Les said, the better II

Anti Choice rally Saturday in San Francisco

Abortion rights advocates have scheduled a 10 a.m. counterprotest Saturday, beginning at Powell and Market streets, and plan to shadow the Walk for Life demonstrators to the Marina.

You’re from the Bay Area. You’ve protested before. But have you ever counter-protested? It’s a rare opportunity for you to be the counter protesters without having to leave the area!
And, if the anti-choice people (the organizers have also organized anti-queer rallies, those bastards) are successful doing an anti-choice rally in San Francisco, we’re doomed. These folks are all emboldened by the cornonation of Dubya. They think they own the whole country. Well, we’ve got blue neck enclaves, dern it! And we won’t give up without a fight or at least a counter-protest, right?
12 years ago (my how time flies) I was a counter-protester against Operation Rescue. Let me say that marching on the other side of the street as them is a lot less stressful than clinic defense. Marching is kind of fun. Clinic defense is stressful, there’s a constant risk of arrest and of the other side winning, etc. Doing a counter march gives you an excuse Monty Python classics like Every Sperm is Sacred. And if their march is successful, then clinic defense will be the next thing on the agenda, so nipping this in the bud would be a good thing.
Tags: San Francisco, Activism, Pro-choice

The naughty children are very disruptive. You’re really on our side and not theirs because they’re so very mean to you other, good children.

Let’s see. I went to my one class today. I’ve signed up for Braxton’s ensemble, Braxton’s seminar and Colloquium. I successfully enrolled. Whoever designed the enrollment thingee in the student portfolio is an asshole, because it took me like 20 minutes to find it. “Hi, press this button from an on-campus computer or be dropped form the rolls of your university” seems to call out for a prominent link, no?
My out-of-department teacher form last spring is going to send in the paperwork that I should have asked for last spring. *cough* My fault for the insane delay. This is very good, as she no longer works here and I was worried I would have to take another out of department class and I don’t want to write another 20 page paper on anyhting aside form my dern thesis. Speaking of which, I have a draft of chapter 6, which is on the fascinating topics of additive synthesis and modulation techniques including ring modulation, am, fm, phase modulation and the tiniest of blurbs on pulse width modulation. (guess what the m’s in “am” and “fm” stand for.) You too could learn to do all of these things and more in SuperCollider if you want to beta test my book.
When I was in grad school I had to walk to school, through the snow, with a tuba on my back. How do you walk on ice without slipping? I’ve managed to avoid falling (mostly), but I have great fear of falling and hurting my tuba. A friend of mine smashed the screen of his powerbook by slipping on ice. It’s dangerous stuff.
I’ve got Xena back. She’s spen the entire time home hiding in my room. I haven’t seen her at all. She’s not very dog-like for being a dog.
I’ve started adding tags to the bottom of my posts. Part of this is because I’m a proponent of automatic catagorzation through machine-readable xml stuff. (human readable explaination coming) Part of it is because I wabt to see if I can hack the tag system by just inventing my own tags. I think I can, as there exists official tags of both “weblog” and “weblogs.” The stupid non-difference of the plural seems to indicate people just putting up tags willy-nilly and there not yet existing a good algorythm to lump stupid plurals together.
Ok, tags are like “file under” thingees to attach to a post. Tehcnorati scans the blogosphere (gah, what a stupid word, it means “lots o blogs”) looking for tags and then files blog posts under the appropriate tags. So users catagorize their own content. the problem with this, of course, is the meandering pointless post like this one. But I’ll tag it anyway. Doing stupid things with tehcnology is fun. (Yes, I created one with my own handle. Because I’m an egotist, that’s why.)
stupid jet lag
Tags: Celesteh, My Life, Wesleyan, SuperCollider

I’m not a Deaniac or even a democrat. Dean told reporters that he wasn’t a liberal. And he’s not. His healthcare plan was to allow everyone to purchase health insurance. Sadly, this would be an improvement over the current sad state of affairs. And he yelled in a way that recording technology rendered embarassing. His campaign had already fallen apart by then. He wasn’t even a real candidate, he just wanted to make health care an issue. The fact that he got so far without really running a campaign indicates the sorry state of the Democratic primaries.

The Democratic party is still in a sorry state. Democrats and sympathizers end up pushing candidates who aren’t very good just because they’re nobody else. Well, in that spirit, Dean for DNC chair. He’s got a few things going for him. He’s a govenor. They’re better at grand statements and symbolic leadership than fillibuster-prone political-compromising senators. Don’t get me wrong. Senators have their place. That’s in the senate. And Dean understands the internet’s potential in a way unmatched by anyone else aside from Al Gore. (I’m being serious here.) And the kids like Dean. The Democrats need the kids. They need their energy and they need their votes in future elections. If the Democrats don’t reach out to the kids, the kids will all go Green or stop voting. Probably the latter, sadly.
So, for the political power of govenorship, for the internet and for the kids, I say Dean should be DNC chair, unless we can find a southern govenor. We need one of those bad soon. The republicans have one, conviently named Bush.
Tag: Politics

My plane left Oakland at the ungoldy hour of 6:15 AM. I had the fun experience of getting to run to the front of the security line, as my plane was already boarding by the time somebody at United decided maybe they could be bothered to check my bag. You need more than one person to check bags of 8 check-in computer thingees. One person gets confused by touch-screen tehcnology and things fall apart, otherwise.

I went through Chicago. There’s a cool tunnel between terminal B and C with neon flashy lights. Last time I went through it, I was grooving on the messages from the conveyor belts. They announce that you’re at the end of a belt. As you ride from one end to another, you hear the messages phase with each other, the reverb levels change, etc. It’s interesting how sound works in space. Somebody else apparently had the same thought about it because this last time there was rythmic sound installation running. Very well done. I don’t know if it’s new or if it was just turned off last time I was in O’Hare.
When I got to CT, the temperature was 5 degrees. Fahrenheit. That’s -15 C. gah.
Classes start tomorrow. I think I will take Braxton’s ensmble and Braxton’s seminar and that’s it. My advisor has said I can beta test my book on his students. Muahaha.
The hole in the bathroom ceiling is patched by not painted. I finally got all the windows to close last fall, but they’re still single pane. It’s dern cold. I have athlete’s foot (a momento from my trip to Yosemite). My sweetie is nice and cuddly but so so so far away. It might get up to freezing temperature on thursday.
If I missed you over break, I’m very sorry. I wanted to see everybody and I fell way short. I did get a lot of writing done. I’ll be back a few times during the semester, but will probably be writing like crazy, alas. I’ll be back for the summer and then hopefully off to Germany in the fall and then come back a year and a few months from now and enjoy the warm, reasonable weather and avoid places where the high temperature is -15 C and never leave California again, where it’s warm and sunny and I can get hugs from Cola.
Tags: Celesteh, My Life, Sound Installation, Wesleyan

It’s my last day in California. tomorrow, very early, I lave to return to Connecticut to finish my last semester and graduate and never live in connecticut again. I procrastinated on several things this break. For example, I didn’t verify that all the thesis writing I was doing was ok with my advisor until sending email a couple of days ago. I didn’t get documentation that I’ve done my out-of-department course requirement. And I didn’t go to the DMV. My liscence expires February 13th and apparently they don’t want to issue me another liscence with that now 13 year old photo (where has all the time gone?) By the time it expired, the new liscnce, if it had the old photo, would have been from half my life ago. You shouldn’t use pictures of yourself at half your age for an ID unless you are very, very young.

I thought to myself that I’ll just head on in today and get the new photo. Augh, but today is a holiday. Not for Cola who is duitifully working for her civil-rights-leader-ignoring, marget-thatcher-loving company. But for the DMV. And for, coincidentally, The Mississippi Tax Board who are also honoring the birthday of Robert E Lee, or so says their phone message at 601-923-7000. I called it. it’s for real.
Matt LaGoy, always an amusing fellow, has coined a new term: blue neck. This would be the liberal foil to a red neck. I am a blue neck bobo, I admit it. and as such, I would never for a milisecond consider celebrating the birthday of Robert E Lee. Good lord. I want my drivers liscence.

Mitch just reminded me that he got me the domain biodieseldyke.com for my birthday a couple of years ago. and there’s bling for sale at the other end. wow.

i wish i had any sort of memory

I reccomended that people listen to this thing, so I feel compelled to offer an errata.

1. The Buchla did not improve on the Moog. The Buchla predated the Moog. It was built for the San Francisco Tape Music Center and was the world’s first voltage control synthesizer.
2. The SF Tape Music Center did not “close.” It moved to Mills College where it became the Center for Contemporary Music
3. Subotnic did not take the Tape Center’s Buchla to New York. It is still at Mills College.

All these errors were in the first 5 minutes. I am dismayed.
On a further note, pre-programmed patches on digital synthesizer are not an “improvement” over analog modular. grrr.

Update   Ok, the rest of the show is good. And actually, they’re talking about something called the “Buchla Box,” which is not the first Buchla, perhaps. However, the beginning is still a bit misleading.

This was the first election in 20 years that I did not vote for the Democratic presidential candidate, because of its radical social policy and its complete failure to have a plan to fight islamic terrorism.

found this quote lurking on somebody’s blog comments. It does not appear to be a troll. “Radical social policy” seems to be some sort of anti-gay thing, given the context, which, ok, you’re a bigot and you want to vote bigot. But “complete failure to have a plan to fight islamic terrorism”??
Clinton had made Al Qeada a huge prioroity. When Bush got in office, he thought everything Clinton was doing was obviously stupid and completely dropped the ball on Al Qeada. This guy clearly doesn’t know that. I used to read long articles in the left-wing press about how the FBI was stupidly wasting tax dollars preparing for terrorist attacks that had never (yet) come. Bush stopped all that.

How Do You Know What You Know?

Maybe you read it in a book. Maybe you saw it on TV. If it’s a positive or negative idea about a brand, a person, or a poltical idea, then you heard it from marketting. When people don’t know that Democrats were the party of effective terrorism fighting until Bush screwed everything up, that’s a failure of Democrat marketting and a brilliant success of Republican marketting.
A lot of people have a lot of ideas about how to fix the Democratic party. Let’s say, hypothetically, that Democrats were actually doing all the right things. Like anticipating the threat of terrorism, preparing for it and foiling terrorist plots. The problem then, would not be that we were on the wrong political course, but were on the wrong marketting course. Our message is not getting out.
Our problems included lack of media access, a muddled message (“I actually voted for the 87 billion before I voted against it”), lack of an echo chamber, lack of a unified message. I was briefly a Product Manager. I’ve done a few Product Requirements Documents. Mostly for web applications. That’s my marketting background.
We need a slogan, and a mission. We fit ideas within this framework, phrasing things in positive way, according to the slogan and mission. For example:

slogan: fighting for working people
mission: We give voice to the hardworking people of this country and fight for their interests
issue:environment
The children of today will inherit the world of tomorrow. You work hard to provide for your kids, to ensure their future. The world they will live in is part of that future. We must make sure that their air and water is clean. We must ensure that they have the technologies to maintain a standard of living above ours without sacrificing quality of life to pollution. Our children dserve to inherit a world as clean and bautiful as the one we inheritted, if not better. We knwo you work hard for your families. And we want to work hard to maintain your family’s health and quality of life for generations to come. Would you do any less for your kids?

Ok, we just framed the environmental issue in hetero-normative rhetoric. In positive terms. Talking about protecting our territory and maintainging our property rights. It’s a more powerful way tof rame the debate, since it takes the initiative instead of seeming like it’s coming from behind and losing. This is a better marketting strategy.

(I posted a comment to Matt Lagoy’s LJ (check out the mp3 posted there) about wine glasses and I thought maybe wine glass information might be useful to some of you.)

wine glasses sound great, but breaking them is always a risk. i used to have a whole set of glasses from cost plus, but they all broke. i was using light metal knitting needles as beaters. cost plus glasses are manufactured very inconsistently, so they all have different pitches, some of them at nice intervals to each other. my ex said that if you show up to cost plus with a mallet and a tuner and try out all the wine glasses, the plainclothes security guys all come stare at you. but they don’t kick you out.

the variation in tuning is nice, but the glasses are cheap and break too easy and plus they’re hard to get to sing by rubbing (ala the glass harmonium). Crystal glasses are best for that and more durable in general, but at over $100 a pop, they’re way out of budget and still fragile. Daniel Lentz uses all cyrstal glasses for his wine glass pieces, however, he’s sponsored by the glass company and gets them for free. So he breaks at least one ($150) glass per performance, but doesn’t have to bear the cost of replacement.

i’ve found that the glasses at ikea are much more consistently made than cost plus glasses. they’re tough, they speak when rubbed almost as well as crystal and they’re just as cheap as cost plus. the downside is that every glass of a particular style is going to have pretty much the same pitch. but you can get different glasses for different pitches or use water to change the tuning. Lentz says that water and different wines create different tones, which makes sense as they have different viscosity. When I played in his wine glass ensemble, we used donated bad wine mixed with quite a bit of water for the concert. We practiced with water only.

so, in conclusion, if you want to use glasses for music, i reccomend ikea as a good source. solidly made. resonant. cost efficient. oh, and not sweatshop. they’re all made in finland or something.

And as post script, wine glasses are extremely well suited to alternate tunings when you use them filled with water. Seiko, iirc, makes a tuner that prints out numerical cents values for tuning. It’s about $30. jjicalc is useful for converting from tuning ratios to cents.
Lou Harrison’s biography has a story in it about bubbles slowly forming on the inside of bowls tuned with water, dulling the sound. Apparently, adding a tiny bit of glycerine added to the water prevents this. However, as far as I know, Lentz left our practice glasses filled with water for days and no bubbles formed. It may be that there was glycerine in the water, though. I don’t know. Or maybe this doesn’t happen with glass. anyway, this is why Harrison built the american gamelan: because the bubble problem was annoying.

What have I been doing in California? Glad you asked.

The week before Christmas

I met Nicole’s family, for the second time actually. I met her parents and sister while she was in college, but only for about 5 seconds and I don’t think they remembered. We flew down to the Inland Empire (that’s the Desert east of LA, San Bernadino County and whatnot), to Ontario airport and then went to Apple Valley. There don’t seem to be apples in Apple Valley, as it is the high desert. That means sage plants, sand, tumbleweeds, Joshua Trees, rocks, etc. In the winter, it rains and is green and rocky and desolate and lovely. I remember long ago hearing a story that God told some Mormons to grow apples there, but then the mormons realized that god was insane and moved on.
So I met all of Nicole’s immediate family. They’re shy. Her brother is a funny, cynical geek boy. Um, we ate a lot of donuts. I ate a lot of donuts. More than anyone should eat in a weekend. ugh. Her parents were shy, so I sat around eating oodles of donuts. Yes. And drinking coffee. Her father has stockpiled massive amounts of coffee. They have their own well, so if they had a camp stove, they would be set for all sorts of natual disasters. But not WWIII, as I imagine that somebody would use that as an excuse to nuke LA (oh, come on, you would) and I think they would get fallout there. anyway. I met the highschool best friend. She’s keen. The family is keen too.
Cola’s father turned 70, so the whole extended family went out to dinner. All of them. my goodness. I felt a bit on the spot. They’re good people. Cola’s dad writes poetry, which is quite good. I like her family. She says they like me. Which is all good.