Where I’m @

20021224

We’ll be off for the Christmas holiday beginning this afternoon, and Bleahh may or may not be updated. Have a Merry Christmas, and remember what’s important.

20021220

Offensive
It’s been quite some time since we found this word useful. We feel that during the 90s it was taken up far too often to describe far too many actions or situations that, while deserving of the term in many senses, should have been labeled with more nuance. Reprehensible, wrongheaded, ignorant, these are a few that were underused.

But in the last week, we’ve found that our capacity to be offended has not gone away.

Verizon Lays Off Workers
By the reckoning of nearly every faith and even by atheists, the end of the solar calendar year is a significant time. If nothing else, it’s a big shopping time, stretching from Hallowe’en to the middle of January. How is it, then, that Verizon decided that this was the best time to lay off nearly 3,000 workers? Appalling.

20021211

Independent Site of the Day #10: Don’t Link to Us!
Today’s ISoD (and the first in three months, chagrin) is Don’t Link to Us!, a blog devoted to singling out companies who have silly policies about linking (or not) to their sites. My guess is that their terms and conditions are followed more in the breach than the observance, and I’m glad that this guy is there, providing many links (most are deep links) to sites that would have you believe you can’t do what you want on the web. (Now that’s focus.)

Independent site review concept by Aortal
Site found via Ishbadiddle to Matt’s article at law.com to Bag and Baggage.

Several years ago, when Dad was still an active-duty Marine, he went on cold-weather training exercises with the Norwegian army. In addition to getting some frostbite, he made a good friend in an army colonel, who has gone on to some interesting posts in the world. This Christmastime finds him in Uganda, and this is an excerpt from his family’s year-end wrap-up letter. A good ground-level view of a troubled area.

As a UN worker you are always deployed to trouble areas. The problem in Northern Uganda is first of all insecurity. Various anti government guerilla groups or rebels as the Authorities call them have been fighting the Government for the last 16 years. The most notorious one is the so-called Lord Resistance Army (LRA) lead by a psychopath, Josef Kony. His LRA has committed the cruelest atrocities against the civilian population in the North, abducting young boys and girls, and in his bases in Sudan (supported by the Sudanese authorities) transferred them to brutal killers or sex-slaves. How many is difficult to say, figures more than 10 000 had be estimated. Many of these youngsters had been killed, either by the LRA themselves when they have tried to escape, or in skirmishes with the Uganda army. The LRA units have proved to be deadly effective, normally operating in small groups, but they also have the capacity to concentrate and strike in larger formations. The Uganda army poorly equipped and with a decreasing moral after so many years of fighting, does not have the mobility and capacity to fight the LRA effectively.

The killing of innocent civilians are still going on, some twenty every week, and in the most brutal way, often clubbed to death or locked in to their huts and burnt alive. Children are still abducted at a high rate, to compensate for losses in fights with the army. Very little is mentioned in the Western media about this "forgotten conflict". This insecurity situation has forced approx. [garbled somehow — Ed.] of a million people to live in congested camps as Internally Displaced. It is the task of the international community to support these camps with food, medicines, water and sanitation.

With peace, this has been quite unnecessary, in such a fertile region. Many internationals are advocating for peace talks with the guerilla, but the Government has so far preferred the military option, which does not seem to be very successful, and in the meantime the civilian population is suffering.


Read more:

• Item on Uganda at GlobalSecurity.org (site leanings: anti-nuke, seemingly pro-SDI, pro-Peace)
• Item at the Federation of American Scientists (site leanings: seems reasonably neutral, tending toward Peace)
• Item at HumanRightsMonitor.org (site leanings: duh)

20021210

In the long-term quest to listen to our more than eight linear feet of records, we have spent several segments of our free time painfully crawling our way through the pre-1983 oeuvre of Carly Simon (official | All Music Guide).

See, she starts off pretty good. We’re going to end up keeping the first four albums (mostly for one or two songs apiece), but the rest — all seven others in our second-hand collection — we just don’t particularly like. Simon started off with some nuanced songs about inner feminist conflict, most notably the only track from the first album to get any airplay these days, “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be”. She went astray a few albums later, grown a little lazy in her success, and started following rather than leading. After a few nondescript mid-70s records, she started making ones that are actively unlikeable. Throwing in a few pseudo-disco numbers here (including one in which she seems to be trying to channel Grace Jones), a Caribbean number there (complete with faux patois), and a folk-country-rock bit elsewhere does not make for exciting music. The nadir has got to be her over-enunciated cover of Bob Marley’s “Is This Love?”

We’re being a bit hard on her perhaps. Her voice is quite good, though her album of (mostly) popular songbook standards would be more believable had she done some of the same type of songs before. In fact, we think she would have had a better career as a cabaret singer. Thanks for those early albums, too. Something in us has a fondness for certain representatives of 70s cheese.

20021206

The W3C has finally gotten with its own program and redesigned their entry page to not use tables for layout. While the page is not exactly on the bleeding edge of design nor is it the most attractive thing on the planet, it’s nice to see the de facto creator of web standards healing itself.

20021204

Amidst all of our self-righteous nodding and smirking during the swirling discussion about XHTML vs. RSS with as connected to semantics and content syndication, we forgot that our content is not as semantically squeaky clean as it could be. Therefore, we’ve begun slight changes to make it so, beginning with adding meaningful class attributes to the H2 containing the date above and to the P containing the text. Enjoy the lack of any noticeable difference.

20021203

Though we mentioned that we would be entering a special post on World AIDS Day, we did not. We didn’t even compose it, except for the germ in our head. Here goes nothing.

Sometime in the early ’70s, my father caught up with two of his close friends from elementary school. As infrequently happens, they found that they still enjoyed each others’ company and began spending more time together. Some twenty years later, the threesome had grown into some nine men and their wives, and the time spent had become a weeklong vacation nearly every summer.

Also nearly twenty years later, the brother-in-law of one of the original three men died from complications relating to AIDS (or whatever circumlocution you choose to apply). All we were ever told, as far as we can recall, was that he had had AIDS and that he was a florist. Kind of like when we once were looking at an apartment in Chelsea and the real estate agent mentioned to a woman moving to New York from North Carolina that the Chelsea neighborhood was very artistic.

Our parents were not generally the free-and-easy types when it came to matters of sexual orientation, or matters of sex in general. We can’t help but think, though, that this was a missed opportunity. It’s not as if we were personally in contact with the old friend, his wife, and her gay brother, but in retrospect it might have been a chance to talk about whether this close contact changed their views.

• Intellectual Property and AIDS Medication in South Africa, a case study at American University
• GMHC (an outgrowth of ACT-UP)
• Harrumph! on safe sex
• AIDS in Africa, a Pulitzer Prize–winning series from the Village Voice
• World Health Organization page on AIDS/HIV