Proud to be: America the Beautiful
The National Congress of American Indians published “Proud to Be” just before the Super Bowl saying, “Watch the #BigGame commercial the NFL would never air.” They suggest viewers, now well over a million of them, get involved by contacting the Washington Professional Football Team, the NFL and the Washington Post.
The Super Bowl did allow this ad from Coke to air, and it sure stirred up a lot of controversy, especially on Twitter and other social media sites. It’s had over 10 million views.
However, Coke missed a few languages which provided the opportunity to create this follow -up ad:
In my college classes, we’ve been discussing discrimination including racism and sexism, and students are working on their first essays on these topics and more. I wonder if any of them will engage these videos as texts for their papers–along with readings from N. Scott Momaday, Sherman Alexie, Brent Staples, Mike Rose, and Gloria Anzaldua?
In many ways, it all comes down to Seth Godin’s question: what is school for?
When I told the extraordinary poet and children’s book author about some of my teaching strategies, including those she had influenced, Lucille Clifton said, in her beautiful rich voice, “Goooood. You’re teaching them how to be huuuummmaaaann.”
To me, that is what school is for: to teach us how to be human. Together. The best we can.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
2/11/14: The Day We Fight Back Against Internet Surveillance
BECAUSE
- The NSA “has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world.” — The New York Times
BECAUSE
- The NSA collected “almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks” in one month in 2013. — The Guardian
BECAUSE
- The NSA is collecting the content and metadata of emails, web activity, chats, social networks, and everything else as part of what it calls “upstream” collection. — The Washington Post
BECAUSE
- The NSA “is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans.” — The Washington Post
BECAUSE
- The NSA “is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world.” — The Washington Post
BECAUSE
- The NSA “is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country.” — The New York Times
- The USA Freedom Act curtails NSA surveillance abuses.
- The FISA Improvements Act attempts to legalize bulk data collection of phone records.
We need to tell Congress to pass the USA Freedom Act and amend it to make it even stronger.
- Attend an event in your area
- Ask your representatives the tough questions
- Write to your representative about NSA reform
- Download the Reform The NSA app on iTunes
- Share on social media.
- Use the #stopthensa hashtag on Twitter to help spread the word!
Information from The Day We Fight Back: https://thedaywefightback.org/
Today is the day when…
Today February 4 is the day before my life changed. On February 5, 2010, my husband broke his neck and should have died because 95% of the people who break their C2 vertebrae do.
That’s why it’s called the Hangman’s Break: it’s what causes people to die when they are hung–they break their C2 and that’s it. It’s usually what has happened when someone dies and they say that person died instantly.
If you are one of the 5% who lives, you’re in a wheel chair. And you’re paralyzed, usually from the neck down.
Of those 5% who live, 
3% are not in wheel chairs. They weren’t paralyzed but the risk is so great of paralysis while the neck heals, and they are in so much torturous pain, that the vertebrae in their necks are fused together, and they lose 75% of their movement in their necks. But they can walk and run and do everything else.
My husband’s neck was so badly broken that Read more…
Philip Seymour Hoffman 7/23/67 – 2/2/14
I think you should be serious about what you do because this is it. This is the only life you’ve got.
If you’re a human being walking the earth, you’re weird, you’re strange, you’re psychologically challenged. Philip Seymour Hoffman (July 23, 1967 – February 2, 2014)
guest blog post
by Ron Wells
Such a talented man.
The range of roles for one so young is breathtaking.
He will be greatly missed.
His long, long list of movie roles include: Read more…
… if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway. (Stephen King, “Reading to Write”) Read more…
Know Your Rights: Blogging in College
In March 2012, I attended the Triiibes Conference in my hometown of Ventura CA. The conference was inspired by Seth Godin’s book, Triiibes, from which an online ning community was formed. That ning is full of Linchpins, whom Godin described in his next book on the same name; however, readers of this blog may be most familiar with Godin from his manifesto on education Stop Stealing Dreams.
That March, while Godin was unable to travel across the country in person from NYC to CA, thanks to technology, he Skyped in to speak with us about being Linchpins and creating and leading Triiibes. We also had the chance to ask him questions; since I am a college teacher who has also taught undergraduate and graduate classes in educational philosophy and had just read Stop Stealing Dreams, I asked him for his advice. Read more…
52 Pick Up: Sit Up Straight!
Art Predator aka Gwendolyn Alley hard at work
I hate to admit it, but I am a couch potato.
Not the kind that sits with a remote watching TV while eating a bag of chips couch potato, but the kind that sits with a laptop, feet up on the coffee table, drinking coffee or wine.
While I used to sit on the floor in virasana or other yoga poses while I tapped away, somewhere in the past two years of grad school for my second MA (this one in Depth Psychology), the yoga block and the zafu were no longer in reach and that habit was shed during the Year of the Snake. (Photo of me being goofy and sitting on a yoga block at the coffee table by my son who was about 8 at the time.)
On the heels of the article I posted the other day about inactivity and how it is BAD FOR THE BRAIN not just our bodies, a recent article in the Washington Post provides this infographic which describes the impact of our poor posture on our body and our health including organ damage, muscle degeneration, leg disorders, foggy brain and more:
“People who watched the most TV in an 8.5
-year study had a 61 percent greater risk of dying than those who watched less than one hour per day.” Now how is watching TV that different from sitting and being online or working on a laptop computer?
Check out the hazards of sitting and take a stand for your health in 2014–the Year of the Horse! Or at least, sit differently!
As for me, instead of staying home and writing a blog post for Wine Predator and lamenting that I’m not at ZAP, I’m heading down to LA to taste the 2011 Bordeaux then going to a Speakeasy Art Happening complete with 20s costumes and a password to celebrate Elle-Je Freeheart’s art and birthday!
52 Pick Up: Weeks 1 + 2 Gallop In
No I’m not talking about a car or a card game when I say 2014 is the year of 52 Pick Up. Read more…
In Recognition of Martin Luther King Jr
From Martin Luther King’s “Drum Major Instinct” sermon, given on 4 February 1968:
Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.
You don’t have to have a college degree to serve.
You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve.
You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve.
You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love. And you can be that servant. Read more…
Art Predator’s 2013 in Review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 51,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 19 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
In June 2013, I hit 500,00 page views for this blog. Read more about this milestone here.
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