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Friday, October 23, 2009 by Nanette Over the past couple of years I’ve spent quite a lot of time offline, with little or no access to the internet due to one thing or another, so - having got rid of cable ages ago because I just don’t watch much TV - for the first time in 11 or so years I’ve been getting most of my news and information from network TV. I am having trouble describing what that is like for me, but sitting at the bottom of a dark well listening to echoes of the same things over and over again comes close. Definitely no information overload, whether I am watching the local or national news or even reading the local paper. The same people reading/writing the same news (from slightly different perspectives each time, if we’re lucky) about the same events with the only real diversion from what appear to be scripts shared across networks coming in whatever little “slice of life” feature they choose to highlight. If that’s all there is, my friend, then let’s keep dancing indeed. No wonder so many of us are so ignorant of so many things. Thank the gods (and Al Gore) for the Internet.
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Wednesday, May 20, 2009 by Nanette  For some reason Governor Terminator and the legislature thought it would be a just dandy idea of the electorate did their jobs for them (without pay, of course). The electorate had other ideas - even though we (or, at least, some of us, primarily the anti-tax nutters) are partially to blame for the mess. Everyone, but everyone is tired of Ahnold, who has made former Governor Gray Davis’ fiscal mess look like the most sound of financial practices. Too late, though, sadly. This is one time, I think, when the fact that a politician is term limited is a comfort to all.
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Sunday, February 08, 2009 by Nanette Marc Ambinder’s explanation - Explaining The Cable TV Booking Disparity - just doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
So, no. That explanation just won’t fly.
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Saturday, January 03, 2009 by Nanette I remember somewhere around this time last year that I declared 2008 the Year of the Manatee! I never did get around to explaining what that was all about but it turns out that is a good thing because I was wrong, wrong, wrong! Not about it being the Year of the Manatee, but about what that meant. See, while I remembered and loved the secret Manatee Lisa smiles some of them wear - their gentleness and lumbering grace…
 I didn’t want to focus, as I was inclined to, on the scars that so many wear across their backs as a testament of not only an uncaring and, sometimes, unaware adversary but also of a resilience and a capacity to survive, secret smiles intact.
 That is usually the more interesting story, though, no? Anyway, 2008 is finally over - and not a moment too soon - and while I still love manatees I do hope this new year will be free of them. I have a lot planned, including a re-focusing of the site (of course!) and other stuff, which I will be writing about as I can. My life is still not quite my own, but now that things have calmed down at least a bit it’s obvious that I’m not likely to get the life I want, at this moment, so will just have to make do with the one I have, and work through whatever obstacles as well as I can. This means that my grammar and punctuation will be even worse that usual as I will have to take the time to write when I can, and will worry about it being proper some other day, when I have more time. I have so much I really should be writing about - I still have to write a letter to PE Obama - who actually won the election, amazing as that is - , as I sit writing the heartbreaking news comes in that Israel has invaded Gaza with ground troops, so there is that, and also lots of navel gazing to come, as I try and make sense, or at least lemonade, of the past year. And continue moving and looking forward into this next one. What’s everyone else up to?
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Monday, December 15, 2008 Random “Don’t Let The Door Hit You… ” Thought by Nanette On January 20th at 12:01pm, we should all toss shoes in the general direction of Washington, DC. (Random worry - where was the Secret Service?)
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Saturday, November 22, 2008 by Nanette
I want my life back. I will have it back soon. Stay at home moms and dads and childcare workers are heroes. And teachers. That is all. Or, almost. Edited to add more whine and heroes. [picture copyright Danielle M. Heitmuller of Oddly Enough, where she does great little illustrations with every blog post.]
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Wednesday, November 19, 2008 by Nanette
It’s hilarious that Obama was elected only 2 weeks ago… and has yet to take office or implement any policies at all and already the sky is falling, in some corners of the blogosphere. (Me, I’m with Liss) Takes me back to that day during the primaries when many of the big political bloggers (separately and independently, I’m sure) all declared the Obama candidacy dead in the water. It was over, done with, they had spoken. Strangely, Obama paid no attention to them and just continued to implement his campaign’s plan and the rest, as they say, really is history. I’m fairly certain that he also has a long range plan now and while I may not agree with all that he does - he’s no socialist, sadly - I’m curious to see what he will accomplish and how. Also funny… Al Qaeda has called Obama a "house negro" and, apparently, a tool of the Jews. I guess that makes nice a change from him being a Manchurian radical Muslim Black Panther, or whatever it is that some on the wacko right (and left) think he is. Some things to read - California Supreme Court is going to review Prop H8 ban - I don’t think minority populations rights should be put up to the vote anyway, but even when they are, the courts have (eventually) stepped in to override that vote. Let’s hope it happens this time too. Related, via P6 - Trends beyond black vote in play on Prop. 8 - One thing I wasn’t looking forward to, getting back online, was running into the (seemingly inevitable) irresponsible "Blacks hate gays and are responsible for all their ills" type talk that happens after votes like this. Sylvia has taken on the stupid printed, once again, in Salon Magazine in Carved Up: Black Women and Bodily Integrity. I have committed to reading the Epic of Gilgamesh and it’s all Theriomorph’s fault. Come join the conversation there on building community and effective strategies online and off.
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Monday, March 10, 2008 What’s With SNL’s Obama Blackface Minstrel Routine? by Nanette "[T]he simple fact is that blackface and minstrels and house Negroes are dangerously wild and crafty memes that have been laughing at intent and virtue for over 140 years. Anyone who has been paying the slightest attention to race in America knows that these are the sort of images that tend to slip out of a user's grasp almost immediately, so deliberately handling them constitutes a form of willful recklessness." Ebogjonson, a year or so ago, after the spate of White liberal bloggers thinking it was oh, so cool and clever to dress up politicians and pundits in blackface, to make who knows what points. With predictable results. I literally paused with my cup of coffee halfway to my mouth Sunday morning when they played the clip of the previous night's Saturday Night Live skit. All it was lacking was the rolling eyeballs, showing the whites of the eyes and a couple of "Oh Lawsy, wut we'z gon' do, Miz Hillary? Save us poor dumb black folks!" to make it complete. Well wait... they had that, just in updated language. Maybe ebog should do another spreadsheet, this time for the media and (apparently melanin challenged) comedy shows.
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Wednesday, December 05, 2007 Can This Woman Get Any More Stupid? by Nanette Don’t answer that. I’m sure they put her on this show on purpose…but for what purpose, I don’t know. Once again, I am so glad that Whoopi, even with all her own weirdness, is on this show and that Ms. Sheppard is not the only black woman on there. Jesus. (No pun intended)
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Monday, December 03, 2007 Stephen Metcalf Tries To Salvage Slate’s Reputation by Nanette
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Thursday, November 15, 2007 Cdesign Proponentsists, Irreducible Complexity And Bacterial Flagellum, Oh My! by Nanette No, I haven’t gone mad and suddenly started typing in awkward tongues. Beyond what I normally do, that is. It’s just that I’ve fallen in love! With PBS’s NOVA, particularly their recent show Judgement Day: Intelligent Design On Trial. Did you see it? If not, what a treat you missed. Fascinating, a little freaky, funny - evolutionary biology and science made so easy and presented with such clarity that even us non-scientists could understand it without strain. Of course, it had to be presented that way because of the court case. The judge wasn’t a scientist either. Judgement Day: Intelligent Design On Trial tells the story of the Dover school board and their efforts to introduce Intelligent Design into their science curriculum, and the great divisions this caused in the community, in the schools and on the board itself. Much of what occurred was familiar to me, on some level, as I’d been reading Ed Brayton, who has been fairly heavily involved in fighting ID for some time now, but watching this presentation gave me a whole new level of understanding. Not only of the science involved, but of the deceit of the ID proponents, and the lengths they’d gone through to attempt to convince people that ID was not promoting religion. “cdesign proponentsists”, in the title, was one of the more amusing discoveries of those preparing for the court case, on the science side. The link is to Nick Matzke, of Panda’s Thumb, who wrote about it a couple of years ago. And, via Panda’s Thumb, I also just learned that PBS has put the transcripts and entire show online, a day early, so anyone who missed it (as apparently some stations didn’t play it, for one reason or another) can now read and view the entire thing at the pbs site. Excellent. I am not a religious person but I have no problem… or little problem… with people practicing their own personal religions in their personal spaces. I do have a huge problem with people attempting to put their religion into public schools, no matter how it’s couched. It just doesn’t belong there. The separation of church and state is there for a reason and, in my view, it’s there for the protection of the church far more than the state. Although both lose, when the two are mixed together.
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Tuesday, October 09, 2007 by Nanette Well, wait… do we really need for ALL Of Us to be included? Y’all are going to have to help me out here. I have a shocking memory and so am no doubt missing some vital area where appeasing bigots… worked. I mean worked to the benefit of those doing the appeasing, not the bigots. Let’s see… there was that whole Constitution thing. There, too, one needed to take what could be passed, and not rock the boat too much by talking about all those humans being held in captivity as if they were actually, you know – human. Southerners (among others) would have been upset and not ratified the Constitution and where would people have been then? It was much better to take half a loaf - or maybe 3/5ths of one - and work later towards rights for all. That worked out well, no? Okay, so maybe some Black folks were a tad upset, but someone always has to complain about something, no? Jeez, why can’t people learn to be pragmatic about little things like civil and human rights? It only took another hundred years or so for them to be, in theory, released from the chains that had bound them for hundreds of years already. And only another hundred years after that ‘til civil rights laws were passed and (somewhat) enforced throughout the land. Who says appeasing the bigots and being pragmatic didn’t work? Whiners, the lot of them. Like women! Just look at them, not realizing how expedient it was that others got the right to vote before them, otherwise, bills just would not have passed. Duh! Didn’t they get rights eventually? Didn’t that work? I mean, so what that they too were considered pretty much property, with no voice, no say in the household let along say in the running of the country. They only had to wait a couple hundred years after the signing of the Constitution before becoming full citizens with rights. I mean… my god, how much faster do you want things to work? Incrementalism is the key! Without that half a loaf, things would never have moved so swiftly. No way did anyone just decide that they’d gotten theirs, and that was just fine, and leave it at that. Nope, those with full (or at least fuller) rights were out there everyday agitating for their lesser privileged brethren and sistren to be fully included. They stood firm and resolute, declaring that no one be forgotten or left behind (for more than a few hundred years). I’m sure of that… aren’t you? So, I would say absolutely yes, they are right! … appeasing the bigots, taking half the loaf instead of the full one, separating out those who – if we massage history, consciences and morality – are just not quite “our sort” and putting them aside for later… has worked like a charm in this fair land. It’s just like some guy with the initials MLK once said, “Justice is divisible”. Oh wait… okay I just might have that quote a little wrong, but what did he know anyway? [added] I should say that I am not GLB or T, but I do feel for those who have been waiting for this bill for decades, and who see it slipping out of their grasp just as it appears it might actually pass. That is heartbreaking. (I do not feel, however, or support, “understand” or accept, in any way, those who are using the language of hatred and bigotry to express their disappointment, no matter how long they have been waiting for what.) But… well, just when has appeasing bigots worked?
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Tuesday, September 25, 2007 Come Back! We Hate YOU, But We Love Your Money! by Nanette Intended consequences of anti-immigrant legislation enacted by various towns… but some are not liking it so much. A case of hater’s remorse, maybe? Towns Rethink Laws Against Illegal Immigrants (NYTimes)
Can’t forget to add in the genius factor….
I can’t imagine why they voted him out of office. Then again, I can’t imagine why they voted him in.
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Tuesday, September 18, 2007 Random Crabbiness (And Notes): Thank The Goddes For Whoopi by Nanette I’m sorry but… what do you mean you don’t know if the earth is flat? It’s not that I’m a huge Whoopi Goldberg fan, it’s just that I am so glad that the black woman named Sherry something is not the only black woman on The View. She’s funny and all that, but man… my mom had the show on this morning and there she (Sherry something) is, sitting there saying that not only does she not believe at all in evolution - which is bad enough, but in that she’s not alone - but that she has no idea if the world is flat or not! She’s never thought about it, she says. I’m all for respecting people’s religious beliefs (or, at least some of them) but c’mon. Anyway, at least Whoopi was there to balance her out with a belief in science (as well as and in conjunction with deities) otherwise it would have been conventional wisdom in no time, among the viewers of that show, that “Black people think the world is flat!” I guess the idea (if they were even considering it) of having Margaret Cho AND Whoopi on the same show sounded just a bit too combustible, even if far more interesting - thus anti-science, anti-sense, but funny, Sherry something. [added] Quote for… maybe not the day. Maybe not even a good quote, but there you go - it does have the advantage of being true:
I have started an offline journal. In part because when I used to keep one, I liked it - like most people, I write more freely when I know no one (besides me and the NSA) will be reading it until I make it public. This way, I can natter on about this or that thought before pulling them together into something um… finished. And polished. And with all sorts of proper punctuation and grammar. Okay, sure… let’s not get carried away here. [added 9/19] about the flat earth and via Oliver Willis, the co-host’s name is Sherri Shepherd. Here is a partial transcript of the exchange and a link to the video. Sigh.
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Thursday, September 06, 2007 Random Crabbiness:The End of Time, Kids Are Not Our Future, Jena Six and The Discoverers by Nanette The end of time? Horrors! I am not so not ready yet for time to end.
Why does that bother me? Well, I do take comfort in the fact that, so far at least, time still goes on in those other places but I think, with no doubt wacky Californian logic, that if we couldn’t be the first - the trend setters - in giving up time, we should at least have had the distinction of being the very last. This second to the last stuff is for the birds. CrabbyNote: It is not the job of “the children” to save us from ourselves. I caught the tail end of some morning show segment a couple of days ago, about some sort of U.S. peace camp that brings Israeli and Palestinian kids together in a safe, fun place for a period of time, in the hopes (generalization) that they will grow up realizing that the “other side” is human and that they are people just like them. And that they can get along, and so on and so on, the children are the hope for the future, blah, blah, blah. This is not the first year for this camp (or similar ones), nor the first time I’ve seen this type of story on the news and on feature shows, by any means - the story itself has not changed much, but my reaction to it sure has. I used to see this stuff and think something like a warm and fuzzy… “oh wow, good idea, hope for the future… I hope it works out. If the kids learn…” Nonsense. If the parents, or adults in general, are unwilling to learn, unwilling to make changes, unwilling to make sacrifices, unwilling to do the hard work… what in the world gives people the idea that the children will grow up to be any different? When has this ever happened? And I’m not just talking about the Israeli/Palestinian issue. No, you hear the same sort of pablum about environmental issues, racism, crime, this or that unjust situation, poverty, pollution - on just about any topic where adults are messing up the world, there is someone mewling about how “the children are our future, things will change with them” and all that. No. We, the fully grown folks - our actions, our policies, our activism, our refusal to stand down - are the children’s future. And nothing ever changes until we act like it. Kinda reminds you of all those folks who “discovered” places where people had been living for centuries All of a sudden, mainstream blogs have “discovered” the Jena Six story - that poc, human rights, anti-racist and other blogs, as well as TruthOut and Amy Goodman and such, have been covering for months. I guess things really don’t exist until another “mainstream” person or publication (in this case, apparently Anderson Cooper of CNN) says it does. (This is not to forget, of course, that most everyone first heard about this through the newspapers who published the original reports.) No (okay, not many) complaints, though. The more, on this and stories like this, the merrier. |
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There are toys all over the floor, cartoons on the TeeVee, the 1 year old is tired but won’t take his nap, the 4 year old is hooting loudly (singing, he says), whining about orange juice and burying his little brother under empty boxes, the 85 year old is clean and dressed now and sitting on the couch reading the morning paper, the 15 year old (cat) has stopped yowling and is sleeping somewhere, having failed to convince me that I’ve been starving her for days even though she just ate, lunch needs making and breakfast needs cleaning up, the floor needs to be mopped, laundry will have to wait, the 31 year old is at work, hating it but thankful that she has a job, the 50 year old is also thankful the 30 year old has a job… but can’t wait til she also has a babysitter. Grandmas need care too.
I’m not all that interested in politics now that the election is over - the endless speculation over possible appointees and such is just mind-numbing - but, still…
OK, sure. I have a computer clock, the clock on my little (not cell) phone, and a couple of other time pieces of varying trustworthiness scattered about the house but when I really want to be sure what time it is…. I call time. Still. My inner Luddite coming to the fore, maybe. It may be contradictory but another thing that bugs me about this story is the realization that the vast majority of the U.S., with the exception of California and Nevada, apparently lost time ages ago. 