And that's Friday - 23 November 2007

[silveradept]

Apart from a quick grocery run, where I got the ingredients needed to make battered and fried fish tonight, I did not go out and shop today. I left that to others. I did not see or find a copy of What Would Jesus Buy, which looks like it’ll be a flash hit and then disappear into the ether, possibly to regenerate around this time next year.

I picked up packages from the post office, and it was quite the laugh to discover that greyweirdo sent me two microwavable tins of turkey/dressing/gravy. So that even if I had been alone, I would still have had turkey around the holiday. (annaonthemoon tells me she was going to send one along, as well, but it didn't fit in her package.) I’m also well-stocked for candy again. Some people seem to think that it’s a good filling material to making sure things don’t slide around. Maybe I’ll make the candy bowl spawn this time around.

Also did a little fish frying tonight - hopefully made it correctly, not one hundred percent sure, but it looks right. And I tested one of them, and it didn’t seem to have any supremely ill effects on me, so that’s good. Yum for beer-battered fish. Although that did leave the rest of the beer to be had, so I had the beer, spaced out over time. I made a good selection for a drinking beer, but if I go back and do it again, I think that an IPA might not be the right beer to batter with.

Couldn’t talk all that much about food without slipping something in - Time has a look at what the world eats in a week, including how much it costs for all the food displayed in the picture with the family. And the Nothing-Homemade Thanksgiving feast, which just seems wrong, even for me in the phase where I can’t cook, having nothing homemade for the holidays just seems wrong.

International news starts with Lebanon's parliament failing to elect a president due to not achieving quorum. The current president’s term has expired, and the vote to elect another has been delayed several times. It is said that 30 November is the time when the elections will appear, but that leaves the office vacant for a week, which could very well be enough time to make everyone’s life miserable.

Domestic news fuses insanity with religion - a Fresno minister is accused of luring women into his vehicle, then raping them while holding a butcher knife to their throat. Not only that, the minister is already a registered sex offender. I guess the church that wanted to give him a second chance couldn’t quite get him to reform.

Doing things detrimental to women, although not quite so violently, the cost of birth control on campuses has been jumping up sharply, thanks to changed requirements in the way that drug companies figured out what kinds of rebates they get from states.

And then there’s the mayor who has resigned his position, claiming that he was abducted by Satan worshippers and given a new identity. There’s no wrongdoing involved for the mayor, but I guess the stress of the double life was too much to take. Didn’t we already debunk the whole “Satanic Panic” thing?

If you want yet another good reason why an ENDA without a transgender provision would be a bird with clipped wings, observe that a transgender politician, who has always presented as a female, is being sued for election fraud because she identified as a female in the recent election. One of her defeated opponents claims she misrepresented herself, naming her as a male and saying she took advantage of a bias in the voting populace toward females.

SOS is once again pleased with (and the Quiche-throwers Association are taking aim at) the American judiciary, as judges have been permitting the government to tap someone's cellular phones, often without meeting the standard of probable cause. And for as many times as they say they’re not interested in the law-abiding citizen, it’s really kind of trivial now to expand the class of criminals. Schneier on Security remarks on this tendency by calling it a "war on the unexpected", noting that we’re encouraging people to report fears, not suspicious activities, and so lots of people get harassed for stupid reasons. And not just in the United States, either.

R.U. Sirius proposes what would be an awesome experiment in the political process, and that might very well turn out the best platform in years, and might even garner a good share of the voting populace. Right now, it’s just a gleam in the eye, but reading his description of the Open Source Political Party makes me think that if it got off the ground, got popular, and then got its foot in the door, there’s a lot that could be done with it.

Likely appropriately for it being the day where merchants find out whether their years will be profitable, there were a few stories about money today. (Those with the appropriate Floyd tune may cue it up, if they like.) The band "The Romantics" have sued Activision for making their cover version of "What I Like About You" too close to the original. This was after obtaining a license to create a cover version. Isn’t the point of covering a song to make it pretty close to the original, so that it’s recognizable?

For people who are much more nakedly after everyone’s money, the Predatory Lending Association lays out in plain terms just what payday lenders want and do to make sure that they maximize their profits from the people who use their services.

If you like smoking things that induce altered states of reality, perhaps this Squid God pipe is for you, then. But in case smoking too much of anything (or too much heat making too much smoke) causes the world to incinerate or otherwise drop back to an earlier age, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault will hopefully be remembered as somewhere that can be rebuilt from. Or perhaps it will serve as a model for others when terraforming tools remake other worlds into those much like our own.

Inmates usually want to have things to do. Prison art projects are popular for that very reason, plus they give the opportunity to show that a lot of inmates are decent people, despite their surrounding. Fine cell work teaches needlework to inmates and gives them something to do while in their cells. It’s a UK institution - I wonder whether prison officials in the United States would be worried that the inmates would try to cause harm with their needles.

Stuck on a name for your child or pet? Why not try the Sci-Fi Baby Name Book? It’ll certainly be an interesting and unique name, and some of them might even sound pretty normal, in case you don’t want your kid sticking out too much.

Delving toward philosophy and the way we see ourselves, Technoccult posits an identity question of those who call themselves occultists: What values can occultists call their own? There’s a bit of a follow-up in there, too - how do you distinguish yourself from the Hot Topic Goth/Punks, the Wanna-Blessed-Bes, and the corporate-inspired zombie horde that inevitably arrives when whatever it is that you’re making becomes “hot” and commodifiable? How do you keep it real? I think the poster believes that through the expression of one’s art, a wickedly sharp sense of humor about it all, and being able to explore everything and not close avenues off prematurely all contribute to avoiding being thrown over by the tug-of-war.

The big cool thing for tonight, however, is a series of underground temple buildings built underneath a house in Italy. The buildings, paintings, and work is beautiful and breathtaking. Now I get the idea of how sacred spaces are supposed to induce reverence and the appropriate frame of mind. Having external sacred space can help to recharge the internal sacred space. The trick for me is figuring out how to keep and create the internal sacred space in the regular world, with everything else hammering at it. There has to be at least some amount of Zen picked up in a customer-service job, lest stress drive one to premature problems. Whether that Zen then sours into apathy and bitching, well, I don’t know. We’ll have to see, won’t we?

Comments

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

hehe! I have a micro dinner for you too, it just didn't fit in the box. When weirdo was mentioning his gag for you, I was really hoping he had sent it along, since that's what we had been joking about back in August ;)

And chocolate is perfectly acceptable packing material. As long as it's not summer.