Memnison Journal

Like hell.  More below the cut.

The Bollywood version (sort of) of THRILLER.  (youtube)

Fake anti-GOP ad taking off on the ghastly Corker one (see above quote) (youtube)
Jay Lake on the unreality-based administration.  Whoops, there goes the bus off a cliff…

I swear I have no idea as to where my mind is some days.  I caught the stuff in this post about people I know moving, and totally missed the more universally interesting stuff further down about Woodland Hills Church.  Those guys sound like they have their head on straight, and thanks to Ann Totusek for giving me a wake-up call.  Er, email.

MEHLMAN: Well I thought some of the issues raised in that ad, the issue of taxes, I think those are fair issues, on the other hand I personally would not have put that ad up.

SCHIEFFER: But what does that say, you talk about “values” and stuff, that you’re taking advantage of an ad when you know what it says is wrong and you admit that it ought not to be that way but you’re willing to take advantage of it.

…filed under ‘alternate history of mass transit.”

One of the things that most people in the ‘first world’ don’t think about; if your cost of gas is bad, what’s it like in the third world, where it’s more expensive still for people who don’t have the resources to pay the price?

“You ought to just back off, take a look at it, relax, understand that it’s complicated, it’s difficult. Honorable people are working on these things together. There isn’t any daylight between them.”

Donald Rumsfeld
Press Conference
October 26, 2006

“The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Conduct of Life
1860

“We are all now BT employees. And we’ll all get paid in pounds, at par.”

Bruce Schneier,
after his business was bought by British Telecom for $20 million this week.

I’ve passed off the messed-up DVD player to a friend who is a serious techie in these parts, and he’s finished the capacitor replacement. Haven’t hooked it back up, but I trust that he knows what he’s doing!

I’m also looking at a replacement for the dead DVD recorder in the living room, and I’ve found one that will play pretty much anything you throw at it, including other regions and PAL (the Philips 3390) for around $140, so that goes on a Daddy Wishlist. There’s Christmas, and my birthday (50th) in February, so I imagine that it will come up at some point. Or it becomes a general family present or something.

Most of the rest of mine is books and DVDs - it’s a family joke that my interest-stuff is limited to that and some high-tech occasional toys. Really, my tastes are limited, and I don’t buy much for myself.

Susan and her mom are strongly talking about Buying Me Clothes for Christmas, which is not a popular idea with me; I had too much of that as a kid. That, or stuff that was obviously terribly immature for me - like The Golden Book of Science at the age of 12. This was more a failure of imagination on the present-buyers’ parts.

Susan’s Wishlist is also up, and I’m scanning it for stuff for her - a lot of crafty stuff there. Last year, Meredith yelled about Not Getting Any Toys, and God Forbid that Toys-R-Us goes out of business or something - she’s already sent one letter to Santa and is musing about the Things She Left Out.

Also, she’s been getting a couple of I Care packages from Sissy - little stuff, but believe me, it’s a Big Deal to a little girl who aches for Sissy.

I’m skipping over a lot of political polemic these days - frankly, y’all know where I stand, and listening to me gnash my teeth over mud, crud, lies and incompetence probably gets boring, and it sucks up my time to research and write it. Probably jumps my blood pressure - not usually a problem, but still. In general, the level of debate has been bad in the past, but this is right out of Nightmareland.

The worst is that it’s so bare-open as to how many people are seriously out of contact with reality. The sky in their world has to be paisley or else everything falls apart.

Great strides are being made on the organization front at work and home; it’s the sort of thing that isn’t so obvious to the eye, but finding things and dealing with things is not such a scattered mess, and less so with every day I crank on it.

In any event, we will be up in front of the house TV on November 7th, watching things closely.

Phil Friedman aka Cyotee has died - he’d been in crappy health for a long time, progressively looking worse every time I’d catch him at a con in recent years, but I didn’t expect this so soon.  My deep regrets to all of his nearest and dearest, and his many friends.

Phil used to be one of my regulars at gaming in the mid-1980s, and I saw dramatically less of him when I moved away from Chicago to Wisconsin, and again when I moved Out Here to the western suburbs. He will be missed.

I won’t put the rest of you through this: if you’re curious, see if any of this binks into your brain from 1960s and ’70s Dayton, Ohio. Otherwise, try another rock:

• Anna Russell, satirical diva of classical music, dies at 94.
• Why it’s ‘Canada Dry.’
• Secretary of State Blackwell of Ohio loses the endorsement of the Findlay Courier, a very Republican paper - because of his nasty, personal campaigning in a losing effort to become Ohio’s next governor.

The other day, I was trying to assemble a set of terms of Bushit Bingo, where you have Bingo cards with different Bush common statements on them, and you pass them out before a speech to see who can Bingo on the terms in the speech.  Bush was trying to get through an hour-long press conference without really saying anything aside of ’stay the course’ and I noticed that ‘the stakes’ kept coming up over and over.

The GOP is about to run one last scare-the-crap commercial on TV that basically suggests  that Osama has suitcase nukes, and if you don’t vote for us, he’ll use them.  On you.  And boy, did it ever remind me of the infamous Daisy commercial that LBJ used.

This link gives you both the GOP on from 2006 and the Daisy from 1964.

If I’d have been of age in 1964, I probably would have voted for Goldwater then, and I remember seeing this commercial then.   I have since been disgusted beyond measure with the Johnson campaign for that election, and again with the Republicans this time.

Both are witless fearmongering.  If Osama had suitcase nukes, he would have used them by now - smuggled in over our porous borders, thanks to the people who don’t want to tighten them up because it would upset business tycoons. And I, unlike Bush, don’t believe anything bin Laden says for public consumption.  Ever.

From the Ohio Trip: Mere and I at the Clifton Mill.  I had my reading glasses on, so I look a bit odd.   More photos tomorrow.