sotu

Tonight George II will be giving his 6th State of the Union address, which I will be using a an opportunity to drink. I have vaguely fond/fondly vague memories of partaking in a State of the Union drinking game with htrouser and lady mctrouser in the past, but since they've fled for the Big City I've been searching for my own drinking game.

A Google search for "State of the Union drinking game" yields no less than 16 million results. Unfortunately, the pickings are actually quite slim. Most links point to this game at drinkinggame.us, which is kind of your typical drinking game with far too many rules for an increasingly inebriated person to keep track of. The other drinking game dominating the Google results isn't so much a drinking game as a satire, by Will Durst. It's reasonably funny, but not really meant to actually be enacted, though I'd like to know how many lefty political nerds try. Wonkette has a couple of additions to the drinkinggame.us one, which provide some much-needed cleverness. Overall, a disappointing selection. But this is the sort of lack of cohesiveness and direction we've all come to expect from the Democrats.

Maybe this year my drinking game will be "Drink constantly during entire speech."

mmmm, donuts

I've never been to Portland, but now I really want to go.

(They also do weddings: The service is performed by ordained ministers beneath the holy doughnut and a velvet painting of Isaac Hayes. )

bag obsession

I'm not one for New Year's Resolutions, but after getting some nice lights and street tires for my bike for xmas I've resolved to bike-commute to work more. I live only 2 miles from work, so it's hard to argue against biking. I used to bike more often when I only worked at my current job part-time, but I discovered that my inherent sweatiness was a problem with my biz-casual attire. Plus carrying all my crap to work - laptop, lunch, etc. - is a bit of a pain in the ass.

About a week ago I found a website that provides instructions on commuting to work. Apparently, non-bike fanatics like me have problems commuting to work because we're silly enough to think it doesn't require some change in routine. The advice I found most helpful is to not wear your work clothes while biking to prevent that unpleasant sweaty shirt syndrome and to get some panniers to transport your crap. Backpacks make your back sweaty, raise your center of balance, and are uncomfortable on you neck.

After some searching, I've located the dream bag for bike commuter made by an English company called Carradice. Carradice has been making bags for bikes for over 60 years, and I figure if anyone knows how to keep your crap from getting wet it's the English. Now I'm lusting after their bike bureau, which is a shoulder bag with laptop pouch made out of cotton duck fabric (nice and old school) that clips onto a rack on your bike. It has loads of brilliant features and looks good enough to carry around work.

If I had the funds, I'd add a rain cape and some rain spats to my shopping cart, because I'd love to be able to say I commmute to work in spats and cape.

blogger of slackness

Apologies for not blogging in a month, but I have been extremely busy eating cookies.

The highlights of my existence of late have been twofold:

1) A brownie consumed minutes ago, acquired from a plate of the same located in the break-room provided by an anonymous co-worker. These brownies had nuts in them, which is ok, but ultimately nuts in brownies are wack. For some reason, however, almost all recipes for brownies call for some sort of chopped nuts. What is up with that? Are brownie recipe-makers in denial about the general lack of enthusiasm for nutted brownies? Is there a secret deal between the chocolate industry and the nut industry? Regardless, the maker of these brownies was too easily tricked by the attemps of the recipe-maker to make him or her include nuts in the brownies.

2) The Elements of Style Illustrated, a Chrismtas gift from Dick. In the last few months I've hardly read more than five pages of anything, excepting the optics book I finally started only to discover that I have to learn calculus first to undertand any of it. Having attended a small Catholic school that paid its teachers so poorly that some of them qualified for food stamps, the quality of my education was highly variable. I learned how to write from my 11th grade English teacher, who was kind of nuts but passionate about literature. In 12th grade AP English my teacher was an ex-southern belle. Her husband had left her, and she spent our classes telling stories about the days when she was young, thin, and wealthy; about how she had never paid bills before her 40's; about how she was part of an organization of young women at Clemson in the 70's that helped recruit football players by joining them for dinner in a uniform of white miniskirt and orange go-go boots. "That is not selling sex," she claimed, "it's showing school spirit!"

Where am I going with this? Oh, right...so I never actually had to buy, read, or use The Elements of Style in high school, and at college they expected that I already knew everything there was to know about that sort of thing, so this is my first encounter with Strunk and White's little book. And it's great. It reads less like an instructional book than a manifesto and reminds me a great deal of Ezra Pound's ABC's of Reading. I like the illustrations in themselves for their sort of childish surrealism and in the book becauase they are completely gratuitous in a text about grammar and language usage. It's a wonderful piece of simple, aesthetically pleasing bookmaking.

hurl in this

Last night around 10:30 I was doing some yoga. Bonnie the cat was walking around the room and jumped onto a chair next to me. Just as I was doing Upright Prancing Dog or whatever Bonnie said, "This is what I think of your yoga," and projectile vomitted across the chair, carpet, and yoga mat. Then she jumped down from the chair and looked at me with an expression that said, "Hm, how about that."

Sometimes, the cosmos just don't want you to do yoga. They want you to clean up cat puke.

white house sez: blah blah blah!

This morning, the prez at Annapolis: Who needs a new speech? Let's just feed them the same line about how the Iraqi soldiers are being trained blah blah blah.

Later this morning, Lynne Cheney on The Diane Rehm Show: Deny everything. In response to a listener's questions about suggestions of the president and vice president tying 9/11 to Saddam Hussien: "I'm not really sure what you're talking about..."

Blah blah blah. Why do they even bother? Bullshit is to be expected, but this isn't even half-assed bullshit.

southern metropolis recap

After Thanksgiving, Dick and I took a trip to visit Htrouser and Lady McT in Southern Metropolis. It was all kind of a blur of drinking, amazing large southern lesbian-made breakfasts, public transit, and Grand Theft Auto.



And the ass peach. In fact, it was such a blur that I can't remember what I had at the Flying Biscuit save the biscuit that came on the side and the totally fucking amazing grits; after waiting for an hour to be seated, all I recall is an intense feeling of joy and contentment as my hunger and hangover were conquered by deliciousness.

Thanks, HT and LMT, for the first class hospitality!

can we start a grant for this?

You know, sometimes I'm astounded by the things that have yet to be invented. I hear many people, especially those who grew up with the "Back to the Future" movie series, complaining about the delayed appearance of the flying car. The flying car is crap.



What I need is a bandaid that will actually fit over the top of my finger. Tip-of-finger injuries must abound, what with the hazards of occupational paper-shuffling and bagel-slicing being what they are. And once you get a boo-boo there, it keeps hitting everything, because it's the fucking tip of your finger.

Of the many shapes bandaids come in, not a single one easily stays on a finger without modification. I mean, what we need here is, like, a bandaid thimble. Doesn't sound so tough to me. And there can be bandaid finger puppets for the kids.

Then you can start on the flying car thing. But don't expect me to buy one. Cause they're going to be a bunch of crap.

thank fuck

Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller tells the world (well, at least the NPR-listening world) that he believes there is no god. As a member of the segment of the population happily and openly unburdened by belief in a divine force, it's a fucking relief to see someone publicly taking this stance. I particularly like, and agree with, Penn's rejection of atheism's non-belief for a belief in there not being god. I remember some similar discussion of this belief on some fellow blogger's blog a few months ago, but I don't remember quite who/when.

I've had an oddly difficult time writing this post without the use of religiously-rooted expressions. At first the post's title was "amen, brother", and I kept wanting to write, "thank god" in response to Penn's essay. But in this context I realized how weird it is for someone adamantly opposed to god-belief to use those expressions: if anything good happened, it sure as hell didn't have anything to do with, as Penn puts it, some "imaginary friend."

I imagine in the UK, an English-speaking society that seems to have a stronger and longer-standing relationship with secularism than the US (a.k.a. the land of Christian bullyism), they've developed linguistic alternatives to god phrases. I mean, maybe if I incorporated the words "bloody" and "sodding" into my speech I wouldn't need to rely on "goddamn" and "jesus christ" so much. Or, I could simply replace every reference to god or jesus with the word "fuck." For example, "Thank fuck I didn't burn the cookies!"

Fuck, now that's something I can get behind.

yet another reason to buy records

I've done a considerable amount of record-buying lately - at least, considerable for me, as I've always been a bit behind the curve of average record collector purchashing. But I attended the annual WFMU Record Fair in NYC and the grand opening of a new record store in Southern Ex-Industrial Town on consecutive Saturdays, and the result is a pretty good stack of vinyl.

I'm sure glad I didn't waste my money on CDs, especially those recently released by Sony. It seems the clever people at Sony included in their CDs software that secretly installed a rootkit that both alowed Sony to spy on users' online activities and created a weakness hackers can exploit. Story here.

Also, an extensive discussion some years ago resulted in the conclusion that records are a superior weapon to CDs when slung, frisbee-style, at high velocities.

oh shit

This is one of those days I'm prompted to make sure my passport is up to date.

Bush nominates Alito to Supreme Court

Meirs "God tells me to hate baby-killers" isn't nearly as frightening as the "Satan tells me to regulate every hormonal activity of a woman's reproductive system with my court decisions" of Alito. "

mark e. smith interview

Mark E. Smith, on BBC television.

In the words of Harriet Miers, OMG OMG OMG!

the four elements

By request, here is a jpeg of a crazy print (woodcut, perhaps?), I'm guessing 16th or 17th century, of the four elements. The illustration is careful to point out that every element has nipples and a navel.

target responds

In response to my form email submitted via Planned Parenthood yesterday in protestation of Target allowing a pharmacist to refuse to fill a prescription for emergency contraception, Target has sent me its own form email:

Dear Target Guest,

Target places a high priority on our role as a community pharmacy and our obligation to meet the needs of the patients we serve. We expect all our team members, including our pharmacists, to provide respectful service to our guests, particularly when it comes to their health care needs.

Like many other retailers, Target has a policy that ensures a guest’s prescription for emergency contraception is filled, whether at Target or at a different pharmacy, in a timely and respectful manner. This policy meets the health care needs of our guests while respecting the diversity of our team members.

Your thoughts help us learn more about what our guests expect, so I’ll be sure to share your feedback with our pharmacy executives.

Thanks for taking the time to share your questions, thoughts and comments. I hope we’ll see you again soon at Target.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Hanson
Target Executive Offices

Ok, so, it sure sounds like they're saying "No, you've got us all wrong, we'll fill anyone's prescription for EC!" But what they actually say is their policy "ensures a guest’s prescription for emergency contraception is filled, whether at Target or at a different pharmacy." i.e., if our moralizing christian pharmacists decide to preach from the medicine dispenser, you can feel free to go to the Walgreens across the street. Damn you public relations professional and your sneaky speech!

right...

To all of you who claim that Harriet Miers wouldn't vote to overturn Roe v. Wade:

"If Congress passes a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution that would prohibit abortion except when it was necessary to prevent the death of the mother, would you actively support its ratification by the Texas Legislature," asked an April 1989 questionnaire sent out by the Texans United for Life group.

Miers checked "yes" to that question, and all of the group's questions, including whether she would oppose the use of public moneys for abortions and whether she would use her influence to keep "pro-abortion" people off city health boards and commissions.


Awesome.

In other depressing anti-reproductive rights news, Target pharmacists can, and do, refuse to fill prescriptions for the morning-after pill (thanks to dickumbrage for informing me about this from Planned Parenthood, though oddly I can't find anything about it on their website). "What, you were raped last night? My god would damn me for eternity for filling your prescription for this effective post-intercourse contraceptive that has been widely approved of by the medical community. But we do have some stylish and amazingly inexpensive baby clothes just past aisle 4..."

I am officially off Target. This is going to be very difficult.

way better than bear vs. shark

Snake eats alligator, then explodes.

There are so many lessons to be learned from this, I think it should be made into a children's book. Or a political cartoon.

i'm that parent who can't stop talking about how freaking cute her kid is

I'm also that kind of person that refers to their pet as their "kid" and to herself as the pet's "parent."

To prove my point, and because in this world of vast suckage I have nothing clever to contribute to the wailing and gnashing of teeth, here are some more photos of my little kitty, Bonnie.

On a bed:


On a rug:


On a bed again:


At a window:

national paranoia-inducing radio

I'm back on the NPR wagon, harkening back to the days when the only thing that kept me from dunking my head into the acid stop bath in my darkroom job was 8 straight hours of public radio. I work at a job I actually kind of like now, but for some reason the last week has seen a shift in hours spent listening to music to hours spent listening to NPR.

The result is that my sense of how much life in the US of Ass sucks has been suddenly made much more keen. I am fucking terrified. Future Supreme Court Robot Meir is going get Roe v. Wade overturned, whiny right-wing college kids are getting Congress to pass a law that will allow Harriet Meir robot clones to pubicly flog any university faculty member that dares to crack a Cheney joke, and the Catholic Church is doing its part to undo years of psychology proving homosexuality and pedophilia aren't connected.

And, as a couple of friends reminded me over drinks last night, avain flu is going to kill us all.

At least I can die with the knowledge that my fuel-efficient car ran circles around the big ass chunks of cash SUV-owners have had to pay to get from their suburban McMansion to work at semi-urban sprawl office park. Plus, my car is baby blue. When was the last time you saw a baby blue Expedition?

(do not fuck with) my cat

Bonnie M says: "Spray bottle? I fucked that spray bottle up."

things that are hot, things that are fermented

A little over a week ago dickumbrage and I took a trip to the Asia Market. It smelled pretty funny in there, and by funny I mean like rotting vegetables, but was packed with a variety of Asian foodstuffs, mostly East Asian like Chinese, Japanese, Thai...you have to go to a different store for the South Asian foodstuffs. A year ago I was inspired to purchase a variety of Asian sauces on the recommendation of a friend who spent a couple of years working in Beijing, who claimed to be feeding himself and his housemates on little else than rice and six different flavors of Chinese sauces.

A while back a bought a jar of Chili Garlic Sauce, which, let me tell you, is the goddamn shit. About a quarter of a teaspoon of the stuff is enough to make one bowl of rice and tofu pretty pungently hot. It's a fast, sharp burn that seems to be putting a hole in your tongue and/or stomach but doesn't make your throat suffer too much. They make sure to pack in the sodium, too, to satisfy that animal craving for as many NaCl molecules as can be consumed.

At Asia Market, along with a few packages of Pocky, which is like crack in cookie form, I bought a couple more sauces: Black Bean and Garlic Sauce and something called Tasty Noodle Sauce or something similar that I can't seem to find referenced on the Internets. Last night I cooked up some food with the Black Bean and Garlic Sauce, which is made from fermented black beans. It is sweet and gooey, and not spicy at all, but quite delicious and also packed with plenty of sodium to keep those synapses firing.

I haven't yet had the courage to try Finely Ground Shrimp Sauce. It is described as "definitely aromatic," which I take to mean "smells like a dolphin's butthole."