Monthly Archives: November 2024

Another day, another meeting…

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Woke up feeling refreshed. Ran the dog out around the wind-break to help her get some yayas out. It’s cold! The weather has returned to Wisconsin-normal, with ice covering the ground and a bitter north wind sucking the life out of everything. Sat down here with a luke-warm cuppa coffee and basically zero minutes free to gather thoughts and express them…

Yesterday I was longing for a simple life selling pasta or something. We had picked up some lemon pepper linguini from pappardelle’s in Kansas City and prepared it Tuesday night with a little olive oil and a lot of sauteed minced garlic. Beth found the link so we won’t need Ben to Fed Ex a continuing supply. Speaking of Ben, he has another feature in the dead tree version of Details this month… sadly it’s not online but you can read it while browsing at Borders. It’s called “The War at Home” and is about soldiers playing patty cake with fellow soldier’s wives.

Wouldn’t it be nice to take a laptop to the farmer’s market, hang out, blog, sell a few hundred pounds of pasta and call it a day? I’ve done the calculations. I’d need to sell an unbelievable tonnage to maintain what I jokingly refer to as my lifestyle. So, I’m off to another meeting.

Not in thy back yard…

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An odd opportunity for development has cropped up here in the Town of Dunn, a rural island with a strict land use plan in an otherwise rapidly urbanizing county. The Federal Government has finally decided to close the Plum Island Animal Disease Center and replace it with an even more secure facility, the National Bio and Agro Defense Facility. The new facility will be located in America’s heartland.

I have mixed feelings. There are those that say that Lyme disease and West Nile Virus are escapees from Plum Island, and if that is true what sane, right thinking community member would want something like that in his township? But then there are those who say that development of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus was an offshoot of boy-in-a-bubble research funded by the Hughes Medical Foundation and undertaken by select academic institutions in the seventies and only escaped the lab in the eighties when the Reagan administration tried to legitimize the black ops, or at least turn them from black to gray at Letterman Army Hospital in San Francisco. But what kind of nut ball would believe a thing like that? It would be as reasonable to think that the COINTELPRO operation targeting for death and “neutralization” the black Americans and other activists of the sixties was more than a figment of some liberal’s imagination.

I don’t think I have much to be concerned about as regards the laboratory being sited here. Texas A&M, home of the Bush Presidential Library, the school where Robert Gates — former CIA Director, Iran Contra alumnus and now nominee for Secretary of Defense — was president is on the list of institutions competing for the prize. Texas A&M has great relations with the Hughes Medical Institute and Texas itself is a much better location than Wisconsin from which to mount a germ warfare offensive against enemies of the American Oligarchy. And Texas is more the heartland than Wisconsin. We are more the bellybutton-land, or perhaps the armpit-land.

My best wishes to all the folks who are competing for these research dollars. It’s just too bad everyone can’t be a winner.

The Esquimaux have a thousand words for sleet…

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Oh the weather outside is sleety
and I’m here with my sweety
so no matter the icy blows
(quelque chose, quelque chose, quelque chose)

It turns out the Inuit don’t have a word for sleet. Well, perhaps they do. How would I know? They may also have a word for “frozen fish fed to husky dogs and later vomited on the trail.” Or they may not, and certainly if they do, I don’t know it. But the weather and the Eskimos are always good for conversation this time of year, and outdoors at our place it is now sleeting to beat the band. The deck is a treacherous patch of ice. Each of the thousands of fallen leaves littering the grounds appears to be a little cup full of shaved ice. And ice covers the driveway like a thick transparent coat of urethane. This is the kind of precipitation that weighs down the tree branches and eventually snaps them off.

Off the cliff and floating free in the world of fashion

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Kat Herding has pushed me over the edge. Or maybe Halley did it. Whatever. Today is the day I’ve vowed to put aside my self destructive bingeing on ze Frank shows and old Tick cartoons and focus, focus on STYLE! So here is my very own stylin’ link-o-rama. It contains images of Paris Hilton and discussions of Britney Spears’ inability to exit a car gracefully without flashing her panties if she’s wearing them. It contains rare introspective meditations on whence cometh the college fashion bloggers, and a concern that this college fashion blogging trend may be diluting the fashion blogging brand. It contains a rare opportunity to examine the variety of Web 2.0 advertising gizmos that style-mantrapreneurs have foisted on a super-saturated market, a survey from Glam-Ads to Stylefeeder, from Style Hive to Style Root. Does all this seem oh so 2024 to you? It should.

Style IT

Almost Girl: Where Plato and Prada Meet

Styleaholics

Star Style Salon

Coutorture

Tickle me Emo (This is my favorite link, both for the information it delivers and the echo of the comments on a recent Christmas miracle in formerly Nazi occupied France…. If that virgin mary baguette is actually crying then it could be sold on eBay for an incredible sum, and it might cure warts too. Or at least skin tags.)

The rash of celebrities flashing their nether regions worries Peter Post, director of the Emily Post Institute of etiquette and manners.

“My concern is the impressionability of young people,” he said. “I think that some young people are going to say, ‘Wow, if Britney Spears and Paris Hilton can do that, I wonder if I can do that.’”

Scrabblephile

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If you too are a Scrabblephile, you will laugh out loud at this show from ze Frank. If you are not a Scrabblephile, you may laugh even harder.

Comment Spam

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I love the guy who ends his herbal supplements advertisement with the prayer: Don’t delete this.

Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha… I deleted it again! And again!

I’ve noticed a huge up-tick in comment spam since I amused myself with the forklift message. I figured Chuck Mortimore might scratch his head in puzzled amusement if he ever vanity-surfed that post, so I let it slide by. Or maybe it’s a price I pay for the paid advertising in the sidebar. Or maybe the vermin are everywhere sniffing out every living blogger and trying to suffocate him (or her) with the foetid stench of rotting spam. I like foetid better than fetid. And while I’m on about spelling, why so many aitches in “diphthong?” “Dipthong” would be much more available to adolescent humor, nicht wahr? Ah well, one is only adolescent once, but immaturity can last a lifetime.

YUI Yahooie!

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I’m all atwitter about this great resource! Here, for example, is a handy RGB and HEX color picker using Widgets brought to you by Yahoo! I take back some of the mean stuff I’ve been saying about the company. (But I reserve the right to lash out mindlessly whenever their BigCo interests seem to be depriving me of opportunity).