beisbol

The Red Sox are done, but I think Boston Fans will probably let them off the hook for losing to the best team in baseball and because everyone there's still pretty stoked about last year and you can't knock a team that had two players hit over 45 Home Runs this season. (I don't care if Alex Rodriguez invents the cure for alzheimers, David Ortiz deserves the AL MVP far more. "A-Rod" makes 25 million dollars a year, played ok defense, sometimes terrible, and hit .321 with 47 home runs. Ortiz makes 6 million dollars a year, hit .297 with 48 HR and over 140 RBI. And he's the best clutch hitter in baseball, with the possible exception of Manny Ramirez, who's hit more grand slams than anyone in history except for Lou Gherig. Also, A-Rod did that slap thing against Bronson Arroyo in the ALCS last year, and that should count against him. Cort Schilling, asshole fundamentalist anti-NYC millionaire that he is, was right to call that shit "bush-league.") One more loss and the Yankees are out, which Mets fans around New York are silently and sometimes vocally praying for. Other than that, I hate the Braves for the racist nomenclature and for ever having employed John Rocker, so i hope they lose, but i don't want Houston to win either, because Clemens is a schmuck and Petite used to be a Yankee and Oswalt's a schmuck too (just ask Cliff Floyd.) I could root for the White Sox now that the Mets and Red Sox are out. My grandfather grew up a White Sox fan in the post scandal era when no one was a White Sox fan. But Carl Everett is an asshole. And if they go up against St. Louis in the World Series, assuming STL can beat whoever wins the Braves-Astros series, i think they'll lose, barring another collapse/ridiculous pitching dominance like the Cardinals had and faced last year.

public transit and permanent catastrophe

This afternoon, Mayor Bloomberg announced that the city has received a specified bomb threat against a specified subway station. They won't tell us which, or when the threat's for, which is info they also have. They won't tell us why they were chainsawing bikes in Williamsburg instead of protecting the subways. I think Sunset Park probably isn't a target, but as i was riding home tonight on the D from Broadway-Lafayette i felt vulnerable, i felt precarious, like at any minute the train would explode in a pinwheel of shrapnel and plastic and rip me and everyone else on the train to pieces. Folks are saying the warning is convveniently timed on all kinds of levels and the NYPD is searching baby carriages and bags and terrorizing people on their morning commutes and i just feel pissed. So i'm going to walk to the East Village right now for our departmental OC (that's Organizing Committee, not Orange County, although sometimes i've found the two to be remarkably similar) meeting and hope i don't get blown up on the way home. But hey, if i do, well, you guys rock.

Yale Invests In Private Prisons

Yale invests 1.5 million dollars in private prisons via Farallon Capital Management's financial intanglements in notorious corporate merchants of the penal, CCA. Folks who've been following the breathtaking investigations into the Yale endowment's imperial involvements might not be particularly surprised at the news, but I can speak for myself and say that I'm disgusted that money that comes in part from student tuition and alumni donations is privatizing the prison-industrial complex. I'm disgusted, though again not surprised, which in itself disgusts me, by Tom Conroy's unbelievably callous dismissals of evidence that the university is essentially investing in prisoner abuse. And I'm glad that GESO and the federation are around to organize for a better university, one neither carceral nor casualized, but, as Paul Gilroy might say, "convivial."

NYU invests in Farallon too.

I'm Like a Walking Slingshot

Besides being Rosh Hashanah, today was October 4th, and thus marked the second anniversary of the Flushing Meadows IWFR rally. I wore my shirt (pictured to the right) without even realizing this. Pretty spooky. I don't have to say much about how incredible that rally was, because most of the poeple who read this weblog with any regularity were there. But if you have any thoughts on this anniversary, please share them. That would rock.

Also, tomorrow is October 5th. If your first reaction upon hearing that date is "I'll Be There," then you were likely present at the event four years ago, less than a month after 9/11/2001, when 3000 of us participated in a candlelit march to the Yale Bowl to constitute a movement of "Hope Not Fear" and to urge Yale, on its Tercentennial, to pursue justice. It was another two years before contracts were signed, and there are 4,000 workers who still need them, but I know that that day was an important one for the movement - particularly the community organizing, and i figured i ought to commemorate it here, because it was pretty amazing. Alek was on stage, so if he reads this and feels like saying something about that, by all means go ahead. There used to be a great photo gallery on the GESO website, but i think it got taken down after the redesign, which makes sense, because it was a long time ago and the site needed to be relevant to new grad students trying to figure out what the hell was going on and how to start organizing. And amidst the tercentennial panegyrics, the march was criminally underreported by the campus press. (Dear "MPM," (the nickname by which friends freshman year referred to the article's author) I have a question. Who, pray tell, is Rev. "David Marks?") But for those of us who were there, looking back and forward over the sea of light stretching into the dusklight, you can damn well bet it was more important than Big Bird and Bill Buckley.

Things here are starting to get crazy. The next two months should be very interesting.

"Este lucecita tiene que brillar."








update: I feel compelled to point out that October 5, 1984 was also an important day in the history of the New Haven labor movement. Something like 125 Members of Local 34 were arrested outside the President's House in an act of civil disobedience during their first strike's second week. I've always found it odd how these dates reoccur. Part of that has to do with the academic calendar - like the requisite late april big rally (Workers Rights Are Human Rights, Building an Equal Partnership, heck, Better Way Village, and, of course, the 2005 Strike,) but other than being roughly a month after classes resume, which is probably pretty important, actually, 10/5 seems like a much more random date. Thoughts, anyone? Also, if you're reading this blog and you've never read On Strike For Respect, you need to rectify that ASAP.

l' shanah tovah.

I watched the season premiere of Veronica Mars today. Charisma Carpenter plays Heather Locklear, and I'm wondering what Stonecutter got Steve Guttenberg the job, though it was actually kind of cool to see him in a bob saget in half baked kind of way. The episode itself was ok, implausible at points, and Charisma Caroenter's character seems totally one-dimensional at the moment.

I also, upon finally finishing my half of the Foucault presentation paper, went out and saw Serenity, the movie continuation of Joss Whedon's wonderful Firefly series. It was pretty much everything i'd hoped for, although there's some stuff i wish had not happened, and I very much wish Fox had not canceled the series in the first place, because it was one of the best things i've ever seen on television. The film does the series justice. I'd recommend renting the DVDs before seeing the movie, though you'll be able to follow what's going on, for the most part, even if you haven't seen the show. I am being tight lipped because i don't want to spoil the plot, but it's great and you should go see it.

Finally done with the Foucault presentation paper, which was supposed to be 3-5 pages and we ended up making ours 9 and change, which we blame on Foucault, whom someone needs to inform that "Inter pocula" means "among the cups" and is a reference, of course, to alcohol. Hopefully discussion will be engaging and we will all have good things to say.