Author: Ruby Sinreich

Since 10 am this morning I have been sitting in the emergency room at UNC Hospital. They are so backed up with patients I heard one doctor call it “the land of the lost.” That’s not a bad description of how it feels to be installed in a room and then ignored for over an hour. I can’t decide if this is better or worse than 2 hours in the waiting room with the TV blaring. Fortunately, I didn’t have to decide – I got both.

You may be wondering why I am here. I have somehow managed to get poison ivy AGAIN. I just had it 5 months ago, 5 months before that, and about a year before that. It appears that my front and back yards are both blessed with the evil weed, and I tend to get infected after doing major yard work, like liberating my catus from a nasty, thorny vine.

Having been through this so many times lately, I know exactly what I need. Only steroids can give my skin the strength it needs. Special soaps and ointments don’t help. Waiting doesn’t help. By tomorrow it will be so swollen that I will barely be able to walk. I need some prednisone, stat.

Unfortunately it takes weeks to get an appointment with any local dermatologist, and that’s if you’re lucky enough to snag someone else’s cancellation. So here I am in the E.R. for 3 1/2 hours now and still haven’t seen a doctor. There has to be a better way!

The Washington Post website has a great column called White House Briefing, in which Dan Froomkin write about press coverage of the presidency. (It even has an RSS feed!)

In Tuesday’s excellent edition Froomkin discusses the second blogger allowed into the White House briefing room. He asked this question: “Back to the report on the botched WMD intelligence, have the massive intelligence failures documented in the report caused the President to rethink his policy of preventive war?”

The Post published the response from Press Secretary Scott McClellan with each of his sentences hyperlinked to a record of how many times he’d said almost the exact same thing before. I won’t bother reprinting here as it’s complete and utter bullshit and does not even begin to answer the question. You can go read it yourself if you want.

In the same column we find this exchange between CNN’s Elaine Quijano and McClellan:

“Q: Scott, you mentioned the culture of life. When Pope John Paul II wrote about the culture of life in 1995, he described it also in terms of the death penalty, not just abortion and euthanasia. He said that in these modern times, cases where the death penalty was warranted are rare, if not nonexistent. Now, knowing that the President fully supports the death penalty, used the death penalty, does he see it as a contradiction to use that phrase, ‘culture of life,’ and still support the death penalty, which the Pope expressed his opposition to?”

“MR. McCLELLAN: Elaine, I think the President’s views are well known. I don’t think now is the time to talk about where they may have differed on one or two areas. This is a time to honor a great moral leader, someone who, as the President said, was a hero for the ages.”

She continued to press on, but to no avail.

I also learned last night (on The Daily Show of all places) that the Pope called our Invasion of Iraq “a defeat for humanity.” But I guess Bush glossed over that one as well.

Is there anything Google can’t do? Or at least try to do? No-one can say they’re not ambitious.

The very beta Google Ride Finder tells you the location of cabs in 11 different cities around the US. I looked at Washington, DC (the closest city to me on their list) and it shows taxis and shuttles from 3 different companies, for a total of 126 vehicles. Hell – there are probably that many cabs just on the DC beltway right now!

Too bad this service doesn’t work on my mobile phone, where it could actually be useful. It also doesn’t tell me what I really want to know: when the Chapel Hill Transit bus is coming. I guess I’ll just have to keep getting around the old-fashioned way.

This is my third national championship in Chapel Hill (of 4 ever won by UNC). The first was in 1982 when I was 11. Horror stories about the celebratory violence in ’82 were enough to keep me from going uptown to celebrate the next time we won in 1993. I was a senior at UNC then, and was actively occupying the campus administration building to protest for a free-standing black cultural center. I used the excuse of holding down the fort while most of my fellow activists went uptown.

In recent years, I have managed to put on my sturdy shoes and head up there with some reliable friends. I have observed some mayhem, but no personal harm. A little chaos is A-OK with me!

Here we see two gals hanging from a street sign at the corner of Franklin and Columbia in downtown Chapel Hill. I left when people started shouting “show us your tits.”

Someone wanted to go to He’s Not Here, but after getting smushed in the crowd in front of I Love NY Pizza and seeing the line of students at He’s Not, we went the long way around to Rosemary Street (via Church Street) and made our way to Hell. It appeared to have emptied out after the game, but folks were starting to flood back in.

We hung out long enough to say hi to Hell proprietor Papa D, Bluefreaky, radio personality Mike Nutt, and Justinsomnia who was so happy that he lifted both me and my 6’2″ boyfriend up in the air (not at the same time). I hope his back is OK. Walking home we ran into J, and then got distracted by a flaming mattress on Pritchard Avenue.

Helicopters were still chopping in the sky above our house when we got home around 1 am. Sally posted the police report on IsThatLegal? this morning:

The crowd size is estimated to have been 45,000 people…

Fifteen people were arrested. Charges included assaults, damage to property, trespassing, disorderly conduct, discharging fireworks, indecent exposure, affray, and setting bonfires. Two citations were issued to downtown establishments for overcrowding.

Affray?

Where will you be watching the game?

This week I gave a presentation on “network-centric advocacy” to participants at a southeastern regional meeting hosted by Connect US.

I promised I’d post the presentation here on lotusmedia.org, but first I have to go spend some time with my family. Please check back next week for a fill post with a link to the presentation and related resource.

At the Stained Glass Museum on Chicago’s Navy Pier.