Oh, and another thing

Can anyone who is actually reading the NY Times these days enlighten me as to the timing of the stories on McCain and that lobbiest (9 years ago)? What's the news peg for those stories, did something happen recently (other than the Times not wanting him to be president)? Update: The New Republic has a whole story on the drama behind the Times story.

Update again: The NYT's ombudsman editor took the big editors (including Keller, the big boss) to task over the McCain story. But what the public editor leaves out of his piece and what is the crucial point here (if you ask people including Tom and certainly including myself), is the following: Media, stop reporting on the affairs people are having! We do not care! They have a right to have affairs in private! Don't make national politics a contest to see who had an affair!

Assume McCain was paling around with a lobbiest and McCain's lackys were like, 'dude, you have got to stop hanging out with her, the press will think you are having an affair': What, in that situation, do I as a reader of the NYT want to know? Nothing! Noooothing! It wouldn't have been enough to have an email proving the affair, as the public editor suggests. For me, you'd need an email proving McCain broke lobbying regulations with respect to this particular lobbiest, for whatever reason, whether because she's his girlfriend, his sister, whatever. The affair is his own affair, so to speak, and I don't want to know about it.

Keller, the head editor, should resign over this. It was a terrible judgment call to publish the story.

On a related note:

Eight years ago...

Mom: Some people forget that McCain was one of the Keating Five. But I will never forget. He is trying to live it down, but I will not forget.

Yesterday

Me: Mom, McCain was one of the Keating Five! I totally forgot!
Mom: Me too!

Post of cycle of self-criticism

This post is because I find the post below this one so sad that I can't bear to look at my own blog. Does anyone want to try to organize a memorial for Lawrence King at our U.? I do, but I feel under such pressure to write my diss right now that I keep telling myself I don't have time. Then I tell myself what a bad person I am. Repeat cycle endlessly.

8th grader shot because he wore lipstick

Did you guys hear about this 8th grader in California who was shot at his school this week by another student, apparently because he dressed in a way that did not conform to social expectations of his gender? See also the LA Times coverage (from whence photo came. The photographer is Michael Robinson Chavez.)

CC volunteers at a center for queer youth, and they were talking tonight about the shooting of this kid in California, Larry King. Every single kid had a story of being harassed at school. Many had complained to school administrators, who generally blamed the queer kid for bringing the harassment on themselves because they are queer.

It just makes me feel like queer adults have a real obligation to these kids, who are now coming out in high school and even middle school (something no one in my school would have dared do) and who are facing not only the violence and homophobia of their peers, but the homophobia of all the adults who are supposed to protect them. One of the kids in CC's group was finally expelled from his high school for beating up one of his tormentors. But since none of the teachers or councilors to whom he went for help would help him, he said, what was he supposed to do?

Odd that this isn't in the national media, especially since the national media found the Matthew Shepard murder so easy to cover in great depth. Is it because Larry King wasn't a white kid? And because reporters are thinking that if King was really so "flamboyant," he brought it on himself? Among many other things, this murder demonstrates the futility of politics that separate gender performance and sexuality, as some groups sought to do by passing non-discrimination legislation that would have covered sexuality, not gender performance.

Take a second to e-mail the New York Times to ask them why they aren't covering this murder. nytnews@nytimes.com

Little Girl

When CC dropped me off at the airport yesterday, I rushed up to the airline ticket counter to check in (naturally I was running late). I was supposed to fly to a job interview. This didn't happen because my flight and all subsequent flights were snowed out, but when I arrived at the airport of course I didn't know that, and was having all kinds of thoughts about being grown up and going to a job interview, and having to act grown up at the interview, and how I wasn't sure how to do that, etc.

I got chatting with counter agent. She glanced at my passport and expressed surprise. Surprise at my age (I'll turn 30 three days from now). "You're much older than you look," she said. "When you walked up, I thought you were an unaccompanied minor."

No wonder I feel like no one takes me seriously.

(Unrelated note: This picture, chosen to illustrate my nearly-thirty-ness, is also a picture of me
with the actual microform of the Prussian govt. file on Prussia's nearly passed 1932 sterilization law. !!)

So long, Sweetiepants

Well, now I have a new Macbook called Saskatoon, and Sweetiepants is on her way to Apple central, probably to get spruced up for sale as a rebuilt machine. I wish her well!

I miss Sweetiepants. But I like Saskatoon. Do you want to hear the story? (This will probably be of interest only to Tom and perhaps to CBAM, but heck, they're my core audience.)

After a flight on an airplane, Sweetiepants started crashing without warning and intermittently. Then, she wouldn't turn on at all. Apple replaced her motherboard. The problem got better, but didn't go away. Then an Apple "genius" worked on updating her OS for 2 hours while I waited in the store. The problem didn't go away.

Then, on yet another trip to the Apple store, I met a "genius" who told me that Macbooks of Sweetiepant's generation just aren't compatible with the older router protocols, and they crash sometimes, and that's just the way it is. Therefore, he couldn't fix Sweetiepants, and I ought to just head home and not worry about the crashing.

Yes, you may recall this line of thinking from your childhood: Macs crash, that's just the way it is!

Well, Tom told me that just couldn't be true, and I called Apple and indeed, the people on the phone agreed. But just to pause a moment, Tom and I used to work on a Mac in college that was about 1,200 years old, and crashed all the time, then started up again faithfully. You could like see smoke coming out the back of the thing as it chugged along. It was like the little engine that could.

But that is not the kind of laptop I was looking to own.

Anyway, much time on the phone with Apple ensued, and I reached Saskatoon Ron, an Apple customer service troubleshooter guy who works in snowy Saskatchewan. He is a really nice person, but because Apple had only done one hardware repair, he couldn't order a replacement for Sweetiepants. Instead, he set up an overnight express repair in Tennessee, but I'd have to mail Sweetiepants away for a week.

I remained calm for like one day. Then, I spazzed. I couldn't be computer-less for a week. I wrote Ron a very long e-mail. Ron found it in his heart to order a machine replacement, even though he had to override company protocol or something.

A huge thank you to Ron! We have spent probably 3 hours on the phone by now. But last night, I picked up Saskatoon and handed over Sweetiepants to the "geniuses."

They are not really geniuses, by the way.

In short, I'm a huge fan of Saskatoon Ron, but not such a fan of Apple. In any event, make sure you get that expensive extended warranty on your Mac!

Saskatoon Ron is a nice person.

And Sweetiepants was a very nice computer, before the crashing started. She rode every day to the Secret Archive in the rain on the back of my bike, and never crashed once!

So long, Sweetiepants.

Yaaah!

Congrats to Tom and Nelly!

People. The state of my dissertation.

The state of my dissertation is strong, people. Back off!

Just back off, people!