Author: Ruby Sinreich

Playing “Let’s get it started.’

Live from Franklin Street…

How can it be I never heard of the Internet Anagram Server before? This simple web site offers hours of entertainment.

Here are some of my favorite of hundreds of anagrams of my own name:
I IS BRUNCH RYE
BUNCHY RISER I
INCUBI SHERRY (my mom’s name is Sherry!)
CRIB USHER YIN
HI RUN. CRIB? YES.
RUBRIC SHE YIN / RUBRIC YEN HIS
I YIN HER SCRUB
CUBS ERR HI YIN for baseball lovers
HI SIN. BE CURRY? Sounds like a fun dinner party.
BURNISHER ICY
BUSHIER CRY IN is how I felt after the election
BRINE ICY RUSH on the Titanic?
HI BRUISER NYC
RUBES RICH YIN
BUYER RICH SIN
SHRUB ICY REIN = the Bush adminstration
I CRUSH RIB YEN
RICHEY IS BURN
I SNUB RICH REY

I just found that my neighbors, the Grays, are moving. The good news is they are selling their house for $170k! This is way more than either of us paid for our homes. Of course the rising prices have a downside – we live in one of the last affordable neighborhoods in town, and you know how it goes.

I will miss the Grays and their adorable kids. I’ll especially miss our mutual cat sitting arrangement, which has worked well for the past 4 years. I always thought they’d be fun to hang out with, but I never got off my butt and invited them over. (Partially because I suffer from CHAOS.)

When the Grays leave, my partner and I will be the only white people living on this street. I don’t expect it to be very different than when we were one of two white households, but it’s notable. Our street has managed to fend off student rentals for the most part. I wonder how long we can continue to hold out.

I see Ed Cone is already bored with the Oscars. I’ve found it pretty entertaining so far, but it’s really starting to drag with the multiple Beyonce ballads. WTF?

Anyway, I think The Aviator has won quite enough awards already, thank you very much. Glad the Incredibles was recognized. I’d like to see at least one more award for Sideways, one for Vera Drake, and I need to see some big love for Million Dollar Baby or I’m gonna be pissed.

Watching the Oscars. (And loving it.)

I have finally replaced the function I had on my old blog that allowed folks to subscribe to updates by e-mail. You can now sign up here.

Today’s annual recognition of the winners of WCHL’s Village Pride Award Winners was a lovely affair. The luncheon was put on at the Carolina Inn and recognized 254 “hometown heroes” (as they call us) that received the award in 2004. In my opinion, not enough thanks went to Ron Stutts, who is the real ‘hero’ of the Village Pride Awards.

As one of these award recipients I can tell you the standards are low, and that’s a good thing. This allows room for many definitions of community service, from volunteering in the schools to doing a good job at work to raising money for charities to being an elected official to bitching about elected officials (that’s me 😉 *). The group was quite diverse and fairly representative of many aspects of our community.

The speakers were funny and engaging, especially WCHL owner Jim Heavner. He’s quite a talker – the man was obviously born for radio. Heavner was also thanked a number of times for bringing this local radio station back home (he bought it back after selling it to a company that all but eliminated the local programming and played tapes out of Durham).

The keynote speaker was Howard Lee, who will always be remembered as the courageous visionary to become the first elected black mayor of a mostly-white southern town in 1969. I’m not sure how he has also been remembered as the creator of the Chapel Hill bus system, which was actually started by students at UNC in 1968.

After several terms as Mayor and some other less successful attempts at higher office, Lee was appointed as secretary of a state agency in 1977, and then represented Chapel Hill in the N.C. state senate from 1990-1994 and 1996-2002. In the state legislature, Lee was a powerful deal-maker, and a good friend to business leaders and UNC administrators.

Many local residents will never forget the time he slipped in a state budget rider that would have stripped Chapel Hill of all zoning authority over the campus, and then took credit for killing the rider after a public outcry. Now he’s the chair of the State Board of Education, and is apparently failing to support comprehensive sex education. I’m not sure when it happened, but over time this community’s values and Lee’s values have diverged from each other.

You can tell that I don’t agree with Howard Lee about much of anything these days, but he is an apt symbol for this community: liberal on the surface, but in deed we are resisting social change as much as ever. We take a lot of ‘village pride’ in that liberal reputation, but we often don’t put our money (or our bodies) where our collective mouth is. But I honestly don’t think it’s much better in other places, and this is my home, warts and all.

—
* I was being honored for starting OrangePolitics.org, but in the program for the event, they listed the address of a website that was started as an alternative to OP. Ooops!

Corey has the most beautiful blog I’ve ever seen.

I would have just told him by commenting on the site, but the comment form is broken. 🙁

I don’t know why, but many birth dates get indelibly inked in my brain. Probably the first birthday I remembered so easily was my very first best friend, Tris Laughter. We went to pre-school together. Her birthday was easy to remember as it was exactly two months before mine. At the age of 6, that can be a meaningful sign.

So almost every year on her birthday, I go looking for Tris. (I do this with other long-lost friends too, such as Alec on April 17 and Alfie on November 11.) I learned that she goes by “Tristin” now. I think it was last year that I found a really thoughtful thing about 9/11 she wrote on a friend of hers’ blog. Over the years I have seen her growing career as publicist for cool punk/rock bands. She has been quoted extensively about The Donnas for example.

So today I did my annual Google search, and what do you know: Tris has a blog! Sometimes I just love this interwebby thingy…