They just take and take and take

So this past weekend, my friend Sheryl, who needs constant reminders to lock the door when she exits the car and yet often forgets anyway, forgot to lock the passenger side door after exiting my car.

Well, some opportunistic folks helped themselves to my car stereo whilst I slept. Now don't get me wrong, I don't really care about the shitty car stereo, but they also took the cupholders.

The fucking cupholders!

What are they going to do with my cupholders?!? Were they in the process of taking the cd player (which they honestly couldn't re-sell for more than $5--I'm sure of it) and all of sudden they thought about how thirsty petty theft makes them? Or in addition to the vast number of CDs they have but have nothing in which to play them, they similarly have a great number of drinks but no place to set them?

The irony, of course, is that the cupholders were poorly designed, so if you actually put a drink in them, it would bump into the buttons on the stereo and randomly change songs and setting whenever you hit a bump. So being the eternal wide-eyed optimist that I am, my first thought was "Well, they took my stereo, but at least now I can use my cupholders without them being annoying and messing with my music."

And that was when I noticed they were gone, and a single tear rolled down my cheek.

Of course, in tribute to both my eclectic musical tastes and the current age of internet downloads, the 2 dozen CDs sitting in the back seat were untouched, but at least they were nice enough to tear out my glove box as well, so that I found a bunch of old cool stuff I had tucked down in the bottom of it that I may never have found had they not been so nice as to do that for me.

And fortunately, this all happened but a few days before I have a nice 4.5 hour drive home for the holidays. Oh, and the drivers-side seat in the car is broken so that if you lean any weight on it, it just falls over. I guess what I'm saying, is that it's a traditional Wozniak Christmas this year.

Quality down-home video production

Two great friends of the blog have recently finished a couple of great video shorts and got them up on youtube. I know the ol' tube has gotten a great deal less fun now that they've removed all of the copy-righted materials from the site, but this is the original reason it was invented anyway: for friends to show off their ridiculous video projects to those who live far away. Enjoy the finest Iowa has to offer below. I would suggest viewing the Ritz if you only have a moment, but even though Meatsloaf is about 9 minutes long, they will most likely be 9 of the best minutes of your day.

Enjoy!

The Ritz:


Meatsloaf:

Students say the darndest things...

I tried posting this before, but I've found that one of the new and improved features of the stupid new beta blogger that they made me upgrade to is that it no longer works on Macs, which is very convenient when all you have at home is a Mac. Yep, it's definitely a huge upgrade. Why is it that people can never leave well enough alone? Why are we constantly getting pointless upgrades that serve only to make life more of a hassle? Ah, but before I sound like too much of an elderly curmudgeon, on with the post I originally wrote at home and then was published as a blank entry.

I recently finished grading somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 term papers, which was not a task I looked forward to, for many reasons. There's the obvious reason that I don't particularly enjoy spending a solid week doing basically nothing but reading student papers. But more so than that, I was scared of the papers themselves. I've graded papers before, both as an undergrad and a grad student, so I was long ago disabused of the notion that college students can write. For example, in the short essays on their midterm, this was a popular response:

Question: Define the term "secret deviance"

Answer: Secret deviance is deviance that is secret.

Brilliant! You know, when you read things like this, it's almost insulting. I mean, did they really think a response like this would garner them many points? Well, everything garners some points, because I'm a softie, but not very many. It kind of blows the mind. What was the thought process? Were students sitting their thinking "All right, I wrote the word down again and added two more words and made a sentence out of it. I nailed it!"?

Well, it turns out the term papers were much, much better. Though I'm sure some sort of ethics code prevents me from reprinting any portion of them here, I wish I could, as they were some pretty amazing essays. The assignment was to write about your own deviant career over the years and do the obligatory sociological explanation of it all. But what these folks wrote about was pretty amazing. Many of the students in the class have been through so much more than I'll ever see, and they seem to have come out of it pretty well.

So I guess that's the trade-off for academia--spending all weekend grading papers instead of having fun, but ending up with much more faith in humanity. I guess I'll take that.

Help stop military recruiters in the Twin Cities

Those plucky young Youth Against War and Racism (YAWR) kids are back at it again. This time, they're making a concerted effort to get military recruiters out of their high schools, or at least to limited their currently unfettered access to students.

But they can't do it alone! That's where you come in.

Central High students have been campaigning for over a year now to get military recruiters out of their school, but recruiters have no far only stepped up their presence. That's why the Central High chapter of Youth Against War and Racism is making the following demands on the principal, school board, and superintendent:

1) Restrict military recruiters to the Career Resource Center and prevent any unsupervised contact with students.
2) Stop military recruiters coming to Central more often than any other post-secondary or job recruiting program actually comes.
3) Ensure that YAWR gets seven days notice before recruiters can enter school grounds.

Central High students presented these demands to the last meeting of the St.
Paul Board of Education, and what we're asking you to do is to join with us to hold the Board accountable to address our demands at the next school board meeting on December 19th. Here's what YOU can do:

1) Show up to the meeting at 6:30 pm on December 19th and show your support. The meeting is located in the District Administration Building at 360 Colborne Street in St. Paul.
2) Send out an announcement to your friends asking others to come show support.
3) Write the school board, principal, and superintendent a letter expressing your endorsement of these demands and send us a copy at against.war@gmail.com so we're aware of it.

Here is the contact information for the various officials:

Superintendent Meria J. Carstarphen
Administration Building, 360 Colborne St., St. Paul, MN 55102
supt.carstarphen@spps.org

Principal Mary Mackbee
Central Senior High School, 275 Lexington Pkwy., St. Paul, MN 55104
mary.mackbee@spps.org

Board of Education (and all members)
360 Colborne St., St. Paul, MN 55102

Individual board members' e-mails:

Elona Street-Stewart, Chair - elona.street-stewart@spps.org
Tom Conlon, Clerk - thomas.conlon@spps.org
Anne Carroll, Director - anne.carroll@spps.org
Al Oertwig, Director - al.oertwig@spps.org
Kazoua Kong-Thao, Vice-Chair - kazoua.kong-thao@spps.org
John Brodrick, Treasurer - john.brodrick@spps.org
Tom Goldstein, Director - tom.goldstein@spps.org

To contact Central High YAWR, call Shane Davis at 651-587-6923 or e-mail shane89@gmail.com

Am I the luckiest man alive?

Last night after a good rowdy couple of hours of socialism, the comrades and I headed to the bar as per tradition. And while there's always bar trivia going on, I've always just been content to shout out the answers at random, thereby either helping those who didn't know it, or hurting those who did and were hoping that others didn't. Or, on the rare occasion when I was wrong, doing the exact opposite. Regardless, I'm sure it just served to annoy everyone, and I'm cool witht hat.

But last night, I thought it was time to put my hat in the ring and prove that I could play more than the spoiler. And wouldn't you know it, me and 3 comrades, also known as Team Totally Tubular Radical...to the Max (the first round of questions were 80s themed), took home the championship amongst some stiff competition.

The prize? A Miller High Life t-shirt. Now, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't drink High Life if you paid me, just because I've neevr typically enjoyed horse piss. And I certainley don't want to wear some stupid dude-bro-esque beer shirt, but this one I will wear with pride, for it marks me as champion of trivial knowledge.


The Miller High Life girl raises her glass to the champions of trivia

Call me crazy...

but I believe the toaster is the laziest appliance in the house

The healthiest state in the Union

The United Health Foundation has just ranked Minnesota the healthiest state in the Union for the fourth year in a row.

We were discussing this today in class when Uggen made the point that Minnesota continually ranks so high because we are one the best states at insuring everyone, although we’re still far behind where we should be.

I’m not a Minnesotan by birth, though I’ve got plenty of connections and now live here. And even though I’m not typically one to be very rah-rah about anything a government does at pretty much any point (I know, I know…so cynical at such a young age), but I must share the Gunnar Nelson Look-Alike contest winner’s opinion that it does fill one with a fair amount of pride in their little corner of the earth to have such distinctions heaped upon them.

It’s not a unicorn…

It’s a horse with a sword on his head and he protects my hopes and dreams


Although I actually have a fondness for unicorns (my moonshine is labeled “Uncle Jesse’s Unicorn Shine”…and I still sleep with a stuffed unicorn I’ve had since childhood…and, well that’s enough about my unicorns), I too have felt the sting of having one’s fragile masculinity attacked for keeping a journal.

But all that aside, lately I’ve been wondering what my journal says about me. I mean, I lead a fairly interesting life. I’m not exactly climbing mountains, but it’s not a too rare occurrence for the FBI to wake me up in the morning, and I always seem to end up in the oddest situations. Which I understand doesn’t necessarily mean I have a very interesting life, but I think it’s fair to say that semi-interesting stuff happens to me on semi-regular occasion.

Anyhoo, the point is that none of this is reflected in my journal. Leafing through it out of boredom the other day, I realized I have basically nothing in there except for women-related things. Like if I’m having girl troubles, or I run into an ex, or some such thing. Like that’s all that happens in my life.

So I got to thinking: what does this say about me? Reading it I just had the most horrible feeling about myself, like I’m an over-weight secretary with a hunky firemen calendar up on my cubicle wall that goes home every night and cries herself to sleep with a carton of ChunkyMonkey and wishes she wasn’t always just a bridesmate.

Well, ok, maybe I’m not quite that bad, but I do need to get out of the house more often…

Peace: 42, Giant Evil Weapons Manufacturer : 0

Very short court day yesterday, as all charges were dropped before we even got in front of a judge. But the victory was much larger than that.

As for the background of the story, Alliant Tek Systems, headqurtered inEdina (of course, very little manufacturing actually goes on there, it's just a nice tax-haven location), is the world's leading producer of illegal weaponry. For instance, they were the clever folks who "discovered" how deadly depleted uranium was and began using it in weapons that vaporize the enemy and leave their nation poisoned for the rest of existence (DU has a half-life of 4.5 billion years). Up until this, people had been foolishly throwing it away. Silly idiots.

But that's just one of many weapons they produce. But the one great point of consistency in their productions is that every weapon they produce is illegal under international law. Every single one. And we're the criminals...but that's another story.

Anyway, over 13 months ago (so much for a speedy trial), myself and 41 other people who are part of AlliantAction showed up at the corporate headquarters to ask the board of directors to stop breaking the law and to tell the employees that they are all facing conviction under the Geneva code (remember, since the 40s you can't just say you're following orders anymore). Needless to say, they weren't too happy with us being there and removed us from the parking lot (we couldn't actually get inside the building, of course).

Now, in a bit of local history, up until this point, the offense had been an aggravated misdemeanor, which meant you could get a jury trial if you so well pleased. Now the problem with that is that hippies tend to be good orators (it's about all we can do), and juries have a pesky problem of being swayed by "logic" and "compassion for fellow human beings." So Alliant, along with the city council, changed the ordinance to be a simple misdemeanor, meaning we could now only have a bench trial. Judges aren't really as easily swayed, since they're on the payroll of the city, which is on the payroll of Alliant.

Well, since they were playing hardball, so were we. Usually in a situation like this, people such as us will stipulate to the facts, which essentially means we admit we broke the law, but we're arguing that we're justified in doing so. Well, this time we refused and said they'd have to subpoena every employee who saw us tresspass and every officer who made an arrest to come in and identify us. Well, seeing as they would have to pay 20-some officers overtime for what looked like a trial that could stretch several weeks, they cited monetary constraints (although they probably just didn't have a good case) and dropped the charges.

Not ones to give up, we have now set up a page on the group's website where we'll print the testimony we would have given, and the city prosecutor has agreed to take our concerns to Alliant and urge them to come to a city council meeting where we air our greivances.

Now, I know this will change very little, but you can do radical pacifist peace work your entire life and never get the city prosecutor of a wealthy suburb to (begrudgingly) agree to put the screws on the most powerful corporation in town. As far as I'm concerned, this is probably the biggest victory I'll ever see in my lifetime of activism, so I'm feeling pretty damned good right now.

So, hey, cheer up my friends. If we can win this, certainly you can win just as much, if not more.

The only way to defeat our robot over-lords

With this perfect paradox:

P1: The statement is only funny if said by Sinbad.

P2: Nothing Sinbad says is funny.

Q: If the statement is said, will it be funny?

Man, their fucking logical robot brains would explode with the implications of even attempting to answer that question

My life at the kiddie table

Another Thanksgiving come and gone, and I've yet to sit at the big people table, but I get ahead of myself. You see, Thanksgiving has always been celebrated on my mother's side of the family. My father was the oldest of the three boys, and only one of them had a child, and he has since passed away (God rest his soul), and the other is a bit of a recluse, only available to you when he wants to be available. As such, it would have been a rather cozy affair.

My mother, on the other hand, was the youngest of 9 children, almost all of whom had children of their own. I, being her youngest child, am the youngest of the whole lot. Hell I have cousins who have children who are only a few years younger than me. These second cousins, or cousins twice removed, or whatever they are are even starting to have their own children, so these third cousins twice removed (does anyone know how they actually figure out these labels?), these gradnchildren of my cousins, are already coming. So I'm not the youngest person present, but young by my family's standards.

As such, I've yet to make it to the big people's table. At 24 years old, I'm still stuck sitting in a plastic half-chair, awkwardly eating my turkey at a table my knees don't fit under, with the sparkling conversation only infants and their angry young parents can provide.

Now my brother is only 2.5 years older than me, but he avoids all of this mess because he's married, which grants him some level of maturity, so gets big people table access. Even his wife, who I would like to point out is younger than me, also gets big peopple table love.

Now, as I've posted many times before, I was dangerously close to getting married at one point in time, and I as I contorted my body to fit on the oddly shapped couch that was by bed in my aunt's basement while my brother and his wife slept comfortably in a bed upstairs in the part fo the house that the central heat hits, I pondered how different my life would be if that had happened.

Would I be conferred all the legitimacy of an elder if I only had the social marker of marriage to do the work for me? I highly doubt I'd actually be any more mature. In fact, I could probably argue pretty effectively that marrying your college sweetheart serves only to stunt your emotional growth, but it seems like regardless of your age, married people are just assumed to be more mature and well-adjusted people. After all, they got someone to agree to spend their life with them didn't they?

So, anyway, I do't know if it would have made any difference, or if it would have even gotten me to the big people table, but you do start to wish you hadn't screwed up the one good relationship you've ever had, if for no other reason that it means you get off of the couch and into a real bed.

Let's Hear it for the Boy

Yesterday, the Baseball Writers Association of America named Canada's finest export, Justin Morneau, the Most Valuable Player of the American League, in what's sure to be one of the most controversial votes in a while, if not for the fact that it was given to a player on a team that's *gasp* not on the coast, then because Joe Buck's Boyfriend, a mildly talented player on a very expensive team, was denied his lifetime-acheivement MVP.

Now I don't need to point out that the good Doctor was the singular ofensive spark on the team with by-far the best record in baseball after June 8th, or that I'm sure that somewhere in the city right now Joe is taking him out for some congratulatory Jimmy Johns, because these are things everyone knows.

A lesser known story goes that when Justin met Larry Walker (the only other Canadian-born player to win an MVP) this year at the World Baseball Classic, Larry autographed a bat for him reading "To Justin: Make Canada proud." Justin lists as one of the greatest moments of his life. Perhaps someday soon, a young Canadian will be fondly remembering the time he got to meet the best Canadian player in Baseball, and the long line of cuddly-looking Canadian baseball players will be unbroken.

So to recap the Twins' season:

2 Silver Sluggers
1 Gold Glover
Batting champ
Pitching triple crown winner
Cy Young winner
MVP
Division title

Not a bad season for a team that was left for dead after May and whose entire payroll is outearned by over 20 individual players in the league. Now let's just hope we can get some starting pitching nailed down for next year.

Our boy on the Daily Show

Minnesota's newly-minted congressman Keith Ellison was recently on the Daily Show in one of the funnier clips I've seen in a long time. The clip is actually of an interview that Ellison had with CNN's Glenn Beck, in which Beck (presumably a liberal, becuase CNN is the leader of the liberal media) challenges Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress, to prove that he isn't a terrorist.

To his credit, Ellison handles it well, with a brief response and a "did-he-really-just-fucking-say-that?" look on his face, but it can't help but make you feel a little depressed about the state of our nation when it is actually seen as legitimate journalism to make a U.S. Representative prove he's not a terrorist simply because of his religion.

I'd like to come up with some sort of snappy joke about it, but as usual, Mr. Stewart does a much better job than I could in the clip below:

Humorous random image

Immy-grants and me

I've never been one to bash un-documented immigrants, for the thousands of reasons anyone using "logic" can come up with. But over the past 8 months, I've gained an even deeper appreciation for why folks who want to come to our fair nation would be inclined to bypass the official process.

The word Kafka-esque is thrown around a lot these days (isn't it?), but if you have ever dealt with immigration in any way, you'll know what I mean. If you haven't, watch Brazil, and then you'll begin to understand what it's like dealing with the INS.

To put it all in context, my brother came back from Thailand last spring with a fiance. Since he works a real job and can't always be shuttling her back and forth to the immigration office, (conveniently located in Burnsville, because we all know how common it is for recent immigrants to own dependable vehicles) this fell upon me. Highlights include the day they canceled the application process because they forgot to send her a letter telling her about her next appointment, which she then didn't show up for for some reason (probably because she didn't know about it), and then sent her files to storage in D.C., even though they are not supposed to do that until 2 months after closing the file. So who do you think was responsible for paying the $150 fee to retrieve the files that shouldn't have been sent off in the first place, and even if they were supposed to be sent off, should not have been sent for at least another 45 days? At least, in their defense, we also got an extended stern lecture about how their mistake was somehow entirely our fault.

I could tell many more such ridiculous stories, but it would take years to document them. All told, it took my parents, my brother, my sister-in-law, and myself (total number of college degrees held between us: 12) two years and well over $2,000 to complete the application process for a greencard.

But it all came to culmination today as Nok finally received her 2-yr. green card, not more than 15 minutes ago.

Of course, that means that in 2 years we have to start the process all over again, but for now, we can at least breathe a sigh of relief and relax for a minute.

But do me a favor, will you? The next time you hear someone complain about "illegal" immigrants, punch them in the face for me, please.

I know what you're trying to do, you bastards

In google's contuining attempt to own the entire damn internet, they have even infected my humble li'l blogging site. In logging in, I was informed that I could now enhance my blog with all these cool and easy to use features (presumably, slicing and dicing a variety of fruits, vegetables, leather shoes, and exhaust pipes while staying razor sharp is included), and the only requirement is that I "log in with [my] google account."

Well you know what, motherfuckers, I ain't got a google account. So don't go acting all normal like I don't suspect that what you hide as an innocent assumption is really a brilliantly devious way to get me to sign up for yet another account I don't want/need.

No thank you, google jerks. I'll continue using the shitty, hard-to-use, featureless version to blog, thank you very much.

Making football more (or less) interesting

In my continuing efforts to be "with it" and understand what all the damn kids are talking about these days, I finally joined a fantasy football league this year, making me possibly the last person in America to do so.

Now, I was already a big football fan. I usually take less credit hours in the fall because I know I'm not going to get anything done on the weekends, despite my best efforts. If there' football on the t.v., I'm just going to be watching it. It's a sad truth. Though, at least I haven't started spending friday nights watching high-school game telecasts on pblic access...yet.

But fantasy football makes you a fan in weird, unpredictable ways. I've found that the attention on single-player performances instead of teams has this weird double effect. In one way, it makes the game so much more exciting. Take last night for instance, in a game I could not care too much less about (seeing as if the Vikings get anywhere near the playoffs this year, it won't be in the form of catching the Bears and winning the division), I was ecstatic seeing Devin Hester tie Nathan Vasher's record for the longest TD in NFL history. Why? Because in my league, special teams TDs count as defensive points, and my normally stout Bears D had given up too many points this week. Especially in light of how I sat out Chad Johnson on the best damn day any receiver is ver going to have because he had been underperforming lately.

So as you can see, fantasy sports makes the other 14 games that don't feature your team more exciting. But the it hit me when my mother (an avid Packers fan) called to brag about the local game. I realized I had absolutely no clue how bad the Vikings were this year. A team without a marketable superstar is useless to fantasy owners, and so I had been paying the amount of attention they deserved: none.

This from a guy who used to be able to name both starters and first-string backups for both sides of the ball, and now I don't even know their record.

It's an interesting paradox, but one that I think will be resolved by the fact that the high scoring 612 Murda Squad is very likely to make the playoffs and put a big ol' payout in my pocket, whereas the hapless Vikings will be lucky to stumble backwards into a first-round playoff loss.

Meanwhile, the countdown to July 27th has officially begun...

Which old witch? The wicked witch!

I know this doesn't change anything at all, but he's finally gone, and damned if it doesn't feel good.

Feelin' on your duty

You can vote today, probably. And if you can, you probably should.

Just remember that voting is such a miniscule part of the political process that it should largely be viewed as a formality one does during breaks in trying to make actual change.

Today would also be the anniversary of the day when two Caroline Panthers cheerleaders were caught (allegedly) making out and fighting in a bathroom stall.

I'm not too sure how to connect these two phenomena, but they seem to go together in some odd way...

The "hard" sciences ruin everything

We in the "social" sciences are often looked upon as not real scientists. We're told that wat we do is play around with social settings, not cold, hard, "real" science. Now, obviously anybody with critical thinking skills (which would exclude most of those in the "hard" sciences) knows that this is simply not true. We can test social "reality" (if such a thing exists) just as well as physicists can test physical "reality" (again, if such a thing exists).

Think about it: design a test to prove gravity exists. I mean, we all know gravity exists, but can you prove it? No, you can't. You're probably thinking you can just pick something up and let it go a bunch of times and be done with it. But that doesn't prove gravity exists, it just suggests that for some reason that object is attracted to the ground. For the record, physicists still doesn't even know whay gravity works like it does (my personal favorite idea is string theory, and not just for its trippy, scientist-hippy implications).

The point is, you can no more criticise sociologists for saying that the effects of class are real even though we can't technically prove that classes exist or how they're reproduced (though we have some damn good ideas) any more than you can say gravity doesn't exists beause physicists can't technically prove it does or figure out why it works (though they too have some good ideas on the subject).

So, to recap: the "social" sciences are no less of a persuit than the "hard" sciences.

In fact, I'd like to suggest they're better. Take the case of vampires. You ask a sociologist about vampires, and we'll give you a great tale perhaps of the functions the notion of the existance of vampires might serve, or a reading of the cultural schemas that give birth to ideas of vampires, or possibly a meditation on the social forces that lead people to still give such power to the idea of vampires. That's just the tip of the iceberg. I'm sure other sociologists would give many other explanations and stories I can't even begin to think of.

But you ask a "hard" scientist about vampires, and you get some lame-ass description of how they'remathematically impossible.

Now where the hell is the fun in that?