Posted by mofembot
Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:29:00 GMT
I wrote a little nothing of a diary over on DailyKos entitled The casino spam on my website, in which I pasted, verbatim, some choice morsels that had been taking the place of genuine feedback on this site.—Well, okay, “taking the place of” is not entirely accurate, given that I’ve gotten all of two (count ‘em 2!) genuine comments since starting this thing.
In any event, they were cluttering up my space and filling me first with false hopes of feedback, and then with a certain degree of outrage: how the hell do the spammers do this? And what was the point of sending me completely unreadable crap? (The casino spam was at least kind of coherent.)
—to be continued—
Well, maybe not. Go read the DailyKos diary and then tell me I should continue.
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Posted by mofembot
Fri, 02 Jan 2009 08:01:00 GMT
Yes, indeed, I am on a roll, if posting two days in a row counts as a roll.
I had a strange dream the night of December 30–31. As with most dreams, I don’t remember too much of it, although this one involved a sort of near-vertical tramway or roller-coaster kind of conveyance to the top of a mountain. Riding it was fun (at least going down). To take it up, however, one had to take an elevator to get to the “ride” platform. It was while waiting for this elevator on the lower level that I ended up speaking to Condoleezza Rice. (No, her guest appearance did not automatically place this dream into the nightmare category.)
She had separated herself from a group of people (stage right) who had been jeering her (no great surprise there) and was standing in front of the middle elevator of the bank of three. I was stage left and moving toward the middle elevator anyway, and here was my chance to tell her what I thought of BushCo and national security and foreign policy (lack thereof) in particular. What did I say?
“Dr. Rice,” I said as we entered the elevator together (I am known for my politeness on the boards that I frequent). She turned toward me, and before I could launch into a well-deserved critique, asked me if I knew what the parking rates were.
I did not know. Ignorance but rarely stops me from providing an answer, however, so as we stepped off the elevator on the upper floor, I hazarded a guess that she (as someone parked in long-term parking) would be paying in the neighborhood of $2.00 an hour. She looked relieved, and then moved off into the swirling Dream Medium. I tried to follow her, but somehow could not (it is apparently against the rules). I ended up spending the rest of my dream trying to get aboard the Up tramway, sliding off of the track….
Thinking back, I wonder if my customary politeness and more particularly my desire to always have an answer at the ready deprived me of the chance to light into “Dr. Rice” for the Bush administration’s astonishing and infuriating malfeasance. I was willing to let a bogus, fact-free “answer” take the place of righteous indignation.
On the other hand, I was probably completely wrong about the parking rates, which were likely much higher. Ha! Ha! Vengeance was mine after all!
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Posted by mofembot
Thu, 01 Jan 2009 10:31:00 GMT
On this First Day of 2009, I am answering the exigencies of at least one resolution—the one to blog more often. And yes, one post on New Year’s Day doth not a fulfillèd resolution make, not by a long shot. My resolution is open-ended: I haven’t committed myself to writing on a daily basis, although that could be thought of as ideal (or not). I’m gunning for at least once a week. My record last year was… pathetic. Further, I’m going to try to do more original writing here, rather than simply porting over DailyKos diaries or entries from other venues.
I am also going to try to work on my book in a more regular and Very Serious way. I am restructuring the book’s organization. I would like to get this thing published while people still have money to buy it. (Sighhhh.)
I have some other resolutions as well, but I am not quite ready to write about them. I’d like to see if they stand a snowball’s chance in the usual place of actually occurring, rather than opening myself to Torment and Ridicule. I haven’t had a great deal of success with the whole resolution thing, but some improvement in certain areas, even if only temporary and largely occurring in the first part of the year (okay, the first week of January), is better than doing nothing at all. I think.
So. Here we are in 2009. We have another 19 days to go before Obama is sworn in and solves all of the problems he’s inherited from BushCo and ushers the entire world into a Golden Era of Peace and Prosperity. (No, I am sober.)
I want to go on record here, right now, that I agree with Bob Herbert’s most recent New York Times column: Bush should not be allowed to slink off quietly into the sunset. He and his band of merry mercenary miscreants need to be brought to justice. Equal justice under law isn’t just a nice slogan on the façade of the Supreme Court building. (Well, let me revise that: it shouldn’t be just a nice slogan.) I am not interested in vengeance, I am interested in restoring America to moral good health: without a full accounting, there can be no remediation. Without justice, all of America becomes complicit in the many crimes BushCo has committed ‘lo these past eight extremely long years.
I can dream, can’t I? (Yes.)
While I’m dreaming here, I am also going to hope that the looming global economic catastrophe can be averted. And that the looming global environmental catastrophe can be mitigated. And that I can lose some weight.
Bonne année, tout le monde.
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Posted by mofembot
Sun, 28 Sep 2008 10:35:00 GMT
Just one of those focus-free kinds of days following a big push to meet a ridiculously tight deadline. I’m feeling the usual spasm of guilt for not having written anything for-frickin’ ever on this site, and I am similarly feeling that I ought to make a Firm Resolution to Do Better. I should be writing more.
Since the last time I made an entry here, I have been to Russia and the Baltic States with my parents and husband and one out of three daughters. (Well, okay, husband and daughter went only to Russia and to Riga.) The days/hours leading up to our departure were filled with getting work done for my client, and the days/hours after our return were spent in similar fashion right up to this past Friday’s deadline.—And with running back and forth to the Marseille airport and environs (Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday). That’s a lot of running around, especially when I include the side-trip taking my parents to the Pont du Gard (fabulous Roman aqueduct) and Nîmes after dropping off daughter at school and hubby at airport on Monday.
I am tired, dissatisfied with my inability to get Truly Organized (where the hell did I put those grommets???)… and trying hard not to be too worried about the global financial meltdown and its possible implications for future employment, the upcoming US election, health, and so on.
Despite my instincts for preserving my deathless prose, this is one entry that may indeed find itself on the cutting-room floor. Bleargh.
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Posted by mofembot
Tue, 15 Jul 2008 06:18:00 GMT
I nearly sprained an ankle after getting off the bus this morning at work. That would be the last thing I need. But then, the last thing I’d need would be a multiple-hours-long visit to a German emergency room, especially on a day when I need to get a lot of work done. Of course, the last thing I’d really need is for the sprain to turn out to be a broken ankle and to end up at the end of a very long day on crutches, which would make getting to the airport on Saturday problematic, given that I have to haul my luggage and all.
If I think of it, however, the last thing I’d need is for the ankle-plastering technician or the attending ER physician notice something odd about my [indeterminate body part], order some tests a la “House,” and discover that I have some kind of rare, life-threatening disease. Of course, the last thing I’d need in this scenario is to find myself surrounded by specialists, all of whom would be talking to one another in German, casting glances my way or looking at x-rays or scans or lab results and shaking their Teutonic heads in an ominous fashion. Occasionally one of them would think to say something to me in heavily-accented English, and it would be something like, “Ve vere chust discussing your case.” I don’t know if I would have the nerve to roll my eyes and give a retort along the lines of “it would be strange if you weren’t discussing my case,” because the last thing I need is to offend the One Medical Expert who could save my life… if only s/he found my case “interesting enough” (which is apparently the fictional House’s main criterion).
This all said, the last thing I’d need is to find out that the typo on my international health insurance card invalidates it at the German ER, which would mean that I would have to cough up the cash for all the tests and treatments and then hope to get reimbursed later on.
So it’s just as well that I managed to avoid spraining my ankle this morning.
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Posted by mofembot
Thu, 01 May 2008 09:14:00 GMT
Well, I let the entire month of April slide by without posting anything here. I’ve been busy (the omni-excuse, n’est-ce pas?). I have just shipped off the last file to my current client, and given that it’s May Day (and that most of France, hopefully including my client, will be “taking the pont” tomorrow), I have a little time to breathe. (Especially if I ignore certain, um, chores. But I can’t call any government agencies or businesses or schools today, yippee!)
One thing I’ve been doing is culling some of my comments from the Salt Lake Tribune editorial pages and on DailyKos, with the idea in mind that sometime “soon” I will start posting the “best of.” I’m happy to report that the majority of my Tribune comments get good marks from readers. The only consistent exception is when I share my opinion about immigration. Apparently believing in the inherent humanity of hispanics, even those who enter the U.S. illegally, is grounds for Umbrage (as is, at least recently, the desire to see Due Process applied even for the FLDS in Texas). Anyway, my highest-rated comments are usually pithy one- or two-liners, and it’s not exactly clear to me how well they will come across in a “best of” without supplying some sort of context. We shall see.
Apart from the occasional diary on DailyKos, the majority of my comments are found in the weekday feature “Cheers and Jeers,” and as many of these are of a semi- or outright autobiographical nature, I’m going to gather them together in a personal history section. My other comments are usually short rants in response to Cost of Living & Hunger and U.S. Health Care issues; they’ll get put with the Tribune political stuff.
All of this means, dear reader, that I probably need to re-structure this site a bit. I certainly have to do so with nonlynnear.com. It really isn’t set up to handle book chapters and such… and yes, I’ve been something of a slug about Dying School. I spent a huge chunk of time gathering and redacting material about La Convention (dealing with the school’s legal status) during the first quarter of 2008, but it’s not quite in shape to publish on-line just yet. Still lots and lots of work to do, alas. Hopefully I will make a little headway this weekend.
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Posted by mofembot
Thu, 06 Mar 2008 07:38:00 GMT
DailyKos’s Kagro X’s frontpage coverage about reporters assigned to cover the Clinton campaign in Austin being relegated to using a men’s room as their press headquarters inspired me to waste a dkos diary take on the persona of intrepid reporter Belle LaTrine, a stringer working on rotation for Reuters (in other words, a “roto-Reuter”). Here is her report.
All of the obvious jokes and puns had been swirling around for quite a while by the time I arrived at the Men’s Press Room in Austin. Everyone seemed wiped out, and none of the formerly-pampered reporters wanted to talk to me. I was finally able to persuade the no. 2 man, whom I’ll call “John,” to open up. He was clear about the terms, however: “One more joke about how my career has gone down the toilet, and I’m outta here.”
I promised to be good. I asked John about the most annoying aspects of working in a lavatory. The question seemed to unblock something inside, and he replied somewhat on the loud side, “It echoes in here (here here). I mean, it’s floor-to-ceiling tile (tile tile) and it really stinks (stinks stinks) trying to talk to people (people people) without going nuts (nuts nuts).”
He lowered his voice. “Another thing is, they didn’t tell the cleaning staff that we’d be in here. So every hour on the hour, these guys come in with mops and buckets and clean everything again. The fumes from the bleach and cleansers are awful. When I tried to stop one of them from spraying the sink nearest to me, she said, ‘No one told me about this, mister, and I’ll get fired if I don’t do my job. And by the way, you misspelled ‘constipated.’”
Asked if he thought the Clinton campaign might be negatively impacted by having put the press in the restroom, John pooh-poohed the idea, but admitted that Hillary’s press liaison was in deep doo-doo. “I mean, treating us like sh*t is not the way to get Hillary good press.” Did he have any idea why the decision was made? “No, but I’m sure there must be reasons to which we are not privy.”
As I looked around the commodious restroom-turned-press room, I was pretty bowled over about how nice the non-porcelain furniture seemed to be. John almost cheerfully agreed: “Yeah, they let us pick what we wanted after showing us a bunch of chairs and stool samples and stuff.” But when I asked John who the Head reporter was, he just gave me an ugly look. And then a cleaning lady came in and looked over John’s shoulder at his laptop screen. “You spelled ‘flatulence’ wrong,” she said.
It was clear that it was time for me to go, but I stalled a little.
“One last question: What happens when you need to take a leak?”
He flushed unhappily. “Just Depends®.”
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Posted by mofembot
Sat, 23 Feb 2008 09:51:00 GMT
“If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.”
Hello out there: this is not an “either-or” proposition.
Clichés really aren’t my cup of tea, but if I had a buck for every time I’ve read or heard a Republican pundit or politician misuse the adage, “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime,” I’d be sitting pretty (instead of sitting here in rumpled disarray in the middle of nowhere in rural France).
I am not fond of false dichotomies, especially ones that have an impact on public policy. The fish adage has been used by conservative windbags to try to portray liberals’ views of public assistance as one neverending fish-handout on a grand scale. But nowhere have I found even one instance of progressive, liberal public policy that advocates the dole. The truth is, liberals understand something that the well-fed bottom-feeding conservatives don’t seem able to grasp:
Sometimes you have to feed people so they’ll be able (to learn) to fish.
Many countries, France included, seem to understand this idea better. For example, I was unemployed for a short while, and when I finally got a job (or, more accurately, created my own company), my unemployment payments stopped, naturally enough. But to my utter astonishment, I was rewarded for finding a job: I received several months of unemployment benefits as a lump sum. It was almost as if the French government understood that many people returning to work after being jobless might have job-related costs, such as having having to put down money on a means of transportation to work, or having to pay a deposit on an apartment in a new location near work, or even needing to buy work-appropriate clothing.
Can you imagine the difference that this kind of policy would make in the lives of poor Americans?
“Think-tank” conservatives swimming in their own brine seem to think it’s possible to skip the “feed” part and jump straight to the “teach.” “Workfare” requirements that do not take into account childcare and transportation issues are a classic example of this unrealistic and punitive mindset.
Not long ago, a New York Times article profiled the heartless and ludicrous policy of requiring single parents (usually moms) on welfare to “reimburse” the state for whatever amount of child support they receive. The fact that nearly all of these low-income recipients of child support remain below the poverty line is irrelevant to the legislative barracudas who came up with this rule.
More recently, Paul Krugman wrote a column highlighting the devasting effects of childhood poverty, showing the indisputable link between the failure of our society to feed fish to children in need and those children’s subsequent difficulties in learning to fish for themselves.
Despite the new evidence Krugman cites (which builds upon a great deal of earlier research), right-wingers will still howl about “socialism” and about how “lazy poor people have a great life on the dole so they don’t want to work” and about how “‘welfare queens’ are stealing from taxpayers,” infinitum ad nauseam.
The sad truth is that many reasonably decent, moral folk still unthinkingly swallow this arch-conservative fish tale – hook, line, and sinker.
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Posted by mofembot
Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:25:00 GMT
Hardly a day goes by when I don’t read yet another story about how our brave soldiers and veterans are being cheated out of promised health care and other benefits by the Bush administration, which has consistently cut funding throughout the 7+ miserable years of its existence. It is already a national disgrace that on any given night, more than 195,000 vets are homeless, and a larger number of them are unemployed. But what is truly unconscionable is that the Bush administration is using our tax money to pay lawyers to fight against veterans’ legitimate claims of neglect and unlawful denial of services: check out this recent article, and this report. (Be sure to check on some of the links accompanying the report.) When this story was first discussed on DailyKos, I commented, “Where can BushCo even find lawyers slimy enough to argue such immoral nonsense?”*
This flagrant violation of fairness and decency makes me livid.
In their wrongheaded quest to kill good government, Bush and his minions are willing to renege on the promises they made to induce our young men and women to sign up for military service. They have extended people’s tours of duty through “stop-loss” orders, failed to provide body armor and armored vehicles (yes, even now, almost 5 years since invading Iraq, there are still soldiers missing equipment or using inadequate equipment), failed to protect soldiers’ homes from foreclosure, failed to prosecute those who illegally refuse to rehire vets … but cheating wounded and traumatized veterans out of needed treatment is the lowest of the low, part and parcel with failing to provide adequate funding to VA hospitals and other treatment facilities.
Bush apparently doesn’t care that it costs more than $220,000 a minute to prosecute his illegal and immoral war in Iraq (perhaps because a significant percentage of this money goes to his corporate cronies), but apparently he is unwilling to spend what it takes to keep our nation’s promises to its soldiers.
Remember the G.I. Bill? Some members of Congress have proposed a new G.I. Bill to reward current vets for their wartime service. This is an excellent idea, just as was the original G.I. Bill, but one that will never come to fruition until after Bush leaves office†. The man who did not bother to fulfill his duty to the Texas Air National Guard doesn’t lose any sleep over failing to fulfill his obligations to those who have put their lives on the line to do their duty: one of the most shameful chapters in a book brimming with shameful chapters.
*Answer: Pat Robertson’s Regent University School of Law.
†Preferably by being impeached, tried, convicted, and removed from office for high crimes and misdemeanors, and then shipped off to The Hague to be tried for war crimes… but given the spinelessness of Congress, the dream of justice remains only a dream. January 9, 2009 cannot come soon enough (assuming a fair election).
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Posted by mofembot
Thu, 21 Feb 2008 09:38:00 GMT
Nod to Mark Twain for the title. A version of this piece appeared a couple of days ago both in an “open thread,” and as an extended comment in Cheers & Jeers, a regular DailyKos feature.
I have traveled to many countries (upwards of 30 by now), and have used many different models of toilet*, yet have never, ever seen toilets like these outside of Germany. To be brief and blunt… well, there’s this sort of viewing platform: a large, almost flat area in the bowl. It is almost impossible to Evacuate one’s Bowel without the opportunity to critically examine the product.
Despite the ease with which this design permits collecting a stool sample for one’s gastroenterologist, I found (and still find) this quite repellent. But being of a somewhat imaginative bent, I thought that perhaps it would make sense to incorporate some 21st-century features into this ubiquitous model… something I would be tempted to call the ViewMeister 2000, for example.
The new model would incorporate all the (waterproof) hardware necessary to facilitate a biometric readout of salient stool conditions (weight, density, laser-based “topographical” measurement). The inside toilet lid could have color charts and descriptions of “healthy” and “unhealthy” stools. Given how much my German colleagues (and my landlady and her family) seem to love all that is high-tech, this idea cannot help but come out okay in the end.
I did ask a German colleague about the rationale behind the design. Apparently the issue of “splashback” is intolerable to the German mind, much moreso than any problems with odor and flat-out bizarreness. (In fairness, the toilets at work are “normal.”)
*I have not always been successful with certain foreign toilets. Years ago, I had to ask someone how to flush a toilet in France: it just was not obvious at all. I’d looked for a pull-chain, a pull-up knob, a push-down button, a US-style handle, a button on the floor, a built-into-the-tank-top push-down flap… to no avail. There was this little hard-to-see rod on the side… very embarrassing.
PS: I have never figured out bidets. And my favorite foreign toilets are the ones in Turkey, which incorporate a “normal” toilet design with the “best of the bidet,” as it were.
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