Intriguing Ebay auctions of the day

1. Burlap sack full of foreign coins from around the world. Almost tempting, though I take issue with the title - foreign from around the world, I suppose, rather than foreign from around Mars? Foreign from one country?

2. Used embalming scissors. There's really nothing I could possibly say about this.

3. A rubber band. I'm sorry - The rubber band.

4. Apparently, there really is no such thing as free advice.

5. Dick Cheney shot my toast. Never understimate the American entrepreneurial spirit.

Happiness is:

Occasionally, I spend a few minutes browsing the extensions page on the Firefox site. And lo! What goodness hath thou provided? Behold: Flashblock, which allows you to get rid of those Flash banner ads.

I am vindicated!

To those who scoff at the St. John's program, to those who question the utility of studying great books for four years: Ha! To those who wonder what one can do with an utterly useless degree: I present an excerpt from the cover story of this week's Newsweek:

Indeed, since 9/11, Cheney has struck a pose more familiar to readers of Greek tragedies than the daily Hotline. At times, he appears to be the lonely leader, brooding in his tent, knowing that doom may be inevitable, but that the battle must be fought, and that glory can be eternal.

I knew I never liked Achilleus! I knew it! Dick Cheney is Achilleus!

Forgive me if my reaction seems a bit too enthusiastic than the situation really calls for. But I'm rather starved for intellectual stimulation out here in the real world, and I get psyched whenever I see a classic referenced in mainstream entertainment. This author gets bonus points for not rubbing it in our faces: Look! Greek literature reference! See? See, I'm talking about Achilleus in The Odyssey! Look how smart I am!

And that pretty much sums up my excitement for the day.

The temperature is:

Cold. Very cold. I was good to myself and went running this morning. But I don't have a gym membership, so I'm reduced to outside, on the streets (or, if I wanted to hurt my ankles and/or knees yet again, the old cracked uneven sidewalks). I didn't run for long because A) I've gotten out of shape, and B) it was cold out. I knew the first item right off and figured the second out fairly quickly. So I just went hard for as long as I could then headed home. In a period of about twenty minutes I went from thinking: oh, hey, it's winter! to: argh hot sweaty sweatshirt OFF NOW.

I'm fairly certain my dog thinks I'm insane, but then again, I think the same of her. She had some sort of issue last night - we generally keep her shut in my older sisters now-unused bedroom at night, so that she (the dog, not the sister) does not go rummaging through the garbage or do other Undesireable Doggy Things. So, last night I sat down in there with her for a few minutes. She seemed fine, nice and settled, and I left. A few moments later she started barking a bit - unusual. So I go back in and sit with her some more, give her a nice belly rub (because what dog doesn't love a good belly rub?) and then she went insane. Just all the sudden jumped up and started doing this thing she does sometimes, which is best described as: Comically and maniacally racing around the house at top speed and fairly frequently sliding into doors and walls because we have hard-wood floors. Bewildered, I followed the frenetic four-legged furball downstairs, and let her run about for a few minutes. Then we went back up stairs, and she lay down in her 'den' (dog bed beneath the desk in the sisters room), and was done for the night.

These things, I do not understand.

It's a gift! A cowboy gift!

Interesting trend that MediaMatters touches on: Cheney did not, in fact, shoot his good buddy Whittington. Whittington got 'peppered'. He stepped into the line of fire. He was hit in the face. He found himself on the wrong end of Cheney's rifle, he caught a load of Cheney's birdshot*. My favorite is that "the birdshot came from a gun fired by the vice president...", courtesy of Nightly News on NBC.

Why all the wordplay? If it were just anyone, it would be: A man was accidentally shot by a fellow hunter. The victim wouldn't have been 'peppered', wouldn't have found himself on the wrong end of the gun, or anything. Generally in hunting accidents the blame falls to the shooter, and even the NRA has said that the final responsibility in this case lies on Cheney. Vice President Dick Cheney shot a man. By accident, yes, and it's very unfortunate, but let's stop trying to make it sound better than it really is.

*Regrettably, the immature part of my mind has informed me that there are a few unspeakably crude jokes that could be made using these phrasings and references to Brokeback Mountain. For the sake of all that is good in the world, my sanity, and cute fuzzy puppies, I'm trying very hard to pretend I never had that thought.

A Tale of Woe, Wind, and Whippets.

My mother is a substitute teacher, kindergarten through twelfth grade. I'm telling you this because, more often than not, she doesn't really know in advance when she's working. Sometimes she gets a call in the evening prior to working, sometimes a school will call even at 6:30 that morning to see if she's available. Last night when I was at work (6pm to 10pm), she apparently got a call from one of the local Catholic schools, to sub today. I'd planned to run some errands today, though, which I probably wouldn't have enough time to do if I had to wait until 3:30 to do them (as I have no vehicle of my own). So she woke me up a few minutes before she had to leave so I could chauffeur her to the high school.

Now, let me say in advance that I'm not a morning person. I may have mentioned it in the past, but I can't begin to stress enough how much of a morning person I'm not. I'm the type of person who, ideally, crawls out of bed at the earliest of 10am or so, stumbles into a 15-minute shower, emerges, dresses, drinks at least one large mug of strong coffee, and then thinks about waking up. So if you give me a few minutes to wake up, yes I can drive the car two miles back home down local roads, but anything more stressing than that is just a Bad Idea.

When I walked into the kitchen this morning, having donned a sweatshirt, knit cap, and my contact lenses, my mother inexplicably handed me a spare set of car keys. I pondered it for a moment and hung them up on the bulletin board with the other spares: it was eventually decided that my mother handed me those keys because (paraphrasing her, here, but fairly close to the original) she was losing her mind. This is relevant, because while I was there, I grabbed the spare keys to her car off the board, rather than grabbing mine off the table by the door, where I had left them last night after work. Following so far?

We cruise on up to the school and I deposit my mother amongst the throngs of green-sweater-clad teenagers (interlude: seriously, how much do you not miss high school? I still don't understand how they were the "best days of my life" or anything remotely close.) and depart. You can't make left turns at a number of stoplights in New Jersey (Why? Who knows!), so I zoom past the intersection, turn right onto a side street, and turn right onto the street I wanted to turn left on. I'm sitting at the light, and then a brick falls on my head (not literally, of course): I took the spare keys.

The spare car keys on the bulletin board are just that: spare car keys. They are an entirely seperate entity from, say, the spare house key that hangs on the next tack over.

The PG-13 rated version: Aw, CRAP!

I get home and pull into the drive. Hey, my parents forgot to let the dog back in, and she's really digging being alone outside in the gusty wind and slight rain! I check the garage in the vain hopes that there's a spare key outside the house, where you could get to it in the instances where you really need a spare key. No such luck. I call our neighbor down the street, who does not answer the phone, implying an absence from their house, meaning that they copy of the key that they have is probably locked away somewhere.

So, apologizing a thousand and twelve times to my sweet, innocent, adorable, and now soggy-around-the-edges pup, I chat briefly with my mother on the phone, cruise back up to the high school, sprint (literally) across the parking lot, meet her at the door, grab her house key, sprint back to the car, and possibly come close to breaking a traffic or three as I rush home to get my four-legged friend inside.

It could've been worse, of course. I didn't lose my pup at the airport. But still: today, she gets lots and lots of treats and love.

I'm so glad I live in the best country in the world.

The rest of the civilized world is, once more, pointing out to the US that really, since we've got such a little habit of invading and destroying sovereign nations in the name of liberty and democracy and freedom and justice, we really ought to have fair trials. This would mean a bit less with the prison camps and a bit more with, you know, the Constitution and due process and justice.

The situation in Guantanamo represents American hypocrisy at it's best (worst): We're working on fighting the Evil Terrorists who want to Hurt Us, and we're Defending Liberty and Fighting For Justice. In order to do so? Well, a lot of non-Christians get locked away and don't get a trial, but, hey, it's for the Greater Good of America, right?

Coming soon to a state near you

Yesterday, the New Jersey Supreme Court began deliberating on whether or not to continue an idiotic and bigotted policy of not permitting non-heterosexual couples to marry.

I sincerely hope that, just like allowing multi-racial marriages, people see that it will not destroy whatever remaining morality this country posesses.

Chocolate is 50% off today

And tomorrow, too, because judging from my brief visit to Target today, they need to clear out the Hallmark Day candy in order to make room for the Easter candy.

In February. Aargh.

When did time just become 'space between over-marketed holidays' rather than actual normal life?

How to get a job with the IRS

1. See an ad in the classifieds, go to jobs.irs.gov, and find whatever job it is you're qualified for. Spend half an hour filing out the online application and, in my case, calculating how many credit-hours I've actually racked up at school, and add in work experience. Submit the application and wait.
2. Recieve an e-mail telling you to report for testing. Print and fill out six government forms. Then, on the given day, get up at 5:30 in the morning, leave around six, drive for half an hour across state lines and down Roosevelt Boulevard, and then spend the next hour waiting to take a typing test.
3. After you pass the test, you'll have to do a few more things while you're there: go over your forms with someone, get fingerprinted, go over your forms again, and fill out a few more sheets of paperwork. Then you wait for the second email.
4. When that comes, you again trundle off down the Boulevard to get there at 7am, after having filled out more paperwork. You'll wait some more, fill out some more paperwork, have to make some changes to your paperwork, and finally get told to report for orientation and training in two weeks.
   
5. In two weeks, you'll go in again, to the real IRS place, not the personnel office, and at the sane hour of 6PM rather than 7AM. You'll spend about an hour filling out more paperwork, go for a walk around an impressively massive building which is just full of tax people. Bask in this: the building is the size of a warehouse, at least, and not a small one. It's enormous. And it's full of tax people. Then you'll watch a few more training videos and learn all about America's 87% tax-compliance rate and learn that taxing whiskey didn't really go over so well with corn farmers.
6. Then they'll talk to you about UNAX. UNAX is "unauthorized access" of tax records: anything that either you have no reason to be poking about it, and/or provides a "financial conflict of interests." They really, really don't want you to do this, and apparently if they even think you have gone snooping around, they'll try to dismiss you. This talk, coupled with the fact that I signed a paper saying that I resign already (if I don't pass the training) leads to...not a great deal of enthusiasm.
7. Look at the pay-scale sheet they gave you. Realize that you are a GS-4 employee and getting paid for training, so this time you're getting paid $12.74/hr for filling out government forms (including some things you've already filled out). Then realize that anything you do after 6PM (remember: training starts promptly at 6) also gets a night differential of 10%, and that means that in the past four hours you just got paid over fifty bucks.
8. Feel marginally better about working for governmental evil and being an enabler of policies you in no way agree with, and keep reminding yourself: $12.74 +10% = getting the hell out of Dodge a little bit faster.
   

Dog at the feet

I spent something like ten hours today priming the walls of my bedroom. Tomorrow, I put on the actual paint, and hopefully will finish up by Friday. Painting's not bad as far as working goes: it's mindless, so you can just turn on some music and mostly zone out, and time goes by fairly rapidly. After I finished for the night, I took a nice hot bath, and now I'm lying on the futon downstairs, with a warm dog at my feet. That's truly one of the best things in life, I think: dogs. They're just - well, dogs are just nice.

Room update, and a special surprise guest!

In the continuing Room Saga: Everything is prepped. The cracks and holes have been patched and sanded, the window frames have been washed, furniture has been pushed to the center of the room (as much as possible, which in my room means it's on one side), everything not-to-be-painted is covered in a dropcloth, nails have been wrenched for their holes, screws have been unscrewed, light-switch and electrical-outlet plates have been removed. I went up to the Cheap Shoe Store and purchased, for $9.99, a pair of canvas shoes I don't mind getting paint all over, because I just two weeks ago threw out all my crappy old shoes.

Tomorrow: I prime, and then I paint.

And now for something completely different: The CIA apparently murdered Princess Diana. To which I say: huh? If I was pressed, I could probably come up with a few people who would have wanted to see her dead (land-mine manufacturers? The Pope, aiming to reignite a centuries-old fued betwixt the Catholic and Anglican church? but if so, shouldn't he have done it publicly?), but the CIA? The American government?

These are important things to ponder.

To quote myself: Holy crap!

While browsing my site stats, I discovered that when you Google 'reasons to hate america' (sans quotes), this blog is the fifth hit. (And thank you to whoever the nice person from Abingdon in Oxfordshire is, because your referral page is what brought this to my attention.)

I'm uncertain if I should feel proud or a little bit guilty about that. This is the entry that comes up as the Google result, if you're interested, and I suppose if I give my entries titles such as 'reasons to hate America' I have to expect to get hits from people searching for reasons to hate America.

I am, in fact, planning on travelling to Ireland and then the UK (probably England, but possibly Wales, haven't figured that one out yet) for a number of months this spring. Now I get to imagine all sorts of horrible scenarios involving angry US passport-control folk in New York when I return, brandishing printouts of my blog at me. "You terrorist!" they'll screech. "You hate America! You said so yourself!"

"I do not hate America," I will calmly say, "though I may sometimes say I do out of anger. America is far to broad of a nation to hate entirely, and it is founded on concepts far to noble to inflict my wrath. I merely strongly object to the rampant idiocy so commonly accepted and embraced within the American public."

And by then, they'll have lost interest and will have waved me through, and I'll be one of those people who walks through the airport talking to themselves, only they're actually using their hands-free device, only I actually will be talking to myself.

I can't wait.

Plaster of Pain!

Room status: Imagine a number of things that could go wrong while emptying out a much-lived-in bedroom, then setting about repairing some gaping plaster damage.

That happened. But it's done now. Up next: sanding, buying paint, painting.

The Room Saga

In the rapidly-developing saga of Repainting My Bedroom, I think I've more or less arbitrarily settled on colors (Suntan Glow with Earth Tone trim, if you're curious). It's a beige-y brown-y, but warm and hopefully won't make my bedroom look like a giant hexagonal filing cabinet*.

Today I started doing the nessecary repair work on some cracks in one of the outer walls of my room, and and ended up discovering a massive part of the wall needs to be patched. There was an unfortunate incident a few years ago involving the Very Big Tree right outside my corner of the house, a Very Big Storm, and what's best referred to as "Roof, meet Mr. Massive Tree Limb." The parentals had thought that it had been repaired entirely but apparently not: a huge (well over a foot across) area of the paint was bulging and just flaked off, bringing copious quantities of plaster with it. The 'little repair job' got substantially less little today, but I'm not too stressing over it, if only because at this point, there's a big gaping hole in the wall that's got to be fixed.

Also, I gave up halfway through the 3rd quarter, but I found the Super Bowl commercials highly disappointing. The halftime show was - well, it wasn't bad and there were no naked breasts. For a group that's been around for something like two and a half times my age, the Stones are fairly decent.

Oops.

Never understimate the power of the free press.

What've they got against Norway? Also: Sweden and Denmark sharing an embassy building I can understand. Where did Chile come from in that mix, though?

Er, WHAT?

I said to my mother the other day: I don't like New Jersey. Really. I've only lived in one other state which admittedly was a very nice state (desert, mountains, beautiful sunsets, very far away from North Jersey), so I don't have that much to draw from, but I'm pretty sure I'm never going to settle down in good ol' Jersey.

But seriously, if I had to pick between Kansas and NJ, I'd pick Jersey in a heartbeat. Because something is in the water in Kansas, something bad. That's the only explanation I can think of for things like this.

This is the sound of time moving backwards

I just wrote a letter - an actual paper letter, to mail to a friend. I wrote it out by hand, put it in an envelope, addressed it, and stuck a stamp on it. Then it occured to me that that means it won't be recieved for what, a week? Huh.

Second order of business: In response to my previous post about WalMart, Ouroboros writes:

Go ladies! After a night of unprotected casual sex, you expect the corporate bogeyman of America to have your contraceptives, dammit!

I have a few responses to that, my dear buddy. For one: You have absolutely no idea and therefore no right to say that a woman seeking the morning-after pill had unprotected sex. Maybe the condom broke. Maybe she was raped. The point is: you don't know, and it's not particularly nice or intelligent to make judgements in ignorance.

Two: Regardless of how you feel about the ethical implications of this particular drug, the issue still stands: it's a medication (some could easily say an emergency medication: if a woman has a condition that makes pregnancy dangerous, but somehow slips up, she could need this medication), and a pharmacy is morally obligated to stock it. If you had strep throat, would it be acceptable for the pharmacist to say, 'nope, sorry, we're just fresh out of amoxicillin'? If someone had asthma and went in to get their fast-acting inhaler refilled, would it be acceptable for them to 'not have it in stock'? What about my grandmothers heart medication? Surely she could have prevented developing this condition if she were more carefuly (she smoked her whole life just about, probably never watched what she ate as much as she could have). How about vicodan for someone who lives with chronic pain - would you be upset if they didn't have that in stock?

You can't have double standards in medicine. Those in the medical field are obligated to help those who come to them. Of course this means trying to save lives, but also to alleviate pain and suffering, and improve the quality of life. If a woman doesn't want to be pregnant, then that's between her and her doctor, and not a single other person has the right to involve themselves in that.

Three women from Massachusetts are suing WalMart for not stocking the morning-after pill.

I wish them nothing but the best of luck, and congratulate them for standing up to a corporate giant.

Live! Adventures in Shipping!

A few weeks ago, I flew out to Santa Fe with the sole purpose of flying back to New Jersey, and spending somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred bucks to ship my stuff home from Santa Fe. A week or so ago I finally got all my boxes unpacked, except for one.

A small poster tube, containing (surprise!) posters, has stalled out in Albuquerque. It got seperated from its big brothers, those brown cardboard boxes that kept it protected.

Today, I call UPS. on the first try I mistakenly went for 'shipping' information, rather than 'tracking'. Hang up, try again, this time say 'tracking'. Please say your tracking number, thank you, please hold. I hold, give someone my name, and then they have me hold again and transfer me to someone else. Long story short: Because I shipped it through a college mail room, I'm not technically the shipper. Therefore in order to find my lost, lonely tube o' posters, I had to call the mailroom at St. John's and ask them to call UPS.

I'm interested in how long this will take to resolve.

Paint day!

A paint day is like a snow day, only it's really not. It consists thus far of me repaiting a rail on the wall of the kitchen and looking at paint samples for my bedroom.

And I wonder: why must paint colors have such odd names. I've got a little piece of paper with a list of colors and it reads like some demented gourmet recipe: Glazed pecan, crisp celery, spiced beige, chili pepper.

SOTU highlights

Cindy Sheehan was arrested for "protesting" at the State of the Union speech last night. She was a guest of Lynn Woolsey, and was wearing a t-shirt that said 'support our troops'. I won't say exactly what I think about this yet (though you can probably guess), other than to say that anyone who gets arrested in the Capital building and has the guts to tell the officers that they're idiots gets my support.

Bush said we're addicted to oil, thereby putting me in the uncomfortable position of actually agreeing with him on something. But the problem, in my eyes, is not our dependency on foreign oil, or oil in general: it's that we're addicted to copious, endless energy. We're a nation of cars that get 17 miles to the gallon. The problem's not going to be solved by shifting to a dependency on ethanol or natural gas or hydrogen or even electric cars (because that electricity has to come from somewhere). The problem will only be solved by a cultural change. Don't ask me how to do that: I don't know (give me a few years to work on it).

And amongst other issues: we're not going to clone human embryos because life is sacred. I wonder if Bush is willing to go and sit with, say, a soldier who served in Iraq and sustained a spinal injury, and tell him that life is sacred, so while we could be working on research that could cure paralysis (for example), we're not going to. We're also going to hire and train thousands more teachers for AP math and science courses, and ignore the fact that we could really use that money to, say, improve the public schools that aren't offering many AP courses because they're located in Inner City USA and don't have the money to help students graduate.