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DD:Recall (ddr ac)
Groovestats (itg ac/cs)
Location: Harwood, Maryland, USA
Jake is a rescued kitten that was found in Baltimore with his two brothers. All three have found forever homes, but we knew when we saw Jake that he had to come home with us. He always looks surprised! He is very active, and loves to play with the other kitties we adopted at the same time, Kelly and Emmett.
Tweets for the Day
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I can't believe I just paid $25 for Ethan Brown's new book Shake The Devil Off, an account of the 2006 "voodoo shop" murder/suicide, only to find out I apparently joined the media frenzy that savaged the reputations of the young murderer and his victim:
"After Katrina, Addie enthused to a reporter that 'we've been able to see the stars for the first time.' After she was murdered, Addie's remark about the stars brought a nasty rebuke from New Orleans novelist Poppy Z Brite, who wrote on her blog that while 'I feel bad for the girl ... I can't quite forgive that remark about how beautiful the stars were over New Orleans in the nights right after the storm. Stars are horrifying things in general and should never, ever be seen over New Orleans. Our night sky is supposed to be purple.' While it was understandable that New Orleanians sought to distance themselves from the gruesome tale of Zack and Addie [yes, I've always sought to distance myself from gruesome tales - PZB], surely these two young people had lives that did not need to be attacked at any opportunity, and sad ends that did not deserve to be ridiculed." ( -- Ethan Brown, Shake The Devil Off)
All very noble, Ethan. I'm not sure how disliking a starry sky qualifies as attacking and ridiculing, but let's leave that. Instead of arguing the point, may I bring to your attention that I did not recently publish a 286-page book about Zack and Addie's lives and, primarily, deaths, a book that meticulously details how the blood poured out of Zack's mouth after he jumped off the Omni Royal Orleans deck, how Addie's charred legs in a roasting pan, severed head, hands, and feet in a stockpot, and garbage-bag-wrapped torso in the fridge were found in the couple's squalid Rampart Street apartment, graphic descriptions of the police photographs you looked at, and exactly where and with which tool (the tub, a saw) he cut her apart? I don't see any notations in the flap copy or acknowledgements about your donating a portion of the book's proceeds to groups for Katrina recovery, troubled New Orleans youth, or a similar cause, so I assume you're profiting (such as book profits go; I don't say you're getting rich) off Zack, Addie, and readers' desire to know the gory, painful details of how they lived and died. No doubt you're doing it to try to understand and tell their side of the story and all sorts of other compelling reasons. As everything seems to do these days, it reminds me of a Stephen King story, in this case "Apt Pupil" and its young boy drawn to Nazi atrocities*:
"'Anyhow,' Todd said, "the library was real good. They must have had a hundred books with stuff in them about the Nazi concentration camps, just here in the Santo Donato library. A lot of people must like to read about that stuff ... I really did do a research paper, and you know what I got on it? An A-plus. Of course I had to be careful. You have to write that stuff in a certain way ... All those library books, they read a certain way. Like the guys who wrote them got puking sick over what they were writing about.' Todd was frowning, wrestling with the thought, trying to bring it out. The fact that tone, as that word applies to writing, wasn't yet in his vocabulary, made it more difficult. 'They all write like they lost a lot of sleep over it. How we've got to be careful so that nothing like that ever happens again. I made my paper like that, and I guess the teacher gave me an A just cause I read the source material without losing my lunch.' Once more, Todd smiled winningly." ( -- Stephen King, "Apt Pupil")
So you go ahead with your bad self, Ethan Brown. Smile winningly at your signings, and keep telling yourself, as your flap copy rather startlingly claims, that you have discovered how these two young people's lives could have been saved. We'll hope your book makes certain that Nothing Like That Ever Happens Again. I'll just stay over here nastily rebuking people on my blog.
But remember this, Ethan: Both you and I have profited from writing about severed heads and bloody limbs.
Mine were fictional.
*I'm aware that I have invoked Godwin's Law here and thereby lose all the Internets. I can't help it; that's what the damn story is about.
Location: Harwood, Maryland, USA
This is Kelly! I’ve wanted an orange tabby for forty years and just never found one at the right moment until Kelly came along. At first glance I knew he was the one. Kelly is definitely an Alpha Cat, unafraid of anything and has opinions which he shares willingly. At 16 weeks he is “large and in charge!”
Tweets for the Day
Going to get my crazy pills adjusted today. I've actually tried to stop using the word "crazy" on Twitter because I know there are people on my tweetstream who feel it is an "ableist" word and are hurt by it. I may or may not agree -- I consider myself fairly crazy at this point, and the word doesn't particularly hurt or offend me; nor does the word "lame," though it undeniably applies to me. Twitter, though, is more or less a conversation or series of conversations. In conversation, I think it is reasonable to avoid language that you know hurts people. So what if I'm not hurt by "crazy" or "lame"? That doesn't negate Jane Deaux's pain, and I'm tired of seeing people blow off genuine pain as "insistence on political correctness." I retweeted a good quote once, and I can't remember it exactly, but the gist was Why should I have to explain precisely how the knife you stuck in my back is hurting me before I can convince you to take it out?
There's no need to hurt people if you can easily avoid it. So many people online seem to ignore or gleefully defy that. But this journal is my place, my online living room if you will, and here I'll call myself crazy and lame if I like.
Music: "Crazy" by Patsy Cline (no, not really)
Location: Harwood, Maryland, USA
Emmett is a half-size kitten. Perfectly normal except he is tiny. At 14 weeks he only weighs 2.9 pounds. He was rescued with his sister and Mom when he was four weeks old. We fell in love with him at first sight and he is a total love-bug. He also loves to eat, he’s never walked away from his dish yet except to try to steal everyone else’s dinner, even ours! He is well loved!
Tweets for the Day
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( YAY )
Crazy Fire, Cary, 7pm Wednesday - EVERYONE READING THIS IS INVITED
Mood: 
full
Music: borat on tv
With all of the recent "supergroups" getting together and the success of Them Crooked Vultures, it's far past time we assemble the best of all time:
Singer from Black Sabbath
Guitarist from Guns 'n Roses
Bassist from Red Hot Chili Peppers
....and someone find me an insane swedish metal band so we can steal a drummer named Janus >.>
That being said, Buckeye still puts up a lot of its own commercials during various broadcasts advertising their various services, and apart from the gratingly smug tone many of these commercials take, some of them are just so bad I can't stand to watch them. One of their recent commercial lines has been to show "humourous" things you can do with your old satellite dish after getting Buckeye Cable, like use it as a frisbee or an outdoor grill. Now, they're not that funny to me, but I'm willing to accept that my sense of humour is significantly different from most people's, so maybe that's just me. However, in each of these commercials, when they're advertising their special offers at the end, those offers include cash and/or credit for selling them your old satellite equipment. In other worse, they're showing you what you can do with your old satellite dish, and then basically saying you won't have the dish after you use this special deal. This is the kind of elementary logic failure that makes me want to go down to Buckeye Cable's offices and start yelling at no one in particular about how ridiculous they make themselves out to be.
In another of these "alternate use for your old satellite dish" ads, they show a guy turning his old dish into a replica of a Star Trek starship that he then hangs from the ceiling of his bedroom. They even have a crappy synthesizer playing a rip-off of the first four notes of the old Star Trek theme, and they only refer to it in the commercial as a "starship model." However, the man's bedroom is full of licensed Star Trek merchandise, including bedsheets with the Next Generation logo on them and a life-size cardboard cutout of Data. It's like they're trying to have it both ways, referring obliquely to Star Trek like they're trying to avoid a lawsuit, but then having all this official merchandise in the background. There's no disclaimer about Paramount licensing the use of Star Trek stuff for the commercial, either, so I have to assume that Paramount could shoot a cease-and-desist order to Buckeye Cable here to get that commercial taken off the air, which would do wonders for my nerves.
The other big line of commercials Buckeye has introduced lately has been for their home phone service, trying to show why it's a good idea to have a landline even in this age of cheap cellular service. I have to admit that the first of these commercials, about a grown-up daughter bonding with her mother over the phone, was actually quite touching and well done; it's probably the best commercial I've ever seen Buckeye put out. However, after that they started trying to be funny, and as before, the commercials became ludicrous. One commercial shows a guy having to lean out of a window of his house, with an active beehive right above him, trying to get good reception on his cell phone. (They couldn't even afford to get fake bees for him to swat at, so he just looks like he's having an episode.) After the Buckeye guy comes in and does his thing and hands the guy a wireless landline phone, though, the guy goes back into his house, but only closes his window part of the way. If the bees there were as bad as he made them out to be, his home would be uninhabitable within about five minutes. It's like that commercial the soda industry put out trying to get Congress not to put a national tax on sodas where the woman takes groceries out of her car's trunk and then leaves the trunk wide open as she goes into her house and closes the door behind her. I'd meant to blog about that commercial a while ago, but then Jon Stewart beat me to it.
The worst of these Buckeye phone commercials, though, makes me want to pull my hair out, so of course it's in heavy rotation. It's about this guy who tries to order a pizza at 2101 (9:01 PM, if you insist) since he doesn't want to use up any of his weekday minutes, only to be told that the pizza place he called stopped delivering a minute ago. First of all, nearly every cell phone company I know starts offering reduced/free minutes at 1900, not 2100. Secondly, no pizza place I know of stops delivering that early. Pizza places, like fast food (especially Taco Bell), make a killing on the late night just-got-stoned-and-need-munchies crowd, so it's in their best interest to stay open as late as possible. Those logical flaws alone would be bad enough, but then the Buckeye guy comes in and gives the caller a landline phone, the caller smiles, and then places a call on the landline phone. Uh, excuse me, but why the Toot is he calling again! The pizza place will still be closed! He's still going to spend the night hungry and miserable! Couldn't you have gotten the phone to him fifteen minutes earlier?
I know that looking for logic in television commercials is kind of foolish to start with, and I admit I probably view Buckeye more harshly than I do other companies, so I'm probably looking for this stuff to point out. Still, though, stuff like this makes me batty. If your commercials are going to be smug and self-righteous, at least have them make some sense.
okay