Monthly Archives: May 2008

Stupidity = Authority

Wow… Great Survivor tonight in terms of “Dumbest Survivor Ever”! I sure have enjoyed the hilarity this season. I like the casting department’s decision of choosing the dumbest people they can, although with just enough bright players to manipulate the scene…

Anyway, on the subject of dumbness, there’s been a continual trend in the Hillary campaign comments that bugs me. Quoting from a recent article, she said (emphasis mine),

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

To me saying “people vote for me, unless they’re educated” isn’t very convincing. The fact that the better educated and the better informed someone is, the more likely they are to vote for Obama should be kind of telling… But because the US has really enshrined this concept of the righteousness of the “average” American over the “elite”, people’s credibility actually goes down if they’re better educated, more intelligent, or better informed. It’s quite shocking if you look at it objectively…

And I won’t get started on how shocking it is that “average people” seem to buy the idea that Hillary, a pandering millionaire-many-times-over, one of the neo-con aristocracy with no understanding or empathy of how the average American lives, is “one of them”, but buy the notion that Obama, raised by a single mother in relative poverty, is not… Meh… I’m glad McCain doesn’t seem interested in a McCain-Clinton ticket, because if anything were to kill off America and complete it’s descent into a bankrupt fascist state, that would be a good way to do it.

Milkbath II

I’m catching up on sleep right now… I napped for most of yesterday healing my leg and most of the redness and swelling is gone now and it’s definitely feeling much better. Since someone asked me to post another picture, here you go. It looks worse than it is, and it really doesn’t look that bad. Nothing much exciting to report. Watching Survivor soon, with a meal c/o Caitlin. Woo woo!

By the way, everyone keeps messaging me asking what the BMEfest plans are. To be honest, with the strangeness and unfortunately extremely divisive trauma that BME’s gone through this year, I’m not sure that there will be an agreed upon official plan, so for now, what I’m recommending is that people check out Jana‘s Toronto BME summer BBQ event, which is taking place on Pride Weekend here in Toronto. She’s been part of the BME scene here in Toronto and has been with us since the start, has hosted numerous successful events, and I think she’s uniquely positioned to host a BBQ that everyone can enjoy. If “official” events are also staged, I’m sure they will be done in a complimentary fashion where both can be enjoyed, so feel safe in making your travel plans now.

Oh yeah, I need to shave…

Oldendays Exposure

I installed CHDK on my SD800 tonight — very neat. This is a 64 second test exposure I took in the relatively total dark on my porch… It’s hard to stay still that long! Maybe tomorrow night I’ll go down to the waterfront and do some night time shooting and keep my fingers crossed that the 24-hour hot dog vendor still has a cart down on Pier 6 or wherever they are.

Wounded… NOT

A few days ago I did some deep damage to my leg, and it had a low-grade infection, so there was quite a bit of swelling in the tissue surrounding the issue. It’s an interesting experience for me to go through, because there’s no real feeling (just phantom sensations) in that part of my leg because it’s in the region that the nerves were severed in. However, I could sort of feel this, with a dull, not quite identifiable ache in the region and up the leg. On one hand it hurt of course, but on the other hand, it was really, really nice to feel something.

Mmmm… bacon!

More pleasantly, I hung out at Nefarious’s school for a while and played with kids in the playground — five is such a super-fun age. Afterwards we went to the park (as almost always) and played hide-and-seek with other kids there, and then made spagetti and cheesecake for supper… Lefrog just sent me a great last-minute ModBlog post, so I’m doing that, watching Jeopardy, and eating a mango. Exciting or what?

Oh, and I got my “GoogleApps” account authorized today, so I’m looking forward to brushing off my rusty Python skills and coding something fun… I’ll have to think about something fun to write — I thought about a photosharing forum system that interconnects stuff a la everything2 might be fun and a quick write.

Climbing at the park

We took the bike to the park after school where Nefarious bumped into a school friend (and gleefully, an ice cream bike) and they played — and damaged their clothes, repeatedly sliding down the hills through the mud — climbing all over the outside of the structures… Her friend’s dad was a rockclimber, so unlike most parents seem to be, he wasn’t too freaked out by it and actually encouraged it. That’s her climbing of course. She’s played on the rock wall at MEC a few times and loves it… Anyway, they are both covered in bruises, scratches, and mud, and appear quite pleased at that (her friend’s dad said he’d have to bribe her with candy to keep the story from her mother — I’m not sure if he was joking or not). Lots of happy insects too, if I can attribute an emotion to an insect anyway — I took the picture below today.