Category: People

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People

Kick butt, Ann

Chris Locke dropped a note about Ann Craig having surgery today for melanoma.

I am glad that Chris make this publication. There was rumors that Ann was laid up because she was carrying Chris’ babies – all eight of them – from a previous liason. However, she wrote me in an email that she never really has met Chris Locke – it was a figment of his imagination after he’d sucked down a really bad cup o’ joe at Starbucks.

Really, Chris has never gone out with any blonde – they were all in his imagination. There was a red head that took pity on him and went out with him once; we don’t know how the date went because she hasn’t talked since and when you mention Chris’ name she screams and runs from the room.

Seriously, if you can’t tell from this get well message that Ann has the most wonderful, whacky sense of humor, then you need only look at this picture at Gary’s.

Laughter is the best medicine, and here’s wishing Ann loads of it. Best wishes, Ann, and hope you’re back up and running quickly.

Categories
People Weblogging

Winer Number?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I missed all sorts of fun being on the road. For instance, there’s this Winer number thing that Mark Pilgrim came up with. According to Mark:

 

Here’s how you can determine your Winer Number:

Dave Winer has Winer Number 0.
If you have been personally abused by Dave Winer, your Winer Number is 1.
If you have been abused by someone who has been abused by Dave Winer, your Winer Number is 2.

 

Mark also lists criteria for ‘personally abused’, such as in an email or forum, or in Dave’s weblog. However, for those who have been multiply zinged by Dave, the number is modified, and your count becomes 1/n, n being the number of times zinged. So, the more you get zinged, the smaller the number.

Well, I used to mix it up with Dave fairly regularly but haven’t since I reached a surfeit on discussing RSS and RDF’s evil influence on it. According to Mark’s criteria, I’ve been ‘personally abused’ in group and personal emails, in my comments, in online forums including the RSS Development forum, and in his weblog, though the entries are usually pulled. I don’t beat out Bill Kearney for number of times hit by The Man, but I probably am the top rated, or should I say lowest Winer number, woman.

My evil twin says have fun with this, but then there’s this part of me that remembered the times when Dave pointed to something I said and made nice comments. And the times that Dave has pointed out people who’ve needed help. And I remember how much Dave has done for weblogging. There’s even been a few times when Dave’s joked rather than zinged, which he should do more often because we all win when he does. So my evil twin’s nasty but deliciously fun inclinations were suppressed in this instance.

However, I’m about to rejoin the RDF/RSS fandango again, because, well, girls just want to have fun. So I imagine that my evil twin will get her way eventually.

Categories
People

Loco-motion

Little Eva died today. For those not into old 1960’s rock n’ roll, Little Eva was a Motown singer who did a great, great song called Loco-Motion. I haven’t heard this song for years, but just the title brings back the tune. And the words:

Move around the floor in a Loco-motion.
(Come on baby, do the Loco-motion)
Do it holding hands if you get the notion.
(Come on baby, do the Loco-motion)
There’s never been a dance that’s so easy to do.
It even makes you happy when you’re feeling blue,
So come on, come on, do the Loco-motion with me.

Listen

It even makes you happy when you’re feeling blue. Still works after all this time. Rest in peace, Little Eva.

(Thanks to reading & writing)

Categories
History People

Slay the Dreamer

On the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr and the National Civil Rights Museum:

Visitors pass through displays depicting African-American life in the Jim Crow South, honoring early civil rights pioneers like Ida B. Wells and describing seminal events like the 1955-56 bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala.

Finally they come to the room in which King spent his final minutes and look onto the balcony where he was standing when Ray’s bullet hit him. Some find this place as evocative an American shrine as Independence Hall or the battlefields at Gettysburg and Antietam.

Thanks to wood s lot.

As I stated earlier, I would never join a protest based on a ‘celebration’ of an assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. However, I am aware that, in some ways, marching against war on the anniversay of King’s death is a vindication of the last few years of his life, spent fighting the Vietnam war. In an excellent perspective article on King’s death, On anniversary of assassination, some want King remembered as more than ‘dreamer’, the author, Gregory Lewis, writes:

As far as Julian Bond is concerned, the day King was shot to death is “the beginning of the reshaping of King’s legacy by erasing the last five years of his life, freezing him in August 1963.” Since his death at the age of 39, King’s image as a dreamer has supplanted King the radical opponent of the Vietnam War and economic exploitation of the poor.

Yet it’s King’s fight for economic equality for blacks, and his fight against the Vietnam war in addition to his eloquent and powerful influence for civil rights that made him, truly, the great man for all times. In one of his speeches, he said:

“Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”

“Beyond Vietnam,” April 4, 1967

How uncanny that King would use the same words then, in a different war, that are so appropriate today: about securing liberties several thousand miles away when we’re being denied liberty here in this country, now. If anything marching against war would seem the perfect memorial for King.

But I think that Martin Luther King, Jr would disagree. He wasn’t a man who be comfortable with shrines, and wreaths, and glass cases containing memorabilia. I think he would say that the perfect memorial for him would be a living one, reflected in people fighting for freedom and against injustice and inequality every day of the year.

Categories
People Political

When you pray, move your feet

Steve Himmer responded to criticism about peace marches, in particular the individual actions of self-expression:

The individual voice in an election doesn’t individually matter. Done. In a march or a rally, on the other hand, that voice can matter–and it can matter without having either the individual voice or the collective subsumed. As 10,000 people march in a street, there is necessarily a unified message–we’re all marching for the same overarching goal, stating our opposition to war, in the current case. At the same time, each of us holds an individualized sign, or wears a uniquely sloganed t-shirt, or a mask, or performs a piece of personally important street theater. While the collective voice of the march can’t be ignored, neither can each individual voice welling up into the collective.

In response, Jonathon wrote of the circumstances in which he would participate in a march:

Recently my friend Natsuko asked me what it would take for me to attend an anti-war march.

‘Everyone would have to agree to wear only plain black clothes,’ I told her. ‘There would be no chanting, no placards, no street theater, no drumming, no red-painted faces. Nothing but hundreds of thousands of black-clad people marching silently through the city.’

Steve responded in comments:

Interesting–the other day, while marching, I wondered at what point what other kinds of mass events were possible, and one of the ideas I considered was a silent river of people flowing don’t the street with signs or chants, without looking left or right. I, too, think it would an incredible piece of street theater, and definitely one worth trying.

march2.jpgMarch 7, 1965 600 people began a walk from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama unified behind one goal: voting rights for blacks. These were simple, peaceful people of all ages from all professions and background, with the men primarily dressed in black or gray suits, the women in dresses, white or black, maybe a bit of color with orange or pink or green mixed in. Six blocks later, they were set upon by police who gassed and beat the peaceful crowd as they walked silently through the street.

There was no screaming at the police, and no thrown rocks, sitting in the street or other acts of civil disobedience. The weapon the marchers carried was more frightening to the authorities of that time – a message of equality.

march1.jpgHowever, neither the message nor the marchers would be stopped. Led by Martin Luther King Jr, they marched again two days later, but this time as a means to convince the federal courts to give them explicit permission to march from Selma to Montgomery. The judge granted this permission, and on March 22, 2500 marchers started a walk in Selma, Alabama that would end with 25,000 marchers, five days later in Montgomery, Alabama.

The photographs and television coverage of the brutality of the police, played against the quiet dignity of the marchers and the simplicity of their unified message, more than any other event, led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

One of the photographers of the march quoted the old African/Quakers proverb to describe it: When you pray, move your feet. To this I add: decide what’s important, and act accordingly.

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