“Specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.”

SC justices can be so poetic.

Alice’s Drive from Bengt Anderson on Vimeo.

My partner Micah is pretty good with his hands, well, so long as they are attached to a computer. Otherwise, he is a bit lost. His father, however, is a master craftsman, rebuilding old cars, making his own houses, you know, the sort of stuff that really puts me in awe.

Thanks to his efforts, his family, notably his sister Emily Anderson, are about to kick off and commemorate Alice Ramsey who in 1909, did the unconventional, which is somewhat an understatement, and drove across the United States in what then was called a horseless carriage. Apparently, she loved to race cars and took that love to trek across what were really gnarly roads and earned the distinction as the first woman to do so.

Using the same model (Maxwell Model DA) that Alice drove, one that Emily’s Dad, Richard, restored (and it is the very last one in existence!), she will be starting off the drive in just a few days.

The whole family is pretty involved, so Bengt Anderson is making a film (short clip featured above), Micah has helped with the website side of things, and the ‘rents will be in the trailer (especially since Emily just had a baby).

Anyhow, more to write about cars and this trip but thought some folks might be interested in following her across the US. I am super bummed I am not in NYC to watch her go, but I will be watching with a lot of excitement from the Internets!

70swindsurfer, originally uploaded by the biella.

So as part of my efforts to work in PR, I bought a printer. The one that was 1) the cheapest 2) worked with the Linux (an HPJ4550) also had a scanner. I thought it would never work on Linux, or not without some series fiddling and tweaking.

But I bought the postcard, pictured above, to do a test run, and the run of test worked immediately. Go Linux!

Now on to the postcard: love the postcard because it is so 1972-1982 or so. It would be hard to find such a scence today.

Not only are windsurfers a dying breed (kite surfing is the new kid on the block), well, current windsurfers are definitely not so 1970s orange, yellow, and blue.

And so you have to ask: are there just truckloads of these postcards printed decades ago or do they actually print them anew?

Can’t answer but at least I know the scanner works!

Soon before leaving NYC for the summer, Sumana invited me to see a monologue on facebook by Mike Daisy. It was a good show and he has since provided an mp3 of it. There are some classic moments in there, especially toward the middle of the audio.

I am looking for am mp3 of his Great Men of Genius where he addresses Mr Hubbard among others (I find stuff on it
but not it). Anyone have it or pointers to where it might be?

shorty, originally uploaded by the biella.

As part of my reading bonanza, I am currently reading and enjoying Ellen Ullman’s The Bug. She has a short section on puns and programmers which I like:

“Puns, I would say, represented a human being’s pent-up need for ambiguity. That a word could signify two things at once! And these double meanings could be simultaneously understood! What a relief from the flat-line understanding of a programmer’s conversation with the machine!” p. 59

Last night, I heard a Spanish pun that I particularly liked, having to do with my sister’s dog, Shorty who is an odd creature (being a mix of Pit Bull, which is for certain, and legend goes, Chihuahua) will be as of the end of the day —> sinbolico.

I bet the Spanish speakers know what is happening to Shorty today. Anyone want to take a guess?

So I am struck by two opposing forces that characterize so much academic labor. Basically academics spend a lot–and I mean mounds–of time judging their peers. It happens informally (“blah is smart” “blah gave such a crappy talk at the MLA”) and formally (journal reviews, book reviews, letter of recommendation, tenure letters and it goes on and on).

While there is certainly a middle ground in judgment in the form of constructive criticism (that which is neither too critical or full of praise), much of this labor is uber-critical and geared toward tearing down and scorching the intellectual earth you walk on. You should read some of the journal reviews! They are a window into some pretty seething nastiness, or at least it comes across as such.

But thankfully scorn, which sometimes is pretty humorous, other times spot on, and other times, just pitiful, sits at the edge of full blown, often overblown, PRAISE. You can find it in journal reviews but it reaches its Whole Hog Glory in letters of recommendation. These letters are all about buttering up, buttering people up to present them as god’s gift to earth or something similar.

I rather enjoy reading and writing letters of recommendation because basically the content is the same (I know blah in this capacity, they are full of nothing but alien-like intelligence and total awesomeness, for these reasons, this is why they are perfect for your program) but the words and style, well, they are always different. And I frankly I just feel good reading them and writing them. Perhaps we have to praise so exuberantly to keep the two forces in cosmic balance.

After a fairly tiring (though exciting) semester of teaching, I have packed my books, lots of files, and other things I Can’t Live Without, and shipped myself via Jet Blue to Puerto Rico where I will spend my summer. My reason for being here is simple: I want to see my mother who continues to live in a state of minimalism at a nursing home with Alzheimers. Coming home is never easy. Seeing her for the first time after an absence of months is especially hard and expect will continue to be as such, so long as I have periods away from her like I do. I never imagined that I would live between two cities as I do, but in general I am grateful I have a job that allows me to bridge these two places.

When I am in NYC, I am so ridiculously busy (being an assistant professor is not unlike being a medical resident and doctor except the tempo slows down during our summers, at least to some extent) that I don’t—for better or for worse—have my mother always perched on my mind. But being here is a different story. Not only do I have to structure my own time (so my mind can wander easily into those nether regions), but the house I stay in is nothing but filled with memories of my mom, most especially from the last 4 years she spent here with Alzheimers

Along with visiting my mom, most of my time will be occupied in front of the computer working on the first draft of my book manuscript, which is due on September 15, 2009, 2 days before my birthday. I think I can hack it given that I have lots of time on my hands and when I get into work mode I can get a lot done.

But the first month or so is going to be really really rough. I always find the transition into “stare at your monitor mode” for the entire day sort of tough. Puerto Rico also has a host of magnetic distractions like the garden and the beach, which I don’t love but in fact adore. I also don’t really associate the tropics/this house/the summer with mental work, but I will spend the next few weeks reversing that association or else I will be in deep trouble!

Right now I am setting up the office, struggling to find the right a/c unit for the space, and in a few days I hope to be writing away…

Set outside ourselves, we swim in an enigmatic, fiery element, no
longer knowing ourselves nor recognizing the most familiar of
things; we no longer possess any standard of measurement,
everything lawlike and rigid begins to shift, everything gleams in
new colours, speaks to us in new signs and characters.

Something I have been thinking a lot about lately is why social science and humanities journals have been slower to move toward the land of open access in comparison to the ‘hard’ sciences. There are a few obvious reasons but there are others which are still a mystery to me.

I understand why existing journals can’t easily pry away from established relations and obligations so I am not all that surprised that these journals, whether in the ‘hard’ sciences or ‘soft’, have not gone open access. But perhaps newly minted journals are in better position to start right off the bat with an OA agreement. This is what the International Journal of Communication recently did and I am sure there are other examples.

So today I was disappointed to find out that the following new Anthropology journal theJournal of Legal Anthropology has seemingly gone down a traditionalist copyright route. But I don’t just want to point fingers here as I know editors are often in a very difficult position when seeking sponsorship and support for a new journal. That is, achieving OA, I understand is no walk in the park. And yet given their mission and given that it is a legal journal, it also makes sense to have some sort of open format:

“International in scope, we hope it will be accessible beyond a specialist legal anthropology area and, in practice, both widen what is understood within the discipline of anthropology as legal and position the legal as also ‘socio-cultural’ in terms of contemporary anthropology. The journal is produced by anthropologists interested in making anthropology accessible (translatable) in other settings and disciplines, and by legal practitioners with support from academics working in human rights, conflict and related areas”

A walled garden is not suited for the flowers of access to grow. But perhaps they tried and failed. If this is the case, it would also be good to learn of these experiences, which can be used in future cases to pave the path toward greater access.

Free as in pie. Might have to start a gluten free version.