I am discovering that the best way to sniff out the overachieving students in my classes is to assign a map quiz.  I gave them a study guide last week with a list of about 30 locations and then picked 15 of those for the quiz yesterday.  The overachievers finished early, of course, and then filled in the places that I did not choose to test them on.  I never promised extra credit for that; I will assume that they are psychologically incapable of leaving parts of a map blank.

This has been another strange week.  Perhaps 2008 is shaping up to be a memorably strange year.

A week and a half after Hurricane Ike's three-day blackout ended, and a week after we restocked the refrigerator with supplies, I stuffed a pizza box in there, which propped the fridge door open all night and ruined all the newly-purchased food inside.  I'm helpful that way.

Congratulations to becc367  for passing her general exams!  She's heard it a thousand times already, I'm sure, but I'm contractually obligated to say "OK, now about that dissertation..."

We've been doing all kinds of house-type stuff, so the whole place is in disarray, but we're making progress.  The living room is about halfway painted, and I've only ruined three brushes in the process.  I'm helpful that way too.  Next up: more yard work!

Most importantly, today we put down a fairly hefty deposit on a child, which makes sense if you've been reading stinky_monky's journal.  Children are on back-order right now, though, so we will have to wait for the factory to catch up.  We're thinking 2009 electric blue, heated leather seats, ten fingers, ten toes, and my eyebrows.  We're hoping my vision and lungs will not be part of the package.  The dealer says we'll get an update in 6-8 weeks.

Wow, the sh*t is just piling up on the John McCain campaign today.  First, he did the about face and will debate Barack Obama tonight (which shouldn't be surprising to anyone, especially since the bailout negotiations disintegrated just when McCain stepped into the fray).  Now a bunch of big name conservative commentators, including George Will, David Brooks, David Frum, and Kathleen Parker are all calling for Sarah Palin to remove herself from the McCain ticket because of her exceedingly obvious inadequacies (Exhibit A is here, courtesy of tim_wright ).  I understand that many Americans do not pay as much attention to this stuff as I (and most of my flist) do, but come on, at least some of this has to be filtering through.

I'm really looking forward to tonight's debate.  Even though McCain is declaring victory in the debate before it even happened.

So John McCain wants to call a time out on the presidential campaign to deal with the economic crisis?  Does he think we should postpone the election in November too?  Maybe keep Bush in office because of how well he has handled things so far?  We held presidential elections during the Civil War, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the Iraq War.  We held a presidential election in 1932, at the freakin' peak of the Great Depression!

Is anybody fooled by this?  He wants to look like a leader who is willing to defer his personal ambition, and he wants Congress to figure out this mess so he doesn't have to formulate any ideas on his own.  He will be able to deflect any questions about the economy by saying that it's premature to discuss delicate negotiations and that the American people will have to wait until there is a bipartisan agreement.  And he gets to bonus of criticizing Obama for not thinking of it first.  And he gets to run away from Friday's debate.

He wants to go hide in Congress instead of facing the voters and the press.  This is pathetic.

This has been a very strange week.  The most obvious strangeness was the unexpected hurricane that came through on Sunday and knocked out the electricity for three days (for us, there are lots of other people who are just now getting their power back).  Then there was a conference paper proposal that my advisers didn't like because they thought it sounded more like a dissertation proposal (which is ironic because I don't really have a dissertation proposal and I don't want to write a dissertation on that proposed paper topic), so they want me to start over.  And then our dog started throwing up at 4am yesterday and kept doing it all day and into this morning.  He seemed to get better throughout the day today, but I missed some of it because I got to go to Lowe's a couple times (and stinky_monky  had to make an additional trip) for house stuff.  Now I'm freakin' exhausted and don't wanna start school in four days.  School stinks!


( Hey look, a meme! What's that doing here? )

It has been 46 hours since the Great Blackout began, and humanity is on the brink.  Refrigerated foodstuffs are dying by the millions, and well-stocked freezers are not expected to last the night.  Credit card machines are down and inventories are getting low at area restaurants (even at McDonald's, which everybody has begun to look to as the savior of civilization).  Local civilian authorities have panicked and fled the streets.  Corporate leaders are stepping in and making promises they may not be able to keep. 

Whoever restores electricity to central Ohio will be treated as a god and will wield supreme authority throughout the land.  But who will stand up to this new corporate dictator?

Find out in my forthcoming screenplay, which will be out sometime after Sunday when the frickin' lights come back on...

I made it back to Columbus Saturday night just in time to hear that the OSU football team crapped out again on the national stage.  Good thing we are only playing against other crappy Big Ten teams for the rest of the season...

I also made it back in time for Hurricane Ike to arrive in Ohio.  Ike left his rain behind in the South but still threw enough wind at us yesterday to knock out power to the entire city.  Unfortunately, our electricity provider had sent most of its response teams to Texas to help with the damage from Ike, so they have to recall all those guys before we will get power restored.  At this point they're saying about a week, though they hope to revise that over the next day or two.  Which means I will be on campus, which is functioning like normal, a lot more this week than I had planned.  Luckily I have something like 6,500 pages of documents and 300 newspaper articles from my trip to catalog and organize, in addition to writing next week's lectures, writing up a grant proposal and a presentation proposal, and who knows what else, so I certainly won't be bored.

We were thinking about having a "last weekend before school starts" party this weekend where everybody helps us get through the Endless Setlist on Rock Band, but we'll have to see if AEP's crews have made it back to Ohio by then.  Alas, Harmonix hasn't managed to include an "unplugged" setting in Rock Band yet.  Maybe in Rock Band 2.  Click click click click...

But we are also toying with the idea of having a big barbecue tonight to cook all the meat that is going to go bad over the next couple days.  So if anybody in the area wants to join us, gimme a call.

tim_wright  wrote up a description of driving in LA a few days ago that pretty much sums up my opinion after driving around here for a week and a half.  Once you get over the initial terror, Los Angeles is the best city to drive in.  People know where they want to be, they know how to get there, and they follow unspoken but universal rules to do it (although those rules might not reflect the California Vehicle Code).  I had never driven in L.A. before this trip, and it showed.  But now I'm not looking forward to dealing with Columbus drivers again.

The only observation I can add to what Tim wrote is that Los Angelenos are unique in their reverence for their highways.  In Columbus (and in Sacramento and in every other town I've lived in), we call our freeways simply "I-5" or "71" or, if we want to get flowery, "the outer belt."  L.A. residents like to point out the uniqueness of every road with a definite article : "the 405" or "the 710."  I suppose it makes sense; Los Angeles highways are monstrous beasts that gorge on motor vehicles, slowly pump them through massive digestive systems, and eventually squeeze them out miles from where they entered, usually unharmed but occasionally demolished.  These beasts deserve the utmost respect because they will take sacrifices (i.e. careless drivers) at any time.  Pray that it is not you.  Worship the beasts, but make sure to point out which beast you are honoring.

I just finished my fifth day of research at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, and it looks like I'll wrap up there tomorrow.  For now, would you perhaps like a tour of the Happiest Place on Earth (Simi Valley branch)?

( Oh, what wonders await inside... )

After a week here, I'm starting to think Ronald Reagan was the greatest man who ever lived.  Somebody slap me.

The History Channel is showing a marathon of Ice Road Truckers, as it seems to almost every weekend, which provides decent background noise while I'm working.  I just looked up and saw a scene where a truck driver is sitting in a lounge watching TV.  The show's producers superimposed scenes from the History Channel's other show, Ax Men, over whatever the guy was actually watching.  There can never be enough product placement in this world.

Jeez, it's Friday already?!?  Time flies when you're, uh, doing whatever the hell I'm doing.

What am I doing?  Oh, right, taking pictures of hundreds and hundreds of documents in the hope that something will gel into a dissertation.  And driving to get to places where I can take pictures of useful documents.  And sometimes doing other stuff.  I'll tell you what I haven't been doing: keeping up on all the madcap fun of the Republican National Convention!  Damn.  But I've had plenty of folks (mom, wife, friends) keeping me up to date on the fun.  And by fun I mean rising blood pressure and cursing at the TV.  And that sentence was constructed poorly.  And I should stop beginning sentences with "and."

The choice of Sarah Palin for McCain's VP is mind-bogglingly insulting.  Even beyond the presumptuous idea that half of all Americans will suddenly vote Republican because they have vaginas and look! the vice presidential nominee also has a vagina!  (Not that I've seen proof that Palin has a vagina, but I've never seen proof that Barack Obama has a penis either, so I'll give them both the benefit of the doubt.)  Beyond that is the insulting idea that someone who served as the mayor of a town with 9,000 residents and who served as governor of a state that has less than 100 times that amount and has never exhibited any desire to get to know the outside world is somehow ready to step in and lead the most powerful nation in the world when McCain finally gives in to the PTSD that anybody in their right mind would have after being subjected to what Fred Thompson described in his speech the other night.  (Now that sentence was epic.)  Yes, Obama has less executive experience than Palin.  So does Joe Biden.  So does John McCain.  So did John Frickin' Kennedy (or was it Fitzgerald?  I always get the two mixed up).  But Obama has spent the last six years immersing himself in foreign and domestic policy issues and preparing himself for the presidency.  Palin has never indicated any desire to immerse herself in anything except flip-flopping on pork projects like the Bridge to Nowhere.  Earlier this year she asked what exactly the vice president does.  Conservatives are supposed to be strict constructionists, so go read the Constitution: vice presidents don't do anything except wait for presidents to die!

Sigh.  Anyway.  I've had kind of a strange, action-packed week.  Monday evening I finally saw my host even though I had theoretically been living in her house for two days by that point.  She had been off camping in the hills, playing a banjo and getting hammered.  Then she came back and started working on a presentation that she has to give in front of a few hundred people in Las Vegas next week, so I did some reading.

Tuesday found me roaming around the USC campus, looking for the special library that houses the Regional History Collection and the Gov. Jerry Brown papers.  In a weird bit of culture shock, I kept spotting signs saying "Ohio State," which made me feel vaguely welcome until I realized that the word "beat" was always written in conjunction with those signs.  Thankfully I had enough foresight to not wear my OSU T-shirt that day.  The entire college football season will be decided when OSU and USC play on September 13.  I'll be on the plane back to Ohio that day, fleeing the carnage.

There wasn't as much in the Jerry Brown papers as I had thought, so I finished in one day, though I had scheduled a week there.  So I have a lot more time for other places.  Nice.

Since I finished early, I decided to give myself a day off from archives on Wednesday.  I sat at Panera for five hours organizing my notes and such, and in so doing I really pissed off the rent-a-cops who enforce the parking code in the Panera parking lot.  My punishment for parking there three and a half hours beyond the maximum time was two post-it notes on the back window and a generic triplicate form under the wiper blade that threatened to tow the car away if I did it again.  Too bad they don't have the power to fine me.  Suckers.

By an astonishing coincidence, tim_wright  found his way to the Los Angeles area in search of dissertation material this week, and we managed to meet up at the Queen Mary in Long Beach Wednesday night.  When I mentioned this to stinky_monky  she thought I meant a gay bar.  Which made me giggle.  So, long story short, Tim and I managed to have a good dinner and discuss lots of school-type stuff.  He actually has a dissertation question and answer, while I only have a vague sense of where I'm going.  Jerk.

Yesterday I started doing research at the Reagan Library, and I have to say, from a professional point of view, that thank God Reagan became president.  The only reason I have access to this mountain of great material from his years as governor is because he became famous.  If not, all this stuff would have probably been dumped down an oil well or something.  In my two days there I've taken pictures of almost 1700 pages of documents, and I have a week left.

I have other stories (like an explanation for why I hate the Swiss), but it's time to pass out.  I'm so gonna sleep in tomorrow.

Los Angeles is a very strange place, in that a twenty-mile separation there seems almost as insurmountable as the distance between Ohio and California.  By a lucky coincidence, two of my friends from Northern California will be in the LA area over the next two weeks, and we have already entered logistical negotiations over when and where to meet, but all of us are keeping a wary eye on traffic reports.  As one example of the power of LA traffic, my Google map to Simi Valley says that my 47.1 mile trip could take up to two hours, at just the times I will probably be making that journey.  Yay.

In contrast to my concerns about traversing the 20 miles between Santa Monica and Irvine, I thought nothing of driving 200 miles to Visalia today to spend the night at my brother's house.  Visalia is, well, an armpit, really.  It's 30 miles south of Fresno, in the middle of hundreds of miles of agricultural land, and normally about 150 degrees fahrenheit.  Today it was about 98 degrees, which felt positively brisk.  The burst housing bubble has left the landscape littered with half-finished McMansions and tattered Reynan & Bardis pennants along the wide streets that disappear just as the asphalt turns to gravel and then rutted dirt roads, giving Visalia an apocalyptic feel.  The heat really helps with that feeling too.

One thing that I didn't really notice while I was gone but am realizing now is that Californians have a lot of booze handy at a moment's notice.  I guess that comes from being able to buy liquor at the supermarket instead of having to go to those dirty state liquor stores like in Ohio.  Firewater may be one of the defining characteristics of this trip.

Oh, and the American-made rental car I will be using for the first half of my trip has an odd quirk: when I use the turn signal, the windshield wipers turn on until I wiggle the turn signal lever.  That car hasn't needed to use windshield wipers since February, I'd bet, but it insists on wiping the glass every time I make a turn.  Precision engineering, there.

Holy crap, things are finally getting rolling at the Convention.

Bill Clinton was on fire tonight, and he did what the Dems needed him to do: tear the GOP a new one and refute Hillary's criticisms that Obama is inexperienced and unfit to lead the country.

John Kerry came out swinging, calling out the Swift Boaters by name.  Goddamn, if only he had given tonight's speech four years ago...

Joe Biden's mom is hardcore.

And then, as is all the rage in movies these days, after the climax and the credits start to roll, the producers manage to squeeze in one more scene.  In this case the star himself, Barack Obama, came out to congratulate Biden and to invite everyone to the party tomorrow night at Mile High Stadium.  That should be quite a show, and it will be interesting to watch the McCain camp try to spin the event in campaign ads to argue that Obama is too popular to be president.  This oughta be good.

Day 1:

Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, is not a very good speaker. 

Ted Kennedy's speech was very moving, if only because of the strength he displayed in the face of the awful brain tumor which will kill him sometime during the next few months. 

Former Rep. Jim Leach, a Republican from Iowa, was in many ways that harshest critic of the Bush administration and the Republican Party that spoke during the first night.  Republicans, who "once emphasized individual rights has gravitated in recent years toward regulating values. The party of military responsibility has taken us to war with a country that did not attack us. The party that formerly led the world in arms control has moved to undercut treaties crucial to the defense of the earth. The party that prides itself on conservation has abdicated its responsibilities in the face of global warming. And the party historically anchored in fiscal restraint has nearly doubled the national debt, squandering our precious resources in an undisciplined and unprecedented effort to finance a war with tax cuts."  He advocated bipartisanship and gave what I thought was a neat summary of some of the great political debates that have raged throughout American history:

Perspective is difficult to bring to events of the day, but in sweeping terms, there have been four great debates in our history to which both parties have contributed. The first debate, led by Thomas Jefferson, the first Democrat to be elected president, centered on the question of whether a country could be established, based on The Rights of Man.

The second debate, led by Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican to be elected president, was about definitions—whether The Rights of Man applied to individuals who were neither pale nor male. It took almost two centuries of struggle, hallmarked by a civil war, the suffrage and abolitionist movements, the Harlem renaissance and a courageous civil rights leadership to bring meaning to the values embedded in the Declaration of Independence.
 
The third debate, symbolized by the new deal of Franklin Roosevelt and the emphasis on individual initiative of Ronald Reagan, involves the question of opportunity, whether rights are fully meaningful if all citizens are not given a chance to succeed and provide for their families.
 
The fourth debate, which acquired grim relevance with the dawn of the nuclear age, is the question of whether any rights are possible without peace and environmental security.

I hope Michelle Obama's speech shuts up some of her critics who focus on her "for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country" gaffe and her terrorist fist jab, but I doubt it.  She provided a human portrait of the party nominee, and the part where the kids talked to their father's giant head on a screen was cute.


Day 2:

Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano is quite proud of her state's tradition of producing losing presidential candidates, even though some of them were Democrats...?

The Republican mayor of Fairbanks, Alaska, is going to vote for Obama!  One down, 50 million Republicans to go...

Hillary Clinton just gave a really good speech.  It stressed unity and support for Obama and gave a moving narrative of the struggle for gender and racial equality in the twentieth century (obviously this twentieth century stuff is on my mind as I write up my lectures for next quarter).  Unfortunately she failed to call out her diehard supporters who want to vote for McCain as a protest against Obama "stealing" the nomination.  She needed to stress that a vote for McCain was a vote against everything that she and her true supporters have ever stood for: equal pay, reproductive rights, better health care, and non-discrimination.  And she needs to continue to harp on this until November.  Everybody needs to harp on this until November.

Another action-packed weekend is in the books.  Saturday saw us on another road trip in pursuit of fruit, though this time we picked a whole bunch of peaches and apples outside of Utica.  I'm not sure what we're going to do with the half bushel of apples in the kitchen, but stinky_monky figured out how to cook, store, and/or freeze the peaches.  We spent two hours cooking, peeling, chopping, and sometimes pureeing last night and made it through about half of what we brought home.  Yesterday we were up running errands by 7am, and it's amazing how much stuff you can get done when you drag yourself out of bed that early.  We bought a new bed for the guest room since both sets of parents are coming to visit between now and Thanksgiving.  And we helped becc367 perform a fur extraction on one of her kitties.  And we did some other stuff.

Today is the first day of my week off.  Technically, I have 3.5 weeks until the next quarter starts, but I'll be spending two of those weeks in Southern California.  So during my "week off" I get to put together my entire freakin' class for next quarter and put together the first couple of lectures since I won't have much time after I return.  Oh, and I'm supposed to put together a paper proposal for a conference but I'm just not really into it.  It's for a business history conference, and while I actually enjoy business history I just don't have much to contribute.  The main reason I'm trying is that the conference will be in Milan, Italy, and the conference might help me pay for a trip to Europe, which rocks.

Speaking of which, my trip to SoCal is finally finalized.  I'll be in the Los Angeles area between Saturday, August 30, and Saturday, September 13.  So if anybody reading this will be in the area, give me a call and we can meet up for some surfing or sunbathing or auditioning or whatever the hell it is that people do in Los Angeles.  I'll be digging through the Governor Brown papers at USC for the first week and then I'll head to the Reagan Library for the second week.  The California Historical Society wants me to put on some kind of program for them on Reagan's years as governor while i'm there, but the library's Communications Director has fallen off the planet (he's probably auditioning for some new movie about a bureaucrat-turned-action star), so those plans will probably fall through.  Though it would be nice to pad my CV with that, I should probably focus on research anyway.  I'd like to graduate someday.

And oh yeah: 

Obama/Biden '08!

The quarter officially ended yesterday when I sent off my students' grades, and I celebrated by cooking one of stinky_monky's celebrated barbecue chicken pizzas.  Good thing we planned ahead.  It took about a week to assemble the ingredients, create the dough (science in action!), make the bbq sauce (onions, garlic, ketchup, worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, pepper, allspice, bay leaf, celery seed, brown sugar, and probably some others stuff I've forgotten), shred the cheese, fry up the bacon, poach the chicken.  But last night it all came together in one moment (well, about an hourlong moment) of gloriousness!



Kneel before the gloriousness!

Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about...

I decided today that if this whole graduate school thing doesn't work out I could always be a migrant farm worker picking produce.  I made this discovery while picking blueberries at a farm near Mansfield.  It was an incredibly nice day and stinky_monky saw an episode of Good Eats on blueberries this morning and there is a blueberry festival going on in Lexington this weekend, so there we went.  We never found the actual festival, but we found a pick-your-own blueberry farm along the way.


Day trips rule.

Time to do some namedropping, just 'cause I should really post something. 

Happy Birthday, abigor60!  And thanks for the goodies.  Reciprocation is forthcoming (he said, mysteriously).

And I just found out tonight that I need to mention theeugene more often than I do.  I found that out from him tonight, during one of his semi-regular drunk calls.  And I told him that I would be more apt to mention him if he posted to his LJ more than once in two-and-a-half years.  So, now it's back on you, hombre!

Russia invaded Georgia because Georgia invaded South Ossetia (I may be simplifying things a bit), and this weekend tsarnrm and sylverfox9 will be flying into the warzone for a few weeks.  Well, they'll be in Moscow, which is thousands (I presume) of miles away from the fighting.  Being an ignorant American, I just assume that they will walk into a street battle when they get off the plane.  Good thing sylverfox has military training...

From: *****@doj.ca.gov
To: rdchino


Hi rdchino,

The Attorney General approved your request to access his papers.  Please let me know if you need anything else.  Thank you.

*****
Special Assistant Attorney General


Now I have something else to do in Los Angeles next month!  Sweet!