Deep Down Louisiana Close to New OrleansI was only there once, and it was sweltering and overwhelming and fascinating and now it's gone, maybe for months, maybe forever. I dreamt last night that I was in a city like New Orleans, running away from 20-foot waves crashing into buildings, hugging brick walls every time one would crash over. In the dream, brick walls protected us from the water. In real life, not so much. And as much as I agree that, yes, building the levee system eroded nature's protection against this sort of devastation, and yes, sending National Guards and diverting money into Iraq left us bereft of our ability to deal with emergencies at home (emergencies caused in large measure, many speculate, by climate change), I'm just too burnt out to want to hear it. I may agree with it, but I have as little patience for it as I do for the newsbots Teresa mentions who use the word "looting" for black people and "finding" for white folks, or the hallucinatory religious wackos Amanda discusses who interpret a satellite photo as looking like a fetus and thus, since Louisiana (like every other state in the union) has abortion clinics it's a sign from God that, I dunno, I lost interest after that. Honestly, these folks think likenesses of Jesus appear on foodstuffs and Mary graces them via underpass stains, and it's not like they even know what the historical Jesus family looked like! And don't get them started on maps! They see things everywhere. It's a good thing they're so ign'ant about things outside their little enclaves, goodness knows how they'd interpret Italy resembling a boot! Probably sexually, they do seem obsessed about that, and it's usually about as far as their imagination will stretch - either holy pictures or dirty ones. Surely those of us who used to see horsies in the clouds have a little more creativity. (And really, if you want to make accusations about God's wrath, the areas hardest hit are mostly so-called "red states"...)
Silly Site o' the DayMy main source of tension (booking nearly impossible personal international travel for my boss, his wife and his brother-in-law) still hangs over me, but other than that things are easing at work and it looks like I'll be able to be out for a few days without having to worry too much about overwork upon my return. Also, my Bloglines clips are back, so I can pass on this weird little amateurish cartoon that Cory at BoingBoing talked about.
Silly Site o' the DayLight blogging continues while I try to shake this cold and wrap up office-things prior to my vacation (and third blogiversary!) next week. My Bloglines clip file is acting a little buggy, so I grabbed what I could for today's Silly Site - the OED in limerick form, via Brooke Biggs a long, long time ago...
Silly Site o' the DayThe cold is still bad, and I feel like I'm nothing but a seat-warmer here at the office. At least my boss is away, and I got a local travel agency to handle all the international flights he wants me to book. I can't even think straight, much less do airline machinations to places I've never been whose names he doesn't tell me ("near the mid or north coast" of a country I don't know isn't terribly helpful). Ah well, this too shall pass. Only five days till I'm on vacation. Wish I could concentrate better, though. Probably shouldn't look at this sheep-counting site (via Augie), it'll put me right back to sleep...
No Sensa HumorTom Peyer talks about the negative reaction he's gotten to The Parable of Jesus and the Rubber Chicken from the usual suspects. Fortunately, my side of the blogosphere has taken to it like cats to sinks... Full disclosure: for a number of years now Tom's been on my "short list" of comics industry correspondents whom I haven't yet met but would really like to, so I'm a long-time fan of his work, and I'm glad to see my fellow liberal and lefty bloggers discovering his writing.
Silly Site o' the DayHmm, I seemed to have picked up or exacerbated a summer cold, which had me up in the night, so I don't know how much I'll be getting through blog-skimming today, or anything much beyond crawling back into bed with the stack of comics I brought home yesterday. Maybe a nice bowl of pasta too. Everyone's talking about the Flying Spaghetti Monster, you know. Says Laura, "Pastafarians will note that Talk Like A Pirate Day is Sep 19th. Put it on your calendar now. And take a look... the most holy day of Pastafarians, Marco Polo's birthday is Sep 15th. That makes Sep 15-19 'Holy Pasta Week.' I intend to indulge." Just remember the Sabbath to keep it holy...
A New York Summer PictorialIf I took pictures more often I'd probably get a Flickr account, but until then I'll make do with Blogger's photo posting capabilities. Most of the touristy ones were taken on a city bus, which I've usually found is the best way to get nice shots. Robin, who's working all weekend, walked me down the stairs, and the first thing we did before I left was finally affix all the Ring of Fire fish to the back of my car.  Don't know if you can see read the Ralph Spoilsport license plate frame, the top part reads "Head in any direction on the freeway of your choice!" What can I say, it's a Firesign thing...  The fountain outside Lincoln Center, where I had to go to exchange opera tickets for my boss and his wife. They were setting up for some sort of outdoor do, there were lots of plastic chairs on the other side of this bandstand thingie, but I didn't stick around to find out any more. Places to go, things to do, farmer's markets to visit...  This one's for Julia, I know how much she simply adores the Trump globe.  The statue at Columbus Circle, with the gold statue thingie that I also like in the background where Central Park begins. I loved the dramatic sky too.  The famous Caroline's comedy club.  Blurry people buying blurry half-price tickets for blurry, bloody Broadway.  The Dove ad that's been discussed to death on the blogosphere is high up enough among the skyscrapers that it would be difficult to graffiti.  Best shot I could get of Times Square from the bus.  This ad on the subway struck me as odd. It's for Sean John clothing, and when I first skimmed it I read it as "Ghetto It," because the "to" doesn't have an initial cap, and I thought "well, considering Diddy is a non-white person and all that isn't it just a tad offensive? Although whites have been appropriating "ghetto culture" for decades now...  A view of the Harlem River from the 225th Street subway platform, where I exit the train to catch the bus that takes me home.  Lastly, looking out the rather filthy windows of said local bus, passing a local church carnival, because it just wouldn't be a summer Saturday in the si-- er, city without a bouncy castle.
Silly Site o' the DayYou know, when most people go into Manhattan for a shopping spree, they probably don't have here and here in mind, but there you are. Or rather, there I'll be, after I take care of a mandatory work errand here. It's a nice day so the camera comes with. Here's a generator link dump from Xeni at BoingBoing for you to have fun with...
Friday Cat Blogging (™ Kevin Drum)Amy's been squinting a bit, we're not sure whether she's practicing for Meow Like a Pirate Day...  And here's a lovely closeup of Datsa:  It's even prettier in actual pixels...
Silly Site o' the DaySayeth Mark Frauenfelder on BoingBoing: "If you stare at the little black cross in the center of this ring of blinking purple dots, the dots will turn green and eventually disappear. But if you stare at the purple dots themselves, you'll see that they only blink off momentarily and are never green." This is pretty much how I'm feeling now after a somewhat sleepless night - turning a little green and fading...
Silly Site o' the DayWhew, what a morning! In honor of my boss flying out to Europe in a few hours, and particularly in light of me having received an actual raise in my annual review yesterday (that I'm now making close to "my age in thousands" again doesn't change the fact that I'm still looking for employment elsewhere, although it helps a bit in easing the current strain on our finances in terms of rent and health insurance and gas money and so forth), it's the Universal Packing List Generator, again care of Augie!
Silly Site o' the DayThis will probably not be a good day to post. Even though my boss and his wife seem to be in good spirits prior to taking off for Europe tomorrow, and even though I'm about 90% better (still getting the sweats), it's my last full Boss Day today for at least six weeks, so I assume I'll be too busy for the next 10 or so hours to devote myself to any posting. But hey, you can always go play another game. Augie has tons of Games for the Brain! Brain and brain, what is brain? It is controller, is it not?
Love is Blinds
To celebrate that I seem to be getting better, and September's on its way, and that it looks like I'm in writing and posting mode again (at least energy-wise, I'm always there in terms of intent), and I really, really want my text to even out with my sidebar once again someday soon, I present the following photo, what I taken with my very camera this evening: 
Five bucks each at Home Depot, gotta love it. No, not the cat, she's cost us far more than that, although it is indeed mandatory to love her as well. I left the slats open in the middle blinds blind one 'cause I'm, y'know, aesthetic that way. Thank goodness one of us was mechanically inclined enough to hang 'em. (Hint: It wasn't me.) Four down, seven to go!
Ghoti
Just to prove I'm a northern liberal elitist who loves both wordplay and expensive food (although two of the items are downright cheap, and AYCE sushi is only $25 per at our local restaurant so "expensive" is a relative term):
All from the good people at Ring of Fire (thanks again, Nona!), where you can see clearer representations. The first one says "Gefilte" in a sort of Yiddish-y font, the one in the middle is "Sushi" in a sort of Asian-y font, and the one on the right reads "N' Chips" in a not-particularly-British-y font at all. This is probably the order in which we'll affix them to the car, as I'm the driver (left seat) and Rob's the passenger. Bonus points to anyone who knows what this post's title means, and where I remember it from.
Shameless Soulmate PromotionWhat the heck, as long as things have livened up a bit with my "there's a difference between being smart and putting on airs about it" posts, I figure I've gotten a curious new reader or two, so I might as well remind both various and sundry that Robin Riggs is one of the bestest comic book artists around (one of the reasons I married him). Here's a story we did together (I should explain that, despite the subsequent surname change in the credits, I actually wrote it before I "met" him, which kinda makes it a little, um, weirder), and you can peruse and purchase original art pages from him here. And hey, if you're a comic fan in SoCal, why not visit Isotope and suggest a Robin Riggs toilet seat lid be considered for their museum collection? (Via BoingBoing)
Big WoidsHorrid, horrid day at the office, with too many people assuming that just because I've managed to drag my sick self in that I can obviously operate at my usual 110% capacity. Someone please hire me away from this place! Now that I can finally breathe a little (a relative term, as chest pains are a major symptom today) I had a chance to take another look at the comments engendered by yonder Southern Belles/We're All Actually Purple States post from yesterday. Good job my husband warned me he'd been commenting there! Now I'm sure y'all know why it's never a good idea to assume that, just because we share a soul, we share a brain as well... Anyway, what struck me most was how defensive a couple commenters seemed to get over the suggestion that one of the things that so-called elitists might think about doing when dealing with folks who don't consider themselves elitist is cutting down on what we used to call "ten-dollar words" (ah, remember when ten bucks meant something more than, what, a quarter tank of gas?). And part of me sympathizes. I love words. I've loved them ever since I was a kid, doing crossword puzzles and playing Scrabble with my mom. My favorite comedy troupe is The Firesign Theatre, who love wordplay as much as their Goon Show influence would attest. I majored in English and Linguistics in college. I still use a thesaurus regularly. Heck, you can't be a writer and not love words, can you? So hey, chill, I'm on the side of words. Big ones, small ones, vocabulary she is my friend! But part of knowing how to use words is being able to figure out which ones to use when. Take jargon, for instance (please!). If I said "I really hate it when people accuse me of said-bookisms" to someone who isn't a writer or involved in editing or publishing, I'm liable to get a blank stare, so I find a different way of putting it (which is why I hate it when people accuse me of said-bookisms, but that's neither here nor there). If I were to tell you of my day getting C of O's from the B of B, you probably wouldn't know what I'm talking about even if you worked in my office. If I were to throw about high school debate terms, even ones you might think were pretty easy like "straw man," to people more used to having conversations than debates (or even "dialogues")... well, you see where this is going. With some plain-speaking folks it goes beyond "fancy" words or jargon. Even employing more formal grammatical habits like "if I were" rather than "if I was" or not ending sentences with prepositions... well, some folks would understand you right enough, but you'd sound funny to 'em. You can lament the death of proper structure until the cows come home (did I mention I was a long-time subscriber to the Underground Grammarian?), but it's beside the point, which is that, if you really want to talk with people to find common ground, it's probably a good idea to have enough common courtesy and common sense to know how they talk, and make appropriate adjustments. And I think this is all Amanda was saying in her original don't-mess-with-Texas post anyway. As much as we may not cotton to it, W's lavish spread in Crawford is what's known as a ranch in those parts. Like South Fork was, y'know? Now, as I see it, the danger here isn't that we edumacated sorts will have to dumb ourselves down in order to communicate with anti-elitists from any geographical locale, but that we'll sound dumb trying to do it. Amanda may very well be shaking her head at my use of phrases like "cotton to" above, although y'all can often get away with things in writing that y'all can't when speaking (I don't pronounce "y'all" nearly as well as I write it!). As a middle-aged white Jewish woman I jump immediately into self-parody any time I even attempt hip-hop phrases (true dat). But see, I don't think that's what plain-speech folks are expecting anyway. Our language is blessed with a truly immense vocabulary. If you truly want to communicate, there's no need to use it to browbeat or intimidate others, or to score points, or to show off, or to "hear yourself talk" without regard to your readers or listeners. If you truly want to communicate, there's always a way to say something directly without putting on airs, without sounding like you're doing all sorts of verbal gymnastics to please some would-be opponent (again, that's the debate mentality at work, plain-speech folks aren't the enemies of edumacated sorts), and without compromising your love of language (in fact, if you love language, this shouldn't be difficult at all). Sometimes, all it involves is being a good listener first, then responding in kind. And not being a boor and reacting like you're threatened, or like someone's trying to take away some implicit entitlement, if they suggest you vary the way you talk toward situation-specific conversations (which are, after all, not All About You). Update: Carla weighs in as well, although I should point out that picking on the specific ten-dollar word "ruminations" was a goof on myself, which context was kinda left out of her excerpt. And I agree with her that we should never let the idea of being smart or educated be seen as a bad thing, the way the current administration is trying to do in so many ways. It's actual elitism that's bad, and the right is just as elitist, particularly Mr. Harvard C+ who needs to keep a "balanced life." There's a difference between being educated and worldly and flaunting same in conversation. Although I admit, my being married to a Brit has peppered my conversation with way too many "bloody"s and the neighborhood kids still look at me strangely when I flip them the two-fingered bird.
Silly Site o' the DayWow, thanks for all the great responses on my Southern Belles post, folks! Nice to know this blog can still attract the traffic when I can find the time, even in a somewhat fevered state, to write a more-or-less proper essay. And yeah, Amanda's mention of it didn't hurt! The fever seems to have broken and, in any case, I can't afford to take another day off work at 75% pay; and after all, I inconvenienced a coworker yesterday by asking her to do a 20-second task that wasn't her job and which I couldn't do from home - forwarding some email that my boss had received over the weekend to a business meeting he was attending yesterday - thereby ruining her entire week, which she informed me with her usual ingracious sarcasm in a strange emailed tirade (just another reason to hope all the executive secretary resumes I've been emailing out lead to at least a few interviews!). So despite having gotten almost no sleep and still experiencing sweat and chills, I'm off to the office in about half an hour. I sat at the computer long enough yesterday to ascertain that I should be able to do my job today (i.e., sit at my desk for 8 hours without collapsing), but it won't be easy. Fortunately, your comments have spurred me on to at least try to do more than one post per day, assuming I have the time, and my boss leaves the country on Thursday so things are looking up. Now, if only someone in NYC wanted a damn good executive secretary... but onward. Here's another game for y'all ("the walrus was Paul"...sorry, sorry), again via Augie - the N Game!
Southern Belles are RingingI see where today is Blog Like a Conservative Day, which I'm not going to do because (a) I think it's kind of counterproductive and mean and plays into a lot of the stereotypes conservatives spread around about liberals (more about which anon) and (b) I don't read any conservative blogs or pundits. Honestly, where do you people find the time, it's all I can do to keep up with the liberal and progressive ones! Instead I want to talk about the South. My ruminations started with Nancy Goldstein's article about capital punishment in Alabama and some good people working to rectify that appalling, racist situation. Then I read Carla's post on the Handbook of Southern Manners which takes said handbook to task for, I guess, being hypocritical and dealing with manners instead of politics. (Interesting reactions in her comments section as well.) Then Billmon started to tear into Texas then took it back. But what topped it off for me were Amanda's musings on how she feels "cultural issues are effective distractions from class issues" and an observation, from a Southern viewpoint, of how "we've been persuaded that liberal East Coast elitists hate us." And I can't help but feel that's true. (I'm guilty myself of assuming certain things when I hear certain accents, but as a former linguistics major I realize I'm doing it and try to compensate.) I mean, there are grains of truth behind every stereotype, but this divisive administration has only made things worse, and it's almost like people are acting proud to be elitist, or racist, or hypocritical or whatever. Yes, there's horrible racism in the South (and in the North), but there are people in the South working to combat that. Yes, there's a schmuck who ran over a field of symbolic crosses, but there's also his cousin who chose to make amends by inviting Camp Casey onto his grounds. And yes, we Northerners and/or liberals pride ourselves (hmm, pride, isn't that one of the seven deadly sins?) on being so much more enlightened than our conservative/Southern brethren, but we can't help using fancy words (I mean, "ruminations?" honestly) and breathlessly blogging about our summer vacations in Europe and the expensive foods we encounter. We're feeding into this divisiveness every bit as much as they are. There are good people and idiots everywhere, folks, and the trick is for the good people not to stoop to the level of the bad people, not to throw things in the face of an entire group just because you believe some members of that group to be godless or stupid or elitist or anything else that doesn't fit your personal standard. So yeah, I'm not Blogging Like a Conservative today, or apparently like a liberal either.
Silly Site o' the DayWell, the fever was "down" to 100.6 last time I took my temperature, so I'm staying home from work today; I'd be a menace on the roads in my fevered condition, and besides, we're temporariliy without health insurance (long story) and I don't want things to worsen. I'll try to do a "link dump" later, depending on how I feel; it would be nice to get through the blog-skimming and/or comics reading just so I can feel I've accomplished something despite this mysterious illness. Continuing with our games theme, here's one that's really too cute for words, found by Augie.
Silly Site o' the DayHad a horrible night. Probably still feverish. Weird dreams involving Duncan and Susie and weird debauchery in general kept waking me up, which I suppose tells me that, all in all, I'd rather be in Philadelphia. (During one hallucination, it turned out that Susie had a pool in her basement. On purpose.) Obviously I still have a long way to go to snap out of this state, so no games just yet, not even the Rubik's Cube Java Applet (via Hanan)...
Silly Site o' the DayGuh. Sorry. Battling 101-degree fever that seemed to come out of nowhere (but is very likely brought on by tension and overwork). Taking aspirin now. From Augie comes another game, Add Like Mad. Wish my brain were working... Going back to sleep now. Tomorrow maybe not speak in fragments.
Friday Cat Blogging (™ Kevin Drum)There's something about Robin's dresser that the cats really like...   I think it's that he sometimes puts laundry there...
Silly Site o' the DayTunnel, light, end? Yeah, right. One more week, but I may get to catch up and play stuff even before that, as the #1 and #2 people in the company will be out of town much of next week. Until then, I can only dream of things like Bubble Trouble (via Augie)...
Silly Site o' the DayStill alive, still busy with job-work, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel that I'm hoping isn't an oncoming train - in a little over a week my boss is off to Europe again (yes, there are people in this country who vacation more than the President), I've already restarted the job hunt, and even if I don't get interviews I'm planning on a lot of time off in September as my favorite time of the year approaches (and I need to use 7 carried-over vacation days, not to mention the additional 15 I've just received as my jobanniversary was last week). Oh, and it took hours of tweezing to remove the jammed paper but my printer is functional once more. Plus, we went and bought a whole set of blinds last night (we needed 11) and they cost less altogether than our dinner (granted, it was sushi, but still...)! So I'm almost looking forward to going in today! I don't want to talk about how far behind I am in blog-skimming the News+Views folks (about a thousand unread posts in both Guys and Gals). No, I want to talk about Kax, because I like the idea of plugging Trevor two days in a row and because it's a nifty little game... just try to move that little arrow to hit the star before it (the arrow) changes direction and crashes!
Silly Site o' the DayMy printer's jammed but good (even tweezers aren't removing the accordion'ed paper) and for the last hour and a half I couldn't access any networked drives to do my work, but hey, at least none of this is my fault. Still, it's not like there's no pressure, so when pressed I play games like... Domino Pressure! Well, no, not really, but I'm getting better at Minesweeper (my default yesterday when the server's hard drive fried and we had no internet or email or anything)... Oh, the domino game is via Trevor at Pleasant.
Silly Site o' the DayLike most of the rest of the blogosphere that's mentioned it in the last day or so (I first saw it on August Pollak's blog), I have no idea if Walken in '08 is real either but I suspect it's not...
Silly Site o' the DayFeeling a bit better, although Datsa needed some kitty-attention at 5:30 this morning so our sleep wasn't uninterrupted. Fortunately, it being a Sunday we were able to stay up for a couple hours, pilled and fed him (and pill-less Amy), then crashed again for a few hours. Still waaay behind in blog-skimming, as I've been since Tuesday, but I just got through my Dynamic Duos section and wanted to pass along an ad that Karen at Dark Bilious Vapors found amusing, since I do as well: BBDO's "Sumo Chicken" spot for Pepsi.
Silly Site o' the DayMan, am I zonked. Between the workweek I just went through, a late evening yesteday playing Diablo and rewatching Rocky Horror when I ought to have known better, Datsa interrupting our sleep at least twice, and sitting at the car service place for almost three hours to get my Sonata re-inspected for the first time, I feel like I've actually lost ground instead of catching up. My eyes can no longer focus, and sleep is definitely on order now for the rest of the weekend, although it will doubtless be more a case of "body and brain collapsing" than "refresh and recharge." Thank goodness for my understanding husband, who passed along this Silly Site today. Apparently the corporate powers-that-be are not amused...
All For NaughtRobin found this lovely cartoon in the Daily Mail. Over a week and the caption hasn't been corrected yet...
Friday Cat Blogging (™ Kevin Drum)Laundry day is fun, particularly when we remake the bed and Datsa decides to remain on it while we put the sheet over him. 
Amy likes "digging for Datsa" as well...
Silly Site o' the DayVia Augie, a nifty color scheme generator. Like him, I have color-matching difficulty; unlike him, I have a professional at home who takes care of those sorts of things. Bear in mind, these are screen colors so they work with light (additive) rather than pigment ones (subtractive).
Silly Site o' the DayLots of office tension today, which doesn't help alleviate my stomach still doing haven't-slept-enough flip-flops. It's like walking through a minefield, and my best bet is just to stay out of everyone's way and in my nice quiet little office. Wish I could be more productive, like folding paper (via Cory at BoingBoing).
Silly Site o' the DayLight Blogging Continues™ as the job workload takes its toll and I feel not unlike crap. I could really use a sick day, but there's just too much to do at the office and I don't feel like getting my pay docked by 25% with Robin still "between regular assignments" as they say. (Thanks to those who've helped out with our bills by purchasing stuff from his pages for sale gallery; he'll be uploading more soon.) I can still smile, though, and who wouldn't at the third installment of Leave It To Bush (via Tild~)?
Respecting the DeadSometimes the most appropriate reaction to death is silence. I had nothing to add to the many well-written blogosphere remembrances of Robin Cook, Peter Jennings and so forth (not to mention sparse blogging time), so I kept to myself my sadness over their passings. Sometimes the most appropriate reaction is anger, particularly if you feel the death in question was needless and preventable. Cindy Sheehan's been camping out in Crawford, waiting for Vacation Boy to actually communicate with her this time around about why her son died in Iraq. Has anyone asked why, if she's not a "threat to national security" now, she will suddenly become one on Thursday? Or is that considered rhetorical or disrespectful? Then there are those who go for the most inappropriate reaction possible to a death, like Fred "Cryptkeeper" Phelps. Julia has the details. Of course, it's not the first time he's pulled a death-related stunt like this. Full of Christ's compassion, that one.
Silly Site o' the DayGoodness, is that the time? Oh Hanan, the last thing I need are more clocks, even Lego clocks...
Silly Site o' the DayVia Augie, it's the knork! I've looked through the entire website except for the Flash bit, and I still can't figure out how it actually works. Anyone want to enlighten me?
Cool PostsWell, only 500 or so posts to go, all in News+Views Guys, before I'm caught up in blog-skimming. (The finances are done, but I opted for TV over sleep because TCM is airing Judy Garland musicals all afternoon...) I enjoyed a lot of what I read, but wanted to especially note the following so I can uncheck that "Keep New" button on Bloglines: The lefty blogosphere seems abuzz over Presidential radio address script, which I believe is too funny not to be an immediate Koufax entrant.
I think Steve Giliard makes an excellent point about email spam. To me it's no different than snail mail solicitations. I may admire the politicians and activists who send me the stuff, and agree with their positions on matters of importance, but that doesn't somehow remove it from the category of junk mail. Moreover, it usually means they want money from me, and I don't like to be reminded that I, like many others on a budget, can't afford to put my money where my mouth is. I don't react well to people who make me feel guilty over something that's fairly beyond my control.
Your go-to guy for any sensible posts dealing with reality versus superstition is, of course, PZ Myers, who has a couple good ones, about the wonder of our role as human beings in a "vast and complicated universe" that superstitious fanatics cannot begin to grasp, and one reminding us that the difference between science and religion doesn't necessarily make them incompatible, it merely makes them different subjects. On the same topic, I'm very grateful to Melissa for explaining what a scientific theory (as opposed to, say, a philosophical theory) actually is, because I get that mixed up also.
I agree with Lis, we all need more ink monkeys. And ink pirates. After all, you can't go wrong with pirates and monkeys (I read that somewhere)...
Cool, Michael Palin has a travel site. Via BoingBoing.
That's it for now. Back to Judy and Marjorie Main and Margaret O'Brien...
How Potatoes Can Make You Run Yourself OverRobin passes along the full story.
Silly Site o' the DayIs this the day I catch up on blog-skimming? Write my essay on geek chic? Do my finances? Or, you know, just sleep some more? Who can tell? Maybe I should ask the new magic 8-ball that Shakespeare's Sister found - every time you refresh it, it displays another incomprehensible response!
Blogathon 2005 Has Begun!Good luck to all the bloggers, including Moi of Blogg on whom I'll be checking up throughout the day. I did Blogathon '03, which pretty much wiped me, but it was a lot of fun nonetheless, and a great way not only to raise money for worthy charities but to find new bloggers! Update: Speaking of Liberal Coalition members, today is also the birthday of both LC'ers NTodd Pritsky and Steve Bates - HB, guys!
Friday Cat Blogging (™ Kevin Drum)Just took this close-up of Datsa, and wanted to see if I could upload directly from the camera right into Blogger. 
Yep, looks like I can!
"Before the Beginning, There Was This Turtle..."
Silly Site o' the DayLBC™, although I'm hoping for a kitty picture later. Hey, here's something fun to play with that Amanda mentioned - a Regender program that takes the website of your choice and switches the gendered words (including names) from male to female and veesy-versy. I chuckled a little at what it did to my blogroll, but otherwise I found it didn't touch a lot of the names that it didn't recognize (for instance, Hanan remained Hanan, which is only fitting as I thought he was female for the longest time), so Pen-Elayne actually wound up fairly gender-balanced, even gender-neutral.
Silly Site o' the DayOnce again, Light Blogging Continues™ as I take care of business. At least I'm keeping pace with some of the blogs, although mostly in the Kultcha rather than the News+Views categories. Via Michael Schaub, I read about the ongoing Lyttle Lytton contest, a sort of abridged companion to the regular Bulwer-Lytton contest I mentioned last Friday...
Way Too PCDoes anyone out there remember the original meaning of the term "politically correct" back when it was first coined by the left? It referred to people who, while well-meaning, were perceived as going just a little too overboard in their personal demands, or suggestions, or recommendations or what-have-you. Nowadays I tend to just refer to this as "an overblown sense of entitlement," which shows up among obsessives of all natures and all political stripes and which I promise someday to blog about in more depth once I have the time and energy. One hallmark of "PC"-cum-"entitlement" is that it often misses the forest for the trees in the complainers' quest to have the world conform to their personal way of thinking, and in so doing shifts the blame from any sense of proportion or personal responsibility onto whatever it is that's bugging the complainers. Two examples, in my opinion, are the folks behind Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week. I can support the first to an extent (and not just because Cat used to work with Adbusters), as I do think it's a good consciousness-raising tool to try to get through an entire 24 hours without making a single purchase, thus perhaps realizibng how much of our modern lives are entwined with and cheapened by hyper-capitalism. But the second, and its newest "spinoff" PC Turnoff Week (brought to my attention by Kath David), are just too much for me. First of all, these organizations ask people to completely change their chosen leisure activities for an entire week rather than a day, which is impractical at best and just plain stupid at worst. But you know, we have to do it - For The Children. "While the computer is a wonderful tool," says the PC people's website, "like many things in children's lives, limits must be set for their own safety and well being." Well, sure. And setting those limits are part of what's called parenting. And part of parenting is understanding (and thereby teaching your children) the difference between moderation and deprivation. One way to moderate an activity is, for instance, to schedule other activities to supplement it. Another is not to let the tool become the parent or babysitter, to actually - gasp! - spend time with the little tykes, communicate with them, be a friggin' parent. If you normally do stuff with your kids anyway, chances are they're not spending excessive time on any one thing - and even if they are, it's not necessarily a sign that something's wrong as much as that they might have a particular interest that they wish to pursue above other interests! Hey, guess what? I wrote a lot when I was a kid! Did my having 150 penpals (in the days of 6-cent stamps) mean my parents should have declared a "No Penpal Week" or something? Intelligent people know enough to realize that deprivation is not only inconvenient for everyone all around but will likely make the kid want the deprived activity even more, and not to blame the tool for one's own inadequate parenting skills. Of course, what a pseudo-meta-post like this says about the obsessiveness of people who complain about complainers has yet to be examined in full.
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