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New year, new life, new possibilities. From where we came to where we go, hoping that I stop enough times along the way to get out and enjoy the scenery. It's nice as it drives by, but there are things that need to be examined in person. thus, some attempt an analysis of 2008, gleaned mostly from the few bits of my journal that weren't devoted to something else... and some bits that are.
The year began with some amount of tradition - the padded rugby squad playing a bowl game in Florida. Un-traditionally, they won. This was to be the last season of Mr. Carr at the Head Coach position, and in the last game he coached, he got victory. Very nice. I was still awed with the newness of my situation - out of school, employed, and pretty far away from home. There were other things in my life that were contributing to shaking things up in the new year, too.
Even in January, we were in the middle of a full-on primary war, with the prize of Iowa to begin the middle sequence. The CW kept Senator Clinton and Senator Obama at the front, basically evenly matched. Iowa went to the Senator, and people blinked and wondered what that meant. From that point on, the narrative was shaping up as to whether it would be the African-American or the woman as the Democratic frontrunner. Historic in their own rights, as well as a truly historic amount of fear being slung about, either about the candidate's supposed Muslim origins, or his racial heritage. Later on, a new charge joins in, but it takes a while. On the other side of the aisle, the frontrunning Republican candidates were being hammered for, in order, not running on anything but 9/11, being a scary evangelical, and being a Mormon. I don't believe the person who would eventually capture the nomination was even on the radar yet, although I could be wrong, considering what would happen next month. Most of the remaining attention was focused on a long shot candidate who was showing that running a mostly Internet-and-word of mouth campaign was viable in the sense of being talked about, even if it was totally non-viable when the ballot box arrived.
The country was still picking up from one hurricane - little did we know more would be on the way. The country was also in the midst of admitting or denying that torture was happening on Untied States controlled areas, conservatives were and are still trying to sell the people on the idea that Iraq was a success, despite its poisonous origin, and a lot of people were ready for the next administration, hoping they would wipe the last eight years clean as if they had not happened. Assuming they couldn't manage an impeachment and clear him and his vice out.
Went and saw Play! in Seattle, and was disappointed, for the most part, by the execution. the pieces themselves are wonderful, of course. And there was evening, and there was morning, the first month.
So, February. Super Tuesday. And when the carnage and wreckage were finished... well, on the Democratic side, it was still a close call. The Republicans had it figured out, though - John McCain, by not being anyone that had a singular issue to hammer on, snuck through as everyone around him exploded.
The lulz came out to play as the eponymous Anonymous began their campaign against Scientology, there were rumblings of collapse in financial sectors, another university shooting, more terror and fear as Iran increased centrifuges, the fallout on warantless wiretapping, and lots of other depressing things, like photographic proof of torture.
And Red Day came and went. Peacefully.
March onward. Major developments: vicious infighting in the Democratic nomination - at this point, we're wondering whether the Republican ticket has their attack lines already made out for them. Additionally, the beginnings of "Obama's black, and that's bad" "Obama's a Muslim, and that's bad", "Clinton is a woman, and that's bad" were starting to show up in the discourse.
Elsewhere, battles on surges, insurgencies, bailouts, education, Livejournal's ad revenues, Tibet, oh, and Super Smash Brothers Brawl came out for the Wii.
Terry Pratchett also found out he got Alzheimer's. Since then, he's been writing as very fast as his brain and machines will let him. Arthur C. Clarke died.
At the end of March, and the beginning of April, the Moisture Festival began (hopefully I can do that gig again this year), which was a hoot every time I got to play.
Unfortunately, at the beginning of April, I also had to fly home on very short notice because I lost a grandfather to Time and Death. Later on in the month, more on politics, finding out the populace hates only Scientologists more than atheists, more bits of Anonymous, limbo on children taken from a compound, the death of the discoverer of LSD-25, and a Ben Stein movie.
May is where we pick up the narrative again. "Mission Accomplished" entered its sixth year, an Army medical facility housed soldiers needing medical care in facilities that the rats were looking askance at, storms crushing people and houses in Burma, a quake in China, a seriously off-base interpretation of Firefly, the beginnings of the breakdown that is Zimbabwe politics under Robert Mugabe (he lost the election), economic stimulus payments, Anime Central (which may have been the last Freakin' Suite), the clearance-rack monitor that I got a VEWPRF or two ago as a gift dying, the Phoenix craft landing on a Mars polar cap and discovering the presence of water ice on the planet, the overturning of a homosexual marraige ban in California, another story which had things later on come up and rear their head.
June came, and with it, Summer Reading. Having laid the groundwork with school visits, the annual reading frenzy took off. Right at the beginning of the month, projections and actual totals indicated that it would be the African-American Senator, not the former First Lady, who would be the Democratic Party nominee. Although it was noted that this was unofficial, and that the Senator from New York might keep campaigning to try and sway the delegates at the convention. Practically, Senator Obama, Senator McCain, and the vast armies of keyboards, commenters, bloggers, and opinion columnists turned their sights on each other and began firing away in earnest. Closet Muslim, "terrorist fist-jab", and the like. Oil prices were also still on the rise, which meant the domestic drilling cries started to appear, to be met with the equally loud cries of "make better cars". robert Mugabe returned to his reign of terror, having intimidated the opposition into not appearing for fear of their lives. There were telecom immunities granted for warrantless work. Siblings visited me, making good on the trip that was canceled when I had to fly home to bury my grandfather. That was a weekend of pure awesome.
Another monitor died, as did George Carlin, and I watched a cat get hit by a truck. The truck never stopped.
July is the month that I was presented to the world, cold, wet, naked, and most likely hungry. This year, I spent it watching baseball. Detroit still lost. Elsewhere, the world was gearing up for Beijing hosting the Olympic Games, the Anglican Church thumbed their nose at the Catholics and appointed women as bishops, as well as some Catholics doing some appointing fo women bishops on their own, hubbub over a stolen consecrated wafer, Jack Thompson finally hauled before the courts with the disbarment threat hanging, the likelihood of troops coming out of Iraq and going into Afghanistan increasing, and the bginnings of the "Fariness doctrine" nonsense. The Dead Pool claimed another, as the writer and deliverer of the "The Last Lecture" died, and members of a Unitarian church in Tennessee were gunned down by a domestic terrorist.
Bring on August. Summer reading wraps up at the end of this month, signaled first by the end of the summer storytimes. We're already deep into planning the fall ones, if we haven't already thrown in our planning sheets, and we're getting geared up for the first-of-the-school year school visits. Anyone who thinks the library is a dull and boring place never sits in on our meetings or sees what happens behind the desk. Twilight mania was still going strong, although a bit of a hissy went off when the draft of book five got leaked to the Web. Elsewhere, the cracks were showing harder as we switched from "that tower looks like it might fall over" to "Someone find me support beams!" The best was still to come, of course. And there was that whole domestic drilling thing, Russia thumping Georgia, the Olympic Games, with their person-powered opening sequences, Detroit looking like a city even more on the ropes than usual, more below-the-belt punches about presidential candidates, including race, religious affiliation, and apparent political orientation, requests for ugly women to move to a remote town because the menfolk would take good care of them, and Rick Warren hosting the first Presidential debate, although neither candidate actually faced off against the other (and how that would come back to haunt us was thankfully unknown), confirming that there are still a lot of people in this country who want to know what religion their candidate has before listening to them on any other issue.
The Democrats had a convention, and despite someone praying for a flood to wash out the Senator's acceptance speech, it went on without a hitch, we found out Senator Joe Biden was his running mate, and that the fractiousness thought to appear from Clinton supporters never appeared. Senator McCain selected Sarah Palin, a monkey barrel full of laughs, as his vice-presidential candidate, setting up some historic possibilites.
The Dead Pool got Solzhenitsyn, Issac Hayes, Bernie Mac, and Julius Carry but Brian May got his doctorate and Ray Bradbury's still going. Oh, yeah, and Paris Hilton got John McCain good. (SNL would hit their stride later on).
September, yo! Republican conventions, complete with 9/11 videos endorsing the Republican candidate, music for which the artists said "I didn't give permission", masked by storms in New Orleans, and, you guessed it, Sarah Palin. Including her hacked e-mail account. Let the shark-biting commence. Oh, and if it hadn't been audible before, the complaints about media bias toward Obama start getting really annoying and kind of loud. There's also whispers of the "support the Republicans. We haven't had another terror attack in seven years. They must be doing it right" rumor.
Later in the month, a really big storm made mincemeat out of the parts of Texas in its path, the banks began the tumble, which is where the government say up and noticed there was a crisis going on, and then dumped 700 billion dollars to try and fix it, plus all the other money they had spent, several pastors revoked their own tax-empt status and dared the IRS to enforce it, high-profile homosexual marraiges in California, tainted baby formula, and Jack thompson finally getting the boot to the head that he's deserved for years.
Right at the end of the month, the two candidates did their first head-to-head.
An iconic movie voice was lost as Don Lafontaine joined the Dead Pool, and Paul Newman joined him.
Tenth month (although named to be the eighth) opened with a debate between the vice presidential candidates, the SNL stride well and truly underway by this point, and added on to it blaming why the crisis happened rather than fretting about the bailout and the mismanagement of its funds, the United Kingdom continued to look more and more like Airstrip One rather than a free and democratic society, the fraud conviction of Ted Stevens, of "Tubes!" fame, the ascendence and crash of a plumber from Ohio, the return and vengeance of several zombie attacks based on Obama's race, "terrorist sympathies", religion, and apparent socialism. It was the month right before the election, so they had to go all out. Proposition 8 also got much more airtime, as the deadline ran down on it. Ah, and a third presidential debate. We also found out that people in the high administration knew and endorsed torture, then denied it to us. And my parents and grandparents visited and saw me in my new digs and job.
November! Off at conference to start with, where much fun and gaming talk was had by all. On the plane ride back, the results of the election - with history made, as Barack Obama became the first African-American President-elect of the United States.
That was the good news. California's Proposition 8 passed, adding a Constitutional amendment to define what marriage is after a court decision overturned a law. That amendment is still under review to see whether it is in contradiction with another part of the California constitution. Several other anti-homosexual initiatives passed.
Some spectrum between channels opened up, Ubuntu ran another six-month update, the economy continued to die, and there were more layoffs everywhere. One the election was over, all that political momentum sort of died and stayed ded, despite the President-elect asking his supporters to turn their efforts to other causes.
A bargain stampede killed a person at a Wal-Mart.
The Dead Pool paid out on Michael Crichton and the drummer for the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
Last month of 2008 - terror attacks abroad, the beginning of a smash campaign by Israel in Gaza, the cabinet is appointed, but not yet confirmed, a sign appeared in, and then was stolen from, the Washington State capitol building advising people against religion, right next to the nativity scene. Rioting in Greece, shoes thrown, possibly with the dust shaken off them, at the departing administrator, bailouts ahoy (and then some), more snow than the Seattle corridor knew what to do with (as well as the realization that my car can't drive uphill in snow. It can, however, reverse.), and, of course, the VEWPRFs.
And the Dead Pool still paid out. The man who coined sci-fi, icon and pin-up girl Bettie Page, Mark Felt aka Deep Throat, singer and Catwoman Eartha Kitt.
But Terry Pratchett got his Sir. And the next year looks to be very interesting, depending on how much the Obama administration can get their agenda going. See you all in 2010.
The year began with some amount of tradition - the padded rugby squad playing a bowl game in Florida. Un-traditionally, they won. This was to be the last season of Mr. Carr at the Head Coach position, and in the last game he coached, he got victory. Very nice. I was still awed with the newness of my situation - out of school, employed, and pretty far away from home. There were other things in my life that were contributing to shaking things up in the new year, too.
Even in January, we were in the middle of a full-on primary war, with the prize of Iowa to begin the middle sequence. The CW kept Senator Clinton and Senator Obama at the front, basically evenly matched. Iowa went to the Senator, and people blinked and wondered what that meant. From that point on, the narrative was shaping up as to whether it would be the African-American or the woman as the Democratic frontrunner. Historic in their own rights, as well as a truly historic amount of fear being slung about, either about the candidate's supposed Muslim origins, or his racial heritage. Later on, a new charge joins in, but it takes a while. On the other side of the aisle, the frontrunning Republican candidates were being hammered for, in order, not running on anything but 9/11, being a scary evangelical, and being a Mormon. I don't believe the person who would eventually capture the nomination was even on the radar yet, although I could be wrong, considering what would happen next month. Most of the remaining attention was focused on a long shot candidate who was showing that running a mostly Internet-and-word of mouth campaign was viable in the sense of being talked about, even if it was totally non-viable when the ballot box arrived.
The country was still picking up from one hurricane - little did we know more would be on the way. The country was also in the midst of admitting or denying that torture was happening on Untied States controlled areas, conservatives were and are still trying to sell the people on the idea that Iraq was a success, despite its poisonous origin, and a lot of people were ready for the next administration, hoping they would wipe the last eight years clean as if they had not happened. Assuming they couldn't manage an impeachment and clear him and his vice out.
Went and saw Play! in Seattle, and was disappointed, for the most part, by the execution. the pieces themselves are wonderful, of course. And there was evening, and there was morning, the first month.
So, February. Super Tuesday. And when the carnage and wreckage were finished... well, on the Democratic side, it was still a close call. The Republicans had it figured out, though - John McCain, by not being anyone that had a singular issue to hammer on, snuck through as everyone around him exploded.
The lulz came out to play as the eponymous Anonymous began their campaign against Scientology, there were rumblings of collapse in financial sectors, another university shooting, more terror and fear as Iran increased centrifuges, the fallout on warantless wiretapping, and lots of other depressing things, like photographic proof of torture.
And Red Day came and went. Peacefully.
March onward. Major developments: vicious infighting in the Democratic nomination - at this point, we're wondering whether the Republican ticket has their attack lines already made out for them. Additionally, the beginnings of "Obama's black, and that's bad" "Obama's a Muslim, and that's bad", "Clinton is a woman, and that's bad" were starting to show up in the discourse.
Elsewhere, battles on surges, insurgencies, bailouts, education, Livejournal's ad revenues, Tibet, oh, and Super Smash Brothers Brawl came out for the Wii.
Terry Pratchett also found out he got Alzheimer's. Since then, he's been writing as very fast as his brain and machines will let him. Arthur C. Clarke died.
At the end of March, and the beginning of April, the Moisture Festival began (hopefully I can do that gig again this year), which was a hoot every time I got to play.
Unfortunately, at the beginning of April, I also had to fly home on very short notice because I lost a grandfather to Time and Death. Later on in the month, more on politics, finding out the populace hates only Scientologists more than atheists, more bits of Anonymous, limbo on children taken from a compound, the death of the discoverer of LSD-25, and a Ben Stein movie.
May is where we pick up the narrative again. "Mission Accomplished" entered its sixth year, an Army medical facility housed soldiers needing medical care in facilities that the rats were looking askance at, storms crushing people and houses in Burma, a quake in China, a seriously off-base interpretation of Firefly, the beginnings of the breakdown that is Zimbabwe politics under Robert Mugabe (he lost the election), economic stimulus payments, Anime Central (which may have been the last Freakin' Suite), the clearance-rack monitor that I got a VEWPRF or two ago as a gift dying, the Phoenix craft landing on a Mars polar cap and discovering the presence of water ice on the planet, the overturning of a homosexual marraige ban in California, another story which had things later on come up and rear their head.
June came, and with it, Summer Reading. Having laid the groundwork with school visits, the annual reading frenzy took off. Right at the beginning of the month, projections and actual totals indicated that it would be the African-American Senator, not the former First Lady, who would be the Democratic Party nominee. Although it was noted that this was unofficial, and that the Senator from New York might keep campaigning to try and sway the delegates at the convention. Practically, Senator Obama, Senator McCain, and the vast armies of keyboards, commenters, bloggers, and opinion columnists turned their sights on each other and began firing away in earnest. Closet Muslim, "terrorist fist-jab", and the like. Oil prices were also still on the rise, which meant the domestic drilling cries started to appear, to be met with the equally loud cries of "make better cars". robert Mugabe returned to his reign of terror, having intimidated the opposition into not appearing for fear of their lives. There were telecom immunities granted for warrantless work. Siblings visited me, making good on the trip that was canceled when I had to fly home to bury my grandfather. That was a weekend of pure awesome.
Another monitor died, as did George Carlin, and I watched a cat get hit by a truck. The truck never stopped.
July is the month that I was presented to the world, cold, wet, naked, and most likely hungry. This year, I spent it watching baseball. Detroit still lost. Elsewhere, the world was gearing up for Beijing hosting the Olympic Games, the Anglican Church thumbed their nose at the Catholics and appointed women as bishops, as well as some Catholics doing some appointing fo women bishops on their own, hubbub over a stolen consecrated wafer, Jack Thompson finally hauled before the courts with the disbarment threat hanging, the likelihood of troops coming out of Iraq and going into Afghanistan increasing, and the bginnings of the "Fariness doctrine" nonsense. The Dead Pool claimed another, as the writer and deliverer of the "The Last Lecture" died, and members of a Unitarian church in Tennessee were gunned down by a domestic terrorist.
Bring on August. Summer reading wraps up at the end of this month, signaled first by the end of the summer storytimes. We're already deep into planning the fall ones, if we haven't already thrown in our planning sheets, and we're getting geared up for the first-of-the-school year school visits. Anyone who thinks the library is a dull and boring place never sits in on our meetings or sees what happens behind the desk. Twilight mania was still going strong, although a bit of a hissy went off when the draft of book five got leaked to the Web. Elsewhere, the cracks were showing harder as we switched from "that tower looks like it might fall over" to "Someone find me support beams!" The best was still to come, of course. And there was that whole domestic drilling thing, Russia thumping Georgia, the Olympic Games, with their person-powered opening sequences, Detroit looking like a city even more on the ropes than usual, more below-the-belt punches about presidential candidates, including race, religious affiliation, and apparent political orientation, requests for ugly women to move to a remote town because the menfolk would take good care of them, and Rick Warren hosting the first Presidential debate, although neither candidate actually faced off against the other (and how that would come back to haunt us was thankfully unknown), confirming that there are still a lot of people in this country who want to know what religion their candidate has before listening to them on any other issue.
The Democrats had a convention, and despite someone praying for a flood to wash out the Senator's acceptance speech, it went on without a hitch, we found out Senator Joe Biden was his running mate, and that the fractiousness thought to appear from Clinton supporters never appeared. Senator McCain selected Sarah Palin, a monkey barrel full of laughs, as his vice-presidential candidate, setting up some historic possibilites.
The Dead Pool got Solzhenitsyn, Issac Hayes, Bernie Mac, and Julius Carry but Brian May got his doctorate and Ray Bradbury's still going. Oh, yeah, and Paris Hilton got John McCain good. (SNL would hit their stride later on).
September, yo! Republican conventions, complete with 9/11 videos endorsing the Republican candidate, music for which the artists said "I didn't give permission", masked by storms in New Orleans, and, you guessed it, Sarah Palin. Including her hacked e-mail account. Let the shark-biting commence. Oh, and if it hadn't been audible before, the complaints about media bias toward Obama start getting really annoying and kind of loud. There's also whispers of the "support the Republicans. We haven't had another terror attack in seven years. They must be doing it right" rumor.
Later in the month, a really big storm made mincemeat out of the parts of Texas in its path, the banks began the tumble, which is where the government say up and noticed there was a crisis going on, and then dumped 700 billion dollars to try and fix it, plus all the other money they had spent, several pastors revoked their own tax-empt status and dared the IRS to enforce it, high-profile homosexual marraiges in California, tainted baby formula, and Jack thompson finally getting the boot to the head that he's deserved for years.
Right at the end of the month, the two candidates did their first head-to-head.
An iconic movie voice was lost as Don Lafontaine joined the Dead Pool, and Paul Newman joined him.
Tenth month (although named to be the eighth) opened with a debate between the vice presidential candidates, the SNL stride well and truly underway by this point, and added on to it blaming why the crisis happened rather than fretting about the bailout and the mismanagement of its funds, the United Kingdom continued to look more and more like Airstrip One rather than a free and democratic society, the fraud conviction of Ted Stevens, of "Tubes!" fame, the ascendence and crash of a plumber from Ohio, the return and vengeance of several zombie attacks based on Obama's race, "terrorist sympathies", religion, and apparent socialism. It was the month right before the election, so they had to go all out. Proposition 8 also got much more airtime, as the deadline ran down on it. Ah, and a third presidential debate. We also found out that people in the high administration knew and endorsed torture, then denied it to us. And my parents and grandparents visited and saw me in my new digs and job.
November! Off at conference to start with, where much fun and gaming talk was had by all. On the plane ride back, the results of the election - with history made, as Barack Obama became the first African-American President-elect of the United States.
That was the good news. California's Proposition 8 passed, adding a Constitutional amendment to define what marriage is after a court decision overturned a law. That amendment is still under review to see whether it is in contradiction with another part of the California constitution. Several other anti-homosexual initiatives passed.
Some spectrum between channels opened up, Ubuntu ran another six-month update, the economy continued to die, and there were more layoffs everywhere. One the election was over, all that political momentum sort of died and stayed ded, despite the President-elect asking his supporters to turn their efforts to other causes.
A bargain stampede killed a person at a Wal-Mart.
The Dead Pool paid out on Michael Crichton and the drummer for the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
Last month of 2008 - terror attacks abroad, the beginning of a smash campaign by Israel in Gaza, the cabinet is appointed, but not yet confirmed, a sign appeared in, and then was stolen from, the Washington State capitol building advising people against religion, right next to the nativity scene. Rioting in Greece, shoes thrown, possibly with the dust shaken off them, at the departing administrator, bailouts ahoy (and then some), more snow than the Seattle corridor knew what to do with (as well as the realization that my car can't drive uphill in snow. It can, however, reverse.), and, of course, the VEWPRFs.
And the Dead Pool still paid out. The man who coined sci-fi, icon and pin-up girl Bettie Page, Mark Felt aka Deep Throat, singer and Catwoman Eartha Kitt.
But Terry Pratchett got his Sir. And the next year looks to be very interesting, depending on how much the Obama administration can get their agenda going. See you all in 2010.
