Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I ought to have more time to blog post-nano, but somehow it all still disappears. Here’s a funny joke, though: Diary of a Madman’s Goon from rec.humor.funny.

I like Thanksgiving because it’s Christmas Lite—all the food with only half the kitsch—but Seema prefers the Christmas music. Her latest discovery: Osama Got Run Over By A Reindeer.

Just a few links:

• Via Todd Dominey: clientcopia - like funny tech support calls or pointy-haired boss horror stories. The HTML is bad (font too small, line breaks missing on the Top 20 Page), but the quotes are still funny.
• In Boston: the deadline is approaching on the cheap rates for Arisia, a Boston con.
• On Putting Students To Sleep: A Classroom Policy Proposal
• At GNXP, an interesting discussion of Shar’ia law in Ontario (mostly in the comments).
• Also from GNXP: speculation that the Hobbits were really just microcephalics

For those who wonder what I have against Europe, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Belgium is a perfect example:

Sophisticated Europe, where you can vote for any party as long as the cultural commissars approve of it. Otherwise, you’ll face sanctions, fines, & imprisonment.

The title is from Brent Simmons, who encourages his fellow Democrats to buck up and get back to the beginning. He’s still a bit political for someone who makes his living selling stuff to people of unknown party affiliation. He says, “I think that winning an election by scaring people with gays is immoral.” Allow me to translate that as 51% of NetNewsWire users are homophobes. (See my previous entry for more about the translation.)

SFF.org has more to say about the nonsensical ravings of lunatic minds: “These Internet fantasies about how evil democrats are and how evil republicans are are getting out of hand.” The candidates weren’t all that different. Most notably, they agreed on the allegedly divisive gay marriage issue. There’s no reason, therefore, to kill yourself over the election results.

Hello Kitty link of the day: Hello Kitty’s blog

Jade wrote a very restrained post on the general mockery of American voters (specifically of the 51% who voted for Bush) in fandom blogging circles. Since I live in Boston, I get to hear that sort of thing all the time. If people don’t know you’re Republican, they’ll say all sorts of things about the evil of the W and the poor fools far away in the Midwest who voted for him. It doesn’t surprise me (much) to see it on LiveJournal, too.

Here in Massachusetts, only 13% of voters are registered Republicans, so the casual attitude that everyone is anti-Bush has some statistical backing. No one expects my state to go red, ever. It’s socially acceptable to mock Bush and to make dire predictions about his second term that, back in Peoria, would play like the nonsensical ravings of a lunatic mind. Such is life in Boston.

But when addressing Americans in general, the basic assumption should be that 51% of us are pro-Bush (or at least 51% of those responsible enough to go out and vote). So it’s odd to see people talking like they’re in a virtual Massachusetts when really, they’re in a virtual Ohio. There’s no way to tell which sort of voter you’re talking to online without prior knowledge of their political opinions.

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I’m on the no-call list here in Massachusetts (and thus the federal one), but I still get calls from telebeggars, politicians, and other organisms that have rushed in to fill the environmental vacuum left behind by the telemarketers. So I still have some use for this highly entertaining EGBG anti-telemarketing counterscript. It’s available in several languages.

By way of Jerie, Seema and probably more people I’ve forgotten: When you see this, post a bit of poetry in your own journal.

My favorite poem is an obscure bit of traditional Portuguese verse which I can’t find online, don’t have my hard copy of, and have never been able to properly translate, anyway. If you know the poem that starts “Onde vais, formosa e bela, aqui neste deserto?” please leave me a comment.

So instead here’s a fragment of “Fare Well” by Walter de la Mare:

Look thy last on all things lovely,
Every hour. Let no night
Seal thy sense in deathly slumber
   Till to delight
Thou have paid thy utmost blessing;
Since that all things thou wouldst praise
Beauty took from those who loved them
   In other days.

Canada boasts two new province-wide smoking bans. It’s nice to know that despite the depredations of multiculturalism, our American Puritan heritage of outlawing other people’s nasty sinful pleasures is still going strong. Maybe soon we’ll be tossing people in jail for nasty sinful opinions, like they do in Sweden.

I discovered the phenomenon of catblogging recently at Classical Values. Since I’ve been catsitting Veronica’s cat (”Kitty”), I have an excuse to catblog. I have no pictures of Kitty; he’s so hefty he’d probably eat all my bandwidth anyway. (I noticed while feeding him that he was off the weight chart on the back of the cat food bag.)

So here are some links instead:

• Obsidian Wings’ obligatory catblogging post
• Instapundit catblogs
• Sharp as a Marble catblogs enough to have a catblogging category
• Medbroadcast reports: Northern Mexican state recruits cat army to combat rat hordes
• Cat User’s Manual and more cat humor.