silveradept | Not that much time left

One housemate went on her way to a job today, so now there are only five in the house for the next-coming month. At the end of such, whether employed or not, I will have to be packed and moving out myself. It’s the end of six years in one place, and I feel like I’m ready to move on - all that I need to somewhere to move on to, because moving back is not the way I’d like to be going about this. If that’s what happens, though, then that’s what happens. There’s still a month left to go, and I have some interviews at the beginning of the month. It feels like I’m running out of time, but that’s because I keep blowing past my self-imposed deadlines without so much as a whisper. If I’m still looking in December, I’m probably going to be a very tightly compressed ball of rage and angst.

(Also, been remiss in welcoming new people to the blog. So, those of you that have signed on recently, welcome. Don’t feel shy about commenting, if something strikes your fancy. I am not an expert in anything that I talk about, although I have been known to be able to fake it at times.)

To happier matters, then! Like finding out what sorts of things doctors tend to have to remove from people's backsides because they’ve put things in there that aren’t approved for that kind of usage. Or accounts of a customer that read her son a religious riot act for pre-ordering Grand Theft Auto IV, and then, after it was all done, tried to proselytize to the person she made the call to. After having heard her discipline her son in such a manner, I doubt the phone rep was ready to make any sort of conversion that day.

Hrm. That didn’t work. Maybe another report about the continued presence of street gang members and those on "moral waivers" in the military will be cheery? maybe the knowledge that there have been more than one hundred successsful suicides of veterans of Iraq that are confirmed, and possibly more as yet unofficial, will put us in a good mood. No? How about a suggestion that perhaps the best thing to prevent martial law in America is for the troops to be wound down and broken that Mr. Bush decides not to risk it. Maybe a suggestion as to why unsavory peoples would like to see Pakistan plunged into chaos will help brighten the room.

Okay, okay. Try on a satirical piece about how Christianity is a big Jewish joke, which at least aims to be funny, regardless of whether it actually achieves it. If that’s the case, then Alternet’s Sarah Posner reporting on the recent Christians United For Israel Conference and how much the members seem to be concerned with upcoming End Times material in the Christian Foundational Writings and the Qu’ran can be laughed off, right? It’s not like anyone expects someone to go to nuclear war with another country because it will speed along the return of a being who could be thoroughly Not Happy at the way things turned out. It should be something that happens less often than a mule giving birth, right? Personally, I’d say it should happen less often than the probability of each particle of matter meeting an equal particle of anti-matter and exploding the universe. But I’m probably just an anti-war wingnut. What would I know?

Innocuous Intel Advertisement? Could be just an honest mistake, but there’s a lot of ways the advert, which shows the upper halves of six black men on the starting blocks of a race protruding from cubicle all arranged around the white “boss” of the cube farm. It could easily be interpretable as a subservient position and a statement of discrimination, as Penciled In wants to suggest. Either way, it looks like there wasn’t quite as much unintended consequence testing for the advertisement as there should have been.

On a more sinister turn, Austin Cline looks at how the phrase "compassionate conservatism" has come to mean things are neither compassionate, nor particularly conservative, and how welding “compassionate conservative”, or even just “conservative” to negative responses, like the response to the Katrina emergency, the war in Iraq, an unwillingness to grant medical coverage to all persons, and the like would be a fine repayment for all the mistakes, lies, and evil that has been been done under such a moniker. If “liberal” has become a dirty word, then maybe it’s time “conservative” became one, too. I think several of the Founding Fathers would approve, especially if the end result was to make affiliation with a political party currently in power a death knell for anyone’s campaign.

Well, at least the overpriced tap water is being labeled as such, now, rather than claiming to be exotic.

There are some very interesting things to see in our cities, the ones old enough to have been built and rebuilt and rebuilt again. If someone goes poking in the right places, they might explore areas of the city long since abandoned, rediscovering them and getting a glimpse of the past life of the buildings, underground and above. And likely breaking a whole lot of trespass laws and endangering themselves in the process. This is probably not for the faint of heart, if one wants to go beyond just noticing parts of the old city where they stick through.

And now, to close out the entry, two things that generally tend to make people happy - creativity and alcohol. Sometimes when taken together, they produce great results. (Other times, they just produce crap.) Anyway, the creativity bit is The International Icon Tarot deck. Setting the ubiquitous solid-color figures that adorn our lives representing the XX and XY chromosomal pairings on a similarly simplified backdrop. Interpreting that deck has to be a blast - and the art is fantastic, too. The alcohol part is provided to us by Modern Drunkard magazine’s ten greatest alcohol icons of all time, many of which you’d recognize, even if you haven’t imbibed the beverage inside.

Anyway, tucking in early so that I can get good rest.