3021 The urban race; the slapping of fingers

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
-- Virginia Woolf --

--------------------------------------------

I have signed up for the NYC Great Urban Race on August 28th! The Man has agreed to do it with me. It's for charity, and I further signed up to benefit St. Jude's. If I can get $250 in donations, I get to wear a red "St. Jude Hero" cape during the race.

It's kind of a combination road rally and scavenger hunt, except that you do it on foot or public transportation - no taxis allowed. Teams of two get clues to various places in the city, you have to figure it out, go there, and take a picture of the two of you there, and fulfill a few challenges along the way. I don't expect to win, but it should be fun.

Apparently they have this event in various cities all over the country every year.

I have not yet received the packet in the mail with details about how people go about donating, but I've already got $50 promised from Piper and The Angel. You do get credit for the donation on your income taxes, so if anyone wants to donate (you do know St. Jude's, right? The Danny Thomas hospital?), leave a comment and I'll get back to you with the details.

------------------------------

My to-do list for today included a trip to the bank to deposit some checks, find lunch, shop for plants for the pots on the new front flower bed, and pay bills (overdue again!). All I got done was the trip to the bank and lunch.

After the bank, I stopped in Piper's office to find out if he had forgiven me yet for raking him over the coals for sending me spam emails. He gets a lot of those politically motivated "let's embarrass some politician we don't like" made-up exposé things, the kind Snopes likes to debunk, and he sent me one last week that was just about the last straw. If you remember some of last week's posts, I was pretty disgusted with the general stupidity I'd been seeing all around, and I fired off a reply that straightened folks out a bit on the truth, and ended with

"You have a moral responsibility to now forward a correction to everyone to whom you sent the original (crap) misinformation. You also have a moral responsibility to do fact checking before you make the same mistake again on the next piece of crap that comes by."

As if that wasn't bad enough, I copied everyone he'd forwarded it to, plus the woman who sent it to him and everyone she had forwarded it to, AND the guy who sent it to her and everyone on his forward list, and so on for four levels of forwards.

I have debunked every prior piece of trash Piper has sent and asked him to also forward the corrections to his list, and I have asked him not to send me any more unless he has verified it before sending it. But he and I are on opposite ends of the political spectrum, and I think he's trying to "educate" me. He's educating me with garbage that he accepts as truth because he wants to believe it, I'm countering with the real truth, and he just doesn't "get it" yet. He should have known better than to send it to me. So I don't feel the least bit guilty for how I responded. He, however, was very upset and said that I had embarrassed him in front of his friends and business associates.

So today I stuck my head in his office door and asked if I was forgiven yet (not that I need forgiveness), and he said yes, and when I said I was going to lunch, he offered to take me to lunch. Naturally, he likes slow places. And Vincent joined us. By the time we'd finished lunch, it was raining. All the places I wanted to look at plants are outside, so I gave up.

I never did get to the bills. Sigh.

--------------------------------

Vic was supposed to come this evening to work on the van, but called about 5:30 (I was outside, so he left a message) to cancel. He'll be here tomorrow. Or Thursday. But definitely this week. Probably.
.