Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

How do our new Democratic Senate and Congress look to the many who have so much to hide?

Scarily revealing is the oh-so-subtle promo for DC white-shoe lawfirm Covington and Burling co-authored by one of the many high-priced DC lawyers who worked for the RNC on the NH phone-jamming, one Robert Kelner.

Phone-jamming fans may recall that Kelner let slip some embarassing info to a TV station in NH–making it clear that the RNC’s defense lawyers were fully informed about DOJ investigations into the phone-jamming’s White House connection, although said investigations were kept a deep secret from Democrats.

Kelner’s remark inspired a Freedom of Information Request to the DOJ (pdf here), filed on April 18, 2006 but not yet answered by the DOJ….

(Quotes, etc. below the fold at my DailyKos page.)

Nextbigthingitude? What a great word Halley has dreamed up for Twitter. But it’s more than that.

Twitter is an experiment in turning OFF a few social taboos, to see what happens next.

Twitter, like blogging, shuts down the taboo that says “Don’t talk about yourself, people don’t care.” Twitter, like Orkut, gives delicious permission to ask for and offer friendship to people you like, while withholding your friendship from people you don’t like so much.

Don’t string theorists believe that the world has tons of extra rolled-up dimensions? Twitter-ers are playing games with the social dimensions, collapsing a few just to see what might happen next.

And what happens next is, most likely, that we all get bored. Or maybe we don’t.

Maybe we decide we want this crazy new-fangled interaction toy that nobody wanted before it was invented–just the way we decided we want email and cellphones.

Besides–it’s fun being part of this experiment–join me!

One of the lovely things about snow is the way it reminds us of all our past snowfalls.

• Above, from a just-today scanned box of old slides, my little sis in a long-ago NH winter.
• In 2003, my little dog was thrilled by two feet of snow.
• In 2004, with Frank a just-named Nobel laureate, a Swedish TV crew photographed us walking through November snowfall.
• In 2005, maple-syrup candy in snow created (a miracle!) the shape of Kokopelli.
• February 2006 piled blizzardy snow up over my boot-tops.

Thanks to my blog (and Flickr) all these snow memories are still here to enjoy. I wonder if, fifty years from now, their zeroes-and-ones will be as accessible to future someones as the dusty old box of slides I just scanned into jpegs…

Mmmm! Let us all eat Marie-Antoinette-knows-what, but first let us photograph it and blog it here.

Thanks to Rebecca Blood for the link, giving me an excuse to re-post this gorgeous piece of Vienna liebeschaum from 2005.

Thanks to the American Dialect Society for remininding me just what words were new, way back in 2002, when I started blogging:

2002 Word of the Year: weapons of mass destruction or WMD, sought for in Iraq. Most Likely to Succeed: blog, from “weblog,” a website of personal events, comments, and links. Most Useful: google (verb), as in “to google someone,” to search the Web using the search engine Google for information on a person or thing…

Think that’s pretty funny? When they started in 1990, a most-useful new term was “laptop computer,” which they thoughtfully defined as “a portable personal computer weighting 4-8 pounds.”

When did the tipping point come for “blog”, “blogging”, “blogger?

When was the last time your Uncle Norbert said, over Thanksgiving pie, “Lucille tells me that you’ve now got something called a blob?” And now, didn’t Aunt Tillie suddenly friend you in Twitter, asking to be blogrolled? I think comments are open here, though I’m still not totally sure how WordPress works…

Thanks to Resource Shelf whose link to new words just added to the OED sent me on that trip down memory lane…

Here you see Einstein (happy birthday, professor!) on the front porch of the Princeton house where Frank and I later spent about eight happy years.

It’s an artist’s conception, so you don’t see any tourists ringing the doorbell.

Welcome to my new blog. Please pardon me if it’s now a (messy) open house. I had been planning to fix it up more before sending out any virtually-engraved invitations. Things moved too fast for me.

Einstein’s ninth law is that nothing moves faster than gossip through the blogosphere.

Or maybe something moves faster–but that something sure isn’t Betsy!

Wow, looks spacious–clean–no cat hair on anything–we’ll, we’ll soon fix that.

Cecil Coupe with his MvManila software managed to collect all the posts and all the pictures I created using Manila over the past four-years-plus, and move them into WordPress so that they all link to each other in the appropriate way, despite the changed URL. Pretty amazing–we ran into some ISP obstacles along the way–through it all, Cecil remained a (very hard-working) pleasure to work with.

Thank you, Cecil!

I found Cecil using a Google search for “move Manila blog” but I put some links in here so that you can find him even faster.

In my blog, I tend to write about:

• Funny stuff I can’t resist and hope you can’t resist either.
• Adventures, ideas, interesting people and science.
• Political good versus evil, with occasional shades of gray.

I grew up in NH, my nose in a book when I wasn’t building treehouses (summer) or giant snow forts (winter). We lived in a real neighborhood–I don’t think many families owned a house key. There were about 10 elderly* women in the 5-block radius I roamed who would offer me orange juice, bathroom privileges, and a comfy chair to sit reading kids books from the 1920s. I’d like to say thank you here to Miss Alice Colgan, who lived with a sister she hadn’t spoken to in 20 years. Both of them were delighted to see me or my siblings knock on the door.

The blogging world takes me back to those days of roaming. I like knocking at the door of your blog and finding out what’s on your mind today. Better than orange juice!

I am a nerd, and even bigger fan of nerds than I am a nerd myself. I used to spend a lot more time programming than I do now. I’ve coauthored a couple of books, both now out of print, but if you look up “Betsy Devine” at Amazon you can read some really nice reader reviews.

When I started blogging, back in 2003, my husband Frank Wilczek and I were living in Cambridge MA, as were our two 20-something daughters–one college, one grad school–a big part of our lives but already out on their own. A whole pile of things have happened since then–not least that in 2004 Frank won the Nobel Prize in Physics. We thought that our lives were complex and filled up with travel in 2003–little did we know!

Right now, I’m typing this into my blog from Sweden, where we’ll be living until almost Christmas, 2007. I’d like to re-organize this little essay and talk more about the non-fiction book I’m writing now, called Meta-Physics: Lives With, About, and Sometimes After the Cosmos. But about 87 other things are in front of this on my to-do list right now, not least getting ready for this year’s IgNobel Prize ceremony. Maybe next week?

Until then–really, thanks for reading my blog!

* The word “elderly” was one my grandmother liked–and one that the women I’m talking about would have liked. I thought of people as “elderly” once they got past 30 or so. I looked forward to getting there myself, and now–woo hoo–I surely have!

Hey–what about the US Attorneys who didn’t get fired? Paul Krugman is asking (free link here)–and it’s a good question. Check out the US Attorney in charge of the NH phone-jamming, Thomas J Colantuono. Does Gonzales give prizes for slow response to Republican dirty tricks? It took Colantuono’s people more than a year before the FBI questioned their top/only suspect in the NH phone-jamming, a crime by Republicans.

But in other matters, Colantuono could move fast. Just before the 2004 elections, he moved fast to block Democrats from questioning phone-jamming suspects–and fast again to file corruption charges against a NH Democrat.

In 2006, right after the Democrats’ landmark electoral victory, Colantuono also moved fast to shut down his phone-jamming enquiries, making a guilty plea deal with the last defendant that gave the Feds nothing and the Republicans everything.

More detail on this sordid story on DailyKos.

Happy, happy moment when I was 11
Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

Mary Parfitt (left) was my best friend for years. You can see just how glad I was to be with her. (Also, most likely, my dad (the photographer) had just said something that made me laugh.)

Just around this time in our lives, we started to play a Monopoly game that lasted 2 years, with about 200 new rules we made up ourselves. We both got so rich in this game that we had to create our own $1000 bills, later $10,000 bills. I made mine small so that I could carry them inside of a gold pinky ring that I’m not wearing in this photo.

How did we play for so long without going bankrupt? We created a third and fourth player, whose “bank” was… the bank. These silly players kept landing on both of our properties and getting hit for enormous rents. We beefed up our rents by putting TV antennas on all our hotels–which were made of wood then; we used bright red thumbtacks for TV antennas.

Who won? I don’t remember. I hope it was Mary.