The interesting part of the last week, of course, was to watch McCain be seriously stupid in the face of Obama’s trip to the Middle East and Europe. The whole thing started off with McCain double-dast-daring that gormless Obama guy to be a real man and walk down a Baghdad street like he did, and talk to the Generals, learn their languages….hmm, hmm…of course, McCain’s walk last year to prove ‘how quiet things are now’ had the cast of the 12 days of warfare. 100 soldiers on point, three Blackhawks hawking, two gunships gunning and a geezer in a big flak suit… ah, you know the song.

The idea, too, was to show how McCain was a maaaaanly man, and Obama a know-nothing elitist pipsqueak and how that would go over with Mr and Mrs. Bubba.

Of course, the answer is that Obama went and – well, looked seriously Presidential wherever he went. And the VIPs he met on the way treated him as such, and were sighing with relief that someone who was halfway sane and sensible might be President of the USA. And at point after point on the trip, and just before, Obama’s ideas on the problems with the Middle East came out as sensible, sound solutions – so much so that the locals he was visiting were endorsing them to the great consternation of Bush and McCain. And since polls are showing that Obama’s weak spots is that he’s something of an unknown factor who may not have sound stuff on security and foreign affairs – well, this is all money in the bank for him.

McCain saw the huge crowds in Berlin and compared them to the sixteen people and an oompah band that he had at his speech in New Orleans when Hillary hit the wall, and – well, he didn’t like that. So now he’s throwing dirt at the idea of Obama Campainging Overseas, the horror of it all – of course, the fact that he’s campaigned and given speeches and travelled recently for fundraisers in such places as Mexico, Canada, Britain and Colombia is set aside.

Why? Because nobody’s calling him on it. CBS got caught the other day screwing around with an interview and rearranging the answers to the questions to avoid showing that he had (1) no idea as to when and what has happened in Iraq over the last couple of years, and (2) forgetting that the war against the Taliban happened since 9-11 and Iraq happened a couple of years after that. In short, he would have looked like a total fool, and CBS was protecting him.

With that, McCain could call Obama the Muslim Spawn of Satan and get away with it, because the big news agencies are not willing to aggressively report about his failings. They aren’t willing to pull apart his fakery, his non-plans, his weak numbers and figures, his failure to remember his butt if it’s not attached. They’re not willing to point out that the man can’t remember the most basic things about the whole situation in the Middle East, supposedly his strong point. Or that short of Bush’s policies for another four years, he has nothing to offer except that there will be a different picture in the post offices with the title President of the United States of America under it.

And basically, that’s the whole campaign. He wants the big job bad enough that he’s willing to say or do anything to get it.

I had been watching his ‘latest info’ page, and noticed yesterday that it said that he’d gone into a decline.   Today, it won’t load.

The word out this morning is that he’s died.

*deep sigh*

“It’s not about how to achieve your dreams; it’s about how to lead your life. If you lead your life the right way, the dreams will come to you.”

The real root of Don’t Ask Dont Tell and other anti-gay stuff seems to be an insistent idea, that, similarly to the idea my father tried to pass on to me, that all gay men and women are desperate and determined to infect us all with their orientation – that somehow, they will all be predators waiting for their chance to rape, humiliate and then convert us all to also become homosexuals.  Total nonsense, of course, but some people feel that they have to approach it that way.

Of course, my attitude is that I’ve seen more improper gay behavior in the Republicans in Congress than anyone I’ve known who happened to be gay in real life, but I guess that’s the difference between real life and Congressional Republicans. Pretty wide.

There’s been a number of notes in the news recently to the direction of – well, Bush would far rather have McCain as his successor because McCain would never go after Bushco for all of the mopery, dopery and violations of federal law that the present ‘whatever you say boss’ Justice Department would never look into. Of course, right now, it looks like McCain is hopeless, so the idea is – hey, why don’t we pardon ourselves in advance? What a concept!

The end of the Ebert-Roeper show on TV (they didn’t like what Disney was going to do with it, which was to massively dumb it down and act more as a promotional effort for films than a real review thing) and the decline of newspaper staffs due to major cutbacks leads me to wonder where the independent reviews of tomorrow will come from…

There’s a huge demand right now in the bicycle trade for spare 27-inch tires. No bikes are presently made with that size, but older bikes being dug out of storage for use in a world where gas is way expensive use those tires.

After the last week of major screwups from McCain, including the whole “surge is when I say it is, ignore history business”, and things like accusing Obama of being responsible for the rise in gas prices and willing to ‘lose the Iraq war deliberately in order to win the 2008 election’, it looks as if the news media, who have generally treated McCain with kid gloves or think he’s still Mr. Maverick From the 2000 Election (he sold his soul to Bushco in the interim) are finally starting to wake from their torpor and realize what a real goof this guy is. Maybe. In the meantime, McCain is prepared to pull out anything, like connecting Obama to Castro, in the hope that some random piece of crud will stick.

The situation is that if he runs on a Bush platform, which is what he’s come up with (even though he feebly tries to deny it IF he’s in front of independent voters) he can’t win. Bushco’s deregulation and hamstringing of government oversight on business led to the mortgage crash and the expensive bailouts that followed for some wall street biggies. It led to a situation where we can’t trust the things we buy, the food we eat and the safety of our workplaces. It led to the fall of the dollar, the high cost of gas and oil products, and the collapse of our economy.

And McCain is starting to realize that nobody’s listening to him, partially because he really doesn’t have a real plan to do anything different than what’s screwing the US public right now. He can’t come out and say publically that ‘you can’t vote for Obama because he’s a black guy, and you can’t deal with a black guy in charge’. He can use any euphemism he can come up with, of course, trying to emphasize the ’scary’ stuff, but it really comes down to what he can find to divert people from their real problems (which will sink him) and towards something that will make Obama look too scary to vote for. They know McCain since he’s been in the news a lot for the last ten years, but Obama’s a new face, and – well, people don’t KNOW him.

But while Obama’s speaking in front of a massive crowd in Berlin, McCain’s in a German sausage restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, for lunch. This German-American isn’t impressed. And I like sausages.

The major vacation expense that we have around here is and has been for a long time Sissy Trips so that the twins can see each other ever so often. This year, there’s been two times - March camping in Kentucky and May for a long weekend camping thing in Georgia (with a brief before and after in Birmingham). And since air rates and gas prices have been going into a sharp upwards spiral, there’s no way that either household could justify another trip - especially when you consider that Mommy has to go with kiddo, and in the case of the Alabamans, there’s two kiddos to consider instead of one if Mommy’s going. At 300-350 a pop, that’s way expensive.

So Susan and I put it to Meredith: the time had come where if the girls really wanted to see each other, they would have to consider Mommy-less trips where Meredith A or Meredith B would get on a plane and take off to the other one’s house. No Mommy for a week. And for little girls who are always well aware that Mommy and Daddy Were Not Always There and that Someone Left Them for the Chinese Orphanage To Take Care Of, you get nervous kiddos that don’t care to be separated from Mommy and Daddy.

So for whatever reason, Meredith (ours) has decided to face her fears and go. So we’ve bought a plane ticket for her to visit the Alabamans for a week, starting the 1st of August.

(I have to also note that this will be the longest that Mommy hasn’t had a Mere in her lap, so we’ll see what happens from that. Susan has from time to time been away from the house for a couple of days for work, but there’s always been other people here, most often me and my MIL. And when she’s away from Mere and the rest of us, Susan usually wants to vegetate and be far away from Everyone Needing Mommy’s Attention, including the dogs.)

Personally, I think Mere’ll do fine. She has a lot of faith and trust in her Sissy and Sissy’s family, and she loves them all to pieces. And Sissy’s Mom is a extremely good person with kids.

The biggest hangup is a 9-11 created one. We have to go through some hoops with Mere as a 8 1/2 year old Unaccompanied Minor with the airline. We have to work out some paperwork, but either Susan or both of us have to make out forms that define where she’s going, who we are, who’s picking up Meredith at the other end, and so on. One or both of us will be allowed to take her personally to the terminal gate in Chicago, hand her off to the crew, who will seat her first and watch her closely, and then hand her off as soon as they land to Sissy’s mom at the other end. Of course, this will also require ID for Sissy and Ally to be at the gate to welcome their sister to get past the security gate - and if you think those guys want to wait somewhere else to see Meredith, you’re cuckoo.

I’m beginning to think that I need to print off a couple of copies of the Good Housekeeping article to hand out to the airline folks so that they can get their head around this situation.

Meredith has developed over the last year a taste for certain ‘reality’ shows that probe into private lives - as in poking inside a family household to see how it works. I have some real reservations on all of this, which I’ll go into in a minute.

In each of these cases, the family has one or more kids and a non-’conventional’ setup of some sort, and the non-conventional part is highlighted majorly in some way. The result is not just seeing how the other half lives, but seeing people in non-standard situations and their ability to cope or not cope with it. Of course, the attraction in all of this is to see the extreme, the ten-car pileup, the disaster and go tsch-tsch.

(1) KIDS GO WILD: Epitomized by SUPERNANNY, this is where the parents are willing to go up in front of millions of people on TV and say ‘my household is out of control, I need help with these kids’. In most cases, the reason is that the parents aren’t good managers of the home and the kids - they are often just not able or willing to put a lot of time into making a house a home where everyone belongs. Sometimes it’s beccause they’re so centered on work (or their personal whatevers) that they have no time for the kids. Sometimes it’s because they can’t deal with balancing discipline, structure and family togetherness time.

(2) EXTREMES IN HOUSEHOLDS: Let’s swap the mom in two households that are at extreme ends of a spectrum and see what results! Usually, the formula is something like ‘extreme free spirit’ versus ‘drill sergeant’ and you watch the fur fly in the conflicts, not to mention the possiblity that both households may learn not to be so extreme.

(3) FIX ME UP: Needy household is in dire straits, and the hosts of the program decend on them to fix up their problems. This can be a situation where the family are mad hoarders who have let the house decend into an unliveable pit, or a family that is plagued by all sorts of bad luck that is finally getting a helping hand to get a major redo (to the point of having the house replaced and totally redone).

(4) I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY CAN DO THAT: Household is special because of some basic difference in the family - most notable of this sort is JON AND KATE PLUS 8, where this man and woman have major fertility issues, and end up with a set of twins and then a set of sextuplets. The show centers around the question of how these people can cope with such a crowd.

The answers to it all after the cut.

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Neat piece from the BBC about a trainer in London who helps actors with their American accents. My everyday speech is a standard US Midwestern one, but my real base accent is a Southwestern Ohio (oh-hi-yuh) one. I beat it out of me in college by aiming at a cultured Canadian accent, and getting halfway there. Meredith, who has a very nice cultured-little-girl British accent she can turn on and off, has a very good ear for accents.

McCain: And not only, that, but Obama’s chicken to go to Iraqi like I did.  Chick-en!  Bgawk!

Obama: Wha?

Army: Do we need to get all those armed guards ready again for the trip through the marketplace?

McCain: (makes more chicken noises, flaps around)

Obama: Cripes, what a loon.  What the heck, let’s go.

Various Foreign Leaders: Wow, an American leader who isn’t a self-centered idiot.  Let’s make him look good, talk to him seriously, and tell the press that we agree with what he’s been saying.

Various Europeans: (swoon)

McCain: I think I need to go to Czechoslovakia.

Press: (Rolls eyes)  It doesn’t exist - hasn’t since 1993.

McCain: Then I’ll stand on the Iraq - Pakistan border and tell people what has to be done.

Press: (getting a headache) They don’t have a common border; they’re 750 miles apart.  Didn’t you say you were the steady foreign policy dude and Obama doesn’t know anything?

McCain: You bet!

Bushco: Ok, just sign here that we can stay as long as we like, do whatever we want in Iraq without being bothered, and sign over all your oil to our pals for development.

Iraqi PM Maliki: Screw that noise. No deal.

Bushco: Dude, we own you.  For good.

Iraqi PM Maliki: ‘Fraid not. Hey, Salim?

Assistant: Yes, Boss?

Maliki: Call up those German reporters who wanted an interview and get ‘em over here. Bushco doesn’t own them like he does Fox.

German Reporters: We’re ready to interview, and the tape is rolling.

Maliki: Good. We want the Americans out of here Yesterday, and Obama’s timeline for getting ‘em out sounds cool to us. We’re not interested in being pwned by the USA. And Obama’s got duds nearly as cool as mine.

German Reporters: Thanks! (publishes story)

Bushco: (reads story) Ack! Thbbbt! (starts to choke on pretzels) (spasms)

Bushco minion: Ooh, I get to send the story to all of our Now-What-Do-We-Do-To-Get-Out-Of-This list of wingnut pundits! They’ll tell us how to get out of this! (Sends story from White House to Entire Press Corps instead.) Aw, crud!

Press: (reads story) Hm? Bwahaha!

Bushco: Ack! Isn’t anyone here competent?

Rest of the World: Not that we’ve noticed.

McCain: (reads story) Ack! Thbbbt! (spasms) He couldn’t have said that! There goes the election!

Bushco: Make it go away now! Get someone up to say it’s all a mistake!

Iraqi dude with the US Army in Iraq: Uhhhhh - It was just a mistranslation. He meant to say something else.

German Reporters: Nope. Here’s the tape. (hands it to other news agencies)

Other reporters and their interpreters: No mistranslation. He said it, all right.

Maliki: Yep, that’s what I said.  Regime change is a wonderful thing, right?

Bushco and McCain: (more gasping and choking) Uh…the Iraqis don’t know what they need. They need us. There. Forever. Obama just wants to surrender! Victory!

Joe Blow Voter: The Iraqis want us out? It’s a deal!

Bush and McCain: Suurrrge! Victory! Pay no attention to the Iraqis!

Halliburton and Cheney: Nuts.  There go the oil contracts.

Not everything works that well.  Here’s a posting about a set of ghost towns (some of which I had heard about, like the Walled City of Kowloon), and another about technologies that failed, such as webTV and the Newton.

In a recent posting, I discussed a drunk driver who hit and killed a kid getting off the school bus - in the kid’s front yard.  A Dayton, Ohio jury found the dude guilty of aggravated vehicular homicide, and another such case is now up in their courts, about a hit and run where the driver was high on heroin, hit the pedestrian rather spectacularly, and hid the car.  The pedestrian died after six weeks of agony in the hospital.

If this comes through fine, then the problem is that if I write something at 6:30 am and set it up to actually post in the Wordpress end at noon, what happens is that it ginks into that mess of One Link Going Nowhere that you saw.  If I save it again (not changing a thing at the Wordpress end) it transfers to LJ just fine.

I would guess it’s a missetting between the new version of Wordpress, the transfer-to-LJ plugin and the timer stuff inside of Wordpress not playing well together.

Nothing all that bad, but all of it is after the cut. No images in this post.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

There’s a trial going on in Dayton, Ohio (my hometown) about a drunk driver who was arguing with his girlfriend while going down a narrow country road at over 100 miles an hour. He came up on a school bus that was parked with its lights on after letting off a 17-year-old kid at his house. The entire bus full of kids saw the car go out of control and go airborne at 103 miles an hour, nailing the kid in his own driveway and sending him flying 65 feet through the air and up 13 feet into a tree. The driver’s got a long criminal record for drunk driving, assault and theft. Needless to say, the kid died and the drunk is on trial, with everyone at the scene (including the girlfriend) testifying against him….with a five year sentence and a $10,000 fine possible with a conviction.

Maybe in the 2nd congressional district race. In 2004, Bush won here in the Presidential by a wide margin, but the Republicans just finished off their primary with a nasty, bruising fight, and there’s a popular Montgomery mayor against the Republican in the general election in November.

…or the Holodomor, as it’s better known. In the early 1930s, Stalin forced the collectivization of Ukraine, and when the wheat harvest then fell below the levels that Moscow had ordered, he ordered the deliberate starvation of the Ukrainians for their failure to ‘fulfill their duty.’ Several million Ukrainians then starved to death.

“I address you on behalf of a nation that lost about ten million people as a direct result of the Holodomor genocide… We insist that the world learn the truth about all crimes against humanity. This is the only way we can ensure that criminals will no longer be emboldened by indifference.”

- Viktor Yushchenko, President of Ukraine.