President Bush delivered a speech at an international gathering in Peru earlier today, and waxed nostalgic about those warm and wonderful days immediately after 9/11, when the entire world was on our side and was ready to stand with us against a common threat. Excuse me, I need to get rid of a load of bile now. Because this same brush-clearing faux cowboy diplomat worked reeeeal hard to screw up our reputation world wide, totally squandering the goodwill that we had gained, and also totally squandering our short-lived sense of national unity. Thousands of lives were lost before the war…
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The tech problem was solved this morning and we’re up and running again. However, we’re not terribly busy and so later today they’ll probably offer “downtime” or unpaid time off. I won’t be able to avail myself of it because I’m covering for someone who specializes in small groups. Ominously, there are now memos making the rounds about training for new accounts, more advanced training, and one-to-one feedback meetings. It’s the season when travel cuts back, but this is pretty quiet even for November. Ironically, this is the time of year when I get hit with small hotel blocks for…
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David installed the white-painted shoe molding earlier this afternoon, and even got through the angsty moments trying to get the floor brackets for the closet doors re-installed. Now all that remains is the quarter-round. We’d had a bad time with the oak trim that came with the floor product (actually, it was quite expensive) as it was such dense, hard wood that no matter how we pre-drilled and pounded and used an electric nailer, we couldn’t get the nails to go in all the way. So we regrouped, bought plain pine and it’s now all cut and mitred to fit…
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David installed the white-painted shoe molding earlier this afternoon, and even got through the angsty moments trying to get the floor brackets for the closet doors re-installed. Now all that remains is the quarter-round. We’d had a bad time with the oak trim that came with the floor product (actually, it was quite expensive) as it was such dense, hard wood that no matter how we pre-drilled and pounded and used an electric nailer, we couldn’t get the nails to go in all the way. So we regrouped, bought plain pine and it’s now all cut and mitred to fit…
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A couple of Russian musicians made a rather sweet little music video as a tribute to “Misses Palin.” They’re good musicians – accomplished, even, but their subtitles are the best part. [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/XR9V_aOCga0" width="425" height="344" wmode="transparent" /] They’re cute – like LOLRussians – with a hopeless pash for Palin. You betcha. Doggone it.
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There’s been another upgrade to Second Life, and I haven’t been online consistently in a couple of months. So I went online today to check in, pay rent, sort inventory; boring stuff to some, but for some reason the purposelessness is relaxing to me. While doing this I like to hang out somewhere with a good music stream. I’m currently located at the Gardens of Apollo[SLUrl link], and found that the nicely detailed gardens are now a bit too detailed for my “big” computer if I set the graphics display to “high,” and woefully undetailed if I set it at…
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Last Saturday, I happened to catch the repeat of This American Life on WBEZ; the last 30 minutes or so is a Studs Terkel piece that seemed particularly appropriate. Terkel died a few weeks ago, we’re in the midst of an economic downturn that ought to be described as a “freefall,” and we’ve just elected a mixed race, self-identified black man as our President. The Terkel segment is a collection of pieces from his Hard Times radio series, with people talking about life in the Depression. There are some surprising revelations from a woman who realized that as a poor…
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Today being the third Saturday of the month, I managed to make it to Asbury Court in Des Plaines for Holy Moly’s monthly ecumenical service. It was pretty lightly attended, probably because of a competing holiday craft fair event, but it was a nice time and those that were there were our “frequent flyers.” Father Paul and Mary did a reprise of their duet from last Sunday’s service of “Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream” with Paul on banjo, but as the words were printed, I joined in anyhow. Some of the other old folkies that were there today…
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Pretty cool. I had this in my “shared Google News” backlog. Which is pretty much the only way I can “blog” during the workday, via my iPhone, that just takes a few clicks. I really like this image. Via Open Thread | Crooks and Liars
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Pretty cool. I had this in my “shared Google News” backlog. Which is pretty much the only way I can “blog” during the workday, via my iPhone, that just takes a few clicks. I really like this image. Via Open Thread | Crooks and Liars