So glad I'm not one of those people who made a goal about posting frequency...

So as it turns out, the business of living my life has actually gotten to the point of interfering with my ability to write about said life. Oops. Here's a quick run-down of the last I-don't-know-how-many-weeks.

• Swingset #5 (picture unavailable) - Ponce Inlet lighthouse playground. Swung late at night, and this set is literally right underneath the lighthouse. There's a large oak(?) tree that was filtering the lights overhead (the lens is fractured, and there are two or three strong beams and four or five thinner ones on each rotation) and it was sort of magical except for the strong odor of fish coming in off the docks across the street.



• I started knitting a yellow cardigan (loosely pictured here) while out at the bar with my friends. I have to date completed the back panel, three quarters of one front panel, and have about seven inches or so (of more than 24) on the second front panel. After that, there will just be the arms and the two buttons/collar strips to complete the front, and sewing it all together. Monday will be the end of the third week I've been working on it, so it should hopefully be done by New Year's. I say hopefully both because Florida's cold season is very very short, and because I promised each of the bartenders who initially made fun of me that I'd knit them something, too - fingerless gloves for Pete and a knit replica of his work t-shirt for Jake, complete with the bar's logo on the front and 'CURRENTLY WORKING OFF MY BAR TAB' on the back.



• Knitting is fun, but it isn't actually progress on goal 40. Luckily, I purchased fabric and a pattern to sew a strapless dress, and it really shouldn't take too long to complete once I actually sit down and get to it. Of course, a dress isn't a whole outfit; I am thinking that if I get really ambitious, I might make a lightweight black trench jacket to go with it. My friend Katelyn insists that I also make the, um, unmentionables to be worn with this outfit... this is already a multi-stage project, so why not?



• As a sort of combo step towards achieving both goals 67 and 79, I did in fact purchase a watercolor journal, paints, and brushes. I won't really say any more about it, other than this: "snails."



• There's an SPT of me in a moose hat, an SPT of me trapped on my camera, and 13904810 SPTs from last night of me acting with a questionable amount of class at a semiformal event. These pictures will hopefully be posted shortly.



• Writing is slow and not actually going where I initially thought, but I am making an effort to at least think about it everyday, if not actually putting words together into real sentences. I just feel like I'm not being very... artful, as though four years of essay and technical writing ruined my imagination. But that's what all this practice is for, right? Right.
  
  On the non-fiction front, I am thinking about writing an alternative history book (a la Lies My History Teacher Told Me) aimed at kids. Or, to be more precise, writing a history book whose primary purpose is not the indoctrination of American children into a brouhaha of blind national pride or Eurocentric elitism. As Joel Stein put it, I love America, like an adult loves another adult - I see her flaws and I desperately want to help her overcome them. I believe in being honest about those flaws, not trying to hide them.
  
  This may or may not be inspired by the fact that my little sister and another girl I met separately who happened to be in her high school class don't know who Nelson Mandela is. Worse, they can't even comprehend why that might be a problem.



• Article reading is still going along nicely, although now that I have paper copies of two of the three magazines, posting links and blurbs seems more trouble than it's worth. Now that I'm, uh, caught up, if there's a particularly interesting thing, I will post about it. Swear. No more batch posts, because that's what seems to be slowing me down. If I like it, I'll post it. End of story.



• Book reading is going okay, too, but I keep getting sidetracked by new books and going out and knitting and... well... I haven't actually finished a book in over a month. I'm about halfway through three, and started two others, if that makes any difference. I really want to finish the Terry Prachett book I'm in the middle of, The Wyrd Sisters, before Christmas. New mini-goal. Woot.

Can't really think of anything else I was in the middle of... Free Rice has sort of faded back into obscurity, it's the wrong season for Walks for the Cure, and Rosetta Stone is still on hold. Oh! I did get an email from Donors Choose, with a follow-up thank you letter and pictures from the teacher of the class I donated the Scholastic Weeklies to a couple months ago. Second graders are ADORABLE and curious and their teacher says they were ecstatic to learn that the magazines are theirs to keep and take home. I'm so glad that they have a new outlet for that inquisitive energy, and hopefully it will inspire them keep researching things they're interested in outside of the classroom. So anyway, that's that. Pictures soon. Articles in the next week, as they become interesting. And, maybe possibly soon I'll finally get the confidence to post my two-month-old drabble.
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Surprises

1. New hair in SPT 13; SPT 12 is still in transit.

2. Short-chained swingset = lots and lots and lots of fun.

That is all; see below.

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ENID: It’s probably the slang.

Still busy busy busy. Last weekend I swung swingset #4, a picture of which should hopefully be uploaded shortly. So too will last week's SPT, after my friend whose camera such a picture should be on uploads them to Facebook. The past two weeks, my drabble has turned into the inkling of a Something, and it's up to about 400 words now. (That doesn't sound too impressive, but keep in mind that a drabble is only supposed to be 100 words and an attempt at a semi-self-contained short story to keep your creative juices going.) It's using the same character as the last Oversized Serious drabble I wrote over a month ago, which I will post tomorrow or Friday, and then after a suitable period of introspective judgment, I'll post this current one, too.

I also began knitting a grocery bag, although I have three sweater patterns that I really want to get to work on. I just needed something a bit more simple to get back into it. I unfortunately did not buy a watercolor journal last week as I said I was going to, because Michael's ended up being on a different (and much further away) street than I thought and I was in a rush to meet a friend for his going away party. I could have bought it by now at Walmart, but I'd prefer not to feed the giant - and, it turns out, there's one even closer than where I was going to go that is legitimately local, Southern Paint and Supply. They supply Actual! watercolor tubes, so I can use something other than a dinky little Crayola tray. Not that I'm knocking my mad elementary school art skillz or anything, but... yeah. I want rich colors, ergo, real paint.

In terms of wine connoisseurship, yesterday I got a call from my mom asking me which I'd prefer to drink with Thanksgiving dinner. When I replied, "Oh, um, well, like, pinot grigio, pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon. I can bring my own," she asked, "What brand is that?" Long story short, I popped a quarter mile down the road to the grocery store to help her find something to drink that isn't white zinfandel or blackberry Manischewitz. We got a pinot noir and a beaujolais, and I also picked up two bottles of Spanish wine I had over the weekend for my own nefarious purposes. Mission successful. Sorta.

That's about it. I forgot to keep all the links for articles last week, so below are the four I found most memorable.

"Lunch with M." is purportedly the first-ever meeting between a journalist and a Michelin restaurant "inspector." It really isn't an interview, because the inspector cannot divulge any identifying details - even her parents aren't supposed to know her real occupation, lest they boast to their friends; the New Yorker reporter just sits down with the head of the Michelin guides and a woman who would just like to be called "M." For all that he's not allowed to tell us about their conversation, it is a surprisingly comprehensive exposé of the Michelin organization as a whole and the incredible shroud Kevlar vest of secrecy they've built up to protect it.

As we all know, the shuttle fleet is retiring next year and the new Orion capsules aren't due to come online until the middle of the next decade. At least. "Is this the end for human space flight?" Inquiring minds want to know, so the science editor of The Daily Mail (seriously?) and a science journalist in residence at some college in Canada argue about it. The former says, yes, we're done with space, because no president will take the Kennedyesque step of committing resources to something that may or may not pan out three administrations down the road. The latter says, no-well-maybe; humans are creatures of conquering exploring and inquiring stock, and we really really WANT to see what's out in space. All I have to say about it is this.

"Four ways to feed the world" provides NS readers with a very simple plan for feeding the extra 3 billion or so people who will be on the Earth in the next 15 years, in addition to the 17% of those already here who are chronically starving. It's simple, really; grow more high-yielding crops on the same amount of farmland with less water, and build more roads to move the harvest around. Genius. Why has no one thought of this before??? This is the sort of quality reporting that drew me to NS in the first place.

I don't even know what this is but the best way I can think to describe it is "forcibly stripping the porn out of the porno script" (pun fully intended). It made me giggle, anyway, if mostly in a WTF-am-I-reading way.
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Brimstone

Today is the day I'm going to buy a watercolor journal for goal 67. I need to domakecreate something other than endless amounts of paperwork. I have a job because other people have jobs that they are one day going to retire from. Or die while doing. Or get fired from. And it's my job to tell them how much money they will or will not receive when one of those days comes. I mean, I guess I don't really want one of their jobs either. The only lifelong career I could really see myself being passionate about right now is at State.

Point is, I'm producing, but I don't feel productive. Commerce is awful like that. Ergo, list; ergo, crafts. Maybe I'll buy some yarn and make a new sweater or something, too. Starting on goal 40, perhaps? I reallyreally don't need any more scarves, and I probably reallyreally don't need another blanket. Things with real shapes FTW!

PS, If you're wondering why I put watercolors on the list at all, it's because of things like this.
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PROCRASTINATION

Yeah, writing up articles all the time gets really sort of dull. I'm trying not to let myself get too far behind, though. These are the highlights of my readings from the last two weeks; you'll notice that the Economist is still conspicuously absent; that's due to the fact that it's still arriving conspicuously late - UNTIL THIS SATURDAY. It was sitting on my desk Monday morning, and there's no post on Sundays, which means only one thing - it actually arrived ON TIME on Saturday. Amazing. Expect article postings to resume a more normal schedule this starting this weekend.

Oh, and on a side-note, the narrative responses for the Foreign Service are due tonight and I submitted them promptly at 1:13pm. Unless I somehow completely blow them away with my brilliance, though, I don't expect to hear from them until late January. Sigh.


"Where do ghosts come from?" Mostly your brain, but possibly also magnets.

"Captives" is an amazing and extensive look at this decade's violence in Gaza and the capture and detention of Gilad Shalit by Palestinians. Even more, though, it's about how difficult any peace deal might be, because the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are not synonymous. Separated geographically by Israel, they are also controlled by two different factions - Gaza by Hamas, the West Bank by the (relatively) more moderate successor of the PLO, the Palestinian Authority. This excerpt below sums it up well enough, but the whole article is really very good.

"Such potential solutions have been poisoned by the frustration that both Israelis and West Bankers feel toward Gaza. The political distance between the two Palestinian entities has caused many Israelis to start talking of a three-state solution, rather than two. “Hamas in Gaza is a fact of life until further notice,” Yossi Alpher, a political consultant and a former Mossad officer, observed. “All our ideas about dealing with them have failed.” Shavit and other Israeli intellectuals have proposed that the Egyptians deed a portion of the Sinai to Gaza, to make the Strip more viable—“a semi-Dubai,” as Shavit terms it. The Egyptians have expressed no interest. “Egypt’s strategy for Gaza is to make sure it’s Israel’s problem,” Alpher said."

"Clearing oasis trees felled ancient Peruvian civilisation," or, those who do not learn history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them, non-Eurocentric edition.

"Rap Sheet" examines the history of American gun ownership and the history of Americans as a murderous sort of people. Guns, it turns out, probably just enabled us to act out our more murderous impulses, rather than creating them, because - get this - we became a democracy before we were civilized. Seriously. Read, it's good for a laugh, and sort of does make you wonder why we keep creating new "frontiers" outside our homes and borders that we have to "defend" ourselves from...

"Governments should get real on drugs" is a scientific editorial by David Nutt, who was ousted this month as the chairman of Britain's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs for pointing out that marijuana causes fewer health problems and deaths than either alcohol or tobacco. If this fact is news to you, or even if it isn't, you should take a look.

And finally, recovering nicely from that Sam Shepard debacle a few weeks ago, "Alone" has renewed my faith in the fiction editor's judgment. It's a sort of slow-moving story, but it isn't exactly boring... I kept at it, anyway, and I'm glad I did. No spoilers, just click it if you like short stories.
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pictures pictures pictures

It's incredibly late and I'm incredibly tired, but below the cut lie not only this week's SPT, but also photographic proof that I swung on swingsets numbers two and three today - if you recall, I have not actually posted a picture of the first swingset yet because... I fail. Whatever. Number 2 is at Wadsworth Park in Flagler Beach, and Number 3 is just up the highway at Holland Memorial Park in Palm Coast. Number 2, as you will see shortly, has an interesting architecture going for it, but has pretty short chains... still, in all, a very nice swinging experience. Meanwhile, I was far more pleased with the longer chains at Number 3, except that half of them were too long and, mysteriously, could not be rolled up. Very good afternoon, though :)

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Apocalypse Never

This weekend, after a few months of trying to get various members of my family to watch it with me, I decided to finally suck it up and get Apocalypse Now over with. It was going along swimmingly until I got about an hour and a half in, to the part where they accidentally-on-purpose kill all the Vietnamese civilians on the sampan and find out it was all because of a puppy. It was at that point I realized there was still more than an hour and a half left, and I didn't really want to see if they kill the puppy, and that really, 90 minutes is the length of a crappy movie and I was therefore allowed to feel like I'd had the complete Apocalypse Now experience. I am therefore declaring the classic movie goal, number 86, to be IN PROGRESS. Go me.
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Backlog

Everything has slowed down a lot, so I apologize for the lack of posts this week. I have two SPTs below the cut here, and an article post I've been writing queued up, and - not kidding - a two-week old draft of music-review for goal number 4. I promise, though, I have kept up with drabble-writing (nothing I'm confident is share-worthy, though) and reading and free rice and working on the responses for the Foreign Service app. I just haven't felt hugely compelled to write about it. Oh well. Picture-time!


This one was before work on Oct 28th. Some days I'm a really good morning person.

This one was last night, not on Thursday. Oh well. I'm not sure how I got it to double-expose, because it never does it when I actively try, but I like it.

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To no one's surprise...

This week I am boycotting The New Yorker AND The Economist because they have been getting on my nerves. The New Yorker's penchant for the pretentious seems to have become more pronounced of late, manifest by the one and only thing I read in it during the week: the first 3/4 of the first page of this short story by Sam Shepard that is completely tired and boring. It doesn't seem to be going anywhere; it's not even luridly poetic (ie, art for art's sake); and its focus on Xanax obviously makes it Hip and Cool. Perhaps the only redeeming value is that it is perfectly illustrative of the fact that waiting in an endless line REALLY IS THAT DULL.

The Economist, meanwhile, has incurred my wrath by arriving on Thursday, five days late, every week of the past three. It's not news at this point, it's editorial retrospective. For that reason, I am going to type up three of the news blurbs of world events you may have missed hearing about for the week of October 17-23.

"In Russia, to no one's surprise, the ruling United Russia party won nationwide votes to local and municipal councils by a landslide. More surprisingly, opposition politicians walked out of parliament, complaining of vote rigging, and threatened to demonstrate in protest."

"Cuba's government denied Yoani Sanchez, a blogger, an exit visa for her to travel to New York to receive a prize from Columbia University's graduate school of journalism."

"Romania's government collapsed after a vote of no confidence in parliament. The vote was connected to political infighting before presidential elections due next month and may jeopardise the cash-strapped country's relations with the IMF."

The most stimulating thing I read all week (aside from finishing Imperial Life in the Emerald City) was "Timewarp: how your brain creates the fourth dimension". The way we perceive time as it's happening and the way remember it after the fact may or may not process separately in the brain. Ergo, experimenters decided to drop people from an eight-storey harness into a safety net and have them look at a special device that rapidly flashed a light - so quickly that, under normal conditions, the human eye would simply perceive it as a solid light. Researchers theorize that frame rate governs our perception of time, and that during certain traumatic moments, the phenomenon of "time slowing down" is actually due to an increase in the number of "frames" your mind takes in. Later on, your brain remembers all those frames but conceives of them with the normal frame rate, which makes them take up more space time. This also means that we may be on the verge of a cure for schizophrenia, if we can figure out why schizophrenic's brains don't have the same frame rate processor as the rest of us, and how to fix it - if that is in fact the reason for their delusions. The article does a much better job of explaining how this all is connected, so just go read it.

Apparently, if we can somehow figure out a way to make free-floating sea ice go where we want it, "We still have a chance to save the polar bears." All it depends on is international cooperation and a commitment from every country in the northern hemisphere not to promote economic development in the Arctic.

Poor polar bears don't stand a chance.

And finally, according to "Multiply universes: How many is the multiverse?" there may actually be a Discworld out there somewhere. Now, I'm not going to lie, I've read this three times and I still don't quite understand how this is science and not philosophy, but they assure me that it is, so we'll go with it. What it comes down to is perspective and observability and obviously we need to find the subtle knife to cut into one of these other universes and see what it's like. Duh.
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Three Hopeful Thoughts

1. As you might have noticed, that goal countdown up in my header now reads "99" instead of "100." That's right, folks, on Tuesday evening, in a magnificent confluence of cosmic factors, the room shook and trembled, and in a sudden rush, the rain beat down upon us. I, properly attired in a rain-frolicking-approved sundress and already downstairs, threw open the door, rushed out across the yard, and finally, finally danced in the downpour I'd been waiting so very long for. The rain was thick and heavy, and the lightening frequent, extended, and close. I would say the whole experience was rapturous, but I feel like you have to be aware of rapture while it's happening for that to be possible. It just felt overwhelmingly and ambiguously good to be out in it. Goal #90 is complete, but it was something I've done before and it will certainly be something I do many times again.

2. Yesterday afternoon, exactly three weeks to the hour after the Foreign Service test, I received a letter (a pdf which I had to download, after being given the link to the site with the pdf via email. Unnecessarily convoluted? I think yes.) informing me that my performance has qualified me for the next round of the application process. Five personal narrative responses, in which I have 1300 characters each to describe variously that time I was a leader, that time I lived with a foreign kid in college, and so forth. They also gave me the fax number for ACT, tantalizing me with the promise that I could get a breakdown! of my results by post in just four to six weeks, but two attempts to do so have returned a failed transmission. I'll try again on Monday. I. Need. That. Breakdown.

3. Letters to Washington, goal number 73, has officially been moved to the "In progress" column. I sent my first letter to my brand-new placeholder senator, George LeMieux, in response to this article in today's New York Times. Sure, there's a war on, and a health care reform debacle, and stuff, but obviously some idiot from Louisiana needs the spotlight to stump against immigrants for next year's election. And obviously the proposal in question is so obscenely ludicrous that I simply had to voice my opinion and make sure LeMieux, GOP loyalist extraordinaire (seriously, he's holding Mel Martinez' seat for less than two years under the tacit condition that he not seek reelection so Charlie Crist, our great governor, can run instead), doesn't fall in with this fringe crowd. The grimy flipside of having a solid Democratic majority in both houses is the ability of Republicans to pick up on whatever insignificant issue they think will help their odds with their constituents - not taking into account that such petty issues could hurt real people if passed. Anyway, it's a fairly lengthy letter, so I've put it down below the cut.

Dear Senator LeMieux,

The New York Times published an article today about the push of your fellow senator, David Vitter, to forbid the census from counting non-citizens as residents of the several states and, by extension, our nation. This is not only an outrageous proposition because of the social, economic, and political ramifications such a census would cause, but also thoroughly unconstitutional. I sincerely hope that, as my representative, you will not support Senator Vitter's proposal.

As I'm sure you know, Article 2 of the Constitution empowers the Congress to count every ten years "the whole number of persons in each state" in order to properly apportion representatives. This particular passage has already been amended once in our history, with the idea that government should include more people, not fewer. Originally, the census formula was taken from the whole number of "free persons" plus three-fifths of "all others," i.e. slaves, further diminished the status of certain Americans. With the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, the three-fifths clause was removed, rightfully establishing non-whites as full citizens worthy of equal representation.

As a representative democracy, America was the eighteenth-century beacon for Europe’s feudal monarchies. Oppressed for centuries by the noble classes, the hard-working serfs rose up and wrenched political power out of their silk-gloved hands. The story of democracy is the story of power continually spiraling downwards and outwards, into the hands of the people. This is where Senator Vitter’s proposal becomes truly farcical.

The Times writes:

“Appealing to his colleagues in states with fewer noncitizens, the Republican senator, David Vitter of Louisiana, warned this month that a vote against his proposal would ‘strip these states of their proper representation in Congress,’ while including noncitizens would ‘artificially increase the population count’ in other states.”

His proposal would strip states of their proper representation – those that are the major entry points for immigrants into our country, like our own Florida. As for “artificially increasing the population count,” I would have to say that people who work, reside, and raise families in our communities are, in fact, part of the American population. They may not have yet acquired citizenship, but we can rest assured that the children they bear and bring here have or will. Not only would this proposal be unfair to today’s immigrants, it would create an unquantifiable backlash with the next generation, as they witness their parents treated unfairly. Worse, measures like this can be used to justify the xenophobic behavior of Americans towards immigrants, both legal and illegal. (Those who would condone or commit violence or hateful speech towards immigrants likely don’t care to see the difference.)

The census began as a device for apportioning government representation– and that remains its primary purpose today. Yet it also serves another important function when it counts residents, and not just citizens: it is one of the most important historical records of who lived where when. My own great-grandparents would not have been counted under such an exclusionary census during their first decade in this country, despite the fact that they worked hard to contribute to America all the same and build a nation their children would proudly call their own. The exponential growth of illegal immigration in the past few decades is certainly an issue that needs to be addressed, but discriminating against all immigrants by excluding non-citizens from the census is neither the right way, nor an effective way, to do so.

Sincerely,

Caroline Leonard


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Two more dollars!

In honor of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Ebay established an optional $1 donation you can add to any and all of your purchases made during October. I bought two really adorable dresses last week, so my new breast cancer donation total is a whopping THREE WHOLE DOLLARS.

Do I rule or what?
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Rocket-powered unicorns and other, slightly less interesting, things

These are the articles from the last two weeks. Oops. Oh well.

Remember Goodnight, Moon? Blueberries for Sal? Little Bear and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Apparently today's toddlers are being lulled to sleep (or not, actually) by bedtime stories that, as the New Yorker puts it, are initiating them into a Gossip Girl reality. "The Defiant Ones" reveals a number of these stories to those of us momentarily without a little bundle of snot in our lives, analyzing the psychological effects their themes have on the children and the parents reading them along the way. Very, very interesting stuff.

An interesting turn of events in the business world lately has been the defection of a number of high-profile corporations from the US Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobby in the country. "Exit Through Lobby" awkwardly tries to contrast this new trend with the historical reluctance of American individuals to resign their posts, even when asked to do something they feel goes against their morals. It's a good piece about how Big and Small Business are fighting over the cap-and-trade system, though, and, if anything, that tie-in is just another example that corporations don't behave like real people (their resignations from the Chamber are likely more financially motivated than morally) and don't deserve "personhood."

According to "Meet future woman" and the longitudinal study of a Massachusetts town it's covering, human women will genetically "evolve" to be shorter, plumper, and more fertile over the next 40 generations. Really, it's just because women who have more children tend to be shorter and hold onto their baby weight, and - look at the Duggars - pass on the proclivity to breed more and start having babies earlier. There doesn't actually seem to be a genetic advantage to being shorter or heavier, except that perhaps it is easier to carry children comfortably.

Down in the comments section to this article there's a good debate going on about the reliability of the study's findings. Some people find fault with the selection of a smallish, ruralish American town to generalize about the entire human race. (The study's defenders rush to point out that it was important to find a relatively closed population, as it is a genetics study, so that they could look at multiple generations of women from the same family easily.) Others have a problem with, as I mentioned, the idea that being short and heavy causes you to reproduce, rather than - a radical proposition here, I know - babies changing the way your body is shaped. Another point that really stuck out to me is that Americans and others in developed nations have actually grown taller and wider in the last few decades because of better nutrition (or overconsumption). Height is an interesting variable, but it's really no mystery that women with lots of children tend to be homebodies more than their unchilded counterparts, and homebodies eat more and exercise less. Maybe there should be a study done on the heritability of homebodiness.

"Blanche Lincoln's balance" and "Ready, set, go" are from the Economist of two weeks ago. Blanche Lincoln is a Democratic senator from Arkansas - one of those 'Blue Dogs' who are very, very centrist liberals from states that you normally wouldn't envision would even consider electing electing a Democrat to a national office.She voted for the health care bill; let's move on.

"Ready, Set, Go," provides a contrasting image of the plan for Chicago's - and all of America's - schools. Arne Duncan, as everyone knows, is the Education Secretary and the former superintendent of the Chicago school system. He has been giving a sizable chunk of stimulus money to invest in our generally painfully underfunded schools; what he has done to try to ensure that the money is most effectively spent, however, is to allow states to essentially rid themselves of the No Child Left Behind rules and test their schools against international benchmarks AND try and reduce the influence of teachers' union contracts. By stopping the freefall of testing standards and making teacher pay and promotions based on their ability to actually educate their students, Duncan hopes to prove that just $4.4b can change the way we view education in America. The best part? States that refuse to use students' test results to even partially evaluate the teachers won't see a dollar of the new money. Obviously, it's not the only reason there are huge gaps between rich and poor and minority and white kids, but it's a step. PS We aren't funding abstinence-only sex ed anymore, either.

An Awesome Book! is awesome and completely redeems the modern children's book from the bile depicted in that first New Yorker article. Click the link and scroll sideways, not down, to read the whole. entire. thing. Then click on the store; I'm thinking of buying the poster of rocket-powered unicorns. Thoughts?

And finally, our science lessons for the week. Both "Underwater town breaks antiquity record" and "Stone age hunting traps found deep in Great Lakes" discuss the living habits of prehistoric humans. "Underwater town" is particularly intriguing because, like Pompeii, Pavlopetri is an extremely well-preserved ancient city, complete with streets and home foundations - except that new artifacts show that it may have been settled during the early Bronze Age, making it three thousand(!) years older than Pompeii. There are also a few cool pictures attached to the article, with the little foundation stones in neat lines. It reminds me of Roxaboxen, one of my favorite books from elementary school.
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Never trust the Swedes.

So this post is the SPT for October 15th, even though they were actually taken on the 17th and 18th, and the post prior to this is the picture from yesterday that was actually taken today because it was a much more pleasant day for picture-taking. For real.

Once upon a time, three lovely maidens set out from the sleepy hamlet of Bushwick in search of the mythical relics rumored to lay in the far off Temple of IKEA. They bundled up against the cold, mounted their trusty steed, Subaru, and enlisted the help of a local guide who called himself Garmin. They traveled on and on and on, twisting and turning through the trails of the Lyn of Brook, stopping only for provisions of bagels and extra sweaters. Finally, thanks to Garmin's expertise, they arrived at the fabled place.

But much to their surprise, thousands upon thousands of other brave adventurers had made the very same pilgrimage! The three maidens refused to believe they had come this far for nothing. Determined not to depart empty-handed, they marched forth into the relentless waves of people entering the temple in search of relics of their own.

As they trekked through the upper levels of the magical IKEA, the energy of discovery and delight was palpable. The maidens beheld strange and glorious wonders of home furnishing the likes of which they had never before dared dream. They wandered from one cavernous chamber to the next, in awe of the sights and sounds laid out resplendently before them. The maidens yearned to collect every single relic IKEA held, but they knew it would be unfair to overburden poor, aging Subaru. They had to make some choices.

At that moment, the wonderland of delights transformed into a hellish pit of fire and brimstone stacked from floor to hundred-foot-ceiling. Suddenly, all their happy co-pilgrims became vicious competitors, each vying for the blessing of a temple priest so they could cart off their chosen relics. The maidens stood faithfully at no less than three different altars as they waited their turn to collect their beautiful relics.

And lo, the maidens were rewarded for their patience and persistence. Having used their cunning to navigate the secret shortcuts through the temple, and their disproportionate strength to lift their own relics onto their carts, they proved themselves superior to all the obstacles the great Temple of IKEA had thrown at them.

After saddling Subaru up with their prizes, and directing Garmin to bring them back safe and sound to Bushwick, the maidens enjoyed a peaceful ride all the way home.

And they lived happily ever after, until they realized they had to transport their relics up to the highest tower of their castle all by themselves!

And then they realized that the relics had to be assembled before their magical powers could be utilized. There were a lot of pieces for the maidens to sort through!

The maidens quickly worked out how to fit the strange-looking components together into something that vaguely resembled the floor model at the temple.

But their most magnificent relic, an item that would provide amazing moving pictures and yards and yards of parchment filled with wise and wonderfully enlightening words, was not to be so easily had. A demon had slipped through the temple priests' defenses and broken a vital piece of the relic! Without it, the maidens realized, the relic would never come to life as they had hoped. Forlorn, they gave up for the night and vowed to begin anew on another relic the next day.

Reinvigorated the following morning, the maidens set upon their second-favorite relic, an enchanted wardrobe that would keep all their garments in tip-top shape as soon as they put them inside of it.

As with the first relic, construction proceeded swimmingly - but only for a short while. When the time came to place the special shelf that would keep their handbags and miscellaneous medium-sized fashion accessories organized, the maidens realized that yet another demon had ingratiated itself into the very particle board of their beloved relic. The shelf simply would not follow the laws of geometry as the priests' holy instructions declared that they would.

But the maidens were fierce and tenacious. Defeated once already by the demons plaguing the temple IKEA, they wrestled with the evil one until at long last, they had forced the demon out and the shelf in. Proud of their hard work, they were at last able to pour themselves a well-deserved glass of enchanted grape juice and admire their precious relics.

Will the maidens ever return to the great temple? Will the demon yet plaguing them ever depart? WAS IT ALL WORTH IT?

The world may never know.

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I can ride my bike with no handlebars

No handlebars.

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Longest. Hiatus. Ever.

Apologies, I was in New York from Thursday until Monday and I'm happy to report that I accomplished very, very little in terms of my list but do sort of feel like I'm winning at life. I had an excellent time with all my friends from school. We ate at some wonderful restaurants, drank a lot of wine, made a loaf of cake, laughed more than should be legal, bought tasty cheese at the farmer's market, stood in line at IKEA for hours, assembled IKEA furniture for hours, and had a brunch with my uncles during which I signed the DNR for one of their friends. I KNOW, AWESOME, RIGHT? I only lost one metrocard all week AND bought a four dollar skirt at a thrift store that looks AMAZING. I have an exciting series of pictures to upload for last week's SPT (actually taken on Saturday and Sunday, but whatever), and hey, I did read 75% of the Economist at the airport. Regular updates will resume shortly.
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Dang, I totally should've added Yakutsk, too...

Last week, before the FSOT, I printed out a blank world map and colored it in with highlighters and set to work labeling all the countries on it from memory. In the interest of full disclosure, I must tell you that Oman and Yemen are reversed, as are Cambodia and Laos; I completely blanked on Burkina Faso and Senegal; I had to look at a map to see what the islands between Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji were (more French crap); I neglected to label Moldova, Suriname, Guyana, and French Guiana because of space issues, and most of the Caribbean islands because I just hate them. The Bahamas were left off entirely by accident, although I remembered to color them. They're off my coast and I've been there at least twice; it's not like I didn't know what they were. Final note: former Yugoslav nations are in the middle of the Atlantic because it was easier for me to write them in an order I would remember that way. So, there.

Check check it. Clicking will take you to a zoomed-in version.

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Dreadful Murder

This week's articles are, if I'm counting correctly, all here. My favorite, about halfway down, has been copied in its entirety because it is Just That Awesome. You should probably put down any beverages you might be consuming when you read it - especially if it's milk - because you will certainly do a spit-take if you don't. It's seriously that hilarious. A preview: a murder suspect is described as "a fine young man."

However nihilistic it might be, "How the planet will recover from us" explores global warming from an epochal perspective. Rather than using this longest of long-term analysis to decry the "myth" that humans are causing the Earth's climate to change dramatically, however, the author examines periods of rapid carbon and methane gas release, long before the dinosaurs, that led to mass extinctions. The fossil record gives a surprising - but very clear - picture of how life on Earth strives to hold on as the planet rights herself into a stable biosphere once again.

In "Two legs good, 24 better," NS interviews Aimee Mullins, an actress/model/athlete who also happens to be a double amputee. Mullins also happens to be more articulate than your everyday model, and discusses passionately why equal rights for persons with disabilities hinges on viewing them apart from their disabilities and seeing what they can do - which, incidentally, is a lot.

The new "Chicago School Violence Plan" hopes to prevent off-campus shootings of students by assigning statistically-calculated "high risk" kids with life coaches, psychological counseling, job opportunities, and other things that, hopefully, will lead them to see the error of their gang-banging ways. It'll be interesting to see how this turns out, especially since there are far more kids actually "at risk" of being involved in a shooting than the program's $30m will initially be able to reach.

So, yeah, it's a New York Times article, but I think it's pretty important and the one New Yorker piece below is really long and involved, so... yeah.

"The Last Mission" is a highly detailed account of Richard Holbrooke's rapid rise - and subsequent decades-long plateau - in the ranks of the State Department. Now on the verge of retirement, he's answered President Obama's call to oversee State's mission in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or Af-Pak, as he's dubbed it. Of equal interest to me is the conspicuous system of patronage and apprenticeship at State, the network of people who care as much about who you know and have served under as what you know and where you were stationed when you learned it. It worries me a bit that I'm not coming out of Yale or Harvard, but I know that I can connect with my superiors and force my way into that web of who-knows-who if I get the chance.

On a much lighter note, "There's gold in them there bacteria!" Apparently, there's a certain class of bacteria that's allergic to gold, and has evolved a way to break it down in its system to neutralize its harmful effects and, due to the law of conservation of energy (or something), this process causes them to emit a light which prospectors can then use to determine whether or not a particular patch of soil holds a gold deposit.

And on a more dreadful note, The Economist has transcribed its first issue and published all the articles online. For some reason, they decided not to do the ads. I feel like this is a huge oversight; very few things in this world are more entertaining than pre-Victorian print ads. Except the stories running alongside them. This one is short enough that I'm actually going to paste in the full text.

Dreadful murder

Sep 2nd 1843

Since Tuesday morning the beautiful seat of the Earl of Darnley, at Cobham park, near Gravesend, in Kent, its village, and the surrounding suburbs, have been the scene of much excitement in consequence of the perpetration of a murder, attended with circumstances of a truly distressing character. The victim is Mr Dadd, sen., 55 years of age, a person who a few years ago carried on a most extensive business at Rochester, as a chemist and druggist. He had lately, however, retired, and had gone to London, where he has since resided, in Suffolk street, Pall-mall East, and gained some notoriety by the manufacture of an improved oil for artists. He was found lying by the roadside, with his throat cut, and a knife not far from his body. It has since been ascertained, beyond a doubt, that the murderer of the unfortunate gentleman is no other than his third son, Richard Dadd, a fine young man, 24 years age, and that he committed the act whilst labouring under an aberration of intellect. He was an artist of some celebrity, and has gained several prizes at the Royal Academy. A year or two ago this unfortunate youth accompanied Sir Thomas Phillips, the late Mayor of Newport, on a tour through Italy, Switzerland, Germany, &c., for the purpose of improving himself in his art. Owing to his arduous studies and constant exposure to the sun, his brain became affected to such a melancholy extent as to produce insanity. The circumstances attending the dreadful deed have not yet been correctly ascertained, nor has the youth been apprehended.

I hope I never live in New York long enough to be this uppity. Some New Yorker blogger decided to do his weekly column on the recently-published list of art the Obamas have pulled from the national collection to display in the White House, and judge them, heavily, for their choices. They like what they like. Deal with it.

Finally, there was an entire issue full of good Economist articles, but the ones that I want to share are "How many Mexicans does it take to drill an oil well?" and "Please do feed the bears", mostly because of their titles. The first is about Mexico's state-run oil companies and their rapidly declining production capability. The latter is a caveat to government regulators to remember that it was bulls, not bears, that caused the market bubbles. Their trading habits should not be restricted, nor should their frequents portents of financial disaster be ridiculed without careful examination of their reasoning. A good policy to hold in general, I'd think, but sure, let's keep it to just the stock market for now.
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Busy little bee...

Another busy sort of week. There's that whole thing about pictures and a thousand words, so... here's me first thing Thursday morning, and a bonus picture of my current work in progress.

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Toward a Red

Two weeks ago, I went back to Mandala with my friend Michelle so she could sell some books, and while I was there, I, as I do, found another postcard to add to my collection. The reason for its extreme delay is that I have found, amazingly, something that is not on the internet. Anywhere. For real. I have searched high and low, working with the artist's name and the title of the painting given on the back of the postcard, to figure out if this abstract piece is meant to be viewed vertically or horizontally. I have googled his name, its name, both of their names; combed wikipedia for any reference to it, and even gone to the website of the museum that printed the postcard to see if they had a picture - nothing. So, I present, with a 1/3 chance of correct orientation, Sam Gilliam's Toward a Red.

If you know think you have a good eye for aesthetic sensibilities, let me know which way you think is up. You should be able to click the picture and be taken to a much larger version, if you'd like to study it more in-depth.

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Oddly refreshing...

Today I woke up at 7:30 and left for work a little after 8. I spent the next four hours as tense as a pregnant cheerleader's boyfriend at the father/daughter purity ball, trying to review everything I'd ever learned about international politics in my head while making copies of rich people's tax forms. The only thing that got me through it - and only just, at that - was cranking up Ben Folds' Rockin' the Suburbs and dancing the Charleston to "The Secret Life of Morgan Baker." Seriously, ask my dad. It was one of the more raucous one-girl dance parties an Ormond office building has ever seen. So I left just before noon, stopping only to get gas (um, also discovering that my gas cap is missing? I feel like that's something I would have noticed last month when I bought gas. (Oh yeah, that's right, I bought one tank of gas in September. 320 miles was all I drove, bitches.)), and pushing Bea for the first time above 70mph to get to the Foreign Service test in Orlando.

She handled it well enough, though I guess four years of not driving very often made me forget that just under 4000rpm at 80mph is normal for a stick - that worried me for a while. The test itself was alright, and by law I'm not allowed to tell you ANYTHING that was on it, but I think I'm allowed to say that I was not asked to write either an awesome essay nor an articulate tirade about corporate greed responsibility (winkwinknudgenudge). I'm slightly less confident about the biographical section, insofar as it really comes down to whether they're looking for entry-level people or those with more practical experience for higher-level positions. I'm betting the recession made them slow down on their new hires, so in the next year, when I'm hoping to be placed, all the old entry-level kids will be promoted, leaving lots of openings for me!

Anyway so that was my FSOT adventure in a smallish nutshell. Now that it's over, I need to make a new deadline for a big project to keep my motivation up. I work so much more efficiently under pressure than without. Stupid college.
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I don't think a brisket really counts as an ethnic recipe. Right?

It's been two weeks since the last articles post and although I was collecting their links, and for some, even got around to writing responses, I couldn't get around to posting them. Too much other stuff was in the way... hello, I had a FAVICON to make? But seriously, the reason the last two weeks of articles is being folded into a three-day-late weekly update post is that this weekend, my computer died. Entirely. It's a long and complicated story involving the power supply and the battery, but it's on right now because I literally forced it into place, and everything important is all backed up to an external and all that... but it's been time-consuming, and I honestly wasn't motivated to write posts on my dad's ancient Windows ME laptop (complete with Firefox version 1.0!). Plus side- I rediscovered (for the umpteenth time) an old DOS game called Lexicross, which running on a semi-modern processor is like Wheel of Fortune and Scrabble's crack baby, on speed, and meth, and... you know, those genes that gave Superman his super speed. Good times.

I also had a four-hour brisket to make on Saturday, as well as apple bread for dessert, in honor of either Rosh Hashanah (if you ask my grandmother) or my sister coming home for the weekend (if you ask her). It turned out splendidly, I think, and because the recipe calls for a cup of red wine, I had (almost) an entire bottle to myself to nurse for the afternoon while it roasted. Extra good times.

So with all that, I forgot to mention that I started writing actual! scenes! of screenplay. I'm still completely unsure about the beginning, so I decided to just skip ahead a bit and write a crucial intermediate exposition scene. I'm actually remotely satisfied with the way it's coming out so far, although it's very awkward getting used to the screenwriting software. It helps you autoformat everything more easily, so you don't have to spend so much time typing mundane things like the characters' names over and over. Theoretically a good idea, but apparently the guild-approved format calls for reentering the character's name after they have direction and speak if you want to add more direction. Anyway, perhaps when it's finished I will put it up. (Probably not.)

I also began reading a book I purchased a few years ago, right after the author was promoting it on the Daily Show, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. Aside from having an awesome title, this very well-researched book exposes the realities of both life in Baghdad's "secure" Green Zone in 2004-05 and the political conflicts that did not just hinder, but visibly set back the progress of rebuilding Iraq as an independent nation. The author lived in Baghdad, across the river from his interviewees, all of whom were employees of the various US agencies represented in the occupation government. The storytelling is so smooth that it reads almost like a novel, and I'm excited to jump back into it tonight. So I'm going to. Below the cut are links to the articles I did end up reading (and, in the case of the Economist, bothered gathering links for) and, yes, I know, it's very light on the New Yorker. Sue me.

"What to do with Moody's, S&P, and the rating agencies?" I was attracted to this New Yorker piece because I was only vaguely aware of the rating agencies' role in the financial system, not knowing much beyond the fact that they had rated AIG AAA - apparently a good rating - right before it collapsed. This article explores that theme further while demonstrating the history of increasing the entrenchment of these agencies into the system. (That very system also writes the agencies' paychecks, which is why the ratings are so slow to change.) It also advocates for a "divorce," removing the government seal of officiousness from the agencies themselves.

What's most interesting about this is the grade inflation that went on over the last three decades without anyone appearing to take notice. When AAA becomes the standard and not a way to differentiate truly low-risk investments from the rest - and when the supposedly perpetually-secure real estate busts nationally - there's no question that America's major disease is greed.

If, in high school history class, we had been given "Trial of the Century" instead of half a paragraph in our textbook to learn about the infamous Dreyfus Affair, I would almost certainly have retained enough of the details to not have clicked on a New Yorker book review to quench my curiosity. This six-page review, after giving a short summation of the book's main point - that the historical context that enabled Dreyfus to be wrongly convicted (twice) of treason by supposedly spying for the Germans before finally being allowed to return to his home - gives a detailed history lesson about that very context. The review does a very good job of it, so I won't paraphrase. Just go read it.

Normally, I wouldn't really care to read a biographical piece about the prospective new owner of the NY Nets. But any article that begins, "Being a Russian oligarch these days isn't easy" is, in my opinion, one worth taking a peek at.

"Rethinking the bees' waggle dance:" so it turns out bees might not actually be as smart and communicative as we thought. Waggledance is still fun to say, though...

"Overconsumption is the real problem" is one article in a large special feature NS published about the looming specter of overpopulation. The whole feature is good, but this is the one that spoke to me most.

"Economic Vandalism:" an anti-American-protectionism tirade. Sort of. Apparently we pissed off China by putting a tariff on shoddy tires instead of letting the market sort it out - never mind that when tires fail, BAD THINGS LIKE ACCIDENTS happen.

"The power of mobile money" explains the new trend of mobile banking in Kenya, and how it's helping jumpstart the economy there. It's a pretty nifty system; people can transfer small amounts of money from one another, which they can then withdraw at local convenience stores - useful in a nation with a very small banking infrastructure.

"Set Angela free" is a little dated now, but this piece is still an informative primer on the dynamics of Germany's multiparty government.

Last, but certainly not least, "The Best of the Ig Nobel Prizes" is best described as the Razzies for science. Two of them involve innovative applications for alcohol, so... just read it.
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Puppy

I sort of forgot to do SPT yesterday, what with all the excitement of creating the favicon, and today I made sure to keep my camera with me at all times - but I never really found a good opportunity for a shot. Until my family got back from dinner and our dog, Lucky, looked more adorable than usual on the top of the couch. (Yes, she's fully-grown; yes, we sometimes think she's a cat. In actuality, she's half Chihuahua, half Yorkie.) She's not normally this shy, though. Maybe she just didn't like the flash...

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Drumroll, please...

I guess it's finally time to declare goal 42, Learn how to program a website, officially underway. First, I tweaked the code for this blog in the weeks before launching it. Then, I completely modified a different template for my friend Chelsea's blog. And now, I am proud to present, for your bookmarking pleasure, the official Swingsets and Cathedrals favicon! Apparently, that is the term the internet, with its seemingly infinite ability to portmanteau, has thought up to label the little icon next to the web address up in the address bar there, and on your bookmark toolbar. Look! See! Isn't it adorable? It was actually surprisingly easy to add to the blog; much more difficult was the actual making of it in Paint.

Anyway, time to hit up at least a thousand grains of rice's worth of capitals before bed. Bamako, Mali! Antananarivo, Madagascar! Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia! Conakry, Guinea!
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Limeades for Learning

During September, Sonic was running a (heavily advertised) promotion for one of my favorite charities, Donors Choose. As you may recall, goal 16 is to donate at least $500.50 to classrooms in need through the site. Two weekends ago, when my family went golfing, we stopped at Sonic for breakfast, and everyone graciously gave me their Limeades for Learning codes. I thought it was a matching thing, so I wanted to wait until pay day to use them, but it turned out you use the codes to vote for your favorite projects and Sonic will choose the projects with the most votes that total half a million dollars and, you know, fund them. Still pretty cool.

So I used my four codes on projects that were lower down in the running, just to make the teachers feel like someone was actually paying attention to their proposals and thought they had good ideas. Then, while I was looking at a map of Yugoslavia on wikipedia to make sure I have the order of the countries down for the one-week-away-FSOT (Slovenia Croatia Bos/Hertz Serbia Montenegro Macedonia boom. Got it.), I remembered reading about the war in Bosnia (capital Sarajevo) and the genocide in Rwanda (capital Kigali) in Scholastic News. Weighty subjects for second-graders, to be sure, but those were the stories that stuck. All the rest have faded into a nebulous feeling of "Oh, I enjoyed reading Scholastic News," but Rwanda and Bosnia have stayed because they were powerful. I'm sure the magazine wouldn't have detailed the exact techniques being used, but I remembered feeling like I wasn't being talked down to about it; it felt really empowering that my teacher trusted me to be mature enough to read about a real-life war happening now, at a time when I was still supposed to want to play with my Barbies when I got home from school.

I'm hoping the magazine has maintained that integrity, because I donated to one proposal to bring Scholastic News into another second grade classroom today. JP Morgan Chase had already donated the first $400 of the project's needed $457.94, and as much as I would have liked to put in the whole last bit, I really need to take care of my credit bill first. I donated $25, figuring the remaining $33 would be an easy enough donation for someone else to make. Turns out, JPMC came back to finish funding the project (which also was for a school-year subscription to Time Kids)! I think it's interesting that everyone's all on about the taxpayer's bail-out money going to outrageous corporate bonuses - and I'm aware that donations like this are probably made in the interest of being a combination tax write-off/PR scheme - but the fact remains that some kids somewhere are being helped by this act. And hey, they could be keeping all the money for themselves.

Scholastic News being my pet project, I didn't actually donate to the ones I voted for Sonic to fund - yet. I'll reevaluate my finances in a week or two. In the meantime, here are the links:

Learning in a flash! asks for 30 2GB flashdrives to help students transport their work from the school computer lab to the classroom to home. As we all know, the price of memory has come down A LOT since I was in school (and paid $50 for my quarter-gig drive and another $50 for the eighth-of-a-gig SD card for my camera), so this whole project costs just $240 plus the site fees.

Meanwhile, this school newspaper needs new supplies. Journalism is a new elective in this New York City school, one that, like No Child Left Behind before it, is drastically underfunded. While I think that three laptops is maybe more than the bare minimum necessary for this project, I respect the teacher who wrote this proposal for choosing devices that are actually really economical and journalism textbooks to help enrich the kids' experience. At $70 a pop, it's no wonder the school couldn't afford to buy these! The whole cost to fund an entire journalism course - with materials that can surely be used for at least a few years to come - is only $2320... someone remind me why we're in Iraq again?

Everything I know about India, I learned by reading Salman Rushdie. Okay. Maybe that's an overstatement... but I definitely learned everything I know about Antigua from Jamaica Kincaid. Point is, books that introduce you to foreign cultures, historic landmarks, and inspire you to love reading for its own sake are awesome. Thus, my most-likely next donation candidate is "Solve a Mystery, Learn some History," which is asking for 31 titles of an acclaimed 5th-grade-level series of mystery books that introduce their readers to things and places as varied as the US Constitution and the Acropolis in Athens. The best part? Most of the books cost less than $7.50 each, so the entire proposal can be filled with $312, $125 of which has already been contributed.

Finally, I chose this bookshelf proposal, because. I mean. The kids don't have a BOOKSHELF in their classroom. Enough said.
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Tallies

I realized this weekend that I have a lot of goals that have cumulative totals - donate this much money, swing on this many swingsets, you know - and that, rather than cluttering up the Master List with all of their progress tallies, I should create a separate post where they can all aspire to be completed together, as one big happy family. I have been updating the "Charity" post every night this week after I finish with my Free Rice learnin', and I will continue to do that in addition to this new post. This post, however, has the advantage of being privileged enough to get a coveted spot in the prestigious and exclusive Quick Links sidebar.

And remember! This is not a complete list of goals in progress, just those that have specific tallies associated with them. You can always see all of the officially In Progress goals by viewing the master list and seeking out the terra cotta colored goals, or get more detailed progress reports by clicking the "In Progress" tag on the sidebar.



4. Discover AND LIKE 101 new bands or solo artists.

New artists approved of: 7

12. Rosetta Stone: Spanish

Lessons completed through: Level 2, Unit 1, Lesson 3

16. Donate at least $500.50 on Donors Choose.

Amount donated: $100.00

23. Visit at least 25 cathedrals.

Cathedrals admired: 1

24. Swing on 101 unique swingsets.

Swingsets swung: 8

38. Volunteer at least 101 hours with Habitat for Humanity.

Hours completed: 4

44. Raise $500.50 by doing Walks for the Cure.

Amount donated: $23.00

54. Finish the Discworld series.

Books read: 5

55. (re)Read the complete works of Tennessee Williams.

Plays read: 0.66

58. Read the complete works of Salman Rushdie.

Rushdies read: 1

59. Read every book on the shelf that has not yet been so.

Backlog finished: 3

68. Loan $101 on Kiva; recycle all repayments.

Loaned out: $25 Recycled: $0

70. Achieve 500,000 grains of rice on Free Rice for Spanish vocabulary.

Grains donated: 2500

71. Achieve 500,000 grains of rice in all other subjects.

Grains donated: 14790

73. Write 101 letters to Washington.

Complaints lodged: 4

78. Accumulate 101 postcards.

Postcards owned: 25

84. Go to ten special exhibitions at museums.

Exhibitions visited: 1

85. Read ten books that are recommended to me.

Recommended reading completed: 2

86. Watch 25 of the Greatest Movies of All Time Ever that I've never before seen.

Movies Consumed: 2

93. Learn to identify at least ten things under the hood of a car and how you can tell when they break.

Car Parts Understood: 0.2 (Yeah zero point two, I know an engine when I see it.)
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A Secret

While I am fairly confident that I could label a map of Africa with all the correct country names, I was really bad about learning their capitals. Same for the islands of the South Pacific, and, to a lesser extent, those of the Caribbean, but in every region, I knew at least the major ones. I have been playing Free Rice for the last 45 minutes or so trying to remedy this, and earned 4030 grains of rice and developed a few mnemonics for remembering which capital goes with which country - at least when the names of the capital are provided and I don't have to recall them straight from memory. I'm hoping that by doing this every day for the next week, at least 2500 grains, I'll be able to reinforce the names even more. Just to confirm my basic geography skills, I'll also sprinkle in some of the "Countries on the map" game, too.

I also realized I should probably get a (re)start on Rosetta Stone Spanish, so my goal for this week is to try and do at least half an hour of it every morning before work. I find that scheduling things to do before work instead of before bed makes me much more apt to do them - partially because it gives me a nice excuse to delay heading over to the office, and partially because I'd just rather go to sleep at night. I'm also trying hard not to overschedule myself, but it's very difficult. Forty hours a week at work is a lot of time, something I know shouldn't be a huge surprise to me, nor something that I let get in the way of me doing what I want to do. Especially when the real reason is TV. Anyway, that's my plan for this week. I'll keep you posted on how that actually goes.
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No, it's totally safe.

The reason this week's SPT is being posted on Saturday is that the last three nights, I have been completely exhausted from work and after-work activities; by the time I get settled in at night, I practically fall right asleep. And I don't really feel the need to apologize to the internet for being out in the world. So my SPT this week comes from one such adventure that occurred on Thursday night with my oldest, dearest friend, Michelle, during which I discovered a few interesting new things about riverfront Daytona, discovered I am good at darts (before I start in on my second double), and began goal 24, Swing on 101 unique swingsets, at my favorite childhood park, the Magic Forest. No pictures yet, even though I obviously had my camera with me that night, but I'll get one soon. This playground is the bomb-diggity, yo.

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Postcards - the beginning.

(Sort of) as promised, here are 15 of my original 17 postcards.

1. Edgar Degas, "Two Dancers on a Stage," The Courtauld Gallery, London.

2. James A. M. Whistler, "Girl with Almond Blossom," The Courtauld Gallery, London.

3. Henri Reignault, "Salome," The Met, New York.

4. John Singer Sargent, "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose," Tate Britain, London.

5. Paul Delaroche, Detail from "The Execution of Lady Jane Grey," National Gallery, London.

6. Detail of Mosaic, St Paul's Cathedral, London.

7. Camille Pissarro, "The Boulevard Montmarte on a Winter Morning," The Met, New York.

8. Detail of Mosaic, St Paul's Cathedral, London.

9. Pierre-August Renoir, "Madame Marguerite-Louise Lemonnier and Her Children," The Met, New York.

10. Pablo Picasso, "Girl with Mandolin," Museum of Modern Art, New York.

11. Georges Seurat, Study for "Le Chahut," Courtauld Gallery, London.

12. Pierre-August Renoir, "At the Theatre (La Première Sortie)," National Gallery, London.

13. Edgar Degas, "After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself," National Gallery, London.

14. Georges Seurat, "Young Woman Powdering Herself," Courtauld Gallery, London.

15. Francisco de Goya, "Doña Isabel de Porcel," National Gallery, London.

The other two are not on the wall (for symmetry reasons) and I don't have any pictures of them yet. They're really awesome, post-apocalyptic paintings commissioned for St. Paul's Cathedral in London earlier this decade. They were first hung, I think, right after the mosaics were given their first thorough cleaning in at least a century, and although I don't normally enjoy paintings that depict Christ, I find this pair to be fascinating, especially their very-intentional juxtaposition with the brightly gilded mosaics. I plan on scanning them at work tomorrow so I can show them off, too :)
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On a Streetcar Named Getting-My-Ass-In-Gear

For the first time, I feel really good looking back at the progress I've made in the last week. It might be because I got paid and so everything just looks a little cheerier, but it just seems like I've gotten over some kind of hump (or maybe just my plague) and am better equipped to listen when I tell myself to turn off the TV and do something else. In fact, on Thursday night I was too good at that and missed half of the Bill Clinton interview on The Daily Show - even though I had set up a reminder and the cable box had switched itself over to the channel. But the reason I missed it was that I was so engrossed in my Adaptation project, and the interview is online, so I don't feel horrible about it. I think this week I am actually going to write a scene, instead of just taking endless notes. Three or four possible ideas for an opening scene have been fighting to claw their way out onto the pixel-page, so I might just do all of them and see where it goes.

I read almost all the articles I meant to, which can be read about in the post below this one, and I finished Sourcery, the first next Discworld novel on the list. I also began Streetcar on Saturday morning and got about halfway through it. If you've never read the introduction that Tennessee Williams wrote himself for it, you can download it from me here. I would pull out one of my favorite quotes, but 1) I don't have just one, and 2) I can't bear to rip any of them out of context. They're all better together. Suffice it to say that reading it, and then lovingly transcribing it because it seems not to exist ANYWHERE ELSE on the internet, I was reinvigorated about both this project and the general direction I want to take my life.

Speaking of which, the Foreign Service test is just a little over two weeks away. It's intimidating. There's this huge, seemingly-singular event in my too-near future and it. It seems like applying to Vassar all over again. I have my sights set on this one thing, to the point of totally blocking out any other potentiality, and I'm not sure how many more times this is going to work for me. To that end, I've begun to think about how else I might leave Daytona in next spring or summer. It's actually not as hard as I thought it would be to do this... I imagined that planning alternatives might feel like a concession of defeat before I'd even given myself a chance to see what I could do. Instead, although I'm still dealing with those feelings, I also feel more confident in myself, and sort of feel resourceful for the first time in my life.

Besides wanting to be a career diplomat, one of my other long-standing career dreams has been to be an editor at a publishing company. I don't just love grammar, I have a sort of unnatural eagle-eye for spotting errors and typos (think an extra space between words) at a glance. Unfortunately for this particular dream - though greatly to my credit for the State Department, obviously - I majored in Political Science, not English, so I'm not immediately qualified, on paper, to get a job in publishing. I do, however, have a bit of practical experience editing manuscripts, papers, and, recently, business reports.

Enough experience, I think, to post a craiglist ad in the major cities advertising my availability for freelance editing services. This idea is still in its infancy, but hopefully, if I can get this venture up and running by the beginning of November, and people are into it, I'll be able to have at least six months of experience to put on my resume and a list of references to vouch for my abilities. If it doesn't work out with the State Department, I can still move back up north (or west, or somewhere completely off my radar right now) and apply for real editing gigs and do something (else) that I love with my life.

So there's that. Another thing I love is books. (Yeah, completely and unartfully changing gears here). On Friday afternoon, my brother and his girlfriend flew into town and I left work early to hang out with them, and discovered that Kristen really likes books, too, and that, furthermore, my brother had never heard of Mandala, my very favorite used bookstore... possibly ever. So we turned right back around after we got home and headed down once more to "Daytona proper" and spent a good two hours rummaging through the overcrowded shelves and floor-stacks and old National Geographics and Playboys. I ended up with three new Philip Roth books; The Satanic Verses; a book called Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz, one of the fathers of the modern Arabic novel; Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man; and a National Geographic from 1975 revealing the amazing future of wind power (including a really excellent artist's rendering of a futuristic, multiturbine, exceptionally top-heavy oceanic device, which, thanks to the power of the interweben, I need not scan because some kindly person has already done it for me. The picture will be below the cut, along with my final purchases, four new postcards! I'm really excited about them and I can't really remember this second if I made any more good goal progress this week - rode the bike to work on two days last week? Stretching regularly every night? - so I'm just going to skip right to the pictures :)



First, the windpower of the future!, as envisioned by National Geographic in, once again, 1975.

I know, right? Craaaazy hippies. What were they thinking?

Now, postcards. Tomorrow I plan on sharing the 17 postcards I already have, but first up tonight is Gustav Klimt's "Cartoon for the Stoclet Palace: Expectation." Secret: I really love the Klimt aesthetic but my inner indie snob has always prevented me from buying a poster of "The Kiss," because everyone else has it. What I enjoy most about "Expectation" is the way the woman's body is facing left, but her head is turned back. What is she looking at? A man? A mirror? A squirrel? The world may never know.

Next, the Monets.

This "Japanese Bridge" lives in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, according to the back of the postcard, and is the much warmer, more vibrant brother of the painting I've seen a few times at the National Gallery in London, and I like it more, I think. I'm a huge sucker for the interplay of the full spectrum of colors.

The second Monet is "Venice, Palazzo Dario," which feels cool and refreshing to look at, with all that bright-blue water. I don't really remember seeing any Venice paintings by Monet before, but the fuzzy detailing in the water really drew me into it. If I have to pick only one city in Europe to go to to satisfy my travel goal for the list, I think it has to be Venice. What with the whole sinking thing (even though that may not be true anymore), it seems rather urgent that I get there as soon as possible. Maybe I'm just in the mood for delicately ornate architecture right now. Who knows.

And the parting shot is Renoir's "La Déjeuner des canotiers," or, "The Luncheon of the Boating Party," for the more English-inclined. Not going to lie, I am a bigger fan of Renoir's ballerinas (second only to those by Degas), but I bought this postcard because of Amélie, one of my favorite movies of all-time-ever. If you've seen it, you know it features semi-prominently in the film, with Amélie playing a semi-metaphorical Girl-with-Drinking-Glass. It's one of those beautifully complex paintings of people that I love, where every person is their own character, and you can tell just by the way Renoir has painted their faces that they all have a unique backstory and set of motivations that make them more enduring than just the luncheon scene itself.

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Missing a New Yorker piece...

But otherwise, I got in the full count of articles for the week. (Actually had a lot more in The Economist, because I have real-life physical copies of it now, but it's been a busy weekend so I only had time to write blurbs for the first three that I read.) My weekly update post will be made sometime tomorrow, due to the same busy weekend. I actually got a lot done! (And yet, so very little...)


"Time Square vs. The High Line" contrasts and compares the new pedestrian-plazafication of Times Square with the opening of the High Line, a park created on a stretch of abandoned elevated rail tracks. Interesting to think about the new standards of "public spaces" in American society - one in the midst of one of America's most famous consumer hotspots, and the other offering prime views into other people's houses; be sure to note the part about the cabaret someone set up on their fire escape nearby.

"Happy Feet" is a cute little fluff piece about Zappos.com. When I clicked it, the leader made me think it was going to be so much more - an in-depth analysis of the American sense of entitlement to shoe collections of Imelda Marcosesque proportions. Instead, the article reveals the interesting corporate philosophy that enabled Zappos to grow so popular so quickly - and, like YouTube to Google, so powerful a competitor that they simply had to be purchased. Still worth the read, though.

"Unnatural selection" is yet another of those first-anniversary-of-the-market-crashing pieces that every media outlet in the world is doing this week. Obviously, though, since this one is by The Economist, it's one of the ones you should definitely take a look at if you're into this sort of thing. Notable sections include: why allowing Lehman to fail was a (kind of) good decision; how to get the message out to banks that the government won't be so generous next time in bailing them out; and why "bonuses are the symptom not the disease." If for no other reason, you should click on this article just to see the awesome carousel graphic which was also the cover of this week's issue.

Breaking news: Moon is coldest known place in the solar system. Sorry, Pluto. Tough toenails.

"Why are we the naked ape?" is a short history of the various theories that have been proposed since Darwin's time to explain why humans are significantly less hairy than the other primates. The theories are all very interesting, and the way in which scientists are currently making headway on this question may unpleasantly surprise you.

So now the robots can ask us for help about how best to map our world conquer all the humans. Hooray!

"Re-rigging Hamid Karzai" describes the... awkward state of Afghani democratic practices. This sentence sums it up best: "The tragedy is that he would probably have won a clean vote: he is still the closest thing Afghanistan has to a national leader."

And finally, "Will Russia and China pitch in?" is, on the surface, about why America and Western Europe need Russia and China's firm support on the UN Security Council to keep Iran's nuclear warhead program from advancing any further, it's also about the deeper issue of that for the last few (or five) decades, Americans have believed they can dictate the world's foreign policy and, now, when we need assistance in preventing a nation we've made loathe our government from attaining weapons to hurt us, the allies we need are nations we've alienated in the past. We never learn to just stop messing with things. Eloquent, I know, but it's 12:30 in the morning and I'm about to head to bed.
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My enduring love of macros...

...requires that I use a paintbrush and not the text tool.

Or, this week's SPT post contains two bonus pictures to show you my workspace!

That is all.




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$1, Bob, $1.

Today I donated my first dollar towards my breast cancer charity goal. Technically it wasn't by doing a sanctioned Walk for the Cure (in fact, I didn't even walk at all except from the car into the restaurant and back), but it's still going to cancer research. I decided to get lunch today at Firehouse Subs and they had a donation box set out for the American Cancer Society. Since I cashed my first full-time paycheck (ever!) yesterday, and proceeded to buy myself two bottles of celebratory wine to commence the wine connoisseur goal, number 53, it seemed like a good idea to also give something back.

I've tried to do this sort of thing periodically from time to time; after a big shopping splurge in New York, I'd keep change in my pocket to give to a homeless person. Most memorably, I gave all the change in my wallet (except for enough quarters for emergency bus fare) to a homeless man in Portland after buying a $2 truffle.

In other, mid-week news, I've commenced goal #93, Learn to identify ten things under the hood of a car and how to tell when they break, thanks to a Facebook quiz to that effect. I got 40% right, but the only one I knew for sure was that a muffler is on the exhaust pipe. Anyways now that I have a car, I'm sure at some point someone will be able to help me identify things that can go horribly, horribly wrong under there, and I'll never want to drive again...

I just went downstairs to get the mail and! I'm glad I hadn't hit post yet. The Economist came! Hooray! I'm reading through "The world this week" right now (in between tasks, of course!), which certainly won't be posted as one of the three articles, never fear. It looks like there's a lot of juicy stuff about Obama and health care, British foreign policy, and, of course, the cover story, "Wall Street: One year on, what's changed?" I am so very, very, very excited to finally have a subscription!
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