We're in crunch time for Health Care Reform in the House. If you want it, imperfect as it admittedly is, for goodness sake call your Representative and say so.
You can find your Representative's phone number here. You need your zip + 4 but there's a link on that page to get it if you don't already know it.
I called (had to call the local number; the DC number is always busy) and I sent an e-mail.
I woke up this morning with a forecast of a beautiful day, temp nearly 70 (F), and permission to use a neighbor's lawn to launch my canoe because the water in Cherokee Lake isn't high enough to use the usual launch point.
I also had a bicycle, finally tuned up and in rideable condition after nearly a year, waiting for me in Knoxville. And an equinox potluck.
My clever plan was to drive into Knoxville, retrieve the bicycle, come home, canoe for a couple of hours, come home, make my potluck contribution and go to the potluck.
Picking up the bike took a little longer than expected (kudos to Gary at the Bike Zoo, who spent probably half an hour working with me to get my brakes good and tight with the brake cable completely out of the way of my pedal, even when the front wheel was angled to make the bike turn right).
When I got home one of my car tires was completely flat. So I put the bike away and everything and spent the next hour getting the flat off the car and taking it to WalMart to be fixed (nothing else in the area is open on Saturday afternoon).
By the time I was finished with that there was no time to go canoeing before prepping for the potluck.
And tomorrow it is supposed to rain. :-(
http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/021896.html
Young girl: Are you Jewish?
Thirty-something guy in suit: No. Are you?
Young girl: No.
Thirty-something guy in suit: Why? Is that a prerequisite for a one night stand?
Young girl: Am I seriously hearing this?
--Blind Pig, 14th St
Overheard by: Seventh Floor Walk-up
First, he complains that Edgeworth and "that other guy" always have some hot girl by their side. I guess even Nick's childhood best friend won't mention him explicitly in this game.
And then he belts out: "Franzy, did you forget your promise? The one where you said you would model for my next book, "Franzy's Whippity-Whip Trip"!
OH. DEAR. LORD.
Okay, here's a Net question.
I just did a LiveJournal read a little while ago, while drinking my tea. As it happens, some of my reading list overlaps with someone I don't know--I'm not on their list or they on mine. But they'd obviously been doing a run just before me because I encountered three comments in a row, basically like this:
ONE:
I hated that movie too.
Ima Writer
Author of FANTASY EPIC ON ICE, vol. 1 of the SHATTERED SHADOWS trilogy (June, 2008)
Twice nominated for the Internet Fantasy Award
Voted number 12 on Best Blog About Cats Internet List
Short story "When Cats are Floons," soon to appear in the anthology CATS ON ICE, Alfred E. Newman Press, October 2010
Visit my blog at CATPRINCESS@WORDPRESS.COM and my website at PRINCESSCAT@DOMAIN.ORGTWO:
The last time I cooked rice balls, I tried using chicken broth, and they turned out awesome.
Ima Writer
Author of FANTASY EPIC ON ICE (June, 2008)
Twice nominated for the Internet Fantasy Award
Voted number 12 on Best Blog About Cats Internet List
Short story "When Cats are Floons," soon to appear in the anthology CATS ON ICE, Alfred E. Newman Press, October 2010
Visit my blog at CATPRINCESS@WORDPRESS.COM and my website at PRINCESSCAT@DOMAIN.ORGTHREE:
I've never heard of more than half of last year's Hugo winners.
Ima Writer
Author of FANTASY EPIC ON ICE (June, 2008)
Twice nominated for the Internet Fantasy Award
Voted number 12 on Best Blog About Cats Internet List
Short story "When Cats are Floons," soon to appear in the anthology CATS ON ICE, Alfred E. Newman Press, October 2010
Visit my blog at CATPRINCESS@WORDPRESS.COM and my website at PRINCESSCAT@DOMAIN.ORGSo here's my question: has anyone here ever followed up on somebody after reading a sig appended after a poster's name? In other words, do they really work as personal advertizing?
Those of you my age or older will probably recall (most likely, against your will) a song that was all over radio in the era of bell-bottom jeans and lighted dance floors: "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)," one of only two songs by singer/songwriter
Rupert Holmes to crack the Top 10 on the old charts, the other being "Him." (For those who mercifully managed never to have heard or forgotten it, go
here if you dare to the lyrics and a video of the song itself.)
Lately one of our local soft-rock radio stations has been playing this at least once daily while I listen at work, reminding me of just why I found it so annoying back in the day. When a song gets on my nerves, me being a filker, my natural reaction is to parody it. Hence this idea for the last verse of this song as its improbable would-be-adulterer's scenario probably would have played out in real life:
She grabbed my piña colada
And threw it into my face,
Then she kicked with her spike heels
In a delicate place.
She said, "My lawyer will be calling you,
You dirty two-timing ape;
He'll take your ass to the cleaners—
There will be no escape!"Anyone wishing to use this in an update of the full song for the era of Internet matchmaking sites and speed-dating may feel free; I don't have the patience for it.
So, first off, I would like to run GM Space at RPI's weekend of minigames. I have 6 signups, out of 15. This does not work. Also, the game is going to rest for awhile after, as 73 people have played, and this will bring it to 88. So, please, I need signups!
http://minigames.foambrainlarps.com/events/362(Also, do you knowhow horrible it feels when people keep telling you you must bring your game to RPI, and then all sign up for the other game in the slot, so that it even has a waitlist of 3 while your game needs 7 to make its minimum?)
Secondly, On April 1st, I plan to go to the Fools Ball which a friend is DJing at.
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=379448299024&ref=mfConsidering the fact that It's 4 hours away from where I am, and about an hour from the Brandeis area, I'd really like to come by Thursday afternoon, hang a bit, hopefully find someone to drive with, and then have a place to crash that night.
If I don't have these, going is probably not an option, as I really can't drive 4 hours after a night of clubbing. So, help?
Yes, I know, the equinox isn't exactly late for this area, but we had several years of early springs, to the point where, say, the forsythia not being in bloom a few days ago seemed odd as well as disappointing.
After lunch today,
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
cattitude and I went for a walk through Inwood Hill Park. It's a gorgeous sunny day, low 70s (21 or 22 for those of you using the modern measuring system), almost no wind. Yesterday was almost as nice, but I spent most of it indoors, working.
We went up into the hills, looking for the first bits of greenery, and enjoying some of the evergreen shrubs as well. We saw, finally, a bit of forsythia (Cattitude had seen some in bloom downtown, but I wasn't with him), and more daffodils (another local park has had them in bloom for a few days) and periwinkle, but much less of all three than we had expected/hoped. Lots of buds, though.
We also saw a garter snake, I think the first I've seen in the wild. (Cattitude remembers seeing one other in the park, but I don't think I was with him.) Just for a moment, because I found it by startling it as I walked along the path, but quite clear. We waited for a minute or two, but it didn't come out again, so we went on uphill
The less fun part was many dead trees, fallen over in last weekend's storm: the parks department crew was in the park today, taking away trunks and branches from the low-lying areas. In the hilly area, they cut through trunks that had fallen over paved paths, and cut some other bits for safety, so they wouldn't fall and hit someone in the next high wind. We lose a few trees every winter, of course, but this was worse than usual. Yes, there are plenty of saplings that have been waiting for the sunlight and room to grow, but that takes time.
Cross-posted from Dreamwidth (
http://redbird.dreamwidth.org/1201186.html), where there are
comments. Please comment here,
there, or both.
3/20/10 03:16 pm - thnidu - Posted using TxtLJ
Must... stop... avoiding... taxes... cleaning... organizing... . BYE!
I'm becoming more and more convinced that I have a failing disk in my 3.5yo MBP.
I know that opening the thing up involves a spudger and many small plastic tabs between the top and the main body of the beast.
Anyone local to me done this before and want to provide some moral support as I do it?
(Why I believe something is failing...
SMART tests are NOT coming up with errors, but various things cause a fair number of
3/20/10 2:09:39 PM kernel disk0s2: I/O error.
to be logged.
I've not gotten a good Time Machine backup in quite a while. I'm getting:
3/20/10 1:59:42 PM com.apple.backupd[20269] Error: (-36) SrcErr:YES Copying /Path/to/file to (null)
(-36 is IO err) and then it fails out after a heap of them.
{sigh}
(developed from
A mighty huntress is our cat...)
[ttto Luther's Hymn, "Ein feste Burg is unser Gott / A mighty fortress is our God".]
A mighty huntress is our cat
Of mouses and of snackies.
She boldly leaps into their lair
And fiercely she attack-ies.
She drags the snack jar out,
Its head gripped in her mouth.
She beats it on the floor,
Its entrails out to pour.
With greed she feasts upon them.
Except, that is, when she gets the lid but leaves the jar behind. She doesn't seem to notice until after the
whack, whack there's nothing there to eat.
To the left, she has killed two real mice since Wednesday night. Good for you, Ista!
http://shetterly.blogspot.com/2010/03/happy-spring.html
The Wild Hunt: A Blessed Spring Equinox: "Eostre"
Yes, there's some doubt about whether there ever was a goddess named Eostre. A good myth is a good myth, whether it's old or new.
http://shetterly.blogspot.com/2010/03/watching-avatar-while-human.html
In
“Watching Avatar While White” @ Booklife, Cynthia Ward says, "In the worlds of Pandora and the imaginary Dances “Wild West” and Burroughs’ Mars and Tarzan, a white man doesn’t just find himself redeemed from his impure, inharmonious, and sinful state. He finds himself redeemed specifically from the evils of colonialism, slavery, and the other forms of oppression that whites have imposed upon people of color for centuries."
I left this response:
The whole “redemption” idea only makes sense if you buy into the essentially Christian redemption concepts of contemporary anti-racist theory. If you don’t, if for example you’re a working class soldier who has been following bad orders, joining the other team may not have anything to do with redemption. It may just be about doing the right thing, no matter which side you start on.
The idea that Avatar is all about white guys is also at odds with Palestinians becoming Navi to dramatize Zionist oppression.
By the way, did John Carter have slaves? I never got the impression that he was one of the 300,000 rich folks who controlled the Confederacy. Being an officer suggests he has some money, but not enough to buy himself a generalship. I think one could assume Carter was like Robert E. Lee, someone who was opposed to slavery, but thought his state was more important than his nation.
Also, whites did join American Indian tribes. Google one of my favorite examples, Simon Girty, or see, for example, this site:
http://www.galafilm.com/1812/e/background/nat_white_ind.html
The native people of this continent tend to see people in tribal (ie, cultural) terms, not racial ones. There are exceptions, of course, like the modern Cherokee, but they’ve adopted the racial outlooks that Europeans brought to this continent.
Mind you, I think Avatar’s a flawed film, and making the hero the guy who rode the biggest bird was overkill, but “white” people are not the only people who write stories about outsiders who become champions. It’s a fairly common element of folktales everywhere. It’s about belonging.
I'm tempted to elaborate on what so-called redemption stories may actually be about. Justice and enlightenment should be on the list.
And the notion that Native Americans were racist rather than tribalist should also be tested with the example of Quanah Parker, the great chief of the Comanches who is seen as half-white by racists and racialists, but as Comanche by tribalists and nationalists.
The Wild Hunt: A Blessed Spring Equinox: "Eostre"
Yes, there's some doubt about whether there ever was a goddess named Eostre. A good myth is a good myth, whether it's old or new.
I'm staying in a house that isn't mine. maybe it's Alon's somehow, but I doubt it. The owner has a similar habit of stockpiling TV episodes, and we've watched up to a certain number of Invader Zim episodes, there are 2 new ones left. The others are saved on his TV archive. Shw [abbreviated name of a dude I met at Cornell] comes by, dropped off by his father, because he's staying at the house too. For some reason I am topless, in the style of guys walking around their dorm rooms in pj pants. Shw is similarly topless. It is somehow understood that my toplessness is a feminist thing, and everyone regardless of gender is allowed to be topless without drawing criticism in their own dwelling. But the feminist thing is new, so I still sort of cover myself. The owner of the house is touchy about people using his TV when he isn't there, but I don't think Shw knows this, and he plays old Zim episodes to entertain himself and his father. I come by the living room to watch. There is an episode... and in the dream I am now dreaming as if I am a character in the episode.
There is a lawn party on a huge lawn, maybe like the party at Alice in Wonderland, in the movie, during her engagement party. There is at the same time an indian couple building a shed in their courtyard, against a hill. Only they aren't done and there's a large hole in the ceilnig of the short shed, which doubles as a short cut to the other side of the lawn/party. My mother's dog somehow gets loose, or I'm carrying the dog somewhere, and I climb through this hole in the shed, up onto the hill on the other side, to get where I'm going. When I have to do it again later in the episode, again with my mom's dog, the hole is smaller, as the wall of the shed now has a new line of bricks not yet covered with cement. I don't quite fit but I manage to accidentally take apart their brick wall, which is [in parts] made of smaller toy-like bricks. I am ashamed and offer to help the Indian dude of the couple [who's been building the shed] my help in rebuilding what I broke and cleaning up. He grumbles but we start working on the wall together in the yard outside the shed. At that moment, his wife brings him a fresh chocolate muffin and says "how did you know I was about to bake muffins?" Apparently, indian dude took a break from shed building and went back out just as his wife decided to make muffins, and he knew if he were outside working she would bring him one. Crafty.
But then a yellow wasp comes by, near the muffin, and scares him. Scares all of us, we don't want to get stung, and we scrabble about a bit trying to avoid it. I wap it with my hand but it comes back, I grab J [no idea hwere she came from] and use her as a human shield, wap the wasp with her, she screams, and it looks like somehow my wapping the wasp with her body decapitated the wasp and hollowed its head. The headless body somehow gets the empty head to sit on top of it and flies away.
More wasps from the first wasp's swarm arrive, but they're not just yellow, they're magenta and other others. We flee, I decide my promise to help with the shed does not extend to making war with wasps. The wasps proceed to cause havoc everywhere in the neighborhood. They invade a children's party full of squeals and energetic dancing, cover everything, transforming the children's clothing while the children stand still in fear. They are prodded to move somehow, in a stilted sort of indie rock/minimalist art dance, while one tall child who has put on some kind of 'cool' sunglasses repeats on beat "just like swiss cheese" over and over, with exact pauses in between. It's part of the music programme constructed by the wasps. They do this everywhere. People who were in regular clothes are suddenly wearing togas striped with watercolor rainbows all in the same orientation. They shuffle unconsciously, frozen into movements by fear of the wasps. The refrain "just like swiss cheese" rings through the neighborhood, uttered in a similar attitude as "right about now, funk show brutha" [a song that I am probably mis-quoting].
The Zim episode ends on that note, [Very zim! Good job, subconscious!], and shows a scanned note from some girl who wrote to the show submitting this episode idea [there's no zim or dib or any usual characters in this ep btw]. She writes "I also ___" I forget what was in the blank, maybe it was 'bungee jump', not sure. Then in parentheses or as a footnote at the end "CTY". And she dedicated it to some guy, and I guess the meaning is that they met at CTY [camp for smarty pants kids] and she likes him.
Shw wants to watch another ep but I'm uneasy about the owner of the house seeing we've been watching stuff on his TV without his permission. He sends his father home, and Shw and I stand around talking. He says something like.. "It's like in that movie, The Logical Choice." and it seems very significant to me. Ostensibly, it is about an indian girl who must choose between lovers, life paths, and moralities, though I think Shw initially means the romance part. But this is about more than romance an interactions with others. I'm sure of it. Someone is using the dream to say something. And the fact that Shw is here, Shw who made the speech in non-dream-life about real monogamy (not serial monogamy), Shw who reminds me of ~ when he talks about relationships, that means something too.
The point of logical choice is that there is some fallacy that there is only one logical choice, as logical goes on the replace "right" choice. But there are many kinds of logic, held by the many people inside of me, and none of them are illogical, and there is no unqualified "right" choice. You can use logic to create "right". You can choose many logical paths. Along similar lines, justification is an afterthought.
And on an unrelated note, something I took away from the Kevin book is that sometimes kids are weird. Some kids might want to break the law and go to jail. That's their thing. By trying to stop them when they have thought long and hard about it and made up their mind that this is what they want to do, you are impairing their purpose in life. You cannot be certain you are saving them for a better, well-adjusted life later. You don't know that they'll turn out okay later. It's something to remember.
http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/021895.html
Girl #1: Did you know that girl sitting in front of us?
Girl #2: I do know her, but not well enough to discuss child porn.
--Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif){kind=small}
amused
irritated
happy
aggravated![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
