Add Some Spice To Our Lives, Please

I often like simple things. My title today links to a story about a simple thing. A bare bones cell phone made by an Indian phone company. No frills.

What's good about it? Keys people can read and aren't itty bitty. It has no bells and whistles. It is just basic. I work in the industry and know that a lot of the 65 and older age groups just want something easy to understand and use and the heck with the rafts of complex and confusing features that fascinate their grandkids and great-grandkids! People with poor eyesight, neuro-muscular problems and arthritis would benefit from a keypad that is more substantial than current offerings.

Mobile phone companies in the US would create a whole new loyal customer bases by offering these phones.

Romantic Steampunkery

As some of you might know from searching my links, I like to visit The Steampunk Workshop from time to time. Jake has a marvelous take on things we use today --- merging them with a Victorian design ethic that is handsomely machined and hand tooled - like steam engines. I like them. I like the aesthetics of them. Gilding the lily is often sweet.

Jake just featured Dave Veloz's steampunked mini mac setup that was a gift to his bride to be. It's a work of art, so go have a look. Just click on the the title line and you'll get there, ok? Have fun looking, but don't blame me if you start salivating. After all, you're also the types who imagined stuff like this while reading Well's "TheTime Machine" or more recently S.M. Stirlings "The Peshawar Lancers."

Just Another Liar

I'm really getting sick of these pseudo-memoir writers. I'm tired of people willing to lie like this. Screw it! I think she could've told the story as fiction and it could've sold on it's own as fiction.

Tis Monday....

Sigh. The weekend was mostly nice.

I've been keeping track of my walking distance on this place called Favorite Run. It has a nifty tool so you can map your route distances and it then will let you break down how far you've walked total per week/month, this month/last month and so on. My distance for February was 63.95 miles, for January (with healing sprains) my distance was just about half that. My total distance so far this year is 106.06 miles including what I did today. Here's an example of one of my routes: http://www.favoriterun.com/191319 You can click on the satellite to get more detail and even zoom in in ya want.

Saturday, met up with my friends Parris and George and their friend Chip at a cat show on the fairgrounds. Oh, my! Kitties everywhere. The handsomest of all were the Maine Coons. Parris ended up buying a lovely ginger Maine Coon female kitten about 3.5 months old. If she could've afforded it, there were only 3 more kittens she'd have taken home too, but it was just the one. For me, there was a handsome mackerel tabby MC, but hey, I'm broke. So I focused on my knitting and enjoying P & G get goofy over the ginger girl.

Sunday was frickin' cold! (The NOT nice part of the weekend!) A cold front moved through slowly heavy with moisture and a bitter wind made it feel icy. You can be sure that I was not up to a long walk and the poor dog got cheated out of said long walk. Jim and I went to Su and Kens to hang out watching movies. I howled through Richard Rodriguez's Planet Terror, a fun, bright homage to the old Grindhouse movies from back when. There were scenes I laughed at til my sides hurt including a damn hot sex scene between 'Cherry' and 'El Wray' that cut to a "missing reel sorry for the inconvenience" splice.

Meanwhile an arrest warrant has been issued in Philadelphia for 24 year old Jose Mendez in the slaying of Teven Rutledge Wilson which I ranted about last week. Mendez is on the run and authorities have labeled him as "armed and dangerous." No shit. Obviously he was dangerous before, too.

In Texas a 16 year old girl along with three others are being charged with murdering her mom and two brothers while her dad clings to life in critical condition. The reason? Her family didn't approve of her relationship with one of the boys who is now involved in that killing. Her bond has been set at 1.5 million dollars. Who's frelling idea was this? I don't wanna hear of any "mercy on accounta I'm an orphan now!" crap.

Hillary is hanging onto her campaign and tomorrow's votes in Texas and Ohio will tell the tale. Rhode Island and Vermont are also holding their primaries tomorrow. Ohio is the biggest prize I think, because it reflects the experiences of job losses due to NAFTA, cuts in the middle class, rising food and fuel costs and more that have trickled down through the rest of the country. Obama has every bit as good a chance in Ohio which I'm glad of as the polls show a very narrow gap between him and Hillary. The politesse has ended and the gloves came off with this weekend's spate of ads. After Tuesday, the next primary will be Pennsylvania. My money is on Obama, folks.

RIP: Bill Buckley

William F. Buckely, Jr., the conservative founder of the National Review has died. While I seldom agreed with him, his clarity of thought and lack of hyperbole in writing made his conservative opinions understandable and grounded.

There was one thing I agreed with him about and that was on teen pregnancy and absent fathers. It was agreement enough to inspire me to write to him and say so. Now I've written such letters to other writers before and have learned not to expect a response other than a form letter, so it was a thrill to receive a personal reply from him a few weeks later. He didn't let a lot of time lapse between my letter and his reply either which astounded me. I still have that letter somewhere in my papers.

The place that I really shared common ground with Mr. Buckley was in the love of words. Lexicography, if you will. Once I learned to read, dictionaries became part of my main reading diet for years. I still love word challenges so his Word of The Day in the National Review Online was fun for me and it was fun to see how many days I could go before a word's meaning tripped me up.

So I'd just like to remember Buckley well and wish his soul a happy entry to his Catholic heaven.

There's Something Really Wrong With You, Mister!

Hey you in Phillie with the gun! You're cursed, man!

For a man who will go away, get a gun, return and shoot a 16 year old kid in the face at point blank range AFTER the kid already apologized repeatedly for accidentally hitting you with badly thrown snowball, I can only think you've got a really small pair. Kinda goes with being a cursed man, though. You are. You're messed up in the head. You're cursed. And I'm probably not the only one cursing you either.

There's something really wrong with you, mister. Wrong, for thinking you're SO damned important that Teven Rutledge Wilson's bad aim was worth killing him over. I'm over here in NM and don't know you, but I think you're a pathetic waste of a man. There's something wrong with your thinking. There's something wrong with the way you feel and it showed when you shot Tavin. As my husband says, "A snowball is not equal to a gun."

You're cursed man! I really gotta hope you haven't sired any offspring yet. I really do, because I want you to die childless. No woman wanting children should get involved with you. I think when they know what you did to Teven, they should run for their lives because you're the kind of bastard who'd hurt them and any kid they may have or produce! The black community doesn't need guys like you; you're nothing but destroyers. You don't build anything of value. In fact no community needs guys like you; the fewer of you there are, the better off everyone else is.

More selfishly, I want Teven's family to remember him with love and to pass that legacy of love down through their descendants unto the 7th generation and longer. But I don't want that for you. You don't deserve it. You're already dead in that gun-hardened heart. Your life is cursed. You can profess any religion you like, but I reckon it'll be just a sham to get a little sympathy. You shall not have any safe haven that lasts save your own grave. If people remember you at all it should be with revulsion and contempt. You're an evil hearted man and people should make signs warding against that evil when your name comes up.

There's something way wrong with you, mister. You can suck air til' you're an old, old man in some prison. You can die there cursed and alone. You've earned it.

Damn You Ralph!

Cheezits! Nader has thrown his hat into the Presidential ring again... and all he ever is is a spoiler. He did it the last election too and look what we ended up with!

:::shriek:::

Snow Moon

Last night a few of us friends got together and held a slightly belated full moon circle. This full moon, even with it's eclipse, was the last moon of winter so we wanted to make note of it as our hearts, minds and bodies yearn toward spring and warming weather. The projects of maintenance over the winter are just about done and spring chores have already begun for us as well.

We started in a circle that was dark and cold. The joyous one hosting had turned off the heat & lights hours and thrown open the doors for a time. When DH & I arrived, I'd asked if her electricity had been cut off somehow. "No," she said, then lit a candle while I put our potluck dish in the kitchen. DH who catches the chill easily due to his lack of body fat then asked if she was going to close the doors. It was raining out. She said, "Soon." Our other participant, Tree, arrived shortly after I'd settled down to a bit of knitting while the joyous one and DH chatted. Finally the door was closed.

After the other potluck food was put in the kitchen as well, the candle was put out and we made our circle, just four of us around a tiny altar, in the now darkened room lit only by lights from the street filtering through the windows. "Tonight," the joyous one intoned softly, "is the Snow Moon, the last moon of winter. Some have called it the Hungry Moon, when winter stores of food have been eaten through and little is left to feed and nourish the people, where the cut pads of peat and chopped logs are almost gone so what's left is carefully tended and used only when needed. So, in this era where we have so much, I've put out the lights and turned off the heat for a time so we can be reminded of what our ancestors knew every year."

We invoked blessings on sprouts of garlic another friend had planted and started in her green house -- garlic with it's history of protecting people's health through it's antiseptic properties and ritual properties of protecting against evil. It's an organic connection really, as in the past disease was often connected to evil spirits and such. We will plant them in our own gardens soon and nourish them through the summer. We finished by sharing from a small loaf of lovely handmade wheat bread and a cup of warming coffee and unmade our circle.

How easy it was then to light a small fire, turn on the lights, turn up the heat and follow with dining on our potluck dishes fueling our bodies and warming our spirits.

Halle-freakin'-lulia!

1. Obama won three more -- DC, Maryland and Virginia primaries! I really like this trend. Winning Maine Sunday was all good too!

2. The writers signed an agreement ending their strike, so re-run season will be ending shortly. I've missed my guilty pleasures -- especially the original CSI.

3. My old friend Alley and I finished laying down 12 yards of landscaping crusher fine. That is -- shoveling it from where it was dumped into wheelbarrows, moving it by the barrow load to where it was being put in, dumping, raking and repeating. The job took us 4 short days. If someone had told me that's 1 ton per yard, I'd have wavered about helping. On the other hand, there is something satisfying knowing that I can work that hard at my age, not wreck my back and say "It didn't feel like 12 tons!"

Old School

What's Your Political Philosophy? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Old School Democrat Old school Democrats emphasize economic justice and opportunity. The Democratic ideal is best summarized by the Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Old School Democrat 95% Libertarian 95% New Democrat 75% Green 70% Foreign Policy Hawk 40% Pro Business Republican 35% Socially Conservative Republican 10%