Month: March 2007

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What kind of life is that?!

Kevin Hosey and his spousal unit Val are good urban types, to judge by the writings on their respective blogs. So apparently they ventured out of their urban comfort zones and out into…the suburbs! All the cars! Streets with multiple lanes! Big box retail! Cookie-cutter restaurants! The horror!

OK, I’m just needling a bit here — they’ve never struck me as the obnoxious “City good, suburb bad” kind of people. What got me is something in his opening paragraph:

Val and I ate dinner at Friendly’s in Cheektowaga Saturday; we saw a commercial for Friendly’s Thursday night, and we started talking about eating there many years ago. We both noted how good their sundaes were and that we hadn’t had ice cream in months, so we decided that Saturday would be the day.

Did you notice it? No? Here it is again, with the passage that tripped me up in bold:

Val and I ate dinner at Friendly’s in Cheektowaga Saturday; we saw a commercial for Friendly’s Thursday night, and we started talking about eating there many years ago. We both noted how good their sundaes were and that we hadn’t had ice cream in months, so we decided that Saturday would be the day.

If there’s anything I find harder to understand than the impulse to vote Republican, it’s the idea that anyone could meaningfully measure the period between instances of consuming ice cream in a unit larger than hours.

(I notice that Kevin didn’t mention the service at Friendly’s, which in my experience can make the progress of glaciers seem sprightly by comparison. Maybe they’ve improved in this area? It’s been a long time since I’ve eaten there. They used to have a sundae that consisted of half a Belgian waffle topped with a fairly large scoop of vanilla ice cream, which was then saturated with hot fudge. And I’d better stop writing this post right now, because I think I just heard my pancreas whimpering.)

UPDATE: Contrasting with my light tone here is this blogger’s experience with Friendly’s. That’s astonishing, truly astonishing. I’m glad the guy’s kid is OK…and if I’m trying to pour water on my child’s burn and someone tells me “Gee, you’re making a mess”, I’d want to hit the guy as well.

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Little Annie

Glenn Greenwald on Ann Coulter, who continues to get the plum speaking engagements when members of the Right get together:

[T]he single most prestigious political event for conservatives of the year is a place where conservatives go to hear Democrats called faggots, Arabs called ragheads, and Supreme Court justices labeled as deserving of murder — not by anonymous, unidentifiable blog commenters, but by one of their most popular featured speakers.

…

But we should, at the very least, be able to have a moratorium on all of the scandals driven by their claims to be so offended and upset when anonymous commenters on a blog say mean things, or when bloggers use curse words, or when Senators transparently botch a joke. The ugliest and most obscene sentiments are openly expressed not by their blog commenters or even bloggers — though that is true — but by their most admired and successful political leaders, the ones whom their presidential candidates desperately seek to embrace and for whom their most committed throngs cheer wildly.

…

She is the face of what the hard-core Republican Party has become, particularly during the Bush presidency. That is why she holds the position she holds in that movement. That’s why Mitt Romney was giddy with glee when her name passed his lips. He knows that her endorsement is valuable precisely because she holds great sway within the party, and she holds great sway because the hard-core party faithful consider her a hero for expressing the thoughts which they themselves believe but which other, less courageous Republican figures are afraid to express.

This is not about a single comment or isolated remark. The more Ann Coulter says these things, the more popular she becomes in this movement. What this is about is that she reflects exactly what sort of political movement this is. She reflects its true impulses and core beliefs. If that were not the case, why would she continue to receive top billing at their most prestigious events, and why would she continue to be lavished with rock star-adoration by the party faithful?

I have nothing to add, really.

UPDATE: Still nothing really to add, except to note the fact that the Right gets the vapors whenever left-wing bloggers swear, and yet they cheer this kind of stuff. By current American standards, Democratic presidential candidates can’t hire people like Amanda Marcotte but Republican candidates can accept the endorsement of Ann Coulter even as she calls prominent Democrats “faggots”.

It seems that Republican “civility” mainly means “We can say whatever we want, but you can’t.”

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O for a bunch of shelves!

Today was the quarterly Used Book Sale at the local library. I always find some treasures there — and even treasures within the treasures themselves — but today was an even better haul than usual, with far better pickings in the SF department than usual. Behold:

And those are just the books I bought for myself. I also picked up five books each for The Wife and The Daughter. And the grand total spent?

Nine dollars.

Folks, if you like to read and if you like to own books, then you really have no reason to not be frequenting your local library’s used book sales. It’s just that simple.

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Huzzah!!!

Since I’ve been away from blogging for a few days, I’ve therefore failed thus far to acknowledge good news for the guy whose blog inspired me to launch this blog in parlaying his long experience of blogging into paid work: Sean Meade will be Project Editor for the Aviation Week website, concentrating on defense tech (if I’m reading it correctly). I guess that means Sean will now be the resident expert in flying machines that can kill us all? That’s very cool, and I wish him the best of luck. It’s always nifty when a person gets to make money doing something that’s genuinely interesting to them.

I will, of course, be closely following Sean’s work over there to see if he manages to sneak in anything like “Maybe smart bombs don’t exist, but rather subsist!” (That’s an unimaginably lame in-joke that only the six people who were in a certain class in college with Sean and I will get.)

Anyhow, go give Sean some congratulations. Or he’ll sic the bombers on you. He can do that now. (I’m a little surprised that they send out launch codes to any G-mail address, but hey, Google probably had the launch codes years ago.)

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I think we left the stove on, dear.

Sorry for three days away from Ye Olde Blogge. It’s been a busy week in “real life”, what with Lenten potluck dinners and services at church and Friday fish fries and trips to the library on Thursday night and a fairly large project at The Store and a new novel by Guy Gavriel Kay to read. But I’m back now, more or less. (Sometimes less is more, after all.)

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