I came, I saw, I mowed

This weekend I bought a lawnmower and cut the grass.  It turns out I have a lot of grass.  Halfway through, a neighbor introduced himself and admired the new Briggs and Stratton engine.  Hoo-Hoo!  We discussed basements, landscaping and sump pumps, a topic with which I am all too familiar.  He told me he had pitbulls and a 21 year old son with a shiny red convertible.  I told him I would try to keep my 17 year old daughter away from both.

At some point during the two hours of cutting and trimming, I started to wonder just why it was I wanted so much lawn.  Oh, yeah, raised beds.

I’d show you a picture of the beautifully cut backyard with the perfectly straight diagonal mower lines but I was too tired to take a picture.  Speaking of mower widths, I found myself in the aisle of the local big box store questioning two employees, “Do 2 inches really make that much difference?”.  Funny looks.

The kid came with me this time.  She made herself busy raking the flower beds and bagging leaves.  I took her to a wallpaper store and she picked out some samples. We pulled up the carpets on the second floor and stairs.  Why do people pick ugly carpets, she asked.  Good question. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder or the previous owners couldn’t see too good.

On Saturday, I visited the DMV and handed over all of my documents to a one eyed, leather vested, Harvey-Davidson afficianado listening to Casey Kasem replays on an XM radio.  It was 1976 again, the same year I got my first license in Pennsylvania.  We chit-chatted while he checked my information and assigned me the same driver’s license number I had before.  I surrendered my New Jersey license and he punched a hole in it.  Then he handed it to me and a yellow form for my temporary license and said, “Welcome back.”

Ahhh.

Reaping, Sowing, whatever

Obama and the Democrats are less than useless.  Film at eleven.

Oh, well, if only we could have done something about this situation back in 2011 before they took us for granted…

The Most Shameful Picture

I picked up on this at Eschaton but it needs to go viral.

There was a Congressional hearing on Long Term Unemployment and here’s what it looked like:

That’s right.  ONE lawmaker showed up.  ONE.

This is how much American politicians care about the millions of people thrown out of work by the reckless gambling of our financial class.  This is how much consideration hundreds of thousands of unemployed scientists get from their government.

The whole lot of them need to lose their own jobs and see how it feels to make ends meet on their dwindling savings and part time work.

There are no words that adequately describe how disgusted I am.

Revealing, Sickening or Scarily Incompetent?

Someone hacked the AP Twitter account today and tweeted that the White House was bombed and Obama was badly injured.

The stock market took a dive.  In a matter of minutes, the market plunged almost 100 points.

That’s not a precedent I would have liked to have set.  Maybe next time, they’ll hack Reuters, MSNBC, CNN, Al Jazeera and the State Department.

(and what exactly were they dumping that seemed to so heavily rely on Obama? Curiouser and curiouser…)

The people who run the economy should be sacked.

In real life…

…I am in the process of relocating.  As some of you may recall, I bought a house in Pennsylvania.  It was a foreclosed property and I got it at a steep discount.  This past week, I started getting it ready for occupancy.  It needs a bit of work, especially in the basement where there is a water issue that needs to be addressed.  There are also some landscaping issues and code violations that need to be fixed so we won’t be moving in for awhile yet.

But the best part of cleaning up this house has to be pulling the carpets up.  I’d like to thank the elderly ladies who like wall to wall carpeting.  Here’s the before shot of the living room:

Living room with manky old carpet

 

And here is the living room after a couple hours of RD with a utility knife:

Living room minus manky carpet

 

That drop dead gorgeous hardwood floor has been lovingly protected for 60 years from dogs and kids by successive applications of dingy beige carpet.  I couldn’t afford a floor as beautiful as this.  It’s a rich dark brown with a lovely patina.  It just needs a good cleaning but not too much refinishing action.  Even the seams between the planks are perfect.

Buying this house was a bit like going to a basket auction and not knowing exactly what I was getting.  The floors were a nice surprise and they run throughout the house.  Combine that with the arched doorways and built-in hutches and niches and I would say I scored a bahgain.

 

Another good reason not to work in Cambridge

It’s in lockdown mode right now while the terrorist suspects are being rounded up.  There are a lot of R&D facilities in Cambridge. Derek Lowe of In the Pipeline who works there just checked in with an update.

This is not the first time that R&D people were associated by location with terrorism activities.  In 2001, the pharma labs in central NJ had visits from the FBI when the anthrax letters made their way through the Princeton, Trenton and Rocky Hill post offices.

I’m sure it’s just an unhappy coincidence.

Stay safe, friends.

Ok, I’ll say it. It was terrorism. But first, some clarity.

When someone(s) plants explosive devices at locations where there will be crowds, detonates them and, as a result, kills and maims dozens of people, that is terrorism.

Why?  Because senseless death in such a dramatic fashion tends to scare the bejeesus out of people.  When the explosions are seconds apart and within walking/visual distance of each other, there is no question that it is terrorism.  The explosions were meant to kill and terrify.

The problem is that we have come to associate terrorism with scary brown skinned people with middle eastern names and have conveeeeeniently forgotten that before Al Qaeda, there was Timothy McVeigh.  Now, unless people are starting to refer to McVeigh as a freedom fighter, we should remember that we once called him a terrorist.

So, while we wait to determine who set the explosives off, we shouldn’t be afraid to call it what it is: terrorism.  And it’s just as likely to be homegrown as middle eastern.  All you right wing whip kissing cowards can chill until we get to the bottom of this.

Here come the soft targets

I was cleaning leaves out of the flower beds at the new house when I heard the news and hoped that #1 child was in class today in Framingham and not taking the day off to watch a race in person.  She hasn’t texted me back yet. She’s probably just busy.

It’s taken 12 years for terrorism to go after soft targets here in the US.  I expect there will be another round of shrieking about how we must go after brown skinned people and clamp down even more and subject each other to even more interrogation and frisking.  But there are more than 300 million of us and we will all grind to a halt, some of us cowering under our beds, and the country will be no safer from soft target terrorism.

Maybe this time, we’ll think before we invade, although I’m sure the military contractors would prefer we are thoroughly freaked out by today’s turn of events.

Yes, I’m pissed off and I’m very sad for the victims.  But I haven’t lost my mind yet.  This time, we need to keep our collective heads cool because as far as we know, the soft target terrorism is just beginning and we don’t know yet who is responsible.

How wealth is really distributed

Most of you have already seen this video.  I’m reposting it here for those of you who lurk here from the right.

Wealth *is* being redistributed in this country.  It’s going to the people at the top.  ”Oh, sure”, you say, “that’s just statistics and you can make statistics lie and stuff.”  Now, you’re beginning to sound like Stephen Colbert.

The point of this video is not to attack wealth.  The point is that it is concentrated in the hands of too few people to the detriment of everyone else.  A corporate CEO does not work 380X harder than his accountant and even garbagemen deserve a living wage. For too many people, a living wage is not a reality.

Well, of course he’s going to meet with the suits

I’ve read posts by Charles Pierce, Digby and Atrios lamenting how Obama has decided to hold a “leadership” meeting with the big bank ceos who got us into this mess to discuss the details of the Grand Bargain.

It sounds a lot like crocodile tears.

Look, you guys KNEW when you were cheering for him (or cheering against Mitt Romney) last year that he kisses the bankers’ collective asses.

What I can’t understand is how it is that such a bunch of smart people could only see two possible options last year.  You didn’t even try to challenge Obama and put the fear of God into him.  So, stop your “shock!” and righteous indignation or pointless navel gazing about why the “culture of smartness” does what it does and cuts ordinary people out of directing their own fates. You’re either useful idiots doing the party’s work or you’re not nearly as smart as you think you are.

There are always multiple solutions to the problem.  You need to think outside the box, possibly take the long view and stop being such whiny ass titty baby cowards about what is happening to your formerly safe spot in the Democratic party.

They moved your fucking cheese.  Get on with it.