Well, needless to say, I don’t spend much time on ManCrunch.com.  Okay, actually I spend NO time there.  I didn’t even know it existed, I hadn’t seen it advertised anywhere.  And I won’t see ads for it while watching the SuperBowl, because CBS declined to accept the ads.

Per this story on CNN Money, they rejected the ad for reasons that don’t seem really solid.

ManCrunch is not alone. Godaddy, an online retailer of Web site domain names, is running an ad in the Super Bowl this year but it had another ad rejected by CBS in the process. The rejected ad features a man named Lola.

I’m not naive, I guess even if gay people finally get all the rights they are entitled to under our Constitution, they still won’t be accepted by the mainstream public for decades.  We finally have a black president and look how divisive that concept still is.  But it still makes me sad.

Wanna see the offensive ad?  We aim to please. 

I work with a fellow who is very centrist, moderate.  He has his conservative moments, he has his liberal moments.  In other words, he’s like most of mainstream America.

He has this theory about extremist Islamist terrorism and our involvement, especially since 9-11.  He says, it’s crap that we’re spending billions of dollars and wasting  and destroying untold numbers of lives and families of US citizens and non-combatants in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

He says the US should pull out and let Iraq use its oil monies to contract with whatever companies it wants to, to rebuild their infrastructure that was destroyed by the war.    Afghanistan, if needed, could be given some financial aid to help rebuild, 100% subsidized if they can prove they seriously got rid of the opium.

And to end this thing once and for all, he proposed getting a message through to the leaders of every Muslim country in the world…

“Take care of this extremist bullshit once and for all.  End the senseless terrorism NOW.  If as much as one tiny suitcase bomb goes off anywhere in the world with the target being US citizens in general, know that we have nuclear warheads ready to go and we will lay to waste for thousands of years your holy places, one by one, starting with Mecca.   You have the power to end this and you haven’t done it.  Get together, get a plan, get it done, or be prepared to have daily prayers to a nuclear wasteland.”

I’m not so sure but what that wouldn’t start an all out war against Israel, because the countries might feel they had naught to lose.  But I couldn’t find much argument to prove it wouldn’t be an effective tactic.

Can you?

Hibernation is highly underrated.

More than anything else, I’ve been amazed that there are a bunch of you that checked me out almost every day,  just to see if there was anything new posted.  Get a LIFE!  says Nemesis in her best Bill Shatner imitation.  My stats showed an average of 20, sometimes as high as 60 and as low as 12, visits in a day this past month.  That’s after three months of nada!  WTF? 

I have to admit, I didn’t totally abandon the interwebs, I only rocked on facebook.  If you can call it rockin’.  I spend a lot of time reading about people’s menus, their childrens’ booboos, their frustrations with family.  However, it works really well because I give as good as I get, when it comes to inanity  (but y’all know that!)

Lately I started missing my old friends.  Since I very rarely came to my own site, I also abandoned all my friends that were linked to from here.  Treasured Valley (sorry you LOST at fantasy football, Chris), and 43rd St Blues (still love me, Sisyphus and Serephin?) and Mountain Goat Reports and Political Game, Casey at All I’m Saying, I am sorry to have missed all the wonderful things you all surely wrote in the last 3 months.   TUBOB, how could I ever stay away from you? 

A few of you are my friends on facebook, so I’m keeping up in a tiny and not so very friendly way, there.  But it’s on the downside of winter and I’m tired of slumbering, already.  Don’t know if I’m fully awake yet but I’m starting to go through the motions of waking up to a Brand New Day. 

These jokes from David Rees’ website are too good NOT to share, and tell you exactly where my head is, these days.

1. A Democratic congressman walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Sorry, we don’t serve your kind here.” The Democratic congressman whimpers, “You’re right, I’m sorry, I never should’ve come in here, it’s all my fault, boo-hoo, please, bend me over, I’ll do whatever you want because I’m a little punk.” The bartender says, “Jesus Christ, you people are pathetic.”

2. What do you call a dead baby with no arms and no legs wearing a sombrero? I don’t know, but whatever you call it, it’s got about 1,000% more fight in it than these jackass Democrats.

3. A member of the House Democratic Caucus goes to the doctor. The doctor says, “I have bad news and good news. The bad news is you have a broken foot. The good news is, you’re a congressman, which means you have health insurance, which means you’ll be able to get treatment without going totally bankrupt, unlike many of your constituents, who you are actively betraying by thinking only of your electoral prospects. And also,” the doctor continued, “I can’t believe you actually broke your foot by jumping off a bridge just because a Republican told you to. What kind of spineless loser are you? Get out of my office. I can’t stand to look at you.”

4. The entire United States Senate is flying on a plane when its engines start to fail. The plane starts falling through the sky. There are 100 senators on board, but only 41 parachutes. The Democrats say, “Let’s give all the parachutes to the Republicans—that way we can just sit on our fat asses and die while the plane crashes because we’re a bunch of self-hating pussies.”

5. Little Johnny Congressman (D) was sitting in class one day. All of a sudden, he needed to go to the bathroom. He yelled out, “Miss Jones, I need to go pee!” The teacher replied, “Johnny, that is NOT the proper word to use in this situation. The proper word is ‘urinate.’ Use the word ‘urinate’ in a sentence correctly, and I will let you go.” Little Johnny thought for a bit, then said, “If a Republican wanted to urinate on me, I would let him because I have no self-respect.”

Interesting thing, this blog has been.  Cathartic and exhibitionist, and a harsh mistress, to boot.  It started out as a kind of personal (but not really) diary, and morphed into my rants about the ways of the world.  It was a way for others to pop in and say ‘hi’ when they felt the urge, or just to hang about on the edges of my twisted psyche and keep in touch without being touched, so to speak.

And then the masses came by, slowly but surely.  Pretty soon it was a taskmaster, always hungry and needing me to feed it new material constantly in an effort to make sure my audience was entertained, and remained loyal.  My stats pages were the first things I checked on each morning and each evening.  Readers from all US states and continents, and the search engine phrases that brought them to me were wild and crazy, to say the least.  Not all stayed or visited multiple times, but lots did and remained pretty constant readers.  Turns out I even had a fan who worked for Google (not just a bot, but a regular reader who popped back and forth between posts and comments on a regular basis).  Who wouldn’t be impressed, and therefore motivated, by that knowledge?

Me, that’s who.  At the end of the day, what is all this for?  It isn’t for me, because it drains me and raises my blood pressure and takes a whole lot of my free time.  And my interests are moving in another direction.  Grass roots activism in other ways…bringing other people online and having them write, teaching them how to be heard and helping them become active in various forums.  Those are the kinds of things that drive me, now.

So I may end this blog altogether, and use my time to focus on those other activities.  I haven’t decided for sure, but I’m more there than here.   Those of you who still visit me regularly (amazingly enough, despite the lack of content)  are too kind, and I thank you sincerely.  Those of you who happened upon this by accident, move along now, there’s nothing to see here…

I’m going to whine a little, have a public pity party.  Then I’m going to go away for awhile, I think. 

Most regular readers know that my job is based in Boise, but because my employer sees the value of having me in that position, and because I won’t (ok, can’t afford to) move to Boise, they allow me to work from Idaho Falls.  That has worked really well for the last 5 years…

This summer, due to the culmination of a 3 year project, I’ve pretty much been working IN Boise since June.  (I’ve held two positions since March, covering for someone else who is covering for someone else, etc).  I’ve been living in hotel rooms, going home on Friday nights usually, only to turn around and drive back on Sundays.  While working about 50+ hours per week, I don’t get paid OT, but I do amass straight time hours for those worked over 40.  However, I can’t use them because there really is no available time to take off.  The truth is, it may sound as if I am being a big whaaany but I am great at my job, and I love my work (I’d rather be retired but this is a great job).

I had hoped to be done with this project as of October, but it extended another month.  Yesterday I found out that I’m returning to Boise at least two more weeks in November…I spent my birthday here this summer, now I’ll spend my husband’s birthday being in Boise, too. 

I am drained, emotionally and mentally.  My body is a mess (it started out that way but it’s deteriorated).  I haven’t gotten on the scale but I’m sure I have gained at least 15 lbs from eating fast food for 3 meals a day (I have a fridge and mic but no place to prepare foods here).  I’ve had viral syndromes since September and I just feel wiped out in every sense of the word.

Nothing brings me joy, or riles me to anger.  My affect is mostly flat.  I feel no desire to dig into a subject and shine some light on it.  I just can’t think of what to write anymore.  You may laugh because I’m saying this after having written more than 300 words but I mean anything of importance, anything of substance, anything someone else wants to read.   I think I need to take a break, which is death to a blog because only the most loyal readers check in once in awhile, the others find other more rewarding venues and don’t return.

Thanks for your support, but I think I’m gonna take a break for a little while.  Unless something makes me crazy I’ll probably just do piddly things like recipes and quotes and videos here and there, maybe until December.  I’ll see you on facebook and Twitter (those are lighter fare) but consider me in blogging hibernation here.

Wargs did not rule this week in fantasy football, lost my fanny in both leagues.  Sigh.  Dropped to 9th out of 10 in my work league, and to 4th out of 10 in the Treasured Valley league.

Y’all know I’m crazy about Penn and Teller, and I follow both of them on Twitter.  Penn frequently links to his “Penn Says” video podcasts…and some of them are quite interesting, even if you’re not a Penn fan.  I usually rave about written blogs, but his podcasts on this site are a notch above  (even as they are very brief) the usual fare.  They are posted on Crackle and I’ve linked to some of them here:

John Lennon Was the Drummer

Getting Yelled at by One of My Heroes

I Love Tiny Tim

I’m dumbing this blog down here, so my regular readers should take note and stay far away if they want to maintain a benign image of me.

I love the songs of Hayseed Dixie, and the bluegrass retakes on great rock songs.  Truth be told, his voice is much clearer than that of either singer for AC/DC, so I learned some lyrics along the way!  I wrote before that I couldn’t find a good video for this song, but I think I did here.

This one is not a redo…it’s an original and scatalogical, and this makeshift video with a couple of kids is kinda cute, in a sick twisted way…like the song.

As you might think.  I was sitting here wondering how we haven’t all been struck down by the hand of that vengeful God of the Jews who would want to start over and try to get a nicer set of kids…

We have the balloon boy, the 7 year old girl whose body they just found in the landfill, Tim Urling who wants us all to BE LIKE TIM or go away and die alone,  Glenn Beck who went from half crazy to full-blown circus freak in short order, the West Virginia “victim” who now says she wasn’t really a victim and 6 people are in prison because of her “lies” but the prosecutor and police say that she is NOW lying and who the hell can you believe these days anyway?

We have so much awfulness and evil in this world, so many who are at the ends of their ropes emotionally and I was thinking that it’s just so draining to read about it all…and that’s when it hit me.

I bet in medieval times there were child predators, but when they disposed of the body the carrion eaters in the woods took care of the flesh long before the remains were found.  And no one outside the village knew about it anyway, so it was just one child here and there that was “spirited” away…

And no one knew about balloon boys who lived in neighboring states, much less neighboring countries.  And the Glenn Becks traveled the country and sold their snake oil and you only had to hear about them once every year or so as they came to your town.

The world hasn’t changed its character….but due to our technology, we all get exposed to everyone’s bad choices or hateful spewing  24/7.   No celebrity lesbian couple goes through relationship troubles without the rest of us having it in our morning headlines.  No wickedness remains unspoken, no fool shuts up his hateful crying and shouting long enough to draw a thoughtful breath.  All news, all the time, and we all need dirty laundry.

I wonder what the cumulative effect of constant exposure to the knowledge of such negative aspects of our humanity will have on our collective psyche?  It can’t be good, evolutionarily speaking.   What entity thrives and grows in such acidic and non-nourishing soil?  I feel I’m becoming more prickly already…

Wow.  Spammers sure love my blogsite, they try really hard to get through as commenters on different posts.  They have some favorites, of course, those that they have presaved the URL on their list and they send comment after comment to that old and currently irrelevant post.

It’s mostly pharmaceutical ads, or gambling sites, or celebrity p * o * r * n.  Sometimes the comment is such that it attempts to pass itself off as a real comment, such as “Wow, great information, fantastic writing.   I’m bookmarking your site for sure” and you’d think, hey, it’s a compliment, until you realize they posted that “comment” on the latest music video or recipe post….hey, wait a minute…

It used to be pretty annoying, to personally go in a delete all the spam.  Then I found out about the nifty program called Akismet, and since I installed that, it has snagged the 11,000 + comments for me.  (It brags and keeps count, I guess so I understand how valuable it is and how smart I was to install it).  I try to go through them to make sure everything really is spam, but sometimes they’re just so many all at once that I tell it to delete without giving it much more than a cursory glance.  I’ve had people say their comments didn’t make it (and truth be told, if you comment with a link or two included it probably will hold you off and I may delete you accidentally). 

So, thanks Akismet, and keep up the good work.  Now, for the hundreds of spam emails that come to this site on a daily basis, I just built a garbage email box and centrally load them all into it, and go in periodically and hit delete on them without reading.  The email address that’s listed on the contact page is the one that actually comes to me, and the spammers haven’t discovered that one, yet.

Ah, pseudo-popularity, ain’t life grand.  Salute to YOU, purveyors of American GOP capitalism at its finest!

I “follow”  Penn Jillette on Twitter, and also Teller (hey, he doesn’t talk as part of his act but he does Tweet).  Both are fascinating in their own light.  This was a link from Teller recently, mentioning that some folks allude to Einstein believing in God but they are quite mistaken.

This letter is written by Einstein in 1954 (a year before he passed away) to a man whose book he had just read, Eric Gutkind.

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. … For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong … have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything “chosen” about them.

I thought this quote was quite profound, and I felt he was very gracious in his letter, as he goes on to say that they have much in common, just not from a religious perspective.  I often feel that my atheism puts up a false wall that some religious folk can’t seem to get around, because they focus on that instead of all the common ground that we share.  I hope to remain as gracious as Albert when I deal with believers.

Oh, I loved this song, it’s one of my favorites from Charlie Daniels Band, before he got all weird with his long-haired patriotism and American machismo.    Remember this was back in the early 70s when it wasn’t cool to be a long haired man in the deep south…

Hats Off! to Mountain Goat, once again.

She is always politically savvy and takes on political figures like the little kid looking for the emperor’s new clothes.  All too often, he’s buck nekkid and she seems to be the only one willing to point it out.

This latest post points out the heighth of hypocrisy amongst the “I’ll just pretend that I’m a conservative while sucking mightily on the public teat” Republicans in our state legislature.  It’s unholy, what she’s published.  You have to read this stuff, it’s incredible.  The amount of money these so-called conservatives have sucked up from agricultural subsidies is obscene.

Where’s the mainstream media with this information?  Why did I end up reading it on a blog site?  Are the Idaho media companies too beholden to their public readers that they don’t dare piss anyone off?

You can’t make this stuff up, it’s just too horrible.  I agree with Mountain Goat…GIVE IT BACK, you loser politicians!

A long distance friend of mine, a man who is a decade older than I am, and on whom I’ve had a bit of a girlish crush for many years, emailed me yesterday and sent a picture…with him having long hair and painted nails…say wha?

He had decided that of all the people that he knew in his life, that I was the one friend that he knew would be the easiest to talk to, the easiest for him to finally be himself…correction…herself.

She rambled on in the email which was not like I remember, this person being usually reticent.  She alluded to having to drink up a little to get her courage to tell me, and worried if she’d finally hit “send” after laboriously typing (hates those long fingernails, I understand that!).   She mentioned that of course I must have known all along…which is SO TOTALLY NOT TRUE…this news floored me.

ME of all people, the one she knew she didn’t have to worry about having to face a negative reaction.  I was instantly worried for her wellbeing, wishing I could be there and help her remember what a wonderful human being she has always been, and making sure she knows how much I cherish our friendship.

I wrote a lame-ass response, addressing her by her new name, hit “send” and then felt really stupid.  So I went back and wrote another equally lame response, and told her that she could always count on me…to write lame-ass responses, if nothing else!  ;-) 

I know only a few transgendered individuals.  I can’t even imagine the terror and pain and heartache these people must go through in their lives.  It’s got to be the gamut of human experience, with the emotional issues, the societal issues, the work issues (she was wondering, as she nears retirement, if she should risk going to HR with this) and the friends and family issues.  Of course, she told her children, and their mothers, it’s not like I was the very first person in her circle to know. 

But I am the first friend to know, and I hope I’m up for the challenge of providing the best support a friend can provide.   I’ll never know what it’s like to have to go through this, but I hope I can help her as much as she needs.

It’s a quiet and unassuming blog, she doesn’t tend to shout out her anger at the universe, nor does she parade herself amongst the local blogs looking for attention.   But when she does comment, I always like what she says, and I think you probably do, too!

Wordsmith has a pleasant layout on Left Side of the Moon, and it’s easy on the eyes.  She blogs on a variety of subjects and has a good mix of opinion and fact.  She uses pictures well and links galore.  I really like the sidebar feature that tells you where someone who just landed on her site came from.

I think if you’re looking for reasonable opinions, you can’t go wrong reading her blog.   It’s one that I’ve had on my links list in my sidebar for awhile now, and I think my readers would enjoy her posts, too.

Some interesting posts:

Here’s Your Apology

Available Options for Local Po’Folk

Death Panels = Medical Insurance Providers

Well, not really.  But it is a great and funny video from at least 3 years ago.  I really like the rescuers at the end!

I’m in two leagues, one at my workplace and one that is made up of  people writing for or reading TreasuredValley.com.  I think I’m the only woman in the second one, but my workplace league has several women there.

The rules are different, the work league allows points for runback/return yards, and the other league uses defensive players on the roster.  It’s a challenge to be in two leagues…I find that players I have on my team in one league are playing against me in the other league…it’s hard to root for my player when it’s going to hurt me elsewhere.

After 5 games, I’m in 4th place in the TreasuredValley league, and not doing as well, in 7th place, in my work place league.  Both leagues have 10 teams.

So are you playing this year?

I don’t know what to think.  Nominations for this year closed shortly after he took office and he hadn’t had time to do anything really other than to indicate that he was going to do business differently.

So I’m hoping he really does do business differently, now that he’s got the prize.  He’s giving a speech in 30 minutes about it, it’s his chance to say, “gosh and shucks, folks.  I don’t deserve it, YET…but I plan to live up to it in short order”.

They say that sometimes the winner is chosen based upon tendencies that the committee wants to encourage, that really seems to be the case here.

Besides, an event that causes the simultaneous explosion of the heads of Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh for the second time in 12 months can’t be a bad thing, can it?

No spoilers here. 

My brother David recommended World Made by Hand, written by James Howard Kunstler.  I got it online, not realizing it was a new book last year.  It was a pretty good post apocalyptic read, and since I’m a fan of that genre, I’ve read enough of those kinds of books to be a fair judge of their caliber.

I did have an issue with a couple of plot sidelines that were used, as they didn’t add to the story (other than to make the church group seem creepier) and they weren’t resolved by the end of the book (yet they were not ’sequel’ type items).  So there was a gaping hole there that wasn’t filled and I felt it detracted from the book on an overall basis. 

  But, if you like post apocalyptic reads, this one is a good one, imo.