Today's "No shit?" news from the Los Angeles Times...
Really? I just thought those joints ended up by the schools kinda by coincidence. Maybe the fast food people knew that if they opened a store within a tenth of a mile, kids would be more likely to go there. Wow, what a gamble: Will kids be willing to walk a whole 176 yards for a Supersized Big Mac "value" meal?
Please, go on...
The next thing you know, we'll be reading that if you place a huge bowl of M&Ms on a table in front of kids during a round of video gaming, they will be far more likely to eat a lot more M&Ms.
Gotta run. I want to gt my application in for that research grant before any of you beat me to it.
In no particular order...
How is it that I can drive from the eastern edge of Dane County all the way to Milwaukee and not pass a single damn Denny's. I was on the road early to catch an 8 AM train to Chicago, and gave myself enough time to perhaps indulge in of of them there grand slam breakfasts. But no. And I wasn;t going to settle for Perkins. Not the same.
It
seems Walgreen's, however, are plentiful. Too plentiful if you ask me. Those things are everywhere. I walked, cabbed and took El trains around Chicago today, and there is one of those freaking things seemingly on every corner. Throw in the two or three I passed in downtown Milwaukee, plus another half dozen I saw from the train or passed driving home. I'll bet I caught sight of at least 25 locations. Maybe they can partner with Denny's.
I wish the Amtrak Hiawatha ran as far as Madison, like it did in the old days. Still, it's a great way to get to Chicago, even if I have to drive 60 miles to get to the Milwaukee station. Comfy seats, power ports, free wifi in the stations, and even a bar cart. I especially like the concept of the Quiet Cars℠. Except for when they smell like a tipped-over porta-potty. That was the case on the northbound train tonight. Someone had even posted a handmade sign stating "Car Stinks" on the door. And let me tell you, it did. No one -- not a single person -- sat in that car. This was, I gathered, a chronic condition, as regular riders commented that it had been that way on the previous Friday 5:08 train. No quiet for me, but I did horrify a woman by playing back some of her very loud cellphone conversation in a harmless but inquisitive manner. And that was kind of fun.
I know it is a sort of unwritten rule that if you are going to go into a coffee place with free wifi, you should buy something. I was in three Starbucks and a Caribou today. That was a few coffees too many. Yeah, I know they have other stuff, but it's a coffee place, and plain old coffee is usually the cheapest thing they have. Decaf seems illogical. So I turned into Shakes the Clown by 4 PM.
It seems virtually everyone in Chicago thinks Governor-for-now Rod Blagojevich is a total asshat. Cab drivers who have only lived in the U.S for a week know he's a crook. When Blago decided to start comparing himself to Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi (Gandhi!), he confirmed that he is ten kinds of crazy dressed in a track suit.
Somewhere in Rockford, Illinois, there is a bar called Shooters. And Shooters has something called "intimate bingo" where all the prizes come from some place that sells adult "marital" aids (i.e. dildo store). And this establishment fuels the fun with, as I recall, $2 Jagerbombs, tequila slammers, and something I believe they make with kerosene. Oh, the things you can learn by just hitting the "seek" button on FM radio.
Crazy.
"LIVE from Wasilla, it's Saturday Night!"
At least that's what I thought when I first saw the page on MSNBC. But upon closer inspection, I found that actually Senator McCain has in fact selected Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska. Dan Quayle is finally off the hook for being the most off-the-wall choice of running mates. Danny has to happy today.
Funny thing about Ms. Palin. She recently told CNBC that she doesn't really know or understand what the vice president of the United States actually does...
In an interview just a month ago, she dissed the job, saying it didn’t seem “productive.”
In fact, she said she doesn’t know what the vice president does.
And then there's her little issue about being under investigation for trying to use her office to get her brother-in-law fired. Uh oh.
Ouch indeed. Sounds, oh I don't know, Cheneyesque? Rovian? Above the law?
I guess this pretty much throws the "experience and qualification" argument against Seantor Obama right out the window. The question will be asked over and over again: Is Palin ready to step into the presidency when Senator McCain succumbs to the cancer that dogs him, kicks the bucket, or just loses it? Perhaps in a sit-com or Disney movie, but this if real life. Serious real life.
The choice of Palin does provide the Republicans the near-required wallop of pandering to both the fanatic religious right (she's a creationist) and disenfranchised Hillary supporters that supported Senator Clinton solely because of her gender rather than her ideology.
I cannot wait for the Biden - Palin debate. That will clearly be the best political theater in this election cycle, bar none.
Not that this should matter, but it will: Palin will be so very easy to parody on Saturday Night Live. Tina Fey has a few cameos in her near future.
Update 1: I have to add this comment left on my Facebook wall by a former intern of mine who used to work for a certain Republican Senator running against a certain one-time SNL satirist:
Haha, palin is a joke of a choice.....this is just getting more and more discouraging, I think we all know how he arrived at that choice, an offer was made to make 14 dollars the hard way and palin readily accepted.
His words, not mine!
Update 2: from the comments, a link to this piece of Photoshop finery:
(h/t to Steve Garfield!)
Update 3: For an Alaskan's view of Governor Palin, you really should read this post from the blog Mudflats, which bills itself as "Tiptoeing Through the Muck of Alaskan Politics." There's some good (and opnionated) background about Palin's history, rise and stumble, and her ideology. This part must make some on the farthest of the right feel good:
Before her meteoric rise to political success as governor, just two short years ago Sarah Palin was the mayor of Wasilla. I had a good chuckle at MSN.com’s claim that she had been the mayor of “Wasilla City”. It is not a city. Just Wasilla. Wasilla is the heart of the Alaska “Bible belt” and Sarah was raised amongst the tribe that believes creationism should be taught in our public schools, homosexuality is a sin, and life begins at conception. She’s a gun-toting, hang ‘em high conservative. Remember…this is where her approval ratings come from. There is no doubt that McCain again is making a strategic choice to appeal to a particular demographic - fundamentalist right-wing gun-owning Christians.
The Mudflats post mentions that many right wing bloggers are already chriping about how Palin has more executive experience than Democratic candidates Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Well, let's put that in perspective. Most all that experience came from being n the city council and then mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.
[Below] is a picture of lovely downtown Wasilla, for those of you unfamiliar with the area. Behind the Mug-Shot Saloon (the first bar I visited when I moved to Alaska long ago) is a little strip mall. There are street signs in Wasilla with bullet holes in them. Wasilla has a population of about 5500 people, and 1979 occupied housing units. This is where your potential Vice President was two short years ago.
I'm sure it's a very nice town. But this doesn't come close to counting as real experience.
The internets help people reconnect. It can be great to do so with some long lost friends; others, not so much.
Back before PDAs, iPhones and e-mail, we used those paper address books. In some ways, it was kind of cool to look through them to see how many cross-outs and scribbled notes were included as friends and relatives moved around. Now, with everything on a digital database, that quaint sense of history doesn't really exist anymore.
That's not the only problem with digital address data. Sometimes, if you are sloppy and don't make back-ups, you can lose everything. Other times, as I just went through, one works through a merge and purge of two not-so-compatible files and has to do a lot of manual entry to fix the damn thing. After having a lot of contacts live on a work PC and others live on my personal MacBook, getting an iPhone and leaving the job to be a full-time student drove me to get everything on the Mac. Along the way, I came across outdated information or found nothing other than a name for whatever reason. Thanks to tools like Google, LinkedIn and Facebook, I was successful in finding just about everyone I was looking for.
A fun part of the process was reconnecting with people I had not spoken with in years. Some was via e-mail, some by phone. I had the chance to talk to the man who gave me my start in advertising, and it was great to catch up with him. I also got a call from my old friend Dan, who since I saw him last has gone back to school and changed careers, launching a successful practice in the mental health field. I tagged up with my best friend from high school and, maybe best of all, a childhood friend who was also my college room mate for two years.
Oddly, but coincidentally, someone also found me last week... through this blog via LinkedIn. This was a guy I went out with for a brief time about 16 years ago, then remained friends with for a while after that. We met right after I moved back from a near-disastrous year working in California, and his friendship came when I really needed it. He pretty much made the decision that we weren't going to be more than friends, as he was still dealing with the whole "am I gay or bi or what" thing, and the friendship weakened after I met Tom. I could read all kinds of things into that, some more self-serving than others, but he didn't hide that he wasn't a big Tom fan, and tended to act as if Tom didn't exist. Maybe he thought Tom didn't like him, when actually Tom didn't really care one way or the other. Indifference sometimes in itself can be damning.
After this guy left a comment on the Nader post from last week, I sent him an e-mail at the address left on his comment form. We had e-mailed a while back after he was part of the address book mass-emailing thing I did when I set up my LinkedIn page, but neither of us followed up with a phone call. I was surprised that he actually read this tripe, and thought since he took the time to leave a blog comment, it would be fun to catch up. That was until I got an e-mail back that, perhaps in an attempt to be funny but more likely because he hasn't changed much, seemed kind of insulting to me and more so toward Tom. At first I thought, well, that's just the way he is. But the more I thought about it, the more I remembered that he never really did treat Tom very well. I decided to just cut him loose with a response to his e-mail saying perhaps we should leave things as they were.
That's resulted in my receiving this:
So this is it for me. I also thought it might be nice to catch up but clearly you remain in whatever weird and rude place you (and/or Tom)
were in years ago.
There is no need to have further discourse at any time in our lives. And you know how it's said to never say never? Well, I mean never. Done, done and done! Should you decide to e-mail, you are already in my spam file, removed from Linked In (how stupid was that?). I will return the previously extended courtesy of not replying to phone calls and will simply recycle any cards (because I am very green these days and would not want to waste gas/manpower as you/Tom had done with sending them
back!).
I still have a few good stories I carry with me from our interaction way back when and think fondly back on that time when you were worth knowing.
Good luck with your life.
[Interpretive illustration thrown in by me.]
Wow. Issues? Baggage? I gather he thinks that we were sending back unopened Christmas cards, that Tom and I are rude and don't return phone calls never made, and I am insecure. For this, he'll never ever ever talk to me again. Fair enough. I gather in his unique perspective, that's how he sees things. Again, wow. Revisionist history can go a long way in helping form a personal reality I suppose. Sadly, it pretty much fits with how I remember the guy.
Tom is probably correct in his thought that people who have been together in a physical relationship, however brief or benign, rarely if ever make the transition to "just friends." He found it kind of odd that I tried to keep in good stead with some of my one-time boyfriends. That happens sometimes in gay world. Two guys meet, have some physical experiences and then realize they are better off friends and try to take things that route. Being same-sex complicates things when trying to decipher the buddy versus partner schematic. When you're lucky, a guy is both (Tom); unfortunately some turn out to be neither (this guy). Straight people have it correct on this one: rarely does anything good come from remaining close to someone with whom you once slept and later broke up. That's as much his common sense as it is his being a psychiatrist.
The summary of the address book overhaul: eight great re-connections and one burned bridge. Not quite a 90% success rate. Or, looking at it another way, a 100% success rate. I'm not much for grade inflation, so I'll take the near 90.
One thing is certain: you just wouldn't have this kind of entertainment with one of those old paper address books.
It's time. The conventions and the Presidential election are coming. You know what that means: a surge in Bush Administration-issued color coded terror alerts!
Be afraid. Be very afraid. And buy a lot of duct tape and plastic sheeting. Do it now.
