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I’m attending WineConf in Paris this weekend. A few of us arrived Friday morning on the red eye and had a bit of time to kill. What better way to cope with jetlag than to spend the afternoon deep underground?

After a bit of struggle at the ticket window (stereotype upheld: Parisians HATE to make change, even if there is a pile of appropriate coins and bills immediately next to their hand) we descended a long, long spiral staircase. There was no point in taking pictures because the stairway was totally featureless and you can only see a few feet ahead and behind. After a point I was overcome with the impression that I was walking on an escalator treadmill and remaining fixed in space while an endless series of stairs slid past beneath me. The stair-climb alone was worth the price of admission. At last we arrived at the bottom where there were a few carved-out chambers with explanatory plaques.

Francois comments: I can’t get any network service down here!

Next was a short hike (500M or so) through featureless horizontal tunnels. Quite a few side-paths were blocked off — this space used to be a limestone quarry, and no doubt goes on much further than the public sections. Occasional street signs indicating above-ground geography.

Every few feet a brick was marked with a date. It clearly took a long time to brick in and tidy up these tunnels.

At a seemingly-arbitrary point the tunnels widened and there were a few beautiful models carved into the rock face. A plaque tells who carved them, what they are, and how the carver died. It does not explain anything about his motivation — why carve a sculpture that is permanently anchored at the bottom of a pit? Why did the other quarry workers tolerate his frivolous life?

Then, finally, bones. I didn’t take any photos of the bones — flash photography was discouraged, and there was clearly no way to properly convey the experience in photos anyway. There are a few not-very-convincing photos of the ossuary on the catacombs Wikipedia page.

Walking through the ossuary pretty much turned my head inside-out. The scale is unimaginable — vast femur structures spanning room after room after room, stacked with skulls and ribs of countless unknowns. I’ve never faced the hugeness of the world like this — it made me feel tiny, and disposable.

A few security guards are stationed here and there throughout the catacombs to prevent people from defiling the remains. I wonder what it feels like to be surrounded by so many thousands day in and out? I wonder what it felt like to be one of the laborers who spent a lifetime digging up graves, hauling corpses, carefully stacking and interlocking bones. There’s something reverent in the way the remains are compulsively arranged, and yet, it must’ve felt like just another job at times.

At the exit to the ossuary is a small alter where masses were held on behalf of the dead. There are also several stones with uplifting latin carvings about rebirth (which, in my case, failed to uplift.) Then, the creepy coup de grace — before emerging into the light, guards searched our bags to make sure we hadn’t swiped any skulls.

I few days ago I saw a truck in my neighborhood pulling this billboard.

These billboards are sponsored by an organization called ‘Election Integrity Watch.’ After an hour or so I mostly regained my composure, but I’m still not put all the way back together. It’s not quite 1960’s Selma, but we’ve got some of the elements here: threat of violence, call to vigilantism, not-especially-veiled racial targeting, and a more-or-less explicit attempt to suppress voter turnout.

(Quick aside: actual voter fraud is vanishingly rare. Meanwhile, voter turnout remains distressingly low. I feel comfortable standing with those who want more people to vote rather than fewer.)

Since seeing that rolling billboard I’ve felt an urgent need to do something vaguely compensatory — preferably something that won’t land me in jail. At some point during my nonstop monologue about this issue, Josh pointed out that he was already signed up to engage in pro-voting-rights countermeasures, so I called and signed up to volunteer with him on election day.

The Election Protection people ran us through a training about voting rights in Minnesota, assigned us five precincts to monitor, and gave us a checklist of things to watch for, a questionnaire for voters, and some not-very-official-looking badges.

It was all very last-minute, so it wasn’t until we started to set out that we really had misgivings. Our instructions were to arrive at a polling place, check in with the election judges, and then retreat a safe distance from the polls and interview voters as they exited. The instructions also included in many places this sentence: “No one except election officials and people waiting to register or to vote can be within 100 feet of the building in which a polling place is located.” So, that didn’t make a lot of sense — how were we to observe the polling place and introduce ourselves to the election judges from 100 feet outside the building?

In the interest of good faith we tried following the script anyway. Sure enough, as soon as we introduced ourselves to the chief election judge at Bryn Mawr Elementary she politely read us the riot act and escorted us to the exit. Interviewing exiting voters was out of the question because voters were parking on the property, so all voters were safely behind rolled-up-windows before they exited the protection zone.

We compromised on just doing drive-bys for the other precincts. There wasn’t any obvious monkey business going on outside, and after an hour or so we’d scoped out all the polling places so I called our team leader to report our experiences (and to call him out a bit for sending us on a fool’s errand). My first two attempted calls to the team leader got me a robotic “Please enter your mailbox number now” which definitely played up the snipe hunt aspects of the afternoon, but I eventually got through to him, said, in essence, ‘this is a waste of time’ and then we knocked off for the day.

Our experience in Bryn Mawr was actually mostly a good one. If we were hustled out immediately, it’s safe to assume that anyone trying to hassle voters would have been ejected just as quickly. Still, getting shooed out of the polling place left us both feeling very sheepish. In retrospect, there’s no particular reason why the election judges should know or care to distinguish between people representing ‘Election Integrity’ (the bad guys) and ‘Election Protection’ (us). And now if I hear news reports about voter-intimidating vigilantes showing up at polling places, I won’t know for sure that they aren’t talking about me. It’s not like I had a chance to say “But wait, we’re here to ensure voting rights! Ensure!”

I still don’t know what to do about those damn billboards.

I just upgraded WordPress and I don’t trust it, I tell you! So I’m doing some testing.

I have two small problems today:

1) The words ‘discrete’ and ‘discreet’ have identical derivations, but different meanings in English. Not only can I not remember which is which, I only occasionally even remember that they are different words. Which, in French and Latin, they aren’t.

2) I told Pandora that I like the band Barcelona because I wanted to listen to squealy nerd-themed 80’s-style synth rock in the manner of such hits as “I Have the Password to Your Shell Account” and “Planet Jerk.” It turns out there’s a newer, more-popular un-squealy band called Barcelona which is the only Barcelona that Pandora knows about and now my stream is polluted with hundreds of naval-gazing contemporary male vocalists.