Author: Heather Meadows

CNN: Amtrak president Gunn fired

Another, less descriptive possibility: The smoking Gunn

(I’m sure he is a little pissed off at being railroaded and then dismissed for standing his ground.

(Railroaded. Hah!)

Snopes has republished “Eleven Tips on Getting More Efficiency Out of Women Employes”, a piece that was originally published in the July 1943 edition of Mass Transportation magazine.

There are some interesting and mostly innocuous items on the list of guidelines, but then there are some freakishly sexist and scary things too, like the following:

4. Retain a physician to give each woman you hire a special physical examination — one covering female conditions. This step not only protects the property against the possibilities of lawsuit but also reveals whether the employee-to-be has any female weaknesses which would make her mentally or physically unfit for the job. Transit companies that follow this practice report a surprising number of women turned down for nervous disorders.

Hysteria, perhaps? o_o

(Interesting how they used to spell “employee” as “employe”, isn’t it? I wonder if it was pronounced differently as well?)

Me: We lost our first and second year Christmas ornaments.
Sean: We did.
Me: I know you don’t care, but I do!
Sean: What makes you think I don’t care?
Me: So you do care?
Sean: No.

I went to bellydance tonight. That’ll make, what, the second time I’ve gone? Added to the handful of times I practiced with Mari and Brooke privately, that isn’t a whole lot, total.

I’ve gone back and forth on the bellydance issue many times. I always thought that I didn’t really want to do it, that I was trying to force myself to go out of some bizarre sense of obligation, but today I finally figured out what it is.

I was trying to do a “jewel”, which is two and a half side-stepping hip circles followed by a pose. I was having a hell of a time going to the right. Candy, one of the Alchemy dancers, was there for a workout and was doing the moves right ahead of me. She looked back and watched me for a minute, then said, “You don’t have to step out so far.”

I kind of spluttered, “Okay,” because I have trouble taking criticism, even when it’s helpful, but she was right. I was stepping out a lot. Why was I doing that?

Then I realized that I had a natural tendency to step as far as comfortably possible with a stable center of gravity. This tendency came from one of the ways I learned to move in kung fu: covering a lot of ground swiftly while maintaining balance. Not making large steps was extraordinarily difficult because of the muscle memory.

I did kung fu for two and a half years when I was in high school. I didn’t just go to a class. I (sort of) made being a kung fu student my life. It changed the way I thought about things, and it changed the way I comported myself. Kung fu stances are second nature to me now (even if I’m not as flexible as I used to be).

This means that when I’m trying to do some other kind of stylized movement, I constantly have to fight my tendency to fall into a fighting stance. When I’m in bellydance, raising my arms for a pose, I have to think about not putting guards in front of my face and body.

Combine all this with learning new, often difficult movements, and you can see that I might have a bit of a struggle on my hands.

The reason, therefore, that I have avoided bellydance is because it is hard for me.

It is extremely liberating to make this sort of realization. It means that I don’t dislike it, I’ve just been wussy. It means I have a challenge to face.

I have an enemy, and that enemy is myself!

But what it really means is that I can go spend time with my friends and not obsess over whether or not I like what we’re doing :)

Funny, that.

It’s just so cute! (Via BoingBoing.)

I do not read gaming news, except for what shows up on Penny Arcade, and even then I often kind of skim over it, making note of what’s funny or interesting or stupid and then forgetting it not long afterwards.

But today…today there is news of Mario Kart!

Mario Kart DS is also ridiculously comprehensive, with thirty two maps that span the entire life of the series. It also lets you hop or powerslide, and brings back traditional battle mode with an odd twist. Instead of three balloons, you have five, only three of which are available at a time: you manually inflate your stock, whether by holding select or by, ahem, blowing into the microphone. You may feel ridiculous, but it’s faster, and such is the price of victory. There’s also Shine Runners, where the coveted shines appear throughout the level, you grab them, you lose some when hit, and the people with the lowest scores are dropped at interval. It’s a stupid amount of value for thirty-five bucks, especially when you think of eight players racing off a single cartridge.

Hopping or powersliding!!!!!!!

As my friends all should know well by now, I am a Mario Kart fiend. This is not to say that I always win, but I do always trash talk :> And it’s hella fun!

So now I just need to get one of those DS thingies.

Andy Gray writes,

I’m the type who would love to live in multiple places at once; keep up dozens of relationships; eat food from a different culture every day; become excellent at a variety of artistic and physical pursuits; win a gold medal and climb Mount Everest (why not). But life is lived in the now, and most effectively when a few important things are in focus at a time.

Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing links today to a forum discussion about why people troll. Like Doctorow, I was interested by Etruscan’s comments. They provide fascinating insight into my husband’s personality! ;>

Trolling is fun.
As someone who has avidly trolled in the past (I grew out of it, mostly) I can clear the mystery up for all y’all.

First off, getting a rise out of people is priceless. There is a distinct exhilirating rush knowing that you’ve really twisted the knife, gotten the goat. There is probably some amount of sadism to this. Hurting other people for fun.

Analyzing someone for buttons, then carefully pressing them, can also be challenging as fuck. While people tend to fall into certain categories — with broad, generalized buttons — everyone is different, and it can take a gentle touch and canny wits to unearth that little something that will really set someone off. We’re talking about seriously honing mental muscles that don’t otherwise get much use.

I mean… don’t any of you enjoy arguing with people, like, IRL? I /love/ it. Coming out on top in a contest of wits is fucking awesome. Notably, most internet trolling is pretty crude, but not everyone’s *good* at it, right?

Sean adores getting a rise out of people. He plays Lineage II mainly so he can socialize, and I think he spends more time on the messageboards than he does actually playing the game. Every so often he’ll say to me, grinning, “I think I made some enemies today.”

(You should have seen how he used to be; compared to his vitriol of five years ago, nowadays he’s pretty tame. Or more sophisticated. Take your pick.)

Later posters surmise that trolls act out to get attention and to hide the fact that they have no substance. In Sean’s case, the first might be true, but the second definitely isn’t. He is very opinionated and articulate.

I think maybe Sean falls into the “argumentative” category that Smoothly Weaving mentions.

In any case, the discussion starts to get boring by the end of the first page, so I stopped reading there :D

MSN Money has an article entitled “The 3 worst reasons to buy a house“. They make some interesting points.

The three reasons they list are:

1. ‘Better than the stock market’
2. ‘I’m tired of throwing away money on rent’
3. ‘I need the tax deduction’

Of those, the only one we were thinking was #2, the rent issue. While we were thinking of the house as being an investment, I don’t think we’d thought about whether or not it would be “better than the stock market”. The main reason I wanted a home was so I could design everything about it–for example, landscape the yard, or put in a Japanese-style bath. To be honest, I didn’t like the idea of owning a house in some ways, because home ownership means you’re tied to the area. Even if you decide to move out and keep the property for rentals, you pretty much have to stay close by to supervise it. (And if you simply move out, it’s a huge hassle, and you’ve lost money.)

And speaking of real estate speculation and investment, it seems to me that the only way to be successful at that is if you start out with a nice chunk of investment capital and are able to pay the property off early, so you can start making money from it right away. That is simply not our situation–thanks, yes, to my not having a job, but also to our being relatively young and not having any savings or investments.

The last paragraph in the “throwing away money on rent” section says:

In other words, homeownership is more like marriage; renting is more like living together. Make sure you’re ready to be wedded to a house before you propose to leave behind life as a renter.

I’m really starting to think Sean’s right. We’re not ready for the responsibility and expense of owning a home. And I don’t think I’m ready emotionally. After all, if we’re renting, it’s much easier for us to move. And there is a large part of me that is dissatisfied with living in Augusta. I like the idea that I can get out quickly if I want or need to.

Now, the only sticking point is that I’m kind of afraid of apartments, after having ours burn down. We may end up renting a house. Who knows.

Yes, sez MSN Money.

All I know is, money is tight everywhere.

I’ve had a few news stories marked as “new” in my Bloglines because I thought they were interesting and worth mentioning. They’ve been in there for ages, so I finally thought I should go ahead and blog them and get them out of there.

First up, an alternative to cremation. This is very interesting to me because I plan to be cremated. The process, called “promession“, involves freezing the body and shaking it to bits. This reduces the pollution caused by cremation. (Via BoingBoing)

Some UK scientists have permission to create an embryo using genetic material from two women. (via Slashdot)

The Guardian has an article about bad science in the press. (via Slashdot)

Auto-torrenting of enclosures in RSS is a reality! (via Slashdot)

Boston.com’s Top 50 Sci-Fi TV Shows of All Time was linked by Slashdot.

This actually really intrigued me. Central Park Media let fans pick the dub cast for a one-episode OVA called Outlanders. (Man, I would have loved to have had the opportunity to pick the voice actors for Kyou Kara Maou…) A oneshot may not seem like such a big deal, but I’m hoping that this is a sign of things to come! (via [surprise surprise] Slashdot)

NASA scrapped the Space Shuttle!

Aaaaaaaaaaand that about does it for Old News. Have a great day.

I told about half a billion people we were getting a house. I was so excited. For some reason, I assumed we could get a really nice house like Mari and Kelly’s.

Finding out that we can’t, and that it’s my fault, just makes me feel stupid. Like I was expecting to get something awesome without doing anything to earn it.

This is just another life lesson.

I’ll figure it out eventually.

I hope.

I just finished bingeing (I had cereal with whole milk, a chocolate bar, peanut butter crackers, and a soda, and now I feel terrible), and then I see this post on BoingBoing. Convenient!

As usual after sinking to the lowest possible point, I’m pulling myself together and moving on. I don’t have a plan, other than to just keep plugging away at life.

People have told me that I just need to get used to drudgery and disappointment. I should just stop having such high expectations.