Towse: views from the hill

August 10, 2008

Orwell’s Diaries

Filed under: blog,people,webstuff,writing — Towse @ 1:23 am

Orwell’s Diaries

The Orwell Prize, Britain’s pre-eminent prize for political writing, is publishing George Orwell’s diaries as a blog. From 9th August 2008, Orwell’s domestic and political diaries (from 9th August 1938 until October 1942) will be posted in real-time, exactly 70 years after the entries were written.

Orwell’s ‘domestic’ diaries begin on 9th August 1938/2008; his ‘political’ diaries (which are further categorised as ‘Morocco’, ‘Pre-war’ and ‘Wartime’) begin on 7th September 1938/2008.

The diaries are exactly as Orwell wrote them. Where there are original spelling errors, they are indicated by a ° following the offending word.

[via Laughing Squid]

August 9, 2008

Found at Looney’s — Matt’s video

Filed under: life,travel,web2.0,webstuff — Towse @ 9:36 am

Watch Matt do his silly dance around the world from Thimpu to Timbuktu to the Giant’s Causeway to Rio.

Like Looney, I’d never seen this before, although it’s one of those viral things that swept the Web three years back. Where was I? Obviously not where Matt was filming his clips.

Looney said this was a happy vid and it is, but it also made me tear up a bit. All those places. All those people. Every one linked by Matt Harding and his silly dance.

Update: I figured what the tearing up was about. Matt and his dance reminds me of the younger nib, who will be “away” until June 2010 — dancing, like Matt, with people he meets along the way.

Update2: An earlier Where the Hell is Matt? and another.

Strothman Agency

Filed under: writing,writing-market — Towse @ 12:39 am

The Strothman Agency (of which I’ve written before) dropped a line to say

“The Strothman Agency is moving. As of July 28th, we will be located at 6 Beacon Street, Suite 810, Boston, MA 02108. This will also be our new mailing address.”

August 8, 2008

LawyerWorldLand: GOV. McGREEVY’S DIVORCE JUDGMENT IS POSTED ONLINE! OBOY!

Filed under: legal,people,yikes — Towse @ 11:46 pm

LawyerWorldLand: GOV. McGREEVY'S DIVORCE JUDGMENT IS POSTED ONLINE! OBOY!

Archer gives a summary of the divorce judgment which is online (lengthy PDF) for all to peruse.

The summary is Classic Archer.

And, yes, I trundled off to read the PDF (well, not thoroughly and not all of it) and Archer did indeed capture the spirit of the Judge’s decision.

Yipes.

(I confess that I’d forgotten who McGreevy was and then it was, oh, yeah. New Jersey. That Governor. The long suffering wife. The confessions of homosexuality. The aide who swore there’d been Friday night threesomes for years. Now I remember. Lovely.)

August 7, 2008

Twitter StreamGraphs

Filed under: timewaster,web2.0 — Towse @ 5:00 pm

Twitter StreamGraphs

Oooh. Pretty! Then take one of the ribbons and click on it.

Say, search for “Obama” and click on “jobs” and see how the ribbon runs through it, what the tweets say, &c. and forth.

If you check “towse” (why would you?), you can see tweets I’ve deleted and re-written and you can get a feel for just how compul^H^H^H^Hnscientious I am.

August 2, 2008

Garbage (and recycling and more!) redux

Filed under: causes,environment — Tags: , — Towse @ 7:42 pm

The trash police: Gavin Newsom is proposing the nation’s first-ever mandatory recycling and composting law. Be prepared to pay hefty fines if you toss coffee grounds in with the newspapers.

Read the article.

Read the comments.

People can be such whiners. Gestapo! It’s so hard to recycle. &c. and so on.

Yes, proposing outrageous fines if people don’t sort their garbage (and maybe cutting off their garbage service … that’ll teach them!) is nonsense, but the City pays a fortune to truck garbage to the dump over by Altamont and with gas prices rising not only is the dump filling (and where will we put trash then?) but costs are rising too.

Our field trip to the dump — AKA “Norcal Waste System, Inc’s Solid Waste Transfer and Recycling Center” — last October was enlightening.

Read the trip report with piccies to see why getting people to separate out their recyclable stuff AND ESPECIALLY THEIR GREEN CYCLE is a must if we’re going to control the garbage stream (and the fuel costs and the personnel costs and …)

That said, my comment on the Chron article:

Dear Mayor Newsom.

Come visit. I’ll invite some neighbors over. We’ll explain how difficult it is to recycle at all when you live off the Filbert Steps.

(1) NorCal won’t pick up blue bins here. Paying extra isn’t even an option. We FINALLY got a locked bin — locked so tourists won’t throw trash in — that the immediate neighbors share up at Montgomery and Filbert, but neighbors who live at Filbert and Montgomery bitch and complain about us parking our recycling bin anywhere near their buildings. Add a green bin? As if.

(2) I have a dish on the counter for green-bin scraps. From there, the scraps go to a covered compostable-bag-lined re-purposed menudo pot over by the ‘frig. Every 4 days or so — MAX … any more than that and the bag will disintegrate and maggots and crud grow — we tie up the bag, put it in ANOTHER bag, walk it three-plus blocks to our car and DRIVE to drop it off in a large green bin we have access to.

We try, Mr. Mayor. ’tain’t easy. Make it easier for us.

His nibs said, why didn’t you write about people putting non-greencycle stuff in bins left out for pickup and the greencycle people refusing to pick up the bins? Why didn’t you write about neighbors getting upset about people picking through blue bins for cash-refund recyclables and the bratty neighbors kicking the full bin and contents down the stairs, spreading recyclables down the steps to the next landing? Why didn’t you write about …

I told him that the SFChron allows you 1000char for comments and I was down to my last ten or so. …

July 30, 2008

Prop 8 update

Filed under: California,causes,culture,life,politics — Towse @ 6:42 pm

Prop. 8 backers sue to change ballot wording

Seems Jerry Brown (formerly Governor Moonbeam, currently State Attorney General perhaps Governor again after the next election, who knows …) has authorized the following ballot language for Proposition 8: “eliminates the right of same-sex couples to marry.”

Says he, since the time the petition signatures were collected, the court confirmed the right of same-sex couples to marry. Therefore, Prop 8, which reads “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” would disenfranchise those who just May 15th got the right to marry and his wording is fine and good and valid.

Prop 8 proponents claim Brown’s verbiage is “inherently argumentative and highly likely to create prejudice” and they aren’t eliminating anyone’s rights. They’re simply trying to reinstate the definition of marriage that existed in California before the judicial decision in May.

Ya. Right.

Yay! hooray! for Jerry Brown. You go, guy!

July 27, 2008

Neighborhood dinner

Filed under: food,life — Tags: , , — Towse @ 6:59 pm

And so it came to pass that we had our second annual neighborhood progressive dinner last night.

As usual, I skipped town — after offering my minimal help in designing the flyer and settling on dates (dinner scheduled for a week and a day after we got back) — and left the delivery of invites, acceptance of RSVPs, and scheduling to my charming co-conspirator, co-host and next-door neighbor.

We got back from Africa and I sent a note: Is dinner still on? Did we get enough RSVPs? Indeed it was. Indeed we did.

Some last minute re-shuffling of venues and a dinner we had. First stop, Napier Lane for kickoff and appetizers. Next stop our lane (and the charming next-door neighbors’) for appetizers. Then upstairs next-door for salads. Then here for tapas (goat-cheese-stuffed Anaheim peppers, chicken piccata empanadas, beef and pepita sauce empanadas from me and vegetable frittata from a Napier neighbor). Then back next door and yet another floor up for dessert and coffee.

Neighbors included a couple who is putting their San Francisco life on hold and heading to Malaysia for a few years, a neighbor I’d never met but whose apartment I’d wandered through on one of our open house Sundays a couple months back, a neighbor who has left her job to go back to school for a post-graduate degree, the neighbors who have the colossal re-model just uphill from us, others, and the chocolate guy.

The chocolate guy lives on Napier Filbert but, because his life is still in boxes, decided he couldn’t host and in lieu brought the desserts for the final gathering on the top floor next door. He had chocolate bars

 

Posted by Picasa

and two types of chocolate gelato (chocolate/cardamom ym!) and I went home the happy owner of a bag of chocolate nibs from his latest tonnage. My assignment: think up new ways of using chocolate nibs.

“add to salads” is already a known use.

I finally put the bag away this morning. I’d been nibbling out of hand during and after breakfast, over reading the Sunday papers. Nibbling out of hand is good enough for me.

Say, Timothy. Why not just sell nibs as a straight-to-the-vein snack for chocolate lovers who don’t want to wade through all the other ingredients needed to make a chocolate bar?

Tcho — the chocolate guy’s chocolate — is that good. Tcho is a San Francisco company, working out of Pier 17.

Buy online! but only if you think milk chocolate is not worth the paper it’s wrapped in and dark chocolate with chocolate content > 70% is the way to go.

July 25, 2008

RIP Randy Pausch

Filed under: damn,life,people — Towse @ 5:55 pm

U.S. professor of inspirational “last lecture” dies

Fri Jul 25, 2008 1:46pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Randy Pausch, a university professor whose “last lecture” celebrating life in the face of terminal cancer became a book which made him a best-selling sensation, died on Friday at age 47.

Pausch died at home of complications from pancreatic cancer, Carnegie Mellon University, where he taught for 10 years, reported on its Web site.

The computer science professor was best known for his “last lecture,” entitled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” which he gave in September 2007 just weeks after learning he was suffering from terminal cancer.

Footage of the poignant and inspirational lecture became a hit on the Internet, viewed by millions of people.

A book based on the talk, “The Last Lecture,” was translated into 30 languages and became an international bestseller, Carnegie Mellon, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, said on its Web site.

[...]

The server at Carnegie Mellon is swamped and not responding, but when it comes up for air, click here for more Randy Pausch information. (I’d checked in just yesterday to see how he was doing. … and was glad to see he was still with us. And, now, not.)

Same-sex marriage foes warn of kindergarten lessons on gay matrimony

Filed under: California,politics — Towse @ 1:09 am

Same-sex marriage foes warn of kindergarten lessons on gay matrimony

Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, July 24, 2008

Backers of a November initiative to ban same-sex marriage in California plan to tell voters in the state ballot pamphlet that the constitutional amendment would protect children as young as kindergarten age from being taught in school about the virtues of gay and lesbian matrimony.

“If the gay marriage ruling is not overturned, teachers will be required to teach young children there is no difference between gay marriage and traditional marriage,” supporters of Proposition 8 said in ballot arguments that went on public display this week at the secretary of state’s office.

That marriage lesson is more than likely part and parcel of the sex education lessons for kindergarteners that the gay agenda is forcing on the good citizens of California.

Yikes. Don’t say they didn’t warn you. …

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