A Series of Tubes

There is a student protest at UCSC today (it’s probably still going on.  I’ll post some pictures later on).  In order to launch the protest a blog was started.  I guess the organizers don’t want to continue to use their old sites (2).  As usual with the protesters, planning was not their forte.  The events section of their website stated for the event that is taking place right now:

April 29 – Escalation of Budget Fight Back

More details will be available soon.

Through collaboration with other organizations on campus we will be holding another rally and march similar in nature to our April 22 action. Our goal for this action will be to turn out more people in preparation for May Day and to demand that Community Studies and LALS professors not be cut! Planning for future actions are still in their preliminary stages, so take part and help shape the movement!

It’s the day of your protest.  I think the time to post your more details has passed.  Also, I’m not sure how signs against the corporatization of the UC campus will get more funds for the community studies and LALS professors.  I’d be more sympathetic to the cause if these actions were more thought out.  This action comes in the shadow of two horribly managed and implemented protests (tent University and the tree sit).  Both protests failed to set a single unified goal and thus the protest ballooned out to encompass animal rights protests, justice in Palestine, anti-corporitization, greater student involvement in the budget and planning of the UC, anti science, anti-growth, and more.  Talking to the UC officials was perceived as selling out and betraying the core values of the movement and thus negotiation was immediately thrown out and step one of Tent University, the tree sit, and the current thing is a student protest. Read more

This video has been making the rounds.  I enjoyed it:

You can check out similar ones here.

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Here are some images from my cell phone.  I’m cleaning it out:

I like to walk.  Just to get where I’m going, that is probably my preferred mode of transportation.  For this reason I hate LA:

Where did my sidewalk go?

Yes there is an apartment complex in LA called Crapi apartments:

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I previously posted that the eastbay express article along with a follow up article ran about Yelp.  They articles claimed that business owners were extorted by Yelp.  The CEO of yelp responded on his Blog (twice), but did not respond to the second article which did not have anonymous sources.  I posted a 1 star review of yelp on yelp.com.  Within yelp itself, the CEO of yelp, Jeremy Stoppleman, responded to my 1 star review and to the allegations made in the east bay express stories and we have been going back and forth a bit today.  I figured I would post the exchange below since it is interesting.  I will always remember this day as the day my career as a hard hitting interviewer took off.

Update: this post keeps getting updated so I’ll just post the date of the last change: (4/13/09)

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I’ve been reading Jesus Interrupted by Bart Ehrman.  In the book Bart goes over some of the peculiar things one finds in the Bible.  I’ve always heard that there are contradictions in the Bible, and this book is an interesting Journey through contradictions, disconnects, and other Biblical oddities.  I’m not that far in, but so far one of my favorite parts is the story of the last supper in the Gospel of John.  I had to go back and reread these quotes to make sure they were actually there.  To set up the quotes, Jesus is being questioned by his disciples about his imminent crucifixion:

John 13:36

Simon Peter asked him, “Lord, where are you going?”
Jesus replied, “Where I am going, you cannot follow now, but you will follow later.”

John 14:5-6

⁵Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”

⁶Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

John 16:5

⁵“Now I am going to him who sent me, yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’

The explanation of how this obvious disconnect made it into the Bible is that the book of John had more than one author and the authors were crammed together without thinking about how the different portions of the story fit together.  If you are a fundamentalist, where nothing in the bible is allowed to be false, then the only explanation has to be that Jesus, the son of God, completely lost his short term memory.  Not only did Jesus forget about two people asking where he is going, but Jesus forgets that he responded to them only moments after it happened.

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