Thank you for the birthday greeting, bre. I had a fairly good one, considering I generally hate birthdays. a friend of mine gave me a Dvorak keyboard that he reassembled himself from a normal keyboard. A Dvorak keyboard is an alternative keyboard set up that's supposed to be far more efficient than the QWERTY one. The QWERTY keyboard was actually originally designed to slow down people typing on typewriters so that they wouldn't get jammed, and now, despite the fact that we no longer use typewriters and QWERTY is expressly designed for inefficiency, we've retained it for convenience (for those interested, there's a totally fascinating chapter in what I think spencer will back me up as saying is The Coolest Book Ever- Guns, Germs, and Steel, about times in human history when people have rejected more evolutionarily sound technologies in favor of older ones they're used to, and this is presented as an example).

I've noticed that we're all- myself included- doing an increasingly terrible job of staying in touch. as we approach the one year mark since the start of TASP (how strange is that?), I'm thinking of you all more and more, and wondering what's going on with everyone. tell me of your exploits. i must know.

as for me, i pierced my nose, i've met/re-met seven TASPers in the past week, i still don't know where i'm going to college, and there's a decemberists concert tonight. so there.

also, the documentary which some of you have been trying to get me to youtube for the past oh, year or so, is now online, through no involvement of my own. I was going to link to it, but then i remembered i hate it. so suffice to say you should be able to find it with a simple google search, if you're so inclined.

that is all.

Happy Birthday RYAN

To the left-handed vegan who is one of the few people that still looks at this blog...

Things that make me think of Ryan:

-hubcaps laying on the street

-"no no no no I don't agjkdl no more"

-Colorado

-photo / memorobilia-ness

-SWINGSETS yay
-there are more. yes there are.

You rock and I miss you and I wish you the best in deciding between Yale and Columbia.

:)!

Oh, you Californians

From the BBC: "The environmental movement must become "hip and sexy" if it is to succeed, California's Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has said."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6546975.stm

It's an interesting idea that movements need to be "hip" to succeed. I remember Bob Hansman lamenting that he is coming to believe that the members of his generation only participated in the Civil Rights movement because it was trendy ("it could just as easily have been swallowing goldfish") and they were now letting down the cause... Now, from what we saw in seminar, the Civil Rights movement's success (although, as Professor Brown would be pointing out now, we still have a long way to go) is due to the courage of the activists who took a stand in the face of horrendous intimidation... So, should a movement actually be un-hip to succeed? (Nevertheless, I think Schwarzenegger is right about the need for "passion" in movements... )
(Speaking of un-hip but thoroughly passionate movements, the campaign to bring TEL back from the dead continues apace. More updates soon.)