Tuesday's Brains: Shrunken by rage

Quote of the day:

McCain isn't confident that conservative policies and personal experience can win, given the ruinous state of the nation after eight years of Bush. So he has made a fateful decision: he has personally impugned Obama's patriotism and allows his surrogates to continue to do that. By doing so, he has allied himself with those who smeared him, his wife, his daughter Bridget, in 2000. Those tactics won George Bush a primary--and a nomination. But they proved a form of slow-acting spiritual poison, rotting the core of the Bush presidency. We'll see if the public decides to acquiesce in sleaze in 2008, and what sort of presidency--what sort of country--that will produce.

Obama is not the Antichrist

( Aren't you relieved, citizen? )

The cost of antivaccination.

( Childhood Death and Disease! Thank you, Jenny McCarthy! )

Perception Personality Image Test

Where do I begin to describe just how massively, incompetently wrong this result is?

( Memes go behind cuts... )

One thing that especially annoyed me about the photographs? I'm being judged by my reaction to a flat, still image. The one image of the mountain really brought it home to me: in the photo, my eye was drawn to the old shack in the foreground; in the field, however, I'd be looking at the mountain, and wondering how to get there. Other images were similar: in the photo, the lights on the radio telescope were interesting; in the field, I'd be wondering what they were looking for.

Two recent photographs...

Trash fire

On my way from the pet food store to the bus stop, I noticed this trash can smoldering and giving off smoke in front of a "real women have real bodies" clothing store in the commercial district nearest to my home. I looked in and saw that someone had dumped a thick advertising flier on top of what is normally an outdoor ashtray, and a cigarette had set the paper on fire.

I went into the store and said to the first person I saw with an identification badge, "Excuse me, do you know that there's a fire in your trashcan?"

"Oh my god! There is?" The woman ran to the door, looked out, and said, "Oh my god!" again. She ran to the back, pulled out another woman to look at it, then said to me, "Do you know how to use a fire extinguisher? We're all women in here. We don't know how."

After recovering from that non-sequitor, I told her, "It's not a grease fire, it's a paper fire, it's very small and contained. Just pour a pitcher of cold water on it and put it out."

"Really?"

"Yes, really." I watched her run to the back. I went out to snap the photo, she came back out with one of those plastic pitchers you usually find filled with beer and she put the fire out. But, grief, "I'm a woman so I can't handle a fire extinguisher?" That's the stupidest thing I've heard yet, and I'm reading the political blogs!

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( And this might be offensive and the text NSFW. )

Voted today!

I voted!

I don't care that it's a purely administrative position, I still say it's really weird seeing my wife's name on the ballot. And yes, I did vote for her.

I will admit to skipping most of the judicial elections entirely; I didn't know enough about either candidate to decide which one I'd rather not see.

Saturday, catching up

Seriously Bad Elf Ale

Well, after the trauma of the mall, Kouryou-chan and I picked Omaha up from the airport (she'd been in Vegas, Baby! for four days at a business convention) and, without even pausing to stop by the house, hurtled up to a friend's house for a lovely housewarming. They've been slowly building the place out from the walls; they bought it for a song, and it was barely worth that, with all the animal products and cigarette smoke that was embedded and layered everywhere. They have new subfloors and bare drywall around the bathroom and major bedrooms, and that's quite the improvement. Good enough to justify a housewarming.

And they even thought of me and had a bottle of Seriously Bad Elf Beer. When other people at the party who didn't know me asked why this was funny, I had to explain my name and that whole "unauthorized reindeer games" incident that got me kicked out of the workshop. Blitzen really does like his eggnog, especially when it goes in the other end...