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Archives for 04/14/2007 - 04/14/2007

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Community Teams With NAACP to Support Rajnii Eddins

Posted by on April 14 at 11:52 PM

A small but determined group of sixteen of Rajnii Eddin’s friends, acquaintances and supporters gathered at Waid’s Place on 12th and Jefferson this afternoon to plan their next move. Eddins, a 26-year-old teaching artist from Rainier Beach High School, was charged with obstruction on April 5th after attempting to intervene on behalf of a student being arrested near the school. While Eddins was unable to attend the meeting, due to a prior commitment, his mother Randee Eddins was there to express her frustration and dismay over her son’s arrest. “As a concerned parent and a community activist, this seems like a trend,” she said, providing a foreboding tag-line for the group’s campaign to exonerate Eddins: “Rajnii today, you tomorrow.” Randee Eddins called on attendees to “flood [Seattle City Attorney Tom Carr]’s ass with e-mails,” to let him know “the whole community is watching. Drop the charges against Rajnii! Folks know that my son is a good guy. People know I raised him well.”

“We had so much energy in that courtroom last week,” exclaimed Eddins’ lawyer Danielle Anderson, referring to Eddins’ hearing on April 10th. Anderson then called on “everyone who has been marginalized at some point in their life to come forward” and support her client.

Randee Eddins proposed a name for the group: “Saving Ourselves, Lifting Ourselves.” S.O.L.O. is currently planning a benefit concert to raise money to hire an investigator to look into Eddins’ case as the Office of Professional Accountability, which provides citizen oversight of the police department, has not yet responded to complaints filed after Eddins’ arrest. Seattle’s Chief of Police Gil Kerlikowske recently opted not to fill an open position at the OPA, which may further inhibit the already glacially slow process of investigating citizens’ claims.

The president of the Seattle chapter of the NAACP, James Bible, was also at the Eddins’ meeting, pushing for “a vote of no confidence in the OPA.” During the course of the meeting, the OPA was repeatedly described as “toothless,” referencing the lack of accountability in the cases of Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes and DV-One. While Eddins’ description of the events surrounding his arrest varies greatly from the account given by officers in the police report, Bible astutely summarized the reality of the situation “he’s a teacher and he was doing what he needed to do for a student.”

The NAACP will hold a press conference at city hall on Monday, April 16th at 11AM.

Eddins’ next hearing is set for May 29th.

Breastfeeding+Ninjas=Awesome

Posted by on April 14 at 10:44 PM

I went out for pizza last night and drove by a wonderfully modified billboard.
I thought I’d share with you:
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I couldn’t get the whole thing in the shot because I suck at scaling buildings (which is why I’ll never make editor) but it read “Every baby deserves to be breastfed.”

Vancouver Art Gallery Censored by the SPCA

Posted by on April 14 at 6:44 PM

In a press release sent out less than an hour ago, the Vancouver Art Gallery, hosting Huang Yong Ping’s installation with live animals, Theater of the World, announced it will remove all the animals by end of business tomorrow. In their place—as a protest—the museum plans to put up documentation of the museum’s dialogue with animal-rights activists, who envisioned the artist’s intended artificial microcosm instead as “something that resembles a zoo or a pet shop, where each species is neatly separated into different glass boxes,” the artist wrote in a statement.

I wrote a few days ago about the controversy brewing up north over the installation.

The museum and the artist still contend that the conditions for the insects and lizards were absolutely livable. When I asked for an interview, the Vancouver Art Gallery did not respond. But at the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis, the installation’s display depended on first consulting a local exotic pet expert to ensure that the animals were fed and watered properly, although the stress of the strange, bare environment was unavoidable—and part of the artist’s intent. By the end of the exhibition, the Walker curator noted, most of the animals had adjusted to the presence of each other and to their new surroundings, “and just looked bored.”

But the prospect of an imagined bloodbath was too much for the Vancouver SPCA to bear, evidently.

I’d like to know why the museum folded (the Walker made its case to local animal-rights activists, and they backed down), and maybe to do that I’ll need to visit the show and talk to the curators, providing they make themselves available. My hunch is that the censorship is a shame, and a sham. Human culture is built on the exploitation of animals; this installation, intended to prompt a consideration of that among other things, to me would barely seem to register on the scale of abuse.

Tattoo Times

Posted by on April 14 at 5:41 PM

Should I cover up my Tweety? Tweety Bird with Accidental Mohawk? My one and only tattoo? The one I got in high school, with a homemade gun, from that weird kid who huffed the rubber cement in Mr. Reimann’s art class?

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The place to do it would be the 28th Annual National Tattoo Convention. Down in SeaTac. Runs tonight until 11 pm, and Sunday 10 am - 10 pm. There’s hundreds of tattoo artists from all over the world scheduled, including Japan. Something tells me they all have real tattoo guns too.

Luminous Pie

Posted by on April 14 at 3:08 PM

In honor of the triumphant return of The Light in the Piazza, I offer you this screen shot from sjsondheim.com :

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Hee haw!

This Week on Drugs

Posted by on April 14 at 12:19 PM

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You say, “tomato,” and Pullman police say, “You have the right to remain silent.”

You say, “pot,” and Australia says, “It mightn’t kill you, but it could turn you into a dickhead.”

Great Leaks: Michigan water tainted with birth-control hormones.

Great Looks: Kirsten Dunst wants you to smoke more pot.

Who Let the Dogg Out? Snoop beats jail rap.

Who Let the Clips Out? Vigilantes behead drug lords on YouTube.

Gonorrhea: Resisting treatment.

Bitter Pill to Swallow: Washington pharmacists have to sell Plan B.

Would You Like Some Fries with that Diet Coke?

Posted by on April 14 at 11:47 AM

Over at HorsesAss, Goldy’s got a post laying out polling numbers on a combined RTID/light rail package.

The numbers, about 61% in favor after a dose of messaging, are pretty positive, and so Goldy seems to be saying, everybody should stop complaining and fretting about a joint measure.

While I’ve certainly Slogged and bitched that a joint measure will fail (transit advocates and environmentalists will abandon the measure), my real gripe isn’t so much that it will flop at the polls. My real gripe is this: I don’t want to vote for roads expansion in order to get transit. It seems a bit like putting a dash of soy milk in my chocolate, almond syrup shake to keep the weight off.

Moreover, in order to ensure victory at the polls, planners might lower the price tag (currently it’s about $9.5 billion for light rail and about $7.4 billion for roads). Since they’re joined at the hip, planners would probably cut from both projects. Well, it sure seems dunderheaded to scale back transit expansion in order to lower a $16/$17 billion plan, when already, 40 plus percent of the package isn’t for transit.

Goldy’s contention that polling looks good doesn’t address my biggest fear—in fact, it confirms it: It’s going to pass, and we’re going to undo the benefits of voting for transit by simultaneously voting to expand roads.

Indeed, here’s the polling I’d like to see: light rail on its own and RTID on its own. I’d bet light rail would pass and RTID wouldn’t.

Don’t Try This At Home

Posted by on April 14 at 11:30 AM

Posted by Sage Van Wing

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A librarian friend of mine recently turned me on to the fantastic 1957 movie “Desk Set.” This is the last of the Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy romantic comedies and one of the only ones filmed in color. It is witty and funny and, best of all, thoughtful about issues that still concern us today.

Based on a Broadway play, the movie pits the hands-on research crew at a large television broadcast company in the 50’s against the coming of technology in the form of a giant, noisy, imperfect early computer known as the “mechanical brain.” Hepburn leads the reference whiz kids, Tracy pioneers the scary machinery that threatens their jobs.

The mechanical brain, the researchers are told, can answer the most complicated of questions in mere seconds. Simply type in a few keywords, and, with the click of a button, Kate and her team of witty librarians are obsolete.

Google, anyone?

In the age of the internets, when the answer to anything is merely a keystroke away, what happens to the humble librarians who have for so long been the gatekeepers of information?

Not surprisingly, librarians are quick to point out that Google does not make them obsolete. “There are limitations with the search engines,” Marilyn Parr, public service and collections access officer at the Library of Congress told me. “You can type in ‘Thomas Jefferson’ in any search engine and you will get thousands of hits. How do you then sort through those to find the ones that are verifiable information, authentic and not someone’s personal opinion?”

The job of a reference librarian these days, says my librarian friend, is to help people use Google more efficiently. “We spend a lot of time helping people be more efficient on the internet. Oftentimes, we won’t even look in a book.” Most of the former “library schools” have now changed their names to “School of Information.” Their graduates are “information specialists” not simply librarians. The difference is not merely semantic. “The job of a librarian now is to teach information literacy—to teach people how to evaluate the information that they do find,” said Chris Sherman, executive editor of industry blog site SearchEngineWatch.com. “I think that’s where librarians are extremely important. They are trained to evaluate the quality of the information.”

Google is a powerful tool, but for serious research it should be used with caution, and preferably in tandem with other sources. Even Craig Silverstein, Google’s Director of Technology, has said that “information professionals are needed to help people articulate their information needs.”

“When Google doesn’t work, most people don’t have a plan B,” said Joe Janes, an associate professor in the Information School at the University of Washington in Seattle, who teaches a course on Google. “Librarians have lots of plan B’s. We know when to go to a book, when to call someone, even when to go to Google.”

In fact, most of the librarians I talked to said their jobs are actually getting more interesting now. While it’s true that they do get fewer questions, the ones that they do get take longer to answer and are much more involved. “People can answer the basic reference questions themselves,” said my librarian friend with a glint in her eye, “they come to us with the really hard stuff.”

This brings us back to the movie. In the final scene of “Desk Set,” the computer, when asked a simple question, is very effective. However, when faced with a more complicated question, it spews out ream upon ream of useless trivia. Meanwhile, Katharine Hepburn coyly recites the correct answer. In the end, the reference librarians get to keep their jobs because it is obvious to everyone that their skills are necessary in order to get the right results from the unwieldy machine.

I know I still call the New York Public Library’s Reference Line at least once a week.

The Morning News

Posted by on April 14 at 10:26 AM

Bad News For Karl: Deleting email doesn’t make them disappear.

Scratch Another Neighborhood of McCain’s Iraq Walking Tour: Car bomb kills dozens, injures scores more, in city of Karbala.

Fucking Nonsense: Abstinence education does not work—this MSNBC headline says it best: “Abstinence students still having sex.”

New Jersey Governor: Corzine’s Injuries much worse than reported at first. He was the only person in the car to be seriously injured… and the only person in the car not wearing his seat belt.

Warming Warning: Demonstrators take to the streets to raise awareness of climate change.

Didn’t We Vote Against This? State legislature keeps new, publicly-financed Sonics arena alive.

Today in Stranger Suggests

Posted by on April 14 at 10:01 AM

Trannyshack

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(DRAG) The lineup reads like Eleanor Lambert’s wet dream: Dina Martina, Jackie Hell, Sylvia O’Stayformore, and more. With those Tater Tots in charge, the entire population of Seattle might wake up the next morning in a magical land where the streets are made of polyester and everyone sings show tunes. All that’s certain is this: Something great will happen at Trannyshack and a sweaty dance party will follow, with DJ Baby J. (Chop Suey, 1325 E Madison St, 324-8000. 9:30 pm, $8, 21+.) ARI SPOOL