Happy May Day!

On May 1, 1896, labor leaders in Chicago organized a general strike to advance the cause of the eight-hour work day. Three days later the Haymarket Square Riots brought xenophobia, anti-unionism, brute authority, and sham justice to quell the protests. Thank god things have changed, eh?

Now, most of the other industrialized nations recognize May Day as International Workers' Day in direct response to the Haymarket events. We Americans, on the other hand, go to work. But not just on May Day: shift workers are more frequently being asked to work 12-hour swing shifts, electronics have made vacation days off-site work days, and I sit here typing this at the office on a Saturday after five hours of legitimate work.

We do, of course, have our own labor day, in September; President Grover Cleveland declared Labor Day a national holiday to placate irate workers after federal troops he ordered to break up the Pullman Strike outside Chicago fired on protestors, killing two, in August 1894. After all, 1894 was an election year.

And at least things have changed for poor immigrant workers, right? I mean, it's not like we're pushing Germans to work long shifts in dangerous jobs like meatpacking anymore. It's not like we force the Irish to work in back-breaking, squalid conditions nowadays, threatening them with prison if they complain. In this golden era of labor, we not only welcome foreign workers into our workspaces, we invite them into our homes! With vacuum cleaners! We enjoy their restaurants! As long as the servers at least can speak English. I mean, come on. It's just rude not to.

AAaaannnyway. Monday. Labor Day. Chicago's having some awesome super mega rallies, which you can find out all about at the Chicago Indymedia site. There's a march for immigrant workers' rights at 10:00 a.m., or possibly noon, they're not real consistent about that. Then at 4:30 there's a May Day celebration hosted by the labor movement at the Haymarket Square site.

In Champaign, the GEO is holding a rally for health care for graduate assistants on the quad at noon.

But even if you're not a rally-going type of person, or particularly interested in labor issues, celebrate May Day. Remember its essential premise: honest work for honest pay. Only work eight hours today. Heck, go nuts--stick to a forty-hour week this whole week. Remember the rally cry of a hundred years ago: Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will. Sounds reasonable to me.

And if you can't do that, avoid buying crap on Monday, so you aren't forcing someone else into service on the workers' holiday. And yes, I know they'd have to be at work anyway. Just do it.


***

[A brief history of the Haymarket Square Riot, in case you're interested. Find out more here and here.]

On May 1, 1896, labor leaders organized a general strike to protest for the eight-hour work day. Two days later, workers gathered near the McCormack Reaper plant in Chicago to rally; police intervened, killing two workers and injuring several others. The next day laborers gathered at Haymarket Square, then a bustling commercial corner. Peaceable rallies and speakers occupied much of the event; in the evening, police moved in to break up the crowds. Someone lobbed a bomb at the cops, killing one immediately. Cops opened fire on the crowds. Eleven people were killed, and eventually, in a trial that is yet today considered a gross miscarriage of justice, eight activists--six of them foreign-born, some not even present at the time the bomb was thrown--were arrested. Despite the fact that none could be identified or even tied to the bomber, seven were condemned to execution and the seventh sentenced to 15 years in prison. Four were hanged, one committed suicide, and the other two were eventually pardoned.

Transitions are for wimps

Miscellaneous notes:

1. Did you know Queen Elizabeth turned 80 last week? She looks pretty good for 80. I wonder what kind of moisturizer the queen uses? Probably something made by peasants. Or made out of peasants.

2. Friday night turned out to be a bit more drinky than I'd anticipated, due to the weight of group emotional weirdness drowned in group consumption of beer. I ended up in what was doubtlessly a rambling, repetitive conversation with Ed K., downstate Illinois' once-only full time radio meteorologist, who asked "Are you SURE you're not a meteorologist?" Hee! No, Ed! I'm just drunk!

3. Saturday I drove to Terre Haute, Indiana, and attempted for a second time to visit the home of Eugene Debs, labor leader and socialist. I didn't get inside, though. I forgot that Indiana, in a fit of modernity last year, decided that this would be the year they'd abandon their quirky resistance to the wackiness of this "Daylight Savings Time," as the kids call it, so I was an hour later than I thought. I meant to blame that for my failure to actually go inside Debs's house, but really, once I got there I just couldn't figure out what I thought I was going to DO there. "Hello! Just thought I'd take a peek at a dead socialist's kitchen. Thanks!" So I got ice cream instead.

4. I also went hiking in Kennekuk Cove County Park and Turkey Run. Kennekuk was weird--I was going on this trail that went to a really, really, really old cemetery, and periodically alongside the trail there'd just be an illegible marble headstone. Something was hopping all along the trail. It sounded like frogs hopping, but it's not wet enough for that, and I couldn't find any toads. It's too early for grasshoppers. I reckoned it might be the long-dead of rural Vermillion County getting pissed off that I was hiking through their final resting place, or possibly pissed off at being dead and consigned for all eternity to rural Vermillion County. Since nobody knew where to look for my body if rural Vermillions, dead or alive, decided to wreak havoc with my person, I turned around and hightailed it out of there.
The best part though was the cemetery sign by the road, an old wooden branded sign reading "Maysville Cemetery." Directly below that, a gleaming yellow diamond proclaiming "Dead End." Indeed.

5. I had a total Mrs. Robinson moment at a gas station in Veedersburg. The kid who worked ther strutted out to the island, and gave me a look back over his shoulder. Why hello, young man! I like the way you refill that washer fluid! He winked at me, I smirked back, and drove away laughing at the absurdity of it. Oh, my illicit teenage Indiana gas station lover! We were never meant to be. Sometimes it's good to be a stranger in town.

6. I walked all over the place on Sunday, then loaded up some goods and stopped by Amalier's house, which was very cozy and homey in a very comforting way. She loaded me up with a yummy sandwich and juice box dinner. Perfect!

7. We won our first softball game of the season 23-12. I didn't contribute much to that, I must say.

8. I just found out through a guy on my softball team that the editor of my high school yearbook (before me) is president of the local Scrabble club. Although I have never played Scrabble myself, it seems somehow unavoidably dorky that in the Venn diagram of my spheres of acquaintance, the overlapping wedge is situated in a coffee shop Scrabble society.

That's all I got. Happy Monday! Er, Tuesday!

Shout out from S-A-Doublelizzy

Hey! Because she never posts anything herself, I'm posting on her behalf to answer the question that keeps us all awake at night:

What Would S-A-Dub Listen To?

Well, here it is, the latest in hip from the the musical missus of bay. You must hear:

* Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

* The entire lineup of Morr Music,
including Electric President, Ms. John Soda, and B. Fleischman

* and you should stop reading this, drop on over to amazon, and immediately purchase New Order's International.

The only logical conclusion being that you will then proceed to shake your booty, groove thang, or moneymaker. That part is totally your call.

S: Feel free to post your own response. Otherwise, next time I'll feel tempted to make shit up.

Sneaky Snakes go dancing

Southern Illinois has snakes. Lots of snakes. When it gets warm in the spring, the snakes wake up from their winter slumbers, and wiggle on over to the rivers and creeks to find some food and begin the warm-weather snaking season, and sometimes they cross roads to do it. Down by my brother's house, there are so many of these jaywalking--jay-slithering?--critters that they actually close the roads. His report? Oh, the snakes. They're in transit. (I post this without his permission from an email he sent to our mom, who knows somebody who wanted to go camping down there.)


***
Well, pretty much all the snakes are out right now. They still haven't been real active, but with these warm days I'm sure that's changed. We've got copperheads, cottonmouths (water moccasins), and timber rattlers that are all poisonous, especially in the southern part of the Shawnee, and a whole lot of nonpoisonous ones. Further north they have the pygmy rattlesnake, or massasauga. It's so small it probably wouldn't hurt you anyway, and they are very rare. We do have one road closed to vehicles for the snake migration, but everything else is open.They will for the most part avoid humans, but I would not trust cottonmouths too much, they're more ornery. They are usually in the wetter areas like swamps. I actually almost grabbed a copperhead about a month ago. I was climbing up a really steep hill, and occasionally using my hands to help pull myself up. I stopped after one such step, and started to step up again - and stopped, since I noticed a copperhead coiled up right in front of my knee. It was so cold, it didn't even flick its tongue or try to get away. It was probably just coming out of hibernation, had probably come out to get some sun, but it was getting darker and cooler as the rain was coming and I think it got too cold to move. It blended in perfectly with the leaves.
***

Hmmm. Just another walk in the park, I guess. A walk in the happy, sunny, copperhead-and-rattlesnake-infested-swamp park.

Repent, or ye shall be tornadoed!

For the second time in two weeks, I was putting gas in my car when the tornado sirens went off.

This time I had the weather radio AND the car radio, and while the sky looked pretty dark off to the west, I didn't see any reason to get all frantic about it. The National Weather Service didn't seem to have issued a warning. So I drove on across town to my grandmother's, passing all these screaming wailing sirens, and then went way out to he back of the back yard to watch the clouds rolling in. The eastern sky was clear blue and puffy clouds and sunshine. The western sky was dark, and pinkish and purplish and not so much ominous as very, very cool-looking, like a very adept and brooding fingerpainting. My dad and uncle came to join me, and when the lightning started crashing all around us I crouched down to minimize my contact with the ground, and to let the lightning strike them first. We stood there and watched, debating whether or not the wall of clouds was rotating or not, when one little arm of clouds reached around itself, forming a nice whirling little circle. My first funnel cloud! Hooray!

Then the lightning struck a bit too close, and the funnel cloud was whirling a little too directly in front of us, and the house was a little too far away, so we beat a path to the door right as the rain started. Grandma was getting the food on the table and we all sat in her nice windowy sun room and ate Easter dinner while the hail bounced off the glass and the weather radio squawked out warnings. No plague of frogs, though, so I think it was just a natural meteorological event and not a Holy Message.

The Illinois Department of Revenue Would Like to Know:

Happy tax day! I think the state form must be different this year.
Social security number: right.
Attach your label: gotcha.
Check filing status: okay...
Check if you were a member of a professional athletic team during 2005.

Does anybody else think that's weird? Right between filing status and federal adjusted gross income? Are they just curious? What counts as an athletic team? Do pro bowlers count? Pro poker players? What if you're, like, base coach? Or the team sport therapist? Does that count?

Tornadozzzzzzzz....

I love the stormy weather, but man, I gotta get some sleep. Between the fact that it's suddenly, and literally, 84 degrees in my apartment, and the storms that keep rolling in in the middle of the night and getting me all worked up with the warnings and the Doppler and the Igor robot voice reading off county names, I'm very excitable but very tired.
I can't blame the weather entirely, though. I've been reading this book of pieces mostly written by people on death row and anti-death-penalty advocates for work. It's getting to me. That, and all the 9-11 stuff in the news lately. When I start to fall to sleep, in that sort of half-in, half-out, dozy period, I start having rather gruesome dreams about torture and brutality, and I make myself wake up and think about something else. Rinse, repeat. It's wearying. I need to think of some nice, happy, relaxing topics to focus on as I go to sleep. Things like...uh...tulips. And the song "Sneaky Snake." And...I'm open to suggestions.

On to brighter things! Our first softball game is next week. It's a scrimmage against our pitcher's church team. Three people so far have expressed their eager anticipation of the trash-talking that will surely issue from, uh, me. That would include the actual pitcher, who arranged things with his church team.
"Steve!" I said. "It's a CHURCH team! Two days after Easter!"
"They need to be toughened up for the season," he wrote back.
Why? Are they playing the Romans?


I was just sitting here in my office typing this when the weather radio alert went off. Hooray! It does work! Tornado watch #185, for all counties, until midnight. Got it. Thanks, NOAA All-Alerts Weather Radio!