Thursday bits (protest, DSL, feline antics)

[cellio]

Tonight while driving through Squirrel Hill I noticed a large crowd walking up the sidewalk. As I parked the group reached me and I saw that they were protesting the war ("no blood for oil" being the pervasive chant). I walked with them for a block or so, raising the average age a bit, before veering off for groceries. It occurred to me only later that its placement on Veterans' Day was probably not an accident.

Our usually-reliable DSL service has been having random short outages for the last several weeks. (Usually 10-15 minutes, a few times a week.) I'm not sure how to test whether it's the DSL service itself or our 5-year-old modem, though, short of acquiring a test modem. So I sent mail to our provider asking if they had other reports and/or debugging hints. (I noticed in passing that their service hours now end at 8PM. I've had productive conversations with them at midnight in the past. Oh well. 8PM is reasonable; I'd just gotten used to hacker hours.)

Ok, Embla is capable of making normal meowing sounds, as opposed to that quiet chirpy thing she usually does. It just has to be Important. Like, say, being trapped between the window and the screen on a cold evening. For calibration purposes, the time a contractor sealed her into a wall she was silent for a long time, even though I was in the room calling her.

(What was she doing there tonight? Well, our sink was plugged up, so we had initiated chemical warfare, but the chemicals gave off mustard gas or something, and we had to open the windows to help with dispersion. I didn't notice the cat on the windowsill when I pushed the window closed later. Fortunately, she was quick to alert me.)

Comments

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

I'll be honest: I find the "no blood for oil" slogan pretty irksome.

[cellio]

So do I. And they had better signs for that, the most chantable of which might have been "why die for a lie?".

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

I'm not terribly fond of politics-by-slogan in general. It's catchy, but it doesn't do much to convey what's actually going on. I have reason to think I might have stronger wonkish tendencies (especially when the oil industry is involved) than many, but I do think it's important at least to try to take a deeper look at things.

[cellio]

I'm not terribly fond of politics-by-slogan in general.

Slogans are not meaningful political discourse. All they can do is get someone's attention so that you can then engage in that discourse. Some slogan-wielders understand this; others don't. Oh well.

[caryabend.livejournal.com]

So I guess chanting, "Use Your Brain!" has some serious irony value.

[cellio]

I love it!

(For some reason it's calling to mind "we are all individuals!". :-) )

(Why yes, I do think the previous sentence was correctly punctuated.)