The Windkey and the Lamplighter

I am getting seriously irritated with "news" reports on the
Presidential Primaries talking about the $color $gender vote.

I was irritated when, before the South Carolina primary, pundits were
talking about how black women had a difficult decision to
make—between voting for Hillary Clinton because she’s a woman or
Barack Obama because he’s black. I am even more irritated by the
chatter now about how white males don’t have a (Democratic) candidate
to vote for since John Edwards suspended his campaign.

(As I think about this, I realize that race and gender have only been
an issue in the Democratic primary, presumably because all the
Republican candidates considered serious contenders are white males,
and therefore race and gender are not issues about which the media
machine can make hay. We will put the "who’s a serious contender?"
rant in the box for another day.)

Why in the world would I vote for Hillary Clinton because she happens
to have two X chromosomes? Why would I vote (or not vote) for Barack
Obama because he has more melanin than me? This is madness.
It seems to be a damned common madness—this same "us and them"
mentality seems to be behind the violence in Kenya, the "sectarian"
violence in Iraq, and a number of other conflicts throughout history.

Who does it help to divide otherwise rational, modern people into
tribes of mindless sheep? I just don’t get it.

I’ve heard only one serious ray of hope that all sanity has not been
lost: There was a commentator on NPR this evening who sounded about as
disgusted and irritated as I am about the expectations pundits have
for the outcomes of the race (in his case, among the "Latino vote").
He said something lovely, that I will try to quote as best as my
memory allows: that is if there is anything one can say about Latino
voters, it is that they are fiercely independent. He said that this
race will not be decided by outdated stereotypes, but by individuals.

His statement applies to a lot more than Latinos—we are all
individuals, not groups. No matter what group you claim membership
in, or are assigned to by demographers, it’s just you (and maybe
Diebold, but we’ll delay that issue too) in the voting booth.

And, on that note, if you’re in MA, CA, CO or any of the other
states voting Tuesday, make sure you take the opportunity to tell the
parties what you really think. If you’re unenrolled in Massachusetts,
you can vote in either primary and (supposedly) you will not be
enrolled in that party for doing so. (You used to have to fill out a
card available at the polling station to re-register as unenrolled,
but I have been assured that this isn’t necessary anymore because it
caused the state a stupid amount of paperwork.)

I was scraping the wet snow off my car this morning, there was a
bright white flash in the sky, like a spark.
The boom a few seconds later confirmed that it was not a
malfunctioning power line, as I’d feared, but thundersnow.
There were a couple more booms as I scraped off the car, but once I
was en route I couldn’t hear it anymore and was too preoccupied with
plows trying to run me off the road to watch for sparks.

How cool is that? Almost cool enough to warrant being up before 6 AM.

The biggest disadvantage of a film SLR is the time it takes to get my
pictures back. Nonetheless, here are some from Thanksgiving.

It was very cold, but very pretty at the Bronx Zoo on the Friday after
Thanksgiving.

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This shot of the leaves in Stony Brook, NY is one of my best in a long
time.

It is with much relief, I’m sure, that you hear that I did not [die in
a knitting accident][]. I don’t knit, I crochet. It’s much safer.
(And I’ll have a recently-finished project to show you as soon as I
remember to take a picture)

Nor, yet, did I die in a blogging accident, although I suppose
this could be it. I’d say that if you don’t hear from me, you’ll
know,
but given my totally random posting schedule, you won’t really.

That is all.

not very good at pictures taken indoors.
However, this one turned out great:

My dad sent me a much higher-res version of this this morning. This is
the house I grew up in, taken a couple days ago:

Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society explains that today is
the day when the north pole of Uranus sees the sun for the first time
in 42 years.
That’s a long winter. I’ll stay in New England, thanks.

I’ve been doing a bunch of grungy work, and I set up a playlist with
lots of holiday and Christmas music, including a recording from WCRB
of the Holiday Pops concert I sang in a couple years ago. This is
great—it’s fun music that I know and enjoyed singing, and is
generally associated with good memories—with one exception.

I’m loud, and a high soprano, so in a couple places I can hear myself
as part of the choir. My gut reaction to this is horror—I’m
spoiling the choir!

A little more thought has me questioning that: is it bad that I can
hear me, if I sound okay? Is it always bad to hear one voice out of a
choir?

What about if I hear "me", but it’s actually 3-4 people who were
matching my usual tone? Or who have a similar one?

What about on the super-high, super-loud end-of-song notes where I’m
one of only a couple people singing that note?

I’m probably overreacting to this—the concert is generally awesome,
and they wouldn’t have let me in the choir if I’d sucked that
badly—but I do worry about these things.

The was a [story on All Things Considered][] as I was driving home
last night about Facebook, from the host of "Wait, Wait, Don’t
Tell Me".
He started out by playing up his self-imposed lonership, so maybe I
shouldn’t be surprised that he "doesn’t get" social networking,
but I am anyway. He just joined Facebook, found and "friended"
some people he knew who were already there. He sort of glossed over
the step where a friending miracle occurred, but claims to now have
900 "virtual friends"—which is the crux of my objection to his
piece.

He was very careful to dismiss them as virtual, not actual friends and
to explain that, even though they "aren’t really there", he’s glad
that they "won’t really be there tomorrow, either". Unfortunately,
he’s wrong about that. A huge proportion of my friends on Facebook
(and Livejournal, and Orkut, and MySpace, and
insert-other-social-networking-site-here) are real friends, whom I see
in person frequently. A much larger proportion are old friends, whom
I would otherwise not keep in touch with—high school friends,
college friends, former coworkers and the like. The third
group—whom I assume were most of this guy’s virtual friends, since
he appeared to acquire a lot of friends very fast—are those people
whom I’ve never met in person. Many of these, however, are just as
close as many of the people I have met. There’s no magic friendship
virus transmitted by an in-person meeting that makes someone suddenly
more compatible, better to play Scrabble or trivia games with, or that
makes their life more interesting for me to voyeuristically follow
along with.
They’re just as real as my "real" friends, and I don’t really
understand why they wouldn’t be for this guy, unless he keeps them
distant.
Maybe that’s part of the generation gap that I can’t really see—my
friends, regardless of whether I’ve met them in the flesh, do much of
their correspondence online. I probably talk to my close friends
more over email and instant messaging programs than I do in person,
simply because there’s so much more time to talk. (I’d feel
unprofessional taking a personal call at work, and I’d feel rude being
on my cell phone while waiting in line at the supermarket, but I could
IM that friend while waiting for a model to open, or text-message them
while in line.)

This leads me to wonder how my generation will feel about truly
virtual friends—bots, AIs, and the like. I’ve already seen one
online community raise their own pet ‘bot, who can now participate in
conversations just as well as any troll. Will we draw a line between
friendly AIs and the fleshy friends we’ve never met? If the AIs can
play Scrabble and talk about each other, I suspect the line will be
thin.

(1) I can’t argue with him that "friended" is an annoying new word. I
don’t see what was wrong with "befriended", but I know my
predeliction for archaic words isn’t shared by most Facebook users or
even most English speakers. I’m kind of surprised that he didn’t seem
to realize that "friend"(2) had a verb form before social networking
websites re-verbed it in a new, short, hipper(3) form.

(2) Also, "friend" is a really weird looking word. That ie does not
belong, and is part of why friended looks weird. Weird is a weird
word, too, for exactly the opposite reason.

(3) I bet the kids don’t say "hip" anymore. See note (1) above on my
love for archaic words.

[story on All Things
Considered]:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16703138

The weekend of October 19-21 was a last-minute vacation to Washington,
D.C. It was our first actual vacation since our honeymoon,(we’d been
to a wedding and a funeral and a couple family visits, but not an
actual vacation) and I had never been, so we went. We got an awesome
deal at the Renaissance Mayflower hotel, near the Farragut Square
Metro stops, so we were walking distance from everything we visited
except the airport. That said, some experimentation with the Google
Distance Measurement Tool suggests that we walked over 20 miles, not
including all the walking inside the museums and monuments, in
approximately 48 hours. (Also, sometime during that I developed
not-pneumonia, in that it’s a nasty cough and wheezing that Brian
kept saying was pneumonia, but apparently isn’t quite according to my
doctor.)

On Friday, while waiting to check into the hotel, we had lunch at Luna
Cafe, which was very near the hotel on Connecticut and had very tasty
vegetarian nachos. My tuna melt was very salty but otherwise awesome,
and I was very jealous of Brian’s omelette-like thing and the homefries
it came with. B+

Afterward, we walked down to the Mall. The old Executive Building is
so cool. I think that is my favorite building-as-a-building (judging
on the basis of architecture rather than judging by what is inside) in
all of the parts of DC that I saw. The white house had a mob of
tourists taking pictures through the cast-iron-supplemented-with-wire
fence, which I thought was amusing—such pretty lawns, and nobody
gets to walk on them. (I suppose if people did, they’d look more like
the grass elsewhere on the Mall, since there were zillions of tourists
even in October, and the mobs of them reliably ignored the nicely
winding sidewalks in favor of the short route over the grass.)

We didn’t get to go up the Washington Monument, since it was closed by
the time we got there, but we walked all around it. We were walking
through the WW2 Memorial (which is beautiful and very fitting) when it
started to rain a little, but not enough to get us to turn back. After
all, I am not a witch, I am an engineer. I do not melt.

By the time we got to the Korean War monument, though, the ghostly,
haunted statues of soldiers in their ponchos looked like they were
much better dressed for the weather than we. By the time we got to
the Lincoln Memorial, we were quite damp, but the inside of it was
dry-enough, and the rain stopped while we were inside. The scale of
the Lincoln Memorial really does not translate in photographs. I’ve
seen hundreds of pictures of it (or the same picture hundreds of
times), but I still did not expect to be dwarfed by Lincoln’s likeness
as much as I was.

By the time we were done reading the walls of the Lincoln Memorial,
and admiring the fasces (which Brian had to point out to me, because I
have forgotten too much Roman history) it was raining less. We jumped
puddles at every intersection on the way back to the hotel, regrouped,
and set out for dinner.

The rain was nearly, but not quite stopped when we got to Levante’s,
so we waited for an inside table rather than sitting at the
only-slightly-damp umbrella tables. This was incredible foresight on
our part, as there was driving rain and screaming wind by the time we
finished our meal. Inside, it was a little noisy but dry and
comfortable—from our table you could see the big brick wood-fire
oven where the pizza boats and fresh bread are baked.
Despite our late lunch, we were starving, so we got an appetizer plate
with several tasty fried things and acceptable stuffed grape leaves
(I’m not a big fan of grape leaves served cold.) The real winner was
the fresh bread. I don’t know how Bertucci’s (which we walked past on
our way to Levante’s) manages to survive in D.C., because their best
feature (bread lumps) can’t hold a glutinous wood-fired candle to
Levante’s bread. Imagine gigantic thick home-made pita, then make
it thicker, serve it hot, and… I’m not sure what else they do to
it. It wasn’t greasy at all, so probably no butter or anything. It
dipped really well in the yogurt sauce from the appetizer plate,
though. (yum) My actual dinner was a Vegetable Pasticcio—kind of
like a lasagna—which was excellent. I was sorry I was too full for
dessert.

Saturday

Saturday was our museum day, which really meant our Air and Space
Museum day. We grabbed a quick coffee and pastries from a Caribou
coffee (and some tea for me, to try to quiet my increasingly annoying
cough) and were at the museum around opening time (which is 10 AM, so
not actually that early). On the way there, we walked past/through
the Hirshorn Sculpture Garden, which I’d love to go back to
someday. Even without stopping to look in detail, I noticed some
familiar-looking pieces—something by the same two artists who had
pieces outside the Denver Art Museum (the red sheet metal thing and
the broom-like thing). It would be nice to go back to D.C. to tour the
art museums.

But, we were not in D.C. to tour art museums, we were there for
airplanes and rocketships. And moon rocks. And, apparently, ENIAC
and Mary Lincoln’s purple dress, which were part of the "Treasures of
American History" exhibit on loan to the Air and Space Museum from the
American History Museum while it’s closed for renovations. I really
enjoyed looking at the WWII and WW! and world-explorer planes, and I
was really thrilled to see that they have Space Ship One in the entry
foyer now, but probably my favorite part of the whole museum was the
space artifacts section. They had a lunar lander (one of the spares,
obviously not one that actually went to the moon, and lots of space
suits and tools that did go and come back from the moon, which was
cool. They also had a neat exhibit on the recently-declassified
(well, 1995) CORONA project, the first spy satellite. It used
panoramic film whose canisters were dropped to earth and had to be
caught by Air Force C-119s. This is phenomenally cool. I am a total
sucker for spacecraft, spy stories, and therefore especially for
space-related spy stories. By the time we got chased out of the
museum at 5, though, my cold was getting a lot worse. The walk to
Dupont Circle, only about two and a half miles, took us well over an
hour because I was not able to walk very fast and was getting tired
pretty easily. (This is when Brian started telling me I had
pneumonia.) We did make it there, though, and I’m glad we did,
because we were able to have dinner in a bookstore. Afterwords,
which is an awesome name for a restaurant attached to a bookstore, had
good tea, pretty-good ravioli, "The best piece of bass in the city",
and the most amazing peach cobbler served warm with vanilla ice
cream. It was as good as my great-grandmother’s peach cobbler, and
that’s really saying something, because my memory of the latter is
tempered by a lot more time.

Sunday

After a night interrupted by multiple coughing fits, our
first stop Sunday morning was CVS for The Best Cough Medicine Ever.
It’s called Mucinex, it comes with pseudoephedrine (I was unhappy to
discover that buying pseudoephedrine requires ID—stupid
druggies—but happy that they were okay with my passport as ID, since
my wallet was still at work back in Massachusetts.) Our second stop,
though, was AfterWords again for brunch, which was delicious. We had
by this time missed the early service at the National Cathedral, so we
checked out of the hotel, left our luggage with the bellstand, and
went to the National Archives. I had not expected to be so impressed,
but the public exhibit at the Archives was awesome. We didn’t stand
in the hour-long line to see the Constitution and the Declaration of
Independence close-up, but we saw the brass plate made of the
Declaration , which is apparently in much better shape than the
Declaration itself. (This 1911 NYTimes story blames the creation of
the brass plate for the damage to the original Declaration.)
By the time we got through the neat exhibit on the education of the
presidents, we only had a little time to look at the normal public
exhibits before we had to start the (not as long as it felt) walk back
to our hotel to get our luggage and head for the airport. Even the
guaifenecin and pseudoephedrine were not enough by this point, but we
made it with only a couple stops for me to catch my breath, and we
were in plenty of time for our flight despite being only an hour
early. (I love the UsAir Shuttle. Apparently I love all Shuttles)

I’m looking forward to going back to Our Nation’s Capitol, especially
to visit the Udvar-Hazy center to see the Enterprise. Clearly next
time we should fly into Dulles—but the Shuttle doesn’t go to where
the Shuttle lives. (Very sad)
We’ll figure something out.