Category: obscure pursuits

FAQs About Donating Blood | Give Life | American Red Cross:

Thank you for making 43 donations. Did you know that you may have helped save as many as 129 lives?!

I just discovered that over the past 14 years or so, I have donated more than 5 gallons of blood, in both whole blood and apheresis.

Some blood centers count apheresis donations as doubles: if the local unit follows that rule, the total jumps to almost 69 units or almost 9 gallons.

This came in via email this AM: looks pretty authentic, doesn’t it?

Now, if this were straight up, you’d think I would be alerted while I was logged into my eBay page: I am and I wasn’t. So I’m guessing this is bogus.

Let’s see: what other clues are there?

• My user name doesn’t appear, nor does my real name (ie, how they would have me recorded in their billing records)
• Misspellings (departement?) are a tipoff: something like this would probably have been looked over by a lawyer or three, to say nothing of the accounting staff, and various others.
• And the secure.ebay.com link goes to “http://site2.apollohosting.com/mmstech.net/httpdocs/” not eBay.

I spell a scam. Don’t you fall for it or anything similar.

Since my brush with fame this morning (a mention on Boing Boing), the AdSense love is flowing more freely than usual. Of course, anything is better than $0.00, my usual daily take. I’m not quite up to a double-tall coffee, if it kept up at this rate for a month, my bandwidth costs would be covered.

This needs to be read in full (Professor Holbo is the windiest of the CT crew: bear with it):

Crooked Timber: Enrich Your Word Power:

I guess I just can’t quite believe that it could be true that less than 50% of the population has read any literature in the last year. (The idea that you can’t assign a 200-page novel in a college class? Preposterous. Can’t be.)

A great post and discussion about college kids who can’t read a 200 page novel without getting lost and who have trouble with literary devices like changes of voice and perspective. I can remember discovering college freshmen who had never read a book. 18 years old, old enough to vote, old enough to be conscripted, but no recreational book learning. And that was 20 years ago, before the Internet, before the ubiquitous PC, before video games (other than arcade games).

I have gotten probably 100 or more comment spams today: only a couple made it through. WPBlacklist deletes them within a second before they even see the light of day.

Election Protection Card:

Move On has a handy card. Download, print, hand them out…

[via]

A friend writes:

As some of you already know, about a month ago I was randomly selected to participate in a “Deliberation Day” project organized by PBS.  The purpose of the event was to get the perspectives of every-day Americans on issues relating to National Security and the Global Economy. 100 people from the greater Seattle area participated in this all event, which was held at the Seattle Public Library last Saturday.  For the morning portion, participants split into 8-9 groups of 15 and deliberated on topics relating to National Security, Civil Liberties, Spreading of Democracy, International Trade, Outsourcing and the Global Economy.  Within our groups we were asked to come up with two questions, which were posed to a panel of experts that met with us in the afternoon.
 
17 other events like this are being held around the country.  Both the local event and national coverage of all events will be televised on PBS.  The Seattle deliberation will be broadcast on KCTS, Channel 9 this Thursday, October 21st on “KCTS Connects Special Report” from 7:00-8:00 pm PST.  The national broadcase, including footage from all deliberations, will be broadcast locally on KCTS this Friday, October 22nd on “A Time to Choose: A By the People Election Special”, from 8:00-9:00 pm PST.  I’m not sure how the national schedules will work, but if you’re not local to Seattle, you can check them out at www.pbs.org
 
Watch one or both of them if you can!  Sadly, any television footage of me will be pretty fleeting — my small group wasn’t selected for television coverage — but you may catch sight of me in some of the “big-audience” pan shots during the introductions at the beginning and when we met with the panel in the afternoon.
 
Being part of this was a great experience and a lot of the discussion that came up, in both my deliberation and the big panel, was very interesting, thought-provoking and sometimes downright sobering.  Watch, in particular, for the near-fist fight between two of the panelists over outsourcing and whether it is a negative or positive thing for the US Economy. Hopefully they won’t cut it in the final edit–it was pretty awesome! 😉

I’ll see if I can capture this or a file and make it available to the author of the above email.

Now playing:Ocean of Mercy by Jaya Lakshmi from the album “Ocean of Mercy” | Buy it

Freedom of the press belongs to the guy who owns one, but not freedom of the airwaves: it might be time to remind some folks — the FCC and some forgetful broadcasters — that the public owns the airwaves.

The Left Coaster: How To Deal With Sinclair Broadcast Group’s Attempt To Play Kingmaker:

The conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group, whose television outlets reach nearly a quarter of the nation’s homes with TV, is ordering its stations to preempt regular programming just days before the Nov. 2 election to air a film that attacks Sen. John F. Kerry’s activism against the Vietnam War, network and station executives familiar with the plan said Friday.

Sinclair has told its stations — many of them in political swing states such as Ohio and Florida — to air “Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal,” sources said. The film, funded by Pennsylvania veterans and produced by a veteran and former Washington Times reporter, features former POWs accusing Kerry — a decorated Navy veteran turned war protester — of worsening their ordeal by prolonging the war. Sinclair will preempt regular prime-time programming from the networks to show the film, which may be classified as news programming, according to TV executives familiar with the plan.

As the site above points, the usual tactics for pressuring a media concern are through boycotts of their advertisers. But another avenue is to challenge their license renewals as they come due. And if you take a moment to read through the FCC’s Localism section, there are lots of opportunities to make your voice heard: it all goes on the record and if there’s a loud enough protest, it can’t be ignored.

The national press corps has been supine for these past four years: the FCC’s proposed media ownership rule changes were headed off by local pressure at public hearings across the country. That’s what it takes. Time to do it again . . .

Now playing:Spines by They Might Be Giants from the album “The Spine” | Buy it

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.
— Pablo Picasso