I hate Tuesdays.
I’m on the international desk. Which means that I get to take calls from crabby prima donna apparel buyers in Greece (frickin’ Greece, man) need to book an earlier flight to Milan. Right. Now. In business class. Or there would be hell to pay.
Fortunately, it was available.
In America, sometimes the class wars take place between business and coach.
According to Edward Hasbrouck’s excellent travel blog: Amazing Race 5 filming completed” href=”http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/000157.html”>The Practical Nomad blog: The Amazing Race 5 filming completed… and that means we have a winner.
Intriguingly, Edward reports an interesting unverified rumor that the broadcast might begin a lot sooner than thought, possibly as early as a month or two from now.
Yippeee!!!! Phil’s a comin’!!!
A friend passed this one along: “When marriage between
gays was by rite”
Boswell’s book, The Marriage of Likeness: Same Sex Unions in Pre- Modern Europe, lists in detail some same sex union ceremonies found in ancient church liturgical documents. One Greek 13th century “Order for Solemnisation of Same Sex Union” having invoked St Serge and St Bacchus, called on God to “vouchsafe unto these thy servants [N and N] grace to love one another and to abide unhated and not a cause of scandal all the days of their lives, with the help of the Holy Mother of God and all thy saints.” The ceremony concludes: “And they shall kiss the Holy Gospel and each other, and it shall be concluded.”
Well, this is a book I’ll have to find and read:
The Marriage of Likeness: Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe by John Boswell is published by Harper Collins.
And that’s enough already. G’night.
Yep, it was just barely 50 degrees today, so my wacky co-worker wore shorts. Nobody took much notice, as we were getting killed (office slang for long, time-consuming calls at a time when we have a lot of calls on hold).
As she was heading out the door, someone else noticed and started to say “Are you….NUTS?” but she cut them off with a cheery “It’s 50 degrees!!” and bopped on out the door (not unlike the way PuppetAngel bopped across the office to watch “Smile Time.”)
She is really quite goofy, that one. Heart in the right place, but goofy.
And she does not have the legs for shorts – neither do I. Seeing her reminds me never to wear shorts in public unless it’s a matter of life or death.
Thanks to a handy link via Making Light: here’s the full text of the Vanity Fair article profiling John Ashcroft, we can all read about how frelling scary the man is. It’s a likely copywrong… but for the right reasons. And I intend to buy the magazine while it’s still on the stands, anyway.
Since the link may be dead soon, here’s my personal Scariest Thing About Ashcroft:
Some 15 years ago, Missouri state senator Harry Wiggins, a Democrat and the spokesman for a bipartisan group trying to get funding restored for a Kansas City home for AIDS patients, met with Ashcroft in the governor’s mansion. The Good Samaritan home, as it was then called, had received a $900,000 state grant, but, says Wiggins, “Governor Ashcroft vetoed it. I think twice.”
Wiggins tried to explain the home’s purpose. “This is a place they go, Governor, but they don’t come back,” he began. “Many of them, their families have rejected them.”
“I understand. You got my attention,” Ashcroft said with interest. “This is the place where it is cheapest for me to send them to die.”
“Governor, these are human beings who have to have a place to live,” protested Wiggins, “or they’ll live in boxes under bridges.”
Wiggins remembers Ashcroft’s reply: “Well, they’re there because of their own misconduct, and it wasn’t very reputable misconduct, either.”
Wiggins was puzzled. “When does misconduct become reputable? When disreputable?”
“That’s beside the point,” snapped Ashcroft.
The other Scary Thing About Ashcroft is that he apparently thinks calico cats are creatures of the Devil, or his staffers think he does and must be protected from them, which is even scarier.
The least scary cat in the world is a calico named Spike, and she now lives in Washington D.C.
She is slimmed down from when she was in my care, but she still resembles a furry volleyball. She’s coming to get you, Johnny – boogedaboogeda.
In the past couple of days, I started fooling around with Bloglines – not to replace Blogrolling for keeping track of various sites I visit, but to make it easier to read more sites, more quickly.
I felt a bit of concern over the fact that I basically had two identical blogrolls – and wondered if I’d commit a horrible blogging fox paws by dumping the duplicate entries in the Blogrolling list without first making the Bloglines one public.
With me so far? Show of mice?
Anyway, there were a few daily-read blogs that weren’t available for some reason via Bloglines’ web-based aggregator (RSS feed not found, etc), so I’ll leave them on the Blogrolling list. Anything I can read (or at least preview) via Bloglines will be in various public folders in the sidebar. A shorter Blogroll list will be below them. So if you think I’ve dumped you from the list, fear not! I’m probably reading you in the aggregator, and I’m not sure if that sends a referral from my site to yours the way clicking on a blogroll link did.
And now, let the Great BlogRoll ReOrg begin. Apparently, I’m going bass-ackwards trend-wise, but that’s never stopped me before.
As an unexpected bonus, when I organized my public folders and added the link, they came over organized by folder name, which is darn handy (for me, since some of the folder names are arbitrary and silly, but I know what they mean, tra la la).
I’m on the outermost fringes of Orkut – I have, at last count, five (5) friends there. I’m trying to take the advice of others in the blogoverse (Accordion Guy today, and others in the last few days) and not assume that I’m still sitting at the equivalent of the “nerd kids” table in the online cafeteria.
It’s a totally legitimate concern – “blogging + emerging democracy” doesn’t play well with “blogging + soshes vs. nerds smackdown after 5th period!”
Is there an emerging democracy through weblogging? Who knows? If enough people think that there is, then there might be…
On a related and characteristically wooly-headed tangent, there is a concept called “the emerging church.” This isn’t strictly an Episcopal concept, it’s another one of those vague “post-modern” terms that means something new and undefined is happening, this time in churches rather than with blogging and self-published journal writing.
I’m curious to know what it is, but am probably not interested if it entails a lot of really bland, happy-clappy worship style. I like me some high-church smells and bells, remember.
I wonder – is “emerging” the buzzword of the decade? Emerging technologies, emerging democracy, emerging church… what if we had emerging tolerance, emerging Neo-Enlightenment, emerging consciousness. Oo-weee, sweet.
I’ll stop philosophizing now and go back to fooling with the blog.
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Okay, this is rich. I received my first comment spam today – a penis enlargment ad – on the entry where I describe events surrounding the death of my dad
Sorry, chaps, your target market is a stiff, thus having no need of a bigger stiffy.
(I can just imagine my sister trying to explain this to my mother. More likely, I can just imagine my sister blowing this one off, as it were. Heh heh heh)