A very warm holiday wish to my friends and loved ones. I’m happy to get out of town to have Christmas with my grandchildren and I look forward to seeing old friends and having fun in Los Angeles for New Year’s Eve, but I’ll certainly miss those I leave behind.
For the first year in several years, there will be no Christmas Eve Santa at my house. I’m very sorry. I wish my friends had taken up the slack and kept up the tradition and maybe they will yet, but it doesn’t look like it.
I’ll be missing OuiMarcy’s Blue Moon New Year party and that’s a tough hit to take. She sets out the very best spread of food for a party of anyone in town and the company is always so very pleasant.
I’ve been reading John X’s adventures in Vienna and he seems to be having a great time. I am very jealous. So jealous, I intend to take my own time in Europe in 2010.
Sister Mary’s adventures in S.C. seem like fun and MCARP is throwing out the old to make way for the new, cleaner spaces in his house.
As far as I can tell, God is in his heaven and all is right with the world.
Even in the United States Senate.
blogblah
Category Archives: General
December 20, 2009 Updated
Holy Saturnalia! It’s Jesus on a Cheeto and a cheese sandwich and in a cat’s fur and on a potato chip … hellfire and damnation, he’s everywhere these days.
I gots your Christmas spirit right here: John Prine singing Christmas in Prison. Enjoy!
December 18, 2009
Happy Holidays!
Blogblah
December 13, 2009
From Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, comes a thought I believe especially cogent for my friend MCARP:
Technically, you’re already a cyborg. If you keep your cell phone with you most of the time, especially if the earpiece is in place, I think we can call that arrangement an exobrain. Don’t protest that your cellphone isn’t part of your body just because you can leave it in your other pants. If a cyborg can remove its digital eye and leave it on a shelf as a surveillance device, and I think we all agree that it can, then your cellphone qualifies as part of your body. In fact, one of the benefits of being a cyborg is that you can remove and upgrade parts easily. So don’t give me that “It’s not attached to me” argument. You’re already a cyborg. Deal with it.
December 12, 2009
I’ve had this cold and it’s kept me inside for several days. Yesterday, I had no choice but to leave the house briefly to make a deposit for a client as promised. I bravely went forth, bundled up and feeling good about my break from cabin fever after a couple of days indoors.
Bad move.
I didn’t have a choice, but I wasn’t as well as I thought. I got home and imploded.
Meanwhile, on the national politics front, that do-nothing Obama; what can I say? In one week, all he was able to accomplish was a Nobel Prize acceptance speech hailed by both right and left, passage by the House of Wall Street regulatory reform and passage by both houses of Congress of a $1.2 Trillion budget, all while the health care reform bill is being filibustered by the same Republicans that passed the biggest government intrusion into the health care field since Medicare on the back of a $1.2 Trillion unfunded deficit spending Part D Medicare drug program. Tea bag my ass.
Blogblah
December 10, 2009
I have a nasty cold. I tried hard not to catch it last weekend, and put it off until this week it seems but it finally caught up with me. I really do just want to have my body thrown onto the plague cart; “Bring out your dead!” I’m way too arrogant and self centered to believe I’ve got anything like a “common” cold. It has to be something special, you know?
Anyways, I’m using every scientific nostrum I can lay hands on. Chicken soup, check. Zinc cough lozenges, check. Heavy doses of Vitamin C, check. Blow nose, wipe nose, cough, repeat. And repeat. And repeat. I’ve reached that place where I no longer can wipe my nose, I have to blot since I’ve rubbed my upper lip raw.
Blogblah
YUK! I took a shower but kept my hair dry, and never put on clothes Wednesday, just bummed around the house in my PJs and robe. Like many American men, I’m a real crybaby about being sick. I had to stop writing this post here to heat up some Theraflu powder, which I used to slug down another 1500 mg of Vitamin C. Oh, how yummy. ::snark::
***
I want to say a word here about the politics of the health care debate in Congress.
Yes, I know all the papers and blogs and Fox talking heads can’t quit bringing you the latest breathless commentary. It’s bull. I mean it’s bull if it is coming from Hannity on the right or Jane Hamshire at FireDogLake on the left.
Here’s why: Continue reading
December 8, 2009
I was the 477th voter at St. Luke’s today for the Maps 3 election. As of this post, I don’t know the outcome and the polls are not yet closed. I think I’m starting to get a cold and I’m still going to go to my Tuesday night meeting, but I have a hunch I may not be doing much as the week wears forth. Had some chowder at Rococo’s for lunch and it was simply mah-vah-lous! Enough rambling.
blogblah
December 7, 2009
“A day that shall live in infamy,” according to FDR. “Bad Day”, for which Pearl Harbor certainly qualifies, by Daniel Powter, has been named by Billboard as the One Hit Wonder of the decade. I have no opinion as to that since I’m unqualified to utter a sensible one on the topic, but I can assure all and sundry that I quickly found it to be the most annoying song of the decade that became more and more cloying each of the 5 weeks it led the charts. I just thought I’d share some of those “good times”:
December 6, 2009
The sun makes the infinity symbol in its travels through a year
This may be the most complicated photo taken EVAH. The method of getting the sun to demonstrate its flight overhead over the course of a year wasn’t easy and is described HERE. Hat tip to the traveling John Heinous.
My daughter has posted the most incredible film starring my grand-daughter on her blog, Mom-A-Tron, and I beg you go see and hear the smartest 7-year-old on Planet Earth.
My sister writes on her blog, MindOverMary, that she wants to go on a genealogical detective hunt for my adopted father’s biological roots and needs a brother to go with her. I have some mixed feelings, but my curiosity presently dominates.
There were lots of things to do this weekend. A few of the things on my list were: IAO opening, Baubles show at Red Cup, the opening of Oh! studios by the lovely Juliet and her partners, First Friday gallery walk on Paseo and the opening of Picaso’s, the much anticipated successor to the beloved Galileo’s. The teapots at JRB Art Gallery were interesting, but there was one teapot with “bullet” teacups that looked remarkably like, well, male genitalia. Joy Reed Belt also showed some really wonderful and bright works in the main room that I wished I could afford.
Being a tea-totaller, I passed on something that sounded like soooo much fun: the Snuggie Pub Crawl initiated by The Lost Ogle. The pub crawl focused on the Classen Circle clubs (Edna’s, Drunkenfry, HiLo and Speakeasy on 51st) and the star of the event was JD Merryweather’s Coop Ale Works beers. JD is a well known and wonderful photographer who lives and works in my Paseo “bubble”; he’s also a helluva great guy.
Love you guys and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Blogblah
December 2, 2009
shut up, he explained
Obama’s speech at West Point yesterday left me with nothing, really, but cognitive dissonance. A Nobel Peace Laureate wants to put 100,000 American troops into Afghanistan to kill brown people for peace. Right. No, wrong. Uhm…
Just about 40 years ago today, I think I was carrying a sign that read “Killing for peace is like f***ing for chastity”. Obama said this isn’t like Vietnam and maybe he’s right, but some things sure seem to be the same.
The only thing I know for sure is that my Red State Republican friends who tell me they don’t like this president because they are birthers or some other form of craziness are going to be told by me that anyone who doesn’t support my president in a time of war is an unpatriotic traitor. Been waiting to do that for a while.
Do we know yet whether the troops that are going to Kabul will be troops we are pulling out of Bagdhad? Do we have any iron-clad guarantees that the wall of troops we will put in Kandahar will be part of a Pakistani effort on the other side of the border?
Sure hope that Rep. David Obey, who proposed a war tax on the superrich to pay for this, holds the GOP feet to the fire on what they want to cut to pay for this, etc., so at least we have some exposure of Republican perfidy.
What does the real presidential power think? You know, Sen. Joe Lieberman. Has he told us how the world is shaped yet?
Obama mentioned that there will be support civilians also going to Kabul, but do we know how many and of what kind?
One thing that does seem to advance the ball from the Bush Administration is a clear committment by us to withdraw on some timeline from both Iraq and Afghanistan, I’m just not sure that the getting out part is as clear as the getting in deeper part.
I know this: when the enemy is stateless, attacking any nation is just an illusion. Somehow, the warlords in Waziristan, the Northwest Territories of Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen and other “failed” states, all have to get the idea that it’s a bad idea to let Al Qaeda have a place to rest their heads. I don’t think it takes 100,000 Marines to get that idea across, but we seem too stupid and clumsy to figure that out.
Colbert seems similarly confused:
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