My walk was the walk of a human child, but my heart was a tree.

Zachary backery,
David Rice Atchison
Made (for a day or so)
National head;
"If you should want me," he
Somnambulistically
Murmured, "pro tempore,
I'll be in bed."

Sunday, March 4, 1849, would ordinarily have been the first day of the presidential term of Zachary Taylor, but he would not be sworn in on the Sabbath, so his inauguration was moved to the next day. It was said at the time and often since that David Rice Atchison, who was then president pro tempore of the Senate, was president for that single day, since the term of the previous president (Polk) had clearly ended, yet neither Taylor nor his vice-president (Fillmore, later president) had yet been sworn in.

There is here a confusion between who is acting as president at a particular time, and who is actually president. When Bush delegated responsibility to Cheney on July 21, 2007, while he was under general anaesthetic, Cheney did not therefore become president for a few hours. Until 1967, there was some doubt over whether you became the president even by being the vice-president when the president died, or just acted as the president until the next election; in that year, the 25th Amendment made it explicit that the VP becomes the new president. CBS is therefore incorrect in stating that Biden was president between the moments of his own oath and of Obama's.

(The question of whether Taylor or Atchison was president on that Sunday is easily answered: either you need to have taken the oath in order to be the president or you don't. If you do need to, then Atchison was never president because he never took the oath (and either there was no president or it was still Polk). If you don't, then Taylor was already president and Atchison couldn't have been.)

Photo of Atchinson's gravestone by AmericanCentury21, GFDL.

+Marc Andrus, Bishop of California, on Proposition 8 today:

The people who were born after the Apollo pictures of the Earth seen from space represent the first people who will fully inhabit a new consciousness. Those of us, like myself, who took this amazing picture in as someone already living on the Earth, had to learn this consciousness; for those born after me it is their birthright.

The recognition of the civil rights of lesbian, gay, transgendered and bisexual people is part of the broad shift in consciousness towards which we are moving. Same-sex marriage in California is an important vehicle in the on-going work of making sure all American citizens enjoy the same rights in civil society.

This shift in consciousness, including same-sex marriage, is a move towards the good. I affirm this from a spiritual, religious point of view. As a Christian, I view the trajectory of history as moving us towards global reconciliation and global justice. The Gospels tell us that Jesus said that God's love is pervasive. He used the idea of rain and sunshine, both of which fall on all the world, irrespective of people's prejudices about who is deserving or who is not.

If Proposition 8 passes, which I hope it does not, those of us committed to civil rights for all will simply continue to hope, and continue to work. Perseverance, knowing that God continues to travel with those who are disenfranchised, is a path we know. I trust, however, that the great Californians with whom I live will continue their tradition of forging ahead towards what lies before our whole great country.

http://www.isobamapresident.com/

Even Fox says:

I keep hearing people say, "If you don't vote you have no right to complain."

This is, of course, nonsense. Your right to complain is inalienable, and should be exercised. Myself, I can't vote, being an alien, and yet I complain all the time. Complain away.

Everyone else is going to remind you to vote if you can, I'm sure, so I presumably don't need to. But I do want to tell you that voting is the least you can do. Feeding one bit of information every four years into the political machine is something, but hardly anything. The people at Peterloo died asking for even that basic minimum, and I believe you should honour them not just by voting but by going beyond it.

I've been very impressed by the way Obama's campaign have used slogans like "Yes we can", rather than something easier like "Yes, Obama can". Unfortunately, people seem to be reading "Yes we can" as "Yes we can... elect Barack Obama, who will then take over from us, and we can sit back and let other people run our lives from then on." I was disappointed that when this video says "Did you do enough?", it means "Did you do enough to get Obama elected?" and not "Did you do enough of the sort of thing we're actually here to do, did you feed the hungry, did you help oppressed folk find a voice, did you join a union to let your voice be heard, did you give time and resources to Habitat for Humanity or the ACLU, did you work to bring about social justice?" And I worry people have stopped seeing the election as a means to such things and just think that when their chosen candidate's in power everything will be lovely and they can go back to sleep. However good a person he is-- and I believe he is a good, even a great person-- he's not a cross between King Arthur, Jesus Christ, a Jack Kirby superhero and the mythologised version of Abe Lincoln. If you believe he is, you will be disappointed. One person can make mistakes: put not your trust in princes. But you-- what will you do?

I can't vote, being an alien, even though I live here-- so make sure you go in my place and the place of millions more who will be affected by this election but have no voice in it. But more importantly, find other ways to make a change over the next four years. Be involved. Complain. Make a difference. It's not about them, it's about you.

---

Update: Join us on #potus on irc.netgoth.org.uk.

I don't understand why saying, "Some other country will screw around when Obama is elected in order to see whether he's up to the job" is supposedly equivalent to saying, "he's not up to the job".

McCain mentioned three or four or maybe more times, in almost identical words, about how Obama hadn't voted against his party line in the Senate and he had, and about "bipartisanship" (which means nothing more than that you think the folks who disagree with you are right to some extent). It's almost as though he wants to get across that he's not really a Republican.

"Mrs. Palin needs to be reminded that Jesus was a community organizer, Pontius Pilate was a governor." -- Commenter "MJR" on the New York Times blog

Someone elsewhere was, quite rightly, complaining about the DUP MP who said (search for it on that page) that "there can be no viler act, apart from homosexuality and sodomy, than sexually abusing innocent children". (She now says she didn't mean it, though I'm not sure why she mentioned homosexuality unless she did, and she says she maybe didn't say it, though the Hansard folks say it's right there on the tape.)

Someone else then complained at the first person saying that they couldn't validly criticise because the MP has the right to free speech. Apparently in this person's universe the right to hold any opinion and to speak your mind also includes the right not to be criticised for it.

Grr.

"Nerds for Obama" bumper sticker.

(I would say "if only this had been an official campaign sticker", but actually I think it's better that people make this sort of thing up for themselves.)

h/t baratron

Conservative leader David Cameron warned the government it was going to have to be "extremely tough" on unions to avert a wave of strikes. He said Labour was "so reliant" on unions for funding they felt they had a "stranglehold" over the party and could "dictate terms".

"That this conference is in favour of establishing a distinct Labour group in Parliament, who shall have their own whips, and agree upon their policy, which must embrace a readiness to cooperate with any party which for the time being may be engaged in promoting legislation in the direct interests of labour." -- Keir Hardie's resolution to the 1901 conference of the Trades Union Congress.

Realtime updates of Kucinich's presentation of articles of impeachment (with supporting evidence) to the House of Representatives. It's all over now, a four hour forty minute speech with 35 reasons he's calling for the trial.

[Association of Chief Police Officers] president Ken Jones said ... "We are not out to criminalise people who have a good reason for being in possession of a knife, but frankly what good reasons would a youngster have for even carrying a penknife?"

Seriously.

I do have to wonder whether Mugabe deliberately chose the night Obama claimed victory, which was more than front-page news in almost every other country, to arrest Tsvangirai.

Tanenbaum says: Glenn Greenwald hit the nail on the head yesterday with a column on political reporting. The column was stimulated by the admission of Politico's editor in chief that all he cares about is more traffic to his site. If ignoring real news and running eight stories on John Edwards' haircut gets more traffic, that's the road they travel there. Greenwald suspects that practically all the news organizations work that way. This is why completely irrelevant "stories" dominate the news (like Barack Obama's remark about working people clinging to religion or Hillary Clinton's observation that Bobby Kennedy was killed after a June primary, both of which were off-hand comments made to private groups). In contrast, "unimportant" stories, like a side-by-side comparison of the health plans proposed by Clinton, Obama, and McCain never see the light of day. Maybe this is why the public rates the press lower than local, state, and federal government, business, educational and religious organizations, the supreme court, the medical establishment, and the military (Greenwald has a chart). Case in point: our lead story yesterday (Bob Barr's nomination on the Libertarian ticket, which could flip several states in November), didn't even make the front page of the Washington Post, NY Times, LA Times, USA Today, or the San Francisco Chronicle.

You know how everyone quotes the "If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution" and how people say she never said it? I found this passage in a book called Lesbian Choices by Claudia Card:

Emma Goldman (1869-1940)... became the first U.S. public speaker known to defend homosexual rights. She spoke out in defense of Oscar Wilde when he was imprisoned in England at a time when, she later wrote, "my sole acquaintance with homosexuals was limited to a few women I had met in prison (where I was held because of my political convictions)." She continued publicly defending homosexual rights, despite colleagues' objections, reporting in her autobiography that in their view, "anarchism was already enough misunderstood, and anarchists considered depraved; it was inadvisable to add to the misconceptions by taking up perverted sex-forms," and that her response was, "Censorship from comrades had the same effect on me as police persecution; it made me surer of myself, more determined to plead for every victim, be it one of social wrong or of moral prejudice."

I have had a moderately successful day. I branched metacity for 2.22. (I wish I could write more about work here; it feels silly not writing about the thing I spend most of my time doing.) I made a list of things which need dealing with now we've branched, and as a diversion fixed up some map SVGs for Wikipedia (and another project). Someone came around with bagels.

Fin phoned and told me the SPCA had come by and told them they'd found a cat who looked just like our cat Zarate, who ran away shortly before Kirsten came to visit; Fin and Alex and Rio went to see, but the new cat (let's say her name is Zaratbee) didn't respond to her name or the feeding song, despite being about the right size and shape and colour. Fin thought it was her; Alex didn't. I will go along tomorrow and see.

It snowed a lot. I was told I gave the best hugs. I came home and it snowed a lot and Fin in her awesomeness said "Why not let's go to Los Aztecas?" So we did and the food was even better than it usually is, and almost nobody was there because of the snow. We talked about politics, and came home. I worked on some simple breadboard electronics on the dining-room table with Rio before she went to bed; she wrote up the findings in her lab notebook, which has a picture of Strawberry Shortcake on the front. Did I mention she has dyed her hair grape-soda purple? It really suits her.

I learned, or re-learned, about the __import__ statement in Python for a project I'm doing with the Metacity Journal (more will be revealed later). I asked jdub to move my public planet feed to blogs.gnome.org and I will automagically duplicate all content to LJ and blogo. I have not decided what I will do about comments. I also need to put some time into copying the stylesheets and formatting from marnanel.org to blogs.gnome.org.

Ande: I have started work on the river story. It is progressing nicely.

Things I wanted to share (because they were an interesting read):

• Lolcats who support Barack Obama (yes, I know lolcats are a tired joke: get over it. I still think All Your Smurf is funny.)
• You should probably eat more fruit. But if the nutrition won't sell it, maybe sex will (not remotely worksafe)
• sabotabby explains why she thought black-focussed schools in Toronto were a bad idea and why she changed her mind
• nhw shares his thoughts on the Treaty of Lisbon and why it possibly doesn't matter
• Andy Tanenbaum is running electoral-vote.com again this year, discussing the November US presidential election, with new analysis and discussion every day.
• Language Log provides a supporting example to ++Rowan's comments about religious courts arbitrating on civil matters.
• Template Toolkit (my favourite templating system) is now beginning to be available for Python.

Now I will make more tea and then go and get out of these clothes and sit in bed and fix bugs, which I can do because Alex has fixed wireless networking, so hallelujah, say I.

I have been having my blood drawn. On Tuesday I went into work late to have this happen, only to find after waiting an hour that I had to bring a particular piece of paper, which I hadn't. Today I tried again, and they said after half an hour that they couldn't do the work at that office for insurance reasons, so I would have to walk to another office a mile up the road; I duly set out ("you walked a mile?" asked someone I told this to) and when I got there found nobody in the office except the technician, so there was no wait at all. (She told me that even the new paperwork missed out some of the information needed, but she was good enough to phone the doctor herself rather than send me on an errand to get it.) While I sat there, the news was on, and they had a story about those toys which are being recalled for being poisonous, and also a very long segment about that cop who was shot last week. The reporter said, "The man who has admitted to killing him has said he wants to stand trial in Philly... and he wants a lawyer!" I am not very sure why this was worth stressing: the man is facing a capital murder charge, after all.

I finished off the curried chicken for lunch, and plexq drove me back to work (thank you!). On the way, someone on WHYY was talking about Pat Robertson endorsing Rudy Giuliani, and how strange that was because Giuliani is "pro-abortion". I ranted a bit about how nobody I knew was "pro-abortion", that it was a ridiculous word to use because I didn't know anyone who thought abortion was a good thing, that Giuliani certainly doesn't and that he isn't particularly pro-choice anyway. (Then later today I met someone who was actually saying that abortion was a good thing, so there we go.)

While we're on the subject of politics... okay, let's get political for a moment. My blog, my opinions, not anyone else's, of course. So: I am disgusted that so many organisations supported the amended version of ENDA. (For those outside the US, federal law currently protects people from employment discrimination based on membership of various groups, including sex and race discrimination; this bill as originally written and supported by many queer rights organisations would add sexuality and gender identity to the list, but gender identity was removed in the most recent revision with the approval of some of these organisations.) Can anyone really believe the whining softly-softly rhetoric that people are putting out which says that the day will come when transsexuals will get a bill devoted just to them? Is anyone actually noticing that the people asking transpeople to wait aren't the ones doing the waiting? I think it is yet another sign that HRC and friends believe there are first and second-class queers, and that "united we stand" has no place in their politics. For this treachery they have permanently lost my support.

Oh, I was going to post about code, but this is long enough. I will post about code after I've read Rio her bedtime story. One thing, though, to all my readers on the east coast of Great Britain: please take care, take your passport and some money upstairs with you tonight, and a battery radio, and tomorrow don't attempt to ford anything you can't see the bottom of. Please be safe.

I just seriously saw some fool online claiming that the fact that there are dozens of communities of people who will help you use free software, giving up their spare time for free, is evidence that non-free software is easier to use-- because nobody needs that kind of help getting Microsoft programs working. I think I just heard the software version of the "why can't straight people have pride parades? -- or "why isn't there a white history month", and so on and so on-- not that software freedom is an identical issue to racism or gay rights, but that people in the dominant group call it special and unusual when the others do something, blind to the fact that they're so default they can and do do it every day themselves without realising.

I've been closing quite a few bugs recently. My lgo page has a list. The ones I'm happiest about are fixing two problems about RTL languages like Arabic, Hebrew and Urdu: 438944: mixed LTR/RTL titles were printed backwards, and 433400: the window menus looked quite awful in Arabic. (One problem was some code that was copy-and-pasted back in September '02, along with a bug that was fixed in the original two months later. Let this be a lesson to us all.) I would link to these, but bgo is down.

Speaking of bgo: it seems that Trac, and possibly also KDE's bugzilla, has a feature where you can write "ref #123" in a svn commit message and have that automatically added as a comment (with a link back to the changeset), or more usefully "closes #123" and have it append that comment and mark the bug as FIXED. I would like to implement this on bgo; any objections?

I'm very much enjoying my new job, and it's wonderful to have a theoretical 30-minute (and even in practice 55-minute) commute, down from a little over two hours. The people are friendly and the work's an interesting challenge. I think when I get paid I'd like to buy you dinner, 5 and Alex, and Amy and John if you're around.

(Crossposted to *FX MARNANEL because of subject matter. Not planning to make a habit of doing so.)

ME: (*carefully pours out cup of coffee over sink so it doesn't spill*)
RIO: That was clever.
ME: That's why they call me Professor McSmartypants.
RIO: No, they don't.
ME: Well, no, they don't.
RIO: You couldn't be a professor: you don't have a doctorate.
ME: Not yet, perhaps. And anyway, neither do you.
RIO: Daddy! When did you ever hear of someone under ten having a doctorate?

Yesterday we got a snow day, and so did Riordon. I stayed home and shovelled the pavement a lot. It was good to have another day to spend with Fin and Rio. One of Rio's friends came over and they watched Mirrormask together.

I am planning to put my current work queue up somewhere so if people say "When will this bug be looked at?" I can point them at the list.

Here is a ghazal I'm working on.

Here deep in the city it is always night.
As I walk each street it is always night.

The men in their mansions drink their delight.
For those in the streets it is always night.

Those in the doorways step out to fight.
They slip to where it is always night.

Each plays a game to increase his might.
Each keeps his brother where it is always night.

We laugh, and lie about the lands of light.
I still light candles where it is always night.

I am still alive. I am very busy. I hope things calm down again a bit soon. i18n work is taking up most of my time and all my coping levels. They did send us chocolates shaped like little planet Earths, though.

Despite all this, I've actually had a moment or two of getting to hack on Metacity again, and not just the compositor. Company found a bug which is just an ordinary Metacity bug, and I feel I'm back in my depth :) Debugging the compositor does sometimes feel a bit like the low points of postgraduate research, when I felt like I had no idea what I was doing and little idea even how to find it out. I would like to learn how to become a better researcher in the future, even if I never go back into research as such. (Actually, at least in the UK, you can take short-ish courses just to learn how to be a researcher, which is something I'm sure would be useful to me.)

It was very good to go and see Amy and John the other weekend. We watched Children of Men, which is a good film, but very stressful. I was shaking most of the way through it.

I would like to thank Nokia and the maemo people for the offer of a heavy discount on a nifty PDA thingy. I am not generally a gadgety sort of person, but it looks very cool and it was nice to be offered it. :)

The local free paper ran a headline the other day at the top of the front page: "CHAVEZ TO U.S.: GO HOME, GRINGOS!" I am pondering how the placement of this story, and its decontextualised presentation of a rejection of Washington's involvement in the Venezuelan economy as a personal insult to American people, is tied up with the editors' or owners' dislike of Chávez, and how much that has to do with his rejection of globalisation or his nationalisation programme rather than things like his authoritarianism. It's particularly interesting because this is a town where perhaps people might like Chávez more because he gives Philly people cheap oil, so there's a popularity battle to be won as well.

It was -13°C this morning, -21°C with windchill. Probably colder at 6am when I left the house. I am wrapped up warm.

GNU Emacs releases have very large major numbers (the current release is 21.4). The story is that early versions of GNU Emacs were numbered 1.x.y. Soon the maintainers realised that the 1 was approximately permanent, so they dropped it and called them x.y instead. Yesterday I was pondering over what would happen if we did the same with the GNOME project. Would it make all the people baying for a GNOME 3 happy if we called GNOME 2.18 "GNOME 18", at least externally?