jackpot

Today is 05/05/05.

I've been enjoying that stuff ever since the turn of the century. For the first few years I was constantly doing little calculations. If you know how to view page source, you can see a bunch of them, but I won't bore my regular readers.



I've got an email to my prof half-written. That has nothing whatever to do with the multidude of little math calculations hidden in the html. Nothing, I assure you.

me & robert redford

Your Seduction Style: The Natural

You don't really try to seduce people... it just seems to happen. Fun loving and free spirited, you bring out the inner child in people. You are spontaneous, sincere, and unpretentious - a hard combo to find! People drop their guard around you, and find themselves falling fast.

Be original, join the club—take the quiz and put it on YOUR blog

Well, it's been twelve years since I tried to seduce someone new, but that worked out well (wouldn't you say, Loopy?), so whatever my style is, it must have been good enough.

Although.... if memory serves, there wasn't a whole lot of "style" to it... I seem to remember something about a long, heart-in-throat conversation in a bookstore about whether we should "get more involved" or not....god, I was so young and earnest.

FAQ: birdfarm and her blog

Q: Does birdfarm do anything else with her life besides sit around and blog all day?
A: No.

Q: Doesn't birdfarm realize that she can't hide out in her office forever?
A: That thought has occurred to her.

Q: Doesn't this worry her?
A: Did you know that it's the anniversary of the breaking of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal? Here's a darkly amusing take on the issue.

Q: Are you even listening to me?
A: What, I'm sorry—did you say something?

Nadine's baby girl...

Since friends from college make up an increasing proportion of my occasional readers—not to mention fully half of my most regular readers (a.k.a. Franklin)(my other regular reader is Loopy who, thank goodness, has rarely been in spitting distance of my alma mater, and when she was there, she pretty much spat most of the time)—I thought I'd post the following. Plus, it's just too darn cute not to share.

Here is Alexa Sophia, flying through the air courtesy of Nadine's hubby Chip.



god, she's adorable!

See more of Nadine's baby pix or read her blog for entertaining updates on Alexa's growth and daily life...(and other topics as well).

Whitman Tongzi Banzai!

Once again I am responding to Franklin's comment with a new post. Ah, how he inspires me, and what a waste of time it is. But that's what blogs are for, no?

Below is a rare archival image of a member of the Walt Whitman Youth Environmental Brigade (center right), shown with figures representing other youth leadership groups.

Originally uploaded to Flickr.com by birdfarm.

Note the caption at left, "Long live Comrade Whitman!"

As is well known, the Whitman Youth fell out of favor during the Cultural Revolution, and unfortunately, most evidence of their existence was destroyed. And now a verse from our fallen comrade:

Who includes diversity and is Nature,
Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and solidarity of the earth, and the great charity of the earth, and the equilibrium also,
None other than our great Leader, who brings us victory and tramples the capitalist swine under his feet!

—from Kosmos

A few more items of interest concerning dear Comrade Whitman can be found in the comments on the previous post.

Happy May Day, part II

Of course, I can't let this day go by without saluting its history.

You can read more about it here, here, and here.

But today I want to conjure in our imaginations is the spectacle of eighty thousand people marching down Michigan Avenue on May 1, 1886, on strike and proclaiming (not demanding) an eight-hour workday from that day forward.

That's one-sixth the population of Chicago at that time!

Imagine them marching. It is reported as a beautiful spring day. The street is lined with police, national guardsmen, and anyone willing to wield a weapon to protect the ruling class, because rumors have been circulated that murder and mayhem are planned.

I like to think that these folks felt pretty silly as they stood there "protecting" the trembling, cowering wealthy folk of Chicago...protecting them from a crowd of families and children, reportedly in holiday spirit, dressed in their best, singing songs and enjoying themselves.

The eighty thousand won—the eight-hour day went into effect immediately—not because they smashed things or killed people, and not because they moved the cold hearts of "the bosses" to pity and benevolence.

They won because eighty thousand people with a single goal are uncontrollable.*

The eight-hour day had been signed into law years before in many states, but the law was ignored. In contrast, unions and strikes were illegal. None of this had any bearing on the struggle or the victory. When hundreds of thousands of people across the country (estimated 400,000 total went on strike) announced that they would no longer be working more than eight hours a day, what could "the bosses" do but agree?

This power is what has been forgotten.

My point is that creating the world we want is not about the ballot box or the law. It's not about getting someone else (a president, a senator, a judge) to do what we want them to do. It's not about waiting for a great leader to take us to the promised land.

It's about organizing ourselves collectively to create the future we want to see.

¡La lucha continua - unidos venceremos!

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*n.b. Eighty thousand, or eight hundred thousand, or eight million people who just gather with signs or candles... can be comfortably ignored, as we saw on Feb. 15, 2003 (although the pictures still make me cry...). This is why I don't put a lot of energy into protesting anymore.

Angela Davis visited here last year and she said something like, "When we used to protest, it was a demonstration of how much power we had, of how many people we had organized, who were determined to get something accomplished. The 'powers that be' knew we were unstoppable and they better not get in the way. But now, the protest is the goal in itself, and it's nothing more than street theater."

Sheep:	"We need a permit to protest the fact that you keep eating us."
Shepherd:	"Be my guest, protest all you like."
Sheep:	"See how many of us are here, begging you, to please stop eating us."
Shepherd:	"Make me."
Sheep:	"But you're supposed to love and protect us!"
Shepherd:	"You obviously don't understand the point of my existence."

---

And just for fun...

Happy May Day from some dead white men!

(But who's the guy in the middle?)

Happy May Day!

Or, as we say in Wisconsin, "Well, it looks pretty gloomy outside, but at least we don't have to worry about tornadoes...


...because it's snowing."