Meet the Editorial Committee

[Clockwise from lower left are August Mallory, Wes Browning, Jihad Salaam, Joe Howard, Teresa Reeves, Mary T Andrews, and Anitra Freeman.]

Well, meet some of it anyway. People wonder how Real Change newspapers are put together. There's an editorial department, run by our editorial manager Amy Roe, and including two reporters and a production assistant. Many volunteer writers accept assignments and some submit unsolicited work, which we consider. In addition to all that there's the editorial committee, or the "EC."

The idea of the EC is to provide grassroots input to the paper's content. All interested readers of the paper may apply. The principal activity of the committee is to brainstorm story ideas for future issues. So the main qualification to be accepted as a member is an ability to work well with others while bringing ideas to the table.

Currently the EC has 13 members, of which 8 are fully active vendors, 2 are semi-active vendors, and one (me!) is a highly inactive ex-vendor. (I was highly inactive when I was a vendor, too.) In this particular meeting 7 of us were on hand.

Besides brainstorming, the EC also spends a little time in each meeting looking through the most recent paper for errors that might need correcting, or stories that suggest follow-up.

Then, every month or so, we go over those unsolicited submissions I mentioned above. These are confidential sessions. A volunteer has previously blanked out the author's names on the submissions, so that we can vote to accept or reject blindly. Our acceptance is provisional -- the editorial manager makes the final decision.

This particular meeting was almost all brainstorming. Ideas batted around the table involved an upcoming anniversary of the Frye Hotel, a future guide to being homeless for the first time, a death on the street in Ballard, the relationships between panhandlers and vendors, an upcoming "carve-in," activities of neo-Nazi and similar organizations in the area, and the effects of budget cuts on ex-offender services.

Meetings are currently 2:30 to 4pm Thursdays in the Real Change vendor room, 96 S Main St. Guests and applicants are welcome the last Thursday of every month. Real Change vendors have preference and may apply at any meeting.

Donald Lambert

Video Find of the Day

I really just wanted a decent version of Anitra's Dance from Peer Gynt. I found this one, from the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival. Terrible video, terrible audio, but you get the idea. This guy couldn't read music, but he was a genius.

Donald Lambert - "Anitra's Dance"

Tolerable Sea Chantey

Video Find of the Day

I'm watching the 1956 Gregory Peck movie version of Moby Dick with Anitra, so I am motivated to find another sea chantey video for her that I can stand. This one is quite tolerable, in no small part due to the fact that the video is 40% over before any of the singing commences.

Makem & Clancy - Leave Her Johnny

Anitra's Tomatoes

Anitra's tomatoes are awesome. I just want to share that fact.

Some other plants. I don't know what they are.

A view of most of the garden.

Anitra's Other Baby

Besides the Union garden, Anitra "With the Lettuce in Her Hair" Freeman also maintains the decorative plants in the entrance-way to the thrift store next-door to the Union. They're pretty. Click on the image to see them in more detail. This image has not been Photoshopped, except to reduce its size.

Anitra's Baby

A view of Union Hotel Garden, worked mostly by Anitra, from above:

Here's another shot of it from the side. Click on it for a bigger version. Kale, sugar pod peas, nasturtiums. We've been eating the nasturtiums, they're yummy. The garden is 70 square feet, roughly in the form of a right triangle, about 10 feet and 14 on its sides.

King Jr., St. John, Nietzsches, and Me

Doing It, Religiously

[Above: Russian nesting dolls originated in the 19th Century. They were inspired by earlier Japanese dolls that depicted nested series of Japanese gods -- a polytheistic image.]

Anitra and I spoke Friday at Tim Harris' University of Washington class on poverty and homelessness. After the class, Tim drove me back to the Real Change office while Anitra ran off to spend all her money on tomato plants. In the car Tim played the recording (see A True Revolution of Values) he made of himself backing up Martin Luther King Jr.'s Riverside Speech on the guitar.

The speech contains this passage:

"This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:

Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us."

The call for love is great, but at the risk of once again prompting the question "So, Wes, when did you first decide to worship Satan?" (answer: The first time some idiot asked me that question) I am going to heap disrespect upon the monotheological underpinnings of King's call to fellowship and offer a polytheistic perspective.

Consider this a continuation of my rant, begun with Extremes of Worship, in which I complained about the notion that all religions are fundamentally the same, that we all worship the same God, blah, blah, blah. Notions that invariably disregard whole swaths of hard-core polytheists.

Oh sure, King is fine with Hindus and Buddhists, as long as they agree with him in the existence of an ultimate reality. But he would compare to "Nietzsches of the world" anyone who doesn't buy into that ultimate reality, and guess who those people include? Me. And I'm not a Nietzsche of the world.

King supports his view with a quote from St. John, the same guy (?) who put the words "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" into Christ's mouth. Way to kiss up to the non-Christians. Not.

My own polytheistic view, (not to be confused with all of them, which is an undelimitable generality of no significant application) is at odds with all the great religions of human-kind but nevertheless still ends up agreeing with the call to love, is that there is no ultimate reality.

In fact, a large class of the gods can be identified with the individual realities "on the shelf."

Realities are narratives about what is, and decide what is. The decisions as to what is are mindful. Without mind there is no what is. There is no reality.

There is no singular ultimate mind. There are minds and states of minds and realities, plural. There are realities within realities, gods within gods. There are realities that are unstable, that transform into other realities, which transform into others.

The gods (of this class) are metaphors for these realities, or they are these realities. The distinction doesn't matter, since the word "god" is totally up for grabs since nobody else ever gives it a legitimate definition anyway. (A legitimate definition being one which allows you to identify whether an entity is a god or not, as opposed to naming an entity that is presumed to exist, declaring it to be unique, and listing attributes.)

So where does that put us? No ultimate reality, so Martin Luther King Jr.s call for love, in so far as it's based on a presumed ultimate reality that doesn't exist, is BS.

John's assertion that Love is God, becomes, to the polytheist, Love is A god.

So how can I still agree with King?

The answer is that even though polytheists do not believe in any ultimate reality, we are not thereby forced to be naive relativists, granting equal value to all that calls itself value in any reality that comes down the road.

I am NOT Nietzschean! In spite of sharing some superficial similarities. I use exclamation points and short one and two sentence paragraphs, yes, but there are such things as Wes realities distinct from Nietzsche realities. I am someone else.

[Right: Not me.]

My realities have grown out of my life, and I have been my realities, and I, or rather my realities, have chosen how we were to grow, and we (the realities that I consist of) have histories and dynamics and we grow into each other and we have identities within identities, and we can own ourselves and what we are.

The outcome is, I can agree with King not because God is within me, but because THAT god is one of me, and I have chosen to embrace it.

The difference between the polytheist decision to embrace a god and the monotheistic decision to embrace that aspect of The God, is the difference between a free choice (modulo the understanding that we are our choices) among alternatives and a decision to surrender to an irresistible power.

The god of love is NOT an all-powerful god. It IS weak, as the "Nietzsches of the world" would have it. But I differ from the Nietzsches of the world in that I consciously take the side of this weak god over stronger ones, to add my strength to it. Weak, yes, cowardly, no.

[Below: Cat-gods within cat-gods.]

Angry Grandpa Look

Video Find of the Day

Tuesday, a bunch of us from the Real Change Organizing project (RCOP) and friends went to a meeting of the Public Safety, Human Services, and Education committee of the Seattle City Council, and spoke during the public comment period. Committee chair Tim Burgess was very generous with the time, letting us speak nearly 20 minutes, twice the time we were supposed to have.

[Above: Anitra tells 'em what for.]

When we planned it, we planned two designated speakers who would use time reserved by others in the group. Apparently that's how its done for other council meetings, but we found out they don't do it like that at the old PSHS&E so we adapted on the fly, and instead of two speak long, eleven of us took turns at it, trying to cover all the points we had previously discussed.

I can't or don't know how to embed the video, but I will have a link to it below. It's at the Seattle Channel website for now and will probably be there for at least a few months.

The whole video runs over 2 hours and 40 minutes. I've only seen the first 23 minutes of it that has the public comment period. I'll be wanting to look at some of the rest of it, because it should have some comments by Bill Block on the Ten Year Plan to Plan Planfulness, and I'm sure I would benefit from seeing that.

Some notes regarding the public comment portion:

The public comments start at about 2:30 (2 minutes 30 seconds) on the video.

The first guy who speaks about his proposal, to put to death 4 time drug crime convicts, is not one of our group. We never saw him before in our lives. All the other speakers came in with us.

The first RCOP speaker is vendor Michael Garcia, at around the 4:50 mark. He was one of the two original speakers we had intended to take all our time. Burgess let him run longer than the two minutes alloted. I was next on the list but deferred as planned to my woman, Anitra Freeman, who was our other designated speaker, and that was when Tim Burgess said they don't do things that way. So Anitra adjusted by giving a shorter speech than anticipated, although it still went over two minutes. She starts about 7:20. You should definitely see that part, because you don't always get to see Anitra so angry in public.

After that they ran through the list of the others of us who had signed up. Each person spoke around a minute or two. When the list was used up Burgess let others who hadn't signed up also speak. That included Real Change Director Tim Harris who appears at about 18:30.

Doug McKeehan follows Tim, and I rounded up the lot of us, speaking last at around the 21:00 mark for a mere one minute 15 seconds. For Cindy Holly is my Muse, and she is the Muse of Few Words. It may look like I'm reading a script but the paper in my hand is just a crossword puzzle I was working on. My eyes are lowered because I'm channeling a scolding grumpy grandpa.

[Above: Grandpa is very, very, disappointed with the behavior of you children.]

For the record, and to make up for not bringing the mic up closer, here's a transcript of my off-the-cuff remarks with the "uhs" and "ahs" deleted, and with some attempts at added clarity:

"I would like to agree with Tim -- I think that the protocols are illegitimate.There's [been] no input from the community that is affected by the rules. The rules of [a] government should reflect the participation of the people that are ruled over."

"Also, there's a lot of secrecy involved in this. We didn't even know about the protocols that were originally established until months after they were established, and we found out because of a FOIA -- by using the Freedom of Information Act -- and that's outrageous. That we're talking about it now at all is because we raised hell about that [forcing the administration to revisit the protocols in a more public way.]"

"And there's still secrecy involved. We don't know how many people have been swept in all of this [or how many camps.] We haven't been able to get that information. I think the City Council has an obligation to make sure that the secrecy ends."

The video is here.

Alone Again

Video Find of the Day

What did I just get done talking about? Sore throat, pain, canker sores, endless agony? So what does Anitra sweetheart do? She takes off for PORTLAND for THREE DAYS in MY TIME OF NEED. I reminded her of the only Kenny Rogers song I could stand to hear repeatedly. I told her I'd be posting this.

kenny rogers -- lucille

I'm a Non-Buddhist, Too

I had a free ticket to see the Dalai Lama at Seattle's Qwest Field. I gave it away to do my Saturday job selling papers to vendors, so as not to require a mad last minute search for a substitute for me. Many vendors went, as did the beloved Anitra (worst vendor ever, in terms of sales) and fellow "editor" Cecil the Vendor, who together reported back to me at the end of the day over fish and chips.

According to their reports and others, what I missed was a crowd of 50,000, speeches from politicians obviously trying to cash in on The Lama's good image, very bad acoustics (the word used most often was reverb) which added to The Lama's accent made for a largely incomprehensible speech. This is what I expected, which was why I wasn't too sad about not getting to go.

What I didn't miss was a lovely exchange with an avid Christian (I'll call him AC) back in the office before the whole thing.

While a dozen or so vendors were gathering at the office to get their free tickets and bus down to the event together, AC was showing off his hand-made cross and making it very well understood that although he was going to see a Buddhist, HE was a Christian. He was being so clear and vocal about his Christianity, in contrast to what the Dalai Lama is, that I started to wonder why he was going. How would he be able to hear, even with perfect acoustics? He must not be going for the purpose of hearing.

He got into a discussion with another fellow "editor" Stan Burriss, who got the benefit of the ticket I would have used. In the course of the discussion AC plied Stan for his religious faith, and Stan told him he was Christian. Then Stan pointed to Anitra and said if you're looking for a non-Christian, talk to her, or words to that affect. This illustrates one of Stan B's problems. Anitra has told him many times she counts herself Christian, but he always forgets each time within the hour.

So as Anitra and Stan left early, she called back to AC and said, she's a Christian -- it's her husband sitting behind the desk there that's the non-Christian.

Just great. It's like the Cavalry is at the teepee and the Captain says, "Any Injuns in there?" and my squaw says "I'm Danish. You're probably looking for my husband. I'll fetch him out." It's like Columbo is at the door, and says, "I just have a few questions to ask," and my woman says, "Oh I'm not good at questions, I'll get you my husband. He can be out as soon as he finishes cleaning the blood off his butcher knife." Way to go, Anitra. Good teamwork.

Truly I kid, but sure enough, after a break in vendor activity a few minutes later meant AC could have my undivided attention, he sat directly across from me and said, "So, what's your beef with Christianity?"

I wanted to tell him that the only beef I have with Christianity is that way too many Christians think that is a decent question. All he knows at this point is that I'm non-Christian, he doesn't know what I am, I haven't expressed any animosity toward his religion, he hasn't done me the formal courtesy of asking about mine, and if he did I couldn't explain it to him in less than a week. I didn't say any of that. I said, "I don't have a beef with Christianity. I just am what I am. Why do you have a beef with what I am?" To that he said he didn't have a beef, he loved me, he loves everybody, I was his Brother, etc.

But he does have a beef with non-Christians, because he sees them universally as rejecting his God, and isn't interested in who they are.

During the debriefing Cecil said that as the Dalai Lama appeared AC shouted something like "JESUS WALKED ON WATER!"

So my suspicion was right. He didn't go to hear.

Me Bad

Above is a scan of a certificate signed and mailed to me by Seattle Minister Rick Reynolds, director of Operation Nightwatch, pictured at left wearing what is undoubtedly an imported stole made by Central Americans willing to work all day for one US dime so they can eat meat once a week and eventually send their kids to school wearing shoes, instead of naked. If you can't read what the arrow is pointing to, clicking on the image will get you a larger more legible version.

Having never actually used a shelter during any of the times I've been homeless, owing to the PTSD and all, I had no idea of the protocol involved. I thought if I didn't show up to Rick Reynold's tent on time he would just wedge someone else into it in my place.

I've already attempted to excuse myself on Rick Reynold's blog. Here's what happened: Anitra, not I, asked if we could sleep in Pastor Rick's tent at the City Hall camp out on Thursday. He said OK. We had no agreed-upon ETA. After the dinner though, I wanted to go home and nap in a real bed and watch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report before camping. After all, I'm too old to lie on concrete for a whole 15 hours. I thought 8 or 9 hours would be sufficient. Besides, I had to go home to get my stuffed skunk and change into my ninja-homeless-camper costume.

Here's the very bad thing Anitra and I did. We forgot to tell Pastor Rick we'd be back after midnight. Then, when we got back and were ready to crash, we were sorry, because we didn't know if Pastor Rick and the other clergy in his tent were asleep or not.

Oh, the moral dilemma! On the one hand, I desperately wanted to wake a bunch of clergy up and loudly set myself and my woman down amongst them, and prattle on for an hour or two about anything that crossed my mind. That is JUST the sort of thing I like to do to people! On the other hand, it's wrong to wake a sleeping minister. So we asked around and got into a tent with some other night people like ourselves.

I know now that my excuse is unacceptable and I earned the one-night bar that I have received. I will never violate shelter protocol ever again.

Boast: My Rice Wine Works

[Note: when I use the word hooch, I don't mean distilled hooch.]

My rice wine works!

My first batch wouldn't even ferment. I threw it out when it grew mold. My second tasted the best, but it was an alcoholic dud. I now know what I did wrong. I let my yeasties breathe.

I now suffocates my yeasties always. I puts a lid on 'em and I puts a pillow on top of the lid.

I made batch #3 four days ago. It was beautiful. A full 45 ounces of creamy white rice wine brewed from what started as 4 cups of raw glutinous rice. But I was fearful. How would it taste? Would I dare drink it? I tasted a drop. I dared not drink more.

Batch #4 was done this morning. It was made with raisins as well as rice. I thought, surely, it would taste better.

My assessment: The rice wine with raisins tastes like NyQuil would have tasted at the factory before the flavoring was added to make it palatable. I returned to the raisin free batch and tasted it again, to see how it compared. It was not so good.

But then I realized I had a box of sugar. What the hell, it works for NyQuil. So I added two teaspoons of sugar to a glass of batch #3. I could drink it! I had another sweetened glass. And another.

And it worked! I made real hooch! The Wes Buzz-o-Meter says this stuff is 8% or higher!

I gave some of the sweetened hooch to Anitra. I said, "Don't you think it tastes better?"

Anitra said, "Better than what? Having steel wool scraped across my tongue?"

Success! It works and Anitra won't touch it!

Anitra's Dance

Video Find of the Day

Naming babies can be a nightmare for some people. When my daughter was getting ready to be born my then-wife and the mother-to-be Kate and I didn't know her gender so we worked at finding both a boy's name and a girl's name we could agree on. If Elizabeth had been born a boy civil war may have ensued. We were never able to agree on a name for a boy. We only agreed on Elizabeth because it represented a compromise between Lisa (one of my top ten choices) and Beth (one of Kate's top ten choices). We agreed to let the girl choose which way she wanted to go with it as she got older. As it happened, Kate won that one.

Anitra, my current squeeze, was similarly a naming battleground when she was getting born. Her Father of Danish ancestry wanted her to have a Danish name. Her Mother, fearing "Olga", "Oluffa", "Hellfried", or "Hildeborg", not that there's anything wrong with any of those names, convinced Dad that Henrik Ibsen was Scandinavian enough (Anitra may correct me later, but as I recall the story she told him Ibsen was Danish rather than Norwegian) and that therefore the name "Anitra" (of a character in his play Peer Gynt) was Scandinavian enough. In spite of the fact that Ibsen just made it up to sound like a plausible name for a Bedouin woman to a Norwegian audience that wouldn't know Bedouin from Urdu.

Some of my wake selections have autobiographical import. The one I posted yesterday was a weak reference to time spent in Mexico as a child. This one, #16, is a clear, unmistakable, reference to the woman of my last ten and a half years. Of course we must also credit Edvard Grieg for providing the composition, glass for providing the raw materials, Crystal Harmony for playing the glass, and vitnetonline for posting it on YouTube.

Crystal Harmony Grieg Classical Collection - Anitra's Dance

New Year Resolutions

Resolved:

1. Before the end of 2008, the only alcoholic beverages I will be drinking will be hooch I make myself, no matter how horrid. If nothing else, I will save the Earth thereby, by only using recycled bottles.

2. The next time I am told I have an "attitude" I will not apologize. I will remind my accuser that the only people who don't have attitudes are those lacking frontal lobes. Then, I will tell them to stick their own, attitudes and frontal lobes and all, where the sun don't shine, and twist.

3. If one more of the morons the Downtown Emergency Service Center hires to work the front desk of my DESC-run subsidized apartment building calls me at 7 AM Sunday morning to tell me it's time for the fucking hot breakfast they always have every fucking Sunday morning, the breakfast that's always listed in the fucking Union Hotel calendar so anyone who can read or who has a medium-term memory can know about it, on my overly loud intercom which has no off-switch or volume control, I will sue them, DESC, and anybody else who crosses my path before I regain control. Bill Hobson's head will be in danger from me. He should go hide in Tumwater.

4. I will not eat Vaseline in 2008. (It's smart to make a few resolutions you're sure you can keep.)

5. I will vote for a presidential candidate who would not wage war on a country that has not attacked mine. I will vote for a presidential candidate who can form a sentence. I will vote for a
presidential candidate who doesn't decide how to run the country based on what "God" tells him to do when he puts on his jammies and prays real hard.

6. I will not frighten people on buses unduly.

7. Anitra says she wants to eat more vegetables. Since I'm the main cook in this family, therefore she wants me to prepare and eat more vegetables. Therefore, I will endeavor to buy, prepare and give her to eat, more vegetables.

8. I will surprise myself, by, I don't know, doing something I haven't thought of ever doing, yet. I will accomplish this by allowing myself to behave unexpectedly. (This should be easy, as I have had some practice.)

9. I will publish something on paper.

10. I will risk my neck again riding around on my scooter, the one which, when I last rode it, slammed me down on the pavement so hard I broke both arms. Good times, well worth it.

Cowardice Rules

Regarding the last post:

Ironically, just yesterday afternoon Anitra, who owes me big time, gifted me with a joint membership in the Madison Market Co-op. So I have a place to buy yeast at a monthly discount. All I have to do is plan ahead, so as not to run out of anything before dark.

I'd sue SaveWay if I could prove they were encouraging vigilantism with favors. But I doubt I could prove that on my own. I need other people who have had something like this happen to them to tell about it, to me or to Real Change.

We live in a police state. When oppression is routine, some cowardly people who don't want to be on the oppressed side are always going to be ready to join the oppressors. When the police rule, everyone is going to want to be the police, including the very street thugs that the citizenry has feared so much as to have let the police state happen in the first place.

What happened to me last night is just exactly what you'd expect to happen in a city that willingly allows downtown businesses to operate their own corp of bicycle cops unaccountable to citizens.

Seattle is a city, by and large, of cowards. Cowards who are afraid of even the sight of poor people in their midst. I've seen middle class Seattleites cross the street wide-eyed with fear, to avoid passing people on the sidewalks who look homeless. The city is now engaged in a war on the visible homeless, taking the war even to the places where they try to hide out of sight. It's appropriate that Greg Nickels is our Mayor. You want a coward to be a mayor of cowards.

Another irony is that over the last ten years that I've shopped at SaveWay I've caught them many times giving me the wrong change, and half those times were in my favor. The money I returned to them, because I didn't want what wasn't owed me, if totaled up, could have bought a couple of cases of honey jars.

I don't want what isn't owed me. I just want the America I was promised.

Land of the Free my ass. More like Land of the Cowards.

A New Jag & Boast

Anitra isn't the only one who has jags. Maybe the only one who has such intense jags, but I have jags, too. My new jag is learning to make my own bread.

I've only made unleavened bread until tonight. I wanted to start out slow to give myself a chance to get used to touching raw dough. I am very sensitive about sticking my hands in goop. I consider raw dough to be goop. I know it's clean goop, but goop is goop.

Tonight, only an hour ago, I made my first loaf of leavened bread. It was a rounded ten inch by five inch by two inch loaf of 100% whole wheat honey bread. Fresh and hot, it was like warm cake.

To make it I had to reduce the amounts by a third and adjust, because the recipe would have made too much to bake in my toaster oven. In spite of the adjustments it came out beautiful.

For that is how the gods dote upon me. They do give me more than I wish they would; I tremble in terror at how I might be required someday to repay them.

I share my glory with my ingredients, the Stone-Buhr whole wheat flour, the Mel-O Pure Honey which I stole from Anitra, the salt, the egg, the yeast, the olive oil, and the lukewarm water. Their sacrifice will surely be rewarded in the next life, perhaps with a mobile form, or appendages with which to scratch itches.

Balls For NASA

Like many geniuses I get more brilliant ideas than anyone can use. This is one of those, which came to me last night as I was making my way from the bed to the bathroom at 4 AM, half asleep. I noticed that, as always, there was an enormous amount of Anitra leavings everywhere. Anitra leavings consist of books, half-spent shampoo containers, boxes, both empty and half full, loose papers, pamphlets, pointy things, half pairs of shoes, containers of garden crud, her glasses, which could be anywhere at anytime (they have a smeared out wave function), all unlaundered clothes, and probably a composting worm or two, trying with all his might to compost all the other stuff.

I thought, "Gee, if there were no gravity forcing all of Anitra's stuff to the floor, she'd be able to leave things hanging up in the air, too, and fill the whole room to the ceiling with flotsam! As I tried to picture that, it occurred to me that except for the pointy things, which we DO NOT want floating, it wouldn't be so bad. You could push against the stuff to move around.

Then I remembered all the problems NASA has with weightlessness in space capsules and the space station. Consider this image of a typical astronaut sitting in the space shuttle in orbit around the earth. There's no reason for her to protect against collision up there. The odds of hitting something are miniscule, what with flying through what's mostly a vacuum, and if you did collide with something, a seatbelt wouldn't help -- you'd be creamed. So why is she wearing one?


Because floating loose about in the shuttle is a pain, that's why!

Notice, too, that there are no books or papers lying about that aren't nailed down. That's because if there were, they wouldn't lie about for long. They'd be floating around and getting in the way, taking up our professional astronauts' valuable time so they can't do the important astronauting we put them up there for.

So I had a brainstorm. Let's give the astronauts balls!

They would be clear plastic hollow balls. They would be lightweight. There would not be enough of them in the cabin to prevent the astronauts from moving around, but there would be just enough that the astronaut could push against them as an aid in controlling their own motion. The problem with trying to swim in air, as NASA has long known, is that air just slips away. It doesn't offer enough resistance. Molasses, on the other hand, supply no oxygen, but would go up the nose unwelcome anyway.

Plastic balls larger than anyone's nostrils would not go up noses! Also, balls do not poke people's eyes out, so that's why I'm recommending balls rather than scissors, steak-knives, or icepicks.

Finally, by using translucent balls, our astronauts will still be able to find each other and perform their NASA mandated socializing duties.

Think how happy our astronaut will be when she's surrounded by brand new balls!

NASNA 2007 Conference

Last weekend there was a NASNA (North American Street Newspaper Association) conference right down there in Portland, less than two hundred miles away! So Real Change sent a bigger than usual contingent to it. We had two vendors, a director, a reporter, an intern, a consultant, the unclassifiable Anitra Freeman, and the overly-classifiable me.

Bad lighting and a shortage of time and free hands prevented me from taking more than a few minutes of video. I broke the camera out first at Saturday's lunch in Portland State U's Farmer's Market. There was a shot of a Buddha, followed by me tracking down the sound of a jug band. It turned out to be the Sassparilla Jug Band, specializing in "Dust Bowl Folk".

Sassparilla



Paula (to our left) and Anitra, rise to the challenge to become impromptu music video babes backing up the Sasparilla Jug Band. I display a low threshold for repetition toward the end, but I'm only just joking around.

Video Girls



Later than day I wanted video proof that the 2007 North American Street Newspaper Association conference was not all Farmer's Market food, jug bands and music video babes. There were serious workshops, too. Here, we see two brief clips of director Tim Harris of Seattle's Real Change newspaper leading a workshop on vendor issues, intercut with a typical surreal conversation between me (holding the camera) and Robert Hansen, Real Change vendor #1188.

Anitra wants all to know that Robert and I just clown around like this all the time and it's all in fun. I want everybody to know that if you couldn't figure that out yourself you probably can't figure out whether your socks go on the inside or the outside of your shoes without tossing a coin. So half the time we know who you are.



Tim mentioned the Real Change Wiki. It's here.

Art and Antidote

Daily Video Find/ a Pair

Anitra found the first one for me. It's Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase. Supposedly 35 artists' works are featured. I might have recognized about half if I was counting.



This second video is the antidote. It's called Closed Mondays.

Anitra's Worm Story

Anitra has posted her own version of her encounter with worms and worming on Gather. If you go there before 10am PDT today (1 pm EDT), it will pop up on the front page as their lead featured story. If you get there later, click on this: The Worm Saga (My First Adventures in Vermicomposting). That should work.