The horror, the horror

I was wandering through Target on this beautiful Halloween day, when I saw the most horrifying thing I've ever seen in a Target in October.

Yes, the Christmas tree display was up.

AAIIIEEE!!! Run away!!!

The month of insanity is nigh

No, this year I'm again passing on doing NaNoWriMo. There's way too much going on for me to have that much energy or focus, plus having done some of the work from the Think Sideways writing course, I know I'm totally not ready to write a real novel yet. Think of me as the Velveteen Novelist.

So this year like last, I'm doing NaBloPoMo (see badge at right), where I post every day to my blog. I can handle that level of activity.

As long as I don't forget that Saturday is November 1st, this should work out pretty well ...

On the intertubes, no one can see your tits

In recent days, Google Reader has been recommending a lot of blogs to me that have "manly" in the title or description.

This is reminding me a lot of all my, ahem, *enhancement* spam from before I changed my main email address.

Hey, Google Reader? Gender female, bub. Do I need to flash you to prove it?

Please help this woman

I'm a big Modest Needs supporter, and my heart aches for any woman stuck in an abusive relationship, so when an email from MN hit my box asking for help for a woman with children trying to leave an abusive situation, I was all over it.

Please come and read her story, and please help her.

LOL politics

Oh, how could I have missed this??

Pundit Kitchen, by the same folks who bring you I Can Has Cheezburger?

This makes me sick

One of Glenn Greenwald's posts today makes me want to throw up. Maeve Reston's unintentional exposure of campaign reporters talks about her sadness at her "dismissal" from the reporters at the center of McCain's campaign coverage - because she had the temerity to ask a simple question he didn't have a good answer for.

Jesus. H. Fucking. Christ.

What does the media think they're for today, anyway? Sucking up to candidates? Being their friends and drinking buddies?

This story makes me insanely grateful to people like Ana Marie Cox (her blog, her twitter feed, also seen all over Rachel Maddow's show), who's been on the McCain campaign trail and has apparently not lost her mind or her vision of what she's supposed to do.

Stockholm Syndrome, anyone?

It's a good question, really ...

And I like Elizabeth Moon's answer to it:
What is a "real" American?

Bra-fucking-vo.

(I am working, really - I swear I am ...)

This is why I love this woman

Rachel Maddow is a goddess:


(direct link here)

The awful truth

How Hackable Are the Voting Machines in Your State?

Oh, and Maryland? Eminently hackable.

Sigh.

OMG this is too funny

Adventuring Party Politics: The Campaign is Getting Ugly

(via Elizabeth Bear's blog)

Change of season

Well, summer's officially over. The lightweight cat quilt on the bed has given way to the heavier blue winter quilt, and I just replaced the batteries in the setback thermostat and programmed it for the winter. Let's hope the latter will actually have a positive effect on our utility bills, which were outrageous last winter because I utterly forgot to program the thermostat, leaving the heat to run all day. D'oh!

Now I'm off to lay down and try to kill this amazing headache. What a lousy way to miss a gorgeous day.

On Poverty: Blog Action Day 2008

I remember distinctly what it was that turned me into a liberal. I was reading this post on Steven Barnes' blog, back in 2005, and this paragraph struck me to the core:

I remember talking to Jerry Pournelle once, and his position was that society shouldn't provide basic goods and services. My position was that every citizen should be guaranteed a basic education, room, board, and medical treatment. He said: "why in the world should we do that?" I said, "We need to provide at least the level of social service one would get in a State prison, because all I have to do to get those things is kill you. " Jerry looked at me curiously, and said he'd never thought of that.

Keep in mind that to the extent I was ever political before this election season, I was a raging libertarian. I still believe strongly that the role of the government is to do for us what we can't do for ourselves, but what those things are has shifted in me.

And it's all because of poverty. The government is the only entity that can guarantee a basic standard of living, and it is the only entity that can destroy that standard. We're living through proof of that now, with this current Neo-Depression. It was decisions made by government about how business should be run that brought us here, pandering to the greed of the people that put this particular government in office, thanking them by encouraging them to play fast and loose with your money.

If the government can create that kind of havoc, make this kind of disaster, why not let it try the other side for a change? Are we so afraid of big government that we won't let it tackle one of our most basic problems - poverty and the inequality that it brings?

Without money, nothing happens. Do you want safer streets and less drug crime? Making sure that no one need turn to crime to make a living is a really good start.

I can give all I want to Modest Needs, and my local and state food banks, and donate all I want elsewhere. I can't possibly donate enough on my own to make more than a tiny dent in the problem.

But our moneys, pooled together in the hands of a truly compassionate government, could make an enormous difference, if we can get past the bureaucratic slowness of government process.

I'm sure I sound like a pie-in-the-sky nutcase. But we've seen the consequences of the beliefs of the wingnuts over the last 8 years. Would it be so bad to try the nuttery from the other end of the spectrum?

(This post is for Blog Action Day 2008.)

I won't put it on my car, but on my blog is fine

Cute and funny

Cat video (with accompanying music - be warned):


(non-embed here)

(via BoingBoing)

OMHFG

Please not to be drinking or eating in front of your computer while watching this:
Hey, Sarah Palin


(If the embed doesn't work, try here.)

(via Rachel Maddow's Twitter feed)

(and that's Oh My Holy Fucking God, in case I was too abstract ...)

ETA: Hubby points out that this is a note-perfect parody of the Plain White T's song "Hey There Delilah" - I *knew* it sounded familiar ...

This makes me happy on so many levels

It's not just that Hannity gets pwned (and Keith actually said pwned earlier in the broadcast, which tickled me no end), and it's not just the lighting effect on KO - it's the joy of an ode written by John Cleese *and* watching Rachel Maddow utterly crack up.



(No transcript for this one - my apologies if the embed doesn't work, but you really had to see this one ...)

Get angry

The government is listening to you. You knew that, maybe, but did you know they're also recording and transcribing your calls? Regardless of who you are? And that Congress knew and did nothing?

I knew this was happening, and I even suspected the enormity of it. But having this confirmation enrages me.

What do we do now? How do I start a protest march from the Capitol to the White House? Peasants with torches and pitchforks, anyone?

Next up: the kitchen

So we're *finally* getting done the little kitchen reno we've wanted to do for 2 years - yes, ever since the new kitchen appliances came and we discovered we couldn't install the new dishwasher. Which has been sitting in a box in the kitchen since then. Which we really need since our old dishwasher died in February.

So here's what things look like now:




We truly are facing the ugliest countertop ever:


And the 70s are haunting me:

Yes, that's a built-in acrylic cutting board.

And the world's smallest sink:


We're also adding a cabinet to fill this gap:


We're going with sparkly black Silestone for the countertop, a deep undermount stainless steel sink with a gooseneck faucet, and a tall white cabinet with no shelf so I have a place for all my baking sheets.

More pictures as things develop. We go pick up the cabinet this weekend, and then need to schedule its installation, the templating for the countertop, and the removal and new installation of the sink, faucet, and dishwasher.

It might even get done by Thanksgiving. Wish us luck.

I have the dumb, part 2

Remember this:


from here?

That's me, all over again. Today I'm starting sentences that get lost in the ether. Concepts get snarled in the sticky parts of my brain, and slide off the smooth parts. (You know that your brain really shouldn't have smooth parts, right?)

Today I not only have the dumb, I *am* the dumb.

No more posting for me ...

Consequences of our choices

In his final post as a guest blogger on Boing Boing, Douglas Rushkoff talks about "how we came to accept corporatism as our dominant value system."

I'm going to be very interested to read his new book on this topic - I hadn't realized until recently just how far this shift had gone, how deeply corporate values have become our values. WalMart is just a symptom of a larger ill. And if we think carefully about the consumer choices we make, we just might be able to tilt things back to humanism, and away from corporatism.

It may be our only hope as a society.

McCain vs. Obama: the past comes back to bite you

Or rather, to bite McCain. All the (verifiable) dirt you could possibly want on McCain, gathered here.

The scary thing is - even if you subtract half off the top for "liberal bias", this man is a major menace. He has even more ambition than Bush, and fewer brakes. He's a cynical, power-hungry pig.

And to add my own observations here - watch his eyes when Sarah Palin is at a mike and McCain's behind or beside her. His eyes linger where they shouldn't, especially with his wife often standing right beside him.

Pig.

So I'm not unique

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 107 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

Word salad

Some brave souls have tried to diagram Sarah Palin's sentences.

The diagrams give me a headache. So does she.

More about the bailout

Some more truths about the bailout from Glenn Greenwald.

Fan girl squeee

Hear Neil Gaiman read his new book, The Graveyard Book. One chapter a day.

WWKMD?

The Communist Manifesto Turns 160

I purely hated reading Marx in college - his flavor of social theorism made my blood boil. I wonder what I would think of him now, if I could make myself go back and read him again ...

(And that's What Would Karl Marx Do?)