I hate doing french listening labs with a completely unreasonable level of hate. Is it because the narrators are so fucking snotty? It’s not enough that they talk with their mouths full of gravel but their sing song-y delivery of the correct answers seem more taunting than anything. Ils parlent «Tu es stupide!» Go fuck yourselves, you motherfucking narrators. Je deteste vous! DETESTE!!!!! mourez! mourez! mourez!
grrrrrrrrrr
Tag: Celesteh
Mitch did some research and found a page on the berkeley website which discusses the possibility of tsunamis. “Similar to the liquefaction hazard areas, the most susceptible areas of Berkeley is an area
south of University Avenue and west of San Pablo Avenue (see Figure IV-B-2). The
most likely damage is due to tsunamis would be loss of property through flooding, with
very little potential for loss of life.” Uh, ok, so that’s where I live. Mitch computes, “there’s about a 25% chance u will need to go at least 5 blocks up from your house, if a 20′ tsunami is recorded at the gate. u will have about 4 minutes if it’s still going 200 MPH… since the gate is roughly 15 mi from your house.”
I wasn’t the only local to try to save their cats. And 4 minutes is not much time to run 5 blocks. However, it really seems like the cat could just go upstairs. The buildings that survived in Indonesia where the ones with solid foundations, built to survive earthquakes, like my house is built. Since Berkeley says, “The risk of a tsunami hitting
the San Francisco Bay is estimated at 25 percent for a 20-foot wave at the Golden Gate
occurring once every 200 years.” I’m not going to worry about this too much. I think I owe Mitch an apology. Alas.
Speaking of tsunamis, folks hit by the real one last December probably still need donations. Unicef is a very deserving organization.
Tags: Tsunami, Celesteh
There was just a tsunami alert for northern california. Apparently, there was a large earthquake in Humboldt county, and so Crescent city was being evacuated. In the 1960’s in Crescent City, there was a Tsunami so large that one of those giant cement jacks that make up breakwaters was washed onto the highway. A bunch of people died. It was the only time that anyone in the continental US was killed by a tsunami. Nobody has every been killed by one in the San Francisco area. This is background to the insanity that is/are my friendships . . .
These scene is my living room, earlier tonight. Ellen is cooking food. I’m doing French homework. Cola and Mitch are both reading. So, right at the same time, Cola’s phone and Mitch’s phone both ring. Danica is calling Cola about a tsunami alert and Mike is simultaneously calling for the same reason. My house is a stone’s throw from the bay. I think my elevation is approximately 3 feet. I worry sometimes about global warming making the ocean levels rise and what this means for my long-term investment. After the big tsunami in asia last year, I called my dad and asked if I should be worried about them at my house. He said no, the Golden Gate is narrow relative to the size of the bay and that would prevent most of the water from getting in.
Mitch says that this is not actually a factor and he’s heading up to Indian Rock. Indian Rock is a rock outcropping in the Berkeley Hills with an excellent view of the whole Bay Area. It would be well above any water line. So, um, panic ensues. Cola decides that we’ve got to run. Ellen grabs a cat carrier and starts stuffing my very angry cat into it. Cola grabs the dog. Somebody grabbed my tuba and all the laptops in the house and so, with me feeling extremely foolish, we jump into mitch’s car and head for the hills.
Yeah, so all around us, Berkeley life is totally unperturbed. We pass a cafe full of people. Mitch is insisting that Treasure Island is being evacuated. I’m at about the same elevation, so this is all reasonable right. MY cat is yowling her damn head off. We’re driving up hill for about ten minutes when the radio announces that the tsunami alert is officially cancelled. We turn around and head back. YOOOOOWWWWWWWL!
Ok, it was stupid, but I’m very annoyed. I need people to talk me out of panicking à la Chicken Little, not piling me into a car with my cat, dog, laptop and tuba, driving for higher ground. This is like last summer, when I convinced myself that I had tetanus and went to a NYC hospital . . . except this time, I wasn’t the one who started it.
That cat is never speaking to me again. She shredded the hell out of Ellen’s hand.
And that’s why I didn’t finish my french homework.
Tags: Tsunami, Celesteh
Remember “Pigs in Space”? Well, they’re making some room for Pigcasso. There’s a call for works in the International Space Station! Ok, contact micing the space station is too obvious and, I mean, things that make earth-bound humans more aware of the artificiality of their environment are good, but to do that to a long-haul astronaught is just cruel. A proposal could be anything right, I mean, reminders of home are good. But I think it should focus on something about being in space. Something that pings when they fly over a hometown or something. Or something that uses velcro intrinsically. NASA uses velcro all the damn time. Or something that uses weightlessness and the coincidences of brownian motion. Speakers just float in space. … or juxtapositions. Something unexpectedly natural in an artificial space. Some articulation of space-ness. . . . It sounds as if they want something that might also be useful/interesting to us earthbound. Some sort of connection or articulation that is meaningful even at a great distance.
Alas, they’re not going to launch a musician, so I will not do the first tuba solo in space . . . yet . . .
Tag: Celesteh
Comment ça va? L’étudiante favorite du proffeseur de la classe de français est dans ma poche. C’est une petite femme. Tu est d’ou?
Tag: Celesteh
Comment vous applez vous? J m’apelle Celeste. Je vais trés bien. Comment allez-vous? J’est une étudiante. C’est la fenêtre de Xena.
Today was my first french class. I have class every day from 9 – noon, one hour lunch break, and class again from 1 – 2. So (this is fascinating) If I wake up at 7:00, I can walk the dog, eat breakfast, etc, bike to school, go to class, eat a packed lunch, um, hang out for a bit, more class. Home at 2:30. Practice tuba until 3:00. Homework until 6:30. Dinner break (cook et eat) until 8:00. More homework until 8:30 or 9:30. Write music till bed time. Rinse Repeat. Starting tomorrow with the homework and next week with the tuba. I just took my horn to the shop. I won’t see it for a week. Alas!
So, I’ve got no time to rehearse except on weekends. I can play gigs during the week. Free improv right now is about all that looks very doable, but I think I could schedule in one or two groups that require practice, depending on how intense they are. I have folks who want me to play their ensembles, but man, am I going to be crunched for time. C’est la vie.
Some neocon thing just published the list of the most damaging books of the 19th and 20th century. It’s tempting to use as a summer reading list (you know, in my copious free time), but the bastards had to include Mein Kampf. Yeah, one book that’s actually damaging in the list just to make it harder to laugh at. Although Coming of Age in Samoa by Marget Mead made honorable mention, so I think I’ll laugh anyway.
Tag: Celesteh
This year seems to be especially bad for allergies. I’m not suffering (yet), but I’ve been collecting people’s remedies. Sure, you could just take pills for it, but think of what they may or may not be doing to your liver! Here are the remedies I’ve heard of.
| Remedy | Does it work? | How? | Negatives | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eating local honey | I dunno | the bees collect pollen from local plants and use it for honey. somehow this is supposed to help | none, unless you’re allergic to honey, a really hardcore vegan or mistakenly hate carbs. Honey is healthier than refined sugar. | Honey in tea is yummy |
| Taking vitamin C | Anna, Jamilla’s wife, swears by it | got me | Taking too much vitamin C over a long periodof time is supposedly bad for you. But hey, it’s water-soluable and you’ll piss it out. | I’d try it |
| Air purifier | some do | removes allergens from air | Probably incompatible with open windows, increases electricity usage. | this works really well in cars with high-quality air filters installed. |
| Nessie pot: pouring (sea)salt water in one nostril and letting it run out the other. | Seems to | clears gunk like pollen and dander out of your sinuses. A good way to start your day. | Feels like getting water up your nose. Especially annoying the first few times you do it (that burning means it’s working.) Remember to keep your mouth open while you do it. | I’ve done this. It helped |
I went over to Mitch’s house yesterday to brew biodiesel. Actually, Mitch brewed and I watched. There is a minimal amount of danger involved and I wanted to see it before accidentally doing something wrong with a semi-dangerous chemical. It really is easy enough to brew in your own garage, but messy enough that a garage is the only place i’d want to do it. I don’t think I’ll have my own setup any time soon. The second best thing about hobbies like this is the silly jargon you get to use. The bucket/vessel in which you mix all the ingredients together is not merely a bucket, it is a “reactor.” Mitch’s reactor is extra fancy in that he has an agitator/pump thingee attached to it that does the mixing for him. The carboy that you leave the fuel in, waiting for the precipitate to drop out is called a “separation chamber.” The worry you experience while awaiting this part of the process to complete is called “separation anxiety.”
The best thing about brewing your own fuel out of waste oil that you get for free from a local restaurant is, of course, the rebellious nature of it. Take that, oil war! I can brew the fuel I need for a week in a saturday afternoon while hanging out with my friends! I don’t need your dirty petroleum . . . except for the methanol that gets used in the process. Mitch claims that his homebrew is higher quality than the biodiesel which is currently commercially available. Data seems to support this claim. Alas. Poor quality control at the biodiesel plant is gumming up fuel filters and causing customers (including the city of Berkeley) to switch back to dinosaur based fuel. Berkeley and some anarchists and peacenics will come back, but the average user doesn’t want hassle getting fuel. One workaround to this problem is to replace your fuel filter frequently. Worth it for the good karma. The other is to run a tank of dinodiesel every 4 or 5 tanks to dilute glycerol in the filter. (Glycerol is the precipitate that drops out in the separation chamber. It’s the byproduct of making biodiesel. Other people know it by the less geeky name, “soap.”)
Biodiesel lives per gallon? Zero. Petroleum lives per gallon? Bad, says a recent Amnesty International report. The Bush administration is dismissing the report, which documents abuses at Gitmo (including the Koran story which caused riots and which Newsweek retracted, despite its being true). What do administration people say about the Amenesty report? Well, obviously it’s wrong. I mean, everybody who reports having been abused is an ex-prisoner and thus is totally untrustworthy. Did you know that all the inmates at Gitmo are suspected of disliking America? Of course they would lie. It makes perfect sense to dismiss everything they say out of hand because we once thought they were guilty of a crime, even though later we let them go for a total lack of evidence. Sure, they were innocent and arrested in error, but we once thought they were guilty and that’s enough evidence to completely disregard anything they say about Gitmo. In fact, it proves they were really terrorists all along and ought to be grounds for re-arresting them. Can you believe that Amnesty would take the word of a large body of political prisoners over the word of the US government? They have completely forgotten their stated mission, which is to take the word of political prisoners when they say bad things about governments that we don’t like! Not us! Sheesh. And there are other countries out there that are much worse, so they should go concentrate on something else, certainly not the most powerful country in the world. It would make more sense just to ignore us. So let’s just dismiss this report and go buy a Hummer. Wouldn’t you rather daydream about yourself in a Hummer (you could just drive over annoying little cars in your way!) than contemplate people raped and beaten to death in US-run prisons? Just relax. We’re on your side. What me worry?
Tag: Celesteh
one nice largish papizan w/ a blue cushion. one glass-topped coffee table (matching end table optionally included). You come get it in berkeley or i drop it off if you’re not far.
Tag: Celesteh
Ok, so the latest trends in women’s fashions are unbearably girly. What to do? Mills alum Breonna Cole and her gf Aisha Pew have launched a butch fashion line called Studded. (Press) They have nice looking stuff on the website, but don’t have a store. They will however do “private fittings.” And they will do group private fittings on weekends.
Please let me know if you are interested in participating in a fashion event. They need to know your size (men’s or women’s) and a few of the clothes that you are interested in. Let’s mix gender roles up! I’m thinking a saturday or sunday afternoon. Please nominate a day that will work for you. The location can be my house.
clothes make the woman.
This is cross-posted to LJ
Tags: Butch, Clothes, Celesteh