I’ve had something of a bimodal month.
12/31: Jamie died
1/15: Was issued a housing code violation for the Gasoline Alley-like state of my back yard. Given 10 days to repair the situation and get it inspected
1/17: Took the car into the shop on account of exhaust system noises that sounded indicative of me not being likely to pass the emissions inspection I had to have by the end of the month
1/18: Found out that the whole exhaust system had disintegrated and repairs would cost $1,000
1/19: Recieved housing code violation, realized I had much less than 10 days, thanks to the delay in my getting it.
1/20: Cleaned up and relandscaped the back yard. Despite soreness, felt strangely good for the exercise. Felt unstrangely bad on seeing the bill from the Home Despot.
1/21: Set myself on fire. No, really. Bumped into a space heater and ignighted part of my jacket. Didn’t notice for several minutes as my coat smouldered. Found a Nintendo DS game in the parking lot (Mario vs. Donkey Kong 3). Finished work on back yard. I think technically I had completed the work mandatated by the city on Friday night, but I wanted to reduce the chances of this ever happening again by sealing up everything that tends to accumulate drifting loose trash. Then it started to snow.
1/22: Found out that the inspector couldn’t come by today on account of the snow
1/24: Recieved another housing code violation, dated 1/22 (yes, after I’d cleaned the place up) for the same thing. Found out the inspector wasn’t going to be back in the office until Friday.
1/25: Recieved letter of abatement on the first violation.
1/26: Played phone tag with my doctor and the inspector both, as he’d gotten some blood test results back (from October; mix-up at the lab), and she was in a meeting all day. Told that the second notice was the result of some bad timing, and that, though I didn’t have to do anything, she had to come back and take more photos of my yard. She also told me that I had to get rid of the boxes under my porch. As these boxes do not exist, and one of Saturday’s repairs was to seal up the space under the porch, I suspect she went to the wrong house (My next-door neighbors do have some boxes under their porch), but that she’d take care of it.
1/27: Turned 28. The love of my life gave me a Nintendo Wii. Got happy and forgot my troubles for a bit. Got drunk and remembered them, but only for a bit. At any rate, there was a whole lot of me being happy going around. I mean, a Nintendo Wii is one of the best presents you can get from someone, aside from a pony, and I don’t really want a pony anyway. And I’d have been happy enough just to spend the day with her, so this was like ultimate happiness on top of ultimate happiness. Zelda is hard when you’re left-handed. I bet this is how generations of Right-handed gamers felt trying to learn to use a thumbstick with their left hand.
1/28: Dinner with my parents, who gave me a cordless Dremmel tool. Damned fine dinner too. Still have leftovers. Sneezed violently and somehow bruised my throat. Gave Mario vs. Donkey Kong 3 to my sister.
1/30: Went to Target in search of band aids and Wii/Gamecube games. Bought a new Optimus Prime (My third in the past year, though I still regret not having bought the Energon version. This one was a bit crap, but he came with a Megatron and a Bonus DVD. Ended up with $1.68 on the Target giftcard I got for Christmas. Tried to buy a cup of coffee at the Target Starbucks with the target giftcard and a Starbucks gift card. Barrista ran them through in the wrong order, so now I have a Target gift card with $1.68 on it and a Starbucks gift card with $6 on it, and still have to tote both of them around.
1/31: I’ll tell you later.
But let me tell you. The Wii is FUN. I’ll upload a picture of My Mii once I work out how to get one without buying a bluteooth card for my computer.
Month: January 2007
IT56: And I thought Laywering Was A Rough Profession
I’ve actually got several friends in the insurance industry. Not that it’s germane or anything. But I saw this a while ago:
I’m not going to tell you what an alligator savagely rogering an umpire has to do with insurance reform. You’re just going to have to read the article for yourself.
IT55:Today I set my coat on fire. I was wearing it at the time.
Seen outside a Circuit City…
<Comic_Store_Guy_Voice>Worst. Mozilla. Clone. Ever.</Comic_Store_Guy_Voice>
IT54: Suck that, Socrates
From google news…
They’re Pro-Bush and Pro-Kerry at the same time? He’s also accused of BLOWING MY MIND
Read This 2
I swear, what kind of country is this?, Leonard Pitts Jr.
So, as you may have heard, we’ve got a new Congress. The Washington Post had a very poorly thought out picture of Speaker Pelosi on the front page of the Style section which will probably be a future IT.
You may also have heard that a certain congressman swore his (not actually legally mandated) oath not on the traditional bible, but on Thomas Jefferson’s Quran, prompting speculation that Thomas Jefferson owned a Quran.
Anyway, this is all little more than a historical footnote, as it wasn’t really an oath required by law, and it’s not like lawmakers haven’t been sworn in on other things before. Pierce took the presidential oath of office on a law book. In fact, at the same time as Congressman Ellison was being sworn in on a Quran, a representative from Hawaii was being sworn in on nothing at all.
But, as always happens, a couple of people went apewire. In an act that threatens to turn “macacanated” into a word, Rep. Virgil Goode (R-Va) macacanated Ellison by launching a tirade about how we need to tighten immigration laws to stop muslims from being elected by the will of the people. Ellison is a native-born American. I’m guessing he’s a third or fourth generation native-born American (Admittedly, I haven’t looked into it).
The most mind-breaking attack, and the reason I am pointing you toward Mr. Pitts’s article, is that of Roy Moore, who, despite his name sounding like it, is not a Wild West-era Texas Hangin’ Judge, but rather the Alabama judge who causes all that commotion a while back over a big rock with the ten commandments engraved in them.
He claimed that freedom of religion demanded that Ellison be blocked from using a Quran (Quick precis: “<Roy_Moore_Voice>In America, we have freedom of religion. In Islam, you don’t. Therefore Islam is incompatible with America</Roy_Moore_Voice>”). The argument isn’t too far afield from the ones that (my dad tells me) were made when Kennedy was running for President — that a Catholic would be bound by his faith to do whatever the Pope told him to, Constitution and the good of America be damned. Which is not a bad argument for limiting positions of power to atheists, but no one’s making that argument (well, except for the atheists, but they’ve got a vested interest).
I think I’m with Pitts on this one: “Moore’s argument refutes itself so effectively he must have been drinking when he wrote it.”
Pitts goes on to talk about the “strain of intolerance” that hides out inthe American spirit. I think he’s missing something important, though. This doesn’t feel like real intolerance to me. It doesn’t feel like real bigotry. Why? Because it’s too flavor-of-the-weeky. It’s not really that we’ve got a deep-down hatred of muslims, or even that we’re all secretly waiting to reveal our prejudice against the abstract “Other”. Right now, it’s Islam that piques our fear. It used to be Communism. And so on and so on. Actually, I think America’s been pretty good on the actual longstanding-prejudice front. You don’t see “No Irish Need Apply” signs any more. We’ve stopped systematically erradicating our aboriginal population. We’ve got one or two longstanding racial problems, but we’ve kept them on a comparatively low simmer, nothing like the many years of institutionalized oppression in South Africa. Nothing like what went on in Europe in the early 40s. Real prejudice, real bigotry, is something very deep and longstanding. It’s the way your grandmother uses the “N-Word”, because she’s been using it since she was a little girl and her daddy always used it — and she can’t even quite compute that it’s wrong to use it. That’s why they’re so insidious and hard to get rid of — they’re burned in, and the people who have them don’t even feel that they’re wrong.
No, I think that prejudice and bigotry are just convenient labels for what we’re really very susceptible to: Insane Fearmongering. We weren’t raised this way. And we know things oughtn’t to be this way. Some folks justify this (Roy Moore did) by trying to say that these are special circumstances — that as it happens, we’re at war with Islam right now (We’re not, of course, but the people doing the fearmongering either think we are, or want us to think we are), so it’s “justified in this special case”. That’s totally bogus, of course, but it’s telling to me that they think they need this justification. Real racists don’t feel the need to excuse or apologize for their racism. They may try to “scientifically” prove the white man superior or the black man inferior (Watch one of them try it some time, it’s pretty funny), but they’ll always start from the assumption that they aren’t making an extraordinary claim, that their racist beliefs are obvious and inherently good. I don’t think I recall ever having a notion of a person “becoming” a racist before — racists were racists because they’d been raised that way. Now, though, we have people who weren’t raised that way, people who never had any problem with this culture and this faith before, who, one day in September, half a dozen years ago, suddenly developed an unjustified distaste for a certain religion. What we have here is people who quite clearly understand that they are standing in the face of what we as Americans are supposed to believe in — they present this sort of prejudice as a necessary evil (Actually, read that last clause twice, once with the emphasis on “necessary” and once with it on “evil”). That is, they know it’s wrong, but they feel like they have to do it anyway.
I’m not sure which is worse, now that I think about it.
IT53: Would You Like To Play A Game?
And in this corner, weighing in at 2.2 tons, Colossus “The Forbin” Project!
The Thought That Counts
This Christmas, I tried to be all subtle about what I wanted, thinking I was too old to go around making Christmas lists. As it turns out, subtlty is not my strong suit. Seems that after my long stint as a Person of Little Income, I’m not very comfortable asking for things I could do without or buy myself. In fact, it’s really difficult for me to write this now. Just feels sort of childish.
But anyway, the point of this little story is that I’ve got a birthday coming up. This post is not me asking for stuff. This post is just to document some things I’d really like to have. Also, I’ll point out that I’ve had an amazon.com wishlist hiding behind one of those little badges on the left side of the screen just about ever since I switched to Movable Type.
So, if you were a person looking to get me something but you don’t know what I’d like, here are some things I’d like. Don’t feel yourself constrained to this list in any way. And if you aren’t looking to get me something, then please don’t. The last thing I need is a perfunctory gift that gives me the feeling that you didn’t want to get me anything but felt duty-bound to do so.
- A cordless dremmel tool, having burned out my corded dremmel knock-off last year
- A Nintendo Wii & the new Zelda Game, because these are so hard to get that I ought to start asking now if I want to get one in time for next Christmas.
- A Nintendo DS *amp; the new Super Mario game, the new DS Zelda game, or the not-so-new Metroid game, because every person in Japan has three of them by now, and I’m jealous
- A Bluetooth Headset so that I do not crash my car while talking on the phone. Don’t care much about the brand per se, so long as it’s a good unit. The kind that has a ring to clip over your ear, not the kind that holds itself up by your ear canal.
- A new car, because mine is broken
- Transformers Milennium Falcon It transforms into Han and Chewie robots. How cool is that?
- A Red Ryder carbine-action, two hundred shot Range Model air rifle BB gun with a compass in the stock and a thing which tells time –wait. On second thought, naah. I’d shoot my eye out.
In Loving Memory
In the summer of 1991, my parents brought Jamie home, concealed in a grocery sack. He cost $25. My sister paid. Jamie was a small black-and-white kitten with a spot on his upper lip that looked like a half-Hitler-moustache. He was named for a character from Doctor Who. He enjoyed sitting on my father’s chest when he sat in his recliner, and he enjoyed hiding on the chairs in the dining room and swatting at the dogs as they walked by. He developed a wanderlust in his middle years and was constantly trying to slip out of the house. He also enjoyed catnip.
Jamie was personable, reasonably outgoing, and very vocal. He got along well with pets older than he was. When he was small, he had a bad habit of falling into the toilet.
Some time last year, he was diagnosed with diabetes, and entered into a slow decline. Jamie passed away at 8:45 PM on New Year’s Eve. He was 15 years old.
In Loving Memory, Jamie The Cat Raszewski, July 1991-December 31, 2006