March 2003
3/30/03 12:47 AM
3/28/03 10:16 AM
3/25/03 10:59 PM
3/22/03 11:18 PM
3/19/03 9:38 PM
3/18/03 9:27 AM
3/17/03 5:38 PM
3/17/03 1:21 AM
3/15/03 11:37 PM
3/14/03 9:35 AM
3/13/03 6:28 PM
3/12/03 11:24 PM
3/11/03 10:51 AM
3/08/03 12:34 PM
3/07/03 9:35 AM
3/05/03 10:45 PM

3/30/03 12:47 AM

I'm very behind on blogging. Mostly because I have been writing a paper (go figure). I am about half way done, I think, on a 30 page paper about WEB DuBois and voluntary segregation, co-authored with Miss Christi Moss, who has finally made an appearance in my blog! Yay, Christi! Like a good public address scholar, though, 25 of 30 pages will be devoted to history and 5 will be devoted analysis of texts! Rar! And like a good academic, I am using lots of prepositional phrases and passive sentence constructions. It takes up more space that way.

Simplemu continues to reign supreme in first position on the start button. Wordperfect has yet to dislodge either my mail program or spider solitaire. I'm tempted to open and close Wordperfect to give it the edge, but somewhere deep inside me I recognize that for what it is -- CHEATING.

Obligatory link: Bards and Battles tour with Astral Travel, the cute new-agers who brought us the Stones and Bones tour in '99. I will never forget watching Steve dowse for laylines at Avebury!  Yay England!

3/28/03 10:16 AM

God wrote back to me last night. I felt honored. Here is what he said:

Dear Laura,

Don't ever fall for it when I say I'm quitting. In that respect, I'm like The Who, The Eagles, and Ozzy Osbourne.

That was very nice of you to mention Me in your blog.  It doesn't make a shit of difference as far as you getting into heaven, but, still, it was nice.

Yours,

G

 

~LS~

3/25/03 10:59 PM

Listening: Hoobastank, Hoobastank

On my Windows XP Start button (to show you my misplaced priorities):

Simplemu
Netscape Mail
Spider Solitaire
Wordperfect 9
Windows Media Player
Microsoft Frontpage
WS_FTP

Note: I use Netscape to surf. No matter how much I surf with Netscape, it -never- shows up on my start button. It's that whole windows monopoly thing, I'm sure.

~LS~

3/22/03 11:18 PM

Well, I made myself a Warblog, since I have been spending so much time surfing war-related sites. I didn't spend a lot of time designing it or backtracking over sites I've visited. I just threw up what I had because I didn't want to lose it or forget it. In retrospect, I wish I'd been more actively blogging my war-related surfing. I've learned a lot.

Here's a non-war related link for sex toys. These toys are hysterical. I got the link from Josh. Warning, it's graphic. If you are a prude, take the blue pill. Relatedly, the Blue Pill -- OMG -- I've never ever heard anyone interpret the Matrix from a libertarian anti-Marxist perspective!!

~LS~

3/19/03 9:38 PM

Listening: Bombs over Iraq

My stomach hurts.

Shoutout to Art Tafil from Knoxville, TN

Art who is looking to buy a "War is not healthy" poster, which led him to my website. He writes:

When I surfed the net looking for that image a couple weeks ago, there weren't that many hits on google. Today, there are 500 hits for the phrase on google and Another Mother For Peace has started to reorganize and they put up a website.

Shaun Treat sent me a link to a Whitehouse parody website. The site is absofuckinglutely hysterical, but not funny enough to make my stomach stop hurting. Also, as an aside, if I'm not careful about posting all the links Shaun Treat sends me, I will end up being Shaun's blog bitch.

Note to Shaun:

Go make your own fucking blog, dude.


~LS~

3/18/03 9:27 AM

Listening: Everclear, Slow Motion Day Dream

This Everclear album rocks. I love Everclear.


From the CAWI List, which posted an article by Howard Zinn:

In the cartoon "The Boondocks," which reaches twenty million readers every day, the cartoonist Aaron McGruder has his character, a black youngster named Huey Freedman, say the following: "In this time of war against Osama bin Laden and the oppressive Taliban regime, we are thankful that OUR leader isn't the spoiled son of a powerful politician from a wealthy oil family who is supported by religious fundamentalists, operates through clandestine organizations, has no respect for the democratic electoral process, bombs innocents, and uses war to deny people their civil liberties. Amen."

Some CAWI people are protesting by holding a vigil on the parade grounds at LSU but they've already been kicked off by the LSU police.

~LS~

3/17/03 5:38 PM

Listening: Everclear, Slow Motion Day Dream

Well, today I have 15 years of continuous sobriety.

Although the state of world affairs is enough to drive ya ta drink!

Here are some seemingly random links that might be helpful to the casual reader:

1. Passive-Aggressive Helping Hand (a support website for people dealing with passive aggressive behavioral disorder). This website includes the traits of a P/A person and tips for dealing with them.

(Because there are sooo many passive aggressive people in my life.)

2. 1+1 Lonely Hearts Beautiful Russian Ladies

(Because I just watched the Birthday Girl. I thought to myself, how STUPID can anyone get???)

3. Lawrence Lessig's Blog - Who is Lawrence Lessig? He is the Stanford Law Professor who argued the public domain case in front of the Supreme Court.; he is author about a ton of books about free speech on the internet and he is chair of the creative commons program.

(Because we all need to know what is and isn't censorship under the current administration.)

~LS~

3/17/03 1:21 AM

More PNAC links (Project for a New American Century)

- PNAC Homepage
- PNAC: Cheney's monstrous scheme
- PNAC and its connection to the Bush War
- PNAC's Present Dangers as Blueprint for Bush Doctrine
- Open letter to president, dated after 9/11
- Were Neo-Conservatives' 1988 Memo A Blueprint for Iraq War (ABC News) This article points out that 10 members of PNAC are now Bush cabinet members
- US had key role in Iraq Buildup (Washington Post 12/02) - This article talks about how, under the Reagan and Bush administrations, Iraq was seen as the bulwark against Islamic overthrow of US-friendly nations in the middle east. Rumsfeld was a key player in delivering to Saddam Hussein the technologies for developing WMD and biotech weapons.
-Hegemony.Com - Anti-war blog with tons of great links!

From Hegemony.com

If not backing the president is treason, shouldn't all the people who tried to impeach President Clinton be behind bars by now?

-- Bill Maher

~LS~

3/15/03 11:37 PM

Well, it looks like my blog is becoming an anti-war blog. Feh. I wanted to go to the DC protest today, or at least the NO protest, but I didn't learn about it in time to make arrangements. I wonder how I missed that. I joined the CAWI mailing list today and my box is spammed with all kinds of informative stuff:

* A report on some of the biological warfare chemicals Bush is using to justify the war shows how these chemicals have already degraded.

* New Mexico is deliberating a resolution denouncing the Patriot's Act.

* A major Scotland paper published an article showing Bush had formulated plans for attacking Iraq long before 9/11. The article cited the PNAC organization, of course. See also The Sunday Herald.

And, from People Magazine, The Dixie Chicks have denounced Bush's war. Yay!


~LS~

3/14/03 9:35 AM

Back in December, God threatened to resign, as per His Livejournal. I stopped visiting said Livejournal for that reason. Today, out of a sense of nostalgia about the state of the world, I became sentimental and I missed God, so I re-visited His Livejournal and Behold! He was still there. I am sure there is a profound lesson here.

Unbeknownst to me, God's Saints also have a Livejournal. Though God's threatened departure has been erased from His Livejournal (how very Him-like to change his mind and then erase the change from History. I think he did that with Lilith, once), the Saints Livejournal has the traces (we fallible humans are always the traces of His imperfection). Some of His Saints are very good at interpreting his absence. Others, predictably, are just bad typists. See the 11/07/02 entry:

There they found the Pope pointing to a single word on a parchment, repeating over and over, "There's an 'R', there's an 'R'! It's 'celebrate', not 'celibate!'"

Which makes me wonder a lot about the Bible.

So I sent him an email:

Dear God:
I stopped surfing your livejournal because I thought you left. But I missed you, so I went to visit for old times' sake, and, behold, you were still there. Yay. I would have posted but I am not a member of your elite, so I just thought I would tell you in a private communication. Now that you're back, though, I do have a question. What exactly -is- the connection between George W. Bush and your rival, Satan. Is there any truth to this website? George W. Bush is the Anti-Christ (editor's comment: This link was sent to me by the inimitable Shaun Treat).

Please let me know soon because I'm worried.

 

In other news, my blog is long and probably needs to be archived soon.

~LS~

3/13/03 6:28 PM

I had a brief and strange convo on the hallway with Shaun Treat today about "this whole Iraq thing." He was passing out printouts of the Impeach Bush website he emailed me (see 3/12/03). Treat's explosion of anti-Bush, anti-war "stuff" on his walls attracted the attention of a Reveille columnist (see Tolerant Ones? and also Treat's response). Anyway, I think it was the strangest Treat conversation I've ever had. It resembled Morse Code -- we both nodded a lot, left sentences unfinished, rolled our eyes, and ended up giggling at our own paranoia and conspiracy theory tendencies. I told him I was going to the hardware store to stock up on survivalist gear. It was one of those sad but hysterical moments where, at the end, all we could do is shake our heads, throw up our hands, and pronounce that we live in interesting times. I'm still not sure what to make of that conversation, except that he shares my feeling that we are going to be royally fucked in this country. My husband, of course, thinks I'm crazy. I hope he's right.

~LS~

3/12/03 11:24 PM

Unrelated ruminations:

More Spanish Prisoner:

The Nigerians have given my address to Kenneth Kabila from Zaire - Congo-Kinshasha. He has diamonds he would like me to help him export (smuggle?) out of the country. Incidentally, here is why that movie, "The Spanish Prisoner," is called..the Spanish Prisoner (from the Urban Legend Reference Page):

The Nigerian Scam has been emptying the pockets of victims for decades -- first through letters, then with faxes, and now via e-mail. In its earliest incarnation -- which dates to the 1920s -- it was known as "The Spanish Prisoner" con. In that long-ago version, businessmen were contacted by someone trying to smuggle the scion of a wealthy family out of a prison in Spain. But of course the wealthy family would shower with riches those who helped secure the release of the boy. Those who were suckered into this paid for one failed rescue attempt after another, with the fictitious prisoner continuing to languish in his non-existent dungeon, always just one more bribe, one more scheme, one more try, away from being released.

Shoutout:

A shoutout to my friend and former student, Helene Kjellman, from Sweden. I got an emal from her after many years of lost contact. She's pregnant! Yay! And it sounds like she's living quite a wonderful life as a journalist and teacher!

----------------------

From Shaun Treat:

Vote to impeach George II

Impeachment appears six times in the U.S. Constitution. The Founders weren't concerned with anything more than with impeachment because they had lived under King George III and had in 1776 accused the king of all the things that George W. Bush wants to do: Usurpation of the power of the people; Being above the law; Criminal abuse of authority.

--Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General

----------------------


I'm Finally linked:

DMOZ Open Directory, under Women's Studies
Google Directory, under Women's Studies

University of Iowa Communication's Study Page -- Links to Configurations article

----------------------

Censorship and bigotry:

A quote from Henry Louis Gates on censorship:

"In the current environment of symbolic politics, the speech ban is a powerful thing: it can turn a garden variety bigot into a First Amendment martyr."

~LS~

3/11/03 10:51 AM

Listening: Zwan, Mary Star of the Sea
Cirque Du Soleil, Dralion

Last night Steve and I went to see the Quiet American. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a really high rating and they were right. The movie was good; it was disturbing and haunting and very hard to watch. The movie effortlessly metonymizes Viet Nam with the woman character, Phuong, who is the object of both Michael Caine and Brenden Fraser's affection. The best review I read is from Kamera.Com in the UK. They like the film because it pushes us away from the tired "Miramax orientalism." That's a phrase I like. Miramax orientalism. But nobody seems to be talking about what it means to turn Viet Nam into a mistress or prostitute. Probably because it's so much a part of our "me so horney, me love you long time" consciousness. Given our current chicken-hawk climate, the film's anti-American sentiment is important, but that doesn't make it any less orientalist.

Incidentally, the movie was initially shelved because of 9/11 but Caine pushed for a release so he could qualify for Oscar consideration. All the reviews, of course, focus on Caine's performance, which was brilliant. I suppose it's overstating the obvious, though, to point out that in all the discourse about the movie, its anti-American sentiments, the performances by Caine and Fraser, the character Phuong and the actress portraying her are pretty much ignored. Viet Nam/woman as plot device, setting, scene for male conflict is replayed in all the reviews and the subtle and quiet controversy the movie raised.

~LS~

3/08/03 12:34 PM

A little quiz from an email I got from Meg, a UUer and a very cool person:

----------------------

Look at this list of countries that the U.S. has bombed since the end of World War II, compiled by historian William Blum:

China 1945-46
Korea 1950-53
China 1950-53
Guatemala 1954
Indonesia 1958
Cuba 1959-60
Guatemala 1960
Congo 1964
Peru 1965
Laos 1964-73
Vietnam 1961-73
Cambodia 1969-70
Guatemala 1967-69
Grenada 1983
Libya 1986
El Salvador 1980s
Nicaragua 1980s
Panama 1989
Iraq 1991-99
Sudan 1998
Afghanistan 1998
Yugoslavia 1999


Question: In how many of these instances did a democratic government, respectful of human rights, occur as a direct result? Choose one of the following:

(a) 0
(b) zero
(c) none
(d) not a one
(e) a whole number between -1 and +1

----------------------

This quiz compliments of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

----------------------

Meg's email prompted me to surf the VVAW website. Old memories abound.  Looking at the website made me cry. I found the link to Veterans Against the War in Iraq. This site lists a ton of actions against the war, along with some great essays. A moving flier promoting a veterans' day action has this to say:

..while veterans are facing deteriorating care, as VA hospitals close and Bush II holds up $250 million in VA funds allocated by congress. Homelessness and despair face millions of vets of past wars, while this government merrily goes off on another.

The site includes a link to an interview with Kurt Vonnegut, author, WWII veteran, and anti-war activist. Here is how he describes our current situation:

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs.”

From this interview I now have a new .sig file:

Q:  ....Do you have any ideas for a really scary reality TV show?

A: “C students from Yale.” It would stand your hair on end.

-- Kurt Vonnegut, in an interview on the Bush II administration and the war with Iraq; with Joel Bleifuss, In These Times, 2/10/03.

~LS~

3/07/03 9:35 AM

A strange but true email I just received:

Hi:

I am a graduate student at Northeastern University and I'm taking a class in Rhetoric & Technology. I am doing a paper that compares Nietzsche's overman to Haraway's cyborg. I want to ask Ms. Haraway if she sees any similiarities between them. Also, I want to know whether the cyborg have a "formula for happiness?"

How can I get in touch with Ms. Haraway? My paper is due Monday.

Signed,
(name withheld)

~LS~

3/07/03 9:07 AM

Interesting times we live in. I'm not watching the news. It's very scary these days. And we are all sleeping through it.

More from the Village Voice on erosion of Civil Liberties:


This Nat Hentoff article from the village voice talks about the follow up act to the patriots act that the Whitehouse is currently drafting. This act talks about secret arrests, reverses a court decision about disclosing the number of prisoners held in the military tribunal, and allows arrests of anyone known to give material assistance to a terrorist group. In addition, the proposed legislation covers stripping people of their citizenship based on presumed terrorist activities.

Links to the Voice's ongoing coverage of the erosion of civil liberties.

Slate article on the Whitehouse's plan to police cyberspace.

The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace -- at the Whitehouse Website.

~LS~
 

3/05/03 10:45 PM

I slept through most of Mardi Gras. How sad.  What's more sad is that, according to the start button on my Windows XP, my mud client is the most used program on my computer, followed by spider solitaire. Feh.

The Nigerian Scam continues to thrive, according to an article in MSNBC. No kidding. These people have actually collected millions and millions of dollars. Who could be that -stupid- to send them money? Apparently the scam artists even have forged cashier's checks. But anyone with a laser printer can make those, so why are people so stupid? According to this article, an old man in Europe who lost his life savings went to the Nigerian embassy and KILLED one of the employees there while trying to reclaim his money. That's very sad.

~LS~