Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

Marie V. Scholes, 1916-2008

reposted from the Columbia Missourian

COLUMBIA — Marie V. Scholes, a Columbia resident for 60 years, loved reading and conversation about politics and history.

“She seemed to know everything and was extremely intelligent,” said her niece, Diane Lucas. “You could have a good conversation on anything with her even if you didn’t agree. We agreed to disagree on politics.”

When Mrs. Scholes wasn’t talking about history and politics, she was reading about it.

“She read everything,” Lucas said. “Her house was packed with history, politics and mystery books.”

She also enjoyed playing bridge and working crossword puzzles.

“She was just neat, she knew everything and was never judgemental,” Lucas said. “She was the best aunt there could be.”

Mrs. Scholes died Wednesday, April 16, 2008, at The Bluffs. She was 91.

She was born Nov. 20, 1916, in Norway, Mich., to Max and Mary Vielmetti. She attended the University of Michigan where she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi honorary societies and received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

She married Walter V. Scholes, who was a member of the MU history department, in 1941. Mrs. Scholes co-authored a book with her husband in 1970, “The Foreign Policies of the Taft Administration.”

“She and her husband spent many summers in London among other places,” Lucas said.

She is survived by five nieces and nephews, 10 great-nieces and great-nephews and eight great-great-nieces and great-great-nephews.

Her husband, one sister and five brothers preceded her in death.

-- HANNAH ZIMMERMAN

yarns made in Michigan

An unnamed reader of this blog searched for the phrase "yarns made in Michigan" and found some page here that wasn't the best answer for that query; let's fix that.

Spun and dyed in Michigan:

Stonehedge Farm and Fiber Mill in East Jordan, MI makes and sells the Shepherd's Wool line of yarns,

The three-ply yarn is spun to 1000 yards per pound, which in 4-ounce skeins is 250 yards per skein. It knits like any commercial worsted weight yarn, about 5 stitches to the inch on size 6-8 needles. This yarn is worsted spun, meaning it's very very smooth and almost shiny in appearance. It will give great stitch definition for intricate patterns such as lace, cables, and knit/purl patterns.

Happy Fuzzy Yarn - Riin Gill, Ann Arbor. Rovings, too. And she rides the bus too!

If you're a knitter, the bus totally rocks! Someone to drive you everywhere you go and give you the gift of time to knit? Golden.

Dyed in Michigan

Briar Rose Fibers - hand painted yarns

Color Joy “Lynn from Lansing” - yarns, patterns, especially sock yarns and patterns

Joan Sheridan Hoover of Heritage Spinning and Weaving in Lake Orion also dyes some beautiful yarn, including luxury fibers like silk. Here’s her website but I cannot find a link to her hand-dyed yarns.

Spinner's Flock is a group for hand-spinning enthusiasts, and the people who raise the sheep (and goats and rabbits) that provide the fibers.

thanks to freddyknits for the details - esp. the East Jordan store (hm that's on our way up north...)

Shiawassee River Paddle Event - May 18 2008 - Holly to Fenton, Michigan

Shiawassee River Paddle Event
Sunday, May 18, 2008

Start : WaterWorks Park in Holly, Michigan

End : Strom Park in Fenton, Michigan

Distance : 7 scenic miles of numerous twists and turns

Canoe Rental available with Heavners Canoe Livery

Schedule :

10:00 am : On-site registration begins WaterWorks Building, Broad Street

11:30 am : Introductory Ceremony North side WaterWorks Park

11:45 am : Experienced Canoeists Start at Millpond, Broad Street

12:15 pm : Novice/Youth Canoeists Start at Millpond, Broad Street

12:45 pm : Kayak/ Single person canoeists Start on Shiawassee River, Broad Street

** 1:15 pm : Leisure/fun paddle Start on Shiawassee River, Broad Street **

6:00 pm : Final river sweep completed

On-site availability of snacks and water.

Shuttle transport from 1pm – 6 pm for continuous transport of boats/ people

Trophies for First and Second Place in all three races.

For more info and photos, visit websites :
www.headwaterstrailsinc.org
http://shiawassee-river.blogspot.com/

Registration Forms :
http://www.headwaterstrailsinc.org/RiverRaceregistrationform2008.pdf

Questions ? Call Sue Julian, 248-634-3513.

Rain or Shine !

Eulogy for Alfio (Auch) Vielmetti

My cousin Zorba wrote a eulogy for my great uncle Auch, who died last week at the age of 96. The whole thing is a bit too much to share right now, but there was one paragraph that really spoke to me about the sort of family I come from (and perhaps some insight into who I am)

In his later years Auch did a lot of walking. I mean a LOT of walking, some of it right below us when the weather was bad, and I am convinced that his amblings had a lot to do with the length of his stay with us. He walked every day to the library to read the [Wall Street Journal], he walked to the stores and the bowling alley, and also, You see, on a lot of his walks, he went to sundry houses and visited the sick and the infirm- just a stop in to see how they were doing- and to cheer them up he said. Now if he was on tear about the city council, I’m not certain how cheery it was, but you get the idea.

It's late now, and the weather is bad, but I'm inspired to go out for a walk.

Technorati Tags: walk, walking

Calder Dairy video on Youtube

We get our milk from Calder Dairy, which delivers (Stan is the milkman). Here's a short Youtube tour of their dairy farm downriver.

Technorati Tags: cows, dairy, moo, calder

Michigan primary results - 2008 presidential primary

2008 Unofficial Michigan Primary Election Results from http://miboecfr.nicusa.com - who are these people, are they really part of michigan.gov ? Something is being outsourced, very badly.

The short story:
Dem: Clinton 55, Uncommitted 40, Kucinich 4
Rep: Romney 39, McCain 30, Huckabee 16, Paul 6, Thompson 4, Guiliani 3

Best counties (overnight approx, data from NY Times, where is my spreadsheet full of numbers?)

Democrats:
Kucinich: 9% in Washtenaw
Clinton: 88% in Houghton, 64% in Macomb, 66% in Chippewa
Uncommitted: 49% in Emmet, 46% in Washtenaw

Republicans:
Romney: 47% Oakland, 44% Leelenau
McCain: 40-42% Van Buren, Crawford, Marquette, Keewenaw, Kalamazoo

SOS - Elections in Michigan SOS stands for "Secretary of State", and the crummy TITLE tag is one reason why this page is hard to find. You'd think, with Google in Ann Arbor, that the state of Michigan would have better search engine friendliness for the state government site.

The best overall politics tracker is memorandum's political web; here's a snapshot of the overnight results at 1am.

Best Michigan 2008 primary map is from the New York Times, showing leaders by county. They picked a weird color choice for the Democrats, leaving Clinton and Uncommitted almost the same color.

The Democratic party pull quotes:

Hillary Clinton won a largely uncontested Michigan Democratic primary - Boston Globe

The Obama Campaign is not participating in the Primary and has not instructed supporters in Michigan whether or how to vote - National Journal, Hotline Blog

Because of the hopelessly messed-up nature of this year's Democratic primary, this is a perfect opportunity for progressives in Michigan to make a statement without taking any risk. And the way to do that is to vote for Dennis Kucinich. Detroit Metro Times editorial

The Republican party pull quotes:

Romney is the son of former Michigan Governor and 1968 presidential candidate George W. Romney (Wikipedia)

Ambassador Weiser, an Ann Arbor resident and chairman of McCain's Michigan campaign, said Lieberman will join McCain at a joint town hall meeting on Election Day (Ann Arbor News)

My personal election story was not as good as it could be. I tried at the last moment to figure out what the status was of the ACLU Michigan Primary Election law lawsuit, where the Green Party and a political consulting firm among others are suing for the right to have access to primary voter lists. If they win, I'm going to buy me a list; even if they don't, you can get voter lists (city of Ann Arbor through the Ann Arbor City Clerk, $5). Hm, time to put that online too.

The technological snafu was voting as though I was a vision-impaired voter and trying to use the AutoMARK machines provided for that purpose. (press release from SOS) The machine marks ballots with audio prompting; it has awful industrial design, a very clumsy ballot shield, the poll workers had not run a real ballot through it all day (just a sample ballot), and when it spat back my ballot a half dozen times they directed me to the hand marked ballot booth rather than spoiling the ballot and starting with a new piece of paper.

The other technological snafu (again from the perspective of the vision impaired) was that the ballot eating machine has no audio or tactile feedback that a ballot was successfully accepted, and even its visual feedback is really bad (a tiny lcd display hard to read in dim light). I had really no way of knowing that the ballot eating machine really took my ballot, not even a reassurance that some bell dinged. Had I had no sight at all, some poll worker could have taken my ballot and disposed of it or remarked it and I'd be no wiser.

Technorati Tags: vote, michigan, election08, bibimbop, primary

Michigan sample ballots at Publius

Publius has sample ballots for Michigan elections.

Publius.org is a non-partisan, non-profit 501(c)(3) organization founded in 1996 to explore the impact of the Internet on democracy and develop web-based tools to enhance the exchange of ideas and information. Publius began by consolidating election-related web sites to make it easier for voters to find the election information they need.

Type in your name into the form, and it will tell you where to vote, what the voting hours are, and who is on the ballot. If the candidate has a web site it will link to that.

Technorati Tags: elections, michigan, vote

Event promotion with Twitter and Google Calendar "Quick Add"

Here's a recipe for promoting your event using a combination of Twitter and Google Calendar.

1. Make some friends on twitter. BE MY TWITTERFREND PLEEZ
2. The recipe for events is to enter "what", "who", "where" and "when".
3. You are writing for both a Twitter audience and for data entry.
4. Please test by cut and paste into Google Calendar "quick add".

What:
5. Put the URL if any in the what part of the event; that becomes event title.

6. Include a #hashtag or @reference in the text to refer to something.

Who:
7. Use both a Twitter @name and a real name in the who part for maximum visibility.

Where:
8. The where clause is preceded by the word "at".
9. If Google Calendar can't geolocate the phrase, it turns this clause into a search. Be creative.
10. You are indexing into Google Map's Community Maps and you can put more information there.

When:
10. Be careful with relative days (today, next week) to avoid confusion when these are seen later.

To be done:
11: build a bot that reads a twitter stream and autopopulates a Google Calendar with events.

UPDATE: a2events calendar via a search at Terraminds. @bkerr is threatening a public google calendar (the #11 TBD).

Technorati Tags: annarbor, arbcamp, calendar, googlecalendar, library, parser, quick-add, twitter

Marshall Poe (Iowa, Atlantic Monthly): Wikipedia: Academia's Friend or Foe, Eastern Michigan University, Thursday Oct 25 2007, 7pm, 201 Pray-Harrold Hall

Marshall Poe is speaking in Ypsilanti tonight (oct 25 2007). Here's his interview in The Atlantic: Common Knowledge: Marshall Poe on the marvels and pitfalls of Wikipedia, the fastest-growing encyclopedia in human history.

EMU is hosting a year-long lecture series on "Wikipedia and Academia." The first lecture/discussion (by yours truly) will be tomorrow night (Thursday, October 25) at 7 pm, in 201 Pray-Harrold Hall on the EMU campus. The subject will be "Wikipedia: Academia's Friend or Foe?"

Next semester there will be three more lecture/discussions:

-Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia; founder of Citizendium), "Wikipedia, Citizendium and the Future of Online Collaboration"
Thursday, February 7, 7pm, EMU Student Center Auditorium

-Andrew Keen (author of Cult of the Amateur), "The Dangers of Wikipedia"
Thursday, March 6, 7pm, EMU Student Center Auditorium

-Katherine Walsh (member of the WikiMedia Foundation Board of Trustees)—Title TBA
Thursday, April 10 7pm, EMU Student Center Auditorium

If you have questions, please contact me.

Marshall Poe

Technorati Tags: emich, ypsilanti, michigan, wiki, wikipedia, law