Home Alone: The Otter Edition

From my new favorite blog.

Props to Tony for the heads up.

If I ever get married ...

... we MUST play this game at my bridal shower:



I'm just saying.


Props to Alisa for the link!

Get well soon, Bettie

This is a bummer:

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Bettie Page, a 1950s pinup known for her raven-haired bangs and saucy come-hither looks, was hospitalized in intensive care after suffering a heart attack, her agent said Friday.

"She's critically ill," Mark Roesler of the Curtis Management Group told The Associated Press.

He said the 85-year-old had the heart attack Tuesday and was hospitalized Friday in the Los Angeles area.

A family friend, Todd Mueller, said Page was in a coma. When asked to confirm, Roesler said, "I would not deny that," but he would not comment further on her condition.

Getting old sucks.

UPDATE, 12/11: Bettie Page passed away tonight at age 85.

(Image courtesy of Stencilry.org.)

Shop Joe

I thought we'd heard the last from Samuel J. Wurzelbacher. But I was wrong.

Make of it what you will, but later this month a book [Joe the Plumber] co-wrote with relatively unknown author and publisher Thomas N. Tabback, "Fighting for the American Dream," will come out. Thousands of copies have already been pre-ordered at $24.95 each via a star-spangled website (theme: "It's about we the people, not we the government") that also offers Joe-approved merchandise and the ability, for a price, to post to its blog and forum.

[...]

"Fighting for the American Dream" is part biography and part current events, Mr. Tabback said, adding that it gives a behind-the scenes account of Mr. Wurzelbacher's encounter with Mr. Obama and what happened in the weeks that followed. It will also dip into Mr. Wurzelbacher's personal history and his take on American values.

Mr. Tabback said that the site is Mr. Wurzelbacher's new platform to give voice to those that may not have one. "[It] will help galvanize an effort for regular folks in the country to be heard on Capitol Hill and local and state governments," he said.

Joining Joe, for a fee But that will come at a cost. For $19.95, Mr. Wurzelbacher fans can become "Freedom Members" with posting rights on his blog and forum. With membership they also get a monthly newsletter from Mr. Wurzelbacher and 10% off "Shop Joe" merchandise. For that price, they also become "an integral part of an American movement to preserve our American Dream," the site claims, but what that means remains unclear.

Please, Jah. Make it stop.

Reflections on McCain's Failed Campaign

I just finished reading the Rolling Stone article, "Requiem for a Maverick" by Matt Taibbi, which provides his perspective on how McCain's 2008 presidential campaign got so fucked up. Here's just a sample:

In short, McCain entered this election season being the worst thing that anyone can be, in the eyes of the Rove-school Republicans: Different. Independent. His own man. He exited the campaign on his knees, all his dignity gone, having handed the White House to the hated liberals after spending the last months of the race with numb-nuts Sarah Palin on his arm and Karl Rove's cock in his mouth. Even if you wanted to vote for him, you didn't know who you were voting for. The old McCain? The new McCain? Neither? Both?

I could have done without the Karl "Doughboy" Rove fellatio image. But interestingly --- or maybe not so interestingly, now that I think about it --- Taibbi also lays blame on the media and the rest of us for buying into all of this bullshit back when Not My President was up for election in the first place:

In short, it was an utterly degrading bourgeois/ruling-class media deception that "ordinary Americans," if they had any brains at all, ought to have been disgusted by to the point of rebellion. But ordinary Americans, alas, would have been perfectly happy to spend the rest of eternity mesmerized by the endless and endlessly condescending I'd Like to Have a Beer With You sideshow, leaving the boring policy stuff to the people who actually pay for the campaigns. Things could have just kept getting dumber and dumber, and no one would have been surprised. There was certainly no trend that suggested our presidential elections were bound to return to being great, sweepingly important contests of ideas. But that's what happened.

But it's not all entirely depressing. Taibbi ends the article, thusly:

When Obama took the stage in Grant Park as president-elect, that question was answered. We pulled off an amazing thing here, delivering on our society's most ancient promises, in front of a world that still largely thought of us as the home of Bull Connor's fire hose. This dumbed-down, degraded election process of ours has, in spite of itself and to my own extreme astonishment, brilliantly re-energized the American experiment and restored legitimacy to our status as the world's living symbol of individual freedom. We feel like ourselves again, and the floundering economy and our two stagnating wars now seem like mere logistical problems that will be overcome sooner or later, instead of horrifying symptoms of inevitable empire-decline.

For this to happen, absolutely everything had to break right. And for that we will someday owe sincere thanks to John McCain, and Sarah Palin, and George W. Bush. They not only screwed it up, they screwed it up just right.

Obviously, I'm really happy that Obama, not McCain, won the presidency. I just worry about the eight-year-old clusterfuck Obama just inherited. I don't doubt that Obama will be a successful president; I just worry about how long righting the wrongs of eight years of Bush will take. People I care about are losing their jobs; people I care about are on the verge of bankruptcy due to adjustable rate mortages; people I care about are being forced to take unpaid vacations; people I care about are unable to afford any kind of healthcare whatsoever. I remain optimistic about Obama's presidency, because I have to be; to think otherwise would leave me hopeless, jaded, cynical and completely disengaged.


Anyway, read the article in its entirety here.


Props to Otto Man at Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Nachos for the link.

Adventures in Bacon

I'm simultaneously enthralled and repulsed by this:

See it in all its glory here. Props to Kenneth for the link.

Fortune Cookie Wisdom

I suspect bloggers create regular features (e.g., "Random Friday _____blogging") to help prevent long periods of writer's block. It is in that spirit that I offer to you, dear reader(s), my new regular feature, Fortune Cookie Wisdom. Here's today's profound offering:

Be yourself, and you will always be in fashion.

Photo lifted from here. Inspiration from this post. Writer's block coming from who knows where.

eHarmony to allow same-sex matches

Y'all already know I have no love for eHarmony. But this is interesting:

Online dating service eHarmony said Wednesday it will launch a new Web site that caters to same-sex singles as part of a discrimination settlement with New Jersey's Civil Rights Division.

The settlement is the result of a complaint New Jersey resident Eric McKinley filed against the online matchmaker in 2005.

McKinley, 46, said he was shocked when he tried to sign up for the dating site but couldn't get past the first screen because there was no option for men seeking men.

"It's very frustrating and it's very humiliating to think that other people can do it and I can't," he said. "And the only reason I can't is because I'm a gay man. That's very hurtful."

Neither the company nor its founder, Neil Clark Warren, acknowledged any liability.

Under the settlement, eHarmony will pay the New Jersey $50,000 to cover administrative costs and will pay McKinley $5,000.

Ok, fine. McKinley seems to be satisfied with the outcome --- in fact, he called it "fabulous" --- but why not just augment eHarmony as it exists today? I guess you take the small victories whenever you can get them, but I don't really see how this does anything to advance equality.

The new website will be called "Compatible Partners." Yawn.

P.S. 22 Children's Chorus, NYC

I can't believe it took me so long to hear about these wonderful kids. Watch them do their version of Tori Amos' 1,000 Oceans and tell me it doesn't send a shiver down your spine.



Just look at them! They're all so into it. That's more than I can say about myself and my classmates when we were in chorus.

But then again, doing Tori Amos, Bjork, Coldplay, and Donnie Hathaway covers is WAY more exciting than singing "Sweet Caroline" and "Jingle Bell Rock."

Oh, check out their version of Madonna's "Sky Meets Heaven." Some of them are in their Halloween costumes. Cute!

Anyway, they have a a YouTube channel and a blog, if you want to see more.


Props to Perez Hilton (don't judge!) for the heads up.

Obama meets Jay-Z

Oh my god, this mash-up between pop culture and politics just tickles my heart to no end.



Props to Brion for the heads up.

It's never too early to say goodbye ...

... to George W. Bush.

Paul Waldman at the American Prospect gets the party started:

Goodbye, we can say at last, to the most powerful man in the world being such a ridiculous buffoon, incapable of stringing together two coherent sentences. Goodbye to cringing with dread every time our president steps onto the world stage, sure he'll say or do something to embarrass us all. Goodbye to being represented by a man who embodies everything our enemies want the people of the world to believe about America -- that we are ignorant, cruel, and only care about foreign countries when we decide to stomp on them. Goodbye to his giggle, and his shoulder shake, and his nicknames. Goodbye to a president who talks to us like we're a nation of fourth-graders.

And goodbye, of course, to Dick Cheney. Goodbye to the man whose naked contempt for democracy contorted his face to a permanent sneer, who spent his days in his undisclosed location with his man-sized safe. And while we're at it, goodbye to Cheney's consigliore David Addington, as malevolent a force as has ever left his trail of slime across our federal institutions.

Goodbye, indeed, to the entire band of liars and crooks and thieves who have so sullied the federal government that belongs to us all. We can even say goodbye to those who have already gone, to Rummy and Scooter, to Fredo and Rove, tornados of misery left in their wake.

Go and read the rest.

Obama wins!

Plus, Sasha and Malia get a new puppy!

Here's more photos, courtesy of the New York Times. People are so relieved, happy, motivated and engaged. How can you not feel inspired?

Election 2008: I'm cautiously optimistic.

If Obama wins, which is looking more and more likely, think about how inspiring this will be for people of color throughout this nation. Like it or not, the face of America is changing, and it's about time our government reflected that.

Sure, there are people of color who already hold high-profile positions in government, business, entertainment, and sports. But to hold the highest office in the nation?

And during a time when our country has been bitterly divided for several years? This is pretty awesome.

I don't know about you, but I'm feeling pretty energized.

It's hard to explain (especially while trying to type this out on an itty-bitty Blackberry), but I know that some of you who are reading this know what I'm talking about.

Please oh please oh please oh please.

Illustration by Patrick Moberg, via my BARBARian colleague, Seamus.

Get out there and do your thing

Screening my calls

Man, I'll be so glad when this election is over. Just this weekend alone, I received about 10 calls reminding me to vote on whatever proposition/candiate/initiative on Nov. 4. Enough already.

Rearranging the Furniture

If you're one of those oh-so-classy YFP! readers with a complete brain stem, you'll notice that I've made some changes around here.

Really, the changes were unintentional. It all began innocently enough with me clicking around my Blogger dashboard and coming across all of the new-fangled bells and whistles I now have at my disposal.

So at some point, I reached the Click of No Return, and now am forced to:
- Re-build my blogroll, since Blogrolling has been down for what seems like 50 million years
- Re-evaluate if it's worth having Google ads on my blog; It's not like I'm raking in the dough
- Decide on a casual, yet elegant, blog template

If you see that your blog is missing from my blogroll, don't take it personally. I'm going off of memory and my Bloglines list here, so let me know if you want back on via the comments section.

And while I'm at it, I'm going to take this time to remove blogs that are currently on hiatus or ones that I've stopped reading. I will also be adding blogs that I follow regularly that weren't previously on my blogroll.

It's all about synergy, people.

Just so we're clear

Mr. Go Fuck Yourself Endorses McCain

A boost to the McCain campaign, or the kiss of death? You decide.

Obama seizes the opportunity to bring it home:

"Earlier today Dick Cheney came out of his undisclosed location and he hit the campaign trail," Obama told a rally in Pueblo, Colorado, quoting Cheney as saying he was "delighted" to back McCain.

"So I would like to congratulate Senator McCain on this endorsement, because he really earned it. That endorsement didn't come easy. Senator McCain had to vote with George Bush 90 percent of the time and agree with Dick Cheney to get it," Obama said.

"McCain had to serve as Washington's biggest cheerleader for going to war in Iraq and support its economic policies that are no different from the last eight years."

Exactly. Thank you for reminding us, Obama.


Totally unrelated: I can't believe I slept on this. Where have I been?

Tuesday afternoon election humor

Courtesy of the HuffPo.