Hm. Must’ve had a fight with mom
Nope. No idea the backstory on this one. I was flipping through images on an old hard drive and ran across it.
That’s the great thing about being a nartist: your petty grudges are immortalized in mean-spirited images.
January 19, 2012 — 11:47 pm
Comments: 10
So join us why, don’t you?
I know, I know…I’m an addict. I’m not doing myself any favors here, but I canNOT keep away from the tossed word salad that is Meghan McCain’s Daily Beast column.
I can’t fisk the whole thing or I’d teach my keyboard to fly. Gah! It’s like stream of consciousness lightly sprinkled with punctuation.
Only someone as rich as Meghan could uncritically accept the story that a New York City schoolteacher made $15,000 a year (the first woman she talked to). Or that birth control is somehow harder or more expensive than bearing that lady’s six children.
But most of the people who I spoke to had real stories of hardship and despair. Tom Quigley, a 23-year-old college graduate from Buffalo, N.Y., said he couldn’t find a full-time job after graduating from college. He’s taking a cross country bike trip, and he plans on stopping at all the various Occupy Wall Street gatherings across the nation.
That’s a real story of hardship and despair? Really? I couldn’t find a full-time job right out of school, either, so I slung donuts for Dunkin’ for a couple of years (I won’t lie; I loved that damn job).
I’m the daughter of one of the most long-standing senators in politics and I have been given every opportunity that anyone could possibly dream of.
Quick, get John McCain a chair!
I was given those opportunities as a result of the hard work from both sides of my family.
No, Meghan, you were given those opportunities because of money. You inherit money. You don’t inherit hard work. Your forebears may (or may not) have worked hard for the money, but you just woke up under a pile of it. If you want credit for hard work, you’ll have to do some of your own.
What struck me more than anything is that for the first time possibly in history, people aren’t being given the same opportunities that my parents and grandparents had.
First time in the history of what? Oh, god, this is such a tragic mess.
The last paragraph…oh, you just know how great it sounded in her head. All quirky and Cohn-brothers.
As I was leaving Occupy Wall Street, I spotted a man who was attending the festivities wearing a giant cape made of tin foil. He was pretending that he could fly, but the tin foil just kept blowing around him, making an empty crinkling sound. He isn’t the kind of superhero that these people need.
Aluminum cape, tin ear. Not sure the dude in the picture is Meghan’s bud, but he’s the only hit I got for foil and Occupy Wall Street (nicked from Weasel Zippers).
Okay, I’ll stop now.
October 25, 2011 — 10:21 pm
Comments: 34
Twinkle on, you crazy minions!
Okay, because I love you guys, and because I sold you short last night, I made you a toy to play with. Yes I did!
I made two new emoticons for use in the comments, the twinkle and the down-twinkle. Apparently, when hippies congregate in large groups and struggle to make decisions, they wiggle their fingers at each other to signal approval or disapproval. No lie.
Here, I’ll let this young lady explain.
I didn’t actually call the emoticons twinkle and down-twinkle, because I’d have to tinker with the WP code (something I wouldn’t mind doing, except I’d have to REdo it every time I patched WordPress), I piggy-backed two existing built-in emoticons instead.
To invoke the twinkle, type the word “shock” with a colon on either side, or make a ‘shock’ face with an 8 followed by a capital O.
To invoke the down-twinkle, type the word “eek” with a colon on either side, or make an ‘eek’ face with a : followed by a lowercase o.
There ya go, wingnuts! Happy disapproving of stuff!
October 15, 2011 — 7:57 pm
Comments: 63
Things’re getting tight around here…
Two days ago, our cellphones were out for a day because thieves broke into O2 headquarters and stole some highly specialized, custom computer equipment. Stolen on commission, suspicion is. Financial picture really is getting very dire here.
By the time the power came back on, I had buggered off to bed with my Kindle and a giant whisky. Oh, well. It wasn’t a very good post, anyway.
Right! Dead Pool is auto-queued to post itself in about five and a half hours. Let’s hope the Grim Reaper takes a chill pill this time.
p.s. For all you kindly OCD-ridden souls writing to point out that the sidebar link still goes to an antique Dead Pool, here’s the deal: I HATE editing my sidebar. I only update that link after the current Dead Pool falls off the top page. Lately, they’ve been dying faster than the ten posts that make up the front page.
So now you know.
May 20, 2011 — 12:38 pm
Comments: 17
You say amoebae and I say amoebas
I’ve written about my microscopy habit before (actually, go read that post instead — it’s got lots of cool links and stuff), but I was going through some old photos and disk and found this montage of amoebas and it brought a tear to my eye.
It took me twenty years to get an amoeba, no lie. And I wanted one so badly.
See, my mother used to talk about her professor in nursing school who had a hay infusion that was decades old. One drop from that was so full of critters, she said, it was more protozoa stew than pond dip.
So I was, like, “right. Got that. The secret is old.” And I made aquariums full of stinky, crusty, nasty hay and bean infusions and nursed them along for months at a time.
These things went through a predictable cycle, even if I fed them fresh ingredients. At the start, I’d get all sorts of interesting, active, sparky protozoa. Then it would degrade to bacteria and boring wormy things. Then it would die and smell like it.
Sooo eventually I rigged up a jar on a string, went out to a local pond and did a proper pond dip. And got an amoeba, first try! I was so excited!
But the next day I was supposed to fly home and visit the folks for two weeks. Arrgh! I did the best I could to preserve it; I put the sample in a bowl in the basement (cool and damp), covered it and hoped for the best.
When I got back, first slide…dozens and dozens of amoebas. Bloody things had been dividing and subdividing for a fortnight. It was one of the happiest days of my life.
Really.
Oh, god.
May 17, 2011 — 10:58 pm
Comments: 27
Hello, I’m new!
Be grateful my blog is in black and white; this little dude is not five minutes old and is still a bit messy. It’s coming to something when you can’t walk to the store without stuff giving birth in front of you.
Yes, it’s lambing time! That magical time of year when all the fields around are full of mamas and babies and I fob you off with cute lamb pictures because I’ve been lolling around in a lawnchair all day soaking up rays instead of sitting at the computer drawing pictures of politicians who piss me off.
I took this video over the weekend, standing in the back yard looking over the field. For some reason (possibly having to do with sheepdogs) the flock only comes to our end of the field at dusk, so the video is a little dark and blurry. These two are maybe three days old; they’ve only just learned they can hop — though “hop” doesn’t really do it justice. We call it a sproing.
These little dudes aren’t entirely in control of the sproing yet, but they LIKE it.
SQUEEEEE!
April 11, 2011 — 10:23 pm
Comments: 21
Ugh.
Looks like we’re hung. And not in a good way.
It’s 1am here, so I’ll have to work it out tomorrow. Sorry.
I’m not having much luck with video lately, am I?
April 8, 2011 — 12:11 am
Comments: 17
Happy VD!
Valentine’s Day! Attentive readers — examples of whom, I feel sure, will exist some day — may remember this as our wedding anniversary. Our second.
Year Two is the Big Mac anniversary, yes? Because we went to the zoo, followed by Mickey D’s. Because basically, both of us, when we turned eight our brains stopped developing.
To be fair, we tried to think of something more grownup to do, but so many things aren’t open in February. And some that are, aren’t open Mondays.
In the spirit of grown-uppedness, we’ll share a bottle of decent champagne tonight. We got two as a consolation prize because the inn which served our wedding supper screwed up our nephew’s vegetarian dinner. We looked it up and it’s suitably expensive, so WHA-HEY!.
Anyhoo, this is a wildlife park I’ve written about before, specializes in British aminals. I didn’t know there was a European lynx. Lovely pussies, seen here being a bit frisky — he’s giving her a playful head-butt, which I managed not to catch, quite. (Wire mesh erased courtesy of Photoshop, a thing it does creepily well).
Also, there’s a European bison. Who knew?
The stoats and weasels were all asleep (I managed to spot a little patch of weasel fur poking out of the straw, expanding and contracting as it snored). Likewise, the minks and otters. All the reptiles were in hibernation, with some of the rodents.
The wolves wouldn’t howl for me, but then an ambulance went by and they all tuned up their pipes. WooooOOOOoooo! That must’ve been effing spooking around the campfire, back in the days when you had nothing but sticks and rocks to drive them off with.
They seem to have a new batch of badgers. Three younguns. The underground sett is inset in various places with glass windows, so we watched Badger A chase off Badger B and dig himself a nice bed in the straw, while Badger C took a dump in the community latrine. Yeah. I was going to say I paid money for that, but I didn’t — they let us in free because we turned up late.
Last up always, we pass the cage of the Scottish wildcat, ounce for ounce the meanest bastard in the park. Really. They look like adorable hearth-rug moggies, but nobody’s ever successfully tamed one.
Solitary beasties, too, so we were shocked at how close this one was. Sitting on a high wooden platform, staring around with seething disgust. Didn’t even acknowledge us.
So, pretty much like Charlotte, then.
February 14, 2011 — 9:24 pm
Comments: 33
The Daily Mail is a lousy rag
My US news sources — Fox and Drudge especially — are linking to the Daily Mail more and more, as their default UK news source. At a glance, they have a similar right-of-center populist editorial viewpoint.
At second glance, though, the Mail turns out to be a really shitty newspaper.
Leave aside the way they report upcoming plot-points on popular TV programs as if it were real news. Overlooking the endless celebrity trout-pouts, baby bumps and unflattering shots of famous people caught with no makeup and their eyes half closed. All this is down in the shallow, stupid end of journalism, but it’s not wrong.
Then there are the endless, breathless, ZOMG one-armed drunken lesbian benefit scroungers with knives headlines — which often aren’t supported by the story inside. This gets tiresome. It’s bad journalism, but it’s not really wrong.
But — via my chicken-keepers forum, of all places — comes a link to a story about the Mail engaging in first-degree just making shit up.
It’s a long blog post. Worth a read, if you’re interested. If not, here’s the Cliff’s Notes version:
In 2003, this woman moves to the country with her two kids, is contacted by a Mail freelancer doing a story on people who leave the city looking for the good life. Woman is starting a PR company in a new town, thinks this would be a bit of harmless publicity.
Story comes out, it’s titled Sex & the Country — a reaction to Sex in the City coming back on TV — and it’s a bunch of made-up shit about her dating life, including totally made-up direct quotes. She’s horrified and humiliated. She contacts the other people in the article — same deal for them, but the Mail laughs them off and nobody can afford to sue.
So the original lady, she spends two years in court trying to get an apology out of them. In the end, the judge rules in her favor (meaning she wins the right to carry it forward to a jury trial) and the Mail offers to settle. Which she does.
I realize there’s a lot of this kind of thing goes around in journalism — especially with this fluffy Lifestyle junk that seems to be taking over newspapers — but I’d like to think there’s a leeetle less poison in my information well.
Anyhow. Be careful who you link to. You might get some on you.
February 1, 2011 — 10:19 pm
Comments: 26
This cat has never been out of this tree
Never. He was born in the tree, the other kittens grew up and left, then his mother did. So Wisconsin man Ron Venden built him a shelter in the fork and began feeding him a diet of meatloaf and salami in milk. Cat’s name is Almond.
Yeah. I wondered that, too. The article doesn’t say, but I bet Mr Venden is very, very careful how he walks around that tree.
What? Yes, that’s it. It’s Monday and I’m damned if I’m going to write about Rahm Emanuel.
January 24, 2011 — 9:24 pm
Comments: 20