So, Friday, March 3 is my birthday. I’ll be turning 27. If I were a rockstar, I’d be about to die, but I’m a union organizer so I’ll merely get balder and fatter.
I’d like to see my friends, particularly those of you that I have not seen much lately (those of you that I have seen, I’m frankly getting sick of you).
Being an extensive party planner, I’m probably just going to go to Botanica at happy hour and hope to see you at some point.
The Stony Brook Cat Network is a group of students, faculty and staff at SUNY Stony Brook who humanely trap, neuter and vaccinate feral cats on the campus. They try to find homes for the tamer ones, and release the others back into colonies in the woods behind campus, where the cats are fed and live healthier lives than before.
I’m awfully sympathetic to this project since my own duck was a rescue cat, herself (coming from the grounds of an retirement community), and I have my own heart-wrenching run-ins with the stray cats of Kew Gardens.
If you’re in the market for a mouser or lap cat, please take a look at these needy kitties, and if you have your checkbook open, support the SBU Cat Network financially.
I called it a year (and four days) ago. The President of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, has resigned. I’m reminded, at this time, of my friend and advisor Josh Freeman who was cool to the movement to oust our Queens College President, Allen Lee Sessoms, back in 1999. What comes next is not necessarily better, he reasoned.
It’s not hard to imagine this episode being used in the right-wing assault on the Ivory Tower. Those lefty professors are out of control. They have no respect for their university presidents, or any attempt to establish “standards.”
Paul Avrich died last week, aged 74. He was a respected anarchist, and a historian of anarchism (particularly Haymarket and the Sacco and Vanzetti trial) and the Russian Revolution. He was a Professor Emeritus at Queens College. I was fortunate enough to have been a student in the last regular undergraduate course that Dr. Avrich taught at Queens College. It was an invaluable experience to learn about the Russian Revolution from a talented and diligent scholar, who was sympathetic to the utopian goals of the revolution, while critical of the undemocratic nature of the Bolsheviks.
There will be a service tomorrow at 12:45 pm at the Riverside Chapel (Amsterdam and 78th).
