Medic!
Boo! The comments were my favorite part of blogging!
There are people coming to see Weasel Acres this afternoon. My agent convinced me to drop another 20% on the price, bringing it from “dear me, that’s unfortunate” all the way down to “holy shit! I’m being eaten a-live on this thing!” So I’ll be making myself scarce this afternoon. I don’t have access to personal email from work, so if you have a brilliant idea what’s wrong with sweasel.com, I’d like to hear it — but I won’t until early evening.
I keep trying to feel sorry for myself, but I can’t quite manage to do so on September 11. Noam sane?
Update: sounds like what I have is a messy/corrupted database, as suspected (thanks to admin at the GCPundit forums for soothing a jangled weasel). I’ll fix what I can fix, or alternatively break something new and more interesting, tonight.
UPDATE: Fixed! Thank you anonymous Blue Host guy!!
Weasel’s back in town — lock up yer runnybabbits!
September 11, 2008 — 10:00 am
Comments: 28
Stay mad
September 11. This fucking day again.
My boss went to ground zero about a week later. Yeah, you wouldn’t think so, but the art department is among the second responders. Somebody has to take pictures of the damage and make PowerPoint presentations about where the bodies were found.
I kid, I kid. There were no bodies. The ‘morgue’ was a bunch of five-gallon buckets under a tarp. As workers filled them with gobbets of meat, they were taken away to the geneticists and new buckets were brought in.
The scene was heavily controlled. Access credentials were placards they wore around their necks, like backstage passes. My boss said the hardest thing was walking the blocks from the inhabited parts of the city to the cordoned area wearing his pass, knowing what he knew. Hundreds of people desperate for news mobbed him, pressing bubblejet prints into his hands. Graduations pictures. Wedding pictures. Smiling, blurry faces. Secretaries, janitors, junior managers.
Yeah, the fatcats aren’t in at eight in the morning. The dead were working doofuses like you and me. In fact, a bunch of our guys were in the building that morning for a meeting; a few didn’t make it out (nobody I knew; I’m not trying to horn in on that kind of celebrity).
He’s a stoical, Scandihoovian type, my boss. I was surprised a few months ago when he told me he still has nightmares. The smoke and the stink and the thick, pervasive, clinging dust of burned paperwork and vaporized modular cubicle furniture and office worker. There was paper, perfectly intact, everywhere. Like drifts of snow.
He brought back thousands of pictures (including some he wouldn’t let us see). I didn’t know about emergency worker graffiti. There was a symbol for “plane parts found here” and another for “body parts found here” and another for “unsafe inside” — warning marks and numbers left on all the buildings that had been searched (and they all had to be; bits were scattered far and wide) in colorful spraypaint.
That stupid fat cunt up there is a bzillion times more likely to die a ghastly terrorist martyr’s death than I am, and yet she celebrates this thing. That’s fucked up. That’s too fucked up to learn better. That’s fucked up beyond all fixing.
Why do they hate us? It’s what they do. It’s what they are. It’s all they have. They don’t have the adult temperament and the simple skills required to be office workers, so they kill and die and dip their hands in the blood and ululate in the streets. Savages.
They have to go, every last one of them that can’t learn better.
Stay mad. We aren’t finished.
— 8:09 am
Comments: 13
It’s Zola!
To hell with politics. Look — a puppy!
Yes, after weeks of hype and tease and adorable puppy photos, the Glorious Lemur King has finally picked out a damn dog.
Wander over and help him pick out a name, too (nah, just kidding. I’ve already emailed his wife. It’s going to be Pretty Princess Poofypants, for sure).
Whoa! For those of you who have written me that you’re stuck in the spam filter, you’re not. I’ve just tried to post a comment, like, six times and it just vanishes into the ether. Just, gone. I don’t know if my host is having database issues or we’re being ‘lanched to our knees (the melty Obama graphic is getting a lot of link love), but please be patient and don’t go away. Weasel would be lost without her imaginary friends who live in the computer…
I filed a help ticket in with my host, though whether this is a database issue or some problem with WordPress, I have no idea. It would have to happen on a big ol’ link day (you know how it is — you’re always having sex on the kitchen table when the vicar always drops by for tea). Now would be the time to tell me what you really think, and take a gamble that the comments are still busted.
Four hours. Four hours without a comment from a minion. Oh god, I miss you. I miss your ASCII. I miss the way your nose wrinkles when you post a dirty word. I can’t go on, trapped by myself in this blog, alone with the sibilant shusssss, shusssss, shussss of my own pulse. Somebody, please, take my keys away before I DUI on the information superhighway…
September 10, 2008 — 4:45 pm
Comments: 4
I love this election so much, I want to marry it!
“You know, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.”
“You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called ‘change,'” Obama continued, “it’s still gonna stink after eight years.”
–The Greatest Orator of Our Time
One weekend, many years ago, without any warning, my employer built a speed bump at the entrance to the employee parking lot. It was a beaut, too; uncommonly deep and high. Like a ski slope. Sadly, there was no time to paint it danger orange. I came whipping in the back way in my two-seater weaselmobile, hit that thing at speed and shot into the air like a free bird. I had just enough time to look down at the ground in astonishment and think, “I’m airborne! Why am I airborne?”
So, Senator Obama, I feel yer. You do not like this place you are at, and you don’t know how you got here. Both Obama and John McCain have used the “lipstick on a pig” line before without controversy. It’s a fairly common expression. But the audience reaction makes it clear they drew a connection to Sarah “Lipstick on a Pitbull” Palin this time. So he doubles down with a “stinky fish” remark? Oy!
Of course he didn’t mean it that way. If he’d had time to mull it over, he wouldn’t dare. But Sarah Palin is worrying him like a loose tooth, and she plucked the remark right out of his head for him. There’s a reason pshrinks make patients free-associate: sometimes we blurt things that have meaning.
Like maybe Mister Hopey von Changerstein has…woman issues.
Update: well, well, well. According to the first comment on this post at Pajamas Media, Obama used “lipstick on a pig” in more speeches than one, and the crowd reacted in a way that made it clear they made the Palin connection. The commenter gives links to two YouTubes, which I can’t reach from work. If he’s described them accurately, then Hopé Changelio didn’t just blurting out something foolish. He meant it. Correction: oops. My bad. This is why I shouldn’t post until I see the YouTube. It was the “flipping the bird” thing he apparently did twice (and in exactly the same spot in the speech).
— 8:56 am
Comments: 37
Meltdown
There are few things in all the world I enjoy more than watching someone come completely unstrung in public. If that makes me a bad person…well, duh. What part of “weasel” was unclear to you?
I am frankly amazed at how prickly and snippy Obama is about Sarah Palin, and with what little provocation. I sincerely thought he was a better politician than this. Any political adviser worth a damn knows that you don’t let your Number One scrap with their Number Two, so he’s apparently off the leash and winging it. Bad for him, an all-you-can eat buffet of delightful schadenfreude for me.
I know. The graphic doesn’t make a lick of sense in black and white. Click it to download a color version — and steal, my pretties! Steal like the wind!
September 9, 2008 — 11:10 am
Comments: 59
Answering a question you probably never asked yourself
The idea popped into my head this morning, “wouldn’t it be really funny to have this brain and it, like, opens and it’s all fangs and snarly and stuff? Wouldn’t that be hilarious?”
Well, there it is. And I think you’ll agree, the answer is no. Oh, dear sweet Jesus no. There is nothing funny about it.
Eh. You should have seen the color version.
You’re welcome.
September 8, 2008 — 3:03 pm
Comments: 52
A tragic story of wild turkey love
My office is located on large and beautiful grounds (who started calling these “campuses” and why can’t we legally murder him?) with much wildlife. Occasionally, some of that wildlife gets past the automatic doors and into the lobby. Mostly wild turkeys.
I got to work about 6:30 in the morning Friday and found a turkey in the foyer. There were feathers EVERYwhere and it was lying on its back but, I was surprised to see, not dead. It was panting and making odd sounds and waving its legs feebly in the air.
I talked to it for a while and considered trying to turn it over with my toe, but someone walked up behind me and advised me not to try. They’re mean peckers, I guess. Anyhow, we decided what had happened was, the thing got into the glass-in foyer, panicked, stuck its stupid head against the glass and ran in place until it fell over, exhausted. I’ve seen them try that maneuver, so it’s entirely possible.
That’s all I know about it, though. We called Building and Grounds and went on in to work. Nothing but a little fluff left when I came out for lunch. That’s not my story.
I was telling someone about the turkey, and she said she saw the oddest thing one morning not long ago. Down the long hill on the lawn, a turkey was slowly walking around and around in circles. Curious, she walked down the hill to get a closer look.
He was walking around and around a dead female turkey in the grass. She looked it up later, and the poor dumb bastards mate for life. So that was likely Mrs Poor Dumb Bastard.
Sad, no?
September 6, 2008 — 8:37 am
Comments: 77
Community organizing his own ass right into a forked stick
Well, well…the Chosen One has awfully thin skin, it turns out. Mustn’t mock. (I didn’t realize Obama’s brand of ‘community organizing’ included working with ACORN, the ‘get out the vote’ group that gets out the votes of dead people and illegal immigrants. More detail from Michelle Malkin in National Review Online today).
Obama’s early and broad appeal was largely because he was so gosh darned likeable. Even your humble Weasel bought into it. I was, like, “they love their guy, I hate our guy, we can’t win them all…let’s give them this one.”
That began to unravel long before I caught Palinmania. The disastrous trip to Europe was his first big stumble (dude, you don’t cross the Atlantic and trash talk America).
And then…Joe Biden! Fucking Slow Joe Biden, whom I have despised ever since I watched him put my favorite jurist’s tits through the wringer (Thomas, not Bork). What did that pick say? “I know what America needs, and it’s pretty much somebody exactly like McCain, but without the War Hero stuff.” Bad, bad mistake. I don’t think he could possibly have run with Hillary, but he SO TOTALLY should’ve picked somebody as new and interesting and Hopey Changey as he is, to maintain the Illusion. A gassy old DC wheeze like Biden is tragically wrong for the part.
And now it looks like Obama has a glass jaw. VP candidates brawl. It’s what they do. P candidates don’t respond. It’s what they don’t — if they don’t want to look weak and defensive.
O-pollo voluntarily came down from O-lympus. Ho ho ho. How’s that ‘mortality’ thing working for you, pal?
September 5, 2008 — 9:36 am
Comments: 79
Time to get arting…
I’m going to use this thread to throw up some art in (whuuulllllf). Take whatever you like; edit if you’re so inclined (.psd’s available on request). Put it on a coffee mug. Spread it around. Ideas gratefully accepted.
We’ve only got a few weeks, so let’s get propagandifyin’!
You know who I’m endorsing, right?
September 3, 2008 — 10:32 am
Comments: 102
Barbarians heart Sarah
I cannot beLIEVE how many pundits I like and admire (I’m looking at you, Charles Krauthammer) have got it wrong on Sarah Palin. Mark my words: she was a brilliant pick. You guys are overlooking one very important fact: I really, really like her.
Hear that? That fluttering sound? That’s the sound of ten thousand DC insiders’ eyeballs rolling in their sockets. “Really,” they harumph, “there ought to be some kind of aptitude test before we let just anybody vote.”
But, see, what you Beltway people don’t realize is, you’re freaks. Really, I love you to pieces — the pundits and politicians on my side, anyway — but you’re politics nerds. You give us (speaking in my capacity as honorary straight American here) the jim-jams.
I can’t even watch the Sunday talking head shows because you’re all like, “well, don’t forget what Ed Muskie said in the ’72 Iowa caucuses!” and everybody busts out laughing because somehow all you Poindexters know what that means. You’re like weird Al Gore zooming across the stage barking “Dingell/Norwood!” It’s enough to make mush-mouth patrician George Bush look like an ordinary guy.
It’s not just that you can reel off more politics off the top of your head than any sane person ought; it’s that you give off that creepy Rain Man vibe doing it.
So why do we read books by geeks like you? Why are you all we elect to office? Because that’s all that’s on offer.
So here comes Sarah Palin — who totally doesn’t make our freak-dar jingle-jangle-jingle — and we’re psyched. Vetting be damned; I already know Sarah Palin. I’ve known several of them.
Cute girl. Likeable. Smart. Did her homework. Partied a little, not too much. Hunted with her dad every deer season. Played on the varsity basketball team. Fierce competitor, but nice about it. Fell in love with a cute guy in High School. Got married and had a cute family. Underneath that healthy, happy, all-American façade is…a genuinely good and decent person. It happens. Honestly. That “quiet desperation” thing is mostly reserved for the arty types.
Plus — Alaska! Man, you’d have to be something as dim as a professional pundit to think Alaska is a liability. Alaska is a real life slice of the mythical Old West. I was in High School while they were building the pipeline and throwing money at people to move up there; we used to dream of going to Alaska. (One of my friends actually went and thought it was a bit of a shit-hole, but never mind — Alaska!)
So, yeah, Sarah Palin could disappoint me yet. But don’t count on it. And don’t think you’ll put anybody off by pointing out how much she’s not one of you sad Beltway twerps.
September 2, 2008 — 10:11 am
Comments: 8