The Boy Emperor’s Cabal’s attempts to screw workers out of overtime pay were scuttled by the Senate, at least temporarily, :

‘The U.S. Senate voted to block … Bush’s administration from putting into effect overtime pay regulations that would limit extra pay for some workers. Senators voted 52-47 to bar changes in overtime rules that would shrink the number workers eligible for overtime and 99-0 for another provision that guarantees overtime for workers in 55 professions, including computer programmers, teachers and journalists. Both provisions are attached to a tax bill that is being debated. … The votes mark the second time in a year senators moved to stop the Labor Department from issuing rules that would restrict overtime pay.’
—Bloomberg.com

Hooray for the Senate. But of course, the Orwellian administration immediately started bleating, ‘Won’t somebody please think of the corporations!!!!’ and whining that those nasty idiot workers at places like Wal-Mart are about to scuttle the entire economy and deny any profit at all for the embattled and put-upon rich by their endless whining and lawsuits:

‘Labor Secretary Elaine Chao has said the revisions would save U.S. companies including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and RadioShack Corp. $2 billion a year in litigation costs for overtime disputes. They would cost companies $1.1 billion for extra wages in the first year and $375 million for higher pay each year after that.’

The corporate shill/harpy has been on an extended PR campaign (a la Johnny Reb Asscroft’s tour of cities to drum up support for USAPATRIOT) to whine and moan and bitch and complain about those evil mean Democrats and labor unions:

’”As the issue moves to the House, we will continue to expose the misinformation campaign against the rules and strengthen overtime rights for workers,” Chao, 50, said in a statement.’

Isn’t it great how this disingenuous idiot warps the truth by saying that they want to ‘strengthen overtime rights for workers’ by stripping workers of overtime rights?

How disgusting are they gonna get?

While subbing in the media center of a south central AA middle school today, the latest issue of People came in, featuring the ‘50 Most Beautiful’ yahoos on the planet, headlined by Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt, of course.

Two selections catch the eye however; both are the offspring, next-generation of 1970s pop culture people. The first is Josh Ritter, John Ritter’s son. Look for a Three’s Company: The Next Generation movie soon, methinks.

The second is heiress and Symbionese Liberation Army gun moll Patty Hearst’s daughter, and let me just say I have rarely seen a more anorexic-looking apparation in the pages of People. Well, at least not since 30 pages before with Jennifer Aniston’s pics, but you get the idea. I mean, I’ve seen Somalian famine victims in the ‘80s with more meat on their bones.

But isn’t it nice to know that the legacies of John Ritter and Patty Hearst will be with us for another few decades? Of course, if Patty’s offspring doesn’t eat a burger soon, that may not be true.

Listen to me, so catty today. That comes from the gorgeous spring day outside and the deserted, sepulchrous media center inside. The highlight of the day was helping students research old dead presidents this morning and discovering that the school has killer wireless internet access.

Not that I’m complaining. I hadn’t read an issue of People in, oh, say three years. So now I’m caught up on that …

Today was significantly more crowded around campus than yesterday. Not sure why; was Monday the tail end of a three-day weekend? Anyway, it’ll be interesting to try to get a read on the traffic patterns in the next few days and weeks. It seemed as though a lot of the people out and about today were tourists and townies. The townies in particular (for good reason) seem intent on claiming their space (it is their space, after all) as emphatically and for as long as they can. I saw a couple of people in caps and gowns get video shot in front of landmarks, so there must have been some peripheral ceremonies going on. All in all, still way less claustrophobic than a school day. It only took me about 10 minutes to get from State and William to Industrial after work tonight.

I read on one Okie blog that respondents to a poll on that site voted that computer access and refrigeration are more important than indoor plumbing.

Let’s just say that it was an unscientific poll and leave it at that.

After all, my ancestral state has far bigger problems than little polls. « The Daily Oklahoman just wrote an editorial bemoaning the expansion of Oklahoma higher education in the state »:

‘Last we checked, Oklahoma had 13 publicly funded comprehensive and regional universities, a dozen two-year colleges and two higher education centers. From Goodwell to Durant and points in between, college students have no shortage of choices. Now they may soon have yet another. The state House of Representatives gave final legislative approval last week to a bill that would make Duncan the home to a branch campus of Cameron University. Cameron is located in Lawton, which is just 30 miles from Duncan. … Under House Bill 2624, by Rep. Jari Askins, D-Duncan, a learning center in Duncan will be used to offer lower- and upper-division courses and master’s-level graduate courses. Askins says no additional state funding would be needed to operate the campus. We’ll be interested to see how long that lasts. Askins is in line to become House speaker if Democrats retain their control in November, so it’s unlikely Gov. Brad Henry will want to buck his colleague on this. But he should weigh it carefully. There’s no question Oklahoma needs more college graduates, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it needs more college campuses.’
—The Daily Oklahoman

Couple of problems here. First, Duncan has had a higher education center in partnership with my alma mater, Cameron, for several years now. This represents just an expansion of its mission and offerings.

And second, as someone who spent five years of his life commuting on Oklahoma’s terrible two-lane roadways that 30 miles between Duncan and Lawton that the Oke seems to think is piffling, well, let’s put it this way: ‘Hey, Daily Oklahoman! Bite me!!!

The condescension, arrogance and petulance in the editorial is just amazing, particularly on this subject. Bringing the opportunity to get a college degree to more and more Oklahomans is a great thing and the Daily Disappointment should be leading the cheerleading instead of trying to snark negative political points against Jari Askins and the Democratic governor.

Shame on them.

Former rightwing attack shill David Brock has « a new website, Media Matters », ostensibly dedicated to combating the same Fascist claptrap he used to produce.

How the worm turns.

Still, donkeys are flying; let’s not criticize them too much and see how far they fly …

« Here’s how our Tough-on-Terror Boy Emperor is protecting us from evil »:

‘The Treasury Department agency entrusted with blocking the financial resources of terrorists has assigned five times as many agents to investigate Cuban embargo violations as it has to track Osama bin Laden’s and Saddam Hussein’s money, documents show. In addition, the Office of Foreign Assets Control said that between 1990 and 2003 it opened just 93 enforcement investigations related to terrorism. Since 1994 it has collected just $9,425 in fines for terrorism financing violations. In contrast, OFAC opened 10,683 enforcement investigations since 1990 for possible violations of the long-standing economic embargo against Fidel Castro’s regime, and collected more than $8 million in fines since 1994, mostly from people who sent money to, did business with or traveled to Cuba without permission.’
—Yahoo News

Yup, that’s the Boy Emperor’s Cabal for you … always and above-all is the ideology, while they pretend to do the opposite.

Don’t you feel safer?

The Boy Emperor’s twin ideological tenets, tax cuts for wealthy people and privatization of everything so that those wealthy get even wealthier, is « trickling down all over »:

‘This summer, when backpackers, hikers, and families—with kids in tow—pony up to get into America’s national parks, they could be in for a rude and crude awakening. Due to dramatic budget cuts some parks may be cutting back their hours, hiking trails may be un-passable, educational programs may no longer exist, and even some bathrooms may be shut down. Over the past few months, the National Park Service (NPS) has quietly imposed a hiring freeze, abandoned maintenance projects, cut visitor services, and reduced park hours at a number of America’s national parks. In response, according to Ski magazine, “Forest Service officials appear to be leaning toward a policy change that would allow more visible displays of sponsors, whose logos, names or ads could appear on items they underwrite.” The NPS believes that “its private partners in the tourism industry can help stem the decline in park visitation through aggressive efforts to lure more paying customers into the parks,” says Scott Silver, the executive director of Wild Wilderness, a Bend, Oregon-based environmental advocacy group.’
…
‘The National Park Service used to be one of the most dependable government-run outfits, Silver says. “From its earliest days, the idea behind the agency was that our national parks would be to America what the Cathedrals and architecture of Europe were to those countries, and most NPS officials cared a great deal for the parks and did a good job managing them.” … during the mid-sixties, the tourism industry begun to sink its claws into the NPS and “the process of Disneyfication” had become well-established by the time George W. Bush took office. Now, “politics rule supreme within the Department of Interior and it appears that when the leadership of the NPS is not misdirecting the media and the American public, they are speaking out of both sides of their mouths,” Silver told me in an e-mail exchange.’
—Working For Change

Sounds like the Boy Emperor’s administration: Mortgage our future, rape our past, make our present as Orwellian as possible. The depredations of snowmobiles in Yellowstone will be looked upon nostalgically in a few years when we have to pay Dreamworks a fee to look at Old Faithful, which will only erupt after the captive audience has seen seven previews of upcoming movies starring the Olsen Twins, Jim Carrey, Angelina Jolie and William Hung.

Says Pat Boone, « ‘Censorship is healthy‘ »:

‘A healthy society needs censorship to survive, 1950s musical icon Pat Boone said yesterday. He added that he would welcome strong content restrictions governing movies and other artistic works. “I don’t think censorship is a bad word, but it has become a bad word because everybody associates it with some kind of restriction on liberty,” said Mr. Boone …’

Censorship is NOT a restriction on liberty, I see. This is a joke, right? Not exactly:

‘A more serious meeting of celebrities was when Mr. Boone was invited to a private screening of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” “After the screening was over, I turned and said, ‘Mel, you’re an apostle,’ ” said Mr. Boone, who has appeared in 15 films. “An apostle is one commissioned by God to tell the story and you are telling it more powerfully than it has ever been told or will ever be told, and you are therefore an apostle.” “I consider it the most important film ever made. It is a film that is not only of gigantic proportion but one that changes life, that affects people’s eternal destiny.” It is all the more significant, he said, “because Hollywood has an open antipathy toward Christianity itself.”’
—The Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times

Mel Gibson, an apostle and The Passion the most important film ever made.

Well, I think I might actually find myself in agreement with Pat: Censorship just might be desirable … so somebody slap some tape on his mouth.

After all, shutting Pat Boone up isn’t a restriction on liberty, right?

Doing some catchup as to what’s going on around the world:

Since it was in the Village Voice, it wasn’t much noticed, but « James Ridgeway noted how … slick the ties are between the Royal Bushes and the Royal Sauds » in fact, the two familes are ‘locked together.’ Yeah, locked together in an unholy alliance that could make things very higgledy-piggledy for the rest of us:

‘If the Saudis decided to let the so-called free market take over, flooding the globe with crude and sending oil prices into a steep dive, then the U.S. would be faced with a true nightmare. Lower prices would finish off not only smaller international companies that had been enticed into the oil play by high prices, but could wipe out the domestic oil companies in the U.S., causing sheer political hell for … Bush in his little oil bastion of Houston.’
—The Village Voice

Look out. This October Surprise could get very interesting.

The BBC is all atwitter tonight about the 25th anniversary of the accession to power of Margaret Thatcher (or should I call her Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven?). I’m not sure how history will judge her. I lived in Britain when she was running for her third term in office, and even then Britain seemed a very polarized, hardbitten, driven place, and that was mostly Thatcher’s doing. There’s no doubt she transformed Britain, but was it for the better? Her legacy is what I suspect hangs over London far more than any contribution of her successors, and from all accounts I’ve read London is now a slick, humming, purring, affluent metropolis, yet essentially cold and hostile. If such is her legacy, so be it. I don’t think it’s a particularly worthwhile legacy.

My favorite artificial language. [Link courtesy Political Theory Daily.]

I must plead guilty to causing the cold snap. I lowered the roof on the Jeep for the first time since we moved to Michigan, because I wanted some sunshine and air the other day.

Now it’s too freakin’ cold to go out there and mess with putting it back up. I had a rather cool ride to and from Huron HS today for my subbing gig.

Sorry I caused the freeze. By the way, I ain’t laughing over here. This is friggin’ MAY for God’s sake!

My geography lesson yesterday was on Russia, and the textbook noted that the Upper Midwest of the United States shares the same climate as Siberia.

Yeah, like, no duh.

Speaking of high school and blogging, 16-year-old girls no longer trade secrets about hair, boys and parties. They talk about html, how to post photos and smileys on their blogs and trade web addresses and opinions on whether Blogger is a good tool or not.

No skateboard hijinks today; they were too busy playing a rousing game of ‘Hearts.’ Kids today playing ‘Hearts’??!! I thought that was a Grandpa’s game. (Not that I’m not guilty of playing it by the hour on Windoze machines … after all, that’s about all you can do on a Windoze machine without going stark, raving insane.)

Still, I learn something new every day that I go to high school …

All you can do is laugh (unless you’re kicking yourself for forgetting your gloves):

The National Weather Service in Detroit/Pontiac has issued a freeze warning for all of Southeast Michigan from midnight until 8 am EDT Tuesday.

Temperatures will fall below 32 degrees after midnight across

Southeast Michigan. Low temperatures will bottom out in the upper 20s to around 30 degrees by sunrise. Temperatures will climb above

freezing around 8 am.

A freeze warning is issued when freezing temperatures are forecast to threaten outdoor plants. Those with agricultural interests in the

warned area are advised to harvest or protect tender vegetation.

Also … potted plants normally left outdoors should be covered or

brought inside away from the cold.

My undergrad university’s alumni mag has this article on blogs in its latest issue.

Nothing out of the ordinary, that is, nothing beyond the usual cliches and cant: low readership, cool photos, rants, inside jokes, personal reflection, you can be anybody you wanna be on the Internet (yeah, right), linking to random crap “just because you feel like it,” yadda yadda yadda. I particularly savored the characterization of blogs as “an outlet for post-teen angst.” So this blog is, what? Post-post-post-post teen angst? Middle-age angst? Pre-senility angst? I know not.

I do know now, however, something I didn’t know before reading this particular piece: that the typical Stanford student’s blog is just as likely as not to be filled with photos of Jaguar XK8s and California poppies, which, I suppose, is just about in keeping with the school’s image as a playground for the spawn of the leisure class.

I also notice from class notes that someone from my graduating class lives right here in good old AA. I wonder how many other Stanfordites live in the area?

It was great to hear Loretta Lynn, God bless her, shock and tweak the boring Melissa Block on NPR today during an interview about her new Jack White-produced album, Van Lear Rose. (“It’s been good talkin’ to you too, honey.”)

Sounds like an awesome album too.

According to Total Guitar Magazine (via BBC), these are the Top 20 Riffs of All Time:

1. Guns N’Roses “Sweet Child o’ Mine”
2. Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
3. Led Zeppelin “Whole Lotta Love”
4. Deep Purple “Smoke on the Water”
5. Metallica “Enter Sandman”
6. Derek & The Dominoes “Layla”
7. Metallica “Master of Puppets”
8. AC/DC “Back in Black”
9. Jimi Hendrix “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)”
10. Black Sabbath “Paranoid”
11. Ozzy Osbourne “Crazy Train”
12. Free “All Right Now”
13. Muse “Plug in Baby”
14. Led Zeppelin “Black Dog”
15. Van Halen “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘bout Love”
16. Aerosmith/Run DMC “Walk This Way”
17. Cream “Sunshine of Your Love”
18. Queens of The Stone Age “No One Knows”
19. Guns N’Roses “Paradise City”
20. Rage against the Machine “Killing in the Name”

This is a more ludicrous list than the Worst 50. Granted, this is a Brit magazine (published in Bath, of all places), but come on. What defines a “riff,” anyway? Who in the hell outside of England has heard of Muse? And two Metallica and GNR selections but nothing from the Stones (”[I Can’t Get No] Satisfaction”? “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”? Hello?) or the Beatles (“And Your Bird Can Sing”? “Yer Blues”?) or Kinks, for God’s sake (“All Day and All of the Night”)?

What about Ann Arbor’s own incongruous (and incomparable) contribution to rock history, The Stooges?

No Velvet Underground? Queens of the Stone Age but no Queen? Fine, “Black Dog,” whatever, but no “Immigrant Song”?

What about The Who? “Bargain”? “Baba O’Reilly”? Come on, people!

“Killing in the Name” but not “Fistful of Steel”? “Voodoo Chile” but not “If 6 Was 9”? No “Psychotic Reaction”? No “Wish You Were Here” or “Money”? No “Journey to the Center of the Mind”? I guess I must be showing my age again.

And when will they stop including that tired, worn-out Free song on top whatever lists? I had to bear the torture of hearing that song played ad infinitum when I was at Stanford—it was the semi-official anthem of the university band.

Morrissey at the Apollo????? It’s true. According to a link from Gawker, he’s playing there tonight through Friday. That is truly surreal. It’s sort of like, I don’t know, Moby at the Whisky a Go-Go.

Anyway, Morrissey’s new single (“Irish Blood English Heart”) is great, 2:39 minutes of spitting, droning glory and fury. I doubt the rest of his new album will be as good, but one can always hope.

Bush was reportedly in Niles, Kalamazoo, and Sterling Heights today on a “bus tour.” His bus has the slogan “America, Yes We Can” on it. Tell that to all the folks in Michigan who’ve lost their jobs in the past three years, Mr. President.

On another somewhat related topic, I was in Borders this afternoon and spied this book. I get a good chuckle out of books like Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men and Jacob Weisberg’s George W. Bushisms. But books like this puzzle me. First of all, how can anyone be “wrong about absolutely everything”? Is the corollary that Kerry (or someone like Kerry, or Nader, or some unknown quantity) is “right about absolutely about everything”? I think not. I don’t think that even Senator Dour, er, I mean, Senator Kerry would assert that as a logical proposition.

There is virtually nothing that would make me want to pick up a book like this; it essentially shrieks “unleavened partisan bias” from across the room. I want to read something that tells me truthfully what’s going on, not something that lulls me into a false sense of my ideological superiority. I am not blind, and I don’t want to read something that presumes that I am (and coddles and flatters that tendency).

Books like this are an insult to the intelligence. (I feel the same way about books like Ann Coulter’s Treason and Sean Hannity’s Deliver Us from Evil). I also think they’re a worrisome trend. Did we see books that screamed similar things about previous presidents while they were in office? What do books like this say about our ability as a nation to get beyond our entrenched partisan divisions? Are future presidents (no matter their party affiliation) destined to be smacked across the face by books like this 15 minutes after they are inaugurated?

It’s May 3, but the wind was astonishingly cold and biting this morning, so much so that I regretted leaving the house without coat and gloves. Same story at 12.30, still, though it had grown more temperate within an hour.

It was not empty in Ambrosia this afternoon, but it wasn’t packed, either. The atmosphere was more relaxed than it’s been in a while.

Campus had a similar feel. Fairly empty at 9 when I got there, but enough people around when I left the office around 12.30 for it not to be a ghost town. The library was empty this morning but (to my surprise) most of the computers in the Science Library on the third floor of the Undergrad were occupied when I passed by this afternoon.

By lunch Liberty was fairly crowded with pedestrians. Again, not the usual weekday school year level, but not depopulated, either. Borders was doing brisk foot traffic.

Curiously, the morning 6 Ellsworth bus was more crowded this morning than it usually is during the school year. Mostly working-class folks on their way to jobs.

The State Street corridor had some vehicular traffic on it, but nothing comapred with the standard weekday (or weekend) school year traffic.

Also, the houses along State above Packard were nearly evacuated. There was one house this morning that had a handful of party-hearty holdouts drinking beer on the lawn at 9.00, but other than that it was dead. A couple of overflowing garbage cans on one lawn. A big stack of red plastic cups for keggers sitting on the porch rail of another house. A carpet-cleaning truck had a hose running into another presumably liquor-soaked domicile. The scary-looking box on the corner of State and Stimson had a pleading, neatly processor-printed sign on butcher paper on the front of it from Oppenheimer Properties reading “WOW! 2BR APTS $745.” Yeah, wow.

There were at least four moving trucks within the environs of our complex this afternoon.

More slurpees today. I’m developing a serious addiction to FCB’s slurpees, particularly coke and wild cherry and white cherry. Nirvana. Thank god they’re downtown and have inconvenient parking at best, or I’d be spending what’s left of our money on them.

We went downtown to return movies to the library and I didn’t want to put the top up on the Jeep, the sun felt so good. But it was pretty chilly; had to run the heater full blast to stay warm. But the sun is great and you have to grab the opportunity for it when you get it.

We were visited by two beautiful birds today, a resplendent bluejay and a shyer cardinal (hence the not-so-hot picture of it). They muscled in on the squirrels and scored some bread. The squirrels pretty much didn’t care, but kept their distance.

Even with the cool weather this weekend, spring around here continues to be fabulous, colorwise.

I’ll give Ann Arbor this, the seasonal color right outside our bedroom window is wonderful, especially in the autumn and spring:

Gorgeous.

The town does appear to be clearing out. We took a little drive this afternoon. The area around our neighborhood was quiet, way quieter than usual (as “usual” has been for the past eight months, that is). There was some traffic (foot and cars both) in the Liberty area, but it was nothing compared to the usual level. And the State Street corridor around campus was relatively deserted.

There’s a big fat front page story in the Ann Arbor News today headlined “Library considers big changes for main branch downtown.” Apparently the fight is between the District and the Downtown Development Authority, and the issue is the parking lot next to the library building on South Fifth.

The library doesn’t own the parking lot; the DDA does. And the DDA doesn’t want to give up 16 of its 223 spots to help the AADL transfer the entrance of the library from the spot where it is now, facing Fifth, to what would basically be the north side of the where the front of the building is now (I guess, looking at the map, where the young adult section currently is), with a passenger dropoff section presumably replacing the 16 parking spaces that the DDA is concerned about.

The crux of the story is that the library board of directors evidently feels that without the transformation of the lot, the main library branch, which has been at the corner of Fifth and William since 1957, is doomed and will need to relocate, possibly to a building somehwere half its current size, though nobody seems clear on where downtown they’re going to find a building that fits that description.

Now I can see the library’s point; the current situation is not that functional. There is absolutely no way you can get out of your car (or other vehicular conveyance) in front of the main branch now without getting creamed or causing a major accident. Fifth Street is basically a one-line north-south highway, and woe betide you if you’re a pedestrian trying to get across the lanes of traffic. Thus, you either use the DDA parking lot or you park elsewhere and walk.

However, the idea that a new building for the main branch is going to materialize downtown when there’s no space for anything downtown seems odd (not to mention the idea that a building half the size of the current building will be able to hold the current collection).

On the other hand, why the DDA is balking at accommodating what is undoubtedly the most significant use of the parking lot next to the library is a mystery that remains unanswered by the article.

Can’t express my disgust for LunarPages and their sysadmin ignorance in terms strong enough or colorful enough. I’m just now putting the pieces back together of this site, and doing multiple installations of Textpattern for each individual subsite. Whatta pain.

Fortunately, Textpattern is easy, straightforward and quick, thank God. It’s very nice to work with and shouldn’t trip any LunarPages lunacy.

Now we’re mostly back in business, but the archives are a mess and the galleries still need work and I have to figure out the photo stuff, etc. So it still needs much more work. Yuck.