...but it's for a good cause. I just now signed up for a candlelit fundraising walk this Saturday, with an ambitious goal of five bucks over the minimum sponsorship. The money goes to the AIDS service center and Elizabeth Glasier pediatric AIDS foundation - and you can sponsor me on the Internet! Which I hear they have on the broadcast spectrum now.

• Brakes that stop, and horns that honk.
• Bunny slippers that really look like bunnies.
• The Singapore Sling. Or maybe not.
• Chicory.
• Buildings painted in vibrant colors.
• Windows.
• Fog.
• Redwoods.
• The idea of pneumatic tubes.
• Polar fleece.
• Black pepper.
• Crudely drawn flowers.
• Interesting metal cabinetry at industrial salvage shops.
• Being able to touch all of one's teeth with one's tongue.

Well. The furnace pilot light's out, and I'm in no shape to re-ignite it tonight (see: Singapore Sling, above, as I believe the full effects are not truly felt until the day after the day after) so the full review of x-treme Thanksgiving dinner technology will have to wait. One can't review cooking implements built from salvage when one's nose is cold, after all.

I'm off to the Greater Bay Area tomorrow, to hang out with old friends and meet the people who might end up on my dissertation committee, if all goes well with admissions, and eat turkey. Lots and lots of deep-fried turkey.

Feel free to invite your favorite trolls to the abortion post, and have a happy Thanksgiving! Or a happy but not particularly gratitude-filled week, whatever.

I feel like I've been abnormally serious here lately, what with the politics and the politics and the what-all. I almost had a bit last week on the disgusting way I clear my sinuses, but just couldn't muster the enthusiasm for a good old-fashioned TMI yuck-fest. This isn't supposed to be a serious blog, but, you know, fuck it.

Hearing/seeing progressive men talk about how, in light of political realities, preserving abortion rights should be carefully weighed against preserving the constitutionality of the New Deal just makes me break out in a cold, Handmaid's Tale sort of sweat. True, if push came to shove, the overall harm caused by back-alley abortions and/or forced childbearing would probably pale in comparison with the harm caused by destroying OSHA, the EPA, etc etc etc, but jeebus! For one, I don't think this is a reality-based dichotomy - in what backwater of the judicial pool will you find someone who would uphold Roe v. Wade but overturn everything else? - so it's a creepy way to frame a discussion.

For two, I happen to have a pet angle on the question, which would solve everything if only it could gain some traction in the debate. Or if not everything, at least the problem of pro-life "feminism". Below the fold, I am right and everybody else is wrong! Except Patricia Beattie Jung, who is way ahead of me.
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Buncha comment spam today! I put in a quick fix to restrict access to mt-comments.cgi - if you're trying to post and can't, your browser probably isn't sending a referer string, or else I totally screwed up the .htaccess file. One of the two.

So far, the prevention side seems to be working. If you're upset that your comment is unfairly rejected, and you don't want to start sending a proper referer (actually any referer string will do) or don't know how, let me know, we'll work something out.

1. Billy Graham is doing his little routine at the Rose Bowl tonight - the second-largest event they were expecting this season, after the USC-UCLA game. He did it last night, too, and I drove home in second gear the whole damn way* behind a crowd of "Los Angeles Crusade" bumper stickers.**
   Didn't Jesus say something about only praying within walking distance? Or at least carpools? I think Paul advised the Ephesians to carpool wearing modest bonnets.
2. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an e-voting petition - which may have somewhat less impact than a petition with verified signatures, but will certainly have considerably more impact than those stupid forwards where every tenth person sends it off to /dev/null, which is to say more impact than zero. Which is to say you should go sign it, you fellow FDRUSians.

* Actually it was fine until Glendora.
** My commute winds through the entire home district of the execrable David Dreier. Whee!

Who, I earnestly enquire, could possibly resist bottles of wine for $1.20?

Don't answer that, I'm sure you all have quite good sense in your heads and realize that $1.20 wine will taste like, well, $1.20 wine. Nevertheless, I do not happen to be involved in La Resistance du Vin and so I bought three bottles.

"Good" is not particularly among the things one could say about the 2020 Tula Vista Cabernet Sauvignon. "Drinkable" is, possibly, if the set of things one could say is broadly construed to include both charitability and sarcasm. It has screaming notes of poison berry and vinegar, with a sour, tannic finish. However, if you are careful to avoid touching the tip or side of your tongue to the wine, and swallow quickly without thinking about what you're doing, it's a plausible excuse for a genuine Two-Buck Chuck.

There's an article in the Weekly Standard asserting that Californians are Suckers for 'Science', spending a million zillion dollars on speculative stem cell research while spurning measures that would totally, definitely, for-real save lives:

THE PASSAGE OF PROPOSITION 71 in California (the Stem Cell Research and Cures Act) was an acute case of electoral folly. As Californians plunged headlong into a $6 billion quagmire of debt in a quixotic quest for "miracle cures" from human cloning and embryonic stem cells, they simultaneously rejected Prop. 67, an initiative that would have added a modest tax to phone bills to keep the state's endangered emergency rooms and trauma centers from shutting down.
[...]
The bitter irony here is that while Californians refuse to fund treatment centers that could make the difference between people living and dying today, they are pursuing treatments and cures that, if they come at all, are likely a decade or more away. What could explain such folly? Blame the awesome power of big money, big celebrities, and big hype.

It goes on to detail how the promise of stem cell research has been hopelessly overhyped (it has) and imply that Prop 71 passed because Californians were hopelessly dazzled by the promise of a vat of spare organs in every closet.

Erm, sorry, what? Prop 71 was about saying "fuck you" to the Bush administration's theocratic anti-science policies, and getting California a slice of that tasty biotech pie. It was about asserting our right to act alone as the world's sixth-largest economy. Yeah, it was also about overhyped science, but to look at that hype in the dry context of political soundbiting and scientific illiteracy is to miss something very, very important.

Imagine you live in a nice suburb, and you drive a very large, very safe SUV. You own some power tools, and maybe a gun, but you're always very careful with them. So what are you most afraid of? Massive hemorrhage, or Alzheimer's?

Now that we're doomed to an eternity of wailing, gnashing our teeth, and hiding our degenerate sexualities from roving mobs of angry countryfolk, we should really be thinking about building our nest eggs for an eventual flight to Canada and/or hush payments for the vice squad. But how? Gold bullion? Stock in torch and pitchfork manufacturers? Gifts to Mexican people-smugglers?

Here's what I've done so far:

• Ditched the small-cap portion of my 401K allocation in favor of increased foreign (the dollar is fucked) and socially responsible investments.
• Invested $35 in a little plastic card from the ACLU.

I know you guys are not always numerous enough to sustain a long thread, but please consider this an open discussion on silly and/or appropriate financial responses to the election...

Ah, yes, those spout box spouts, never so unenlightening as they have been in the past few months:

i like moerikankeys

Your preferences, sir, are obsolete. Please upgrade to ones that make some sense.
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