She Looks Like Everybody’s First Wife Standing Outside of Probate Court

I’m glad that Obama is the “presumptive democratic nominee”. In the past several elections, the Democratic party has chosen the safe and boring candidate, and then paid for it during the general election. Hillary Clinton seemed like the safe and boring choice here, so I voted for Obama. But I still like Clinton a lot, and am sad for her at the moment.

Since I don’t watch cable news much, I hadn’t realized how much idiotic sexism actually occurred on television during the campaign. As usual, the Daily Show has a really hillarious take on it. The montage at the end must be what inspired Howard Dean to say that “many of the most prominent people on TV behaved like middle schoolers” during the campaign. I don’t know who some of those assholes are, but they need to be fired.  And I congratulate that one asshole’s ex-wife for being rid of him.  I hope she took him for everything he had in probate court.

 

Upgrade Your Insults

I have a horrible case of road-rage. Even though it’s a small town, Ithaca has awful traffic. Our dog trainer told us he wants to write a book called “Going 15 in a 30: The Ithaca Story.” That’s is a pretty accurate description of how all the old hippies getting high in their Subaru station wagons drive around here. And it drives me up the wall. I tend to overuse the term “Fucking Asshole” when dealing with them, which is why it so great that I Stumbled Upon this webpage with some great insults, attributed to Shakespeare. I’ve vowed to add these to my vocabulary:

• Weather-bitten Pig-Nut
• Beef-witted Barnacle
• Fat-Kidneyed Footlicker
• Common-Kissing Clotpole

I particularly like the ones that are composed of seemingly innocuous words that somehow add up to something bad like “Frothy Onion-Eyed Clack-dish” or “Saucy Elf-Skinned Wagtail”

I also wish I was one of those Southerners who could rattle off bizarre Southern expressions. So I googled up some southern insults and came up with these:

• “You look about as happy as a dead pig in sunshine”
• “You’re more slippery than snot on a glass door knob”
• “If your brains were dynamite, you couldn’t blow your nose”
• “You’re tighter than a flea’s ass over a rain barrel”
• “If I had a dog as ugly as you, I’d shave his butt and make him walk backwards”

They are all a little long winded for shouting at a hippie in a Subaru, but I sure hope I can find a use for them sometime.

 

Baby Found in House Riddled with Filth

After I published my last post complaining about the downward slide of CNN.com, suddenly the hits on this blog spiked hugely, mainly from people searching the term “baby found in house riddled with filth,” a CNN.com headline I mentioned in passing in my previous post.

I hadn’t even looked at the story, so I decided to head over and see what this was all about. You can see the video here. It contains some pictures of a very dirty house where police apparently found a baby and charged the mother with neglect. At first I saw the video without audio, and the house definitely looked gross, but not necessarily criminal. Especially after listening to the audio, it is clear that the baby should not have been kept in those conditions, but it really sounds like the family needs some (private) help and kindness rather than vilification by some harpies on national television.

 

Bizarro CNN TShirts

My friends are probably tired of hearing me rant about CNN.com. It was once a reasonable source of basic mainstream news. It was never really thought-provoking, but was at least functional.

In the last few months, it has really deteriorated. Two kinds of stories seem to take up a lot of the front page: stories about people who have done something awful to children (“Baby Found in House Riddled with Filth”, “Teen Thrown into Fire for Being ‘Low Class’”) or complete fluff pieces (“Roger Waters flying pig found”, “Do you ‘mommy’ your husband”). They seem to have more and more articles on relationship advice. Anybody who is going to take relationship advice from some reporter trying to think of “10 ways to revitalize your marriage” has got to be in dire straights.

But now CNN has brought a whole new level of absurdity to their website: you can order t-shirts with CNN headlines on them. One of today’s headlines in shirt form is “Teen Too Young for Come-Hither Pose“? Why on earth would you wear any t-shirt with a CNN headline stamped across the front, much less one that would make the wearer look like a pedophile?

There is a CNN Shirts FAQ, and one of the questions is “I took my CNN shirt on vacation, and I have great pictures. Where can I send them?”. Maybe the person who wrote that wasn’t aware that the FA in FAQ stands for “Frequently Asked”?

 

Catster

I can’t sleep (the second part of the root canal starts in 7.15 hours), so I was doing some work, but there comes a point around 2 a.m. when one’s brain stops functioning to the point that further “work” actually results in negative progress towards one’s PhD. So instead I’m going to blog about cat webpages . (Confidential to those who don’t think that cat webpages are an entertaining subject: you are lame and you don’t have to have a root canal in 7.14 hours, so shut up). Here are the Catster pages of Jessamine and Teagan, two of my favorite felines:

http://www.catster.com/cats/757887

http://www.catster.com/cats/757909

J&T’s personal assistant is my friend Val so I get to see those two cuties a lot. (I steal the term personal assistant from Cody Bear because it is so awesome and appropriate). Apparently they both recently started journals. You should totally check out Teagan’s hilarious entry on cuddling.

Maybe Lucy and Julius deserve Catster pages, but their personal assistant is lazy, so all they get is this lousy blog:

Howard, Lucy and Julius are all occupying the same pillow next me at the moment. How cute is that. I should go join them.

 

Yummy Heirloom Beans

I love getting packages in the mail.  This one came the other day:

And had these yummy beans inside:

So far we have just tried the ones on the right “The Eye of the Goat” Beans.  Aren’t they purty:

I choose this variety because the Rancho Gordo website said they were really good simply cooked with some onion and garlic, and that’s my preferred way of eating beans.  So that’s how I cooked ‘em and they were very tasty.  Paying $5 a pound plus shipping for beans sort of ruins one of the great benefits of eating beans (they are normally incredibly cheap), but since I like buying heirloom varieties of produce, supporting small farms and eating beans, I might buy some more.  If you are a bean fan, check out the Rancho Gordo website.

 

Silliness in the NY Times

Today’s edition of the New York Times has an article on the front page about some people suing various LHC related entities to stop the collider from operating due to fears that it may produce black holes. I think giving a couple of crackpots a forum on the front page of a respected newspaper is probably a bigger crime than this:

which appeared in the continuation of the article on page A14 of the print edition (it’s been fixed in the online version).

 

A Sad Day For Women

The Washington Post published a vile awful sexist piece of trash yesterday that was written by a women. They now claim it was a joke. If it was a joke, which I doubt, it’s not a funny one. The gist of the piece is that women are stupid. Amongst her dubious evidence is the fact that some women have swooned in the presence of Barack Obama. She goes on to cite such logical gems such as:

“A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men’s 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women.”

I’m not linking to the article. If you want to read it, Google it, but I warn you, it will make your blood boil.

Also available in the Washington Post today: this article and this article, both about men. I have to say I am proud to be a member of the sex which does not rape people as they lay dying, even if we do occasionally fall for our favorite politicians. If Charlotte Allen and the Washington Post think this makes us the inferior sex, they have an extremely dubious definition of inferior.

 

Microsoft… Superheros?

My long absence from blogging was due to a trip home to Arkansas sans laptop. I will post pictures of my trip soon, but this morning Slashdot introduced me to something so bizarre, I can’t not mention it.

If you’ve used Microsoft Windows lately, you might have asked yourself just what those folks over at Microsoft are doing these days, since they are obviously not putting a lot of time into developing a usable operating system. Well, apparently they have been developing superheroes based on their crappy-ass products. The characters are apparently known as the “Source Force,” which is bizarrely close to the name of a popular online repository of open source software, SourceForge, but the weirdness goes much deeper than that. The superheros have long biographies that make me think illicit drugs must have been involved in their writing. I particularly enjoy the utterly ridiculous gender stereotypes. While the male “Windows Vista Sensei” is “highly thought of as one of the most powerful warriors alive”, the “ISV Supergal” is a wanna-be cheerleader who failed to win a lame magazine contest and “SQL Server Gal” is a hyper-bubbly crazy-woman obsessed with calories and Oprah. WTF, Microsoft?

 

Huckleberry

Since my last post was not interesting to much of anyone other than me, here is an amusing picture of one of our prospective presidents. My dad sent this to me a few days ago; my sister’s response was to say we should totally take a Christmas picture with matching shirts next year. Howard thought I was serious when I told him this. A few years ago on Thanksgiving, my stepmother suggested we go around the table and say what we were thankful for. Everyone – my brother, my sister, my dad and I all answered “NO” at the same time. We are not the sort of family who does that, or who takes Christmas pictures is matching shirts; we just mock people who do.