Save Philly's Libraries!!

Just a short post -

The city of Philadelphia might lose all their libraries - all 54 of them - if a 1% sales tax isn't passed by the state senate.

Oh. My. God. A city with no libraries and, as Blogging Censorship notes, most Philadelphia public schools don't have libraries so students would be completely without library access. And many disadvantaged Philadelphia residents would lose out, too.

Please re-blog, re-tweet, re-Facebook, re-whatever this story wherever you are. If you live in Pennsylvania or Philly, unlike me, please contact your state senators (contact info and sample letters at The Free Philadelphia Library) and tell them to save the libraries from Philly Mayor Michael Nutter's budget (is his last name really "nutter"?)

Cyberbullying Blogger Style

Tonight is a lazy night for me. I didn't close at the store so I've been finishing a few knitting projects (Karma's Poncho is done, yarn ends sewn in, steamed and in the bag, yeah!), having tea and a scone, watching You've Got Mail (because for all my snark I'm also pretty sappy), and occasionally perusing TweetDeck. Oh, we're having a summer storm here, too.

I got totally distracted by series of tweets from BiblioBrat, mjmbecky, and thestorysiren regarding some wing-nut who has Kristi pegged for harrassment (of course, I had to go read all the comments and put in my own two cents). Kristi has been removing some of the more heinous comments from the "crazy person" - who is posting more garbage using the defensive "we" rather than the singular personal pronoun - but the gist of Anonymous/Lena's rant is that Kristi needs to quit hogging the YA books, leave them to the teen bloggers, and just not review YA because Kisti is "old" (Kristi is younger than I am, FYI). In short, the crazy is demonstrating that he/she/they/it has the IQ of a troll and behaves like one, too. The same type of comment-flaming ensued on Tricia's Book Blog this week over the fact that Tricia hit the jackpot and was offered a free bookshelf to test out and review on her blog, lucky her (I have to be slightly jealous of Tricia in a good way because it is a pretty nice bookshelf). And, come to think of it, there was also a crazy person flaming The Yarn Harlot only a few weeks ago; flaming Stephanie is about like self-immolation because we Harlot-ites are militant in our defense of her (and we carry pointy, sharpened needles with us....everywhere).

Either there are multiple flamers running around in cyberspace or one sick individual.

So as I sat knitting the collar for a baby cardie (last piece!) and watching You've Got Mail I was thinking about the inherent community that goes along with reading/loving books and knitting. Those us who love books and love to talk about books - meaning we have blogs and book clubs and various bookish friends in the 21st century - have a very supportive community with all the other bibliophiles out there; we exchange reviews, encouragement, memes, and our love of the written word. Even if we don't agree on a point or have different reading tastes we don't denigrate one another; I don't think I've seen any serious book bloggers get obnoxious with one another (I've not been really active in the blogosphere long, so this could just be a case of not looking in the right places). The same goes for knitters. We all love and admire one another's handiwork, ask about where we got the yarn, support our LYS, and happily troop off to fiber festivals. Look at the Sock Summit that just wrapped up in Portland - if that doesn't say "community" then I don't know what does.

Cyberbullies seem to feed off that community energy; attack one in the community, the community responds with support, and the bully is somehow validated in its sick existence. The more the community backs the bully's victim, the more attention is afforded to the bully. It's a sick cycle and one that is nearly impossible to break. The web affords a cyberbully some veneer of anonymity since one can fake an online ID/persona, at least until the IP address is revealed and then "back-hacked into the Stone Age" (I love Penelope on Criminal Minds). Would ignoring the cyberbully work? It seems responding politely or vehemently only causes more flaming so perhaps pretending the bully doesn't exist will help (and turning on the comment moderation/requiring commenters to have an OpenID or Blogger account). However, remaining silent seems to tacitly agree with a bullying commenter so speaking out against the negativity seems to be the better option.

There isn't a really good way to solve the problem - the best we can do right now is call the cyberbully out and support the bully's target. So keep on blogging, knitting, reading, whatever floats your boat because the community will support you.

What??????

I just checked the news - the IC and UI police had to detonate a suspicious package reported to be a bomb at Burge Hall. Oh, my god. I would be so, so, so angry if I were an undergrad living there because it's finals week here at the UI. Glad to read in the article that the students are OK, even if their study schedules got messed up.

If some yahoo thought this would be a great joke, it's not very funny.

Deep thought for the day

If you are up shit creek, is it necessary to kill your entire family?

Granted, the autopsy will tell whether or not the father is the charred body in the family's van but if that's not the father and if the evidence doesn't point toward him as the murderer of his wife and four children I will be very, VERY surprised.

I don't particularly care if your life has totally gone to pot, that you've been indicted for embezzling half a million dollars from the bank (of which you are the vice-president), that you're probably going to jail because you admitted to the police that part of that money went toward a serious coke habit. I really don't. If you want to skip out on the charges and kill yourself, be my guest. Just don't take anyone else with you.

Here's a little prayer hoping that the children's deaths were quick and that they didn't realize what was going on.

Current book-in-progress: Beloved (for LbW BNBC April), Then We Came to the End (gotta support the Iowa alum), Birdsong (for our in-store group), Villette (also for BNBC April, just not my group), and whatever else I find
Current knitted item: My first commission - a tan neck warmer for a co-worker's partner
Current movie obsession: I just finished Once - a great little movie, very moving and sweet, I might like the music better (the soundtrack is on order)
Current iTunes loop: It's a tie - Sarah Barreilles's Little Voice and the original cast recording of Rent

There are no words

Ordinarily I reserve the right to be a curmudgeon on Valentine's Day. This trumps any holiday.

The fourth school shooting this week and the most lethal. Why?

Is the "school shooter" phenomenon spreading virally i.e. one incident sets off the next and the next (think Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point)?

If this bozo (who by now has been identified as a former student of NIU, now at Illinois Champaign-Urbana) felt the need to exterminate himself, why kill people he didn't know? Why? None of them did a damn thing to him. What irritates me most is that shooters like these take the coward's way out, taking no responsibility for their actions.

Incidents like these weigh heavily on me because I would like to return to school and eventually end up as a professor. Will I need to always be on my guard in case a student, disgruntled by the lack of an "A," comes to my office with a weapon? Will I need to carry one myself? Will I have to lock my classroom doors once I begin teaching a class? Will we all need to swipe our ID badges to gain access to buildings and classrooms? Will I need to be schooled in psychological profiling to identify students in need? It is mind boggling. I am not an advocate of having more weapons because that really won't solve the problem. In nearly every school shooting as of late, the attacks were a surprise, none of them were previously suspected by school officials, security officers, or the shooters' friends. Even if a member of the class had a gun, a high powered weapon can spew dozens of bullets in just a few seconds, enough to kill or severely injure many people before that class member could procure his/her weapon.

There is no easy answer.

May the family members of the victims find peace and solace in one another. God bless.

Tuesdays are terrible too

This morning I had an email, addressed to my boss, about the issue from the phone call last night. Gee, thanks for waiting until you had my reply LIKE I TOLD YOU ON THE PHONE. So I called this person and let them know that the email was not appreciated at all. Then he got read the riot act about how crappy his organization was being. Sigh. Probably not the best course of action but I was beyond pissed off at that point. He's lucky I didn't yell.

I've been updating my book journal. I find I've been very lax regarding that bit of bookkeeping.

Current book-in-progress: finishing an ARC (new author) and The Almost Moon (I'm in finishing mode)
Current knitted item: I left the "hair" at home, so the tank is with me
Current movie obsession: I just ordered "History of Britain" from BN.com - it was on sale and I had a coupon!!

Alright, my fellow feminists

Get on the horn to the politicians. If no one's heard about this story from Nebraska, then I'll fill you in. The victim was having a drink at a local bar and then next thing she knew she woke up in a stranger's bed with him doing the nasty to her. So she went to the hospital, had a rape-kit done, the police arrested the guy and charged him with first-degree sexual assault. At the trial in Lincoln the judged decided certain words were inflammatory and inferred guilt - words like "rape," "forced," "victim," you get the picture. So pretty much everyone has to commit perjury because the victim can't say she was forced to have sex, the attorneys can't refer to a rape kit, and to top it all off the jury wasn't even told the judge had imposed an order. I think the first trial ended in a mistrial. Well, the second trial was ordered to obey what is essentially a gag order and was declared a mistrial this week. To top it off, a motion to have the judge's ruling was rejected in Nebraska state court because the victim's attorney was from Boston and she didn't have a Nebraska license (the attorney had filed a motion to practice but this was turned down, too).

The article about the NE Supreme Court is here.

I'm not sure how many people read this blog, but if you do - get the word out to your state senators, reps, presidential candidates anybody. Tell them that we won't sit still and watch while our rights to our own bodies are frittered away by a mysogynistic judge.

Current book-in-progress: Too busy reading the news
Current knitted item: Too grouchy

Today, we are all Hokies

After reading the growing media coverage of the mass shooting at Virginia Tech, I waited nervously all day. Alpha Chi Sigma, the chemistry fraternity - of which I'm a District Counselor, has a large chapter at VT. Gamma Iota chapter hosted our 2004 Biennial Conclave and we had a marvelous time on VT's beautiful, peaceful campus. Thankfully, we heard from the chapter's president and none of our brothers are among the deceased or injured (and my friends Katharine and Beth, whose cousin attends VT, also heard he was unharmed). My heart breaks for all the families, friends, emergency workers, alumni, and administrators of VT. I pray to whichever God is listening right now that the entire VT community find peace and solace in one another as they heal. So many lives lost - none for any better reason than they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And now, some callous idiot has posted on the Barnes and Noble Book Clubs board that we should all buy a certain novel about gun-toting nuns in Wal-mart because the VT tragedy illustrates perfectly why the US should have gun laws. The post is as follows:

Yesterday's mortifying events in Blacksburgh Virginia underscore the importance of finding a way to stop the production and distribution of handguns. Only a few days ago I posted a message recommending xxxx's newly released novel "XXXX" and calling for EVERYONE interested in the subject of violence committed with pistols to read.Did you see? and if you did, did you care?If you did, and you didnt, you are part of the problem.xxxx'snovel is not available from Walmart online. Why? because in the story Nuns terrorize a WalMart gun department and destroy all the handguns present.WalMart refuses to publish it. How is this free speech in action? WalMart will say "We decide what free speech is".Fortunately, none of the other vendors agree. XXXX is not a political tract. It's a delightful novel filled with wonderful characters and at the base of it all is the question: why, when people can have all the rifles they want cause the constitution grants permission, do we need to allow handguns too?Look, don't listen to me. I'm only a schmuck who stumbled on a book far above his head and got kicked in the mind by it. I think the ISBN of XXXX is ISBN-10: ##########. I'm tellin' ya. This is a great read.

Did you notice a few things are missing? I took out the author, title, and ISBN - I don't want anyone, not a single person to buy this book. I even submitted a complaint to the BNBC admins; I'm a pretty tolerant person but this pretty much stretches my limits. The poster is part of a circle of authors with TERRIBLE self-published novels and they all push each others' novels. Promotion is one thing; the unfeeling use of a heinous act of violence with no regard for victims and survivors to sell a completely unrelated novel (which is crap, by the way) is completely ... I don't know. I don't even have a word for it - I need one which encompasses this jerk's callousness, self-aggrandizement, and my sentiment that he be electrocuted by his computer next time he's near it.

I shed many tears yesterday for thousands of people I will never meet and I shed more now in memory of the victims and their families. Nikki Giovanni spoke at the convocation and I close this post with her words:

We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on. We are embracing our mourning. We are Virginia Tech ...
-- Nikki Giovanni, University Distinguished Professor, poet, activist