A good friend from college is currently taking an epic early-retirement trip – she bought an Amtrak USA Rail Pass and she’s been making her way across country from California, visiting friends. She was at the taping of Prairie Home Companion in Minneapolis, and then she hopped on the Empire Builder to get to Chicago. She’ll come out our way tonight on a Metra commuter train, and will stay for a few days. Meanwhile, we now have a guest room again – after we finished the final floor project, we moved out of the guest room back into the master…
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In the last few weeks, I’ve gotten pretty obsessed with the A&E reality show, “Hoarders,” which if you can get past the piles of junk, “treasures,” and poo, is compelling. In the season preview clip above, the newly famous Possum From Hoarders makes her (not his) daring leap for freedom after being poked with a stick. This little clip apparently kept the other obsessed fans talking all summer, but the actual appearance of the Awesome Possum did not disappoint; she hopped in a handy Pet Taxi and lit off for the bright lights of the big city. You can read…
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What with all Chaplinesque moustache-porn videos going around, I do wonder what J.R.R. Tolkien would make of the current culture wars. He knew his way around a mythology, invented or real, so I wonder what he’d think of Beck’s reverse-engineering of the national mythos of the Founding Fathers? 10. He wasn’t nearly as fond of Nazis as they were of him. Tolkien’s academic writings on Old Norse and Germanic history, language and culture were extremely popular among the Nazi elite, who were obsessed with recreating ancient Germanic civilization. But Tolkien was disgusted by Hitler and the Nazi party, and made…
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Dispatches from the Culture Wars.
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Let’s see… it’s Wednesday, so I’ve finally recovered from the barrage of total neatorama that occured last weekend. My husband David’s birthday luau, and some HTML and CSS geekery, and then on Sunday evening, we actually MADE IT TO WOOTSTOCK V2.2 IN CHICAGO!!!!!!!11!! (my bangs, they go to 11). If you’ve spent any time reading here, you know we’re really big fans of going to Hawaii, and we’ve been to a bunch of luaus and other Hawaiian-type dinner shows over the years. We’ve even gone with friends, and done goofy things with them just because we were in Hawaii. But…
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Dear Wally (nobody ever called you Edward except your dad, and the Army), A lot has happened since 1968. Your two daughters have grown up, and you’re a name on a smoothly polished, black granite wall in Washington DC . They’ve both struggled a bit (maybe because you were taken away from them far too soon) but seem to be fine now. You’re a grandfather, can you believe it? Neither can I. In fact, you have an amazing step-daughter and a couple of cute step-grandkids; you know how the living always say “life goes on,” and it did. I never…
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It will be interesting to see what my nephew will have to say about his experiences when he gets back from his trip to Israel. He’s a history student currently, but I don’t know if he’s a student OF history; doubt if he’s made the connection that my online acquaintance Mad Priest did. BBC News – Deaths as Israeli forces storm Gaza aid ship More than 10 people have been killed after Israeli commandos stormed a convoy of ships carrying aid to the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army says. Armed forces boarded the largest vessel overnight, clashing with some of…
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@SarahPalinUSA needs to read this letter to the editor of the White River Junction (VT) Valley Times to see how a REAL mama grizzly defended her young in 2000. So good, I quoted the whole thing. h/t MadPriest Of Course, I Could Be Wrong…: ANSWER THAT!. Sent in to MadPriest Towers by THEMETHATISME: A letter from SHARON UNDERWOOD published by The Valley News (White River Junction, VT) Sunday, April 30, 2000 Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I’ve taken enough from you…
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Stephen Fry lays it out. Ultimately, vote how you like, but VOTE! How I will vote… « Stephen Fry. More important than my own political views or my own voting intentions are my hopes that nothing I say will stop you from choosing Conservative if you consider it the right way to cast your vote. It may be you will be voting Tory through dyed-in-the-wool instinct and loyalty or it may be that you are someone who once voted Labour or Lib Dem but who has decided that Cameron and the Conservatives will be best for Britain. It’s none of…
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It’s a funny old Sunday for me; had to get up and out the door this morning by 4: 30am to get my husband David off to O’Hare for his flight to Orlando for a technical conference. He’s there, he’s run into some of his list members, he’s That Mailing List Guy. He runs a lot of mailing lists that cover areas of expertise that are mostly to do with the AS/400 iSeries Systemi whatever IBM calls their midrange computing platform this week. He got all packed last night, including the traditional “I can’t find my pants” crisis which fortunately…