Random Access

Monday – 28 February 2011
Another week of workin’ begins. This one includes some high, hazy clouds, but the sun is out and it’s supposed to be a nominally warm day, so, in the words of Curtis Mayfield: “It’s Alright.”

Last night, we went up to SaraRules!’ parents’ for dinner: Baked fish (both cajun seasoned and parmesan)  with rice pilaf and broccoli. After dinner, we watched The Long Kiss Goodnight. Long-time readers will recognize this movie as the top end of the “Cool World–Long Kiss Goodnight” scale, my metering for bad movies. It’s a one-dart movie, but it also had some amusing dialogue and some lovely over-the-top scenes. And, more to the point: My in-laws love a good, campy action flick, so it was a perfect choice.

After dinner and the movie, SaraRules! and I headed home. I’d gotten her Fables Vol. 14: Witches, so she curled up with that while I surfed the Interwebs. I’ve also discovered that Triscuits (Cracked Pepper and Olive Oil) with string cheese make a tasty pre-bed snack.

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
This year’s final Black History Month item is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or N.A.A.C.P (1, 2, 3).

Founded February 12, 1909, the NAACP is the nation’s oldest, largest and most widely recognized grassroots-based civil rights organization. Its more than half-million members and supporters throughout the United States and the world are the premier advocates for civil rights in their communities, conducting voter mobilization and monitoring equal opportunity in the public and private sectors.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, usually abbreviated as NAACP, is one of the oldest and most influential civil rights organizations in the United States. Its mission is “to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination”. Its name, retained in accordance with tradition, is one of the last surviving uses of the term colored people.

The NAACP’s headquarters are in Baltimore, Maryland, with additional regional offices in California, New York, Michigan, Colorado, Georgia, Texas and Maryland. Each regional office is responsible for coordinating the efforts of state conferences in the states included in that region. Local, youth, and college chapters organize activities for individual members. The NAACP is run nationally by a 64-member board led by a chair. The board elects one person as the President and one as chief executive officer for the organization; Benjamin Jealous is its most recent (and youngest) President.

In 1905, a group of 32 prominent, outspoken African Americans met to discuss the challenges facing “people of color” (a term used to describe people who were not white) and possible strategies and solutions. Because hotels in the U.S. were segregated, the men convened under the leadership of Harvard scholar W. E. B. Du Bois at a hotel (Fort Erie Hotel) on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls in Fort Erie, Ontario. As a result, the group came to be known as the Niagara Movement. A year later, three whites joined the group: journalist William E. Walling, social worker Mary White Ovington, and social worker Henry Moskowitz, then Associate Leader of the New York Society for Ethical Culture.

The Race Riot of 1908 in Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois had highlighted the urgent need for an effective civil rights organization in the U.S. This event is often cited as the catalyst for the formation of the NAACP. Mary White Ovington, journalist William English Walling and Henry Moskowitz met in New York City in January 1909 and the NAACP was born. Solicitations for support went out to more than 60 prominent Americans, and a meeting date was set for February 12, 1909. This was intended to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the birth of President Abraham Lincoln, who emancipated enslaved African Americans. While the meeting did not take place until three months later, this date is often cited as the founding date of the organization.

The NAACP was founded on February 12, 1909 by a diverse group composed of Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Archibald Grimké, Henry Moscowitz, Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villard, William English Walling (the last son of a former slave-holding family), and Florence Kelley, a social reformer and friend of Du Bois.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, which was disproportionately disastrous for African Americans, the NAACP began to focus on economic justice. After years of tension with white labor unions, the Association cooperated with the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations in an effort to win jobs for black Americans. Walter White, a friend and adviser to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, met with her often in attempts to convince President Franklin D. Roosevelt to outlaw job discrimination in the armed forces, defense industries and the agencies spawned by Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation.

Throughout the 1940s the NAACP saw enormous growth in membership, recording roughly 600,000 members by 1946. It continued to act as a legislative and legal advocate, pushing for a federal anti-lynching law and for an end to state-mandated segregation. By the 1950s the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, headed by Marshall, secured the last of these goals through Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which outlawed segregation in public schools. The NAACP’s Washington, D.C., bureau, led by lobbyist Clarence M. Mitchell Jr., helped advance not only integration of the armed forces in 1948 but also passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1964, and 1968, as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Heading into the 21st century, the NAACP is focused on disparities in economics, health care, education, voter empowerment and the criminal justice system while also continuing its role as legal advocate for civil rights issues. Yet the real story of the nation’s most significant civil rights organization lies in the hearts and minds of the people who would not stand idly by while the rights of America’s darker citizens were denied.

While much of NAACP history is chronicled in books, articles, pamphlets and magazines, the true movement lies in the faces—black, white, yellow, red, and brown—united to awaken the consciousness of a people and a nation. The NAACP will remain vigilant in its mission until the promise of America is made real for all Americans.

Stray Toasters

• T minus 4 days to the Hostler’s Model Railroad 2011 Festival.
• I have discovered something about WordPress 3.1 about which I am not fond: The way it now embeds media. I shall have to continue investigating this, but it seems as though I’m not the only one who doesn’t care for it.
• Skip the Sundae? Christie Is on First Lady’s Side
  • First Lady Teams with U.S.T.A. to Fight Obesity
• 
• Jos. A. Bank is having a suit sale, today through Wednesday.
• X-Rays and Unshielded Infants
• I ran a 19-car consist on my railroad last night. That, along with the engine and tender, roughly comes out to 24 feet long — as the caboose is entering the track on one 4’x8′ board, the engine is just about to exit that board.
• Fashion Week: Milan
• For Meliko:
  
• Meetings and reports!  YAY! </sarcasm>
• Puggle (not Puggle).
• Frank Buckles, Last World War I Doughboy, Is Dead at 110
• Air travelers may have been exposed to measles
• There are… three… shirts on woot! that may make it to The Covet List.

Namaste.

Friday – 25 February 2011
It’s Friday. Amen. Aside from the whole “end of the work week” thing, it also means that it’s only a week until the Hostler’s Train Show in Ogden.

Last night, I made dinner: Teriyaki chicken stir-fry over rice. It turned out pretty well. SaraRules and I caught up on NCIS over dinner; now, we just need to do the same for NCIS: Los Angeles. We also caught a bit of Dawn of the Dead, by Zach Snyder. I am very curious as to how his new vision for Superman shapes up.

After that, I spent a little time in Gotham City, chasing down Harley Quinn – saving Robin in the process – and beating on some of Bane’s thugs.

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
Today’s person of note is Bessie Coleman (1, 2, 3)

Elizabeth Coleman was an American civil aviator. She was the first female pilot of African American descent and the first person of African American descent to hold an international pilot license.

Coleman was born on January 26, 1892 in Atlanta, Texas, the tenth of thirteen children to sharecroppers George and Susan Coleman. Coleman began school at age six and had to walk four miles each day to her all-black, one-room school. Despite sometimes lacking such materials as chalk and pencils, Coleman was an excellent student. She loved to read and established herself as an outstanding math student.

When she turned eighteen, Coleman took all of her savings and enrolled in the Oklahoma Colored Agricultural and Normal University (now called Langston University) in Langston, Oklahoma. She completed only one term before she ran out of money and was forced to return home. Coleman knew there was no future for her in her home town, so she went to live with two of her brothers in Chicago while she looked for a job.

In 1915, Coleman moved to Chicago, Illinois, where she lived with her brothers and worked at the White Sox Barber Shop as a manicurist. There she heard tales of the world from pilots who were returning home from World War I. They told stories about flying in the war, and Coleman started to fantasize about being a pilot. She could not gain admission to American flight schools because she was black and a woman. No black U.S. aviator would train her either. Robert S. Abbott, founder and publisher of the Chicago Defender, encouraged her to study abroad. Coleman received financial backing from Jesse Binga (a banker) and the Defender, which capitalized on her flamboyant personality and her beauty to promote the newspaper, and to promote her cause.

Coleman attended the well-known Caudron Brothers’ School of Aviation in Le Crotoy, France. There she learned to fly using French Nieuport airplanes. On June 15, 1921, Coleman obtained her pilot’s license from Federation Aeronautique Internationale after only seven months. She was the first black woman in the world to earn an aviator’s license. After some additional training in Paris, Coleman returned to the United States in September 1921.

Coleman’s main goals when she returned to America were to make a living flying and to establish the first African American flight school. Because of her color and gender, however, she was somewhat limited in her first goal. Barnstorming seemed to be the only way for her to make money, but to become an aerial daredevil, Coleman needed more training. Once again, Bessie applied to American flight schools, and once again they rejected her. So in February 1922, she returned to Europe. After learning most of the standard barnstorming tricks, Coleman returned to the United States.

When Bessie returned to the United States to pursue her new flying career, she knew she must have publicity to attract paying audiences. She created an exciting image of herself with a military style uniform and an eloquence that belied her background. Her first appearance was in an air show on September 3, 1922 at Curtiss Field near New York City. The show, sponsored by Robert Abbott and the Chicago Defender, billed Bessie as “the world’s greatest woman flyer.” More shows followed around the country including Memphis and Chicago. On June 19, 1925, Bessie made her flying debut in Texas at a Houston auto racetrack renamed Houston Aerial Transport Field in honor of the occasion.

In the time between her 1922 flying debut in New York and her 1925 Texas debut, Bessie never lost sight of her goal of opening a school for aviators. She flirted briefly with a movie career, traveled to California to earn money for a plane of her own, crashed that plane once she bought it and then returned to Chicago to formulate a new plan. It was another two years before she finally succeeded in lining up a series of lectures and exhibition flights in Texas. Once there, she defied not only racial barriers but gender barriers as well. She appeared in San Antonio, Richmond, Waxahachie, Wharton,Dallas and numerous unreported small towns and fields. At Love Field in Dallas, she made a down payment on a plane from the Curtiss Southwestern Airplane and Motor Company.

Coleman’s aviation career ended tragically in 1926. On April 30, she died while preparing for a show in Jacksonville, Florida. Coleman was riding in the passenger seat of her “Jenny” airplane while her mechanic William Wills was piloting the aircraft. Bessie was not wearing her seat belt at the time so that she could lean over the edge of the cockpit and scout potential parachute landing spots (she had recently added parachute-jumping to her repetorie and was planning to perform the feat the next day). But while Bessie was scouting from the back seat, the plane suddenly dropped into a steep nosedive and then flipped over and catapulted her to her death. Wills, who was still strapped into his seat, struggled to regain control of the aircraft, but died when he crashed in a nearby field. After the accident, investigators discovered that Wills, who was Coleman’s mechanic, had lost control of the aircraft because a loose wrench had jammed the plane’s instruments.

Over the years, recognition of Coleman’s accomplishments has grown. Coleman’s impact on aviation history, and particularly African Americans in aviation, quickly became apparent following her death. In 1927, Bessie Coleman Aero Clubs sprang up throughout the country. In 1989, First Flight Society inducted Coleman into their shrine that honors those individuals and groups that have achieved significant “firsts” in aviation’s development. A second-floor conference room at the Federal Aviation Administration, Washington, DC, is named after Coleman. In 1990, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley renamed Old Mannheim Road at O’Hare International Airport “Bessie Coleman Drive.” In 1992, he proclaimed May 2 “Bessie Coleman Day in Chicago.”

Mae Jemison, physician and former NASA astronaut, wrote in the book, Queen Bess: Daredevil Aviator (1993): “I point to Bessie Coleman and say without hesitation that here is a woman, a being, who exemplifies and serves as a model to all humanity: the very definition of strength, dignity, courage, integrity, and beauty. It looks like a good day for flying.”

Stray Toasters

• Geeksoap: The Cleaning Agent for the Everyfan
• It’s the Inequality, Stupid
• From the “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot…?!” file:
  • Cab driver throws out dark-skinned opera singer
  • A Woman Almost Died in Her Burning House Because of Verizon’s Dropped 911 Calls
• The Supreme Court’s Failure to Protect Blacks’ Rights
• 

• Have We Grown Too Fond of Technology?
• MarknTyme sent me a couple of links:
  • An entertaining and amusing short: Schizofredric
  • Concert for George, which is streaming all day
• How Photography Shifted the Balance of the Civil Rights Movement
• Enlisting Prison Labor to Close Budget Gaps
• 
• Gangster’s daughter has beef with a new Vegas mob exhibit
  • Hard times don’t stop Las Vegas influx
• California’s Tax Aversion Complicates Budget
• Seven Simple Ways to Fix Air Travel for Everyone
• US cities original names

Namaste.

Wednesday – 23 February 2011
It’s midweek, once again.

Last night was SaraRules!’ night to host her book club. This meant that my evening had a roughly two-hour “free pass” section in it. I took advantage of this and did a little gallivanting. I went to West Valley Hobbies and Best Buy. I was mostly just window shopping at WVH, but I went to Best Buy with a purpose: To pick up the just-released All-Star Superman. (I also picked up the first two seasons of Moonlighting, as a boxed set.)

When I got back home, I played DCUO for a bit. This time, I ventured to Gotham City. As bright and shiny as Metropolis was, Gotham was equally dark and menacing. I met Commissioner Gordon and Robin (voiced by Wil Wheaton) before heading off to my first mission. On the way to that mission, I noticed that I flew over Crime Alley. I’d heard that there was a Feat available for finding the Wayne Memorial – the place where Bruce Wayne’s parents were gunned down. So, I detoured to see if I could locate it. I did. Not only was there, in fact, a Feat awarded for finding it, but the designers actually put a couple of roses on the ground there. Nice touch.

After her book club was finished, SaraRules! and I watched All-Star Superman. The movie was an adaptation of the award-winning mini-series of the same name (1, 2), by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. It did a good job of condensing the story into 76 minutes, without losing much of the tone and flavor that Morrison brought to the story.

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
I’m going to go out of my standard semi-alphabetical order for today’s entry.  Today’s person of note is: Dwayne McDuffie (1, 2).

Dwayne McDuffie was an American writer of comic books and television. His notable works included creating the animated series Static Shock, writing and producing the animated series Justice League Unlimited, and co-founding the comic book company Milestone Media.

McDuffie was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan and attended The Roeper School. He attended the University of Michigan studying physics, graduating with an undergraduate degree in English, and a graduate degree in physics. He then moved to New York to attend film school at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

While working as a copy-editor for a financial magazine, a friend got him an interview for an assistant editor position at Marvel Comics. While on staff at Marvel as Bob Budiansky’s assistant on special projects, McDuffie also scripted stories for the company. His first major work was Damage Control, a series about the company that shows up between issues and tidies up the mess left by the latest round of superhero/supervillain battles. While an editor at Marvel, he submitted a spoof proposal for a comic entitled Teenage Negro Ninja Thrasher in response to Marvel’s treatment of its black characters. Becoming a freelancer in early 1990, McDuffie followed that with dozens of various comics titles for Marvel comics, DC Comics, and Archie Comics.

In 1992, wanting to express a multi-cultural sensibility that he felt was missing in comic books, McDuffie co-founded Milestone Media, a comic book company owned by African-Americans. McDuffie explained:

If you do a black character or a female character or an Asian character, then they aren’t just that character. They represent that race or that sex, and they can’t be interesting because everything they do has to represent an entire block of people. You know, Superman isn’t all white people and neither is Lex Luthor. We knew we had to present a range of characters within each ethnic group, which means that we couldn’t do just one book. We had to do a series of books and we had to present a view of the world that’s wider than the world we’ve seen before.

Milestone debuted its titles in 1993 through a publishing deal with DC Comics. Serving as editor-in-chief, McDuffie created or co-created many characters, including Static. After Milestone had ceased publishing new comics, Static was developed into an animated series Static Shock. McDuffie was hired to write and story-edit on the series, writing 11 episodes. McDuffie was hired as a staff writer for the animated series Justice League and was promoted to story editor and producer as the series became Justice League Unlimited. During the entire run of the animated series, McDuffie wrote, produced, or story-edited 69 out of the 91 episodes.

On February 21, 2011, McDuffie died from complications due to a surgical procedure performed the previous evening.

And, the/another reason that I chose McDuffie for today’s personality: He wrote the adaptation for All-Star Superman, which was released yesterday.

Stray Toasters

• Court Weighs the Power of Congress
• The germiest parts of plane travel and how to avoid getting sick
• Sentencing due in hate crime killing of immigrant
• 
• Cell Phone Use Tied to Changes in Brain Activity
• DC Superhero Inspired Fashion on the Runway at NY Fashion Week

Namaste.

Wednesday – 16 February 2011
It’s Midweek. Which also means that it’s new comics day and D&D 4.0 night. Win-Win-Win.

Last night was D&D 3.5 night, but it was also “The Game Night That Almost Didn’t Happen.” Of the six (6) players in our campaign, only and I made it. Fortunately, had a small side adventure ready to go. We ran through it, picked up some “free” XP and have something new for our characters that the others don’t/didn’t get. (Neener neener neeeeeeeener!)

After the game, I went home and watched the first half of Prince of Persia with SaraRules!.  It’s not the greatest movie ever made, but it has been entertaining. We will most likely finish it tonight.

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
Today’s item is the Plessy v. Ferguson court case.

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), is a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in the jurisprudence of the United States, upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in private businesses (particularly railroads), under the doctrine of “separate but equal”.

After the American Civil War (1861–1865), during the period known as Reconstruction, the government was able to provide some protection for the civil rights of the newly freed slaves. But when Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877 and federal troops were withdrawn from the south, southern state governments began passing Jim Crow laws that prohibited blacks from using the same public accommodations as whites.

The Thirteenth Amendment (1, 2)served to abolish slavery and involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime. Under the meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment, the term “slavery” implies involuntary servitude or bondage and the ownership by human beings of other human beings as property. According to the Slaughterhouse Cases, the Thirteenth Amendment was intended primarily to abolish slavery as it had been known in the United States, and that it equally forbade involuntary servitude.

In 1890, the State of Louisiana passed Act 111 that required separate accommodations for African Americans and Whites on railroads, including separate railway cars, though it specified that the accommodations must be kept “equal”. Concerned, several African Americans (including Louisiana’s former governor P.B.S. Pinchback) and Whites in New Orleans formed an association, the Citizens’ Committee to Test the Separate Car Act, dedicated to the repeal of that law. They raised $1412.70 ($33716.44 in 2008 USD) which they offered to the then-famous author and Radical Republican jurist, Albion W. Tourgée, to serve as lead counsel for their test case. Tourgée agreed to do it for free. Later, they enlisted Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth black (an octoroon in the now-antiquated parlance), to take part in an act of planned civil disobedience. The plan was for Plessy to be thrown off the railway car and arrested not for vagrancy, which would not have led to a challenge that could reach the Supreme Court, but for violating the Separate Car Act, which could and did lead to a challenge with the high court.

The Committee hired a detective to ensure that Plessy was arrested for violating the Separate Car Act, which the Citizen’s Committee wanted to challenge with the goal of having it overturned. They chose Plessy because, with his light skin color, he could buy a first class train ticket and, at the same time, be arrested when he announced, while sitting on board the train, that he had an African-American ancestor. For the Committee, this was a deliberate attempt to exploit the lack of clear racial definition in either science or law so as to argue that segregation by race was an “unreasonable” use of state power.

The decision was handed down by a vote of 7 to 1 with the majority opinion written by Justice Henry Billings Brown and the dissent written by Justice John Marshall Harlan. “Separate but equal” remained standard doctrine in U.S. law until its repudiation in the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education.

Stray Toasters

• Why is it that most people elide the first “r” in “February?”
• It’s Fashion Week 2011
• Borders files for bankruptcy, plans to close 192 stores
  • According to this article, from The Wall Street Journal, our favorite Clitorati spot is officially on the chopping block.
• By way of my friend, Anne: A Missing Piece in the Economic Stimulus: Hobbling Arts Hobbles Innovation
• 
• Role for Teachers Is Seen in Solving Schools’ Crises
• United Grounds Its Boeing 757 Fleet
• For MarknTyme and :
  • For those of you to whom that sounded “somewhat familiar,” see if this version helps to jog your memories.
• Prisoners stole millions from the IRS in 2009
• 3D Comes to Met Opera, but Without Those Undignified Glasses
• Apparently, tonight’s D&D game is being postponed. Oh, well… at least there are still new comics to which I can look forward.

Quote of the Day
Today’s quote comes from Sib-4’s Foursquare status update:

Melissa just became the mayor of Eighth Circle Of Hell!

It was one of the first things that I read this morning, post-email, and (as a fan of Dante’s Inferno) it made me laugh.

And, that’s a wrap.

Namaste.

Friday – 11 February 2011
It’s Friday. Granted, it’s my “on” Friday, but it’s still the end of the work week.

Last night, SaraRules and I attended a performance of Never Fight a Shark in Water, a one-man play based on the experiences of Gregory Bright, a man who served 27^1/2 years in prison for a second-degree murder charge that he didn’t commit. The play, starring Charles Holt,  gave a time-compressed view of Mr. Bright’s ordeal, from his arrest to his emancipation. Mr. Holt gave a very powerful and emotional performance… despite what had to be one of the worst audiences that I’ve been part of:

• People wandered in, not quietly, ten to fifteen minutes after the play had started;
• One woman’s daughter was restless – and very vocal about it – throughout the performance;
• One man shouted down at Mr. Holt not smoke; he lit and took two or three drags off two (2) cigarettes over the course of the two-hour performance, both of which were extinguished within a minute or two of lighting them. The smoking of both cigarettes was integral to each part of the story. To his credit, Mr. Holt queried the audience and offered to not smoke – the audience response was overwhelmingly in favor of continuing.
• People got up, leaving and returning to the theatre, mid-performance… again, not quietly.

After the performance, there was a brief Q&A panel session, led by KUER’s Jennifer Napier-Pierce, with Gregory Bright, Charles Holt and a professor whose name eludes me. There were some rather good questions posed by the audience, including:

• Q: How long did it take for you to let go of your anger?
  A: “Five or six years.”
• Q: You taught yourself to read while in prison and spent so much time reading legal documents to help in securing your freedom; do you read, now, just for enjoyment?
  A: “When I learned to read, I read everything: George Orwell… Plato… comic books. Reading was such a great thing! I still read… I just don’t have as much time to do it.”

Mr. Bright was very candid and open in his responses. Even when asked about his former love, who – after 23 years of visits – told him that she’d married someone else, he said that she had been a major force in his life and that she remains a very good friend today.

In all, it was a very good way to spend the evening. If you have a chance to catch a performance of Never Fight a Shark in Water, you should do so.

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
Today’s personality is Eartha Kitt:

Eartha Mae Kitt was an American actress, singer and cabaret star. She was perhaps best known for her highly distinctive singing style and her 1953 hit Christmas song “Santa Baby”.

Kitt began her career as a member of the Katherine Dunham Company in 1943 and remained a member of the troupe until 1948. A talented singer with a distinctive voice, her hits include “Let’s Do It”, “Champagne Taste”, “C’est si bon”, “Just an Old Fashioned Girl”, “Monotonous”, “Je cherche un homme”, “Love for Sale”, “I’d Rather Be Burned as a Witch”, “Uska Dara”, “Mink, Schmink”, “Under the Bridges of Paris”, and her most recognizable hit, “Santa Baby”, which was released in 1953. Kitt’s unique style was enhanced as she became fluent in the French language during her years performing in Europe.

Throughout the rest of the 1950s and early 1960s, Kitt would record, work in film, television and nightclubs, and return to the Broadway stage in “Mrs. Patterson” during the 1954-55 season, “Shinbone Alley” in 1957, and the short-lived “Jolly’s Progress” in 1959.^[9] In 1964, Kitt helped open the Circle Star Theater in San Carlos, California. Also in the 1960s, the television series Batman featured her as Catwoman after Julie Newmar left the role.

In 1968, during the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Kitt encountered a substantial professional setback after she made anti-war statements during a White House luncheon. The public reaction to Kitt’s statements was extreme, both pro and con. Publicly ostracized in the US, she devoted her energies to performances in Europe and Asia.

During that time, cultural references to her grew, including outside the United States, such as the well-known Monty Python sketch “The Cycling Tour”, where an amnesiac believes he is first Clodagh Rodgers, then Trotsky and finally Kitt (while performing to an enthusiastic crowd in Moscow). She returned to New York in a triumphant turn in the Broadway spectacle Timbuktu! (a version of the perennial Kismet set in Africa) in 1978.

Ms. Kitt became a vocal advocate for homosexual rights and publicly supported same-sex marriage, which she believed to be a civil right. She had been quoted as saying: “I support it [gay marriage] because we’re asking for the same thing. If I have a partner and something happens to me, I want that partner to enjoy the benefits of what we have reaped together. It’s a civil-rights thing, isn’t it?”

Kitt died from colon cancer on Christmas Day, 2008 at her Weston, Connecticut, home.

Stray Toasters

• Poetry
• Some people choose to be inconsolable.
• How did dinosaurs do it?
• From the “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot…?!” file: British woman dies after botched butt ‘enhancement’ in a hotel
• 
• After the “less-than-ideal-to-me” X3: X-Men United, I have been… skeptical… in my attitude towards this summer’s X-Men: First Class. Until this appeared yesterday:

  Now, I’d say that I’m “cautiously optimistic.”

• Nothing’s ‘Unknown’ about January Jones
• I stopped at Pin-up Girl on the way back from lunch. Kendra (the on-duty barista) and I were a little more than “mildly” shocked to learn that Christy (another barista) had NO idea who James Brown was.
• Sex questions answered: 1959
• 
  
• Hospitals Shift Smoking Bans to Smoker Ban
• Twitter Users Tricks Sony into Posting ‘Secret’ PS3 Code
• Super Mario Game Theme: Violin

Namaste.

Thursday – 03 February 2011
It’s my NBN Technical Friday. Amen.

Last night was D&D (4.0) game night with and company. We almost team-wiped twice. It wasn’t pretty. But, we finished two encounters… and everyone survived. Barely. One neat, but unrelated thing: Jack and I noticed a Justice League Chess Set for sale for $50 (USD). We were intrigued. We pondered it for a bit before realizing that we could just “build” a chess set, using ‘Clix figures for the pieces for a lot less, should we decide that we really couldn’t live without one.

I also played a little DCUO last night. I’m still having a lot of fun with it. Last night, I was sent to a new (to me) part of Metropolis, Chinatown, to meet Zatanna for my next set of missions. Let me just say that this part of the city looks simply amazing.  The DCUO team also released another teaser video that portends ill things…

AND… new information has been released about new content being added to the game, including their Valentine’s Day event content, as well.

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
Today’s personality is: Stokely Carmichael

Kwame Ture, also known as Stokely Carmichael, was a Trinidadian-American black activist active in the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement. He rose to prominence first as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”) and later as the “Honorary Prime Minister” of the Black Panther Party. Initially an integrationist, Carmichael later became affiliated with black nationalist and Pan-Africanist movements. He popularized the term “Black Power”.

In 1960, Carmichael went on to attend Howard University, a historically-black school in Washington, D.C., rejecting scholarship offers from several white universities. His apartment on Euclid Street was a gathering place for his activist classmates. He graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1964.

He joined the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), the Howard campus affiliate of SNCC. He was inspired by the sit-ins to become more active in the Civil Rights Movement. In his first year at the university, he participated in the Freedom Rides of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and was frequently arrested, spending time in jail. In 1961, he served 49 days at the infamous Parchman Farm in Sunflower County, Mississippi. He was arrested many times for his activism. He lost count of his many arrests, sometimes giving the estimate of at least 29 or 32, and telling the Washington Post in 1998 he believed the total number was fewer than 36.

Carmichael saw nonviolence as a tactic as opposed to a principle, which separated him from moderate civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr.. Carmichael became critical of civil rights leaders who simply called for the integration of African Americans into existing institutions of the middle class mainstream.

The Black Panthers and Carmichael disagreed on whether white activists should be allowed to help the Panthers. The Panthers believed that white activists could help the movement, while Carmichael thought as Malcolm X, saying that the white activists needed to organize their own communities first. In 1969, he and his then-wife, the South African singer Miriam Makeba, moved to Guinea-Conakry where he became an aide to Guinean prime minister Ahmed Sékou Touré and the student of exiled Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah. Makeba was appointed Guinea’s official delegate to theUnited Nations. Three months after his arrival in Africa, in July 1969, he published a formal rejection of the Black Panthers, condemning the Panthers for not beingseparatist enough and their “dogmatic party line favoring alliances with white radicals”.

It was at this stage in his life that Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Ture to honor the African leaders Nkrumah and Touré who had become his patrons. At the end of his life, friends still referred to him interchangeably by both names, “and he doesn’t seem to mind.”

Carmichael remained in Guinea after separation from the Black Panther Party. He continued to travel, write, and speak out in support of international leftist movements and in 1971 collected his work in a second book Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism. This book expounds an explicitly socialist, Pan-African vision, which he seemingly retained for the rest of his life. From the late 1970s until the day he died, he answered his phone by announcing “Ready for the revolution!”

Stray Toasters

• This LEGO video was sent to my by angstd:
• Shippers Concerned Over Possible Suez Canal Disruptions
• The White Stripes Call It Quits
• The Super Bowl is Sunday. As the Ravens (and Dolphins and Panthers) are not in the game, I guess this means that I’m a Packers fan… at least through the weekend.
  • Even the Avengers are choosing sides… again:
    
• Ad banned for simulating drug use
• MTH has announced a locomotive that I now covet.
  I specifically want it in the Army livery.
• Reprogrammed stem cells are loaded with errors
• LEGO Mystery Box
• 
• Dispute Over Jewish Archives Derails Russian Art Loans to U.S.
• Classic Teen Heroes Boogie Down in the Art of Bill Walko
• This is a very cute commercial:
• The time has come for child seats on airplanes
• Foreclosed Homeowners Go to Court on Their Own

Namaste.

Tuesday – 02 February 2011
It’s Groundhog Day; be on the lookout for Bill Murray.

It’s also new comics day and D&D (4e) night, to boot.

Last night was D&D (3.5) night with and company. When we weren’t behaving like twelve-year-olds – and derailing the game – we managed to come up with a course of action… most of which we won’t get to until next gaming session. But, it was still fun. (A good corollary is found in Wil Wheaton’s blog entry: In which we play Cal & D).

After I got home, I played DCUO for an hour or so. One of the missions repeatedly kicked my trash. Nothing like getting swarmed – and defeated – by higher-level H.I.V.E. Troopers…repeatedly. *sigh* After what felt like eleventy-kajillion times, I finally got through it. I did a couple of Brainiac-related missions, as well.  Those weren’t quite as painful, though.

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
Today’s person of note is… actually going to be TWO people:

• James Baldwin

  

  Baldwin was an American novelist, writer, playwright, poet,essayist and civil rights activist.

  Most of Baldwin’s work deals with racial and sexual issues in the mid-20th century in the United States. His novels are notable for the personal way in which they explore questions of identity as well as the way in which they mine complex social and psychological pressures related to being black and  homosexual well before the social, cultural or political equality of these groups was improved.

  During his teenage years in Harlem and Greenwich Village, Baldwin began to recognize his own homosexuality. In 1948, disillusioned by American prejudice against blacks and homosexuals, Baldwin left the United States and departed to Paris, France. His flight was not just a desire to distance himself from American prejudice. He fled in order to see himself and his writing beyond an African American context and to be read as not “merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer”. Also, he left the United States desiring to come to terms with his sexual ambivalence and flee the hopelessness that many young African American men like himself succumbed to in New York.

  In 1953, Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, an autobiographical bildungsroman, was published. Baldwin’s first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son appeared two years later. Baldwin continued to experiment with literary forms throughout his career, publishing poetry and plays as well as the fiction and essays for which he was known.

  Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room, stirred controversy when it was first published in 1956 due to its explicit homoerotic content. Baldwin was again resisting labels with the publication of this work: despite the reading public’s expectations that he would publish works dealing with the African American experience, Giovanni’s Room is exclusively about white characters. Baldwin’s next two novels, Another Country and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, are sprawling, experimental works dealing with black and white characters and with heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual characters. These novels struggle to contain the turbulence of the 1960s: they are saturated with a sense of violent unrest and outrage.

• Gwendolyn Brooks

  

  Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was an American writer. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985.

  Brooks published her first poem in a children’s magazine at the age of thirteen. When Brooks was sixteen years old, she had compiled a portfolio of around seventy-five published poems. Aged 17, Brooks stuck to her roots and began submitting her work to “Lights and Shadows”, the poetry column of the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper. Although her poems range in style from traditional ballads and sonnets to using blues rhythms in free verse, her characters are often drawn from the poor inner city.

  Her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, published in 1945 by Harper and Row, brought her instant critical acclaim. She received her first Guggenheim Fellowship and was one of the “Ten Young Women of the Year” in Mademoiselle magazine. In 1950, she published her second book of poetry, Annie Allen, which won her Poetry magazine’s Eunice Tietjens Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the first given to an African-American.

  After John F. Kennedy invited her to read at a Library of Congress poetry festival in 1962, she began her career teaching creative writing. She taught at Columbia College Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, Clay College of New York, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1967, she attended a writer’s conference at Fisk University where, she said, she rediscovered her blackness. This rediscovery is reflected in her work In The Mecca, a book length poem about a mother searching for her lost child in a Chicago housing project. In The Mecca was nominated for the National Book Award for poetry.

  In addition to the National Book Award nomination and the Pulitzer Prize, Brooks was made Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968. In 1985, Brooks became the Library of Congress’s Consultant in Poetry, a one year position whose title changed the next year to Poet Laureate. In 1988, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. In 1994, she was chosen as the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Jefferson Lecturer, one of the highest honors for American literature and the highest award in the humanities given by the federal government. In 1995, she was presented with the National Medal of Arts.

Stray Toasters

• Consider this: There is almost always enough time to exchange a pleasantry with a coworker before asking a question or setting them to a task. It amuses me how often I have to “gently remind” people of this fact.
• Flowchart: What Facebook Comment Should You Leave?
• I considered making Avery Brooks (1, 2) this morning’s Black History Month personality… but then I figured that people might not want to read my gushings over my man-crush. So, I didn’t.

  But, guess what: You’re reading about him, anyway!  So, I guess that means I still win!

• Punxsutawney Phil celebrates 125 years of Groundhog Day
• How to Use “Who” and “Whom” Correctly
• 
• Fees for home mortgages increase
• Crime Scenes: No break for cops caught on camera
• A Hacking Case Becomes a War of the Tabloids
• 
• Batman: billionaire plutocrat vigilante
• Leave the libraries alone. You don’t understand their worth.

Namaste.

Tuesday – 25 January 2011
We’re almost a full month into the new year, but my fingers still want to type “2010.”

Today is my sister-in-law, Chelsea’s, birthday:

It’s snowing again. It’s not a heavy snowfall, but it is constant.  The snow doesn’t appear to have affected drivers in this part of the valley too much… but we’ll see how it goes as the morning progresses.
UPDATE: It’s gotten a little worse:

With that in mind, the Council for Better Driving: Utah would like to remind drivers to exercise caution when traveling today.

Last night, SaraRules! was kind enough to pick up the engine, tender and boxcar that I was having repaired at The Train Shoppe:

The locomotive now goes like the proverbial “bat out of Hell” — I hitched it up to a nine car consist and opened the throttle… and off it went. With the quickness. I am happy. I am also happy because I now have three (3) fully-functional locomotives.

SaraRules! fixed a very tasty recipe of stuffed peppers for dinner. As we ate, we cleared another couple of episodes of NCIS and NCIS: Los Angeles off the DVR. Then, it was time to catch up with a few coworkers for CoD: Black Ops online. It was fun; I even tacked three more levels onto my character. After the group broke up, I tried to play a little more DC Universe Online. Once again, it locked up on me. (I’m going to be Level 30 before I ever get out of the introduction, at this pace…) I have a support ticket logged with Sony. In the past 12 hours, I’ve had two responses on it – one was a request for more information; one was a possible solution to the problem. I’m going to test it out this evening.

Chew on This: Food for Thought
This morning, Marvel’s latest event, “Fantastic Four: 3,” kicked off.

In this event, a member of the Fantastic Four dies. There’s been great speculation as to which character it would/could be. Comics news sites announced, as early as last night, that some mass media sources were spoiling the news of which member died.

*sigh*

It was bound to happen, I know… but I still held out a glimmer of hope that I would be able to make it until tomorrow – when I pick up my books – without hearing who the doomed person was.

Nope.

This morning, on the drive in, an announcer on a local radio station just blurted it out. There was no “Hey, if you’re a fan of the FF, you might want to turn the volume down for a minute” warning or anything.  Just “BAM!”

Monkeys.

Ear Candy
I heard this on the way to work this morning…

…which, for some reason, made me think of this:

Stray Toasters

• I finally got to introduce Kristen to iChat’s video chat option last night. It was nice to not only talk with her, but to see her, as well. I also gave her a “walking tour” of the house.
• The Sartorialist
• Bethany Sew and Sew: Character Aprons
• Chopin ‘probably had epilepsy’
• Test find high levels of lead in reusable bags
• Updated version of yesterday’s comic:



• Documents Open a Door on Mideast Peace Talks
• Jan. 25, 1921: The Robot Cometh
  • All Hail Our Robot Overlords! Sci-Fi’s Best Bots
• From the “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot…?!” file: Flier goes ‘berserk’ over blocked lav, punches attendant
• 2011: A security manager’s wish list
• Unusual Wave of Violence Strikes Police Officers

And with that… on to the rest of the day!

Namaste.

Thursday – 20 January 2011
I almost typed “Friday,” as today is NBN Technical Friday. Wishful thinking, I guess.

Last night’s D&D 4.0 game was cancelled. That meant that my Wednesday night had a gaping hole in the middle of it. So, after collecting this week’s four-color haul from Dr. Volt’s,  SaraRules! and I capitalized on the free evening and turned it into Date Night! We went to Pawit’s Royale Thai for dinner and then headed down to Jordan Commons to see True Grit. I’ve not seen the original, but this one was a very good movie. I have heard a number of people talk about how good the main actors’ performances were, especially Hailee Steinfeld‘s… and am happy to report that they were correct.

Stray Toasters

• Higher Taxes Wouldn’t End Some Deficits
• Malware Warning: New Kookface campaign hits Facebook
  • Koobface exploit for Macs circulating in the wild
• This was a horrible movie, but I like the music video…
• Hello Kitty’s Borg-like Assimilation of the World Continues in Awesome Mashups
• From the “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot…?!” file: Undercover policeman married activist he was sent to spy on
• American Express to cut 550 jobs as service needs shrink
• 
• Wonder Woman Teams Up with MAC for Super Makeup
• From the “No, I never would have thought that something like this was needed” file: Has this ever happened to you?
• A Racy Show with Teenagers Steps Back From a Boundary
  I find it interesting that they waited until Paragraph 12 to note that MTV’s Skins is an Americanized version of a British show of the same name, or as the article states: “…a country that has historically displayed a higher tolerance for TV eroticism than the United States.”
• Batman vs. Bruce Wayne
• Tricks of hotel marketing photos

Namaste.

Wednesday – 19 January 2011
Midweek is upon us once more.
And it comes to us with a mixture of sun and snow. At the same time.
But, it’s also Comics Wednesday. And also possibly even “Caramel Apple Wednesday,” in lieu of Sushi Wednesday.

Last night was D&D 3.5 game night with and company. I’m not sure what the deal was, but most of the game’s disruptions came from the lot of us behaving like high schoolers. (Let’s just chalk it up to “puerile behavior” and move on.) Last night’s challenge came from our group trying to parley with a group of frost giants for possession of a crown… and not get squished. Things went well: No one died, we have favorable status with the tribe of giants and we may even have new trade partners. Not bad for a night’s work.

Stray Toasters

• I may have come up with a new (or, rather, “yet another”) rail yard layout idea. And, unfortunately, I really like this one. Instead of having a stub-ended yard – which my current layout is – it would be a double-ended yard, allowing a train to enter/exit from either end. There are a few drawbacks to this idea, though:
  1. I would need to purchase six (6) new switches, minimum, to make it work.
  2. I would need to expand that side of my layout by at least 4′ in length and 1′ in depth.
  3. I wouldn’t want to set it up until the basement is finished, which would tentatively be sometime in March or April.
• Rock Stars for a Night, and for a Price
• Who is fixing your plane, and how?
• Former Haitian Dictator to Face Charges
• This is kind of what it’s like when I go to The Train Shoppe or The Wonderful World of Trains…
  

  

• Thom Zahler Returns with “Love and Capes”
• From the “Longinus!” file: Caligula tomb found? No. Caligula movie reappraisal time? No.
• This Year, Sundance Will Savor Its Homegrown Projects
  Speaking of Sundance, our first film of this year’s festival, I Saw the Devil, is Friday night!

Namaste.

Thursday – 13 January 2011
This NBN Thursday morning finds the sun, visible today, creeping over the mountains. There’s still a bit of inversion haze over parts of the valley, but being able to see the sun – as opposed to a “slightly brighter spot in the sky” – is nice.

Last night was D&D game night with m3lody and company. Our opponents for last night’s encounter laid a good, old-fashioned beat-down on us. It was not pretty. We prevailed, but there was a lot of near-death dealt to our group.

SaraRules! rented, and we watched, The Town last night. It was good. The story, followed Ben Affleck’s character, Doug MacRay, and his heist crew, as they engaged in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse with the Boston Police Department and the FBI, following a bank robbery. MacRay complicates things even further due to an attraction to one of the robbery victims. The movie also contained what SaraRules! called one of the best bits of dialogue… ever:

Doug MacRay: I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we’re gonna hurt some people.
James Coughlin: …Whose car we takin’?

Stray Toasters

• For reasons that I have yet to discern, I woke up with the chorus from Richard Marx’ Hazard running through my head.
• Obama’s Message in Grief: Talk in a Way That Heals
  • Text of President Obama’s Speech at the Service
    

    If this tragedy prompts reflection and debate — as it should — let’s make sure it’s worthy of those we have lost. Let’s make sure it’s not on the usual plane of politics and point-scoring and pettiness that drifts away in the next news cycle.

    The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better. To be better in our private lives, to be better friends and neighbors and coworkers and parents.  And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy — it did not — but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.

• Suggs Plays the Villain
• Tense time for workers, as career paths fade away
• As the Web Turns
• For Ms. :



• China, in a Shift, Takes on Its Alzheimer’s Problem
• Carnival Cruise Lines to pull out of San Diego
  • Thanks to too much time spent on Q-Link as a kid, I always want to type “San Diego” as “Sandy Eggo.”
• Harvard psychologist explains the science of zombies
• Spec Fic Parenting: This, My Son, Is a Sword

And that, as they say, is that.

Namaste.

Wednesday – 05 January 2011
It’s midweek, which means that it’s Comics Wednesday! Unfortunately, no word has been given on if/when “Sushi Wednesday” will be reincorporated into the mix. I guess time will tell.

Last night was D&D 3.5 night with and company. Our party got into a fight… and got seriously smacked around. In fact, ‘s character took a beating at the hand a a war chief and came down with a sudden case of death. And, even though my character has some cleric-like (read: “healer”) abilities, he was beyond the scope of my power. So, I called in a favor. A big one. Really big. We got ‘s character back, but it came at a pretty steep cost.  (That whole cleric thing I mentioned before…?  It’s gone, at least for the foreseeable future.) Hopefully, that won’t come back to bite us in the collective recta.

Today, I got to work only to discover that I had left my ID badge at home.

*grblsnrkx*

I have a temp badge. Yay. Although, I really shouldn’t gripe too much… it does what I need it to. Mostly.

Chew on This: Food for Thought
Publisher Tinkers with Twain

A new edition of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is missing something.

Throughout the book — 219 times in all — the word “nigger” is replaced by “slave,” a substitution that was made by NewSouth Books, a publisher based in Alabama, which plans to release the edition in February.

Alan Gribben, a professor of English at Auburn University at Montgomery, approached the publisher with the idea in July. Mr. Gribben said Tuesday that he had been teaching Mark Twain for decades and always hesitated before reading aloud the common racial epithet, which is used liberally in the book, a reflection of social attitudes in the mid-19th century.

I read this article before heading to work this morning. When I got to the office, angstd messaged me to ask if I had seen it and what I thought about it…

I first read Huck Finn when I was in 8th Grade. I remember having a little bit of difficulty with it, not because of the content or offensive language, but from a few of the slang used. Aside from that, it was “just a book.” The fact that it dealt with social issues – especially slavery – wasn’t a big concern of mine, at the time. (Come on… I was 13 and it was reading for school.) I do remember thinking that it was a good book, however.

I’m not on board with Professor Gribben’s argument. I understand translating books from one language to another, but this was written in English – granted, some word structures are a bit dated, but English, nonetheless – and as a classic work of American fiction, I say leave it. Mr. Twain wrote it in a particular manner and I think that it should remain in that form. “Nigger” has a… colorful… history, but it is part of the American lexicon and, more importantly, it was part of the daily speech of many in the 19th Century. Changing the word to “slave” changes the dynamic of the language. I’ll concede that both words were used to denigrate the people about whom they were used, but one has a history of being used more harshly and cruelly. (Three guesses which it was.)

I was pleased to note that the article included a counterpoint:

“I’m not offended by anything in ‘Huck Finn,’ ” said Elizabeth Absher, an English teacher at South Mountain High School in Arizona. “I am a big fan of Mark Twain, and I hear a lot worse in the hallway in front of my class.”

Ms. Absher teaches Twain short stories and makes “Huck Finn” available but does not teach it because it is too long — not because of the language.

“I think authors’ language should be left alone,” she said. “If it’s too offensive, it doesn’t belong in school, but if it expresses the way people felt about race or slavery in the context of their time, that’s something I’d talk about in teaching it.”

Agreed. Were some of the issues that came along with and out of slavery offensive?  You bet they were. But I don’t see them as things to be swept under the rug or turned away from. If we do that, we forget about a powerful and divisive part of our history.

I’m sorry that Professor Gribben has a hard time with a few words. But, that’s all they are: Words. They can be used destructively, but we can learn many things – from who we were and where we’ve come from to what we have achieved and where we are going – from even the most harsh of words.

Perhaps the professor should take some time to read Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, by Randall Kennedy. The book takes the word and attempts to present ways to diffuse its volatile nature and history.

Maybe that would help.

Stray Toasters

• Escaped from Belarus, Actors Raise Voices
• 8 Superhero Movies That Broke the Mold (Please Copy Them!)
• By way of my coworker, Corey: Detroit in ruins: The photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre
• 
• Swear Freely In Pennsylvania: It’s Your #$%^&*^ Constitutional Right
• I’m not a big country music fan, but I do like Darius Rucker… and Hootie and the Blowfish (much to my friend, Peggy’s, chagrin).  I caught a performance of this song on Palladia the other night. I was amused and entertained by it:
• “Whoops! #1”
• Could the days of the British “pint” be numbered?
• 
• A Most Successful Self-Experiment: Over 18 Months Soap and Shampoo Free
• “Whoops! #2”

Namaste.

Monday – 03 January 2011
Today is the last day of my vacation; our robot overlords gave us the day off. (Did I say “overlords?” I meant “protectors.”) Tomorrow, the new work year begins. Fortunately, this is the week with my 9/80 “off” Friday, allowing me to ease into this whole “working” thing again.

So far, 2011 has been alright. After playing ‘Clix with Chris on Saturday morning, SaraRules! and I headed up to her parents’ place for a New Years’ food and football. ‘Twas good. After that, we headed to the theatre and caught Tron: Legacy. I enjoyed it; SaraRules! didn’t. And, that’s not to say that I didn’t have a couple of issues with the movie, but it was entertaining.

Sunday started with and me hitting the local Lowe’s and Home Depot. He was kind enough to offer his time – and Jeep – to allow me to pick up and transport more sawhorses, plywood and foam for my growing railroad. I still need to set up the saw horses and paint the foam. All in due time. I also need to start thinking about more permanent railroad structures — SaraRules!’ father is going to help me frame and finish the basement in the not-too-distant future. He also gave me a couple of ideas about extending my layout… vertically. I was intrigued with his idea and haven’t ruled anything out yet.

We headed back up to the in-laws’ for New Years’ leftovers. (Every bit as good the day after as they were the day of…) We watched a little football and then headed home to watch The Godfather: Part II, which I don’t believe I’d ever seen before. It was good… quite good, but I had a little bit of a rough time following the corollaries between the flashbacks and the “present day,” until the end of the movie.

Today, I met Perry and a couple of his kids for coffee. I also worked a little on a drawing that has been stagnating in my sketchbook for the better part of 10 months. It felt good to get something – anything – done on it.

Instant Replay: Football

Cincinnati Bengals at Baltimore Ravens
7 – 13
The boys from Cincy came Baltimore to wrap up the final week of regular season play. Bonnie and Clyde… I mean, Batman and Robin… I mean “T.O. and Ocho” didn’t play, though. That’s fine, because the Ravens seemed to have a tough enough time dealing with Bengals’ QB Carson Palmer, despite FS Ed Reed’s two interceptions.But, nevertheless, the Ravens wound up coming away with  “W,” and that’s always a good thing in my book. Sorry, and .

Ray! Hey, Ray!  Hey… yeah, so you guys just beat a division rival, are going to the Playoffs for the third straight year – a team record – and you don’t have to face Indy in the first round!  How does that make you feel?

Yeah, I bet it does feel pretty sweet!

Oakland Raiders at Kansas City Chiefs
31 – 10
The Raiders went to Arrowhead Stadium and scalped the Chiefs. They finished the season 8-8, their best record in seven (7) years! They also set a curious record: It marked the first time that a team has swept their division (6-0), but did NOT make it into the playoffs. Congrats, SaraRules! and 1silver_seraph.

.

Carolina Panthers at Atlanta Falcons
10 – 31
I don’t know what it is about the Panthers and teams with bird-themes, but once again, they managed to lose. There’s always next season, I guess…

.

Miami Dolphins at New England Patriots
7 – 38
The ‘Fins dropped this one to the Pats. ‘Nuff said.

Stray Toasters

• This post, from made me grin this morning.
• Class Decides Whether to Donate Professor’s Kidney
• Actor Pete Postlethwaite dies
• 
• Into the Tunnels: Exploring the Underside of NYC
• Courting Disaster: Family Ties
• 
• Body of former Pentagon official found in landfill
• How to stay safe at a public Wi-Fi hotspot

Namaste.

Friday – 31 December 2010
Snow falls on the ground.
The broom sweeps away the snow.
The driveway is clear.

BOOM!  Just like that: Two days of haiku!

It snowed again last night, with very light snow falling this morning. This time, it was the light, powdery snow for which Utah is know. Thus, I was able to literally sweep away the snow. Today’s snow removal music was 2112; I finished in the time it took to listen to “2112” (the A-side) and “A Passage to Bangkok,” so… 24:08.  Not too shabby.

Last night, SaraRules! and I went down to Abravanel Hall to hear – and see – The Blue Planet Live! We went with Logan and Sanaz, and wound up running into and Jeff, as well as Mickey and Sammie . The performance was narrated by Utah Senator Orrin Hatch. It was a good production. It was made more amusing by the woman sitting behind us who was amazed/fascinated by practically everything on-screen. (Seriously… you’d think that she didn’t use her television for anything but watching The Young and the Restless and maybe Martha Stewart Living.)

I was originally planning on heading up to The Wonderful World of Trains with today, but his schedule won’t allow it. I may still head up on my own, as I’m itching to get a look at the new location of The Bookshelf… and it’s three blocks from WWoT.

Chew on This: Food for Thought
Today is the last day of 2010. It’s been a year of ups and downs, but mostly “ups”:

• SaraRules! and I bought a house (…and discovered a great little neighborhood espresso shop)!
• My mother retired.
• I lost another good friend.
• I got back into model railroading after a nearly 30-year absence.
• I celebrated my first anniversary.
• I turned 40… and, thanks to the coolest wife ever, got to race cars for my four-hour mid-life crisis!
• My third niece was born.
• We got to host Thanksgiving in our new home.
• We had my family come out and celebrate Christmas with us.

…and, as I said last year: “…these are all part of ‘life.'”

On the whole, 2010 was a good year. I am thankful for the many new people I met and I am grateful for the many wonderful things that I got to experience. If you were part of my year – no matter how big or small a part – thank you for the pleasure of your company and for being a part of my journey.

I wish you a very happy and prosperous 2011 and beyond.

Stray Toasters

• I think that I like sweeping snow far better than shoveling it.
• The Sartorialist
• 
• John Ridley’s Top 7 ‘Nontroversies’ of 2010
• GeekDad, meet GeekMom
• Nyx is dealing with ever-increasing levels of monkeydom. I think that she should keep a dead-blow hammer handy, for just such occasions.
• 
• DC Women Kicking Ass – The most memorable moments in DC history for women: Nominee #21
• I believe that I’ve solved the “problem” of streets in my model railroad: SuperStreets
• Demolition of the Paris Metro
  • Berlin – The Metro
    
• The Style Guy’s 15 Rules to a Sharper, Smarter Life
• How to Take Better Pictures with Your Smartphone’s Camera

And with that…

Be well and be good to yourself and to others.

Namaste.

Tuesday – 28 December 2010
It’s quiet around here again.  Things are returning to what passes for “normal” around here.

I just talked with my mother and uncle — they both made it home, although MUCH later than either of them had anticipated. Thanks to a three-hour delay getting out of SLC, my parents didn’t get home until almost 0100 AM EST. My uncle didn’t fare any better, as he made it into and out of Chicago with no problem… but couldn’t land in White Plains. At least, not the first time. His flight was re-routed to Hartford for refueling and then went back to White Plains. He got home after 0200 AM. But… everyone made it home safely.

Last night, I had dinner with my in-laws, before they took Meliko to the airport. We went for Mexican food at El Chihuahua. I had the beef enchiladas; they were good. After dinner, I met at MacCool’s for the last Monday Night Football broadcast of the season: The Saints at the Falcons. It was a very good game and pretty much came down to the last few minutes. Add to that a couple of Black and Pumpkin beers and an order of Finn’s Skins and it made for a good evening in good company.

Stray Toasters

• I’m thinking (seriously) about tearing out my rail yard and reconfiguring it. Again.
• 1980s cartoon intros in other languages
• From the “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot…?!” and the “People Are People” files: Harry Potter actress in hiding after death threats
• Coded American Civil War Message in Bottle Decoded
• 
• Big Bird Behind the Beak – A Look Behind the Feathers
• Infographic: Bad Science in Movies Chart
• Despite the fact that I left my old web hosting company nearly three months ago, I still get email from them.  (No, I’m not still getting billed by them.)

I should probably start getting ready to face the day.

Namaste.