Life has been slipping through my fingers, a little too busy since my trip back from Seattle to really do anything totally right. And it seems like my mail has been slipping too. 2 pieces of mail have been sent back to the sender even though the address was correct (I have head that Chicago mail is notoriously bad) and then a number of gmail emails that were not spam got filed into my spam folder and I only discovered that today.

Maybe in a few (Days, Weeks or Months), things will be back in order.

So here is a new article on the Walmart class action suit. Good stuff. I still get more comments on this entry and here is where you can get information about the suit

So, I have some pretty strong views about health and nutrition but I keep most views to myself.

But if there is something that I will be preachy about, it is mercury and fish. My suggestion is really look into it, because all reports is that fish is filled to the gills with mercury and if you eat enough fish, the effects are nothing to be jumping for joy about.

Look, if the FDA has warned that pregnant women should limit fish consumption to less than two servings a week, you know that there IS a significant amount of mercury in fish.

Mercury poisoning can cause serious health problems, and now researchers are looking with more seriousness into the connection between mercury and chronic illness

Mad About Mercury

By Pat Hemminger, Common Ground. Posted September 15, 2004.

Last April, at the first federally sponsored symposium on mercury and public health, Dr Jane Hightower of San Francisco’s California Pacific Medical Center presented some alarming findings: nine out of 10 Bay Area residents who ate fish regularly had elevated blood-mercury levels and associated health complaints.

“People are having symptoms just like the hatters,” says Hightower alluding to the 19th and early 20th century “mad hatters” who were exposed to mercury nitrate used to process fur pelts. “They have weakness, headache, stomach upsets, hair loss, allergy symptoms, and there’s a question of autoimmune disease.”

Hightower is not the only medical professional who is worried about mercury. Recently, many Bay Area physicians have begun questioning their patients about fish intake and measuring blood-mercury levels. Dr. Laurie Green of the Pacific Women’s Obstetrics and Gynecology Medical Group now asks her patients to record not only what fish they eat but how much: “I’ve been astounded at how many patients have high mercury levels and underestimate their fish intake,” she writes. Green was amazed to discover “how much better they feel once they cut out the contaminated food.”

It is good to see that the ill effects of mercury are being addressed outside of the alternative health community. If you are interested in this this site no mercury has great up to date information.

Wow, so on my way to the DMV to renew my license, I took a short detour to millenium park. There I was swept by the fever for the flavor or world’s newest and for sure one of the coolest parks. What I liked was that the various art pieces adorning the park while different, all shared a certain aesthetic quality. While they were dramatic and larger than life, they were also personable and intimate, some of them cleverly integrating people into their very presentation.

For example, the crown fountains are really tall, they tower, a cool mist of water flowing down it sides. Yet is demeanor is inviting, kids of course made their way under the mist, cooling off on a hot day, an inviting posture magnified by the faces adorning its facade.

The pritzer pavillion is intensely dramatic, huge pieces of wavelike metal crowning the stage. It shape is sweeping yet inviting, a hovering puzzle that beckons you to stare at it, marveled at its ability to hang together.

Probably by favorite piece is what reminds me of a drop of mercury, the reflection so brilliant, and even if slightly distored, an integration of the public into the very art.

The

Today I visited the place of one of my last incarnations, the Ultimate Frisbee field to watch the final game during Chicago’s “premier” tournament held every fall outside of Chicago in the burbs.

Ultimate is usually played with a white frisbee and this whiteness is matched by the whiteness of the sport. Ultimate is really one of the whitest sports around although everyone is really quite brown because players spend nearly every weekend outdoors, playing in these marathon two days tournaments. So they are perhaps the whitest tannest athletes with the exception of beach volleyball players and surfers etc. There is always a smattering of Asians and a few African-American player but aside from that you have your pretty much white, liberal, and relatively affluent players out on the fields.

Despite the homogenity of players, Ultimate at some other level strikes me as wholly unique in so far as “types” of sports that exit out there, even perhaps bordering on the revolutionary. It has been years since I attended a large scale tournament and today I was struck at the absence of outside corporate sponorship and advertising adorning these large scale tournaments. While there might be local sponorship, corporate presence is kept more or less at bay. Advertising usually comes in the form of a motely collection of beer brands as most every player downs a brewksi (or two or three or four…) once their team has been eliminated.

Ultimate is one of these recent, ‘modern’ sports, after all, it came post the plastic age. One of the defining features of the Ultimate is that it is player run, players decide the rules, and as an extension, make calls, like fouls, picks, etc themselves during the heat of the game. They don’t rely on officials to mediate conflict. Governance comes from within, as opposed to being mediated from the outside.

The governing principle of Ultimate, which undergrids this form of self-governance, is called ‘Spirit of the Game.’ Though the name is a little dorky (and makes me wonder if a Hegelian, inveted it), it is one hell of a great concept to apply to “sports,” normally thought to be organized around a logic of extreme competition, at all costs. Instead, Spirit of the Game affirms that since players first love playing the game, a certain form of respect is required to live up to the game, a respect that carries with it responsibility.

Ultimate has traditionally relied upon a spirit of sportsmanship which places the responsibility for fair play on the player himself. Highly competitive play is encouraged, but never at the expense of the bond of mutual respect between players, adherence to the agreed-upon rules of the game, or the basic joy of play. Protection of these vital elements serves to eliminate adverse conduct from the Ultimate field. Such actions as taunting of opposing players, dangerous aggression, intentional fouling, or other ‘win at all costs’ behavior are contrary to the spirit of the game and must be avoided by all players.”

And believe me, Ultimate at the club level is not some gushy mushy feel good sport of late night home baked cookies and warm milk. It is about as competitive as sports can get, men and women literally dedicating their time and cash to play, sacrificing their bodies to the hard ground, and largely without recognition outside of the community. Everyone on the field wants to win. Yet, given the atmosphere is quite different than in most sports, (even “unconventional” extreme sports where ESPN and major corporate labels are always to be found), it reminds us that competition and desire to win does not take some universal form. It can have a different valence and in this case it its mediated by what is a fundamentally moral concept.

These folks are obsessively dedicated and yet dedicated to the idea and experience of the sport and thus as an extension to those who play. There is trust among players that translates into the idea that players can make judgements about fouls and then how to proceed. The rules are decided by the players and every couple of years they are ammended to include some new provision, clarify some other one, or eliminate one all together. Learning the rules comes from playing together on fields, working through some pick or foul or stalled count.

There was a brief period, I think in the late 1980s (it could have been early 1990s) when there was more of a corporate presence. In particular the tequila company Cuervo was running elite tournaments and they wanted to change the rules to make it more “viewer” friendly. This was not taken well and they were given the boot and since then, there has been no large scale corporate presence. It is not necessarily the presence of a large banner announcing the wonder of some alcohol drink that is a problem (these folks are not anti-corporate and certainly not against alcohol) but if the prescence of that banner takes power away from the players, then there is a problem.

In this way it strikes me a lot like free software production, which is anti-that which takes away power away from hackers as to what they can hack on. The ‘that’ happens to be IP law (among some other things) but it is not necesarily a critique that extends further than that.. I should one day right a more comprehensive comparison between the two but for now I will leave it at ‘that.’

I really enjoyed watching the final game today. For me, it is just a fun game to watch, bringing back memories of years and years of running around, always out of breath, simply because I wanted to catch and throw a disc. Beyond my personal experiences with the sport, I really do appreciate Ultimate for its broader example of the respect that comes from self-governance enshrined in a ethical principle that is realized in the very practice of the game (Can you tell, I am dying to do a small ethnographic project on this…) More notable is that the ways in which principles of respect and self-governance can be applied to places and contexts that otherwise might seem inimical to those principles. And that is why it is a poweful example. It is not just that they have successfully integrated self-governance but have done so in a context, “sport” that is usually associated with extreme competition.

I have been using a gmail account for school related emails and since GMAIL knows I am a dissertation writer (being that gmail is a full on snoop doggy dog), I get funny ads about dissertation writing services.

Now I know there are the “term paper” services, but a whole dissertation?

I would, I have to admit, love to meet some of these ghost dissertation writers because who in the right mind would ever want to write some one elses dissertation for a living? Or do they just do some serious cutting and pasting? I mean, it is hard enough to write your own, why take this up as a side job? But then again, there might be some people out there who are really GOOD at writing dissertation. I mean we all have our special gifts in life? And I bet they charge a pretty penny.

Anyway, the site is also pretty amusing, with testimonials like:

Top bananas. What can I say? — J.D. / LSE

Greg and the rest of the team offer you the chance to remember your student years for the good moments. — J.J. / Aberdeen Uni

to ‘very well’ thought out justifications:

Ok. What is it that you do then?

We take care of things. If you don’t want or feel that you cannot write an assignment or dissertation, we can do it for you. For a price, of course.

Eeeek! Isn’t that a bit…?

Yes, it is. A bit. But students have been doing it in since the Dark Ages and they are still doing it now. And if you’re going to do it, you would really want the best you can get, right? Well, we’ve been doing it since when we were at uni and we are very good at it, so you don’t need to worry about the quality of our work. Your university or college may not like it, but you are not going to tell them, are you? Your secret is safe with us. We’ve been keeping secrets for other students around the country (and some abroad) and we never told anyone. Not even our partners.

If I had money to burn I would give them on the many topics I would love to write about and see what they are capable of producing. And it is also good to know that if I don’t get a job, I can always work for them but I guess you are not considered unless you actually wrote your dissertation, but really who is to tell

I love it when some seemingly arcane academic topic (like framing and association in language) directly bears on politics. George Lakoff, a linguist from Berkely has recently published a new book Don’t Think of an Elephant that captures, in very straighforward language, the extraordinary power of language and association to shape political affect and desire. Moreoever he links the difference between progressive/liberals and conservatives to the ways each group views family, family relations, and especially child rearing. Thus, the images and words conservatives use directly evoke and reinforce the ways in which conservatives tend to see the role of family, and by extension, nation. Apparently, according to his arguments, progressives have not been adept at transforming thier program into an evocative language of values and associations.

You can read an excerpt of the book A Man of His Words as well as a nice Editorial .

As an anthropologist who studies geeks, I found this shirt being sold on Cafepress as infintely amusing…

Siva Vaidhyanathan has written a short but interesting piece, an “apologia” of anarchism, titled We are all anarchist now. A professed liberal, he studies anarchism and says we should take them seriously. As he concluded:

So anarchists are not as dangerous as the police and newspapers would have you believe. And they are not as effective as they dream they are or hope to be. But they do matter.

Now, I have to say my interest has been piqued. He seems sympathetic to anarchists but he is makes sure to designate himself a liberal (just in case we would confuse him as an anarchist). I would like to know more about what he sees as the compelling aspects of anarchism and what he sees as the unrealistic and problematic parts. Maybe this is covered in Anarchist in the Library, which is why I just recalled it from the library…