okay, maybe my password is hosed.

the bears have eaten it again. arrrgh!

Test, Test, Test.

no, no, i just can't log in. need to fiddle with my password, i think.

or maybe it's the version of blogger that i'm using to post! that could be it. cross your fingers.

not yet. hmm. wonder if my template's hosed.

hello! am i here?

"You know, Dharma, some people are meant to live happily in couples, and other people are meant to live happily in...(pause)...clumps"
--Dharma's Mom, Dharma & Greg


heh.

what i am doing tonight is listening to mp3's and reading usenet and sending carefully worded emails and being wistful.

and i paid bills. that's way more productive than the rest of this.

Anti-gravity and us - smh.com.au

Webdiarist Malcolm Street has a unique theory on why Britain and Australia are backing Bush on Iraq. Welcome to the anti-gravity arms race.

Australia, the UK, anti-gravity and the Iraq crisis

by malcolm street, in canberra.

i don't know enough to know whether this is actually as plausible as it sounds.

other good stuff that happened at supercon:

i spent time with both of my sweeties who were there.
i had a really good talk with my friend pied piper about when he and i first met. yay for congruent happy memories!
i also had a good talk with my friend becca confirming that we are pleased to be friends with each other.
i got to spend time with nathan and beth who are from madison and make spiffy masks. i don't see them often enough. they should move to minneapolis!
i got to spend time with monte who is friendly and cuddly and sweet.
i got to listen to pied piper and joe play music, and i got to sing along even though i didn't actually drop in to the room they were playing.
i saw tony who also needs to move to minneapolis.
i met another adam, who was rooming with the first adam i know. (they do this just to confuse me!)
i talked to kerry about how more people should have babies for us to play with.
i got a very pleasing shoulder rub from kyle.
and there was much good talking about the future of supercon with my co-conspirators. wheee!

Human Peace Sign from Antarctica

The Nuclear Option in Iraq

The U.S. has lowered the bar for using the ultimate weapon

by William M. Arkin

One year after President Bush labeled Iraq, Iran and North Korea the "axis of evil," the United States is thinking about the unthinkable: It is preparing for the possible use of nuclear weapons against Iraq.

i'm stunned, at the moment. maybe more, later.

vipe.org

The first rule of Vipe.org is: stop hating your body.

i am home from supercon. it was great. i had very little sleep all weekend, and am bleary and groggy and must remember to drink gatorade until i can't stand it any more.

sigrid, nathan, jenny, kyle, scott, and i went out to india garden in rochester for dinner on friday. mmmm, indian food. it was very good. i had chicken makhani, which i always mispronounce. there were still bones in the chicken, which always puts me off of meat for a while, but i had eaten my fill by the time that i discovered this, so i just didn't take the leftovers back to the hotel.

saturday night, we (as a convention) ordered dinner from waiters express. it was cool. joy from waiters express (who came back to the con later in the evening, and again on sunday; yes, virginia, we recruit!) came to take our orders, and then came back to take money, and then our food came! yay! i got greek food.

there was much game playing, talking, flirting, smoffing, drinking, movie watching, and just all around having fun. yay!

i love this convention. i am very pleased to be chairing it.

poem by a crocodile. very pleasing.

Scientific American: Four-Winged Dinosaurs and the Dawn of Flight

oh my gosh. they're so pretty. go look at the picture! shoo! go look!

weather.com - Local Home and Garden Page for 55406

it's 1°F and mostly cloudy. with the windchill, it feels like -15°F.

i love this weather. i mean, i whine about it, and i get cold, and i spend a lot of time grouching about it, but i love it. okay? just so you know.

(my car had the "drive like a pokey turtle" light on for most of my way into work because it was so cold. but it started right up!)

Welcome to America! Care for some grubs?

PERHAPS WE SHOULD prepare ourselves for America as a sort of top-tier Third World nation. Our health care system is already pretty much of a mess, and the government has neither the resources nor the will to do much about it. Our public schools are still in sad shape, and our state is about to adopt an "austerity budget," which will mean more school programs will have to be cut. Already our hunger and infant mortality rates compare unfavorably with those of much of Western Europe. The government is suspicious of any social welfare program that does not come clothed in raiments of Christianity. And it's darned hard to have faith-based electricity.

jon carroll, from earlier in the week.

NASA plans two-month manned dash to Mars - theage.com.au

The United States was hoping to send an astronaut to Mars in a nuclear-powered rocket within eight years, said a senior NASA official.

Under the space agency's ambitious plan, the project would involve a two-month journey to Mars in a spaceship travelling at three times the present speed of space travel.

i'd go.

from google groups and rasseff

Generic Science Fiction Convention


Most conventions allow people just to arrive and assume any role they
want. This willy-nilly method of role distribution is hardly fair &
often leads to some people getting to take the fun roles over and over
at several conventions while others are stuck with boring, stuffy or
annoying roles. To alleviate this problem, our convention will require
people to sign up for one of the following positions before being
permitted to attend.

if you're a fan (and if you bristle at that, you're included in the group that i mean to warn here) make sure you're not going to disturb anyone with your laughing before you read this. also, place pillows on the floor so as to cushion your landing.

Designer bottles and other perplexes

from jon carroll.

We sat in silence again. It's interesting being married; you've told each other all your stories, and you don't want to do relationship processing all the time, so you get going on something you know nothing about, like industrial design. You make up theories and then forget what they were. Meanwhile, you develop a kind of shorthand intimacy, so a meandering conversation about beverage bottles is actually sort of romantic.

this is frighteningly true. well, so far. i expect it to become both more frightening and more true as applied to my life.

i am working from home today. so far, the high point of the day was when the plumber came over with the blowtorch.

but the sink doesn't seem to leak anymore. hurray!

The Sideshow January 2003 Archive

Even if we ignore the fundamental lie behind the suggestion that low-income workers don't pay taxes, this is an immoral way to talk about the people who take the jobs that most of us don't want, at wages those of us who are lucky enough to choose wouldn't work for.

has anyone not read _nickled and dimed_ by barbara ehrenreich yet? if you're local, i'll loan you my copy.

hard working people versus productively working people, my sorry ass.

Body and Soul

We are fundamentally a middle class society that works together to solve problems. We're not an I-got-mine-and-the-hell-with-the-rest-of-you society.

at least, that's the society that i want to live in, and the one that i strive for.

The New Republic Online: Axle of Evil (1 of 4)

Safety loopholes allow SUVs to be more dangerous than regular cars: it is a common fallacy that the occupants inside SUVs are safer than they would be in ordinary cars, and these Godzillas are instruments of death for non-SUV-driving motorists.

suv's make the baby jesus cry for many different reasons; their crappy fuel efficiency is only one of them.

The Sacramento Bee -- sacbee.com -- Molly Ivins: Peerless leaders of Texas

yes, we here in minnesota elected a pro wrestler to be governor. we did. i didn't vote for him, but i wish i had.

people from and in texas, however, don't get to make fun of jesse. not one whit. here's why.

Gov. Goodhair Perry has already earned himself a new nickname after a stunning interview with the Austin American-Statesman in which he noted that Texas has two very serious problems that he, Rick the Reluctant, plans to do exactly nothing about. "Gov. Rick Perry said Wednesday that Texas is burdened by an outdated, out-of-whack tax system and a public education finance system that has to go," reported the paper. "But the state's top elected leader also said Texans shouldn't expect the upcoming legislature to do anything about either. Perry said tacking the dense issues is too much to ask of new leaders."
...
Funny, none of them ran on not being ready for the job.

i'm hungry. i've been hungry a lot this week. this is very weird. i never get hungry. i usually just notice that people are pissing me off, which is a sign that i need to eat. people are not yet ferociously irritating, but my tummy is growling.




(fyi, there are in fact times when people are ferociously irritating when i am both well fed and well rested. lots of them. just so you know.)

Jon Carroll on The Gate

you should always read jon carroll. every day. well, every week day. when he's not on vacation.

but you should read him.

Declaring War On Republicans / View from the left

Bush's plan is an atrocity, so it makes sense that loyal Americans cheated by it would object, while the sanctimonious profiteers who stand to cash in on it would accuse the huddled masses of class warfare.

Okay, you santimonious creeps, we accept your accusation.

over the top, in places, but full of good points, including the one that gorbachev ended the cold war, not reagan.

(xat, read it, 'kay?)

Long story; short pier.: Boom and Bust.

Deep in the core of American ideology and culture is a constellation of beliefs and attitudes: belief that the future will be brighter than the present; that what you accomplish you make with your own hands; that individuals should rely on themselves, not the state; that people can cross oceans and mountains to make for themselves a better life; and that those who succeed do so not through luck and corruption but through preparation and industry. These are not beliefs conducive to social democracy.

We think we’re richer than we are. We think we all have more of a shot at striking it rich than we do. We don’t want to think about how much of our lives is dependent on contingency and luck; we don’t want to think about the one bad day that could be between us and the street. We willfully do not want to see how many people live in poverty, and we don’t want to think about how crushing that poverty really is. We don’t want to admit it could ever happen to us, and even if it has, we want to plan to secure what will happen to us, someday. When all our deserving hard work finally pays off. Any day now.

i'm bookmarking long story; short pier. not that i expect that y'all care, but i'm telling you anyhow.

The Sacramento Bee -- sacbee.com -- Molly Ivins: The rich are screwing up our democracy

How dumb do you have to be not to be able to connect the dots here? Law, policy and regulation are consistently shaped to favor the rich over the rest of us, and that, dammit, is not fair, it is not right, it is not the country we want and for which we are asked to sacrifice.

i went to see my gp on monday afternoon, to talk to her about allergies. i mentioned having had norwalk over new year's, and i said that for a while i had thought that i had the flu because my muscles ached and my joints ached, but then i started to throw up, and i thought "no, not the flu, must be norwalk."

she said "well, stomach flu..."

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh.

(stomach flu isn't flu. thank you, drive through.)

got my teeth cleaned yesterday. no cavities! woo! this is a fine thing. and they almost don't hurt any more from the bit where they stick a pokey bit between each and every one of your teeth.

then, for dinner, we went to spam sushi central... er, i mean, midori's floating world cafe. good california rolls, good miso, passable tempura, and abby and nathan were very pleased with the spam sushi. i refrained from trying it. the service was a little uneven; there's not enough people working there yet. but it seems like it'll turn out fine.

had a dream last night that a college friend of mine had suddenly shown back up. (i've been out of touch with her for a while, y'see.) she had a baby boy with her, and a toddler at home, she said, and she'd gotten married and changed her last name, and was doing all of the suburban mom sort of things, and was happy with it. i hope it's true, at least the happy bit.

Joe Bob's America: Hey mom I'm abstinent

All of this ties in, of course, with our president's Don-Quixote-like fixation on teen morals, in the form of doling out funds to groups that preach abstinence. In order to get those funds, you have to teach that "sexual activity outside the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects" and "a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity."

The "expected standard"? There's an "expected standard" for sex? Expected by, of course, THE STATE! There may be a more Soviet sentence written by an American bureaucrat, but I've never seen it.

And furthermore, if you endorse condom use, you get ZIP federal money. It should be called the Restrain-Yourself-Or-Die-Trying theory of teen sex.

what he said.

New Scientist

Repeated airborne infections of the bacteria acinetobacter in an intensive care ward have been eliminated by the installation of a negative air ioniser.

totally totally cool.

Mirror.co.uk - WHY MOTHER TERESA SHOULD NOT BE A SAINT

I discovered that she had taken money from rich dictators like the Duvalier gang in Haiti, had been a friend of poverty rather than a friend of the poor, had never given any account of the huge sums of money donated to her, had railed against birth-control in the most overpopulated city on the planet and had been the spokeswoman for the most extreme dogmas of religious fundamentalism.

a good explanation with which i happen to agree.

hello! not dead! i promise!

my parents are pondering getting a dog. well, pondering in that way that involves calling rescue groups and trying to arrange meetings with small yappy creatures.

just to validate my friend shahn, i am eating oatmeal.

(well, also because it sounds edible and not much else does...)

happy new year!

sorry, not much end of the old year or beginning of the new year posting for me; i've been sick. i, thank goodness, slept into 2003. (this was a very fine thing, considering the other choices...)

it was not a sparkling end to the year; we got some upsetting medical news about nathan's dad (who is okay now, for the record) on tuesday, and then i came down with what i do believe was the norwalk virus.

fortunately, nathan, bless his heart, had talked me out of throwing a new year's eve party at the last minute. phew!