One more day!!!

Yesterday my wonderful family threw a surprise birthday party for me. I was completely surprised and I loved it! It made me feel grounded and whole again after weeks of pre-election nerves and anxiety. I'll post some pictures and stories about it later, but right now I have to grade papers and catch up with work. Unfortunately all the excitement and chocolate cake seem to have brought on a sore throat/cold, but I'm hoping it will be a short illness.

I'll also compulsively be checking up for coverage of the last day of this historic campaign. The Minnesota Independant, or MNIndy, has been doing a fantastic job of covering the local stories that the Star Tribune is refusing to cover (so sad that our papers has gone down the tubes in such a spectacular fashion). Check there for the stories of the Madia, Tinklenberg and Franken campaigns.

Here is a great story about hope from the Christian Science Monitor by an unlikely Obama canvasser. I am really loving the stories that people are telling online about their personal transformations as a result of being involved as citizens. It makes me feel so hopeful!

Two Virginians, Ethel Kennedy and RFK's son Max, talk about their support for Obama. My mother admired RFK very much, so I know she'd be interested in how his family sees Obama in relation to their history.

Minnesotan now writing about the media for the NY Times, David Carr, talks about the way the New Media has changed this election. He points out that traditional media, such as broadcast news, still plays a major role, but that they are adapting to the multiple channels of dissemination online, and that there are many alternate ways for people to get news, such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc, that we are just beginning to understand. I find this so exciting!

OK, time to get back to work.

Punaise! Palin se fait avoir.

Pour mes amis francophones:

Un des Justiciers Masqués, un duo comique québécois, a réussi a parler avec Sarah Palin pendant presque six minutes avant de lui dire qu'il n'était pas vraiment Nicolas Sarkozy,"Sarah Palin se fait avoir!"

Il y' avait quand même des indications. Par exemple, "my special American adviser Johnny Hallyday, The Prime Minister of Canada Stef Carse, the Prime Minister of Quebec Richard Z. Sirois.

Bon, ben, qu'elle sache pas qui est Johnny Hallyday, ça passe, mais ne pas savior qui est le chef d'état de son pays voisin Canada? Quând même! Faut pas déconner. Sarkozy, lui, avait racroché.

A la fin, j'ai eu pitié quand il a mentioné le porno, et on se rend compte en écoutant qu'elle réagit comme nous réagissons toutes les femmes quand quelqu'un nous a insulté de cette façon, si grossièrement--soit, elle rit mais ne réagit pas tout de suite.

Mais ça m'a vite passé quand je me suis souvenue de ses intentions á propos de l'intégrité de mon corps et de notre pays. Tant pis pour elle.
(merci, gerrit)

Is it research or is it fun? why not both?

Following the trail of serendipity leads to amazing things! (I will be using some of this material in a class next semester.)


Checked out The Chutry Experiment where Prof Chuck Tryon blogs about film and new media, and found a link to an inspired remix showing McCain's links to his political friends (see this video about remixing) "My Friends, the Musical", by an extremely skilled video remixer who posts at the YouTube channel Humanitainment.
I love the way the remix makes its points with verbal and visual puns on "my friends" and a wicked sense of humor.
This link then led me to a site that promotes and houses video remixes, RemixAmerica.org. What a find! not just for the entertaining and thought-provoking remixes, but also becaue the site provides you with the means to make and post your own! I'm going to try it out later. Here is how RemixAmerica describes itself on their About page:

RemixAmerica.org is a multi-partisan, non-profit website that uses digital technology to give everyone the chance to own the words, the music, the images and sounds of America in digital form; to remix those expressions and ideas with their own; and to send the products of our community's creativity out to the world... where others will come back to us and start it all over again...

Poking around, I came across this absolutely superb remix of STYCYD judging and the presidential debates. For those of us who watched STYCD faithfully, it's fun as hell to see the judges comments repurposed this way. What I especially like is that the message the judges give the two candidates is that they have to listen to the audience. It's a great way to show how reality TV, even as a crass money-making operation, also allows for 'talk-back' from the viewers. More to the political point, for those of us who are frustrated at some of Obama's less-than-audacious positions, this vid gives a refreshing critique of his positions on "clean coal" and saber-rattling in Afghanistan. So I checked out the site of the remixer, Rebellious Pixels, and discovered the site of activist, photographer, videographer and busy, busy guy Jonathan McIntosh.
He just posted about his presentation at a New Media conference called Ars Electronica in Austria. (Note to self: listen to the talk!)

His remix playlist, the material he presented in his talk, is here (thanks, Jonathan, for your generosity in posting all this!)

For future reflection: when people take copyrighted footage and repurpose it for parody, political commentary, or just for fun, what are the issues of Fair Use that come up? The Center for Social Media at American University has a blog where people are talking about this and other issues related to this emerging phenomenon of Web 2.0 creativity, citizen journalism and activism, and collective intelligence.

There is a lot to reread and digest. here. A final note: a Google search on McIntosh led me to El Oso's (David Sasaki) work; he was the Latin American editor of Global Voices Online, one of my favorite blog portals, and now he is dedicating himself to outreach through Rising Voices Awesome!

Halloween festivities

We joined our friends with whom we've spent Halloween ever since our kids were very little. The older ones still want to dress up, even though almost all of them are now taller than their parents. There were a lot of trick-or-treaters because the weather was mild, and one came dressed as a voting booth! Too bad I didn't get a picture. But here are a few:

Mello and the Phantom

Athena!

Sorting the haul: "I'll trade you these Starburst for your Snickers."

Lots of folks were out on the streets in costume; I love it!
Rocketboom posted a wonderful video of last year's Halloween parade in NYC

Still need a costume?

Just a quick wander around YouTubia for some How-To videos

DIY number costumes!

Threadbanger best DIY videos

The Dark Knight Joker make-up


Cool skull face!

Pumpkins and power tools!

Language in contact; growing up with Yiddish

I didn't know when I was growing up that many of the expressions I learned from my family and friends were Yiddish. Some of them I knew because they've entered English in general (like lox and bagel) and some were familiar from movies, songs or books, but many were words we used daily because we picked them up from our friends: oy, oy gevult, feh! bubeleh, mensch, schlep, tsuris, meshugenah, dreck, nudnick, yutz, putz, schmendrick, shlemeil, plotz, megillah, kvetch, schlub, schmaltz, shmeer, kibitz, chutzpah, chazerai, cockamamie, schlock, shmatte, shpeil, mishegoss, shmo, shmuck, shnook, svhvitz, and more. I think the fact that so many of our friends were Jews from the East Coast meant that certain words were absorbed into our home vocabulary, even though both my parents were raised as Catholics. In college and graduate school, a dear friend continued my education in Yiddish by explaining some of the finer distinctions (schlemeil vs shlemazil, for example). So I get a kick out of this ad where a variety of people who "don't look Jewish" use so many of the Yiddish expressions I grew up with.

A Yiddisha Take on 2008
Transcript and translation

What do you think of a man who called our economy strong just weeks before it tanked?
There’s a meshugener (crazy person).

What do you think of McCain opposing funding for renewable energy?
Meshugeneh! (It’s crazy!)

Excuse me. McCain voted against the violence against women act.
What a shmendrick (fool).

McCain supports Bush’s plan to privatize social security so it can be at the mercy of the stock market.
Such a yutz (clueless person).

Ya know, McCain said he preferred that a president has a grounding in the Christian faith.
That gets me in my kishkes (guts). We don’t need that kind of tsores (trouble), honey.

Is Palin ready to handle complex foreign relations?
You think Bush is farblondzshet (bewildered), you haven’t seen anything.

You-hoo. You know, McCain didn’t support equal pay for equal work.
So women do all the schlepping (dragging), get bupkis (nothing) in return. Whatever.

John McCain says staying in Iraq is the only way to define victory.
That guy is such a nudnick (pest).

Hey. McCain supporters say we can’t trust Obama on Israel.
That’s total dreck (dirt). Obama’s a great friend to Israel. He’s got a perfect voting record.

What do you think about Pennsylvania Republicans implying that electing Obama could bring a Holocaust?
A shonde, it’s a shonde. (A shame, it’s disgraceful.)

You know McCain has 8 houses and 13 cars?
Oy gevault! (Oh for heaven’s sake!)

So what kind of leadership do we need for today’s world?
We need a mensch, a real mensch.(a decent person).

We hope you enjoyed our shtick (comic performance).

What he said

Remember when we had a smart president? It can happen again.

Full transcript of his speech is here

One more week!

Tonight, we can watch the half-hour Obama show. What's it going to be? Nezua gives us a possible preview with this "Switch" commercial.

I wish it could be more skits and songs! (we are still running around my house singing "Solid as Barack!"). He has already run an infomercial on a late-night cable network. I doubt it will be a speech, because we've seen plenty of those.

Jon Stewart will give us the wrap-up after the baseball gave when Obama goes on the Daily Show. Here's a Daily Show preview, reviewing McCain's performance on Meet the Press and his "liberal" use of air quotes re: women's "health":

NPR has collected the Solid Gold Collection of irrelevant campaign moments! These will become history on Nov. 5, so get 'em now!

And it's down to the wire, so let's see who you think won the Obama-McCain dance-off!


Uh-oh, Palin is still in play In case you needed to review them, here are Sarah Palin's greatest hits, compiled into one video.

Ever since she sneered at fruit fly research as some kind of weird "earmark", instead of basic science that has been the origin of multiple breakthroughs with medical applications, the scientists have been afraid, very afraid. Today this group of 76 Nobel Prize winning scientists put out a letter begging us not to let the crazy lady winendorsing Obama

Happy birthday, honey bunch!

Happy Birthday (by Altered Images), the "new wave" version!
Some of my favorite birthday songs were posted for my sister's birthday here: The Ramones on the The Simpsons sing HB to Mr Burns; a Persian comedian does a Happy Birthday bellydance, and the Sesame Street artist Sally Cruikshank did a fabulous video about rhyming C-AKE with L-AKe and J-Ake!.
By request, here is The Lazy Town "Gotta bake a cake" song"




The original Cuppy Cake song is so sweet!

and finally, that great Beatles "Today is your birthday!

I...I...forgot!

November 4th--don't forget to vote! Or you might wake up to this:

You can send one of these to your friends here!

"Two lovers...."

This song is getting heavy earworm airply in my household, thanks to the kid who will be 14 tomorrow!


From Avatar: the Last Airbender an anime-inspired show that aired on Nickelodeon for a few seasons, but has a robust presence on YouTube.

Remembering the Wellstones

From Wellstone Action's homepage, a tribute:

"Saturday, October 25th marks the 6th anniversary of the plane crash that took the lives of Paul and Sheila Wellstone, Marcia Wellstone Markuson, Mary McEvoy, Tom Lapic, and Will McLaughlin. We pause to remember these six wonderful and talented individuals and to hold them in our hearts.

We remember their passion for social justice and their commitment to transforming our world for the common good. We dedicate our work to their memory, knowing that they would be proud of all that we collectively have accomplished.

Visit the Paul and Sheila Wellstone Online Archive or learn about the Wellstone Memorial and Historic Site."

"The McCain campaign may not want you to see this"
The UpTake (yay!!) has video from a McCain campaign office in Florida; the citizen-journalist keeps her head admirably while being threatened by a campaign worker for asking 'volunteers' what they do and if they are paid.

Good news just a few days before the election:
McCain aides going public with their frustration at being unable to control Palin, now become the meme "Palin goes rogue". The McCain/Palin campaign is in disarray

Today's polls at 538.com and it's blue, blue, blue.

A silly beer commercial gets remade into a poltical commentary on the state of things on the eve of the election: via Of América Pop culture is a thermometer of public opinion for Joe Six-Pack.

Corrupt MN Senator endorsed by corrupt local media: MNPublius has the details

Al Giordano now calls his blog The Field instead of NarcoNews, but it is still one of the best sites for the story behind the story: how the grass-roots organization behind this election is more than the Democratic Party: he posts an interview with Howard Zinn who puts this campaign in historical perspective and reminds us that it's not too soon to start thinking about what comes next!

Bibliophilia

Fresca has begun her own 100 things about me" meme. Number 8 is about holding onto books because it is unthinkable to get rid of them, but discovering that it is OK to let them go.

The obsessive version of this is bibliomania, but my relationship with books falls more into the categorey of bibliophilia. I was an extreme bibliophile until I was thirty, although one whose collection was acquired in circumstances of relative poverty, and therefore requiring hours of searching in order to find volumes within my budget. I was a voracious reader and routinely had 6-8 books from three different libraries sitting on my bedside table at once, but I also bought books. I spent my adolescent years combing the used book stores for 5 cent copies of the books that cost 50 cents new: science fiction, mostly. By the time I went to college, I had a couple of hundred. Often they had to stay in boxes in my family's house because there wasn't room for them all in the various dorm and apartment rooms I always had to share with another person in college. I also had to move a lot. Once I lived in a very large room in a boarding house, and had no furniture except a foam mattress. Then my books became my furniture; I lined them up on the floor around the walls of the very large, mostly empty room. It was satisfying to see them all at once at last. Nicholas Basbane has a book called A Gentle Madness that tells the history of such love of books, and interviews many bibliomanes, bibiophiles and collectors. (I must get it!)

As a university student, my scrounging of book stores shifted to the foreign language sections, well-stocked in Berkeley with the discards of multitudes of graduate students leaving town for their big job opportunities. Books in Spanish and French were hideously expensive new, but daily or weekly stops by such bookstores as Moe's often meant I could score a used copy for a dollar. I also bought books when I traveled because it was so hard to find them in the U.S., but they were too expensive for me to buy new abroad in great quantity. By the time I got my first academic job, I had an uncounted number of books, measured by the box. I didn't have the money to hire a mover, so I had to mail my clothes and some of the books, and a few pots and pans, to my new, unknown home in Minnesota. There were 35 boxes of books I thought I would absolutely need in my new job, but I couldn't afford to ship the many other boxes, including all the hundreds of science fiction and fantasy books I had read multiple times. I can't remember if they were sold or given away or left in my mother's house until she told me to get rid of them, but they are gone now, and I so regret it. There have been many times over the years where I've wanted to reread one of them, only to find that it's not in the library, I can't find it in the local science fiction book stores, even used, or if I do find it, it doesn't have the original cover. To scour ebay and the stores again, to reconstruct that collection would cost hundreds of dollars and precious time I don't have. I won't even think about the record collection, similary acquired in the used sections of Tower records and other stores, that I can't afford to replace with CDs.

But frankly, I hardly have time to read the unread books sitting on my shelves now, or listen to the 75 days worth of music I have on my iPod. It's liked the pain in a phantom limb; the book hoarder, that poor student who was rich in books, has been displaced by the disciplined, thrifty purger who gets rid of the old to make way for the new. I have limited room in my office and at home for books. I seldom buy books that I can get from the library, and I try to keep them on shelves and not in boxes in the basement or piled in stacks on the floor. I know someone who chose not to rent a two bedroom apartment because it was too small for her and her books, and I never want to be that burdened again. Yet, I wanted to reread Kim Stanley Robison's books the other day, and I don't have them. Samuel R. Delany is coming to town, MY FAVORITE AUTHOR!!!, and I can't get his autograph on my original copy of Babel-17. with the awesome cover art, I'll have to settle for my copy of Dhalgren, which was one of the books that has survived the purge.

You can satisfy your bibliomania online for free, if all you are really interested in doing is READING instead of having the books. Basbane has a website, too. And here are a few fragments one of Walter Benjamin's most endearing essays, "Unpacking my collection". Larry McMurtry, author and bibliphile, has written Walter Benjamin in the Dairy Queen, which I must now read as well. Underneath it all, though, is reading: Luc Santé, another book collector says about his relationship with his books and love of reading:

It is a bit like the stories of cannibals eating their adversaries' brains in order to acquire their strengths and skills, only with books no one gets hurt.

SNL: Bush endorses McCain and Palin

Will Ferrell joins Tina Fey for a great bit.

Talking about language with Lucy and Ricky

Translation:


The bilingual household:

Yay, Amy Klobuchar!

MN is getting a national rep as home of wackos, what with the gal from Lakeville telling John McCain that Obama is a Muslim, and Michele Bachmann's scary-eye shouting on Hardball. Those ten minutes went viral, and inspired a huge number of people to send about half a million dollars to her opponent El Tinklenberg (who, by the way, is a very good candidate and not just her opponent). Colin Powell even referred to Bachmann's hateful rant as representative of what motivated him to support Obama. I was glad to see that Rep. Amy Klobuchar was invited to speak oon Hardball to repair Minnesota's political image and rebut Bachmann. She's a much better representative of the long Minnesota tradition of smart politicians. And Chris Matthews is getting his yuks at Bachmann's expense because she blamed him for her remarks:

All the way from Marin County, M.C. Yogi!

MC Yogi has a song for Obama "Vote for Change" that I really like:

Obama '08 - Vote For Hope from MC Yogi on Vimeo.


Lyrics:

M.C. Yogi

VOTE FOR HOPE

chorus
Change begins when we believe / in a brighter day a better way to succeed / together we can make it better you and me / so we can be safe and prosperous and free

Ladies and gentleman beautiful intelligent / friends of all ages races and measurements / us citizens world wide residents / what ever your religion is or sexual preference / there’s no separateness one things connecting us / the planet we inhabit plus all the different elements / that’s the reason why we need a new president / someone who understands interconnectedness / and won’t go to war based on false evidence / who’s not addicted to oil and aggressiveness / who believes in global warming and he’ll fight pollution / instead of shredding and abusing our constitution / the candidate in 08 that we’ll be choosing / is Barack Obama cuz he’s gonna offer real solutions / lets get involved and offer all our contributions / vote for hope join the movement of the revolution

chorus
Change begins when we believe / in a brighter day a better way to succeed / together we can make it better you and me / so we can be safe and prosperous and free

I hold this truth to be self evident / it’s time for Barack Obama to become president / that’s why I’m calling to my nation and my generation / this is our moment no more waiting or procrastinating / we gotta make it happen; time for some action / it don’t matter if your black white asian latin / we gotta vote for hope; and steer clear of fear / regardless of the garbage they put in our ears / the talking head on the radio and television / spinning the facts treating us like we’re little children / but even with the propaganda they can’t stop us can they / cuz we know in our souls that we’re gonna stand up / & let our voices be heard word to the people / lets make sure this election is fair and equal / no more illegal war dying on a distant shore / and that’s the reason why Obama’s who we’re voting for / he can restore our reputation in the world / and that’s the reason why Obama’s who were voting for / so we can be prosperous free and feel secure / and that’s the reason why Obama’s who were voting for

chorus
Change begins when we believe / in a brighter day a better way to succeed / together we can make it better you and me / so we can be safe and prosperous and free

Everyday graphics

New forms of "imagined community" during the campaign?

We took a long walk and got a lot of fresh air yesterday. As a result I started dozing off right as SNL got started, so I completely missed watching Sarah Palin's appearances in real time. Thanks to Twitter (which I've just started to use and still don't really totally get), this morning I got a whole new set of perspectives on the event of watching it with other people. I'm getting an education in finding things online by having started to Twitter, because people post links that take me to new sites. Cool!

But Holy "imagined community," Batman!

If you missed it too, and you want to check out the clips, AND see videos of all the other candidates' SNL appearances this year, you can find them at Mashable.com."Millions of viral views" is the title of the post. One of the stories of this year's campaign is going to be the way that digital media has altered our experiences of participating as an audience in political discourse and political action. Not only can we see videos of events filmed by the mainstream media, we can watch those of citizens journalists, like Chuck Olson and Noah Kunin on The UpTake, and other folks who just posted their cell phone videos of rallies or speeches; we can watch vlogs or YouTube posts where folks give their opinions; there are all the mashups, parodies and songs; and when we watch a debate, we can chat, liveblog, or tweet in real time, feeling ourselves to be part of a group with people we know through their online personae. I'm sure some very smart people are going to help us analyze all of this. Right now, I'm just trying to get up to speed on all the various ways in which we are co-participating as more than passive viewers in a collective experience of knowing ourselves to be part of the citizenry.

The interactive, participatory, and productive potential of these experiences is evident when Michele Bachmann (MN Congressional District 6) appears on TV, ranting for ten minutes about investigating the patriotism of Congress, the video clip is reposted on YouTub and then on blogs, and as a result, her opponent El Tinklenberg receives over $100,000 in donations from people who find her to be the new McCarthy. Awesome! because she is a hateful demagogue and he is a decent human being with a track record of working for the public good, especially in transportation issues, which we so desparately need!

The arguments or discussions in blog comments that I've observed, or in which I've participated, are another way that political discourse is being created, and where we see people interacting who might not do so IRL. But a very important part of these experiences is also the story-telling that validates these expressions of opinion. When people share their stories of conversations when door-knocking (at 536.com) for example, or of the emotional impact of John McCain's scare quotes when he said "health for the mother" on those who have had to terminate a pregnancy due to health risks or the death of joyfully awaited child in utero (at dooce's site) these stories have an impact on people's ideas.

Colin Powell was going to endorse Obama anyway, but he specifically mentions Bachmann (although not by name) and her rant as the last straw. (but he has a lot to answer for).

Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)

Live