lightning: up or down?

It doesn’t really matter which way the current is flowing if you are a part of a 100 million-volt circuit. Nonetheless, Husband found himself arbitrating an “up or down” dispute at work yesterday. Fortunately, we had already found this page to help explain the whole thing to Kid. I wish I could embed the video here–it’s worth clicking over there to check it out.

It’s amazing how much cartoons affect my understanding of the physical world. After years of seeing cartoon lightning bolts shoot down from the sky, it is tough to wrap my brain around the idea that the earth reaches up to the lightning to connect the circuit, through which massive current flows down from the sky. The light, on the other hand, moves in segments. In each of the segments, the light travels down, but these segments discharge from the earth upwards, such that the overall picture is light traveling up.

a peril of public sociology?

As you may remember, I got in a somewhat public tiff with a local Republican/libertarian blog, the Red Clay Citizen, over the veracity of their poll numbers on a state labor issue. Among other things, I was accused of being “basically a government-paid lobbyist for the labor unions,” a particularly incredible idea since NC government is deeply anti-union!

When I returned from vacation this weekend, I had a message waiting for me from UNC’s head of internal audit, whose job is to insure that UNC employees don’t abuse their positions for commercial or political gain.

a note from france

So I’ve been here a day. But some notes on Paris:

1.) Paris is filled, and I mean FILLED with Americans. They are concentrated in obvious places - like around Notre Dame. But they truly are everywhere. I have heard almost as much English (and mostly American English) as I have French. This strikes me as odd and has cheapened my experience so far. Yes, I want to be the only one here. But apparently some memo went out to all upper-middle class Americans that they should take their kids to Paris as soon as school is out. And they have obliged. Either the French have abandoned the city this week, they are hiding, or they are simply overwhelmed and keeping their mouths shut. I suspect that those who went in the opposite direction to me do not wonder, “where are all the Americans in New York?!?” Indeed, I suspect my nostalgia for a French France is probably a particularly American variety.

2.) I’m going to say it… So far I have been disappointed with the food.

name that blog

All right, I need y’all’s sage advice. I’m going to have my first-year seminar this fall maintain a blog as part of their course work, and I need a name. The seminar is “Citizenship and Society in the United States,” and it’s focused on political participation, writ broadly, but using the election as a consistent point of consideration.  My current top choice is 6608.wordpress.com since it’s sociology 66 and the election of 2008, but I can’t decide if it’s hip and tangential or just geeky. Other ideas?

zomba, 2

It’s winter here and Zomba is relatively high altitude, so I’ve been told there isn’t especial reason to fear mosquitos. I slept under a mosquito net last night, more because it was hanging over the bed anyway and after starting up at it awhile I decided why not. I liked it, making me wonder if I should get a canopy bed when I get home or follow through with my plan to pitch a tent in my office and pretend it’s my secret social science fort.

An upside of it being “winter” here is that the weather here has so far been my personal ideal (similar to your personal ideal, although a bit cooler). A downside is that the class ends at 4:30 and within an hour after class ending it was already pretty dark.

Sitting in a place called Tasty Bites now where you can buy 30 minute scratch-off cards and use WiFi. Sal is actually trying to work. I’m not sure I’ve slept more than 10 hours total since leaving and am completely exhausted. Teaching was a challenge at the beginning but I think I got better as the day went on.

I only realized today that Stata’s “summarize” command imposes an American spelling on the rest of the world.

big boy bed

“Why isn’t anyone blogging?” seems to be the question of the month. My own response is that I have been soaking in the pleasant bubble bath of mundane life: writing, recruiting participants for a study, hanging out with family. It’s super boring, and I LOVE it.

Among the happenings here in the now sunny and warm north is the Kid’s completion of his first year of preschool. His school ended with a Spring Concert, in which his class sang the national anthem and My Dog Rags. The next day, the school had Games Day in the park, at which Husband took 647 photos.

Much effort was put into securing and assembling Kid’s new Big Boy Bed, which (surprisingly smoothly) replaced his toddler bed. Just when he was feeling a little like he might fall off the edge of this new bed, he dozed off. Any lingering worries have been surpassed by his pride in the new bed, which he has shown off to all visitors in the last few days.

girls rock! details

For those of you who wish to rock out with the girls while you’re in Boston for the ASA, here’s the info. for the screenings of Girls Rock! at the MFA:

July 31

August 2

August 7

[There are screenings later in August, as well.  See the MFA film listings].

 

being older

It’s odd.  When I chose it, I thought of the “olderwoman” moniker as a little edgy, sort of the wise and proud Crone of mid-1990s feminism blended with Anne Bancroft in The Graduate.  A lot of my friends had croning parties* in the 1990s, before I was old enough to qualify.   So I’m always a little taken aback when someone (so far it has always been a young man) thinks I’m somehow saying something humble or self-demeaning or depressed in my choice of name.  I’m not.

I had fun when I was young and I’m having a good time now.  The hardest part was in the middle, when I was raising children, but even that was interesting.  It’s interesting hanging out in the blogosphere and finding out how different the preoccupations are in different life phases.

*A croning party, at least in my circle, was pretty much a 50th birthday party with feminist pseudo-pagan rituals.  All the web sites I can find easily about it are trying to sell you something.  Relatedly, this made me think about Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s Women Who Run With the Wolves, which I read in about 1993.  To be honest, I found the Jungian analysis tough sledding but found the stories and myths thought-provoking and interesting.  I think I’ll re-read it while I’m on sabbatical.  I imagine the stories that speak to me will be different now that I’m in a different life phase.

dispatch from zomba

Over 41 hours from the door of my apartment to the door of my accommodations here in Malawi. And nobody else posted in all that while? Hmph.

Sal and I got to walk around London a bit in our long layover there, but we squandered a good chunk of the time watching cricket in the bar at a casino. This was less a waste as it might seem as, for the first time ever, I actually understood the sport as I was watching it.

The four hour drive from the airport to Zomba would have been less scary if I did not know how to convert from kilometers per hour to miles per hour or if they did not drive on the left here. I will not here recount the speed with which we passed another driver on a curve while there was a bicyclist in our lane as well as, farther over on the shoulder, a man holding what looked like a board with rats nailed on it.

Internet access is going to be more spotty here than I anticipated. I’m posting this from a restaurant, where I just finished eating and my stomach has immediately commenced making noises of an extremely ill-portentious sort. I am not making this up.

updates

I cannot believe that in less than 24 hours I am going to be (1) on my way to Africa where I will (2) teach a course presumably with little/no supply of Coke Zero. Meanwhile, regarding a couple silences certain people have noticed:

1. You’ve been quiet lately about your resolution to exercise 200 days in 2008. Let me guess: you’ve abandoned it.

To the contrary, I earned my 96th star this evening and am actually a little ahead of pace. I had a negotiation with the Official Star Arbitrator before agreeing to the Malawi gig, and I will be given 7 stars credit for the 15 days I will be gone. I am not sure whether I will use the same gold stars as I’ve been using or a different color to denote their quasi-legitimacy.

2. You wouldn’t shut up about your secret hobby project, and then once you revealed what it actually was, you promptly shut up about it. Let me guess: you’ve abandoned it.

No, although it does seem even more dork-quixotic than it did when I first started. I wanted to have my second alpha version done before leaving for Malawi, and that didn’t happen. However, I have pinky sworn that I will be entering the Interactive Fiction Competition with its September 29 deadline, and pinky swears to me are absolute. I still have my stated goal of finishing at least eighth and my secret goal of finishing at least fifth. I’m currently a bit intimidated by the need for cover art.

and you wonder why i wait to pack until the last minute

Because otherwise, I just end up doing things like cleaning out my closet. My closet has been perfectly tolerable as a disaster for the last several months, and then a day before I’m to leave for Africa, I pull everything out of it? Suddenly I’m concerned with the many dozen wire hangers I’ve accumulated over the year from my dry cleaners?

It’s like teaching. It expands to the amount you allot to it.

I’ve heard I am going to have trippy dreams as a result of the malaria pills I’ve started taking. My dreams are normally pretty tame, especially the recurrent one where I’m wandering around ASA asking everyone “Are you Drek?” I’ll report back about that.

The course I’m teaching in Malawi is introductory Stata training using the Malawi Demographic and Health Survey. If you’ve anything about Stata that you think introductions don’t emphasize or underscore enough, let me know.

raise your hand if you’re not here

Where is the usual energy of scatterplotters? A friend recently told me that a colleague wished her a good summer. This was disconcerting as it suggested that the colleague (or everyone?) in the department would be gone for the entire summer. Is that common? And just because one is not in the office, wouldn’t one still go scattering? Are you all vacationing or so deeply immersed in research that you don’t want to be disturbed even by fellow scatterbrains?

soccultish update

Eszter reports evidence that her blind reviewer voodoo doll is working.  Meanwhile, within hours of tacking mine to my bulletin board, someone I suspect of having given a paper of mine a negative review changed their Facebook status update to “PLEASE GOD LET THIS PAIN IN MY ARM SUBSIDE” and it has stayed that way since.  So, 2-for-2, or 1-for-1, if you insist on discounting my testimonial for being made up.  Support travel-funding entrepeneurship and buy yours today! 

shout out to phyllis and del, et al.

The hoopla over same-sex marriage in California that was sparked by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s act of civil disobedience has come to a close, with the California State Supreme Court ruling that the DOMA-like law preventing same-sex marriage that voters had passed by ballot initiative was unconstitutional. As of this past Monday, marriage licenses will be issued without regard to the gender of the applicants.

Back in 2004, when San Francisco issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples despite California’s law prohibiting the act, life-long lesbian activists Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin were the first couple to be married. Although Martin and Lyon had been critical of the institution of marriage in the past, they saw this as an issue of unequal access to rights.

Back even further, in 1955, when the lesbian and gay movement did not even exist, Phyllis and Del were among those who founded the first lesbian rights organization in the country, which published the first lesbian newsletter, The Ladder. The whole lesbian and gay movement that some people think emerged at the Stonewall riots in 1969* really rests on the work of these pioneers who shepherded the movement through the repressive McCarthy era.

So, 55 years into their life-long relationship, Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin were married on Monday in a ceremony officiated by Gavin Newsom. Congratulations to the happy couple, and to all the other newlyweds in California.

*See Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Suzanna Crage. 2006. “Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth.” American Sociological Review 71:724-51 for an excellent analysis of the movement underpinnings of the Stonewall riot and its commemoration.

francophilia

So I’m sitting in an incredible house in the Cote d’Azur after four days in Paris. This is the life! First time overseas since my kids were born, and Europe is definitely a different experience with kids–and, by the way, with the Internet.

I made my visit particularly Francocentric by reading Jean-Noël Jeanneney’s Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View From Europe while in Paris.

a green asa?

So this email came around about making ASA greener. I have an idea: not requiring us to get journals. Also, not mailing us anything if we don’t want it (where we opt-in to mailings, not out of them). Also, stop selling our mailing information to publishers who send COUNTLESS catalogs about books. I’m sure Jeremy, with his war on paper, would have some good ideas too. My poor vision has one up-swing: I can’t read small type. So I read everything on-line now (where I can increase the viewing size to 300% so I can see stuff…)*.

maybe asr could give its reviewers facebook icon gifts

I reviewed an article recently for the American Political Science Review. As part of the e-mail apprising me of the editor’s decision and the other reviews, this was attached:

california dreamin’

Like Jeremy and some other of the scatterbrains, I grew up with a very deep and specific sense of place, although a very different place from his rural Iowa. My mother still lives in the north Torrance house I grew up in, and I’ve been out here visiting. It has been 41 years since I left for college in 1967, although I’ve been back periodically. The area has evolved, although much is the same. Walking yesterday, I realized how small a section of land feels like home – about a square mile. I walked everywhere when I was young, and have never lived in the community as a car-owing adult. This is a neighborhood of one-story tract houses near the corner of Yukon and West 182nd Street. (Map) Many of the houses on my street look pretty much the same as they did 40 years ago, although some are even more run down now than they were then. Others have been substantially remodeled, in some cases into quite upscale dwellings. The vegetable farm that was across Yukon when I was growing up is gone now, replaced by development of 3000 sq ft homes.

muzak hell

The AirTran transaction would have been bad under the best of circumstances, as it was a complicated mess.   It was all made worse by AirTran’s unreliable phone system, which tended to generate random hang ups after long holds, so that it took 6-10 trials of listening to long instruction messages and waiting on hold for each of the four rounds of phone calls.  But what made it wholly intolerable was the loud techno-pop muzak blaring into my ear.  AirTran prefers web transactions.  Phone transactions are already punished with a $10 phone fee and a minimum of $20 more on the fare.  Apparently they feel this is not enough and are further reinforcing web use with highly aversive phone experiences.

r.i.p. tim russert.

A heart attack at 58.

If it weren’t for Tim Russert and watching Meet the Press every weekend in college, I don’t know if I’d have made it through some of my courses. I was looking forward to watching him on the campaign trail this year and feel a little like an old friend died.