26.02.04

blame me, I voted for nader

4 more years of g. w. bush?

be afraid. be very afraid.

vote your fears, not your hopes.
 

NADER ENDORSES NADER
Major Vote of Confidence, Says Nader

Ralph Nader's quixotic bid for the Presidency got a major boost today as the scrappy candidate snagged the endorsement of Ralph Nader.

"No question about it, this is big," an exultant Nader announced at a press conference attended by many of his closest supporters, including Ralph Nader.

While many political observers had expected Mr. Nader to obtain the coveted Nader endorsement, getting the nod from Mr. Nader gives Mr. Nader's campaign the credibility it has been seeking.

"It would have been possible to run without an endorsement from myself, but I'd much rather run with it," a jubilant Nader told reporters.

Among the supporters who came to cheer on their newly-announced candidate was Ralph Nader, 69.

"I supported him back in 2000 and I'm going to support him again," said Mr. Nader, a longtime Nader booster.

Mr. Nader's words were echoed by Nader supporter Ralph Nader, 69.

"We're going to surprise a lot of people this year," Mr. Nader said. "This movement is a lot bigger than people think."

As for the candidate himself, Mr. Nader said that the Nader endorsement would help him "broaden our base."

"This campaign is about the voters out there who have been ignored by the two major parties," Mr. Nader said. "It's not about Ralph Nader, and if it was, I really don't think I would have gotten this endorsement today."

Ralph Nader, 69, agreed: "The two major parties keep putting out new candidates every election year, but I always find myself coming back to Nader."

Elsewhere, fans of the HBO series "Sex and the City" announced today that they were "actively seeking" new imaginary friends.

quote 'o' the day

The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views ... which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.

Doctor Who, "Face of Evil"

25.02.04

25.02.04

snooze-a-palooza

the days are getting longer, both coming and going: the sun rose at 6:42 am this morning in madison, and it set at 5:39 pm. but unlike jimmy the groundhog, my brain apparently saw its shadow sometime around the beginning of february and has crawled back into my skull for another six weeks of winter. wake me up when winter's really over.

and while you're at it, wake up jamie too. she's been snoozing a lot of late, and not just metaphorically. seems like she got a semester long backstage pass at snooze-a-palooza

I devoted a good chunk of last weekend to sorting and filing the stacks of papers that had piled up on top of the file box, in various plastic bags, and on all the available horizontal surfaces, including the floor. this was part spring cleaning, part new year's resolution: it was the first step in writing a will, one of my goals for 2004. (for those of you who are keeping track of my other resolutions, my flossing record for 2004 is near perfect, though the vitamin/calcium regime is a bit spotty.)

apparently, writing a will requires that you have a list of all your assets and some idea of their value. sheesh, what will these lawyers think of next?

turns out that bill & I have 9 retirement accounts between the two of us. we still don't know what would happen to most of them if bill & I died at the same time, but at least the statements from the 9 accounts are now in 9 tidy manila folders.

I came across a few other noteworthy items in the great paper chase:

• two copies of my scuba diving certification card (and my dive log).
  I also found the temporary diving certification letter that had to be faxed to a dive shop in monterey last summer because I didn't have either of the two cert cards with me in california. (you need to show your card to the park ranger if you want to dive at point lobos state park.) so richard, aka the patron saint of spastic dive buddies, who had gotten up early to drive from mountain view to santa cruz to get me, and then had driven me and my gear from santa cruz to the dive site in carmel also got to drive me back to monterrey to the aforementioned dive shop to get the aforementioned faxed copy of my certification. I should probably send richard one of my cert cards, it could save him time in the future.
   
• a paper bag with two holes in it.
  I was in a bad mood. a really bad mood. I was a danger to myself and others. but I had to go to work. so I did this. it worked.
   
• a check for 0 dollars and .07 cents

  You have been identified as a member of the class of Citibank and AT&T Universal Card customers who are eligible for a refund under the terms of a settlement agreement in class action lawsuit titled Schwartz v. Citibank ...
   
  ... Pursuant to the terms of the settlement, all proceeds from uncashed checks will be donated to charity.

  and if they hadn't sent me a check for .07 cents in the first place they could have donated the .37 cents in postage to charity as well.

• a letter describing the new prescription benefit plan sponsored by the state of wisconsin.
  

  As part of this change, the Board developed a 3-level prescription benefit design that provides more choice to employees, while encouraging them to become better consumers.

  translation: the allergy medication that used to have a copayment of $10 last year now requires a copayment of $35. I would be less annoyed with the changes to the plan if they weren't accompanied by incredibly smarmy PR statements. but it has in fact encouraged me to become a better consumer --- I learned that I can get the same drug (zyrtec/cetirizine) in generic form over the counter from an online canadian pharmacy for less than the original $10 copayment.

• the results of the bloodwork from my most recent physical, ie. my reward for clean living
  total cholesterol, 155; triglycerides, 54; HDL ("good"), 56; LDL ("bad"), 88; ratio (TC/HDL), 2.8.
   
• an ad for a bedrest study at NASA
  

  Are You Curious?
  Do You Have a Sense of Adventure??
  Would You Like to Help Science???
  Are You Available 24/7 for a Month In Early 2002????

  You Can Do All of the Above Without Leaving the Comfort of a Bed During a Bedrest Study Being Conducted at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA

  according to my sources, the study involved staying in an inclined bed with your head about 6 inches lower than your feet for weeks at a time. this causes your muscles and bones to atrophy much the same way that astronauts' muscles and bones do in low gravity environments. after you experience sufficient muscle loss and osteoporosis you are "rehabilitated" with an exercise regime. how comfortable is lying in a bed with your head lower than your feet for weeks at a time? not comfortable at all. in fact, it's downright unpleasant after a couple of hours, when your internal organs start shifting into new configurations. and there's more fun on the way after your digestive system realizes it has been rerouted uphill...

18.02.04

a man with one watch knows what time it is,
a man with two is never sure.

but what about a woman with three scales?

we used to have three scales in the third floor bathroom at rivendell, one that I brought with me, one that jamie inherited when michael moved out and one that I found on the street during move out week. bill & I thought the three scales lined up side by side were hilarious. jamie thought they were ridiculous. my scale retreated to the walk-in closet in my room, michael's old scale wandered off into the attic crawl space, and the dumpster scale, the newest and most optimistic of the lot, stayed in the bathroom.

when I work out everyday I weigh myself everyday. I wake up, go to the bathroom, and weigh myself on the bathroom scale. then I weigh myself on the scale in my closet. the bathroom scale is all about the power of positive thinking, coming in about 5 pounds lower than the closet scale, but it's fickle, taking away a few pounds one day and adding them back the next. the closet scale is stern, constantly scolding me with its worst case scenario, and it's obstinate as well: the red LED readout hasn't budged one pound since I kicked my exercise thing into high gear about a month ago.

then michael came for a visit. michael is one of those massively annoying metabolic freaks who has to worry about not weighing enough. he hopped on the dumpster-bathroom scale and pronounced it seriously underweight. this distressed jamie, who had been relying on the "positive thinking" dumpster-bathroom scale without the counterbalance of the stern and uncompromising closet scale. she quickly retrieved michael's old scale from the attic. then she hauled my collection of hand weights into the bathroom, 32 pounds in all, in an attempt to calibrate the two scales. she concluded that power of positive thinking was actually an exercise in self-delusion to the tune of about 8 pounds.

so jamie replaced the dumpster-scale with michael's old scale, newly calibrated with a strict scientific procedure that involved latin incantations recited in the presence of a small mammal. (fortunately, small mammals are plentiful at rivendell.) the result is that the new michael's-bathroom scale now tells me I weigh more or less the same as the dumpster-bathroom scale, give or take a couple of pounds.

meanwhile, the scale in my closet turns out to have an achilles heel of inconsistency: how much I weigh depends critically on where the scale is. (rivendell is old and the floors stopped being flat a long time ago.) just as jamie was recalibrating michael's-bathroom scale, the closet scale got jostled to a new a location and began reading 3 pounds less than it had previously. despite an extensive search and recovery mission I was unable to locate a spot on the closet floor that would return to the scale to its previous reading. it continues to tell bill that he weighs 3 pounds less. but now it tells me that I weigh the same as before. so either I weigh the same and bill has lost 3 pounds, or I've gained 3 pounds and bills weighs the same, or the scale in the closet is using its puny but twisted electronic brain to play an elaborate practical joke on me. or maybe the difference results from a small gravitational anomaly caused by fluctuations in the holographic force field that bill uses to project the appearance of a human form.

in other words, in spite of, or more accurately, because of, weighing myself on three different scales I have no reliable measure of my actual body weight.

now some people, bill being first among them, think the previous tale of the scales is some kind of a parable, a cautionary tale about the foolishness of letting your scale double as a self-esteem-o-meter. instead a of a consulation with the scale, bill suggests starting the day with the roll of a couple of 16 sided dice. ooh, I get +4 self esteem points this morning, but dang, -7 battle strength. lookin' good and feelin' fine, but I really better try to avoid any stray orcworts, wereducks or elemental weirds on my way to the coffeeshop this morning.

yeah, yeah, I know. all this exercise stuff is about feeling good, not about losing weight. it's about a sound mind in a healthy body, not what the scale says. does anyone, other than the people who write fitness articles for women's magazines, who are most likely space aliens from another planet, and bill, who is a definitely a space alien from another planet, actually believe that? more to the point, does anyone who has nordictracked her way through over 3 full length movies without being able to say for certain that she has lost even a single pound actually believe that? not with two or three self-esteem-o-meters standing by waiting to disabuse her of such nonsense.

my name is ann and I am a google news addict.

I've relapsed.

I'm using and using hard.

and I'm not just a junkie, I'm a pusher.

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

Three days ago I asked:

am I the only one who finds it abhorrent that the texas national guard has a "champagne unit" for the sons of prominent politicians and well-connected families?

Turns out I'm not:

I am angry that so many of the sons of the powerful and well placed and so many professional athletes . . . managed to wangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units. Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to their country.

That's Colin Powell, writing in his 1995 autobiography My American Journey. I found the quote in Clarence Page's column for the Chicago Tribune:

Vietnam War comes back to bite fortunate sons who didn't serve

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

It's clear that there was plenty of disagreement among the different intelligence agencies and reports on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the US invaded, and it's not just the Bush administration that ignored and sidelined those with dissenting views: the media relied almost exclusively and uncritically on administration sources. Michael Massing details the critical failure of the pre-war reporting on WMDs, especially at the New York Times:

Why didn't we learn more about these deceptions and concealments in the months when the administration was pressing its case for regime change‹when, in short, it might have made a difference? Some maintain that the many analysts who've spoken out since the end of the war were mute before it. But that's not true. Beginning in the summer of 2002, the "intelligence community" was rent by bitter disputes over how Bush officials were using the data on Iraq. Many journalists knew about this, yet few chose to write about it.

The entire article at the New York Review of Books is well worth reading:

Now They Tell Us By Michael Massing

as is Paul Krugman's article and dual book review focusing on the Bush family political and business empire:
The Wars of the Texas Succession.

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

Gary Younge, a black reporter and commentator at the British newspaper The Guardian performs an autopsy on the Dean campaign:

Dean's rise showed it was possible to mount a credible electoral challenge from the left even in a country at war, where dissent has been marginalised by both the political and media establishments.

. . .

...as soon as Dean's candidacy proved viable it shifted the centre of political gravity considerably to the left, prompting a far more strident tone among all the candidates. By snatching the initiative away from the right, his candidacy made John Kerry look moderate and Bush look extreme.

By changing the terms of the debate, Dean forced all the candidates to address the kind of questions Democratic voters were asking and for which president Bush had no answers. By the time the polls opened, it was Kerry and Dick Gephardt who had to clarify why they supported the war, rather than Dean explaining why he opposed it.

The first three paragraphs are a bit snarky, but the rest of the article is worth a read:

Spirit of the Dean machine By Gary Younge.

Robert Kuttner hits many of the same points on this side of the Atlantic:

Dean demonstrated that there was a real hunger -- and not just among the young -- for a candidate who would speak truth to power. In a sense, he made it safe for the rest of the Democratic field to be a lot tougher on Bush and his rogue foreign policy. If Bush today seems an incumbent with a glass jaw, history should give Howard Dean a lot of credit.

Dean's chance to be a hero By Robert Kuttner

17.02.04

in the news

the chief of newsday's washington bureau notes that "Something changed in Washington last week, and it wasn't the weather." now that the press and the media have taken off their kid gloves I hope they keep the heat on and fight the good fight when it comes to political coverage. the overuse of mixed metaphors is optional.

A Change in Political Climate By Timothy M. Phelps

usa today recounts the numerous details and ommissions from bush's record that suggest he received special treatment in the national guard. for example, he was accepted as a pilot even though he had 2 arrests for college pranks and 4 traffic violations, 2 of which involved accidents.

Why Bush stopped flying remains a mystery By Dave Moniz and Jim Drinkard

I haven't been been following the post super bowl coverage of the uncoverage of janet jackson's nipple, but last week orelia mentioned that it seemed like janet jackson was taking the serious heat, while justin timberlake was getting off with only some finger-wagging and tut-tutting because "boys will be boys." even without having seen any of the coverage, I don't doubt that the reaction would have been very different if a black male rapper had ripped the shirt off of white pop star. this article from the chicago tribune explores the double standard in the media's treatment of janet and justin:

It's an old story: Nasty Janet, Naughty Justin By Heidi Stevens

on tv, but not for long

I resisted buffy the vampire slayer for the full 7 years that it was on tv. then last summer, long after the final episode had reduced sunnydale to a smoking pit in the ground, bill & I let our guard down and got sucked into the hellmouth. it started with a few minutes here and there, watching reruns with our old housemate caroline (not be confused with our current housemate carolyn) while waiting for the pasta water to boil. then it was whole episodes. then it was two episodes every night. when we got back to wisconsin we started with season 1 on dvd, and now we're counting the months until season 6 comes out on dvd. how the mighty have fallen.

I will not, I repeat, will not get sucked into watching angel. even after it reaches the end of its run on primetime, which looks like it will be sooner rather than later. but I liked what joss whedon, creator of buffy and angel, had to say after learning that angel was (unexpectedly) cancelled:

Remember the words of the poet:

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the road less traveled by and they CANCELLED MY FRIKKIN' SHOW. I totally shoulda took the road that had all those people on it. Damn."

meanwhile, liz passes along this appeal:

Quick Postcard Campaign to Save Angel

at a coffeeshop

written in silver magic marker inside the men's room door

you become what you think about all day.
ralph waldo emerson    

that is a very scary thought.

16.02.04

untitled

still haven't decided who I'm voting for in the primary tomorrow. actually, dean, edwards & kerry (candidates listed in alphabetical order) all look good in their own rights, and even better better when compared to bush. dean's record as governor of vermont is impressive, combining fiscal responsibility with real progress on issues that matter, like health care. edwards is the son of a mill worker and spent a good part of his career defending the weak and poor against the rich and powerful. I also appreciate his emphasis on the separate and unequal existence of "two americas," one for the wealthy, the other for the rest of us. kerry has a solid record and isn't afraid to play hardball. he's striking right back after bush ran an online ad accusing kerry of taking money from special interests. and they're all air breathers so it's looking good for the democrats.

a few website additions: some pictures from kites on ice, madison's own "it's 20F and the wind is really blowing so let's go stand outside on the lake all day" winter festival, and a chronological version of my blog entries of my roadtrip to arkansas/kansas, with coverage of an alternative reality accessed by travelling alternate routes, a truck stop on planet obese, fear and loathing in missouri, chez pam, poodles, DWI (driving while insane) and way too many twizzlers. both are linked to from my alt.personae page.

bill has been brushing up on his unix skills now that we're using mac OSX. he foudnd this nifty command line tool that plays music files in the terminal window, qtplay, over at version tracker. we have qtplay set to play random selections from our entire collection of mp3s. it's like living on the set of "name that tune" --- we keep getting up to check what song is playing. I'm surprised at how many things that we recognize, given that we have 54 Gb of mp3s. laura love is playing now, following up on carlos nakai & his echo machine and some weirdly tuned instrumental thing that passes for music in the misty reaches of the internet. bill had to change my default shell from tcsh to bash to get qtplayer working, and he made some aliases in my bash profile so I don't have use the awkward syntax for calling qtplay, I just type "playall." sigh. he's got root. he's a real sudo geek. I'm just a rootless pseudo geek.

last night we went to hear a lecture on and performance of alban berg's violin concerto the memory of an angel by diego bañeulos. the lecture was interesting, with the interpretation focusing on events in berg's personal life, the "secret program" of the concerto, rather than on the life and untimely death of manon gropius, the "open program" of the concerto. the musical analysis, unfortunately, passed through my neural net completely undigested, I hope that roughage turns out to be as good for the brain as it is for the bowels. after the lecture, diego played the concerto with piano (and triangle!) accompaniment. there's a heck of a lot of violin playing in a violin concerto, at least in this one anyway. watching the concerto performed, seeing the sheer effort involved in calling forth that much sound from an inanimate object, made it feel consequential in a way that was absent from the recordings with an orchestra. it almost made me nervous, like watching the olympics: the performance skates on the edge of catastrophe, one mistake and the violinist is doomed.

I've figured out how to watch movies while I workout on the nordictrack at home. but they can only be movies with really predictable plots or ones that I've seen before, because the sound of the machine cancels out some of the dialogue. I've watched baz luhrman's version of romeo & juliet (not to be a spoiler or anything, but it does not have a happy ending. they both die.), franco zefirelli's romeo & juliet (boy meets girl. girl meets boy. they get married. they have sex. they die. what kind of a plot is that?) and west side story (boy meets girl. girl meets boy. they sing. they pretend to get married. the boy dies. the girl threatens to kill herself but doesn't. oh happy day!) if you want something much more cheerful, with a happy ending, watch dark days, a documentary about homeless people living in squalor in the amtrak train tunnels beneath the streets of new york. (make sure to read to the "where are they now?" epilogue on the dvd.) and if you want to be bored beyond endurance, or if you want to be reminded of just how bad an adaptation of a book can be, watch the mists of avalon.

I was going to call this entry "schmata" which I thought was a yiddish word meaning "bits and pieces." turns out it actually means "rag" or "worthless stuff" and is more typically spelled shmatteh. in a fit of cyber-self-esteem I abandoned shmatteh as a possible header. today's entry is titled "untitled."

15.02.04

retreat, hopefully strategic

I've moved my two blog entries in progress, one on the law of unintended consequences and the other on kids these days and the crazy way they talk, to a separate file --- they're too long and not finished enough to continue lurking in this one. I really hope this is a temporary retreat and not a permanent rout, but the blognotes folder of unfinished entries sings the siren song of defeat, "come rest here a while...".

blogus interruptus:
bats need friends!

I started writing this around 9:30 AM at my desk at home. I'm now writing this at espresso royale at 3:15 PM. first my mother called. then while I was talking to my mother jamie discovered a bat in her attic closet, hiding under one of those plastic storage containers. it turned out to be three bats, two living and one dead. michael (former rivenelf and current sweetheart of jamie, conveniently visiting for the weekend) picked them up with a pair of thick gloves and put them into a paper bag. one of the bats started screeching when michael picked it up --- wow! I could hear why jamie was freaked out when she first moved the box and this sound started emanating from the crawlspace. afterwards, andrea & I transferred the bats to a plexiglass container that we use for holding mice.

I called the humane society, closed on weekends, but their message said call the police, who offered to give me the numbers of some pest control services... then I did the smart thing and googled on "madison WI injured bats" and found the website for bat conservation of wisconsin aka batCOW. what a great name/acronym, it's like batman and robin in wisconsin: "quick robin, time to milk the batCOW!

batCOW does bat rescue and rehabilitation as well as bat research and education, and I love their slogan: "bats need friends!" within two hours of my call, ken bowman, founder and president of batCOW, drove out from sun prairie to retrieve our cute little bat friends, who were not babies, as we thought at first, and not particularly little either --- they were adult big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus).

we tried to interest ken in the 7 domestic mice that we have caught at rivendell in the past couple of days (matt caught 3 by hand, andrea caught 1 by hand with hunter's assistance, we got the other 3 in one night with the tin cat trap). mice are just like bats without wings, right? nice try, but ken was much more interested in demonstrating the remarkable anatomical similarities between bats and humans than in starting a mouse farm alongside his bat habitat. he showed us how a bat's wing is actually an arm and a hand with a tough membrane attached. like humans, bats have 32 (itty bitty but quite sharp) teeth, which the bats showed to us while ken held them safely in his gloved hand.

more big brown bat facts: they mate in the fall, but the female keeps the egg and sperm separate until spring, letting conception occur after she's starting tucking in a few insects. aside from mating, males and females don't interact much. the females live in big colonies, the males wander off on their own. they are fully grown at 6 weeks and an adult big brown weighs about 3/4 of an ounce when it's active in the summer. big brown bats eat lots and lots of insects, especially beetles.

yay bats! & yay batCOW! because bats need friends!

now where was I?

right, my blog.

the wisconsin primary is this tuesday, jason wrote a message about it on the blackboard in the kitchen this afternoon. he asked me if I was planning to vote, and I said yes, but I haven't decided who I'm voting for yet. jason had something to say about that --- namely, that he thought it was very irresponsible of me to not know who I was going to vote for two days before the election. I was kind of hoping he was going to tell me who I should vote for.

rivendell has quite a few dean supporters. bill thinks he'll vote for edwards, because he really likes what edwards has to say about his experience as a lawyer (!) personally, I don't much care who the democrats nominate: the only criteria the democratic nominee needs to fulfill to get my vote this year is "air breather." I suppose I might have preference for primates, a lingering trace of specie-ism perhaps, but I wouldn't say no to a rodent or an ungulate. I draw the line at fish.

I do know that I'll be voting YES on the referendum that would allow the ho-chunk indians to expand their dejope bingo & slot machine operation on the outskirts of madison to include other casino games. I don't support gambling and I dislike suburban sprawl, but I'm voting yes because the indian nations have gotten screwed over so many times and in so many ways in their dealings with the us government. they've finally found a legal loophole that works in their favor, one that allows them to turn other people's bad habits into revenue for themselves by a voluntary transfer of income from people who gamble to the ho-chunk nation. fine by me.

I'm glad that the democrats finally seem to be learning a new trick, I don't think I could stand another fours years of watching them roll over and play dead. and the media seems to be shaking off its stupor too, they're finally asking some hard questions about bush that should have been asked a long time ago. contrast time magazine's scathing coverage of bush's service in the national guard:

how well did he serve?

with their gushing over how bush plans to be "a uniter, not a divider" and will be more likely to reach across party lines than gore after the election:

george w. bush: person of the year 2000

the article about bush's service in the national starts out by describing the reputation he acquired while working on the campaign of the republican candidate for senate in alabama in 1972, the time when his national guard service record gets a bit murky:

...a group of older Alabama socialites, who were volunteering their time, gave Bush a nickname because they thought he "looked good on the outside but was full of hot air." They called him the Texas Soufflé.

newsday columnist jimmy breslin places bush's service in a "champagne unit" of the national guard in historical context by recounting exactly what was going on in vietnam the day that george w. bush got an early discharge from his service so he could go to business school at yale:

a dodger not a warrior

am I the only one who finds it abhorrent that the texas national guard has a "champagne unit" for the sons of prominent politicians and well-connected families?

06.02.04

unintended stuff

I started out three days ago intending to write a series of short breezy comments like these:

smell-o-vision

hunter snuck upstairs onto the third floor again and prowled into the room. he headed straight for the table that holds all our tea and tea stuff, the brita water filter, the hot water gizmo, a teapot, lots of mugs, and stuck his head into a box of herbal tea that I had forgotten to close. third ingredient in peace tea made by the algonquin tea company: catnip.

imagine the world from hunter's perspective: when he walks into my room the largest, loudest, brightest thing in the perceptual landscape is an open box of herb tea.

let nothing come between you and the light.     h. d. thoreau

I broke down and bought one of those lights that's supposed to convince your body that you live on an island in the carribean when you are actually stranded in the middle of the dark frozen wisconsin winter. it's very bright and very white. I'm supposed to sit under it for 30 minutes in the morning and then again for 30 minutes in the evening.

is my pineal gland really that gullable? I hope so.

...and this is where my blog entry composed of short breezy comments itself ran afoul of the law of unintended consequences, morphing into a sprawling, still-in-progress contemplation of the law itself. stay tuned...

05.02.04

meet the rivenelves

an unplanned convergence of all 11 people living at rivendell in the same place at the same time is a rare occurrence, but the stars and the pizza (homemade by nathan and andrea) aligned just right for a full constellation at dinner on 02 feb 04.

exclusive footage of the elusive rivenelves:

join us for dinner at rivendell

keep your eyes peeled for the pink tea cozy, I think carolyn's still wearing it.

PS 11:53 AM, 06.02.04

the quicktime movies don't seem to work in every browser, you can try this AVI version instead.