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Speedskating’s Olympic Rewards Fail to Pay the Bills
By KAREN CROUSE
Published: February 8, 2010
Tears welled in Kip Carpenter’s eyes last fall as he addressed the Wisconsin Speedskating Association board at the Pettit National Ice Center. One of the athletes he coaches, Jilleanne Rookard, had an abundance of talent, desire and grit, he explained, but a cash deficit threatened to derail her bid to make the 2010 United States Olympic team.
Rookard was at a crossroads, said Carpenter, a two-time Olympian and a bronze medalist at the 2002 Salt Lake Games. Without financial assistance, she would have to quit training, possibly before the team for the Vancouver Games was chosen in December...
... She persevered because she viewed representing her country and her community in the Olympics as a calling worthy of taking a vow of poverty.
“It’s about finishing what I started,” Rookard said. “It’s about my family. It’s about the people who did all the small things for me — drove me to practice and cheered for me and held me when I struggled. I just want to honor them and do my best and thank them for allowing me to do what I love....”
read the rest here
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http://www.careerpath.com/career-te
Best Occupational Category
You're a CREATOR
Keywords: Nonconforming, Impulsive, Expressive, Romantic, Intuitive, Sensitive, and Emotional
These original types place a high value on aesthetic qualities and have a great need for self-expression. They enjoy working independently, being creative, using their imagination, and constantly learning something new. Fields of interest are art, drama, music, and writing or places where they can express, assemble, or implement creative ideas.
CREATOR OCCUPATIONS
Suggested careers are Advertising Executive, Architect, Web Designer, Creative Director, Public Relations, Fine or Commercial Artist, Interior Decorator, Lawyer, Librarian, Musician, Reporter, Art Teacher, Broadcaster, Technical Writer, English Teacher, Architect, Photographer, Medical Illustrator, Corporate Trainer, Author, Editor, Landscape Architect, Exhibit Builder, and Package Designer.
CREATOR WORKPLACES
Consider workplaces where you can create and improve beauty and aesthetic qualities. Unstructured, flexible organizations that allow self-expression work best with your free-spirited nature.
Suggested Creator workplaces are advertising, public relations, and interior decorating firms; artistic studios, theaters and concert halls; institutions that teach crafts, universities, music, and dance schools. Other workplaces to consider are art institutes, museums, libraries, and galleries.
2nd Best Occupational Category
You're a SOCIAL MANAGER
Keywords: Tactful, Cooperative, Generous, Understanding, Insightful, Friendly, and Cheerful
This very social type enjoys working in groups, sharing responsibilities, and being the center of attention. Fields of interest are instructing, helping, nurturing, care giving and instructing-especially young people. They discuss and consider feelings in order to solve problems, lead, direct, persuade, guide, organize and enlighten others.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
fengi breaks down the Super Bowl ads this year better than I could have. Don't think for a second that fecundity of sexist idiocy went unnoticed. Hey marketers, way to alienate a large statistical population of viewers, pat yourselves on the back. You're geniuses. Way to project your emotional shortcomings on to the victims of your inadequacy.
HAVING TO PRETEND THE FUCKHOLE IS HUMAN.
DOESN'T THAT SUCK?
DON'T BE A GIRL, BUY OUR SHIT.
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Hi. Here is an update from our reconnaissance work this week in Haiti. XXX and I are participating in the GEER (Geotechnical Extreme Event Reconnaissance) effort in Haiti. We have eight team members from the U.S., two geologists and one engineer from the Dominican Republic, and three guards/guides, all traveling in four SUV's. XXX has been a tremendous assess to improve our security for the reconnaissance.
Our work has focused on documenting ground deformation effects, and how these contribute to structure/building damage. As expected, we see tremendous building damage in Port-au-Prince and areas along the rupture. Unfortunately, most damage is due to the exceptionally poor construction techniques of the local building community. Poor quality blocks, poor mortar, rebar is smooth or too small, not enough wraps or containment for rebar, poor concrete in structural columns, etc. Heavy concrete roofs certainly contributed to the collapses. Buildings with tin or wood frame roofs generally survived. In hillside areas, houses just collapsed and cascaded down the slopes. Rubble and debris are slowly being cleared from the streets.
Life is returning to the basic mode of subsistence for the living. Food is being distributed, some shops are open, food and miscellaneous goods are sold on the streets. Street markets have sprung up around the refugee camps, which are everywhere, including the countryside. Traffic is of course horrendous. The clean-up is beginning, but the country will need a WPA level effort to deconstruct the damaged buildings, clean the mess up, and rebuild. Unfortunately, the locals are already salavaging the rebar for re-use. And, unless a massive education effort is instituted, they will use the same poor construction methods.
We've been camped out in a outdoor garden terrace at a restaurant behind a large building under construction. A multi-story childrens hospital next door collapsed. The restaurant building is damaged, but we've had power, water in bathrooms, and intermittent wifi access. Better conditions than we expected.
We've been working in the port area to document the damage, in the city to catalog building damage, and further west from Leogane along the area near the fault that ruptured. We've mapped and observed many locations where road damage has occurred due to settlement of road fill in soft ground or to slumping/settlement of embankments around culverts. We are seeing extensive liquefaction and lateral spreading along the coast. Acres of ground have disappeared into the ocean in several locations. We've mapped the extent of the lateral spreading, and have done SASW and CPT testing of several areas where liquefaction occurred.
We've traversed the surface trace of the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault in several places, above the midde and west end of the aftershock zone; XXX, XXX, and XXX travesed areas in the middle and to the east. No surface rupture has been identified along the trace of the fault in the area of the rupture. Uplifted corals have been identified at several areas along the coast, so there may be some surface deformation.
Lots of small to large landslides are visible, both along road cuts, and visible higher on hillslopes.
We leave tomorrow for Santo Domingo, a hot meal, and a hot shower. We'll have lots more to report next week when we're back in [the States].
MY FIRST TOURNAMENT EVER!
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!
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For those not in the knee-deep in-the-know of flat-track derby, there are only 14 skaters on a roster for a bout. You can be on the team but not make the roster cuz you're growing your wings. Not to mention that a tournament with this caliber of teams is a hell of a way to start your skating season.
Rocky Mountain (and Denver) took the derby world by storm this year with an amazing performance at the Western Regional Tournament placing second (and third, respectively) and then beating some old school eastern powerhouses at the (Inter-) Nationals Tournament the following month. They're good.
Also, we get to play Rose City (Portland, OR). I hosted a few folks from their travelling team, The Wheels of Justice, back in August and hung with them at Regionals. They're ranked just above us at #5 in the Western Region. The WoJ is also the team of my future derby wife, Mick U. Cry -- another uber rad (super skilled) ndn derby chick. She's not on that great team just because she likes to wear shiny hot pants, know what I mean?
So, yeah, it's all a really big fucking deal. These are no ordinary three games... in two days. (EEEEE!!)
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Wild West Showdown 2010
February 26-28, 2010 in Bremerton, WA
* 24 WFTDA Leagues
* 2 Sanctioned Bouts per Team
* 1 Challenge Bout Track
* Lots o’ derby fun and games
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A Lasting Gift to Medicine That Wasn’t Really a Gift
By DENISE GRADY
Published: February 1, 2010
...The bounds of fairness, respect and simple courtesy all seem to have been breached in the case of the Lacks family. The gulf between them and the scientists — race, class, education — was enormous and made communication difficult....
i mean, whatevs. i still get asked about how the rules work all the time, if i get to elbow people, or broken any limbs. *yawn*
blah blah let's watch the 2009 texas rollergirls (austin, tx) highlight reel (hey, the b.a.d. all-stars made a guest celebrity appearance!)! let's have more extraneous exclamations!!!! !!! !
i love a catcher in the rye, i really do. but, i'd like to spend a minute focusing on the one that left a small vacuum where he exited, one who left an enormous life's body of work that has inspired a whole lotta ordinary and extraordinary people, one who was a champion to me.
But he was constantly involved with civil disobedience. I was many times with him, as Dan Ellsberg was and others. And he was just—he was fearless. He was simple. He was straightforward. He said the right things, said them eloquently, and inspired others to move forward in ways they wouldn’t have done, and changed their minds. They changed their minds by their actions and by hearing him. He was a really—both in his life and in his work, he was a remarkable person, just irreplaceable.
He was everybody’s favorite teacher, the teacher that changed your life, but he was that for millions and millions of people. And so, you know, that’s what happened. We just lost our favorite teacher.
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Howard Zinn (1922-2010): A Tribute to the Legendary Historian with Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein and Anthony Arnove
"...Yeah, it’s true that people have asked that question again and again. You know, should we tell kids that Columbus, whom they have been told was a great hero, that Columbus mutilated Indians and kidnapped them and killed them in pursuit of gold? Should we tell people that Theodore Roosevelt, who is held up as one of our great presidents, was really a warmonger who loved military exploits and who congratulated an American general who committed a massacre in the Philippines? Should we tell young people that?
And I think the answer is: we should be honest with young people; we should not deceive them. We should be honest about the history of our country. And we should be not only taking down the traditional heroes like Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt, but we should be giving young people an alternate set of heroes.
Instead of Theodore Roosevelt, tell them about Mark Twain. Mark Twain—well, Mark Twain, everybody learns about as the author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but when we go to school, we don’t learn about Mark Twain as the vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League. We aren’t told that Mark Twain denounced Theodore Roosevelt for approving this massacre in the Philippines. No.
We want to give young people ideal figures like Helen Keller. And I remember learning about Helen Keller. Everybody learns about Helen Keller, you know, a disabled person who overcame her handicaps and became famous. But people don’t learn in school and young people don’t learn in school what we want them to learn when we do books like A Young People’s History of the United States, that Helen Keller was a socialist. She was a labor organizer. She refused to cross a picket line that was picketing a theater showing a play about her.
And so, there are these alternate heroes in American history. There’s Fannie Lou Hamer and Bob Moses. They’re the heroes of the civil rights movement. There are a lot of people who are obscure, who are not known. We have in this Young People’s History, we have a young hero who was sitting on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to leave the front of the bus. And that was before Rosa Parks. I mean, Rosa Parks is justifiably famous for refusing to leave her seat, and she got arrested, and that was the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and really the beginning of a great movement in the South. But this fifteen-year-old girl did it first. And so, we have a lot of—we are trying to bring a lot of these obscure people back into the forefront of our attention and inspire young people to say, “This is the way to live.”
read the whole thing here
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Bob Noorda Is Dead at 82; Designer Took Modernism Underground
January 23, 2010
By STEVEN HELLER, New York Times
Bob Noorda, an internationally known graphic designer who helped introduce a Modernist look to advertising posters, corporate logos and, in the 1960s, the entire New York City subway system, died on Jan. 11 in Milan, his adopted city. He was 82...
...Mr. Noorda’s best-known work in the United States was for the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which in 1966 commissioned his firm, Unimark International, to modernize and unify the look of the subway system’s signs. The firm had been recommended by Mildred Constantine, an influential design curator at the Museum of Modern Art...
....Theirs was among the first international design firms to base their work on the Modernist principle that a good design could have a positive effect on all aspects of life, not just on business. An early proponent of unified branding — the consistent use of distinctive type and imagery to identify a company — Unimark has been credited with awakening the corporate world to Modernist design thinking.
Unimark became identified with the austere Helvetica typeface. “For better or worse,” Ms. Conradi wrote, the firm became “a prime contributor to Helvetica’s ubiquitous appearance in corporate identities around the world.”
read the whole thing here
For instance, the U.S. Geological Service, I had no idea that the South American plate is subducting from the East beneath the Caribbean plate and hence, the number of active volcanoes on the islands from the Virgin Islands to Venezuela. Also, as I'm studying for my Seismic Engineering State Exam, I've recently learned that it is believed that the African Plate is the only plate on the planet that is fixed with respect to the mantle and is not moving via plate tectonics.
http://supersites.unavco.org/haiti.php
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There is a huge chasm between white women who frame their experience in terms of feeling pressure to live up to a harsh set of standards versus women who live on the margins yet are still expected to adhere to the same standards that do not even recognize their existence. The former often focuses on specific traits such as blondness, thinness without much critical examination, with the expectation that intersectionality should have no bearing on the discourse.
HOB's comics and ephemera can be found here: http://www.graphesthesia.com/
16 April 1963
...You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue...
read the entire piece here
thank you,
hyperaesthetika- - - - -
Road Warrior [Essay]
by Scott Bear Don’t Walk
“Weren’t you the Indian Rhodes Scholar?” she said, as I shivered in her doorway holding my pizza delivery bag, wearing my “Red Pies Over Montana” polyester shirt and ball cap. She handed me 20 dollars for driving a Sausage Lover’s Special through the snow-drifted streets of the reservation border town of Missoula—for a one-dollar tip.
A month before, I had been sitting next to a well-known British novelist at a Rhodes House dinner in Oxford, which involved multiple courses and sparkling conversation over after-dinner sherry. I had been wearing a jacket and tie, not a tux, but near. The writer asked, “Aren’t you the red-Indian Rhodes Scholar?”
They say the Rhodes is one of the few things a person can do at 20 years of age that will be mentioned at 40, that and joining the Marines—but I didn’t go to Parris Island. I went to Oxford, England...
We prepared for the vetting, but we didn’t prepare for life at Oxford. Could I go? Did I want to? It was assumed that if I could, I would. Oxford was a great place: everyone just knew that. Key information about what it was like was left to a few pictures in the catalogue. Margaret had sent many to Oxford, but hadn’t been there herself. She assumed I would be glad to escape the rural poverty of a cultural backwater, finding refuge first in Oxford, then in the big city. We both assumed that greatness did not, could not, involve Missoula, Montana. I read The New York Times, The New Yorker, and I desired worldly opportunity, but I also wanted to put Native America on the world’s map.
What about the world I was leaving? My university was 15 minutes from my mother’s reservation, 20 minutes from my grandmother’s house. My father had gone to the same university for law school, and I went to the university preschool. I had never left home. I hadn’t even been out of state. My tribe is ambivalent about its people going away. Going away can make sense, economically, or to study, but in another sense, it doesn’t make any. We were nomads and we traveled, but always within a known world of connections. Our world is known through stories. Sacred ancestors, from before humans existed, had lived in and around where Missoula is presently located. At the dawn of time, the sacred trickster, Coyote, killed a monster that was devouring everything in the next valley over. Coyote cut out the heart of the monster and threw it west. The heart of the monster is known by the tribe as the original source of all the mosquitoes in the world. This is what it means to be Indian: I could stand on campus in Missoula, slap a mosquito, and know that it had come from the dawn of time, when Coyote saved everything. Many Indians still live in their holy land, they’ve never left. Sometimes I would drive over to Idaho and view the heart of the monster, now a red monolith. Other Americans don’t have this connection...
At Oxford I would lose touch with this. Other Indians had gone away before: to school, to the federal relocation program, where Indians were enticed to leave the reservation with promises of jobs and job training, so that the country might end its obligations to the tribes and the treaties. But everyone always came back... I had some idea of these things when I applied for the Rhodes, but not enough to be able articulate them. In my Rhodes application essay, I wrote about standing astride two worlds: the tribal and the global. What I didn’t realize is that if I lost my footing on one, I would fall...
And so I went to England, and it was in Oxford that I crashed and burned. No story is pre-determined. To this day I search for the signs of what happened, the warnings. I’ve mentioned that while the Rhodes was important and lauded, I had no real idea of what it involved. I was also very far away from a world that made sense to me. This is all true. But there is something more. Another person with these same factors might have gone to Oxford and thrived. When I got there, I felt the alienation of a place unlike any other I had experienced...
...In Western culture, we haven’t figured out how to spend less than forty hours at a desk. In this world, in Oxford’s world, relationships aren’t as important as getting ahead....
read the rest here
A magnitude 7.0 earthquake + ten miles from a major urban hub with very-likely sub-standard structural integrity to sustain the acceleration forces of an earthquake + only six miles below the surface + up to magnitude 5.0 aftershocks + a developing world country with little emergency infrastructure = mind-boggling catastrophe.
The head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti and his deputy are dead. The archbishop is dead. And then there is Port-au-Prince. Anpil fou.
I've heard of at least three organizations that are taking relief:
1) Partners In Health
2) Yele Haiti
3) HERF
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http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6
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