My Linguistic Profile

I did this out of curiosity after running into the link on Aunt Purls' blog.

Your Linguistic Profile:

50% General American English 25% Yankee 15% Dixie 5% Upper Midwestern 0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

SteamPunk Recycles

I happen to admire the Steampunk movement that Jake von Slatt (who I have in my Good Links section) is part of. I accidentally ran across him sometime last year or so and thought his stuff was PFM -- Pure Frelling Magic combining the artistic whimsy of the Victorian era with modern technology.

In his recent blog which you can get to by clicking today's article title, he talks about not being able to acquire materials from the local dump because officials fear the spread of disease... which sucks. But so many older items like old typewriters, lanterns, trunks, boilers and so on are sent to the dump instead of places where they can be bought and repurposed into the marvelous meld that is SteamPunk.

So, I'm going to ask if you read this and have any old fashioned appliances, tools, gadgets that may seem possibly Victorian that you consider keeping them out of the landfills and metal recyclers and contact your favorite steampunks so they can repurpose them into the magickal blend of beauty, form and function that they create.

Yum! Dessert

One of my favorite places for an after dinner indulgence is The Flying Star... They're a locally started and grown restaurant chain here in Albuquerque. They've always had a focus on good food and even better desserts. Also, they're pretty darn socially and environmentally conscious and have been throughout their 20 year history.

Now, I haven't sampled the entire dessert menu as I already have too many favorites: chocolate mousse cake, giant eclairs (enough to share with 2-3 other friends), creme brulee, apple pie, key lime pie, and a bread pudding to die for. Some desserts I indulge in every few weeks.. like the 3x Ginger cookies or apple pie. Others, like the eclairs, tiramisu, and chocolate based goodies I try to keep as rarer treats so I don't tire of them.

So click on the title and see what the Flying Star has to offer and if you make your way to Albuquerque, then give them a try... and have dessert!

Ya Think ?!?!?

From the AP today , we have a story that Scott McClellan, the former White House Press Secretary is disenchanted with Bush and that in a memoir wrote "that President Bush relied on an aggressive "political propaganda campaign" instead of the truth to sell the Iraq war, and that the decision to invade pushed Bush's presidency "terribly off course.' The Bush White House made "a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed" — a time when the nation was on the brink of war, McClellan writes in the book entitled "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception."

The way Bush managed the Iraq issue "almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option."

"In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president's advantage."

Of course we knew this. We've know this for years. We didn't respect the lies & manipulation then either. Now the new press secretary's spin is that McClellan has an axe to grind or something. Whoop. Te. Do.

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20080528/D90UNQ2O1.html

So I'm Thinking....

... there's a fug of a lot of crap going on out there.

The big elections are mostly out of the way. The news said that Dems are discretely suggesting she call it quits, that the numbers "aren't there" and that she can't possibly make them up in the last two elections in Montana and Wyoming. Yah. I once thought an Obama/Clinton ticket could prove to be real sweet, but with the acrimony of the last few weeks, I'm not so sure. Depends on what kinda chops the lady really has as a politician. If Hillary's a 'statesman' and not just a pol and is asked to share the ticket as veep, then yeah they could make a powerful great team.

I'm still wrapping my head around what that Austrian guy Fritzl did to his daughter for nearly 25 years. It beggars the imagination to think what she went through. How do you conceive of not seeing the sun or feeling as though you've been buried alive? Of course she wants guarantees she'll never have to see his face again in her life. I'd want it like that. I think, though, that once he is convicted, as he surely will be, that instead of being hidden from view in a prison, that he should be put on full public view for the duration of his sentence. Put him in a secure, climate controlled room with a minimum of two glass wall so he has no privacy whatsoever during his sentence. He eats in public, he shits into a toilet in open view... all of it, from his first waking moment to him sleeping through the night. And it shouldn't matter if people throw rotten tomatoes or other stuff at him either. The glass walls would shield him, but he'd get to see it comin' at him.

Did I ever mention that I have odd revenge fantasies???

I've been reading about the mess in Philly with a group of cops wailing on some drug suspects following the murder of another cop a few days earlier. I hope my one of my blog buddies (from another blog place) neighborhood isn't involved and is safe for him to be in. I understand things are very, very tense. There has to be some value in hewing to a higher standard of better behavior when one is a cop. Police violence was bad form in the 60's when practiced against the hippies and protesters and it's still bad form when practiced against idiot criminals today.

Myanmar is so screwed right now. Of course, maybe the dictatorship there will have it's death knell in the aftermath. That's another thing that is pretty incomprehensible. The likelihood of 100,000 or more dead from the storm. There's hardly any clean water there now which is a hazard even more dangerous than the storm... bad water can fuel outbreaks of cholera, dysentery, possibly malaria and yellow fever which would lead to even more deaths. Gods grace and bless all the local relief workers there, whether the monks in their temples and monasteries or anyone else lending a hand because the junta isn't allowing outside aid workers entry at all.

Got Done

scored good yesterday.

There are times when a gal's gotta do what a gal's gotta do. I've had a need for a while and hubby's been too busy to 'git'er done.'

So I put a little ad up. Craigslist came through for me. His name was Fxxx. He had just what I needed. Lots and lots of it.

So I called my friend Scrawny and said "Lets go, so I can get me some..." and gave her some gas money for her truck. We went down to North 4th and met up with Fxxx at the address the gave me.

It took about 30 minutes and a good bit of grunting and heavy breathing, but sometimes that's all it takes to satisfy. Then Scrawny schlepped me back home.. where we unloaded 30 bundles of roofing shingles that I bought for $50.00.

What did you think I was talking about?!?!? Sex???

Click This and Enter The Arena

It's just a game.

A Rhapsody

It sure seems that spring was early this year. My daffodils and tulips were 2-3 weeks early. Ditto my lilac. Of course, I'm really happy about the lilac as it's one of my favorite fragrances. The bush is loaded with blooms this year too!

Willa and me did a bunch of seed starts a few weeks ago. The germination rate was over 95%, so we're really happy about that. We'll be planting tomatoes with names like Red Siberian, Bloody Butcher and Mexico Midget, not to mention the more usual Italian Plum tomatoes and grape tomatoes. We've also got a good start on pak choi, two types of eggplant (grilled eggplant, yum!), squash, runner beans and bell and spicy peppers.

Did anyone know about compressed peat pellets? They're super compressed into small 1.5" discs and you set them up in a germination tray and give them a good watering with very warm water. They expand about 4 times larger, then you can just pop your seeds in and you're ready. Then after a few weeks, you can just plop the seedlings and their peat pots into the next size up pots, fill with potting soil, water deeply and after a few days of hardening off, they're ready for the green house. I thought those peat pellets were so cool and who ever invented them deserves a real pat on the back.

The Siberian elms seemed to be the first to show green this year. And it's not leaves first... it's their seeds. They're good germinators too. But, BUT, it's a nuisance tree too. At least here, maybe not so in their place of origin. They were brought to Albuquerque by Clyde Tingley, a former mayor and his wife sometime in the late 20's or early 30s as part of a beautification project because they're mildly drought hardy. However they were as someone called them "environmentally ignorant" about how non-native plants can take over an area. Like kudzu in the South. The problem is the nuisance factor. The seeds volunteer everywhere and they're hard to get rid of and the trees are subject to disease too. I do get a chuckle though... some local artist has used them to do a bonasi forest with them and put a picture of it up on his blog. If you go to google images with keywords 'siberian elm seeds' it should be the first picture that comes up.

I love watching how the greens of spring seem to follow the elevation of the town. For example, if the Japanese plum flowers downtown near the railroad, I can pretty much say when other Japanese plums will be green up and flower or in other parts of town within x number of days depending on the elevation and micro climates around them. Ok, that is one of the advantages of generally staying put in one town for a lifetime -- a person has plenty of time to develop intimacy with the environment.

Arthur C. Clarke: Rendevous With Life's End

The great writer Arthur C. Clarke has died. I was a fan of his for many years and read almost all of his earlier science fiction novels through my late teens and early 20s and kept up with his newer works over the intervening years since. I figure my friends Parris and George are writing their toasts to Mr. Clarke tonight as well. Cheers, kids.

Thank you for all the fine writing, dandy stories and the pleasure of reading them Sir Arthur. Goodbye.

Emptied E-Mail Box

I've been following a blog titled "How to Save the World" written by Dave Pollard. Recently he wrote A World Without E-Mail: Getting Our Lives Back in Synch with suggestions on how to manage our contact needs productively via calendaring. It made a lot of sense to me.

I commented that due to my leave from work due to stress related illnesses, that I'd deleted my email from my home computer -- purged everything regardless of what it was. And I did. Now, I check email once a week and am a lot happier for it. I said it freed up time I need for healthier activities like walking with my dog.

What did I let go of anyway?

7 years worth of CTIA and other mobile phone communications newsletters and email. I worked in the mobile communications industry which is the source of my stress related illness. As a customer service and tech support rep, I felt I needed to keep on top of anything that affected or potentially affected my employer's customers. Those emails included topics developing technologies, our products, competitors products, legislation, zoning, you name it. I even had email with links to manufacturers who made phones our company did NOT sell, but that our customers would buy to use on our network (or try to) back from before our company's intranet had a reference knowledge base addressing unsupported products.

I've gotten out of touch with the business and need to stay out of touch with it for a while. It is okay. Really.

Ditto C|Net, ZDNet, and Tech Republic with all their cross platform stuff that segued into my work related email. Years worth of updates gone in seconds.

I kissed off my news updates. Good bye NY Times, Washington Post, SF Chronicle, Irish Times, The Telegraph, et.al. Some of the news was so old the links were beyond archived and simply dead. The saving grace was if I had paper copies of those same circulars, our home would have been a firetrap. I told myself that I'd go back and read x,y and z stories, but the truth is once read and in the folder, new things came up and I seldom went back to them no matter how clever I was flagging & tagging them as "important."

I trashed email from friends and family that was chock-a-block with forwarded urban legends, scams and chain letters, not to mention jokes, cute pics and inspirational stories (which were often urban legends)! These were the emails that got read once then filed into the family/friend's folder and left to moulder. Very few ever got answered. Some vexed me enough that I'd send a reply with a link to Snopes or About.com showing that what they sent was bullsh*t and either not true or fraudulent or some combination thereof.

Oh! and with those deletions were thousands and thousands of unsolicited email addresses I got which had been included with each forwarding. Suzie forwards to Tom, Dick and Harry. Harry then forwards to Marvin, Tyson, and Sylvester each of whom gets Suzie, Tom and Dick's email addys and include them when they forward to Mom, Pop, Uncle Ted, Aunt Alice and Uncle Bob ad infinitum. (Some people never did learn how to cut and paste, you know? It's too hard, they say!)

Perhaps I have issues but seriously, it's discouraging to think family and friends can be taken in by some of this stuff. It's sometimes a bit scary when some of the email my well-meaning family members forward is also bigoted. Do these people I'm attached to really believe this crap even though the lies and rumors have proved again and again to be untrue and distorted? Even when investigative media has proved they're untrue? It worries me. Some of the screeds have such hyperbole, it's hard to believe that my family doesn't see through the language used to see that they're being told lies. So it's good to get that junk out of my in-box and out of my life.

The fact is I'm skeptical enough anyway.

Last to go were the catalogs. I'm not buying anyway.

How radical is it to delete the email box? Harried executives are now doing it. I misplaced the story, but apparently some hotshot CEO got fed up and deleted his mailbox and no one ever noticed that he hadn't replied to their emails. It was just so much noise after awhile.

So if you're overwhelmed, just give in and delete your email inbox once in a while. It doesn't hurt. I promise.