It’s a fabulous month. Too bad I’ll miss it.

In the past, it was always the crescendo of poetry slam season, when the finalists of 4 months of hard poetry work would queue up and prepare for what was the biggest night of poetry in Phoenix- the Mesa Slamoff. It’s like the Superbowl of local poetry the slamoff. I always preferred it to the actual National Poetry Slam, mostly because I knew that at least for one night, everyone that wanted their chance on a huge stage would get it.

At it’s peak, we rivaled some of the largest poetry events in the country. But time passes, and people change and stuff isn’t the same- and that’s OK.

No, I’ll miss it because of the insane schedule of events I have lined up for the month, and the gritty hard work I need to do to get Brick Cave continuing in an upward cycle.

More later, gotts go, it’s 8am…

I think I let myself get distracted by something that in the end isn’t going to move the needle for me, or Brick Cave, or even Anthology for that matter. I was good about getting it out and away, although I felt badly after.

Went to a D’backs game today, loved it!

Ended the evening on a positive note. Tomorrow is all about infrastructure…

One might say these represent opposing ends of a spectrum- now, before you decide you are going to “educate” me on your local chicken haven, or your significant other’s blue ribbon poulty- don’t. Go and make your own post, on your own blog, about fried chicken.

I digress, it is exactly this wide range that appeals to me. Sometimes, I like chicken- fried well, spiced nicely, crispy goodness. So I go to Popeyes. I was not always wise to the ways of the cajun. The first Popeyes I saw opened up, literally, across the street from where I lived when I was just out of high school. The long lines and never ending business did nothing to penetrate my chicken ignorance. It wasn’t until much later, when I came to the desert, that I truly cam to embrace the one chicken.

But sometimes… sometimes I feel naughty, and I want chicken that isn’t so much chicken but some sort of land oyster that you slide in your mouth. The kind of chicken you drink. The kind of chicken that can only come from the circa 1950′s grocery store deli, that has been sitting under heat lamps for almost as long. Some people have their dirty food secrets (Jack-In-the-Box Taco’s, anyone?), I have grocery store deli chicken.

You can only imagine the horror then, when I went to retrieve some of this protein grease crack when I found that- YES, my local grocery store was trying to emulate Popeyes. When I want Popeyes, I go to Popeyes. When I want to thrust a Hoover Dam sized obstacle into my artery, I go to the “deli” (I do not think this word means what the grocery store says it does).

I have no idea where I am going with this thought, except that i am saddened by it.

Things are super busy in the neighborhood, lots happening on all fronts is all I can say, but it’s been a good day of chill.

More later, just wanted to say hi and not mention al the brick cave stuff…

Dear Wil,

I apologize, you were right in being suspicious.

It had been a rough week, this crazy stone just will.not.move.

I remain optimistic, still fighting, still weaving… the last couple days have been good, and more good on the horizon, so I have no complaints.

I hafta go write a new Brick Cave post, so later, gators…

For full disclosure, I am not connected to any party involved in this. I watched the video yesterday, was moved, and forwarded it on. I saw the backlash start today, and decided that I wanted to speak to it.

First, before we continue, please make sure you have read these things:

Joseph Kony’s Wikipedia Listing

The Guidestar listing for Invisible Children, Inc.

Invisible Children’s Wikipedia Listing

BBC News Profile of Joseph Kony

Here’s a nice BBC piece from 2009 as well

So, to set the table appropriately,  Kony is universally agreed to be a bad guy- so the issue at stake is not whether or not Kony deserves to be captured- and that’s an important point- no one is defending a man that deserves no defense.

The issue arises with Invisible Children, Inc. and- to keep it simple- if the people behind the organization are using charity money for things other than the charity.

Fair question, every charity should be challenged for honesty’s sake.

So, for starters, Wil points out that Charity Navigator gives them a 2 star rating. When I pull up the page, I see a three star rating (he selectively chose the rating for transparency and ignored the 4 star financial rating), but I’ll go with the flow here.

1. Argument One: “they won’t let their financials be independently audited.”

So, the issue here is that they have not allowed 3rd party auditing. According to Charity navigator, the rating is:” The charity’s audited financials were prepared by an independent accountant, but it did not have an audit oversight committee. ” Hmmm. Ok, let’s move on.

As for the Better Business Bureau reference, I think this sums it up: ” While participation in the Alliance’s charity review efforts is voluntary, the Alliance believes that failure to participate may demonstrate a lack of commitment to transparency. ” So, basically, if you don’t play by our rules, you are bad, period. Can’t have it both ways here, one organization that judges based on participation in their own program?

Regarding the Foreign Affairs Reference, let’s pull the entire sentence, and not just the conveniently damming snippet: “In their campaigns, such organizations have manipulated facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasizing the LRA’s use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony — a brutal man, to be sure — as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil.” READ THAT ENTIRE ARTICLE, IT WILL MAKE YOU SMARTER.

Hmm, where have I seen someone exaggerate and emphasize particular attributes or facts for the purpose of getting a point across? I’ll let you think about that one.

2. “By IC’s own admission, only 31% of all the funds they receive go toward actually helping anyone [pdf]. The rest go to line the pockets of the three people in charge of the organization, to pay for their travel expenses (over $1 million in the last year alone) and to fund their filmmaking business (also over a million) — which is quite an effective way to make more money, as clearly illustrated by the fact that so many can’t seem to stop forwarding their well-engineered emotional blackmail to everyone they’ve ever known.”

From Charity Navigator:

Now, I don’t know how often Wil has traveled to Africa, but going to Uganda isn’t exactly on the Southwest Airlines $49 fee sale list. Traveling to some parts of the world requires, how shall we say it, certain investments to mitigate risk (or here). The entire world is not a shiny southern California suburb where protest signs are made at Kinkos. Imagine traveling there with film equipment, or having someone find out you are filming there because you want to meddle in someone’s business. Let’s say that someone is a killer, that perhaps has informants all over the landscape. I remember some guy in Afghanistan finding a way to strike out against an entire country and killing over 2,000 people in one day- so yeah, if they spend some money to make sure that they don’t disappear in the night, I think there’s justification for that.

But Ok, let’s JUST focus on Kony here, and we’ll see where this takes us… scroll back up to the Metrics, now scroll back down.

The point of the Kony 2012 Campaign, as stated plainly in the video, is to create awareness of Kony and his atrocities and keep pressure on the US Government to continue to support his capture.

IT’S CALLED LOBBYING. This is actually the part that raised my eyebrow… They want to raise money to promote awareness and create pressure to continue to hunt down a bad guy. I’m not exactly sure, in today’s world of SuperPACs, Corporate governance and “for sale” legislators, how anyone could possibly not see this as creative way to use the system against itself.

It really comes down to:

What Wil says at the end, do your work and read up on what you want to support. But don’t crucify an organization because they are successful at what they set out to do, just because you are tired of having people send you the video.

End: 1100

It was a busy day, went to the dentist, face was cremated, so the rest of the day went to trash, but did get to class, and had a good class discussion.

errands completed

Start of day email 1600, end 1454

Progress made on:

- Scheduling filming meeting

- Phoenix Comicon

- Vul-Con tournament

-2012 Quickbooks file

- Marketing

- completed cover for The Healer’s Legacy

Tomorrow is all school, dentist, and more emails… youu hoo!

Got The Last Incarnation finally to iTunes today… finally as in less than 90 days from launch, but it feels like forever. Also got alot of material into iTunes from the bookstore as well.

It looks like the transition from Tunecore to CDBaby will probably take most of the year. It only makes sense to go ahead and let each album run it’s course before shifting it over, and some of the albums don’t renew until November, so there you go. I am curious if having them run through a different aggregator increases sales. One of the benefits of CD Baby I have seen so far is that they are far more active in keeping their store list up to date.

Amazon continues to humm right along, generating sales without interruption. Barnes and Noble also is having a great month, and I was hoping to see us break some sales recods for January- we have already, but there was a pretty aggressive one I still want- and I think I can get. I have rediculous 1400 emails piled up…

lots to edit on the video side, and I have to find 16 players for a board game I am hosting at a gaming tourney. should be interesting.

School, both classes are in full swing, not particularly fond of either class right now, I hope that changes soon.