Laurentina's skeleton

Elections are tomorrow, and in Seattle, we've got a couple of very interesting races, and for those of you who don't live around here, a couple of very interesting electoral features that really ought to be more widely adopted.

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First, off, we have 100% mail-in ballots. Everyone gets ballots and voter guides mailed to them a few weeks in advance. We can mail them in by election day, or physically stick them in dropboxes, or do it the old-fashioned way and go to one of the "vote in person" locations. The result being: no in-person voter suppression, no misdirection about voting locations, no surprise day-of-election id requirements, no worrying about taking time away from work to vote, no huge lines, no untrustworthy electronic voting machines, online verification that your voter information is correct, online verification that your ballot was mailed to you, online verification that your ballot was received, and online verification that your ballot was counted. And much higher voter turnout. Snail mail is the wave of the future.

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Second, we have a jungle, er, top-two primary. Every single frickin' candidate gets to run in the primary election, and specify whatever party affiliation they want to. And the top two vote-getters go on to the general election. The organized political parties are treated precisely the same as any other organization, from for-profit corporations to unions to non-profit advocacy groups - the candidate can put "Endorsed by the WA State ____ Party" in their voter guide statement, just like they'd say "Endorsed by the 53rd District Firefighters". This is a wonderful, wonderful system, because it means that, in districts that skew in a particular direction, people can still make a choice between two viable candidates in the general election. I'm in a very left-wing location, and the two most interesting races involve two left-wing candidates, as opposed to the "normal" situation, which would be a Democratic party candidate who is assured of victory no matter how regressive some of their positions are, and a Republican candidate who is assured of defeat no matter how liberal they actually are in practice.

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(As an aside: the Republican party talks a lot about the virtues of federalism and decentralization, and yet it seems that one of the things crippling them the most is their insistence on a homogenous nation-wide ideology, with no room for state-level or local-level experimentation. Republicans from urban Seattle are under pressure to conform to the same views as Republicans from rural Texas, and that just seems self-defeating. Not that the Democratic party doesn't do this, but at least from my perspective, it seems like a much less systematic and organized effect, which is mainly still driven by individual interest groups. Of course, that may just mean that much of the Republican leadership actually drank their own Kool-aid, whereas the Democratic leadership has largely held themselves aloof from such plebeian concerns.)

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The first of the awesome races is for Seattle City Council Position No. 2, where the incumbent Democrat Richard Conlin is being challenged by Kshama Sawant, who teaches economics at Seattle Central Community College and is running under the banner of the Socialist Alternative Party. This is awesome, she is awesome, and I really want her to get elected. A caveat is that I probably would not be happy if the entire government was composed of her ideological clones, but as with libertarian candidates, I think her positions are far less represented than they should be. Her presence in the race has already gotten other candidates to take seriously the idea of a $15 minimum wage; I'd initially thought this was a bad idea, but I dug around and found some economic studies that indicate that it actually doesn't have a noticeable negative effect on prices or employment rates. The reason seems to be that the people who would be paid more are in turn more likely to spend that extra money in the local economy, thus increasing the local velocity of money and making more people wealthier. (There are some weird parallels between money and electricity, that I am still scratching my head over.) Basically, trickle-up economics.

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The second of the awesome races is for Seattle's Mayor. Four years ago, Mike McGinn became mayor after running as a complete outsider, never before elected to public office, and defeating the incumbent in the primary and the annointed corporate tool replacement in the general election. Since then, it seems like the establishment has been trying to undermine him at every turn, and engaging in hypocritical games such as refusing to work with him and then claiming that it's he's impossible to work with. So he'd already have my vote from a screw-the-establishment perspective. Plus, McGinn actually paid attention to the Environmental Impact Statement about the big tunnel, and actually changed his position based on the new evidence! (Yes, that's a shock. Updating conclusions based on new data? Clearly he's not a career politician.) While Ed Murray was part of the effort to stick Seattle City with responsibility for any cost overruns. But more than that was a part of one of the last debates between McGinn and the Democratic challenger Ed Murray:

http://www.king5.com/news/politics…

7:45 - question to McGinn
8:20 - answer from McGinn
9:40 - response from Murray
10:48 - question to Murray
10:55 - answer from Murray
11:22 - response from McGinn
11:55 - time is up

The subject is the federal Department of Justice civil-rights investigation into racially biased policing and excessive use of force by Seattle City police. The federal government has imposed a settlement on the city to help fix this, and apparently a lot of people in the city government find this to be embarrassing and unwelcome. Ed Murray was forced to admit that he "probably" doesn't have any objection to the final settlement that McGinn worked out, and that his worry is that "this could go on for years and years", and he wants to expedite us getting out from it. To which McGinn's response was:

"You know, and that really reflects his attitude, Senator Murray's attitude towards the consent decree. 'We've let it linger for years and years, we've got to get out from under it'. This is an opportunity to fix something. I've heard Senator Murray say it's embarrassing we have a consent decree; it's embarrassing we had complaints of police brutality from our communities of color for twenty years and we didn't *do* anything about it. *That* was embarrassing. It should take as much time as it takes to get it right."

So yes, that's pretty much my impressions of them in a nutshell.

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And finally, in case you were feeling lazy, here's a link to the Stranger's voter's guide, which is, well, much less biased and manipulative than that of the other major local papers. :)

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle…

This is a rather long and convoluted set of links, but I thought it would be nice to put it all in one place.

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The Main Event:

The owner of the Linkery, Jay Porter, has written a series of blog posts about his experience there and the insights that he's gained from their no-tipping policy. There are 6 blog posts, plus 4 postscripts, and a final overview, stretching from July 25th to August 20th. But they are very well written, and worth reading straight through. He's also got links to some of the real research on the subject, and excerpts from some of his conversations with the experts.

Some of my favorite quotes:

• ... unlike those other places, and unlike every other sit-down restaurant in America, we refused to accept money beyond the service charge.

• The story of the server being motivated by the customer’s power to tip, is instead a fiction created to make the customer feel important.

• At this point I have to admit some uncomfortable truths. Before we switched to a non-tipping system, I was pretty much like these guys. Perhaps that just made me like most guys. I like to think I was generally nice to people, and I’m sure I always tipped way more than twenty percent. But I, like many males, loved the rush of having my needs attended to by young, attractive, female servers.

• ... it was clear that we were now the only restaurant in the US where, if a female server chose to look sexy, it was most likely because she felt like looking sexy. If a server flirted with you, it was because she wanted to flirt with you. Not because she wanted your money; but because she was enjoying flirting with you. It didn’t affect her night’s income at all.

• Yes, it’s disorienting at first when you perceive something as ubiquitous as tipping to be an actual civil rights issue; but then again I imagine most civil rights issues at some point were so ubiquitous they seemed normal. If we can verify with research that compensation by tips causes non-whites and women to be systematically treated worse in places of public accommodation, do we need much more reason to declare tipping a failed experiment and move on to a more proven method of compensation such as wages or salaries?

• The point is this — we know that tipping rewards employees for being white and for being attractive females, and punishes them for being otherwise. We know that compensation by tipping lets employers speciously punish employees by assigning them to low revenue shifts, while still maintaining the legal fiction that the employee is making a full wage.
  
  Additionally, compensation by tips ensures that customers who are non-white, who are female, or old people, or young people, or foreigners all get a lower quality of service than medium-aged white men, in establishments that claim to welcome all peoples equally.

• [From a food critic:] ... with your fixed service charge you didn’t give my any choice. I couldn’t give him a lower tip. How else could I punish him for his mistakes?

• [From their former Director of Operations:] I’m curious why it seems that nobody has a problem with “parties of 5 or more will be subjected to a 20% service charge”, but, in the minds of some people, “parties of 1 or more will be subjected to an 18% service charge” is heresy?

• I’ve also noticed that people in general turn their ears off once the subject of tipping comes up.
  
  My Rule #1 in life is “never read the comments”, but as this blog series has become popular I’ve read through a couple forum discussions about it. One thing that really strikes me is how many people are compelled to share their personal tipping policy. A key point of this blog series is that most people have their own policy, and the difference in tipping practices among individuals is so big that any given tip contains no information. But I think that the people who can’t wait to tell you how they tip, are missing that point. They’re not listening; and from what I can see, they’re also not being listened to.
  
  Tipping embodies a lot of messages — and no one is listening.

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After taiji and brunch, I went down to Portland by way of Bolt bus. My parents had sent me a portable back massager cushion with a 12V car plug attachment, but since the bus had 2 regular 120V plugs per seat, I didn't need that. Boy, did that make the trip better. :)

I met up with silver_fishing and her R, and their friends H and S, and we went to Bollywood Theater for dinner, which is this great place that serves Indian street food. Apparently they went around India and observed what was being served at the equivalent of truck stops in the various regions, and brought them all together. It's absolutely delicious, if perhaps not the healthiest meal out there. ;-) Also, for what it's worth, R is from India and a great cook, and this is his favorite restaurant in Portland. I suspect that it'd be like encountering Glo's diner in India, but more so. :)

Dessert at Papa Haydn's. We polled everyone to find out what fraction of a dessert we felt we could handle, then ordered the sum, and shared them all. There was a lemon chiffon cake that seemed to use cheesecake for icing, an incredibly light pile of merangue and fruit, and this chocolate mint cake that had the texture of a lemon merangue pie, but the flavors of an Andes mint candy.

And then home, and now to bed. It's good to get down here again; I fell way off my planned once-a-month visiting ideal. I'm not sure what the plans for the rest of my visit are, but they should involve a lot of relaxation. :)

This will be a bit roundabout, I'm afraid, traveling through a song and an interview and a digression about translations, before getting to the actual book. :)

So, first off, a while ago I stumbled on an a capella musical group called Sassafrass that is working on an album called Sundown based on Norse mythology. In particular, there's a song that has wound up stuck in my head for weeks at a time, coming and going. It's a duet between Odin and Loki called My Brother, My Enemy - the link has streaming audio, so go and listen! :)

I also enjoy their absolutely delightful Futhark song. :)

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A bit later, I came across an interview with Ada Palmer, the composer. One of her responses in the interview led to one of those moments where a bunch of things snap into focus; I don't know whether it will have similar effects on anyone else, but I figure I'll share anyway:

BLT: You mentioned that while Christianity struggles with the problem of evil, the Norse myths face a rather different issue. Tell us about that.

Ada: Christianity and the Greco-Roman religions emerged around the Mediterranean, where life was basically good: the climate is comfortable, the earth is fertile, and there is an abundance of plants and animals for food. In these surroundings, where the world was basically good, the gods too are conceived of as basically good, thus giving rise to the question “if the gods are good, then why is there evil in the world?” But in the far north, where Viking culture emerged, the world was a very different place: the earth is more often frozen than not, plants and animals are rare, and even the gods have to fight and scheme for survival in a fundamentally inhospitable cosmos. In Norse cosmology, the basic elements of creation are ice and fire: dangerous elements that are intrinsically hostile to life. In such a world, the basic question that emerges isn’t “why is there evil in the world”: it’s “why is there anything good in the world at all?”

This more or less also clarified my views on civil liberties, in a philosophy I am hereby calling "Viking Socialism": concepts like "rights", "justice", "fairness", and "universal health care" don't exist in nature, don't exist apart from groups of people, and aren't floating around somewhere in Platonic idea-space. They're things we create, things that we do for each other, because we think they're good things, and so we bring these concepts into existence by an act of will, powered by a sacrifice of our time, energy, and resources. (And hopefully not of our eye, life, and/or capacity for love.) Talking about "rights" as if they were a thing that people somehow mystically "have" is misleading; "rights" are a thing we give to the people around us, over and over again until we are dead, and it will be inconvenient and painful at times, but that's what we do because that's how we make ourselves into someone worth becoming. (And because we carved the oath onto our spear, of course. And because any other choice will, in the long run, lead to the absolute annihilation of all that we hold dear. Ha ha only serious.)

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And now a digression into translation styles. When I'm delving into a culture and language, I really prefer word-for-word translations, where the translator keeps the original word order as much as possible. This is what I do when translating on paper, for example. It lets me start thinking in the language's sentence structure, to start parsing concepts in the language's word-bundles, and to start using the language's idioms naturally. Eventually, more and more words are just left alone, until poof, I'm basically just making a gloss of unfamiliar words.

But for stuff where I'm not immersing myself into a culture, I tend to indentify two main categories of translation. One tends to aim for conveying the same meaning, but this usually requires enough careful English phrasing to completely hide the original rhythm, style, etc. The other tends to aim for conveying the same emotional impact, but often tends to be a bit loose with the literal meaning of the words. Possibly it's just me, but no matter the type of the translation, I often seem to find myself wishing the translator had done more of the other type, whichever it happened to be. :) Maybe I'm just contrary and unsatisfiable like that. :)

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So finally, the book is Two Old Women by Velma Wallis. It's a native Alaskan folk tale about how a tribe and two old women deal with a harsh winter, and the consequences that follow. It is simple and direct and unflinching and pragmatic and honest. All the people feel real, all the choices seem human, and there is a complete lack of Romanticism and euphemism. It reads very much to me like something one would want to tell to one's children if one wanted to prepare them for life in a marginal hunter-gatherer tribe that lived near the Arctic circle. There is stuff that needs to be known and taught, not just simple knowledge, but feelings, spirit, and patterns of emotional growth, and this story seems a great way to get them across.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, when I first opened it without knowing anything about it. Perhaps something written by an outsider who was too much in love with the new rhythms of the language, who wanted to transmit the feelings they felt when they heard it for the first time, but which passed over what the story means to the people who tell it to each other, or perhaps which exoticized the meaning beyond recognition.

But this doesn't feel like that. I'm not sure what it feels like. Possibly like the unknown roots of what eventually became the Grimm brother's tales. But it's definitely worth reading!

I am in the middle of post composition, but shall now go to bed, because sleep is good.

On the brighter side, I have a new bike, which is a lot of fun to ride!

In preparation for seeing the Ring cycle, mimerki and I read (to each other) one of J.R.R. Tolkien's "newer" posthumous works, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. It's kind of his translation into modern English of what the Anglo-Saxon version of the Volsung saga might have been, had there been an Anglo-Saxon version of the Volsung saga. And it deserves to be read aloud. OMG. It altered my speech patterns for weeks.

In it's extant state, it's not masterwork quality. It's not even technically finished, in the sense that Tolkien misplaced his draft and it was only found after his death. (That is, the text is complete, it's just not polished to the degree that epic poetry ought to be.) But that said, there are moments of greatness, especially if read aloud.

Among other things, I enjoy how Loki and Högni (Hagen) are basically sane and rational, unlike the people surrounding them. Most of the villainry is taken up by Queen Grímhild of the Niflungs, mother of Gunnar and Gudrún. And I also enjoyed the inclusion of the less-well-known second part, the "The New Lay of Gudrún", in which Grímhild marries off Gudrún to Atli, King of Hunland. Better known to us as Attila the Hun, the Scourge of God. It ends as you might expect: badly and in fire.

A verse from the middle, and the verse from the end:

By mighty Mirkwood
on the marches of the East
the great Goth-kings
in glory ruled.
By Danpar-banks
was dread warfare
with the hosts of Hunland,
horsemen countless.

...

Thus glory endeth,
and gold fadeth,
on noise and clamours
the night falleth.
Lift up your hearts,
lords and maidens
for the song of sorrow
that was sung of old.

So yeah, definitely something to check out if you enjoy the primal rhythms of the English language.

PS - An interesting etymological note is that Attila is Atli is Etzel is Edsel. So yes, the Ford Edsel was named after Attila the Hun.

PPS - I have a fairly strong intuition that the language in "The Lord of the Rings" describing the men of Dunland, is pretty much a direct analogue to descriptions in this of the Huns of Hunland. I might be persuaded to hunt down some of the original language references, if others are interested?

I shall say some nice things:

• I enjoyed the designs of the dress uniforms and some of the civilian clothes. They pleasantly reminded me of the uniforms from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and that's not something I ever thought I'd have cause to say.
• There was one moment, right near the end when Kirk was in a hospital bed and looking slightly sideways, where Chris Pine looked almost exactly like a young William Shatner. It was eerie!
• Zachary Quinto had a few (I think about 3) good monologues.

And, uh, yeah. Plot holes the size of the steroid-addled new Enterprise. And I didn't mind when they lifted a scene straight from Return of the Jedi, but could they please not steal ideas from Galaxy Quest? It's in poor taste!

Edited to add: Another thing that stood out as quite good was the general diversity of the Enterprise's crew, especially the inclusion of so many non-humans. Of all Star Trek shows, this movie has come closest to what I picture in my head as the general crew consistency of Federation starships, at least in the Original Series era.

Also, I consider it a virtue to be able to appreciate quality/arete in mediums that are not particularly to my taste. It's tough, no one's perfect, it's impossible to escape our own little subjective world, etc. But, well, there are excellent action movies, and excellent space shoot-em-up movies, and those are good things. This movie was not excellent. (Dude.)

It's like, if you're going to make a space action movie, great, go for it. But if you're going to borrow characters and setting from Star Trek, you should be aware that those are only the visible tip of the iceberg of what people liked about Star Trek. And if you don't actually understand or care what people liked about the original, and (unlike Nicholas Meyer) your own personal vision differs too much from the original, then your work will not stand on its own. Because it doesn't, because you *made* it not stand on its own when you took the name and characters and setting from somewhere else. If you don't want your movie to be compared to other Star Trek movies, *don't call it Star Trek*.

What with the whole "government spying on its citizens" thing rearing its ugly head, I thought I would put up a link to a wonderful hip-hop song that I heard almost 15 years ago. It's pre-9/11, so some of the conspiracy theories are less than relevant these days. But it's fun to listen to it gradually get more and more out there, and reflect on just how far down the list we've gotten. :/ And hey, it's a good listen, and has a shout out to Noam Chomsky!

So, I recently started watching the Game of Thrones TV series with my roommate, and I was wondering - which characters are safe to care about? :)

We're on the second season second episode right now, just after Theon returns to the Iron Islands. I've only read the first book, and that was 15 years ago, so we're past the point where I know for sure what's coming. That said, I've picked up bits and pieces over the years. And so, for example, I know what's just happened on the TV series, and it doesn't surprise me in the least that such a thing would happen. :/

Anyway, I'm looking for a short list of likeable characters who live, and who are predicted to continue to live, and who don't have horrible soul-shattering things happen to them? Right now I'm betting on Jon, Arya, Tyrion, and Daenerys. They seem to be the center of long-running plotlines that would be utterly pointless if they suddenly died. Does that seem reasonable? Anyone have other suggestions? :)

Interesting legal trivia that I stumbled on:

Title 12A CRIMINAL CODE, Chapter 12A.14 WEAPONS CONTROL

Chapter 12A.14 - WEAPONS CONTROL

The short version:

In Seattle, it's illegal to "carry" a box-cutter or chef's knife or hatchet or axe or machete or sword. It's unclear from this section what "carry" means, but the best I can find is that it's probably equivalent to "carrying" a gun, in that it's OK if it's packed away in a container of some sort, but it's not OK to just stick it through your belt or toss it over your back, or tote it around in any other way that's easy to access. So definitely no putting a box-cutter in your pocket, because that's both carrying and also concealed!

In Seattle, it's illegal to give someone under 18 a box-cutter or chef's knife or hatchet or axe or machete or sword. And they can't buy or possess them either, except that they *can* possess them under direct adult supervision. One hopes that this wouldn't apply to a 17-year-old preparing a meal while their parents are away.

In Seattle, brass knuckles are Right Out. Nunchaku and throwing stars are, too, unless you're actively practicing a martial art that uses them, and you only take them to or from practice, purchase, or repair. (Technically, it seems to be illegal to possess them in your home while you are away from home.) I suppose the moral is to get rid of your throwing stars *before* you betray your ninja clan?

The long version:

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