As if things weren't ridiculous enough already

Teachers' T-Shirts Bring Bush Speech Ouster

CENTRAL POINT, Ore. -- Three Medford school teachers were threatened with arrest and thrown out of the President Bush rally at the Jackson County Fairgrounds Thursday night, after they showed up wearing T-shirts with the slogan "Protect our civil liberties."

All three women said they were carrying valid tickets for the event that they had received from Republican Party headquarters in Medford, which had been distributing event tickets to Bush supporters.

Teacher Janet Voorhies said she simply wanted to bring a message to President Bush, but did not intend to protest.

"I wanted to see if I would be able to make a statement that I feel is important, but not offensive, in a rally for my president," said Voorhies, 48.

The women said they were angered by reports of peaceful protesters being thrown out of previous Bush-Cheney events. They said they chose the phrase, "Protect Our Civil Liberties," because it was unconfrontational.

"We chose this phrase specifically because we didn't think it would be offensive or degrading or obscene," said Tania Tong, 34, a special education teacher.

The women got past the first and second checkpoints and were allowed into the Jackson County fairgrounds, but were asked to leave and then escorted out of the event by campaign officials who allegedly told them their T-shirts were "obscene."

Democrats were quick to pounce on the incident and claimed the GOP has routinely sought to disclude anyone from public appearances by President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney who might question the administration. There was no immediate comment from Republican officials.

"Thursday's actions in Oregon set a new standard even for Bush/Cheney - removing and threatening with arrest citizens who in no way disrupt an event and wear clothing that expresses non-disruptive party-neutral viewpoints such as "Protect Our Civil Liberties," said Adam Green, a spokesman for the Oregon Democratic Party.

When Cheney visited Eugene last month, the Register-Guard newspaper reported that Perry Patterson, 54, was cited for criminal trespassing for blurting out the word "No" after Cheney claimed that the Bush administration had made the world safer.

In a separate and unrelated case Thursday, two protesters were arrested in nearby Jacksonville, outside the historic inn where President Bush was spending the night.

A few hundred people were demonstrating peacefully there, but police moved to disperse the crowd after a few protesters allegedly put their hands on police officers. City officials said police fired projectiles known as "pepper balls" -- similar to paint balls, but filled with cayenne pepper to break up the demonstrators.

Early applications in... (2/10)

Whee! Both MIT and Chicago applications sent in! Now (well, soon) to start on the next batch... X-P

But first, to do my compsci homework.

Random linkage

http://www.null-hypothesis.co.uk/broth.html
Do Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth?

"What's so scary about low-density polyethylene?"

EDIT: The title has been changed.

The last few weeks have seen the rediscovery of my social life[0], with Nick's weekly game nights. You can guess what that means - yup, I've got a whole new string of names you soon might be seeing regularly here. I'll not go and deliberately mention people before I have to, except, of course, for some interesting name collisions. Specifically, Pete and Pete, and Harry, Harry, and Harold. The two "Pete"s are petmar[8] and pethog - I think generally petmar is just called "Pete" while pethog is "pethog"; I'll adopt that convention here. pethog isn't in this entry anyway. As for the "Harry"s - obviously one is me, the other is... don't know his last name. Big Harry. (Formerly) from BCA, same year as Pete[3], and also still lives around here. Generally "Harry" refers to him, while I'm... well, there doesn't seem to be a universal way of referring to me yet. Some have said I should just be "Altman", but usually it seems I'm just called "Harry" with some note added to indicate the speaker means me. Meanwhile I'm learning to assume that "Harry" does not refer to me. Of course, here that won't be a problem - obviously, if I mean Harry I'll say "Harry", and if I mean me I'll use a first-person pronoun. Harold isn't really a collision, but still kind of funny. :) Anyway, on to last night.

Now, I think they generally start at 19:00, but being my slow self I arrive at 19:30 and meet Pete coming outside. He's dressed as for the Renaissance Fair and tells me the others are too and we're going up to... whatever that street is, with all the ridiculous Halloween decorations[4]. Anyway, Nick and Harry also come out, also dressed as for the Ren Fair, and we manage to fit ourselves into Pete's car and head out for... whatever the town is. I, of course, am wearing my ordinary jacket and backpack. :P

There are two staffs in the car, Pete takes one. Nobody else wants one, so I take the other, so as not to look completely out of place. I think maybe if anybody asks what I am I'll say I'm a time traveler from the present who's gone back to the time period of the others, or perhaps and taken the others back with me, but I don't get the chance.

So we go along, looking at the houses, and at the end of the street we find a pirate-themed house. There's actually a person standing there dressed as a pirate, who asks about us, and the others explain who they are (apparently they're actually character actors at the Ren Fair, with actual names and all), and explain that they sing, and the person asks if we'd sing something, so they start singing a version of the drunken sailor song[6] while the people videotape us, and then a much-abbreviated version of "Another Irish Drinking Song" (which I actually knew a bit of). It was neat to actually be the person being entertained for once, the pirate-person said.

Anyway we're heading back up the street and we run into Bethany, from school, who shouts "Hi Harry Altman!" or something to that effect and we stop and she asks who the others are.

And then she sees Pete, and immediately shouts, "Oh my God! PINYAN?!"

And after we laugh at that for a bit he explains that he's Pete Marchetto but she doesn't remember him, and we continue on.

Several people asked if we were supposed to be people from LotR - including one group of people who even thought one of them was Frodo and another Sam. One person thought one of us was supposed to be Moses. I think Nick said back at school someone thought he was supposed to be Guybrush Threepwood, which is a bit more on the right track, I suppose, but anyway...

Well, one group of people that asks us who we are consists of one person in a Sylvester the Cat costume and two other people wearing strange masks. We explain who we are and then they start *following us*. So we all turn around and shout in unison... well, I don't remember the exact wording - which is probably pretty important, it sounded like it was a reference to something - but it was along the lines of "Stop! Who are you? Reveal yourselves!". The Sylvester person noted that the other two people were from - well, either Betelgeuse or Beetlejuice, they never specified - and I made a comment about Betelgeuse, and suddenly the Sylvester person looked startled - well, more likely, they *said* something startled, as I couldn't see their face - and started whispering to one of the masked people.

[5]After the two of them whispered to each other for a while, the Sylvester person (the only one to talk, BTW) finally said of me that "He looks so familiar!" The other masked person, it turned out, was a sophomore at BCA, but not one I recognized, and she didn't recognize me, either. Meanwhile Sylvester and Mask 1 continued whispering to each other and eventually decided that they had seen me in a movie. "I don't think so", either Pete said. "He's not an actor." "No! No! You didn't have to act! You just had to spell! It was called 'The Spelling Bee' or something!" "...?" After a few more rounds of this, either Harry finally got the idea that maybe they were talking about a documentary rather than a normal movie, and asked them if they were. "Yes, it was a documentary! I just forgot to say that." Nick loudly makes some irrelevant comment about Spellbound. "Yes! That was it!" "Harry, were you ever in a spelling bee?" "Yes, in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade, and in 4th and 5th grade too..." "Where?" "Well, IIRC, in 4th grade it was held in..." but before I can even say "Coleman School", much less get to mentioning the NSB, Sylvester interrupts again, but I forget what with. "Well, they take footage from all sorts of things in a documentary", says Harry, "Maybe he was accidentally in one. Harry, were you inadvertently in some documentary?" "No," I replied, having been silent the rest of the time, "I was not inadvertently in any documentary." "See?" At one point either Pete said that I was "not in any movie that they knew of", at which point Nick and I just cracked up, but neither of them seemed to think this might mean anything. Finally either Harry or Pete just asked me straight out if I had ever been in any documentary, and I had to admit that I had been, and they got really annoyed they had been defending me all this time. :D The people continued to follow us for a bit, but eventually we managed to lose them.

When we got to the car, we found a thing on the windshield, stuck into the windshield wiper. On closer investigation it was a tied-up sock - containing *something*, but we didn't know what. I removed it from the wiper, and was going to open it, until Nick suggested it probably contained feces. Pete suggested we put it in a plastic bag and take it home, but Nick didn't want to do even that. We ended up not doing so, so we don't know what was in it. (Especially because I recall Pete saying something about it seemed like whatever was inside was powdery...)

So, we went back, I beat Harry at Homeworlds while Nick and Pete went to get food, and then when they got back we started playtesting this neat game idea Nick had. Anyway he was explaining the theme, involving home computers in the 1980s and certain operating systems that didn't handle memory allocation very well, and Nick points out the Amiga as a notable exception, to which Pete responds "Our friend..." and then suddenly realizes, "Wait... amiga... our *girlfriend*... it all makes sense now!"

Nothing much else worth reporting occurred, except that when I was leaving, and zipped up my jacket, the zipper *came off*. After the jacket was zipped up, mind you. And when I got home the zipper came apart rather easily. That I'll be able to zip it up again, though, I don't know.

Well, that was way too long, I haven't gotten any work done, I haven't eaten lunch yet, and I don't have a costume (and I probably won't have one at all, seeing what else I have to do). Enough of this.

...oh, and it seems I can now eat Bagel Bites without needing antacids. Yay.

-Sniffnoy, still waiting for the day he can again drink Coke

[0]This footnote was deleted.
[3]Most of the people are not BCA people, but, coincidentally, everyone who appears in this entry is, except for Nick.
[4]"In any other neighborhood, this would be overdoing it. Here, this is minimalistic." -Pete (approximately), on one of the houses
[5]In this paragraph, I might have some of Pete's comments confused with Harry's.
[6]While of course I just stand there with my staff. :P
[8]Who, you may recall, still lives around here.

--
"I never make predictions. I never have and I never will."
-Tony Blair