yes! the laptop works! wheee!

first day of alt.polycon is done. so far, so good. i am continuing my fine fine track record of totally ignoring anyone who i think is cute and who is flirting with me. it's served me so well in the past, you see. er, something.

aaaagh. tired, and on a panel in 9 hours. must sleep now.

oh, i seem to be quiet this week. and i'll likely be quiet next week as well.

tomorrow, nathan and i leave for alt.polycon 10 and then worldcon, aka torcon3 both in toronto. we'll be back september second.

(yes, mom, the security system will be on and people will be stopping by to check the house occasionally.)

knowing me, i will probably spend all this time warning people that i will be nowhere near the internet and then update like a fiend while i'm up there.

i am looking forward to both things. i will get to see lots of people who i am excited about seeing at polycon (and a few people who i'm not so excited about seeing, but eh) and this will be my second ever worldcon, so i'm all excited about that. wheee!

tonight, the puppy goes to my parents house. i will miss her dreadfully while i'm gone.

(i also want to propose the idea of getting another dog to nathan when we get back. shhh; don't tell him.)

snagged this from sarah on livejournal:

From a mailing from Alternet, today:

Dear Friends:

This election may be the most critical election in our lifetime. We know that most of you are already registered to vote. (Don't forget to reregister if you have moved or changed parties.) However, are all of your like-minded friends, and friends of friends, registered?

Thanks to Working Assets, voter registration forms are available ONLINE! Just fill out the form, print and mail. AlterNet hopes to help register 50,000 people. If each of you signed up just one unregistered person we'd reach our goal. And think what we could do if each of you signed up five unregistered people!

To fill out a voter registration form, go to:
http://workingforchange.com/vote/?ms=ALT001

Please help spread the word. Use the sample message below or write your own, but be sure to
include the link so we can keep track of how many people our readers have mobilized. With a
minimal amount of effort, we can create a tidal wave of change.

Thank you,

Yours,
Don and the AlterNet staff

they say "likeminded people", but i think that all y'all should get registered to vote. yes, even your irritating libertarian sweetie, xat. and every one else's irritating libertarian sweeties, too.

do note: you have to print it out, stamp it, and mail it. on the other hand, you don't have to go track down a form, first.

from avedon, at The Sideshow

You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him.

And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them.

And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in
singin a bar of "Fair and Balanced" and walking out. They may think it's an organization.

And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said
fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of "Fair and Balanced" and walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement.

And that's what it is , the Fair and Balanced Anti-Pravda Movement, and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it come's around on the guitar.

With apologies to Arlo. (and many thanks, to avedon.)

New York City - Unemployment Rate Declines 6.2 Percent

WASHINGTON -- The nation's unemployment rate declined to 6.2 percent in July as nearly half a million discouraged Americans stopped looking for a job. Payrolls were cut for the sixth month in a row, suggesting that businesses remain cautious and want to keep work forces leans despite budding signs of an economic revival.

see! those tax cuts to make the economy better are working!

(how even the cheap labor conservatives can think this is a good idea boggles my mind...)

Through the Looking Glass

A homeowner puts a UN flag on his front lawn. Some local bureaucrats tell him to take it off; having that flag is against the rules. He's refused, and will probably wind up in court. If the local bureaucrats were government officials, libertarians would be all over this as an example of the silly excesses of the nanny state. But the bureaucrats are members of a private homeowner's association, and some libertarians seem quite pleased.

i think i need to start reading the looking glass on a regular basis. much much good stuff there.

Hungry in America
Hungry in America
by Trudy Lieberman

I have no heart for somebody who starves his folks. --George W. Bush discussing North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and US food donations on CNN (January 2, 2003)

[...]

Food and hunger are a lens through which we see what America has become: a country indifferent to the basic needs of its citizens, one that forces millions of them to rely on private charity that is inadequate, inefficient and frequently unavailable. As people with low and middle incomes have lost their jobs, their families line up for handouts, something many thought they'd never have to do. Hunger exposes the casualties of the ever-widening income gap between the rich and the rest of the population, and the damage inflicted by a twenty-year campaign waged by right-wing think tanks and conservative politicians to defund and delegitimize government. That campaign, which has succeeded in returning the public's view of poverty to the Darwinian one that prevailed before the Progressive Era at the turn of the twentieth century, is emblematic of the right's assault on public programs, which has used the old-fashioned notion of personal failing as the vehicle for accomplishing its political goals. Indeed, few politicians now advocate for the hungry.

we are dog sitting the coco dog this weekend, and i see that i forgot to mention that. she and pirate are getting along as well as can be expected, and have even (just barely) been sighted playing together. coco, however, is a big fan of basking in your love love love, so if there's a human around, she will come gaze soulfully at you instead of playing with pirate.

i am on methotrexate again (for the arthritis), and i was reminded by mary about one of the side effects of it that both she and i are having. i'm hungry, but food just doesn't seem like a good idea. could eat something, but really, it'd just be too much trouble.

this is no fun. just for the record.

BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Bush gets behind Arnie:

United States President George W Bush has added to the drama of California's recall election by saying movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger would make a good governor.

this isn't even a *nice* handbasket. yeesh.

later this month, nathan and i are going to toronto for ten days. two conventions will be on either side; alt.polycon on the front end and worldcon on the backend. i expect it will be fun, even though i'm a little nervous about it.

Slacktivist:

YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO KILL CIVILIANS (part 2,398)

Nicholas Kristof, repeat after me, 'You're not allowed to kill civilians.'

Today is the 58th anniversary of America's dropping an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. That's city -- not 'missile site' or 'strategic installation,' but city -- as in 'population center where lots and lots of noncombatants live.' The American bomb killed 231,920 people -- the great majority of whom were noncombatants. Women and children. Civilians.

You're not allowed to kill civilians.

No utilitarian calculus, no alternative-history what-if gamesmanship after the fact can alter that rule.

But Nicholas Kristof tries, and with little more by way of argument than that he seems to have read The Man in the High Castle back in high school.

All of Kristof's hypothetical what-iffery doesn't change the rules. You may not both 1) intentionally target and incinerate 230,000 noncombatants in an act of terrorism; and 2) not be a monster.

went over to sig's last night and watched the house being cleaned. oh, the excitement. my job was to keep sigrid amused and also to occasionally try to keep the dogs off the freshly washed floor.

i had a dream with one of my exes in last night. it was strange, in that "what are you doing in my head?" way, but also felt very real, in that zir behavior in the dream was irritating in the exact same way that i find zir irritating in real life, i was very very angry at zir, and i missed zir like crazy, like, curl up in a ball and keen crazy.

i don't think about zir much any more, but apparently my subconscious thought it was time for a round of it. i don't miss zir much any more, either. sometimes there's the occasional sharp pain, like stepping off a curb that i didn't see was there, but most of the time, the edges are worn down and i don't even notice. (how time turns missing your exes into a curbcut, by me. heh.)

abby and my dad are back from russia. they took nine rolls of pictures and brought back many many fine things. i now have a copy of podkayne of mars in russian. i can't, of course, read any of it, but it's still very cool. also, a fine tea glass holder and an amber dragon. (oh, the cuteness. honest.)

nathan and i went down to austin this weekend to check out a hotel for supercon, and to have dinner with his parents. this went pretty well. it's a very fine looking hotel, and dinner was yummy. we brought pirate, who played (fsvo "played") with their dog, aaron.

today our fine cleaning ladies come. hurray! if you are in minneapolis and want the names of some fine cleaning ladies who will clean your house and play with your puppies, let me know.

last night, denae and i went over convergence artshow stuff, and got one step closer to being able to write the checks to send out to artists.

i am currently reading the second foreigner trilogy, by c.j. cherryh. reading them all in a row helps with understanding the atevi-- it takes about half a book to figure it out, and if you just keep plowing through them, they make more sense (in that cherryh, too many weasels in a too small barrel sort of way).

perhaps i will post something amusing soon; i am sorry that this was not it.

hi! here i am! not dead!