I got to the Elizabeth Ave. location at about 6:45 this morning.  The campaign had called me last night to encourage me to arrive before 6:30 a.m. so I could go stand with a group at a busy intersection and jump up and down and wave a sign, but between trying to get some food and medicine into my very sick pootie and being a slacker college professor who isn't used to having to get up real early, I didn't quite make it.  The bouncy little volunteer who has been staying in my house since Friday, was not much earlier than I was, but she had an excuse -- she'd been out until at least nine the previous night.

I just wanted to share a little piece of interesting news that has nothing to do with either Barack Obama (well, almost nothing) or Hillary Clinton.

I just became a member of the SEIU!

I voted today in North Carolina early voting.  There's no secret who I voted for.  So that's one for Team "O".

In line at 2:00 on a sunny Friday afternoon were several older African American voters, me, a nurse from the local hospital, and a very young looking girl who was worried that she might not be allowed to vote because she didn't have a registration card.  We reassured her that it would be OK.  The man in front of me was talking proudly about how North Carolina was going to have better turnout than any other state.  All the voting machines were in use, and they remained in use the entire time I was there.

As a scientist, I've really been hoping that the folks at ScienceDebate2008.com would talk the candidates into holding a discussion on the incredibly important topic of science, the role it plays in our economy and our society, and what should be done about/for science in the future.

However, it seems at this time both Democratic Primary Candidates have blown them off.  From an e-mail I received today:

I just got back from an organizing meeting in Charlotte, NC, that was so mobbed it pretty much thwarted all of the advance team's carefully laid plans for getting the crowd organized into teams.

Inside the meeting as things were heating up

For those looking for a change from the endless Wright vs. Tuzla smackdown, I've got a little bit of good news today.

Charlotte NC Obama HQ is ready to open and it's looking good!

When Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham are allowed to snigger triumphantly in the pages of Time about how they are spoiling the Democrats' election, it's time to wrap this thing up:

Meanwhile, Limbaugh opened his program Wednesday with a victory cry: "Operation Chaos is exceeding all objectives...this is just fabulous." Dubbing the Obama-Clinton face-off a "soap opera," Limbaugh says he will carry his campaign through to the final primaries in early June.

"I want our party to win. I want the Democrats to lose," Limbaugh said. "They're in the midst of tearing themselves apart right now. It is fascinating to watch. And it's all going to stop if Hillary loses."

This little snippet of information just rose to the top of Yahoo! News:

The nation's service sector contracted in January for the first time in almost five years, a trade group of purchasing executives said Tuesday.

This little story is destined to disappear into the ether, I'm sure, snuffed out like a brief candle by primary news.

A not-so-lovely person of my acquaintance has just sent out the Obama/madrassa smear to a mailing list of nice people I know who (ironically) are mainly women who participate in middle eastern dance as a hobby.

The person who sent the e-mail is an out-and-out racist and although (full disclosure) I would love for John Edwards to win this primary I would also be happy to see Obama win in part just to know that people like her are having their poisonous ideology ground into the dust.

So...

Apparently this is a highly controversial award, but as someone who has been reading Lessing for years, I couldn't stop smiling when I saw this news.

She was praised by the judges for her "skepticism, fire and visionary power."

Lessing, 11 days short of her 88th birthday, is the oldest choice ever for a prize that usually goes to authors in their 50s and 60s. Although she is widely celebrated for "The Golden Notebook" and other works, she has received little attention in recent years and has been criticized as strident and eccentric.

I'm sitting here in Charlotte, North Carolina.  The weather forecast calls for ten days of "sunny", interspersed with a little "mostly sunny" and a lot of "plenty of sun".  My lawn is dusty and brown, my 60 year old dogwood is dying because I'm not allowed to water it any more, and my major trees are starting to lose their leaves unseasonably early.  It's still 90 degrees in the daytime and 60 at night; a first frost seems like a distant fantasy -- why, then, would the leaves turn color and fall?

Isn't it a bit sleazy for a TV network to attempt to make money off a recent natural disaster that is still un-remediated, un- cleaned up, where people's homes are still broken and the dead are barely two years in the ground?

This press-release from FOX TV came up in my Yahoo entertainment news today, and I had a little of that same nasty frisson that I had when I heard about OJ Simpson's If I Did It.  In OJ's case, readers will be getting a cheap thrill out of a failure of our justice system; in this case Katrina recovery, a massive failure of our emergency management system, becomes the backdrop for banal entertainment.

Sorry if this has been posted previously, I couldn't find it in the past couple of weeks' diaries.  

Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook?

Go watch that and come back and talk about it.

One of my favorite sources for flours, both gluten-free and regular, good organic flour, is Bob's Red Mill.  Their products are available in health food stores and in the baking aisle in fancier mainstream grocery stores (Harris Teeter and Kroger, for sure) -- they make specialty flours, gluten free bread and cake mixes, baking additives, cereals, and more.  

After a lot of discussion here about whether the many gluten-y additives imported from China might be getting into the human food supply, I decided to ask them about their ingredients.

There's a lot of really neat discussion of food chains and local sourcing going on around here lately.  Enough people have asked questions about gluten in the various food threads that I thought I'd put some of the information that I've been posting as comments, together in one diary.

The main questions seem to be:

What is gluten?
Where does it occur?
If I eat a lot of bread do I have to worry?
How do I avoid gluten?

After weeks of pet food nightmare diaries and as we find out more and more about what might be making its way into the human food supply, I see Kossacks asking "how do we eat safely?"  "what foods could be contaminated?".  So I thought I'd write something, and maybe more than one something, about what I've learned about safe and economical eating and drinking over the years.

adigal mentioned in the sad thread about her dog's death, having once been told to shop the perimeter of the grocery store and it would help with weight loss.

Right now, in the brave new world of weird food additives that may be poisonous, shop the perimeter is probably the best and safest possible advice, short of doing all your shopping at Whole Foods (as not everyone can afford to do that).

Below the fold, I'll talk a little bit about how I eat and how I learned to change my food habits.  If people are interested, I can write more -- about the cooperative movement, about how to start a co-op, about buying clubs and CSAs and Credit Unions and cohousing and all sorts of local organizing that can be done to make food and living cheaper and safer.  I was kind of saving this for bink's proposed "My Left Fork" site...but instead I'm seizing the day.

People, people.

I gotta tell you, the Edwards vs. Obama snipe-o-rama is really getting me down, because I have long had a fantasy that needs fulfillment, and if we can't come together on this I just don't see how it's going to happen.

Here's my fantasy:

Edwards/Obama '08
Edwards/Obama '12
Obama/Wasserman-Schulz '16 (or pick your talented young Dem of choice)
Obama/whoever '20

Sometime on Monday evening, I found myself in a position that Americans aren't often put in:  I was checking for my friends' names on lists of the civilian dead.  I worked at Virginia Tech for a while.  Left, moved somewhere else that suits me much better.  But there are still many people I know there that I like very much and sporadically keep in touch with.

I sent an e-mail to several of them.  One by one they all responded, with notes sad and touching.  Some were also feeling the loss from one remove.  But others had lost students, collaborators, close family friends.  My graduate student came to work Tuesday in tears over Dr. Librescu, who had been on her husband's Ph.D. committee and a friend to both of them.  The girls in the belly dance club that I once taught beginner lessons to cancelled their spring show because they'd lost their friend Reema Samaha.

So it's very easy for me to imagine being there.  It's easy to imagine because I know the Tech campus very well.  It's also easy to imagine because I visited my New York friends and walked by ground zero on Sept. 28, 2001.  Right now, they are devastated by unexpected and undeserved disaster, and there is a great echoing hole that seems it will never close.