Nom de Plume

Pam, my mother outlaw, is arriving tomorrow morning. Steve is taking Thursday and Friday off, and I am in a frantic cleaning mode. Argh.

The SavetheInternet.com Coalition launches April 24 to urge Congress to take immediate steps to save the First Amendment of the Internet — a principle called “network neutrality” that ensures that the Web remains open to innovation and progress.

link

Found on Poppy Cedes. Here are the rules: BOLD those you’ve read, ITALICIZE the ones you’ve been meaning to read.

Alcott, Louisa May–Little Women
Allende, Isabel–The House of Spirits
Angelou, Maya–I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (totally overrated in my opinion)
Atwood, Margaret–Cat’s Eye
Austen, Jane–Emma
Bambara, Toni Cade–Salt Eaters
Barnes, Djuna–Nightwood
de Beauvoir, Simone–The Second Sex
Blume, Judy–Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret (we must, we must …. I cursed myself)
Burnett, Frances–The Secret Garden
Bronte, Charlotte–Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily–Wuthering Heights
Buck, Pearl S.–The Good Earth
Byatt, A.S.–Possession
Cather, Willa–My Antonia
Christie, Agatha–Murder on the Orient Express
Cisneros, Sandra–The House on Mango Street
Clinton, Hillary Rodham–Living History
Cooper, Anna Julia–A Voice From the South
Danticat, Edwidge–Breath, Eyes, Memory
Davis, Angela–Women, Culture, and Politics
Desai, Anita–Clear Light of Day
Dickinson, Emily–Collected Poems
Duncan, Lois–I Know What You Did Last Summer
DuMaurier, Daphne–Rebecca
Eliot, Geroge–Middlemarch
Emecheta, Buchi–Second Class Citizen
Erdrich, Louise–Tracks (not this one, but plenty of others, my fave was The Beet Queen)
Esquivel, Laura–Like Water for Chocolate
Flagg, Fannie–Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
Friedan, Betty–The Feminine Mystique
Frank, Anne–Diary of a Young Girl
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins–The Yellow Wallpaper
Gordimer, Nadine–July’s People
Grafton, Sue–S is for Silence
Hamilton, Edith–Mythology This seems like an odd inclusion to me.
Highsmith, Patricia–The Talented Mr. Ripley
Hooks, Bell–Bone Black
Hurston, Zora Neale–Dust Tracks on the Road
Jacobs, Harriet–Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Jackson, Helen Hunt–Ramona
Jackson, Shirley–The Haunting of Hill House
Jong, Erica–Fear of Flying
Keene, Carolyn–The Nancy Drew Mysteries (any of them) This inclusion is just plain WRONG. The original was written by a man; the rest were written by a whole passel of writers
Kidd, Sue Monk–The Secret Life of Bees
Kincaid, Jamaica–Lucy
Kingsolver, Barbara–The Poisonwood Bible
Kingston, Maxine Hong–The Woman Warrior
Larsen, Nella–Passing
L’Engle, Madeleine–A Wrinkle in Time
Le Guin, Ursula K.–The Left Hand of Darkness
Lee, Harper–To Kill a Mockingbird
Lessing, Doris–The Golden Notebook
Lively, Penelope–Moon Tiger
Lorde, Audre–The Cancer Journals
Martin, Ann M.–The Babysitters Club Series
McCullers, Carson–The Member of the Wedding
McMillan, Terry–Disappearing Acts
Markandaya, Kamala–Nectar in a Sieve
Marshall, Paule–Brown Girl, Brownstones
Mitchell, Margaret–Gone with the Wind
Montgomery, Lucy–Anne of Green Gables
Morgan, Joan–When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost
Morrison, Toni–Song of Solomon
Murasaki, Lady Shikibu–The Tale of Genji
Munro, Alice–Lives of Girls and Women
Murdoch, Iris–A Severed Head
Naylor, Gloria–Mama Day
Niffenegger, Audrey–The Time Traveller’s Wife
Oates, Joyce Carol–We Were the Mulvaneys And God, was it horrible.
O’Connor, Flannery–A Good Man is Hard to Find
Piercy, Marge–Woman on the Edge of Time
Picoult, Jodi–My Sister’s Keeper
Plath, Sylvia–The Bell Jar
Porter, Katharine Anne–Ship of Fools
Proulx, E. Annie–The Shipping News
Rand, Ayn–The Fountainhead Even worse than Mulvaneys
Ray, Rachel–365: No Repeats
Rhys, Jean–Wide Sargasso Sea
Robinson, Marilynne–Housekeeping
Rocha, Sharon–For Laci
Sebold, Alice–The Lovely Bones
Shelley, Mary–Frankenstein
Smith, Betty–A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Smith, Zadie–White Teeth
Spark, Muriel–The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Spyri, Johanna–Heidi
Strout, Elizabeth–Amy and Isabelle
Steel, Danielle–The House
Tan, Amy–The Joy Luck Club
Tannen, Deborah–You’re Wearing That
Ulrich, Laurel–A Midwife’s Tale
Urquhart, Jane–Away
Walker, Alice–The Temple of My Familiar
Welty, Eudora–One Writer’s Beginnings
Wharton, Edith–Age of Innocence
Wilder, Laura Ingalls–Little House in the Big Woods
Wollstonecraft, Mary–A Vindication of the Rights of Women
Woolf, Virginia–A Room of One’s Own

The race this weekend is 30 hours long.

30 hours.

I cannot even begin to fathom what it would be like to spend 30 hours on a sailboat. It’s a good thing Steve likes the rest of the crew. They’re going to be very cozy. I, of course, am going to miss him while he’s gone. He called me at about nine this morning.

“Wanna go on a hot date tonight?”

“Sure,” I said, pleased. I didn’t think he’d want to do anything tonight; he’s a real morning person, can easily be asleep by 8 every night. Okay, okay, he is asleep by 8 every night.

“Okay,” he said. “But we have to make it early. I have an even hotter date at 7:30. With the bed.”

Last year, I wanted to plant masses of bulbs in the front yard. I imagined froths of hyacinths and daffodils poking their heads up spring after spring, tons of tulips for cut flowers. But no. “It’s not in keeping with a Japanese garden,” sniffed Steve in disdain. So I resigned myself to planting five or six bulbs in the ground, and the rest in pots. And we all know that I kill plants when they’re in pots. There’s a reason that Steve calls them Zia’s Torture Chambers.

So what happened this year? Steve “discovered” the joys of bulbs. He planted flat after flat of ‘em. He dragged me to McClendon’s to get the more exotic types of bulbs. He’s even ordered a bunch of them online. And when I complained? “I’m so glad I thought of putting bulbs in the front yard,” he said.

Back by popular demand, the cast of Maguire’s fabulous Wicked appears, at least partially. Elphaba may be gone, but her spirit of the resistance lives on, both in the hearts of the –what do you call them anyway? Ozzians? Ozzites?–and in Liir, the little boy who lived with her. Is he her son? Is he someone else’s? We don’t know and it doesn’t really matter because he is thrust into a role he isn’t sure he wants to take on. I love Gregory Maguire, I loved Wicked, and Son of a Witch deserves a place on everyone’s to read list. The man is a genius.

Getting one is yet another thing on the to-do list that probably isn’t going to be done anytime soon. I want one of these. Aren’t they nifty? They light up. More than that, they’re pretty.

Unfortunately, I think they’re only available in Australia. link

After I read False Impressions, scavenged around for a copy, and sent it to my mother for airplane reading, I got this book from her in the mail. Crossed paths, indeed. Freund follows three early American antiques from the time they are made to their latest sale at auction–and he delivers a tale not just of the pieces itself, but the history of American antiques, the stories of famous antique dealers and buyers, and a crash course in certain aspects of furniture making. Granted, he meandered all over the place, and didn’t often end up where he started (or even in the general vicintity). Even so, this was very fun, very interesting … and very addictive.

Mom left for Iraq last Friday, and we managed to talk for a few minutes before her cell phone cut out. It made me a little teary. Neither one of us is good at the emotional farewells and so on. But she’s there, safe and sound, and I just got this:

A quick note before I address the e-mail (through the slow connection we have here) to say that we arrived safely. The flight over the Atlantic was great (lobster, good wine, fabulous service, great cheeses) and the bag made the transfer to Amman. I don’t have much of an impression of Amman except for light colored flat surfaced buildings spread over hills in the desert air.

On to Baghdad on the C-130. Not an uncomfortable flight except, possibly, for the lack of restrooms (a bucket in the back doesn’t cut it for me) and the landing in Baghdad was smooth.

Unfortunately, we missed our helicopter and no one goton the later helo flight, so we waited for the Rhino. Ate in a good cafeteria, enormous, barbecued pork ribs (o sin!) and fresh salad for me. The Rhino, this armored, lumbering small windowed metal plated bus, convoy came in late and we arrived here about 4:30 a.m. Long day, to say the least, but I made some friends and acquaintances.

The C-130 flight and Rhino was enlivened by Jim Biggus, an FSO of somewhat but not greatly younger years than I, who will be in Kirkuk. (Jim has a splinted finger. Someone broke it when shakinghis hand good by. I joked that this was the difference between State and USIA–I have my shotgun bruise.)

I will be here in Baghdad two or three weeks, it turns out. My “hooch” is much larger than advertised, a good 10 x 15. Functional.

And that’s about it. I’ll sign off and try to do the Pamlico News. Love you both, Me

My mother, who is going to Iraq tomorrow, has been in training classes for the past week and a half. She’s been busy and so have I; thus, we’ve been playing phone tag. Serious phone tag. The latest? She was just at the shooting range, practicing with an AK47, a rifle, and a shotgun.

She’s in heaven. After all, this is my mother, the one who’s an NRA card-toting member of the Democratic Party. Okay, maybe she doesn’t have the actual card, but she’s there in spirit. The first time she came to visit me in “the wilds of Idaho,” my then-boyfriend wanted us to take his gun with us to Sun Valley in case we broke down in the middle of nowhere. I refused. She accepted. I refused again, on the basis that I didn’t want to be around a loaded gun. She insisted. “You’ll never know it’s there,” she assured me, popped it into her purse, and off we sped to the swishy Sun Valley Lodge. The gun nestled happily in her purse all weekend long, amid rumpled Kleenex and hand lotion.

Don’t get me wrong; I’ve shot guns, including an AK47 and an Uzi. But I’m really bad at it and to be frank, they scare me. She, quite obviously, doesn’t suffer the same qualms. That’s probably a good thing. And as one of her fellow trainees said, “I wouldn’t want to meet you in a dark alley.”

Just in case you’re curious, here’s a dedicated blog.

The first picture is of animal prints in the snow. Which makes one wonder whether winter activities are also conducted in the buff.

Sounds cold.

It died a gruesome, grisly death, 23 to 8.

A Mercury News editorial sums it up quite nicely:

Just as lawmakers in Congress are pushing a bill that could increase competition in video and high-speed Internet services, they’re willing to allow phone and cable companies to subvert that competition.

Then again, as CNet says:

AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon spent $230.9 million on politicians from 1998 until the present, while Amazon, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo spent only a combined $71.2 million.

The really ironic thing is that most of these people are 60-year old men who have their secretaries and wives send their e-mails. As Information Week points out:

Despite the Congressional battle, former FCC Chairman Michael Powell cautions that Congress doesn’t always make sound decisions about technology. “They have a very shallow understanding [of network neutrality],” he says, adding that this shortfall might make them more pliable to experienced telecom lobbyists.

For the past month or so, I’ve been having problems with Vonage: dropped calls; fading in and out; weird echoes. The problems intensify whenever I’m connecting to a conference calling number. And for the past couple of weeks — ever since I listened to a podcast on net neutrality — I’ve been wondering if this is not unintentional on the part of ISPs.

And now I am vindicated. According to Russell Shaw:

Over the last couple of years, when I’ve wanted to take the temperature of the Vonage user community, I’ve often stopped at the Vonage Forum … I have been noticing a growing number of posts in which many Vonage users and Vonage Forum Members have been complaining about the quality of Vonage calls over Comcast broadband connections.

It’s interesting that there are relatively few similar complaints about the quality of these Vonage calls over other broadband provider networks. Occasionally you’ll read about Verizon or AT&T complaints, but rarely.

But something has happened. Two weeks ago, a Vonage Forum Member named rdstoll began a Vonage Forum thread called Comcast vs. Vonage. The last time I checked, this thread had 116 posts and nearly 7,000 page views. That’s an exceptionally high number.

Although you will see all manner of opinions on this thread, there seems to be a sentiment that - politely put - Comcast could really be doing a better job of carrying Vonage bits.

There’s not much of a leap from that belief to one, expressed by some Vonage Forum Members, that the connection quality problems they are having over their Comcast lines just might not be coincidental …

To make a little leap of my own, perhaps this has something to do with the fact that Comcast now offers its own VOIP service. Consider this: Vonage costs $25 a month while the Comcast service costs $40. How better to get Vonage business than by discrediting the company? And how better to discredit the company than to refuse processing its packets?

And there you have it. The need for net neutrality. It’s interesting to note that the only people who are against it are the telecom companies. The only way they can make money is to bundle their services — and naturally, they can’t bundle services if other people are offering them for less.

That’s what the garden is.

In case you’re wondering, the white thing in the pathway is my trash can covering the mole trap. I don’t know if it’s worked or not — the contraption is scary.

And below is Steve’s new garden gnome. He’s been wanting one for ages. I don’t know why. But, it makes him happy, and that’s all that really matters, isn’t it?

The folks over at the Lit Blog Co-op had nominated Atkinson’s Case Histories as a Read This! novel a few months ago. It’s strange, because I probably would have gotten around to it on my own; I loved Behind the Scenes at the Museum (though I found Human Croquet hard to get into and Emotionally Weird just plain incomprehensible). But there’s something about feeling you have to do something ; it just sucks your motivation away. And thus I checked this out library a total of three times before actually reading it.

The novel is about three different past crimes. In the first, the youngest daughter in a family disappears one night. In the second, a college-aged girl is killed while working as a summer intern in her father’s law office. The third is about the sister of a convicted axe murderer who is seeking her sibling’s daughter. The cases are hinged together by the private detective put on each of these cases years and years later; he has his own tragedies and past mystery. And the resolution of each of the cases is shocking in its own way.

It was an ambitious novel, and I have to be honest and say that I’m not really sure what I thought of it. Sometimes it dragged. The first bit about the sister disappearing was a chore to wade through, for instance. Other times it sprawled, with its jumping around from character to character. But I read this a few weeks ago, and ultimately think it’s one of those novels that you appreciate more in retrospect.

There is, of course, nothing quite so tiresome as someone explaining why she hasn’t been posting more regularly — so I won’t bother, except to say that it’s been a crazy week with no end in sight. But spring is really here! We spent Sunday working in the yard; I cleared off the deck, started fantasizing about heirloom vegetables again and planted a bunch of seeds hoping that this year I won’t kill my container garden. I call them pots; Steve calls them torture chambers. Mean, but true. In any case, he has his hands full;we have a mole. He’s dug several holes in the backyard, and when we stuck a hose down one of them, it ran for 45 minutes before leaking through the containing wall. So he’s a man with a mission: to kill the furry little bastard. It’s very entertaining. Actually, I think the mole’s just moved next door; I was talking to Nicki over the fence when she looked down and said with some surprise, “Oh, I think I have a mole.” Yep — huge pile o’ dirt at her feet. How can something so small create such a mess?