Steven D. Krause

I’m listening to a story on NPR right now about the inauguration of W., an event I will thankfully be missing because I teach today, and an event I find particularly depressing.

I don’t subscribe to the various conspiracy theories about the 2004 election that are out there. However, you don’t have to be a political nutjob to think there was some funny business with the last election. In the January 2005 edition of Harper’s Magazine, editor Lewis H. Lapham has a compelling “Notebook” essay about some of these things. Just to mention a few:

• In one county in Ohio where there were only 638 registered voters, there were 4,258 votes for Bush.
• The private company that processed about a third of the votes cast in the last election, Diebold, is run by very vocal right wingers.
• In three states that relied mostly on paper ballots, the exit polls (the ones that had Kerry ahead– remember all of that stuff?) corresponded to the final tally. In six states that relied extensively on electronic ballots– including Ohio and Florida– the exit polls, which had favored Kerry, were oddly wrong. Bush won those states.

Check the piece out– interesting stuff, and not as crazy as the stuff on the ‘net.

Anyway, I am not much of a person to “protest” per se. I find rallies for various things like that kind of boring, and I have never made an effort to go to a state or national protest. But when I hear about the way that folks trying to protest this inauguration are being repressed in the name of “national security,” it makes me wish I had decided to find a way to D.C. today. I agree that there are legitimate security concerns– there always are. But not allowing protesters to have sticks to hold up signs and confining them to a small area has nothing to do with security and everyone knows it. Remember, Bush et al wanted people who attended their rallies during the election to sign loyalty oaths. Now these same people have essentially demanded a sort of loyalty oath by default from the tens of thousands of people lining the parade route, the tens of thousands of people attending a public event.

What loyalty oath will we be asked to sign next?

For me, there’s only one bright side to all this. With some confidence, I predict that Bush and the rest of the Republicans will either merely “over-reach” in some sort of political move (social security “reform” will be their first opportunity to do so), or they will out-and-out screw-up something that directly affects millions of Americans in a numbingly major way. I don’t know exactly what it’s going to be– maybe the war, the economy, maybe some something about terrorism– but I do feel pretty confident that this over-reach or screw-up will happen.

Or let me put it to you this way: had 9/11 not happened, had there not been this rallying around Bush for the sake of national unity, there is no way we’d be celebrating/mourning the second inauguration of GW Bush. Unless we have another 9/11 sort of event (and obviously, nobody wants that), my prediction is W. will leave office in disgrace and hopefully take his Republican congress with him. Perhaps this is wishful thinking, but I prefer to think of it as a hopeful prediction.

There’s been a lot of buzz in the blogosphere lately about folks being fired from a variety of different jobs because of blogging activities. Via the Earth Wide Moth blog, I found this link and this link on a blog called the Papal Bull. I’m certain that this list is incomplete, but it gives you an idea of the various types who have become recently unemployed.

A few thoughts about this in no particular order:

* I of course believe in the idea of free speech and people ought to be entitled to write and speak their peace. But, as Stanley Fish argued a while back, there really is no such thing as “free” speech in the sense of words without consequences. So it makes sense to me that (for example) people working at Starbucks who were writing on their blog about the poor quality of Starbucks coffee might have an employment problem. The rhetorician in me thinks that to not see that suggests quite a lack of basic “audience awareness” on the part of these writers.

* As I have mentioned before, I keep both this official blog (where I post things about academia) and an unofficial blog (where I post things about the rest of my life), and I try to divide up what I post where accordingly. I don’t think much about job security based on what I post in either place because of issues and traditions of “academic freedom” and tenure and because EMU is pretty mellow about these things.

However, that doesn’t mean I should or do say anything. I don’t make overtly negative comments about my students or colleagues, for example, not because there’s nothing bad to say (nothing is perfect, right?) but because that strikes me as both incredibly unprofessional and, well, dumb. About the only thing I’ve really vocally and negatively critiqued about EMU is the whole President’s House fiasco, but that was very much a topic in the public media/domain, and I was pretty confident that they weren’t going to fire a tenured faculty member over complaining publicly about the house.

In any event, I suppose you could say that what I’m doing is exercising “self-censorship.” But I prefer to think of it as “sense.”

* While I have written here before about my negative feelings about anonymous blogging, this particular situation seems one in which being anonymous isn’t such a bad idea. Of course, one could also argue that the person who feels compelled to anonymously blog about their bad situation perhaps ought to be spending her or his time getting out of that bad situation, and it seems to me that some of the folks on the fired list were trying to blog anonymously and got caught.

Via Collin’s blog, I found this, the “Rasterbator.” Basically, it allows you to take a graphic that is 1 MB or less and to blow it up to huge proportions– up to 20 meters, according to the web site. It’s a fun fun tool; I just have to figure out where I’d put such a giant poster.

I don’t know why, but Whole Foods is the place in town where I most consistently have strange encounters and conversations with complete strangers. Take today, for example. I was in there picking up a few miscellaneous things and some lunch. I was in the bread/baked good/cookie section, picking out a mooselick cookie (which is a vegan, super high fiber/whole grain/honey sweetened thing that is close enough to diet food for me) when I noticed a guy next to me talking to himself. “Huh, he doesn’t look crazy,” I thought to myself.

So I reached into the case with a piece of wax paper to select my cookie while the normal looking crazy guy kept talking to himself. I looked over at him again and he looked at me at the same time, one of those awkward moments where we realized we were both looking at each other. It passed and I started to walk away.

“Excuse me,” I heard behind me. Out of instinct, I stopped. “Excuse me,” this guy said again, and now that he was facing me directly, I could see that he had one of those cell phone earphones and microphones hanging out of his other ear. So he obviously hadn’t been talking to himself; he’d been on the phone. “Would you send out a letter and a resume for a job if you were unwilling or unable to go to a job interview?”

“Ah, no, no I wouldn’t.”

“Thank you,” cell phone guy said to me, and then he started back on with his crazy/cell phone conversation, “Do you see what I mean? I just asked the same thing….”

John “A Writing Teacher’s Blog” Lovas has a report/narrative about attending MacWorld this past weekend posted on this blog. Interesting stuff.

* This week has been characterized by the classic “three steps forward, three steps back” technique in weight loss. I was “good” for the first part of the week and had indeed lost three pounds. But then I was “bad” for the last part of the week (cookies, wine, going out for dinner, pastry, etc.) and I managed to gain it back. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what I’m going to have to do to change this trend.

* I have really enjoyed my gym workout as of late. Essentially, I’m trying to “train” myself to jog. Slowly, and just a bit, but something more than just walking on the treadmill. I’m trying to get to the place where I can jog for fifteen minutes without slowing or stopping, and then we’ll go from there. It seems like a worthy goal, and it’s a good workout. Interestingly, I don’t really find myself getting out of breath– that is, I am not stopping because I feel like I am risking a heart attack or something. Rather, my legs give out, especially my calves. A bit of practice and I’ll be like Forest Gump.

From Mary’s site, I also found this site about the “Colossal Colon,” which “is an oversized model of a human colon that is forty feet long and four feet tall.” The goal here is to raise awareness of colon cancer, and after hunting around the site a bit, I learned that the “Colossal Colon” was the idea of Molly McMaster, who is a colon cancer survivor who does “crazy things” to raise awareness of colon cancer and such. She has a kind of interesting story, actually.

Anyway, I’m all for awareness of colon cancer and such of course, but I guess the thing that I find amusing is the idea that you can request to have the colossal colon at an event. I assume, of course, that the sort of event these folks have in mind would be a “health fair” or something like that. But wouldn’t it be cool to have it for just some big party? You know, set it up in the back yard, make people climb through the colon to get to the wine and cheese table….

Check out “The End of the World,” which I found by my friend Mary’s blog. Pretty funny.

I went to the gym again this morning (I’ve been pretty good about both exercise and eating this week– more on that later) to do my usual (as of late) fast walking/slow jogging while watching CNN Headline News. Just another day at the gym. Then someone taps me on the shoulder and says “You have to go. We’re evacuating the building.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Bomb threat,” this person said.

The gym that Annette and I go to, One-on-One (here’s a link to their horribly out of date web site), is in this sort of out of the way strip mall sort of place. There’s a beauty parlor, some kind of small business, a day care center, and the gym. Now, I don’t much about the logic of bomb threats, but who the hell would call in a bomb threat to a gym/strip mall?

There isn’t anything in the paper about it tonight, but maybe there will be some kind of update tomorrow.

Just in case you were wondering why krause.emich.edu isn’t working: I’m in the midst of the dreaded kernel panic on my office computer. This is the one thing that can go completely and utterly wrong with the Apple’s OS 10, at least as far as I can tell. For Apple users who have never seen this before, it’s a black screen with a ton of computer gobbly-gook all over it and then the words “kernel” and “panic” buried into the last lines of the code. If that seems a little vague, believe me, if it happens to you, you’ll know it.

What caused it? Well, all I know I ran the routine Apple software update, I installed 10.3.7 and the new version of iTunes (or at least I thought I did), I restarted, and then ka-boom. The tech guru for the college said he always does two restarts before installing any updates, and the fact that I run my computer as a server and hardly ever do any restarts might have had something to do with it. I don’t know, maybe….

Complicating matters a bit is the previously mentioned tech guy. I don’t want to go into it all right now, but in the nutshell, this guy is having some labor problems, and combined with some other issues, he seems a bit, er, tense. You know that sketch on Saturday Night Live, “Nick Burns, Your Company’s Computer Guy?”

Anyway, it isn’t all bad. For one thing, my office computer isn’t really my “main” computer, and I’m serving up my class web pages through my stevendkrause.com web space. If I had been having these problems with the laptop I am working on right now, I would be more, well, panicked. But it’s not, so I find the whole thing kind of an interesting technical problem. For another, I was able to restart the computer in “target disk mode” (hold down “T” on restart, and after you get the firewire logo bouncing around on the screen, hook up a firewire cable to another computer and you can mount the hard drive of the computer in target disk mode) and back up key files with no problem. In other words, if I have to, I could erase the whole thing and start over.

Later on this morning, I’m going to attempt the solutions suggested on this helpful web site, including using DiskWarrior (thanks to Steve B.’s help). If that doesn’t work, I’ll have to decide if it’s worth it to deal with our local Nick or to do a disk wipe. I’m kind of leaning toward the wipe ’cause it might not be a bad idea to get a clean start.

Update:
I’m back and running, sort of, and only after spending far too much time dorking around with the solution. Essentially, DiskWarrior sorta fixed it, but not quite (it’s hard to explain), so I had to reinstall the OS. Frankly, I should have just done that in the first place. Live and learn, I suppose.