But my ability to use its software to save my soul currently has some bugs. This is the error message I get every time I try to open MS Outlook.
My Redemption Helper is on the fritz! I am unredeemed! Maybe I need a laying-on of IT hands! A binary prayer request! A baptism in bytes! A Microsoft mitzvah! (Trying to keep it ecumenical here.)
I think this is the scariest and most infuriating article I’ve read so far: In Town at Ease With Its Firearms, Tightening Gun Rules Was Resisted. It tells of the evolution of Newtown from a partially rural area in which some folks enjoyed owning and using guns for hunting or sport, to a place where a folks with assault weapons were are waking, disturbing, and terrifying their own neighbors with semiautomatic gunfire and exploding targets. That’s right – exploding targets.
Gun enthusiasts here, as elsewhere in the country, have taken to loading their targets with an explosive called Tannerite, which detonates when bullets strike it, sending shock waves afield.
Doesn’t improve your aim or better prepare you for the zombie apocalypse. It’s just fuckin cool.
[A] police commission member, who is a lawyer, said he wrote [a] new ordinance, which would have imposed additional constraints on shooting, including limited hours, and a requirement that any target shooting range, and the firearms that would be used there, be approved by the chief of police to make sure they were safe. This was no liberal putsch, [he] said; three of the five commission members are Republicans, and two members are police officers.
Of course, the new ordinance was voted down. This isn’t Second Amendment Rights vs. Creeping Socialism; it’s peace and quiet and neighborly consideration vs. unbridled selfishness. One shooting range owner explained,
The explosions [the] neighbors hear are targets that are legally available at hunting outlets. “If you’re good old boys like we are, they are exciting,” he said.
I’m guessing loud music and barking dogs are more closely regulated than exploding targets. Selfish, selfish bastards.
Every time another gun massacre happens, the commissars of weapon-correctness announce that we should not politicize the tragedy. They say this loud enough and often enough to shout us past the tragedy and into the next campaign where “taking away gun rights” equates to socialism, communism, and the coming of a one-world government that will force you to teach your disabled kids science,* and every politician of every party runs fast in the opposite direction.
Fuck that.
We need to politicize this most recent gun massacre because, in this country, “politicize” means “figure out wtf to do about.” The opposite of “politicize” is not “debate respectfully” or “decide unanimously.” It’s “sit around with our collective thumbs in our collective asses** and do nothing.” So let’s politicize. Let’s talk. Argue even – it’s how things get decided in a democracy.
And when we talk, let’s talk about the fact that – as a friend pointed out on Facebook – you have to provide more information to buy Sudafed than to buy a gun.
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* Or something like that. I get my right wing conspiracies confused sometimes. For example, do the same paranoid wingers who defeated the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities on the grounds that the one-world government would force them to kill their disabled kids oppose gun control on the theory that the future one-world government might prevent someone from killing their disabled kids? It’s so confusing!
** Not sure how this works in practice.
I’d like to take a break from the frivolity of blogging about abortion, constitutional theory, and peace in the middle east, to address a truly important topic: Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. Guy Fieri (né Ferry it turns out) has come in for some recent and apparently not so recent crap for being an over-exposed douche with a couple of crappy restaurants. The Westword dis and the NYT wrecking ball are both worth reading, if for no other reason than to stock up on entertaining invective such as “hair like space-alien pornstar pubes” or “whirling hypno wheel … where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex.” Gotta remember that last one for my next opposition brief!
And it’s true that Fieri may be a bit overexposed, what with the TV show, the other TV show, the TV game show, the original restaurants, the new restaurant, the website, the books, the accessories, and the constant need to come up with new ways to say “off the hook!” “out of bounds!” and “on the _____ to flavortown!”*
But I’d like to stand up for Triple-D – Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.
In this show, Guy drives around in his signature red convertible (OK, probably flies to where some truck has recently delivered his signature red convertible – I get the kitsch but really don’t mind it!) to the sorts of restaurants that serve yummy food but may not make the Michelin Guide or even Zagat’s. I disagree with Westword that he sets himself up as
the proverbial white knight of normal, average, hard-working, unpretentious Midwestern diners who are oppressed and marginalized by hoity-toity East and West Coast chefs and their expensive, unapproachable, foreign-sounding dishes.
In fact what he does is celebrate a certain kind of non-chain, non-fancy restaurant with good food and – this is what I love the most – a good story. The restaurants are true celebrations of American creativity and entrepreneurialism. Some have been in a family for generations. Others were started by a couple with a small nest egg and a love for cooking, or by a classically-trained chef who wanted to call his own shots, or – my favorite, because these are the ones I am most likely to track down – by an immigrant family recalling and cooking their grandmother’s recipes, sometimes sending back to the old country for missing ingredients.
The shows always involve interviews with diners, who extoll the food and, often, the owners. Hell, some of the customers have been coming since they were kids, or their parents or grandparents ate at the same place.
It’s a celebration of good food and friendly restaurants as creators and sustainers of community.
So, yeah, Guy has a bit too much signature-this and –that (bleached tips, backward sunglasses, weird goatee, flip flops,** cargo shorts, red convertible, repetitious slang), but who on the telly doesn’t have a shtick? We tune in for the restaurants, the people, their stories, and the food. And have tracked down many a Triple-D joint on our travels, almost always to good result.
Extra bonus Conan O’Brien/Guy Fieri spoof: Brozen Brogurt: The Frozen Yogurt Just for Bros!
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* Tim and I always try to gauge Guy’s real view of the food he’s tasting on camera by the vehicle on which he is traveling to Flavortown. Someday some poor joint is going to whip up their specialty for Guy and hear that it’s “on the mo-ped to Flavortown!”
** I do wonder about the flip flops and the health code. Don’t want to get in the way of the signature, though!
South Pearl Street’s Winterfest — as advertised:
and in reality, at 72 degrees on December 1:*
Yes, that guy is selling poems. Why not, eh? South Pearl Street is a little slice of Portlandia in Denver. In fact, if you look carefully, the booth behind the poet is
where Tim bought a $12 jar of pickles, and which of course reminded me of
We also bought $50 worth of organic crap — what sort of weird spell do local farmers’ markets cast? — and I took some pictures. Like this one, which seems to fit with my penchant for photographing random textured distressed things,
but was in fact taken at a stand selling random textured distressed things.
But this is the real deal: the side of an ancient pick-up truck. Not sure why I like distressed vehicles so much. Oh. Right.
Another random photo:
And two bonus dog photos. Watching the Winterfest crowds wander by.
And Saguaro, just after this morning’s bath, helping me practice with the new flash.
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* That is not a political statement. It is an accurate statement about the weather. That is, we did not get pulled by snow-covered horses through snow-covered streets. I walked through Winterfest in shorts and sandals. In Denver. In December.
In my inbox today:
Perhaps some dude with a yacht is getting spam from my favorite publication, “The Smartass Guide to Dog Park Photography.”
I never know what to think about Israel. Partly it’s ignorance. Partly it’s my mixed heritage and the angst I feel about what I *should* be thinking as a half- (technically entirely-) Jewish, thoroughly liberal American. I have friends and family with deeply-held, passionately-expressed, 180-degree opposite views on the subject. Over the past week, one friend posted to Facebook at picture of a person wrapped in a red and green flag with the caption “When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes a duty,” while my dear cousin posted a link to “Friends of the IDF.”
Leave it to Dahlia Lithwick — the only person who could make reading about Antonin Scalia enjoyable — to say it perfectly. Writing from her sabbatical in Jerusalem (emphasis added, as we say in the law biz):
I don’t know how to talk about what is happening here but it’s probably less about writers’ block than readers’ block. It says so much about the state of our discourse that the surest way to enrage everyone is to tweet about peace in the Middle East. We should be doing better because, much as I hate to say it, the harrowing accounts of burnt-out basements and baby shoes on each side of this conflict don’t constitute a conversation. Counting and photographing and tweeting injured children on each side isn’t dialogue. Scoring your own side’s suffering is a powerful way to avoid fixing the real problems, and trust me when I tell you that everyone—absolutely everyone—is suffering and sad and yet being sad is not fixing the problems either.
…
You want to hear about what it’s like here? It’s fucking sad. Everyone I know is sad. My kids don’t care who started it and the little boys in Issawiya, the Arab village I see out my window, don’t care much either. I haven’t met a single Israeli who is happy about this. They know this fixes nothing.
Thank you, Dahlia.
Chinook & Saguaro
Golden Retriever Convention (Chinook at far left (I think))
Saguaro
Chinook and Saguaro
Chinook, Mocho, Saguaro and Quince
Quince
Pooped out puppy!
Several days after the election, while my in-laws were at their local gym, someone slipped this under their windshield wiper:
That’s right, some industrious jerk in Parker, Colorado, took it upon himself to create and print these little flyers, and walk around putting them on his neighbors’ cars. Getting an early start on the 2016 GOP Campaign to Win Votes through Random Insults.
Thought Snax 