Monthly Archives: June 2004

Crossballs! The Debate Fraud

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Oh, this is rich. BoingBoing reports that a pundit named Lauren Weinstein narrowly avoided being skewered on a fake “debate” show called “Crossballs.” Whew! Crisis averted.

However, it appears that at least one conservative pundit was contacted to appear on the show, but was warned off in time by another conpundit that wasn’t so cautious.

There follows a lengthy tirade in the “Bush-bashers are traitors, all critics of the Administration are evil, Hollywood is part of the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy” vein. Read, or don’t read, it’s your choice.

But it’s funny to think that at least one neocon fell for the dodge. I wonder if they got any bleeding heart liberals? It’s only fair and balanced.

Don’t Be A Crabby Juror

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SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. – Warning from the Sheriff’s Department: Don’t show up for jury duty with a bad attitude. Ross Selkirk’s alleged behavior got him arrested and he had to pay $5,000 bail to get out of jail.

Holy crap, it’s a good thing I didn’t throw attitude and snark around when I was called for jury duty. Though if I had been down at California Avenue 2 days in a row, and then got empanelled when I thought I’d dodged a bullet, I’d be pretty pissed. I guess the lady that sat behind me got off pretty lightly – she just whined a lot.

Nine Parts of Desire

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I finally finished reading Nine Parts of Desire a couple of weeks ago, and found it disturbing and also enlightening. For instance, this article from the Beeb:

Iran’s government has launched a crackdown on women who flout the strict Islamic dress codes during the hot summer months.

And according to the book, Iran is actually strangely flexible in its rigidity – Khomeini was always more willing to extend more rights to women, so long as they observed the proprieties. At least they can work outside the home, for one thing. And drive, for another. Iranian women are better off than their sisters in Saudi.

On the other hand sidebar story claims that young Iranians are likely to ignore the edicts and political troubles and party, party, party.

Blogstuff

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Well, I think I’m approaching the apogee of the third stage of blogging, at least in Moveable Type. Oh, no, not because I’ve learned everything there is to know about MT, but because I’ve learned just enough to know there’s a hell of a lot I don’t know about what I’m doing with the blog; when I run it through the validator there are a hell of a lot of errors that I don’t really understand (well, some). I might be able to do a lot of cleanup, or more likely a lot of damage to my main index template by trying to “fix” it.

There’s been a persistent “bug” that I’ve never been able to kill off: it’s something to do with IE and divs touching or anti-matter coming into contact with matter (no wait, that’s Star Trek technobabble).

I’ve added a lot of crap to the sidewall and it looks busy, especially compared to the relatively “clean” sites I read most often.

I’ve never been completely happy with the stupid bad hack job I did with the banner graphic. It looks like crap and is crap, it’s not Scottish at all! And also, not terribly original, and then there is the…ahem… provenance problem.

Meanwhile, I’ve been goofing around with a side project with Blogger, and have set up two test blogs over there. Which were completely easy to do, and although the default templates for Blogger are mostly blah rectilinear clones of basic Gettysburg or Clean MT templates, there was one that was actually attractive in a nice, old fashioned, bookish sort of way. And it took all of 5 minutes to set it up. Although, oddly, the attractive template wasn’t one of the few defaults that you’re given on first setup – but it’s there as an alternative once you’ve gotten started.

Although it’s not possible to upload files without a paid account, you can put pictures in posts (a little like a moblog) using a free thing called…hello from pikasa or some such. Actually, it’s pretty slick.

I’d show you, but they’re just test blogs. However, it’s surprising how easy they were to set up. No bugging David with “Honey, how do I” questions. And I knew just enough “advanced” stuff to be able to figure out how to do things.

Since Moveable Type seems to be coming back to a reasonable equipoise as regards to licensing and authors and so on, I’m thinking it might be worth it to pay up to upgrade – the lowest price is now totally fair. When and if I do, I may leave a lot of the little stickers and pixies and doodads behind. I’m not using them, and they sort of “brand” me as a hopeless fangirl geekette… which I am, no disputing that. But I’m also feeling like it should be more about what I have to say, and not endlessly sticking more crap on the sidewall.

No matter how cool and cute it is. 😉

No Peeking!

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A Northwest Airlines flight that was headed to Rapid City, South Dakota, landed a few miles off course at Ellsworth Air Force Base, and passengers had to wait in the plane for more than three hours while their crew was interrogated.

Passengers on Northwest Flight 1152, an Airbus A-319 from St. Paul, expected to be welcomed to Rapid City Regional Airport on Saturday, but after about five minutes they were told to close their window shades and not look out, said passenger Robert Morrell.

OOPS! Well, that story will be making the rounds at work tomorrow. And hey, I’ll bet the flifo (flight information) on it is entertaining. It’ll still be in the system. I bet it’s something innocuous like “FLT IRREG” or “AWAIT CREW.”

Picnic-a-can-we-go-go-now-now

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Father’s Day. Yep. Until joining this family I hadn’t really had to deal with Father’s Day much – it was a holiday that ranked somewhat below Arbor Day in my personal rankings. After marrying into the clan, suddenly I found myself with a father-in-law and a reason to celebrate Father’s Day for the first time since 1968. Instead of simply getting together for a little barbecue or dinner out, though, we have to go to the annual Father’s Day Picnic hosted by my father-in-law’s fraternity (not a college frat, it’s more of a service organization for adult Jewish men).

Welllll, the first year was fun – I ate potluck picnic food, played Frisbee, played softball. The subsequent years have been less and less fun, because really, all there is to do is eat potluck picnic food, play Frisbee, and play softball. And it turns out that all the activities are really to keep the kids busy, plus a few wacky adults, and quite often it was just to hot to do all the running around. So some years we’ve sort of ducked out and gotten together with the ‘rents privately.

Not this year, though. It was Made Clear several weeks in advance that we needed to be there and not duck out.
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Poll Results

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Right, right, right, we’re all thoroughly bored with the following poll:

What do you think of gay marriage?

All your drag bridesmaid are belong to us. 13 %(2 votes)

It doesn’t affect me, but it’s kind of icky. 0 %(0 votes)

Congratulations, where are you registered? 73 %(11 votes)

It’s against God’s law and threatens my family. 6 %(1 votes)

Who is this God person, anyway? 6 % (1 votes)

Total votes 15

So there will shortly be a new poll to get bored with. Huzzah.
(oh, and congratulations to all newlyweds. Now let’s all defeat the idiots that want to amend the Constitution over this issue)

Bucky Katt’s Favorite Reality Show

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buckyfoxtv.gifGet Fuzzy takes a swipe at FoxTV for me so that I don’t have to. And while we’re on the subject of favorite shows formerly on Fox, the excellent folks over at FireflyFans.net have got a great campaign going to help get new Firefly fans excited about the upcoming movie – they’re buying DVD sets and donating them to troops and military stationed in Iraq, Afghanistan, on Navy ships. I think this is an excellent project and wish them all success. I know it’ll be appreciated; after reading ginmar’s blog about all the closet Buffy fans in Iraq begging to borrow her DVDs, I’m sure they’d enjoy Joss Whedon’s orphan series/movie a-borning.

And speaking of favorite reality shows, which we were originally but got sidetracked to hell and gone, CBS has got new Insider videos with team interviews, a new one with Phil where he Philiminates the viewer, and so on. Right now on TWOP they’re trying to work out if “Philiminate” was coined there or somewhere else and picked up, but it’s the classic show joke for TAR. And also – mmmm, Phil.

Something else I’ll have to watch – former TAR contestants Kevin and Drew have a show that begins in early July also. They’re from a season I missed, so I’m looking forward to catching on to the Frats lovefest – they continue to be fan favorites long after their Philimination.

And more July TV fun – the new season of Stargate and the series premiere of Atlantis starts then too. Damn, July is going to be a hella good TV month.

AHHHH!!! I am SO blogging this.

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We went with Steve to the big new Meijer store near us, because he thought it would be neat and cool and would have a difficult to find product he’d been looking for. I told him I thought it was more of a cross between a really big Target and Sears with a grocery store on one side. And that when I’d been there before, it seemed like a lot of tacky people and their badly behaved kids seemed to congregate there.

Well, for once, I was right. I am so rarely right where Steve is concerned. He called later to admit whole-heartedly I was right.
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What Monty Python Character Are You?

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bedevere.jpgI am so totally Sir Bedevere. The “construct large badgers” part is especially spot-on as character assessment. They are quite useless and don’t look remotely badgerlike, however. They resemble large piles of unfolded laundry more than anything else.

The quiz was making the rounds of the TWOP / Amazing Race Meet Market board, so naturally I had to come up with the stupidest answer. Everyone else got to be the killer bunny or King Arthur or that fop Lancelot. Me, I have to lift my completely useless facemask thingy in order to say anything of the least consequence, which is pretty much everything I say. Such as “My liege!”

Take the quiz – go on, be your inner killer bunny. Or French kinn-iggit.

What Monty Python Character Are You?
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