EBAY LISTING IS LIVE - CLICK TO SEE.

Auction will run for 7 days starting right now. For the love of all that is D, tell your friends. Crosspost! Bring it up in random conversation! ;)

So I posted a while back about winning some sort of Engadget giveaway of a mysterious nature. Long story short, I got in a flamewar with an artist I admire from afar about what Americans could be reasonably expected to do in support of the Iran election protests, given that direct involvement could potentially harm more than it helped and not everybody is a proxy wizard.

He and I both walked away super-pissed in spite of being ostensibly on the same side; twenty minutes later I got the email saying I'd won the giveaway. I declared there and then on Twitter that I'd set aside something from the mystery grab bag for an ebay Auction For Iranian Democracy.

But first, let me tell you the tale of Engadget: The Unboxening.

( Warning: image-heavy. )

Well, hope you had fun, kids. Because the protests themselves sound like they were the worst combination of stupid, lame, and more revealing of the participants, sponsors and not-so-secret cheerleading squad than fruitful in any political sense. The Washington Post covered our local 'rebellion'. I could describe it, but I think I'll just end with what the journalist himself used, since nothing else sums it up so neatly:

Bunny Monroe, a retired teacher from Fairfax County, said: "I'm really concerned with what's going on with this country. . . . I'm afraid of what's going to be happening. . . . There is no place like this country. . . . I'm afraid that [this] America is not the America that I was born into."

No shit, Sherlock. When you were born all the black kids in your neighborhood (if there were any) went to their own special school with the leaky roof and the 20-year-old textbooks. Women were teachers or librarians or secretaries or housewives. The environmental movement was not even in its infancy, it was a fetus, and many separate and wide-ranging interests were trying to abort it as quickly as possible. The America you were born into was either suffering its biggest economic catastrophe in history, fighting valiantly against a powerful and obvious evil fascist threat, or, if you're on the young side, entering a mini-Golden Age of unsustainable growth and suffocating conformity in which the worst you had to worry about was BEING NUKED OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH. But seriously, none of that compares to taking our first hesitant steps out of a national nightmare of Orwellian madness to find A BLACK MAN IN CHARGE OF THE COUNTRY TRYING TO FIX ALL THE DRASTICALLY BROKEN BITS (HINT: MOST OF THEM) AT ONCE USING THE SAME KIND OF DOLLARS THAT PAY YOUR TEACHER'S PENSION.

BE AFRAID, BUNNY. BE VERY AFRAID.

(P.S.)
(10:15:42 PM) Alex: I love how they protest waste by... throwing teabags into thrashcans.
(10:17:34 PM) Alex: Maybe next time we can have rallies in support of traditional marriage.
(10:17:41 PM) Alex: They will consist of man-trains.
(10:17:45 PM) Eliza: XD
(10:19:27 PM) Alex: Hey, it's just like supporting our troops.

VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE

That is all.

Thank you.

Love,
Eliza

"Man, I think if the cops left traffic alone it would've been better," said a perky bottle-blonde as we got into the elevator.

"I know," said a taller woman holding coffee. "It took me two hours to get here this morning."

"It was awful," said the first one. "It was as bad as - just about as bad as nine-eleven!" She giggled.

Wow, that's super-disrespectful, I thought, but I was groggy as hell and focusing on trying not to touch anyone else in the packed elevator. I said nothing. A couple people got off at the fourth floor in chilly silence.

"If you leave Route 1 open but block off all the arteries, of COURSE Route 1's going to be at a standstill," continued the first. "It took us half an hour to move three blocks."

I figured this would be a bad time to bring up the joys of public transportation, which had had absolutely zero delays today. The originator of the conversation got off at the fifth floor in a gaggle of people, and I was left with the second woman and a couple older guys, who stood in silence. The doors closed and we rode upward.

Suddenly the call lights all turned off at once and the elevator jerked as if hiccuping. We all made simultaneous noises of surprise, and one of the guys mashed the unresponsive "6" button a couple of times. I looked at my phone. It was 9:37 AM.

A few tense seconds, and the doors shuddered open on the sixth floor. We piled off that elevator like it was on fire. I took the stairs the rest of the way up and reported the issue to the building manager.

I guess living and working in one of the cities attacked seven years ago can get to you, even if, at the time, you had no connection to either the places or the victims other than the big one, citizenship. Americans are pretty good at pulling together in the face of overt threats, but all I've seen in the years since, graduating high school and then college and moving out into the wider world, is great power misdirected in ways I can sometimes barely comprehend.

A lifetime of reading science fiction has shown me what a good imagination and a little preparation can do in the face of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but the people entrusted with the power to rule the world barely seem to think past the next couple election cycles - and I'm not convinced that anything's going to change even if enough voters make the sane choice on election day. Do Americans as a whole know how to sacrifice anymore? Even if continuing to ignore the obvious means they'll give up a lot more before they die?

Seven years ago we came together in anger, in sorrow, in shocked disbelief, and for a little while we were one country again. Aren't there other emotions that can unite us? I'm not so naive as to expect basic respect for fellow man in all my fellow men, but how about basic respect for the fact that resources are finite? Fear of collapse? Primal urge to provide for our descendants?

The people who died in 2001, in whose names we have pillaged and destroyed - I'm pretty sure they wouldn't want their tragedy remembered only as the casus belli for an enormous military action that sapped their country of strength and attention in the moment when it most needed both. But I'm not one to put words in their mouths.

I'm not sure how to conclude this. I just started writing. I guess I want this day of remembrance to also be a day of looking forward, to the threats and issues that have unfolded since the attacks. I want everyone to have a good long think about where they want the country and the world to be in five years, ten, fifty, and how they can work to help make it happen. Because I'm damn sure some psycho in a cave on the other side of the world is thinking about it, and rubbing his hands in anticipation.

Dear Echoing Void,

I don't often touch on touchy subjects, anymore, in this journal; and the simple reason is that it seems that while most of the blogs I lurk around delight in "creating discussion", what this often turns into is a bunch of trolling and people yelling at each other to no productive end. And, while I do not back down easily from a confrontation or argument once I've entered it, I find the thought of provoking such idiocy or hosting it in my private/public space distasteful, and most of the time I have no energy to defend my opinions or choice of linking material once I've put them out there.

But today I'm willing to invite criticism and stupidity by discussing the wider world and its effects on me - this is an ego blog, after all, given how long it's run (five years, five weeks, two days) and how few people actually read it. I blog for myself, perhaps a few select friends, and I blog for posterity - most likely also myself, as occasionally going back to posts from a younger me gives a strange sort of pleasure of recognition, retreading certain half-lost memories and making them more real than everything else I never wrote down. I blog because I need to talk and I don't have much in the way of people to talk to right now.

So in the past few years as I've read again and again the stories of people horrendously abused overseas, people horrendously abused closer to home, people trained to protect my liberty and then sent halfway around the world to stomp all over someone else's, the scandal, the graft, the corruption, the hypocrisy, the no-bid contracts, the enormously bloated military that is sucking down our tax dollars and our dreams and our future as infrastructure and economy and hope falter at home, I've tried to pass off my feeling of terrible wrongness as liberal guilt, or an incomplete picture of the situation, or something I can't do anything about anyway.

But the more I learn about this new world in which I'm coming of age, the more I see history repeated as the internment camps of old are revived, the more I'm revolted, frightened, and completely at a loss. I've been doing my best to live my life while horrors are perpetrated in my name, because I thought it was all I could do. Take public transportation, recycle, help others, foster a cat, vote. Maybe someday I might be powerful enough to exert influence, maybe when I'm old I'll be strong enough to fight the system. Right now I'm a nothing, a nobody, a near-invalid who can barely manage to hold down a desk job and feed myself at the same time. As a federal employee, I can't even make a phone call for my political candidate of choice. Bound by law and illness and a kind of social despair, I feel angry and trapped and stupid for not hitting my personal breaking point until now, when my country is chin-deep in shit and still digging. I want to stand up, I want to speak out, I want to act, because I know that someday a middle-school girl just like me is going to raise her hand in history class and blurt, just like me, "But why didn't anyone do anything?" And my only excuse is that I was tired, I was busy growing up, and I don't think I'm even close to done yet but however slow I may be on the uptake I'm secure in my conviction that I have got to DO SOMETHING AAAARGH.

So my big dumb question of the day is, what the fuck can I do? Call my representative to voice my unfocused concerns? (I got an answering machine.) Go to a political protest? (Because those have sure accomplished a lot latelyohgoddon'thurtme.) Donate to a campaign? (Already dug deep, and am now in "with what, my grocery money?" territory.) I need a plan. Well, I need suggestions that can then be incorporated into a plan. Trolls, dumbasses, and actual intelligent, informed comments accepted.

Please.

Sincerely,
Eliza

Okay, so when I joined a local CSA a couple weeks ago I was envisioning a big cardboard box of veggies to take home every week, something actually worth the $23.30/wk I was shelling out for the experience. Instead the first "box" I got was a small Rubbermaid tub with about $8 worth of produce. Delicious produce, sure, but all the "supporting local agriculture" and "99% organic" in the world can't change the realities of a skimpy grocery budget, so last week I called the farm, canceled my membership, and got a refund (less the first delivery). I know production picks up later in the summer, but all I was ever going to get was stuff that fit into that little container, so I decided to get my produce from the grocery store like everyone else.

That said, I got home from Alumni Weekend yesterday, crashed for two hours, and then made roasted kale with my farm-fresh 99%-organic kale and cheapo olive oil, and it is CRACK, I tell you, CRACK. I only used about half the kale, so I might make it again tonight. The rest of dinner was mostly chili-from-a-can (NEEED grocery shopping), but you can't say I didn't try to be healthy. Then there was more crashing and I was half an hour late to work today.

Sleep deficit is still painfully apparent, but I foresee no more crazy weekends for a long while, so maybe I'll finally have some time to recover. It was great to see people and hang out, even if I did have to be bitchy and drag arctangent and appending_doom back to DC before hanging out was complete. I feel like I cut it too close anyway, but those beds were so awful, I couldn't have gotten up any earlier...Blergh. Anyway, I survived and probably won't die of exhaustion before Friday, which is the important bit.

In not entirely surprising news, McCain = kind of a toolbox. He would have earned an awful lot of Eliza Respect Points had he stuck with her, and I'm not just speaking as a woman suddenly disabled in the flower of her youth. The real question is, why the hell did I learn this from a British news outlet instead of our own supposedly "liberal" media? *grumble*

( Edit with more bloviating )

I spent a lot of time on the comic for this week, and then they printed it blurry. I think they took the "view-only-on-the-internet" version and blew it up. I have very little to say about this, because it doesn't matter, but the amount of incompetence rampant in the current leadership is really amazing.

That statement can be applied, of course, on a more national scale. Reporters getting arrested, almost shot? New Orleans filled with private mercenaries armed with assault rifles? Concentration camps for refugees, cots stacked like firewood, fences patrolled by National Guardsmen, complete with soul-crushing idleness and lack of psychiatric care? Incompetence, foot-dragging, apathy, lack of leadership from every quarter. Legally-owned guns are being confiscated. Remember that thing, you know, that piece of parchment called the Bill of Rights? Where is it? Oh, in DC? Right in the same town as our nation's leaders? Then why the fuck haven't they read it?

The Astrodome radio station has been forbidden from operating, in spite of having jumped through every bureaucratic hoop set in place over the last week. The former people of New Orleans are scattered to the winds, and now they're evicting the remaining holdouts in preparation for the incredible landgrab which will surely follow. Amazing how many rich people are managing to get even richer in the face of catastrophe, and how many poor people are getting utterly screwed. As usual. Oh yeah, and look what sort of shit they're sneaking in while everyone's attention is diverted! Welcome to 21st Century America, bitch, now put your hands on your head and lie down.

Went to the Dollar Store, CVS, and Goodwill today. Dropped off a prescription, bought hot-glue sticks and notecards, failed to find both poker chips and facepaint. They were having a book sale, ten for a dollar, so I gathered up twenty great-condition children's books to donate to the book drive on campus. They'll go to shelters in Philadelphia where New Orleans refugees are being housed.

I am so angry at the current government right now, and there is very little I can do about it. Donate money, books, toys for the displaced kids. Donate to the SPCA and hope they can help even a fraction of the homeless animals wandering the streets, being used as fucking target practice by the aforementioned mercenaries. Refuse again and again the temptation to write to Republican acquaintances with a long list of hotlinks and big freaking WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?!?. I can't blame my government for a hurricane (unless you get into the whole Bush Willful-Ignorance-vs-Global Warming shitfest), but I can sure as hell blame it for not doing its goddamned job.

The CNN restraining order is, I hope, only the first in a long line of little changes which may just make America a better place, in spite of the dumbass at the helm.

Also, 25 Incredibly Stupid Quotes about Hurricane Katrina + general cock-up of a disaster response.

[[4/19/09 - A lot of Katrina refugees are still angry. As they fucking should be. I'M still angry and I didn't even have anything to do with it.]]

I wrote a long-ass post complaining about physics eating my soul and the great turnout for the first night of Uechi (which turned into the not-so-great turnout for the second night of Uechi, as usual) and going slowly insane from overwork, but then I deleted it, because it doesn't matter. I feel that my life is in perfect harmony now. What matters is that I finished an entire set of Electrodynamics problems in one day - with Advanced Lab in the middle, no less! - and turned them in hours earlier than I'd expected. And I suggested Dr. Diane Linne's NASA Mars Hopper project site to boingboing as a followup to their robotic space penguin story. And people in New Orleans are HOLYSHITfinallly getting the aid that should have been there approximately Tuesday.

God damn. I remember showing the Scientific American article to my parents almost exactly four years ago - the scope of such a disaster was nearly incomprehensible at the time, as it was written even before 9/11 (but published afterward). It seems to me that everyone in the entire country should be asking some very pointed questions of our current misbegotten glitch of an administration. I generally avoid armchair politics on this blog (and promise to hereafter), but this really takes the cake. Let's cut funding for the only man-made structures keeping an entire city from drowning, unleash developers on the only natural structures doing the same, rely on decades-old engineering to magically prevent a gigantic disaster, funnel the money into sending more ill-equipped weekend warriors into a war zone which we created, get right down on our knees and pray to Heaven that we're safely out of office before the shit hits the fan. Brilliant plan, guys. You really called that one.

Grendel's Workshop looks like just the thing to keep me from dying of physics this semester, but it involves writing a story once every two weeks. Holy crap. So much living to do, so little time.

QotD:
Alex: Dark chocolate is LIKE dark energy.

Linkscape:
WORST. Pirate impression. Ever.
Clicky's Stolen Song:
A Lesson in Digital Ethics - Captain Bootleg, an Internet pirate, has stolen Clicky's hit song. Nettie and Webster learn why it is wrong to steal music from others.

Mice regrow limbs, organs - mutant healing factor in our future? :)
Swarthmore is in the news, even if it's for stupid reasons.
Cats in Sinks. 'Nuff said.

Also, some zombies recently ate Vancouver('s brains).

Saw a casting call for a senior film thesis, entertained the thought for a whole ten seconds before sighing and walking away. There's just no freakin' way I could ever fit that into my current life. Someday...

[[4/17/09 - I ended up disliking Grendel's Workshop a great deal due to the absolute horror that was most of the rest of the class's submissions. I tried to mask my hatred in vicious critiquing but it always turned into me being angry and affronted that I was being forced to read this garbage. I do not play well with other writers.

Oh, also, I break my no-politics promise pretty regularly.]]

Fuck, fuckity fuck fuck fuck. Fuck fuck, fuckity fuck. Fuck! Fucknuggets.
Hmm, let's see. Which parts of our future just won a free ticket to Hell?

1) Environment
2) Economy
3) Political standing (The part where other countries respect us)
4) Education (today in class we're talking about how No Child Left Behind is going to destroy American education)
5) Jobs

6) No, wait, those were the only things I care about. Yep, guess we're pretty well fucked. Good job, Ohio. You had one chance to prove that you're actually a progressive East-coast state instead of an ignorant southern wannabe. That's it - I'm getting a job and moving the hell out before you start setting black people on fire or something. Homeland pride? What pride? I've always hated you. Your posturing's a joke, your precious agriculture has been absorbed by suburbia, and your precious forests are now farmland. Your rivers are sewage, your politicians are corrupt, your public schools are shit. Fuck you, Ohio, fuck you and your fucking provisional votes and your close-minded stupidity and your fate-of-the-world status.

Love, Eliza

[[6/22/08 - Boy, was I spot-on with my extremely broad statements or what? And now I live in Virginia, partly because it reminds me of Ohio. Dammit.]]

Useless but Amusing Flash Video of the Day: Tiny Plaid Ninjas

Small discoveries:

1) You know you're losing your tan when you successfully light a corner of your room by reflecting sunlight off your arm. My albedo causes objects to cast very sharp shadows. I feel like this should be a problem, but I'm too busy to worry about any more silly things.

2) Find a dead cicada. Pull off one of its larger wings. Hold the wing so that direct sunlight reflects off it at an angle. Adjust until you are rewarded with the sight of dozens of tiny veins, heretofore invisible, which spring into focus in brilliant gold and silver. The fuck? Awesome.

3) Though I still severely doubt the existence of emotions in reptiles, I've decided to use emotional terms for lack of better language. "Happy" is when they're out of the plant and on the branches I provided, basking in the sunlight, not hungry or frightened. I think they're finally happy now.

I requested an absentee ballot and suddenly I'm being inundated with propaganda from Northeast Ohio. I'm practically afraid to vote now, because I don't know a thing about any of the non-Presidential candidates and I'm too busy to do any research. We're allowed to leave sections blank, right? Well, I'll vote for President, anyway.

There's a circus today. I'm trying desperately to justify leaving all this homework and forking over $11 to go see it this afternoon. It's possible that the camels will be the deciding factor. It doesn't look like the most amazing circus ever, but the animals appear well-fed and the guys setting up were boisterously cheerful. I'd rather it be a Barnum & Bailey circus than a Ray Bradbury, if you know what I mean.

How many of you watched the Bush announcement about the space program yesterday? I thought so.

My only complaint was that whenever he talked about robotic missions, he always seemed to be envisioning these huge, white-elephant kind of constructions, which is exactly what NASA has been trying to move away from recently. But he was speaking so generally, and it's not like he's an expert on the subject, so I have utmost faith in his team of handlers to steer him in the right direction. I mean, he wants people back on the moon. He wants an aggressive space program. How can I not support that? I mean, I would give NASA my life savings tomorrow if I thought it would make any difference. I'm still sorta wondering how he plans to reallocate eleventy bazillion dollars from old programs to new ones without earning the hatred of millions of engineers. But we'll see.

The thing is, even if he's blowing hot air, even if most of those deadlines aren't met - I'm happy. The goals themselves will come to fruition whether Bush is steering them or not. Why? Because big networks and big politicians are suddenly talking seriously about PUTTING PEOPLE ON MARS. It's in the public eye, it's generating discussion, and now suddenly millions of forward-looking humans from all points of the globe and a handful of generations are vindicated for their years of imagination and hard work. It's happening, folks. The future is now. Bush doesn't have to be reelected to keep this going. We're planting the seeds of our wildest dreams, and in just a few decades they will burst into bloom.

seek out a star, hold on 'til the end

[[1/14/08 - Yyyeah. Jaded? Me?]]

Go to Google, type in "miserable failure", and click "I'm feeling lucky". |^_^| Apparently there was/is a campaign out there to trick Google into doing this. Basically, the engine tries to match up an http address with the link text, right? So if ten thousand people link to that page with the text "miserable failure", then the engine happily supplies you with the page when you run a search. Yet another nifty abuse of technology.

[[1/8/08 -- Now it's my job to help keep this from happening. Irony?]]

I just watched an episode of Dr. Who. It was fun, but wasted as much time as a full-length movie and now I'm behind again. I love how apparently everyone on Pluto is British. I should see more of these when I have some time to blow. (Read as: unfortunately, never.)

According to SWIL chat, the Verizon Wireless Guy is having phone sex in every commercial. My take on the matter:

"Can you hear me now? Good. Okay, I'm taking off my pants."

"Was it good for you? Good."

At that point I realized that I know absolutely nothing about phone sex. I would be willing to pursue research if it wasn't so damn expensive (and if I could keep from laughing hysterically the whole time at such a ridiculous concept). Do you think the college give research grants for this sort of thing?

Other QotD:
nautiluspq: "I can't remember whether I intended to save humanity or destroy it this week."
Me: "Flip a coin."
Her: "Okay. Heads is save, tails is destroy."
*she flips it.*
Me (while coin is in midair): "Heads."
*it is.*
Her: "Stop using your psychotic powers."
Me: *evil laughter*

[[1/8/08 -- Psychotic powers are fun.]]