Carleen and Mike » 2003 » August

Why people should be neutered

Carleen Huxley — Sun, 31 Aug 2003 18:50:53 +0000

I’m hoping that just by writing, I’ll think of something to say…nothing too inspiring has hit me so far. Of course I could talk about several recent articles that have come my way about two children dying because their parents have the I.Q. equivalent of rock salt. I wasn’t going to talk about this now, but now that I’m writing about it, it’s getting me foaming.
I”m really bad at this because i should site the articles, but I’m lazy and can’t help it. I do know the one article came from Tulsa World, and that one pertained to young autistic boy in Wisconsin who was smothered to death during a church service. Now hopefully that raised some eyebrows–it did mine. Again, I don’t know the name of the church, but it was one of those hardcore fanatic religions, and they apparently believed that the boys autism was caused by demonic possession. Hello? Are we in the 21^st century or what? Demonic possession? Given the right medical treatment, this boy could have lived at least a semi-normal life. Though given the apparent state of his parents–probably not. But my point is–this did not have to happen.
And another case of two people who should have been neutered; I don’t know where this was, but a newborn baby was left in the car–in the middle of August, I’ll remind you–while its mother went shopping. You don’t even leave dogs in parked cars, this mental midget is leaving a baby in the car. I hope she gets Murder 1.
Well I AM too freakin tired to be doing this and my dog is lonely.

-M

missing entries

Carleen Huxley — Sun, 31 Aug 2003 02:01:13 +0000

We lost all our entries from the August 26th when our blog host decided to use old backups when reinstalling their server.
However, Mitch was able to find them again (thankgoodness for Google cache) but a lot of our links that we put in our entries are missing. So, bare with us. We’ll get them put back in eventually. Right now we’re going to eat some steak at Montana Mikes.
-C

Comment

Carleen Huxley — Sun, 31 Aug 2003 01:54:15 +0000

My good friend and supervisor, Beth, made a comment to my last blog on
filters (CIPA). Take a look, she has some interesting things to say as
always. Beth is my mentor and has been my greatest inspiration to pursue a
degree in Library Science.
-C

USA PATRIOT ACT

Carleen Huxley — Sun, 31 Aug 2003 01:53:41 +0000

The USA PATRIOT ACThas been threatening the library world since it was past in haste a mere fourty-five days after the Sept. 11 attacks. What is so frightening about this legislation is that it eliminates the checks and balances needed to protect many of our rights. Effecting libraries most is Title II, Section 215 which allows the director of the FBI, and basically anyone else he assigns, to apply for a court order requiring a library or any such facility (even a bookstore) to produce whatever tangible documents they request without a warrant or probably cause. In a book titled Lost Liberties: Ashcroft and the Assault on Personal Freedom by Cynthia Brown a study is mentioned, done by the University of Illionois’s Library Research Center revealing that “in the year since the September 11 attacks, federal and local law enforcement agancies visited at least 543 libraries to requestinformation on patrons. Approximately 10 percent of the requests that were reported referenced Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT ACT.” (45) What is even more disturbing are reports that our government have been less
than honest regarding this law. Check it out.
-C

me and the monkey

Carleen Huxley — Sun, 31 Aug 2003 01:52:40 +0000

Mike and I met while attending art and design college in Savannah , Georgia.
Despite our complaints, some of which included a badly run administration
office, sticky heat and annoying tourists, Mike and I have very fond
memories of our time there. As one of the few cities that survived the
Civil War intact, Savannah’s historic routes run deep, one of the reasons it
draws so many tourists every Spring (although the publication of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil probably helped too). However, it wasn’t
always so. On her visit, Lady Astor, remarked that Savannah was “a
beautiful lady with a dirty face”. It is just in the last 20 years or so
that the city has gone through a kind of rebirth, most especially with the
preservation and restoration of its historic district. It’s historic homes
made it a wonderful place to pursue my degree in architectural history and
provided a picturesque setting for Mike to pursue his in photography. We
also had a chance to actually work in one of these homes the Owens-Thomas House Museum as tour guides. As one of the oldest and best examples of the Regency
Style in America, I would highly recommend visiting this museum if ever in
Savannah. I was required to write a senior thesis for my degree (Bachelor of Building Arts). It took me over a year to complete. My thesis committee have been more then patient with me, thank goodness. My topic was on the stave churches of Norway, specifically, portal(fancy term for “doorway”)decoration. I’m thinking I might try to put my thesis on my blog as a pdf file, but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. Anyway, there a little more about me and the monkey.

Carleen Huxley — Sun, 31 Aug 2003 01:51:44 +0000

Found a couple of really great sites thanks to a good friend of ours–Beth
(last name withheld to protect individual). Just thought I’d post them here.
I love games and so this area of the blog will reflect that. Hopefully the
longer this blog stays up, the more games and other Fun Stuff I’ll post.
Anyway, here’s couple to get started:

Orisinal Games

Runescape haven’t played it yet but it looks like a cheaper version of
EverQuest. Which I’m all about, I loved EverQuest, but it took up too much
time and $$$.

-M

Carleen Huxley — Sun, 31 Aug 2003 01:50:38 +0000

I was informed by my lovely wife that I would NOT be able to have any input
whatsoever as to the design of this site if I do not add entries. So here is
what will probably end up being a lame entry. I have just finished
redirecting traffic from our newly acquired domain (www.huggin.net.) to
here. I wish it was the other way around, but i don’t know that much about
this stuff. Huggin by the way, to all of our American readers is not an
abbreviated version of Hugging, it’s actually a Nordic/Scandinavian
legend/story about two crows, I believe, Huggin and Munnin (say the “o’s”
sort of like “ooh”) Anyway, carleen or Mitch ( Munnin.net ) can tell you
more about it.
Web design is going well. I’m getting really psyched about this stuff, and
the best part is, about 80% of it is actually sinking in. A few more days
working with it and I should have a fairly good understanding of Cascading
Style Sheets. Which, to the uninitiated, is basically a way to make HTML
easier to modify. It creates a file to which you can reference all your web
pages, and instead of modifying each individual web page, you modify the CSS
file and it modifies all the pages for you (Sweet!).
I am now a week into training on a new machine at work. I will now be
running a snap out collator, check out some pictures of it here:

Snap Out Collator

Anyway, that’s my blog for now, got too much to do. For once in my life I
can’t say that I’m bored, it’s pretty nice.

-M

Death begins with a mirror

Carleen Huxley — Sat, 23 Aug 2003 04:24:00 +0000

As I was putting together a display for our Young Adult area a few weeks ago I came across a very thin book titled You remind me of you: A poetry memoir by Eireann Corrigan. Eireann suffered from anorexia nervosa and bulimia while she was in high school. Beautifully written, her poetry provides a horrifying reflection of her struggles to overcome not only her disease, but the attempted suicide of her high school boyfriend.
When I first moved to the states one of the first friends I made was a girl who suffered from anorexia and bulimia. She used to write me letters at school. One in particular stands out in my mind. She had been starving herself all week and had felt mighty proud of her achievement. She woke up that morning so hungry that she ate five bowls of cereal in one sitting, only to puke all of it up again in time to catch the bus to school. What I always found interesting was how the other girls at school would treat her. Everyone knew she had a problem. It was obvious she never ate. But rather than be concerned for her, they seemed to envy her. It was as if they wished they could have such discipline to be able to starve themselves too.

Here’s a portion of one of Eireann Corrigan’s poems that I particularly liked. She apparently played basketball in high school. The poem is called “Poem for myself, on the Free Throw Line, Fifteen Years Old”:

Coach says
you’re young-you’ll grow into your height,
get some grace in your game.
But she doesn’t train you
to guard yourself as fiercely
as your opponent down court,
as carefully as your left-hand dribble.
There’s still forty pounds
between you and your future,
but they’ll peel off as easily
as those snap-on trousers. You’ll realize
you can steal your body
like a slow pass, sucking on single
grains of white rice, whole
coffee beans and besides
two fingers stuck down your throat
can intercept anything.

After reading Corrigans poetry I realize how the pressures to be thin often come in very subtle forms nowadays. People are very quick to blame the media, pointing fingers at all the Kate Moss archetypes plastered across every magazine. I agree. But I think this epidemic has been caused by many things. The medical field doesn’t help, with it’s constant “new formulas”, diet solutions, bulge free in 20 min a day and oh, my personal favorite, the fat flush program. All these attempts to come up with a “healthy lifestyle” only brings to much a attention to something that should just happen naturally and instinctively. No, I think everyone is missing the real culprit here. The mirror.
I wish I could say that I am wise and strong, that I have never thought about resorting to drastic measures to help me achieve the “ideal body”. I have thought about it, all the time convincing myself that I was only trying to become “healthy” not “beautiful and thin”. So, admitting this to myself, I try to come up with a solution so I can continue to pursue a healthy lifestyle honestly and truly because I want to be healthy. The only way I believe this can be achieved is by refusing my reflection, leaving me free to focus on what really matters in my life.

Health tip for today: Death begins with a mirror and ends with a reflection.

-C

CIPA

Carleen Huxley — Thu, 21 Aug 2003 03:26:50 +0000

I spent last night at work reading through a back log of library science newsletters and magazines. I must admit, most of the time I still feel rather ignorant about the current events and issues within the field, however, I persist in reading all the material placed in my mail box by my supportive supervisors and staff in hopes that one day that little light bulb will go on and I will finally feel “familiar”.
One of the most talked about issues at the moment concerns the U.S Supreme Court ruling earlier this summer upholding the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA). The ruling states that in order for a public library to receive federal funding, they must install filtering software on their computers so as to protect children from accessing pornography over the internet.
This has, of course, been an issue ever since the internet came into existence and as a women who hopes to someday be a mother, I can fully understand the fear and concern of our children becoming exposed to such material before they are mentally prepared. As a librarian I also realize the difficulties of keeping unwanted patrons from using our computers for their sexual thrills, running the risk of exposing such material to an innocent child who just happens to walk by. However, even when taking all these things into consideration, I’m not sure installing filters is the best way to solve the problem.
I know very little about filters and how they work. What I’ve heard and what I’ve read seem to indicate that the filtering software in existence today are flawed and will only prevent our public from being able to view perfectly legitimate sites. A logical answer to this would be “Well, in a case where an adult is trying to access legitimate information, just switch the filtering software off”. Seems reasonable to me but apparently it’s not that easy. However, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who ruled in favor of the mandate seems to think it is. “Assuming that such erroneous blocking presents constitutional difficulties, any such concerns are dispelled by the ease with which patrons may have the filtering software disabled. When a patron encounters a blocked site, he need only ask a librarian to unblock it or (at least in the case of adults) disable the filter” (Library Hotline,1, 6/30/03). According to Library Journal, Rehnquist has been misinformed since generally filtering softwares are not installed on individual terminals, but at the system level. You can’t just simply disable it on one users computer.
Rehnquist made another comment in the same article (Library Hotline,1, 7/30/03) that really infuriated me. “CIPA does not ‘penalize’ libraries that choose not to install such software, or deny them the right to provide their patrons with unfiltered Internet access…CIPA simply reflects Congress’ decision not to subsidize their doing so. To the extent that libraries wish to offer unfiltered access, they are free to do so without federal assistance”. Forgive me if I’m missing something here but what hell’s the difference. Libraries are suffering from a financial crisis nation wide right now and as a result we are unable to provide for our public in the fullest capacity that we should. Branches everywhere have decreased their opening hours, some only open a few days a week, some like us, closing an hour early four nights a week. Other libraries, as is the case at the East Grand Forks Campbell Library, MN, now charge people for a library card, $5 a year for adults to use books and audios, $10 a year for them to be able to use all materials, etc. Ok, sure so it’s not that much money, but that’s not the point. It destroys what libraries are supposed to stand for. NO ONE should have to pay money to use a library (unless they have overdue fines, obviously). So, how can Rehnquist state that withholding any amount of federal funding is not a form of penalization, especially where our peoples freedom of information is concerned.
-C

Blog?

Carleen Huxley — Wed, 20 Aug 2003 19:37:08 +0000

So this is a blog. I’m starting to understand the whole “blog” thing. At first i was confused. “What’s the difference between a blog and a regular website?” As it turns out, not much. You see I compare blogs to Nerf. Remember Nerf? What is a Nerf–a squishy ball. Nerf is just much more fun to say than “squishy ball”. Likewise with blogs, what is a blog? It’s a website where you post articles. But the pop generation requires catch phrases and funky words–thus blog is born.
Well I sure hope I use it. I mean, there is a very good chance that this will turn into something that is hip for a while and then it will turn old hack. But I’ll try to post, though really, who’s going to read it? I”m not famous, my life is not that particularly interesting, but I’ll give it a go and see what happens.

-M