sundries

Waiting for it to be a good time a day to try paying Patty on her India mobile to see if I can actually get through to her.

Writing meeting with Kali tonight.

What we learned from yesterday's non-scientific poll:

- If you're Jewish, you probably know what blood libel is
- if you're not Jewish, you have a better than even chance of not knowing

- Anecdata (my favorite made-up word ever) suggests that if you are from the US, not Jewish and not a medieval history scholar or hobbiest, your likelihood of knowing the term "blood libel" pre-Sarah Palin drops to around 35%.

- Anecdata also suggests to me, and I wish the polling tool on LJ was better so that I could actually do this and run the numbers for real, that people who were raised more religiously, REGARDLESS OF FAITH, are more likely to be familiar with the "blood libel" term.

- General poll problems include self-selecting respondents, comparatively low numbers of Jewish respondents, and the ways in which LJ response samples don't necessarily reflect the general population in terms of age, income and gender. In general, my gut tells me that a similar poll done on a general-population sample would show an even lower awareness of the meaning of "blood libel" among non-Jewish folks.

I have a lot of strong feelings about the current political mess, and I don't know how to express them, without being part of the problem myself. But when I hear "at the end of the day we have to remember we're all human and we all love this country and be civil" I wonder why I have to do so much work to be gentle with people who think me an animal or a demon (Jewish, gay, yadda yadda). I also know I should shut the fuck up, because dude, everything is already ugly enough, but it feels yucky.

I have to drop like $250 on DVDs this week (after just dropping about $70 last week) for various scholarship I'm working on. I'm a little less than thrilled, but I've developed my data plan and spreadsheets and schedule and structure and all that shit I never usually do in advance, and think I'll be able to knock this work out with a fair level of efficiency.

If you have projects I should be aware of for tomorrow's trash day on LfT, let me know and I'll see what I can do. Book releases, crowd-funding things, specific charity drives, etc. No guarantees, and PLEASE DON'T PM ME. I really hate the LJ system. Comment here or email to racheline AT gmail DOT com.

the story of two dogs

http://lettersfromtitan.com/2011/01/13/the-story-of-two-dogs/

Entry is pretty gentle, but includes references to animal cruelty and something non-graphically horrific someone once said to me about rape. If you're having a rough day, this may not be the entry for you.

But it's mostly about how even though I'm scared of dogs, I think pit bulls are pretty cool.