Beowabbit

I’ve been meaning to post links to these blogs for a while:

• A Gay Girl in Damascus
  What it says on the tin. Amina lived in the US for several years, and then moved back to Syria a while ago. I found her blog a few days ago thanks to a link from a coworker — around the same time the secret police started looking for her and she went underground. So far she’s still posting.
• Egyptian Chronicles
  A fascinating firsthand account of the revolution and the early days of the new Egypt

These blogs remind me of the fall of the Soviet Union, which had joined Usenet (then in its heyday) just a few months or maybe a year before. An employee of the Soviet Union’s first public ISP of my vague online acquaintance was going to the White House (the Russian parliament building), joining in demonstrations, listening to Yeltsin standing up on a tank defending the Parliament, and then going back to work and posting about it; history shared from across the world almost in real time by an ordinary person living it. It’s odd to think how new and incredible that concept was then, and how relatively commonplace it is now. (And of course, given how central Facebook and Twitter and YouTube have been to the Arab Spring, that sort of decentralized citizen journalism now makes history rather than just observing and recording it.)

So plumtreeblossom and I (and docorion and many other people we know) were quoted extensively in a great story on polyamory in today’s Boston Globe magazine. The print edition has photos of me and docorion as well as the photo of Alan and Michelle that’s on the online edition. The online version (linked above) has a video that docorion and Alan (W.) and Michelle were interviewed for which is, if possible, even better than the article — at any rate, I think it does a great job of presenting polyamory effectively to non-poly people in a way that lets the warmth of the relationships and lives described shine through. I am really pleased about how it all turned out.

PS: Alan M. discusses the article at his blog Poly in the Media, and Kamela reviews it favorably in her Boston Open Relationships Examiner column.

① My wonderful friend bbbsg was the subject of an article in yesterday’s Boston Globe. Here’s the article. It’s mostly about her decision to have her foot amputated (a prosthesis would give her more mobility and less pain), but it fits with the subject of this post because it also talks about her skills in “circus arts” — namely silks, although the article doesn’t say so. (I am really bummed I didn’t get a paper copy yesterday; I meant to, but I forgot. The physical edition has a picture of her on the silks. Anybody have a spare copy of Monday’s Globe?)

② At sunspiral and roozle’s Beginning of Summer party (awesome, as they always are), I took a bunch of photos of firespinning. Here they are, on Flickr. (If you’re in them and would like to be credited, let me know which photos — I could only recognize two and maybe three people in them — and how you’d like me to credit you. If you’re in some of them and would like them removed or Friends-and-Family locked, of course, just let me know!)

For those of you who haven’t seen this in person, while it’s pretty gorgeous in photos, the trails seem very different in person (they don’t start and end abruptly the way they do in photos, of course, but are part of one long trail from the flame lighting to the flame going out), and because the eye can’t catch the subtle detail and texture in the flame the way the camera can. So while I love firespinning photos, they feel more like art than like representation to me. Here’s an example:

Here’s a Q&A session with a BBC reporter who spent some time with Taleban fighters in Helmand province. One interesting quote:

I was shocked to see soldiers from the newly-formed Afghan national army taking money at gunpoint from every car that passed. This was happening on the main road linking Iran to Pakistan across the south of Afghanistan, and has powerful resonances since it was to stop corruption on this very road that the Taleban first emerged, with some popular support, in 1994. The trucking companies are paying the Taleban again to see if they can clear the road for them again.

Aren’t we lucky we spent all that blood and money to build a modern, pluralistic democracy and a functioning government in Iraq?

Yesterday in lieu of my regular work day I went to Linux World Expo, along with my boss. It was fun and I certainly learned some interesting stuff, but certainly not something I would have travelled for. Nice to have it in Boston, though. I heard a nifty (and well-attended) talk at the O’Reilly booth by Jesse Vincent on his company’s new (free) web-application development tool, Jifty.

So last night I met chienne_folle for dinner and a movie in Arlington Center. We had dinner at a restaurant called Bangalore. My experience was better than hers; my malai kofta was very good. Her muttar paneer, which she ordered mild, was too spicy for her to eat. Fortunately, the garlic naan had cilantro on it, so I couldn’t eat it and she got all of it. I always forget to ask for no cilantro at Indian restaurants, because not all of them use it.

Then, after a walk because we had a lot of time to kill, we saw Mrs Henderson Presents, which I really really enjoyed. The plot was pretty straightforward and unsurprising (although quite sweet), but it was just charmingly crafted and full of very good lines.

On the way home after the movie, I was listening to a BBC Newshour piece on WBUR on the discovery and translation of a manuscript of the Gospel of Judas. One of the guests made the point that the canonical New Testament gospels leave us wondering what Judas’ motivation was in betraying Jesus, and that the new manuscript might shed some light on that. Then ’BUR went to a station break, and the local announcer started talking about the benefits of underwriting and what was going to be on their flagship call-in talk show On Point the next morning. But I noticed that the background music for the station break was a bit unusual for public radio. It was, well, peppier and more whimsical than one usually expects even the incidental music to be. The sort of thing you might expect on commercial TV, for instance.

And then it struck me. It was the theme song from The Price Is Right.

Whatever ’BUR sound technician chose that music is my new hero!

My wonderful stepfather Don is a journalist (and classical music announcer) for the local NPR station in the town where I grew up (Macomb, Illinois, pop. ~19k), which means he often gets to attend interesting events for work. Macomb’s pretty small, but it has a municipal airport and sometimes hosts fly-ins of various kinds.

Recently, there was a powered parachute meet there. A powered parachute is an open metal frame with two seats (maybe some of them have just one; I’m not sure) with a motor and push propeller on the back, rigged to a big ol’ square parachute. You start the engine, and the frame moves along the ground with the chute behind it. The chute fills with air and billows out, and starts acting as an airfoil. Eventually, it develops enough lift to raise the whole thing off the ground, and you’re flying. Running out of gas is not a problem; you just drift gently to the ground as a parachute. Powered parachutes only get up to about 30mph, and usually stay within about 500 to 1000 feet of the ground, although at this particular event one pilot (Ed Neff of Hamilton, IL) broke the powered parachute height record by taking his above 20,000 feet.

So Don went to this event and got to ride in one! He said it was an amazing experience — noisy, but very restful. He had a certain something in his voice when he was telling me about it that made it clear that it was really something. They guy who took him up, Dave Krause of Red Bud, IL, took the picture below of Don in the back seat. (Don said Krause had taken his ’chute down to Texas to help look for Columbia parts after the disaster — since powered parachutes fly so low and so slowly, they’re good for search operations.) I think he said they range in cost from about $10k-$30k (expensive, but cheaper than an ultralight).

Anyway, here’s the picture: ( Picture of Don flying in a powered parachute, 84k 800x600 JPEG )

(By the way, I wanted to find out where the quote “Slipped the surly bonds of Earth” that Don used as the subject line when he sent me the picture was from, and I found a mildly amusing page with the original poem “High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee, Jr., and a bunch of parodies of it, including the FAA supplement. Probably not of interest unless you’re into flying.)