A very random post involving: Family friends, strange dreams, crime, and politics.
Fandom to return to center stage later today, really, I promise. I still haven't seen last week's Criminal Minds or Numb3rs, but I do have some thoughts on CSI: NY, CSI, Without a Trace, and Moonlight from last week. Also, I may write something small up about Law & Order SVU from this week, because one of their bad guys was Stephen Collins who played the Reverend Camden on 7th Heaven, which just made me laugh.
So anyway, on to some of the crazy. I have to start by saying that Hy-Vee opened yesterday and I'm just ecstatic. We went, which I kind of wish we hadn't, but even with the mob there I can tell the store is going to be every bit as fabulous as the ones in Lawrence. We got there about 10:30, something that my mother blames on me because I flat-out refused to get up in time to be there when doors opened at 6:30. I say it's still not entirely my fault, because we could have been there no later than 8:30. I was up just before 8 AM and ready to go less than 20 minutes later. She still wasn't dressed, was whining about wanting cinnamon toast, and hadn't balanced the checkbook in two weeks which it was vitally important to do before walking in to Hy-Vee. Anyway it was packed when we got there, so after waiting around for 1/2 an hour or so to see if we could get a cart, we decided to eat lunch. Hy-Vee may have the best lunch in town. Yummy! After lunch we hung out for another hour waiting for an electric cart to free up. When one didn't, Mom sent me out to the car to get her wheelchair. We were making very slow progress, because Mom isn't really strong enough to maneuver herself for very long at a time, and it's exceedingly difficult to push both a cart and a wheelchair at the same time. Some girl asked if she could help us in anyway, and Mom said she'd like to have an electric cart. The girl went off, and when she came back she said there weren't any available, but she asked one of the managers to watch for one and jump on it if someone left it. She'd track us down if she found one. About 20 minutes later she did. Things were much easier going after that. Signed up to win a $50 gift card and be put on the nutritionist's listserv. Sampled a ton of really fabulous stuff. And we spent $144 which included $20 on the Chinese dinner for 4 we brought home, but not the $20 we spent on lunch. They have the best grocery store chinese I've ever had.
Next, a dear friend of my grandmother's was in the Salina Journal today. She lived next door to Lois Furse for several years in her apartment. I've always known that Lois had a big family, but I hadn't known just how big. She has 3 sons and 8 daughters, and this year the daughters were, for the first time in their whole lives, all together with her at the same time. Her oldest is 66 and her youngest is 45 (Lois is 87, so she was 42 when her youngest was born), the exact same age as her big sister's oldest child. They're pretty spread out all over the country, and by the time the youngest was born, the eldest was already living in another city, married, and a few months from giving birth herself. While they certainly all know each other, they have never all been together at the same time. There has always been someone missing. So, they decided to get together and visit their mother for Mother's day. I thought it was a lovely little story, and for anyone who might be interested they can read it (and see a picture), here.
And on to the weird dream. Last night, I had the strangest dream that I've had in a very long time. It seems that I was visiting my friend, warhol65, but not in St. Louis where she is now, someplace else. I can't really tell you where. Anyway, she was living in this underground space that had a very industrial sort of feel to it. There were no bedrooms, and only a teeny-tiny bath and kitchen. There was a huge office, which she spent the evenings and nights in, and a large space that was set up very much like a classroom with those 2 person tables that science classrooms have in them, but some of the desks were kind of partitioned off with big sheets of cardboard. I had an assigned spot there. There were also white-boards with markers on all of the walls. The one thing out of place in this room was a big cushy red velvet chaise, which is where I was sleeping. I have no idea where my friend was sleeping, but it must have been in the office. The miniscule kitche and bathroom were down a short hall, and then there was another room that opened up onto what looked like a warehouse without windows, but there wasn't much of anything in it. Maybe five or ten palates of stuff wrapped in plain brown paper pushed up against one wall. The rest was just concrete floors, harsh lighting, and brick walls. Every morning, warhol65 would leave for her job, and I would stay there, and take over the office for the day, which was huge. It also had what is pretty much my dream non-fiction library in it, which I really can't explain. There is no reason that she would have all those books on forensics and weaponry and poisons and such. The books on history and culture, those made sense, but not so much the others. Anyway, my little vacation was apparently a working vacation in which I was writing two novels. The first one was some fantasy thing that I'm apparently not really writing because the names were stupid and awful and I'd never name a character that. The second, was the "to pay the bills," novel which was an SG-1 tie-in. And seriously the only thing I remember about that is that I was writing a fairly heavily subtexty (but not out of line with the kind of subtext that is really in the novels or the show) scene involving Cameron and Daniel who were arguing over something utterly inane, and it was apparently the scene that never ended because every morning I started right there with that scene. Also, during the day, I sometimes emerged into the main room where there really did seem to be some kind of classes going on. I didn't recognize anyone but a friend from high school, John, who had apparently become an artist, but he kept running out of paper, so I kept giving him mine. I had this stack of paper on my desk that looked to be about 3 reams, and no matter how much I used or gave away it never got any smaller. And then one, day, I went out to lunch with my mother who had apparently found a job, a job in which she has to kill people. I think maybe she was an assassin. We had a lengthy discussion about the relative merits of the Glock 19 and the Beretta M9 which is a really weird discussion any way you look at it because it's not like they're comparable, and how is it that I've absorbed that much random knowledge about firearms. Anyway, I advised her to go with the Glock if those were the guns she was looking at, because it has a smaller grip and she has little hands. And then I went back and wrote the stupid Cameron and Daniel scene again. It was very bizarre, and I didn't like it one little bit.
Last week, I posted about my cousin who was killed. Just wanted to give a small update on that. No, they don't seem any closer to determining who shot him, but there has been a second crime against his poor family. While they were at David's funeral, someone broke into his fiances home. The Sheriff's department was called, and eventually caught a woman who was driving the car that the burglars got into, but the two men who actually broke into the home both escaped on foot. This is exactly why we need the helicopter program back. Grrr.
So, politics, the Indiana and North Carolina primaries were yesterday. I don't really have a lot ot say about them, because more and more I'm thinking that it doesn't matter who wins the nomination. They've screwed the party, and John McCain is going to win. I'm going to try to keep a positive outlook here though. Obama is still beating McCain in a few head-to-head polls, and I still think that Clinton is just holding off the inevitable by continuing to fight this dirty nasty campaign. I am beyond fed up with her, and that's really part of the problem. Why do I think we're going to lose in November, because the Democratic party is too divided to win. In a poll that was released yesterday, something like 43% of Democrats said that if their candidate didn't win the nomination they would vote for John McCain. I can pretty much tell you from the other polling done that most of those Democrats are Clinton supporters and it just makes me furious. It is, as I see it, at the heart of what is wrong with her campaign. Her campaign is not, and I'm not sure it ever was, about what's best for the American people. It's about what's best for Hillary Clinton, the public be damned. If she was thinking about what was best for the people, she would have dropped out a long time ago, not too long after McCain clinched the nomination, because it didn't take a genius to see that this was what would ultimately happen. And she can't possibly still believe that she's going to win. Her campaign is bleeding funds, even if she does win she'll have no money left to jump start a campaign against McCain. She's still got superdelegates jumping ship, despite her increasingly desperate ploys to bring them back to her, and when he wins, he wins big. When she wins it's by an absurdly narrow margin. She's either delusional or just plain selfish and too filled with pride to do what's right.
I feel really betrayed by the Clintons, because I was a fan. I adored Bill Clinton, and I always thought that Hillary was a much better person than the press corp ever gave her credit for. I was either wrong, or the love of power has warped them both into something they weren't even just eight years ago. Frankly when this cycle started, I was all geared up to support Biden or another of the safer candidates, and I was disappointed when the party rejected them all out of hand. Which meant I was left with something of a dilemna, support a woman who I had a great deal of respect and admiration for, but who I felt was so disliked by not only the opposition but elements within the Democratic party that she had almost no chance of winning a general election, or support a young black man who could inspire me, and it seemed the rest of the nation, with his words but whose inexperience and race would be huge stumbling blocks. I honestly didn't think that either of them could win. I think America might be ready for a woman, but I don't think that woman is Hillary Clinton. I still don't know that we're ready to elect a black man president. I'd like to think we are, but I can't be entirely comfortable with it either. I sat on the fence for a good long while, but the more I watched them, the more I listened to them speak, the more I was for Barack Obama. He's a positive force. His message is one of hope, and he dreams big. Hillary Clinton is a negative force who downplays the importance of hope and says that big dreams are failures waiting to happen. That bothers me, because it seems antithetical not only to what the party has always been about, but also what her husband was about. I remember all to clearly the part of his campaign that was all about The Man from Hope, raised in Hope, Arkansas he would restore hope to millions of Americans. Why was it good enough for him, but not for Barack Obama. Further, her refusal to accept real responsibility for the things she has said and done really bothers me. The fact is, she had the information that would tell her that Iraq was a bad war at her disposal. A small but vocal minority proves that, but she voted to go to war anyway. I can forgive her that. What I can't forgive her is this endless posturing that it wasn't a mistake, that she was duped by George W. Bush, because I have got to tell you if that man can trick you then I don't want you as my president. She did it because it was politically popular and expedient, and after all, nobody actually liked Sadaam Hussein whether he was involved with Al Qaeda or had WMD or not. I think as the campaign has gone on, she's just continued with that kind of lack of responsibility. There's her responses to Obama's attack on her record with NAFTA. I watched her talk about how good NAFTA would be for the country. Bill pushed it through. It was the two of them that made me waver in my opinion that it would be an unmitigated disaster for Mexico and ultimately us as well. Their conviction made me think I might be wrong. Again, I can forgive that she once supported it. What I can't forgive is that she now refuses to acknowledge that she once publically and openly supported it, and give real and honest reasons why that has changed. She's taken no responsibility in the crazy thing about when she landed in Bosnia. It's all her saying that she was sleep deprived, and her husband saying she's old and sleep deprived. Well, I'm sorry, but do you really think she's not going to be called on to spend some sleepless nights making life or death decisions for people as president. I need a better reason than that. I could live with, "it was an exaggeration," or even, "I was confusing reports of things that had happened with what really happened to me, I'm sorry." I wouldn't particularly like either of them, but I could live with them. I can't live with, "It's not my fault, a presidential campaign is just so hard and I'm old and I haven't had any sleep in days."
Anyway, the real point of this is that I saw Penn Gilette on MSNBC yesterday and he was talking about why he thinks that Hillary Clinton cannot be president. It was interesting, and from a fairly impartial guy. He doesn't like McCain, Obama, or Clinton. He's a libertarian in the old school meaning of that word, and doesn't agree with any of them. Obama and Clinton want to restrict business too much for him, and McCain wants to fight an endless war with his money and restrict personal freedom. Yeah, not real big on either side. But he talked about how humor can be a much better barometer for what people really believe than polls. People will vote in a poll the way they think they should feel, but when it comes to comedy there's no real pressure to laugh or not laugh. So he tells this story about how during an act he did, he's got this downtime that he fills with real bad throw-away sorts of jokes. These aren't jokes that he really expects to get a laugh at, and this one in particular, he thought might draw some boos and some scandalized expressions. Here's the gist of the joke. Barack Obama did really well in February and some people think that's because it was black history month. That might be true, because Hillary is doing really well this month, it's white bitch month. He said not only were there no boos, but people laughed. People laughed more and longer and louder than they did at jokes that were much much better. People applauded even. Hillary can't be president because ultimately people don't like her. Even people who support her don't like her. That was his observation, and I can't say that I disagree.
I'm done ranting about things for now. If I'm not drug off into the kitchen to do dishes for the rest of the afternoon, I'll try to have that fannish post up today before new episodes of things start to air.
So anyway, on to some of the crazy. I have to start by saying that Hy-Vee opened yesterday and I'm just ecstatic. We went, which I kind of wish we hadn't, but even with the mob there I can tell the store is going to be every bit as fabulous as the ones in Lawrence. We got there about 10:30, something that my mother blames on me because I flat-out refused to get up in time to be there when doors opened at 6:30. I say it's still not entirely my fault, because we could have been there no later than 8:30. I was up just before 8 AM and ready to go less than 20 minutes later. She still wasn't dressed, was whining about wanting cinnamon toast, and hadn't balanced the checkbook in two weeks which it was vitally important to do before walking in to Hy-Vee. Anyway it was packed when we got there, so after waiting around for 1/2 an hour or so to see if we could get a cart, we decided to eat lunch. Hy-Vee may have the best lunch in town. Yummy! After lunch we hung out for another hour waiting for an electric cart to free up. When one didn't, Mom sent me out to the car to get her wheelchair. We were making very slow progress, because Mom isn't really strong enough to maneuver herself for very long at a time, and it's exceedingly difficult to push both a cart and a wheelchair at the same time. Some girl asked if she could help us in anyway, and Mom said she'd like to have an electric cart. The girl went off, and when she came back she said there weren't any available, but she asked one of the managers to watch for one and jump on it if someone left it. She'd track us down if she found one. About 20 minutes later she did. Things were much easier going after that. Signed up to win a $50 gift card and be put on the nutritionist's listserv. Sampled a ton of really fabulous stuff. And we spent $144 which included $20 on the Chinese dinner for 4 we brought home, but not the $20 we spent on lunch. They have the best grocery store chinese I've ever had.
Next, a dear friend of my grandmother's was in the Salina Journal today. She lived next door to Lois Furse for several years in her apartment. I've always known that Lois had a big family, but I hadn't known just how big. She has 3 sons and 8 daughters, and this year the daughters were, for the first time in their whole lives, all together with her at the same time. Her oldest is 66 and her youngest is 45 (Lois is 87, so she was 42 when her youngest was born), the exact same age as her big sister's oldest child. They're pretty spread out all over the country, and by the time the youngest was born, the eldest was already living in another city, married, and a few months from giving birth herself. While they certainly all know each other, they have never all been together at the same time. There has always been someone missing. So, they decided to get together and visit their mother for Mother's day. I thought it was a lovely little story, and for anyone who might be interested they can read it (and see a picture), here.
And on to the weird dream. Last night, I had the strangest dream that I've had in a very long time. It seems that I was visiting my friend, warhol65, but not in St. Louis where she is now, someplace else. I can't really tell you where. Anyway, she was living in this underground space that had a very industrial sort of feel to it. There were no bedrooms, and only a teeny-tiny bath and kitchen. There was a huge office, which she spent the evenings and nights in, and a large space that was set up very much like a classroom with those 2 person tables that science classrooms have in them, but some of the desks were kind of partitioned off with big sheets of cardboard. I had an assigned spot there. There were also white-boards with markers on all of the walls. The one thing out of place in this room was a big cushy red velvet chaise, which is where I was sleeping. I have no idea where my friend was sleeping, but it must have been in the office. The miniscule kitche and bathroom were down a short hall, and then there was another room that opened up onto what looked like a warehouse without windows, but there wasn't much of anything in it. Maybe five or ten palates of stuff wrapped in plain brown paper pushed up against one wall. The rest was just concrete floors, harsh lighting, and brick walls. Every morning, warhol65 would leave for her job, and I would stay there, and take over the office for the day, which was huge. It also had what is pretty much my dream non-fiction library in it, which I really can't explain. There is no reason that she would have all those books on forensics and weaponry and poisons and such. The books on history and culture, those made sense, but not so much the others. Anyway, my little vacation was apparently a working vacation in which I was writing two novels. The first one was some fantasy thing that I'm apparently not really writing because the names were stupid and awful and I'd never name a character that. The second, was the "to pay the bills," novel which was an SG-1 tie-in. And seriously the only thing I remember about that is that I was writing a fairly heavily subtexty (but not out of line with the kind of subtext that is really in the novels or the show) scene involving Cameron and Daniel who were arguing over something utterly inane, and it was apparently the scene that never ended because every morning I started right there with that scene. Also, during the day, I sometimes emerged into the main room where there really did seem to be some kind of classes going on. I didn't recognize anyone but a friend from high school, John, who had apparently become an artist, but he kept running out of paper, so I kept giving him mine. I had this stack of paper on my desk that looked to be about 3 reams, and no matter how much I used or gave away it never got any smaller. And then one, day, I went out to lunch with my mother who had apparently found a job, a job in which she has to kill people. I think maybe she was an assassin. We had a lengthy discussion about the relative merits of the Glock 19 and the Beretta M9 which is a really weird discussion any way you look at it because it's not like they're comparable, and how is it that I've absorbed that much random knowledge about firearms. Anyway, I advised her to go with the Glock if those were the guns she was looking at, because it has a smaller grip and she has little hands. And then I went back and wrote the stupid Cameron and Daniel scene again. It was very bizarre, and I didn't like it one little bit.
Last week, I posted about my cousin who was killed. Just wanted to give a small update on that. No, they don't seem any closer to determining who shot him, but there has been a second crime against his poor family. While they were at David's funeral, someone broke into his fiances home. The Sheriff's department was called, and eventually caught a woman who was driving the car that the burglars got into, but the two men who actually broke into the home both escaped on foot. This is exactly why we need the helicopter program back. Grrr.
So, politics, the Indiana and North Carolina primaries were yesterday. I don't really have a lot ot say about them, because more and more I'm thinking that it doesn't matter who wins the nomination. They've screwed the party, and John McCain is going to win. I'm going to try to keep a positive outlook here though. Obama is still beating McCain in a few head-to-head polls, and I still think that Clinton is just holding off the inevitable by continuing to fight this dirty nasty campaign. I am beyond fed up with her, and that's really part of the problem. Why do I think we're going to lose in November, because the Democratic party is too divided to win. In a poll that was released yesterday, something like 43% of Democrats said that if their candidate didn't win the nomination they would vote for John McCain. I can pretty much tell you from the other polling done that most of those Democrats are Clinton supporters and it just makes me furious. It is, as I see it, at the heart of what is wrong with her campaign. Her campaign is not, and I'm not sure it ever was, about what's best for the American people. It's about what's best for Hillary Clinton, the public be damned. If she was thinking about what was best for the people, she would have dropped out a long time ago, not too long after McCain clinched the nomination, because it didn't take a genius to see that this was what would ultimately happen. And she can't possibly still believe that she's going to win. Her campaign is bleeding funds, even if she does win she'll have no money left to jump start a campaign against McCain. She's still got superdelegates jumping ship, despite her increasingly desperate ploys to bring them back to her, and when he wins, he wins big. When she wins it's by an absurdly narrow margin. She's either delusional or just plain selfish and too filled with pride to do what's right.
I feel really betrayed by the Clintons, because I was a fan. I adored Bill Clinton, and I always thought that Hillary was a much better person than the press corp ever gave her credit for. I was either wrong, or the love of power has warped them both into something they weren't even just eight years ago. Frankly when this cycle started, I was all geared up to support Biden or another of the safer candidates, and I was disappointed when the party rejected them all out of hand. Which meant I was left with something of a dilemna, support a woman who I had a great deal of respect and admiration for, but who I felt was so disliked by not only the opposition but elements within the Democratic party that she had almost no chance of winning a general election, or support a young black man who could inspire me, and it seemed the rest of the nation, with his words but whose inexperience and race would be huge stumbling blocks. I honestly didn't think that either of them could win. I think America might be ready for a woman, but I don't think that woman is Hillary Clinton. I still don't know that we're ready to elect a black man president. I'd like to think we are, but I can't be entirely comfortable with it either. I sat on the fence for a good long while, but the more I watched them, the more I listened to them speak, the more I was for Barack Obama. He's a positive force. His message is one of hope, and he dreams big. Hillary Clinton is a negative force who downplays the importance of hope and says that big dreams are failures waiting to happen. That bothers me, because it seems antithetical not only to what the party has always been about, but also what her husband was about. I remember all to clearly the part of his campaign that was all about The Man from Hope, raised in Hope, Arkansas he would restore hope to millions of Americans. Why was it good enough for him, but not for Barack Obama. Further, her refusal to accept real responsibility for the things she has said and done really bothers me. The fact is, she had the information that would tell her that Iraq was a bad war at her disposal. A small but vocal minority proves that, but she voted to go to war anyway. I can forgive her that. What I can't forgive her is this endless posturing that it wasn't a mistake, that she was duped by George W. Bush, because I have got to tell you if that man can trick you then I don't want you as my president. She did it because it was politically popular and expedient, and after all, nobody actually liked Sadaam Hussein whether he was involved with Al Qaeda or had WMD or not. I think as the campaign has gone on, she's just continued with that kind of lack of responsibility. There's her responses to Obama's attack on her record with NAFTA. I watched her talk about how good NAFTA would be for the country. Bill pushed it through. It was the two of them that made me waver in my opinion that it would be an unmitigated disaster for Mexico and ultimately us as well. Their conviction made me think I might be wrong. Again, I can forgive that she once supported it. What I can't forgive is that she now refuses to acknowledge that she once publically and openly supported it, and give real and honest reasons why that has changed. She's taken no responsibility in the crazy thing about when she landed in Bosnia. It's all her saying that she was sleep deprived, and her husband saying she's old and sleep deprived. Well, I'm sorry, but do you really think she's not going to be called on to spend some sleepless nights making life or death decisions for people as president. I need a better reason than that. I could live with, "it was an exaggeration," or even, "I was confusing reports of things that had happened with what really happened to me, I'm sorry." I wouldn't particularly like either of them, but I could live with them. I can't live with, "It's not my fault, a presidential campaign is just so hard and I'm old and I haven't had any sleep in days."
Anyway, the real point of this is that I saw Penn Gilette on MSNBC yesterday and he was talking about why he thinks that Hillary Clinton cannot be president. It was interesting, and from a fairly impartial guy. He doesn't like McCain, Obama, or Clinton. He's a libertarian in the old school meaning of that word, and doesn't agree with any of them. Obama and Clinton want to restrict business too much for him, and McCain wants to fight an endless war with his money and restrict personal freedom. Yeah, not real big on either side. But he talked about how humor can be a much better barometer for what people really believe than polls. People will vote in a poll the way they think they should feel, but when it comes to comedy there's no real pressure to laugh or not laugh. So he tells this story about how during an act he did, he's got this downtime that he fills with real bad throw-away sorts of jokes. These aren't jokes that he really expects to get a laugh at, and this one in particular, he thought might draw some boos and some scandalized expressions. Here's the gist of the joke. Barack Obama did really well in February and some people think that's because it was black history month. That might be true, because Hillary is doing really well this month, it's white bitch month. He said not only were there no boos, but people laughed. People laughed more and longer and louder than they did at jokes that were much much better. People applauded even. Hillary can't be president because ultimately people don't like her. Even people who support her don't like her. That was his observation, and I can't say that I disagree.
I'm done ranting about things for now. If I'm not drug off into the kitchen to do dishes for the rest of the afternoon, I'll try to have that fannish post up today before new episodes of things start to air.