Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
I just broke my store.
I generally come in the back door when I get here. Today, after unlocking the door to get in, when I pulled my key out of the lock the entire tumbler came with it.
So now my key has the tumbler still attached to it, and the back door can’t be unlocked from the outside.
What will be really entertaining is when my manager gets back from lunch, parks in back…and can’t get in the store.
Whee!
What?
I challenge anyone to explain to me how this isn’t just flat-out idiotic. From a press conference with President Bush yesterday:
Q Mr. President, could you tell us, did you see the presidential — the President’s Daily Brief from August of ’01 as a warning —
THE PRESIDENT: Did I see it? Of course I saw it; I asked for it.
Q No, no, I’m sorry — did you see it as a warning of hijackers? And how did you respond to that?
THE PRESIDENT: My response was exactly like then as it is today, that I asked for the Central Intelligence Agency to give me an update on any terrorist threats. And the PDB was no indication of a terrorist threat. There was not a time and place of an attack. It said Osama bin Laden had designs on America. Well, I knew that. What I wanted to know was, is there anything specifically going to take place in America that we needed to react to?
As you might recall, there was some specific threats for overseas that we reacted to. And as the President, I wanted to know whether there was anything, any actionable intelligence. And I looked at the August 6th briefing, I was satisfied that some of the matters were being looked into. But that PDB said nothing about an attack on America. It talked about intentions, about somebody who hated America — well, we knew that.
This would be the PDB entitled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US“, by the way.
You’ll have to excuse me for a moment, but…could we please get this fucking imbecile out of the Oval Office?
I cannot believe the hubris, the monomaniacal egotism of Bush and his cronies. Because there wasn’t a time and dated marked on a calendar and circled in bright red ink, they think they’re absolved of any responsibility in preventing the attack.
This makes me sick.
David Sirota is fact-checking Bush also:
Not only is Bush lying, but he’s making a ridiculous argument: he’s essentially saying that because he did not know terrorists would attack at a specific time, place he is absolved from his gross negligence in failing to ratchet up homeland security and counterterrorism before 9/11. It is like saying that while you know a car accident can kill you and your family, it is OK to not strap yourself and your kids in because you don’t know exactly when and where you might get into an accident.
(via Atrios)
Given how incredibly silly all the controversy was, I think it’s great that Janet is spoofing her “wardrobe malfunction” — and doing it in character as Condi Rice, no less!
It was inevitable: Janet Jackson spoofing her infamous wardrobe malfunction by flashing a heavily pixillated breast on “Saturday Night Live.” The one surprise was the context. Jackson portrayed national security adviser Condoleezza Rice opening her blouse at the Sept. 11 commission hearings, in an opening skit on the comedy show.
The skit showed Vice President Dick Cheney, played by Darrell Hammond, suggesting Rice should “flash a boob” to distract the public from her testimony.
“Just one headlight, real quick,” he said. “It does two things. You win over the liberals, plus, it’s a distraction for the press. I guarantee that’s going to be the headline, not the bin Laden thing.”
Jackson, as Rice, huffily refuses.
“I am not a prude, sir, but this hearing is not the forum for that kind of lewd conduct,” she said. “There are other forums, like pay television or national sporting championships. That would be fine, but I am the national security adviser.”
Cheney reluctantly agreed. “It was Ashcroft’s idea,” he said.
iTunes: “Among Myselves” by Future Sound of London, The from the album Lifeforms (1994, 5:52).
Happy Easter, folks.
You may just have to bear with me here. I’m at work today (boo — filling in for a co-worker who made plans for the day when we thought we’d be closed for Easter), stuck in a store with no customers and no work, looking out through the windows at the sun.
Bored.
And whining.
Then, to top it all off, I’ve just spent some time browsing LiveJournals and going through the various “Friends” pages and skimming through what I find. Man oh man, is that a different world than my usual reads. Of course, having immersed myself in LJ entries for the past hour or so, my brain is somewhat stuck in “LJ” mode, and now I get to subject all of you to a long, rambling, disjointed post about absolutely nothing of import whatsoever. ;)
(LJ users, please don’t take offense at that. Yes, I’m teasing. No, it’s not entirely serious. There’s plenty of content on LJ pages — but the stereotype of “LJ = angst-ridden teenybopper” is just so much fun to play with…!)
(Besides, I used to be an angst-ridden teenybopper, and I shudder to think of what I might have written at that stage of my life if weblogs, LiveJournals, or the like had been around at that time. Ick.)
Memo to me, just in case I get suckered into working here next Easter Sunday: bring a bag luch. Virtually nothing is open in Georgetown on Easter Sunday, and I had an hour long lunch break to kill. Ended up grabbing an overpriced sandwich from Starbucks and wandering around in the sun for a while. Turns out that while the main drags in Georgetown offer little to the eye other than light industrial, warehouses, and run-down buildings, if you go just a street or two over, there are some really cute neighborhoods around here, and some houses that — were I in the housing market, which I’m nowhere near — I could easily be tempted by. I’m thinking that once I have a camera again, I may want to grab a sunny weekend like this one and come down to wander around and explore the area more than I have so far.
Question for any Seattlites that might be reading this that know the town better than I do — is Georgetown really that bad? It seems like every time I mention that I work in the Georgetown area, people cringe. Okay, so it’s run down, and I see the occasional drunk wandering around, but that’s hardly something unheard of in other areas of the city. What causes the instant “oh, I’m sorry” reaction? Is there a sky-high crime rate here that I have somehow managed to miss in the past four-plus months of wandering around after dark each night on my way home? Is my victimless state just pure luck, destined to go the way of the dodo at some point, leaving me crumpled in a gutter somewhere after some local hoodlum makes off with the \$7 and a free pass to the Vogue’s fetish night that they’re likely to find in my wallet? I don’t even have a hat n’ boots for them to steal….
Inquiring minds want to know.
This store’s Muzak system only has two channels: 50’s and 60’s, and 70’s-80’s-90’s. It’s been on the 70’s-80’s-90’s channel nearly continuously since the store opened (and by opened, I mean opening day, not unlocking the doors this morning), but today I figured out how to change the channel to the one other choice I have (I’m so smart…S-M-R-T…). I have to admit, the selection isn’t nearly as bad as it could be, though the mere fact that it’s not the same stuff I’ve been listening to for the past four months is good enough in itself that the actual music could be nearly anything and I’d be thrilled.
I’ve been finding myself less and less motivated to post about the stuff I run across each day on the ‘net. Let’s face it — I get my links from all the same usual suspects as nearly every weblogger on the ‘net (BoingBoing, MetaFilter, Slashdot, Daily Kos, Eschaton, etc.), and I just don’t have the time to randomly troll the ‘net at large in hopes of finding something that hasn’t been linked to by everyone else yet, so the chances of finding anything original is slim to none. On top of that, the majority of what I post can pretty much be summed up thusly:
Good: Gay marriage, equal rights, tolerance, Macintosh, wacky humor, music, movies. Bad: bigotry, racism, homophobia, Windows, George Bush et. al., the war.
And there you have it: the Readers Digest Condensed Cliffs Notes version of my weblog. Fascinating, isn’t it?
It’s probably a bad sign when I start to bore myself.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that I’m likely to stop anytime soon, boring or not. I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing — or just indifferent — but somehow, I just don’t see myself closing up shop and walking away. I’m just not sure that I’m really contributing that much, and if that’s the case, where do I want to go from here?
I’m not open enough with the world in general to suddenly go overly personal. While I don’t mind occcasionally mentioning bits and pieces of my life on here, I’m not the type to post every last little detail of my life — what I had for lunch, little daily annoyances, relationship ups and downs, orgasmic expertise, or the like — while I’ll admit that there are times that it’s a little tempting to give that a shot, I’m just not that comfortable being that open. If that means that what ramblings I do put up are a little more boring, a little less titillating, a little less exhibitionistic than other sites out there…well, sorry. Barring a sudden major personality transplant, that much is fairly unlikely to change much, if at all.
At the same time, though, having said that…sometimes it’s definitely tempting.
Just don’t hold your breath.
Hrm. Anyway. I think I’ve just about run out of steam for the moment. Just over two hours left to go, then it’s homeward bound, see if I can slam my laundry through the washroom if it hasn’t been taken over by other tenants already, and then off to the Vogue for tonight’s Fetish Night.
The excitement never stops, I tell you…
The Memo has been released.
Declassified and Approved for Release, 10 April 2004
Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US
Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Ladin implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and “bring the fighting to America.”
After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a [CENSORED] service.
An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an [CENSORED] service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative’s access to the US to mount a terrorist strike.
The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of Bin Laden’s first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US. Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that Bin Ladin lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Zubaydah was planning his own US attack.
Ressam says Bin Laden was aware of the Los Angeles operation.
Although Bin Laden has not succeeded, his attacks against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrate that he prepared operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks. Bin Ladin associates surveilled our Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.
Al-Qa’ida members — including some who are US citizens — have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Two al-Qa’ida members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our Embassies in East Africa were US citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990s.
A clandestine source said in 1998 that a Bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.
We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [CENSORED] service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of “Blind Shaykh” ‘Umar’ Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists.
Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patters of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.
The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.
For the President Only
6 August 2001
Declassified and Approved for Release, 10 April 2004
(via Daily Kos)
About a month ago, Dan Savage wrote a column for The Stranger explaining just how he, a gay man, was able to get a legal marriage license in the city of Seattle. It was pretty simple, actually.
He applied for, and was granted, a license to marry his lesbian friend.
The clerk called over her manager, a nice older white man, who explained that Amy and Sonia couldn’t have a marriage license. So I asked if Amy and I could have one–even though I’m gay and live with my boyfriend, and Amy’s a lesbian and lives with her girlfriend. We emphasized to the clerk and her manager that Amy and I don’t live together, we don’t love each other, we don’t plan to have kids together, and we’re going to go on living and sleeping with our same-sex partners after we get married. So could we still get a marriage license?
“Sure,” the license-department manager said, “If you’ve got \$54, you can have a marriage license.”
…Amy can’t marry Sonia, I can’t marry Terry–why? Because the sanctity of marriage must be protected from the queers! But Amy and I can get a marriage license–and into a sham marriage, if we care to, a joke marriage, one that I promise you won’t produce children. And we can do this with the state’s blessing–why? Because one of us is a man and one of us is a woman. Who cares that one of us is a gay man and one of us is a lesbian? So marriage is to be protected from the homos–unless the homos marry each other.
Is it putting too fine a point on it to say that this is a pretty fucked-up situation?
Dan and Amy got their license, and last week, they got married.
Savage and Jennigs got a marriage license, got married by a minister of the Universal Life Church and plan to file their license with King County, making the marriage legal.
Afterwards the [couple] plan an immediate divorce.
“We are going to try and stay married for about 55 hours and 10 minutes. We are going to just best Britney Spears,” he laughed.
So, congratulations Dan and Amy!
The situation provoked a very interesting discussion on Metafilter which I’ve just spent much of the evening reading through. Lots of well-reasoned, well thought out, intelligent, and passionate arguments in favor of allowing anyone to marry the people they love regardless of which way their genitalia point, and only a couple of people trying to make reasonable arguments against gay marriage (and not doing a very good job, in my opinion). I believe this was one of my favorite posts:
There’s a large set of psychological reactions we have to an associate’s mate. Take the earlier example of a male corporate executive’s partner of twenty five years dying, and the guy having to suffer in silence. It’s not about the time off. It really is about condolences, the understanding, the empathy. You can’t use semantics to erase this; this is a fight for empathy. Gay people are insisting that other humans respect their capacity for deep, abiding love — and those other humans are protesting, because “they’d never marry such a person”.
We cannot have an honest debate without admitting openly that it’s not just about legal rights and that it’s not merely about what a church feels. You can’t legislate condolences — but you can remove the legal rubric that says it’s OK to ignore the love of another.
[…]
If you really want to talk religion, The Creator of the Universe saw fit to breathe the binding fire of love into all mankind — He did not restrict it as a special gift to straights, any more than he did for whites (which would make whites more special) or English speakers (which would make English speakers more special) or the rich. You are familiar with the phrase that God is Love. You need to take a good long hard look at the fact that every time you reject gay marriage, you are denying a love so powerful it is willing to be martyred. That’s far more God-rejecting than anything two people in Love could ever do.
But I don’t really want to talk religion here. Look. I know my viewpoint doesn’t fall into the nice, neat categories of “keep your religion out of my life” vs. “that’s unholy”. But we really need to be honest here — this is a fight for the tiny respects, not just the grandiose ones. It’s a fight for humanization, and it’s one that naturally fought by every single second class citizen throughout history.
iTunes: “Hello I Am Your Heart” by Hickman, Sara from the album Rubáiyát: Elektra’s 40th Anniversary (1990, 2:44).
So Phil was bouncing around the ‘net, trying to find Sonnet Technology’s website (which is right here, by the way). On one attempt, he made the guess of www.sonnet.com. Turns out that that’s actually the home of Sonnet Networking — “Your neighbors on the ‘net.”
Well, as long as you aren’t Mexican, at least.
Quite frankly, I was more than a little taken aback by this. There’s a certain almost surreal incongruency in the combination of banner ads promoting wireless networking and DSL-based broadband and the blatant racism plastered across the top of the page. 
There’s even a handy “Invasion Map” showing how much of the southwest has become overrun by Mexicans (this map appears to have been taken from La Voz de Aztlan, an independent Mexican-American news and opinion site based out of Los Angeles, which in turn seems to lean fairly anti-semetic…).
In the left-hand sidebar of the page, underneath links to Disney and Google is a link simply titled “Defending Citizenship” that goes into more detail about this “invasion”.
In the schools of Mexico, students are taught that the southwestern USA belongs to Mexico, an area called Aztlan, and that one day Mexico will reconquer it. For political reasons, the Mexican government encourages Mexicans to invade our country, relieving Mexico of its poor, and generating a stream of \$14.5 billion into Mexico every year. This is money that should be spent in local businesses, but instead becomes Mexico’s second largest source of foreign income. And so the invasion continues, and their vision of reconquista becomes real.
According to the 2000 U.S. Census Bureau, 96.8 percent of the population in East Los Angeles, Calif., was Hispanic/Mexican. Stockton, Calif. was recently featured in a Wall Street Journal story about the exploding Mexican illegal alien problem. A dead crack-mama Mexican with 9 children on welfare and father on workers comp disability was on the front page of the Modesto Bee just before Christmas. This problem is on our doorstep today.
It’s hard for me to come up with any other description for this than “disgusting.” Bad enough that there are people who feel this way, but to make such hateful views a large part of a corporate website?
Is this even legal? Wouldn’t anti-discrimination laws prohibit things like this? If nothing else, I’d think that the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Laws would make this display illegal…at least, if I were of Hispanic descent, I know that I would think twice about applying for a job with a company promoting such beliefs on their public website. What do you really think the chances are of anyone from Mexico, Spain, Peru, Portugal, or any similar heritage getting hired by this company? How about their customers — do service requests called in by someone with a Spanish accent get resolved with the same politeness, speed, and efficiency as requests called in by someone without an accent?
Admittedly, it’s something of a Catch-22, but I’ve often found that the one thing I’m steadfastly intolerant of is intolerance. There is no justifiable excuse for any company to be so blatantly racist.
Should you be so moved, here’s the contact page for Sonnet Networking. I’ve rapidly reached the point where I’m out of anything more to say while remaining coherent.
I just wish I’d known about Very Good Friday earlier — I’ve only got two hours!
(via Something Positive)
iTunes: “(Big) Wish” by D., Thomas/Potente, Franka from the album Run Lola Run (1998, 3:53).
For someone who whines and complains every time I switch apartments, I’m fascinated by what it must take to move the Seattle Central Library to its new building.
It was the biggest word problem the Seattle Public Library had ever faced:
If the Central Library housed 855,840 items, and they weighed around 14,000 tons, how could they be moved out of the old building in 2001, separated and stored for years, reshuffled into an entirely new order, and moved into a landmark new building?
The logistics of the double-move seemed unfathomable. Most people were convinced the splashy new Central Library, scheduled to open May 23, couldn’t be built on the same site as the old one.
“She’s crazy” is the chorus City Librarian Deborah Jacobs remembers when she broached the plan.
But now, book by book, waist-high packing box by waist-high packing box, the freightloads of the final move are under way.
I pass by the new library building every night on my way home from work, and I was excited to notice a couple weeks ago that, even though interior construction still seems to be in progress, books were starting to line the shelves visible through the windows.
I’ve taken a couple evening walks by the library, getting off my bus a couple of stops earlier than I normally do so that I could walk by the new building once I noticed that construction had moved to a point where the sidewalks around the building were open again. I’d already decided that I liked the design, but at night, it’s absolutely gorgeous, with all the odd angles picking up reflections of sky and stars above, other buildings across downtown, and traffic streaming by on the streets below. Really makes me wish I had a new camera.
Just a few more weeks until the new library opens, and I’m hoping to be able to stop by on opening day just to wander around. The funny thing is, I’m not entirely sure now much I’ll actually use the library — they always have this funny habit of wanting their books back, something I have deep issues with. ;)
iTunes: “Girl” by Amos, Tori from the album Little Earthquakes (1991, 4:07).
Another book I need to add to my collection: Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.
“Eats, Shoots & Leaves” takes its title from a mispunctuated phrase about a panda. In Britain, where this rib-tickling little book has been a huge success and its panda joke apparently recited in the House of Lords, Ms. Truss has proved to be anything but a lone voice. Despite her assertion that “being burned as a witch is not safely enough off the agenda” for the punctuation-minded stickler, Ms. Truss obviously hit a raw nerve. For those who are tired of seeing signs like “Bobs’ Motors” and think an “Eight Items or Less” checkout sign should read “Eight Items or Fewer,” boy, is this book for you.
Ms. Truss has not succeeded solely on the basis of her punctuation acumen (though that is considerable — and by the way, she finds dashes and parentheses annoying). Her mission to “engage in some direct-action argy-bargy” has helped the book, too.
Dashes and parentheses annoy her? Ah, such a shame — given that I’m quite prone to using dashes (as I did earlier in this sentence) and parentheses (like this, for the second time in a single sentence — and another dash, too, just for good measure), I suppose she won’t be much of a fan of my writing style. ;)
(via Mickey)
iTunes: “Mile End” by Pulp from the album Trainspotting (1995, 4:31).