| SECRETARY SHIPLEY:
Senate Resolution 46, offered by Senator Dahl. No committee or Floor amendments reported.
PRESIDING OFFICER: (SENATOR DeLEO)
Senator Dahl, to the resolution, sir.
SENATOR DAHL:
Thank you, Mr. President. Senate Resolution 46 is a resolution that establishes March 13th as "Pluto Day" and reestablishes it as a full planetary status in honor of its discoverer, Dr. Clyde Tombaugh, who was a Streator, Illinois native and the only American that has ever discovered a planet. This -- this passed out of committee unanimously, and encourage a Yes vote for the good citizens in the City of Streator. Thank you.
PRESIDING OFFICER: (SENATOR DeLEO)
Okay, is there any discussion? Is there any discussion? Okay, the question is, shall Senate Resolution 46 pass. All those in favor will say Aye. All those opposed will say Nay. And it's the opinion of the Chair, the Ayes have it. And the resolution is adopted -- receiving the required constitutional majority, is declared passed.
Full text of SR0046 at Illinois General Assembly's official website | comments: 2 Kommentare or Kommentar hinterlassen   |
| ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) yuri93, heresybythought, and I went into Chicago to see Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind. We failed. We lost time trying to find our way around unfamiliar parts of the city on foot, and when we got there the show had already started, and, in fact, sold out. Our guilt that apparently we had failed to communicate our plans to digopheliadug before today (despite each of us remembering telling her about it while waiting with her at the Metra stop on New Year's Day) was, hence, somewhat alleviated.
We tried to make her one of our prank call targets, once we had settled in for what turned out to be a two-hour Starbucks visit, but she has all of our phone numbers, so the prank call turned out to be mostly just a "call". We entertained ourselves sufficiently on other unsuspecting victims, though. I represented the Eastern Seaboard Crab Promotion Association, you see, and was conducting a survey to ascertain public opinion of crabs. As to how we came up with this prank, suffice it to say that the explanation makes no sense and hinges on yuri93 being a linguist and me being a Beck fan.
So, much like Happy Metal Gear, the gathering was an utter failure if measured against what we set out to do, but we had a lot of fun. | | comments: 1 Kommentar or Kommentar hinterlassen |
| (Backdated entry written Jan 8 2009)
paakun and his wife not_existing visited me today, despite the latter's broken arm. Because of ice they weren't able to make it until roughly 13:30, but we had enough time to visit a little and eat lunch before I had to go to work.
paakun brought me Christmas gifts, and they are the best:
( Barack Obama and John McCain action figures )
Now I have to figure out a way to retaliate, because I hadn't got anything for him. Suggestions welcome.
After some adventures trying to park paakun's car in the slippery snow, we ate at Chipotle. I lost a rock-paper-scissors bout for determining who would pay (we had to go 8 or 10 rounds to determine a best-two-of-three, because we're awesome), but I wasn't about to let him buy me a gift and lunch, so I slipped a $20 bill in his car's backseat ashtray, which he didn't even know existed, and waited until he was back in Michigan to tell him about it. This wouldn't be the first time I've done this sort of thing, so I know he's probably going to find a way to pay me back, but this gives me some time to figure out an actual gift.
Super Mario Galaxy and Call of Duty: World at War for Wii both have 2p modes where the second player doesn't need the nunchuk, which would be perfect for not_existing's circumstances except that she didn't really seem to be all that into Mario. (I don't think they tried Call of Duty, but I happen to think it's terrible anyway.) It was good to see them, but I had to leave for work while they were playing Mario, at about 15:00. A speedy recovery to not_existing, and a happy new year to them both. | | comments: 6 Kommentare or Kommentar hinterlassen |
| Technically speaking, I still exist, and here are some (i.e. all) of the things I've been "doing" recently.
I went south with Chris and SS on Nov 7th, to visit yuri93 and her friend CG for a few days. (Adopting her nomenclature on people not previously mentioned in this journal.) I was glad to see all of the above people (CG I don't really know, but he's a friendly fellow), but I was pretty bored for most of the visit. We watched anime series I'd never heard of and wasn't really interested in; Chris and CG played a lot of ZONG, from which I was excluded by lack of my own computer on site and in which i wasn't really interested; Nerf munitions were fired. At one point I took to throwing Nerf darts at CG's washing machine to pass the time. Nevertheless I consider the trip worthwhile, because I would have been even more bored at home. Being around people is nice even when there's nothing to do. CG is a decent guy, at which conclusion I would arrive even had he not let me stay despite only having met me once (twice?) before.
Then I was home for a while. My last grandparent died, my maternal grandfather, and my uncle Keith (who had been living with and caring for said grandfather) used his newfound freedom from responsibility to take me and my brother to visit our mom and stepdad in Florida for Thanksgiving. Again, pretty bored - this time with fewer video games to play and fewer people whose interests intersect with mine. It was good to see my mom, though - some of you have met her, and I agree with your expressed assessment that she is pretty cool. My stepdad, though diametrically opposed to me in politics, isn't a bad fellow himself. They're both studying to be acupuncturists, which involves learning a lot of traditional Chinese mysticism before they can get to the Western scientific explanations of how and why acupuncture works, which fact my stepdad abhors. Under Florida law they'll be able to practice as primary care physicians, covered by health insurance, if they graduate the program. They won't, however, be authorised to prescribe pharmaceutical medication. I talk about them so much, rather than what we did together during the visit, because we did nothing together during the visit. Watch House, watch 007 movie, go to conspicuously un-vegan restaurants (I don't mind, except that in some places there was literally no menu item I could eat as prepared - at my stepdad's favorite steakhouse I had to custom-order a bowl of pasta, and then I had to send it back because it had cheese), repeat. Again, worthwhile despite boredom.
Now I'm going back to work on weekends at the zoo, until the end of December, at which point I will officially lose my seasonal job. I should be looking for a new job now, but when was the last time I did something just because it was in my best interest? | | comments: Kommentar hinterlassen |
| My bias is toward Obama. I decided quite a while ago that I would vote for him. This you should know before reading my take on the presidential debate tonight.
However, I never disliked McCain until tonight; I simply thought he was wrong. It made me cringe when Obama kept going over his allotted time, and McCain gets points for learning to shut up, but McCain threw some outrageous bullshit his way which Obama needed extra time to refute. When Obama specified he'd violate Pakistani sovereignty to pursue Al-Qaeda if necessary, McCain started claiming Obama would "attack Pakistan", and the fact he did it twice, even after Obama's hard-won and irregular clarification that it would be Al-Qaeda, not Pakistan, he'd use military force against, was the most infuriating thing, to me, of the whole debate. I wish Obama hadn't rambled as much, and sucked every question into the vortex of rhetoric that makes up his platform. I still come out of this thinking Obama has a better grasp of the issues than McCain does: on government spending, Obama's position was "we need to look at both spending and revenue" implying some spending cuts, some spending increases, and tax increases to pay for it; McCain hammered home his principles that the budget can be balanced by spending cuts alone, and that if we just ease up on taxes the economy will work itself out. I get the impression from McCain that conservatives, in general, believe government spending simply disappears once it's allocated, rather than reciruclating through the economy. I think McCain spent a lot of effort trying to co-opt or paint over Obama's campaign promises; he argued that tax cuts were necessary for ordinary Americans and seemed to ignore the detail that Obama is also proposing cuts in most Americans' income taxes; he said 95% of Americans would benefit from his healthcare proposal, suspiciously the same percentage Obama quoted would get tax cuts under his plan (or am I just paranoid?); his description of "these gold-plated Cadillac kinds of policies" which would not benefit from his plan seemed to be grasping at the wealthy/middle-class dichotomy that already defines Obama's rhetoric.
Obama didn't seem to understand the question "should we treat healthcare as a commodity", and gave what sounded to me like a stock answer describing his healthcare plan. I forgive him, because I didn't understand it either.
In short: Obama was flawed, giving oft-unsatisfactory answers that took more time than he was allotted and lowering my opinion of him somewhat; McCain was infuriating, making oversimplified and sometimes outright false statements that Obama could not refute or correct in equal time--due, in my opinion, to the greater degree of nuance in Obama's positions. Some of you have expressed intent to vote for McCain, and I look forward to learning what this debate looked like to people who watched this with a bias in the other direction. Speak freely. | | comments: 3 Kommentare or Kommentar hinterlassen |
| I went into Chicago today, to hang out at the beach with willyousplode. I never really know what to do at the beach, besides just swim, and I start to feel pretty silly after a while of that; I'm not really into just lounging in the sun, and I have a kind of physique that makes me feel like I need a reason to have my shirt off in public. It's different, though, with someone who likes playing with sand. We took turns burying each other (pics taken but probably not forthcoming) and occasionally went in the water. willyousplode complained each time the clouds obscured the sun; I secretly rejoiced. We have opposite tastes in weather.
Her friend Sarah showed up (eventually), and our water-related activities delayed her plans to go to the Chicago Summer Dance. We managed to show up about 2/3 of the way through, though, and underwent some tango training. I wouldn't have participated, but willyousplode was just watching and it literally takes two to tango. It was fun; not exactly my first choice of fun or even of dance styles, but worthwhile nonetheless.
I never come home disappointed from a trip into Chicago with friends. | | comments: 10 Kommentare or Kommentar hinterlassen |
| What a disappointment. I go to the graduation party of a girl I barely know, and it doesn't turn out to be awkward at all. Beer probably helped, but really, it wouldn't have been bad sober. Thanks to heresybythought, both for relaying my invitation and for driving me to the event and back.
I had a lot of fun. Slowly, but surely, I am getting used to the idea of not perpetually staying at home, on the internet. No offense, internet, but all things in moderation. At some point in the last few years I stopped turning down invitations to the occasional social thing. I wish this point would have come while I was at IMSA, because seeing a bunch of IMSA folk at this party reminds me that IMSA students, alumni, and nongrads are roundly and soundly excellent. I'm grateful for the few of you with whom I keep in touch, but the large majority of quality people I met there who I now essentially do not know makes me sad.
Seeing them also reminds me of how far I have fallen from the traditional academic trajectory. As disdainful as I've always appeared to be of the whole "homework" thing, I truly value academia, and it is depressing to reflect on my inability to stick with it.
Fortunately, none of these thoughts occurred to me at the party. I had a genuinely good time, and around other IMSA alumni I really felt at home. How do I get this kind of thing to happen more often? | | comments: 1 Kommentar or Kommentar hinterlassen |
| I went into Chicago to go to a Blackhawks convention with my cousin today. He convinced me to go by telling me Second City would be performing there. I have absolutely no interest in the Chicago Blackhawks, or any other Chicago sports team, unless the Cubs make it to the playoffs. If that happened, I would have exactly one iota of interest.
Mostly I went because I wanted to see him. He is an ex-paratrooper who was in the first firefight of the Iraq invasion and has had good buddies die. Somehow he managed to get out of the Army and go to college, majoring in political science. He's getting a bit out of shape.
We have essentially nothing in common, not even blood. My uncle is his stepdad. He's family regardless, but today was a minor exercise in awkward, in a three-day parade of awkward beginning with my last post and expected to climax at my next post. Do tune in. | | comments: Kommentar hinterlassen |
| Tuesday: I got my IL driver's license. It turns out that, if my boss is to be believed, I had 90 days, as opposed to 30, of grace--I could have put it off until after my birthday, so I wouldn't have to renew so soon, but that idea struck me as a flimsy excuse for procrastination. (What the hell is wrong with me? Was I not once the avatar of procrastination?)
Wednesday: Some of my n00b co-workers and I were given a tour of the Zoo's indoor exhibits by a much more experienced co-worker. It's not like this should have happened before we started giving tours of our own, or anything. This took up the whole day and I didn't do a lick of work after 9 AM.
Thursday (today): Happy birthday to Feifei! I'd hoped to visit her in Peoria, but after buying some pants (for my work uniform) with my first paycheck I've impoverished myself to the point I couldn't get back if I went. Instead, I spent about 6.5 hours at heresybythought's house playing Zelda: Twilight Princess and doing nothing else. This kind of ashames me, as I thought I stopped going to people's houses just to play their video games about ten years ago, but we did enjoy ourselves poking fun at the series' idiosyncracies as expressed in its latest iteration.
( apparently I have a lot to say about the game after playing it for six hours ) | | comments: 4 Kommentare or Kommentar hinterlassen |
| Chris, his friend Steve (not Savi), and yuri93 came to Brookfield to visit me at work today. They picked up my brother (who lives with me in our dad's house), too. Unfortunately, today was, to my surprise, the day I was taught to actually drive the tram, which meant when they showed up, they had to wait half an hour before hearing my tour--and that was after half an hour of hunting me down. I am not permitted to carry a phone while I'm in the zoo as an employee.
Driving the safari tram isn't hard, notably because the two trailers that follow the first car have "smart" steering, which means they follow the same path the front car takes. In the busy summer months, each tram has two tour guides: the driver, and the narrator. I am now qualified to be either. (I actually became qualified to drive the next day. --Ed.)
Fortunately, during the half hour they all waited to hear my tour, they were treated to a somewhat poorer narrator (who is just as new as I am), which made me sound good by comparison. Astonishingly, my brother did not mock me for the various verbal disfluencies I produce; in normal conversation he will assault me brutally for them.
After my hour of talking was over, I was discharged from duty early due to rain, which allowed me to take them all to some ticketed areas for free, using my badge. Five adults (or three adults and two 18+s) should not have as much fun riding a carousel as we did. We also visited Stingray Bay, which is a pool at the Zoo where visitors can touch stingrays and sharks. The sharks are actually a mite too shy to come within reach, though. After that, we spontaneously burst into song while we browsed through the feline and pinniped exhibits. We were damned good.
For a person who has lived in Brookfield for 15 years, I am none too good at finding restaurants here. I actually led us to nearby LaGrange, where there's a Noodles & Co.. It's across from a Borders. yuri93 wonders: "What is it with seeing Gabe and going to bookstores?" I swear it's not my fault.
I am thoroughly pleased by the visit. I still have a number of free general admission tickets left, but if you wanted to visit on a day when I'm not working, you wouldn't need them; I would just h4x you in with my badge. I can't expect, though, that there will ever be a weekend I have off, unless I asked for one 2+ weeks in advance.
It still hasn't truly hit me that I have a job, and an income. Maybe after I deposit my first paycheck. Being able to do something like get friends into the zoo for free felt extremely good, though; I'd like to think I'm a generous person but it's a hard theory to test when "giving to others" means "taking from your parents", which, up until now, it has. | | comments: 2 Kommentare or Kommentar hinterlassen |
| I started actually giving tours on the motor safari today, which is good, because I'll need the practice for when Chris and yuri93 visit me at work tomorrow. (I do work weekends.)
I also got my first paycheck today. After taxes and whatnot, it appears I'm making $7.51 per hour*. I am not dissatisfied. A Wii is only about two weeks away--assuming I can actually find one on which to blow my next paycheck. (Do they even sell them standalone, or are they always bundled?)
*edit June 20: this was an error in the withholding calculation and I'm actually making $7.05 per hour. | | comments: 7 Kommentare or Kommentar hinterlassen |
| yuri93, digopheliadug, and I went to Chicago today. All of us took the train. Two of us took the same train. It was much fun. digopheliadug can't stand the fact that I store my sunglasses in my beard when I'm not using them. She says it's "not a valid lifestyle choice".
We visited the Bean. I think everyone who might read this knows what that is, but if not, it's an enormous, bean-shaped hunk of mirror sitting in the middle of Chicago at Millenium Park. It is pleasing. I brought Ramune for all three of us, because I don't much like it and wanted help finishing off the 6-pack I bought after ACen. digopheliadug thought to actually read the instructions on the bottlecap wrapper, and thereby proved herself smarter than I. We didn't get any pictures of any of us standing in front of the Bean, for ... some reason?
We also hung out and got our clothes wet at the facetowerfountains. I'm much better at kicking water around than I ought to be. Little kids can scream really loud.
I gave two of my 10 free general admission tickets to the Brookfield Zoo to yuri93, who is planning to visit me at work next weekend. Ask and you shall receive.
digopheliadug's dad works downtown and speaks quietly and bought us lunch and somehow remembered that I was in choir at IMSA. I am not sure I ever even met this person before today. He is amazing.
We took turns writing each others' names in various non-Roman scripts: yuri93 in the elven language Tolkien authored, digopheliadug in Arabic, and I in the alien script from Commander Keen (the easiest of the three by far).
They tried to teach me Silent Football. It's the kind of thing I would happily have played at the Couches but probably won't ever get a chance to use now.
digopheliadug took us to the CAIR office at which she'd had an internship. While she was talking with her old bosses, we read through a survey that showed a majority of Americans who read the Koran (Qur'an?) for the first time during the study increased their opinion of Islam as a result. Of course, that study would presumably have excluded people who were unwilling, on principle, to read the Koran at all, but it's still meaningful. We were handed some glossy booklets as we left. I doubt I'll ever look at mine.
We browsed at a Barnes & Noble. There's a great parody of Goodnight Moon called Goodnight Bush. I bought a copy. If you don't know what Goodnight Moon is, you are a terrible person and must go find a copy on eBay or in someone's garage sale.
We parted in good spirits. I walked yuri93 back to her train station, because apparently I'm now a partially competent downtown Chicago navigator. I had a good day, and it wasn't too sunny or hot, and it was rounded out nicely by a train that was already boarding when I got to Union Station, and which left 5 minutes after I got on. Sometimes, things just go right.
Some pics forthcoming. Must figure out how to reconcile my camera with Ubuntu. | | comments: 8 Kommentare or Kommentar hinterlassen |
| Today was my first day at my first job. I showed up at 9 AM, fought through a line, managed to clock in at 10 AM, and got off at 7:45 PM. That is to say, I spent 10 hours and 45 minutes at the zoo. I'm fortunate I don't respond adversely to hunger, because for an institution that inspires compassion for wildlife, the Brookfield Zoo is not good at serving vegan food.
I and all my newbie colleagues were trained in the operation of the zoo's carousel ("the largest hand-crafted and hand-painted carousel in the country!"). It's not a bad job; most of the zoo visitors guests are pretty amicable, and more often than not the errors I have to correct are of the form "you don't need this many tickets; hold onto this one". My co-workers are decent folk, and I get to indulge my infatuation with the sound of my own voice when I give the safety announcements.
Training for the actual motor part of the motor safari job will be slow; trainees have to sit in on tours given by seasoned employees crew, and write our own scripts based on information we are handed in a thick binder. I guess I can expect to start giving tours in a week or two.
I still have to get my IL driver's license back; I exchanged it for a CO one in 2005, and I need to do the reverse within 30 (90?) days if I am to keep this job. I don't know what I'm going to say at the DMV if they ask me to take a road test, because I don't have a car. | | comments: 5 Kommentare or Kommentar hinterlassen |
| I was officially offered my first job on Thursday, May 15, at 1:37 pm. My orientation (during which I will be mysteriously earning money) is on Saturday. I need to buy some khaki pants.
My new video card came, and it didn't fix the problem with my PC. My monitor does not detect any video signal during boot, not even the bios splash. I guess the motherboard is faulty, but the fact that I can toggle numlock on the keyboard indicates to me that it's up to something. Maybe I should get a new computer, and try to use the broken one as a server. My brother just got a pretty capable machine from Dell for $600; I might want another expensive, bulky Alienware. I also want a Wii, though, and I'm sure I'll spend the relatively cheap $300 on one before I even start shopping for a new PC. I'm one of those people who doesn't give a second thought to buying each successive iteration of Zelda, Metroid, and Mario games.
Speaking of Zelda games, I'm told the Wii version of Twilight Princess breaks with the tradition of Link being left-handed in order to enhance the Wiimote sword-fighting gameplay, without even an option for lefties to switch it back to canon. That's kind of upsetting, and I'm considering getting it for the Gamecube instead. After all, I won't be playing Portal or TF2 for a while. | | comments: 6 Kommentare or Kommentar hinterlassen |
| As I mentioned in an earlier note, I volunteered at Anime Central this weekend. I was assigned to the Staff Services/Hospitality department, which is responsible for checking the other staff members' luggage, handing out their badges, and feeding them.
I worked 13 hours on Thursday, arriving at 10 am, skipping lunch, and being dismissed at about 2 am. It was a slow day, though, since whoever is responsible for printing staff badges has spectacularly terrible luck when it comes to printers: three different printers failed before badges could be made. Apparently, many fewer staff took advantage of the luggage check function of my department than last year. To my surprise and delight, a staff dinner (which was tough to get into, considering the lack of staff badges Thursday) included vegan burgers. Less surprising, but arguably more delightful, was meeting anoudegozaruna, thefeifei, and djfluffkins there.
My reason for going to ACen was not that I'm a fan of anime (it would be hard to claim that I am when I never, of my own volition, watch any), but that so many people I know attend or volunteer every year. I correctly assumed that this fact alone would make the convention worth the 24 hours of work to which I committed (and the 33 I ended up actually contributing). I was to go to Anime Hell and Midnight Madness, merely because these were events I remember vaguely from 2004, and then spend the rest of my free time barnacled onto one friend or another. djfluffkins and anoudegozaruna went out of their ways to get me into events, and I'm grateful.
I'd heard of HALCALI, and liked the limited selection of their music I'd heard, but I think anoudegozaruna's enthusiasm for them was the critical factor in asking for time off my afternoon shift (which spanned both their concerts, for some reason) to go see them. I learned how much fun it is to actually move one's body during a concert on Friday, mostly because I was in standing room up front and thought it would be unsporting not to clap when told to clap, wave when told to wave, and emit cacophonic wails when asked to sing along.
The really funny thing, though, is that Rider was right behind me, and followed suit.
ACen staff was a pleasure to work with and for. Genuine gratitude came from my department heads for my uncomplaining (if uncomplicated) labor, and from the rest of staff for serving them food. They deserve my gratitude, in return, for cheap food ($20 for 7 meals), a free room (I slept on the floor, but I slept nonetheless), and a general tendency to be pleasant and cheerful (at least when they were around me). I had a great time this year and will probably volunteer again next year, though I worry that Anime Hell and Midnight Madness will be less entertaining if seen a second year in a row. Maybe I need to start watching some fucking anime in preparation for ACen 2009. Recommendations, besides Death Note? | | comments: 14 Kommentare or Kommentar hinterlassen |
| My job interview seems to have gone well. Barring some kind of inexplicable nastiness in my background check, I am probably going to be hired by the end of the month to be a:
( Motor Safari Adventure Guide )
This is a job of which I was made aware by teufelskreis23, who did it last year. The zoo is an easy walk from my house and the job pays a little better than minimum wage. I think I'm looking forward to it, and not just because I'll have the resources to get myself a Wii. | | comments: 11 Kommentare or Kommentar hinterlassen |
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