Who’s gonna eat my leftover Cheerios now? I’ll miss you buddy, but Michael will be so glad to see you again.
Monthly Archive for September, 2006
Page 2 of 3
As with most people, music is therapy for me. I made a playlist that travels the full emotional spectrum most people will probably experience today. Ending, of course, at a place of peace and acceptance vs. anger and retaliation.
My playlist for today:
- Self-Evident – Ani DiFranco
- Breathe Me – Sia
- Agnus Dei – Rufus Wainwright
- The Other Side – David Gray
- Hallelujah – Jeff Buckley
- Fix You – Coldplay
- This Too Shall Pass – India.Arie
- World Spins Madly On – The Weepies
- Life Less Frightening – Anti-Flag
- Let It Be – Beatles
- Track 4 – Sigur Ros
- Not in My Name – Banco de Gaia
The urge to be glued to the TV is strong today. So was the urge to glance down at the clock from about 8am to 11am. “It was right now five years ago.” Yeah, it was. We are obsessed with marking the time and I cannot figure out why. There is no point, nothing is gained but maybe a creepy chill up one’s spine. Masochistic indeed. Did they do this after Pearl Harbor?
If one must be immersed in the events, at least do it right. Listen to Self-Evident by Ani DiFranco. Read “What Next” by Walter Mosley. Listen to “This Too Shall Pass” by India.Arie, “Agnus Dei” by Rufus Wainwright, or anything by Sigur Ros. Don’t try and mourn in between commercial breaks.
I am battling the desire to be a spoonfed numbed-by-grief American on this day. To not look back for so long that I end up tripping on today. Today. THIS day. We are sad, yes. So acknowledge that emotion, then move on. Do something courageous, compassionate, selfless, or all of the above. At the very least, keep living your life.
That being said, I’ve compiled a list of do’s and dont’s I hope I can abide by:
- I will not get sucked in to the barrage of 24/7 “Five Years Later” coverage. I’ve seen it all before, the information has always been there to revisit on my own. Reliving each significant minute that something happened is tempting, yes, but a very masochistic thing to do and nothing will be gained from it.
- I will not lose a day of my life trying to relive the past. Nothing can be done about what is gone, but something can be done about its implications on the present and future.
- I will not return to a life lived in fear. No amount of CNN rebroadcasting, political speeches, or terror alerts will bring that back.
- I will not let the wound of my lost innocence re-open. Once is enough, the bubble is popped, I know what’s going on now.
- I will not watch any of the millions of movies/specials/made-for-TV pieces of crap that are on every channel these days. Nobody needs to be profiting off this. If they’re not trying to make money they wouldn’t have any commercials.
- I will remember the lives lost that day, but I will also remember the almost 2,700 U.S. soldiers that have died in a war justified by what happened 5 years ago. There is no connection, the war is a lie, and our Commander in Chief has all of their blood on his hands.
- I will remember that the events five years ago are being used as a blank check for endless war, illegal detentions, torture, and murder.
- I will recognize that Islamic extremists don’t “hate our freedom”, they hate our colonialism, foreign policies, and world subjugation. It’s not as simple as the government would like us to believe. Terrorism goes deeper than religious differences, but our educational system, media, and government likes to leave this part out.
- I will remember that because of ignorant Americans and their prejudices, Muslim Americans continue to be wrongly targeted and forever have to defend their religion and their right to live in this country.
- I will not believe the official story given to us by the government.
- I will remember the dozens and dozens of questions that remain to be answered.
- I will recognize that it’s five years later and nothing has changed. Things are worse, nobody has been held accountable, and somehow people have forgotten than Presidents can be impeached.
That being said… I do love my country, and I do mark this as a sad day. My hope for the future is that September 11th moves from being a day of defeat and mourning to a day of action. There is no power in being sad, scared, and complacent. If people took their sadness and anger and directed it at the real cause of this country’s suffering, imagine the possibilities. It’s not “love it or leave it”, it’s “love it or fix it” and dissent is the highest form of patriotism.
In the seemingly endless process that is moving out of my apartment, I have been trying to thin out my collection of clutter and useless artifacts. I came across some papers I had written for Franklin’s Learning Strategies class back in 2002 or so. One of them referenced the results of this personality test I took, a pretty popular test called the Keirsey Temperament Sorter. I thought the given results were interesting considering I moved on to do AmeriCorps shortly after:
Your Temperament is: Idealist
Idealists, as a temperament, are passionately concerned with personal growth and development. Idealists strive to discover who they are and how they can become their best possible self — always this quest for self-knowledge and self-improvement drives their imagination. And they want to help others make the journey. Idealists are naturally drawn to working with people, and whether in education or counseling, in social services or personnel work, in journalism or the ministry, they are gifted at helping others find their way in life, often inspiring them to grow as individuals and to fulfill their potentials.
Idealists are sure that friendly cooperation is the best way for people to achieve their goals. Conflict and confrontation upset them because they seem to put up angry barriers between people. Idealists dream of creating harmonious, even caring personal relations, and they have a unique talent for helping people get along with each other and work together for the good of all. Such interpersonal harmony might be a romantic ideal, but then Idealists are incurable romantics who prefer to focus on what might be, rather than what is. The real, practical world is only a starting place for Idealists; they believe that life is filled with possibilities waiting to be realized, rich with meanings calling out to be understood. This idea of a mystical or spiritual dimension to life, the “not visible” or the “not yet” that can only be known through intuition or by a leap of faith, is far more important to Idealists than the world of material things.
Highly ethical in their actions, Idealists hold themselves to a strict standard of personal integrity. They must be true to themselves and to others, and they can be quite hard on themselves when they are dishonest, or when they are false or insincere. More often, however, Idealists are the very soul of kindness. Particularly in their personal relationships, Idealists are without question filled with love and good will. They believe in giving of themselves to help others; they cherish a few warm, sensitive friendships; they strive for a special rapport with their children; and in marriage they wish to find a “soulmate,” someone with whom they can bond emotionally and spiritually, sharing their deepest feelings and their complex inner worlds.
Idealists are rare, making up between 20 and 25 percent of the population. But their ability to inspire people with their enthusiasm and their idealism has given them influence far beyond their numbers.
Wow, hope I can eventually live up to all of that!
From BBC News : The web-based tool allows users to explore existing digitised newspaper articles and more recent online content, spanning the last 200 years.
People using the search are shown results from both free and subscription-based news outlets.
Partners in the project include the websites of US newspaper the New York Times and the Guardian from the UK.
Other sources include news aggregators, websites which collect and display news stories from multiple sources.
“The goal here is to be able to explore history as it unfolded,” said Anurag Acharya, an engineer at Google and one of the team behind the project.
“It’s fascinating to see how people’s attitudes and emotions have changed through time.”
The new service searches hundreds of different news sources to answer a user’s query. The exact number of sources is confidential.
Results are presented in similar fashion to a Google News search, with “related” articles about the same event grouped together. Free and charged-for articles are displayed side by side.
With pages from commercial websites, the cost of viewing them is also shown. Google says search results are based on relevance, not partnerships with companies.
Users can also view articles using a timeline that displays key dates associated with a story.
So the first Moon landing would highlight 1969 as a key date, but also identify other years when lunar landings took place or when the topic was in the news.
“The ability to browse this historical overview allows users to identify key time periods and get some sense of the flow of events,” said Mr. Acharya.
The earliest known searchable story is, he said, from “somewhere in the mid-1700s” – considerably older than the current 30-day archive offered through Google News.
The service is accessed through the news archive website or the Google news page. It is also activated when it can provide relevant results to a user’s search on google.com.
In this case, links to the most relevant historical news articles are displayed separately above the normal search results.
Check it out: Google News Archive Search
Some interesting searches to start with:
City Year workers swap service for experience
Sunday, September 03, 2006 – By Amanda Kawalek
Claps and cheers resonated Thursday morning near 4th and Broad streets, where a cluster of people stood with balloons and greeted newcomers to the City Year office.
Dressed in white and red uniforms, the 37 young adults came from different backgrounds and various cities and states to begin 10 months of service with City Year.
The volunteer organization, active in 16 U.S. cities, began training Thursday for the term that ends in June.
Some members delay college for the volunteer experience; others put off job hunts to figure out more concrete career plans, said David Ciccone, 27, City Year recruitment director and a former corps member.
Members of the group of 17-to-24-year-olds serve in Columbus Public Schools. Focusing attention on children in kindergarten through middle school, corps members tutor in writing and reading, run afterschool programs and events and act as role models.
While working and living in Columbus, the City Year volunteers wear uniforms, are given a bus pass and earn a weekly stipend of $160 or $250. It’s a wage that makes them eligible for food stamps.
When their service ends next spring, the City Year volunteers will each be awarded $4,725 to use for tuition or school loans.
Living on a City Year budget means less shopping for clothes and eating out, but the experience is well worth it, said Kara Daniel, 23, a senior corps member who graduated from Penn State in 2005 with a degree in marketing.
Daniel is in her second year of City Year service.
“My friends thought I was crazy, working for $160 a week, but then they think it’s awesome that I took that chance,” said the Waterford, Pa., native. “It’s very humbling knowing that everyone took a year out of their lives to serve. I’ve never met people who are so selfless. It’s really refreshing.”
City Year helps pair the new corps members with roommates, but it’s their responsibility to find housing and pay rent, Ciccone said.
“We don’t promise large sums of money, though they do get some, but City Year is something people do because they want to and they have a passion for it,” he said.
The impact that volunteers have as mentors to children goes beyond the fuzzy feelings of volunteering, said Tamar Campbell-Sauer, principal at the Literature-Based Alternative at Hubbard school, one of City Year’s volunteer sites.
“Part of their program is that they track results,” she said. “It’s not just a ‘feel good’ program. They want data, and they want the data that show the kids are making progress, so they monitor them on a quarterly basis.”
Former corps member Brian Reed, 26, said City Year gave him direction and job connections.
Reed now works with the Boys and Girls Club of Columbus as an outreach and recruitment director.
“I’ve learned how to understand and relate to the children that we serve,” he said. “I’ve made a personal connection with them. Working with City Year helped me realize that this is what I was called to do, and that was my purpose.”
After working with children through a high-school class, 18-year-old John Perrin, of Waterville, N.Y., said he took a chance moving to Columbus for City Year.
Like most of his friends, he anxiously applied to colleges, but then he decided to wait a year and took the service route to help find out whether becoming a teacher was right for him.
Like Perrin, Daniel had done little service work before City Year, but she wants to eventually work in the nonprofit arena, a big change from her college internship at an insurance company.
“When I leave City Year every day and see people stressing out about things, I think about the kids we help and the problems they have,” she said. “It makes it very easy for me to come back to work every day, which I think is something most people can’t say about their job.”
It was among the fastest, most efficient production cars ever built. It ran on electricity, produced no emissions and catapulted American technology to the forefront of the automotive industry. The lucky few who drove it never wanted to give it up. So why did General Motors crush its fleet of EV1 electric vehicles in the Arizona desert?
From the movie’s official website:
WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR? chronicles the life and mysterious death of the GM EV1, examining its cultural and economic ripple effects and how they reverberated through the halls of government and big business.
The year is 1990. California is in a pollution crisis. Smog threatens public health. Desperate for a solution, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) targets the source of its problem: auto exhaust. Inspired by a recent announcement from General Motors about an electric vehicle prototype, the Zero Emissions Mandate (ZEV) is born. It required 2% of new vehicles sold in California to be emission-free by 1998, 10% by 2003. It is the most radical smog-fighting mandate since the catalytic converter.
With a jump on the competition thanks to its speed-record-breaking electric concept car, GM launches its EV1 electric vehicle in 1996. It was a revolutionary modern car, requiring no gas, no oil changes, no mufflers, and rare brake maintenance (a billion-dollar industry unto itself). A typical maintenance checkup for the EV1 consisted of replenishing the windshield washer fluid and a tire rotation.
But the fanfare surrounding the EV1’s launch disappeared and the cars followed. Was it lack of consumer demand as carmakers claimed, or were other persuasive forces at work?
Fast forward to 6 years later… The fleet is gone. EV charging stations dot the California landscape like tombstones, collecting dust and spider webs. How could this happen? Did anyone bother to examine the evidence? Yes, in fact, someone did. And it was murder.
The electric car threatened the status quo. The truth behind its demise resembles the climactic outcome of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express: multiple suspects, each taking their turn with the knife. WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR? interviews and investigates automakers, legislators, engineers, consumers and car enthusiasts from Los Angeles to Detroit, to work through motives and alibis, and to piece the complex puzzle together.
WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR? is not just about the EV1. It’s about how this allegory for failure—reflected in today’s oil prices and air quality—can also be a shining symbol of society’s potential to better itself and the world around it. While there’s plenty of outrage for lost time, there’s also time for renewal as technology is reborn in WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR?
I find it mind-boggling that GM has the capabilities of producing such a perfect car, and yet they’re not doing so. I’m sure this goes for all car manufacturers. Even worse, they’re acting like they still don’t know how to do it. They parade their 30mpg cars around like they’ve made some great leap in auto technology. Too bad the Ford Model-T got 25 miles per gallon. Okay sure, the Model T didn’t have to provide power for A/C, surround-sound stereos, GPS, etc. But still, it’s 2006, come on.
For sixteen years they could have been making these cars! It’s certainly not a lack of demand, I definitely can’t buy that rationale. I mean really, gas is $2.85/gal these days and maintenance costs can easily drain one’s savings account (if you’re lucky enough to have one.) Who wouldn’t buy one of these??! No gas, no oil changes, no emissions. Your eco-footprint would practically disappear. Global Warming– what’s that? You’d think GM would be pumping these out like crazy trying to save their company. Last I heard they weren’t doing so hot…
There has to be tremendous pressure by the gas and maintenance industries that’s keeping them from moving on this. I have to wonder what GM is getting from them that’s worth more than becoming the #1 auto manufacturer in the world? Is this simply another case of humans having the capabilities to save our future (and the planet’s) but choosing money instead? How sad. It’ll be hard to enjoy being rich when you can’t breathe outside anymore without an oxygen mask. Our greed will ultimately become the end of us, and we deserve it if we don’t stand up and speak out against it.
It’s a fascinating story, and I can’t wait to see the documentary. I’m still on the lookout for local showings. Yahoo! Movies says it’s not showing in Columbus yet, but the movie’s official site says it opened at the Drexel Gateway theatre on August 11th which was this past Friday.. however it’s not listed on Drexel’s site at all so I’m doubting this. I’ll keep my eyes open and update this post when I find any local release info.
Here are some links relating to the documentary:
- Mother Earth News article about the story that inspired the documentary
- Official Movie Website
- WKTEC on Yahoo! Movies
Update 09/03/06:
The movie is now showing at the Drexel Gateway Theater!
