Your default Microsoft Office toolbar has the "print" and "print preview" buttons located right next to each other. Why d'you suppose this is? I "customize" my toolbar experience by removing the print button, but this is periodically rejiggered to the default configuration by a computer migration or inexplicable Windows event. Whereupon I immediately start printing at least five spurious copies of everything, every time I need to preview the formatting.

Is Microsoft in cahoots with printer-toner manufacturers?

Not only have large chunks of my favorite slang been co-opted by The Man (one of my managers said "ginormous" this morning)... I'm drinking decaf. Which ranks high among betrayals of my adolescent self, right after admitting that it might be kinda fun to go to a high school reunion. But, y'know, flying high on caffeine doesn't feel like boundless bouncy determination anymore; it just feels like stress.

Sigh.

This is a food entry. If all works out as planned, it'll be a long food entry, because if I don't handicap the verbiage, my Meyer lemon meringue pie (tasty as it was) will never compete with the pecan pie, 4 feet in diameter, shaped like a Koch snowflake.

Since it is now three days after I started writing the post, it obviously hasn't worked out as planned, and is short. But it has headings!
(more...)

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!

• The results of this election don't matter. Why? We're all about to be eaten by global warming-enabled giant squid, that's why. [Via Worldchanging]
  
• I'm going to reload the BBC's results page every five minutes for the next half hour, squealing like a stuck pig every time. Then I'm watching the Gilmore Girls and heading off to the volunteer party.
  
  
  I feel like something the cat is currently dragging in. I bought Martinelli's instead of champagne, for the one hand, and orange juice instead of vodka for the other - but even teetotalling is probably not enough to stave off this cold. However I'll be damned if I forego the chance to suffer/rejoice with compatriots for at least a little while.
  
• What's the conventional wisdom about the kinds of precincts that get their counts finished and reported early?
  
• Meanwhile back at the ranch, I've gotten a couple hundred extra hits in the past few days for my judicial endorsements. Due to the vagaries of Google-ju they've been mostly for the Office 52 contest; if Ms. Priver wins by a small margin, then, I and my bot-optimized heading tags fully intend to take credit.
  
• I've never been this invested in an election before. Eeeeeeek! I should write a reflection - but not until after the party tonight.
  

This election is a productivity pit. I'm getting a little bit of work done, but only a little, and I'm sure tomorrow will be worse. My throat started getting sore yesterday afternoon and hasn't stopped; calling up two precincts worth of Democrats* and going out in the crisp evening air to distribute door-hangers was probably not what the doctor would have ordered. I haven't quite worked out where I'm going to watch the results, but I'm sure it won't be a recuperative experience.

If you've also given up on getting anything done until Thursday, try contrasting Joshuah Bearman's stories from Florida with Common Cause's liveblogging of voter intimidation tactics. Then spin around in your chair until your head goes wubba-wubba-wubba.

* These were La Canada-Flintridge precincts, so it didn't take long.

Since my car still doesn't have working brakes, I'm at work, while a large chunk of the office (including my ride home) finishes the seminal masterwork entitled Proposal to Provide Super Fabulosity to Your Wackily Upscale Beach Community for Only Two Point Five Squillion Zlotys. I cut out some binder edge inserts but there's not much else for me to do.

• Last week was Earth Science Week! I missed it, too.
  
• But as my search requests remind me, it's not too late to miss out on Mole Day 2020! Who knew site logs could be transformed into a helpful calendar app?
  
• I signed up with Vote Pair, but it seems there aren't enough wishy-washy Cobb supporters in Ohio to satisfy the insatiable vote-swapping appetites of California progressives.
  

I got off the freeway (and might I add that I had just spent half an hour erasing traffic compression waves at 5 mph? I think I might! This rain has been rainy for sure, but it's clearly not in excess of the design storm, for any reasonable choice of design storm. The fact that three lanes were flooded out of commission can therefore be blamed on civil engineers. Bad civil engineers!) - anyway, I got off the freeway, and hey isn't it curious how much I have to step on the brake before stopping? And how I have to step a little more at this light than I did at the last? And how I don't seem to be stopping at all?

Maybe I should've done one of those N-point safety inspections. Or paid more attention to my dashboard light, the one that says "brake" that's usually for the parking brake but was also on all yesterday, but you know how dashboard lights are, always wanting attention like a fucking whiny puppy.

Hell, snapped brake lines are what emergency brakes are meant for! And I cleverly used the parking brake to drive in to the nearest parking lot, which happened to also be my office. I bet it was the most exciting day in the parking brake's life!

AAA is really the best thing ever - unlike conventional insurance companies with tow insurance add-ons, they're too stupid to charge extra for shitty cars. And one free tow justifies a whole year's worth of dues! I'm expecting at least a 200% return on investment here, not even counting the maps.

So, desks. My desk at home doesn't have drawers; it's not so much a desk as a repurposed side table.

My desk at work has two columns of drawers. No desk I have ever worked at, that had two columns of drawers, has ever had a sufficiently wide knee cubby. Do the same people design desks who design women's shoes? I'm not unusually fidgety but man am I ever sick of banging my knees.

1. Via Three-Toed Sloth via Crooked Timber, it's a cat research review.
   
2. Saturday night, I See Hawks in LA was live at my old dorm. I'd never heard them, or of them, before, but they were billed as "bluegrass/folk/rock" so I got all excited. Of course I forgot that these words mean different things to people not raised by an old-time string band. In the rest of the world, "bluegrass/folk/rock" means "country for a different demographic" and not "Fairport Convention but with banjos and verve".
   
   
   But, after getting over a deep-seated sense of righteous indignation at a world that refuses to conform to my taxonomy, I quite enjoyed the show. Lead singer Robert Waller employed that classic bluegrassy style on the calling out across a parking lot side of singing; it worked most of the time, though the slower harmonic numbers didn't get the careful blending they needed. It was a stripped-down ensemble, two guitars (dobros?) and bass, which supported the tunes (and they were fun tunes, a few quite catchy, with words and everything!) but really cried for ornamentation. Had the fiddler and drums been along - had I known there was a fiddler and drums - I probably would've snagged a CD. Maybe next time.
   
3. Persimmons. Yum.
   
4. My awesome backyard neighbor has been hinting that I should try my hand at prickly pear jelly from her prickly pears, so I could share the results. I gave it a go, and aside from having little prickles floating round the kitchen for a week, I burned my thumb on the hot jelly syrup last night. Rather than finishing the jelly anti-botulism preservation, then, I held ice on my hand for a couple hours (sugar syrup is hot). Now I've got three little jars of jelly (which really did gel!) in the fridge, rather than in the cupboard where I wanted them, and a bandaid on my thumb where I didn't want it at all.
   
   
   Prickly pear jelly: tasty, but not at all worth the trouble.
   
5. I just now cut my finger on a yogurt lid. I will not rest until all ten fingers have bandaids!