Mayday

In celebration of Mayday, I managed to make it to three separate protests yesterday: the massive immigrants rights march, the Mayday celebration in Haymarket Square and the Save Darfur Rally. This involved a lot of quality time spent on the Green Line to and from Hyde Park. Here are my reflections; sorry if they're a bit lengthy.

Immigrants Rights March
The mainstream papers are reporting that in Chicago alone, nearly half a million people turned out for the immigrant rights march, so the total number was at least that many. When I arrived at Union Park at around 11:30, people were already heading down Randolph towards downtown. I never personally saw the beginning or the end of the sea of marchers. The crush of people was already threatening to swamp the CTA's capacity. My train was packed solid, almost entirely Latino families: strollers, little kids waving homemade "No on 4437" signs, teenagers wearing Mexican and American flags like capes, a constant hum of Spanish. Just getting out of the Ashland El stop took 10 minutes.


The day is grey and threatening rain, but thankfully, the promised thunderstorms hold their distance. Union Park is awash in people. Since the march started on the West Side, the Latino turnout was understandably enormous -- probably more than 90% of those marching. But this being Chicago, there is a substantial Polish contingent as well, many of whom are 'sin papeles' and come here to work in the construction trade or as janitors. There are certainly a good fraction of Mexican and Polish flags, but mostly it's the Stars and Stripes. Street vendors are selling a combo-pack of U.S. and Mexican flags for $4. I think this may be the most American flags I've ever seen at one time. Everytime the news helicopters do a flyby the crowd cheers and starts waving like crazy.










The cops funnelled the march out of the park through a very narrow gate, and then only let us march on one side of Randolph, even though the other lanes were closed to traffic. This meant that for the first hour the mass of people I was with moved about 500 yards. Not so much marching for immigration justice, as shuffling slowly forward. Once we got past the bottleneck, it sped up a bit.


At this point, a feeder march of anarchist youth joined the column to great cheering. The Black Bloc kids brought a lot of energy with homemade drums and loud chants of 'Si Se Puede', and, because they've never seen a police line not worth crossing, they streamed over into the unused lanes, overturned the blue barricades and encouraged everyone else to cross over as well.


Some of the older marchers seemed uncertain and a little annoyed about this confrontation, but large numbers of high school and college aged kids crossed the median onto the other side. The cops made a panicked show of blocking these lanes with their bikes and trying to force us back into line, but the pressure of so many people was too great and after a few minutes they surrendered the right side of the street and the people flowed into it. I can understand the annoyance towards a group of mostly (but not entirely) white kids provoking a confrontation with the cops during a peaceful, family oriented march, but the police-lines were ridiculous and anyway, it ended well.

There were a lot of great signs. The one in the picture above says "My Brother is in Iraq fighting for his country." Other favorites:

"Today I March, Tomorrow I Vote"
"Somos America"
"Las luchas de los obreros no tienen fronteras"
"Sacar corriendo el gobierno de Bush"
"All religions believe in Justice"
"Queremos Legalizacion"
"Amnistia!"
"Immigrants and Workers Forged America"

Part of the UNITE-HERE contingent.


This is the view from the top of the Kennedy overpass, looking back on the throngs of people. For myself, I have to say that it was incredibly moving to be a part of this march. Everything about it had the feel of an organic, grassroots uprising for justice. There were undoubtedly tireless organizers who threw themselves into making this march a success, but the impetus for half-a-mil to leave work and come out into the streets could only have come from a deep, visceral understanding that their very existence in this country is under attack. There are too few times in history when such a mass mobilization happens. The trick now is to focus all this energy on getting specific legislation pushed through.

For the record, we've been told for so long that corporations and gobs of capital should be stateless and free to go wherever they want in the world, so to me it seems only fair to allow the same for humans. But since an 'open border' policy isn't going to be passed anytime soon, I hope for an immigration policy that strongly rejects criminalization of people already here, that allows a path toward permanent legal status and citizenship, and that gives immigrants equal rights and access to services. I know that amnesty is not the most popular proposal right now, but it is the goal we need to work for. Call your reps, go to a rally and sign this petition.

Mayday Celebration in Haymarket Square
I had to drop out of the immigration march before it finished at Grant Park, but I headed back downtown later in the afternoon for the Mayday rally. Most of the rest of the world celebrates May 1 as International Workers Day, except the US, even though the history of the date started here in Chicago.

On May 4, 1886, during a rally of unionists protesting the killing of two strikers by the Chicago police the day before, a bomb was thrown by someone at the watching police (killing several) and the police retaliated by firing upon the crowd killing several and injuring many more. The state convicted eight anarchists for inciting the crowd to riot (even though no evidence linked any of them to the bomb-thrower). Four anarchists, August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer and George Engel, were executed on November 11, 1887. Since then, Mayday has been a cause celebre for labor unions and left-wing political parties in most countries, except here, where its celebration was stamped out by the Red Scare. Good histories of the riots can be found here and here.

These days Haymarket Square is a completely non-descript strip of sidewalk, west of the downtown, and perched above the Kennedy Expressway. For years, a statue of a police officer stood here commemorating the incident, until it was bombed by the Weather Underground in the late 60's. After years of antagonism between the police and the labor unions about the history of the incident, the city agreed two years ago to put up a new memorial statue as part of a proposed Labor Park. Chicago labor unions have been trying to reclaim this bit of history as theirs, and so staged a worker's rights rally there this year. It was cool to be at Haymarket for Mayday and to support the local unions, but the rally was small and fairly tepid in comparison with the immigration march.





Save Darfur Rally
Our final stop of the day was Federal Plaza for the Save Darfur rally. I was struck first off by the tremendous diversity of the participants. White folks, black folks, awesome suburban high school kids, a huge Jewish presence. A singer ran through a medley of freedom songs from Bob Marley to the Beatles. It definitely felt like a movement growing beyond the usual activisty suspects. The message was a little unfocused ("We need action! Now!", but what?), but the passion was tangible.

There were a bunch of speakers, but two really stood out. The first was Father Michael Pfleger of St. Sabina Faith Community. If you ever get a chance to check out the worship service at St. Sabina, it really has to be seen to be believed. Father Pfleger is a true fire-breathing, truth-telling, social-justice preacher, and he set the place on fire, issuing a strong condemnation of any church, synagogue or mosque that remains silent or apathetic about genocide. The second speaker was the Imam Senad Agic, of the Northbrook Mosque (a Bosnian Muslim, with first-hand experience of genocide), who put the issue in plain words: the Quran says, anyone who kills an innocent person, it is as if they are killing the entire world, and anyone who saves someone from death, it is as if they have saved the entire world.

Watersheds

As I was standing atop Starved Rock this past weekend, I had a revelation that is probably boring and obvious to a lot of locals, but I really hadn't understood how it worked until an informational sign enlightened me. This is the problem: the watershed in the Chicago area is really strange. For example, the water in Lake Michigan (and the entire Great Lakes Basin) flows to the Atlantic Ocean via the St. Lawrence seaway. But, most of Illinois flows to the Mississippi River and then to the Gulf of Mexico.


As this map shows, the line demarking these two watersheds is just outside Chicago and rings Lake Michigan. And it's not like there's a great mountain ridge running along that dotted line - it's just prairie, swamp and dunes (or nowadays, suburbs). In fact the difference is so slight that canal projects in the 1800s were able to reverse the flow of the Chicago River so it flows out of Lake Michigan (and hence to the Mississippi as well). I mean, everyone always jokes about how the Chicago River goes the wrong way, but I never understood until now what that means. Does anyone else think it's strange that the watershed line is so close to the lakeshore?

In a sense, this geographic burp is kind of why Chicago is such an important city. Ever since Jolliet and Marquette, people had been looking for a passage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi so they could ship things easier to different places. Just outside Chicago was where the portage was shortest, and once the canals were dug the city grew rich on the shipping trade. Now it all makes sense!

There's an excellent overview of all this to be found here (which is also where I stole the map image from; please don't sue me).

Starved Rock

We recently bought a new tent, and this weekend we tried it out at Starved Rock State Park, which is this really lovely little park halfway to Iowa along the Illinois River.



The campground was pretty gourmet as far as car-camping goes, and not too crowded yet. I can imagine the place rivals downtown Manhattan come July. Lots of RVs and kids on bikes. We were psyched to have a campfire, and the site we picked even had some leftover firewood. Yet, having forgotten a lighter, we lacked the technology to actually make fire. Hmm. We had seen signs advertising firewood as we entered the campground "Jack's Firewood and Stuff", so we set off to find Jack. Turns out, Jack doesn't run a store but is this really nice old guy who lives on this ridiculously picturesque country road and who sells firewood out of his front yard for $5 a stack (leave the cash in the thermos, thanks!). Since we didn't need any firewood, he loaned us matches and threw in some old newspapers. Super nice guy. And now we had a campfire.



And when the sun went down, the stars came out. Now I've been spending the past several months designing a museum exhibit on constellations and the local stars, but I realized that I hadn't seen actual stars in months. And the night was clear and beautiful - perfect for stargazing.


The next morning it was warm and sunny, with the first signs of the woods coming alive for spring.


This is the view of the Illinois River from the top of Starved Rock, which is a layer-cake rock outcropping right above the river. Legend has it in the 1760's an Illiniwek war-party was besieged on the rock by Ottawa warriors avenging the killing of their chief, Pontiac. The Illini refused to surrender and they all starved to death. The park has had the good taste to not put a snack shop on the top.



Here's some pictures of us hiking around.


A view of Starved Rock from "Lover's Leap" (another cheerful story behind that one, I'm sure).


Here's Laura Jean looking cute. The watershed region of the Illinois River is pretty interesting in itself (I'll probably devote another post to it). The dam prevents this part of the river from freezing solid, and so bald eagles come to the park in the winter to fish. We didn't see any, but we did watch a barge go through the locks, which was kinda cool.


The park is mostly twisting canyons and waterfalls, which is weird for Illinois. I wouldn't really have guessed that there were things high enough for water to fall off of in this state, but this canyon was deep and cool and very peaceful, with a great waterfall back in the nook.


The nearby town of Utica is pretty adorable as well; 1000 people, nearly all of them proprietors of tiny shops or cafes along the Main Street. The vision of a church steeple perfectly framed by two grain silos is what greets you as soon as you enter the town from the interstate. Perfect.

Dream Jobs

I've started taking a Career Exploration Seminar through the U of Chicago's CAPS service. Since I'm planning on making a leap out of academia and into some interesting and useful job in September, I'm hoping this class will help me focus what I want to do and give me some tips on resumes, networking and how to get hired. Anyway, one of the first things they had us do was to make a list of what we would do with our lives in some ideal universe. Here's mine, in no particular order:

• Travel the world, learn lots of languages and live overseas for a while (but not forever).
  
• Be a rabble-rouser of some sort, i.e. community organizer, etc.
  
• Write science-fiction novels.
  
• Stay at home and raise the kids.
  
• Be a really good high school math or science teacher, who makes students love (or at least not hate) math and science.
  
• Work as a bread baker.
  

I'm not sure if I would be any good at these jobs, or even that they're what I want to be doing right away, but hey, ideal universe, right? For now, I'm looking for jobs in the non-profit sector, so if anyone has any contacts or good ideas about such jobs in the D.C. area, let me know!

Here's another list of jobs that aren't quite what I'm looking for, but seem like they would also be fairly cool.

• Nicholas Kristof's job: I imagine that this is what many an aspiring journalist daydreams about doing: traveling the globe, talking to interesting people about human rights, exposing corruption and abuse, rousing rabble, raking muck, etc. These days, this is dominated by independent and/or foreign journalists since most corporate American media outlets don't put very much money money into investigative or international reporting any more. Among mainstream American journalism, Kristof seems to be the only big name who does this, but he does it well enough to score a Pulitzer. (By the way, how much does TimesSelect suck? I mean, I shoveled out the money for it, but still... thumbs down)
  
• Google: Granted, they're probably the next incarnation of Big Brother (unless they really do stick to the "don't be evil" rule). But they do give their software engineers some large percentage of their time free to dream up cool stuff, like this, and this, and this, and this ...
• Movie Reviewer: It still amazes me that some people get paid to do this.
  

The Storybook Project

When inmates make collect calls (the only calls they can make) from Cook County Jail, it costs their families 3 to 4 times the usual rate to accept the charges. It's a small thing I suppose, but like a lot of things in our correctional system, it seems like they're going out of their way to be rapacious and unfair and counter-productive. Talk about kicking someone when they're down. Does price gouging poor people and isolating inmates from their families and communities serve the common good in the long run? Does it make our streets safer or reduce recidivism? I very much doubt it. But, of course, it's a safe bet for the phone companies (or the jail, or whoever's idea it was) that sticking it to prisoners won't win them any enemies, even while it fattens their profit margins. The invisible hand is more like an invisible fist when you've got a monopoly and a captive market (so to speak).

This last Saturday, Laura Jean and I went with 3 other folks from our church to the Cook County Jail for our first session volunteering with Aunt Mary's Storybook Project. We had our orientation about two months ago, but hadn't been allowed inside the jail since, due to security lockdowns. These may have had something to do with, oh I don't know... the jailbreak that occurred just a few days after our first visit, and subsequent allegations that prison officers may have had a hand in the escape. So yeah, they've been having some security "issues", but they finally decided to let us in this past weekend.

Just getting into the jail is quite a task. Your name has to be on the right piece of paper, you get patted down (twice), go through a metal detector and an ion scanner. Not all of the officers seem tense and unhelpful, but after a while you feel like some of them are looking for any excuse to toss you out. So, you learn to be very polite and helpful at all times. The system is highly bureaucratic, yet oddly incompetent -- we had to ask them to carefully search the cart of books we brought in, not wanting to get busted for any accidental contraband and lose our right to do our program. Go figure.

Anyway, we finally got everything set up in one of the gyms, and they sent us an initial group of 15-20 mothers from the women's ward and we explained the program to them. We told them that we were there to give them a chance to connect with their kids. We had boxes and boxes of children's books for all ages (from 'Pat the Bunny' through 'Harry Potter') and tape-recorders so that they could read the book aloud to their kids (or sing them a song, or send them a message). We would then mail the book and the tape to the children. The kicker is, when we explained the program to them, there was an audible response, and at least three women started crying right off the bat. This, of course, made it tough for the rest of us to keep a dry eye. We got started by helping them pick out the right books for each of their kids, and handed them a tape-recorder.

The few hours I've spent in CCJ give me the impression that it is a pretty rough place -- hugely overcrowded and oppressive. A few years back there was a big scandal about the officers beating the crap out of the inmates (read the full Chicago Tribune coverage here). In CCJ, almost everyone is awaiting trial. Laura Jean tells me that the prisons downstate are calmer since everyone knows how many years they're looking at. Although some have been awaiting trial for a year or two, everyone in the jail is on edge and unsure what will happen to them. I should say that probably most of the women in CCJ are there for drug-related crimes (see also here), either possession or property-crimes related to a drug problem. The War on Drugs marches on.

Anyway, there are some times when you're doing a service project and you wonder whether it will have any impact at all: this was not one of those times. The women were all completely down with the project and they spent every last minute they could reading into the recorders and writing letters to their kids. I got a very strong impression that the books and tapes were filling a painful gap for them. A few women cried through the entire book; others were excited and everyone seemed grateful in the end. Communication out of the jail is very difficult; in addition to the collect calls, they have to buy paper, envelopes and stamps through the commissary just to write a letter. It may not be a systematic fix for a broken system, but if it helps keep even a few families from shattering completely it's a success.

Working Weekend

Over the past four days I have attended five church services at two congregations for a total 6.5 hours and Lord knows how many hymns. Not to mention a church volunteer trip on Saturday to Cook County Jail ("the real work of the church", as Laura Jean said). I'm pretty sure that that is more church than I logged during the entire Clinton administration. Turns out Holy Weekend is a working weekend for preacher's spouses too. Still, it was pretty fun. Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, we got to see friends confirmed into their church Saturday night (which almost burned down, but then didn't), attended a very nice sunrise service on Sunday, and capped it off with a completely fabulous sermon from Susan at the full Easter service. And then we all got up on stage and sang the "Hallelujah" chorus together to close it out. Amen indeed!

And now I can drink beer again! Yay!

Goin' back to Cali

A few weeks back we had a really nice mini-vacation to California. Kinda like "spring break", except neither of us are students any longer. It was just five days but we packed a lot of stuff into them. Anyway, here are some pics...

The main impetus for the trip was that Laura Jean's little brother, Eric, is getting himself hitched this summer to a lovely young woman named Holly. They attend college in New Mexico and were travelling by train to Nevada City, CA, where her family lives, and so they stopped over in Fresno at my parents' house for a few days. Since Laura Jean had yet to meet Holly, we took it as an opportunity to kill several birds with one stone.



The happy couple and Laura Jean. We wanted to hike down by the San Joaquin River, and even though it was rainy and gross, we were brave and did it any way.



There were some really good rocks for skipping.



Hanging out with Eric and Holly was great, but they had to be on their way to meet her Mom for the first time (da da da!), so we set out to enjoy California for ourselves. We took one day to meet up with friends and go hiking on the coast in Santa Cruz. I had forgotten how much I miss the Pacific Ocean, having moved to the heartland for the past six years. Dad, Jessica, Laura Jean and Sandhya in front of a natural bridge.


More beautiful coastline...


Jess on the beach.


Ocean waves.


A raucous (and quite green) St. Patrick's Day party with the Knapps.


We spent Saturday visiting more friends in Berkeley. The rain had finally rained itself away, and we were treated to one of those days that makes the Bay Area the most wonderful place in the universe. It was warm and sunny -- everything was positively luminous. This is the view from our friends' apartment in the Berkeley hills. Amazingly, you can see the Golden Gate and downtown San Francisco from their porch.


Kate, Laura Jean, Alex and Becca enjoying a brunchly idyll.


We spent far too little time hanging out with Jessica and Cathy, but we'll take what we can get.

night lights

There's a lot of things I will miss about Chicago when we move away. One small thing is the beauty of its skyline. Here are two photos taken from the bar atop the John Hancock Building, looking west...



and south.



Taken when we were lucky enough to have Carina visiting us.

Shamrock Shuffle

Today I ran in the Shamrock Shuffle (advertised as the "largest 8K in the world!" with 25,000 participants). For starters, the weather report was saying something about it being in the high-50s today, but actually it was a cold 40 with wind when the race started. Thankfully it didn't start raining until after. Not exactly what you would call a "nice day for a run", but whatever. I've done this race for the past two years, and its generally a fun time. You get to run through the downtown streets and lots of people come out to watch. I've been telling myself I'd like to run at a 7 minute pace (5 miles = 35 minutes), but actually I'd be happy with 8 minutes and my knee ligament not hurting (its been twinging a bit on my last few runs). Anyway, 'ere's the play-by-play:

• Mile 1: Start out north on Columbus, right past the Gehry alien spacecraft and then into the underground streets. The downtown, stripped of its cars, is totally transformed -- it feels a bit like being in a music video or something. The pack of runners is quite crowded, and in the tunnel the thump thump thump of our shoes is the only sound. I start out fast and feel pretty good. We cross the river, quite windy, turn on Grand.
  Time = 7:10
  
• Mile 2: Head back across the river on State. I don't think I'll be able to keep up the 7 minute pace, but I'm still feeling pretty good - no twinges in my knee yet. Crowd starts to thin out a bit.
  Time = 7:30 Total = 14:40
  
• Mile 3: Mmm, gatorade. My ankle and shin start to feel a little tight, maybe I'm overcompensating for the knee? Anyway, we turn west on Jackson and head out over the river again. There's a pretty good crowd cheering us on, which is cool. When I look down the side streets, I can see the front-runners already returning in the other direction, almost a mile ahead.
  Time = 7:40 Total = 22:20
  
• Mile 4: Return east on Van Buren. Starting to feel a... little... tired. I slow my pace just a bit, and wonder why there aren't bands serenading us along the route like last year. OK, starting to feel more than a little tired. Breathe in, breathe out, remember to keep your stride long.
  Time = 8:00 Total = 30:20
  
• Mile 5: OK, we turn south onto Michigan and it's just a mile left. Despite wanting to die, I pick up the pace a bit. Only a mile left, right? Then someone decides it would be funny to end the race with the only hill in Northern Illinois - it's uphill along Roosevelt to the corner with Columbus. Brutal. But after that it's only 300m and I try to finish strongly. I manage to cross the finish with arms upraised for the cameras.
  Time = 7:50 Total = 38:10
  

After we cross the finish line, they present us with mountains of bananas and granola bars and water. We all stumble through the lines, grabbing whatever we can carry. The bag check line is really long, which is too bad because it feels really cold once you cool down and everyone wants their warm clothes.

We have the option of getting a free beer and listening to live music, but for me, the idea of standing shivering in the rain drinking a beer by myself at 10am on a Sunday morning sounds too much like an operational definition of alcoholism. I put on my windbreaker and try to track down a bus back home.

Of course, all the bus routes are screwed up by the race, but I do eventually find a 6 bus and am extremely grateful to be out of the rain and cold. But then as we're turning south onto Lake Shore, the bus sideswipes a cab. I didn't even feel the collision and it looked like nobody was hurt, but we had to sit in the bus, blocking traffic, for about 25 minutes until the next 6 came along to rescue us.

ps: ---
My official time was 0:38:09, which I think is identical to last year down to the second (a 7:38 pace) and which places me 2386th out of 20,408 finishers (top 12%). Among men I finished 1966th, and 494th in my division (age 25-29). The mens and womens champions clocked in at a mind-wowing 23:52 and 26:27, respectively. All in all, it was pretty fun time. Pictures coming soon, hopefully.

Maps

OK. So it's been a looonnnggg while since I posted anything here. But never fear, I have a list of goodies I've been saving up to post and yak about: travels and photos and work and random thoughts galore.

But first, maps! I've always loved staring at maps - I have a distinct memory from when I was very small of looking at a globe and wondering which country was the United States (apparently I couldn't read yet). I remember deciding that Australia was in fact the U.S., mainly because I figured we were a large country and were too important to be connected to other, lesser nations. It seems I was a raging nationalist as a 3-year old.

Anyway I stole this idea from Leo's blog (it's apparently the hip thing to put on your blog these days): here are some maps of the places I've travelled.



First, the world map -- pretty pathetic really. I've really wanted to travel outside the U.S. more than I have. Laura Jean and I have plans to live overseas at some point in the near future, so maybe all that empty space will start to fill in a bit.



This is a bit more respectable. As a kid, my family's vacation of choice often involved super-long road trips to places like Yellowstone and Vancouver, thus accounting for most of the western states. And in this past year I picked up three new states: Nebraska, Missouri and Delaware. It looks like a swing through the South is in order at some point -- and since we'll likely be living in Virginia come September, that just might happen. But who knows if I'll ever make it to Rhode Island.

Anyway, the websites to create these maps are the following for the visited country map and the visited states map.

[ Update Feb 2007: Since I posted this I've racked up one new country (Poland) and one new state (North Carolina), bringing my totals to 12 countries (5%) and 35 states (68%). Wahoo! ]

Life in 360

I've been playing around with stitching together panoramas from many different snapshots. These are the small versions, so really you should click here to see the full size versions. The panoramas below are of (1) Florence, (2) Rome from the top of St. Peters and (3) the Sierra Nevadas from Italy Pass, respectively.






There's a suite of really well-done free software programs that make these kinds of things really easy. If you want to make your own, try the tutorials at the Hugin homepage to get started, its really not that hard and kinda cool once it works.

Like a Dirigible

Another Wednesday -- March Fools Day, I suppose. I feel there has been a distinct lack of excitement in my life during this last week. Somehow, I have become non-descript of late. Hmmm.

Elsewhere, in more exciting places, archaeologists have recently discovered the Lost Kingdom of Tambora which was destroyed by a volcanic eruption in 1815 (similarly to Pompeii). Which leads me to ask: Have fields like archaeology and history reached the point where all the big discoveries have been made? Physics appears to be a bottomless well of experimental information, but perhaps archaeology will advance to a point where all the low-hanging fruit have been picked and there's just nothing more to dig up and no more manuscripts to decipher. Or are there major discoveries a few feet down, as big as finding Troy or King Tut, and researchers in those fields have just barely scratched the surface? I guess it's naturally an impossible question to answer, but I'd be curious if anyone has an opinion.

Anyway, more diversions. If you've ever played a musical instrument (or tried), you might find this funny. I first saw it several years ago and nearly ruptured a spleen laughing. For some reason I was inspired to track it down tonight. Still funny.

Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz, by John Stump

"adagio cantabile with a rock tempo feel!"
"like a New Orleans concertina choir!"
"release the penguins!"

In lieu of an actual performance (which would rule!), someone should really create a MIDI file out of it...

Old Slang

One of my pet peeves is the idea that there is a right (and hence a wrong) way to speak your native language. This has always struck me as snobby and, well, unscientific. There are few things I care about less than when you're supposed to use "who" or "whom". The great thing about humans is that we make stuff up: Shakespeare did it, blog commenters do it (although some worry we are running out of new material). Language, as spoken by actual humans, seems to be in a state of constant and rapid evolution. Why try to constrain all that with arbitrary rules?

A paen to this diversity is the Urban Dictionary, which attempts to collect and define slang from a myriad of English sub-cultures. Much like Wikipedia, it is largely user-driven, so, of course there's a fair bit of humorous fakes thrown into the mix (like this, for example). And of course, you've got your usual crop of slang from hip-hop and internet subcultures, like grillz and 1337. It's also disappointing, but not super-surprising, that a lot (most?) of the definitions are not-so-clever ways of saying misogynistic and homophobic things about sex. Sigh - so it goes.

After a bit of browsing, I was particularly gratified to find accurate definitions for slang words that were really common when I was a kid, but that I haven't heard since. For example, on the playground we used to say "moded" or "face!" when someone did something stupid and you wanted to make fun of them. One definition for "moded" described it as 80's San Fran hip-hop slang, which sounds about right. I pretty much haven't heard anyone actually use those words in a sentence in twenty-odd years, although they still get a laugh out of my sister.

Steven Pinker wrote an excellent book on language acquisition several years ago called The Language Instinct that is well-worth the read. He smashes the notion that "proper" language use is indicative of anything besides cultural mores, and highlights the beauty and power of often discredited linguistic traditions: African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), teen-speak, creole and pidgin languages and the like. Of course, the book is mostly about the controversial Chomskyan view that all languages share a universal grammar which arises out of our brain (and genetic) structures (which is interesting, but maybe not the whole story, according to many linguists). Although he's become something of a right-wing, ev-psych tool in recent years, TLI is still an eye-opening, egalitarian celebration of spoken language in all its diversity.

An extra level of hell for...

After watching the women's figure skating the other night, I just want to say that figure skating commentators are complete tools. Overheard: "A lot of other girls will skate to 'Romeo & Juliet', but Sasha Cohen is Juliet!" Are you kidding me? I mean she's a great skater and handled losing the gold medal pretty gracefully, but sheesh. And then the not-so-subtle digs at the non-American skaters? Gag.

Hamas and Israel

I was doing a little reading after Hamas's election, and I stumbled across a factoid that shocked me (and here I thought I was unable to be shocked by the situation in Palestine). The Palestinian city of Qalqilyah (with 50,000 inhabitants) is at present completely surrounded by a concrete barrier, with access in and out of the city controlled by the IDF at two checkpoints.

I'd been keeping up with the demoralizing progress of the separation wall, but somehow this had escaped me. Wow. That must beyond suck for the people who live there. Ali Abunimah points out that after this encirclement was decided, the good citizens of Qalqilyah tossed out the Fatah-dominated city council and gave every seat to Hamas. And this was several months before the recent election. I said I was shocked by Hamas's gains, but perhaps I should have been paying closer attention.

The media seems to have fixed on the issue of Fatah's corruption as the reason for the Hamas election; but it would seem to me they're blinking at looking the real problems in the eye. Israel exercises military control over the fundamental fact of daily life in the West Bank, who can travel where and when, and daily metes out collective punishment for the actions of a few. And most importantly, the separation wall has eaten into the body of the (supposedly) future Palestinian state, isolating and destroying existing Palestinian communities, while legitimizing and strengthening the settlements. The map of the wall's route looks like something drawn up by Tom DeLay on a bender (a highly detailed PDF here). The Israeli human rights organization, B'Tselem, along with many others, have condemned the separation wall as nothing more than a land-grab. They provide evidence that the routing of the wall was driven more by the desire of established settlements to expand than any real security.

In my mind, there are a few ground rules for a just solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Every person living in the region has the right to life and liberty and security and other good things. They have the right to live under a democratically elected government that considers people of all faiths to be equal partners in society. The notion of a one-state solution, whereby Israel would simply annex the West Bank and grant citizenship (and franchise) to the Palestinians living there, is anathema to many Israelis, since the new state would not be a guaranteed majority Jewish. It's an attractive idea, but fairly unrealistic if you think about it. The notion that Israel would keep military control of the land, but not grant self-determination to its inhabitants (the status quo) is to contemplate either apartheid or ethnic cleansing (IMHO). Therefore, many people imagine a two-state solution to be the only way out, with the border between sovereign Israel and sovereign Palestine marked by the 1967 Green Line (putting aside for the moment the UN Resolution in 1948, the right of return, the status of Jerusalem and the settlements, etc.).

It is the dream of legitimate statehood, prosperity and self-determination that will give Palestinians reason to negotiate. That dream has been seriously jeopardized, in part yes, by illegitimate targeting of civilians by terrorists, but also by an internal political decision to appease settlers. True, Sharon has in recent years stepped back from this, but perhaps it is too late? Ha'aretz has opined about the separation wall, "it looks like a border and behaves like one." What now for our Palestinian state?

So: simple ground rules, complex state of human affairs. I won't offer a simple solution. I suspect reaction against Hamas will make things much worse in the short run. This will be aided, of course, by our leaders' immeasurably hypocritical talk of ousting Hamas (I'm sure they have a list of other democracies they wouldn't mind ousting also: Hugo Chavez this means you). But in the long run, perhaps some sort of shake-up is needed. The peace process has been a disaster for ordinary Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories. And Israel should realize by now that military might alone will not gain you security. I'm reminded of a quote from the man who was once recruited to become Israel's first president:
"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding." - Albert Einstein

memorybox

Serenity

We finally got around to seeing Serenity at DocFilms last night, and I have to gush a little bit: wow, what a cool movie! I love the way Joss Whedon punctures the usual solemnity and self-importance of too many sci-fi movies, while still managing to make it serious and exciting. Although I love Star Trek and its ilk, the ghost of Jean-Luc Picard does not hang heavily over this film; it has some genuinely funny moments (without becoming Douglas Adams goofy) and, as usual, Joss writes some clever clever dialogue. It was a lot of fun to see the film at Doc, where the crowd is super-vocal (with die-hard Firefly fans well-represented, apparently). Obviously, my next big obsession will be to checkout the 14 Firefly episodes.

To provide an antidote to all this gushing, the hoverbike blog critiques Firefly (links here and here) as right-wing libertarian sci-fi with a pro-Confederate, anti-Indian subtext. Given the setup of the show, its hard to argue that there's nothing to this point, but I would pretty much disagree that it is the only or the best interpretation (especially given the big reveal at the end of Serenity, which the hoverbike guy hadn't yet seen). It's interesting reading, at any rate, especially some of the rebuttals in the comments section. Sci-fi always seems to invite political interpretations (I'm thinking Orwell and Huxley, as well as Hollywood), but anything more complex than Ayn Rand should have enough subtlety to carry multiple interpretations. If I had to put a slogan to it, Serenity spoke more to the seemingly inevitable corruption that comes with any rigid ideology coupled with the power to enforce it. 'Tis much better, Joss says, to be pragmatic and humanistic, to stick by your friends and try your best to figure out what the right thing is, and then do it. Which isn't so bad.

Going to jail...

Our church is beginning to participate in a program call Aunt Mary's Storybook Project, which tries to help mothers incarcerated in Cook County Jail to stay connected with their children and their communities. So this past Wednesday night, I went to jail. It was just an initial orientation required for all volunteers in the jail, but in the near future we hope to have a couple sessions a month.

Cook County Jail is an enormous complex (as can be seen here). It is one of the largest county jails in the country; someone said it houses about 10,000 people, mostly those awaiting sentencing. Security was, of course, crazy -- a pat-down, an ion-detector followed by a metal-detector (although as we were entering, this cop was trying to get his girlfriend through with a wink, and the other guards weren't having it), barbed-wire curls topping 12-foot fences. There was a lobby with several dozen family members were sitting around waiting for bail to be processed for their loved one. We walked briefly through the detention units and were afforded quick glances into the cell units: usually we saw 20-30 men sitting around at tables, talking, playing cards, looking bored.

For the Saturday sessions, any interested mothers can select a children's book from a cart and we provide a tape recorder. They record themselves reading to their kids, and then the kids get the tape and the book. We, the volunteers, pretty much hang out and chat and give any assistance that might be needed. All told, it seems like a well-thought-out project with a concrete goal (it's being organized by a group called Companions Journeying Together), and I'm excited to see how it goes in practice.

Optical Illusions

One of my partners in my museum internship is developing a demonstration focusing on optical illusions and the brain adaptations that cause them. She found this really cool website that collects a lot of the famous illusions together with images and movies.

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/index.html

It's a great website with a lot of trippy visuals and comprehensive explanations of what's going on, so I thought I would share. Definitely worth a half-hour of clicking.

For my project, I proposed to develop an exhibit to teach astronomy using the GeoWall, which is a new technology that allows museums to implement 3-D virtual reality exhibits really cheaply. My idea was to develop a hands-on, video-game-esque exhibit that allows kids to fly-through space and learn a bit about astronomy on the way (hopefully). With luck it'll get selected and someday come to fruition, but we'll see.

Palestinian Elections

OK, so just one quick thing before getting some work done...

Hamas Victory

My first reaction was: Holy crap! 76 seats! I had no idea Hamas would do so well. Regardless of what you think of Hamas (and for the record, I think killing civilians is always wrong, no matter how just your cause), this result speaks volumes to the level of anger among Palestinians about the Israeli occupation.

My second reaction: the NYT slide show has all the same images of elderly women with ink on their fingers and women lining up to vote that they had for the Iraqi elections, but something tells me that these pictures aren't going to make it into the Bush administration slide show about "changing the Arab world" and "moving towards democracy." Funny thing, democracy.

Anyway, a longer post about Israel and Palestine is forthcoming, but not before Saturday. Ack.

winter

Oooph - this week has been kicking my bootay, and hence no time to blog. After my proposal is turned in Friday I should have something to say. In the meantime, here are some pics I took from the big snow in December. Look at them and then meditate upon how (comparatively) ridiculously warm its been since New Years.

shorn

Before



minus two ponytails



= after.



Yes, the time had come, which chiefly means that the length of my hair finally met the minimum requirement (10 inches) for a donation to Locks of Love, a very nice group who make high-quality hairpieces for children with medical hairloss. And so now I have short hair again, just in time for spring (ha!).

Supernova 1006

Happy New Year! To prove to you that 2006 is not such a boring year, check this out.

I actually do get paid to study exploding stars of various types, but I also happen to think that they are quite cool in a 10-year-old astronomy geek sort of way. And one topic I've always been fascinated with is archaeo-astronomy, or the use of historical and archaeological methods to learn about the universe. Excitingly, for nerds like me, this year marks the 1,000th anniversary of the brightest supernova ever recorded.

Supernovae are fantastically bright explosions that occur when certain types of stars reach the end of their life and decide to go out with a bang. They are also extremely rare events such that only five have ever been observed to occur within our own Milky Way galaxy, and all five happened before the invention of the telescope. Astronomers observe hundreds of these events every year in the multitude of distant galaxies, and in 1987 were lucky enough to observe a supernova occurring next-door in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy in orbit around the Milky Way. But for the last 400 years, there's been nothing going on here at home.

The five historical supernovae were first seen in the following years: 1006, 1054 (which created the famous Crab Nebula), 1181, 1572 (observed by Tycho Brahe, among others) and 1604 (observed by Johannes Kepler, among others). Of these five, SN 1006 was certainly the most impressive. At its peak, the supernova was brighter than Venus and nearly as bright as the full moon. The image here is a reconstruction (by astronomer Tunç Tezel) of how the supernova would have appeared.

It appeared on April 30 or May 1, and was visible in the sky for three years. The "guest star" was widely noticed: observations have survived from China, Japan, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Italy, and Switzerland. It made a big impression on the Chinese court astronomers, who kept very meticulous records of its position, and who reported:

its appearance was like the half Moon and it had pointed rays...
[It was] so brilliant that one could really see things clearly [by its light]

Another astronmer in San'a, Yemen observed:

It rose regularly half an hour after sunset. It was not round, but rather was elongated; at its edges were lines like fingers. It showed great turbulence as though (reflected) in disturbed waters.

The monks at the Benedictine Abbey in St. Gallens, Switzerland also recorded the guest star:

A new star of unusual size appeared; it was glittering in appearance and dazzling the eyes, causing alarm. In a wonderful manner it was sometimes contracted, sometimes spread out, and moreover sometimes extinguished. It was seen, nevertheless, for three months in the inmost limits of the south, beyond all the constellations which are seen in the sky.

Astronomers and historians combined aspects from all these various records to triangulate where the supernova came from. In 1965, Milne and Gardner identified the remnant of the explosion by its radio emission and gave it the creative name G327.6+14.6. Interestingly, the position of the remnant would just have skimmed the top of the Alps when viewed from the Swiss monastery, occassionally passing behind the peaks, which nicely meshes with the monks' observations. The remnant is now an expanding bubble of star material that was flung outward by the explosion and has been slowing down ever since. The image is of the remnant observed in X-rays by the Chandra observatory.

Anyone interested in learning more should check out (from a library) "Historical Supernovae and their Remnants" by Stephenson & Green; it's where I got most of the info for this post, and it goes into a lot of depth about several other events also. The pictures are from the very cool Astronomy Picture of the Day website. Hopefully none of these fine people will sue me.

Seasoned Greetings

Tonight we had Christmas Eve service at Montgomery Place. Laura Jean and I took part in a lightly staged reading of W. H. Auden's long Christmas Oratorio, "For The Time Being." We were the first two (of three) Wise Men, decked out in tweed jackets, repenting our "tall errors of imagination." The poem is a pretty interesting, modern re-dressing of the Christmas story, at times funny (as in this excerpt), at times political. It made me want to read through it again.

Anyway, this year is the first year I'll be away from Fresno for Christmas, which is a little bittersweet, but also makes me feel a little bit like a grown-up. Tomorrow we'll have our very own Christmas morning here in Chicago, go to church and then fly to Maryland to catch the tail-end of family dinner there. To all of you I'm not lucky enough to see in person for the holidays, I'd like to wish you each a joyous week. (I really don't want to rant about the so-called War on Christmas except to say: Wha-huh?). To those celebrating Christmas: Merry Christmas. To those celebrating Hanukkah: Happy Hanukkah. To those celebrating something else or nothing at all, best wishes and joy. In the new year, I hope we all may come to better appreciate the gifts of those who are different in various ways.

I'd also like to share my new favorite carol; it's a gorgeous song by Vienna Teng, and you should totally check out her music if you get a chance.


The Atheist Christmas Carol

It's the season of grace coming out of the void
Where a man is saved by a voice in the distance
It's the season of possible miracle cures
Where hope is currency and death is not the last unknown
Where time begins to fade
And age is welcome home

It's the season of eyes meeting over the noise
And holding fast with sharp realization
It's the season of cold making warmth a divine intervention
You are safe here you know now

Don't forget
Don't forget I love
I love
I love you

It's the season of scars and of wounds in the heart
Of feeling the full weight of our burdens
It's the season of bowing our heads in the wind
And knowing we are not alone in fear
Not alone in the dark

Year-end Top 5 Lists

At times, it seems the primary skills I picked up in grad school are drinking beer and commenting on pop culture. In that vein, I'd like to offer my year-end "Top 5" lists for music, movies and books. In reading these lists you may notice that a great many of the titles mentioned were not, in fact, released this past year. Being perpetually behind the times, it seemed simpler to limit the results to stuff that I heard, saw or read in the past year, regardless of how old it is. For example, I haven't really seen any of the movies currently being offered up as Oscar bait and which are making the top 10 lists of all the real movie critics out there. Oh well -- this is just what I liked about the past year; feel free to comment and (dis)agree.

Music

1. Sleater-Kinney, The Woods: Loud. Louder than your boyfriend's rock 'n roll. And better. And they give a great live show, too.


2. Kanye West, The College Dropout: This hip-hop is the new punk rock. The first track, "We Don't Care", is a completely joyous song about how much it sucks to be poor, and it gives a deserving middle-finger to every authority figure in range. I think maybe he had some other big hits also.


3. The New Pornographers, Twin Cinema: Listen to this band if you like super-catchy, yet sophisticated, power-pop. Each song crams in more hooky melodies, hand-claps and "hey ya's" than your average hour of pop radio (and why aren't they on the radio? oh yeah, they're Canadian). And the song "Sing Me Spanish Techno" will totally suck your brain out.


4. The Arcade Fire, Funeral: A cycle of songs about children living in a world without grown-ups. I definitely have days where I feel that way.


5. M.I.A., Arular: She's an ex-pat Sri Lankan, and current Londoner. There's an entire globe's worth of musical traditions in here, yet it mainly sounds like music played on trashcan lids while dancing on top of a burning cop car. In other words, pretty awesome.
   

(Hon. Men.: the Shins, Spoon, Talib Kweli, Neko Case, the Flaming Lips, Cibo Matto)

Movies

1. Batman Begins: I love action and comic book movies, but a lot of them are frankly kinda lousy. This one's not. Christian Bale makes a great Batman and Bruce Wayne, but the film's got an even better villian, exciting action sequences, and an actually compelling storyline.


2. Code 46: I'm also a sucker for any kind of sci-fi (LJ still makes fun of me for liking A.I.), and I really fell in love with this movie. Or perhaps I just fell in love with Samantha Morton's character. Hmmm. Anyway, imagine Gattaca as a zero-budget romance and with better acting. And I love that they filmed modern-day Beijing and Dubai as stand-ins for the cities of the future.


3. Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit: See here.


4. Brokeback Mountain: OK, so this actually is oscar bait. I don't know if it's as groundbreaking a movie as the critics say; I suppose a movie about gay cowboys is always going to be shocking to some. I enjoyed it for the simple pleasures of unpretentious story-telling, backed up by great acting. Heath Ledger deserves every award he's going to win for this one.
   


5. Gangs of New York: Finally got around to seeing this, and I actually liked it a lot. I was expecting a polite Merchant & Ivory period piece, but it's really more of an urban western with a story lifted from a fascinating bit of forgotten American history (the Civil War draft riots). They should've lost the Hollywood romance between Leo and Cam, and stuck with the tribal street warfare set to rock music. Daniel Day-Lewis tears it up (as usual).
   

(Hon. Men.: Bad Education, The Incredibles, Million Dollar Baby, Born Into Brothels, Velvet Goldmine, Hotel Rwanda, Harry Potter 4)

Books

1. Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: A book to savor -- the anti-page-turner. This is the comprehensive tale of the rebirth of English magic, as related by the disreputable love child of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. It has footnotes better than a lot of fantasy stuff you pick up (no joke).
   


2. Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: The story of a young Hmong girl with epilepsy and her encounters with the California medical system. The author tries her absolute hardest to be completely fair to the parents and the doctors and everyone involved, which just makes the tragedy of the story all the more wrenching. The most thought-provoking book on multi-cultural America I've read in a long time.
   


3. Neil Gaiman, American Gods: The tale of a war between the old gods and the new gods of media and technology, as waged in the interstate truck-stops and tourist traps across the landscape of the Midwest.
   


4. Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A funny and charming novel about comic books, escape artists and the different ways people can come together as a family.
   


5. Joe Sacco, Palestine: Joe Sacco spent a year living in the West Bank in the early 90's after the first Intifada. Here he downlinks his impressions, sketches, opinions, thoughts, and myriad interviews with Palestinians living under occupation. Just cuz its a comic book doesn't mean it can't be hard-hitting journalism too.
   

(Hon. Men.: J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince; Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats; Laura Kaplan, The Story of Jane; Karen Armstron, Islam: A Brief History)

Graduation

So I finally graduated, and they handed me the piece of paper without too much fuss. Sadly, my Mom, Dad and sister Jessica all missed the ceremony. They were due into town the night before, but the closing of Midway Airport following the runway accident caused their flight to be diverted to Hartford (yeah, the one in Connecticut). The next morning, they had to catch a flight with a transfer in Baltimore (yeah, the one in Maryland) just to get back to Chicago, and the flights kept getting delayed longer and longer. The finally showed up in Chicago, exhausted and frustrated, about an hour after the ceremony ended.

Happily, they made it to the after-party/reception and we got to take photos while I was still wearing the silly robes. Laura Jean, Amy, Judy and David (my family-in-law) were at the ceremony to represent, and we all rallied and had fun for the rest of the weekend.

Here's a blurry picture of the processional - I often think blurry photos are kinda cool.

Look! a gamma-ray burst! Yay for dress-up in silly robes!

Laura Jean's family also got to see her in action at her new church. She gets to dress-up in silly robes every week!

I think Laura Jean looks especially cute in this one.

My family is very cool. They were totally calm and collected under pressure and they dealt with a thoroughly lousy airline experience with grace and humor. Also, they handled the freezing Chicago winter pretty well. Here they're looking sharp in their new winter coats.

funny/sad

In general, I like Maureen Dowd's columns, although at times she's what the Brits like to call "too clever by half." However, today's column got a laugh. She quotes Secretary of State Rice's recent comments defending extraordinary rendition of suspects to foreign countries to avoid laws that forbid us from torturing them on home soil.

"The United States government does not authorize or condone torture of detainees," she said.

and Dowd's response:

It all depends on what you mean by "authorize," "condone," "torture" and "detainees."

And if that's too much laughter for you, check out this article from the Washington Post, about the German national who was kidnapped and taken to a secret jail in Afghanistan and tortured for five months based on a "hunch" by a CIA agent that proved to be totally wrong. The really chilling part is when the CIA realized they got the wrong guy they seriously considered just dumping him somewhere and denying that it ever happened. Accountability please?

Wikipedia: Suck or Rule?

For those not in the know, wikipedia.org is now officially the world's largest encyclopedia, offering nearly a million articles, all written and edited by volunteers. In fact, anyone (maybe you?) who happens to click onto their pages can edit or change them (without registering). This of course, has great potential to let blossom a million flowers of nerdiness, but it also crucially relies on the good faith (and competence) of the volunteer corps.

Recently they've decided to clamp down on unrestricted editing of articles, after a bio of John Seigenthaler (a former aide to Robert Kennedy) was edited to insinuate he might have been involved in the assassinations of both Kennedys. Oops. Mr. Seigenthaler was understandably upset and consequently ripped them a new one in a USA Today Op-Ed piece. Still, abuse like this seems difficult to control, given the nature of wikipedia. In my mind, the controversy is a another round in the struggle between free speech and (occasionally legitimate) state control over speech. No magic bullets here.

On the subject of wikipedia's general quality, one friend of mine likes to refer to the site as "decision making by a committee of twenty idiots". I don't quite agree: I like the fact that the site tends to have reasonably good articles on topics you can't get elsewhere. So it's not really a competition between "good" and "better", but rather between "good" and "nothing". The few times I've looked at subjects I do research on and know a fair bit about (gamma-ray bursts, HETE-2, astronomy) I've been pleasantly surprised at the level of detail. No obvious mistakes, good external links. Sure, some of the articles could be longer and more interesting, and there is a fair bit of stating the obvious, but for the most part way more informative than the string of generic news articles you would get from a google search. A good first start, which is what an encyclopedia should be.

Of course, gamma-ray astronomy is a fairly non-controversial backwater. I could easily put in a few hours of editing and improving the afore-mentioned pages (a better option than complaining about them) and be fairly certain that someone won't come along and undo everything. The same couldn't be said for articles on "aliens", "George W. Bush" or "Kennedy assassination", I guess.

So I'm curious. Do other people use wikipedia? Do you trust the stuff you find?

The Truth Is Out There

Turns out that the L'Enfant Plaza in DC (where conference I just attended was held) has a shiny glass pyramid that leads you to its underground entrance, just like the IM Pei pyramid at the Louvre. Of course, the Louvre entrance leads you to the finest art collection in the western world, while the L'Enfant entrance leads to a shopping mall. So it goes.



At any rate, it is clear that both pyramids mark sites of ancient power. The L'Enfant pyramid is actually the transmitting post for the gamma-rays that the alien Illuminati conspiracy uses to control the world governments, conveniently located in the heart of DC. Legend has it that the bones of the Messiah (a.k.a. Jean-Luc Picard) are buried beneath the pyramid's apex, and there have been reports of manifestations of great power from the pyramid.

Tellingly, when I snapped a photo of the Great Pyramid, I was accosted by a security guard who told me that photos of the plaza were not permitted unless I crossed to the other side (!) of the street. I'm probably violating some Homeland Security law by posting this photo, but the people need to know the truth!