posts I would like to see (I)

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I realized today, while talking to someone about blogs and why I read them, that many people I personally know are doing some interesting things that I think should be read by more people. So I’m going to start calling them out because I want to hear them write about what I’ve heard them talk about and I think others should read it as well.

This will be a series of posts — if you take up my challenge I’ll post links here and hopefully start a discussion at your place. Or just write about something else because you think my idea of a topic sucks. In any case, we all win — you’ll write about something you care about. I’ll start out with only three requests:

Deb: What is so interesting about film noir, and why?

Ranjit: Why should everyone care about cops in schools? What do you realistically think youth can do to organize and protect themselves?

Ram: What do you think is broken about political rhetoric these days? Is it that the radicalization of viewpoints is unproductive? How should we effect a debate so that we really end up understanding one another?

If this works I’ll try and get more ideas going. I like blogging, but I’m lacking a purpose most of the time. Requests can be nice, I find.

the ship is headed nowhere good

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According to a BBC article today, Jean Charles de Menezes was, in fact, behaving relatively innocuously before being shot in the head while being restrained. He picked up a paper, ran to catch his train, and sat down. No bulky jacket, no leaping over ticket barriers, just a guy trying to catch his train.

In the aftermath of this incident I was willing to give the cops just a little sympathy — perhaps it was a tense situation and things got out of hand. I could, with little effort, construct scenarios in my mind that would have led to the same outcome and a less-than-clear-cut assignment of good and evil to the players involved. However, with this new information my dramatic imagination is stretched to its utmost. I’m left with the premise of “cops see swarthy/brown man running, shoot to kill.” Hopefully there will be some accountability here rather than the parade of official deceptions to which we were treated in the aftermath.

evolution of horses

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Over at Pharyngula, there is a summary of a paper on the phylogeny of American horse species. The amusing thing to me about it is the chart which has a scatter plot of metatarsal dimensions and an oval with the label New World stilt-legged and Asian asses. I feel inspired to write something with that phrase it in now…

Ives has been cancelled

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The Ives concert that I posted earlier has been cancelled. While that gives me some more free time in the spring, I’m a little sad, since I really like Ives.

However, today I bought a CD of Cox and Box and Trial by Jury as well as the Hilliard Ensemble doing Machaut’s Messe de Notre Dame, which I will hopefully be singing this fall.

now that’s leveraging your base

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Or fandom, in any case. Neil Gaiman announced on his blog that the following authors are auctioning “cameos,” if you will, in their forthcoming works. The proceeds will go to the First Amendment Project (which really needs a new color scheme). You can name a victim in a Stephen King novel, an utterance by Sunny in a Lemony Snicket book, a character in a Jonathan Lethem comic… and many more.

I’m sure you can write a nice little article about how postmodern a phenomenon this is, but it’s cool to see creative ways of leveraging fans for chartiable causes. It’s first amendment, internet-based, pop-culture… all we need is for some video-game designers to auction off cameos too. Then the academy would go crazy-go-nuts.

mark your calendars now…

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… for Spring 2006. The fact that I have events planned that far in advance is astonishing to me. My audition went well enough, all things considered, and I received the following concert assignments from the San Francisco Symphony Chorus:

one slow step at a time

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(via Kevin Drum) California is lumbering towards equity for same-sex couples:

Businesses that provide discounts, special services or other privileges to married couples must extend the same rights and benefits to same-sex couples registered as state domestic partners, the California Supreme Court decided 6-0 on Monday.

The ruling was based on a case involving a lesbian couple’s use of country club facilities. Spouses were allowed to play for free, as well as “the live-in girlfriends and boyfriends, and grandchildren, of heterosexual members from the extra fees, while denying the same benefits to same-sex couples.” It seems pretty clear that the club didn’t have a leg to stand on, given those kinds of standards, since the only pragmatic reason they could give was “that extending membership benefits to unrelated friends might lead to overuse of the facilities and discourage the friends from purchasing their own memberships.”

Because, you know, I’d be totally willing to enter into a domestic partnership with someone solely for the perks of free golf at their country club.

But in any case, hooray for California, and let’s hope the marriage thing goes through as well.

catch-up on Darfur

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No, Plamegate, the Michael Jackson trial, and other domestic fun and games were not being given so much attention because things in Darfur got better. Instead, it was just too depressing to keep going on about it, so the MSM wanted something else to talk about. Here is a piece encapsulating the situation in Darfur and its antecedents. Catch up and become alarmed. Something needed to be done a while ago. What is happening now?