| Inside the campaigns |
[05 Nov 2008|04:23pm] |
Newsweek is posting a fascinating series of articles. They had some reporters inside the campaigns but they weren't allowed to post until after Election Day. Here we are! So now we can read tidbits like:
The Clinton campaign blew through cash: fancy hotels like the Bellagio in Las Vegas and the Four Seasons everywhere; thousands of dollars on flowers and valet parking; and one memorable $100,000 grocery bill at a Des Moines supermarket. Hillary never spent a night in a motel in rural Iowa if she could possibly avoid it. She preferred to overnight in the Presidential Suite in the Des Moines Embassy Suites and to fly alone in private jets, without the press or staff.
and other charming vignettes. Heck, I'd prefer to fly alone in private jets too.
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| a political meme: If you can't say something nice... |
[30 Oct 2008|04:08pm] |
CNN's got a great idea for a political meme.
If you are an Obama supporter, say something genuinely nice about McCain or Palin. If you're a McCain supporter, say something genuinely nice about Obama or Biden.
No half-hearted mealy-mouthings, no "buts", just say something nice about the US Presidential candidate you don't support.
I'll start. I voted for Obama. I think McCain really wants what's best for America, and has tried to support good causes like immigration reform and lobbying reform.
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| Back at home at last |
[30 Oct 2008|04:06pm] |
After 3 weeks of being on the road continuously (or more?) I'm finally back! Not going anywhere next week either. Yay!!
I am in love with my new t-mobile G1 googlephone :)
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| Joe the Fucking Plumber |
[16 Oct 2008|10:37am] |
HEY why is this country suddenly all worried and weeping for Average Joe the Fucking Plumber who's got TWO HUNDRED and FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS burning a hole in his pocket? I mean if you have that kind of cash we all KNOW you're going to hire a rat-fucking bastard tax accountant who'll find you little loopholes to squirrel your nuts away in, so you won't PAY any increased taxes ANYWAY. But the only way most of us will see $250k in a year is to WIN THE FUCKING LOTTERY. So my fellow Americans, why did Joe the Fucking Plumber hijack the debates last night?
Edited to correct:
Joe IS registered to vote but his name was misspelled. (via ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) supergee)
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| I voted; new judge show concept |
[15 Oct 2008|12:46pm] |
I love how Georgia allows you to vote early. The other day I was renewing my car tag and while I was there I voted. Now I'm done.
I voted for Obama. I would be happy to discuss the relative merits of Obama v McCain but let me encapsulate: recently John McCain told a Maine TV reporter that Sarah Palin "knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States." If you want to tell me why you're going to vote for McCain, please first defend that sentence.
In other races if I didn't know anything about the race I voted Democrat where I could. Our local sheriff Clayton Lowe is one of the only incumbent Democrats in the county and is a good guy-- apparently somewhat ineffective at cracking down on yer local cannabinoid distributors and otherwise harmless so he's got my vote. For many races there were no Dems so I went Libertarian or Independent, and if that didn't narrow it down, female, and if that didn't completely determine my vote, in the end I went with whoever's name sounded the most Jewish.
Here's a couple bits from this week's local police blotter so you can see what Clay's got to deal with around here:
Threat: On Oct. 3, Lt. Steve Gary was dispatched to meet with a Danielsville man, who said he had an argument with his girlfriend's 67-year-old father. The younger man said he has allowed his girlfriend's son and father to stay at his home for the past year, but now he only has about 3 feet of water left in his well. He asked them to ration the water left, until he can afford to pay for the drilling of a new well. He said his girlfriend washed clothes everyday, so he took the hoses off the washing machine. This angered the father, who told him to put the hoses back on or he might end up at Lord & Stephens Funeral Home. The younger man said he refused to put the hose back on, but left. Gary advised him to get a temporary protection order against the father.
Arrest: On Oct. 4, deputy Gary Floyd was dispatched to a home on Buddy Moore Road, Hull, where a couple said a neighbor had threatened to burn down their home. They had an argument earlier about selling wood pallets. The couple said Willie Lee Smith, 62, came to their home and banged on the porch with a stick. He also was holding a 2-liter Pepsi bottle, which contained gasoline and was rigged with a rag sticking out of the top. Smith told them, "I'm dying of cancer and going to hell. And I'm going to burn this trailer down and take everyone with me." When they told Smith they were calling the police, Smith went back to his home. Floyd found Smith, who had been drinking, and he claimed his neighbors were stealing pallets from him and he went to their home to confront them. Smith was arrested for making a terroristic threat.
Arrest: On Oct. 2, investigator Steve Kimbel was working on a criminal investigation in Hull, when he decided to question a man, who said he was Issak Culver. Kimbel took Culver to the jail for further questioning and Culver admitted he gave a false name because he thought there was a warrant out for his arrest. Jason Adam Culver, 27, of Hoschton was arrested for giving a false name to police.
W thinks someone should start a reality show 'Cracker Court' where locals could bring these disputes before the judge. Would you watch?
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| bad ketzl, no posting |
[07 Oct 2008|01:00pm] |
Sorry I haven't been posting much guys. The annual busy season at work is heating up.
My friends & coworkers have been busy too-- with forwarding me silly emails. Here are two for your LJ amusement.
One sunny day in 2009 an old man approached the White House from across Pennsylvania Avenue, where he'd been sitting on a park bench. He spoke to the U.S. Marine standing guard and said, 'I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.'
The Marine looked at the man and said, 'Sir, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here.'
The old man said, 'Okay' and walked away.
The following day, the same man approached the White House and said to the same Marine, 'I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.'
The Marine again told the man, 'Sir, as I said yesterday, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here.'
The man thanked him and, again, just walked away.
The third day, the same man approached the White House and spoke to the very same U.S. Marine, saying 'I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.'
The Marine, understandably agitated at this point, looked at the man and said, 'Sir, this is the third day in a row you have been here asking to speak to Mr. Bush. I've told you already that Mr. Bush is no longer the president and no longer resides here. Don't you understand?'
The old man looked at the Marine and said, 'Oh, I understand. I just love hearing it.'
The Marine snapped to attention, saluted, and said, 'See you tomorrow.'
Happily no matter who wins the election that joke will still be funny.
Next, some financial advice:
If you had purchased $1,000 shares in Delta Airlines one year ago, you would have $49.00 today. If you had purchased $1,000 shares in AIG one year ago, you would have $33.00 today. If you had purchased $1,000 of shares in Lehman Brothers one year ago, you would have $0.00 today.
But, if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year ago, drank all the beer, then turned in the aluminum cans for recycling refund, you will have received $214.00. Based on the above, the best current investment plan is to drink heavily & recycle. It is called the 401-Keg.
Is it Friday yet?
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| HOME YAY YAY YAY |
[01 Oct 2008|07:40pm] |
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I'm SO happy to be home! Yay! King W, Queen G, Jasmine the tuxedocat, Leaflet the torbie, Willow the meatloafcat, Apollo the crazy chinese crested, Venus the toy poodle d'amour! Guppies! (7 when I left, 14 now) Snails! Babaloo the betta! Garden full of tomatoes and sweet potatoes and figs and flowers! Pond with goldfish, stream with er streamfish! Trees with squirrels and birds! Tivo with new eps of everything! Other electronics I can't mention except behind the sekrit filter! Tasty clean pure free well-water! Air that smells of growing things! Neighbors with cows! Truly I have returned to paradise.
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| my name is so not going to be written in the Book of Life this year |
[30 Sep 2008|07:18pm] |
This is the sanctuary at the synagogue where I attended Rosh HaShanah services last night:
Now MAYBE the sermon was incredibly boring and the only way I could stay awake was to fall into a sexual reverie. But tell me-- the holy of holies there IS a giant vulva, right?
I mean, the inside of the ark is even lined with red velvet.
L'Shanah tovah to all y'all :)
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| Happy days will soon be here: Gadget decision is made |
[27 Sep 2008|11:24am] |
I've ordered the new T-Mobile G1 googlephone. Oct 23rd it shall arrive!
Reasons I rejected the iPhone in favor of the G1:
1) The iPhone doesn't allow you to access the battery; the G1 does. This is crucial for me since I ditched my landline and talk a lot. I've got 3 batteries and an external charger for my current cellphone, so I can yak all day, swap out for a fresh battery when I need to, and keep at least one extra battery in the charger. I'd tap out the iPhone in a few hours and then be SOL.
2) I can write apps for my OWN PHONE!!! Yeah I realize this reason doesn't apply to the 99% of people out there who aren't serious geeks but I've been pining, seriously, to write a good expense report handler. I want to be able to take pictures of my receipts, select which expense report they should be attached to, click 'submit' and have an itemized report of expenses with receipt photos emailed to my payroll department. I wonder if there's an OCR widget I could grab to automatically lift receipt details from the photos so the user wouldn't have to type in the name of the business and amount of the expense. Hmm.
3) Other people can write apps for my phone!!! This could be so great. With the camera, GPS, internet, audio, and telephone all in one package there's all kinds of things that could be done. Of course you can download new apps for most phones, but they're inherently limited by restrictive license agreements between the developers and the carrier, and the huge amount of effort developers put in to write code for just one phone. With the googlephone developers know their programs will work on ANY googlephone, not just the G1, and google doesn't have a restrictive license agreement but is open source, open access. I anticipate an explosion of creativity.
So, three reasons. That's it, really. I expect to love the 1-touch google search on the G1 but other phones can access google, maybe just with two clicks. I hear people have whined that the G1 doesn't have an exchange client, but it DOES have IMAP and POP and that'll work for me. I know the iPhone looks cooler, but I've always favored function over form. I know I don't really need an internet-enabled phone, but soon I'll be able to search google anyWHERE and anyTIME so I'll never need to actually know anything again. I'll just google for it.
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| alien invasion |
[26 Sep 2008|03:55pm] |
Did you know that in the last few years a growing number of people have been reporting that they feel and sometimes see strange things moving beneath their skin, and develop sores that hagve strange fibers sticking out of them?
I'd heard about this before but the medical community's take on it is that people are, you know, crazy. This MSNBC article makes me wonder if we really are being invaded by aliens:
Wymore says he assumed the people posting were unhinged and spinning wild obsessions out of dryer lint and pet hair. To satisfy his own curiosity, he e-mailed a few of those who had posted, inviting them to send him some fibers for analysis. “I was quite expecting people to say things like, ‘Well, if we try and ship them to you, they’ll disappear,’ or, ‘You can’t see them unless you have the disease, too,’” he recalls. “But 24 hours later, FedEx packages started arriving.”
He fished the samples — too small to study without a microscope — out of the packages and popped them onto a slide. “I didn’t know what to make of them,” Wymore says. Before he analyzed them, he collected fiber samples from his own life: sweater snags, threads from his jeans, dust bunnies. The samples from the patients did not look like these: tightly tangled, vividly red, blue, brownish, as well as some that were clear and smooth. He began collecting fibers everywhere he went — from his house, the medical school’s carpet, the hotel rooms his family stayed in on summer vacation, the pets at his daughter’s elementary school. Nothing he gathered looked like the Morgellons samples — but the samples, which by now had come from Texas, Washington, California, Pennsylvania and Florida, all looked similar to each other.
He and a colleague, pediatrician Rhonda Casey, M.D., then persuaded about 30 adults and children who claimed to have Morgellons to come in for interviews and physicals. They looked ill, sometimes thin and lacking in energy, and some had slurred speech. And Dr. Casey found something odd: tangled skeins of dark fibers, not stuck to the surface of rashes or popping out of pores, but buried in intact skin. Wymore asked two forensic experts at the Tulsa Police Department who had access to national fiber-identification databases to have a look at the fiber samples. They were stumped, he says. The fibers had no cuts or extrusion marks that would establish them as man-made and no internal structures such as cell walls that would make the case for natural origin. The fibers did not lose their color in any solvents or detergents. At 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit, they did not burn.
And now back to your regularly scheduled financial crisis.
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| More on the Decline of America |
[17 Sep 2008|04:10pm] |
From Slate summarizing this Washington Post article:
Two political scientists gave volunteers who described themselves as "conservative" a list of Bush's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. To some of the volunteers they provided a thorough, neutral refutation—the 2004 Duelfer report that concluded Iraq had no WMDs. Now here's the amazing result: The ones who received the refutation were vastly more likely to believe the Bush view than the other group. In other words, the mere presence of "expert" refutation—i.e., an opposing view from people with BIG FAT RÉSUMÉS, as Sarah Palin calls them, made the conservatives less likely to believe the truth and stick to their guns. The researchers call this the "backfire effect" and say it shows up mostly with conservatives. Sending corrections to obvious mistruths, one of them concluded, is only likely to backfire. The very act of arguing against those corrections seems to make conservatives believe them more strongly and reinforces their view that anything from those people with BFR has to be wrong.
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| quick political post |
[16 Sep 2008|01:04pm] |
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2008/sep/16/uselections2008.useconomy
Capitalising on the Wall Street crisis
If ever there was a moment when the seemingly inexorable slide toward a John McCain presidency was halted in its tracks, it should have been Monday. But if Barack Obama is to be sworn in next January, he'll have to take advantage of Wall Street's ongoing, slow-motion collapse with an urgency and a sense of sure-footedness that has sometimes eluded him.
The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the fire sale of Merrill Lynch were driven in large measure by the deregulatory zeal of the Bush administration. Unlike the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which precipitated the last stock-market slide this ugly, what's unfolding now can be attributed directly to bad policy - policy that McCain is not only unlikely to reverse, but may not even understand.
"The fundamentals of our economy are strong," McCain said at a rally in Florida on Monday, though he did manage to acknowledge that "these are very, very difficult times". Indeed. Even as McCain spoke, the insurance giant AIG teetered on the brink of failure. On National Public Radio, Wall Street Journal economics editor David Wessel said that if the decision by government regulators allowing Lehman Brothers to go under backfires, "they'll go down in history as the guys who made the biggest blunder since 1930."
McCain's economic cluelessness is not exactly news.
( Read more... )
Forgive me for the boring political article, just wanted to share the misery
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| A is for apple |
[13 Sep 2008|04:44pm] |
Comment and I'll give you a letter; then you have to list ten things you LOVE that begin with that letter. Afterward, post this in your journal and give out some letters of your own.
sirhc_warrior gave me A:
A is for America, my country that I love, even though the politics and crass materialism are disgusting
A is for Animals, like my pet cats Leaf, Jasmine and Willow, W&G's dogs Apollo and Venus, and also for cows, chickens and fish-- yum!
A is for air-- ahh sweet elixir of life!
A is for Athens, my adopted home town with the wonderful mix of rolling farm country, small town charm and big city cosmoplitan culture
A is for Alternative lifestyles -- nuff said
A is for my brother far away and my late great-grandfather, may he rest in peace
A is for Abstract Algebra, one of my fave areas of study. I miss it.
A is for Air Conditioning-- I know it's a sin and bad for the environment but oh it feels good
A is for Authors, two of whom are the loves of my life
A is for Art, artists and all striving to create beauty and meaning
and now for some music:
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| fish math |
[10 Sep 2008|11:18am] |
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Yesterday I had 4 adult guppies and N baby guppies all swarming around in a 5 gallon tank. Today I have 4 adults and N-1 baby guppies, and G has one well-fed betta.
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| Why Fetlife sucks; a superfluous post |
[10 Sep 2008|10:25am] |
I've been poking around on Fetlife for a few weeks now. First, the good; I've had some good correspondence with people one on one, and I've found a few groups about certain more esoteric sex subjects where some interesting discussions are happening.
However the lameness oozing out of the larger groups is overwhelming. It permeates the site. Let me give a concrete example.
First, the post I made a few weeks ago is still valid; most posts are still of the form "Answer this question? I'm just curious" and most respondents answer as if they're taking a poll. No conversation, no thought, just reaction. For example:
Subject: does it make a diffences ? ? ?
Greetings to all, But does it really make a difference if master or mistress toys are homemade. or bought ?
Does that made the master or mistress less or more of a powerful person ?
On the face of it, what a stupid question! Most BDSM toys are homemade-- maybe not in your home, but a lot of them are made in someone's basement or living room. Most crap mass-produced in factories isn't going to hold a candle to a well-crafted homemade flogger, or even a well-crafted homemade candle. Really the poster should've asked "does it make a difference if the master makes toys that are dysfunctional pieces of shite?"
(Let's assume the poster is not native and cut him some slack in the English department. Does bad spelling make the master less or more of a powerful person?)
One would have to assume from the question that the poster does, in fact, make toys out of duct tape and coat-hanger wire that fall apart and give tetanus to anyone that so much as looks at them, and that their partner let something disparaging slip. So this guy is clearly trying to round up support for his lame-ass handiwork so he can go back to his snobby elitist bitch of a partner and show her that no one but her would even THINK about whining. I mean, that's the only scenario that makes sense to me. Am I right?
And the poster is getting what he wants, I suspect. 29 replies so far, all saying (essentially) "my partner makes his own toys sometimes and they're great!" Well sure. But not a single person asks the poster why he would ask such a lame question, and no one replies to anyone else. Standard format, lame-ass question and simple responses. No thought, no interaction beyond reaction.
Of course the website setup doesn't necessarily support conversation. It's not a threaded board so if you want to reply to someone you have to type out their name and hope they notice.
I'd post all this on there (and maybe I will) but the board that I would've posted it on has been deleted. "Fetlife Rants" got trashed along with some other boards yesterday, in a weird and fascistic administration spasm where evidently the head guy banned a bunch of people without warning and deleted the groups they moderated. Some of those folks were universally recognized as assholes but others were just speaking their mind. The administrator has now appointed Sekrit Moderators who will go around deleting posts without notice, warning or appeal. Well, whatever.
If I cared enough I'd start my own non-lame site based on slashdot-style forums with threading and karma moderation, although also with personal profiles, journaling, picture-hosting and other sorts of interaction. Should I do it? Is it worth it? Or is it all doomed to be lame no matter what?
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