Gypsysavage’s Weblog

The fighting in Basra and in some southern Baghdad neighborhoods continued for days, despite concerted efforts by American-trained Iraqi troops to dislodge remnants of the Mahdi Army, the militant wing of the political party of Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. The prospect of a successful operation looked grim as militants openly walked the streets and manned checkpoints and as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s compound – where he oversaw the operation personally – was mortared, forcing him to flee.

A ceasefire agreed upon by both the Iraqi government and Sadr’s party is still holding despite an escalation of hostilities.

Despite the fact that Sadr said he would withdrawal his fighters (or perhaps because of it), the Shiite militant faction may have scored a major victory in the upcoming elections.

Bush touted the Iraqi government last week for pulling its weight against the militants while Iraqi officials downplayed the recent clashes, calling it a fight against criminal elements, as quoted in the New York Times.

The Iraqi capital has been in lockdown for the past four days, and the recent security improvements credited to the American troop surge that took place last year is delicately hanging in the balance as thousands of Shiites demonstrate in Baghdad against the recent moves against the Mahdi Army and as the American death toll exceeds 4,000.

The administration, measuring the slightest improvements by the centimeter, is laying bets on the April 8^th testimony of US officials in Iraq who will brief Congress on the prospects of bringing troops home and our recent successes in the region. Regardless of the outcome, the recent fighting in Iraq underscores the violent tribal nature of the government’s political parties, many of whom have their own, privately-funded militias, and stresses the Iraqis’ resolve to kill each other long after we have left them to their own fatal devices.

Is the use of a pot where the pot is not?

Since Pennsylvanians realized their state was in fact an important primary so late in the race, the GOP has been hemorrhaging registered voters. Give it up to the dynamics of a race between a Caucasian woman and African American man, the rhetoric of change, or the disenfranchisement of Republicans living in a party that no longer adheres to the principals of state government and fiscal responsibility. Any one will do.

According to the Philly Inquirer, state Democrats gained 57,651 voters who were either already registered as GOP, Independent, or in another party, and 111,227 new voters since last November. No matter how you look at it, that number is huge. Only 10,754 Democratic voters jumped ship in that same period of time.

A political battleground in the general election, Pennsylvania is a microcosm of the country, swept up into something indefinable and new. I can’t put my finger on it, but I know that this election means more than any other I’ve lived through. I’m psyched to be alive right now.

I’ve begun to cover a story about my good friend, Beau (a.k.a. Optix), a guerrilla aerosol artist whose nom de plume riddles the urban skyline of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He is part of a sub-culture whose art is taboo, in fact illegal, and he prides himself in gaining access to seemingly impossible places and using brick walls, trains, or the underside of a bridge as his canvases.

Walking downtown, Beau says, “Check this one out,” and points to the scrunched and exaggerated letters that tower above a fire escape of an old corporate building that spell out some inside joke or a name. But it’s not the vibrant colors or the detail of the piece that I find fascinating, its how the artist got up there and planted his flag, a piece of art that the whole city can see, like or not. That’s the thing about aerosol art; it’s definitely in your face.

Ironically, instead of being arrested (again) for his craft, he was approached by the executive director of a non for-profit arts program and the director of the Business District Operations to spray paint privately owned, dilapidated downtown buildings in an effort to beautify the city.

I look forward to covering this story, not only because it’s a great chance for local artists to come together and share their talents, but it’s chance that my hometown might look a little more… colorful.

It would take more than a complete shut-out of the remaining primaries for Clinton to win the Democratic nomination at this point. She would need to win the remaining dozen or so contests, including shepherding a majority of Pennsylvanian votes and the magical reincarnation of the Michigan and Florida primaries (they broke the rules, by the way, and I’ll be damned to suffer another Florida vote). She’s now beholden to the will of the superdelegates. Clinton’s checkmated mathematically, by the AP’s calculations, and must now rely solely on past favors and future promises, anathema to true democracy.

Superdelgates, like the electorate (in some circumstances), can jump ship and vote their conscience, which is what she’s relying on at this point in the race. No one superdelegate or party leader is calling for her resignation from the race at this point because they know the rules – and the consequences – of this race. Shamefully, courting endorsements and pledged votes are as much a part of the democratic process as is the act of checking off a contender’s name in a voting booth.

Clinton needs to reconsider her standing in this race. If she doesn’t, we’re in for a world of hurt.

Southern New Jersey’s rural landscape is a vanishing commodity. Farms and woodland are almost utterly spent, replaced by five-bedroom houses whose development is ravenous and eerily similar in appearance, springing up from the ground faster than what was originally planted there. To take from Alexander Pope: Grove nods at grove, each house has a brother, and half the neighborhood reflects the other.

So, I savor the opportunity to walk my dogs in a patch of woods a quarter of a mile from my house. Here, I can free my lab and golden from their leashes, and watch as they sniff and roll in the gross remains of dead things, swim in one of several ponds, and meet with other dogs that smell just as bad and canter just as happily along the beaten paths that wind their way though the wooded acres of the park.

You could almost call it a community of walkers, good people that enjoy every moment of their pet’s supervised freedom. It is a community of people that savor just as much as I do one of the few sanctuaries left in an ever-growing, sprawling suburbia.

One of these walkers, a gentleman by the name of Ben, is amateur photographer. He was kind enough to take a picture of my golden, Sam. Thanks, Ben.

If we think of collaboration as an assembly-line or segmentation model of working together, as George P. Landow puts it, in which any number of people contribute to a piece of writing over a period of time, then authorship becomes an issue of acknowledgment. What else could it be? We live in a society where authorial credit for an endeavor is currency. Authorship, especially in the humanities, gives us a sense of meaning, as well as legal and professional benefits.

But with hypertext, it is common to think that collaborative writing takes the place of individual achievement, which can be translated in some circles as the death of the byline. Read the rest of this entry »

The following are questions are intended for members of the Rowan graduate course, Writing for Electronic Communities.

On Bush:

1. In the author’s quest for the “great record”, he virtually prophesies the creation of the internet. Relative to writing for electronic communities, what invention do you propose that would enhance our record of knowledge and our ability to communicate efficiently (your invention can be as crazy or impossible as you like). I propose that we invent a lens with which we can project our ideas onto a medium, and communicate at the speed of thought. In terms of individual achievement, check this video out (dude’s a nerd but he’s awesome). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

On Dibbell:

2. After a virtual rape, Dr. Bombay’s community scrambles for identity, defined solely by the execution of one of its members, the perpetrator. Just like the author, I have a hard time taking this bollocks seriously (it did take multiple violent rapes for the VR community to become more self-aware). But she does bring up a central point: where lies the theoretical boundary, all but non-existent for non-MOO-users, between RL and VR? Consider this:

Where virtual reality and its conventions would have us believe that legba and Starsinger were brutally raped in their own living room, here was the victim legba scolding Mr. Bungle for a breach of “civility.” Where real life, on the other hand, insists the incident was only an episode in a free-form version of Dungeons and Dragons, confined to the realm of the symbolic and at no point threatening any player’s life, limb, or material well-being… (Dibbell)

3. Within this virtual community (of practice?) psychopaths and newbies are the two types of users who view MOO as a place where they can act without censure. The potential anarchy of MOO is what’s most appealing. The rest of the users, says Dr. Bombay, “tend to make the critical passage from anonymity to pseudonymity, developing the concern for their character’s reputation that marks the attainment of virtual adulthood.” So, answer me this: what’s the point of a virtual existence in which you have unadulterated freedom at your fingertips if all you’re going to do is be as self-conscious and restrained as you are in real life? What’s the point if you are going to employ government and regulate the goings-on of the community?

On Turkle:

4. Can you think of problems with an alternate version of your “self” displayed in virtual rooms or in video games? In other words, in generations to come, will a human being’s identity be so fragmented that the self will be utterly indefinable? What would be the consequences of turning ourselves over to the “psychology” of a computer, as Turkle puts it?

On Kelly:

5. Kelly says we little notion of what the web really is. Can anyone really define it (for real, this isn’t rhetorical), keeping in mind what it could become by 2015?

I recently came across this photo while rummaging through my attic. I had to share it. At the time it was taken, I was recovering from knee surgery. My father just got back from the dentist after having a lot of work done, so we decided it would be funny to exaggerate our pain. My brother is on the right.