Martin Luther King III's letter to John Edwards

From the Below Boston blog...

January 20, 2008

The Honorable John R. Edwards
410 Market Street
Suite 400
Chapel Hill, NC 27516

Dear Senator Edwards:

It was good meeting with you yesterday and discussing my father's legacy. On the day when the nation will honor my father, I wanted to follow up with a personal note.

There has been, and will continue to be, a lot of back and forth in the political arena over my father's legacy. It is a commentary on the breadth and depth of his impact that so many people want to claim his legacy. I am concerned that we do not blur the lines and obscure the truth about what he stood for: speaking up for justice for those who have no voice.

I appreciate that on the major issues of health care, the environment, and the economy, you have framed the issues for what they are - a struggle for justice. And, you have almost single-handedly made poverty an issue in this election.

You know as well as anyone that the 37 million people living in poverty have no voice in our system. They don't have lobbyists in Washington and they don't get to go to lunch with members of Congress. Speaking up for them is not politically convenient. But, it is the right thing to do.

I am disturbed by how little attention the topic of economic justice has received during this campaign. I want to challenge all candidates to follow your lead, and speak up loudly and forcefully on the issue of economic justice in America.

From our conversation yesterday, I know this is personal for you. I know you know what it means to come from nothing. I know you know what it means to get the opportunities you need to build a better life. And, I know you know that injustice is alive and well in America, because millions of people will never get the same opportunities you had.

I believe that now, more than ever, we need a leader who wakes up every morning with the knowledge of that injustice in the forefront of their minds, and who knows that when we commit ourselves to a cause as a nation, we can make major strides in our own lifetimes. My father was not driven by an illusory vision of a perfect society. He was driven by the certain knowledge that when people of good faith and strong principles commit to making things better, we can change hearts, we can change minds, and we can change lives.

So, I urge you: keep going. Ignore the pundits, who think this is a horserace, not a fight for justice. My dad was a fighter. As a friend and a believer in my father's words that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, I say to you: keep going. Keep fighting. My father would be proud.

Sincerely,

Martin Luther King III

allow me to correct myself:

contrary to what I was saying the other night, the UMass Lowell men's ice hockey team is Division I. In addition to being Division I, they are apparently really really awesome and currently ranked 4th in Hockey East. So my apologies to anyone who was actually listening to me when I was making shit up about hockey. Remember, I'm the one who didn't know what the C in AFC stood for. So when it comes to sports, don't listen to me unless I'm talking about the infield fly rule.

ode to stansfield tire

It's not every day I'm happy about customer service - just thinking about my experiences with Verizon and Bank of America gives me tiny little heart attacks. It's even less often I'm satisfied with the experience of getting my car fixed. But the dudes at Stansfield Tire have made my heart grow three sizes today.

I happened upon Stansfield Tire about two years ago when I moved into the neighborhood. I had previously been having my car serviced at the Source of All Worldly Evil, so I was pretty psyched the first time I went to Stansfield Tire and discovered that I don't have to pay $600 to find out that nothing's wrong with my car (or that every single solitary thing that has ever been wrong with me car is in fact, my own fault/"due to wear and tear"/not covered by my warranty. EFF YOU, IRA!)

So, back to the story here... Today I had driven to work in four-wheel drive, and on the ride home I put the car back into two-wheel drive. When I took my first left-hand turn of the trip, I heard a really loud, really disturbing pop/thud coming from my back driver's side wheel. I drove out of my way to make sure I had to take both a sharp right and a sharp left, and the noise happened only when I made a left. Plus the car had started to make a sinister groaning sound when I was going straight. I've always had some issues getting my car to switch between four- and two-wheel drive, but this time, none of my old standby tricks were working.

So I pulled into a gas station and called my friends at Stansfield Tire to see if they could take a quick look at my car before the end of the day. The guy who answered the phone proceeded to ask me a series of questions, analyze my problem over the phone and talk me through fixing it. In the time it took him to do this (quite a while), he could have told me to come in and made me pay an hour's labor. I also have to mention that he had no idea who I was, that I was a regular customer, or any of that. He was just being nice. Un. be. lievable.

In the end, what he told me to do (put it in reverse and back up 30 feet, some other crap I don't remember) worked like a charm and I didn't have to take the car in. On its own, this episode probably isn't that exciting or groundbreaking. But I've been this satisfied every single time I've dealt with these guys, with the exception of one kind of fatherly lecture ("It's an oil change every THREE thousand miles, young lady. Not eight thousand miles, not nine thousand miles.") Their nice service and lack of desire to rob me blind are just so refreshing I feel like shouting it from the rooftops. And whatnot.

So in the immortal words of Ice Cube, go to Stansfield Tire for all your tire and car repair needs.

i'm not an engineer

but I do spend 20 hours a week having my intelligence insulted by engineers, so when I found Cooking for Engineers, I was expecting a useless collection of gross recipes written in a condescending, unintelligible manner. I should rephrase that - I was hoping it would be like that, so I'd have an excuse to call engineers useless, gross, condescending, and unintelligible.

Oh look, I just did it anyways!

But I digress. Cooking for Engineers is actually a super awesome and incredibly super website. Some of the recipes are weird chemical experiments, mock apple pie and the like. But most of the recipes are good, plus there are lots of pictures, plenty of step by step information for the more difficult stuff, and interesting explanations of the science behind cooking and baking phenomena. Check it out next time you're at work - especially if you work with engineers, who may walk by, spot a chart like this, and think you're actually working:

:

Material	Thermal diffusivity
Copper	120 * 10-6 m2/s
Aluminum	100 * 10-6 m2/s
Cast Iron	22 * 10-6 m2/s
Carbon Steel	14 * 10-6 m2/s
Stainless Steel	4.3 * 10-6 m2/s

who knew?

The best thing about this website is that I can spend hours on it at work, and nosy coworkers looking over my shoulder may assume I'm just making some work-related charts and graphs.
Except when I start laughing really really loud.

if the kilo of cocaine and the machine gun weren't incriminating enough...

I just read this article about a dude in Lowell who had 40 POUNDS of pot FEDEXED to him AT HOME. But that's not the only funny part:

When local and state police searched his apartment they said they found baggies containing cocaine, another 10 pounds of marijuana, a bullet-proof vest under his mattress and a loaded 40-caliber semi-automatic handgun.

Under his bed they found a box with Soviet military writing on it containing 14 boxes of machine-gun rounds.

In the closet, police found an Ultimac Mac 90 machine gun with two, 30-round magazines.

They also found a magazine called High Times in the apartment.

happy Thanksgiving, and don't forget forget that Friday is a holiday too.

pumpkin pie contest

since I'm unable to win a pie contest where the participants are "other people," I decided to have a pie contest with myself. I totally won.

this year for Thanksgiving dessert, my mother is making a chocolate-y thing and my aunt is making apple pie. I'm the one who should get to make apple pie, since I've been diligently, painstakingly perfecting my recipe for over two years now. Maybe my family heard about my staggering loss at the annual Halloween apple pie making contest.

Just to recap, last year I was convinced I lost because, unlike some people, I didn't let the Pillsbury dough boy make my crust. This year I lost by an even huger margin, despite using a store-bought crust.

sooooo anyways, i basically suck at making apple pies that people like, yet I decided to try my hand at making pumpkin pie, which I don't even like. (My dad and grandfather like it though). Since I never made it before, I looked at dozens of PP recipes online, confused them all in my brain, then made two different recipes and let The People choose which was better.

PP1 was based loosely on a combination of the recipe from the can of pumpkin and the aforementioned "research." It involved a can of pumpkin, the usual spices and some salt and flour, 3 eggs, 3/4 cup of brown sugar, 2/3 cup of maple syrup, and 1 1/4 cup of half and half. I mixed them all together, poured it into the crust and baked it at 350 for a little over an hour. I had to cover the crust with aluminum foil after about 20 minutes. The middle was a little jiggly when I took it out, so after cooling it on a wire rack, I refrigerated it for about two hours. It came out pretty well, nice and dark, but too sweet for my taste.

PP2, the product of "additional research" plus the recipe from the can of sweetened condensed milk, was a lot more labor-intensive. First I prebaked the crust with foil around the edges. Then I mixed a can of pumpkin, a can of sweetened condensed milk, and the spices - but not the eggs - in a saucepot on the stove and cooked for about 15 minutes. I brought it almost to a boil and then turned off the heat and let it cool and thicken before beating in 2 eggs. I have no idea why I waited to add the eggs, but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. I put it in the crust and baked it at 425 for 15 minutes (with foil already on the edges) and then turned the heat down to 350 for another 40 minutes, and cooled it on a wire rack.

PP2 looked much lighter and the filling was a lot less dense, but the texture was a lot better and more even. I'm sure that was due to cooking the pumpkin before putting it in the oven. It was also a lot less sweet, which I like, but the maple flavor of PP1 was really nice compared to the canned white sugar flavor of sweetened condensed milk. I can't believe modern chemistry hasn't come up with a sweetened condensed maple milk yet. If any Future Homemakers of America are reading this, consider SCMM development and testing as a possible final project. Now stop reading and get back in the kitchen!

so The People's votes were pretty much split down the middle at work today - I think they were just happy to taste pies instead of reducing toxics. So for Thanksgiving, I think I'm going to try a combination of the two recipes, somehow incorporating the mapley deliciousness of PP1 into the fluffy better-cookedness of PP2. And I'll take pictures, because these pies are a gorgeous vision to behold.

roo roo quotes

I am dedicating this post to sharing just a few of the many hilarious things Amanda has said recently. She's one of those people that makes me wish I carried a tape recorder around in my bag. Actually, I sometimes do carry a tape recorder around in my bag, as a kind of half-assed reminder to work on my thesis, but I never record anything good. Anyhow, enjoy:

"Hi, it's Amanda... I'm on my way from work to a work event, and I just wanted to chat with you about my alcoholism."

"Hey! Does 'OG' stand for Original Gangsta hot dogs?"
and later... "Are you guys REAL brothers, like you have the same mother?"
(to the proprietors of the Original Gangsta Hot Dog Cart, HTFD, who did turn out to be brothers from the same mother)

"I don't believe in boys who wear shorts."
(implied: cargo shorts)

"Sorry I missed you, I was in a meeting with the executive VP of global communications. WHAT."

"I want the short guy, he's easy."

the precautionary principle

henry miller didn't believe in it:

"Instead of asking - 'How much damage will the work in question bring about?' why not ask - 'How much good? How much joy?'"

but I still think that's kind of nice

this is what you shall do

a Walt Whitman poem that one of my college professors had taped to the side of his desk, the side that faced the chair students would sit in when they came to see him. I think about it every so often, sometimes it makes me feel bad about myself, sometimes it makes me feel better.

This is what you shall do:

love the earth and sun, and animals,

despise riches,

give alms to every one that asks,

stand up for the stupid and crazy,

devote your income and labor to others,

hate tyrants,

argue not concerning God,

have patience and indulgence towards the people,

take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men,

go freely with the powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers of families.

Read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life:

re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any books,

and dismiss whatever insults your soul.

quotes of the day

"Don't be seduced by the precision of the numbers!"
~ guest instructor in my toxics use reduction planning course. He said this on three separate occasions during a single day of class. The quote was also prominently featured in the "Internal Rate of Return" slide of his power point presentation. The "numbers" in question include such things as "incremental cash flow," "net present value," "time value of money," and "risk-adjusted value," none of which has ever made me feel particularly seduced, no matter how precise. But the instructor's vehemence on this matter made me think that he had, possibly on more than one occasion, been seduced by the precision of the numbers, and maybe I should be careful. I've never been seduced by the precision of a number before, but I imagine if I did, I'd feel really dirty afterwards.

"Osama bin Laden has a John Edwards bumper sticker on his cave wall."
~ Bill O'Reilly. I can't even get into this one, just wanted to share it.

"I'm having surgery on my arm next week. So I'm just waiting to hear if they got that stuff in Guadalajara."
~ a guy at work, talking on the phone while I eavesdropped furiously, hoping to hear that someone I know is trafficking drugs, or even just getting some for himself. Much to my dismay it turns out he was talking about something totally boring. He's having arm surgery, so he can't go down to Guadalajara to do a lead-free manufacturing workshop that he's coordinating, but he's waiting to hear if they got the solder and parts for the demonstration. No office gossip, no fascinating shenanigans. Dammit.

"Let's make this a plagiarism-free year!"
~ graduate coordinator in an email explaining my program's plagiarism policy. This one really needs no explanation. Oh no, wait, maybe it does, considering the amount of students in my program who worked incessantly over the past two years to make my life a living hell, plagiarizing for fun and profit.

i just met my high school self, and it was depressing

lately I've had delusions of grandeur involving me writing a lengthy blog post that encompasses all the stuff that's been going on for the past few weeks. that's not going to happen, and I'm in a hurry to share this gem I just found upon rediscovering my TI-86 (more later on why I've been forced to rediscover it...)

:yO.ANN.YOU.SHOULD.LI
KE.USE.YOUR.BRAIN.MOR
E.AND.YOUR.TI-86.LESS
...AND.THE.ONLY.REASO
N.YOU.BEAT.ME.ON.THE.
COMBINED.SAT.IS.CAUSE
.I.HAD.SOME.IMPORTANT
.SHIT.ON.MY.MIND...

I thought that was just hilarious, for the obvious reason (it's ridiculous) but also because the "use your brain more comment" was painfully true. A good 50% of the time I spent in high school chemistry and math classes was wasted in that manner, writing programs back and forth on graphing calculators. Another 25% was spent playing Tetris on the calculator. And for the final 25% of class time, I would make other programs with all the formulas and definitions that might be on the exam, e.g.:

ph=-log h+
log= -log oh-
H+=antilog(-ph)
ph+poh=14
kw=h+*oh-=1.0*10^-14
pH=pKa+log (bs/ac)

WHAT? I have no idea what ANY of that means. Antilog? Am I on crazy pills here? I feel like I'm on crazy pills here.

In college the TI-86 slept for the first three years, then I busted it out again for the single solitary science class I took to fulfill the gen ed requirements. I should have taken geology or "forensic biology" or one of those other blatantly easy courses that humanities majors took to fulfill the requirement while maintaining GPA. But I had a crappy GPA anyways, and my roommate and I thought it would be FUN to take a mechanical engineering class instead, mainly because it was twice a week in the afternoon, instead of three times a week in the morning like most science classes. We thought this would allow us to continue our debaucherous lifestyle by night while learning cool stuff about airplanes by day. HA. That was among the top five mistakes of my college career, and that's really saying a lot.

Anyways, the class was a disaster, but the subject matter provided a lot of good fodder for immature jokes about "thrust," "yaw" and "skin friction." In the TI-86 I found a ton of haiku we wrote, mostly involving the professor and the TA "inducing drag" on each other, and some junk like this:

:flaps incr camber an
d lift. roll ailerons
pitch tail chg dir
:yaw rudder
:elevator horistab
:vrot is tang to blad

WHAT? All of this was kind of fun to find again after all these years, but in a way it's extreeeemely depressing. I mean, I was writing all this in the calculator so I wouldn't have to actually "learn" it, but I did "know," albeit in the most rudimentary sense, what I was talking about. That's right, there was a time in my life when I had some concept of sine and cosine, and just a few years later I actually understood (kind of) how an airplane stayed in the air. These days, if it weren't for the many chemistry textbooks that live on my staircase, I couldn't even tell you the difference between an acid and a base.

I guess it's all relative, because back then I couldn't have told you how to say "nail polish remover contains acetone" in Spanish. I also didn't know the mortality rate of the Lowell mill girls, or the historical trajectory of computer and electronic component manufacturing employment in Essex County. But do any of those things actually matter?

I'm starting to wonder if maybe I'm spreading myself too thin over the years. Let me put it this way - I started nursery school when I was four years old. I'm now almost 26, which means I've been in school (in some capacity) for 22 consecutive years. Yet by some miracle, I'm still not an expert, or anything close to that, on any one thing. You know, that whole "little of everything and all of nothing" thing? Blech. I've learned and forgotten more information than I can fathom, probably due to the fact that I'm constantly switching gears, or the fact that I have the memory of a goldfish. Either way, the other depressing result of this is that I'm basically unqualified for any job that I might actually want.

(Yes, I have stopped "wanting" my current job.)

green journalism

I heard a story on NPR about greenwashing, the long-time bane of my existence. it almost made me want to start writing some thesis again. but anyways, one of the commentators was talking about "green journalism," and it made me think of this piece I read a long time ago by Jack Shafer, editor at Slate:

Often as sensationalistic as its yellow predecessor, green journalism tends to appeal to our emotions, exploit our fears, and pander to our vanity. It places a political agenda in front of the quest for journalistic truth and in its most demagogic forms tolerates no criticism, branding all who question it as enemies of the people. (read more)