Paul @ 199:
No -- mine is a children's book, and I have nearly a direct quote from a character ("You'll go your way and I'll go mine") that pops up later in the book.
#116 is Yhxr Fxljnyxre va Fgne Jnef: N Arj Ubcr.
The feller had a girl that he liked well enough to dance with, but then he met her best friend. He never knew what true love was until he met the best friend, so his girl went her way and he went the best friend's way.
Maybe I can't objectively evaluate my own life, but I can't think of a single butterfly moment.
My dad, however, has a clear butterfly moment. In 1971 (or '70?), he was all set to go to graduate school, when his birthday came up number 1 in the draft. Instead of graduate school, it was the National Guard and the workforce for him. He met my mother three years later at work.
I watched yesterday's We Are One concert, and, you know, it was fine. But it's these pictures that made me tear up and think about how I really do love this country.
Caroline @ 41: Also, I am pretty sure the "Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity" article proves that the Onion has a time machine.
One of the common arguments against the possibility of time-travel is, "Where are all the time-travelers from the future?" That article -- plus the Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades -- is what cemented my belief that they're writers for The Onion.
@ Rivka #21: A few weeks ago, I asked a friend who is a well-connected Republican about this. . . . (b) it would all swing into high gear in the last three weeks, because they had a good enough machine to get the vote out fast.
Except that with the early voting in so many places, three weeks is too late for the GOTV machine -- you need it a good 4-5 weeks before the election. Are the Republicans completely out of touch with regards to how many people planned on voting early? Or did they just not have the resources to start getting out the vote two weeks ago?
(In my hometown, people on both sides of local issues seem to have been completely blindsided by the early voting. I find that astonishing. Talk about not doing your homework.)
I skipped flu shots for several years, as there were shortages and I wasn't in a high risk population. But last winter I got the flu twice*, and I don't want to think about how many people I may have infected at work or on the bus -- or how many people my husband may have infected, after catching it from me both times. I'm getting a flu shot this year.
* 3.5 months apart, and I moved across the country in that time period, so I don't think it was just a relapse of the same bug.
Hiking, fireworks (of a sort), magic moments:
The first time I went to the Big Island of Hawai'i, three friends and I drove across the saddle road from Kona and went hiking across the lava field in the middle of the night. At this time, there were a lot of surface flows about 5 miles from the end of Chain of Craters Road (well, from the current end of it). We didn't realize they were quite that far away, and we kept scrambling over rocks towards that distant glow that just wasn't getting any closer. Luckily, there was so much surface activity that a small hot spot formed near us, with lava bubbling up and flowing for a good hour or so.
We were the only ones around for miles, and there was no other life around -- the lava field was so new that there was no scrub yet, and no bugs. In front of us, there was just the earth regenerating itself, and behind us, just the moon rising over the ocean. It was like this glimpse of a prehistoric world.
#4, #7, #9: I think the final break for Sullivan with the Republicans wasn't about gay rights, but about torture. He came out strongly and vociferously against torture when the Abu Ghraib news broke, and to his credit, has not wavered from that view. The rest of the right wing turned on him for that.
The real point is McCain’s unbelievably foolish and impulsive handling of a major decision. The secondary point is that McCain has an incompetent campaign organization, yet heads are not rolling the way they should after a fckup of this magnitude. These are not the kind of mistakes a candidate for the presidency should make.
YES. I keep telling myself that Obama beat Clinton in part because he simply ran a better campaign, and that at this rate he should have no problems defeating the self-destructing McCain campaign.
P J @ 59: I completely agree. The question is whether the other Democrats would have followed Obama's leadership there. I'd like to think they would have, but maybe Obama was too afraid to test it. (For the record, I think they would be stupid not to. If anything, the Democratic party is slowly but surely shifting back to the left, and the centrist Democrats need to worry about liberal primary challengers more than general election Republican challengers. I think. I hope.)
And I can't stand Reid. Last week or so he was quoted as saying that since he was the majority leader, he had to go along with the majority. Funny; I thought that meant that maybe he set the tone and actually led the majority!
#42 Joe J:
And yet, I can’t help thinking that he had some very compelling reason to vote for it. I can’t imagine that he was ignorant of the flack he would take for his vote. He must have known that voting this way would hurt his popularity with a large block of his supporters. And yet, he still did it. Maybe it’s just me, but I find that fascinating. I really wish I knew what he was thinking.
Joe J, the only speculative reason I've heard that even comes close to being acceptable is that there was simply no way that FISA was going to be voted down. No way, no how, not even if Obama voted against it and led the filibuster against it. And Obama voting for it, looking like a flip-flopper and pissing off his base, is less embarrassing than being unable to lead the Democratic Party in voting it down.
That argument assumes that there are a couple dozen Democratic Senators who are cowardly enough to vote for it, no matter what. I can't decide if I dislike the argument because it's an unreasonable assumption, or because it's sadly a reasonable assumption.
#45 Stephen Frug: The disappointment is in all the other members of Congress -- who didn't stand up for the powers of their branch.
Exactly. I could sort of understand it through 2006, with the Republicans being too gleeful about power and war to bother with checks and balances, but we have a Democratic Congress now. Most of those seats are likely to be safe, based on the projections of voter turnout this fall. And Bush has maybe a 20% approval rating right now. So what on earth are they afraid of?
My nomination for the sentence that Matters in the whole story: "You know, sometimes I think we Sort too soon..."
John A @ 21: Oh, yes. Especially since at the end it was a Slytherin who had been the bravest, and a Gryffindor who had been the most cunning. I wish Rowling had touched on that just a hair more.
Fade @ 40:
Today I wear that
shirt, and today Making Light
is making me smile.
Coincidence? Or
do the summer storms also
bring haiku showers?
Ronnie Earl once turned himself in for violating a reporting law, and paid his own fine. (There was a report that was a day late getting turned in.)
P.J., is there any chance you have a source for that, or a link? That's a great story, and worth spreading around.
I still can remember the mystified looks he got when he tried to explain "spiro" galaxies. I had no idea Agnew knew which end of a telescope was which.
Ah, that reminds me of my mechanics professor, who was very good but had a thick Russian accent. On the first day of class, he was discussing coordinate transformations, and he said, "And then you get . . . a magic lambda!" My friends and I, in our first upper-level physics course, dutifully wrote "magic lambda" in our notes. It wasn't until after class that someone realized that he had meant matrix lambda . . . which was pretty sad, considering that we had been dealing with matrices throughout the lecture.
PiscusFiche, far-off galaxies appear to have "clouds" of light because they are so far away that we cannot resolve individual stars in a distant galaxy (the exception is Andromeda, and the brightest stars in the Virgo cluster). So even though the outer regions of galaxies are relatively sparsely populated, those stars appear as a faint cloud of light in observations.
The oddest part about the "pie wagon" insult is that is comes a mere seven words after the "no bra-needing" insult. Democratic women are all fat and flat-chested? That's quite an achievement.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 6 |
| 2008 | 6 |
| 2007 | 2 |
| 2005 | 2 |
| 2004 | 1 |
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