- I know I should drink more water, but the water in this building tastes disgusting. I have to add Emergen-C to it to make it palatable. Even then, I can taste the staleness. Ugh.
- Why do all libraries smell like pee?
- I’m still getting more traffic to my pets’ website from some damned Usenet post about Puggles, than I am any other source. Puggles, I tell you!
- Dark chocolate covered espresso beans are a gift from the gods.
- I’m sick of the political bickering on various art mail lists. Specifically, I’m fed up with people who freak out at the merest mention of anything that might be even remotely political in nature. I’m amazed at the amount of time and effort that gets wasted in whinging about it. Person Y says X. Twenty people are loudly offended by it and rush to put the smack-down on Person Y, claiming that she’s stomping all over their right to have a peaceful list experience. Hello? Who, exactly, is creating an unpeaceful list experience? Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. So, anyway, I started an art and politics/social issues Yahoo group, wherein discussion of art and social/political debate will be welcomed. I’ll post details soon. Aside from canning spam, I don’t intend to do any other moderating. I’m a big fan of the Usenet “free speech” model. (I’ve often said that, if I ran the world, things would be different.)
- Gas is up to US$2.65/gallon. I don’t even want to think about what my heating bill is going to be this winter. Last winter, which wasn’t terribly cold, I went through two tanks of propane. At ~$500/tank, that was harsh. This winter is sure to be even worse.
- Big Brother is on tonight. I’m not amused that Kaysar was nominated for eviction. The guy was only just returned to the house, for Jeebus’ sake! Worse, he gave the Head of Household win to the person who nominated him. She made a deal with him, promising she’d nominate the two people he’d chosen, if he’d throw the competition. She lied, which is not unexpected, but she and the rest of her alliance have spent the entire game insisting that they will play honestly and with integrity. M’kaythen.
- Offensive ads. Specifically, this recentish Mt. Dew ad (#3). I don’t even know where to start. It’s as bad as all those Hardee’s Food Porn ads.
Category: News & Politics
A Recipe, the Moon, and Some Other Stuff
I love green beans. They are quite possibly the most perfect food in the world. One of my favorite ways to make them is to sautee them with a bit of tamari and lemon juice.
(All measurements are very approximate.)
4-6C fresh or frozen green beans, cut to taste
1T olive oil (enough to lightly coat pan)
4-6 scallions, chopped
4oz mushrooms, cut to taste
2-3T tamari (you can substitute soy sauce)
a few cloves of garlic, chopped
the juice of one lemon
Lightly coat a wok or large frying pan with olive oil and bring up to medium heat. Add the scallions, green beans, and tamari and cook for about 15-20 minutes. Add the mushrooms and garlic and cook until the mushrooms are tender. Add lemon juice and turn up heat slightly. This is a good time to taste and adjust the tamari and add any other seasonings you might like. I prefer fairly plain food, so I stick to just tamari and lemon. When all the liquid is cooked out, remove from heat and serve.
The left-overs make a damnfinegood breakfast, too.
Last night, I got home a little before 8:00. It was nearly full dark, the sky had cleared, and the waxing gibbous moon was a lovely, buttery color.
I feel out of touch with the shifting seasons right now. My regular schedule is such that I’m up at 4am and out the door by 5am. I get to see the slow, subtle, daily changes in the morning light. I miss the fog and the smell of early morning. I miss the quiet, secret feel of pre-dawn. I miss being one of the first people at work.
Right now I’m on a later schedule, leaving home around 8am. That means that the sunset shift is coming as a bit of a shock. Instead of a steady build-up to fall, it feels like it’s happening all too suddenly. When I get to work, there are hordes of people and, despite the fact that it’s a library, it’s noisy and crowded and bustling. It makes me feel anxious and like I’m putting my feet in all the wrong places.
Despite the fact that Harriet’s a high strung, tweaky, high maintenance sort of dog, she’s completely unperturbed by things like loads of laundry descending upon her while she’s innocently napping. I guess that’s not really all that surprising, as she loves to be covered up while she sleeps. I expect the laundry feels nice and toasty warm to her.
Right now, in fact, she’s sleeping on the bed. Somehow, she’s managed to get one of the pillows on top of her. It’s draped over her like a blanket. She takes being comfy very, very seriously.
I’ve noticed that she’s starting to take some interest in strange noises. While she was one of two, she would leave the watch dog duties to Elliott. The house could be overrun by an army of zombies and she’d happily sleep right through it. Last night, while we were sitting on the couch watching Big Brother, the cat knocked over something in the bedroom. Harriet snapped to attention, gave me an “Aren’t you going to check that out?” look, then let out a couple of soft woofs. She’s also started to alert me to cars going up and down the drive, which is reassuring. Not that I’m concerned about traffic, but that I’m glad she’s taking interest in what’s going on around her.
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In other news, I finally finished the new Harry Potter book. It was spoiled by some asstrumpet online, so I knew what was going to happen, but that didn’t soften the blow. I’ve read a couple of blog reviews of it, all of which were unhappy about the ending. I won’t say that it makes me happy, but I do see why it was necessary. Part of the hero’s journey requires that s/he go it alone.
Some of the responses I read were hopeful that those who have died would return in the last book. I don’t think they will. I hope they won’t. One of the things that’s struck me about the last couple of books is that they don’t lie to kids about death. Death can be sudden and incomprehensible, it can happen at the hands of those we trust (but maybe shouldn’t), and it is, most of all, final. You don’t get do-overs.
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Via Bitch Ph.D. and posts to a couple of my mail lists:
Have you heard about Cindy Sheehan? She’s the mother of a soldier who was killed in Iraq. She’s been holding a vigil outside the president’s home in Crawford, Texas, waiting for him to talk to her. All she wants is an explanation from him for why her son had to die. Personally, I think that’s the least he could do for her. Bush, who is there on vacation, refuses to speak to her, though. Apparently, he needs to get on with his life. Must be nice. Some folks, like Ms. Sheehan’s son, Casey, aren’t lucky enough to have a life to get on with. Ms. Sheehan is camped out, waiting for the president to change his mind. She might be in for a long wait, so there is a postcard campaign to 1) help show support and 2) help her pass the time. Ideally, you would send a postcard a day, but I think even just one would make a difference.
Cindy Sheehan
Crawford Peace House
9142 East 5th Street
Crawford TX 76638-3037
No matter how you feel about this war, I think you’d agree that the loved ones of those who have died deserve to know what, exactly, they died for.
Nitpickings and Ramblings
Have I mentioned that if it’s not one thing, it’s ten others? Yes! Yes, I believe I have.
I keep finding pesky little issues with the website. Most of them stem from having used my host’s silly web FTP to upload files. Life would’ve been grand if I could’ve used a proper FTP client to do the uploading, but, obviously, that would’ve been far, far too easy. I think there are approximately eleventy-hundred separate files, so when loading them five (yes, *5*) at a time, it’s not surprising that a few went AWOL. I keep a close eye on my error reports and fix problems as I find them, but if y’all run across files that seem to be missing, just let me know and I’ll fix them ASAP. So far, it’s mostly been large images that have gone walkabout, but I also ran across a couple of links that were, um, pointing with their middle fingers. I dunno how that happened, as I used relative URLs for internal links. Another issue has been file names changing case when uploaded. What’s weird is that they changed from lower to upper case. Hmmm. Usually, it’s the other way around.
Anyway, that’s a rambly way of saying that I’m continuing to tidy things up around the edges. Which, you may have guessed, is the story of my life.
No art today. I’ve been driving myself to tears with this Color Erratica round robin. Someone dropped out, causing a log jam of books, so a bunch of us are scrambling to get caught up and get the group back on track. I took a break from it last night, though, and sat on my ass and did N-O-T-H-I-N-G. Well, not exactly nothing. I watched some–you guessed it!–really bad TeeVee. I’ll spare you the details, as there really aren’t any.
The unholy hot weather continues. “They” say we’ll get a break from it tomorrow. I’ll believe it when I see it. In the meantime, because Freshman orientation is over and the wee kiddies and their parents have left the building, and because the heat index has been in the triple digits, and because we supposedly need to conserve energy, The Powers That Be have declared that our building will be having periodic chilled water outages. Yep. When it gets super hot, they turn off our AC. Of course, this is an eleven story building with no windows above the third floor, so it’s not like we need AC or anything. M’kay. All that means that here are about a zillion fans going full-blast, so A) it’s impossible to hear yourself think and B) I really have to question whether there is, in fact, any sort of energy savings at all.
Le sigh. If I ran the world, things would be very, very different. Not better, mind you, just, well, different. For example, we might have year-round snow:
And, finally, for those of you who care, the House of Representatives re-upped the Patriot Act. (A pdf of the full text of the Patriot Act can be found here.)
Artings and Musings
First, the artings.
These are from the latest installment of the Color Erratica round robin. The color theme this time was “dusk,” so I focused mostly on purpley, winey colors.
The Pea Hens
I’ve had that peacock feather floating around in my stash for at least ten years. It was time to use it. The little cotton knickers came from a bunch of antique baby and doll clothes my mom snagged for me at a yard sale. The background is another piece of wrapping paper from Mr. and Mrs. B.’s wedding. This particular book has already travelled overseas, so I figured it was safe to include the poplar leaf and the peacock feather.
The Party Girls
This was a silly little page. I kept the label from a bottle of Christmas sangria. It was too lovely to throw away. The purple wrappers came from a bag of chocolate truffle candies. The yearbook girls–glued to 35mm film negatives–are from the 1920s (Prohibition era in the USA), which makes me laugh, because the sangri was non-alcoholic.
Baubo and the Girls 1
Baubo and the Girls 2
The last two pages started out covered with dark purple tissue paper. It was a little too garish, though, so I covered it with unbleached waxed paper to tone it down. I love the way it looks–the scans do not do the subtle color justice. I used a couple more Polaroids from my Baubo’s Safari series. I separated the photos from the backing, then sanded through the photo layer, to make them lay flatter and give them some transparency and texture. The top Polaroid was also sanded on the front and rubbed with brown India ink.
The bottom page presented an interesting challenge, in that it had a window cut out of it by the person who worked in the book before me. I decided to emphasize the window by framing it with a scrap of intaglio print I’ve been carrying around with me since college. A cast-off from another student’s printmaking project, I picked it out of the trash and have been carting it around ever since.
Now, the musings.
Thanks to Cynthia for pointing out this article.
I think one of the ironies of the whole Rove debacle is that it shows just how dishonest and lacking in integrity this administration is. It seems to me that, when your platform is based on “moral values,” you might be expected to hold yourself and your staff to a certain, well, moral standard. Countering claims of wrong doing with “it’s partisan politics,” or “he didn’t actually do anything illegal,” seems to me to indicate an ethical disconnect. Since when were moral values a legal matter? Rove clearly discussed information that he had no business discussing with people he had no business discussing it with. Whether or not he’s legally in the wrong ought to be irrelevant to this administration, as it’s quite clearly morally wrong. Condoning such behavior speaks volumes about what’s important to Rove’s superiors and it’s not “moral values.
Oh, and speaking of ironies, dare I say that Mr. Bush’s rephrasing of his intention, from “the leaker will be fired” to “if the leaker did anything illegal he’ll be fired,” might–just might–be considered flip-flopping?
And This Just in from the Us vs. Them Newsdesk
It looks to me like Rove is going to walk. I’m angered, but not surprised. What struck me, though, was this bit:
On Thursday, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada pressed for legislation to strip Rove of his clearance for classified information, which he said President Bush should have done already. Instead, Reid said, the Bush administration has attacked its critics: “This is what is known as a cover-up. This is an abuse of power.”
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tennessee, said Democrats were resorting to “partisan war chants.
By reducing criticism of Rove to “partisan war chants,” Frist deflects the main focus from Rove’s actions and sets the stage for an Us vs. Them debate. A debate which, conveniently, no one can win, for we have always been at war with Eurasia Oceania Them Us… You see the problem this presents.
red paper boat 