1) I just melted a plastic baking pan in the oven while trying to cook dinner.

Positives: I saved the pork chops; the melted plastic drips broke off of the metal baking rack easily under cold water.

Negatives: It was Jinya's mom's baking pan; there are now pools of superheated melted plastic in the bottom of the oven.



2) Jon Stewart has clarified that someone like me can, in fact, take part in governmental politics.
He said, "For God's sake, the whole point of being Vice-President is to be a snide humor magnet. To deflect any douche-arrows from people like me that might head toward the President. It's "Who's the best Executive Branch rodeo clown?"!

...I WOULD BE THE BEST FUCKING VICE-PRESIDENT EVER

EVER.

Researchers found that the satirical quality of "The Colbert Report" was lost on a surprising number of conservatives.



...I.

I just...

Wow.

That's, uh.

Well, that's just special!

How many times a day must my forehead need to meet the palm of my hand violently? They're well-acquainted already.

Current source of rage: Do a Pig a Favor! Ban Vegetarianism Now!

According to this raging misogynistic, anthropocentric, egomaniacal fuckwad, "vegetarianism is an eating disorder" and "a cry for help."

"A sadly transparent attempt to exercise control over your body, which you feel the need to do for psychological reasons of which you are probably unaware. It's why so many vegetarians have tattoos and exotic piercings (you know it's true). It's why anarchists, squatters, G20 protesters and art students are usually vegetarians. Frustrated that they cannot, and never will, control the world, or anything else of any significance, they starve themselves and carve holes in their bodies.

"It's why vegetarians are mostly girls. Because vegetarianism is a way of controlling one's food intake without drawing attention to one's vanity.

"It's the same with all these bogus wheat allergies and dairy intolerances - codswallop the lot of them."

*face -> palm**face -> palm**face -> palm**face -> palm*

ARGGGHHH. NO, YOU FUCKING IMBECILE. GO GARGLE WITH SOME ACID, WOULD YOU.


"Meat tastes good. It carries vitamins and minerals with a unique efficiency that is critical to the maintenance of a healthy life. And it gives pigs, quite literally, a reason to live." [emphasis mine]

...

...................there are just...no words.

*face -> palm**face -> palm**face -> palm**face -> palm**face -> palm**face -> palm**face -> palm**face -> palm*

"Sometimes you just get the feeling the Vatican clerics have never even read the Gospels. A nine-year old is repeatedly abused, beaten and raped by her step-father, who also is suspected of sexually abusing her disabled sister. But the mother who helped the nine-year-old get an emergency abortion of twins is excommunicated. The rapist? Nah..."

Here.

More here. And here.


"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." -- Anne Lamott

Some of you may remember the shoot-out in the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church last July that killed two people and wounded eight more.

There's been an update on that, and here's the word's straight from the horse's mouth: It was a deliberate hate crime against liberals.

Progressives should take three lessons away from Knoxville:

"One: we are no longer safe, not even in our own houses of worship. It's ironic that progressives -- the subgroup of Americans who were most determined not to abandon reason and succumb to overblown fears of Islamic terrorism in the wake of 9/11 -- now have good, serious reasons to fear real domestic terrorism against themselves.

"Two: A significant part of this country's media infrastructure is thoroughly devoted to inciting people to commit horrific acts of violence against us -- and now, we know for a fact that people are acting on those incitements. It's time to start taking this far more seriously. What goes out across our airwaves these days isn't all that different from what went out over Radio Rwanda a decade ago, spurring that country to genocide. At this point, it's only a difference of degree.

"Three: The right wing has, as usual, grossly underestimated our courage and our commitment. The members of Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist quickly and effectively disarmed and captured this man within seconds after he opened fire. Adkisson expected fear; what we got was determined resistance. It's why he's still alive today, and why more UUs aren't dead by his hand. The TVUUA congregation should be our enduring example of liberal grace under fire."



___
Street Prophets has a new "News from the 'Net" up I recommend their NftN posts; they have a definite liberal bias, but it's nice to see someone on the religious left's political opinion and ideas of what's newsworthy.

Has anyone actually been listening? Does anyone have their head up, ears and nose to the wind?

Are words lost in the dull echos of meaningless white noise, so devoured by the frantic static of modernity that even those who are full of sound and fury are drowned out?

Yes, the economy's slipping more. The Senate and the House both agreed to the $850 billion bail-out and it seems right now like that was just throwing good money in after the bad. Strange, how last year-- when the economy was supposedly so robust-- we didn't have $100 billion for healthcare for the nation's poorest children, but suddenly now we have seven times that to spend on Wall Street.

And of course we spend more than that on the military in any given year, especially lately. The figure for the Iraq war is well past 3 trillion.

Palin doesn't believe in global warming, but I do. There's not enough Arctic ice. Polar bears are swimming now; they'll drown soon, and the dark ocean water will keep absorbing more and more solar energy, get warmer, release more methane, melt more. Water has a high specific heat; it may heat up slowly, but it also holds that heat longer.

Another degree Centigrade and we get three times as many Katrinas. How long can the people of New Orleans keep swimming? As long as the polar bears?

In New York, a mentally ill man fell to his death from a fourth-story fire escape after being tasered by the cops; later one of the officers committed suicide. What the hell was the point?

The extinction rate for amphibian species is over 200 times the natural background level. The pollutants of the rivers in southern England are causing fish to gender-switch. Scientists map the ocean floor with sound waves louder than a nuclear blast and then claim that those killing blasts are unrelated to the dead whales washing up on beaches.

852 million people don't get enough food to survive. 1.6 billion people are obese. Can't we split the difference?

A cup of coffee costs me 3 bucks. How much of that money gets back to the farmer who grew the beans? What's lost when fields are converted to monoculture and sprayed with inorganic pesticides and fertilizers? How many trucks are involved in getting that coffee to me- trucks made out of metal that needed to be mined and refined and which run on oil that must be pumped from the earth? How much potable water is used for irrigation? How many rivers diverted or wells dried up? How many middle men are there? And how about the cardboard cups and the espresso machine in all its shiny glory, and the wood of the building and the cloth aprons, and yes, even the barista, making just over minimum wage?
...three US dollars? Really? Who even gets that money? Anyone? Does it vanish into that black hole we're calling global economy, which is impatient and easily bored, which is hungry and has only one rule: more?

Even solar panels need metal pieces. More mining. More burning fossil fuels. More carbon. Damn it!

It doesn't matter what I do, as a consumer, as a cog in a violently capitalist system. I don't own a car, yet car culture continues. I can buy organic apples and grass-fed beef, and those apples are still grown in monoculture and the cattle raised on land that used to shake under herds of bison. It's the corporations, stupid. Du Pont does more damage in a day than I could ever do in a lifetime. And I let it, because I don't know how to stop it.

We go to war because I don't know how to stop it. I bet you don't either.

We're lied to and manipulated by advertising and by people who have more money than us.

I watch people buy twenty dollars of gossip rags full of news about Tom Cruise and Suri, Brad and Angelina, Brittney and Paris, and I want to grab those people by their collars and scream at them about how the world is dying and everyone's insane...but I can't, because they'd just blink their big, dumb, blank, glazed-over cow eyes at me and tell me that I am the crazy one.



Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani?

Strangely, I feel a lot better today than I have for a while. I was reading some of last holiday's LJ posts, and for some reason now I feel almost cheerful and nearly willing to go into work tonight; maybe it's some twisted form of nostalgia on my part, I don't know.

(Or maybe it was getting to sleep in for two days in a row, really phenomenal sex last night-- nnnnggggghhh, that was good--, Randy seeming to slowly come around to the fact that he's starting to reciprocate some feelings for me, or the fact that I spent most of yesterday stoned out of my god-forsaken mind.

Eh. Whatever. *shrugs*)

Tomorrow I have a doctor's appointment for my knee. Friday I pay bills. Sunday is the holiday meeting at work (oh...goodie). Things will start settling into a pattern soon.

I had one of the most bizarre experiences of my entire adult life last night while shopping with Wendy in the grocery store.
We had gone out because Wendy wanted to make her cardiac-arrest bacon-wrapped cheesedogs again, and she wanted to pick up hotdog buns and ketchup and a few other odds'n'ends. After navigating Wendy through the store relatively quickly-- that's a special skill, let me assure you-- we finally stopped in front of the bread aisle, right next to the cash registers. The buns were the last thing we needed.
...and then, suddenly, out of no where, this little 6-8 year-oldish Hispanic girl with pigtails and a red shirt came up to Wendy and started pointing and laughing at her loudly. And babbling in some language that definitely wasn't English, and which I am not sure was even Spanish. It certainly didn't sound like Spanish to me, anyway.
Wendy and I just stood there, staring at this rather peculiar spectacle in tolerant, speechless bemusement, until I finally started giggling. "You jes' got told," I said smugly.
...and then, suddenly, there was ANOTHER identical little Hispanic girl with pigtails and a red shirt who promptly began pointing, laughing, and scolding me in the weird language! O_o! And they did this for like three to five minutes, just standing there, waving their little index fingers and yelling incomprehensibly, and then doubling up laughing and blowing raspberries at us!
WTF? I mean, seriously, WTF?
Wendy and I finally absolutely lost it about thirty seconds after the second one showed up, giggling nervously at first, unsure of how to respond to this-- I mean, were they making fun of us, or what? How do you begin to handle a situation like this?-- but by the time they vanished and we had checked out, heading for the car, our stomachs hurt from laughing so damned much.
We had just gotten told off and laughed at by a spontaneously-appearing-and-disappearing set of little Hispanic twin girls in an unknown language, and that, my friends, is pretty well FUBAR.


On a completely unrelated note, I met a very pretty ditzy boy named Luke tonight. Mmmm... Just how I like 'em: lovely and a little dizzy upstairs.
DAMMIT! Why don't the pretty boys like me? I like them! I like them a damned lot, and I'd like to like them more, if'n ya follow me! The naughty, naughty things I dream about doing...
*sigh*

EVAN! Next time you visit, I am SO FUCKING molesting you! GRRRRR...

"Imagine for a moment a scenario in which the Creator’s name is the word that has become the most well known profanity on the planet, that he is in love with and wants to have what you might call sexual relations with the object of his fantasy – a man, that he wants men to worship him while he performs the activity that he engages in as he fantasizes this universe and us into existence, that is, while he masturbates, that he has brown skin, that he wants us to smoke the cannabis and to consume the psychedelic mushrooms that he put in this world so that we could experience him, and that his kingdom of heaven is basically an orgiastic celebration of sensuality and unrepressed sexuality. And imagine that in order to know him we would have to repeat his name with every breath while we masturbate, that he encourages men to consume the soma that flows from their organ while they are in the state of ecstacy that comes from being in a sort of sexual union with him (see the ecstatic poets such as Rumi and Solomon for reference to this experience), that heaven is a place devoid of any inhibition whatsoever, where, for example, masturbation (one of the biggest taboos on earth) is regarded as so normal, erotic and beautiful an activity that men feel free to engage in it openly. Imagine if the Holy of Holies in the Temple were a place where men come for a highly sexual private session of worship with the father and the son. What if the Creator prefers granola-crunching hippies, queers, yoga practitioners, vegans, rastafarians, hari-krishnas, people of color, young anarchists and hip-hoppers, artists, dope-smoking societal drop-outs, anti-war activists, people who try to live lightly and who take pains not to disturb the peace, and dislikes the people who are judgmental toward those whom he considers his favorites? Is this a being that people would feel comfortable knowing as their Creator? Well, my friends, Satan is busy twisting our minds with lies such that the Creator will be acceptable to as few people as possible, because it is his mission, as a servant of the Creator!, to lead as many of us as he can into choosing Hell. Even the idea of a male Creator has been made into something of negative in the minds of many new-agers and practitioners of woo woo spirituality. The Creator isn't going to admit those who, given a choice in the matter, are willing to accept a negative idea of who he is or what his intentions are into his eternal kingdom. He doesn't say "no", he just presents himself and then lets us decide whether we want to be with him or not. It’s just the way it is. The fact that a majority of American voters would like George W. Bush, an obvious liar and hypocrite, the Antichrist and the son of Satan, (perhaps in training to become the Satan himself in the next turn of the wheel of Creation) to be their leader does not bode well for the fates of their souls. I would like to submit that whatever is taboo in a world ruled by Satan is likely to be dear to the Creator. And that whatever is encouraged in this world is anathema to him. The obsession of the far right with fomenting hatred of people with penises who love other people with penises is a great example of Satan hard at work. Bumper sticker idea: The Creator is a fag, and boy, is he pissed!"

...like that? Find more here!

( Stupid people who IM me get anally molested by billy goats in hell. )

We have internet. Like offically now, instead of just ganked free from the neighbors.
And I love Foxfire. It's sweet.