Dan visits the nuclear power plant
This is the most interesting blog post I’ve read in a long time. My friend Dan toured the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant [no kidding] and took some photos [I especially like the one of him in a Tyvek suit]. Do check it out.
Hope Maryland’s AccuVote is ready for me
Well, here we go: On Tuesday, Maryland [and nine other states] gets to test out its electronic voting gadgets. And we, the hapless American public, could be the victims of this little experiment:
“People complain about hanging chads,” said Aviel D. Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and a co-author of the first study that found security flaws in the Diebold machines. “But if an electronic machine has malicious code in it, it’s possible that all of the chads are hanging — and then you have to question every vote.”
The company has worked to fix all security issues that researchers have described, said David Bear, a Diebold spokesman. “Those things have not only already been addressed,” he said, “they were implemented.”
For more than a year, Diebold also has been fighting conspiracy theories popularized on the Internet that say its Jetsons-at-the-polling-place wares serve as cover for an ongoing effort to stuff electronic ballot boxes on behalf of the Republican Party.
Diebold executives, along with outside computer security experts who are seeking to fix the voting machines, say the conspiracy theories are bunk. The company’s chief executive, Walden W. O’Dell, did not help matters, though, when he sent out a fund-raising letter for the Bush campaign last summer saying he was committed to “helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president next year.” [New York Times]
Here is the Senate report detailing the flaws and holes.
Having no paper trail just seems like a BIG BAD IDEA. An ardent, power-hungry politician’s wet dream. I mean, how can I, as a voter, go in and make sure they got my vote? I can verify my selection before I hit “Cast Ballot,” but can I see that the vote “went through”? How do I know it didn’t just vanish?
Still got questions about voting in Maryland? Want to know how to register or where to cast your [electronic, shady, potentially hackable] ballot? Check out the state Board of Elections.
Sure, it’s nice, but it won’t last
Love this weather, man. Spent the afternoon on the porch reading Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Here are a couple excerpts. Good book. I laughed a few times. And yes, I think it’s pretty obvious that members of the Right have been lying their little butts off. But I think, too, that Democrats have done their share of truth-twisting … unfortunately, a lot of politicos and hangers-on seem to think it goes with the territory, that the American People don’t want to worry their little heads about big issues.
Most importantly, I fear that these people lie, people from both sides, because 1) they can get away with it and 2) [scarily enough] they don’t actually think they’re lying. But what I really like about the book is that [and Michael Moore does this too] Franken actually researches the claims put forth by rabid Republicans. With like, actual facts. This is important, folks. Make all the claims you want, about whatever you want. All I ask is that you be able to back it up. And that I be able to check out your research.
This is why the current administration is in hot water. Not so much for what their policy [such as it is] is, but for their shadowy, mystery-cloaked reasons for doing whatever it is that they do. Sunshine laws were created to stop this kind of shadiness from continuing, and many Republicans/people of this administration don’t seem to like people knowing what they’re doing.
Ridiculous. In my opinion, a damn good reason for we ordinary Americans to start paying a hell of a lot more attention to politics and Capitol Hill than to Survivor: Supreme Reality Death Challenge or whatever the hell is on TV these days.
Anyway. Other forms of entertainment this weekend consisted of playing Super Mario Bros. on my SNES, reading the newspaper, examining a new zit, having a cookout with Tom and Carole [OK, that was a good time], discussing mortgages, and sniping at Iain.
Hold me back, y’all, I’m having too much fun.
Yawn.
Crafty son of a bitch, ain’t she.
Behold the T-shirt I made and the quilt parts that are waiting for the next step.
Weedwhacker time
Quick thoughts, before I pad off to bed:
- For the love of all that is holy, don’t even consider voting for Nader. I’m so pissed at him.
- I shaved my legs for the first time in like two or three months and I’m all silky now.
- “The Devil Wears Prada” is a book that could have been condensed into 2 pages. I skipped about 250 pages in the middle and still didn’t miss anything.
- … [referencing something] … Woo hoo! I rock!
- I need to get a walker foot so i can start quiltin’ my shit.
- Heard Kerry’s stump speech from the University of Toledo today. Good speech, but Ed Gillespie of the Republican National Convention sounded like a total numbwad trying to attack it.
Busy busy busy this week. Nothing brilliant in here, I know. But there’s more to come, I promise.
It just gets better and better.
Warning: This Post Rated R for Language. This post in no way reflects the views of Baltimore County teachers, Baltimore City teachers, any teachers I know or may in the future know, the N.E.A., or TABCO. Though it should.
Education Secretary Rod Paige calls national teachers union a ‘terrorist organization.’
Let me lay it out for you, layman’s terms: Bush says [and I confess I’m paraphrasing], “All y’all teachers better make our kids smarter ‘n’ stuff, make ‘em do real good on tests. Here’s a list of [counterintuitive] ways to do it [a.k.a. No Child Left Behind] — and you have to follow it, or no more money for you. Oh, and by the way, I’m not going to help y’all out with any extra funding for all the ridiculous hoops I’m gonna make y’all leap through in order to comply. Just, y’know, make it happen.”
And then his very own Cabinet member says, “Yeah, take that, ya big bunch of terrorists.”
To our schoolteachers.
Do any of you remember your teachers? Harried, overworked, underpaid people you made fun of? Well, life sure as hell hasn’t gotten any easier for them.
And now, to top all of this ignominy off, certain members of the voting public want to point fingers at Baltimore City schoolteachers for the mess that the city schools are in.
Talk about blaming the victim.
And I’m not just spewing out my ass. I was a Baltimore County teacher for a time. It’s fucking hard work. About the same pay as a clerk at Home Depot. Far more likelihood of getting poked, insulted, or beaten [or called “You fucking slut! You fucking ho!” during class].
To have the fucking Education Secretary pile on more bullshit is, I would think, about the last straw for these guys.
I hereby propose that any numbskull motherfucker who thinks they can cut yet more funding for schools, yet more salary for teachers, and pass it off as “cost-cutting measures” be forced to give teaching a try. Just for a day.
‘Cause you know what they do to substitute teachers …
Thanks to Erik Pepple for the link.
Pop Culture throwdown
This week’s library haul:
Books:
- The Devil Wears Prada, by Lauren Weisberger
- Second Helpings, by Megan McCafferty
- Radical Sanity, by Elizabeth Wurtzel
Mags:
- Entertainment Weekly
- The Advocate
- um, and another one I seem to have temporarily lost, and can’t remember
Albums:
- The Essential Janis Joplin
- Diary of Alicia Keys
- Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
- Mutations
Man. I just don’t get why more people don’t take advantage of this free shit.
Wax in my teeth, fur in my ear.
So we’re at the grocery store today, trying to find the orgasmically good sharp white cheddar cheese we had while at my in-laws’ house. Can’t find it. Get some expensive cheese with wax binding instead.
The wax gets all over the place and now is living in my teeth, waiting patiently for an eviction notice. Well don’t get comfy, cheese wax, because your ship’s about to sail.
My Incredibly Boring Life: As my sister pointed out, I am nowhere near cool. Which is probably why I spent my weekend watching movies, quilting, reading and fucking around on GarageBand.
Tra-la-la-la.
Damn! Wax!
The trouble with tribbles: So I had this dream last night. The world was being overcome by aliens that start out as tiny lavender fluffy things, the size of a quarter, and grow to be great big lavender fluffy things as big as houses. I was on Earth’s defense team, trying to rid the planet of these hideous aliens [they remind me of Popples]. There was one attached to the side of my neck, by my ear, and it was growing. Fortunately, someone discovered the only way to fight off the aliens: hay. Somebody held a piece of hay up next to it, and it shriveled and —poof!— disappeared. The rest of the aliens turned into blue crabs. I’m not sure why.
Please, somebody tell my subconscious to start serving up some better bullshit.
Note to Jen: What did I tell you?
This post brought to you by: Nice Dream from the album “The Bends” by Radiohead.
post-script: Just laughed my ass off when I realized what the title reads if you switch adjectives predicates. Oh, and I’m taking suggestions for the T-shirts I’m going to make with my new ink-jet printer iron-on T-shirt transfers. I’m stumped for ideas.
Damn you, Sofia Coppola.
I’m a wreck. I finally watched “Lost in Translation” tonight, and now I’m a puffy-eyed slobbering idiot.
[Combine that with Baz Luhrman’s “Romeo + Juliet,” which I watched earlier in the week, and I’m all tapped-out, tears-wise.]
LIT was terrific. One of the few movies I’ve seen this year that I’d actually consider buying.
As Entertainment Weekly pointed out a week or two ago in a DVD review, Coppola doesn’t bend to the “inherent Lolita-ness” of this story, and I have great, great admiration for that. If she had ended with those two banging their brains out I would have been pissed off. For those who haven’t seen it, a recap: Scarlett Johanssen’s character, Charlotte, is staying at a Tokyo hotel while her workaholic husband is in Japan on business. Bill Murray plays Bob, a middle-aged actor staying at the same hotel while he shoots commercials for whiskey. Charlotte and Bob meet in the hotel bar, strike up a conversation, and end up hanging out together the rest of the week, while a strange bond is forged between them.
Coppola could have gone the skeevy route and had the two of them hook up, thereby wrecking their marriages as well as whatever new relationship they had going. But she didn’t, and the resulting emotional attachment they find growing is so well-done, cinematically [and I’m movie-stupid about these things]. I think it’s a nice examination on the awkwardness of meeting after marriage a person of the opposite sex with whom you have a connection.
While I have only ever found Bill Murray to have the barest of sympathetic qualities, I actually enjoyed him in this movie.
And I’ve never seen any of Johanssen’s movies until today, but I loved her character right off the bat.
Charlotte is smart, she’s cynical, she’s mean; but she’s also a watcher, an observer, friendly, quiet. She takes an extra minute to just look, to just watch people, the way they do things when they don’t realize they’re being watched. She notices things. She has some hope for her future. She’s not jaded. She’s a loner, an outsider; she doesn’t speak the language. She’s afraid, and stagnating, and procrastinating. She watches the world from her window, but at times puts her scarf on and wanders among the masses. She’s young and married and underemployed.
Do you see where I’m going with this?
It’s quite rare that I see a character with whom I can actually empathize, not just sympathize, with in films. Most women are still portrayed as types: The ingenue. The ball-buster. The bored housewife. The slut. Idealized, stereotyped, and reduced to lowest common denominator, regardless of how “complex” they appear to be.
But occasionally you get a character who seems real. She’s not just Girl In Tight Clothes, or Woman Who Hates Her Life. She’s a person. A normal, flawed human being. In high school, it was Claire Danes as Angela in “My So-Called Life” [as it probably was for half of the suburban white girls out there]. In college, it was … well, nobody who I can think of. And after being married, at what seems to be a far younger age than everyone else I knew, there was nothing. Yeah, lots of movies had wives in them [“The Good Girl,” “The Hours,” etc] but none who seemed like me. I wasn’t suicidal or an adulteress or even middle-aged.
Where were the young, married, under-employed, reticent loner-dreamers?
Well, there’s one here. And I have to say, it feels good to see that.
At any rate. I obviously am not going to strike up a strangely beautiful yet wholly platonic relationship with Bill Murray this year, so I can’t claim the whole ‘budding friendship with a middle-age actor’ thing in common. And even the fact that I cried is certainly no testament to its quality — I blubber at particularly moving telephone ads, for pete’s sake — but the fact that I’m still thinking about the movie and actually sat down to write something about it is.
I’ve been in a weird mood ever since. Long story short, it’s a new favorite, it made me cry fat cathartic tears, and it’s a chart-topper in my book.
But damn you, Sofia Coppola, for the inevitable puffy-face I’ll wake up with tomorrow morning, and the twenty bucks I’m soon going to part with in order to own this flick.
Some interesting pro-con critiques amid the flame wars on IMDb.
Note: I realize now that I’m one of “those people” who really liked “The Virgin Suicides,” too. What can I say? Make it enigmatic and slightly depressing and I’m all over it like EZ-cheese on a Triscuit.
Angry Ninja, where are you?
I sure could use a stealthy, martial-arts-trained amateur advice columnist who is wise to the arts of Ninjury to help me in my political confusion.
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