sundries

[rm]

We did set the alarm for late to get up to see the eclipse, but the plan was only to look if we could see it from our bed (we can often see the moon from our window), but we could not and so went back to sleep. The world is, however, brighter this morning, and we are glad.

Last night we found a restaurant on the edge of Soho (so it claims, is Noho/Little Italy the edge of Soho now? God help me) that has gluten-free pasta and pizza. Also, excellent ambiance and major skylight action. We're very happy.

A cruise option may be back on the menu vs. France now. We're going to try to figure it out over the holidays. I don't know.

Cards are happening for New Year's.

And we both got our Yuletide's uploaded!

Today is the day. Dogboy & Justine fundraising ends tonight at 9:22pm EST.

Travel across Europe remains severely disrupted by weather. I've heard horrible reports of friends stranded in Germany trying to get home to the US from Asia and chaos at St Pancras in London. At least the volcano wasn't cold.

14% of the US population now receives food stamps. In Washington DC that number is over 20%; if you look at people under 16, the number near doubles in some jurisdictions. Some politicians would tell you the shame is that they're lazy. The shame is that our system is so broken that so many people need our help (and make no mistake, everyone who needs help isn't getting it) and that we vilify them for it.

A Brooklyn food pantry tries a plan to allow recipients to choose their groceries. This is huge. For people who need food assistance but also suffer from diseases like celiac disease the choice is often go hungry or get sick.

100,000 homes. A plan to address chronic homelessness is actually working.

Ireland's financial woes seen in the fate of its horses. (Warning: animal suffering).

With the DADT vote, Harvard and Yale are now exploring the possibility of ROTC programs.

Meanwhile, a Virginia politician wants to make sure LGB people remained barred from the Virginia National Guard.

The UN is to make another attempt to say that killing gay people for being gay is bad. Not gay or otherwise marginalized and at risk? Imagine if you had to type that sentence with adjectives that applied to you like it was a normal thing.

George Osborne accused of homophobia. (Hi, Fandom, HOW ARE YOU TODAY?)

And in case you missed it, Haley Barbour has just blown up his presidential hopes (we hope) by letting people know that "segregation wasn't that bad." Seriously, no matter how much of a bigot you are, how bad at this public speaking thing do you have to be to let that one slip?

Law and the multiverse: Are mutants a protected legal class? What if someone is convicted of murder but then the victim comes back to life?

Paul Cornell is a lot of things (all good, Paul, all good!) including a professional creator who has written fan-fiction. As part of his 12 blogs of Christmas, today he links to fanfic from people about some of his characters.

There has been a significant fall at Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark. About 20 feet. The actor is listed in serious condition.

A space wardrobe.

Finally, custardfairy is part of an LGBT chorus in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They have an upcoming concert in January on the WCC campus. The chorus desperately needs to sell tickets, advertising and receive contributions if they are going to continue to exist past January. The website is a bit out of date, but custardfairy says "people can also email OutLoudChorus@gmail.com for more ways to support the choir. They are a 501c organization so advertising and donations are tax deductible." For more info on attending the concert, you can contact the Chorus's email address or custardfairy.

P.S., Happy Dalek Day! (Gosh, there's a lot of analysis to do about bodies and sexuality and absence and The Void thanks that still of the Dalek plunger blocking out Barbara's torso, ne?). The first appearance on our TVs of the Doctor's nemeses (singular or plural do you think? How collective are they? Has this changed over time? Do we need to discuss the Dalek/human hybrid?), the Daleks, happened December 21, 1963.

Comments

[emily-shore.livejournal.com]

Are mutants a protected legal class?

It almost sounds as if they think mutants are fictional...

[laughingacademy.livejournal.com]

There are some interesting comments over at cleolinda's journal in her post about the most recent Homo arachnid Musical injury -- and by "interesting" I mean "horrifying," as people discuss injuries that have occurred in other Broadway shows.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

I'd rather wanted to see Spiderman, but now I'm starting to feel guilty for that. I don't want other people hurt for my entertainment. And even if you manage to go on a night where no one breaks anything, it still feels like you're morally culpable for the nights where someone ended up in the hospital.

[wesleysgirl.livejournal.com]

A Brooklyn food pantry tries a plan to allow recipients to choose their groceries. This is huge. For people who need food assistance but also suffer from diseases like celiac disease the choice is often go hungry or get sick.

Wow, that's so great! We were on WIC for half a year when my son was a baby (husband was laid off) and it was barely worth the hoops we had to jump through because the two items we were allowed the most of, milk and cheese, weren't part of our diet and there were no substitutes permitted. It was very frustrating.

[martygreene.livejournal.com]

The food bank here in Seattle which I use has a color coded system. You get a shopping cart, and your color coded card based on household size. The shelves say how many of each item/item type you can have based on your color card. It lets us pick the items that we use, and leave behind those which we don't (so, being The Jew that they get, they will hold the special kosher items for me if I call ahead, so I don't get stuck with the problem of all the protein being porky). I don't take bananas, so I get grapes and apples instead. We also get as many bags/bins of salad mix and containers of pre-cut fruit and veg as we like.

[custardfairy.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for signal-boosting! There will hopefully be an update to the sponsorship/donations page later today.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Is the more info email address the right one for Paypal donations if we don't want to do one of the amounts listed on the page?

Also, you may want to post to crowdfunding. I got some donations from total LJ strangers for D&J that way.

[custardfairy.livejournal.com]

I just confirmed - Yes! outloudchorus@gmail.com

[rm.livejournal.com]

Okay, cool.

[lookingaround17.livejournal.com]

Also, 501(c)3 or 501(c)4 or what? 501(c)3 is deductible and 501(c)4 is not, so I just wanted to check--

[custardfairy.livejournal.com]

501(c)(3) My apologies.

[lookingaround17.livejournal.com]

No problem: the 501(c)4 is one that many political bunches use, and is not tax-exempt, so I just wanted to check. Thank you.

[lookingaround17.livejournal.com]

I mean, not deductible, but is a category of tax-exempt in some ways--

[offbalance.livejournal.com]

Apparently, Equity is halting performances: http://broadwayworld.com/videoplay.php?colid=195868.

Glad they stepped in before someone died.

[rm.livejournal.com]

And this is why we have unions, because actors in particular will do anything for a job.

[offbalance.livejournal.com]

It's true.

[hoyland54.livejournal.com]

With the DADT vote, Harvard and Yale are now exploring the possibility of ROTC programs.

I'm curious what the benefit to the universities is, which, of course, the article doesn't say. The article makes it seem like they rushed out with a press release, rather than responding to an inquiry. I seem to recall MIT's prospectus mentioning that ROTC was banned on campus for DADT reasons, but that an MIT student could do ROTC by being attached to ROTC at some nearby university, so presumably the same is true for Harvard. I don't think this set-up is unusual, both for schools banning ROTC for violating the non-discrimination policy and for schools too small to support a program on their own.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Harvard and Yale are now exploring the possibility of ROTC programs.

Ditto Columbia, I believe: DADT was in violation of the nondiscrimination policy CU had in place for student bodies.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I wonder if the Right's whinging about the un-Americanism of "elite" education will go the fuck away if ROTC programs return to the Ivy Leagues. If this is a back-door to educational attainment getting respect again, I could be very happy.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Eh. Princeton shares an ROTC program with Rutgers. (Neither school had enough students in any one branch to justify their own classes, so we pooled resources. I think we were technically the host of the Army program and they technically had the Air Force, but it was confusing so I might have them switched. Effectively, they did half the drills on one campus and half of them on the other, so everyone commuted half the time. It's not that far.) I had a couple friends in the program who are now active duty officers. No one ever seems to notice them. The right wants to whine about colleges being "elite" (as if that's bad?), and they're going to continue doing so.

[byzantienne.livejournal.com]

We (Rutgers) have the Army; you all have the Air Force. For the record. *grins*

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

I have the nasty feeling that general anti-intellectualism is too well entrenched, but we'll see.

[riverrocks.livejournal.com]

I've been one of the people turned away from food shelves because they couldn't or wouldn't deal with my dietary restrictions. I've also been one of the people impacted by the rules imposed on food stamps during the Clinton years that limited single adults without dependents to three months of food stamps in a three year period. I figured out alternative ways to deal with my hunger (and ended up with a one person show about it) but not everybody in that situation has the skills and community I had, and that kind of hunger is a place no one should have to be.

I was very happy to read recently that in the last few months the government has gotten rid of that rule and also changed the requirement that a person must get rid of any assets (including the car a person uses to get to work) in order to qualify for food stamps. I don't have the space or the brain power to come up with a clear, pithy statement about the privileged politicians that make a career out of vilifying (and punishing) the folks in this country who are struggling to survive. I do, however, find myself longing for a country/culture where the current those-who-have-deserve-more attitude gets replaced with an agreement that every single person gets their basic needs (food, water, housing, medical care) met first and then we move on to work on the extras.

[lookingaround17.livejournal.com]

I used to get food from a food shelf, and was the only vegetarian (I think it was NH), and sadly, the lady who ran the health food store killed herself, so I inherited all the organic vegetarian items, which was great for me but of course freaky for her--

[alchemia.livejournal.com]

I hate our food pantry; first its in the Salvation Army, so to go there, you have to be bombarded with religious messages.

Then, they have you fill out a "menu" of what you want, except they usually end up substituting 80% of what you mark off so what is the point of that. I'd mark off stuff like tinned veggies and tomato soup and explicitly cross out meat and write next to it, vegetarian, no meat please... and come home to find they gave us bags of tinned vegetable beef soup and refried beans made with lard. I brought it back once and the guy quipped "not that hungry then?' ha.ha.

I know lots of people in the area are Muslim,Hindu etc, and qualify for the pantry, but don't go. I wonder if the people that run the pantry are that ignorant about diets, or if they do it on purpose to punish those of different beliefs.

[eredien]

From that "Advocate" article:

“After 232 years of prohibiting active, open homosexuals from enlisting in our military, President Obama and a majority in Congress are conducting a social experiment with our troops and our national security,” [Marshall] said.

"A majority in Congress conducting a social experiment" has a very different ring from "activist judges conducting a social experiment." I wasn't really expecting it to feel that different, but it did.

[lyorn.livejournal.com]

The weather is frightful and spares us having to about any other issues. My friends and I just decided that christmas with family would be cancelled because of the weather, and we'd stay where we are and have a nice dinner together on Saturday.

They are canceling the short-distance flights to have more slots for the long distance ones and ask passengers to take the train, but the trains are a complete mess

To make the train system more "efficient" they cut all redundancnies and saved on maintenance. Only, "redundant" means that you have a backup. Cut that, and if one locomotive breaks down, there isn't a single one to replace it. People have to get picked up from the train by buses. And the roads are a mess, too. Also, ignoring maintenance on high tech equipment does not do anything good to its reliability, so when a train fails in the middle of nowhere, it can't get moved (no spare locomotives), no other train can pass, and then the heat and the light goes out and the doors won't open because electricity and/or controls fails. "Cutting the fat", my ass.

When we got snowed in up to our rooftops in '79, the trains were the only thing that got through. Not fast, but reliably. These days? Not so much.

[ekatarina.livejournal.com]

I must apologize. My credit card bounced for my Justine and Dogboy pledge. I will be able to retify this on Friday.

I am so embarassed.

Yours,
Ekatarina

[rm.livejournal.com]

No worries. We don't actually know these things until the whole processing process is done.

[robling-t.livejournal.com]

Happy Dalek Day

{facepalm} And guess what I brought to my knitting group tonight to be passed around and admired? At least now I can say I was acting under orders...

[meirion.livejournal.com]

Despite the horror stories the media is putting out, travel across the UK and Europe is doable, although extremely fraught. My housemates made it out to Aachen on Saturday and back on Monday, and I made it up to Southport on Saturday and back on Monday. I don't know why the cross-channel ferries are not being considered as an option by more people.

Hi, Fandom, HOW ARE YOU TODAY?

Oh, Gids, oh. Actually that just sounds like standard House of Commons repartee, and quite mild at that.

BTW, you and Patty will be welcome to come and visit me in Corsica (when I finally get there).