Going through another quiet spell. Probably has to do with being totally overwhelmed with:

  • looking for housing – any leads on housing in and around Boston, particularly the Davis Sq. area is appreciated
  • preparing a grant application to the Open Society Institute to fund IMC open editing tools
  • preparing a presentation to Five Colleges Inc, to convince them to reprise their role as first paying customer for the latest round of calendar software. they were the people who funded the original development of Calendrome, and made Protest.net possible

Spent the week down in New York City. Learned that preparing Thanksgiving dinner in a kitchen that usually gets used for making coffee, and the occasional quesadilla is not a good idea.

Found out that a friend of a friend has spent 3 years trying to get accepted to the Army. I found that very sad and ironic. I tried to talk him out of it, but without success. (is there a way to represent that as FOAF?)

Learned Bloomberg is trying to destory public transit, both raising the fare to $2, and continueing the policy of hard balling transit workers. Discovered that my New York friends contain a surprisingly large percentage of unemployed philosophers from whom I learned of the Unemployed Philosopher’s Guild, the only place you can buy Will to Power bars, plush Freudian Slippers, and a Karl Marx beanie baby.

It was also one of those strange weeks, when everything you read seems to relate to each other.

Ecology of Fear takes a surprise swerve to talk about the “demonized Other”, feminized utopians, and Octavia Bulter, Decoding Gender in SF‘s bread and butter, who in turn is talking about Donna Haraway and her cyborgs, as discussed by D&G in 1000 Plateaus which is threatening to insert itselfs in my (re-)reading queue. (because as Calvino says, “One never reads the classics, only ever re-reads them”) Strange.