Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:15 AM

I want to leave for the con in about a half-hour, so we can (hopefully) make a 10:30 panel (none of the 10 am panels feel like must-attends). And now I find myself trying to decide: blog about yesterday or eat a healthy breakfast? Blog? Or eat? Blog? Eat?

Much as I'd like to write up everything that happened yesterday while it's still fresh in my mind, I think I'm going to make myself some scrambled eggs. Sorry, but you'll have to wait a while longer...

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:51 AM

As readers may have guessed from earlier posts, I'm going to Worldcon. I'll be out, and probably off the computer, from about noon today through Monday afternoon. From past experience, keeping up with my usual blog reading list (including LJ friends lists) can be quite difficult after a long absence (and yes, five days is a long absence in the blogosphere). I don't even know if I'll be able to catch up on my friends list, or whether I'll just start afresh when I get back. That being the case, if you read (or write) anything that you really want me to see, or think I'd like to see, please add a comment with the link.

Though I'm much less of an autograph hound than when I was younger, I'm bringing three books to be signed:

• My first edition hardcover of Good Omens for Terry Pratchett. I just realized that it's over a dozen years since I got Neil Gaiman's autograph. Time flies.
• The Scholars of night by John M. Ford
• The December 1987 IASFM for Connie Willis' "Winter's Tale"

The latter two are both Marlowe fics. I've also made note of two other Marlowe books to seek out in the dealer room: Mary Gentle's Left to his own devices and (less likely) Louise Welsh's Tamburlaine must die.

I'd post more, but I want to get ready. I've already seen at least one must-see panel at 1pm. Byeeeee!

PS: For anybody looking to meet me at the con, I'm wearing a grey Reduced Shakespeare Company t-shirt -- large image of the Droeshout engraving with Groucho makeup and cigar.

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:05 AM

As Ian was going to bed: "Can't sleep; cats will eat me."

Yes, the kitten is on the bed. Last night (from about 3 - 4 in the morning) she spent a solid hour attacking any limb under the covers that made the slightest move. Fortunately, she mostly keeps her claws in and I think she still has her baby teeth, so it doesn't really hurt. It's entertaining (she fell off the bed twice) but hardly conducive to sleep.

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:40 PM

I just started looking at the online program for tomorrow's Worldcon. It's slow-going, because I keep stopping and reading aloud the niftiest-sounding ones. I've just gotten to 7pm, and squealed when I discovered:

Punday
A host provides topics to a set of contestants who must in turn make a not-yet-said pun on that topic within 30 seconds. When someone misses or repeats, they're gonged out and the topic changes.

Jordin T. Kare, Josepha Sherman

Of course, if I couldn't win at a regional convention, I probably don't stand a chance at Worldcon, but I may as well size up the competition before deciding. Then I continue reading and see in the same timeslot they've scheduled:

Ask Dr. Mike
What can you get for the man who knows everything? Science fiction's wildly acclaimed answer to Drs. Hawking, Ruth, Phil, and Laura asks only for the gift of your most challenging questions about science, philosophy, history, the meaning and origin of life, and that awkward con restaurant invitation thing.

John M. Ford

Ooh, tough choice. But I'm still leaning towards Punday. Then, a little further down the screen I discover yet another panel at the same timeslot:

The Return of 20 Panels an Hour…
A preview of the program? Using patented ThoughtSquasher compression technology, Boskone's barely tolerated "Sunday, Funny Sunday" crew flees to Noreascon's First Night. Watch with whimpering amazement as they whip through at least twenty complete panel topics (not including this one) in fifty-five minutes or less. Warning: do not apply directly to brain.

Michael A. Burstein, Keith R. A. DeCandido, Bob Devney (m), Leigh Grossman

This is so not fair. How can all these great humor panels be scheduled opposite one another!? Oh, and look what else is running at that time:

Terry on Trial
…for such charges as "failing to stop at a trilogy", "writing with undue care and attention", "cruelty to animals", and "being a rich bastard!". Celebrity witness will include Death, Nanny Ogg, and others. Caselberg as prosecutor, Friesner as defender, Bacon as judge…

James Bacon, Esther Friesner, Jay Caselberg (m), Mary Kay Kare, Terry Pratchett

That's the problem with Worldcon. Too much good stuff all at the same time. Well, too much good stuff all the time, really. I'm going to go back to reading the program.

By the way, I won't be posting terribly much over the next several days. Doesn't this convention sound so much more enjoyable than the one currently in New York City?

Posted by Lis Riba at 5:50 PM

Last night I wandered into McIntyre and Moore, a used-book store in Davis Square. I know I spent well over an hour just wandering among the shelves looking at titles. I really don't need a $30 slipcovered volume containing six prompt books from the Restoration. Really. However, I did see several titles worth checking out further:

Nonetheless, I displayed extraordinary restraint and bought nothing at the time. Worldcon starts tomorrow and I already have plenty of reading material lined up from the library. I am pleased with my self-control.

Posted by Lis Riba at 4:50 PM

"It's not who votes that counts. It's who counts the votes."

-- Joseph Stalin

Theresa LePore lost her reelection bid, however will still be in office to supervise the November presidential election. According to AP:

With all 692 precincts reporting, challenger Arthur Anderson had 91,134 votes, or 52 percent, while LePore had 85,601 votes, or 48 percent.
LePore refused to meet with reporters early Wednesday, but as the polls closed Tuesday she said she was too busy overseeing the counting of ballots to think about her own race.

But Suburban Guerrilla found there's still cause for concern:

A more than 6,000-vote discrepency in absentee ballots counted in Tuesday's election has forced Palm Beach County to re-count all of those votes.
County Judge Barry Cohen, a member of the county's canvassing board, said 37,839 votes from absentee ballots were counted in Tuesday's election — far more than the 31,095 that were actually sent in.

Readers may recall earlier concerns about her handling of absentee ballots. And the ballot discrepancy is greater than the gap between the candidates. Hopefully, though, the result will hold. The challenger (and elections supervisor-elect) has a platform I can agree with:

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:55 PM

To those critics who are so pessimistic about our economy, I say: "Don't be economic girlie men!"

-- Arnold Schwarzenegger, last night

I am neither male nor terribly "girly." Perhaps we would have less to criticize if Bush and the GOP actually did anything to pump the economy up.

This morning, I found myself listening to The Connection. The host was asking listeners the question "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" I think I only heard three callers said yes and all of them said they were Bush voters. [One of them sounded like a plant, he seemed to be parrotting talking points rather than talking about his own personal experience as most other callers did.]

I'm definitely worse off. When Bush came into office... let's just say my salary put us well into the upper-middle class. Then I lost my job. After nearly a year unemployed, I found another job earning about half my previous salary. I stuck with that for a year before losing out to another round of layoffs. I'm unemployed once again, and this time can't even afford health insurance. I've now got a higher academic degree (MLS) and yet most of the jobs I'm seeing advertised pay little more than my first job out of college in 1991.

Growing up, there was an American assumption that each generation can look forward to a better life than their parents had. I'm no longer sure I have a shot at that. And I'm not alone in this sentiment. Most of my friends are also struggling and underemployed. And someday, maybe I'll write up my rant on how messed up health insurance is in this country -- and The Connection spoke with business owners for who are hurt competitively by the current system as well.

By the way, I caught the first few minutes of Schwarzenegger's speech last night on the radio while we were getting out of the car. He took so many pauses, and in weird places that it was dead simple to MST3K it:

To think that a once-scrawny boy from Austria could grow up to become governor of the state of California...

Why? I've heard of at least one other scrawny Austrian boy who grew up to be major political power.

It's the American dream.

I thought the dream was to become president, not just to speak on his behalf.

I will never forget the day 21 years ago when I raised my right hand...

and saluted, "Seig heil!"

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:05 AM

I hate to post corrections for other like-minded bloggers in my journal. I'd rather post a comment or send them a note and let them quietly correct it themselves. But my need for accuracy outweighs my ideological solidarity, and I've seen no response to my email.

Shawn posted the following on Liquid List:

Blogs: The Difference Between Us And Them

Did any of the bloggers chosen by the DNC to cover the convention post hot babes alongside their political musings? Do any well known Democratic bloggers anywhere for that matter intermingle Maxxim-style photos of women in with their daily posts?
Somehow I don't think so. And I'd like to think its because we've evolved past the point where we need to constantly talk about our primordial instincts.
So, I guess I could say that GOP Convention blogger WizbangBlog is "different" than us liberal bloggers. Hop on over to the site and while reading about the convention you'll notice frequent "GOP Babe of the Day" postings like these here, here (fine its not a hot chick, but close from an intellectual standpoint - a guy getting kicked in the balls), here and here.
Thats 20% of Wizbangs' front page content (4 of 20 posts) dedicated to scantily clad ladies (and one ball-kick) DURING the convention. WTF? Surely the GOP must have known about this guy's proclivity to objectify women before they invited him in. But we all know where they stand on women - Wizbang is right on target.

"Do any well known Democratic bloggers anywhere for that matter intermingle Maxxim-style photos of women in with their daily posts?"

While I hate to spoil a good rant, I have one link in rebuttal: Oliver Willis, a well-known liberal blogger who spices his politics with frequent cheesecake photography. He posts enough photos that I have to be careful where I read his blog. I don't think he was officially invited to the DNC, but he's popular enough to be in the top 100 of the Blogosphere Ecosystem.

So it happens on all sides of the political fence, and we don't have a monopoly on that particular "virtue."

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:35 PM

I'm curious. Has anybody seen polling data on how all the Vietnam-era attacks have been playing with younger voters? I mean, I'm 34. I have no real memory of the Vietnam war. I vaguely remember stories in the news about the Vietnamese boat people, but we lived in the Midwest at that time, so that was hardly relevant to my experiences. By the time my family moved to Florida, any Vietnamese students were well-enough integrated that I didn't notice any difference between them and the rest of my diverse classmates.

So all this heat and hoo-hah is over things that happened before I was born. It can be fun to debate as an exercise, but it really holds no relevance to my life or that of my friends.

I started thinking along these lines after reading a post by Steve Gilliard on an almost entirely unrelated topic. Apparently, Bush supporters (or Kerry detractors) are trying to call into question John Kerry's suitability to be president on the grounds that he had prostate cancer.

And as an issue, this seems even more alien to me than the whole Vietnam thing.

I've heard that in the "old days" cancer was considered such a death sentence that the word was only spoken in hushed tones. But I know so many people who have survived a bout of some cancer or other, that I really don't think cancer is qualitatively different from any other serious disease. I tried to think of other diseases with those kinds of consequences -- perhaps AIDS in the 80s and early 90s, but even that appears to be survivable nowadays with monitoring and proper medication. So why do they think cancer is a disqualifier (in a way that Cheney's heart attacks aren't)?

Are the campaigns misreading (or overlooking) the generation gap? Or are my experience and opinions atypical?

[Incidentally, if you're not already reading him, I'd like to recommend Steve Gilliard's News Blog as one of the better ones for liberal political analysis. The articles he posts tend to have less overlap with other blogs, and he provides some excellent analysis.]

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:10 PM

Who would've thought I'd end up writing about Teresa LePore again after only one week. But she's in the news again. This Greg Palast article is making the rounds, though I first saw it on Suburban Guerrilla:

On Friday, Theresa LePore, Supervisor of Elections in Palm Beach, candidate for re-election as Supervisor of Elections, chose to supervise her own election, no one allowed. This Tuesday, Florida votes for these nominally non-partisan posts.
<snip>
This time, Theresa's in a hurry to get to the counting. She began tallying absentee ballots on Friday in her own re-election race. Not to worry: the law requires the Supervisor of Elections in each county to certify poll-watchers to observe the count.
But Theresa has a better idea. She refused to certify a single poll-watcher from opponents' organizations despite the legal requirement she do so by last week. She'll count her own votes herself, thank you very much!
And so far, she's doing quite well. Although 37,000 citizens have requested absentee ballots, she says she'd only received 22,000 when she began the count. Where are the others? Don't ask: though she posts the names of requesters, she won't release the list of those who have voted, an eyebrow-raising deviation from standard procedure.
And she has no intention of counting all the ballots received. She has reserved for herself the right to determine which ballots have acceptable signatures. Her opponent, Democrat Art Anderson, had asked Theresa to use certified hand-writing experts, instead of her hand-picked hacks, to check the signatures.
Unfortunately, while Federal law requires Theresa to allow a voter to correct a signature rejection when registering, the Feds don't require her to permit challenges to absentee ballot rejections.
I know what you're thinking. How could Madame Butterfly know how people are voting? Well, she's printed PARTY AFFILIATION on the OUTSIDE of each return envelope. That certainly makes it easier to figure out which ballot is valid, don't it?
And dear Reader, please take note of the implications of this story for the big vote in November. Millions have sought refuge in absentee ballots as a method to avoid the dangers of the digitizing of democracy. Florida and other states are reporting 400%-plus increases in absentee ballot requests due to fear of the new computer voting machinery. Some refuge. LePore is giving us an early taste of how the Bush Leaguers intend to care for your absentee ballot.
If there's no safety in the absentee ballot, how about the computerized machines? The LePores of America have that one figured out too.
On Friday, the day on which Theresa began her Kremlim-style vote count, the New York Times ran a puff piece on Jeb's Palm Beach political pet. Cub reporter Amy Goodnough derided fears of Democrats who painted "dark scenarios" about the computer voting machines Madame Butterfly installed over the objections of the state's official voting technology task force.
If you're wondering why the experts told her not to use the machines, I'll tell you -- because the New York Times won't. It's not because the voting specialists are anti-technology Luddites. The fact is that Florida counties using touch-screens have reported a known error rate 600% greater than the alternative, paper ballots read by optical scanners. And those errors have occurred -- surprise! -- overwhelmingly in African-American precincts.
<snip>
In Leon County, by contrast, Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho insisted on paper ballots and did not lose a single vote to error in the March presidential primary. Sancho told me it's a slam-dunk certainty that the computer screens will snatch away several thousand Palm Beach votes.

Call me distrustful, but I'm not comfortable with anyone being in charge of their own election in this manner.

People (and companies) act in their own self-interest. That's perfectly normal behavior. Therefore, outside observers/auditors are necessary when anyone may be required to act against their own interest. Whether it involves pharmaceutical testing, employee-safety, environmental impact studies, or other areas of self-evaluation, it's too easy to let bias color one's findings. And it's not much more difficult if one wishes to deliberately cook the books. So why risk the temptation?

Posted by Lis Riba at 5:01 PM

For the folks I brunched with this morning: Captain Jack Sparrow/"I'm Too Sexy", my Muppet Shakespeare casting, and info on upcoming novels bought by Henson (including Holly Black's Tithe). Oh, and Shadesong, if you like the ballad and modern interpretations thereof, I assume you're familiar with Tam-Lin.org? I forget if we mentioned anything else I wanted to share with y'all, but if you recall, please don't hesitate to remind me.

And, if you know so many other librarians hunting for work in the Boston area, well, I'm kind (or sucker) enough to help my own competition. Here are (most) of my prerigged links to listing services, already set to find library positions in the Boston area. The two I am leaving out are Monster and Democratic Gain, both of which require logins, and I don't feel like sharing my personal accounts. They're free services, you can easily set up your own. Otherwise:

MLIN Simmons GSLIS NE Jobline Bostonworks search SLA Boston LIS Jobs

Yahoo HotJobs! Careerbuilder JobFind USAJobs

My search strategy aims for recall over precision. Better I weed out unsuitable jobs (film librarian and the like), rather than miss a possible match.

I also have a bookmarked list of local companies and institutions (such as area universities) which I check directly, but if you're looking for library work, you can probably compile that on your own.

Good luck to us all. If you do find a job through one of these sites, all I ask is that you keep me in mind. And if you know of other sites that I should add to my list, please return the favor by letting me know of them.