Pow Wow

I've just returned from my first ever pow wow, the 17th annual Bay Mills Honoring Our Veterans Pow Wow to be specific. My photos are here. For those unaware, a pow wow is basically a drum and dance competition within the community -- and sometimes competitors come from neighboring reservations and tribes. The dancers are judged both on their skills as a dancer and on their regalia, most of which was breathtaking. I can't even begin to imagine the number of hours spent on the bead work alone!

We showed up for the start on Friday and I was a little let down by the casualness of what I saw. But it turns out, Friday was just the hand drum competition and the just-for-fun two-step "competition." The Grand Entry (which I took pictures of before I learned it was sacred -- they've been deleted) didn't take place until Saturday afternoon. The remainder of Saturday and Sunday was filled with impressive competition dancing and intertribals.

Dancers are categorized by gender, age group (juniors, teens, adult, and golden agers), and style of dance. Men's dancing, which is for the most part flashier than women's dancing, has three styles: traditional, grass, and fancy. Fancy, as the name suggests, is the most intricate of the three, both in dance steps and regalia, and seemed to be the crowd favorite. By comparison, women's traditional is much more controlled -- the movement is minimal and the focus is on positioning. Each little movement has deep healing significance. Women's jingle, as it sounds, is the noisiest of the women's dances. The regalia for these dances are covered in little metal cones which "jingle" as they dance. However, I preferred women's fancy shawl dancing, which has the most elaborate quilting of any of the women's costumes.

In between the competition dance rounds were the intertribal dances. During these dances, which were open to anyone, each of the five drum groups were judged. The singing drum groups consist of around six men who all beat the same drum while singing. The students in my class told me that women are not allowed to beat the main drum, though they can play the hand drums and sing. Indeed, two of the five groups had a woman singer who stood behind the drummer and joined in the choruses -- and they were the groups who took first and second in the competition.

Beyond the competition part of the pow wow were vendors selling their wares and food -- mmm, fry bread and wild rice soup. The whole thing had an air of any other small town celebration that I've been to. Little kids ran around, high school students hung in the back seeming too cool for it all (but not too cool to skip it entirely), and parents and grandparents beamed with pride when it came their kid's turn to compete. With the exception of the rainstorm that blew threw in the middle of Saturday, the weather was gorgeous. It was a great way to spend a weekend.

Hello from the Sault (Soo)

As of Sunday evening, I am in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where I will be teaching Ojibwe students some computer science on the Bay Mills Reservation. More specifically, we are teaching them how to use Drupal to build a digital content management system to be the base for a virtual museum of their tribe's history.

And while I'm doing that during the day, in the evening I am staying in an apartment at Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste Marie, MI. (Not to be confused with Sault Ste Marie, Ontario across the lake.) This evening I took a little walk at sunset down by the water and brought my camera. Based on maps, I thought I could just go from the backyard of my apartment and walk straight over to the water... but then I realized that there is a border crossing in the way. I didn't think they'd smile too kindly on me hopping a fence just to cut through, especially since I left all of my forms of ID inside. Thus, I took a more roundabout way to the water instead.

The photos I took are here. Unfortunately, while I went to a lighthouse this afternoon, I didn't have my camera with me. I'll try not to make that mistake again...

Haikus

These are for Sarah,
Who is up in Alaska,
And asked me to blog.

We have no snow here,
In fact, it is quite nice out,
Unlike at Toolik.

The Detroit Tigers
massacred Minnesota
in Saturday's game.

But I was away
watching Indiana Jones
under the night sky

with Dave and Martine
at the old Starlite Drive-In
in Cincinnati.

Now Kansas City
is where the Twins are playing.
Easy victories.

Red Sox road trip slump.
Can Manny hit five-hundred?
Not in Seattle...

Maybe Baltimore
is where the Sox can catch up
to the Devil Rays.

Here Come the Grooms...

Big news out of California... with some timely personal significance for my friends Brad and Russ who have been engaged for about a year AND are moving to California this summer so Brad can start a professorship at USC. Hurray Brad and Russ! Now they need to work on having kids so that we can call them Brussell Sprouts... and yes, they're aware that I've been saving that pun for awhile now. The most intriguing part of the NY Times article was the following:

"The court left open the possibility that the Legislature could use a term other than 'marriage' to denote state-sanctioned unions so long as that term was used across the board -- for both opposite-sex and same-sex couples."

I've been saying for years that the answer is to just get rid of the term marriage in the legal system and make all domestic partnerships, gay or straight, civil unions. I realize this might not play well in the bible belt, but they got over interracial marriages (well, most of them did).

How to Make an American Quilt

Inspired by vague recollections of a similar quilt owned by tfazio, lately I've been working on creating my own T-shirt quilt. Today I finished the front side -- which is about 5'x7'.

Now I just need to create the back (same thing, but with the backs of the shirts) and sew them together... which means I'm less than halfway to being finished. If I ever make another quilt, I'm buying myself a rotary cutter. Cutting all those squares and strips with scissors is really tedious. If you want to see more pictures, they're here.

Red Sox 5, Tigers 1

It took all the way to May to get me to the ballpark this year -- the latest for a first game since 2004, when I waited until June. I had some nebulous plans to attend the Twins-Tigers series back in April, but a family emergency had me, coincidentally, back in Minnesota for that week. And thus, my inaugural ballgame of the year was tonight's Red Sox-Tigers game at Comerica Park.

And it was a good game for a Sox fan. Boston scored three runs in the 2nd inning and never looked back, winning 5-1. Looking at the starting pitchers, Beckett and Verlander, I thought it might be a pitcher's duel, but then I talked to a pair of guys sitting next to me and it turns out that Verlander hasn't been the no-hitter throwing Verlander of last year. So instead, the game itself was pretty non-exciting. My observation of the evening (which I'm sure I've made before) is that if the home team is never really in contention, the crowd is pretty blah leading to a dull atmosphere at the ballpark.

However, I did have some amusing snippets of conversation with the two guys sitting next to me. For starters, we bought our tickets from the same scalper official ticket booth, and they actually bargained the guy down $10 cheaper than I paid. Note to self -- never accept the first offer, even if it is cheaper than face value. Second, being a Red Sox fan pretty much sets you up to be hated outside of Fenway Park. (And arguably with good reason, but I'll not go there.) However, declaring that your first allegiance is to another Central Division team actually redeems you quite a bit. And being able to remember the name Archibald "Moonlight" Graham will redeem you even further.

Free Ice Cream

Public service announcement by way of one Miss Sheeva Azma...

It is free cone day at Ben & Jerry's today. Find your local scoop shop and go... thank me later.

I probably don't hate you

A random thought I just had coming from the transoms of my sleep deprived mind (hurray conference deadlines)...

In an exchange of not-really-witty e-mails, a friend wrote something that he knew would annoy me. (If you're curious, one of my pet peeves is the misspelling "prolly" -- "probably" has three syllables! You can't just remove the middle one and expect it to be okay!) In response, I simply wrote to him, "I hate you."

But of course, I don't really hate him... in fact, I hate very few people, if any at all. (Although I can certainly think of a number of people I dislike.) After I sent the e-mail I then wondered: if there was someone I actually hated, is there any situation in which I would send them e-mail that simply said "I hate you" with no further explanation?

I don't think there is. While the concept of sending such a terse line to certain politicians is amusing to think about, if I truly hated someone and wanted them to know it, I would also want to expound upon why. So if in the future you receive such an e-mail from me, rest assured that I don't mean it.

But, damn it, it's P-R-O-B-A-B-L-Y.

On This Most Solemn of Days

First things first, I got a new phone number: 952-431-9500

Things I've noted throughout the day...

• Virgle -- Easily the most entertaining April Fools joke
• Click on any video on You Tube's homepage
• Custom Time for Gmail
• Open up a google word document and then go to File, and look at the line under "New Document." (Thanks, Lou, for the heads up.)
• More from Google
• Livejournal announces a new advisory board member
• The microwave and toaster oven in our downstairs kitchen were mysteriously upside down today... as were all of the glasses, which were also filled with water. Gee, wonder who did that...
• My housemate, who has a tendency to forward every crime alert notification she receives, forwarded an e-mail that appeared to be a crime alert notifying us of jaywalkers on our street. The suspect descriptions seemed oddly similar to certain roommates of mine. And upon further inspection, the x-sender was not the same housemate as the from address.

I'll add more as I discover them... although I should note that I'm officially bored with the RickRolling... ha, ha, we get it. Find a new joke.

The Event That Will Live in Infamy

As if a musical wasn't enough, we've now been contacted by a budding author about the prospect of writing a novel based on the idea of the Time Traveler's Convention. It amazes me how, three years later, people are still interested in what was originally just a kooky party idea.

I expect Hollywood next. And I want Ellen Page to play me.