Pay per hour to live and write a book

By Kelsey | May 16th, 2008 | No Comments »

After expenses, time, pain, suffering, and writing, I’ve made a whopping $7 per hour (so far) writing my book. To all those aspiring authors stocking the shelves at your local book store: it is possible to do what you love, work more, and earn less.

Living the dream!

Undemocratic disasters or Let’s invade Myanmar

By Kelsey | May 14th, 2008 | 2 Comments »

Myanmar, 100,000 killed by cyclone

China, 10,000 killed by earthquake

Myanmar, China, cyclones, earthquakes – all undemocratic.

I’m not saying that disasters struck Myanmar and China because of their lack of democracy. That would make me no different than off-the-wall preachers claiming Hurricane Katrina was the price New Orleans paid for its “celebrations of sin”, or 9/11 a result of fowl coming home to roost. But I would like to say, these uncontrollable disasters are an opportunity for nations, not to capitalize on, but to reach out to the people of Myanmar and China.

The scale of the disaster in China, although massive, is much smaller than that of Myanmar and the Chinese government is probably more capable of responding to a disaster than the U.S., so I think heaping them with moral support and funding will be enough, but Myanmar is whole other story.

The Myanmar government will not allow the full wave of international aid into its country. This could result in 100’s of thousands of preventable deaths as disease and starvation set in. This is the kind of country that should be invaded, not by dropping bombs, but by dropping food and supplies. Why not have an air raid on Myanmar? What, are we afraid of their air force? Do they have an air force?

Excerpts from a CNN piece on the disaster in Myanmar:

Adm. Timothy Keating, head of the U.S. Pacific Command, was on the first of three U.S. aid flights allowed into Myanmar this week.
He described meeting with a Myanmar three-star general who opened up a map of the country and pointed to the areas worst-hit by the cyclone.
“[He] characterized activity there as returning back to normal — his words,” Keating said. “[He said] people are coming back to their villages, they’re planting their crops for the summer season, the monsoon will come and wash all the saltwater out of the ponds.
“His manner, his demeanor, his attitude indicated something less than very serious concern.”
A former Yangon resident now living in Thailand told AP that angry government officials told him that high-energy biscuits rushed into Myanmar on the World Food Program’s first flights were sent to a military warehouse.
Speaking on condition of anonymity over fears for his safety, he told AP that the biscuits were exchanged for what officials said were “tasteless and low-quality” biscuits produced by the Industry Ministry.

Why would a government stand and watch as its people die needlessly?

(Insert lengthy critique of U.S. government during Hurricane Katrina here, which pretty much erases the footing of the rest of the argument)

My theory: They are afraid of exposing their people to democracy and compassion, which breeds more democracy and compassion, which erodes at the fear and power that these jackasses hold over their countrymen.

I guess what I’m saying is…Let’s invade Myanmar!

Who’s with me?

Time magazine is.

Misremembering the English language

By Kelsey | May 13th, 2008 | No Comments »

I watched Roger Clemens testify before Congress. I laughed at him when he busted out “misremember” after “misremember”.

“That’s not even a word,” I said to the TV, talking around a bite of cold pizza.

Months later and I find “misremember” entering my everyday speech. I always say it with a wink and a nod and maybe a pair of air-quotes, as if everyone had spent hours on the Tuesday or Thursday – or whatever day the testimony was – watching it. Like it was our own inside joke.

Last night the guest on the daily show – some Washington crony whose book Stewart touted as “well foot-noted, making for a very slow read” – busted out “misremember”. I laughed, smug with the knowledge that I knew “misremember” wasn’t a word.

This morning I sat at my computer to write about how amazing it is that Roger Clemens, a baseball player, had invented a word that looks like it’s taking hold. But first I decided to look it up in the dictionary, even though I knew it wouldn’t be there. It was.

Misremember is a word.

And what a great word it is. Instead of having to say “I don’t recall” or “I can’t remember” or some other multi-word phrase, “misremember” is a tight little package of “hell, I don’t know.”

Have you used “misremember”? You should give it a try. Although if you’re testifying before Congress, you might want to be a bit more formal: “Sir, I cannot (conjunctions are too informal for Senators) at this time.”

Reasonable Writing Advice from Mark Twain

By Kelsey | May 12th, 2008 | No Comments »

Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what one was intended for.

I was lucky to start writing for pay from the beginning. However, I was not so lucky that for the first few years that pay was about half-a-penny per word. Twain’s advice hits especially close to home considering my day job is in the wood sawing field.

Mrs. Butterworth,

By Kelsey | May 10th, 2008 | 1 Comment »

A “still boobless” Mrs. Butterworth has sunk to the level of Geico commercials. Sad. One has to wonder, if she had boobs would she be doing this? We’ll never know.

Sweatshop the Game

By Kelsey | May 7th, 2008 | 3 Comments »

Does anyone remember the computer game Hot Dog stand in which you buy the hotdog, the buns, etc, and you see if you can make your little hot dog business work?

Well Sim-Sweatshop is kinda like that except instead of selling hot dogs for a profit you make shoes for a loss. Okay, other than they are both less than elementary introductions to economics, they’re nothing alike.

The goal of Sim-Sweatshop is to make three shoes in a day to earn your full day’s worth of pay – $6.05. You do this by dragging the parts of a shoe together. It’s frustrating, which I suppose is the point, because the game constantly interrupts you to eat or join a union or to buy your daughter some shoes. The closest I got to reaching my daily quota was 2 2/3rds pairs of shoes.

Do you think you have the mouse ability to be a successful shoe assembler?

PLAY SIM-SWEATSHOP

Michael Pollan’s call to Action: “Plant a garden!”

By Kelsey | May 6th, 2008 | No Comments »

Author Michael Pollan (In defense of Food, The Omnivores Dilemma) recently wrote a call to action in the New York Times Magazine, including this little mid-paragraph nugget:

Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will.

Mainly, he’s talking about the environment, but his message can be applied universally. As I read, I found myself substituting “clothes” for “food”, and “what we wear” for “what we eat”.

Here’s a longer excerpt:

Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Blood, Sweat, and T-shirts

By Kelsey | May 6th, 2008 | 5 Comments »

When I was in Cambodia and China I heard rumblings about a BBC reality show/documentary that followed young Brits as they worked in a sweatshop in India. The first episode of Blood, Sweat, and T-shirts aired last week.

“I don’t understand. Why don’t you just go to night school.”

“There’s like Poo on the floor” in the slums of Mumbai

Cotton: A fashion revelation or “I ain’t carrying that!” or “Do I look like an ork to you!”

For more of Blood, Sweat, and T-shirts GO HERE.

A belated early Happy Labor Day

By Kelsey | May 5th, 2008 | 2 Comments »

Labor Day didn’t always end summer. Here’s an excerpt from WAIW? explaining:

Today is May 1st, Labor Day around the world for everyone except a few countries, including the United States. On this day in 1886, some 40,000 workers marched down Michigan Avenue in efforts to bring about an eight-hour work day. A few days later at a labor rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square a riot broke out complete with a bomb and police firing into a crowd. Seven police officers and two protestors were killed and many more were wounded. Four of the “anarchists” were rounded up and later hung. President Grover Cleveland didn’t want to celebrate the “socialist” movement so Labor Day in the United States was moved to the first Monday in September.

Radiohead “All I need”

By Kelsey | May 2nd, 2008 | 3 Comments »

As part of MTV’s EXIT campaign to end exploitation and trafficking Radiohead has released a powerful new video.

Not that lead singers are any more qualified to talk about human rights and globalization than, say, drummers or butchers, but here’s what Radiohead’s lead singer Thom Yorke has to say on the subjects:

“(It’s) a video of two parallel stories running, one of a little boy in the West and one of a little boy in a sweatshop in the East, and the boy [in the West] ends up buying the shoes from the sweatshop. It’s actually quite powerful. It’s the sort of images I have in my head anyway. Sometimes when you’re walking down High Street and you’re looking at the incredibly cheap [sneakers], you sort of think, ‘Hmmm, well how did they manage to make that so cheaply?’ It sort of reminds me of one of my preoccupations, so I’m touched that the music goes with that. I think it’s great.”

“…if you are in the West, it’s a luxury to be able to talk about the importance of human rights for everybody, but yet in the East, or the poorer countries where slave labor is going on, if you talk to certain companies, it seems that it’s much more important that they’re on some sort of economic ladder, and somehow the rights of the workers are secondary to economic growth. And that I find a very peculiar logic, and I think that’s as much about the power of the companies and the profits they’re making as it is of any moral stance. So it would be useful when the West talks about human rights, they actually consider countries where, for a lot of workers, it’s not really on the agenda yet.”

Here’s the video: