23-Jul-2008 (wed) [23 Jul 2008|08:59am] dnalounge http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2008/07.html#23 Photos are up of Everything Goes Cold (apparently nobody took any photos of the other three bands?), of the Zivity Batman Party, of Hubba Hubba Revue's "Jolly Olde England" show (don't miss their "Benny Hill" video!), and also of Immigrant performing at the final Pop Roxx. It was a great turnout for the last one, because everybody loves a funeral... If we could have gotten that kind of attendance regularly, it wouldn't have stopped! To commemorate the final event, we gave away a bunch of compilation CDs of most of the bands who have played at Pop Roxx over the last two and a half years. It wasn't all of the bands, because there were too many to fit on an audio CD, so we had to leave a few off. If you didn't manage to pick one up, you can still listen to it as this week's mixtape. This is the "director's cut" of that CD: it's almost the complete set of Pop Roxx bands. It is only missing tracks by three bands (Pretty Vicious, Landshark, and Sunday Drivers), because somehow I managed not to get CDs by those bands, and I wasn't able to track down MP3s in time. We had a lot of great bands at Pop Roxx! I'll miss it. Starting in September, every third Saturday will be a new party called Super Ego. Stay tuned... post comment

dnalounge update [23 Jul 2008|01:59am] jwz [ music | Portishead -- Machine Gun ] DNA Lounge update, wherein mostly photos are presented. 3 comments|post comment

Fortune [22 Jul 2008|11:39pm] jwz Seriously? That's the weak-assed shit you bring to the fortune cookie game? Seriously? 8 comments|post comment

[22 Jul 2008|11:36pm] exoskeleton , originally uploaded by ashleyniblock. post comment

[22 Jul 2008|11:34pm] exoskeleton , originally uploaded by ashleyniblock. post comment

LOLnomics: I can has utility [22 Jul 2008|09:27pm] ch Economics explained with LOLcats. post comment

I really don't know why I bother [22 Jul 2008|08:40pm] ch David Brooks at http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/18/from-the-mountaintop/ writes: [Obama's] Iraq statements are a sign of his thoroughly political nature. When the surge was being considered, he went on TV again and again and said the additional troops would not reduce violence. Today, he could just admit he was wrong. But, of course, it is an iron rule of politics that no politician — not Bush, not Obama — can ever admit a mistake. So Obama goes on TV and says he always predicted that the surge would reduce violence. In America it’s better to be seen as a confident liar than as someone who once got something wrong. And he rewrites his position with such confidence and bald-facedness it’s sort of scary. (emphasis mine) I have to admit I used to have a sense of what kind of president Obama would make. Now I have no clue. I am not suggesting McCain is significantly better, though I don't think he lies. 3 comments|post comment

"We don't know what we are seeing." [22 Jul 2008|08:10pm] ch Whatever video you nmight see on Obama's visit to Iraq and Afghanistan, bear in mind that it was staged. Andrea Mitchell, on MSNBC's Hardball, on the use of these materials: ANDREA MITCHELL: This is message [referring to the video MSNBC played] -- Let me just say something about the message management. He didn't have reporters with him, he didn't have a press pool, he didn't do a press conference while he was on the ground in either Afghanistan or Iraq. What you're seeing is not [what?] reporters brought in. You're seeing selected pictures taken by the military, questions by the military, and what some would call fake interviews, because they're not interviews from a journalist. So, there's a real press issue here. Politically it's smart as can be. But we've not seen a presidential candidate do this, in my recollection, ever before. post comment

Uh [22 Jul 2008|08:12pm] valdelane Country Conditions for Mailing — Canada ... The following must not be accepted for insurance: Bees, postage stamps (canceled and uncanceled) and albums in which they are mounted, and parcels addressed to CFPOs. ... http://pe.usps.com/text/Imm/ce_003.htm#ep2041503 post comment

reframing [22 Jul 2008|03:25pm] inhumandecency I've been struggling to start exercising regularly again. I was pretty wiped out for the first week after the move, and it's practically impossible to keep up with my strength training without access to a gym. I should finally get my ID card sometime this week, and then be able to join the UCSF gym, but I'm still afraid I might flake out. Today I saw a poster for a study on chromium supplementation and blood sugar regulation. Unlike most studies, it didn't exclude me for demographic reasons or due to any of my numerous problems. Payment for participation is $500 over 4 months, plus you get free chromium supplements and medical exams, and all sorts of neat tests! However, you're not allowed to exercise. So: In economic terms, I'm paying $500 for the privilege of exercising over the next four months (plus whatever it costs to join the gym). If it's worth that much to me, then there's no question I'll go and do it! post comment

birthday [22 Jul 2008|01:51pm] queenofhalves my 30th birthday is october 13. honestly, i can't wait to leave my 20s behind. they were very difficult. i'm not sure what i'd like to happen. on the weekend closest to my birthday, i have to work with youth on sunday morning, so i'd only be able to be away from home on friday night. there's a witchcraft campout that weekend, but i think most of the people i'm closest to are not going, which makes it less appealing. i will have a bit more money than i do now then, but i'm still going to be operating on a tight budget. what did you do/what would you want to do on your 30th birthday? 21 comments|post comment

We're not keeping up [22 Jul 2008|01:05pm] the_macnab There's a good story by Louis Uchitelle, one of the Times's labor reporters, today on how the economic downturn has contributed to a decline in women's labor-force participation. (I know that household work should be included in any definition of the labor force. I agree that most modern service industries can only be understood as the commodification of previously unpaid domestic work. I'm working with the narrow definitions of the Labor Department for the moment.) Executive summary: Every recovery since the 1958 recession has ended with more women in the labor force (as a share of all women) than it started with. The 2001-2007 recovery saw a slight drop in participation, though, and that's expected to accelerate as the economy tanks. It's an interesting empirical phenomenon. You can see how the perceptions of previous decades shaped the interpretation of this data for several years. Academics and policymakers long perceived a large voluntary component in the growth of women's labor-force participation. The quest for social equality, status or something similar was seen as at least as important in drawing women out of the home and into the paid workforce as economic pressures were. Withdrawal from the labor force was also perceived to have a voluntary component: motherhood, spending time with the kids, etc. Yet of course there was always a counter-narrative based entirely on classic labor-market factors, such as declining real (and sometimes nominal) wages for male workers. I've mentioned before (and I'm hardly alone) that almost all the increase in Americans' real standard of living since the early 1970s has come from increased female labor-force participation. Even that, we think, may be chimeric, because an income scale doesn't correct for exactly the commodification of previously unpaid domestic work necessary to allow many women to operate in the paid labor force. But the bigger point still holds: to stay in place, many households had to add another wage-earner. Now we're finally noticing the other half of that story. If economic conditions are a better explanation for women entering the workforce than sociological aspirations are, then those economic conditions should also better explain women's withdrawal from the labor force. It's this shift in thinking that Uchitelle's article describes. I give the dude credit: he explains both the misconception and the realization. So do many of the researchers he quotes: “When we saw women starting to drop out in the early part of this decade, we thought it was the motherhood movement, women staying home to raise their kids,” Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Joint Economic Committee of Congress...said in an interview. “We did not think it was the economy, but when we looked into it, we realized that it was.” I suspect several people are reading this and thinking, "How could they have ever thought that it wasn't the economy, Stupid?" But it's more complicated than that. The US labor force has been dominated by wage earners for about a century. For most of that time, women were disproportionately concentrated in a few industries and occupations. Remedying this, of course, was a major goal of the women's movement. One unintended impact of that odd distribution, though, was that women's employment was less sensitive to general swings in the business cycle than men's employment was. Thus the business cycle (however defined) was never as good a predictor of women's participation and pay as it has of men's.* Go back and look at my earlier post, for example, and you'll see that women's wages rose in the 1970s and early 1980s, against a declining economy, while men's wages declined. Thus the general business cycle's coming to dominate changes in female participation is an empirical change, not just the scales falling from researchers' eyes. The upshot is that though gender segregation is still widespread in the US, especially by occupation, it has decreased enough over the last generation that women as a group now resemble men in their vulnerability to business cycles. Talk about a bittersweet finding! This doesn't imply that women are paid or treated the same as men in all jobs, of course, As the article continues: The women, in sum, are for the first time withdrawing from work with the same uniformity as men in their prime working years. Ninety-six percent of the men held jobs in 1953, their peak year. That is down to 86.4 percent today. But while men are rarely thought of as dropping out to run the household, that is often the assumption when women pull out. “A woman gets laid off and she stays home for six months with her kids,” Ms. Boushey said. “She doesn’t admit that she is staying home because she could not get another acceptable job.” * If you remember Gary Becker's dictum that discrimination acts like a constraint on free-market activity then this makes complete sense. (I agree with Becker's metaphor, though I disagree with the ways he tried to push it.) 1 comment|post comment

dns attack of doom [22 Jul 2008|08:54am] evan_tech [evan] If I've learned anything from the new Kaminsky DNS attack, it's that if you want to keep something a secret while disclosing to a trusted subset of vendors, you do not include publicity-hungry overeager bloggers in the list of people who can keep their mouths shut. 2 comments|post comment

[22 Jul 2008|12:13am] exoskeleton , originally uploaded by ashleyniblock. 1 comment|post comment

[22 Jul 2008|12:12am] exoskeleton , originally uploaded by ashleyniblock. post comment

At this time next week... [21 Jul 2008|11:23pm] royalbananafish ...I will already be in Arcata, half way to the new place. I am still ISO wardrobe-sized boxes, the kind with bars to hang stuff on. I've tried freecycle and am stalking craiglist. Portland area leads are welcome. Tomorrow: work long-ish hours LSAT helpline during "lunch" sell books at Powells and more! 2 comments|post comment

You can take the boy out of Texas... [21 Jul 2008|08:36pm] don_negro As y'all may or may not know, I've moved from the East Bay into San Francisco proper. One of the biggest enticements I had moving out of my idyllic zen sinecure in El Cerrito (where other people did the shopping and cleaning and all I had to do was keep my door closed and pay the rent on time, and I could see the entire bay from my deck and my bedroom window) was the opportunity to cook whatever I wanted. And as should completely unsurprising, what I want to cook is barbeque. But there's no place to put a barbeque pit in my new apartment in the Inner Richmond - what to do? The answer? Fireplace. This weekend, I built a smoker into my fireplace, and smoked some pork ribs. It was excellent. What you're looking at is a frame built of 1/2 inch galvanized pipe which supports a grill and a smoke hood made from the lid of an enameled roasting pan, combined with the body of the roasting pan which is where the coals and the smoking medium (in this case, waterlogged mesquite chips and chopped onions) go. I've wanted a barbeque pit like this for a long time. In this configuration, you have direct access to the coals, can add more charcoal, or smoking medium, at will, can measure the temperature of both the coals and the meat directly, and can look up at the bottom of the meat on the grill without having to take the lid off and stop the smoking process. I've only cooked one thing on it, but I already see huge opportunities for experimentation and progress. So, anytime anyone is down for an afternoon of beer-drinking and conversation, show up at my house with some meat and we'll fire this thing up. 16 comments|post comment

mail? [21 Jul 2008|04:52pm] inhumandecency Has anyone tried to send me mail since the beginning of June? I think my mail might have been disappearing at the coop, and be continuing to do so here. post comment

Pop Roxx Black [21 Jul 2008|10:53am] lilmissnever Everybody loves a funeral. Normally, I would attribute this turn of phrase to JWZ, but the honor goes to Da5id Din, who made this same observation many years ago, when Assimilate had its sixth or seventh very last night ever. People always show up for births and deaths, he said. Everybody loves a funeral. Let us not mourn the death of Pop Roxx, but celebrate its life. Let us celebrate Barry in his array of multicolored zoot suits. Let us celebrate the DJ's, who mostly played music I did not find to be offensive. Let us celebrate the Bootie lounge, which was often so crowded that it was impossible to get from one end to the other. Let us celebrate Eric, drunk and puking and possibly passed out on my couch. Let us celebrate the go-gos, dressed like a tragic paper shredder accident at the Leg Avenue factory. Let us celebrate the bands: Lurid Bliss and the Epoxies and those other guys whose names I cannot recall. Let us dance on boxes and wonder where our drinks went and stand irritated behind drunk people kissing. I was not always good to you, Pop Roxx, especially not in the last year, when everything went slow and no one was really steering the ship. I cheated on you with other clubs. I cheated on you with house parties. I stayed home and fell asleep on the couch. But you had your moments. There were times when you were sublime. I raise this Cosmopolitan in your honor. I am sad to see you go, but I am also glad that I can finally throw those orange and black striped thigh-highs away. 18 comments|post comment

Tuesday @ 7 PM @ Opal Divine's Downtown [21 Jul 2008|12:51pm] lexicat That's right, tomorrow night, scotch (for me) at opal divine's in the evening. Be there! 1 comment|post comment

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