgia, contended the searches were needed because of the elevated risk of terrorism, but the court threw out that argument, saying it would “eviscerate the Fourth Amendment.”
“In the absence of some reason to believe that international terrorists would target or infiltrate this protest, there is no basis for using September 11 as an excuse for searching the protesters,” the court said.
Michael Greenberger, law professor and director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Health and Homeland Security, said the ruling could have broader implications if it is used to challenge aspects of the Patriot Act.
It was surprising, he said, coming from the conservative-leaning 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta, but the opinion was “very well-reasoned” and reflected “conventional application of constitutional principles.”
First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams said that though there are steps the government can take to protect people from terrorism, “that doesn’t mean we just dispense with the Bill of Rights as a consequence of 9/11.”
“We don’t yet live in a society in which everyone must always go through metal detectors everywhere we go.”
Contrail to popular belief.
Sunday, October 17th, 2004
When we go way out in the country…either up to the North Georgia mountains or way, way north to Upper Michigan, the shore of Lake Superior, one part of civilization that tends to intrude on the pristine wilderness are these white streaks across the sky, the distant signs of people being carried in aluminum tubes from point A to point B at 550 mph.
Pretty? Sometimes. Defacing a clear blue sky? Yeah, sometimes that. Dangerous? Well, could be.
This picture from NASA gives you a pretty clear indication of why it’s of some concern. I remember a few years back Star Trek:The Next Generation ran an episode where they discovered that the use of faster-than-light speeds was causing permanent damage to the fabric of the universe itself. I guess this is just one more place where actions–and the development of technology–has its consequences.
In the form of a question.
Thursday, October 14th, 2004
Well, I’m excited…my sister is now “in the pool” to appear on Jeopardy, a year after my brother’s appearance. She’s written a great sum-up of her Culver City experience (Californians get to go to the mother ship to take the test).
[and an update: they called her the next day, so she’ll be heading up from San Diego for a taping the day after election day. “Alex, what is uncertainty about our country’s future?”]
I was going to point you to my brother’s summary of his experience (he did great in the first two-thirds of the show), but all I could find on his site was this reference. If you run in to him, though, he tells good stories as well.
And yes, I believe I made some sort of deal with my sister that if she got on the show, I would try out after her appearance. So the die is cast…
Comforts of Hudson Drive.
Sunday, October 10th, 2004
Home again, we are. Familiar environs, the comforts of knowing exactly where to reach for a certain fork or a certain glass…knowing how hard to swing the back door so it snaps shut.
The back yard has a fine coating of leaves and twigs, a lot of the debris from the storm we didn’t sit through—hurricane Ivan’s remnants. But the house is more or less as clean as we left it, if you ignore the mountain of junk mail that came flying in through the front door. Why is it that charitable organizations we give money to seem to squander it on pounds of direct mail solicitations?
We had great weather, we had good times with some wonderful folks, and all in all I feel ready to move into the fall here, among the familiar, safe at home.
Fort-ified.
Wednesday, October 6th, 2004
It’s a quarter till midnight…wait, it’s a quarter till one…wait..it’s…I’m just confused about what time it is, which must mean one of several things…I’m exhausted in the wake of the Edwards-Cheney debate…I’m loaded down with fine Mexican food, and, oh yeah, I’m in Fort Wayne!
Yep, Sam and I are on the “return” portion of our great journey, and it’s actually an interesting one, since we get to stop and see friends we may well only see once a year. Sure, we have to put up with the uncertainty of what time it is here on any given street, since I think it’s a law in Indiana that folks can pick from a menu of available time zones on a zip code-by-zip code basis. Sure, we have to dodge the occasional disturbed Jack Russell Terrier, but believe me, it’s a pleasure.
Before the end of the week (when Sammy turns another year older), we’ll be home, simultaneously tired and refreshed, informed, entertained, and, well, ready for the next..hurricane?
So Sault me.
Tuesday, September 28th, 2004
It’s a crystal-clear fall Tueday so we head over to Sault Saint Marie, and we encounter small handmade expressions of a polarized nation: a handmade ‘Native Americans support Kerry Edwards’ sign…a stack of round hay bales, one on top of two on top of three, the ends painted red white and blue and labeled “one nation under god.”
We’re listening to ‘The Current’ on CBC Radio…first a half hour with the Montreal-based president of Medicins sans Frontieres, a pediatrician who lives her life helping small dying children in Darfur, in Afghanistan, in Haiti. In the next half-hour, it’s a thoughtful documentary on the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide.
Canadians are routinely listening to thoughtful radio about the problems of the world, their attentions turned outside their borders. Here on this side, we are a nation turning away from the world, presenting them a caricatured cowboy arrogance, take us or leave us. Marvel at our simplicity, our solidarity, our strength.
I find myself grateful for every Kerry Edwards sign we see up here, and come away with, in general, a bad feeling. I remember in 1988 I listened to the Vice-Presidential debate on the radio heading back to Georgia from Ohio…this time we’ll be at Doug and Ruthette’s…
Sidewalk blogging, U.P. style.
Monday, September 27th, 2004
It’s a bright sunny late morning, and Sammy is around the corner at the laundromat folding clothes after checking her email here on a bench in front of the local newspaper office. Newberry Michigan is a very small, somewhat economically…challenged?
And yet, here I am, squinting at the Powerbook screen, watching the 4WD trucks and SUVs (all american-made, of course) parade at a strict 25 mph.
Wireless broadband. It’s amazing.
Murrowed brow.
Tuesday, August 31st, 2004
ShopTalk today led off with a quote (provided without comment) from deep in broadcast journalism’s past…one that I thought appropriate to pass on during a week of police versus demostrators in the streets of New York while in Washington, civil liberties seem all the more on the wane.
“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular.”
—EDWARD R. MURROW, journalist (1908-1965)
Are there reporters out there following in Murrow’s tradition, with his courage? or has the economic landscape changed too much to support that old hardy breed?
Hole in the bucket.
Monday, August 30th, 2004
On the first night of the Republican Convention, an orchestrated fiesta of we love the troops more than those other guys, I read (out here, in the vast blackness of the Internet) that the Justice Department is again—again!—abusing their authority and prerogatives. The whole story is here at The Memory Hole, but I commend to you here a quote, from a Supreme Court opinion, redacted—blacked out!—by the Justicers because I guess those expressed, oh-so-very-public ideas of the highest court of the land can represent a threat to someone’s national security…
“The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect ‘domestic security.’ Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent.”
I want to see t-shirts printed with this paragraph. I want to see Ashcroft apologize. I want to see the election go another way.
C-Spanning the globe.
Sunday, August 29th, 2004
My brother called earlier this afternoon to ask if I was watching the protests on the streets of NYC on C-Span. “Punching in and out of it,” I said.
It occurred to me that everyone I had talked to who watched the Democratic Convention on television—seriously—watched most of the coverage on C-SPAN, blissfully spared commercials and Wolf Blitzer’s tiny microphones and the blather they picked up.
And now again, on the eve of the Republican Conventions, this non-profit service of your local cable companies—in some ways more “public” than public television—is serving the American public interest by just pointing a camera out on the streets of Manhattan and shutting the hell up. What’s CNN covering at the same moment? Prepackaged People magazine biography of Dick Cheney. Fox News? Canned wrap up of the week’s news—old news.
C-Span is in many ways doing the job of the 24-hour news channels, at a fraction of their budget. It’s the kind of service that makes one wish their mandate was broader: “Where’s C-Span for the Olympics?” Sammy asked.
So now, here come the Republicans. If you want to watch—really watch, you know where to go.
Undertime.
Wednesday, August 25th, 2004
You heard about there being new rules about overtime…rules that the labor secretary hailed as being great news for employees?
Rule 6: Employees whose job requires imagination, invention, originality, or artistic or creative endeavors are not eligible for overtime.
Oh, that’s just great. Encourage people to avoid creativity. And let employers take advantage of creative people. Oh, good idea.
Well, we can dig it.
Thursday, August 19th, 2004
Will Smith might want to take note. Some guy (in an earlier day I think I’d say “some wag,” but we’re all wags now) named Shane posted this in a comment to an entry in Engadget…ladies and gentlemen, Issac Hayesimov’s Three Laws of Robotics:
A robot must risk his neck for his brother man, and may not cop out when there’s danger all about.
A robot must be a sex machine to all the chicks, except where such actions conflict with the will of his main woman.
A robot must at all times strive to be one bad motha-shutchyomouth.
Excuse me, I’m getting a bad case of the wicka-wackas.
A spime day.
Tuesday, August 17th, 2004
Okay, I really thought about going to Siggraph this year…it would have been the first time in more than a decade for me, but no, I figured I had important stuff to do here at home.
So I am pleased when I read excellent reporting from the conference, and even more pleased when I can catch up on keynote speaker Bruce Sterling’s remarks in tasty, convenient online form. Sterling is at his futurist best here, and manages to weave together smart objects taken to the extreme, macroregional systems, our wasteful society, and Steve Jobs’ cancer. Yes, you read that right.
All that and more, as they say. Please click and enjoy.
