BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: October 2008
Friday, October 31, 2008
Fall Arrives, and Other Personal Developments
It's raining. And they say it's going to continue raining all weekend, and perhaps into next week. Despite having inhabited California for my entire adult life; most of that in rainless SoCal, I like the rain. Jinx is less thrilled. She keeps pawing at the back patio door to go out, and when I open the door she walks out for about 30 seconds, before returning, bemisted and bemused. Well, not so much bemused as annoyed. But "annoyed" wasn't alliterative.
She gets used to it; come February or March, when it's been raining regularly for a few months, she'll just hunker down and ignore the dampness. Most of my back patio is covered by the roof anyway, so she can stay out of any actual water; she just doesn't care for the ambiance. Plus it's been like, 2 or 3 cat years since it last rained, so she's probably forgotten about this phenomena.
It hadn't rained here in months. I don't know when the last measurable precipitation fell over the North Bay, but I can't remember anything but a few light sprinkles since spring. It was just in time too, since my car was frickin' filthy. I ran some errands Thursday afternoon, and emerged from CostCo to find a wet parking lot and streaks of dirt across the my vehicle's exterior. I parked out by the street instead of under the carport in hopes that the rain would continue, and then it rained quite hard later in the evening, so when I came out of the gym my car was entirely clean.
Well, at least visibly clean. Ish. I wouldn't exactly perform an appendectomy on it, or anything.
Speaking of wet cats (sort of), the IG got a cat this week. She moved into her own/first/new studio last month, and after living alone for that long, she decided she wanted some company. Male company, that could sit in her lap w/o wanting to fuck her. And with a soft, furry pelt. So I went with her to the Berkeley humane society, and we petted many kitties, and she gravitated towards the feral recovery room, since she wanted a cat that was older and on the euthanasia list. One big, black and white male immediately caught her eye, and when she sat down on the floor beside his cage, and he sort of poured himself out and into her lap, purring like a motorboat, the sale was made.
The funny part was that the cat was in the feral room since the male employees didn't like him. Because he didn't like them. The rep for the cat was that he didn't like men, and would hide from them, or become aggressive. The volunteer who was guiding our tour was amazed when kitty was perfectly calm around me, and let me pet him and kept purring and such. She exclaimed, "You're the third man he hasn't attacked!"
Apparently he's a bit of a nervous kitty, and the guys tend to come at him too fast and too hard (a common complaint of women) and he does not like. I sat down across the little room and let him get used to the IG before I moved over, and he was perfectly calm when I did. She went back a few days later and made him her kitty, and I went along then too, to have a chance to hang out with her and to see the new kitty.
He was a little scared on the ride home, but the IG said he settled down pretty well and was actually purring in his cardboard box. What I'd give to transplant that talent into my own "30 miles of meow" Jinxie. I met her at her apt, with some cat food (Jinx didn't like) and toys I'd brought over, and we made dinner and chatted and checked on kitty for a couple of hours.
Initially he hid in the closet, burrowing down into the IG's dirty clothes basket. He was kind of doing like Jinxie does; removing himself from the main room where the people were, but not so much out of fear as out of preference. Jinx doesn't cower or hiss or hide, she just doesn't like/trust other people since Malaya and I raised her like a veal, and had very few visitors during her formative years.
The IG's cat (who is yet nameless, since she didn't like his existing name and hadn't thought up a new title yet) was like that. He hid in the clothes basket, but he wasn't really hiding, since when the IG or me entered the closet and knelt down, he was quite happy to be petted. He'd sprawl in the hamper and purr and rub his head; he just didn't want to come out.
That shyness in the new place lasted for about an hour, and by the time we finished dinner kitty was out and exploring, and quite eager to be stroked. For a while the IG and I were sitting about five feet apart, and kitty was walking back and forth between us, rubbing and purring and sprawling and pulling himself along the carpet in excitement and happiness. Very cute. He's a big cat too; probably 15 pounds, and strong. Short haired and not fat, just solid. When he rubs you, you know you've been rubbed.
Very active too, as the IG reported after a restless night of being trampled on by sleepless, stomach-walking kitty. I've not been back over since Monday's acquisition, but she says kitty is doglike, following her around the apartment and trying to climb on her the minute she sits down. He especially likes to help with homework by pawing at the monitor, leaping onto the keyboard... all that good cat stuff.
I hope to drop by sometime next week to see how the little dude is settling in and to give him some lumpin's. He's a solid, pushy cat; good for thumping and pushing over since he enjoys popping right back up and rubbing your hand hard enough to knock it backwards.
Oddly, my own interest in getting a second cat, which was piqued when first visiting the humane society with the IG, largely subsided after seeing kitty brought home safely. He was fun to play with, and watching a pet who lacked predictable mannerisms (I always know what Jinx is going to do next.) was nice for a change, but afterwards I didn't feel a strong need to add to my own menagerie. I've long said that I'll get a second cat when, and not before, I move into a larger place. That's one of about 2000 things I want to do when I have space/time/can afford it, and the list grows perpetually longer as my remaining life grows ever shorter.
I'd like to find that someone special and get married and have kids, for instance. Nothing on the horizon for that, but at least someone I know is going down that path.
Malaya's getting married. No, really.
It's been almost 2 years since we split up, (time flies, eh?) and she's been dating someone since early this year, and it would seem that things are going pretty well. The wedding's next month. I'm invited. I'm going. I'm looking forward to it.
We've remained friends since we stopped dating, and we've encouraged each other to date and move on with our lives, so this isn't a surprise or a heartbreak for me. I wasn't carrying a torch, and neither was she. And life, as they say, goes on. That said, knowing someone's dating is a lot different than knowing that she's set a wedding date. That's a big deal. That's life, rather than parole. And it's impossible not to think of how often Malaya and me talked about marriage, and to wonder at how we veered from that path, for better or worse.
I'm happy for her (and him) and Malaya's a good friend of mine, so of course I want her to be happy. I'm selfish and solipsistic, but not so much so that I want my exes to remain alone and barren for perpetuity. Well, not Malaya at least. Some of the earlier ones, perhaps. At any rate, she's getting married and I'm not, and that's that. I'm sure I'll have some feelings of "that could/should have been me up there" when I view the ceremony, but at this point, I'm not upset that we broke up. Once we were apart a lot of issues that I'd ignored, overlooked, and smoothed over emerged like stones from the mud in a hard rain. Nothing was severe enough to motivate me to end the relationship, but in retrospect, I think they would have come up over the years if we'd gotten married, as we often discussed. Especially when/if we'd had kids, since we had some very different ideas about how best to raise/discipline/tolerate children. And no, I won't go into more specifics.
Currently, I'm not sure how I feel. Malaya is the only woman I've ever been in love with/had a serious relationship with, so obviously she's the first "real" ex to get married. My first reaction was to think how much I wanted to get laid. Right that moment. To a supermodel. On top of the wedding invitation. After I removed the RSVP part.
That impulse faded quickly, and for the last few days I've not really thought about it much. No drinking binges, no late nights clutching tearfully at the wedding announcement, no incoherent rage, no sentimental journeys through old Malaya/Flux photo galleries. My most common thought has been about the weather, actually, since they're getting married in about a month, and the ceremony is outdoors. It rains quite often in late November in the Bay Area, and the usual high temperature is about 60. Not a big deal to me, since male formal wear involves slacks, long shirts, jackets, etc. More of an issue for the bride, though they've usually got enough layers of white satin to stay fairly snug. Female wedding guests, on the other hand, are notorious for flimsy little prom dress type things, and that can't be much fun on a windy, cloudy, damp afternoon in November. At least not for them. I've seen a few wedding parties taking photos on cold, rainy days, and found it pretty amusing. Nothing like a flock of shivering bridesmaids in cerise, with nothing but strappy stilettos on their feet, huddling under umbrellas held by disinterested, tuxedo-clad boyfriends, to create lasting memories. I don't think Malaya's wedding will create that sort of vision, since she's keeping things small and private, but one can always hope?
Insightfully analytical post by an ex-Republican and one of my favorite political bloggers, John Cole. It's long and thorough, and I'm not going to delve into the whole thing. I'll just recommend it and quote a key portion. I'm too lazy to incorporate the HTML, so go read the whole thing to see the supporting links embedded throughout.
None of this matters a whit when you have no message, and that is the unenviable position the Republicans are in right now. What is John McCain’s core message? I will tell you, as it is very simple- “Not Obama.” That is it. That is the sum total of the message. He and the Wasilla Wingnut have done nothing for the past two months but provide weak and ugly reasons why you should not vote for Obama, starting with the sneer de force at the RNC and continuing on to the present, where we learn that we should not vote for Obama because some plumber (but not really) is worried about socialism and because Obama knows a guy named Khalidi who does not agree with everything Bill Kristol says about Israel.
That is the Republican message, when they are not busy yelling how different they are from the current President, who just so happens to be a Republican. You would think the folks who routinely mocked DKOS for going 0-16 would figure out the similarity between what happened to the Democats in 2004 and what is happening to the Republicans right now. In 2004, the sum total of the Democratic message was "Not Bush." You saw how that worked out.
...
For 30 minutes, Barack Obama talked about what he thinks are the problems currently facing the country, about what he thinks he can do to help fix them, how you can help him, and why it is important to elect him. He did not spend his time telling you why you should not vote for McCain, he spent his time telling why you should vote for him. You may not agree with his ideas, but you can not argue he has them and is presenting them to the country in a clear and nonthreatening manner.
Now, for a moment, consider what the Republican 30 minute infomercial would look like this year -- if I had to guess, it would be ten minutes about McCain as a POW, ten minutes of McCain saying he isn’t Bush, and then ten minutes of bullshit smears about Ayers, Khalidi, socialism, celebrity, and maybe Rick Davis could go before the cameras and pull a tire gauge out of his ass.
Historians will forever debate why Obama won so convincingly, and why the Republican attack politics that worked so well for the past decade+ failed this year. Were Obama's political skills so accomplished that he could shrug off the various Swift Boat attempts? Did his massive organization and grassroots support ($) buoy him through the tough times? Was the world wide economic collapse so important that American voters ignored the personality games and slurs? Did McCain's erratic campaign and disastrous VP pick sink him? Are people just growing inured to the perpetual negative campaigning? Was Bush so awful that all Republicans are doomed for at least a few years? All of the above?
Whatever the cause, it's been a fascinating campaign to watch, and it will be interesting to see the results come in next week. Every reputable survey and poll has Obama with a substantial lead, both popularly and electorally, but I won't believe that Americans will elect a black man with an African name until he's actually hosting the historic inauguration ball.
I didn't play or watch any Starcraft 2 at Blizzcon, though now I kind of wish I had. I never played the first game and it seems way too intricate to try to learn now. But while looking for some D3 stuff tonight, I wound up watching a SC2 Protoss demo on gametrailers.com, and my god does it look good. I still have no interest in playing the game, and will just give my beta invite to someone on our network SC2 site, but I think I would enjoy watching an expert play this game, esp if I were in the room so they could give me a play by play of what they were doing with all the complicated units and strategies.
Even though I've embedded the movie, I recommend you click to watch it full size. It's long, but highly entertaining.
I've been home for a week and a half after I was down in Southern California for an equal amount of time, and I still feel a bit off of my routine. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since my routine is far from optimal, but... it's mine!
I felt normal at the gym the last 2 nights, for the first time since my return. I've been going almost every day, but I've usually felt tired or weak on weights. Doing fewer reps than I was accustomed to, not feeling the energy to do a second (or third) cycle of the various machines, etc. I was fine on cardio, but hadn't felt in the mood to pick up heavy things. No idea what changed. Maybe I got a better grade of steroid?
One thing that I've been amused by at the gym is my attire. On nights that I wear a short sleeved shirt, I've been wearing one or both of the Starcraft 2 sweatbands that came in the BlizzCon goodie bag. They work pretty well, actually. The wrist bands themselves, which are stretchy inside of very fuzzy towel-like material, and the act of wearing them. I don't think I've ever before worn wristbands in my life, and I'm not likely to go out and buy a bouquet of every color, but these two aren't bad. I drip sweat constantly while on the cardio machines (that's the whole point) and while I don't especially mind that fact, it can be annoying when beads of it swell in my eyebrows. And the wristbands are excellent for swiping them away. It's almost as if they were designed for just that purpose!
The funny thing about it, other than that I'm wearing Starcraft 2 wristbands at the gym, is that I might be the only person who attended Blizzcon who is actually using them for that purpose. The purpose for which they were designed. I base this conclusion on the fact that most people probably kept them in their goodie bag as a collectible, the fact that most people don't wear wristbands even when they do sweat (I'm that case in point), and the fact that I don't believe sweating, from exercise, is real high on the priorities list of your average Blizzcon attendee. The arm of the woman who's modeling the wristband in the above link is about average for the women (and men) at the event.
On that topic, I returned from Blizzcon with an altered sense of my own appearance. I work out and lift weights almost every day and I know I'm in good shape, but I'm doing those activities at a gym full of people in good shape. Not everyone is fit and lean and such, but a fair amount of people on the cardio machines are thin, and if I'm not there too late, there are always at least half a dozen guys in the weights area who are pretty built. I've never seen anyone who is even borderline body builder looking, since all the big guys are also fat, but there are plenty of guys in their early/mid 20s who are relatively thin and quite muscular. More muscular than me, anyway.
I don't mind; my goal isn't to get huge and it's not a contest. My point is that I don't usually think of myself as especially fit or built, since I see numerous guys every time I'm at the gym who are ahead of me on one, or both, categories. At Blizzcon... I was a body building triathlete. For a man, at least. To my surprise, there were quite a few women at the event who looked like they were in good shape. Or at least thin, and if they're in tight jeans that's just as good, as far as my eyes are concerned. What am I, a cardiologist?
Our IncGamers group secured a long table in the rear corner of the press room, (Pro: nearest the food. Con: furthest from the Diablo III machines.) and we enjoyed a commanding view of the entire room. That view wasn't much good, other than giving us ample opportunity to laugh at the man-titties on display, (tight t-shirts are not a fat guy's friend), but it did allow us (me) a good view of the Japanese and Korean journalists at the tables ahead of us. Most were skinny guys, but a considerable number were attractive, slim, fetchingly-attired 20 something females.. who spent nearly every minute hunched over their laptops, typing furiously. They had lovely, graceful necks, though. And graceful other things, swaying beneath faded Levis, as I happened to note on the few occasions I looked up to see one dashing off to an interview, or heading back to the buffet.
One bad thing about the ready supply of food and unlimited supply of drinks in the press room was that I got into some bad habits. Drinking real soda, for one.
Prior to my "vacation" I blogged about my attempted transition to diet soda, or at least away from the full sugar versions of Pepsi and Dr. Pepper that I've used to wash down countless unhealthy meals of fried food. I never just sit and drink a soda, but I am conditioned to like/want/need the sugar water with fried food, pizza, nachos, etc. I can tolerate water, or enjoy beer or wine with some of those entrees, but I really like soda. I don't like the 150 empty calories per can though, so last month I tried out Diet Pepsi and Diet Coke and Coke Zero, found the Diet Pepsi least offensive, and bought a case of it at Costco.
That case went down pretty okay; the caffeine worked as intended, and the beverages were palatable, if not actually good, with the foods I like soda with. I was getting sick of the chemically, fizz-lacking stuff towards the end though, and it was only after some internal debate that I bought a second case, in early October. That case looks like it will stay with me, herpes-like, for quite some time, since I've had 2 Diet Pepsis in the week+ since I've been back, and I didn't enjoy either, didn't finish either, and generally wished I hadn't despoiled a quality mood with both.
This isn't entirely unplanned or desired. My ultimate goal is to stop drinking soda, and diet soda does two things to enable that result: saves me calories when I do drink it, and tastes lame enough that I'm unlikely to drink it very often.
Prior to my SD/Anaheim trip, I'd found that Diet Pepsi was better with a splash (about a half shot) of vodka. It didn't exactly enhance the palate, but it did largely counteract the chemical aspartame taste that's the price we pay for saving 150 calories per can. I tried that in my first can upon my return, and it no longer seemed to help. Curiously, vodka absolutely kills the bubbles, somehow counteracting the carbonation. I could judge the right amount of vodka in real Pepsi, to which I added it for taste/variety, since I poured the vodka into a glass about half full of Pepsi on the rocks, and stopped when the fizzing was neutralized. I'd then pour the rest of the Pepsi in and have an enjoyable, buzz-inducing, poor man's speedball experience. The same trick doesn't work with Diet Pepsi, since the lack of real sugar does something to the carbonation. As a result, a mere splash can instantly de-fizz an entire glassful. So it's no bubbles vs. less aspartame taste, without enough booze to give a pleasant buzz. Or the first two and not the third, when the products are mixed inexpertly.
Displeased by the soda experience, I didn't have any for the first few days of this week. I wanted real soda, and the urge for a well-chilled plastic tanker of the stuff was tempting me towards fast food. I resisted over the weekend, but last night I couldn't stand it, and stopped by Jack in the Box on the way home from the gym. The spicy chicken sandwich was as non-spicy and lame as usual, but the curly fries were glorious, and the bucket of Dr. Pepper was divine. I could almost still taste it the next day. Sadly I could still taste the greasy, slimy phlegm that meal always leaves in my mouth, even though I'd eaten an apple, brushed my teeth, and used mouthwash afterwards.
The memory of the cola joy stayed with me today, and when I had to stop by the store late at night to get a nearly overdue birthday card, I found myself wandering down the soda aisle, picking up a six pack of 24oz Dr. Pepper bottles, and walking off with them, just as though I were allowed to consume such things.
When talking to Malaya about my diet soda efforts last month, she verbalized a thought I'd had on several occasions. "It's not worth it. Have a real soda once in a while instead of diet crap every day."
I agreed in principle, but I wasn't yet sick enough of the diet sodas to give them up. I still ain't, but the urge to drink = falling. The urge to drink real soda = constant, but I've got a plan, now.
Cans aren't good to help cut down consumption. They're so small that it seems nothing to pop one open, and they come in such a huge block from Costco that it seems inexhaustible, and they're so cheap that the expense is negligible. Having just six Dr. Peppers, in larger size bottles, is different. I won't open one just to go with a regular meal, since I'd never drink all 24oz at once. So they become sort of special occasion treats, and I can endure not drinking sugarwater, knowing I've got real sugarwater in the fridge, if I get a real craving. It's also handy that those plastic bottles preserve the fizz only slightly longer than an open can. So I know I can't open one unless I'm going to drink the whole thing right then, or at least will finish it later that day
It's a good thing I've never gotten into real drugs, given the difficulty I have, and time I take, just to semi-quit soda.
I want a second cat. The IG, who really, really needs a new nickname, since we've moved solidly into friends now, and aren't even bothering to flirt anymore (though I must admit to occasional impure thoughts prompted by the tight, size zero jeans that are her usual attire), just moved into her own tiny apartment. She's not supposed to have any pets, but she misses the cat she had at her parents' house, and she's never lived alone before, and she's got a soft spot for ferals and strays who are going to be euthanized if no one loves them. So she took me to the pound with her earlier this week, we toured through the cat storage area, and petted many a kitty. So many were so friendly!
The IG wasn't sure if she was going to get one, but she really liked several of the animals, especially one huge black/white beast who was in the feral room, and was supposed to be troublesome. The old lady volunteer said that he's actually very nice, but that he just doesn't like men. Very often. To her surprise and my non-surprise, he liked me just fine. (I don't have any special affinity for or interest in dogs, but I can almost always befriend felines.) I stayed back while the IG made his acquaintance, and when I slowly eased in after she'd been petting him for a few minutes, he looked at me, sniffed me when I was close, and submitted happily to head scratching. He was soon disabled!
I, of course, think that a huge cat that doesn't like men is a perfect pet for the IG. She can has furry chastity belt? I don't seem to need a cat to help me remain chaste, and I don't think a second cat would help change that fact (and might help reinforce it), but I still sorta want one. I think Jinx would enjoy it, since she's usually interested in playing more often than I'm interested in getting up and playing with her. She always wanted more to be friends with Dusty than he wanted with her, and I think she'd adjust to a new cat alright. I'd just have to get one that was active, playful, not yowly, not a picky eater, liked crunchies, and that got along well with other cats.
Best case scenario is that Jinx accepts the other cat fairly quickly, they sleep together and are snuggly with me on cold nights, the other cat is relatively quiet and not destructive, they play and interact in amusing fashion, but don't do it constantly, and that my landlord don't find out/care that I've added a second cat when my lease agreement only allows for one.
Worst case is not to be contemplated, since it would involve mutual feline insanity, them both running out into the street and becoming furry pancakes/coyote bait, etc. On a more realistic level, the new cat could be noisy or restless at night, a picky eater, the two cats could spur each other to disturbing hyperactivity, it might create a change in Jinx's behavior so I'd go from 1 nice cat to 2 dildo kitties, etc.
I'm not making any serious plans in the short term, but I'll probably go with the IG to pick up her cat sometime next week, and if I really enjoy interacting with it and keep thinking about the potential enjoyment of having two of them instead of just Jinx, I might pursue the issue further.
And yes, there have been a few jokes made about the IG's new pussy, her wanting to get a used pussy, me going to help her pick out a new pussy, the risks of her pussy liking my touch more than her own, etc. Fortunately I'm not 19 anymore, so I'm able to control my urge to make such jokes. Plus I realize that she, like all women, finds them about 1/1000th as funny as a man does. Happily, she's good natured enough to tolerate them in good spirits.
I had something else I was going to talk about, but eh, this is long enough. Maybe I'll babble about BlizzCon later this weekend, if the blogging urge strikes again.
Just to get one more political thing out of the way before I post a longish personal rambling I mostly wrote 2 days ago and saved as a draft when I ran out of gas that night... I enjoyed this run down of the various anti-Obama "news" bits from the past couple of months. They're very well presented, and the post extensively documents the credible coverage they received on various quite prominent right wing blogs. If there's a summation possible, it's that no slanderous, insane rumor about Obama was too much for the wingnut bloggers to believe, support, or outright invent.
And yes, I'll be laughing out the other side of my face when I, along with the rest of America's "whities" wake up in a re-education camp to cure me of my non-blackness and non-Muslimness come the Obamessiah's glorious reign.
Stories pushed relentlessly by various prominent right wing blogs and news sites include: Obama was involved in domestic terrorism bombings during his college years at Columbia, Ayers ghostwrote Obama's first book, Michelle Obama has ranted against "whitey" to the media, to a crowd including Louis Farrakhan, and to an African media outlet, Obama cheated with a campaign staffer and then banished her to the Caribbean so she couldn't talk, Obama was born in Indonesia and/or Africa and has a forged Hawaiian birth certificate, Obama enjoyed a sexual liason with a pedophile when he was 9, Obama has gay sex on cocaine in limos, and much, much more.
Who knew? And you thought the right wing witch hunt against Clinton paralyzed the nation during the 1990s? You ain't seen nothing yet. Imagine if Clinton had been black, the right wing had just been booted from power after running almost everything for 8 years, and needed a new enemy to focus on? I don't think the circular firing squad will last more than a month or two after the coming election day debacle(s). By the inauguration in January, they'll be all over their mourning period of blaming McCain for being insufficiently strident, and will be ready to go back into attack mode against Obama and the Democratic house/senate. It'll be insane, but at least Sadly No will have no shortage of mockable material.
I would give any amount of money to have this woman quizzed, on camera, on the actual content of the Bible. With a knowledgeable theologian on duty to explain why she was wrong about everything she thought she believed. She'd still vote for McCain against Obama, but the humor of such a presentation would be well worth the investment.
This joke writes itself, but I can't resist. It's hard putting lipstick on a pitbull.
News from the campaign finance disclosures is that after dropping a well-publicized $150k on her new outfits over the past month, the highest paid member of the McCain/Palin campaign team since then is... the woman doing Palin's makeup, who pulled down $23k for two weeks work.
Ms. Strozzi, who was nominated for an Emmy award for her makeup work on the television show So You Think You Can Dance?, was paid $22,800 for the first two weeks of October alone, according to the records. The campaign categorized Ms. Strozzi’s payment as "Personnel Svc/Equipment."
In addition, Angela Lew, who is Ms. Palin’s traveling hair stylist, got $10,000 for "Communications Consulting" in the first half of October.
Aside from the humorous political implications of a faux-populist, red-neck rabble-rousing politician spending $200,000 dollars on clothing, hair, and makeup in less than a month, what the hell do professional stylists do that's worth so much money? I know Palin's been doing a lot of media appearances and stump speeches and such, so the hair and makeup artists are pressed into duty multiple times a day, but $1000 a day to touch up the foundation and slather on some fresh lip gloss?
Furthermore, does it really help? I've never thought Palin looked very good; she aspires to "aging MILF" at best, and is pushing her luck even there. I think people are confusing the much more attractive Tina Fey from SNL for the actual, much older, politician. It'll be interesting to see candids of her in a month when she's back in Alaska, wearing a parka and arguing about wolf hunting laws. Wonder if she'll even look like the same person?
As for the money, it's pennies compared to what they're spending on TV commercials and other major expenses, so it's not a big deal. The campaign doesn't mind spending it anyway, since it's free money; various idiots donated it, corporations spent it to keep their tax breaks current, and our tax dollars go to match it. So they might as well spend it as fast as they can. Besides, the makeup will wash off, but Palin wants to at least have something to remember this debacle by, and besides her instantly elevate political status amongst the right wing faithful, a few closets of designer goods are a nice parting gift.
Also, we've still got a week and a half to go, so it's a bit early to get too schadenfreude-y, but it's hard not to enjoy coverage of the behavior of McCain staff, supporters, and advisors that includes "Lord of the Flies" metaphors.
I seldom approve of the mindset of my fellow Americans, or of the mentality of any large mob, for that matter. Humans are fearful, ignorant, tribal creatures, easily swayed by lies and misinformation, as innumerable recent national and international events have demonstrated. Goering summed it up quite famously, with principles that were on (very successful) display throughout the political discourse of the US from 2001-2003.
In the new Newsweek poll, taken over the last two days in the midst of the Ayers attacks, Obama now has a +24 favorability rating (60/36), which has improved from the +20 (57/37) he registered in last month's poll. In the new poll, McCain's favorability rating is only +6 (51/45), which has worsened substantially since the +21 he registered last month (57/36). The same has happened to Sarah Palin's rating, which has dropped from +20 (52/32) in the prior month to a meager +4 now (49/45).
...
Worse still (for the Right), a large majority -- 55-39% -- answer "NO" when asked if Sarah Palin "is qualified to step in as President if she had to" (Newsweek 14), whereas only 46% answered "NO" last month. And 47% say that Hockey Mom Palin does not share their values, while only 48% say that Palin does (versus 59% who say that the Radical-Terrorist Obama shares their values) (Newsweek 14).
...the more Americans see of and hear from Sarah Palin and are exposed to her filthy smear politics, the worse she looks to them. And the more the McCain/Palin campaign attacks Obama with ugly, despicable smears, the worse McCain/Palin look, while Obama's popularity with Americans continues to solidify and even gradually increase (Americans believe Obama is "trustworthy" by an overwhelming margin of 60-32%) (Fox 36).
And perhaps most damning of all for the McCain campaign, when asked which campaign has been "too negative or nasty," Americans choose the McCain/Palin campaign by an overwhelming margin (39-10%) (Newsweek 17) -- by far the most lopsided margin for that question over the last eight years (by comparison, both the Democratic and GOP campaigns of 2000 and 2004 registered no more than 24% on that question and each side received roughly equal ratings).
So, the more people have seen of Sarah Palin, the less they think of her. And the more they see Obama slandered by the nasty, all-negative McCain attack ads, the more they like him. This isn't going to change, either. There are 3 weeks to go until the election, and since McCain has nothing positive to run on other than the ludicrous notion that he somehow represents change from the President he voted with 95% of the time, (And really, that's not a positive message either; he's just attacking Bush instead of Obama.) and since the recent years of Republican electoral triumphs have been built entirely on Rove-style attack ads and race baiting and fear-mongering... there's no chance McCain's strategists are going to change their tactics now, even as they're proving less and less successful. (Well, successful nationwide; they are very effective at firing up the radical right fringe, while alienating everyone else.)
I've been wondering about it for a while, since news of people shouting out "traitor" and "terrorist" and "kill him" during the anti-Obama speeches by McCain and Palin, and I've not seen it addressed anywhere. Is there a chance the Secret Service could be forced to take action to muzzle the Republican nominees they're there to protect? Think about it; if some group were holding rallies at which speeches were given that were clearly designed to whip up a nearly-murderous rage against the leading presidential candidate, and at which people voiced unveiled death threats towards said candidate, wouldn't we expect the Secret Service and FBI to descend upon them?
We hear about it when some random kook makes a, "I want to kill George Bush!" comment online, or in real life. We hear about it since that kook gets a sobering visit from the Secret Service, even when they (the random kook) obviously had no intention or ability to do anything to back up their "threat." McCain, and especially Palin, are going far beyond that. They're not actually threatening Obama's life, but they're deliberately creating a climate or rage that's causing audience members to voice comments as threatening as those that regularly draw the attention of federal law enforcement personnel.
I'm not suggesting that McCain or Palin (well, maybe Palin) actually wants one of their minions to instigate some sort of murderous action against Obama, but no one suggests the people I linked to above (or the hundreds of others like them) were serious about their threats either. That's the whole point; you can't make threats against the president or leading presidential candidates without receiving some unwanted legal attention, and yet in this case the people making inciting the threats are under Secret Service protection themselves. I can't envision some black-suited, shades-wearing SS dude taking Palin aside for a stern talking to... but why not? If you or I did what she's been doing at campaign rallies, we'd have our very own FBI file by the end of the week.
Ironically, while skimming some blogs for links to news items about the "kill him" stuff people have been shouting, I saw a link to this. Apparently the Secret Service is looking into it, but only (so far) to maybe try and identify the Republicans in attendance who are getting a little too um... overly-enthusiastic about their candidates' message.
I was originally going to write this post in a rush of rant, and call it something like, "Costco: where the frothy milk of human stupidity is churned into the curdled butter of simian incompetence." But I didn't get to write it while I was still in the mood to vent, since I was busy cooking and washing clothing and putting away groceries and working on D3 site stuff all afternoon and evening. And now it's 12 24 hours later and I'm typing this late night the next day, while sipping soup and yawning water and sweating, and as is the case with most torrid flings, the bright early passion has cooled to a more contemplative, mature analysis. With that in mind...
I've complained about Costco in the past, and today I'm going to do so again. (Just be glad I don't shop at Wal-Mart, or this sort of thing would be every third post). Well, it's more that I complain about the customers I am forced to endure while buying crap in bulk at Costco. Obese, gluttonous, free-sample grubbing sluggards who thoughtlessly leave their carts mid-aisle to waddle to the next tiny cup of complimentary calories, perfectly demonstrating why the "fast lane" so seldom is, though there's usually more than enough pavement for all the cars to move at considerable speed.
Costco, like the freeway, is worse during rush hour, simply because it's more crowded. But like the freeway, during rush hour most of the traffic is comprised of professional drivers; people who drive every day. Usually to work. They're used to driving, they've got someplace to go, and they'd like to get there ASAP. Weekend drivers are generally less skilled since they don't drive to work every day, plus they've generally got nowhere to go and are in no rush to get there. In fact, they're often in an anti-hurry, actually wishing to not get there, since when they get to wherever "there" is, they'll have to do chores, or housework, or put up with their inlaws, or pick up their bratty, Coke-hyperactived kids from their play date.
Costco during weekday afternoons is equivalent to freeways on weekends. The roads/aisles are the same, but even though there are fewer people, they're so much slower and less competent and aware that they 1) take up more space, and 2) are far more annoying as they do (fail) it.
To indulge in an ironic digression, the worst person at Costco today wasn't that slow. Her sin was physical unsightliness. She was a woman of about average height (she was actually rather tall for a Hispanic), but of considerably more than average girth, the majority of which could be found below her belt. Not that she was wearing a belt, which was part of the problem. She was wearing a tight white t-shirt on top, with black low rise panties down lower, which were in turn shrink-wrapped by dark red tights. This might have been a delightful site sight, if she'd contained oh... half the mass?
Not so much.
She had to be somewhere north of two bills. Maybe 100kg, but Kardashian-like, she wasn't that disproportional. Just overstuffed, like a walking, loudly-talking, bottom-heavy, faux-leather recliner. Or perhaps a sumo chair. The vexing part was that she seemed to be reverse following me. Three different times in 10 minutes I turned onto an aisle, or approached an aisle I wished to turn down, and she was there, just ahead of me, facing away from me, and chattering away at her 1/3rd size Mini-Her accomplice.
Did not want!
I literally turned around one time, and moved on past the aisle she'd claimed two other times. My only good look at her came the first time, when I found myself staring in something approximating horror. It was a lingering, train wreck-esque stare. What was so bad about walking behind her? I can only answer with another analogy: Late last night, when I got back from the airport and carried in all my luggage and the loudly protesting Jinxie, I turned on my computer for the first time in nearly two weeks, after spending 8 days in San Diego and 3 more in Anaheim at BlizzCon. It nearly blinded me.
My monitor is large, old, and very bright. I run it with the brightness on 0 and the contrast on about 50, and don't have white as any default color, since it's dazzling. I'd used a number of other computers during the past week; my Dad's, my Mom's, and several borrowed laptops in the press room at BlizzCon, and they'd all looked fine. This one, in comparison, was like the surface of the sun. I've been blinded by it in the past, but I get used to it since I see it every day. After not seeing it for so long the difference was very clear, and rather than squinting and bearing it I resolved to decrease the brightness. I could not turn down the monitor any further short of installing some of that bubbily, DIY tinted glass plastic wrap you see in the back windows of rice rockets, so I went into the nVidia control panel, where I slid down the brightness and gamma, and tweaked the contrast a bit. It looked a bit dingy, but the sample images were okay. However, when I started surfing and catching up on various sites after nearly a fortnight w/o, I found myself peering in confusion at a lot of images. Anything with a dark shape on a dark background was indecipherable. I saw shapes and curves and outlines, but it was impossible to make out what images were, or to recognize enough of the key features.
I ignored it, until I tried to watch some football highlights on NFL.com, and found myself unable to make out anyone's face under their helmet. Black guys were just blanks in the shadow behind their facemasks, and even the white guys were pretty well shrouded. So I turned up the gamma a bit and upped the brightness on my monitor controls, and found a more manageable level.
My expression while trying to recognize anything composed of dark brown on black was the same face I made when first looking at that woman's ass in Costco today. My mental state was quite similar as well. I sort of squinted, and turned my head from side to side, like the RCA dog. I've seen asses before. In fact, the prospect of seeing women in tights is the thing that gets me to the gym before 9 most nights, since it's a dispiriting sausage-fest past 10pm. I've made something of a study of that portion of the human anatomy, and I'm reasonable certain that I know how they are formed. Two legs, thighs, hips, etc. Indeed, this woman contained the usual components of a human's lower body, but with each leg perhaps double the usual circumference, and so tightly hugged by her impossibly-inappropriate garment, it was as eye-baffling as the dark images had been on my recalibrated monitor. I could see the shape, but the revealed details didn't match my preconceptions.
In retrospect, I think it was the all-too-clearly visible panties that really disturbed my visual estimate. They were a large item of clothing. If they'd been men's underwear there would have been at least one "X" in the size. Probably 2 or 3. A normal woman would have put both legs through one leg hole. This lady wore them like a rubber band around a chocolate chip muffin, and as a result I found my horrified eyes roaming helplessly back and forth, trying to account for the square footage of hip and thigh that swelled, in all directions, past the tortured black elastic and beneath the equally-tortured red spandex. You ever seen a tree limb that's grown through a chain link fence? Like that. But moving behind a shopping cart. In broad store-light.
I've seen plenty of fatter people, but virtually never in such a form-hugging garment. I hope never to see one again.
Between that (repeated) sight, the amount of crap I had to buy after eating or otherwise disposing of most everything in my apartment before my vacation absence, the general feeling of malaise I had at being back home after some relaxing time away, and the numerous weekday afternoon, CostCo-filling old people who all seemed to be standing cluelessly mid-aisle while their palsied hands shoveled free bites of semi-food into their dentured mouths, I was in a pretty bleak mood. It was not improved when I finally reached the cashier, after an interminable wait in line, and beheld his assistant using the comically-inefficient "cart switching" method. I've seen that in action a few other times at CostCo, and always figured it was an in-store joke.
When I used to work at the stadium in San Diego, the vending stand managers would occasionally amuse themselves by sending a new and gullible employee off to retrieve the "left-handed crescent wrench." Everyone knew the game, so when the new guy would trudge over to C-37, wouldn't you know that they'd just lent the wrench to U-16. Which had sent the hardware snipe down to B-32. And so on. I assumed that most guys caught on pretty quickly, laughed at the initiation joke, and waited their turn to use it on some new employee even dumber than themselves. So I assume it goes with the backwards cart technique at Costco.
All the sensible cashiers there simply scan the bulk item crap and put it back into the cart, sometimes taking a second longer to stack it into a box of some sort. If there's heavy stuff, like cases of water or soda or 50lbs of dog food, they scan it while it's still in the cart, which is the whole reason they've got those price checking guns on cords; so they don't have to lift the heavy stuff out of the cart. It's such an obvious and simple approach that it's not even worth the sentence of description I just gave it. Giving instructions on that is like telling someone how to take a shower; you don't imagine anyone would ever need to be told, since it's so self-evident.
Which makes the backwards cart method all the stranger, and is what makes me think it's the Costco version of the left-handed crescent wrench. When they get a new and particularly stupid employee they start him off on cashier assistance, where he has to do nothing more challenging than turn heavy items so the SKU is up and scannable, and put the crap back into the cart after it's been scanned. I'm quite certain any of the higher primates could be trained to perform that job adequately, and suspect that your average gorilla, or bonobo, would be better at it than the pimply high school students Costco usually has toiling away at the task. I further suspect that you could not get an ape to use the backward cart method, since the animal would see the stupidity of taking each cart, turning it around backwards, and laboriously transferring everything from each customer's cart to another cart. The Costco employees? Not so much.
Let me clarify. The backwards cart mechanism requires an extra, empty shopping cart. It's turned backwards, so it faces the incoming carts. The cashier's assistant takes everything out of each shopper's cart, puts it on the conveyor belt to be scanned, and then puts it into the second, backwards cart. Then, when the customer has paid and is ready to go, the second, freshly-loaded cart is backed around the end of the cashier's table, the handle conveniently facing towards the customer who is about to roll it out the door.
That's not so bad. What makes it left-handed crescent wrench-comparable is the wasted prep time. Once they've loaded a cart and delivered it unto the shopper, they've got to turn around the other cart, the one the last customer wheeled up to the cash register. Better yet, this method defeats the entire purpose of those "leave heavy items in cart" signs they have near every register. It wasn't so bad with my cart, since I just had one brick of Diet Pepsi, and a 10 lbs bag of potatoes in my cart. Not too hard to switch over, though the bag boy had to squat down and slide the sodas from beneath my cart onto the new one.
The guy before me in line though, had 4 cases of soda, plus a large pumpkin in his cart. Any competent cashier would just have wheeled it through, scanned the prices, and been done. Not Mr. backwards cart man. Nope, he hunkered down and dragged those 3 cases of soda from the underneath tray over to the underneath tray on the other cart, and followed that by lifting the 4th case and the pumpking out of the cart and putting them into the backwards one. He then had to scramble to stuff all the guy's other items into his new cart, since the cashier had already rung him up, and all that pointless soda dragging had taken some time.
I watched this US Army-level inefficiency as I always do, with one eyebrow slightly raised and a half smile affixed to my mouth. As Malaya once pointed out, when it was already too later to matter... if I had an LOLcat totem, it would be this one.
The only possible benefit of this technique is that the customer's cart is backwards once loaded, which lets the cashier's assistant push it around the end of the cashier's table so the handle is right at the customer's hands. The alternative is to pull it through forwards, so it has to be wheeled out a whole step, then turned to the left so the handle is at the customer's hands. That difference is both pointless and negligible, but it's something. The really inexplicable part is why they switch things to a second cart every time. Why not just turn around the customer's own cart? It would be equally pointless, but at least it wouldn't require all the items to be shifted from one cart to another. Plus, what do they do when someone comes up with one of those flatbed, six-wheeled carts that look like escapees from a home improvement store? People get those at Costco when they're shopping for a summer camp or a restaurant, and need to buy like, 20 cases of bottled water, or 5000 rolls of toilet paper. Not only is the volume of goods on those push carts too great to be transferred to a regular shopping cart, but the backwards cart is in the way once the flatbed is rolled through.
Flatbed carts aside, try to imagine how awkward it is to squat down beneath a shopping cart and slide 36-can cartons of soda or beer from the bottom of one cart to the bottom of another one? Wouldn't you realize the stupidity of that after doing it like, once, and realize that no, there wasn't actually a left-handed crescent wrench, and stop humiliating yourself by walking all over the goddamned stadium in search of it?
Of course you would. And that's why you don't work at Costco, or if you do, you aren't fool enough to use the backwards cart method.
Unsurprisingly, after bag boy clumsily muscled my caffeine and aspartame delivery devices and taters into my "new" cart, he started to dump the black olives and frozen pizzas and lettuce and mushrooms and other stuff right into the cart.
"Can you put those in a box?" I said, surprised, and yet not surprised, that I had to ask him to do so. He kind of grunted, then squatted down again and pulled out a box that had once held a lot of pecan halves (it's still sitting by the door, since Jinxie was sprawling in it all night and I was too lazy to carry it out to the trash tonight). Which was fine, except that box was large enough to hold maybe 1/3 of my loose items. Which defeated the whole purpose of putting the stuff into a box... so it wouldn't take the customer (me, in this case) 11 trips to carry it all from their car to their fridge.
I let him keep going, and wondered if he'd see any problem with putting just a giant tray of mushrooms, an 8-pack of canned black olives, and a bag of lettuce into the tiny box, while stacking maybe 10 other items loosely into the cart. Nope, it all looked fine to him, and when I caught his eye, flicked my eyes to the loose heap of stuff in the cart, and said, "Think that box is big enough?" he just sort of stared at me for a second, before rolling my (new) cart backwards around the corner, where I could grab it while he hurried to turn my former cart around backwards, to get it ready for the next lady in line.
Back when I worked at the stadium, I don't recall ever noticing any strong correlation between general job incompetence and left-handed crescent wrench gullibility, but in retrospect, and with today's data factored in, it certainly seems likely. Lots of humans just don't think. Or aren't smart enough to evaluate their actions in any sort of impartial fashion. Self awareness and intellect don't necessarily share any more correlation than gullibility and incompetence -- but I think there's got to be a fairly robust overlap between both sets of data. I do not think there's such an overlap between intellect, self-awareness, and success. The ability/likelihood of learning from mistakes does not require an individual to apprehend them in their entirety. In fact, such contemplation and navel-gazing (the type I enjoy indulging in) is quite possibly/probably an obstacle to improvement, since it's easy to over-analyze what you've done, and why, instead of just doing something different/better in the future.
Tuesday night at the gym I exhausted my reading material (a printed out chapter from my ongoing novel) while still on my warm up session on the stepmill. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to discover a copy of the current issue of Rolling Stone sitting neatly on the very elliptical machine I was planning to spend the next 45 minutes grinding away on. I grabbed it, and hopped on.
I've never regularly read Rolling Stone, not even back when I was 20 and thought I had a responsibility to care about new bands, but I've flipped through copies often enough in doctor's offices and car repair waiting rooms that I figured I could get half an hour's amusement out of this issue. Especially since it had a cover article on Metallica, whose new, supposedly-super-heavy album I'd just downloaded obtained that afternoon.
I disregarded the table of contents and just started flipping through it, a decision I began to regret around page 30, when I'd not yet seen anything I was interested in reading about. Plus it's not so easy to turn pages while doing 200 strides per minute on the swinging arms elliptical. I did at last get to the Metallica article, and read it, but came away unimpressed. They were my favorite band in the world in like, 1990, I still think Justice for All is the best metal album of all time, and I've got all their other albums (most on actual CDs, though 99% of my music listening is to ripped versions on my computer, tracks on my ipod, or burned CDs in my car), but I haven't found much to like on the last few. A good song here or there, and the heaviness can still move me, but nothing that catchy.
My last conscious thought about the band Metallica was when the Some Kind of Monster documentary was out. I never saw it, but the reviews all talked about how crazy and dysfunctional the guys were, how they had to see a therapist to resolve their band anger issues, and how they might break up at any moment. I hadn't processed the fact that that was more than 4 years ago, and that they were still together and releasing a new album, so obviously they'd worked things out to some degree. The Rolling Stone article covered that, and talked about how they do intense jam sessions in closet-sized rooms before every concert to get themselves in synch and charged up. After the shows they all travel separately, flying on their own planes, jetting back to Paris or Norway between the shows in their European tour, etc. Not a bad life, for the proverbial blister on your little finger and/or thumb.
That article exhausted, without greatly adding to my information about the world or reducing the remaining time in my elliptical session, I flipped back to an earlier piece in the magazine, about Sarah Palin. I don't go out of my way to read about her, and I can't watch her talk anymore. Just the 2 and 3 minute clips of SNL's Tiny Fey channeling her incoherence are more than I can take, and only the fact that she could soon be an irregular heartbeat away from the presidency compels me to push out some old football trivia for long enough to contemplate her existence.
I've blogged in the past (too lazy to find a link) about how humans judge intelligence, and how we're clearly biased towards our own strengths, or at least our own aspirations. For example, I greatly admire people who can speak extemporaneously and remain coherent and literate. I'll listen to Christopher Hitchens discuss almost anything, just because he can do it real time and keep his words and concepts as clear and intelligent as a well-written essay. Even when he's defending the invasion and occupation of Iraq in the most misleading, obfuscating, goalpost-shifting terms, he's so erudite doing it that I'm almost seduced. (Seduced into believing that he's being sincere, rather than making a coldly-calculated argument.)
This, I think, explains (which I just Freud-ulently spelled "expalins") a lot of the revulsion I feel for Palin. She's not qualified for her job (current or aspiring) and she's unable to speak clearly about anything. Why her inability is particularly galling to me I'm not sure; she's not articulate and doesn't seem to be very bright, but neither was Bush, and listening to him never annoyed me that much. I didn't agree with many of his ideas, and thought he was entirely uninformed about the actual results of his policies, but he seemed sincere about them, and did his best to explain them. It was like he had enough information to justify what he was doing; he just wasn't able to spit it out. It seemed like he was doing the best he could, and sort of knew he was in over his head, but was trying to rise to the challenge. Like he took the responsibility seriously.
Palin seems very different. She seems to feel entitled and smug and cynical. I don't get any humility or humbleness from her; she's all brassy surface growl. She seems like the wound-too-tight hockey soccer mom whose smile never reaches her eyes, who relentlessly spoils and estranges her children, and who drives her husband crazy with an endless litany of hateful gossiping and bitching about anyone who (in her twisted world view) dares to cross her. In the real world, she'd terrify any teacher who tried to tell her the truth about her mediocre, underachieving children, then scream at her kids all the way home, before suffering a breakdown when some little old lady took "her" parking spot at the mall.
Pop psych aside, I read this blog entry this afternoon and thought it was fairly brilliant on the whole, and in its summation of Palin's question answering "ability."
My initial reaction to the “in what respect, Charlie?” moment was that it was like watching a student try to fake a term paper in real time: “well, the Bush Doctrine, Charlie, is a doctrine developed by George Bush. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines ‘doctrine’ as ‘a: something that is taught; b: a principle or position or the body of principles in a branch of knowledge or system of belief,’ and the Bush Doctrine has taught us much about the body of principles in George Bush’s system of belief, which is to defend America and never blink, Charlie.”
Doesn't that sum it up just about perfectly? She's an undergrad, faking a term paper in real time. Unprepared for the issue, without the intelligence to segue into something she does know about, she just spits out catch phrases and talking points without any real connection to the question at hand. "Don't blink. Keep America strong. Tax relief. Win the war in Iraq. etc..." Whether this makes you feel sympathy for her or horror for what she might become depends primarily on how much agreement you have with her alleged political leanings. I thought Tom Tomorrow's comic take was pretty funny too, if less accurate. If only I could think of an appropriate analogy for her speaking style!
As for the Rolling Stone piece, it's worth a mention just for how lacerating it is. It was written after Palin's triumphant debut speech at the RNC, when she read an angry, cynical, sarcastic speech that was almost entirely an attack on Obama. She threw verbal red meat to the crowd of aging carnivores, and was greeted rapturously by the faithful. Literally and figuratively. The RS article isn't so much about Palin or her speech, but more about what her popularity says about Americans. The author is neither impressed, or forgiving. A couple of quotes that had me laughing and shaking my head at the gym.
Here's the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore. And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket.
...
Here's what Sarah Palin represents: being a fat fucking pig who pins "Country First" buttons on his man titties and chants "U-S-A! U-S-A!" at the top of his lungs while his kids live off credit cards and Saudis buy up all the mortgages in Kansas.
The truly disgusting thing about Sarah Palin isn't that she's totally unqualified, or a religious zealot, or married to a secessionist, or unable to educate her own daughter about sex, or a fake conservative who raised taxes and horked up earmark millions every chance she got. No, the most disgusting thing about her is what she says about us: that you can ram us in the ass for eight solid years, and we'll not only thank you for your trouble, we'll sign you up for eight more years, if only you promise to stroke us in the right spot for a few hours around election time.
Ouch? Well, it made for some decent gym reading, at any rate.
In other news, blog posting will (continue) to be light and erratic for the foreseeable future. I'm going to be in San Diego on semi-vacation for the next week, before driving up to Anaheim next weekend for BlizzCon, where there had better be playable D3 machines on the floor, or I'll be one unhappy attendee. Even if I'm there on a free ticket and even Blizzard's dime for the hotel. They're still excessively secretive, but they're PR has certainly become more supportive of fansites in the years since we covered D2 and had to get everything directly from Blizzard North, since Bliz Irvine PR was Dilbert's pointy-haired boss-esque in virtually their every (in)action.
