Observations from the Coffee Shop 5.10

I tend save way too many links to articles I want to read later, sometimes I do read them and sometimes they just clutter Chrome until I delete them. The coffee shop is where I do most of my catching up so for the hell of it here is a selection from this week.

There was an article in New York Magazine about NYU Abu Dhabi, a satellite campus that opened in 2008. Their website says it was built because of "a common belief in the value of a liberal arts education" which isn't exactly something that comes to mind when I think of Middle Eastern states. It might have more to do with the $50 million NYU Chancellor Sexton pried from the UAE, a major reason Sexton is known as the Emir of NYU at it's New York City campus. What intrigues me is the new campus they are building on Saadiyat Island, a satellite of a satellite if you will, which is scheduled to open in 2014 and will be located next to the Louvre and Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi of course.

Last Sunday the Daily Mail ran a Piers Morgan interview with Lindsay Lohan. Normally I wouldn't have cared at all but the headline caught my eye so I saved it and ended up reading it. When I finished I quite literally pitied Lohan because the girl has absolutely no clue. In it she says she only did cocaine ‘four or five’ times, that rehab is a joke, and that she doesn't consider herself a heavy drinker. The interview than ran with copies of her six mugshots including the two for DUI. Morgan notes that the interview was done a few weeks before Lohan was scheduled to begin a new court ordered stay in rehab which will be at least her fifth visit in the past six years. Lohan also takes Adderall which, in my un-professional opinion, explains so much..

Also last Sunday The New York Times ran a story on the U.S. Supreme Court and how the Roberts' court could be remembered more for its pro-business decisions than upcoming social ones. It mentions a report in The Minnesota Law Review which ranked all the 36 SCOTUS justices since 1946 for their pro-business votes and found five of the current court's were in the top ten. It has all been very hush hush so you may not have noticed.

Along the same lines comes a column from The Huffington Post about warehouse workers who are suing Amazon over unpaid time, up to an hour, that they spend in security checkpoint lines at the end of their shifts. I love Amazon but maybe if they paid their workers a little bit more they wouldn't have to stop and frisk them on the way out. Amazon reported profits of $621 million in 2011, they reported an actual loss in 2012 but that was due to investing in new product lines.

So you see sometimes my thinking goes off in weirdly differing tangents. I didn't even mention that the Pulse Art Fair began yesterday or that the Frieze begins today.

Observations from the Gallery 11.26

I love my Kindle even though I'm using it for something I hadn't really planned on using it for, reading. I have a button attached to Google Chrome that with a click will send any article I can read online to my Kindle, "Send To Kindle for Chrome". With the HD no glare screen it's much better to read on than my laptop and oh so much easier on the eyes than phone reading. Totally worth the investment and worth waiting for the HD models to arrive.

The following paragraph is just a minor geek vent. Somebody recently accused me of setting my tumblrs to private. For the record no I haven't made them private and no it's not something I ever really considered. What would be the sense of having them if I didn't want anybody to see them? Also the links to are right there on this blog's sidebar so I ask again, what would be the sense of making them private? Honestly if this blog got as many hits as my tumblrs I would be a rich girl. But enough about that.

Something else I have found so very interesting is how many people have discovered VPN (virtual private network) software since the whole Petraeus email mess. Suddenly everybody wants to be anonymous and they don't think other people realize that their emails aren't originating in Russia. To be fair I should say that I have been using one program or another for years but it's funny seeing the pizza delivery guy using one. I'm thinking maybe I should just give up art and go into the security business or maybe, even better, art security.

This short geek post is actually a bit of history in the making. This is my first blog post written and posted entirely by Kindle. Technology is a wonderful thing, until it's not.

Observations 10.15

Full page ads are nothing special in a Sunday paper and this time of year full page political ads aren't all that unusual. Yesterday's
Seattle Times included a full page ad that was both political and special. Washington is one of the four states that next month will be voting on marriage equality laws of one form or another. The state's Referendum 74 asks people to either approve or reject Washington's law legalizing same sex marriage. The enactment of the law, which was passed earlier this year, is on hold pending next month’s vote.

Yesterday's ad, payed for by Washington United For Marriage, urges voters to approve R-74 which would enact the law and legalize same sex marriage in the state. The ad is signed by a whose who of companies including Amazon, Expedia, Google, Microsoft, Nike, Nordstrum, REI, Starbucks, and T-Mobile. In part it says;

“We don’t want our employees, our customers or our friends and neighbors who are gay or lesbian to have to produce a legal document just to comfort a loved on in the hospital or to lose a partner of decades and be told that in the eyes of the government, they are considered a stranger. We support allowing all loving, committed couples the freedom to marry because it means every employee is treated fairly, it helps our competitive business advantage and is good for our state’s economy.”

If you want you can read the full ad with signatures here and and see a complete list of Washington United for Marriage coalition partners here. If you do read the ad you might notice that it is signed by VP David Zapolsky for Amazon and not Jeff Bezos. I have no idea why but I wanted to note that Amazon founder Bezos and his wife MacKenzie are the campaigns largest contributors having donated $2.5 million so far.

Meanwhile in Maryland, another of the four states, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg quietly donated $250,000 to the marriage equality campaign there. It is the largest individual contribution the campaign in Maryland has received. "I do not believe that government has any business telling one class of couples that they cannot marry," Bloomberg wrote in an e-mail. Earlier in the year Bloomberg donated the same amount to Planned Parenthood.

The election is now 21 days away.

10/16 update - From The Washington Post; "The lead group seeking to uphold Maryland’s same-sex marriage law on Monday announced it had received a $250,000 contribution from Paul Singer, a prominent New York-based hedge fund manager — and a major donor to Republican candidates. The contribution is among the largest that has been made to Marylanders for Marriage Equality...."