[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View] [Friends]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
dglenn's LiveJournal:
| Monday, December 1st, 2008 | |
| 5:26 am | QotD "It seems a little absurd for one in my position to be asked,
or to answer, the question as to what I would do or would not do if
I were President of the United States, since no such contingency
has even one chance in sixty-million to be realized. But, if that
chance should happen, it would probably be my experience and my
misfortune to make as many blunders and give just cause for as much
criticism as any one who has ever occupied the Presidential chair.
One thing however I would do or try to do. I would employ every
means supplied to the President by the Constitution of the United
States, to secure to every citizen of the United States, without
regard to race, color, sex, or religion, equal protection of the
laws. No citizen, however poor or despised, should be able to say
at the close of my administration that he had suffered an
injustice or had been in any way oppressed or injured by any act
of mine while acting as President of the United States." --
Frederick Douglass (b. 1818-02-15, d. 1895-02-20)A
(thanks
to
"Rosa Parks sat so Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. could march, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. marched so Barack Obama could run. Barack Obama ran so our children and grandchildren can eventually fly." -- I've seen this variously attributed and unattributed in several places; I'm not entirely certain to whom it should be credited, but retired history professor Dr. James Horton appears to be a good candidate |
| Sunday, November 30th, 2008 | |
| 5:25 am | QotD From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2005-07-31</a>: "The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be." -- Bruce Lee (b. 1940-11-27, d. 1973--07-20)(submitted to the mailing list by Reddy, Michael) |
| Saturday, November 29th, 2008 | |
| 5:25 am | QotD "I have always found it rather odd that everyone credits our 'freedoms' to the soldiers. The truth is that our freedoms and democratic systems are obtained by journalists and activists. "Soldiers may protect from outside threats, but the real threat to freedom and democracy is a threat that comes from INSIDE. -- Sunnydayz, 2008-09-05 [I don't see how to link directly to the comment; once the page loads, search for "The real troops are". Better, read the whole article first, to see why our freedom does need protecting.] |
| Friday, November 28th, 2008 | |
| 5:25 am | QotD "I've always found it amusing/surprising/perplexing how so many of the religious far right are also fanatical market capitalists. "If you consider that natural selection and the invisible hand are essentially the same concept applied to different systems, that Jesus basically preached socialism, and that the early Christians were the original communists (small c communist, as in living in communes, sharing all wealth, etc) the intellectual disconnect here boggles the mind. -- Pharyngula reader / Scienceblogs commenter 'amphiox',
2008-10-30, reacting to the spectacle of a crowd of
so-called Christians "laying on hands" to a [Note: fellow commenter Walton takes issue with this interpretation of Smith's invisible hand later in the comment thread, and is in turn gently corrected by Natalie] |
| Thursday, November 27th, 2008 | |
| 1:02 pm | Bad Timing, Body It's not supposed to feel this difficult. Argh. Frustrating night. Finally resorted to a chemical solution[*] to get to sleep, after several hours of tossing and turning, and even so I only managed to stay asleep for two hours. (Gee, a few days ago the problem was not having enough awake time to get anything done because I was sleeping so long; last night/today the problem is insomnia.) I really wanted to get to sleep early enough to have decent odds of feeling well enough to drive to Mom's for family Thanksgiving. (Hmm. Insomnia also appears to have a dramatic effect on my pre-breakfast blood sugar. Not the first time I've noticed that it's especially high after a night of no, or far too little, sleep.) I guess now it'll be a game of balancing meds so as to be able to cope with the day despite so little sleep while not winding up feeling too drugged to drive. Argh. And if I wind up not feeling like I can reasonably (or safely) make it there, I'm not expecting huge amounts of understanding from certain quarters. (And I do want to see folks, even if my ears do the kids-voices-turn-painful trick, which I hope doesn't happen today.) A silver lining: I have an invitation to a quieter and within-crawling-distance[**] dinner if I can't make it all the way to Bowie (or if I get back from Bowie early enough, but that's rather unlikely). So I'll get to have a holiday dinner with people I like either way. (Practically (and responsibly) it may make more sense to beg off of the family visit in order to rest up for, and finish preparing for, my performances at Darkover (one concert and playing for two dances), but I think something like family Thanksgiving warrants making the effort to get out there even though I've got a gig to save spoons for. Maybe I should try to get home a little early though... I do need to get out of the house earlier tomorrow than I need to today, and be well enough to play decently.) [*] It's actually pretty difficult to medicate myself into sleep, too. All the more so if I'm trying to ensure that I don't wake up still feeling drugged (logistically bad if I have someplace to go, just unpleasant and uncomfortable otherwise). A morbid thought: if I die in my sleep due to drug interactions some night, it'll be neither suicide nor recreational abuse; it'll be an accident stemming from desparation to finally get some sleep after too long awake with no end in sight. But I don't resort to that often, and I do try to be careful. [**] Literally, though I don't foresee doing anything more dramatic than limping if it comes to that. |
| 5:25 am | QotD [To my fellow Americans: Happy Thanksgiving!] "None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody - a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns - bent down and helped us pick up our boots." -- US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (b. 1908-07-02, d. 1993-01-24) |
| Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 | |
| 5:25 am | QotD "I visited downtown Silver Spring on June 23rd and to test a theory about 'no photography' rules. My theory is this: 'No photography' rules only apply to stand-alone cameras -- cameras that can be seen. If you have a cell phone camera you can snap photos to your heart's content and not be harassed at all. So I took my 3 megapixel Samsung D900 cell phone camera on a stroll through Ellsworth Avenue. Up and down I snapped photo after photo, and as far as anyone was concerned I was just having an extended phone conversation, I even took a close-up of two security guards, whose function is, among other things, to stop photographers." -- Bill Adler, "Photography Banned in Downtown Silver Spring, Maryland", 2007-06-22</a> |
| Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 | |
| 5:24 pm | Darkover: Call For Musicians, and Concert Announcement Argh. My body is not being cooperative lately. I did get out Saturday, then I slept all day Sunday, all the daylight hours and then some Monday, and much of today. This is not conducive to getting things accomplished. Anyhow, the tardy announcement: I'm looking for musicians to play Playford and Regency dance tunes. Specifically, if you are going to be attending Darkover Grand Council Meeting XXXI in Timonium, MD, this coming weekend, and play an instrument well enough to keep up at dance tempos, I could use you in the pickup band for the Playford dance on Friday from 16:00 to 18:00, and/or the Regency Ball on Saturday from 17:00 to 19:00. If you tell me you think you'll be able to play for the Regency Ball, I can point you to PDFs of the sheet music online. Sheet music for the Playford will be made available at the start of the Playford dance. In related news, although The Homespun Ceilidh Band is skipping
Darkover this year (due to
Also, keep an eye out for
|
| 5:25 am | QotD "I'm white people's best friend -- they think I'm their enemy but I'm not; I'm their best friend because I'm honest. This election thing, this whole thing with the election, it has always been racial for black people in America. Even when we couldn't vote, we always had to say, 'Is this white man liberal? Does this white man like us? What will this white man do for us?' It has never been racial for you guys. This is the very first time. And it has driven you crazy -- the things that have come out of my white friends' mouths, it scares me! And I'm saying, if this has driven you crazy, we've had to do this all these years -- how crazy must we be? Because it's been race for us, you understand?" -- Paul Mooney, on the CBS television program, The Late Show With David Letterman, 2008-10-29 |
| Monday, November 24th, 2008 | |
| 5:25 am | QotD "I think no one has really looked at the impact of the crackdown on the illegal immigration and what role it has played, both in the housing bust, and in the turn in the economy. "You know, immigrants are, in many respects, including illegal aliens, they're like the canaries in the mine shaft. They tell us, they give us early warning signals that there are problems. You know, most people in this country, I think, would believe that illegal immigration right now is at an all time high. "In fact, it's not. It's about half what it was at the peak period, which was in 1995 to 2000. So, you know, I actually believe that what you're seeing in terms of the illegal immigration issue, a lot of the people who were here, working hard, very productive folks, were trying to get a foothold, trying to get a slice of the American dream. And many of them actually did try to buy houses, and some of them did succeed in buying houses. When you had this crackdown, that's sort of they were many of the people in these sub-prime loans. That was the beginning." -- Linda Chavez, 2008-10-17, on the PBS television program, Bill Moyers Journal</p> |
| Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 | |
| 5:25 am | QotD From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-11-08: "The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails." -- William Arthur Ward (submitted to the mailing list by Brian K. Read) |
| Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 | |
| 5:25 am | QotD "Many people hear voices when no-one is there. Some of them
are called mad and are shut up on rooms where they stare at the
walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much
the same thing." -- Meg Chittenden
(
thanks to
|
| Friday, November 21st, 2008 | |
| 5:25 am | QotD "There are plenty of people in the world who deserve a punch
in the nose, but punching them in the nose isn't the only way of
handling them." --
|
| Thursday, November 20th, 2008 | |
| 5:25 am | QotD "I grew up outside of this country, and I watched this country when I was a kid, growing up ... America was the beacon of everything that was good. Everything that was right, everything that was aspirational to me was in America -- it's the reason that I ended up here. And I've thought that the whole time I've been here -- I've been here fourteen years -- and for a long time, I've had a hard time trying to sell that to some Americans. But I think that changed last night. I'm very proud to be an American today; I'm proud of this nation for what we did." -- Craig Ferguson, regarding the election of Barack Obama, on the CBS television program, The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson, episode aired in the wee hours of 2008-11-06 (recorded 2008-11-05) [I'm interpreting his statement as meaning he feels extra-proud to be an American, given that he has already come across as quite proud of being an American every time the topic has come up since he got his citizenship.] |
| Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 | |
| 5:25 am | QotD "Provided you use executable line counts for the density measure, the injected defect densities vary less between languages than they do between engineers by about a factor of 10." -- Les Hatton [as quoted in a footnote in Eric Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming] |
| Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 | |
| 5:25 am | QotD "There's nothing unique about this; it is something which happens every twenty or thirty years, because that is about the length of the financial memory. It's about the length of time that it requires for a new set of suckers, if you will, a new set of people capable of wonderful self-delusion, to come in and imagine that they have a new and wonderful fix on the future." -- John Kenneth Galbraith, discussing the Wall Street crash of 1929, on the PBS television program, American Experience, episode "The Crash os 1929" (aired November 2008 -- in my area, on 2008-11-10) |
| Monday, November 17th, 2008 | |
| 7:43 pm | What I've Been Up To Most of my one-handed typing lately has been with my left hand. Perrine is being clingy this evening in a way that makes it hard to reach the keyboard with my left hand, so I'm discovering how much slower I am with my right hand due to lack of practice. Wow. (Somehow, two-handed typing does not seem to help keep my right hand in shape for typing one-handed.) Or maybe it's just that my right arm and hand are still sore from yesterday (I kept feeling like I was about to lose hold of the drumstick in my right hand, in the fourth verse of each take -- I use my right hand on the hi-hat and ride cymbal). There is a curse laid upon those who deign to smite the skins. (According to legend the curse can be abated by giving money to members of an order devoted to moving other people's stuff and setting it up, an order known as the Roadies) ... in other words, my back hurts quite a lot from loading and unloading the drum kit a couple of times yesterday (and dragging it down from the third floor Saturday night). No one piece is all that bad (well okay, the Bag Of Bronze is, maybe) but it adds up even though I don't always notice the effect piece by piece. Add in my ongoing tendency not to notice that I'm over-doing until too late, and...) Anyhow, I waded through really really nasty traffic (I do not like coming to a complete stop in the middle of the Capitol Beltway, but it does allow time to 'tweet' safely), played drums and electric guitar, wasn't really happy with how I played (but the folks whose opinions actually count were satisfied), bought a pizza on the way home 'cause I felt sufficient need for such a treat to warrant splurging so (I also drank one of the ales that's been sitting in the back of my fridge waiting for me to have a beer-mood come around again; I suspect the ale did less to help my back pain than the relaxation of allowing myself to enjoy a pizza did), and procrastinated putting away the drums and other gear properly until later (it's stacked where it's not blocking the front door; that'll do for now). My not feeling very well at the start of the day did have an effect on my playing. :-( More on guitar than drums, I think, but my drumming doesn't take as much interference to throw me off, so ... Anyhow, I was doing well enough to get out of the house and play, though I do wish I could've managed to be having a better day and be all there for recording. (Ah, if only I could schedule in advance which days would be my good days WRT the fibromyalgia, that would make So Many things easier...) Other than mental glitches (I still have to think a lot playing the drums[*], and although I had the complete drum part worked out in my head note by note ahead of time, there were a bunch of tricky spots where it was easy to fall off), my biggest problems were my right hand starting to lose hold of the drumstick, and late in the drum session my left leg was cramping and twitching a bit from fatigue (which, oddly enough, resulted in some double-strikes on the kick drum that I was told sounded intentional -- they weren't). Anyhow, it's done, and if my mistakes aren't audible or aren't identifiable as mistakes in the finished product, then I shouldn't moan about it, eh? I'm just a little frustrated because I know what I meant it to sound like. At the same time as I'm complaining about not playing as well as I think I should have, I also have to feel good about a a couple of bits that had frustrated me for ages finally starting to click for me while I was practicing during the week. Last Monday I was pretty wiped out. Tuesday I got to do
something fun (I got to spend hours hanging out with
So now I'm facing the weekly question: on Monday night, am I feeling well enough to carry the double bass, and alert enough to drive to College Park and play it? I think I can make it if I'm willing to take codeine for the second day in a row; I'll have a more reliable answer after standing up long enough to take a shower. (I'll be showing up about forty minutes late if I do get there.) Saturday I felt almost well enough to go to the monthly recorder club meeting (which I've missed the past several months), and if it had started at three insteaf at one, I would have made it. Alas, it took a little too long to get to a point where I could handle going out. (*sigh*) Then again, given how marginal I was for the recording session yesterday without having used up extra spoons on Saturday, perhaps it's just as well that I missed the recorder group. [*] I play well enough to say, "I play the drums," but not well enough to be comfortable saying, "I am a drummer," if that distinction makes sense to anybody other than myself. |
| 5:25 am | QotD "[...] When I was a boy I asked God please make me normal and the prayer never got answered and I realized why. Because God would've made somebody else he wouldn't have made me." -- Roman Catholic priest Geoffrey Farrow of Fresno, coming out as gay in the course of an interview 2008-10-05
|
| Sunday, November 16th, 2008 | |
| 5:25 am | QotD From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2007-01-25:
(submitted to the mailing list by Mike Krawchuk) |
| Saturday, November 15th, 2008 | |
| 5:25 am | QotD "I always say beauty is only sin deep." -- Hector Hugh Munro (b. 1870-12-18, d. 1916-11-14), better known by the pen name Saki |
![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}