debitage
Occupation Flintknapper Landscape Kiosk This site uses stylesheets. Which means you shouldn't use Netscape. © Eemeet Meeker Online Enterprises, to the extent that slapping up a copyright notice constitutes actual copyright protection. |  21.7.01
I was really pleased with the FTAA protests in Quebec a few months ago. The violence was minimal, as was vandalism. The protesters showed up en masse, made their point, and left the city pretty much intact. And it worked. They didn't stop the FTAA -- but it would have been naive of anyone to thing they would. What they did gain was respect. People saw a thoughtful, respectful anti-globalisation movement with legitimate concerns about the consequences of unfettered global capitalism. The leaders meeting for the FTAA summit recognized those concerns and made what was at the very least lip service to addressing them. This is a good deal better than the violence and violation of basic rights that characterised the WTO meeting in Seattle or the S11 protests in Melbourne. I'm certainly not saying that all or even most anti-globalisation protesters are violent and lawless. It is unfortunate that in this movement, like any other, the extreme minority is the one that shapes public opinion. But that public perception is what the movement needs to attract support. In Quebec, passions were held in check enough that people could see the good side of the movement. I had high hopes that the protesters at the G8 summit in Genoa would learn from the successes of Quebec. But apparently not. In the first day of protests, Carlo Giuliani attacked a police vehicle with rocks and a fire extinguisher. An officer, doubtless fearing for his life, shot Giuliani and backed the vehicle over his body. Neither side is innocent in this situation -- the protester clearly violated the law and any reasonable moral standard by attacking the police like he did, and the officer clearly overreacted (and is expected to face manslaughter charges). But Giuliani has become a martyr for anti-globalisation violence. Protest leaders are now calling for a halt to the summit because of the death. The violent faction is shooting the anti-globalisation movement in the foot. They're turning what could have become a dialogue between two legitimate ideas about how the world should be into a war. Rather than aim for a mutually acceptable agreement between the two sides, the violent wing is insisting it must be all or nothing, one winner and one loser. But I don't see how the disorganised and low-budget anti-globalisation movement can win this war.
Today's project was to mark the spots where we're going to dig the shovel test pits. We found the old pits from past years, and used those to orient several new transects and stick flags at 10-meter intervals. It should be thrilling. The bigger news, though, is that the Oneidas have succeeded in attracting some national media attention for the dig. The workshop, which has run every summer since 1995, has always gotten very good coverage in local papers (Utica Observer-Dispatch, Syracuse Post-Standard, Mid-York Weekly, etc.). This year they somehow talked a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor into showing up. Prof. Kerber is worried because the reporter is coming during the first week, and he hadn't intended to open up any excavation units (where we usually find the most stuff) until the second week. Now I feel like I ougt to start reading the CSM so that I can chat knowledgeably with the journalist (and it would be really nifty if I remembered any of his or her other stories). Having written that, I realise that I'm experiencing an impulse to suck up to a random reporter. How pathetic. In other news, I've been speculating on what it would be like to be a spoiled child raised by the federal government:
Out of curiosity I clicked through to the site, only to discover that the "tc" in tcgreens.org stands for "Tompkins County" -- the home of the city of Ithaca and Cornell University. I don't know why, but this amused me to no end.
I've been listening to this a lot lately. Hooray for bagpipes.
Today I learned to program a macro in Photoshop. It's not actually difficult, but it's something I didn't know you could do. So now with the click of a button I can make an image resize to 150 dpi and 480 pixels across, save as a jpg on my zip disk, and close. And I did that with around 250 images. Oh what fun. I'm currently experiencing the joy of trying to teach someone html over IM. (Incidentally, the fact that IM won't let you send anything between angle brackets, while not crippling since I can substitute parenthesees, is irritating.) Yesterday Sarah Compter IMed me and basically said "I want to make a web page, but I don't know how." So I talked her through getting an Angelfire account and setting up a page. The thing is, she wants to do all kinds of nifty things that are no problem for me, but that are rather difficult to explain to someone who knows nothing about webpage building. For example, she wasn't satisfied with a <h1> for her title. She needed it to be in Curlz font, with a shadow. So I had to try to talk her through taking a screenshot of Word and cropping it down to a title graphic. Then she put in a background image, and she wanted her text to not overlap the dark blue sidebar of the graphic. Since the sidebar was too wide to be taken care of with a <blockquote>, I had to prefabricate a table with a 100-pixel blank cell on the left for her. I like helping people with stuff, so I shouldn't be whingeing. It's just frustrating not to be there with the person to explain things and easily see what they're doing wrong. The Onion updated today. I'm debating whether I should stay up to read it.
"Kiiiioooosk! Kiiiiiiooooosk! Kiiiiiiiooooosk! You suck!"
We're getting a fair amount of text here. This is good. Text is good. I need text to help me test my template. Template starts with T, just like text, but other than taht they don't really have much in common. I need a template, too. But I also need text. Lots and lots of text. I'm going to post this now, because I think I have just about enough text for my purposes. Oh yes, my purposes that require text. (A bit more text.)
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The tax refund checks are in the mail. And so are millions of "sorry, try again" letters to people who don't qualify. The government spent $34 million to let people know they won't be getting a refund. It sounds like an awful lot of money to spend to rub it in poor folks' faces, but maybe they expected to spend more than $34 million answering inquiries about "why didn't I get a refund?"