testing, testing

am i on tehran time yet? scott westerfeld is hoping putting everyone's blog on UMT +3:30 will overload the censors trying to shut down communication among iranians. tiny effort, why not?

even if the election looked clean, censorship sucks.

short stuff

i've not been getting around to writing about things lately... so bullet-point time.

• virginia -- like, the same virginia where philip morris is based, the one where jamestown started commercial tobacco production back in the early 1600s -- just put through legislation banning smoking in most bars and restaurants. hallelujah, i didn't really think it'd get passed!
  
• i worked at project homeless connect all day yesterday. one of the cooler things about my job is the opportunity to do things like this - as part of the job. and it was an eye-opener. the event served more than 500 homeless folks yesterday... tons of volunteers and most of the local human services agencies were out to match people up with housing, medical and dental care, i.d. services, haircuts, new shoes, care packets with sanitary items, towels, clothes, food, you name it. the heartbreaking part was when things ran out -- men's shoes and dental appointments for the day were among the first to go. my day was split among escorting folks to the restrooms near the initial line (the restrooms were in a hallway that gave access to the rest of the scope arena... the facility didn't want people wandering the entire place), taking exit interviews, and handing out clothes and tote bags with towels. i'll certainly be back for the next event this summer.
  
• unexpected side effects: i took up using cloth grocery bags. (wow, most of a year ago! didn't realize it'd been that long.) among the other cool things like it being really much easier to haul a lot of groceries around, it's finally causing me to act more like my parents, at least on one point, and a relatively good-for-me one. they've always been bargain shoppers and scoured out tons of coupons--it's a benevolent obsession. me, i'd normally forget to use any coupons i found, so i didn't bother much. with the cloth bags, i collect coupons IN the bags... so they're with me when i go shopping. plus, the market in downtown norfolk where i grab lunch and snack supplies has double couponing... so i'm slowly getting more addicted to the game. this week, i bought $22 of food for $12!
  
• jesse's ship made it through sea trials! i might get to see my boyfriend again now and then! he even has a 3-day-weekend! oh, and there's some nifty video of the thing actually moving from the outside and (jesse's video) from the inside.
  

50 years

this week marks 50 years since the norfolk public schools ended their state-sanctioned campaign of "massive resistance." rather than integrate, they shut the public schools down in 1958... and didn't reopen until forced to on february 2, 1959.

a lot of the norfolk 17, the first handful of black students who entered the formerly segregated schools, are still in the area and talking about their experiences. the current mayor and governor just apologized on behalf of the city and state.

it just blows my mind, though. as i quickly approach turning 30, fifty's suddenly starting to seem like not-such-a-big number, things that you can look up people to talk about instead of flipping through history books. 51 years ago, black schools and white schools. right here. defended by government.

i guess i shouldn't be so surprised that injustice recently existed in my society -- i mean, it still exists, just not this particular instance of it. still, it happened to strike me this morning as being really pretty unbelievable...

new president

has anyone seen any good estimates on how many people watched yesterday's inauguration ceremony, either in person or via tv or internet? something more quantitative than "enough to break the internet"? (and yeah, i was on the cnn stream from work until it got too choppy near time for the ceremony... most of my floor gathered in the volunteer crisis line room to watch on the tv there.)

while yes, the speech was inspiring, and yes, it's a historical event no matter what happens from here out... the thing that got me most was the sheer number of people wanting to be there and wanting to believe that this guy can lead us to work together to make a better united states, a better world. if he can keep that goodwill and hope going even without a miracle cure for tough times, that's a mighty beast to leverage.

and i gotta give it to them -- starbucks chose an awesome moment to unleash their pledge 5 campaign, bribing folks with coffee for signing up for five hours of community service... hope it works.

hope it all works.

big smile for the day

via my friend matt's livejournal, a story on DIY adjustable glasses. the idea is to help all the people without access to opticians and corrective lenses. can you imagine having to retire when your vision started changing due to age? or even not being able to read at all because your vision was never so great?

at $1 per pair... i, for one, would happily put in $30 or so to get a pair, for pure glee at seeing how they work. (and, well, with no more vision insurance, $30 would be a steal for a spare pair of glasses.) wonder if one laptop per child's give one get one idea for capitalizing on the neat-o factor could be used to help raise funds... give twenty-nine, get one?

jimmy carter vs. the worms

i first saw this on saturday... i didn't get around to writing about it then, but it's been making me giggle every time i see a caduceus on signs around town ever since. share the mirth, right?

it really sort of sounds like a comic superhero sort of battle, but jimmy carter has a death warrant out on a parasitic worm that grows up to three feet long in humans and has to be painfully, slowly reeled out when it blisters through the skin. nick kristof blogged it on saturday when carter announced that we're down to 5,000 cases worldwide. it's looking likely to be the first disease in history eradicated through behavior change, without the use of vaccines or a cure. proper water filtering techniques do the trick. jimmy carter's winning.

if you go from there to the wikipedia article on guinea worms, the story gets even cooler. seriously, beyond the usual getting public health aide workers into remote areas to educate people and hand out filters... carter's negotiated ceasefires to fight these things.

i don't recommend an image search for the queasy of stomach.

the caduceus connection? according to wikipedia, the caduceus (and the less commonly used but probably more correct staff of asklepios) may actually have evolved from a picture portraying worms wrapped around a stick, not snakes. guinea worms. the still-standard medical treatment involves wrapping the worm around a stick or piece of gauze as it's extracted, so theory goes that the symbol comes from a picture of one of the services offered by ancient doctors.

so now every time i see a caduceus, it's not just "doctor's office here." it's "hah! humans are winning this one!" go jimmy carter.

commonplace?

i've been reading the paper newspaper a bit at work... it gets delivered to the office, and it's good for keeping up with local agency information that ought to find its way into our database. one thing that strikes me as kinda cool about the virginian pilot is that they're totally unintimidated by pointing their readers to the web... and if it's a long URL, they just send everybody to a tinyurl. i haven't exposed myself to real print media on a regular basis in years. is this the standard now? or are they just that smart?

(they also tend to use google maps with pinpoint locations in their online edition. i'm a little more ambivalent about that... not so sure i want to know exactly how close to my place last night's robbery was...)

jugs

nytimes has an article on the new style of milk jugs that we've been seeing at costco.

i didn't know they were better for the environment. i'll cease grumbling over the awkward spilly-ness and work on getting used to them now.

iran story update

today's fresh air was an interview with seymour hersh, author of the new yorker article i linked yesterday. it's probably a little more accessible than the article itself, since terry gross is good like that. (plus, you can take the podcast driving/running/housecleaning/whatever. npr helps make our kitchen a cleaner place.)

stepping up ops in iran

i'm not all that in touch with the news media, honestly. but had any of you heard about this story, involving congress authorizing $400 million to step up covert ops in iran? it's front-page news today in france. still working my way through the stories, but it's interesting to see what's likely to affect the perception of america o'er there... (and has it hit al jazeera yet? can't imagine this making too many friends.)