My sister,

she emails me in LOLspeak.

Raise your hand if you even know what that is.

Text messages, too.

ksrsly thx bye.

Party coinage

New word:

Obnoxicant - noun - One of a number of ingested substances which in practice mainly serves to make the consumer louder, more grating, or otherwise more annoying than when sober.

Examples: Vodka & Red Bull; ecstacy.

Obnoxicated - adjective - Inebriated on such a substance or to such an extent that one's presence becomes overly festive or otherwise difficult to enjoy.

Friday Flobots video posting

Because it's alliterative, and good.



[Flobots, Handlebars]

Other, animated, very cool but unembeddable version: here.

I hadn't heard of Flobots until last night. They talk about Iraq, Obama, and health care - very cool. Via ptudor.

Memory like a...

I wish I could tell you I just got a little misty while watching this video about Christian the lion this morning. But, uh, no. Truth be told, I cried my nerdy little eyes out.

I also wish I could tell you that "this video" is embedded below. Never mind, just click here and go be sappy and happy and dorky like me.

Jeremy gets a Friday video posting post

I beat Jeremy at Scrabble this week, which surprised me as he is vociferously wordy. He beat me with two out of three rock/paper/scissors, though, because he is wiley.

Is it just me, though, or does rock/paper/scissors over AIM does seem somewhat imbalanced?

In any event, here's Jeremy in the trailer for a Western:



[Lost Animals Society, Samuel]

* * *

OK, this song has pretty much nothing to do with Jeremy, except that it involves Hoosiers and men with very long hair. As regular readers may recall, however, the latter no longer applies to this week's hero, what with the having sold the hair for baby shoes and all.

But I heard Paradise City tonight, and wanted to hear it again, so Paradise City I shall post.



[Guns n Roses, Paradise City]

Check the shades. Seriously.

Careware Stare!

I keep stumbling upon a new kind of downloadable software for my Mac: somewhere much closer to freeware than to shareware, careware.

What’s New in this Version
- Koloroo is now careware. It’s free. That’s right, free … with one tiny catch (isn’t there always). Before you download it, you must agree to do something nice for someone. And it doesn’t matter how big or small your act of kindness is.

Koloroo is actually a pretty cool color widget for people with fancy gadgets, while this one just came up in a 'careware' search and is for people with fancy gadgets who can't do math. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Here's a rundown on the careware philosophy. In short:

• Economic principles lie behind many more human activities than most of us realize. We are almost constantly exchanging something for something else.
• Many economic transactions don't involve money. In traditional societies, and sometimes even this one, people trade using favors, influence, even pure ideas, instead of money.
• Sometimes money is not the best way to convey value. And sometimes money is so completely inappropriate that it destroys the transaction . CareWare is one of those transactions.
• CareWare ^* doesn't involve money, but it is a transaction nevertheless. Something is delivered, something is received. Adam Smith's invisible economic hand moves through the CareWare economy just like everywhere else. I can't ask for something more than I am giving, but I can ask for an appropriate exchange.

In CareWare, ^* the "buyer" gets something of value in exchange for something the "seller" wants. And what does the seller want? The general answer is "Anything except money," but I prefer the really remarkable transactions, which you recognize instinctively when you see them.

Hippie geeks: on your mark, get set....

He's coming! He's coming! Friday music video blogging

Not til September, but still. Never hurts to start the anticipation early.



[Neil Diamond, Cracklin' Rosie]



[Mr. Diamond, Forever in Blue Jeans]

'cause that's how I want to be.

Mom for Obama

My mother is volunteering for Barack Obama today and tomorrow.

My sixty-four year old mother, a registered Republican, is making calls for the Obama campaign from now until the Indiana primary.

My mom, who hasn't been politically involved aside from making a huge role model-y production of voting (for a conservative, except for maybe once for mayor, she thinks, possibly) every election year of my childhood, is spending two days at campaign headquarters, working for the Democrats.

* * *

So if a low-voiced woman named Susan calls you, tell her you're going to vote for Barack Obama.

Then go do it on Tuesday.

Friday Stage Visuals posting!

[Nine Inch Nails, Right Where It Belongs]

We used this song as the house music when I worked on Oleanna a couple of years ago. When the sound quality shifts at around minute 3, that's when we went to blackout.

That's what plays behind Trent Reznor when he does this song in concert. Here's a different version of the same song with footage from Children of Men:

This just in: Still.

So, women getting paid less for the same work as men. Fascinatingly new subject, no?

On Wednesday, Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have overturned a Supreme Court ruling (PDF) that sharply limited pay-discrimination suits based on gender under Title VII. In Ledbetter v. Goodyear (2007), the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 margin, held that the clock for the statute of limitations on wage discrimination begins running when the employer first makes the decision to discriminate, and does not run for all the subsequent months—or in this case, years—that the disparate paychecks are mailed. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the court, found that the plaintiff in this case, Lilly Ledbetter, was time-barred from filing her discrimination suit because it took more than 180 days after she first got stiffed to discover that she was being stiffed on account of her gender. The court agreed her jury verdict should be overturned.

Many of the Republicans who blocked the vote to reinstate the original reading of Title VII claimed they were doing so to protect women—read "stupid women"—from the greedy clutches of unprincipled plaintiffs' attorneys and from women's own stupid inclination to sit around for years—decades even—while being screwed over financially before they bring suit. That means they were, in effect, just protecting us from the dangerous laws that protect us. Whew.

* * *

Ledbetter worked for Goodyear Tire in Atlanta for almost 20 years. When she retired, she was, according to Ginsburg, "the only woman working as an area manager and the pay discrepancy between Ledbetter and her 15 male counterparts was stark: Ledbetter was paid $3,727 per month; the lowest paid male area manager received $4,286 per month, the highest paid, $5,236." So she filed a suit under Title VII, and a jury awarded her more than $3 million in damages. The jury found it "more likely than not that [Goodyear] paid [Ledbetter] a[n] unequal salary because of her sex." You see, Ledbetter hadn't just negotiated herself some lame salary. She was expressly barred by her employer from discussing her salary with her co-workers who were racking up raises and bonuses she didn't even know about. She found out about the disparity between her pay and her male colleagues' earnings only because someone finally left her an anonymous tip.

My sister's favorite part is McCain's comment on how if women only received more training and were better educated [you can sign a petition at this link], they would deserve equal pay to the men doing the exact. same. work. What I love is that McCain missed the vote because he was busy campaigning for a primary that is pretty much decided at this point. Both Obama and Clinton, on the other hand, managed to make it in despite being neck and neck. (ish)