I try to eschew Earth Day hoopla, because for me every day is Earth Day and it’s a bit too much of preaching to my choir. I’ve been heathen all my adult life, and mysterious Nerthus who gave Her name to our planet is one of my Vanic Deities, the mother of Yngve-Freyr and His twin sister, my Matron Goddess Freyja. The tendency of some to do the right thing only on Earth Day (or worse yet, to do nothing but TALK about it!) makes about as much sense to me as locking yourself into a little box on Sunday for an hour and claiming that after you leave that little box your worship is done for the week. But being a live and let live sort in general, I figure if that’s what gets them their jollies I don’t have to be there to like it, I’ll just go do things my way anyway and it is sure to take me sufficiently away from theirs.

So for my own cynical amusement, I spent the day AFTER Earth Day wondering how much of a haul I’d bring in. The car is full. I am guessing I’ll get about five to seven bucks for what I picked up. Seems to me that there are enough people NOT doing the right thing on Earth Day to the degree that if someone’s going to go out there and pick up cans for an ego trip, I say LET THEM, because it really doesn’t matter WHY they’re doing the right thing so long as they’re bloody well DOING it. Perhaps I should be glad from a financial perspective that I don’t have as much competition out there but believe me, I don’t entirely welcome the opportunity to have a cynical laugh about it.

If I did, I wouldn’t say a single word about it. I’d just do what I do and keep silent and hope no one else would join in. More nickels for little me… right? Wrong.

But that ended up not being the focus of the day. I am occasionally given opportunities by these little trips into the Big Blue Room to learn something else. I have decided to share what I learned with the rest of you about the growing problem of homelessness in this country.

As a meadmaker and a practitioner of heathenry, what is happening to the worldwide honeybee population disturbs me on multiple levels. I have attended a beekeeping class where a New York State hive inspector from the Cornell Cooperative Extension all but got down on his knees and begged the attendees to start keeping their own bees.

Few things are more frightening in this world than real fear in the voice of a scientist, and I have seen this repeatedly as the global scientific community wrestles with the impending extinction of the European honeybee.

70% of the world’s food crops are pollinated by these bees. If the honeybee becomes extinct, the impact this will have on an already threatened ecological system will be dire.

Chlorosilane, that ordinarily virulent harbinger of toxic chemical doom, is bustin’ a move today.

Now why would that be? It might be because today I read in Newsday that there has been a

42 million dollar stimulus package designated for the cleanup of the Brookhaven National Lab nuclear reactor sites. Chlorosilane is clearly getting a big jazz out of this.

Breaking away from Chlorosilane’s joyful performance art for a moment, let’s flash back to early February, 1986, where a gaggle of geeks were holding a going away party for a skinny little nerdling of theirs who was in the process of joining the Air Force. You’ll want to take note of Jeff. He’s the guy on the extreme left.

Weeping! Wailing! Gnashing of teeth!

I have lost everything! Employment opportunities! Friends! Pantyhose!

I suffer in an agony foisted upon me by enemy shamans! Scottish African German and American shamans have brought me to a level of woe that cannot even be addressed by Tilex! Indeed, the very POWAH of CHEESE is ineffective before their mighty wrath!

Not only this, but the Vengeance(tm) of psychotic stalker exes and their Brotherhood has once again been manifested in my life! I am out three hours and a pair of pantyhose and I have no idea how I will ever recover from this trauma!

Clearly I should never have been so fucking lazy as to keep getting out of bed with a ruptured L5 vertebrae to take my 2.5 hour ride into the city for the exalted honor of carrying forty pound system backplanes in high heels for sexist Wall Street fucktards. The mere nerve of me to expect reward and praise (not to mention equal pay) for doing the right thing, I mean, really! I should have been home baking cookies for my man. Obviously I just don’t have the right stuff and never did. My four page resume is mere cotton candy. Oh, and I’m fat and over forty in a world where eye candy MATTERS. Well, ok, it matters to someone, I guess.

See, my problem isn’t that I was sitting in the same room with the entire New York City Sun Microsystems office when, as part of our orientation meeting for the move into our new offices in the World Trade Center, they played this movie clip.

My problem is that when I was sitting in another room with the same people in October 2001 in a hotel in New Jersey, listening to them cry and vent about the stuff they experienced during the 9/11 attack, I remembered that they showed this clip when we moved into the World Trade Center, and I was very tempted to stand up and scream at the top of my lungs, “FUCK YOU! GO HOME AND PLAY WITH YOUR KIDS!” to see if any of them remembered too.

Yeah. I guess that’s my problem.

And even worse… domestic spying continues apace, and I am made to hear the taunts of those who are (*ahem*) “competent” in that strange, secretive and sticky-handed existence through LOLCATS messages and the SCA Livejournal community!

But here’s what’s worst of all: for all their comparative (*coughahem*) competence, respectability, political correctness, good looks and (*coughahem*) “clean” hands, it would seem that none of my… hmmm, what should I refer to them as – compatriots? Co-workers? Cow-orkers? None of those People Who Are So Much Fucking Better Than I Am At Everything In Life(tm) can seem to actually SOLVE the problems of the creeping fascism, warrantless wiretapping, accountability for the Bush administration, restoration of Constitutional values, the looting of the Treasury, the spazzing economy, global warming, world hunger, or AIDS.

Oh, and we’re out of beer.

Alas! My life is clearly over. I have no reason to exist. I must flee or kill myself. Probably both. I’m not sure in which order. At least I will be in good company, I am sure my ghost will have some excellent conversations with Alan Turing.

Goodbye, cruel world.

Red light cameras don’t work.

They make mistakes. They ARE a mistake – a costly one – to any community that puts them in.

This is known to the industry, and it’s known to the populace in places where they have already been installed such as Cleveland and California.

As I write this, the Nassau County Legislature is having a last-minute emergency meeting to decide whether these cameras will be installed. The meeting comes at the repeated urging of Tom Suozzi, Nassau County Executive. He has been repeatedly told that the cameras don’t work, and he is repeatedly ignoring what he has been told.

This is yet more overblown emphasis on law enforcement which ultimately benefits corporations and government at the expense of the end taxpayer. When (not if) the cameras malfunction, causing the prosecution of innocent people, those people fight the tickets in court. This makes the legislative machinery spin and ensures that every little lawyer and judge and jurist and clerk in the system continue to have a reason to spin their hamster wheels and get paid for it.

But the County loses, because the tickets are proven to have been issued in error. The expensive machines don’t work and are a waste of money. In the end, the taxpayer loses quite literally coming and going.

One hour before the meeting which has at the time of this writing been in session for 40 minutes, I sent a fax to Diane Yatouro, my district Legislative Representative, explaining this. One hour isn’t a lot of time but I used it in a manner I consider wise. I followed up with a phone call.

That’s it for now from here. I now return you to your own respective contemplations of comparative masterpieces.

Oh, by the way, here’s Chlorosilane again. I really like this screen cap of her, so you’re stuck with it. You’re still stuck with the real deal if you live near Photocircuits, too.

UPDATE: The red light cameras were voted in unanimously by the County Legislature. Now this issue goes to Albany. If you live in Nassau County, contact your State Senators and Governor Paterson and ask them NOT to have these cameras installed. They cause more problems than they solve, and create more cost than any revenue they generate.

Thx for the FP, EKH.

My husband and I do a lot of online gaming. We like to pick silly or witty names for the characters: Mysthang Foshizzlyo, Freudian Slap, stuff like that. I have an Anarchy Online agent named Valerie Plame and a Guild Wars dervish named Meclazine Skelaxin. (Anyone in the medical profession will get the joke.)

One day last summer I came home in a really, really bad mood. I’d found a little yellow book in my merry volkswanderung in the big blue room. I won’t say where, and I won’t say what the title of the book is. That book had a little piece of paper stuck between some particular pages, and I really didn’t like what those particular pages had to say.

One of the primary functions of the shaman is to serve as a negotiator between the spirit world and what we perceive as the “real” world. Types of entities encountered in the otherworld vary: spirits of the unrested dead, land wights known by various names based on culture (the ones I primarily work with are usually referred to as alfar/elves and duergar/dwarves, which Celtic practitioners often refer to as the Sidhe), animal spirit helpers (aka “totems” in the Native American parlance), deities and other energy based beings. As a valkyrie and a priestess aligned closely with the earth-friendly Vanir, I work with the spirits of the dead and other types of landvaettir (land wights) very easily.

I have an affinity for finding antique glass. The stuff all but jumps out into my hands. It may have been there for over 150 years. Doesn’t matter, given the chance I will find it.

Glass is one of those substances once revered by the people who follow my spiritual path, now taken for granted like so many other things in our world. Glass still contains many a scientific mystery – it is neither a liquid nor a solid, and those who have sought to understand and study it have brought us to many a scientific breakthrough.

My affinity for finding glass frightens even me. I was helping family friends clean out the mansion that had originally belonged to the inventor of Corningware and found some absolutely priceless original prototypes in the basement that the entire family had missed. While we were in Corning, my husband and I visited the Museum of Glass. The energy of the place had me as high as a kite, I had to practically be dragged out of there kicking and screaming by my husband.

My connection with glass has existed since childhood, but only recently as I wandered my local lands this summer did I realize that something was going on with this that pertained to my shamanic practice and which required my attention. A gigantic hoard of antique bottles came to light from two turn-of-the-century sources as I began my work this summer to bring the festering problem of the contaminated Photocircuits corporate campus to the attention of local government.

I realized that this was, in it’s way, a form of thanks expressed to me by the landvaettir for speaking on their behalf. I even ended up obtaining a perfectly sized display cabinet for the antique bottles off Craig’s List, so here they are on display in my kitchen.

As global warming and environmental conservation have become issues our society had best no longer ignore, I have become prone to ending my letters and email messages on those subjects to local government with the following sentence: “Take care of the land and the land will take care of you.”

This is no mere platitude I preach to others, it is one that I live by. In my wanderings I began cleaning up the land. To be sure, some of this was rooted in the fact that I’ve been unemployed for over two years now and I wanted to be able to feed my kitties. So I was gathering up recycleable bottles and cans and redeeming them. However, if I had the energy and the wherewithal, I would gather up the non-redeemables I found in equal measure and recycle them along with my regular household stuff. I considered this part of my shamanic service to the land; a means whereby I would assure the local vaettir that I cared about their well being. I find that there is little shame in such action if one is doing it for wider reasons than one’s own benefit.