Category Archives: Blogs Wot I Read

Why Melissa Bean Trashed TARP

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As I suspected when I Twittered about it at the time , she’s a creature of the insurance and banking lobbyists. I am SO DISAPPOINTED in her. She replaced the worse do-nothing doddering Republican Congressman then in the House, and for this? Ugh. I hope some good people gear up to give her a primary challenge. And she still doesn’t have a Twitter account or a decent email system.  Her canned responses via email take forever.

Jane Hamsher: Melissa Bean Helps Banks Gut Bill to Limit TARP Bonuses
It looked like it was going to be smooth sailing for Grayson’s bill, but then Melissa Bean decided to give the Republicans a hand. Her New Democrat Coalition has an Executive Director, Adam Pase, who is a former bank lobbyist for predatory lenders. Their members brag about their Wall Street backgrounds and their close ties to the banks, and Bean herself took in $918,200 in campaign contributions from the finance, insurance and real estate sector for her 2008 race. She was one of six Democrats who voted against the bill taxing AIG bonuses.

So it was no surprise when Bean stood up and offered an amendment which allowed TARP recipients to get out from under the bill’s limitations if they had started paying their loans back.

Brad Sherman, known for being a genuinely fiscally responsible member of the House, objected (see video below). He said “it would allow a large number of companies to escape the effect of the bill without doing much more than making a few monthly payments of a very small amount.” Sherman’s own bill, which would have capped executive compensation for TARP recipients at a million dollars a year, was never allowed on the floor.

CROCS Intervenshun – Thanks For Ur Halps LOLcatz!

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I wonder what MrRileycat_Esq would do if I came home wearing CROCS? Would he react like this stalwart cat, saving his or her human from committing shoe crime?

funny-pictures-cat-hates-your-shoes

Every now and then, I think about getting a pair of CROCS, because they’d make pretty practical gardening clogs and also for those times when we’re on vacation and need a comfortable slip-on sandal that won’t get ruined by salt water.

Fortunately, the good people at I Can Has Cheezburger were there to stop me from doing irreparable harm to my dignity and self-respect.

Glenn Beck’s OMGWTFBBQ and My Manifesto

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Daily Kos: State of the Nation diarist Hunter spent the day posting updates about yesterday’s wingnut festivities.

omgwtfbbq

[Throughout the day we have been bringing you breaking coverage of today’s ‘We Surround Them’ event, newsperson Glenn Beck’s effort to demonstrate the power of the ultraconservative movement via… um… well, we’re not quite sure. It seems to be based on surrounding the rest of us by meeting at Chili’s?]

CRITICAL EMERGENCY UPDATE — DAILY KOS EXCLUSIVE: Home again now. Home not surrounded. Neighbors seem placid, no surrounding seems imminent. Possible conservative flanking maneuver on 2nd street turned out to be loose dog.

Of course, a conservative talk-radio sponsored function in Utah was a big success. No surprises there.

No word on the turnout in Lafayette, LA, but the mockery in the comments is pretty telling. Also, some pretty sturdy objections to the theocratic posturings of the two “celebrity” event hosts, Beck and “TV’s Chuck Norris.” The martial arts star threw a barbecue at his Texas home, announced his readiness to be President of Texas when they secede, offers himself to serve a Godly republic,  etc. Actual Texans were not that impressed, frankly.

The rest of the country is too cold (and possibly too reality-based) to think about outdoor BBQs yet. So most of the events were held in restaurants and bars that either agreed to change the channel on the TV, or that had function rooms that could be reserved. The regionalism of the OMGWTFBBQ mindset is evident.

Hundreds gathered for a viewing party of Beck’s tearstained special in Asheville, NC.

Portsmouth had an event at a restaurant that was SRO. This supposedly non-partisan concept was hosted by the local Republican party and their supporters.  Newsflash: the GOP lost the election.

Rexburg. Home of BYU-Idaho. Dude, they already surround non-believers there… Almost 400 turned out,  so all three of the non-LDS Democrats stayed home and made escape plans.

The whole thing is based on Beck’s concept of “912: 9 Principles, 12 Values” which are listed here (on a site unlikely to crash, as Beck’s site did yesterday).

Note how carefully worded they are so as to seem “not that crazy.” Some independent-minded people, even self-identified liberals, might not think they are such a bad idea, except for the problem of enthusiastic older ladies forming militias and marching on Washington to overthrow the gubmint.

The 9 principles
1. America is good.

2. I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life.

3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.

4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.
[…except for those whose spouse is Teh Gay, of course. They must be purged.]

5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.

6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.
[Translation: “I have a right to life, liberty, and happiness. You, not so much.”]

7. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.
[Translation: I read Ayn Rand in college, which formed my core values as a selfish S.O.B.]

8. It is not “un”-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.
[Translation: …except for liberal traitors who complained post-9/11 about “curtailment of civil rights,” “extrajudicial rendition,” and “illegal war.”]

9. The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.
[Especially after I threw a big donation their way at that golf junket to Bermuda]

The 12 values
Honesty
Reverence
Hope
Thrift
Humility
Charity
Sincerity
Moderation
Hard Work
Courage
Personal Responsibility
Gratitude

Some of these seem reasonable, some of these are a little suspect. Here’s my take:

Ginny’s 10 Principles For A Better,  Kinder World

1. America (and the world) could be better, if it weren’t for our deep well of stupid preventing progress.
2. Insert creed of your choice here, or quote a moral philosophy, such as “Be kind, rewind.”
3. No change.
4. See 2 above: express importance of family in your own terms. Cherish them and your pets.
5. No change. Cheney better pack a bag for a long stretch Inside.
6. All people should have the right to life, liberty,  clean water, food, and the pursuit of happiness.
7. I work hard for what I have and I am willing to help people who have less than I do.
8. It is the duty of every American to speak out on injustice, while not being a dick about it.
9. No change. Addendum:  all corrupt politicians must be thrown out of office.
10. Science and religion should never be mixed, or bad science and bad religion are the result.

That should do it. The Virtues list is all right as it currently stands, although I might add a few of my own, such as:

Compassion
Tolerance
Inclusion
Forgiveness
Kindness
Humor
Open-Mindedness
Curiousity
Love (the greatest Virtue of all)

Whitehouse.gov Change Log

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This isn’t the funny, jokey changelog version, this is an interesting project: a weekly review of changes at the White House website. Earlier the Internets noticed the site’s new robots.txt file, which prevented search engines from effectively finding information (especially damaging or unflattering information).

It’s a pretty interesting concept and I hope it shows up in my regular dKos feed.

Daily Kos: State of the Nation

President Obama has stated his intention that whitehouse.gov will serve an integral role in offering Americans the most transparent and accountable administration in our history. And we all noted with rapturous glee just how fast they rolled this site out to us.

There will be an overflow of information, documents, posts, and video. Constantly. So I’ve decided to start up the Whitehouse.gov Change Log and record changes and updates to the site on a weekly basis.

First, in this inaugural post, I have to establish a baseline by documenting what is there right now, everywhere, and then we can just watch for updates. I’ll do a new post each weekend, where I discuss what’s new and interesting at the President’s webpage. None will be as long as this one unless the President rolls out a new Whitehouse.gov between Saturday and the next, like he did this week.

I hope this will be a fun project and that many readers will benefit from a concerted effort to track the development of form, function and content on Whitehouse.gov. – Ibid

BUGGER ALL Javascript and Cookies… hawk-spit!!

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This post is in response to a blog post at Newsarama, but there was an error preventing me from commenting. Most of the original post is about a DC Comics character, and guest casting for this character on an upcoming episode.

For those of you who don’t know what a redshirt is, it’s Star Trek lingo for easily expendable cannon fodder, usually ones who bite the bullet ahead of icons like Picard and Kirk.

And perhaps the most famous redshirt was Wesley Crusher, played by Wil Wheaton, possibly the most annoying role in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Well, Comics Continuum has reported that Mr. Crusher will be playing Ted Kord, the superhero and professional bullet swallower known as the Blue Beetle, in the January 23rd episode of “The Brave and the Bold.” The episode will have young Jaime Reyes examining the legacy of his heroic predecessor.

A number of people commented on how stale and inaccurate this “Wesley Crusher, red shirt” quip is, mostly because they were pointed in that direction by Wil Wheaton himself, or  @Wilw as he’s known on Twitter. He’s become a well-known blogger and Internets Tubes guy, and recently his acting career went into a higher gear. Which is great, because he’s documented both success and disappointment over the years on his blog, and it’s nice when he gets to chalk up more WIN than FAIL.

Here’s what I would have posted as a comment if Javascript/cookies had been enabled:

Ah, the late Eighties. The joke in the title is actually *20* years out of date.

I spent a lot of time then grousing then about “Wesley saves the universe. Again.” Star Trek: TNG was my favorite teevee show at the time. “Mr. Crusher” wasn’t my favorite, as I was more into alt.sexy.bald.captains at the time. But as TNG ended its run, I liked the Wesley character much better, because he had matured – and in the context of the Trek universe, he was shaping up to be a fine young officer.

Guess what? I changed my mind about Wil Wheaton years ago. You should, too. He’s now a respected Internets-Tubes blogger and poker maven. Have you SEEN his recent performances on cop-procedural shows? I bet you didn’t recognize him… he was scary as hell on a recent “Criminal Minds.”

Via Blog@Newsarama » Blog Archive » It’s confirmed: Ted Kord is a redshirt

My Peekchures, Let Me Show You Them

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The image in the header is randomly displayed from my Flickr sets. Go ahead, refresh! Hey, it’s from our trip to Hawaii! No, it’s Rocky Mountain National Park! Wait, now it’s family members! Yay! Click on any page, gawaaaan. I just hope there aren’t too many clinkers in there that turn out to be resized and don’t fit the frame.

No Photoshoppery needed, I just selected the best of my full size, uncropped images with a special tag, modified a Flickr “photo badge,” and the images are then re-sized to fit the background frame with CSS. Thanks, Theme Hack and Frontender, for the point in the right direction! This will help motivate me to get my backlog uploaded to Flickr.

On The Verge

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Doyce, whose blog posts I read most often at one remove via the miracle of quotes and feeds, starts it off:

I’m actively communicating online all day, every day, but my main blog languishes. Why is that?

Simplicity. Twitter tweets, facebook updates, Flickr photo posting, and sharing news articles with commentary… all of those things are easier and faster BY AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE than posting via Movable Type.

Via What it boils down to is this… – doycetesterman

And ***Dave carries it forward:

Now, I don’t do Facebook, and have never had a justification (see below) for using Twitter. But my own blogging has suffered, net, because of my love affair with Google Reader, and the “Share” and “Share with Note” functionality in same. Where, once, if I wanted to post about something cool I’m reading, I had to be at my machine, open up a blog client, write something out, do some cut-and-paste excerpting and copy over the link … now I just click on a button to Share with other GReader users — or on another one and write out a quick note.

It’s that easy. That quick, painless, seductively easy. And the result is the flood of stuff that appears in the sidebar of this blog each day under “Unblogged Bits.”

Yes, it’s that easy to use a quick and dirty method to share a link, or comment briefly about some transient insight. But it’s not sitting down, thinking, and putting words out there for all to read. It’s not blogging. It’s not writing. It’s not taking the time and effort to craft something worth doing, whether it’s for one’s own enjoyment or the (possibly imaginary) edification of others. And sure, it may be because it’s incredibly easy to just jot something quickly on Twitter, or click a Google Reader “share” link on a mobile device. It’s convenient, it’s fast, and it works.

But I, too have been blogging a lot less in the last year or so – even with all the election stuff. Oh, sure, I was copying and pasting quotes and links and posting them in the blog, but that’s not what I consider to be real, deep, personal blogging. This blog is supposed to be my Pensieve, and I just have not been pulling whispy memories out of my head with an alder wand and storing them away where they’re safe; they’ve been left to fade away into nothing. Stuff happens in my not-terribly-interesting life; funny things are said, interesting insights are had, books are read and music is heard. But you’d never know it from the never-ending cascade of regurgitated newsblather I’ve been in the habit of posting lately.

The problem is time, or specifically the lack of it, and constraints on my use of it.

The speed of posting/sharing GReader items is important, but the ease and portability of that sharing is just as important. The fact is, my life has, for reasons I’m not altogether pleased about, gotten a lot busier in the last year. As a result, I don’t do much posting from the office, and evenings are often a choice between a dozen different urgent activities, only one of which is blogging. ***Dave, ibid

Like ***Dave, I can blog on the fly, but my tool of choice is the iPhone which is never far from my hand. Using the iPhone, I can even blog with my CMS of choice, WordPress, with pictures either emailed to Flickr and bounced to the blog via an email link from there, or direct to the blog itself using one of several plugins. But the limitations of the interface are that you must tap letters, numbers and symbols out with one or two fingers or thumbs, so you can never type as quickly as you could on a full-size keyboard. Certainly, much faster than someone on a cell phone could text, but not as fast as I’m typing now. And it’s not currently possible to copy text to quote, or a url to cite in a blog post, although within some applications there are work-arounds. It’s great for posting quick photos, though. And I could set up an email-to-blog interface if I really wanted, but it would be a security problem for the main blog.

I’ve chosen to do that instead with a Blogger blog that I consider an extension called ginny’s links galore. I send links there from within Google Reader, but it’s not possible to edit them first; the email link sends the whole post. I’d have to fire up Blogger on a full-size desktop or laptop computer to get anything useful done as to editing there. It’s just a stopgap.

The real problem, as stated, is time. There’s not enough of it after work, and I don’t even have kids or hobbies. When I get home, I tend to veg out for a while before dinner, whether David cooks or I do. And then there’s TV. Might play a few hands of solitaire, catch up on Reader either on a full-bore computer or the ubiquitous iPhone, and then bed.

During work? Not bloody likely. A couple of years ago, I used to update constantly through the day – I had work tasks that left me with a lot of pending time while waiting for processes to complete, so I’d blog a lot about stuff I was reading online. But that changed with a recent “NO INTERNET DURING WORK TIME” edict, which is pretty strictly enforced (with some exceptions if you are on a “sanctioned” site for work purposes, such as looking for hotels using Google Maps or catching up on travel or weather news. Part of the policy specifically states “no updating personal websites or commenting on websites,” too.

Yeah, it’s that detailed.

So for a couple of years, no netsurfing and no blogging from work. As Wonkette is wont to say, the end.

Early last year, enter the iPhone: a handy little appliance that allows me to netsurf, catch up on email, or play games while waiting for an incoming call (so long as I’m otherwise caught up on my tasks). Google Reader, my RSS feed reader of choice, turned out to have a really slick, clean iPhone interface (complete with Share Note button, nyah! and email button). I get a kick out of reading stuff my husband David, or ***Dave shares. I need to find more people who share, too. And I sometimes think it’s a shame that the great little shared-comments scroll off so quickly, but life moves pretty fast.

More recently – the week of Blago’s arrest, actually, when I was home sick – I got into Twitter. It seemed kind of dumb, but then I started seeing hints of why some people rave about it so.

For one thing, Wil Wheaton and Levar Burton are on there, talking about interesting stuff in their real lives and not making like they’re stuck up famous actor-types. They’re people with concerns and problems and triumphs and questions. Just like, yes this is a platitude, everybody else. But because they’re famous, they’re more interesting than most and get more attention. However, I’m also just as interested in Sockington the Tweeting Cat, who is hi-larious.

And I’m on Facebook, too. It’s only recently started to get fun again; it had become a drag because there were too many goofy applications and games requests.

For a while, I had it set up that all of my “tweets” from Twitter would go to Facebook, and I’ve got both services patched into the sidebar of Blogula along with my Google Reader items, which are called “RED57’s Googlies.” But I had doubled up too much: I had Twitter set up to automatically post a tweet whenever I blogged something, and I also had Facebook set up to post a status update when I “imported notes” from my blog automatically. It’s much cleaner and more sane now that my Twitter stuff stays put, and the Facebook stuff doesn’t get all snarled up.

And then there’s Flickr. Well, there’s a ton – like MANY MANY MANY hundreds of pictures from a few recent trips that haven’t been uploaded. In some cases, the pictures are still sitting on flash cards. There’s so much volume that I can’t seem to sit down and take the time to sort through the cards, pick out the best images, and deal with them in coherent, workable batches. YET, I seem to have time for endless games of Spider Solitaire, or Gawd help me, Space Cadet. I’ve been coasting along using my cameraphone to send photos to Flickr, but frankly, some of them haven’t been that good. I’m feeling the need to pay more attention to photography again.

Really, all this tweeting and status updating and Flickring ought to be the supporting cast to the star of the show, my main blog. And the lack of original content here has been bugging me enough lately that I’ve tried to make more of an effort. Recent updates and theme changes certainly help; the new WordPress interface makes it easier than ever to do great stuff, and it looks good once posted (especially when compared to the semi-automated posts at the Blogger version). One of my sidebar gadgets is a live visitor update dealio, and it tickles me no end to see how many people are trying to figure out how old their washer/dryers are and how to do drop shadows on images with CSS.

Reading these posts of Doyce’s and ***Dave’s make me want to get off my figurative and literal ass and blog in a more writerly fashion. Sure, I will continue to use Google Reader/Twitter/Facebook/Flickr and put content from those sources on the sidebars of Blogula Rasa, especially during the work day. And it is at least possible and not difficult to do a blog post using the iPhone only (but it’s not very efficient or comfortable for posts of more than a paragraph in length). But all the new beginnings this year are working in me like yeast in a batch of bread (or better yet, in a pail of homebrew).

I want to do better. I need to make time for real blogging. I feel like I’m on the verge.

Big Red Snow Beast

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big-red-snow-beast

Last night’s snow (or as I originally typo-ed, slow), dumped only about 4 inches on suburban streets in the area, but the traffic was horrendous and there were enough minor accidents to put corks in all the bottlenecks. And due to the way the east-west arterials around here are blocked by large tracts of parkland or shopping malls, there’s only a few ways to get between work and home. If there’s bad weather, or traffic, everything gets choked off at one of two places.

I started out pissed, as I had a late “hit” call where someone needed an exchange ticket issued by the end of the day, and there were technical problems getting it done. I call down curses and imprecations on high-mileage status travelers who upgrade themselves before the new ticket issues! But I was able to get through to an airline res agent (miraculously; it’s an airline that outsources a lot of calls to India)
and downgrade the traveler. Heh, that’ll teach them not to mess with their records… I felt very unsympathetic.

As I headed west towards home, I puttered along at about 5 miles an hour. It took about 30 minutes just to get to where I could turn off my “bottleneck” route to an alternate street that avoided the worst of the traffic. Then I had to navigate around some other obstacles, cut through a high-school parking lot to an outlet to residential streets that I knew of, and finally got back to a more direct route home. It turned out that my zig-zagging didn’t really save me much time, but it did give me a sense of accomplishment since I was moving rather than sitting in a jam-up.

David texted his location a couple of times… he started an hour before I did because he’s farther away, and it took him all of 3 hours to get home. I beat him home by about half an hour and had started using the Big Red Snow Beast on the driveway. It was still snowing pretty heavily and I had all my snow
gear on; boots, gloves, long down coat, muffler around my ears and face, fleece jingle hat with ear flaps, and had the faux-fur trimmed hood up as well. I was seriously rocking the Arctic look.

Of course, David had to take a picture. Fear the Beast!

(It is left up to the discretion of the reader to decide which is meant, the machine or the operator.)

I’ve recently gotten sucked into the time warp that is Twitter and was monitoring a few locals who complained of 3 and 4-hour commutes. It was particularly bad in the north suburbs, where there was more snow, no plows, no salting, and nothing but side streets and minor arterials that were all completely backed up.

I’m currently writing this at work in Wordpad while waiting for a call with my “ears” on, with the plan of sending the text to myself and updating at home. This is my first full week sitting with my new team, and I’m comfortably settled in with my new work-mates. I kept much more to myself on my former team,
partly because I’d formerly held a position that was between line agents and the previous team leader, and I was not popular because I was responsible for quality control at one time and was gathering data about error rates for each agent. That was years ago, but I sensed there was still some lingering… not resentment, but reserve. I wasn’t entirely to be trusted, I guess, and I didn’t bother to try to overcompensate by bringing in a lot of treats or being very social with everyone else. I don’t have this
baggage with the new team, and as it happens I work with a former team leader who stepped back to agent level whose company I enjoy. And I work with people who make me laugh and enjoy being here. It’s a pleasant change from my previous “anti-social” stance to actually chat with my neighbors.
There are minor drawbacks to the move, of course – there always are. But the compensations are: great coffee (they bring in their own bags of it and keep it in a thermos at one of the desks) and great cameraderie. It’s nice. Also, I’m closer to a window now that I don’t have to be hopping up and down
printing and faxing forms to hotels, and I have a view that looks along a tollway towards Chicago.

Currently, traffic is flowing. But don’t ask me to do constant updates. I will say that there’s snow on all the rooftops and the sky is a solid grey. Visibility is probably only a mile or two, and I don’t think we’re
on the flight path today because I don’t hear planes overhead. This may or may not be a good thing.

It’s kind of slow today. I haven’t taken that many calls. One of my mates from my former team and I send IMs to each other with questions and comments now and then, as we back each other up and she’s not physically located in the office. Now and then she sends funny emoticons and animated
GIFs.

I call this one “ZOMG! I’m In Crazy Town!”

crazy-town

It’s animated in the original format so that the background wobbles up and down, but I didn’t save it that way. My office mate sends me a lot of wacky crap like this. Most of them involve animals or weird cartoons expressing extreme agitation. I think there’s an underlying theme…

It helps to pass the time chatting, of course, but sending IMs is also dead useful when you can’t reach someone by phone, but they’re logged in to the messaging network. To ask questions like “WTF can’t these people put in the right format???” Both of us are crabby, perfectionists when it comes to formats, and unsociable; this makes us ideal IM partners.

Later, after lunch….

I continue to see more and more small signs of the bad economy. There are empty “big-box” stores on my way home, there are empty offices in my building at work, and just now I got waylaid by my hairdresser lady who said that they’re closing the hair salon downstairs. They needed to increase their visibility, and had lost a lot of regular clients because so many companies here pulled out and went away. It’s not a ghost building, but the trend is not an upward one. Anyway, she stopped me to give me a business card with the new address and phone number. They merged with another salon in the area and there are a couple of locations, but the closer one is farther to the east of me.

It may be that once they’re moved, I’ll get my hair done on choir nights, as I have about 90 minutes
to kill between the end of the day and choir, and this new location is not far out of the way to Holy Moly. So it could work out that I could keep going to Evelyn, because I like her and she’s willing to give me a simple, unfussy cut. And she likes long hair, which is a plus: some hair stylists are always on about “this long hair drags your face down.”

Dudette, I come from a long line of horse-faced people; there’s only so much you can do with a chin-length pageboy or an unnecessary (and damaging) body wave perm. Evelyn is happy to keep my hair long.  Done.

Actually, with short hair, I look a lot like Mr Crazy Town, especially without makeup. Let’s not go there.

Today’s weather has gradually cleared – the clouds that were overhead this morning are gone, replaced by mostly blue sky and fairly bright sun. It makes for some pretty shadows and contrast where the light is coming across the trees from the forest preserve across the way. By the time I leave, though, it’ll be dark. And I’ll be on my way to choir practice, so I won’t be home tonight until after 8pm.

For music this year at Holy Moly, we’re doing a modified “Lessons and Carols” format for Christmas Eve – for the later service at 9pm, that is. I’m not part of the earlier Family Service, thank GOD. It conflicts with work, anyway, as I’m scheduled to work until 5pm on the 24th. Bleh.

Anyway, the music will be good and lovely and I hope it puts people in the right headspace. One is especially good, as it’s not one of those standards you always hear: it’s called “What Sweeter Music” by John Rutter. It’s gorgeous, with floating harmonies that shimmer. Even with our few, poor voices, it sounds good. We’ll have some “ringers” on the night, though, so it’ll be even better.

Some of the other pieces will be effective – some are kind of required favorites, but a few are nice arrangements that aren’t just the plain vanilla versions sung from the choir book. One of the traditions at St Nicholas is for people to bring little bells to ring, so there’s something for that as well. We’ll have something for every taste, high class singin,’ low-class ringin,’ everybody join in on the chor-e-us.

On my mind in the news: the sheer gobsmackery of Rod Blagojevich’s hair, and the special hairbrush called “the football” that was carried by an aide, ready for any photo or video opportunity. It’s going to be what used to be called a “mare’s nest” of countercharges, questions about members of the impeachment committee’s own “favors and perks” for friends and family, and will turn out to be a giant waste of everybody’s time. Blago reportedly is defiant and claims he’s done nothing wrong; impeachment proceedings were being floated around the General Assembly months ago because he was seen as incompetent and an obstacle to the legislative process, not because of any of Fitzgerald’s charges. Still, they add spice, all those recordings of Blago (and his wife) dropping the F-bomb. I keep an eye on the news via the iPhone while waiting for calls.

Nearing the end of the day here, finally; the number of calls picked up and the afternoon went faster than the morning. Time is weird that way.

I’ll get grumped at at choir, because I was sick last Wednesday and still not feeling great Sunday, so I’ve missed 2 practices AND a Sunday, le horreur! but it’s never a good idea to run around in sub-freezing weather with a cold. In my experience, it just leads to the cold going into a sinus infection or bronchitis, so I’ll take the dirty looks in my direction, because I got over the cold without further ado (or catarrh).

UPDATE: Made it home safely after choir practice. We sounded awful, not sure why. I think it was because Mary decided to rearrange us and we were “upside-down” musically (or more likely, sideways) and hearing a different blend. Also, it was time for Mary’s annual Christmas Hissy… the stress of the season gets to her, especially when we’re not sounding good after months of work (and after sounding much better in our previous configuration).

Also, my friend Kevin reminded me via Facebook of the very funny “conversation between Rahm and Blago” that was posted at dKos the other day. Heh. This is the best part of this CLEVERLY SATIRICAL PARODY.

BLAGO: What if I appoint Valerie, what if she takes it?

EMANUEL: What do you want me to say? We’d appreciate it, I’m not gonna fucking kiss your ring over it.

BLAGO: “Appreciate it”? Come on, this is a Senate seat we’re talking about. It’s worth a fuck of a lot more than appreciation.

EMANUEL: You asked us for a list, we gave you a fucking list, you want to make your own list then make your own fucking list. [Raising voice] But if you’re asking for anything else from me, or Barack, or Valerie, then you can fucking stop talking right now Rod.

BLAGO: Wait a sec there Rahm. Wait just a fucking minute. Who are you to talk to me like that? I fucking made you.

EMANUEL: You made me? You made me? Tell me you’re fucking joking.

BLAGO: No no no, you listen to me shit-face. You see this list I got, the names motherfucking Obama fucking wants for the Senate. I just ripped it in two. How you like that? Oops, Harris just dropped it in the shredder. Harris?

HARRIS (muffled): Yes sir?

BLAGO: Did you just drop that list in the shredder?

[Whirring, shredder noise]

HARRIS (muffled): I did.

EMANUEL: Do you have me on fucking speakerphone?

BLAGO: It’s in the shredder, Rahm. The list is bye bye.

EMANUEL: Hold on a sec — you got me on fucking speakerphone? Who the fuck do you think I am?

BLAGO: Who are you Rahm? Who are you? You’re shit, you hear me? Don’t come back to Chicago Rahm, it’s not your town any more.

EMANUEL: Pick up the phone Rod.

Also also, more holiday-themed “heh.”

funny pictures of cats with captions