« September 2006 | Main | November 2006 »
and, of course, here is the Omnibus Society, a Brit organization of people crazy about buses (and trains) and how they work. They even have a bimonthly magazine!
Not my colonially begotten porcelain cup of overly strong tea diluted with whole milk and too much sugar, but hey: props!
i get all choked up about the stupidest things. No I won't give other examples, no matter how rhetorically correct it is. It's embarassing, that's why.
But the one thing I will admit to getting inappropriately misty about is the word, and denotation of, "bus," short for "omnibus," which has always evoked the essence of communitarianism for me. I get weepy when I study it. Just think: a type of vehicle named "for everyone." Travel for everyone. Movement for everyone. Mechanism, for everyone. Progress ... for everyone. I love it! *sniff*
As this article points out (from a Brit English perspective, at least), the bringing together of everyone on buses has led to a layered metaphoric usage of the word:
The most noticeable characteristic of the bus was that, being a public conveyance, it gathered into itself all manner of diverse people, who were brought together solely by their desire to travel in the same direction. This idea of a miscellaneous collection was taken up and, by the 1840s, omnibus had gained the sense of a large number of distinct items or objects lumped together solely for convenience. This turned up first in the British Parliament, where omnibus bills were measures that contained a lot of miscellaneous proposals; as one German commentator wrote in 1857, they were “bills which contain laws dissimilar in their character and purposes”. ... later on the word was applied to the new technology of electricity, in which the term omnibus bar was given to a conductor, a copper rod or bar, that carried the whole of the power output from a source, for all purposes. This is the origin of the term bus bar, so memorably abbreviated to bus by the astronauts [of Apollo 13]. These days it is perhaps more familiar to a lot of people because of its use in computing for one of a series of control pathways.
And, as if the the name called up that same pinko spirit in every brain receiving the phonemes, social justice causes just happen to cluster around buses. The American Civil Rights Movement started with busing justice, and race and class issues in education are called "busing" issues. "Busing", in fact, connotes "access," and not just the geographical access buses literally provide. Buses, theoretically and practically, provide access to economic opportunities, housing opportunities, social opportunities, and cultural opportunities. Inter- and intra-city buses literally extend people's horizons, making movement toward diverse opportunities possible.
In fact, we seem to have lost this social justice access connotation in recent years, since the civil rights movement put an end to differential treatment of passengers on buses, and disability access has become universally mandated (if not universally implemented.) Strangely, when bus systems begin to tighten their belts, the measures are not necessarily perceived as social justice or economic access issues. In San Francisco last year, the MUNI system transit lines were slightly contracted, frequency was reduced, and rates were hiked (again) because MUNI is so poorly run that for years they haven't been able to make an extensive public transit system work properly in a seven-square-mile city with one of the highest per capita rates of environmental organization membership in the world (I made that stat up. It could be true. You know what I mean). And in this city, whose mayor helped a contentious hotel union fight by walking in the picket lines, no one protested the injustice.
The urgency has gone out of the "omni" part of "bus" in the US. Omnibus, in our increasingly income-polarized neo-gilded age, connotes the low-rent, or the lower class, because buses literally are lower "rent." Although diversity, common space or common ground, is one major characteristic of the average passenger list, another is that an income line is drawn above their heads. Yes, you will often see middle, upper-middle, and even upper-class young people taking buses ... but only as long as the romance of youth keeps them living in neighborhoods only serviced by buses ... or only until those neighborhoods get gentrified into a tram or subway line. Even in the most mixed-media of public transport cities (in the States) buses occupy the lowest position, below tram, subway, elevated, and commuter trains.
Wow, the caste system of city transit vehicles! Would that we could consistently rank yellow bikes among these!
On the third hand, the "for everyone" nature of buses, as well the loss of their connotation as a continuous tool of social leveling, has also led to some cool art projects, both on a social justice front, and on a par-tay front. The effectiveness of "art buses" sent out from county seats to rural school districts is well known. (The only not-cool thing about them is defunding of on-site arts programs in American schools that necessitates them.) And the performance art buses ...
Okay, you know what? I have a theme here, and a bunch of potential posts listed already in this one. So I'm gonna do what Marrije suggested way back when I actually asked and take the next few to talk about nifty ideas and public transportation ... omnibus transportation, for everyone.
(Plus, the most common misspelling of "busing" or "buses" is "bussing" or "busses", which are archaic terms for "kissing" and "kisses." I love it!)
check it check it out!
The image above is from the lovely and amazing electoral-vote.com site, which updates the Congressional races (both houses) ever' single day, y'all. The image is from yesterday, by the way.
It's gettin' close. The GOP has given up on the House of Reps: it's going back to the Dems if they can turn out the vote. And now, even the Senate is about to blow wide open for the Donkeys. And there will be much rejoicing.
If you're living in a district where the Senatorial or Congressional seats are either not up for grabs, or not seriously contested in this election (like me and almost everyone in California who isn't in Pombo's district), you might be feeling some white-knuckle anxiety over your inability to affect the outcome.
Well, white-knuckle it no more. The also lovely and amazing MoveOn.org is running a campaign to mobilize its members in noncontested districts. These members will call out to the 30 most vulnerable congressional districts, calling apathetic Democratic voters who don't tend to vote mid-term. All the call does is motivate the voter. This tactic is proven effective, and it gets more effective the closer to the election you call. Voters called on the day of the election are almost 100% likely to get out to vote.
The campaign referred to is MoveOn's Call For Change campaign, an action whose tight organization the Dems can only look on at and wish they could pull off themselves. They're making it easy for everyone by allowing volunteers to call from their homes and log in the results immediately online. Basically, you sit in front of your 'puter, make the calls, and check off that you made them as you go. You call one hour this week, and one hour every day for the four days before the election. Or as much of that as you can manage.
The calls are super easy, since you're not selling anything. All you're doing is reminding folks to get their butts out the door on election day. It's easy. Seriously. Sign up now. Do it.
A single hour of calls can turn out 10 voters. Five hours of calls can mean the difference in that particular election. Seriously. It's effective. Do it.
If you have any questions, use comments or email me. And anyone in the Bay Area who wants to come with me to the local phone bank, just let me know!
continuing this week's theme of personality taxonomies, here's a blog post cleaning up another blog post categorizing CIO stereotypes.
A CIO (I had to look this up, although I assume most of you didn't) is a "Chief Information Officer", something which became an executive position while I was scratching my ass and writing letters to my congressman, apparently.
The taxonomer only provides four stereotypes:
1. The Bluffer
2. The Tweetie Nerd
3. unnamed, but called "a variant on greenmail"
4. The Absent Genius
Okay, dude, you need to learn how to taxonomize. If you're going to categorize people, you have to give each category its own name. Then you have to explain the name. I'm sure other CIOs know what "tweetie" means in this context, but taxonomers are throwing themselves upon their rubrics, so to speak, for the good of insiders and laypersons alike. Ya know?
Okay? and a real taxonomy has subcategories and sub-subcategories, and can be mapped out, or more accurately, diagrammed, kinda like this:
Anything with less than three hierarchical strata is mere categorization. Yes, that's a haughty tone in my voice. Not every set of categories is a taxonomy! There's more at stake here than mere stereotypes!
And cross-referencing? Hello? Any single taxon must be able to find more than one parent. Okay? Dude.
Plus, what is "greenmail"? Is it like blackmail, but with plants?
of course, the original, best, and still ultimate, still useful taxonomies of human personalities are those described by astrological symbol systems. (Because there's so much bullshit online about astrology, I've had to go to wikipedia for the basics. Salt to taste.)
Okay, so as far as I can tell, the twelve constellations of the zodiac are the constellations that form a perfect circle around the Earth, so that when our planet turns, the zodiac signs are always in the middle of the sky (or rising or falling on either side along a central line). So, "your sign" (baby) is the sign of the zodiac in which the sun falls on the day on which you're born. I don't know what this means. Presumably, it means the sign that is in the center of the sky (and not rising or falling) on your birthday.
So your sign describes personal characteristics. It seems these personalities we like to use astrology to describe are based on convergences: this sign has this element, that aspect, and the other quality. Or something. Each of these (aspects, elements, etc.) carry with them characteristics. Combine all of these characteristics, and you can extrapolate a unique personality for each sign.
In addition, each visible planet and the moon also fall into signs on the day of your birth. Because days are determined by the sun's movement, the exact time of your birth on that day can change the position of the planets or the moon. The planetary and lunar signs also affect your personality in certain ways, so to determine your personality, the astrologer would have to choose the set of characteristics determined by your sun sign and all the rest, and then calculate and interpret their impact on your overall personality.
Then there's Chinese astrology, in which not only the 12 animals of the year in which you are born are important.
These yearly cycles represent what others perceive you as being: while a person might appear to be a Dragon they might actually be a Snake internally and an Ox secretively. Combined with 5 elements, this makes for 8640 combinations (5 elements, 12 animals, 12 months, 12 times of day). The inner animal is assigned by the month of birth. This dictates your love life and inner persona and is critical to a proper understanding of your compatibility with other signs. It may be considered what the individual wishes to become, or believes to be their true self. The secret animal is determined by exact time of birth and is your own true sign which your personality is based on. It is important to compensate for daylight savings or any clock adjustment performed by your country, as it is mapped according to the sun's location and not the local time.
This gets very complicated, so complicated, in fact, that one can suspect that a person's birth signs can be tweaked to mean pretty much anything. Which is why I've always respected astrology as a way of advising people---and probably why astrology is still so powerful in our culture. The astrologer isn't someone who understands how the stars affect us; the astrologer is someone who employs a woo-woo vocabulary to help her client understand himself better. "When the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter is aligned with Mars" basically means "get your shit together before you lose momentum," or something like that. Well, imo.
Anyway, I think it's fascinating that 12 seems to be the magic number for personalities. Magic numbers are: 3 (very magic), 4 (elements), 7 (seventh sons, etc.), 8 (musical scale), 10 (counting), and 12, for different things, but 12 tends to be a natural cycle number and a human number (12 months, 12 jurors, 12 doughnuts). While we count things in groups of ten, and estimate larger numbers in tens (hundreds of, thousands of, millions of) we still estimate smaller numbers in twelves (dozens of, not tens of). It seems that 12 is the largest number of discrete identifiable units that we can maintain overview of. It's perfect for personalities, because we can fit personalities into twelve categories without feeling constrained, but we can still remember all twelve categories.
Someday, maybe soon, I'll write a cycle of 12 stories, each one driven by a character typical of one of the astrological signs. The question is: do I use the western or the Chinese system? I should probably do a little research first and figure out if the 12 western signs match up with the 12 eastern ones, or if they're divvied up differently.
a taxonomy of the personalities that make your blog comments section a living hell.
What's with the taxonomizing of personalities? Ooo! I've got another one! See tomorrow!
ragged Ass Road is my favorite. But I also like Dick Drive, Blue Ball Road, and Noisy Hole Road.
I should've posted this ages ago when I was working on odonymy, but for some reason I didn't. Since I seem to be playing catch up this week, here's a site called Freak Streets, a google maps mashup allowing people to submit the freakish and weird names of streets in their area. You (yes, you!) can add your own.
Recent Comments