Whee!

I’m on the train from New York up to Mohegan Sun. I’m excited partly because I get to see Jason Mraz again for the first time since April, but also because I’ve never been to Mohegan Sun before. I haven’t been to a casino lately, so I’m itching to be parted with my standard $20.

I still have five hours before the concert, so it’s too early to start listening to Mraz. Thankfully, my good friend Ingrid Michaelson is here to keep me company.
I’m bringing my camera, but the concert has assigned seating, so I don’t know how well any pictures will come out. If they’re not terrible, I’ll post them tomorrow.

Good on so many levels

I love helping people. And cupcakes. So I’m really stoked that there’s a new business in Teaneck that specializes in both! The bakery, Zoe’s Cupcake Cafe,  opened in June, with a mission to help teenage mothers get work experience. All proceeds from the shop benefit Zoe’s Place, a non-profit organization that helps pregnant teens and teenage moms and their babies. NJ Monthly magazine has a lovely article on the cupcake cafe.

Doing it for the children

I find it highly cathartic to write an angry letter every now and then. This is one I emailed to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, which is trying to prevent the Georgia O’Keeffe Elementary School from going by the initials GOK, which might diminish or tarnish the artist’s legacy…somehow. Anyway, I like this letter so much that I’m going to print it out, put it in an envelope, sacrifice one of my pretty pretty Jackie Robinson stamps, and allow a mail carrier to deliver it.

************************************************

To those who make the decisions [I considered, and decided against, Dear Wankers]:

I just read this article about your museum, and to tell you the truth, it made me a little sick. You’re a well-respected art museum that apparently has all the grace and compassion of a school-yard bully. It has been said that there’s no such thing as bad press, but I’m pretty sure you know that this is simply not true. We live in the age of the Internet now, and I am always begrudgingly impressed when highly visible entities like the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum display such an appalling lack of awareness of how quickly information spreads via this medium.

I read just a few minutes ago on Metafilter (consistently listed as one of Time Magazine’s Top 25 and PC Magazine’s Top 100 Classic web sites) that your museum is trying to get the Georgia O’Keeffe Elementary School of Albuquerque, NM not to go by its initials, as if having people pronounce “gawk” for GOK would somehow diminish this amazing artist’s legacy. There’s quite a lively discussion going on over at Metafilter about the way that your museum is doing a fine job on its own of tarnishing the legacy of Georgia O’Keeffe. There’s a lot of sympathy in that thread, but none of it lies with you. And I don’t think that Metafilter is somehow unique in its interpretation of this situation. I sincerely doubt that anybody is going to say, “Well, I used to respect Georgia O’Keeffe, but ever since that one elementary school in Santa Fe started going by GOK, I realized how vastly overrated she was as an artist and have since allowed my membership to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum to lapse.”

More than anything, I wonder what you could be thinking by even allowing your ridiculousness to continue through several rounds of emails, letters, and now the serious threat of legal action. I’m curious to know whether you are somehow unfamiliar with the plight of public schools in this nation in general, and Albuquerque in particular. It’s not as though schools are raking in the dough hand over fist, so why would you think it prudent to threaten the school over its use of Ms. O’Keeffe’s initials? You do realize that she was a former schoolteacher, right? I can’t imagine, if she were still living, that her sympathies would lie with you, either. And let’s not forget the very real fact that the school had this name before your museum even owned the rights to Ms. O’Keeffe’s trademark.

In the olden days (say, the late 1980s), awareness of this story might not have reached very far. Locals might have tsked, and if it was a particularly slow news day, you might have made it onto one of the nightly news programs. Dan Rather would have used some indecipherable phrase to illustrate how dastardly he found your behavior (because “like stealing candy from a baby”) would have been to easy, and Peter Jennings would have said something amazingly erudite that would have made you look like graceless money-grubbers.

But now we’ve got blogs, 24-hour news cycles (it’s always a slow news day somewhere), incessant social networking, and online communities with near-global reach. And just like I’m posting this on my web site, Facebook page, and twitter feed, somebody I know is going to see this and pass it along, too. I’ve got friends all over the world, and being that I am a librarian, several of them work in museums, archives, and libraries. We’re used to feeling like the good guys, and this will be passed along just as a sheer oddity. I mean, shouldn’t an entity dedicated to the preservation of an artist’s works, spirit, and legacy be on the side of education? Who are you saving this legacy for, if not the people who will grow up in a world where knowledge of Georgia O’Keeffe recedes further and further into the past? And what about the students affected by your misguided attempt to prevent the disrespect of Ms. O’Keeffe’s legacy? Let me tell you: you’re doing a heckuva job at disrespecting your raison d’etre all by yourselves. At this point, all that the kids at that school are going to remember is that they were named after a woman whose memory was left in the hands of seriously misguided, greedy people.

I am utterly disgusted by your behavior.

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So there.

That’s my girl

It’s been a while since I checked in with her, and I don’t do well with change, so it’s a relief to know that our friend Michele Bachmann is still as crazy as ever. This time, she temporarily blocked voting on the resolution that celebrated Hawai’i’s 50th year as a state, and, (oh!) also named it as the birthplace of our 44th president. Controversial stuff, there, right? Thankfully, her nuttiness didn’t impede the resolution from being passed 378 – 0 (not that it was unanimously approved; over 50 cowardly jackholes just abstained from the vote).

Words I Hate

I love words and language, which is why I never say one word where three would do. Still, I reserve the right to hate some words, because they’re just stupid.

• Webinar
• Widget

As in: I am currently mired in a webinar where the leader won’t stop saying the word “widget.” Save me!

Update: The phone system just stopped working and there has been a (temporary?) break in the torture. Thank you, universe!

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

I told Satanski that I’m a little grossed out by Spongebob Squarepants (due to that gross episode where he has the Suds), so of course he decided that all he wanted to do for the rest of the night was draw me various Spongebob-esque pictures. This only stopped when I told him that he couldn’t use any more sheets of paper until he’d used the backs of the sheets he’d already used. This is always the point at which he stops.

Here’s the gallery:

30 seconds I’ll never get back

The real reason that I hate to receive email forwards is that the sentiments expressed therein are usually mawkish, wrong, obnoxious, or just not true. Forwards that fall in the first three categories are quickly archived, but for emails whose veracity is not immediately determined, I’m forced to do actual research. Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy research. It’s my job, after all. I just hate spending any more time thinking about the crap that people email me about. Today’s example was the Bristol Zoo Parking Attendant email. It’s such a good story, I couldn’t pass up the chance to find out whether it was true. And…it’s not.

Bummer.

Beautiful

The tiny part of my heart that is not shriveled up and black loves this wedding entrance so much. Makes me feel like I’m not such a freak for wanting to march out of the church to Jason Mraz’s “Butterfly,” which ends with joyous repetitions of the phrase “You’ve got it all, you’ve got it all, you’ve got it all.” Anyway, I know that I would love to attend a wedding like this, and as much as I might play it cool, I’d probably have a blast if I could be one of the dancers.

Times are not that desperate

I understand that we’re in a recession, and people are cutting back on paying others to do what they can really do for themselves. Some have learned to cut their own hair; others have done their own nails or forgone artificial tans. Still, I think we can all agree that there are some  things that you shouldn’t try to do for yourself; at some point you just have to admit that if you can’t afford it, it’s better just to wait. And tops on that list would have to be plastic surgery.

Let’s face it, no matter how much better you want to look, elective plastic surgery is not a necessity. It’s expensive, and requires many years of intensive training on cadavers and cadaverous trophy wives before one can really be said to master it. Why, then, did this woman try to perform her own plastic surgery? And then seem surprised when she effed up her face? How could this outcome not have seemed the likeliest to her? Of course, she then had to have an actual doctor perform several corrective surgeries to remove the liquid silicone that she’d injected into her face. Heckuva job, lady.

Good old Jersey

Of course, it would be remiss of me to rag on West Bend, Wisconsin and not even mention the big news in New Jersey today. A boatload of politicians and religious leaders were arrested today on charges of corruption. One of those people is Hoboken’s mayor, Peter Cammarano. I’m not surprised that a mayor would get caught up in this; this is New Jersey, after all, and Secaucus mayor Dennis Elwell and Ridgefield mayor Anthony Suarez were also arrested (I linked to the Google caches, in case industrious city workers remember to yank these). No, what surprises me is that Cammarano has only been on the job since July 1. And he’s being accused of taking$25,000 in that time. So this man, if the charges are to be believed, has taken over $1,000 in bribes for every day that he’s been on the job. He should be happy the feds arrested him; how could he have possibly kept up that pace? Also, it might be good for him that this happened so quickly, before he could make more incredibly boneheaded statements. All in all, I’m pretty sure that this is not what Cammarano had in mind last night (his 32nd birthday!) as he poured beer  for the opening night of Hoboken’s St. Ann’s festival.