Random Access

Tuesday – 22 February 2011
Work Week: Day Two. The sun’s out, but the temps are still kind of low. (Although we might actually break 40F today…)

On the “up” side, I am definitely feeling better. I also no longer sound (completely) like a reject from the old Budweiser frogs commercials. I’m still a bit congested, but I can breathe… for the most part.

Last night, SaraRules! made a tasty chicken pot pie for dinner. We ate and watched a couple of episodes of NCIS: Los Angeles and then a couple of episodes of House Hunters.

Generally speaking, I enjoy House Hunters, but last night’s episodes contained a couple of families who the Logic Fairy seemed to overlook – or at least skimp on – when she was doling out common sense:

1. A family in the suburbs of Louisville, KY decided that they wanted to purchase a vacation home.
   (So far, so good.)Let me reparse the above with the kicker: “…they wanted to buy a vacation home, twenty minutes from their current home.” Yeah, we were dumbstruck. They wanted to take out a second mortgage ($250, 000) on a “vacation condo” in downtown Louisville. Twenty minutes away. That doesn’t even make good crazy people sense.
2. The second family wanted to buy a new home in which to raise their 18-month-old daughter. Their main “wants” were:
   • One level.
   • Three or more bedrooms.
   • A yard for their daughter to play in.

   All-in-all, their wants weren’t too outrageous… especially when compared to some of the things that people have sought on this show. The “one level” requirement was because they saw stairs as a safety hazard. (I guess they’d never heard of a child safety gate. *shrug*) They saw three houses:

   1. One level, but the “back yard” was largely taken over by a large, in-ground swimming pool.
   2. Multi-level house, with a couple of notable potential hazards.
   3. Two-level house with a loft.

   They chose House #1, despite the wife’s early – and quite vocal – objections to having no back yard and the giant water hole. I can understand some of their reasons for avoiding the second house, but the third house’s stair “problem” could have easily been handled with a gate.

I also spent a little time in Metropolis before bed. I started off just flying around, exploring parts of the city that I hadn’t yet visited. I decided to tackle a mission that I’d let languish for a couple of levels.

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
Today’s personality is: Carter G. Woodson (1, 2, 3)

Carter Godwin Woodson was an African-American historian, author, journalist and the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. He was one of the first scholars to value and study Black History. He recognized and acted upon the importance of a people having an awareness and knowledge of their contributions to humanity, and left behind an impressive legacy. A founder of Journal of Negro History, Dr. Woodson is known as the “Father of Black History.”

The son of freed slaves, Woodson worked as a sharecropper and a miner to help his family. He began high school in his late teens and proved to be an excellent student. Woodson went on to college and earned several degrees. He received a doctorate from Harvard University in 1912—becoming one of the first African Americans to earn a Ph.D. at the prestigious institution. His doctoral dissertation,The Disruption of Virginia, was based on research he did at the Library of Congress while teaching high school in Washington, D.C. After earning the doctoral degree, he continued teaching in the public schools, later joining the faculty at Howard University as a professor and served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Convinced that the role of his own people in American history and in the history of other cultures was either being ignored or misrepresented among scholars, Woodson realized the need for research into the neglected past of African Americans. Along with Alexander L. Jackson and three associates, he founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History September 9, 1915, in Chicago. That was also the year Woodson published The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861. His other books followed: A Century of Negro Migration (1918) and The History of the Negro Church (1927).

After leaving Howard University, Dr. Woodson devoted the rest of his life to historical research. He worked to preserve the history of African Americans and accumulated a collection of thousands of artifacts and publications. He noted that African American contributions “were overlooked, ignored, and even suppressed by the writers of history textbooks and the teachers who use them.” Race prejudice, he concluded, “is merely the logical result of tradition, the inevitable outcome of thorough instruction to the effect that the Negro has never contributed anything to the progress of mankind.” In 1926, Woodson single-handedly pioneered the celebration of “Negro History Week”, for the second week in February, to coincide with marking the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. The week was later extended to the full month of February and renamed Black History Month.

Dr. Woodson’s most cherished ambition, a six-volume Encyclopedia Africana, lay incomplete at his death on April 3, 1950 at the age of 74. He is buried at Lincoln Memorial Cemetery in Suitland-Silver Hill, Maryland.

Stray Toasters

• I took “a few” new pictures of my railroad layout.
• Datamining Hip-Hop’s History
• I’m not an Indians fan, but I found this story interesting: Straight Down the Middle, the Long Way
• Free Trove of Music Scores on Web Hits Sensitive Copyright Note
  
• Rafting for Rocks
• “Tonight I’m Frakking You” is your new sci-fi dance single
• 
  
• Will Michael Bay’s NASCAR Transformers Be the Skids and Mudflap of Transformers 3?
• Hundreds of Tourist Photos Weaved into One
• Child-Product Makers Seek to Soften New Rules
• Apple in talks to improve the sound quality of music downloads

Namaste.

Monday – 21 February 2011
It’s a sunny, but cold, President’s Day. While many people/businesses have the day off, ours is not one of them. I just noted how empty the parking lots are. *shrug* Of course, most of the people who are off today don’t get a week-and-a-half off for Christmas, so I really shouldn’t complain too much.

Over the weekend, I apparently picked up SaraRules!’ cold. Yay. It hasn’t been completely hellish – mostly a cough, some sniffles and a few aches – and I seem to be on the downhill side of it now. Of course, I still sound like a frog, but what can you do…?

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

Denmark Vesey, originally Telemaque, was an African American slave brought to the United States from the Caribbean of Coromantee background. After purchasing his freedom, he planned what would have been one of the largest slave rebellions in the United States.

No records existed on Denmark’s origins, although scholars have speculated that he may have been born in St. Thomas or in Africa. Denmark labored briefly in French Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), and then was settled in Charleston, South Carolina as a youth, where Joseph Vesey kept him as a domestic slave. On November 9, 1799, Denmark Vesey won $1500 in a city lottery. He bought his own freedom and began working as a carpenter. Although a Presbyterian as late as April 1816, Vesey co-founded a branch of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1817.

By 1818 he was preaching to slaves at plantations throughout the region and, drawing on the Bible, he told them that, like the Israelites, they would gain their freedom. Although he would later deny it, he allegedly held meetings at his home to collect arms for an uprising he was planning for as many as 9000 African-Americans in South Carolina.

Inspired by the revolutionary spirit and actions of slaves during the 1791 Haitian Revolution, and furious at the closing of the African Church, Vesey began to plan a slave rebellion. His insurrection, which was to take place on Bastille Day, July 14, 1822, became known to thousands of blacks throughout Charleston and along the Carolina coast. The plot called for Vesey and his group of slaves and free blacks to execute their enslavers and temporarily liberate the city of Charleston. Vesey and his followers planned to sail to Haiti to escape retaliation. Two slaves opposed to Vesey’s scheme leaked the plot. Charleston authorities charged 131 men with conspiracy.

Vesey defended himself ably at his trial, but was sentenced and hanged along with about 35 blacks; some 35 others were sold to West Indian plantation owners. It would have been the largest slave revolt in U.S. history, but its end result was the passing of even stricter laws against African-Americans.

Stray Toasters

• An Eye-Opening Look at America’s Academic Standards
• U.S. Sets 21st Century Goal: Building a Better Patent Office
• Trying to find the replacement part I need for my railroad crossing has been like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
• Five retirement planning mistakes to avoid
• 
  
• LotR Rewritten from a Mordor Perspective
• Another Stop on a Long, Improbable Journey
• RR in a Box – this is an interesting concept.
• Women in War: “I’ve Lived Out There With the Guys”

Namaste.

Sunday – 20 February 2011
Today is my friend, Perry’s, birthday:

This morning, I was up before 0800. That in itself wasn’t so bad. I made my way to the living room, to see what the world outside the windows looked like. Opening the blinds, I discovered the world was grey and white: Snow was falling. (Why can’t it be Spring now…?)

Yesterday’s main excitement, so to speak, was the HeroClix tournament at Dr. Volt’s Comic Connection. I was curious as to how it would go, as the store layout had changed last week, and I didn’t know how it would affect gamers’ ability to move about. Turns out that it wasn’t bad at all. We had a decent turnout – 10 players – which provided a good litmus test. We’ve had a number of close tournaments over the past few months, many of them decided by less than five (5) points. Yesterday’s event was not of that mold: The winner came in over 300 points above his nearest competitor.

On the way home from the game, I stopped to pick up late lunch/early dinner for SaraRules! and myself. (Guess who had Chinese food.) We wound down the evening with Machete. Somehow, I never got around to seeing it last year. Pity. It was a fun flick that, in many places, tossed “suspension of disbelief” right out the window… and that was just fine.

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
Today’s person of note is Dr. DeNorval Unthank.

Unthank was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His mother died when he was nine, leaving eight children. Unthank’s father, a cook unable to support him, sent him to live with his aunt and uncle in Kansas City. After completing high school, Unthank attended the University of Michigan where he received his B.A. He received his medical degree in 1926 from Howard University in Washington, D.C. Unthank returned to Kansas City to complete advanced medical training before moving to Portland in 1929 to start his own practice.

Dr. Unthank was recruited to Portland in 1929 because the city needed a black doctor.  He was quickly tested as his white neighbors greeted his first attempt to move into a previously all white residential area with broken windows, threatening phone calls, and general harassment.  Unthank had to move his family four times before finding a place to settle down peacefully.

Throughout the 1930s, Dr. Unthank was Portland’s only black medical practitioner.  He was a dedicated doctor and a friend to any minority group in the city as well.  Black families could not receive treatment in hospitals – house calls were necessary, and Dr. Unthank made himself available day and night.  He served African Americans, Asians and many whites as well.

Dr. Unthank was politically active and was outspoken in his support of civil rights and equal opportunity.  In 1940, Dr. Unthank was elected head of the Advisory Council, an organization that hoped to pressure local leaders into providing equal access to economic opportunities related to WWII jobs.  The Council documented incidents of discrimination in the workplace around Portland despite raised expectations following President Franklin Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 8802.  On Dec. 5, 1941, the Council organized a mass meeting to promote an official letter of protest to federal authorities about Portland’s situation.

During and after World War II, Dr. Unthank worked tirelessly to build his medical practice and promote civil rights.  He became the first black member of Portland’s City Club in 1943.  He encouraged the club to publish a significant 1945 study called “The Negro in Portland,” which opened the eyes of many citizens to ongoing discriminatory practices.  Dr. Unthank also served as president of the local chapter of the NAACP, and was a cofounder of the Portland Urban League.  He played a strong role in the passing of Oregon’s 1953 Civil Rights Bill, which among many issues, overturned a law banning interracial marriages in the state.

Dr. Unthank died on September 20, 1977. His impact on racial integration and institutional recognition of minority groups was eulogized in many newspaper articles and obituaries by people from both the medical profession and the civic organizations he helped form and influence.

Stray Toasters

• I had weird and disturbing dreams involving a zombie apocalypse situation last night. That’s a new one for me.
• The Life of Edward Gorey, Told by an Old Friend
• I had no idea, until a few minutes ago, that Danny Trejo did the voice for Bane on Young Justice.
• “C” is for “cookie”
  
• For Kids, Self-Control Factors into Future Success
• For Tyranist: Producing a Book, the Analog Way

That’s good enough for me.

Namaste.

Saturday – 19 February 2011
It’s a grey day here… and there’s the possibility of snow in the forecast. Yay.

Last night was the beginning of the end of an era. The local Borders, where we spend the “coffee” portion of our Clitorati gathering,  is one of the nearly 300 stores that is slated to close. I’ve been going to that store for close to ten years; I started going there on Friday evenings because that was where and I would meet so that she could coach me at drawing. In fact, the entire Clitorati gathering came about from me telling people that they should come and hang out with us while we were there. And now, nearly ten years down the road, we find ourselves looking for a new home-away-from-home.

We knew that the stor was closing. What we didn’t know, until we arrived last night, was that the Seattle’s Best Coffee franchise/sublet that ran the cafe closed – for the last time – on Thursday night. This means that for the next two months (or however long it takes to liquidate their inventory), there will be no cafe service. At all. I spoke with Brandi, one of the sales associates about the closing: She said that she and the other employees found out about it on Wednesday… from The Wall Street Journal article. According to her, employees:

• …had no advance warning.
• …haven’t been offered any kind of relocation/transfer package to the Orem/Provo store.
• …will be officially unemployed when the closeout sale is over.

While Borders has been on the rocks financially for a long time, I think that it’s poor form to let your employees be blindsided by the closure news and have to find out from mass media.

Since the list of closing stores came out on Wednesday, there’s been chatter among the group as to where we should now meet. We bandied about a few places and decided that we’d test drive the new location when the time came. Funny, we weren’t quite expecting it to be so soon. We had eight people show up for coffee last night, which made for a decent litmus test. I think that our new choice fared decently; we’ll have to see how it stands up over time.

After coffee and dinner, I came home and played DCUO for a bit. I’ve decided that I don’t necessarily want to plow through the game. Instead, I’m enjoying just roaming around the city (I haven’t even left Metropolis yet) and enjoying the view. Jim Lee and his crew did an amazing job of bringing Metropolis to life. I’m looking forward to seeing the other settings the game has to offer.

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

Wallace Henry Thurman was an American novelist during the Harlem Renaissance. He is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life, which explores discrimination among black people based on skin color.

Thurman was born in Salt Lake City, UT to Beulah and Oscar Thurman. Between his mother’s many marriages, Wallace and his mother lived with Emma Jackson, his maternal grandmother. His grandmother’s home doubled as a saloon where alcohol was served without a license.

Thurman’s early life was marked by loneliness, family instability and illness. He began grade school at age six in Boise, Idaho, but his poor health eventually led to a two-year absence from school, during which he returned to Salt Lake City. From 1910 to 1914, Thurman lived in Chicago, but he would have to finish grammar school in Omaha, Nebraska.^[2] During this time, he suffered from persistent heart attacks. While living in Pasadena, California’s lower altitude in the winter of 1918, Thurman came down with influenza during the worldwide Influenza Pandemic. Considering his history of illness, he surprisingly recovered and then returned to Salt Lake City, where he finished high school.

Thurman studied at the University of Utah and the University of Southern California, although he did not receive a degree. He moved to Harlem in 1925, and by the time he became managing editor of the black periodical Messenger in 1926, he had immersed himself in the Harlem literary scene and encouraged such writers as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston to contribute to his publication. That summer, Hughes asked Thurman to edit Fire!! , a literary magazine conceived as a forum for young black writers and artists. Despite outstanding contributors, who included Hughes, Hurston, and Gwendolyn Bennett, the publication folded after one issue. Two years later Thurman published Harlem, again with work by the younger writers of the Harlem Renaissance, but it too survived only one issue.

Thurman was lauded as a satirist and often used satire to accuse blacks of prejudice against darker-skinned member of their race. He also rejected the belief that the Harlem Renaissance was a substantial literary movement, claiming that the 1920s produced no outstanding writers and that those who were famous exploited, and allowed themselves to be patronized by, whites. He claimed, as did a number of authors of the decade, that white critics judged black works by lower standards than they judged white efforts. Thurman maintained that black writers were held back from making any great contribution to the canon of Negro literature by their race-consciousness and decadent lifestyles.

Thurman and others of the “Niggerati” (the deliberately ironic name Thurman used for the young African American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance) wanted to show the real lives of African Americans, both the good and the bad. Thurman believed that black artists should be more objective in their writings and not so self-conscious that they failed to acknowledge and celebrate the arduous conditions of African American lives. As Singh and Scott put it, “Thurman’s Harlem Renaissance is, thus, staunch and revolutionary in its commitment to individuality and critical objectivity: the black writer need not pander to the aesthetic preferences of the black middle class, nor should he or she write for an easy and patronizing white approval.”

Thurman died at the age of 32 from tuberculosis, which many suspect was exacerbated by his long fight with alcoholism.

Stray Toasters

• What Watson Might Do After Crushing Humanity on Jeopardy!
• By way of MarknTyme: Superhero Organizations and Business Entities
• Best Art Ever (This Week)
  
• (Can’t You) Trip Like I Do – Filter and The Crystal Method
• Ever wondered what the X-Men would look like as an anime-style cartoon? Wonder no more.

And with that, it’s time to finish getting ready for today’s HeroClix tournament at Dr. Volt’s.

Namaste.

Friday – 18 February 2011
It’s my day off. Unfortunately, it’s not a four-day weekend for me, as our robot overlords protectors don’t give us President’s Day as a holiday. Oh, well.

Last night, SaraRules! and I attended Ballet West‘s performance of

It was very enjoyable. The dancers for Aurora, Prince Desire (“Prince Philip” for the Disney-ites out there), the Lilac Fairy and the Male Bluebird were all excellent. My only real complain about the performance came in Act III, with the court dances of the fairy-tale characters in attendance — It seemed to be a never-ending cavalcade of dance. Granted, the performers were all talented and acquitted themselves nicely, but it just seemed to make the production drag on and on. (NOTE: The dances were written into the original production by Tchaikovsky, so it’s the way the ballet is supposed to be performed.)

After we returned home, I played a little CoD: Black Ops before calling it a night.

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
Today’s personality of note is: Nina Simone (1, 2)

Eunice Kathleen Waymon, also known by her stage name Nina Simone, was an American singer, songwriter, pianist, arranger, and civil rights activist widely associated with jazz music. Simone aspired to become a classical pianist while working in a broad range of styles including classical, jazz, blues, soul, folk, R&B, gospel, and pop.

She took to music at an early age, learning to play piano at the age of 4, and singing in her church’s choir. The sixth of seven children, Simone grew up poor. Her music teacher helped establish a special fund to pay for Simone’s education and, after finishing high school, Simone won a scholarship to New York City’s famed Julliard School of Music to train as a classical pianist, but she eventually had to leave school after she ran out of funds. Moving to Philadelphia, Simone lived with her family there in order to save money and go to a more affordable music program. Her career took an unexpected turn, however, when she was rejected from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia; she later claimed the school denied her admittance because she was African-American. Turning away from classical music, she started playing American standards, jazz and blues in clubs in the 1950s. Her original style arose from a fusion of gospel and pop songs with classical music, in particular her first inspiration, classical composer Bach, and accompanied with her expressive jazz-like singing in characteristic low tenor. She injected as much of her classical background into her music as possible to give it more depth and quality, and as she felt that pop music was inferior. She took the stage name Nina Simone—”Nina” came from a nickname meaning “little one” and “Simone” after the actress Simone Signoret.

Simone had always included songs in her repertoire that hinted about her African-American origins (such as “Brown Baby” and “Zungo” on Nina at the Village Gate during 1962). But on her debut album for Philips, Nina Simone In Concert (live recording, 1964), Simone for the first time openly addresses the racial inequality that was prevalent in the United States with the song “Mississippi Goddam”. It was her response to the murder of Medgar Evers and the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four black children. The song was released as a single, being boycotted in certain southern states. With “Old Jim Crow” on the same album she reacts to the Jim Crow Laws. From then on, a civil rights message was standard in Simone’s recording repertoire, where it had already become a part of her live performances. Simone performed and spoke at many civil rights meetings, such as at the Selma to Montgomery marches. Simone advocated violent revolution during the civil rights period as opposed to Martin Luther King’s non-violent approach, and hoped that African Americans could, by armed combat, form a separate state.

In 1987, the original 1958 recording of “My Baby Just Cares For Me” was used in an advert for Chanel No. 5 perfume in the UK. This led to a re-release which stormed to number 5 in the UK singles chart giving her a brief surge in popularity in the UK. Her autobiography, I Put a Spell on You, was published during 1992 and she recorded her last album, A Single Woman, in 1993.

In 1993, Simone settled near Aix-en-Provence in Southern France. She had been ill with breast cancer for several years before she died in her sleep at her home in Carry-le-Rouet, Bouches-du-Rhône on April 21, 2003. Simone’s ashes were scattered in several African countries.

Stray Toasters

• Women Cover War: Dodging Bullets, Sexual Assault
• My CSX water tower (for my railroad) was just delivered. It’s been… 10 days… since it was shipped.
  • CSX is the product of the Chessie System and Seaboard System Railroads, along with a couple of other lines.
• Driver Sued for Updating Facebook in Fatal Crash
• There’s a new trailer for Thor that’s hit the Internet:
• The Line It Is Drawn #28 – Album Cover Homages
• Digital Age Is Slow to Arrive in Rural America
• With ’21,’ British singer Adele opens her heart to the world
• 
  
• Planned Parenthood Financing Is Caught in Budget Feud
• I just had a random craving for gummy cola bottles…
  
• Our new Superman on the cover of Entertainment Weekly
• This did not come from my workplace. I don’t recall who posted the link to it yesterday (or two days ago):
  



• A Car You Can Drive With Your Thoughts

That’s it for now.
Time to find some trouble to get into…

Namaste.

Thursday – 17 February 2011
It’s another NBN Thursday in the valley. The sun is shining. The sky is blue. And the mountains (and a fair portion of the valley) is covered in white. That’s right: It snowed last night. Of course, that also means that the air is clear and one can see the west side of the valley clearly.

Last night, after work, I ran up to Dr. Volt’s to pick up this week’s four-color goodness before dashing back home to grab a quick bite to eat. SaraRules! had a Justice Junior League meeting and I had coffee with my friend, Frankie.  While out, I had thought to kill multiple avians with a single piece of silicate and get the batteries in a couple of my watches replaced. The snow made me decide to deal with that tomorrow, on my day off.

After coffee, I headed back home – time for comfy pants and comics! – to wait for the missus to get in. I even had the presence of mind to throw in a load of laundry. When she got in, we finished watching Prince of Persia. I swear that movie had more gratuitous slow-motion scenes than The Matrix, Dhoom and Resident Evil: Afterlife combined. On the whole, it was an entertaining movie — it was kind of like a live-action Aladdin. I also found it amusing that “foreign” (or at least “non-American”) still seems to mean “just speak with an (affected) British accent” to most people. *shrug*

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
Today’s personality is Paul Robeson (1, 2).

Paul Leroy Robeson was an African American concert singer (bass-baritone), recording artist, athlete and actor who became noted for his political radicalism and activism in the civil rights movement. Robeson was the first major concert star to popularize the performance of Negro spirituals and was the first black actor of the 20th century to portray Shakespeare’s Othello alongside an all white cast.

The son of a former slave turned preacher, Robeson attended Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., where he was an All-America football player. Upon graduating from Rutgers at the head of his class, he rejected a career as a professional athlete and instead entered Columbia University. He obtained a law degree in 1923, but, because of the lack of opportunity for blacks in the legal profession, he drifted to the stage, making a London debut in 1922.

At the height of his career, Paul Robeson chose to become primarily a political artist. Increasing political awareness impelled Robeson to visit the Soviet Union in 1934, and from that year he became increasingly identified with strong left-wing commitments, while continuing his success in concerts, recordings, and theatre.

During World War II, Robeson’s support for the Allied War effort had made him the world’s most famous African-American and his previous statements and advocacy for socialism had been ignored by both the media and the white establishment. The start of the Cold war led to a social climate in which most civil rights and anti-imperialist groups in the United States were considered “Communist affiliated.”

In 1950, Robeson’s passport was revoked under the McCarran Act over his work in the anti-imperialism movement and what the U.S. State Department called Robeson’s “frequent criticism while abroad of the treatment of blacks in the US.” Under heavy and daily surveillance by both the FBI and the CIA and publicly condemned for his beliefs, Robeson was blacklisted, his income fell dramatically and he became very nearly a non-person.

Robeson’s autobiography, Here I Stand, was published by a British publishing company in 1958. As part of his “comeback”, he gave two sold-out recitals that month in Carnegie Hall, which were released on LP and later on CD. They were his only stereo recordings.

Also that year, Robeson’s 60th birthday was celebrated in several US cities and twenty-seven countries across Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa, as well as in the Soviet Union. Later, in May 1958, his passport was finally restored and he was able to travel again, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Kent vs. Dulles, that the Secretary of State had no right to deny a passport or require any citizen to sign an affidavit because of his political beliefs.

By 1965, he was forced into permanent retirement. He spent his final years in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, unapologetic about his political views and career.

Stray Toasters

• Created Equal
• Jim Lee on the Beginning of DC Universe Online
  • Retired Superheroes (courtesy of )
• From the “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot…?!” file: Goldfish killer “didn’t want to leave witnesses”
• 
• International Pillow Fight Day
  • Pillow Fight Flash Mob
• The Hard Luck and Beautiful Life of Liam Neeson
• U.S. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, ‘By Mistake’
• Detroit Will PAY You to Take One of These 100 Abandoned Houses

Back to it.

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.

Tuesday – 15 February 2011
Day Two of the work week is upon us… and it’s a bright, sunshiny day. It’s even supposed to be fairly warm, too. And tonight is D&D 3.5 night.

Last night, SaraRules! and I had a quiet evening in. That was one of the benefits of having celebrated Valentine’s Day last week. We had a quick dinner and then settled in for a movie. As I had mentioned wanting to watch Star Trek (2009) on Saturday after watching The Hurt Locker, SaraRules! was gracious enough to agree to watch it last night. It was fun — we MSTK3-ed parts of the movie. All-in-all, it was a very good evening with the coolest wife ever.

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
Today’s personality is: President Barack Obama (1, 2):

Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned after his election to the presidency in November 2008.

A native of Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004.

Obama served three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid against a Democratic incumbent for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, he ran for United States Senate in 2004. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party’s nomination. In the 2008 general election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009.

Stray Toasters

• Dwayne Johnson – The Rock Back in the Ring
• Companies Warn That Higher Prices Are Looming
• Radio sleuths may have discovered Coca-Cola’s secret recipe
• I like this new Demotivator from Despair.com:
  



• My Neutrophils Can Kick Your White Blood Cells’ Butt
• Best-Kept Secret Now Has a Grammy
  • If you didn’t know Arcade Fire, Spalding before…
  • Long-time readers may remember that I posted about Ms. Spalding in these posts: 1, 2
    
• Your Favorite Characters as Facebook Avatars
• 
• Taking Her Art Seriously, Not Herself
• Drumming Up More Addresses on the Internet
• A Fight to Win the Future: Computers vs. Humans

Namaste.

Monday – 14 February 2011
It’s Monday, which means that it’s the start of another work week.

It’s also Valentine’s Day

or, as Neil Gaiman put it:

Happy Valentine’s Day. Or take pride in Being Single Day. Or join me in the newly-created Why Is My Wife In Australia Day (people who live in Australia are not eligible to join).

or, as I was just reminded: It’s Anti-Green Lantern Day. (Look at a color wheel, it will make sense then.) I wasn’t thinking about it when I got dressed this morning, but I selected a green shirt, white turtleneck and black slacks for today’s fashion fare. It wasn’t until Julie came into the office, in red-and-black that I thought about it being Anti-GL Day, too.

Yesterday, I finally picked up a six-car hopper set that I’ve been eying at a local hobby shop. It’s an older set – and showed no signs of moving any time soon – so they cut me a rather nice deal. (That didn’t hurt my feelings.) After that, I headed home and saved the world (DCUO-style) for a bit before heading over to the in-laws’ for dinner and a movie. Last night’s feature was Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
Today’s person of note is: Huey Newton (1, 2).

Huey Percy Newton was a political and urban activist who founded the Afro-American Association and co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.

Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana, the youngest of seven children to Armelia Johnson and Walter Newton, a sharecropper and Baptist lay preacher. In 1945, the family settled in Oakland, California. The Newton family was destitute, and often relocated throughout the San Francisco Bay Area throughout Newton’s childhood. Despite this, he contended that his family was close-knit and that he never went without food and shelter as a child. Growing up in Oakland, Newton claimed that “[he] was made to feel ashamed of being black.” In his autobiography Revolutionary Suicide, he wrote, “During those long years in Oakland public schools, I did not have one teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or experience. Not one instructor ever awoke in me a desire to learn more or to question or to explore the worlds of literature, science, and history. All they did was try to rob me of the sense of my own uniqueness and worth, and in the process nearly killed my urge to inquire.”

Although he graduated at Oakland Technical High School in 1960, Newton was illiterate. During his course of autodidacticism, he struggled to read Republic by Plato. He read it five times to better understand it, and it was this success that inspired him to become a political leader.

In the mid-1960s Newton decided to pursue his education at Merritt College where he met Bobby Seale. The two were briefly involved with political groups at the school before they set out to create one of their own. Founded in 1966, they called their group The Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Unlike many of the other social and political organizers of the time, they took a militant stance, advocating the ownership of guns by African Americans, and were often seen brandishing weapons. The group believed that violence—or the threat of violence—might be needed to bring about social change. They set forth their political goals in a document called the Ten-Point Program, which included better housing, jobs, and education for African Americans. It also called for an end to economic exploitation of black communities.

The Black Panthers wanted to improve life in black communities and established social programs to help those in need. They also fought against police brutality in black neighborhoods by mostly white cops. Members of the group would go to arrests in progress and watch for abuse.

Newton earned a bachelor’s degree from UC Santa Cruz in 1974. He was enrolled as a graduate student in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz in 1978, when he arranged to take a reading course from famed evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, while in prison. He and Trivers became close friends. Trivers and Newton published an influential analysis of the role of flight crew self-deception in the crash of Air Florida Flight 90. Newton earned a Ph.D. in social philosophy at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1980. His doctoral dissertation was entitled War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America.

On August 22, 1989, Newton was fatally shot on the 1400 block of 9th street in West Oakland by a 24-year-old Black Guerilla Family member Tyrone Robinson during an attempt by Newton to obtain crack cocaine.

Stray Toasters

• Valentine’s Day dating tips from lovestruck scientists
  • The Valentine’s Day Survival Guide
    
• In Spokane, a Mystery with No Good Solution
• Back to the Future (not the movie)
• 
• I’m not sure that I’m overly fond of the new UI on Gizmodo.
• NYC gives Optimus Prime a parking ticket
• States Aim Ax at Health Cost of Retirement
• 
• Yay for problems with the locks on the doors to two of our storage rooms!
• Watch IBM’s Watson on Jeopardy! Tonight

That’s good for now.

Namaste.

Sunday – 13 February 2011
It’s my sister, Rana’s, birthday:

So far, today has been rather quiet and lazy. I slept in, which was quite the treat.

Yesterday, I headed over to Dr. Volt’s Comic Connection to play HeroClix with a few of the guys.  We wound up playing a 3-on-3 game, themed “Science vs. Magic.” Chris, Andrew and I played figures with the “Mystical” and “Psychic” keywords, while Jeremiah and the two Johns played “Science,” “Robot” and “Armor” keyworded figures. It was a good game. We beat science to a pulp… with the very notable exception of Jeremiah’s Dr. Manhattan figure.

After I got home, SaraRules! and I ate dinner and watched The Hurt Locker and Iron Man. We’d not seen The Hurt Locker before. It was a very good and well-done movie; it was easy to see why the Academy lavished so much attention on it last year. And, Iron Man – which was SaraRules!’ choice, not mine by the way- well, that was just fun.

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

Wynton Learson Marsalis is a trumpeter, composer, bandleader, music educator, and Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Marsalis has promoted the appreciation of Classical and Jazz music often to young audiences. Marsalis has been awarded nine Grammys in both genres, and was awarded the first Pulitzer Prize for Music for a jazz recording.

Wynton was born in New Orleans, Louisiana to Dolores and Ellis Marsalis, the second of six sons. At an early age he exhibited an aptitude for music. At age eight, Wynton performed traditional New Orleans music in the Fairview Baptist Church band led by banjoist Danny Barker, and at 14, he performed with the New Orleans Philharmonic. During high school, Wynton performed with the New Orleans Symphony Brass Quintet, New Orleans Community Concert Band, New Orleans Youth Orchestra, New Orleans Symphony, various jazz bands and with a local funk band, the Creators.

At age 17, Wynton was the youngest musician admitted to Tanglewood’s Berkshire Music Center, where he won the school’s Harvey Shapiro Award for outstanding brass student. Wynton moved to New York City to attend Juilliard in 1979, and picked up gigs around town. In 1980, Wynton joined the Jazz Messengers led by Art Blakey. In the years that followed, Wynton performed with Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie, Sweets Edison, Clark Terry, Sonny Rollins, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams and countless other jazz legends.

In 1987, Wynton Marsalis co-founded a jazz program at Lincoln Center. In July 1996, Jazz at Lincoln Center was installed as new constituent of Lincoln Center. In October 2004, Marsalis opened Frederick P. Rose Hall, the world’s first institution for jazz containing three performance spaces (including the first concert hall designed specifically for jazz) along with recording, broadcast, rehearsal and educational facilities. Wynton presently serves as Artistic Director for Jazz at Lincoln Center and Music Director for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

Stray Toasters

• 4-Star General, 5-Star Grace
• If you’re in the San Francisco area – and are a fan of movies and sci-fi – you might want to check out this event, coming up on Wednesday.
  • If you’re not familiar with Sandy Collora’s work, check out the trailer he made for Batman: Dead End:

• A Point of View: Why books do not prepare us for real love
• Waltham, MA becomes Steampunkville
  
• 
• By way of Lish: Mystery Surrounds Cyber Missile That Crippled Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Ambitions
  • When I countered that this was an article from Faux News, he backed it up with this corroborating article from The New York Times
• Ebooks Finally Included on the NYT Bestsellers List

Namaste.

Saturday – 12 February 2011
It’s the weekend, baby! Surprisingly, I’ve even managed to be… productive… this morning. I folded a bunch of laundry, started a new load, started cleaning the bathroom. And all of this before 1100. (Yeah, I know! I’m a little shocked, too.)

Last night, after hanging out with the Clitorati crowd, I played a little CoD: Black Ops with a few of my coworkers for a couple of hours. After that, I took a spin through Metropolis with Nefer-Tem and beat on some bad guys in DC Universe Online.

Today, I’m hanging out with some of the usual suspects at Dr. Volt’s and playing ‘Clix. It’s not a tournament, so I should be able to just hang out, relax and play. Oh, and trash talk… of course.

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
Today’s personality is “Sugar” Ray Leonard

Sugar Ray Leonard is an American retired professional boxer. He was named Ray Charles Leonard, after his mother’s favorite singer, Ray Charles. Leonard was the first boxer to earn more than $100 million in purses, and he is widely considered to be one of the best boxers of all time, winning world titles in five weight divisions and defeating future fellow International Boxing Hall of Fame inductees Wilfred Benítez, Thomas Hearns, Roberto Durán and Marvin Hagler. Leonard was named “Boxer of the Decade” for the 1980s, due to his accomplishments.

Leonard started boxing at the recreation center in Palmer Park in 1969. His older brother Roger started boxing first. Roger had helped start the boxing program, urging Ollie Dunlap, the center’s director, to form a team. Dave Jacobs, a former boxer, and Janks Morton volunteered as the boxing coaches. Roger won some trophies and showed them off in front of Ray, goading him to start boxing.

In 1972, Leonard boxed in the featherweight quarterfinals of the National AAU Tournament, losing by decision to Jerome Artis. It was his first defeat. Later that year, he boxed in the Eastern Olympic Trials. The rules stated that a boxer had to be seventeen to box in international competition, so Leonard, only sixteen, lied about his age. He made it to the lightweight semifinals, losing a disputed decision to Greg Whaley, who took such a beating that he wasn’t allowed to continue in the trials. Whaley never boxed again.

Sarge Johnson, assistant coach of the U.S. Olympic Boxing Team, said to Dave Jacobs, “That kid you got is sweet as sugar.” The nickname stuck. However, given his style and first name, it was probably only a matter of time before people started calling him Sugar Ray, after the man many consider to be the best boxer of all time, Sugar Ray Robinson.

In 1976, Leonard made the U.S. Olympic Team as the light welterweight representative. The team also included Leon and Michael Spinks, Howard Davis, Jr., Leo Randolph, Charles Mooney and John Tate. Many consider the 1976 U.S. team to be the greatest boxing team in the history of the Olympics. Leonard won his first four Olympic bouts by 5–0 decisions. In the final, he boxed the great Cuban knockout artist Andrés Aldama, who scored five straight knockouts to reach the final.

In the second, he dropped Aldama with a left to the chin. Late in the final round, he again hurt Aldama, which brought a standing eight count from the referee. With only a few seconds left in the fight, a Leonard combination forced another standing eight count. Leonard was awarded a 5–0 decision and the Olympic Gold Medal.

He finished his amateur career with a record of 145–5 and 75 KO’s.

When Leonard decided to turn professional, Janks Morton introduced him to Mike Trainer. Trainer talked twenty-four of his friends and clients into underwriting Leonard’s career with an investment of $21,000, to be repaid within four years at 8% interest. Trainer then made Leonard the sole stockholder in Sugar Ray Leonard, Inc. Angelo Dundee, Muhammad Ali’s trainer, was brought in to be Leonard’s trainer and manager.

Leonard made his professional debut on February 5, 1977 before a crowd of 10,270 at the Civic Center in Baltimore, Maryland. He was paid $40,044 for the fight. His opponent was Luis “The Bull” Vega, whom he defeated by a six-round unanimous decision. After the fight, Leonard paid back his $21,000 loan to the investors.

In his fourteenth professional fight, Leonard fought his first world-ranked opponent, Floyd Mayweather, who was ranked seventeenth. The fight took place on September 9, 1978. Leonard won by a tenth-round knockout.

Leonard fought Wilfred Benitez for the WBC Welterweight Championship on November 30, 1979 at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada. Leonard received $1 million and Benitez, a two-division champion with a record of 38–0–1, received $1.2 million. Going into the final round, Leonard led by scores of 137–130, 137–133, and 136–134. The two went toe-to-toe in the fifteenth. Late in the round, Leonard dropped Benitez with a left. He got up, but after a few more punches, the referee stopped the fight. The time was 2:54 of round fifteen.

In October 1996, the 40-year-old Leonard announced that he was coming out of retirement to fight Héctor Camacho for the lightly regarded IBC Middleweight Championship. Camacho, a quick southpaw, had a record of 62–3–1. The fight with Camacho took place on March 1, 1997 in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Leonard held his own in the first two rounds, but Camacho, who applied pressure from the opening bell, started to score well in the third. He continued to score well in the fourth and opened a cut above Leonard’s right eye. In the fifth, Camacho dropped Leonard with a right followed by two left uppercuts. Leonard got up, but was unable to ward off Camacho. The referee stopped the fight with Leonard taking punishment on the ropes.

The Camacho fight was Leonard’s last. He finished his career with a record of 36–3–1 with 25 knockouts.

Stray Toasters

• My father took me to see a Sugar Ray Leonard fight, when I was a kid.
• Neil Gaiman explains why he doesn’t sweat “piracy”
• Inherently Funny Words
• 
• Book uses colored thread between pages to make hyperlinks

Up. Out.

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 – 10 February 2011
Another NBN Thursday is upon us.

Last night was D&D (4.0) game night. We started a new encounter, created by . It was good… and a little odd. We were traveling down a road, minding our own business, when we were ‘jacked by a goblin… which stole an item that we were trying to return to its rightful place. We chased the gob through woods and into a clearing. There, we found:

1. A goblin corpse (the goblin we’d been chasing, in fact) and
2. A pink slime

For those of you – like me – who have never encountered Item #2 before, allow me to share with you a little insight:

The key thing to note there is its “Seasoning Mist.” All but two of us were caught in the mist… which nearly turned us into a party of cannibals. Nearly. Instead, a few of us (those who missed our saving throws) wound up eating some of the carrion in the area. Yeah, it was like that. We managed to survive the encounter.

Back at home, SaraRules! and I tackled another recorded episode of NCIS and a couple of other shows before she called it a night and I dove into yesterday’s four-color haul.

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
Today’s item is Juneteenth.

Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day or Emancipation Day, is a holiday in the United States honoring African American heritage by commemorating the announcement of the abolition of slavery in the U.S. State of Texas in 1865. Celebrated on June 19, the term is a portmanteau of June and nineteenth, and is recognized as a state holiday in 36 states of the United States.

Though Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, with an effective date of January 1, 1863, it had minimal immediate effect on most slaves’ day-to-day lives, particularly in the Confederate States of America. Texas, as a part of the Confederacy, was resistant to the Emancipation Proclamation, and though slavery was very prevalent in East Texas, it was not as common in the Western areas of Texas, particularly the Hill Country, where most German-Americans were opposed to the practice. Juneteenth commemorates June 18 and 19, 1865. June 18 is the day Union General Gordon Granger and 2,000 federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to take possession of the state and enforce the emancipation of its slaves. On June 19, 1865, legend has it while standing on the balcony of Galveston’sAshton Villa, Granger read the contents of “General Order No. 3”:

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.

Stray Toasters

• On the way to work this morning, I was listening to X96’s Radio From Hell morning show. They had an interview with Gregory Bright, who – after serving 27 years in prison for a second-degree murder charge – was released from prison due to wrongful conviction. Mr. Bright and Lara Naughton have turned his story into a one-man play, called Never Fight a Shark in Water, which is being performed at the University of Utah this evening; there is no admission charge for the performance. For more information about tonight’s performance, click here.
• Breakout Style
• Fooducate: Eat a Bit Better
• Houston Opera Still Embraces Bold Ventures
• From the “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot…?!” file: 7-Year-Old Buys Harrier Jet — Then Gets Dreams Shattered
• 
  
• Medical Treatment, Out of Reach
• Navigating the new UI at Gizmodo will take some getting used to…
• ‘Superman’ artist Joe Shuster’s lurid comic world exposed
• 
  
• Girls Love Gadgets, Too: Gifts for Your Geeky Sweetie
• Black Metal Greeting Cards

Namaste.

Wednesday – 09 February 2011
Midweek. Which makes it not only new comics day, but also D&D (4.0) night. Now, to just make it through the work day…

Last night, SaraRules! and I helped her father (and both brothers) move an organ out of her grandfather’s apartment. I’m going to let that sink in for a moment…

::: pause :::

Got it? Okay. Moving on. It was cold last night. Sub-freezing, with a not-so-lovely wind adding to the “fun.” The move took a little longer than it could/should have. But, in the end, the organ was loaded into a U-Haul trailer. Amen. Mid-move I jokingly asked SaraRules! where she was taking me for dinner. Without missing a beat, she asked,”Where do you want to go…? Outback?” Mmm, Outback…

And, so it was, later, as the miller told his tale, that her face – at first just ghostly – turned a whiter shade of pale that we wound up at the local Outback Steakhouse.  Aussie Cheese Fries. Prime Rib. Good. On the way home from dinner, we drove past A Perfect Dress, to see what new fashion (or horrors) they had in the windows. Turns out that SaraRules! and I agreed that most of the items weren’t too bad; there were only a couple of dresses that we questioned. The rest of the evening was spent, on the couch, watching TV. And I wrapped up the night playing CoD: Black Ops with a few coworkers before calling it a night.

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
I had a hard time coming up with something that began with the letter “I” for today’s entry. Eventually, an idea came to mind… and it’s one that I find apropos, as today is also the day that new comic books release:

Today’s item is Incognegro, a graphic novel by Mat Johnson.

(c) DC Comics

For a synopsis of the book’s plot, I’ll refer to an interview that Mat Johnson did with Newsarama in 2007:

NEWSARAMA: Mat, let’s start with the big picture. What’s the gist of Incognegro?

Mat Johnson: It’s the story of a mixed person of African-American descent who passed for white in the 1930s to investigate lynchings in the South. He goes down to Mississippi on a specific mission that ends up getting tangled really quickly, and it turns into a noir thriller.

NRAMA: What can you tell us about the protagonist Zane Pinchback and where he is when the book opens?

MJ: He’s a reporter in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance, and he’s kind of a minor celebrity, but he’s only famous on paper. Nobody can know what he looks like because of what he does. So he’s somewhat frustrated by that, being famous but not being famous. He’s dealing with his past, and part of what happens in the story is he’s pulled back into his personal past, his own story.
NRAMA: In addition to dealing with his own issues, he also has to go “incognegro” and go to the South to save his brother. So there’s a whole external drive going for him, in addition to his own internal awakening, right?

MJ: He has a twin brother who looks much like himself but is dark-skinned. His brother has had none of the breaks that Zane had, largely because of his difference in appearance, even though they’re of the same mother and father. When he goes back, Zane has to confront this other life that he was able to escape, but that his brother instead had to dive deeper into. And that’s really the emotional heart of the book, the two of them and their lives, the convergence of them coming together.

Johnson also notes that the story was partially inspired by Walter Francis White, a light-skinned African-American who used his skin color (or lack thereof) to investigate lynchings and race riots in the American south in the early 20th Century:

MJ: Yeah. Well, Walter White is the primary idea for the piece, when he was investigating these lynchings, but there’ve been other points in history – I’m African-American, but I look fairly white or European, so I’ve always been very fascinated by these points in history, when people like myself interacted, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. I was fascinated with the idea of taking something that is part of my life and part of past lives, and seeing if I could make that into not just a curiosity, but into something that actually could mean the difference in lives.

As I wrote in 2008, when I first read the book:

Incognegro, written by Mat Johnson (1, 2, 3) – a light-skinned Black man, himself – is adeptly written. Its characters aren’t just stereotypical caricatures; they have depth. The settings aren’t just backdrops, they add to the flavor of the scenes. The story also contains a few interesting plot twists, as well.

See also: The New York Times review of the book.

Stray Toasters

• Employee surveys. Normally, I’d be all *twirls finger in air* about it, but it seems as though our robot overlords protectors are actually invested in seeing what employees think and feel about the company and their jobs and what – within reason – can be done to make our working lives better.  We’ll see how this shakes out.
• Speaking in Defense of Science
• Ravens’ Michael Oher tells his side in memoir
• Lymph Node Study Shakes Pillar of Breast Cancer Care
• 
• Packers celebrate Super Bowl win with 56,000 fans at Lambeau Field
• Women “computers” of World War II
• Worker Trapped in Plane’s Cargo Hold Avoids Becoming Passenger
• Homeowners face “new normal” in housing bust
  • Chart: Owing more than home is worth
• 
• Iconoscope No. 1: Star Wars Episode IV
• From the “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot…?!” file: Sofa made from a coffin

Quote of the Day
Today’s quote comes from last night’s moving extravaganza. While standing outside, watching the comedy of trying to figure out how to arrange the organ in the trailer, SaraRules! thanked me for “…helping my crazy family” with the move. We joked about it for a moment before she noted:

SaraRules!: “Oh, your family’s crazy, too.”
Me: “Yeah, but at least my family has the good sense to be crazy indoors, where it’s warm!”

We both got a good laugh out of that.

Namaste.

Tuesday – 08 February 2011
It’s a sunny day in the valley. That is in stark contrast to the snow that fell yesterday afternoon and last night. Although, on the “plus” side: The air is clean(er) and you can see across the valley:

Last night, SaraRules! and I had a Date Night Adventure! It was really just supposed to be dinner and a concert, but the first half turned into something of an ordeal. Shortly after last month’s Preservation Hall Jazz Band concert, we learned that Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra was going to be performing.

So, we decided to go and celebrate Valentine’s Day a little early.

This came under the heading of “Good Theory.”
“Practical Application” went a little something like this:

We drove to the University of Utah campus and found parking. We walked down to 13th East, as we had planned to eat at Aristo’s, a restaurant that SaraRules! had heard was good and wanted to try. We walked in to find they had at least a 45-minute wait. No good.

We walked next door to Indochine, a Vietnamese restaurant. The restaurant was fairly packed and there wasn’t anyone at the front counter. Again, no good.

We headed over to Market Street Broiler… and were met with people walking out, saying that they’d lost some power – the block across the street had a complete power outage – and were closing. *sigh*  We were starting to see a pattern and it wasn’t good.

We then walked back down to B&D Burger. We were at the “beggars can’t be choosers” point of the evening and we were also running out of time. It was 6:30 PM when we walked in and the concert started at 7:30. Fortunately, we were only a five-minute walk from the hall. SaraRules!, in her near-infinite wisdom, suggested that we grab what looked like the last available table before we ordered. (Very good call on her part.) We stood in line for about 10 minutes, as the place was full of people – like us – who were unable to get into the other restaurants. We ordered and we sat down and waited.

6:50…

7:00…

7:05…

Around this time, SaraRules! went up “to have words” with the young lady at the counter. Granted, the place was full and the cook – the sole cook – was busy, but apparently the cashier had an “Oh, well…” attitude about the whole affair. And, at no point did anyone call in additional help to cover the rush.

7:15…

SaraRules! went back to the counter to get our order “to go.” Many other patrons had just decided to leave, without getting their orders AND without demanding refunds. (SaraRules! told me later that the cashiers were like “Hey… more money for us!” about those customers.) Contrast that attitude with this, taken from the back of the customer survey card:

We got our food about 7:25 PM. We hurried back to the car – we couldn’t exactly take our dinner into Kingsbury Hall – dropped off the boxes, took our gyros with us and ate them as we headed to the hall.

Fortunately, the performance started a few minutes late. I literally sat down a couple of seconds before the orchestra started playing.

It was a fantastic performance. One expects excellence when listening to Wynton Marsalis play. It was great to see… um, hear…  that he surrounded himself with phenomenal talent, as well. It was an amazing show. There was no band leader/conductor. In fact, Wynton Marsalis wasn’t even front and center; he played on the third row, with the rest of the trumpeters. Mr. Marsalis even explained, between a couple of the pieces, why we saw the band talking amongst themselves during the performance: It was to decide who was going to solo or be featured in some pieces. On the fly. They played for about an hour-and-a-half and came back for an amazing encore. It was a great way to cap off an evening that began less-than-auspiciously.

Chew on This: Food for Thought – Black History Month
Today, let’s take a look at the Harlem Renaissance.

The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the “New Negro Movement”, named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke. Though it was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, many French-speaking black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also influenced by the Harlem Renaissance.

The Harlem Renaissance is unofficially recognized to have spanned from about 1919 until the early or mid 1930s. Many of its ideas lived on much longer. The zenith of this “flowering of Negro literature”, as James Weldon Johnson preferred to call the Harlem Renaissance, was placed between 1924 (the year that Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance) and 1929 (the year of the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression).

The Harlem Renaissance grew out of the changes that had taken place in the African American community since the abolition of slavery. These accelerated as a consequence of World War I and the great social and cultural changes in early 20th century United States. Industrialization was attracting people to cities from rural areas and gave rise to a new mass culture. Contributing factors leading to the Harlem Renaissance were the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities, which concentrated ambitious people in places where they could encourage each other, and the First World War, which had created new industrial work opportunities for tens of thousands of people. Factors leading to the decline of this era include the Great Depression.

Characterizing the Harlem Renaissance was an overt racial pride that came to be represented in the idea of the New Negro, who through intellect and production of literature, art, and music could challenge the pervading racism and stereotypes to promote progressive or socialist politics, and racial andsocial integration. The creation of art and literature would serve to “uplift” the race.

There would be no uniting form singularly characterizing the art that emerged out of the Harlem Renaissance. Rather, it encompassed a wide variety of cultural elements and styles, including a Pan-Africanist perspective, “high-culture” and “low-culture” or “low-life,” from the traditional form of music to the blues and jazz, traditional and new experimental forms in literature such as modernism and the new form of jazz poetry. This duality meant that numerous African-American artists came into conflict with conservatives in the black intelligentsia, who took issue with certain depictions of black life.

Some common themes represented during the Harlem Renaissance were the influence of the experience of slavery and emerging African-American folk traditions on black identity, the effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas inherent in performing and writing for elite white audiences, and the question of how to convey the experience of modern black life in the urban North.

The progress—both symbolic and real—during this period, became a point of reference from which the African-American community gained a spirit of self-determination that provided a growing sense of both Black urbanity and Black militancy as well as a foundation for the community to build upon for the Civil Rights struggles in the 1950s and 1960s.

Stray Toasters

• Since we were heading out for Date Night – and since we were going to an event – I decided to wear my black suit, a white shirt and my African masks tie. While standing in line to get dinner, a woman (who was obviously aware of the concert) came up to me and asked,”Are you playing tonight?”

  *sigh*

  That’s right, lady. I’m a black guy in a suit and tie near the university campus.  I, obviously, must be playing in the concert.

  I simply told her, “No, I’m not.” My second – and, unfortunately, much-delayed – thought was to tell her “Yes, I’ll be playing trombone.”

• If you haven’t taken a look at Google’s home page (“Google classic,” that is), check it out.
• Ken Olsen, Founder of DEC, Dies at 84
• Space Avalance (some possibly NSFW content)
  



• A Hidden Treasure Struggles in Los Angeles
• Imperial Walker (AT-AT) from recycled computer parts
• The Apollo, Uptown’s Showbiz Incubator
• Courtesy of Vince, from Dr. Volt’s, comes Superman Classic, a short – and very well-made – animated fan film:
• Planned Parenthood to Retrain Public Staff
• Kayabuki in Utsunomiya – Where Waiters Are Monkeys

Namaste.