A group of primatologists got together and wrote up a manifesto to encourage governments to support conservation and economic development efforts in habitat countries so that wild apes do not disappear completely in the next 50 years (only 20 for orangutans). The authors and signatories, of course, support conservation not only because it will save the great apes but also the other species that live in threatened forests. They recognize that appealing to the public for support saving our closest relatives, who happen to be large, charasmatic animals, is more likely to spur action than saving a lot frogs or plants or insects.

In case anyone is interested, click here for more information and an opportunity to sign.

This weekend I am going to have an all Buffy, all the time kind of  Saturday. The San Diego Indie Music Festival is in North Park (basically my neighborhood) and Amber Benson's new movie Lovers, Liars, and Lunatics will be screening in the afternoon, followed by a Q&A with none other than Amber Benson. Then, just a couple of short hours later James Marsters will be performing on the main music stage. I am attending this event with two of my school friends, Kyleb and Alyssa, Lea, and her friend Allana. All of whom like Buffy. But, even cooler is that Kyleb, Alyssa, and I had already planned a Buffy nite for that night before we even knew about the Buffyverse fun at the festival. So, we will leave the festival to watch Buffy at my house. I believe it will be quite enjoyable.

This will be only the second actual social outing I have had with Alyssa and Kyleb. All three of us tend to be anti-social so it nice to attempt socializing outside of our offices on campus.

I am done grading. I am done calculating grades. I just need to fill in the little bubbles on the grade sheet. This is very good. I shall commence relaxing.

My birthday was very good this year. Well, except for the grading papers. That always sucks. But Lea and I left my school/her work early and went to dinner at Sipz. It is a vegetarian Asian fusion restaurant right by the comic book store. How convenient. I had the "beef" and broccoli but instead of the fake beef, I had tofu. Lea had the Bun Chay Tofu. It was all very good. Then we went to the comic book store and I got the new Runaways and the most recent Angel: After the Fall. Then we went to the new Korean frozen yogurt place and I got peanut butter and chocolate. That is my favorite. There weren't any open tables outside so we moved the car to a parking spot in the sun and sat in the trunk. Very funny.

Then I got to open my presents. Lea is very good at buying presents for me. She got me a Ravenclaw tie, the Serenity wave cards, Veronica Mars season 3, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer hat, and earlier I had already gotten the Serenity blueprints reference pack. All very cool stuff. There are also a few items that are on pre-order that I will get soon. The new Starbuck action figure!!!!! The fruity oaty bar lunch box from Serenity and a new Serenity t-shirt. 

Very good. She is a great lady. It was fun. Then I went home and graded and she went to class. Very good, though.

Look behind the cut for very funny diary entries by a dog and a cat. I read it several times a day and laugh. Those are totally my dogs.

 Please put it in a trash can; that's good news for everyone.

A brief article in the NY Times about a semicolon in a sentence on a sign on the subway encouraging people to throw trash away. 

I love the semicolon; it is a great piece of punctuation.

We went to the Vagina Monologues at UCSD last night and it was kind of strange. Our primary motivation was that a student intern at Lea's job was performing and we went to see her. The last time we saw the VM at KU, I was pretty sure it would be the last time. Not because they are not great and powerful and all that but because it seemed to be getting a little old as each year went by. A little burnout. So, it has been 4 years since I last saw them and absence makes the heart grow fonder. It was really fun and these ladies did a great job. It was more dramatic and they were more theatrical, adding great physicality to it that I don't recall in the KU productions. But I have to admit it was also strange. No one I have taught was actually on stage, although one of my current students was a stage hand, but I see these folks very differently now.

At KU, even though I was older than most undergraduates having taken the scenic route through college, I was one of them even if I did not perform I took part in the event. Now I teach people their age and see them as so young. But they are adults and can talk about vaginas all they want. So it was a little weird. But good. It was also neat to be reminded of the fact that even though it is something "old" for me, this is their first opportunity to take part like this. It is a radical event and probably very life changing. It is always important to be reminded of that and it made me appreciate it even more.

There were these two young guys sitting in front of us and they appeared to get more and more uncomfortable as the show went on. My first response was to think, why be here if you cannot handle it and that they didn't need to be there if they were going to be so easily embarrassed. Then I realized that, almost as much as the young women, young men need to be there. They need to see it. They need to learn about how awesome vaginas are and how so many women suffer sexual violence in our world. These two guys were very shocked when at the beginning the emcee asked people to stand up if they had been or knew someone who had been a victim of sexual violence. Almost all of the women stood up. Men need to know that women's vaginas are a source of great pain and pleasure and that they are not just penis recepticles, even if a woman engages in heterosexual sex. Even though they were embarrassed, I hope that the experience helps them understand the women in their lives better, that they become better lovers and better human beings.

At KU we always had a Vagina Festival go along with the monologues complete with vagina cookies. I believe that these students should also have vagina cookies. Perhaps Lea can suggest it to the student she knows. My favorite little bit is the part where a lady talks about the clitoris as the ONLY organ in the human body designed purely for pleasure and that it has 8000 nerve endings in this little tiny bundle, fully 2x as many as the head of a penis, which is way bigger, too. So the absolute and relative number is bigger. Excellent.

Good times.

are SPECTACULAR!

Yesterday was one of the spectacular kind. We have been having seriously crazy and expensive car trouble as of late and have finally given up on the big car. It is a Honda CR-V. It was always a wonderful car to have, particularly with the dogs, but I must admit to always disliking the near SVU nature of it. Now, we got it because the car we drove out here with, a Honda Civic, did a wonderful job getting us out here but we traded cars with my mom, she had the CR-V, for a reason. I do not currently remember that reason but I am sure there was one. Then, my mom drove the Civic back to KC and gave the car to a family friend who was in need of such a vehicle. The CR-V served us well for 3 and half years but recently began eating money. Chomp chomp chomp.

So, yesterday, as the fuel gauge reached empty we pulled up to the Honda dealership in Huntington Beach and left 2 hours later in this:



This is Starbuck, our new car. She is a 2008! Honda Fit. They are apparently one of the most popular cars worldwide but were never sold in the US until now. It is a reasonable car and was actually cheaper than many of the used Civics. Very nice. It even has an mp3 jack. I like that.  

On last week's Left, Right, and Center from KCRW out of Santa Monica,  Ariana Huffington mentioned her website and the Huffpollstrology posts. Ariana Huffington, the voice from beyond (progressive independent) on the show, hates pollsters and political opinion polls and I guess now posts results from polls for the presidential candidates plus their horoscopes and online political betting pools. That is one of the funniest things I have ever heard. She cracks me up. Here is the intro:

"Polls have come to dominate the media's horse race coverage of political campaigns. Pundits and reporters constantly use them to tell us who's hot and who's not -- but skip over the fact that plummeting response rates and variables like undecided voters and margins of error and often render these polls useless as anything other than lightweight diversions on par with horoscopes and political betting lines. Our HuffPollstrology chart helps keep you up to date on the latest poll results, along with the latest horoscope predictions, and the latest online political betting lines - and will hopefully help the polling junkies in the media keep polls in the proper perspective."

If you haven't listened to this show you should if you like politics. It is a roundtable discussion with the left, right, center, and Huffington discussing the political news of the week. It is totally great and usually pretty funny. Tony Blankley, the conservative, often says things that make me want to throw things and vomit but it is still fun.

Battlestar Galactica comes back to the airwaves Friday April 4th. If you have never watched it or perhaps you watched the first season but never got the second one, you could take this opportunity to watch it now. It is going to air on Friday so I wonder if that means that SciFi will bring back SciFi Fridays. I miss those. Although Stargate:Atlantis is still coming out with new episodes and SG-1 is gone so I am not sure what they would show with it. Oh, Flash Gordon maybe. I have not watched it but I have not heard good things about it. Maybe Eureka. I have not watched that either but it sure does sound interesting.

I cannot wait for the new Galactica episodes. What will happen to Starbuck? Who is the fifth Cylon? Will President Roslin live? What is this crazy dream thing going on with Athena, Six, and Roslin? I am getting a Starbuck action figure for my birthday. I am also going to get Veronica Mars season 3 and a Ravenclaw tie. I always get sorted into Ravenclaw, which is fine with me as long as I do not have to be friends with the snooty Ravenclaws. Luna Lovegood will be my Ravenclaw friend.

I know what I am getting for my birthday because Lea ordered them from eBay and her account is the same as mine. So I got the e-mails about them. But that is okay. I do not need to be surprised to be totally excited. I mean, really, you ask the pretty lady for 3 very specific things, you know there isn't much surprise there. I am excited about all three things. I almost asked for a Gryffindor tie because I always wish I could be in Gryffindor, but I never am.

A response to a question from

ethel_aardvark who lives in New Zealand where electoral politics maybe make more sense.

I think this is correct. I hope so. I will try to look it up later and make sure but I think the basic idea is in there. The part about money and possible disenfranchisement of millions of people because of the electoral college. I so got that right.

The first thing to discuss is money. You have to have a lot of it. That's really all there is to say about money. Now, the electoral college.

 

In the early days of the United States, every state was designated a certain number of delegates to the electoral college. The number of delegates a state was given was based on the population so that they were distributed proportionally. When citizens (at the time, white, male landowners) voted in the Presidential Primary, they would not actually be voting for a candidate, they would be voting for one of the delegates that supported the candidate they chose. So, the people voting would get together and caucus or later actually cast ballots. For delegates. Not candidates.

After each state had its Primary, all of the delegates would attend the party national convention. At the convention is where the real voting took place. The idea was that the candidate who had the most delegates at the convention would be the one the party nominated to run for president. But, delegates also had a little bit of leeway. They could change their votes and often these conventions could get quite heated.

Ultimately, it just meant that the popular vote was not always the way that the candidates were chosen. If the votes of the delegates diverged from the popular vote, then the delegates decided the candidate not the people.

Then we go to the national general election where the president was actually elected. Again, people would "cast a vote" for a candidate but again, they would really be voting for delegates in the electoral college. The electoral college would then get together and the number of members of the electoral college each candidate got would determine who won the presidency. Again, not the popular vote. Typically, the electoral college votes matched the popular vote but not always. Such as the 2000 presidential election where Al Gore won the popular vote but the Secretary of State of Florida (a Bush family friend) decided the state's very close election was in favor of Bush and the Supreme Court agreed.

In the 19th century, this form of voting made sense. Votes were tallied by hand, communication between states took a long time because it had to be delivered by hand and of course there weren't cars or planes or the internet. So, for a large nation with lots of states it made sense to do things this way. Well, since the beginning of the 20th century, or at least the mid-20th century, this does not make sense any more. Communication is instant and there is no reason to not have the popular vote stand as, well, the will of the people.

For some odd reason we have not abolished the electoral college and moved to a national primary election day where everyone votes on their party's candidate the same day and the person who get the most votes wins. Then that person runs against the other party's person and the popular vote again determines the winner. There are also these people called "Super-delegates" who are party big wigs in each state who have a vote as a delegate to the party convention that weighs as much as the other delegates'. The other delegates, however, represent a proportion of the population of the state who actually voted for someone. These "Super-delegates" do not. One person, a shitload of votes. Their voice counts more that the rest of us. Pretty much that disenfranchises a whole bunch of people. In the land of the free and all that.

Now, I am not so naive as to think that one person, one vote is actually the way this thing works. The electoral college keeps party influence in the hands of entrenched, establishment interests and you have to be absurdly wealthy or sell yourself to the absurdly wealthy to even get a voice in this thing. The people get to choose between the candidates that the establishment decides to allow to run. None of these people are the Puppet Master but the forces at work all tend to favor establishment candidates. I am trying to make myself sound less like a conspiracy theorist.

I hope this makes sense. I think it is pretty accurate, although it has been a while since I had a government class. Some of the details might be a little funky but the general idea is right. If anyone has corrections, please let me know. I will try to look this up later and make sure it is accurate.

What he's said so far and what I think about it (these are not direct quotes, they are paraphrases, except for the first sentence of #3):

1. Trust the government.
This president has probably done more to damage faith in the government than any president since Nixon. Trust the government to do the people's work. Like lie to them about the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. And the imminent threat that Iraq under Saddam Hussein presented. And how quickly the war would be over. And how we are not setting up a permanent military presence.

2. Not making the bush tax cuts permanent means raising taxes. No new taxes! American families have to balance their budgets, so should the federal government.
$720 million dollars a day for the war he lied about. $720,000,000 per day. $262,800,000,000 a year. Not all of this went into the budget. Lower taxes, $262.8 BILLION in military spending every year. Can he do math?

3. Decisions about medical care should be made in the privacy of your doctor's office, not in the halls of congress.
The government should not get involved in health care decisions, like providing affordable health care for every American. But, your decision about whether or not to have a child should probably be made by the president's God and the congress.

4. The oil man says, use less oil.
No comment.

5. Our foreign policy is based on the idea that people, when given the chance, will choose democracy and freedom.
As long as you define "choose" as unilateral invasion and the advent of horrible poverty and violence, the slaughter of innocent human beings, and the destruction of thousands year old buildings and art that were the cradle of human civilization. I am sorry, it's not unilateral invasion. It is the "Coalition of the Willing".

6. Just commenting--this very bad man has no sense of history. Many struggles similar to the one between "LIBERTY" and "EVIL" that we are engaged in currently have occurred in the past. Perhaps if he had read a history book he would know that economic and political problems are often embedded in religious symbolism and discourse. Perhaps he should look into the division between the Shia and Suni in the first hundred years after the death of Muhammad. Maybe then he would learn a little something about the world in which he has so forcefully inserted himself. Or what about the Protestant Reformation? (Did you know that the Catholic Church declared that forks were the instrument of the devil when they first came about in Western Europe?)

$720 million dollars a day. 
 
ETA: So very angry that I am going to go ahead and fill out my absentee ballot to vote in the California Primary. This is the first time I have done absentee and I think I am okay with it. I am still disappointed about not going to the polls. I love election days and atmosphere of polling places. The democracy of it all just gets me. And the sticker. Last year I got stickers in Spanish, English and Vietnamese. As one of those "libery-loving Americans" the president is so fond of invoking, I am going to enjoy exercising my right to vote for someone to replace him. 

Oh, and the link on the $720 million dollars a day above is to a great YouTube video about what else we could buy with $720 million dollars a day. Really cool stuff like affordable housing, health care, education improvements, school lunches. And lots of those things.

So Hillary Clinton's eyes mist over while discussing how hard it is to run for president and how exhausted she is. The mainstream media respond with more overt misogyny than we usually get from them. The majority of critical coverage and insightful punditry typically chastises her for being too stiff, unemotional and coming off cold. Because women are not supposed to be cold, calculating leaders. Do we ever hear about how cold Dick Cheney is? About how unemotional and unfeeling his public presence is? The man is the true incarnation of evil but his stoic demeanor is indicative of his seriousnes and his ability to "make the tough decisions". There are countless other examples of male politicians being cold and unfeeling and not necessarily praised for it, but it simply doesn't figure into the equation. I mentioned Cheney just because he seems to be the prototypical example. But it works with most of them.

So then she cries and she doesn't have the...balls...to be president. John Edwards, the leading progressive-populist democratic candidate, talks about how it takes strength to be commander-in-chief--clearly making the point that Clinton does not possess that strength. Not only, apparently, is there no crying in baseball but there is no crying in national politics. The constant coverage and talking-head idiocy that took over the news for the days surrounding the New Hampshire primary and even into this week is making me sick. I am just now writing about this because I can finally do more than say, "Stupid fucking misogynistic heteropatriarchial fuckers". But then I realized that Katha Pollitt said it much better in her recent blog entry for The Nation. I love Katha Pollitt. She is freaking awesome.

Mitt Romney doesn't know what the Violence Against Women Act is and nobody seems to notice. Would anyone like some double-standard with their media misogyny?

And everyone is really enjoying saying Hillary, Obama, and Edwards. Which of these things is not like the other? Why is she, a sitting member of the United States senate, referred to by the media by her first name and not her last? NPR does this, RadioNation does this, and of course, Fox and the mainstream media do this, too. But, NPR's Bob Garfield recently did a great story about this on On the Media, one of the greatest shows ever, and offerred a great discussion of the use of Hillary's first name but not John or Barack's. There are certainly instances of the use of male politicians' first names in campaigns or disparaging nicknames (Slick Willie comes to mind) but news outlets tend to refer to them by their last names which in our society connotes respect and possession of authority.

Giant extinct rodent was guinea pig relative. 

I think that link might require an account so here is a story from the NY Times.

1500 pound extinct rodents that were herbivores. Phoberomys pattersoni. Totally cool.

This evening on Marketplace there was a great story about marketing clothing to big and tall men. Why would that be interesting, you ask?

This company, Colossus, was having trouble marketing its clothing line until they tapped into the Bear market. That's right. Bears. They even had audio of a photo shoot with Bears where the photographer said, "Okay, guys. Say grrr". Freaking awesome. The photo shoot was for A Bear's Life magazine that "is only slightly more risque than O magazine".How often do you hear about Bears on anything that is not decidedly queer?

I love Marketplace but right now? Love it even more.

Listen or read the transcript here.

 There was this whole quiz thing here previously but apparenty I still have not really figured out html and whatnot so I will just say that it said I was 69% Chief Tyrol, 63% Apollo, and 61% Laura Roslin.

I am pretty okay with that. I like those folks and no matter how much I might like to fantasize about being Starbuck, I know I am nothing like Starbuck. That's okay. I would really rather fantasize about Starbuck in a different way.



Perhaps you can guess what way that happens to be.