modchen/news

in order to enrich their lives, my two old fogies' lives, and our lives, Himself and i have adopted two beautiful feline childies from the Denver Dumb Friends.

DDFL named this guy Hans. he is black with white blazes and socks, and has eyes like chips of steel, gelid and beautiful. IMNSHO, he's not quite eight weeks old, although DDFL thinks he is "2 months old." i'll be damned if he wasn't weaned about two weeks too early, but at least he -is- old enough to be fixed now without hurting him.
his coat is soft; he is reserved, but not in an aloof way: he seems more shy than dismissive. his nature is sweet as honeysuckle nectar.
he is smallish and still has the very rounded head of quite young kittens. he purrs whenever picked up, like a house on fire. he loves to play with wires and tangly things, and seems more than capable of entertaining himself. and after 20 minutes with us, he gravitated into my lap and plain passed out. it's so STUPID cute when they just run out of gas like that: GOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGOGO! -hm, tired.- *PLOP*{zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz}.
and there's nothing a kitten can do to win my heart in quite the same way: purr in my ear, pass out in my lap, and i'm pretty much signed, sealed and delivered with giftwrap (not that i am a hard sell anyway). mine ovaries, they still shrieketh with delirious joy. something tells me hans here will be daddy's pride and joy: they share a certain quality of spirit. but that doesn't mean mama don't want a big ol' lump of sugar on her lap from time to time. i mean, i didn't grow this here capacious lap for nothin'.

 

this is Jetta. she is all-black, rangy, IMO about nine or ten weeks old. she is utterly without fear, and her energy reserve is bottomless. in this image she looks as if the camera is freaking her out a little, but i think she is actually sizing the camera-wielder up for potential weaknesses.
she talks volubly and has a roughish coat. she likes anything that dangles and is insanely curious about anything and everything around her at all times. though she be but little, she is fierce. i adore her fierceness and her restless inquisitiveness. she is intrepid and has a rare brilliance about her spirit. when she gets bigger she will be a huntress to be reckoned with. but when i picked her up she did not cry or freak: she just sniffed my cheek, gave me a tiny lick and peered into my face like a person would. she is a climber, full of will, upwardly bound, dauntless. already i love the tiny unquenchable flame in her. they have an id collar on her at the shelter. in my house she will will walk uncollared, free to dare and do.

ddfl is keeping the two of them overnight. itty hans isn't fixed, so they'll do that tomorrow, poor sweet baby. they'll both be microchipped and then i'll bring them home together, tomorrow afternoon. they get along well, and will be good life-companions to each other.

i'll keep them separated from the elder devilish duo for a couple of days, while they all get accustomed to one anothers' scents. they'll eat and sleep here in the gracious queendom with me.
i don't know whether we'll keep the names DDFL assigned them. #Him may come up with something for the boy that he likes, and it always takes me ages to come up with names, and then they end up having four or five names anyway.

more pictures to follow, never doubt.

at the DDFL there are walls of ceramic tiles and etched-glass plaques with folks' tributes to their lost pets. it's sad, but sweet. i'm not sure what i would put on one of those if i bought one for Commander Bun: there is too much to say.

thank you for saving my life.

of course, shelters inspire me with indescribable grief anyway: every one of these deserves love and warmth and safety: every single one. and i can't take them all.

if i am ever old and rich i will endow a hospice for old, sick animals. they will get love and ease and rest. people can fend for themselves: there are too many of us anyway, by a damn sight.

at any rate, i try my best. much more kitten news to follow, to be sure.

a comment on what some people think passes for 'retro style':

this looks like something a twelve-year-old would make for their six-week-rotation Home Ec final project.

it sells for £120. POUNDS. not dollars. do the math if you want a horrified chuckle in your day.

i'm in, if you follow my twitter, a truly shit mood today. the country is going to hell, people are by and large obnoxious assholes, everyone is on the make, i hate my hair, i came home to freezing empty house full of trash and the situation with my parents is just awful. i don't even think a nice ride would cheer me up. maybe homicide, but there are so many irritating strings attached.

i'm back.

giant mechanical spider invades liverpool!



oh the steam.

bbc coverage here.

today is the true first day of fall, in these environs. you can feel it, a faint presentiment of chiming icicles in your mind's ear, a chord of race memory, vibrating, urging you to migrate, or die. soon the leaves will begin to turn. you can smell it.

i'm pretty bitter about having to go down to Yon Future Ancestral Manse again after just one month. there's no reason for it, other than that my dad sees it as a convenient excuse to emotionally blackmail me into being right there, under his thumb, as often as possible. so i'm going to go this time, and after that, i'll be happy to go down there at three or four-month intervals, or when something major happens. like a terminal coma. yes, Mom is going to die in weeks or months. no, me running down there every other week is not going to change it, or serve any other purpose. 

i question if i'm not getting softer in my old age. i wonder if i'm getting tougher, drying and refining. i *am* getting old. :) i feel a little out of shape, physically -- Fourteener Dave likes to squish me and declare that i am Buff And Hard, and although hucking the metal-bodied vespa, two and a half times my weight, around, has toughened me some, of course it's a fat lie: i'm proportionate for my height and that's all.

my horoscope sucks this month. last month they lied to me and posted a glowing description of Your Birthday Month, and now it's gone to complete crap. i am sanguine at the most about my birthday: fortunately, i don't expect a whole lot.

at any rate, i decided i wanted a course of lessons from this aerial dance studio for my birthday, so #Him is giving me the first 4-week basics course as a present. (sepideh, if you run across this, feel free to chime in: i know you did aerialism in boulder when you were here.) i'm excited: i've always been a great climber and a born flip-and-twist-er, i have great extension from all the ballet i've done, and i pose naturally anyway. i think it will be great fun. if i like it, i'll go through the rest of the run of classes and see where it takes me. i think my buddy Steph, bartender at the church, et c., has taken a couple of things there. fun to try new things, anyway. my first lesson is next tuesday. i have some trepidation about climbing -- i climb a lot, and the way they want you to climb isn't the way i'm used to, at all -- but i do feel good about having the advantage of completely prehensile toes. i use my feet as second hands when i'm sewing large things, and even making long synthetic dreads -- trudis! *L*so that may help some.

and speaking of sewing: i hate having to put things on the shelf. i have a care package to send to my girl in france, paint repairs to make to my scoot, and have at least two sewing projects i'm going to have to put on five-day hold. 

 *grumble* huge swathes of Bargain Wa Forest Green silk velvet and sateen, *grumble*

must wash and pack. i'm not taking Lappy 4000 with me this trip: too much to ask for a three-day jaunt, so posts may be infrequent. i have new copies of Guns, Germs and Steel, Why We Hate Us, and a Ngaio Marsh gem to take with me in lappy's stead.

wish me luck. be well, all.

mmmmkay, this is pretty funky. but "Hookers and Blow" is not only a pretty awesome name for a band, it's also strangely appropriate for the Party of Denial. :)

actually those parties look decently Fun. or would, if there were a different set of people participating. pink wigs and roasted pigs, even. i LOL, friends and neighbors. oh, the symbology.

forgot to include pics from Scoot the Vote -- here's an awesome flickr set that isn't mine:



we're all mad here.

this has been kind of a crap week for scooterists. one of the guys on Totalruckus was struck by a dumbass cage driver, and lost his leg (not to mention his ride) as a result. efforts are underway to provide relief, so if you ride a scooter, or especially a ruck, please go and buy a TR sticker to help with the relief effort... it goes towards his medical bills, rehab, that kind of stuff. it could be years before he sees any money from the suit he'll press against the car driver who struck him.

also, right here in the Metro area, a dumbass football has-been struck a scooterist who was stopped at a red light, minding his own business. this scooterist died as a result. the driver ran like a little bitch. later, realizing that, DUH, the police will be able to find out who you are by running your plates, he came back to get arrested.

billy jenkins, little bitch


yeah, the scooter rider chose to stop at an intersection of two extremely busy, high-speed streets. yes, you *should* be paying attention to all the vehicles around you, all the time.
it was six in the morning. how are you going to avoid every single asshole on the road who's coming home from a drunken bender?

i hope to god i never get hit and hurt. i try to pay attention to everything going on around me, all the time. but you can't always. momentary lapses of attention are simply inevitable.

if this ever *does* happen to me.... well. if you hit me, you better kill me right then. that's all i'm saying.

in other news, i love my vespa more every day. :)

my stomach has been OMG retardedly queasy all day. we had Fourteener Dave over last night to hang, and i'm not sure what exactly i put in my tummy that pissed it off so much -- but anyway, i'm not good for much today but cleaning out my camera, so that's what i did.

miz lolo and i wandered around some on day 3 of the DNC, so here are images from our adventure:


we have olive drab, and we're not afraid to use it!

and here are process pics from dreading miss echo's hair:



click for the set.

going back a ways, here are pics from DJ 12Gauge's visit to Denver:

wooo!

 

well, dad just called me back after about three text messages last night and a call this morning. i guess they're okay: they're hanging out watching TV. the patients and staff are locked in, and they gave away free breakfast this morning so apparently it's not that bad where they are, anyway. jones park, which is right by the beach, is underwater; highway 90, the beach road, is underwater: but this is SOP for anything from a minor depression to hurricane Camille (Camille is still the benchmark for sheer violence if you ask me) and is not alarming.

i watched some video of how the city is holding up: there seems to be a lot of wind and some trees uprooted so far. it seems from most of the MSM reports that they've gotten most everybody who wanted to to be evacuated out of the way. no thanks to michael chertoff. thank you, helpful Canadia!
but i also read another story this morning:

Infoshop News will be posting updates from New Orleans when Hurricane Gustav strikes, to the best of our ability.

Common Ground Relief has posted a list of supplies and materials that they will need after the storm clears. Some Common Ground volunteers have evacuated and a few are staying put.

Canadians begin evacuating New Orleans residents as hurricane Gustav nears

Most people who aren't evacuating are elderly who feel they couldn't handle the stress of the evacuations.

Computers for evacuation effort crashed on Saturday. Names on the waiting list were lost and people were never called about evacuation transportation.

Food Not Bombs is looking for servers to help serve food and run first aid clinics after the storm passes.
Common Ground will be open AFTER the storm. They are currently gathering volunteers and supplies.
People living in towns and villages along the coast will need critical assistance after the storm passes.

Hurricane evacuation in New Orleans seriously lagging, reports I-News collective member. Disabled people who are on the top of the list haven't been evacuated, with 24 hours to go before the hurricane hits.

Mayor Nagin tells people to "get the hell out," yet most poor residents of New Orleans don't have the money to travel, because it is the end of the month. The government didn't send aid checks this week and with stores closing this weekend, New Orleans residents left behind will have no access to food and water.

Homeless are being denied access to evacuation transportation if they don't have ID.

Authorities are guarding the Superdome and the Convention Center and won't let people near those buildings.

Make a donation to help out our collective member in NOLA by going to Paypal and sending a donation to jamieandjoe@hotmail.com

tip of the hat to elusis.  

 so all in all, it could be considerably worse. as we know from the last time the republican regime made a giant poopy-smelling FAIL.

speaking of giant fail: am i the only one who thinks michael chertoff bears a striking resemblance to one of these creepy old master vampires in a modern special-effects blockbuster? like maybe blade II or, even better, underworld?

(and do you believe they're making yet another of these? jesus, Hollywood is so talent-bankrupt these days, they'll beat any POS to death.)

yeah, i know. a couple of days ago i make this preachy post about "OMG don't be judgin' people on appearances!", and here i am doing it myself.
well, i'm not objectifying him, man. i'm just saying he bears, you know, a resemblance. just.... an observation. :D

so. on to other things.

my dad couldn't get Th'Generator started, so he's called an ambulance and is taking mom to the local memorial hospital. this is sort of a relief. they're a designated shelter, and their generators are pretty good.

i hope they have a house to go back to on tuesday.

click it for the fullsize. 

people both underestimate and overestimate hurricanes. sometimes both at once. firstly, they don't understand how gigantic they are. as you can see from the image, this one's core alone is larger than the state of arkansas. but the whole storm, if you recentered it over southern Illinois or thereabouts, would encompass fully half the country, from the great lakes to the the gulf and from oklahoma to the atlantic.

this one is a category 3 right now, but it will likely be in the upper reaches of category 4-dom when the storm core slams into land. i have been through storms that were cat-3 at landfall (mother was scared stiff, i was enthralled), and we lost a tree in one of them. tall pine tree, just cracked clean through the middle and broke like a pencil. junk tree anyway, but they can do that.

i just hope it doesn't work its way up to category 5. that's the second thing: category 3 and under, they're really not that bad. 4 is bad. upwards of that is going to be a disaster, no question. it's all in the scale.

but you know, unusually severe weather patterns, growing worse over a period of time, and all. no such thing as global warming, no sir. the president's scientists say so, so it must be true.

addendum: this is the newest projection:

click it for moar.

okay, maybe dad has a better sense about this one than i gave him credit for, but it's still gonna hit them pretty hard. from DKos, talking about the storm surge effect:

the biggest danger to communities near the coast during a hurricane is the storm surge shown in schematic above. The much larger wind-driven surge is the result of water being piled up by wind, and that effect is significantly larger for the side of the eye that's blowing toward the coast. In the case of Gustav, any place just east of where the eye eventually crosses the coast will experience the max surge ...

The surge acts a lot like and can be as destructive as a major tsunami. Beach front communities in Mississippi were leveled by Katrina's 25 foot surge on the storm's stronger eastern side, but the water receded as quickly as it had come. The levees in New Orleans were breached in 50 seperate [sic] places by the less severe western surge, and the city was flooded for weeks; until the water could be pumped out.

The dynamic could be reversed in the case of Gustav, currently projected to strike west of NOLA. If Gustav strikes just barely to the west of NOLA, the levees, rated for a Cat 3, will take the full brunt of Gustav's maximum landfall storm surge. That's why any change in Gustav's intensity now even if he goes on to weaken, and the precise point of landfall, are so important.

 

 from weather underground, talking about the effect on the city levees:

If the NHC storm surge forecast is correct, there will likely be multiple levee failures in the New Orleans levee system resulting in flooding of portions of the city. However, the extent of Gustav's current weakening was unexpected, and this could substantially reduce the storm surge. Given the current intensity forecasts, I believe there is a 60% chance that a lower storm surge of 12-15 feet, characteristic of a Category 3 hurricane, will affect the city. If the Army Corps of Engineers' assertion that the levee system can withstand a Category 3 hurricane is correct, the levees will hold.

 and the capper from fikshun mike:

At first, it looked like it would wipe out coverage of the RNC, stealing steam from McCain and depriving him of a chance for the electorate to get to know him and Sarah Palin. But it's becoming a plus for ticket. Sure, it should have been a solid negative for the party that denies global warming and for Bush's mishandling of Katrina three years ago, but they'll spin it positively.

First, they're using it as an excuse to keep Bush and Cheney away from the convention. Good move there. How could they have Bush and Cheney speak there without having them hug or shake hands with the new candidates? Those images and any relevant soundbites would be damning to any moderate sick of the last eight years. But without the hurricane, there was just no way to keep Bush and Cheney away without it appearing like they were snubbing the heirs apparent.

Second, you have to feel that Gustav will be handled differently. Folks will be evacuated quickly, smoothly, and with no mistakes. The Republicans know that the election may depend on it. They know that Bush has to look like he's in charge and that Katrina was a fluke. 

 and they'll probably get away with it.

canada is looking better all the time.

remember the crazy over-detailed how-to-make-tea post?

my #Him likes to grumble that all the girls on his reading list only post about food and shopping. i usually counter that not only does he only post about guns and things of concern only to Grizzly Adams, i haven't made a post about shoes in months.

i'm just revisiting the tea post because i'm delving into (really, really elementary -- no, REALLY elementary) chemistry. chiefly because i ran across a fructose sale in the bulk division of Wild Oats (99 cents a pound? suspiciously cheap. what's the catch? must remember to ask them next time) and decided to vary up my sugar routine a little. i remember fructose largely as an illicit pleasure from childhood -- my mother used to keep a bunch of little packets, individual-size, in a little index-card box in the dusty, generally undisturbed back of the pantry, and i would raid it for a packet whenever i felt an urge for a sweet thing come on me, which wasn't all that often. i don't think she ever used it for anything, actually. i remember it being sweet, that's all.

so i pick up this pound of fructose and use some of it to make a batch of tea. while it's brewing i read a little about it: come to find out, fructose is a monosaccharide with an unusual taste profile. not only is it 1.73 times sweeter than regular sugar, its taste profile is odd: "The sweetness of fructose is perceived earlier than that of sucrose or dextrose, and the taste sensation reaches a peak (higher than sucrose) and diminishes more quickly than sucrose," as i read on the wikipedia article.
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not certain, but think i fixed my overly draconian spamfiltering on the comments. seems to work according to my tests. you guys test it out for me? leave a comment here. :)

addendum: this is a global fix. anything you feel like commenting on all the way back to the beginning of the blog, have at it. 

in other news,

i've been reading Women Who Run With The Wolves for the last day or so. yes, it is cheap yoni-worshipping pop-jungian trash of the most gaggingly new-agey kind, as you would expect. but what do you want, i'd never read it, and i've heard people -- people who don't have my extensive grounding in comparative mythography, to be sure -- rave about it, so what the hey: it was on a dusty shelf at my local thrift, amongst many other Book of the Month Club five-minute wonders, and it was satisfyingly thick.

the saying "even a stopped clock is right twice a day" applies to it, i think. it seems like people who are into Jung are really into Jung. as in Unified Field Theory Into Jung. like blinded by Jung. and therefore they feel free to make all kinds of crazy-ass interpolations on the corpus of established seasonal myth cycles. a lot of the antique ritualistic meanings this chick imputes to simple seasonal myths are just plainly and demonstrably wrong. and the saccharine, the-universe-is-a-friendly-place-my-child, overly expository tone just makes me want to grab the woman by the hair and shake her till her teeth rattle. maenads were not happy rain-bathing hippies, you dumb bint: they ate mushrooms and chewed ivy and tore their own neighbors to pieces with their hands! cybele was not a loving all-fertile goddess: she inspired her celebrants to rip their own genitals off in their orgiastic dances, to whip each other to exhaustion and death, as the drones die after mating with the queen bee. the pig queen's children tied the oak king to a tree and lopped off his limbs before they ate him! fairyland is not what you think it is. if you'd have women embrace wolf nature, then call a spade a spade: wolves will kill and eat their own young if they don't come out right.

but there are little glimmers of insight here and there. i suppose you can't collect folk stories for years on end without gleaning some insight into human nature. me, for example, in metonymic terms, i have fallen into the red shoes trap. i have been wearing red shoes for two years (three)? i'm not sure why, but i have been substituting genuine living from my soul for, at first, friends with the cold clotted lard of envy behind their bright smiles, massive amounts of partying, settling for relationships with people who don't want the same things out of it that i want, doing what is easy and pays well and lets me live easy and doesn't feed my soul at all and makes me fat and unhappy. and those red shoes are beautiful traps that will dance me and dance me until i am exhausted: if i let them, they'll dance me to death.
fortunately, i have never let go of my soul-oriented instincts since i was a tiny child, and even more fortunately, i was born with an innate and enormous mountain of pure dromedarian stubbornness, which have allowed me to at least resist most efforts to squash and stifle me into a good-girl-high-achiever-make-us-look-good do-what-you're-told be-a-lady cube of pablumized, blank-eyed nothingness. and by even better fortune, i've gotten out of a lot of these traps in the last year or so, and have made internal peace with others. and that's all right.
but it's good to be reminded that i have more to do if i want to live with perfect integrity. and really, nothing is more important. you can have as many children, be as good and ladylike, make as much money, drive as big a car, be as famous, as you like: but all roads lead to the same place, in the end, and you don't get to take any of that shit with you. i always need to be reminded of that.

at any rate, some of it is interesting, and it's an interesting read if you can get past the pseudo-intellectual jargon (not to mention the random interpolations of spanish dialect and the ostentatiously folksy narrative tone)  -- not necessarily good, but i'll make my final decision later. if i don't want to keep it, i'll hollow it for a purse or something. it's good for an afternoon lazy read when i should really be optimizing and uploading some images from my camera and repairing nicks in my scooter paint and cleaning the kitchen and cleaning the den and watering the plants and and and...

i just argued with my dad for ten minutes, trying to get him to take himself and mom out of Gustav's way. according to him, this is an impossible task. i am scheduled to get down there on wednesday: who knows if this will be possible.

they're square in the middle of the approach path. according to dad, and his magnificent psychic powers (of which there has been no evidence up to now, and which seem to have exploded from his psyche full-blown, as Athene from Zeus's cranium), this storm is going to blithely waltz right on by them and "hit the City," i.e. new orleans, which is half an hour away from them as the crow flies.

*blink*

"dad, if it hits the city, it's going to hit you too." (o you stubborn asshat i sweartogod) "just because the eye does not pass directly over your house does not mean you will not get the entire brunt of the storm."

"naw, we'll be fine. i got th'generator and th'AC in th'window and i'm gonna tape up here shortly."

thus, my dad. i am certainly stubborn, but i do not lay claim to psychic prediction concerning catastrophes of nature. apparently it will be STONE COLD IMPOSSIBLE to bundle mother into a car and go to baton rouge to stay with my step-grandmother for two days. and we have been through numerous storms: i myself have danced under the trees as the eye of a category 3 passed over us, and i have waded and swum to work when the flooding in the french quarter was up to my waist. this isn't one of those: this thing is fast and furious and it's picking up strength from the gulf and it wants to hurt people: you get to where you can tell. and Mr. Stubborn-slash-Bulletproof Pants won't bother to get his rear in gear and get out of the way.

mom was awake. i told her i love her and to try to eat something, for me, please. she said she would -- i think. she does not really sound much like an adult any more.

i would cry, but this year just has me all cried out. i think about crying and i get this arch-melodramatic picture in my head à la Lichtenstein. that brings out the cynical self-disgust pretty quick.

all we can do is wait. *L* if i had to come up with a title for the last two years, that would be it.

 

yes, i know she looks deliberately MILF-y, or worse, like a barfly.

yes, i know we are all frustrated with the fact that simpering MSM-slaves like to make fun of hil's laugh and her pantsuit. turnabout seems fair play, doesn't it? shoe's on the other foot now, isn't it?

but we shouldn't sink to the level of making fun of her clothes. it's not who we are. we deserve better than to sink to their level. and we ARE better. we should hold ourselves to a higher standard than the sort of sandbox-style namecalling repugnicans think of as meaningful discourse.

remember bella abzug? she wore some crazy shit. crazy hats. and she had a damn fine brain underneath them. a woman is NOT WHAT SHE WEARS.

yes, Palin may be inept, unfitted, corrupt, misled, and dumb as a bag of hammers in the bargain. fine and good. probably so.
but me, i'll die defending her right to wear whatever she damned well pleases, and be judged on her capabilities and not her outfits or her stripper shoes or for fuck's sake her family life.

i'm well aware of how naive this is. how impractical, how idealist.

that's okay with me. as long as you don't be objectifyin', it's all good. 

...but maybe not so much for its taxpaying citizens.

DOWNTOWN — Police mistook an 80-year-old man as an anarchist Monday night while he walked from the Denver library to his bus stop.

Of medium height and an aging frame, Cecil Bethea became trapped in a tide of protesters near Civic Center and was then detained by police.

Briefcase in hand, the elderly man stood and smoked a cigarette with a slight frown, as police fired pepper spray into the chaos of young anarchists surrounding him.

"Suddenly there was a police barricade on all four sides. I stood there and didn't know what to do," said the retired men's suits salesman. "I did not carry a sign and was not shouting, but just stood there and said nothing."

Two police officers drew Bethea from the crowd with his hands tied behind his back and searched him extensively because they were concerned with the content of his briefcase.

"It was ridiculous how they handled me. You would have thought I was a mass murderer or something," he said.

Several of the protesters yelled at the police for their handling of Bethea.

"They were a little rough with me, especially because I did not represent any danger to them," Bethea said. "I don't think anybody would say I look dangerous or scary."

A resident of Denver for more than 50 years, Bethea said he was on his way home from the library. Police released him after he showed them a library receipt.

"I just sat there waiting on the curb until one police officer asked me if I was a little old to be protesting, and I repeated that I wasn't a protester," he said. "Thank God for the receipt with the date on it, because evidently it reads off that I just checked two books out."

Police escorted Bethea out through a nearby hotel.

"I went and bought a cup of coffee because my throat was dry," he said. "I planned to be an observer, not a participant."

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/aug/25/80-year-old-man-gets-caught-protest/

or whatever. my german sucks. more on my opinion of german and all languages with way too many declensions later.

there is WAY too much buzz about the police state going on in dear old denver right now. i was going to try to do a nice roundup, but there's just too much, so i'm opting out. i'll just roll around and take my own pictures. maybe i'll try to round it up later.

still nervous. went out this morning and felt nervous, even though the entire police presence in the city is thickly clustered around downtown, which is like two miles away from here. everyone is edgy: the number of aggro drivers on the two major traffic arteries we sit on has never been so intensely aggro. there is shouting and honking. there are pedestrians shrieking invectives.it certainly cannot be called boring or banal, i guess.

i watched michelle's speech on cnn last night and i'm not ashamed to admit that it gave me a tear. she's like jackie o, but with a backbone. and she played the Mommy card to sublime perfection -- i am still convinced that if Hillary had been able to do this, instead of playing the I'm A Badass Too card, she'd have gotten a lot farther and garnered a lot more support. biden may be a standup guy, but his pro-RIAA and pro-surveillance voting record disturbs me deeply. i almost wish we could have a michelle/barack voting ticket.

off to cherry creek.

on the back streets. 

i don't have to split out of here, come to find out, until next wednesday. so that's a relief. i was frankly pretty freaked about trying to fly out of here on thursday, and racking my brain to try to think of a way to get everything i need into a backpack, so i don't have to check luggage. i'm pretty sure that if i have to check anything it'll vanish.

my dad thinks that i'm at his beck and call because i'm not working.
this is a problem.

at any rate, i'll be doing Scoot the Vote on thursday night, but i'm not sure about the rest of the week. it's astonishing how many people we met last night asked us what we were doing this week. Lolo: i live here. i'm going to go to work.  Me: i live here. i'm going to go about my life.

i feel sorry for the number of people who are staying in hotels way out in the middle of Nowheresville. now that i look back on it, i should have offered up my spare room on Craigslist, after all. we're a lot closer to the action here than these kids who are staying in the DTC.

i was considering going to this blogger thing, but (a) the aptly-named zombyboy is going to be there, and (b) some dim twat/blog recruiter from face the state, aka What Brad Did With Mommy's Money Last Summer, is going to be there. and if that's going to be the tone of the thing, i'd rather stab myself in the ass several times and marinate myself in a bidet filled with lemon juice for a few hours. getting drunk around people who i don't know, don't care about, think are stupid or KNOW are stupid -- that's a bonafide recipe for disaster, friends and neighbors, with my mouth.

but a lot of other stuff is up for grabs.

opening my eyes and looking around at the sheer volume of things there are to do has forced me to realize just how staggeringly boring my life has been for the past few months. 
Lolo congratulated me a few days ago on not going stark, staring mad while not working, not gaining fifteen pounds due to copious couch-TV-and-bonbons-time, not becoming a gibbering fruitjob due to ingesting mass quantities of sf/f and genre fiction. but the real danger isn't that: the real danger is allowing yourself to go fetal in a mental coma, to draw away from the world, to go slack and numb and fade into a routine of nothingness.

last night at the bar i was subjected to a photographer waiting next to me, who looked at me, turned away and then pointedly told the friend on the other side of him, "These people are all too old. Where are the real Young Democrats? That's what I want."
i stuck my tongue out at him. i can certainly act young. how Imma Chur of me! my, my. going to hell, i betcha ten dollars. later on i saw him across the room and i not only stuck my tongue out, i flappled my hands beside my ears at him. you want young, feller, how does first grade sound? i'm still giggling at this particular piece of craycray on my part. hey, it fights banality, man, and every little bit helps.

but i'm too young to accept sitting at home, watching TV and crocheting, as my destiny. water the plants, feed the cats, crochet, read a book, fuck around on the internet. i'm too young and too vital to get stagnant like that. and, let's face it, i'm too awesome.
at least i can realize and accept that i'm bored stiff. i don't want a lot of drama in my life. i want my life quiet, but i see no reason that has to mean deadly, crashingly boring.

 so in sum, this week will be good for me. maybe if i can get my rear in gear i can actually start caring about getting a job, outside of my dad thinking i can just pick up and fly down there whenever he gets bored. 

miz Lolo and i hit the Young Dems convention kickoff party last night. good times. we met some nice boys from minnesota and a lot of other people. danced a little bit, and some guy with a movie camera ran around recording us (and everyone else). wandered around Bar Standard's, this is the bar that used to be part of the Shelter, upper patios. nicely redone, i must say, although it's not nearly as deco-esque as they probably want it to be and will certainly never hold a candle to the Cruise Room. such interesting peoplewatching, such interesting conversation. i had a laughing argument with a guy who refused to bet me money that michelle obama could kick his ass. then we met up with a friend of Lolo's from SD, who's here doing yoga with the sustainability roadshow. he was going to stay with her, but she realized that her spare room was a total mess and mine was relatively clean, so he stayed overnight with us and ran off back to the roadshow early this morning.

fun times. Lolo took pictures with her phone, i forgot to take any at all, as usual, and i need to make up some info cards to hand out.

the city still feels like it's on lockdown. all the locals i've talked to lately are edgy and nervous. nobody likes living in something that bears striking resemblance to a police state, it seems. with luck we'll get through the week unhurt. but the new laws they've put into place -- no chains, no wire, no helmets -- those will remain. they'll never be taken off the books. and we'll have to live with that.

i got an invite to the obama speech at invesco, but i'm not entirely sure i'm going to go. i'll mull it over and decide.

the Westword has a nice roundup of the all-pervasive DNC cray-cray.

*sigh*

apparently bike locks are outlawed too. as are chains, wire, and god only knows what-all else. you know what? fuck this everything-not-compulsory-is-forbidden shit. i live here and i use my chain and padlock to lock my bike against thievery and i'm not going to sit in my fucking house all week because DPD has its collective panties in a wad over some 'violent' 'protesters' which may or may not exist.

i never even considered choking a cop with my bike lock chain.

until just now.

and rightly so, because this is absolutely absurd.

Time: Denver Police: Beware of Bicycles, Maps

absurd. MAPS are for turrists, now? do they have ANY IDEA how many people are about to be walking around this town with city maps clutched in their sweaty, slightly hungover little paws? are you KIDDING ME?

what's next? watches? iphones? pants?

quoth wash park prophet:

This kind of security theater does not enhance public confidence of the security measures being taken. Instead, it suggests that police are utterly incapable of distinguishing between harmless people going about their daily business, and people who are about to commit violent violations of the law. This kind of stupidity emboldens and provokes anyone who would want to carry out the kinds of violent protests the city is allegedly trying to forestall.

my emphasis. but damn right. because it isn't just laughably stupid, it's scary. i live here, and i wear pants, and i wear a helmet a lot of the time, and sometimes i use maps. why should i have to feel like a police target? why are the many getting proactively punished on behalf of the few who haven't even done anything yet?

and we thought Boston was a joke with their absurd kneejerking paranoia. who's the joke now? 

i don't know about you, but i don't appreciate being made into a target when i haven't done a damn thing wrong.