I stayed at the office to play with Illustrator tonight. We’ve already seen boobies for choice and boobies for Ashcroft… but none of those were blue-footed boobies! No slogans yet, but I’m thinking that the blue-footed booby, as a beneficiary of the Galapagos eco-sanctuary, would want to endorse a candidate with a strong environmental record. Perhaps several such candidates. Boobies for Boxer?

The L.A. Times Food section attempts to turn a well-worn trope on its head by insisting that there’s never too much zucchini. Though I normally enjoy any article focused on a single, seasonal ingredient, does rhapsodic praise of the goods at the Santa Monica farmer’s market really never get old?

My own zucchini - the one I planted to ensure a yield of something from my garden - has output precisely one (1) zucchini and has a rather severe case of leaf mold. So this isn’t, you know, jealousy speaking or anything.

In my wild flailing Google for the perfect election gear, I came across a discussion forum for right-wing goths. It’s two obnoxious tastes that taste, when combined, kinda like a bunch of young conservatives learning to find a voice in political satire. Which I imagine to taste somewhat like salt licorice.

• Dick Cheney: A Goth Icon?
• John Kerry: The Arnold Rimmer Candidate

As is often the case, it’s all too heavy-handed to be actually funny, but right-wing goths are still a damn sight better than that *&$%#** “I’m hilarious and subversive and hard-hitting and original because I talk about how Doonesbury is dumb!” Mallard Fillmore. And now I’m really truly going to bed.

I went down to the local Democratic headquarters last night, to purchase swag and scope out volunteer opportunities with the youth-oriented partisan institution. Actually joining the Young Dems would be an unseemly affront to my cultivated lefty-swing-voter image, but one must occasionally sacrifice ideology to build an effective grassroots apparatus, sigh.

The rest of this post will be about swag.
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I’m currently installing the show/hide sidebar gadgets script, from scriptygoddess. Because I don’t want to have the script included on every single bloody page, file, and MT template, I’m hiding it in a layer of includes which have caused a couple problems. The extended entry has the gory details.
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It seems my help is urgently needed on a coincedentally tropical isle:

Bill McGuire, the director of the Benfield Grieg Hazard Research Centre at University College London, said a huge chunk of rock, roughly the size of the Isle of Man, was on the brink of breaking off the volcanic island of La Palma in the Canaries.

When - Professor McGuire says it is not a matter of if - the rock plunges into the ocean it will trigger giant waves called mega-tsunamis.

[…]

Despite the potential scale of the threat, little is being done to monitor the geological activity of La Palma. Only a few seismometers have been set up on the precarious western flank of the island, which do not provide enough information to predict when another eruption might occur.

And of course there’s a few dour individuals dedicated to pooh-poohing the idea that we should pay seismologists luxurious sums of money to study the problem:

The present study examines the assumptions and input parameters used by probabilistic numerical models and evaluates the threat of mega tsunami generation from flank failures of island stratovolcanoes. Based on geologic evidence and historic events, it concludes that massive flank collapses of Cumbre Vieja or Kilauea volcanoes are extremely unlikely to occur in the near geologic future. The flanks of these island stratovolcanoes will continue to slip aseismically, as in the past.

Aseismicity - pah! Incidentally, eccentric web design is generally not to be counted against a geologist’s professional gravitas. However, I don’t find the article particularly convincing, for a variety of reasons I’ll try to refrain from snarking about or discussing much at all since I really only skimmed it. On the other hand, this could genuinely plausibly be an interesting thesis topic, it’s got volcanoes and earthquakes and modeling and field work on nice islands and give-me-funding-or-New-York-gets-it and everything! Even hydrogeology. And appears to be somewhat understudied.

Of course, not having started applying to grad schools yet I’m getting somewhat ahead of myself.

(First link via World Changing)

So I’ve been asked to elaborate on my rather dim view of Big Scientific Metanarratives in lit-crit circles. Fair ‘nuf, but be forewarned that I’m working against my instincts here. Right now, my instincts are telling me to keep snarking about beer.
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Volokh Conspirator Todd Zywicky writes:

Indeed, if the expansive interpretation of the plain language [of the 21st Amendment] is adopted, it seems that the state government could enslave members of the population and make them drive beer trucks.

I don’t know what planet the Volokh Conspiracy lives on, but here on the Federal Democratic Earth of the United States of America, there are terrorists trying to steal our beer. If Arnold Schwarzenegger needs to commandeer a fleet of beer trucks, who are we to stand in his way? Or lie down and moan in his way, if we’ve had a little too much beer for standing?

Some days, a long wisp of hair curls very far out from your head, and you stop and look in the mirror and think hey! that looks like a communications antenna! my head is from space! - but no matter how hard you wish neither your hair nor your teeth will pull in signals from the secret military-alien bandwidth.

Being a responsible jalopy owner, I threw some oil into the engine this morning. Drove to work, and got off the freeway to discover that my engine was smoking - as sometimes happens. Upon further inspection, I noticed the cap to the oil-goes-here bit sitting happily on the intake manifold. D’oh!

At least I was clever enough to bring along a spare quart.