The weekend.

Friday, FallenPegasus came over. We hadn't done this last week, too busy, but he came over to dive into the treasure chest he'd left us and pull out a pound or so of halibut, which the three of us then turned into a delicious fish casserole with layers of roma tomatoes herbed with rosemary and basil from the garden. After putting Yamaarashi-chan and Kouryou-chan to bed, Omaha and Pegasus watched The Fugitive while I finished up BloodRayne. There's a real disconnect between the people who did the full motion video movies and the ones who do the in-game cutscenes; the faces are too far apart. I'm afraid that the better graphics engine in the sequel will probably result in the more bloodthirsty, less cute Rayne being the predominant one.

Saturday, I made scrambled eggs and then Yamaarashi-chan and I were out the door to take her to a friend's birthday party. At first, I had thought that this would mean hours of hanging out with a gaggle of little girls, not a welcome predicament, but as it turned out her friend had only three other people over for her party. I chatted with the parents while the girls played outside, then snuck down the hill for something cold but caffeinated from Starbucks, then back. Omaha had spent the afternoon canvassing for Kerry. For dinner, we ate at the local fish joint down the street, and the kids got more Uninhabited Planet

Sunday, we decided to head out to the park jenkitty and I had climbed over a week earlier, Flaming Geyser. Omaha thought it was no longer tall enough to qualify as a geyser and quoted one wag as calling it "Flaming Gashole." Okay, that's fair, that's what it is. We went up the second trail and then the geyser trail. Kouryou-chan got a bit freaked out by the big beetles crawling about the trails, and both she and Yamaarashi-chan spent time on the kid's playground at the picnic field. They were both fascinated by the river, and wondered if they would see any baby salmon, but it was too early in the season for that. On the walk back, we passed by a pair of trees that had dumped all of their leaves in great layers, and with just a few judicious kicks Omaha and I assembled a massive leaf pile for the girls to run and jump into. Much giggling ensued, especially after we buried the girls in leaves. "Look! It's a leaf monster! The pile is moving! Cthulu ph'tagn!" More giggling.

Afterwards, it was time to take Yamaarashi-chan back to her mother's house, and then the rest of us tried to make it to Costco before they were closed. So, it was time to hit the local grocery store, and then home. Omaha made delicious lamb chops while I used up a lot of the leftover vegetables by chopping them fine and mixing them with ginger and garlic, saute'ing them and mixing them with couscous.

And Omaha found the coolest thing on the planet: an ice-cream scoop that works! Rather than that dopey scoop-bar thing you sometimes find, this scoop is made out of steel and is split right down the middle. Gripping the handle naturally causes the scoop to close, and when you release, the scoop opens completely, dropping by half the surface area the ice cream has for gripping to the spoon. That and a robust non-stick coating make it damn near the perfect scoop. A lot better than the "Good Grips" piece o' crap we've had for the past two years.

Watching porn: Mary Carey

So, this weekend, after the kids and Omaha were in bed, I settled down to go through whatever it was Harvester had found for me over the past week. Harvester is a little program I've written, a wrapper around UBH (usenet binary harvester), which pre-sorts through lists of newsgroups and sucks down whatever it can find based on criteria I give it. Sometimes I have to tweak it, but right now it's pretty reliable at finding me comics, anime, music, and smut that I like. The smut is more often miss than hit, but at least I've not seen anything repulsive recently. And since Harvester is passive, spammers don't get my email address.

One of the things it found was a Mary Carey movie. Mary Carey, if you recall, was the significantly stacked porn star who ran for governer of California against Arnold Schwarzenegger (I don't know what's more alarming-- that I spelled it right, or that it's in my word list), and also recently generate a ton of publicity by starting a protest movement against the U.S. Army's policy of providing free cosmetic surgery to its troops under the heading "Bombs, not Boobs: Spend that money to protect our troops!" (The policy is intended to give military plastic surgeons peacetime practice for repairing wartime disfigurements.) As Fleshbot recently said, "God bless Mary Carey: if she didn't exist, we'd have to take some cheeseburgers and a stack of string bikinis and try to invent her." Indeed.

If one can have a favorite porn starlet, I think Mary Carey just became mine. In a world where porn stars (thanks to Viagra, of both sexes) are more disposable than japanese pop singers, Carey has managed to hang onto a successful career by being unique. She's not artifically attractive: she has a slightly pinched nose, a significant overbite, and a low forehead that, frankly, combine to make her look a bit slow, but apparently that all hides a pretty sharp brain for both publicity and business. It's not immediately obvious why her body is porn starlet material: she is a touch heavyset, with a soft belly and thighs. Okay, that weight translates to large teardrop breasts, but those aren't always a selling point.

And you have to love a porn film where the mad scientist is the hero. Our mad scientist hero babe, celibate and dismissive of the animal act of sex but comprehending of its power over others, creates an evil doppelganger to fuck herself into the halls of power. Mad scientist babe decides things have gone horribly awry and proceeds to follow the doppelganger's trail, decides she likes sex after all, conquers the doppelganger and there's a happy ending.

And the one thing you get from watching this silliness is that Mary Carey likes sex. There's something self-denying about the thin, time-trapped perfect bodies of most porn starlets, something less than, well, robust. Mary Carey is robust. There's something in her expressions, her vocalizations, while she's being banged, some je ne sais quoi that says in no uncertain terms that she's not faking it, that she's really having a good time in front of the camera. A certain ineffable glee at what her body can do for her, and a mischevious astonishment at the whole "and I can get paid for it too?"

More power to her. I wonder if any of the DVD shops nearby have her in the rentals section.

Theories on George W.

The exceptionally shrill Brad DeLong proposes four reasons for George W. Bush's terrible performance at the debate, since he used to be a consummate debator:

1. George Lakoff's theory: it's deliberate--these daya George W. Bush wants to sound more like John Wayne.
2. Kate O'Beirne's theory: George W. Bush is out of practice, because nobody has dared contradict him to his face for four years.
3. The "worried man" theory: George W. Bush knows he has messed up badly, and is scared, and it shows.
4. The "organic brain damage" theory: something is going badly wrong inside George W. Bush's brain--perhaps the result of lots of substance abuse in his youth.

I'm not sure which one is viable, but I guess we'll know depending upon whether or not Bush holds his own in the second debate. If he flubs it, the latter two seem much more likely.

I'm going to try and use 'shrill' for now on for my politically-oriented posts.