A pleasant (if unproductive) day.

Woke up late after spending way too much time online last night researching stuff no sane fag ever would.

My mother's freind was in town for a conference and took me out to eat at my favourite Vietnamese restaurant, which I don't get to visit near often enough. The girl who served us was wearing a KUNM t-shirt, and I startled her by practically yelling out "KUNM!" when I saw her. She probably thought I was hitting on her or something. I wasn't, though, it's just you either have to pledge to or volunteer at the station to get one of the shirts, so I knew she was *somebody*. As she overheard the conversation, in time, she got comfortable enough to chime into it. She volunteers with the Youth Radio collective that does a show each Sunday at 7 PM. She was enthusiastic, but expressed frustration at having been asked about damaged equipment.

I don't know who does it, but it's a problem -- some damn fool ripping out the soundproof foam in Studio C, drawing smileyfaces on the microphone windguards, manhandling turntables and the like. Someone has cleverly attached price tags to various key pieces of equipment in the control room to raise awareness at what the physical equipment actually *costs* the station. I guess that kinda goes with being a public resource -- there is no guarantee whoever's using the equipment at all hours of the day and night will give it the respect that it deserves. And Studio C has someone in it, doing something, almost 24 hours a day.

That was my outing for the day -- I needed it -- I hadn't left the house in something like 36 hours, and am starting to live like a hermit.

Tomorrow, if I'm awake, which I definitely hope to be, KUNM is sponsoring a screening of "Inconvenient Truth" at Emmanuel Presbyterian Church at noon, and hosting a panel discussion afterwards on global warming. I don't know, but suspect, this is the upshot of Danny's frustration at having attended a "Move On" screening back in December when he wound up not being able to get any usable sound from the echo chamber of people who showed up to that. The News Department did a whole slew of stories this last week about global warming.

I like that attitude: bad meeting? Fine, we'll just hold one that's bigger *and* better.

I'm no big fan of Al Gore, you know -- here's this guy who talks all purty about global warming, and still (I think) invests in Occidental Petroleum. That's what the protest was about on 14 August, 2000 that wound up with police charging the crowd on horses and "sweeping" Pershing Square with hundreds of bicycles. That investment was why he couldn't effectively paint Bush as "the oil candidate", and a big part of why he lost the election (even though he actually won it, or something). But what the heck. It's a real issue, and I won't be going to hear him blather on, but to see who else locally shows up and what kind of dialogue happens on the issue. I'm going for the message, not the messenger.