Last night, I made a list of things that I have to accomplish today. Blogging was not on the list.

MSNBC's using yesterday's Gallup numbers, what's up with that? McCain's gained a point on Obama since then. I think with the debate fallout and the newest dramas like the bailout bill passing and the Ayers thing and another SNL sketch we won't get a real idea for any big shifts for a few days and we'll be onto the debate by then...and it's not like the developments are going to stop. So really it's just going to be a roller coaster from now on, isn't it?

Now they're using the right numbers. Maybe I heard it wrong. Rather pointless to bring it up, in that case. Aha, Josh Gottheimer, who I actually like a lot, just said up by eight, not seven. Little bit of spin there, tricksy little surrogate!

Back to the subject of blogging I'm not doing, I've been struggling with the Comic-Con recap. I don't know if it's my connection or Flickr or some combination of both but it's nuts. I'll get there, but speaking of uploads, I've already got 130+ for Day 3 alone. Since there are really just a few comparatively from Day 4 I think I'll split it up a bit more evenly.

I'm bummed that I haven't been able to keep up with the Lunchbox Project. I mean, I've been keeping up with doing it, just not posting. I just got an order of new bento boxes in and they are awesome...Dag, I'm so behind I haven't even posted any pictures from since I got the first set of bento goodies I bought a few months ago. Here's one of the first ones I made back in June:



Man, I'm going to miss in-season fruit. Sweater weather is nice and all, but at what price?


ETA a few more thoughts...I took "The Politics Test" on OkCupid, thought the questions were a bit dopey but they pegged me pretty well as a dirty little pinko so who am I to criticize?
( results )

Caught a showing of the overlooked Blow last night. It's not like there's really any such thing as a bad Johnny Depp movie. But when he's channeling Robert Evans by way of Robert Kennedy? And Penelope Cruz dials it up to 11, AND PeeWee's a main supporting character? And they're all rocking the most epic 70's fashions? That is a classic film right there. It owes heavily to Goodfellas, but I think they give a nod to that by having Ray Liotta as Jung's dad. Maybe I'm wrong in thinking it's kind of an underrated movie. Or maybe I'm just a huge sucker for a good biopic that has some kickass montages and doesn't fall into the "put you to sleep in the third act" trap.

Feeling pretty good coming out of the first debate. The poll numbers seem to be ranging from decent to great so that's a relief since this was supposed to be McCain's strongest subject. Sure there's were some stumbles (sharpen your knives, Barack!) and spin from the other side but as Joe Biden said on Friday's post-debate Countdown, the American people are so much smarter than that.

Why yes, I am seeing the world as glass half full. I just have to, at least until November 4th, and I'm planning on feeling that way afterward too, right up until January when we're celebrating the end of a terrible era. The audacity of hope indeed.

Went to a fundraiser last night. I didn't drop the suggested donation amount but I put in what I could and bought a few campaign goodies. I also brought a bunch of stamps; I'd taken a batch of postcards home to work on last week and I did another chunk at the party. It was fun, there were a few bands that played, including a group of boys in their early/mid-teens who played a version of Californication with rewritten prObama lyrics. The Jo Bros got nothing on these kids.

There was also a speaker named Ian Masters who was fascinating if terrifying in his pronouncements about what would happen if John McCain was elected. He's got a show on KPFK 90.7fm that you can also catch by podcast.

I probably wrote about 60-70 postcards total. Controlling my handwriting was probably the hardest part, I think I came up with some reasonably decent stuff to write. One of the organizers of the the postcard campaign, said that she said she'd read through the ones I'd done at the park last week and that they were really good. I mean, I don't want to brag or anything but I've certainly absorbed the talking points and tried my best to present them in the most appealing ways. Actually it was kind of fun, trying to get the most pointed attacks in while keeping it completely truthful (obviously, or maybe not so obviously if you're John McCain) and subtle.

So we're really in the final stretch now. Maybe you're wondering what you can do to be a part of making sure that Barack Obama is the next President of the United States so that we have the necessary leadership to take our country in the right direction after the disastrous policies of the last eight years (see what I said about the talking points?). The first thing everyone should do is go to www.VoteForChange.com to register or check on your registration. Even if you think you're set, it only takes a minute to be sure. You can also talk to your friends and family about why Barack Obama is the right choice for President and making sure they're registered to vote. Vote absentee, vote early!

If you want to learn more or get more involved in the campaign, go to www.BarackObama.com. There's a new Neighbor to Neighbor tool that lets you connect with people in your area or by phone, super easy. Or you can always the Event Finder to find stuff going on nearby.

Next up, the VP debate! Expect the unexpected.

I used to write teen angst poetry. Actually, a very dear friend of mine and I used to put together a little 'zine back in high school that was it's biggest showcase. I pull them out and flip through them every once in awhile; I've always told myself I would scan and post them one day but of course more of it makes me cringe than I want to show off. I'm speaking only of my contributions here, my buddy was and is an amazing artist and an electric wordsmith so he's got nothing to be ashamed of.

Thinking back candidly, there's one particular recurring feature that I think was probably the real reason we were able to unload copies every month, and that would have to be the Naked Picture of Drew Barrymore. I can't remember if they were in from issue 1 but they soon became our most popular feature. Sure, pasted in clippings from the Weekly World News are great, but they don't move paper like, well, you know. I can still remember the one that was the most popular too (partial nudity, probably nsfw). Hooray for violating other people's copyrights for personal gain!

I was desperately obsessed really into Drew back then. In recent times, I'd sort have accepted that I was now a fan based on personality rather than her work, since none of her roles in recent years have captured me in any way. But I watched the movie Lucky You this week and I was reminded of why I became a fan in the first place; her naturalness as an actress is something special. It's a sweet little movie, check it out if you have a chance.

Heh. This vid gives short shrift to Keith's contributions, but at 9 minutes it's already long enough and it's pure concentrated awesome. Keith was great, but Dave was on fire. To quote him, "this just keeps getting uglier and uglier" >:)

I was going to start this by swearing I was done with cooking goofy crap after this. But...there's this tiny voice that says "Halloween! CHRISTMAS!!!!!1". So I don't think that's going to work out so much.

I was trying to downsize though. I was going to another Obama phonebank/BBQ event but I didn't want to go quite as overboard as last time with the cupcakes. So when I was at Target scoping out the 'weenie goodness I decided to take on one of Domokun's easy snack recipes:



I was supposed to use the fancy dancy Pumpkin Spice Kisses and pecans, but Target didn't have pecans. They weren't out of them due to domopular demand, either, they just didn't carry them. So I went for cocktail peanuts and picked up regular and Special Dark Kisses instead.

( Check 'em out )

Before I left for the event, the details for the (hopefully first of this season's?) X-Entertainment “Draw Jason Voorhees Dancing” Art Contest were posted, so on my way home I stopped at the store because I'd already decided that my interpretation would be edible. I wasn't necessarily sold on doing yet another cake (I flirted with the idea of a pizza) but then I saw that the produce market carried a Duncan Hines mix for tres leches cake, so I couldn't resist.

It was an interesting project. The cake mix itself uses a ton of eggs (I used two boxes) and it also comes with a powder that you mix with milk and soak the cake in after it's baked. I also made a filling using some mashed bananas we needed to get rid of, and sliced strawberries.
( Here's some pics of the process )

As for Jason himself, well, I've never been much of a Michaelangelo but I think it's pretty cute, in that sweetly murderous way:





So, does anybody want some cake? LOL, the biggest reason I've got to cut all this cooking out is someone's got to eat it afterwards. This was totally worth it though, since I placed in the art contest! Soon I will be drinking my very own ancient Ghoul-Aid. Halloween effing rules.

Avast, me beauties! The calendar has turned once again to the day that's most special to the hearts of us that live on the account. We've met on this day many times before, and God willing, we will again.

The seas are rough ahead, mates. A storm is brewing. But though the times may be tough, a true pirate does not falter. Our hearts are bold and our eyes are clear, and we shall never fail.

Hoist the colours!

I was reading some recent Jezebel entries when I noticed a something that seemed a little familiar...

( playing hardball )

Look like anything you've seen before? LOL...For a second I was afraid I'd subconsciously ripped them off, but my post predates theirs by a week. Not to mention, it has that hand-drawn, one-of-a-kind charm.

I always knew I was destined to be a trendsetter.

Wanna see some silly cakes I made? Okay, but first make sure you go read about Comic-Con Day 2. Also, I'd like to take a moment to remember my favorite sweater, lost at the tail end of this past (very fun) weekend. Dear burgundy cardigan, we will miss you. Even though you had a pulled thread on the right side and weird buttons on the inside of your cuffs and collar, you were comfy and matched everything in the closet. You will be fondly remembered.

On to the cakes. I already had a project planned for the weekend, when a last minute work thing came up. A couple of girls were leaving for school and we did a little potluck, or more accurately, dessert extravaganza. I knew immediately what I could do with what I had on hand:



I decided to make a Spongebob cake! I went out and bought a pineapple cake boxed mix, and a tub of white frosting. Normally I would try to do the frosting from scratch, but like I said, this was last minute. I also picked up a set of pastry tips, which I used with fairly disastrous results using plastic baggies that kept exploding on me.



I honestly thought it was going to come out really ghetto and cheesy, but after the frosting set in the fridge overnight and I put the toys on, it actually looked decent. I mean, it was corny as hell, but the person I was really dedicating it to seemed to be amused. People claimed to think it was tasty too, so, bonus there. I made sure not to over or undercook it, so it was moist without being gooey, I guess that was where I went right.

Now, onto the project I actually thought about ahead of time. I was going to an Obama phonebank/BBQ event, and they said to bring a side dish. I guess I'm getting into the Halloween/Christmas spirit early, because for some reason instead of just picking up a bag of chips I wanted to go all out. I really wanted to do red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, because that's what I saw in my mind. Apparently red velvet cake is considered a seasonal item around here, so I couldn't find a mix even though I tried two places. I even thought about doing it from scratch but I was aware that I was already going overboard here so I settled for strawberry cake instead. I also picked up a real genuine pastry bag, along with even more pastry tips, so...there will probably be more stupid cakes to come in the future. I kinda even want to take one of these Wilton decorating classes now.



It's supposed to be the Obama 08 logo. Oh, and that's the cream cheese frosting there, aka the good shit. At the BBQ someone commented on how good the frosting was, I told her it should be, since it's all sugar and butter and cream cheese.

The only problem was, strawberry cake is just too sweet on it's own to put such a rich frosting on. Red velvet would have been perfect. Not that anybody at the BBQ complained, the lady doing all the organizing told me they were "a hit" and took a bunch of extras home.

( More pics! )

At long, long last, here we are. It's done! I've finished recapping Day 2 of Comic-Com 8D

( Comic-Con Day 2 Recap! )

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is coming back this week! I've already seen the first episode thanks to Comic-Con, and it's as hilarious as ever. They've got something on the FX site that lets you make mashups:

( Cut for autoplay )

Lot of good movies out/coming out, huh? I saw Righteous Kill last night...I want to see Ghost Town too (along with a bunch of others). It seems pretty typical, but the Gerv is awesome and Greg Kinnear has always been consistent. Too bad there's no way to watch old Talk Soup episodes, it would be nice to go back and watch Kinnear's and John Henson's. You know, on the blast from the past tip.

I was stressing out max at the beginning of the week, but things have evened out now. This, the world's greatest Venn diagram ever, helps. Done with class for the week, and already done with most of the hw too, what you know about that. I'm feeling pretty good about the class in general at the moment, now my goal is to ace 9 out of 10 tests and be able to skip the final. Tonight I was going to relax and watch a movie and maybe try to catch up on some writing but I got sucked into the National Service Forum and now they're showing 9/11: As It Happened. The second plane just hit.

Oh yeah! One of the other things that was getting me earlier in the week was the whole "MSNBC dropping Olbermann and Matthews as anchors because they're too opinionated, supposedly in part because of KO's criticizing of the RNC using graphic footage from 9/11 in a crass exploitative way" thing. But Keith says the change was all his idea, so I guess it's all good. Except for me, who is going to have to look at David Gregory and his weird face instead. Now that I think about it, does he look like Donkey from Shrek?



Sorry, my moms gave me something for my back because it was killing me earlier so I might be a little loopy. To go back to the subject, Keith Olbermann did another Special Comment about the Republican's and John McCain's use of 9/11 as a political tool, that once I again I cannot embed but that you can watch here. It's not quite as fiery as the last Special Comment I linked, but still worth watching.

And because this clip needs legs, here is Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's response to the question of whether or not she agrees with our country's war policy of the last six years:


She didn't even know what the Bush Doctrine referred to until he told her! People aren't REALLY buying this broad as a no bullshit ass kicker, are they?

Implications

McCain has seen no immediate increase in support among highly religious white voters after his selection of Palin as his vice-presidential running mate. McCain has been ahead of Obama by better than a 2-to-1 margin among this group all summer, and that margin continues more or less unchanged in the first three days of September through Wednesday night. Meanwhile, Obama continues to dominate McCain among white voters who seldom or never attend church.

It should be reiterated that the data reviewed here do not yet reflect any possible impact of Palin's widely discussed acceptance speech on Wednesday night at the GOP Convention. Even if McCain does gain ground in the next several days as part of a positive reaction to Palin or the usual convention "bounce," it will be important to see whether he gains equally across all groups of white voters regardless of religion, or whether his gains are particularly concentrated in the highly religious group to which observers believe Palin may have a particularly strong appeal.

Also, the selection of Palin may serve the function of manifesting a change in enthusiasm and turnout propensity among various subgroups of voters. That is, highly religious white voters could now become more motivated than they have been in their support for the GOP ticket, and could therefore increase McCain's overall total vote count on Election Day. By the same token, the selection of Palin may generate increased enthusiasm among Obama's less religious supporters who likely disagree with her conservative views on social issues. All of this will be sorted out as Gallup continues to analyze data over the next several days.

ads;lfj'aewASDFKJfd no tell me now asjadfsoaeijowerjfd. Sorry, I know the political stuff is probably getting very tiresome, but I'm kind of overloading on it right now. I hope to tone it down now that the cons are over; I'm planning to do some volunteering tomorrow and channel the energy towards something that's actually productive, so hopefully that will help. Course I'm not going to shut up completely, so if you're somebody that's bothered by that you might want to check back with me in November 8D



So forget about the election for a second. I just discovered that not only can I order Peek-a-Pooh collections on ebay, they have snazzy Europeon ones that I couldn't even have gotten by wasting quarters if I wanted to. Looks like the Chip and Dale figures are harder to find, but I've already got all the good ones of those anyway. Man, when I think of the quarters I wasted chasing that eggplant...

I try to be open-minded, but it seems to me that so far the RNC isn't doing anything but harping on the same old tired partisan blah blah. "Democrats want to raise your taxes and kill your babies" "People want less government, not more!" "Only Republicans can respect service to this country!". Meanwhile they studiously avoid any mention of the huge issues of the last eight years. Whatevs, I guess all that really matters is Palin's speech, which actually has a freaking countdown clock on MSNBC right now.

As has probably been obvious, most of my TV watching for the last couple of weeks has been devoted to the convention coverage. A tech from Time Warner came by today to look into some of the problems we've been having, and I was terrified he was just going to replace the DVR box to shut us up like in the past, and I would lose my beautful, beautiful backlog. But he didn't! Even still, I thought it would be interesting to record what I've got piled up.

( 64 percent full )

Seems like the RNC is hitting it's stride after all the hurricane drama. I've been thinking a lot about the whole idea that Hillary Clinton supporters were going to switch their allegiances to the McCain ticket simply because he picked a female Vice President. I've seen mouthpieces spouting it; earlier KO called it "not the most sophisticated political idea", which is putting it gently. Anyway, so far the numbers aren't bearing it out:



I tell you I am checking Gallup for updates after every new development, like a junkie looking for a fix. Once a day is not enough. Planning on doing phone bank/voter registration/bbq stuff this Saturday in No. Hollywood. If that sounds interesting to anybody, hit me up. I'm bringing snacks!

I've really been trying to work on my Comic-Con recap, but I'm having connectivity issues that are driving me up the wall. As soon as I get on a roll, I'll start running into problems and eventually I have to take a break before I grind my teeth into stumps. We just replaced the router because we were having constant problems, and it is definitely better now but it's still being a pain in the ass. The cable/dvr is being a bitch too, so we've got a guy coming. They never do anything useful, though. Might be time to reconsider changing providers...I'd do it in a second if I knew it would solve the problems :/

( Life, the Universe and Everything )

Apparently more people watched Obama's speech than the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. And of course there's today's news (yesterday's, now) of McCain's VP pick, which I still don't quite know what to make of. I just discovered Gallup.com and all the goodies contained therein...there goes whatever productivity I had in my life.

I also discovered my.BarackObama.com, which is the way to find local events. It looks like there's plenty of phone bank work available close by. I swear to the sweet baby Jesus that the very last thing I would ever want to do in my offtime is talk on the phone to people that don't necessarily want to hear from me, but:

1. I'm the shit at it
2. It's for Obama

So I guess I'll have to suck it up and deal with it. I was planning on starting tomorrow but my car is out of commission at the moment (D:) so everything's up in the air. I hope it's nothing too serious.

Yet another dumb movie meme. I tried to jazz this one up by actually forcing myself to pick a single answer. ( 'One movie' meme )

I've been checking the stores for at least a week hoping it would show up and it finally did. 800 pages of pretty pretty conspicuous consumption!



For the uninitiated, the Vogue September issue is a complete beast. I've been losing interest in the magazine lately. I only made it halfway through April's annual "Shape" issue (where they promise styles for "every shape" meaning "0-16") so I figured it was time to stop throwing money away on the cover price and I haven't bought it since then. I haven't really missed it, or at least I thought I didn't, but I was still pretty eager to see the big fall issue.
( I took some pictures of the pretty. Not too many, just what jumped out on the first flip-through. )

Some assorted observations:

~Apparently store.barackobama.com doesn't carry any "¡Sí se puede!" shirts. Bummer!

~Nigella, Sunny and Giada are all as cute as Sandra Lee is inversely horrible. Also, I watch way too much food tv on the weekends.

~I watched The Hustler for the first time yesterday, while this morning I was subjected to a ton of promos for Disaster Movie. Quite a disparity, sheesh. How long can we keep making movies based on the trailers for other movies?

~I'm on the mailing list for the El Capitan theater so recently I got an ad for screenings of the first of FOUR new Tinker Bell movies:

Maybe it's just me, since I've been so attached to the character over the years, but doesn't this 3-D version kind of get into uncanny valley territory? It's not as bad in this picture as in some of the others...I guess I'm just being one of those annoying purists because I'm also not loving the fact that she's talking now, even if Egg from Arrested is doing the voice. It's just stupid of them to dedicate four movies to prequels of a character that is supposedly going to go on to be, well, Tinker Bell. Girl can be a real bitch, hello! That's why I love her. She's mercurial.