Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:10 PM

When listening to Outkast's "Hey Ya!", I keep hearing the chorus as "I'm just being earnest." [According to lyrics sites, the last word of that phrase is actually "honest." But it sounds like earnest to me.] At any rate, because of that, I want to see a fan-video of the song using Oscar Wilde imagery:

Unfortunately, I haven't the time, tools or talent to do something like that on my own. And I doubt this association has occurred to anybody with the abilities, so it will have to stay strictly within my imagination. Oh well...

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:19 PM

I don't know why, but I'm just feeling very down and dispirited today.

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:45 PM

Well, even though Kevin Drum has given up on Friday Cat Blogging, no reason the rest of us can't continue to post cute cat photos whenever the mood strikes.

And tamouse on LiveJournal has found some truly adorable kitten pictures.

Making the rounds of LJ a couple weeks ago was a very adorable page of Baaaaaby animals, which I now can't find. If anyone remembers where this was, could you please reply with the link?

Thanks!

Posted by Lis Riba at 4:35 PM

Via one of my LiveJournal friends, electronic rune-casting:

Question or Information: how'm I doin'?

Past Raido - Safe travel, movement, obtaining justice in an issue, used to keep a situation from stagnating.

Present Jera - Harvesting tangible results from efforts already sown, fertility, culmination of events, abundance.

Future Neid - Need, desire, fulfilling those needs, love and sex magick, motivation created by distress.

Cast the runes here:
Rune Caster

I'll confess, I don't really know how to read runes, so the results are somewhat meaningless beyond the brief summary provided. But I kinda like the message I think I'm getting.

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:29 PM

Artist/cartoonist/illustrator John Kovalic (Dork Tower, Murphy's Rules, Apples to Apples, Munchkin, Chez Geek, and all over the place) now has his own LiveJournal.

He's just posted some artwork from an upcoming card game he's been illustrating, Creatures and Cultists

And, I simply can't resist. The artwork for Suck The President's Brain[*] is so amusing that here it is:

• reduced to LiveJournal user picture size,
       
• and to IM buddy icon size (though this could probably use some smoothing),
       

I suppose they could be fancier -- animated GIFs with the image alternating with the title and artist's name or something -- but this is about the limit of my abilities.

If you want to use them, please copy the images to your own machine (rather than burdening my webhost).
And be sure to credit (and support) John Kovalic. He's good people.

[Note: John Kovalic has given permission for his artwork to be used in this manner. Just FYI.]

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:35 PM

Nope, not referring to gay rights. And even though this involves sages who regularly wear black robes, nothing to do with Harry Potter, either.

Instead, this has to do with one of my other favorite obsessions: the U.S. Supreme Court.

When Justice Blackmun died in 1999, he decreed that all his papers be made available to the public five years after his death, even though it would give insights into recent cases and current justices. The files have just been released this week, but Nina Totenberg of NPR got an advance preview. NPR has established a special page just for the series including audioclips of Justice Blackman, links to all Nina Totenberg's stories, and other fascinating information. Thanks to SCOTUSBlog, we also have access to the full transcripts of Nina Totenberg's coverage (including stories that haven't yet aired), available contingent upon anyone using them giving proper credit.

At any rate, here are some of the fun and amusing tidbits I've enjoyed reading and hearing.

At any rate, if you're at all interested in the Supreme Court and its workings, this is simply a must-read.

Thanks to NPR's Nina Totenberg for all the quotes above. And SCOTUSBlog has links coverage of this story by other reporters going through the archives.

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:40 AM

This morning, I ran Ad-aware, because something hijacked my browser's homepage/search settings/etcetera. And I discovered a whole spyware program called WildTangent. While Adaware successfully removed it, I went Googling to figure out where it might've come from. Apparently, AIM 5.5 installs it without explicit knowledge or consent as part of its new "Games" feature (something I have no interest in using, not the least of which because I use AIM primarily at work).

It's gone now, but ugh...

Lawmakers are proposing anti-spyware legislation, but I wonder whether it'd be any more effective than the recently implemented antispam legislation. [Have you noticed any decrease in spam since it took effect? My inbox is worse than ever.] And, of course, AOL is insisting their end-user license agreement already permits them to install WildTangent. Here's their current TOS, but this information is usually buried even deeper than the demolition plans for Arthur Dent's house.

At any rate, if you haven't already installed and run Ad-aware, I recommend it. You may be surprised what kind of scum you find on your machine.

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:25 AM

So, I was thinking further about that J.K. Rowling chat. Each person only got one question, with no followup: possibly frustrating for the questioners, but allowed JKR to answer as many people's questions as possible.

At any rate, given those parameters and the fact that she answers many potential spoilers with "no comment", I started wondering what I might ask JKR if I could only ask one question under such circumstances. Something I want to know that she might actually answer.

For the moment, the best question I've come up with is (spoiler for Bk 5):

Did you feel Dumbledore's Army make a mistake by not inviting or including any Slytherins, particularly given the Sorting Hat's song?

And I know a lot of smart people are reading this who are also HP fans, and I'm wondering what question you would ask JKR you had a similar opportunity to these kids.

Note: I'm asking for serious responses, but for a sillier take, get a load of the answers to the What's your smutty HP question for JKR in an adult chat? poll. [via McTabby]

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:05 PM

Making the rounds of Harry Potter fandom today is this transcript of an online chat with JKR. Lots of enlightening picayune details (like characters' middle names and ages, and many significant "no comment"s) and comments that make me grin and then I get to this:

Leanne from Eastbrook Primary School - Hemel Hempstead: If you could spend a day in real life with one of your fictional characters, who would it be and what would you do? *Schools Competition Winner*
JK Rowling replies -> I think I'd most like to spend a day with Harry. I'd take him out for a meal and apologise for everything I've put him through.

Oh, I can so understand that...

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:00 AM

Via an academic on my LiveJournal friends list, a collection of Shakespearean Prompt-Books of the Seventeenth Century!

These are facsimile images of the actual scripts, marked up for performance, with deletions and handwritten insertions...

[Reading some of the cuts aloud to Ian, he commented that it reminds him of broadcast version of 1980s movies -- "Can you hammer a six inch spike through a board with your pinkie?" The editors get the jokes they're cutting, but they don't want the audiences to.]

At any rate, Nifty.

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:15 PM

Excerpted from a letter sent by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, to King James VI and I:

There is this difference betwixt that noble hand and heart, one may surfeit by the one, but not by the other, and sooner by yours than his own.

As seen in Michael B. Young's excellent (why isn't this still in print!?) book, King James and the History of Homosexuality.

Throughout their correspondence, the two men enjoyed wordplay and double meanings. So what does this mean to you?

More quotes possibly later; I've just started rereading the BPL's copy for the third time in as many years.

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:15 PM

So, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments yesterday about COPA, the Child Online Protection Act. SCOTUSBlog has lotsa links to the NYT, WP and other major reporters. Salon, one of the plaintiffs in the case, had this to say.

But nyaaargh!

Since it's not in any of the synopses, I think the lawyers may have missed a crucial point that needs to be made: Using credit card numbers as the key to access porn sites is not an accurate way of keeping minors away, since high school students can (and many do) have their own credit cards!!!

Having a credit card number only indicates the person has a credit card number -- not that they're a legal adult nor that they even have rights to the number they are using (whether theft or kids borrowing their parents' card). So setting that up as the definitive age check is just a recipe for failure requiring further legislation.

And that doesn't even get into all the other excellent arguments against the law which the lawyers did raise.

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:45 PM

Because LiveJournal chokes whenever RSS feeds exceed 150K and I've been posting some lengthy entries these last several days, here's a quick tip for anybody attending BloggerCon II:

The smartest thing I did at the first BloggerCon was to bring along a stack of personal (business) cards to hand out. Just my name, email address and a link to my homepage, but it was much easier than trying to spell out my journal URL when telling people how to find something on my blog or my site.

For this go-round, I'm tempted to run by a copy shop and run off some cards with a direct link to my blog... [Come to think of it, it might be more useful to have some business cards with the URL to my main page followed by an underscore, for when I point people to specific pages on my site... And, of course, enough blank space on the back to provide context for when they find the card three months later... Hmm...]

In short, in general, having personal cards or business cards is much handiness for quick exchanges of information where you want to be remembered.

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:10 PM

In which Lis addresses the actual questions Lisa posed for the BloggerCon II roundtable on women and blogs:

According to Perseus Research, women write more than half of existing blogs -- yet they are underrepresented in popularity rankings such as the Technorati 100. Will womens' blogs, focused on daily life and personal issues, turn out to stand the test of time better than more topical, news-focussed blogs that may have more traffic today? Do women trade off popularity today for longevity tomorrow?

Do womens' personal blogs -- often dismissed as self-indulgent or "ramblings of teenage girls" represent a challenge to notions of what's Really Important?

What are the great undiscovered blogs written by women?

If you're a woman with a blog, what effect does your gender have on how & why you blog? None at all? Quite a bit?

Do you blog anonymously? Do you take steps to conceal your gender in your online presence?

And that's about all for now. That's probably more than enough, in fact. Anybody care to discuss any of this with me? I've got a comment box ready and waiting...

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:54 PM

Reading this makes me wish I were in academia:

Damnit, I came up with a model of information-seeking behavior back in late 2001; At the time I was able to do some further readings into existing models, with which mine seemed compatible, but I don't have the time or resources to explore it on my own! <gnash><gnash>frustration!

Posted by Lis Riba at 5:29 PM

Elizabeth Bear's SF novelette "This Tragic Glass" will be published at Scifiction on April 7th.

I'll update my Marlowe list with a valid link once it's available to the public.

Posted by Lis Riba at 5:19 PM

Today's Krugman:

First, "starving the beast" is no longer a hypothetical scenario - it's happening as we speak. For decades, conservatives have sought tax cuts, not because they're affordable, but because they aren't. Tax cuts lead to budget deficits, and deficits offer an excuse to squeeze government spending.

Second, squeezing spending doesn't mean cutting back on wasteful programs nobody wants. Social Security and Medicare are the targets because that's where the money is. We might add that ideologues on the right have never given up on their hope of doing away with Social Security altogether. If Mr. Bush wins in November, we can be sure that they will move forward on privatization - the creation of personal retirement accounts. These will be sold as a way to "save" Social Security (from a nonexistent crisis), but will, in fact, undermine its finances. And that, of course, is the point.

Krugman writes much, much more, including exposing the shell-game Greenspan has just played on us all. For those coming late to this story, here's Kevin Drum's summary timeline:

• 1983: Recommended raising payroll taxes far above the amount required to fund Social Security. Since payroll taxes are capped (at $87,000 currently), this was, by definition, an increase that primarily hit the poor and middle class.
• 2001: Enthusiastically endorsed a tax cut aimed primarily at people who earn over $200,000.
• 2003: Ditto.
• 2004: Told Congress that due to persistent deficits Social Security benefits need to be cut.

So: raise payroll taxes on the middle class to create a surplus, then cut taxes on the rich to wipe out the surplus and create a deficit, and then sorrowfully announce that the resulting deficits mean that the Social Security benefits already paid for by the middle class need to be cut.

This shouldn't come as a surprise. Last June, Grover Norquist openly confirmed their goal: "we are going to dig out their whole structure of programs and power."

And yet I feel I should mourn for how far they've gotten at undermining the basic promises of America that I grew up with. And this isn't irresponsibility -- both what they're doing and the devestation they hope to produce are entirely intentional!

Over on Corrente, Lambert writes about reading a recent nonfiction book, The Coming of the Third Reich:

But I would like to focus on one major error that almost everyone in Germany made about the Nazis (except for the true believers):

The Germans didn't take the Nazis at their word.

Evans explains that the eliminationist anti-semitism of the Nazis wasn't a secret; it had been in the Nazi platform since the founding of the party. But because it seemed so extreme, so "out of the mainstream", people just couldn't believe it.

I propose that we should not make the same mistake. In other words:

We should take the wingers at their word.

So let's play close attention to their rhetoric. Over on Orcinus, David Neiwert has written several essays on fascism in right-wing rhetoric that many people whom I respect recommend highly.

Let's not turn a blind eye to this. And let's do what we can to prevent Bush from gaining another four years. We literally can't afford it.

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:55 PM

First of all, there will be a second BloggerCon this April, and this one will be free. Details are available at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/bloggerCon/ii/

Lisa Williams over at Learning the Lessons of Nixon has proposed a session on "Women and Blogs" and asked me to take part. [Here are the initial idea, draft description/proposal, and a few words on language.]

While I find that immensely flattering, and I'll have to look at the panel description in more detail later to address those questions, my immediate reaction was to start thinking about what being a woman blogger means to me. And since I tend to organize my thoughts best by writing them down, I'm blogging my initial reaction a month before the panel will actually take place.

See, here's the thing: I really don't think of myself as a woman blogger. I'm me -- someone who happens to be female -- and I'm a blogger, but I don't think femaleness comes into my blogging all that often. I can think of a few posts, such as writing about menstruation or Janet Jackson's breast or sexual dysfunctions, where I think I approach the issues from a female angle. Many of my posts have a traditionally-feminist slant/focus (such as Ashcroft's attacks on abortion clinics), but since I don't believe that only women can be feminists, that's not necessarily a gender attribute as I think of it.

But just because I make certain arguments from an explicitly female point of view, does that irrevocably color everything I write with a gender brush? [For what it's worth, the Gender Genie ranked my current blog page as male.] Am I invariably and always a Jewish blogger because I sometimes write about religious issues? I come to blogging out of a Usenet culture where the prevailing myth was of a meritocracy based upon having good things to say and presenting them well. We joked that "on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog," but also believed that cartoon had more than a grain of truth.

Many years ago, my husband took a class in Gender Communications. As part of his final project, he talked about "geek" as gender. After all, gender roles are societally determined, and in his words:

As a rule, geeks were ostracized as children. We were never quite like other people, and, because of this, nobody really wanted to have anything to do with us. So we tend to grow up lacking the socialization rules that everyone else gets.

However, we also tend to be exposed, through science fiction and other speculative fiction, to all sorts of strange ideas.
We generally end up regarding people in the mainstream, who haven't been exposed to these ideas, with just a tiny bit of disdain. We call them "mundanes."

So: we don't have ideas about gender from anyone else. We're trained to think about things on our own. And we have exposure to ideas way outside the mainstream and distrust for the ideas of the mainstream.
To quote one of my friends, "Gender roles are for mundanes."

And that's somewhat how I feel about it. I'm a woman and I blog, but I don't really think of myself as a woman blogger. My geek-iness (such as my exuberant enthusiasms for British history, books, and whatever flavor of the day happens to grab me) plays a greater role in what and how I write than my gender. And I'm not sure whether an attitude like that should disqualify me for a panel on woman bloggers or makes me even more suitable.

And I wonder whether this is typical of how other bloggers feel about their own writing -- whether they're male or female, black or white, majority or minority. How conscious are you of what you present? How aware are you in what you read? I hadn't really thought about it before, but my website is in shades of purples and lavenders, which I suppose upon consideration could have a "girly" look to it. But, purple is simply one of my favorite colors, and I've tried to coordinate the UI accordingly.

Two observations on blogging and gender from the first BloggerCon that might be worth picking up again:

As at the mixer, I was asked what my blog was about and gave a similar vague answer. One of the Bentley professors mentioned the feminist notion that the personal is the political, and wondered whether women bloggers might have more trouble separating the two than men. I tend to be skeptical of such gender-based arguments, but setting aside LiveJournal, which encourages much more personal blogging, and focusing on the political bloggers I read, I can think of few male political bloggers who talk about family issues regularly (PLA) and few female political bloggers who don't talk about family issues regularly (TalkLeft). Of course, this is a biased sample from my imperfect memory, but it might be something to consider further at some later time.

She also pointed out to me later in the day how many of the audience members who stood up and spoke out on practical objections to some of the more fanciful utopian suggestions were female. And also how often these issues were dismissed by the (mostly male) panelists. That was something I noticed as well as the day went on.

At any rate, those were my initial thoughts upon being invited to this panel. I have registered for BloggerCon II, and would like to be a part of the panel (though I really hope it's not in the earliest morning timeslot). And I'll almost certainly have even more to write about this after I actually read the description/proposal in more detail...

Comments on any or all of this heartily welcome!

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:55 PM

Following other people's example, last month I started a month in review of my reading habits. Meant to post something on this yesterday, but got busy and forgot.

Not too much worth mentioning, though. Finished a dozen books or novel-length fanfics. [One was only 45,000 words, but I chose to count it after reading it twice.] Only three works of nonfiction and no works officially labelled YA. Of the dozen books, three dealt with Shakespeare. Five of the fiction works were Harry Potter fanfics and all the rest of the fiction falls somewhere in the fantasy genre.

Last month's reading was more balanced between the Elizabethan/Shakespeare and Potter, but that was partly because several new titles were released then and I discovered others while composing my Marlowe in modern fiction list. [I have got to keep a copy of that in my purse in case of any accidental bookstore discoveries. Few things more frustrating than walking around the shelves trying to remember even a fragment of the author's name or title...] At any rate, new Potter is easier to obtain, so I've read more of it.

And so far, Reinventing Shakespeare has the strongest claim of any of them to making my year's best list. I read a library copy, and definitely feel it's worthy of owning.

With so little to say, I'm not sure I'll continue providing these monthly updates. After all, I already track everything (without comments) in both list and calendar formats, and have been for years. I don't think this is really adding much.

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:54 PM

So yesterday morning, I got the automated email from Shakespeare & Company announcing this summer's schedule. Dutifully, I posted it to Bard in Boston. But even though they're showing one of my favorite comedies this summer (As You Like It), what really lit my eyes up are a series of free lectures they're giving several Friday nights, including:

Of course, these are all scheduled for 5 PM on Fridays, and they're located in Western Massachusetts (near the New York border). Mapquest estimates over a two-hour drive under the best conditions and it would be much longer during Friday rush hour, since 110 miles of the route is along the Mass Pike (a major commuter thoroughfare). Which means the only way I could possibly attend any of these these would involve taking the afternoons off.

As long as I'm writing about Shakespeare, I just finished Peter Blayney's book on the First Folio of Shakespeare. This is a short book, but well illustrated. It was originally released as a catalog accompanying an exhibit in the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Fascinating!

The book is largely concerned with the technical details of how the book was printed, and I think many people I know who are in the publishing industry (Teresa Nielsen Hayden in particular came to mind) would find it equally fascinating, particularly in comparison with how things are done nowadays.

For example, books were printed in three-sheet quires, yielding twelve pages (front and back) when folded. Since they didn't have enough type to set the pages in order, they'd start by "casting off" -- estimating what text would end up on pages 6 & 7 (the center pages), and setting those first. After they were printed, they'd work forwards and backwards, setting pages 5 & 8, 4 & 9, and so on. Pages 6-12 were set in order, but 5 - 1 were done backwa