Barbara Ehrenreich on the Perils of Positive Thinking

Via Pharyngula.

More RSA Animations here.

JAQing Off

Shorter Bruce Walker, at The American Thinker:

"Barry" Obama is a real nice guy to have a beer with, and is therefore eminently unsuited to be PUSA.

WARNING! WARNING! Actual Quote Follows! NONFICTION! NONFICTION!

As Robin of Berkeley observed in her truly scary article, Barack Hussein Obama may well be have been a traumatized victim in his youth, perhaps of sexual abuse. If he is, then Obama will have personality disorders which simply cannot be cured (read Robin's article for the details). If Robin is right, then at some point, the true, hopelessly sick Obama will show himself before a horrified nation. Average Americans will no longer like the president. They will, instead, be saddened and repelled -- and they will emphatically expel Obama and his supporters from power or influence in our lives. When folks stop liking Barry, the party is over. [Emphasis mine]

Gee, thanks for helping victims of child sexual abuse move past their trauma, there, you jerk.

And that link to Robin of Berkeley's horrible article will take you to another instance of JAQing off. She's just asking questions, guys. Of course, the questions are why is Barack Obama so strange? and did his drunkard father beat him about the head in Indonesia? and does he have Asperger's Syndrome or is he merely mentally ill? and did his mother leave him in the care of a self-admitted child-molesting Communist? so only go there if your blood pressure is crashing.

These articles, like Goldberg's opus Liberal Fascism, are just intended to get these smears into published form so that they can be referenced as authority on Obama by all kinds of smear artists. Now that Bruce Walker and Robin of Berkeley have produced these articles in which they wonder, in wide-eyed childlike innocence, if Obama is not, in fact, fucked in the head, people like Glenn Reynolds and Andy Schlafly can point to these articles as support for declaring that Obama is, indeed, fucked in the head and that this fucked-in-the-headness is the least of our worries. Don't you know he didn't tip Medvedev off to our intentions to arrest those Russian long-term spies?!?!

The Big Lie: you're soaking in it.

Thanks to Alicublog.

I Think It's An Improvement? Maybe?

Usedtabee, when a decent, God-fearing white American committed suicide, you'd get chain letters or emails with the structure of a parent searching the dead child's room and finding a book that wasn't expected:

Jesse Kilgore committed suicide in October by walking into the woods near his New York home and shooting himself. Keith Kilgore said he was shocked because he believed his son was grounded in Christianity, had blogged against abortion and for family values, and boasted he'd been debating for years.

After Jesse's death, Keith Kilgore ... searched Jesse's room and found the book under the mattress ....

Now what do you think Mr. Kilgore had found under his son's mattress?

If this were the 80's, or the 90's, or even sometimes the Aughts, you might expect the parent to have found one of the following:





or even



But what did Mr. Kilgore find under his son's mattress?



I think this might be an improvement? Maybe? Unfortunately, Jesse's still dead, but now the moral Chicken Littles are screaming about a book of substance instead of a harmless, lightweight pastime.

Personally I don't for one second think that The God Delusion alone drove this man to kill himself. He was a veteran, after all; who knows what psychological damage he was dealing with? And we must also consider the source: I found this on Fundies, but they source it to World Net Daily, a known screech rag. It does not present a neutral account of the man's death, instead getting all of its information from the man's father and relatives. They blame all of the man's troubles on his college education and the people he interacted with in school, thereby allowing WND a second target: Atheists and intellectuals. It's like a wingnut's wet dream, two screech targets with one stone.

The rap music blares from the Toyota that the Latinos are working on at the side of the quiet suburban street: Ah, America.

The Reason For The Season

Today is Columbus Day, a day when we citizens of the United States celebrate the discovery of our continent -- and maybe a couple others, too, but who cares? -- with a solemn day of having to wait another day for our next Netflix delivery.

And why, you ask, O my darling and O the delight of my eyes?

Well, I'd tell you a story, but why should I, when someone else has done an amazingly accurate yet concise summation of the political and socioeconomical forces at work behind this amazing discovery, without which we would not have this great nation of ours -- and a couple others, beside -- and doubtless without which we would all still live in the lands of our forefathers and yes this whole sentence is a question simply because I asked why?

Via Pharyngula.

Lulz

(c) 2008 SAP, from Shakespeare's Sister.

The amount to which Joe Lieberman is involved in this campaign is aggravating.

I keep reminding myself that ol' I's Independent Now is not worth my anger. I can go as far as aggravation, but that's all he deserves.

Does anyone remember what narratives the media had about Loserman back in 2000? 'Cause if this ends up McCain-Leiberman I think we are justified in dusting them off. I know Campaign 2000 was all about "Gore's a liar and he's a fake and he sighs too loud!" but surely some vituperation was aimed at Holy Joe.

Dear Clients

I appreciate that your time is precious. I appreciate that a lot of the time, all these questions that we're required to answer by law are bullshit. No, I don't know why they want to know about that thing in first grade with the noodles, except they are legally empowered to ask and pin us to the wall if we fail to answer.

I do appreciate that sometimes you have to come all the way from another state to bring us the materials. I know that mailing rates are absurdly high.

Having said all that,

Please do not wonder why we don't know about the noodles.

Please do not tell us we have all of this information, when in fact we do not actually have your tax returns from the past 10 years.

Please do not state that apparently we are too lazy to do all of this stuff ourselves, and wonder why you paid us in the meantime when you actually haven't, and threaten to go to another lawyer if we ask you one more stupid question.

And if, somehow, you can't avoid doing all of those things above, please make sure you actually have given us everything we need to answer these questions, because we can't read your mind and tell what you've done for a living the past ten years.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Your Friendly Neighborhood Office Manager.

Huh

I can type a lot more accurately and faster if I am not looking at the screen while I'm doing it.

Weird.

I think perhaps the reading portions of my brain interrupt the typing portions of my brain. So bits of my brain are pulling Scrabble tiles out of the bag and other bits are reading out "What do you get if you multiply ... ?" while yet third portions are noting that I've spelled Libray with one R again.

And if I watch the beige wall or the clock or anything other than the screen or my hands, I get along much better. Probably because I'm concentrating more attention on which keys my hands are actually touching. If I concentrate too hard, though, I get into the centipede's dilemma and get all fouled up. So there's a trick to it.

We Get Mail

Today, we got a big old package in the mail. I'm talking 9 by 12 bubble-wrap-interior white envelope, gotta weigh a good fraction of a pound. So I'm thinking this thing is important to one of our cases, I just can't think which one. The return address lists no recipient, just a street address in Sevierville, Tennessee.

Maybe it's a surprise mailing from Cormack McCarthy, an advance copy of his latest book, Look Ma! I Wrote A Blood-Drenched Thriller About the Unbearable Burden of Being a Manly Man! But why would he send one to me? And surely that would weigh as much as any of the guns the anti-heroes inside it use!

So, full of curiosity enough to kill all three cats I'm supposed to be feeding this evening, assuming they bother to show up, I get my trusty letter razor out and open this sucker.

A packet of M&Ms falls out. Plain. Or rather, "Milk Chocolate," because "Plain" tested poorly. There's at least two dozen pages inside, some of them legal-sized. Turns out to be a come-on letter from a real estate business in Sevierville. I bet they sent something to David because one of our clients deeded him some property in Sevier County in lieu of that other thing. They included the M&Ms in the package because they thought we'd just throw it away if they didn't have something that would capture our attention.

Like some people head up their blog posts with SEX!! just to grab your attention, I guess they wanted to do the next best thing, and seeing as it is a truth universally acknowledged that people will misconstrue the content of your letter if your cover sheet prominently features A Certain Word, they went with another bribe: Chocolate, as is also universally acknowledged, is supposed to stimulate the same parts of your brain as any orgasm will tickle. The writers of the letter hope thereby to entice us to read what they have to say, rather than consigning it to the trash bin of history with an apathetic shrug.

It is very easy, in this day and age, to just trash something with little more than a cursory glance. Take, for instance, a letter we got yesterday. The envelope was not so ostentatious, in fact it was rather unassuming, but it concealed contents sure to start any conversation. Thomson West, which is a legal publisher, was pushing its latest publication, Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges, by Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner. The only thing that forestalled its appointment with the circular file was my anticipation of David's reaction when I told him Thomson West wanted him to supplement Tony Scalia's income. I had to wait until the next time I called him, which wasn't long. David chuckled and questioned Thomson West's collective sanity. So, that little interaction complete, the stay on the letter's fate was lifted, and into the pit it went. Perhaps I should have staged it better, with a dramatic one-liner as I held it over the bin and let go, but all I could manage was a rather flat "meh."

What was that? What did the other letter say? The one from the realtor? I don't know, I don't like plain M&Ms.

Father's Day Movies

The History Channel just got done showing Tombstone, with Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Michael Biehne, and Billy Bob Thornton.

Now it's showing The Outlaw Josey Wales, a Clint Eastwood picture with Clint and John "Whoop-de-god-damn-de-doo" Vernon.

While Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday are after vengeance and call it keeping the peace, Josey Wales is after vengeance on the Kansas Irregulars who slaughtered his wife and child and burned his home down.

Wikipedia says that Josey Wales was a revisionist western, in that the hero is a Confederate veteran, now on the run, and the villains are the Kansas "Redlegs" who first burnt his homestead and then joined the Union and shot Josey's companions after they surrendered.

The conflict in Tombstone builds for a while, before an accidental spark sets it off: One of the Clanton gang gets high on opium and shoots the local marshal while handing over his guns. Wyatt and Doc and the other heroes get pressured into taking down the gang, and it turns personal when the Clantons shoot Morgan Earp.

For Josey Wales, it's personal from the beginning. Both movies are of the Reluctant Badass genre, in which the heroes are simple, peaceful folk until Someone Touches Their Stuff. Then the kid gloves go off.

I don't think the History Channel was thinking much about the implications of these two movies, especially set back to back. I think they just thought, "Wow, it's Father's Day, let's fill up our schedule with westerns!" But they ended up with two movies whose protagonists are basically the same people, just on different sides of "the law," which in both cases is merely an excuse for a lot of gunplay.

There's one other parallel between the two movies: The antagonists wear red in both films. The Clanton gang wears red around their waists, and the Redlegs sport the infamous leggings. A lot of red blood gets spilled. It's pretty dull in Josey Wales, which seemed to have been filmed under an overcast autumn sky, while in Tombstone it's nice and bright, just like the rest of the film, which is nominally set in Arizona.

Memorial Day

I don't suppose I can cheerily wish anyone a happy Memorial Day while mindful of the purpose of Memorial Day. Nevertheless, think happy thoughts about your lost ones on this day, or you'll never get out of bed.

I haven't lost anyone in any wars of the 20th Century whom I'd ever known. I believe there's a Marsh on that big stone plaque by the Paris Courthouse memorializing our Great War dead. My Grandfather Williams was a clerk in the army, and went to Europe, although he was too old to serve in the foxholes or with the artillery; he was a clerk. My Grandfather Chandler moved over to Norfolk, Virginia at some point to help build sheds and housing for the Naval base there. He was home before my mother came along in early 45, before the war ended, and my father is technically a Boomer, although my grandparents Williams had been married a fur piece before the war started.

My great-uncle James was a conscientious objector during the war, but they took him anyway and made him a stretcher-bearer and all-round medic in the Pacific. He never talked about what he'd seen there, after he came back from the war. He was a reticent and taciturn man who'd show up of a Sunday and sit in one chair, and not talk (although he was probably pretty deaf by that point), but I don't know what his personality was like before the war, so I can't say how it changed him.

My grandmother Chandler tried to make ends meet on the family farm, in the little house she still lives in at 91, with three small children in tow. My grandmother Williams had a job at the Avon army depot in Kentucky, repairing busted electronics for the army.

Isabel's grandfather Johnson was in the Navy, and taught sailors to read radar screens and other electronica at the University of Chicago. Her grandmother Johnson was a nurse; they got married near the end of the war, and Isabel's mom was the first of three children, born in 48.

Isabel's grandparents Pelech moved from the Ukraine to Germany in the 30's, escaping from the Soviets' purge of priests. Then her grandfather was involved in some unclear way in some resistance movement, and may have blown up a railroad. Her grandmother kept her head down, and somehow they came through the war, only to move to Peron's Argentina. They moved to the United States when Isabel's dad was little.

I have a toast here, for them all.

We Get Visitors

So we just had a visit from a couple of young women shilling for Check Into Cash in the office. They dropped off a handful of flyers that have some smiling, handsome handyman whose precise profession is hard to determine, and a handful of cheap pens with their logo on 'em. They promised us $20 cash for every person we send down there.

So, we're gonna rake in that cash real fast. Watch us refer people. Any day now, we're gonna start.

But that doesn't top the visitor we had the other day.

I've already told you about the Christian missionary from the Phillipines who tried to solicit donations from me some months ago.

Well, now we've had another missionary, this one from much closer to home. She came in with an armful of books hoping to get me to cough up a buck or two to fund their school/mission/thing, in exchange for which I would get FABULOUS PRIZES including (but not limited to):

1. A Health Food Cook Book (It's healthy! For your soul! See? It's got Christ in it!)

2. A Children's Book (Look mommy! Pastel Jesus is drawing the eyes back on that beggar so he can see again!)

3. A Propaganda Vehicle (Jesus watches over our troops and gives them victory on the battlefield!)

That last one had a blurb about "The Terrorist behind the Terrorists!" I shit you not. Wonder who that could be.



Seriously, it was a military fluff piece mixed with blatant Christian proselytizing.

How. Could I ever. Possibly. Resist.

So I sent this poor young girl, who was only trying to help me Savior the Flavor, away with no cash because I simply don't carry much these days, and damned if I'm going to dip into the (very) petty cash just to get her out of the office.

I even refused her offer to say a quick prayer with me.

I'm a bad boy.

Beer!

So I get up this morning and step through the shower, perform the rest of my ablutions with more than my normal vigor, and get out the door about 15 minutes early, planning to grab breakfast on the road, because we've got a big meeting between a couple of our clients and some other lawyers at the office today.

My drive in to work is uneventful. I stop to get one of those pint bottles of milk and some cereal at a convenience store (one in the chain of gas stations labelled "Git-N-Go" that're pretty numerous here in the Tennessee Valley) and, as I roll into the office, I notice several things.

First, the boss's car isn't in the parking lot. There is another car, one I don't recognize, parked near the telephone pole in the middle of the lot.

Second, the office isn't open. I can tell because the flag isn't flying. The boss is not one to let the authoritarian right and the war hawks have the flag all to themselves, and he always puts it out on a nice, sunny day like this.

Third, there are two people standing next to the door into the office.

Crap. Someone's dropped the ball somewhere, and I have to make sure that it wasn't me.

All right. So I get out of the car, leaving my breakfast in the passenger seat, and approach the two people next to our door. Yep, it's the other lawyer and the court reporter, both of whom drove up here from Nashville yesterday for this meeting.

Okay, all's not lost. It's not 9 o'clock yet. So I let them into the office, and plug all the lamps in (they have to plug in, one of them doesn't even have a switch) and then I go call the boss.

"You mean the meeting's at nine? I thought it was at ten! I'm on my way. Put 'em in the upstairs conference room. Where are our clients?"

So I unlock the conference room and try to call the motel where our clients are staying.

"I'm very sorry, sir, there's no one by that name staying here. He just called me to say that he's in front of your office right now, but he can't get in."

Seriously, that's what the guy who answered the phone said. They don't have our guests as clients, but incidentally, they can't get into our building.

So I go down to the parking lot. Good, the boss's car is here, but there's no new car. Our clients are probably on the other side of the building, parked on the street. It's back through the building for me. The boss is in here somewhere, but I don't see him.

I do see our clients as soon as I unlock the streetside door. Both of them are over 80, and I usher them indoors to meet the boss coming out of the downstairs conference room. He gets them seated in there, and I head upstairs to make coffee.

The coffee's percolating along nicely when I discover that our non-dairy creamers have become obstinate lumps in the bottoms of their bottles. So they'll have to make do with sugar and sugar substitute. Fortunately, everyone eventually takes their industrial-strength coffee black (seriously, I think the boss got some ultra-mega-jumbo strength coffee that makes, like, 100 cups or something on one filter pack) except me, and I manage to sneak out and get my breakfast so's I can put some milk in my coffee.

So, a bad start to a day that is rapidly shaping up much better than it used to be.

Still, my robot brain needs beer.

Monday Sunday Blogging

So I was just settled in for a long winter's read when my telephone rang Sunday morning.

It was Linda. She had been on her way out to the lake to see her mother and she'd taken Skipper the Bouncy along. First she stopped at Kroger's to get her prescription filled and rolled the windows down so Skipper could get some air. But she rolled them down too far and he hopped out and tried to follow her inside.

So she got back in the car and tried to start it. Her brand-new 2007 Camry refused to even turn over.

Could I come get her dog while she waited at AAA? Well, certainly.

So I put my shoes on and I get in my car and I turn the key.

Click.

Oh, come on now! So I turn the key again.

Hail Eris, the engine turns over. From this point on, my car's running reliably. So I drive down to Kroger's and I park next to Linda's car. She's standing near it, holding Skipper on a leash. I take custody of the canine and she goes inside to get her prescription. She takes about ten minutes. In the meantime, I'm standing near the cars, sometimes between our two cars to stay out of traffic, and I find in the next space over a Lego motorcycle and two Lego men, both of whom are painted red with decals that suggest motorcycle jumpsuits, but their heads are white and painted up like skulls.

Weird.

So finally Linda comes out and Skipper recognizes her from thirty feet away, and starts wagging his four-inch tail stub against my leg. I think I'm still bruised.

So Linda tries to start the car again -- nothing -- and she asks me please to take the dog home while she waits for the AAA man.

So I coax Skipper into my back seat and take him to Linda's house. While I'm trying to make sure he's got food and water, the phone rings. It's Linda. I took Skipper back to her place? She meant me to take him home with me for the nonce. Anyway, the AAA man says it's a dead battery, and she's not to turn her car off again because it won't ever start until they get a new battery.

So it being a Sunday, nothing's open, but Linda decides she needs me to escort her into Clinton so she can drop it off at Fox Toyota. So, fine. We drive into Clinton, minding the speed limit because the MIL is watching, and find that our favorite Toyota dealership has an awful lot of Chevy pickups parked in its lot. Then we notice the great big blue CHEVROLET sign hung over where it still says TOYOTA in illuminated letters. So our Toyota place isn't there anymore.

There's a man checking out the Chevy pickups, and we ask him where the Toyota place is. It's over across the Interstate, he says, about ten minutes from the Chevy dealership.

So Linda decides that we've already driven into Clinton, we might as well get to the Toyota place, so off we set again. It's not long before we cross the Interstate and I spot the Toyota place off to the left.

I think I can get there from this turning. Okay, I'm in a Shoney's parking lot, fine. I just need to go left and between the Shoney's and whatever is next to it. Crap, there's a chain-link fence and a gate and now I see that the road back to Fox Toyota is on the other side of the Shoney's. So I turn around, minding that RV that's parked there, and I drive through the Shoney's lot and find myself at a turn onto one of those divided drives where it's one way on either side of a small median, and I'm on the side running away from Fox.

So I look left, towards Fox. And I look right, towards the road. And I turn the wrong way on this drive, just long enough to cut across to the proper lane. This road is still under construction. It runs past Fox, but then there's a bunch of heavy equipment and yellow construction vehicles and things. That's all right, I can turn into Fox's parking lot. We drive around the front of Fox and find space to park, and that's when we notice that there's an awful lot of plywood on the front of this building.

Are they even open?

But Linda's spotted some people inside. We go up and try the door (it's locked) and then we bang on the glass to get their attention. One of the men comes out, a small boy in tow, and talks to Linda. Meanwhile, I'm distracted by this awesome sword the boy has. He's no more than six, but his sword has a yellow plastic blade that springs from the chromed jaws of some sort of plastic skull. I think the hilt is red. Anyway, that's an awesome sword, and the kid can barely fit his hands around it.

The man is assuring Linda that they'll be open Monday morning, that technicians will be here, and there is a key drop. So Linda fills out the information on the key drop and we discuss what we're going to do. She still wants to go out to the lake, and then on Monday she's going to drive her spare car to work. She doesn't know how we're going to get her Camry back. I suggest that either Isabel or I could come out here when the work is done, pay the people and get the spare key back. Then she or I could drive Linda out here after she's back from work so Linda could pick up her car. That way we've got everyone and everyone has her car.

So that's agreed on. We're done for now, and I drive Linda back to her house. She's worried that Hillary is being awfully negative towards Obama. I point out that the Clintons are playing the game. The Republicans aren't going to treat our candidate with kid gloves. I try to remember how Obama has been negative toward Clinton, but for the life of me I can't, so I can't make a very good case. Anyway, the conversation turns towards other things and soon enough I've dropped her off at home. By now it's after 1, and I need to go home and get lunch so Isabel and I can drive out to Bill's place and return the electronics she borrowed so she could earn a buck or two.

It's been a long morning, and if you're still reading this, thanks for sticking with me.

What Are Those Veggies For, Anyway?

An' why are you chopping them up?



This is Spook, just after Halloween in 05 I would guess, judging by both the location (just inside the front door of our last apartment) and that big glass bowl that used to hold the chockies nobody came by and tricked, er, begged for. So Isabel and I were condemned to eat them before they went stale. Oh cruel fate. She's wearing a flea collar, which we've found to be less effective than that goop you're supposed to put between her shoulderblades but which always ends up slicking down the hair along one side of the cat.

In other news, this morning I was reminded of that sequence in Sabrina, wherein Humphrey Bogart's dissolute and womanizing brother sits down on the two champagne flutes in his back pocket and thus spends the rest of the movie (or a good chunk of it) with a bandaged ass. So Bogey, the ant in this particular fable, gets his plastics factory to make his grasshopper bro a plastic hammock with a circle cut out of it for the guy's sore and bandaged jacksie. (I wondered, then, how the actor managed not to fall through.)

I am also reminded of an old National Lampoon comic in which a famous football star promotes, not an athlete's foot cure, but a brand X hemorrhoid cream. When he gets fed up with it, he chucks it across the locker room, ejaculating "Fast relief my a--foot!"

I have no possible explanation for why these two memories are now associated in my noggin.

Hope everyone's weekend is shaping up better than mine.

No Tap-Backs, Huh?

So I have been tapped with a bleearghh meme by me dear ole mum, because (she says)

he’s just getting his feet wet at this blogging thing, and he’s got a decent wit, if I do say so myself.

So here I am in the spotlight. Everyone's expecting me to say something witty, now.

The rules are thus:

1. Pick up the nearest book and look at page 123.
2. Count to the fifth sentence.
3. Post the three sentences immediately following that fifth sentence, but not the fifth sentence itself.

Okay. So. In an apartment that looks like this



in one room and this



in the other, I should be able to hold out a bucket and shout "Here, book!" and a hefty tome of perspicacity and insight would come jumping in, right? Right!

Here book!

Here book!

.... Maybe I need a bigger bucket.

Oh, that's right. I'm a liberal. My books speak French. Duh!

Ici livre!

Sacre bleu! Un nibble!



Ah-HAAA!

All right, page 123 ... fifth line ... next three lines:

"Sounded like you meant it to me."
"Perhaps. I was looking back to a time when I was only eight, before I found out what a pain life really is."

Hmmm. Kind of dull, really, but that's the rules. Pity. There are more interesting exchanges in the book, like

"Now, just tha' hold on, Dalziel! No bugger talks to me that way!"
It was there, the old Yorkshire accent, loud and sweet.
Dalziel stood back and said, "Ee bah gum, Art. It's grand to have thee back wi' real folk again."

Phonetics for the win!

Now I'm supposed to tap seven other people. I'm afraid I'm going to have to break the chain, here, because I don't know seven other bloggers well enough to tap them. Mom's already done it, and she's tapped Rabbitswift. I'm supposed to go on Pharyngula or Sadly, No! and demand they do this thing? I'm just a little fish, here.

So I am breaking the chain. Those chain emails you get always promise good things if you forward 'em on to ten people in the next 10 seconds, and dire calamity if you break the chain. I guess I'm screwed, then. I resolve to face my imminent spontaneous combustion and vast impoverishment with a grin and a set jaw in the manner of the two-fisted heroes of the pulps. Bring it on!

Spiny Norman

Mood: Anemic.

I have been to the doctor's, this fine day, early in the morning. I hear you now:

What's this? You had a doctor's appointment? And you didn't say when last we spake?

Yes, O my readers and O the delight of mine een, I did have a 'pointment with yon physician this very morn, at three-quarters of an hour past the seventh ante meridian.

Dam' good thing I remembered it at 7:40, then.

So, long story longer, I'm up, dressed and abluted within two minutes, out the door and down the street in another two, and am no more than 5 minutes late to the doctor's office. After I sign in, I decide that I really can't pull off the Einstein look so I hop into the restroom to comb my hair. Once I have got it tamed and put away the chair and whip, I find a seat as far from CNN In the A.M. as possible and pull out my book. I've barely flipped it open before they're calling my name.

All right, this is gonna be short and sweet. So after the ritual humiliation with the scale and the sliding weights that keep moving to the right, I am shown to a room to get my arm squeezed. My blood pressure is deemed "fine," and I am told to wait for the physician. I don't bother with my book, she'll be right in.

Maybe I should have got my book out again.

Finally, around 8:30, the doctor breezes in. I don't have to worry about being sleepy and depressed about my weight and being up at going on half past 8 without brekky, the doc's got enough energy and pep for both of us.

After inquiries into my toilet circumstances, and discussion of my larger situation and Isabel's, the doctor declares no major changes right now and breezes out again with a promise of playing Vampire later.

So I've got five minutes to wait for the fleba, phlembe, blood-taker woman and her devil needles. Joy. If my heels got any cooler they'd superconduct.

So the nurse wheels in the torture device and informs me I'm to be strapped down, or at least that's the only reason I can discern why she tied the rubber band on. I've still got a mark right round my bicep.

And then the poking and prodding, all in vein, and I'm smelling alcohol and making a fist and trying to think of small fuzzy animals like puppies and kittens and did you know the male platypus has a poisonous sting! Are we done yet?

"I'm not getting anything," she says, and pulls out. So we go through the whole thing again on the other side of the elbow and she gets a trickle, like the blood is bashful. Five minutes later she's got half a phial and whatever wellspring she tapped is reminded of its Bartleby and goes on strike.

"That's enough for your C-peptides, let me check if we need any more." Out she goes, leaving me holding the gauze on the needle wound, which is now treating me to its impersonation of Old Faithful. And another nurse comes in, gets out a bigger needle, and rolls up my left sleeve. She decides that her best shot is on the outside edge of the left elbow, over there with all the nerves. "Big pinch!" she chirps, and I'm not ready, where are my hamsters and squirrels and why does the male platypus have such a venomous sting? That didn't help, time for the big guns: CANDY BAR CANDY BAR GONNA GET A CANDY BAR what? All done?

Great. I gotta hold the gusher in my right elbow with my left hand and the trickle in my left elbow with my right hand. The paperwork goes between the middle and ring fingers of my right hand and my plaid overshirt between the opposite fingers. I have to pick up my coat in my teeth, and I stand up and nearly fall over on my way to the checkout desk, where at least I have the relief of not being charged $Iseemtobehavingtremendousdifficultywithmylifestyle-load right then, I'll be billed for it later.

So I go home and tuck into two bowls of corn flakes before dressing for work and using Isabel's car because she's going to take mine to get that funny squeak in the brakes looked at (I guess the hamsters under the hood are on strike in solidarity with the WGA).

So all in all I feel like I've just been savaged by Spiny Norman. Which means I need to post this:



Copyright infringement be damned.

Sunday Saturday Blogging

I meant to post something for Caturday, but things got away from me.

Isabel got a call from her part-time employer. His two daughters are taking him to Mexico near the end of February, so it looks like Isabel's going to babysit his job for him.

He also invited us to come on over and pick through all the effluvia of his suburban life because he's going to move to a smaller house. So we went over around 2 and we spent about half an hour visiting and looking through his stuff. We came away with a comfortable-sized frying pan, a set of four blue plates, a cookie sheet that fits in our elfin stove, and one of those chopper things that has four blades connected to a shaft on a spring and you put vegetables inside the jar and go fapfapfapfapfap and it's all chopped. No more garlic sticky hands for me! No more onion-sprayed eyes! Whooptie!!

So then Isabel asked if I wanted to go rent us up some video games because it was Saturday and all. She wanted to go to this specific Blockbuster, and I said I knew how to get there from Bill's house without making two legs of a triangle.

So we got lost.

We ended up out by the CompUSA on the west end of K-town. They'd paid some poor fellow to stand out on the street corner with a giant GOING OUT OF BUSINESS EVERYTHING 30 TO 50% OFF BUY BUY BUY. So Isabel recalled that Linda had wanted to buy a new Macintosh because her old one was going the way of all flesh and the iMac Daria gave her wasn't on speaking terms with keyboards. She called Linda and told her about CompUSA's sale. This store is the only one for miles around, so Linda asked us (or we offered, I can't recall) to stop in and price some Macs.

So we did.

I had been hopeful that I could find a nicely-priced graphics card because my eMachines on which I am typing this rightthisverymoment just has an integrated card on the motherboard. It runs programs just fine but whines about it an awful lot. So while Isabel was trying to find the last three Macs they had in the store, I went to find graphics cards. They had three left, two for $60 and one for $fuckload before the 30% off. So I grabbed one and tried to find a guy in a red shirt to ask if it would talk to Vista (gone are my days of impulse purchasing! Ooh, that's pretty...!) This worked out well because Isabel had found the last three iBooks in the store and needed someone to unbolt the one labeled LAST ONE that she and Linda had conferred on.

So I walk past the giant big-screen teevees showing the Transformers movie from last summer (poor Sam Witwicki. You thought you were in another teen movie, get the car, get the girl, you know the drill, and now your Camaro's following you and that cop car is chasing you and you're in Christine instead of She's All That, you poor sod) and waited in line for one of the two red-shirted customer service guys to notice me. So then he had to go find the right kind of screwdriver to unbolt it, and then the box to stuff it all in. I managed to ask him about the video card and he said I don't know man if it doesn't say Vista on it then it probably doesn't work which wasn't a lot of help. So I went back to see if there was anything else. I really didn't want to pay $fuckload, even $fuckload 30% off, so I reluctantly put it back and decided to go do research using the Series of Tubes (R).

So I found Isabel waiting for the guy to box up the Mac and watching the Transformers movie, which was in the middle of a bit of 'splode as the Army plot thread moved forward (and people thought it bashed the army. The black soldier lives through the whole movie!!!) and showed off all of the air power that $200 billion a year buys us. Just about the end of that scene, the guy comes out and hands us the boxed-up laptop and we check out.

So. Finally. We drive back into Oak Ridge and deliver Linda her new laptop. I thought it came with an iPod, but it was just a remote control (they apparently expect you to watch this computer from your couch if you're doing a slide show or playing a DVD). After I figured out how the battery goes in (Linda: Does it go in this way first? Isabel: No, it goes in the other way. Linda: But that end won't stay down. Me: ::reaches out and pushes that end down, sticks a thumbnail in the little slot beside the battery port, and turns, just on a whim. Click!::) we booted up the laptop and started to explore it. Safari? Check! DVD player? Check! Word processor? Well, there's TypePad... So Isabel started to worry that she'd gotten a defective one and by the time everybody started to snap at each other it was obvious that we all needed to go home (or, well, we did, Linda was already home) and get supper.

So after supper Linda called us up and said that she didn't think Apple shipped AppleWorks with their computers anymore and she'd have to buy it separate and she might decide to get Office 2008 instead (what, does she have a thing about pain?). So Isabel felt better about getting the cheaper laptop.

And this all kind of drove every thought of this blog out of my mind. So, here's your cat pic:



Spook wants to go out. She wants to go out so badly that we're going to have to sand and varnish the doorframe when we move out because she's endangering our security deposit. We gave her a cat tree, dammit! So anyway, to stop her clawing at the door we usually give in and let her out onto the porch. Within 5 minutes in this kind of weather she wants back in, and she's taken to doing a Garfield imitation on the screen door. It never occurs to her to ask. We might not hear her, anyway. So we get up for the second time in five minutes to let her in, at which point she threatens to call the SPCA if we throw her out in that freezing forty-degree weather one more time.

Then she checks her food bowl. If it's not full of succulent, yummy gooshy food she wants back out. I think she believes it's a food-bowl reset button.

Cannonball!

So, I've finally decided to hold my nose and jump into the community pool that is the blogosphere. I do this knowing full well that the pool is full of nice people who'll let me ride their inflatable orca and toss the beach ball with me, as well as jerks who think it's great fun to grab the string of your swim trunks and pull as hard as they can. And the lifeguards are all off necking in cars parked just across the woods from the hospital for violent psychotics.

So I'm plunging in, and I'm going to watch the bubbles and swim down to the bottom and see if I can find any pretty rocks among the concrete chips. If anyone tries to pants me, I'll just have to stand up for myself since those aforementioned lifeguards aren't anywhere around.

A few words about why it's the Falcon's Gyre. As W. B. Yeats famously starts one of his poems, the falcon turns in a widening gyre, taking in everything below it but not lingering overlong on any one thing (and that's pretty much the only parallel between my maunderings here and Yeats' dark poem).

That's pretty much my Mission Statement, there. I'll put up my thoughts on matters diverse and sundry, from the profound to the silly, the divine to the mundane, whatever falls under my falcon eye as long as this thermal lasts.

I'm really cutting new paths of bloggerdom here, ain't I?

I really can't promise good insights, just my two cents. I don't think I'll ever be a Big Dog. Certainly the Kos phenomenon is a rare and frightening thing.

But I'll keep doing this as long as inspiration strikes. Maybe I'll strike it big, maybe not. We'll just have to see.

This ought to be fun.