September 2010
““The office of the Senate Sergeant at Arms has concluded its...”
– Senator Saxby Chambliss apologises (personally!) for the hate speech one of his staffers left at Joe.My.God.
On Proselytising
thecurvature:
meloukhia:
In case I didn’t make it abundantly clear in my post (I thought I did?), I think that missionaries/etc. should only approach people who have asked to be approached. Which is actually a lot of people; organisations like the Mormons have a system where you can sign up for a missionary visit. I think it’s violatingly offensive to shove your religious faith down someone’s...
“But, you know, it’s important to remember that with what I do know about the...”
– tangerine trees and marmalade skies:
DING DING DING! I’d like to welcome you all to my new social justice movement, it’s called antiassholism.
On Proselytising
In case I didn’t make it abundantly clear in my post (I thought I did?), I think that missionaries/etc. should only approach people who have asked to be approached. Which is actually a lot of people; organisations like the Mormons have a system where you can sign up for a missionary visit. I think it’s violatingly offensive to shove your religious faith down someone’s throat,...
But before I go out!
imissedtumblr:
meloukhia:
imissedtumblr:
meloukhia is a liar who claims the sky is blue over the ocean right now. This is obviously the falsest of facts because I, too, live by an ocean, and it is grey and overcast and windy and the ocean itself is looking sad and not mermaid-ish at all.
meloukhia is such a liar. Liar liar pants on fire! (Are you wearing pants right now?)
Lunch time!
...
this ain't livin': Faith and Respect →
I’ve noticed more and more lately that there’s a trend in a lot of liberal and social justice circles to make disdain for religion as clear as possible. I speak not of out atheists talking about their atheism and challenging assumptions about people who don’t follow a religious faith. I’m talking specifically about treating faith and belief with contempt, turning religion almost into an...
But before I go out!
imissedtumblr:
meloukhia is a liar who claims the sky is blue over the ocean right now. This is obviously the falsest of facts because I, too, live by an ocean, and it is grey and overcast and windy and the ocean itself is looking sad and not mermaid-ish at all.
meloukhia is such a liar. Liar liar pants on fire! (Are you wearing pants right now?)
Lunch time!
Exhibit A:
Now, I will grant...
“My new roommates were all right. They didn’t mind I was queer. One...”
– rm, ‘just because I didn’t kill myself, doesn’t mean I didn’t feel like I was dying’
Heidi Walters at The Journal: Bigfoot and the... →
On May 29 at 12:10 a.m. Streufert posted a cryptic warning on his blog and, as he always did, posted notice of it on the BFF: “When looking for Bigfoot, watch out for TROLLS.”
Shit, meet fan. And he was temporarily suspended.
But then, when he came back, he was attacked again. This time, Brian Brown, who founded the BFF in 2002 but had been absent from it for years, heard about the mess,...
J. Adrian Stanley at Colorado Springs Independent:... →
A few weeks ago, dominoes began toppling in Colorado’s insurance industry.
First one company, then another, then another took their “child-only insurance policies” off the market. The reason was obvious: Sept. 23 was approaching, the date when federal health care reform dictates that insurance companies cannot deny coverage to a child because of a pre-existing condition....
Blah blah Glee blah blah spoilers →
Camilla Mortensen at Eugene Weekly: Return of the... →
OK, so, we don’t actually have a public option. We’ve got the Oregon Health Plan, which covers tens of thousands of randomly selected low-income Oregonians. What we don’t have is a government-run health insurance plan that competes alongside private insurers.
But we could.
Oregon could be the first state to resurrect the public option from the...
Mara Shalhoup at Creative Loafing Atlanta: CL's... →
That week’s cover story, “8 Artists to Watch,” highlighted a group of artists selected by CL whose work is worth checking out this fall. They all were deserving of inclusion.
The problem is, they all were white.
Your response was swift and fierce and, for the most part, spot-on. As one of you pithily noted, “The cover looks like a flyer for a condo in fucking...
Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Staff:... →
Backpage.com respectfully declines the recent demand by a group of 21 state attorneys general that it close its adult classifieds website. Backpage.com is a legal business and operates its website in accordance with all applicable laws. In response to concerns raised by the AGs in recent months, Backpage.com has increased its efforts to provide clear, legal rules to users who post...
Ron Reason at Design With Reason: At Burning Man,... →
I’ve been in alt-weekly mode with several cool clients this year, and some work with the AAN, so I was intrigued to find not one but two alternative weekly newspapers circulating at Burning Man, the annual desert festival of art-culture-camping-music-whatever in the remote desert of Nevada. Well, no wifi or cell phone service for the entire week, so, how you gonna get out your information...
this ain't livin': False Accusations and Rhetoric →
Filing false charges is absolutely harmful, and absolutely shouldn’t happen. But it’s worth exploring who tends to file charges falsely and why, and to deconstruct the idea that filing false charges somehow makes it harder to file real charges. What makes it hard to file real charges is living in this culture, where rape victims/survivors are disbelieved for any number of spurious and ridiculous...
Queues at capacity
thecurvature:
staff:
Later this week we’re pushing a complete overhaul of the Queue feature with some killer new functionality.
In the meantime though, the existing queue service is handling a volume of posts it was never designed for. To prevent it from becoming unstable and mis-publishing posts, we’ve decided the best course is to take the queues offline and expedite the relaunch.
The Queue...
FWD/Forward: Dear Imprudence: Yeah Hi I’m Actually... →
Abby’s decision not to represent any people with disabilities in her column is noted. I’m willing to bet that some people with disabilities wrote in about how much they do not like being stared at, to point out that when everyone is staring at you, it is most definitely perceived as offensive. It’s not ‘embracing’ at all to feel like you can’t go to the grocery store, ride a horse, sit in the...
Tim Carman at Washington City Paper: Inside D.C.'s... →
If only supply-and-demand economics were so easy. The sudden appearance of gourmet food trucks that delighted so many lunch-hour consumers simultaneously horrified the established restaurant community—a deep-pocketed, politically wired bunch.
Now, like in Brooklyn and Los Angeles and every other city where mobile vendors represent new competition, the District’s inline businesses are...
Random Irritant of the Day
imissedtumblr:
For reasons I do not understand, some people think “people with disability” and “worker”/”employee”/”small business owner”/”entrepreneur” are mutually exclusive terms.
Funny, that.
Our society is structured in a way designed to make these things mutually exclusive; take, just for one example, the fact that people on disability are essentially barred from working if they want to...
Peter Rugg at The Pitch: Jonathan Franzen: Great... →
For anyone out there that might want to talk to Franzen in the future, he says he doesn’t read about himself, so save those questions. He also doesn’t give a shit about the Atlantic Monthly, because the Atlantic Monthly stopped publishing fiction, which makes sense to me. The only thing he said about the media perception of his work that sounded false, and about this whole...
Annie Zaleski at Riverfront Times: Meet Kella... →
I guess what everyone wants to know — how did this happen? Did Bruce walk up to you, or to the couple? Did he introduce himself? Set the scene and describe what transpired. Basically, we were walking down the sidewalk along the water that leads to the beach — it was me, my camera, Ed, his guitar, Jen, my husband Chris and Jen’s brother, Scott, and [the couple’s...
Michael Muller at Mountain XPress: Fire dept: We... →
Larry Pierson, deputy chief of the Swannanoa Fire Department, says that no one at the department was informed that a recent fundraiser held by the Buncombe County Republican Party was political in nature or that it would directly benefit that party’s get-out-the-vote efforts.
“What was proposed to Chief [Anthony] Penland was that this would be a ‘rappelling-a-thon’ to help cure cancer,” he...
Census Bureau Poverty Rate Drastically Undercounts... →
In my analysis, a key metric to judge the overall economic security and hardship level of a country is the percentage of the population living paycheck to paycheck. Anyone who lives paycheck to paycheck can tell you about the stress and psychological impact it has on you when you know your family is one sickness, injury or downsizing away from economic ruin. The employment company CareerBuilder,...
this ain't livin': Immigration Policy, Racist... →
Human slavery continues to be a problem around the world, and in the United States. There is ample evidence to show that some people in this country are slaves. Not in a metaphorical sense, but in the sense of being held captive and forced to work, receiving no remuneration, and being bought and sold as commodities. Human capital. These reports are hard to ferret out because the media, for some...
Joe Eskenazi at SF Weekly: PG&E Disseminates List... →
It’s also uncertain how much relief or terror one should express regarding the proximity of a pipe to one’s domicile, as the stretch of piping in San Bruno that exploded last week was not on PG&E’s internal list. When asked what use area residents could make of a list of risky pipes that didn’t include the one that ruptured and killed at least seven people,...
FWD/Forward: Self-Portraits With Disability:... →
Each portrait tells a little piece of her story. I really love her use of colour, textures, and shapes and I like that while each picture stands on its own really well, they can also be viewed together as part of a larger narrative about her life and her disability.
Blair Campbell at East Bay Express: Confessions of... →
I never questioned the safety of the drug because it was prescribed, seemingly without hesitation, by a doctor I trusted. More than a year later, I looked it up online and saw that it was classified by the FDA as a Pregnancy Category C medication, meaning that its risks to the fetus are unknown. What is known, according to the FDA, is that Promethazine can cause fatal respiratory depression...
James Pitkin at Willamette Week: Saving Ryan →
Santana’s story is not about a 20-year-old cured of addiction. It’s too early for that chapter. Just two weeks ago he suffered at least his third relapse, cashing in an inheritance check for enough smack to keep him high for a day.
What separates Santana’s story from conventional wisdom is this—it isn’t shelter workers, drug counselors or psychotherapists who have labored the hardest to...
Gus Garcia-Roberts at Miami New Times: Colombian... →
Why is it that parrots can’t avoid running with the wrong crowd? First there was their storied relationship with blood-thirsty pirates. Now, apparently, they’re getting involved in the Colombian drug trade.
Colombian prosecutors are accusing Lorenzo the Parrot of being trained to scream a warning in Spanish— “Run, run, the cat is going to get you!”— when...
Michael Roberts at Denver Westword: Immigration... →
In yesterday’s preview of an immigration rally at North High School in favor of the DREAM Act, which would provide a path for citizenship for certain undocumented graduates of U.S. high schools, Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition communications director Alan Kaplan hoped for a turnout in the hundreds. That proved to be optimistic — but Kaplan was still pleased by the event,...
this ain't livin': Faith and Prejudice →
This is hardly a new thing; talk as we might about enshrining the separation of church and state in the very documents used to establish this country, the founders were Christian, had Christian values, and expected the United States to be a Christian country. Faith was integrated into those founding documents just as much as shrewd politics was and it continues to be, thanks to the fact that...
Rachel Monroe at Baltimore City Paper: Button... →
The MICA professor/graphic designer/DIY publishing guru is talking about Sexy Librarian, the debut novel by Julia Weist released on Lupton’s Slush Editions imprint and a test case in self-publishing that took advantage of print-on-demand, or POD, technologies. For Lupton and other POD enthusiasts, this new way of publishing allows artists and writers more creative control and empowers small...
Ryan Stewart at The Boston Phoenix: Interview:... →
Set at the beginning of Prohibition in Atlantic City, the show recalls, at various points, past HBO classics like Deadwood and The Sopranos. (Creator Terence Winter was a writer and producer on the latter.) And the impressive cast includes Steve Buscemi as Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, a fictionalized version of bootlegging kingpin Nucky Johnson, Michael Pitt as a young man who works for Nucky,...
Justin Kendall at The Pitch: David Gutierrez, Air... →
Gutierrez’ wife, Gina, told investigators that her husband “began having unprotected sex with numerous partners” after being reassigned to McConnell in 2008. He’d arrange the hook ups through adult networking websites and “bragged” to her “about his numerous sexual exploits in the Wichita area and commented he never informed the other parties of ...
Michael Roberts at Denver Westword: Chris... →
As you’ll recall, Bartkowicz was busted shortly after showing off his grow to a 9News reporter. DEA personnel saw a website piece about the interview and raided his home, which was less than 1,000 feet from a school — a factor that ratchets up the potential time Bartkowicz can spend in stir.
Joseph Saint-Veltri, Bartkowicz’s attorney, told Westword earlier this month that...
Kyle Munzenrieder at Miami New Times: Fort Myers... →
Moore called police dispatcher Joeleen Jeffery and asked her to enter a fake crime report and instructed her to make sure the ex-girlfriend responded to the scene. Another dispatcher, Michael Grimmit, ended up inputting the crime report, saying that a black male was looking inside car windows parked outside the Edison Mall. (Ugh, of course the fake crime involved a black male. Not only is...
Holly Otterbein at Philadelphia City Paper: Hall... →
Take, for instance, the 911 tapes regarding the April 29, 2008, shooting of Dwight Dixon on West Thompson Street in North Philly: The public cannot hear them, the city has decided — not now, likely not ever. Same goes for the Police Department’s procedures for investigating officers who’ve shot civilians, and the groundwater contamination records for a building on 1500 S....
