A good cause. For reals!

Ok, so, look: I didn't hit y'all up this year for donations to a charity bike ride. (I was actually entirely too busy to do one of these great rides, which is pretty sad.)

Good friends who operate a really fantastic nonprofit in Alderson, West Virginia, have a fundraising call out. The Alderson Hospitality House is asking for the very small donation of $10. (Well, lots of those, hopefully.)

The Alderson Hospitality House is so warm, so full of kindness and beauty and hope, that it's hard to express in words. I've had the extraordinary opportunity to visit a few times.

I have already donated the full $100, and encourage any of you who can to consider donating any amount that makes sense for you. If you can, match me! If you can't, please give whatever you can.

The Alderson Hospitality House provides hospitality to the families of women incarcerated at the Federal Prison Camp at Alderson:

The Alderson Hospitality House supports the women of the Federal Prison Camp Alderson and their friends and families. We believe in the importance of visitors during incarceration. Our volunteers and staff, through donations, demonstrate this belief by providing temporary lodging, meals, transportation assistance, information and support.
Since AHH opened in 1977, there have been more than 50,000 overnight guests from all over the world.  We do not charge for our services, but rely only on the generosity of our guests and friends of the house for operating funds.  We are not part of, nor do we receive any assistance from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, any church or religious organization, any government entity or any corporation.  Our staff, who live and work at AHH, and Board of Directors, who are local community leaders, are all volunteers.

Below is the fundraising pitch for this. As though any more than going through the website is needed. (Really: please go through their website.)

The Alderson Hospitality House needs your help to continue offering free housing and meals to our guests. 

Some of the most important visitors to the House are the children of the women incarcerated at the Federal Prison Camp. They come in all ages, all colors, and most importantly, they all miss their mothers. The children travel from all over the country to spend just a few short hours with mom in the visiting room. Our job at the Hospitality House is to make these children feel as comfortable as possible. A beautiful playroom with lots of toys, home-cooked meals, and a listening ear are just a few of the ways we accomplish this goal. After an emotional day of behaving in the visiting room, it is important to let the children play and get their energy out. Our house is here for them during this difficult time.

I need your help to keep the doors open for these children and their families. I have to find 10 people willing to give 10 dollars in the next 10 days. Will you help me out? It's simple. Just click on the link below and click on the amount you are willing to give. Don't wait, click now before the 10 days disappear.

http://www.razoo.com/story/10-In-10

Thanks for your support.

Vote! (I did.)

As longtime readers of this blog already know, I take voting very seriously. Though it mystifies some of my lefty friends, I believe that the franchise is a critical right, and should be expressed meaningfully and thoughtfully by all those who we haven't disenfranchised fucked over.

And since I'm pretty open about it, as I did in 2010, I'm again posting photograph of both sides of my voted ballot for the Alaska 2012 general election:

Some thoughts:

voting thoughtfully is a time consuming process. It once again took me several hours of research to decide how I was going to vote.
I was surprised to find that I actually was okay with voting for the democrats in the US House, State Senate, and State House races, and didn't feel like I was just voting against the republicrats.
I particularly dig the candidate for US House, Sharon Cissna, who is aggressively anti-TSA for outstanding reasons. (And Michelle Scannell is her former chief of staff.)
As for bonds, I'm generally tax-and-spend, but unstated transportation bonds where I couldn't find any clear indication of what it would be spent on? Since it's a decent prediction that that "something" would be primarily to build and improve infrastructure for single passenger automobile transportation, I passed.
A constitutional convention? Ummm, sure? Why the heck not? (This is required by state law to be automatically included on the ballot every ten years.) Here are some thoughts on what a constitutional convention could do (though I'm not at all sure how I feel about a unicameral legislature, which the author advocates for.)
Justice Winfree I was genuinely kind of torn on, and it was a somewhat close call. (I mostly evaluate appellate judges based on their written opinions, especially their dissents, where you get to judge how they really feel about stuff.) 
Judge Bolger sucks.
The real timesuck was researching every single superior court and district court judge, using their applications to the bench, in some cases their reappointment packets, and in some cases, extraneous web searches when this didn't yield enough information.
Turns out it's actually really important to vote on judicial retention in Alaska: judges are regularly retained by as little as 55-60% of voters.

Okay: back to work for me!

15 Issues this Election is Not About

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/24/neither-candidate/

September 24, 2012

15 Issues This Election is Not About

Neither Candidate

by BILL QUIGLEY

Neither candidate is interested in stopping the use of the death penalty for federal or state crimes.
Neither candidate is interested in eliminating or reducing the 5,113 US nuclear warheads.
Neither candidate is campaigning to close Guantanamo prison.
Neither candidate has called for arresting and prosecuting high ranking people on Wall Street for the subprime mortgage catastrophe.
Neither candidate is interested in holding anyone in the Bush administration accountable for the torture committed by US personnel against prisoners in Guantanamo or in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Neither candidate is interested in stopping the use of drones to assassinate people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia.
Neither candidate is against warrantless surveillance, indefinite detention, or racial profiling in fighting “terrorism.”
Neither candidate is interested in fighting for a living wage.  In fact neither are really committed beyond lip service to raising the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour  – which, if it kept pace with inflation since the 1960s should be about $10 an hour.
Neither candidate was interested in arresting Osama bin Laden and having him tried in court.
Neither candidate will declare they refuse to bomb Iran.
Neither candidate is refusing to take huge campaign contributions from people and organizations.
Neither candidate proposes any significant specific steps to reverse global warming.
Neither candidate is talking about the over 2 million people in jails and prisons in the US.
Neither candidate proposes to create public jobs so everyone who wants to work can.
Neither candidate opposes the nuclear power industry.  In fact both support expansion.

Bill Quigley teaches law at Loyola University New Orleans and is Associate Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.  He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. You can reach him by email at Quigley@loyno.edu 

Vegan airport breakfast!

I almost never drink Bloody Marys, but got a wild hair this morning. Sitting at the SLC Sky Club, never my favorite in the system, and now that they've torn out the business carrels, it hasn't improved.

Solid fights from ANC to SEA and SEA to SLC, both upgraded, now awaiting the final fight of today to SMF.

Alaska was... amazing. Beautiful place, great people, great work. I'm thinking i might be spending more time there...

Alaska! North Carolina!

Holy. Shit. Been a long, wonderful, exhausting few weeks. (Month?)

Here is some fun vegan food porn. Feeding some awesome folks. Out of the back of the car. In NC.

Posting from ANC. Damn. I miss Alaska. Like, a whole lot. 

Mat Su glacier

From the top of the Lion's Head formation. It's a good day in Alaska.

Damn, I miss this place.

Vegan traveling breakfast!

Decided I'm tired of airport food, so i knocked up a quick fried rice with tempeh, artichoke hearts, sun dried tomatoes, jalapenos, and a ton of fresh grated ginger.

Back to the airport for me now!

St. Petersburg hotel room vegan food porn!

I knew i was gonna be tired after driving 9ish hours, so i got an exorbitantly priced ($8.55) hot food bar dinner at Whole Paycheck, and a delicious beet to go along with it.

Ohhhhh, Florida.

Volume

Yesterday I received email in 102 different threads, not counting spam. (gmail users know what I mean: I didn't click into each thread to determine how much activity was in it yesterday.) I sent 33 email messages.

Since midnight (when I was sleeping, happily) I have received email in 22 different threads.

Ugh.

So, like, I get it: you all miss me blogging. I kinda miss it too. But since most of you know me, you also know how busy I've been, and why.

I do have a shitton of photos I need to go through, which will surely yield some quality vegan food porn.

But it's pretty unlikely that it's going to happen any time in the next three weeks. It's just gonna be that kind of three weeks. Or month and a half, depending on how you cut the cake.

But I haven't forgotten you. I promise.

Clowns. Just. Clowns.

result in me drinking a beer. For another night. Clowns. Sigh. Ugh. Clowns.

I shouldn't complain, though:

my life is amazing. Like, for reals.

IAD

I fucking despise this airport. It's huge, confusing, has ridiculous intra-airport transit, is horribly located, poorly signed.

Yep, pretty much hate everything about it. Except that it has a Chipotle. About three miles from my gate.

Airport beer porn

Young's Double Chocolate Stout, a delicious airport treat at the end of a long, amazing, productive, powerful week in Ohio.

Y'all are awesome. (Really: you know who you are.)

K/L/Ubuntu

In my building, we asked our "IT vendor" to fix up our slow, creaky public internet kiosks. They told us the boxes were too old (they're from about 2002), one was running Windoze Professional 2000, and one was running Windows 97 (ack!) And both were running an unregistered free trial copy of the payware SiteKiosk (which is craptastic at best.)

So they say they "can't" fix the current boxes, and we should just throw them out. And their quote for selling us two refurbished windows boxes with SiteKiosk (no doubt again the free trial version)? $1200. Our answer, in two words: Fuck. That.

So I tell our building manager to get the boxes back. I'll try stripping them, install a very light distribution of Ubuntu, create a very limited privilege user account, throw Firefox or Chromium on, and be done with it. A supports this approach and sends a handy instructable.

Great idea, right? Except that the stupid motherfuckers THREW ONE OF THE COMPUTERS AWAY. Say WHAAAAAAT? You threw it in the garbage? Without asking us?

That's kinda like you take your car to the mechanic, and they tell you that it's not worth fixing, so they donate it to public radio for you. Or run it into a river.

So we yell a little, and they agree to provide us a refurbished box (not yet arrived.)

This morning at half of the asscrack of dawn I took the one remaining computer out (which required some power tools to liberate it) and then spent much of the morning downloading torrents of Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) (very new, but I really wanted a Long Term Support version), creating a bootable USB drive with it, only to find out the computer doesn't support PAE (meaning you can't boot from an external hard drive with it.) So I go back and torrent Lubuntu 12.04, remake the bootable USB drive, and try that. No kinda dice whatsoever: just a massive pain in the ass. It takes FOREVER to install, won't properly set the time zone (which even though you used to be able to tell it manually what time zone you're in, it now insists on hanging while waiting indefinitely for a network time server for), won't complete the console configuration properly. And then even though it pretends that the install mostly finished, it just totally freezes, and freezes completely upon startup.

Back to the drawing board. I go through the same miserable process with Kubuntu 12.04.

By now I've learned by lesson about 12.04, and ditch it. I try Kubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) with the same damn result.

So I go get Kubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal , the alternate (stripped down) version, and it installs like a charm. Well, it takes a while, but with no hiccups.

The moral of the story? Be very wary about early adoption. 

Now time to go configure the machine and make it a public kiosk, and await the arrival of our newly refurbished machine.

Museum bathrooms

Some of you (well, one of you, anyway) might remember that I once considered doing my senior thesis as a photographic study of bathroom graffiti.

I admit it: I like taking pictures in bathrooms.

Even when I'm not supposed to. (Bondi Beach, near Sydney, Australia.)


Recently however, I've gone to several museums, and respected the rules to not photograph the galleries. Nothing said about the bathrooms, though!

Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville

(check out all the annoying advertising above the urinals)

Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville

Pretty, high ceilings, though: the building originally opened in 1934 as Nashville's downtown post office (a post office is still housed in the ground level on the west side.) 

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

(Think much, speak little, write nothing)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

If it's Tuesday, it must be Nashville

Okay, fine, so it's actually Wednesday. And it's Atlanta. And tonight is Sacramento. But these photos are from Nashville!

These are the delicious buffalo tempeh strips at The Wild Cow in Nashville. Everything on the menu is vegan unless you request dairy cheese. (No, I don't really get it, either.) The buffalo strips and "ranch" had great flavor, but definitely aren't as amazing as the all-time reigning king of vegan buffalo wings, at the old City 'O City in Denver. And of course, the company there was also fantastic. (A2, we miss you!)

Here is my reuben, which was good, but not great (the bread needed to be toasted more, and the tofu needed to be more heavily fried.) The side of BBQ seitan was very tasty (and in the right of the frame you can see the remains of the buffalo strips, which we demolished.)

This is J's seitan philly, and garlicky kale. Also tasty, but again, not amazing. We would totally go back, but would branch out some on the menu.

From Massachusetts: this is a mural I painted on a wall in my college dorm in my first semester, Fall 1993. Still there, with a few later artistic adaptations. (It used to say "...ITY)

In Revere, from a hotel room window. I noticed plenty of traffic on the road below, but zero on the overpasses. Clearly this needed to be explored.

The roadbeds themselves are abandoned. You can see them on this google map link, just north of the hotel. It looks like maybe they used to be highway on/off ramps, but it's hard to say for sure. Could also have been access roads to the abandoned Muller Airfield / Revere Airport. (Scroll down on that link, or search Revere...) It made for an interesting way of crossing that rotary to get to the bus stop on the west side without walking alongside traffic.

Did some mountain biking and urbex last night with D3 here in Atlanta, including the fascinating Hartsfield Incinerator site.

Named for the former mayor of Atlanta, William B. Hartsfield, just as the airport. In searching for it, I found this amusing bit of historical commentary in a google book: William Berry Hartsfield: Mayor of Atlanta, by Harold H. Martin (1978.)

...his profound interest in garbage paid off in honors when in May 1963 a new incinerator was named for him -- a fitting tribute, according to editor Eugene Patterson. "After all what more appropriate monument could be raised to the hottest-tempered old tyrant in the municipal annals of benevolent despotism than a roaring, 1,500-ton fountain of blue blazes," wrote Patterson. "Where is the man who has done more slow burns, roasted more enemies alive, thrown up more smoke screens or carried more coals to Newcastle than the former mayor who will be honored by a city that was shaped brick by brick in the kiln of the irascible genius? Bill Hartsfield never cooled off in twenty-three years as mayor. Now his temperature belongs to the ages." (p.171) 

This is the rusting but still climbable conveyor strutcure. 

Here is the observation post on the top of the conveyor, just above the massive hopper. 

To get up to it, you briefly have to crawl up the conveyor belt itself before switching out to the stairs (visible on the right.) 

 Lots of old cylinders laying around. 

Naptime! 

Under the pavement, the forest.


Which a little searching indicates might be an adaptation from a beautiful Wendell Berry poem:

IN A COUNTRY

ONCE FORESTED

By Wendell Berry

The young woodland remembers

the old, a dreamer dreaming

of an old holy book,

an old set of instructions,

and the soil under the grass

is dreaming of a young forest,

and under the pavement the soil

is dreaming of grass.

Nashvile

BTW, is weird. Fun, but: weird.

Nashville

This is about as close as I'm likely to get to Nashville honky think or country. It's also the quickest photo i could snap on my phone to blog with.

I'm currently at  Big River Grille & Brewing Works  in Nashville after an unsuccessful attempt to check out a Nashville Green Bike . The cask pulled, dry hopped Sweet Magnolia Brown Ale has a great taste and body, unfortunately it's served at ambient temp, not cellar temp. But still tasty.

Had lunch at Flying Saucer, with an extremely friendly bartender, Mike, who made my vegan needs work despite several 86s on the menu, including avocado, and pita. The BBC Kentucky barrel aged stout was delicious.

Just prior, the Frist Center for the Visual Arts was well curated, but small, and somewhat underwhelming. Still well worth the cost (free.)

Various and sundry

Hot off the digital presses, since I know y'all must be missing the food porn and gardening porn something fierce.

This is this year's crop of container gardening tomatoes. (Containers, in this case, are drilled out 6.5 gallon homebrewing buckets. I sold some brewing equipment through Craigslist right when we moved to Atlanta, and the guy who came to pick the stuff up noticed I was using old brewing buckets for gardening, said something like, "Wow -- you really must have a ton of brewing equipment!")

The larger plant to the left looks healthier, but it struggling a bit. Atlanta is a tough place to grow tomatoes, and buckets are a tough place to grow tomatoes.

Now on the left is the smaller plant, a Tumbling Tiger, with a couple delicious specimens picked and sitting on top. And that's our little baby herb garden with, I think, oregano and thyme. We finally gave up on some transplated hydroponic basil which did surprisingly well for a while, but then just wasn't having it.

Here are those Tumbling Tigers in action: sliced on toast with Better Than Cream Cheese, then going clockwise: sauerkraut, fried tempeh, sauteed broccoli, and caramelized ONIONS!

My favorite apron from my time cooking aboard ship has a silkscreened patch sewn on. The text is: "under the pavement  |  the forest".

I love exploring, particularly abandoned buildings and industrial sites. I particularly love it when nature takes back over.

I'm posting this from my college alma mater which many of you know. Yesterday I moderated a roundtable discussion of alums and friends about Occupy, caught up with one of my most important faculty mentors (K), and am going to a couple more workshops today, and get to just wander around and re-explore the place.

Above is a shot from my bike and hike this morning through the "pine forest." (See any pines?) (Stir any memories?)

It's a little hard to express how amazing this place is for me, and for many people.

Here's a toad trying hard to blend in on that same little path. 

Students here make stuff. Sometimes it's hilarious.

I'm lodged in the housing group (starts with "P") I never did officially stay in, but spent plenty of time in. The first time was when I needed to flee the rages of Fuckmonger, and an upper year friend invited me over. They were going out on an exploration of the former SAC bunker built into Bare Mountain. (Neat video in that link.) It's massive: almost 26 acres, and 44,000 square feet. Now owned by Amherst College and used as the Five College Book Depository, it contains nearly 500,000 volumes, filed by size rather than by subject, on over 8 miles of shelving. Here's a wonky article all about how it was set up and is used as a library depository. Its initial purpose (1957-71) was as the eastern communications hub for the Strategic Air Command, and it played a significant role in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Back in 1993, however, it was in a strange transitional state of use, and, well, some students knew how to get in. And so we did. And wandered, climbed around, sat and spun around in really uncomfortable office chairs, went through piles of old records (mostly boring stuff like time logs.) For further details on this trip, we'll we'll have to talk in person.

This is only the second time I've been back to campus for any significant period of time, the first being June 2010. As of then, my mural was still up in the basement of the dorm I was housed in. I'm hoping to be able to go check it out today and see if it's still up.

Tomorrow: Boston for some friends, some Red Sox, some wandering.

State College, PA

Lunchtime. Otto's. Old Fugget Barleywine. Yum.