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ritaxis: (Default)
Wednesday, November 9th, 2011 08:12 am
2100 words, bringing the chapter to 2800 (rounding down that same fifty words) and the book to 19 000. Accomplished: got religion established in a couple of sentences and now the story can refer to it casually from here on out. Also got the "superstitious" old system explained. Got Yanek in the car and set up for the events that will get him mistaken for a servant boy at the Palace. The rest of the chapter will be about that and its consequences. And meeting the first, and less vile, tutor. And then I will be done with Yanek being ten years old.

On another front: the result of the knee exercises having been a worsening of the symptoms or rather the arrival of a new and worse one, I have been instructed to quit them and start using a stationary bike. Or go straight for the cortisone shot, but even if that's where I'm headed, I'd rather get stronger first. This is dumb. I'm not even trying to walk to work, and I feel idiotic having to drive four blocks.

In case you were not online last night and you haven't read the news yet, the Mississippi personhood amendment lost, but by far too narrow a margin (42-58 which I guess is not such a narrow margin, but it's too narrow for an issue like this: the bastards will be encouraged to try again), and also, in Ohio, they defeated "issue 2," the ballot proposition that would have limited collective bargaining rights for public workers and other anti-labor measures in the name of cost control. Since Ohio also voted to make public healthcare unconstitutional, it's hard to see this as a clear signal that the class war is turning. Yes, there is class war. There never has not been. Whenever the classes are seen to be to peace, it's an illusion: a ceasefire at best, and you can bet that the only side that's not fighting t those times is the "working" class (we really need a better word for it in today's world, where unemployment is so high and the richest people all claim to be workers because they go to an office when they're not running for an office).

Somebody should, however, take a moment to compare and contrast the current political movement with those of the twentieth century or even the nineteenth. There's something interesting going on. I'm looking at you, Mike.
ritaxis: (Default)
Saturday, November 5th, 2011 01:49 pm
I had thught I had heard about Delta airlines doing bad things in the past, but when I went to buy tickets for us earlier in the year (and I had to buy three sets of intercontinental flights: 2 roundtrips SF-Prague, 1 roundtrip Prague-Accra, and 1 roundtrip Prague-SF -- this may not seem like a lot to some people, which amounts to about a third of my income for 2011, not counting mysterious legacies that keep popping up suspiciously) I could not find anything when I googled, so I had decided I must have remembered wrongly. It turns out I googled wrongly, not knowingf exactly what to ask for, and completely failed to find the records of Delta's swalling of Northwestern and their bad labor policy.

This is where you kind of have to know what you're looking for to find thngs. Googling "delta labor policy" reveals on the first page a slew of articles about flying pregnant, an attack on Harry Reid by the US Chamber of Commerce, and three hits for Delta's PR machine including their "applauding" a decision by a House committee to investigate the Labor Board. But this time, knowing for sure that there was something to look for, I changed up the words, and "Delta labor violations" turns out to be an overwhelmingly productive search.

Thanks, Pamela and Mike!