posted 2006/01/31 at 11:36
Coretta Scott King Dies at 78 -- Yahoo! News
Coretta being one of the most famous Antiochians of all time, right up there with Rod Serling.
Every year around the national Martin Luther King Jr. holiday I'm tempted to post links to articles on progressive Websites about how both MLK and Coretta championed fair social and economic treatment of the poor, and how that got them in trouble with the FBI. Aw hell, you all know the political Websites I go to, just look up MLK on there and you'll see what I'm talking about.
posted 2006/01/30 at 22:29
According to Blogger, my last post was the 1,337th post to the .org. Take that for what you will.
I'm always looking for people who share common interests with me to befriend, but one thing I've never been able to do is find people who share my love of new age piano music. They have to be out there, but I never seem to run into them.
Anyway, I mention this because I've been getting my textbooks through Amazon this semester, and for one shipment I added Catherine Marie Charlton's The Undershore to the package to get free shipping. I've bought two of Charlton's CDs already, and The Undershore is just as amazing as the others. I'd recommend her, but I just get the feeling that the people who read this aren't interested in this kind of music. Le sigh.
posted 2006/01/29 at 20:00
So in addition to having my prized Cobalt Flux apparently bite the dust (see my diet log for the details on that), the situation with the graphics card on Yggdrasil Mark I is getting more and more dire. Now when I start getting a lot of artifacts on screen I sometimes have the graphic feed cut off on me for a second before being restored, and a couple of times when the feed's cut off, the computer's spontaneously rebooted.
I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling the graphics card driver, I've run Norton Utilities, I've done just about everything I can think of doing short of buying a new graphics card. Even when I went to my local computer shop, though, I found that it is damn near impossible to get a graphics card these days without buying all sorts of RAM and 3-D processors that I don't freaking need. Seriously, what happened to the good old days of 8 MB on a card, you get your 24-bit colour and you're happy? Not that I don't see the need for 3-D cards for all the gamers out there, but what about the rest of us?
The bottom line is that the Nevada trip is looking more and more like it's not going to happen, and that seriously scares me. I may need to start looking for miracles here.
posted 2006/01/28 at 18:49
I've received a couple of e-mails from people expressing interest in Un/Gagged so far. Next week another article comes out, and then that Friday I'll be posting flyers over campus, so hopefully that will help us get the group up and running once and for all.
I'm finally over this stupid cold (or at least over it enough to resume all normal activities), but now I can't make up my mind. I could go down to the garage and work out for the first time in a couple of weeks, or I could go out and enjoy the warm weather while it lasts. (We're close to 50 now, but we'll have snow on Monday.) See, I overthink things so much that decisions like these have a tendency to paralyze me, to the point where I think them through for so long that either one or both options become unavailable by the time I come to a decision. Sigh.
posted 2006/01/26 at 16:58
Bondage group looks to become official
by Alia Orra
In the farthest corner of a sixth-floor stable of cubicles in University Hall, a running conversation on the virtues of whips, ropes and nipple clamps is filling an otherwise dull workspace.
Explaining the basics of such equipment may tend to elicit school-girl laughter or vulgar intensity, but Sean Shannon is exhibiting neither.
The graduate student speaks of bondage, domination, submission and sadomasochism as one speaks of English literature (in which she's well-versed) or the History Channel: with considerable restraint.
Shannon is in the later stages of organizing an official university group to be called UT Un/Gagged, one that socially and politically advocates for practitioners of BDSM sex.
The bondage safety demonstration that Shannon has given on campus in the past is perhaps one of the only things that will make the transition from bedroom to university.
"This isn't a group where people are going to be titillated," Shannon said. "This isn't going to be a big sex group. It's going to be educational and social."
Other colleges, such as Columbia and New York University, have established similar groups formed around a shared interest in BDSM.
But at UT, the first Un/Gagged meeting attracted a "handful" of students, Shannon said, and while their application is in the final stages of approval, they'll need at least 10 members to make it official.
Finding those people has proved problematic. Besides some recent local publicity, Shannon's graduate student schedule has thus far been able to accommodate one Friday meeting and a few e-mail inquiries.
But she wants to find those lone collegiate souls willing to take what is often traditionally considered private into a "school club" setting and is one of the people furthering the change from taboo to popular.
And there is difficulty in drawing the line between where "vanilla" sexual encounters end and BDSM exchanges begin.
As psychotherapist Dr. William Henkin said in a telephone interview, "With 6 billion people on the planet, it's hard to say what most people do."
"I do think long before BDSM became a cultural phenomenon, lots of people who would never think of aligning themselves in such a community would be involved in tickling their partners, holding their partners hands down during intercourse," said Henkin, who is based in San Francisco and well-known as a sex therapist in the BDSM community. "At what point does slap and tickle move from one place to another?"
The visibility of BDSM has been aided by pop stars like Madonna, who although "was really seen as someone who was a poser," Shannon said, also associated with the sexual phenomenon a degree of accessibility and especially an element of cliché.
This latex-clad image and domineering was one that Midori, the Japanese author, sexual educator and ex-professional dominatrix, was conscious of avoiding for the cover of her book, "The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage."
"It's a very conscious decision [to go with a stark, Japanese-style cover]," Midori said in a telephone interview. "Part of what was being expressed in my book and what I was trying to share with others is the sensual aesthetics of the contemporary and classical Japanese [sexuality], as best I can translate for an American audience without it being entirely alien."
While niches have been formed around BDSM since the 1950s and 1960s, Henkin said, it initially was thought to be a pathological disorder, and practitioners have perhaps become accustomed to a lack of understanding from the mainstream.
Despite the risqué image, Shannon and others in the BDSM community are concerned with safety, hence Un/Gagged's potential focus on safety demonstrations.
The idea that it is for the emotionally damaged or disconnected simply further encourages some misunderstanding - Midori is the upbeat spokeswoman, though, and dutifully recites the lists she's composed of people who shouldn't be involved in BDSM.
In it she advises: "if you're broken as a person, SM won't fix you."
"There are couples that get into BDSM so much that the sexual and sensual elements really get backgrounded," Shannon said.
And there are those people "who through a consensual exchange of power reach a higher level of intimacy," she said.
That BDSM does not suit many people's tastes is fine by Henkin, Midori and Shannon, but putting limitations and prejudices on the community is not, they say.
"There are a lot of things that people really like that I don't get," Henkin said. "The fact that I don't get it doesn't mean that it's not valid ... it just means I don't really belong there."
"I've always been different so ... it took me awhile, but eventually, I came to realize I shouldn't be ashamed for who I am," Shannon said, pulling at a loose string on her pants. "And then I realized what I wanted to do with Un/Gagged is help people see that people in the BDSM community shouldn't be ashamed of who they are."
Alia wasn't able to cover everything we discussed in the interview, but of course newspapers have space considerations, and especially given that UT's about to merge with another college here later this year, it's not like Un/Gagged is the most newsworthy thing on campus right now. Still, it's a very good article, and hopefully this will help get people to the next meeting, whenever that ends up happening.
posted 2006/01/25 at 22:50
It's funny how when you haven't been hugged for a long time and then someone hugs you, and even a half-hour later you can still feel that person's warmth on your skin. It's a feeling I've missed dearly this past year or so.
Anyway, today I had the first real opportunity to talk face-to-face to a friend that I've had since Penny stopped here on her way to MichFest back in August. It's given me a lot to think about in terms of my own happiness (or whatever it is I feel that approximates happiness), and how my self-worth is governed by other people's observations of me. I still don't know that I have a long-term solution for really getting out of the bad position I've been in for so long, but for now I think I've got a better handle on the short-term stuff I can do. Unfortunately most of that is still predicated on the actions of others, but at least things in that regard don't look quite so bleak anymore.
Oh, and the school paper's running an article on Un/Gagged tomorrow. I did the interview Tuesday night, and for once I really hit all the points I wanted to make spot-on. Sometimes I amaze myself when I do that.
posted 2006/01/24 at 18:26
Nothing like finally getting in touch with someone on IM when you're in the front row of a computer lab and you need to talk about private stuff. Gah.
Not to get too ahead of myself here, but does anyone have any advice for a first-time airplane passenger? Knowing some of the weird phobias I have, I'm a bit concerned that I'm going to get spooked out on my way to Nevada over Spring Break (if I still end up going there).
posted 2006/01/23 at 23:04
Nice to see our friends to the north prove once again that, above all else, the United States' chief export is stupidity. Oy, eh?
I'm doing two media interviews for Un/Gagged in the next two days. Hopefully this means we'll get some more freaking people to the next meeting, whenever I get around to scheduling it ...
posted 2006/01/21 at 23:29
While we're on the subject of local news ...
Last summer I was looking around on the programme guide on our cable hookup, and noticed that our local CBS affiliate had started its own weather channel. It wasn't all that impressive -- a Bloomberg-like setup with text boxes for forecasts for various communities, and a "big window" that alternated between your standard radar and satellite shots along with pre-taped forecasts and commercials -- and I'm far more likely to get weather information online these days (the weather widget that comes with Yahoo! Widgets is awesome, especially since it includes a block for the current moon phase), but I thought it was interesting, and in all honesty I tended to change the channel to that station over the summer whenever a thunderstorm rolled in, if only for the constantly-updating radar shots.
Fast-forward to last night, as I'm flipping around the programme guide again in a futile effort to forget what a shitty day I've had. I start looking at the listings for the higher-number channels, which I normally don't do since those numbers are usually reserved for HDTV channels, the movie channels we don't get, the pay-per-view movie channels, and the channels for the sports packages. While looking around, though, I found that the local NBC affiliate now had their own 24-hour weather channel, with much the same setup as the CBS channel but with additional feeds that were attributed to AccuWeather. Then I found that the local ABC affiliate had their own 24-hour weather channel as well. To top it all off, I then discovered that the local CBS affiliate, whose own 24-hour weather channel is still going strong, now has another channel that is literally nothing more than a constantly-updated 600-mile radar image.
Honestly, this is the kind of thing I'd expect in big cities like New York or Los Angeles. It seemed odd to me when I found our first local weather channel, not only because Toledo is such a small city to start with, but also because our cable company is locally owned and operated, so it's not like they've got huge resources to work with. To have four different local weather channels, though -- especially the radar channel, which has no commercials whatsoever -- strikes me as pointless overkill.
Let me ask this of those of you who have cable: Do you have locally produced all-weather channels? If so, how many, and are there any "specialty" channels like the all-radar channel I have here?
posted 2006/01/20 at 22:11
Note to self: Next time, try setting a meeting time for Un/Gagged that is more amenable to other college students' schedules.
Please let me get over this bug by Monday. Please.
posted 2006/01/19 at 12:53
Uh ... hi.
All I can say is that for the past week, I've been having an even harder time than usual dealing with my personal problems here, which likely caused me to get sick first thing upon waking up this past Friday. Instead of doing something meaningful during my long weekend, I wound up watching all of the first two seasons of SVU on DVD as I tried to rest and recover from this bug. I'm past the worst of it now, but I'm still coughing and sneezing up all kinds of nasty junk.
Anyway, just before I got sick there, I started publicizing the first UT Un/Gagged meeting for the term, which will be tomorrow. The last time I tried to get Un/Gagged started I got a mention from one of the local radio Rush Limbaugh-wannabes who decried the group, which wasn't much in the way of press. This time, a couple of days after I sent the first e-mail out on UT's listserv, I got an e-mail from someone at one of our local free papers here confirming details with me.
However, yesterday I had a local television person start to contact me abot the group. Specifically, someone from our local Fox station. Now, I know that not every local Fox affiliate is one of Rupert Murdoch's Weapons of Mass Disinformation, and that the people in charge of Toledo's Fox station may very well be just as liberal as I am. That doesn't totally put things in the clear -- if the local Fox station filmed me, that video would become part of the general Fox News media bank, meaning that I could still easily show up on The O'Reilly Factor or Hannity and Colmes or something like that -- but in and of itself, being contacted by the local Fox station wouldn't be too much to be worried about.
Here's the thing, though: when I sent the e-mail out to UT's listserv, for my contact information I listed my e-mail account on UT's servers. (That's how the free paper guy got hold of me.) The Fox guy didn't try to contact me that way, though, nor did he get a hold of me via my seanshannon.org e-mail account. He contacted me via my maloneysbaloney.org e-mail address. Of all the ways someone from Fox could get hold of me, this guy chooses an e-mail address from the Website I put up to counter the arguments of a right-wing film about education. I find that to be just a bit more than totally freaking creepy.
Then this morning I got a voicemail from the secretary of UT's English Department, stating that this Fox guy was calling the department office trying to get hold of me. Okay, first of all, I didn't put a phone number on the Un/Gagged advertisement, because I am very cautious about giving my cell phone number out, and I don't have another phone number I could use for Un/Gagged now. (Hopefully if we get an office from the University, we'll get a phone for there.) Even if this reporter was digging through UT's records, though, he should have gotten the phone number for the office I share with about fifteen other graduate students. Instead, he calls the secretary of the office. I had to go around to everyone in the family and tell them not to accept any calls from this guy for me, in case he decides to open up the Toledo phone book and start calling every Shannon listed in there.
I can't say that I don't appreciate press and publicity, even for something as controversial as this -- I can handle rational criticism about Un/Gagged's presence on campus -- but I don't need this crap from this Fox guy, especially when I'm still trying to get over this bug here. Grrr.
posted 2006/01/12 at 23:57
I finally found a Su Doku programme that works on my cell phone. Too bad that one, it uses this weird Chinese-like font for the numbers that makes it hard to distinguish an 8 from a 9; and two, even on the easiest difficulty level I'm not having much luck. Not that I'm all that great at Su Doku yet, but I shouldn't be having as much trouble with the game as I've been having.
I can almost guarantee you I'll be complaining about the snow that will fall tomorrow, so let me just say here that we haven't had to deal with snow at all for a couple of weeks here; in fact, it was so warm this afternoon that we had the house open for a little while. So much for that, though ...
posted 2006/01/09 at 17:22
First class of the new semester went well, I think. It's too early to get a good read on the class right now, but hopefully after our next couple of classes I'll have a better feel for where to go with things. I have to say, though, teaching the same class in the same room at the same time with all-new students is a bit disorienting, but I'll manage.
Between the end of class and now I went over to Wildwood to get a quick walk in, which may be the best way for me to get exercise on Mondays (Wednesdays are off because I have office hours during my break), and I also went to the "big" Media Play for what will likely be the last time. (Unless someone wants me to pick up a dozen copies of that 50 Cent videogame for cheap.) I didn't mention this in my earlier post, but that Media Play was built on the ground of what had been Toledo's last drive-in movie theatre. I vaguely recall going to see a movie there once, but I could be wrong.
Not long after that drive-in closed down, the one dine-in-car eatery we had, a place called Dudley's, quit the whole dine-in car thing and just became a regular greasy spoon. (From their commercials I can't tell if Sonic does the in-car thing, but we don't have any Sonics around here.) What really annoyed me about Dudley's was that back before I had my license and I used to drive around with Jeff, whenever we passed Dudley's he always made a sign of the cross. Sigh. (If you don't get that, you're one of the lucky ones, trust me.)
posted 2006/01/08 at 20:49
Well gee, first play in and Palmer tears an ACL. Gee, you don't think that could have had anything to do with what the Bengals did to Bo Jackson in their last playoff game, could it?
Sigh. I need to get ready to teach tomorrow ...
posted 2006/01/07 at 18:51
Yesterday I went over to one of the Media Play stores, and they're definitely getting down to the dregs over there in terms of available stuff. I didn't walk out with anything there, and I doubt the other store has anything I want at this point either, but I'll still go over there anyway just to check and to be there one last time.
Media Play may just be a chain of stores -- and a nationally-run chain at that -- but for the nearly twelve years that Media Play's been in Toledo, it's amazing how many memories I have tied to them. I've mentioned some of these before, but I think they're worth mentioning again:
- The first time I ever went to the "big" Media Play (near Toledo's dominant mall), it was in the middle of a school day to see David Lanz give a quickie concert in support of his Bridge of Dreams tour. (Paul Speer was there as well, but he never played; it was just David and his piano.) I even got David to sign one of my books of his sheet music.
- Chantelle Marshall, my childhood crush, worked as a cashier at Media Play on her summers off from Brown.
- Media Play was where I picked up my first anime ever -- the first episode of Bubblegum Crisis -- on VHS.
- Although I eventually ordered the complete boxed set of the Oh My Goddess! OVA from AnimEigo directly, I saw the first three episodes from a friend who bought the tapes from that same Media Play. When the DVDs of the OVA came out (volume one and volume two, as well as the movie, the four volumes of Mini-Goddess (one, two, three and four) and the two volumes of the TV series that have been released so far (volume one and volume two), I picked them up at Media Play.
- The night that Media Play stayed open until midnight so everyone could pick up copies of Elton John's "Candle in the Wind '97" as soon as it came out, I got the employees there to go to the back and grab me another album that they could sell to me after midnight as it had now technically just been released: Björk's Homogenic. Yeah, so that's my favourite anime series of all time and my favourite album of all time right there. Media Play was always a few days slow on getting new video games, though, so I picked up Final Fantasy at a nearby Toys'R'Us.
- I wrote about a shopping trip I took to Media Play to help me get over the anxiety of my post-IWC life in the first .journal entry ever on the .org.
- After the fire at the house, I finally discovered the other Media Play in town was less than a mile from the hotel, in a building that used to house a Builders Square. (Builders Square was the Home Depot of the '80s, but they went out of business in Toledo pretty quickly.) That Media Play was smaller than the other one, but it carried different things, and it was at the "small" Media Play that I found my Belldandy figurine.
- Lastly, Media Play was where I picked up my first piece of DDR equipment: a cheapo PS2 dance mat. (They were out of games at the time -- this was the weekend before Christmas -- so I had to pick up a game at Best Buy).
Like I said, there are lots of memories there, and honestly it's kind of painful to see Media Play go. Especially now that our big local record store and bookstore have bitten the dust, I may wind up getting everything off of Amazon from now on.
posted 2006/01/03 at 22:04
Tomorrow I'm going to be heading over to campus to make copies of everything I'll need for my second-ever comp class once it begins next Monday: the syllabus, readings for the first few classes, first-day surveys, stuff like that. Of course this means doing things like reworking last semester's syllabus, which I didn't think would be a problem to put off until tonight, but today I have been dealing with one heck of a sinus headache. I don't think finishing the work will be a problem, but getting to bed so I can wake up in time to do everything I need to do tomorrow.
Anyway, my schedule is set for next term, and somehow I wound up with two super-late night classes again. I guess my professors don't like getting up early any more than I do, but I have to say I like getting home before ten at night. Anyway, my late nights are going to be Mondays and Wednesdays this term, and hopefully not having the late nights consecutively won't screw up my schedule/exercise schedule/dieting like it did last term. On the minus side, though, I am going to have a class on Thursdays this term. Blah, having a more regular schedule will probably help me.
Oh, and I'm going to try relaunching Un/Gagged at the start of the semester here. Hopefully that can help me with that one thing with the, uh, yeah, I'm going to shut up now.
posted 2006/01/02 at 18:18
It's the second of January, and we actually have thunderstorms moving through the area right now. For Toledo, this is mighty weird. Of course, the weather is totally screwing with me here, because the combination of my existing cold-weather sinus congestion and the low pressure from this weather front is combining to make my head feel like it's going to explode here. Here I was just complaining about the snow and cold temps just a little while ago. Ugh.
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