sundries - long-ass, sleep-deprived and Mercury-retrograded for your pleasure

We're back! The kitties are fine! The plants even look like they'll revive. But mostly, we're back.

To recap, we experienced the following mishaps:
- trouble getting car to airport.
- car to airport getting pulled over by cops.
- confusion about cash or credit at airport that had me running to cash machine.
- in chaos, tipped driver $10 past what as already generous
- discovered we were at the wrong terminal.
- METRA - late, weird and creepy more than once.
- Left directions to Oriental Institute in hotel room.
- Everything, more or less, about the trip to the Oriental Institute Museum other than the museum itself.
- I got glutened at PF Changs.
- Cab company decided to fuck us over royally the one afternoon we spent in Naperville's downtown and we had to call the hotel shuttle to beg them to come get us.
- Flight home canceled.
- New flight delayed.

It's a good thing Patty and I like each other. A lot. Man! Oh yeah, and we bought lots of cool stuff at Penzey Spices.

After weeks, 33 Chilean miners have been discovered to be alive, but it may take months to rescue them.

The Green Book was a travel guide that told African Americans where they could eat and stay while traveling when segregation was still a typical and open part of life in America (and elsewhere -- the guide included international destinations). It stopped publishing in 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act was passed. karnythia helpfully links us to a PDF of the 1949 edition.

Letting go lessons for parents as students go to college. My parents were horribly over-protective, and made me wear business clothes to my freshman orientation (nearly assuring that I would have another friend-free education experience), but then they went home and everything was fine. Apparently, this stuff is increasingly rocket science.

A great poet and his weird letters to the Montclair Police Department.

Everything you've heard about New York is true: Alligator in Queens!

From the department of Everything You Learned on Doctor Who is True: China gridlock goes on for 60 miles and traps drivers for over a week.

I do not have the time of day for this shit: In case you missed it the Pentagon is surveying military spouses about DADT, wanting to know if they will encourage their partners to leave the military or if they will be rude to gay military spouses or inclined to leave military housing should DADT ever get solved. Yes, whether the spouses of American servicemen and women can act like adults is the latest supposed deciding factor in whether gay men and lesbians will be allowed to serve openly and honorably in the US military.

I remain consistently startled by how upsetting and frightening I find the backlash regarding 51Park. I don't know if it's because I'm a member of minority populations and shit shit scares me, if it's because I had significant exposure to Islam as a pre-teen, or if it's because living and working in predominantly Muslim countries is normal to Patty and something we both may very well do more of. But seriously, the opposition to 51 Park is not okay. (link via reannon).

help_pakistan. Millions of people have been displaced; 25% of the country is underwater; and the $$ aren't flowing in because it's not a tourist destination for Westerners and because of the West's Islamaphobia.

Since 2002, Lisa Spodak has raised almost 150K to fight breast cancer by walking long distances and creating innovative charity auctions of celebrity autographs. It's Avon Walk season for her again. To support her efforts donate at http://donate.lisawalks.com.

ASK MORBO. Do it. Do it now.

I am still in a flurry of stuff I can't tell you, including publication news and my final Dragon*Con schedule and maybe an upcoming performance thing. I can tell you I got asked to neaten up a recent LJ post for HackGender, so that was nice.

Hey, some of you might be interested in the Butch Voices conferences coming up around the country, including in NYC.

Oh god, I have a proposal I need to finish like NOW. Well, this week. Argh.

While we were in Chicago, Patty told me this story that's at least part urban legend/conspiracy theory of some guys during the early space exploration days that found a way to listen in on radio transmissions between Soviet ground control and whatever people were sending into orbit and recorded it all. Some of the tapes were of Soviet efforts before, to our knowledge, there were manned missions, and they recorded things with heartbeats, and one where a woman says "I feel hot" before saying she's going to abort the mission and then the transmission cuts out.

I can't stop thinking about this. Does anyone know more about it? I am haunted by this idea that people were sent up before the technology was ready, not because it just hadn't been tested well enough, but because those on the ground absolutely knew they would die and wanted to see how and how long it would take.