Jun. 3rd, 2010

gwydion: (Default)
* North Koreans sink a South Korean ship; http://www.komonews.com/news/national/94256209.html

* Start of month errands wore me the fuck out. Apologies for not logging on to Trin.

* OMG Colbert knows it's Pius Aeneus. I wonder if he did Latin in school too. he doesn't pronounce it classical style, but that happens sometimes.

* Real person needing real help: http://iamzulma.livejournal.com/260521.html

* (RM found): NY police mishandling sexual assault cases, mis-filing, mocking survivors, and generally being rotten. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/nyregion/03rapeside.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/nyregion/03rape.html

* I class a lot of the drama shows as Science fiction: House takes place in an alternative universe where Americans have access to health care and there is no yanking of medical licenses for egregious ethical violation. Crimal Minds is what would happen if profiling actually worked. The Law and Order franchise all takes place in an alternate universe were police are mostly not corrupt and actually care about helping and protecting people and catching criminals. I mean, I'm sure such police exist and I'm willing to believe the ones on panel at Orycon are such, but I've never had to deal with any like that when actually out in the real world. It disgusts me that I am still, as a 40 year old law abiding citizen, living in a country where I have to fear the police because they are unpredictable and occasionally violent and where they can and do stop me at random for warrant checks and the occasional visual search. (Seriously, the extent of my record is one speeding ticket from Utah in the mid-90's and maybe four total promptly paid parking tickets, yet I can expect to be harassed and treated like a dangerous criminal if the police happen to be bored or if I'm forced to make a complaint.

* A scholar's confession: Sometimes, people who know my academic background ask me about Dante. They assume I know, given where I went and what I studied. The truth is, that I've studied the Inferno. Not recently, but I have read it and put effort into thinking about the contents. I remember enough of it that I can say intelligent things in response to most questions, but I have to look up things like what was where. My memory of it is more episodic, than continuous after all this time. I know I read at least half of Purgatory, which was interesting, but not nearly as historically or politically as exciting as Hell. I carried away some big ideas and a little imagery, but hardly anything else. Heaven was so deadly dull, that I mostly faked the reading. (Skimming bits here and there to use after I kept falling asleep trying to read it properly. This is the only reading I remember doing this for at st. Johns, though I may not have quite finished second Calvin. Yes, I read all my Aquinas readings). The Inferno comes up often enough in medieval/Renaissance studies that I've restudied and reread chunks of it, but frankly, in history classes no one much cares about the other two unless they are Dante scholars specifically. I wasn't and neither were any of my profs, so really, I haven't looked at Purgatory or Paradisio since I came west, though the actual physical books are still with me. Embarrassing, but honestly, not embarrassing enough to make force my Buddhist ass to wade through all those snores just to say I've actually done it.

* Cake gone awry (possibly NWS): http://www.cakewrecks.com/2010/06/nothing-to-see-here.html

* Is that duct tape? http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com/wp-content/uploads/cache/2010/06/window-colin1.jpg/560_0_resize.jpg

* It occurred to me this morning that I've talked more in the past week than I usually do these days in a month. No wonder my throat hurts.

* Buffy: They re-ran Entropy tonight. My feeling is, after you dump someone, you sure don't get to complain about who they are fucking now and you don't get to shame the ex for trying to move on.

* (Rm found) "Trans Wheelchair User Wins IML 2010" http://advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2010/06/01/Trans_Wheelchair_User_Wins_IML_2010/

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