At what point do we say, "Enough is enough"? For some reason, we are willing to let 40,000 people a year die in traffic accidents in the US and others to die because they don't have adequate health insurance, but we're willing to give up more and more of our dignity every year to make sure no one dies from a terrorist attack on an airplane.
The terrorists don't have to take any planes down, they just have to think up new ways to mess with the security equipment and we all have to go through another hoop at the airport. This new one is pretty invasive.
This picture comes from the Guardian which carried an article about the full body scanners in the UK, where they've been delayed because they would breach child pornography laws.
Here are some excerpts from the story which you can get in full at the link.
The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned. . .
They also face demands from civil liberties groups for safeguards to ensure that images from the £80,000 scanners, including those of celebrities, do not end up on the internet. The Department for Transport confirmed that the "child porn" problem was among the "legal and operational issues" now under discussion in Whitehall after Gordon Brown's announcement on Sunday that he wanted to see their "gradual" introduction at British airports.
A 12-month trial at Manchester airport of scanners which reveal naked images of passengers including their genitalia and breast enlargements, only went ahead last month after under-18s were exempted. . .
And what sort of rays pass through our bodies? Do we know they don't cause cancer or some other harm? When I was a kid we had fluoroscope machines in the shoe stores so we could see our feet inside our shoes. Until someone realized this was not healthy for kids. Will this be the same? Scan now, check on health dangers later?
What if airline passengers were ready to turn around from security and say no? Just flying less doesn't seem to work. Can we figure out ways that get people to join in a mass boycott of airport security, ways that overcome all the pressures to just suck it up and let them do it to you - the cost of the ticket, the inconvenience of making huge changes in one's plans, the threat from the TSA for doing anything to question them, etc.
It has to be planned so people can get their refunds (buying first class tickets maybe?), where enough people do it to get attention, where airlines are affected by the loss of already paid passenger revenue, and where people have the time to deal with the likely hassle. It's time to force the powers that be to consider reasonableness as well as safety in designing security.
Maybe here in Alaska where privacy is protected by our State Constitution we can argue that TSA is forcing us to give up our State Constitutional rights to privacy if we want to exercise our Federal Constitutional rights to interstate travel.
You know the frog in the pot of water story? Well, bubbles are starting to appear as I write.
The Mt. View Forum blog demonstrates today how blogs make important contributions to our local information sources. His interview with Assemblyperson Patrick Flynn covers a number of important issues: the budget, property taxes, public-private partnerships, land use planning, and utilities. All, of course, in the context of Anchorage today. It's definitely worth ten minutes of your time, if nothing else, get a sense of Flynn, to get an intelligent view of Municipal issues, and to see the Mt. View Forum blog.
J wanted to see Red Cliff because she studies tai chi and there was supposed to be some good sword moves. I was more skeptical. I'd seen the previews and it looked like an artsy war flick that would require a trip to the blood bank afterward. I was right. A friend afterward said, "but it had an anti war message." I'm not sure saying "Today there are no victors" after almost two and a half hours (total 147 min) of blood, via arrows, lances, and a whole array of pointy weapons I couldn't name, plus lots of fire, typhoid victims floated into the enemy camp as a weapon, to name a few, qualifies it as an anti-war movie. The desensitization to all those severed and burning body parts, the normalization of human destruction is a visual message far more powerful that those few words. And the Red Cliff website touts this dubious reviewer comment:
This sort of Chinese historical epic plays on several channels every night on Beijing television, so it's not particularly new for me, though the story is good and the film is well made. I just don't need to spend what time I have left in this world watching people killing each other. And I just don't think this is an effective way to end warfare.
But there was one scene that reminded me of one of the films at the Anchorage International Film Festival that I particularly liked, but in the rush of movies, never got to mention - The Tea Master. It was one of my favorites. A short, well-made film with a great story. It turns out the filmmakers were able to concentrate on other aspects of the production because they already had a good story:
The Tea Master is Aaron Au’s rendition of a Japanese fable titled “The Samurai and the Tea Master”. The story has been told for hundreds of years and there are numerous versions.
A humble chado, or tea ceremony master was challenged to a duel by an unscrupulous ronin who was confident of winning with ease. The chado knew he was no match for the master-less samurai but could not refuse without losing honour, so he prepared to die.
He therefore went to see his neighbour a Kenjutsu (sword) master, to ask how he should best prepare to die with honour. “ How honourable your intent neighbour” he says. “but before we talk of such things we must drink some tea together”
The chado set about the task of preparing the tea in his usual manner. He was clearly relishing this, probably the last, time he would be able to perform his life long art. As he became absorbed in the ceremony the sword master was greatly impressed by the serenity that this supposedly doomed man was demonstrating. (You can read the rest of the story at hubpages. Picture from The Tea Master web page.)
The tea ceremony is an important part of Japanese and Chinese culture and has a powerful effect on people who can appreciate its art.
In Red Cliff, a tea ceremony also plays an important role in distracting the power hungry prime minister/general Cao Cao just long enough for the wind and the war to change direction.
Perhaps in the next fifty or 100 years, enough research will be completed that we will better understand why some people have such a strong need to control others and to destroy those who get in their way. My suspicions are that the secret lies partly in genetics but that genetic disposition doesn't need to show itself if children get the love and support they all need to become whole people. I'm guessing that when the Rush Limbaugh story comes out on film, we will learn about an abused fat kid who spent his formative years fantasizing his revenge on all the hip people of the world who ridiculed him as a kid. Too bad he didn't learn the tea ceremony.
Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.
Since most of my posts are way too long, I'll just let you ponder the significance of this on your own. (Tuyuca is spoken, it says, in the eastern Amazon. Ethnologue says there are about 815 speakers in Columbia and Brazil.)
Below is an email I got today asking me to trade links with another website. That was a key strategy offered for getting more hits when I first started blogging. But then it was more bloggers linking to each other. Technorati, one of the sites that tracks blogs and ranks them,
now says
Please note that links in blogrolls don’t count towards Authority, as they are not indicative of interest in relevant content; we stopped including blogroll links in August 2008.
On occasion I've mentioned ways sellers have attempted to advertise on this site. Some leave comments - usually with a couple of generic compliments about the site first. Then put in a link to an unrelated website. Usually I just delete the comments unless they are relevant to the post. For example, I deleted one that sold modern Italian furniture that was in a comment on a large Asian furniture complex that we visited in Thailand, but I left a link to dvd's that taught children Mandarin Chinese that was linked to a post where I had pictures of children writing Chinese characters.
Others offer to pay you if you write a positive post about their products. They pay more if you don't mention that you're getting paid. I'm sure a lot of bloggers must take them up on that, but I think that's pretty slimy. People buy things that bloggers endorse because they think this is a genuine testimonial. And it hurts blogger credibility in general when people find out some bloggers are paid to do that. It's an example of how the market contaminates honest dialogue. (I'm not against the market, I'm just for honest, sensible understanding of its benefits and costs.)
1. Here's the carrot as he works on my vanity by calling this a quality link.
2. It's about bikes, and this is a bicycle friendly blog. But it's not like the two Alaska bike links I have on the right that talk about biking in general. It's selling bike jerseys.
3. And it's a generic email. He didn't even use my first name, which isn't hard to find.
We've already placed a link to your website along with a description at our site on the page, which we encourage you to check for accuracy. Once you place a link back to use, your link will be moved up to a more visable spot on the page.
3. And I get a link from them, and when I get back to them I get more visible shelf space.
We'd appreciate it if you place a link back to our site using the following HTML code (just copy and paste it into your links page): http://www.sharethedamnroad.com" title="Cycling Jeresys That Make A Statement">Road Cycling Jerseys Cycling Jeresys That Make A Statement On your page, the code will look like this: Road Cycling Jerseys Cycling Jeresys That Make A Statement If you'd like the description of your site modified, the category changed, or if you have any other cross-promotion ideas, feel free to email us. Please note that if you don't place a reciprocal link to us somewhere on your site within a week, the link to your site will automatically be removed from our directory. Please link to us using the code above, and let us know where we can find the link.
4. And now the stick - put something up or we're going to take your link down.
Best regards, Jonathan Ciaccio Cycling@ciaccioseo.com This is NOT SPAM -- this is a one-time reciprocal link request. We have NO INTENTION to email you again. You can also reply to this email with REMOVE in the subject line to make sure we'll NEVER send you any more e-mails in the future.
I'd guess the difference between this and spam is that these aren't computer generated messages to zillions of people. At least I'm assuming that these went to bike related blogs. Though biking is not the focus of this blog.
As these things go, this is fairly reasonable. It came as an email, not as a comment. That's good. It's bike related and I like that too. I'm guessing someone saw the post I did with the Share (bike) sign. But I do think wearing "Share the Damn Road" on your back when you bike through traffic is more likely to get you in trouble (all you need to do is piss off one driver) than increase support for cyclists.
So I wrote back saying I'd probably put up a post. And so I have. Not to get a link on his site. It gives me a chance to remind readers of the kinds of things people do to advertise in the blogging world.
Boycott blogs with non-transparent paid advertising testimonials - if you can figure out which ones they are.
We made it on time to Out North last night for Under 30. (Under 30 refers to the time (minutes) of the performance, not the age of the performers. It seems they now spell it Under :30 which I thought was a typo, but now see it's trying to clarify the meaning.) Last week we got to Santaland Diaries a few minutes late and it had already begun and was full, so we weren't allowed in, although we had purchased tickets in advance online. We were able to transfer our payment to this show. So we got there early enough this time to check ou the retrospective exhibit of the Under 30: Sweet Sixteen Archive Exhibit.
The exhibit has a wall length time line of the Under 30 programs from the beginning. And then there were these various props from different shows over the years. We've been to a fair number of them and they are always interesting, and usually there's at least one performer we know.
The last page of the program has a recruitment ad for next year's Under 30.
Many of the performances over the years have been done by people who don't normally do theatrical work. It seems like as good a way as possible to work on and present something important to the world. A lot of the work is still in the development stage. This is the first public showing and gets important feedback for the next stage, if the person wants to go further with it. Some manage to work well even at this stage.
The performances were introduced by Scott Turner Schofield who is a visiting performer who will be putting on Debutante Balls Jan. 14 -17. He seemed totally comfortable onstage and I'm sorry we're going to miss his show, but we leave for Juneau on the 11th.
Given that taking pictures in the middle of the show is often forbidden I'm filling in with these pictures from the exhibit.
All four performances last night kept my attention, though for me the third one - Jonathan Lang's "Radio" - worked most fully. It was a retrospective of radio in Alaska, starting from when Jonathan's family arrived in Alaska through his days on radio in Anchorage. The juxtaposition of taped 'radio' in the background, some props on stage, and probably the relatively uncomplicated content, made it the most complete and unified piece for me.
Van Le's "Letters to Ho Chi Minh" represented, perhaps, the most ambitious work, as she tried to articulate her family's experiences as refugees who survived smugglers, pirates, refugee camp in Malaysia on the way to the United States and the cross generational conflicts of children who want to know what happened and parents who want to forget. Some of the obstacles she still has to work out in the piece are technical ones - jumping back and forth between different time periods. Others are probably more emotional - I think more reenactment rather than telling of the stories would be more powerful. I got to meet Van Le when she was volunteering for the Anchorage International Film Festival and so it was particularly fun to be able to see how she put this together. The photo was taken after her performance, but before they moved things off the stage for the next performance.
Don Decker's piece integrated video into the performance. I liked a lot of the parts - particularly the extreme closeups of the lines in the videos. And he had some audience members laughing almost non-stop. I just didn't follow how all the pieces came together as one coherent statement. But maybe that wasn't intended.
Mark Muro's monologue started shakey, then got into gear, and then seemed to veer into different directions. Mark's done the Under 30 thing four times before according to the program and he could talk off the top of his head and it could be interesting and provocative. And I've heard him do that more effectively than his piece last night - but then last night he had to carry it off for thirty minutes. But Mark took the challenge and stood up and did his thing.
That's one reason people should go to the performance this afternoon at 3 or next weekend. The challenge is out there for next year's Under 30. This is something anyone could actually do. The only thing different from those on stage and you and me is that they put in their proposals. So, being in the audience is also a personal challenge. What do you have to say and how could you say it so it would keep an audience's attention for 30 minutes?
Once again I post some of the search terms people used and what they got to list some interesting search terms and to see how google works.
Bullseye
santa monica trapeze school - this was an image search that got to a post on the Santa Monica pier with a photo of the trapeze school.
rockin dentist - I actually have a post called 'Rockin Dentist'. I got scheduled once with another dentist in my dentist's office and it turned out he has a second amateur career as a rock guitarist.
how do you get prickly pears outta your skin - I had the answer to that at the bottom of a post on eating prickly pear. (Duct tape)
unfuck the world, the song - This got to an audio clip of the song from Kathryn Blume's play Boycott when she performed it here in Anchorage. But the most interesting part of this was that the computer seeking this came from the World Bank. Does this mean they finally have defined the problem they're working on?
black members of congress - I take a certain amount of pleasure when someone at
the ISP "Information Systems, U.S. House of Representatives" comes to a blog in Alaska to get information about Congress.
fruit flies fungus gnats difference - Got to Tiny Black Bugs - Fruit Fly or Fungus Gnat? The visitor, from Boston, probably had fruit flies, because the outclick was to the Oklahoma State University page on fruit flies, not the Colorado link on fungus gnats.
famous people who was born in pansilvania that start with the letter c - First, I need to say this person was from Pennsylvania. Google did manage to get him to the post on famous people born in 1909, and two - David Riesman and Joseph L. Mankiewicz - were born in Pennsylvania, but as you can see there was only one c between them and it wasn't at the beginning.
difference between a clique and a colloquialism - Never thought about a connection between those two words, but I can see how this Dutch searcher might have. Unfortuantely, I don't have anything on that and google sent him to Difference between a Cyclone and a Hurricane. (I probably jumped to the wrong conclusion on the nationality. It was from Holland, but Schiphol, which is the Amsterdam airport and the computer uses US English.)
a yellow egg with a tan spot. the moment you look away from it, it moves to another space - got to a picture of a yellow egg I did in photo shop in class last year..
Not even close.
2.employee bloggers sometimes use pseudonyms. under what conditions might the blogging service be forced to provide the real identity of the blogger?- This one got to a post that at least touches the issues here, The Right to Privacy, Bloggers and Privacy. This post discusses privacy in general and specifically the outing of Alaska's most read blogger at Mudflats. It doesn't quite get into the question sought though.
gender butterfly abdomen - When I stopped to think about it, it seemed to be about how to tell the gender of a butterfly. If it was, it got a pretty picture of a white butterfly with brown markings in the foothills in Northern Thailand, but nothing on determining gender. This one got me wondering. If you're interested, Clay shows how to identify a Monarch's gender when it's still a chrysalis. Dragonfly power gives a more thorough explanation. Scroll down to Part 1.
do flies know when they're full - Interesting query. I'm not even sure where this one landed. I certainly didn't have the answer.
do humans live in alaska - This one came from a computer that is set for Arabic from Jordan. So at least we can say some people in that part of the world are as ignorant of us as we are of them. Google sent them to the post "To Live and Die in Wales Alaska" He did get the answer, that yes we do.
do hipsters go skiing - I wrote about the movie Hipsters and I mention skiing now and then in my posts, but there's nothing that answers the question. Google took them to a post on the Russian movie Hipsters that won the Anchorage International Film Festival Best Feature.
Missed the target even.
if you don't know when you were born how old are you - This is a legitimate question. Got to famous people born in 1909.
racket tailed drongo sound clip - There actually is video with a racket tailed drongo calling, but Google took this person to a post in the same month on Burma and bio fuels policy. If the searcher had been persistent, he might have followed my search instructions in the upper right hand corner. If he had searched for the word drongo on that page he would have found the link to the post with what he was after. But the Sitemeter data suggests that he didn't get to it. He was so close to exactly what he wanted, but Google should have put him on the right page.
how much does it cost to get into amber in nature the mueseum in warsaw??tell me now!!! i need this for homework!!! - Despite the fact that my blog can't even come close to answering the question, What Do I Know came up first out of 1340 hits. Why? Because google uses robots, not people to find the hits. They found a page with enough posts to match six of the words in his search command. (It does sound like some bratty kid doesn't it?) But there are no two words together even. If mine was the number 1 hit, can you imagine how useless the others were? And if there were some that got him to the museum in warsaw, why was mine number 1? Does google think it's better to give lots of wrong answers than to say, "Sorry, we can't find anything useful"? Here's the google link he found:
You can get the whole letter at the Warsaw Gazette.] ...... There's so much to tell...... I don't need to do my homework, the college guys like me just the way I am. ...... Seward Highway that is now a bike trail to Girdwood, I found this nature lesson - on cottonwoods. ...
whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html - Cached -
Google Sense of Humor
politicians laughing - This image search got to a picture of a white crested laughing thrush. Why not? Unfortunately, it wasn't even a good picture.
It's time to pump up the brain and get moving on this second decade. It's not that I partied hard last night, but I'm still trying to get some other things done. We did connect on an apartment in downtown Juneau this week, so the ethics issue over staying with a friend is moot. I'm trying to get up this year's post on famous people born a hundred years ago, but my original source of such information has changed its format and a new source has way more names than I can handle. But I can tell you at least two seem to be still alive - a sports legend and an economist. Some everyone knows - like Mother Theresa and Jacques Cousteau - and some are obscure and I might not include. At least one of the obscure has affected so many lives I probably will include him - the inventor of instant noodle soup. There's lots of B actors I think I'll skip, though my mother might know them. More tomorrow. The bread is almost done then we're off to friends for dinner.
Some of you might be wondering why I keep taking pictures of bike racks. We all see what we are looking for. When my wife was pregnant, suddenly we saw all the other pregnant women, a phenomenon we'd barely noticed. Nothing had changed in the world, only in our heads. When we bought our first Subaru, we suddenly began seeing how many Subarus were on the streets of Anchorage.
[This first picture was at the Providence Hospital garage yesterday. I biked over (about a mile) to get my teeth cleaned. There were three bikes (one fat bike on the right) and two mountain bikes in this rack - mine's the fourth - and there were four in the other rack in the background. This is winter. I've never seen more than one or two bikes here in the winter before. These bike racks are close to full, again, in the winter. The summer is going to mean that Prov will need more bike racks for sure.]
Cars dominate life in the US and increasingly elsewhere. But in many ways they are the default status quo, bolstered by habit, by advertising, by city planning, and by our mental models that say we can't live without cars. But my personal experience is that using alternative transportation - such as bikes or walking or buses - when feasible is really liberating. When challenged to change, we think about what we're giving up, not what we're going to gain. Foot power not only saves petroleum, the air, and parking spaces, it also keeps us healthier, connects us to the world we usually whiz by - the trees, the flowers, interesting houses, new shops (old shops we never saw) and to other people.
It's NOT either/or. We won't eliminate the auto. That's not the point. We'll just use it less. If everyone drove 20% less, that would be a huge impact. So we just need to rethink some of the short trips. A mile walk is extremely doable. It shouldn't take more than 20 minutes once someone is fit. But walks of 3 miles - hikers do it all the time as recreation - are also very doable. But few people think about walking from downtown to UAA, but it's about a 60 - 80 minute walk. I don't have time for that, you say. But if you walk, you can skip the trip to the gym. When we talk about bikes, the distances we can go increases.
[This second picture was last night at Benson and LaTouche. The biker is in the white oblong. It would have been better in video as his head lamp and bike lamp both flashed on and off. These LED lights are making winter bikers much more visible to drivers.]
So, there are two reasons I do these posts:
1. To raise people's awareness that more and more people are biking, even in the winter, change people's idea of what is possible. It's not just fanatics who are on their bikes. It's normal, average people who have found that it works in their lives.
2. To document the changes that are going on as people do start using their bikes - some just making occasional use of the bike instead of a car when it's a short trip and others actually commute every day by bike, some doing ten mile round trips or more, even in winter.
It's the last day of the year. Even if you aren't going to write down any New Year's resolutions, this still is a time to reflect on how we've lived our lives and how we might do it better.
I urge you to 'see' all the bikers around you. I urge you to try to abandon your car for at least one trip a week - and either walk or bike instead. Start small. You're parked at Barnes and Noble. Instead of driving the short distance to Blockbusters for a video, walk there and back. Once you start making some small trips like that without the car, you'll start thinking about other times you could walk or bike instead. For some, you can start in January. For others, go ahead, wait until April when the snow is almost gone and there's more light. I promise you, you'll feel better.
One of the reasons Progressive Alaska is such an interesting blog is that its blogger, Phil Munger, has worn so many hats that give him intimate knowledge about so many important topics in Alaska and beyond. One of his hats is musician, composer. Last night he and his wife Judy Youngquist celebrated their 30th Anniversary with a lot of others who crowded into their Wasilla home.
At one point Phil invited me downstairs to his home studio to see his set up and to hear some of his new unfinished work. Here's a glimpse of that studio and his music on the speakers and on his screen - watch the vertical green line. I wasn't able to figure out how, with just my Powershot, to get the light right for both the screen and the rest of the scene, so when I'm not right up to the screen, it just whites out. And the water heater is in the same room and adds its own improvisation to Phil's composition.
