(no subject)

My apartment is clean, CLEAN! Glory hallelujah, for the first time in two weeks I'm actually caught up on chores. It helps to actually have the strength and lack of pain to make the whole thing a lot more pleasant. Well that and being able to eat mostly normally again, yay!

You know I really thought I'd have more trouble on this whole uber-restricted diet thing but so far it really hasn't been that bad. I suppose a big part of it is mitigated by the fact that I've been a strict vegetarian for the majority of my life. A restricted diet, for me, is the norm. I do miss pizza, but not overwhelmingly, I mean I know I'd like to eat it again someday but I don't want it OMG RIGHT NOW, so I figure that's a pretty good sign that overall I can cope.

I suspect tonight I'll actually do a bit of cooking to prepare lunches for the rest of the week and then a whole lot of slacking. Might even get some writing time in.

Bushit indeed

via Pandagon:

‘Bushit’ bumper sticker gets woman $100 fine in GA

[Denise Grier] pulled over on Chamblee-Tucker Road, unaware of her infraction.

“The officer asked if I knew I had a lewd decal on my car and I thought, ‘Oh gosh, what did my kids put on my car?’ ”

As it turns out, the decal was an anti-Bush bumper sticker Grier slapped on her 2001 Chrysler Sebring last summer. The bumper sticker — “I’m Tired Of All The BUSH—” — contains an expletive.

The officer “said DeKalb had an ordinance about lewd decals and wrote me a ticket” for $100, said Grier, an oncology nurse at Emory University Hospital who lives in Athens.

“This is all about free speech,” Grier said in a telephone interview Monday. “The officer pulled me over because he didn’t agree with my politics. That’s what this is about, not whether I support Bush, not because of the war in Iraq, but about my right to free speech.”

You can find more on this here.

And fortunately one of the commenters noted that the GA supreme court had
already ruled once before on this very subject ("lewd" bumperstickers), and
guess what, it is protected under free speech:

Mr. Bill:

Just a few years ago this case was decided by the Georgia Supreme court:
In Georgia, James Daniel Cunningham was cited for having a bumper sticker bearing the words “Shit Happens” on his car. Prosecutors charged him under a state law that read:

“No person owning, operating, or using a motor vehicle in this state shall knowingly affix or attach to any part of such motor vehicle any sticker, decal, emblem, or other device containing profane or lewd words describing sexual acts, excretory functions, or parts of the human body.”

A jury convicted Cunningham of violating the statute, and he was fined $100. Cunningham took his case to the Georgia Supreme Court, contending that his conviction was invalid because the law was unconstitutional.

The Georgia Supreme Court agreed with Cunningham, writing: “The peace of society is not endangered by the profane or lewd word which is not directed at a particular audience.”

The Georgia high court said Cohen stood for the principle that a state may not criminalize “the public display of a four-letter expletive” in the absence of some compelling reason. The state of Georgia argued that the statute was necessary to shield minors from harmful speech. The Georgia court rejected that argument in its 1991 decision State v. Cunningham, writing: “The audience of observers of bumper stickers is not made up primarily of minors or other persons of delicate sensibilities.”

from http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org

Sadly for this particular police officer and his "delicate sensibilities", even in Georgia the US Constitution still holds some authority.

Don't shoot the messenger

Jack Cafferty, CNN's The Situation Room:

"You know, I just have a question. I mean, the coverage -- they don't like the coverage, maybe, because we were sold a different ending to this story three years ago. We were told we'd be embraced as conquering heroes, flower petals strewn in the soldiers' paths, unity government would be formed, everything would be rosy. This, three years after the fact, the troops would be home. Well, it's not turning out that way. And if somebody came into New York City and blew up St. Patrick's Cathedral and in the resulting days they were finding 50 and 60 dead bodies on the streets in New York, do you suppose the news media would cover it? You're damn right they would. This is nonsense: 'It's the media's fault the news isn't good in Iraq.' The news isn't good in Iraq. There's violence in Iraq. People are found dead every day in the streets of Baghdad. This didn't turn out the way the politicians told us it would. And it's our fault? I beg to differ.."

On a lighter note, Howard Kaloogian, who's running for Congress in our great state tries to show us just how calm and peaceful downtown Baghdad really is, by posting a picture, unfortunately the pic is actually from a street in Turkey. Oops.

via Metafilter

I hear they like lobbyists with real purty mouths

Jack Abramoff gets 5 years in the big house. Of course knowing our criminal justice system it'll probably be more like a year and a half in a country club for white collar criminals. But the best part, the absolute best part is the brief filed by the defense to stir up some pity for poor old Jack, won't someone think of the children?

Unfortunately, Mrs. Abramoff's concerns about her children are not without foundation. Dr. Randi Ettner, a clinical psychologist who has been working with the children explains that "as Mr. Abramoff's difficulties escalated, and humiliation came daily with the morning news, [Levi] and the other four children began to suffer, as well. These young people are innocent victims of a steady barrage of ridicule, and they are being traumatized in subtle and obvious ways." (Dr. Ettner Ltr. of 3/13/06.) The toll of seeing their father vilified on a daily basis in the press, and the fear of the fate that awaits their family has depressed the Abramoff children's outlook on life. They are constantly reminded of their fate by the daily public assault on their father's name, including overhearing strangers' insensitivity and callousness when the word "Abramoff" is mentioned.
[...]
How could proud parents endure knowing that one of their beloved sons feels such humiliation among his peers that he has sometimes claimed a different family name, just to avoid the awkward conversations that inevitably follow the mention of the word Abramoff?

Here's a thought, how about those concerned parents decide not to become, you know, criminals in the first place. I mean when Jack was out there scamming the tribes and making sure the GOP machine's money flow remained a mighty river through theft and deceit, didn't he ever stop to think, "Hey, if I'm caught my children could well suffer for my actions." And what, precisely does it say to kids when the finger of blame for their father's misdeeds is not pointed at the man responsible for them, rather the public and media who uncovered and took note of his dispicable actions.

Further, what does it say about a guy who'd use his kids as a cheap ploy for sentencing leniency. Well, nothing we didn't already know about him, I guess.

You did the crime, Jacky boy, now do the time.

via The Good Roger Ailes

There's motherfucking snakes on this plane!

Ok so the greatest story ever told (no, not that silly Biblical movie, Snakes on a Plane!) has spawned it's own role playing game. I know I bitch about seeing films in the theater and all the attendant annoyances involved with it, but oh god I'm seeing this one if it's ever released. I'm sorry, but this would be all about the experience, the audience experience, man.

Many thanks to Aelf, who is as vastly amused by the internet phenomenon this film has become, as I am. Hey, at least it's not another goddamn remake horror film, and dude, Samuel L. Jackson!

Oh and my RPG character concept is "Gutsyy herpetologist who's been trying to warn the airline industry about the danger of snake infestation for years, but nobody would listen!". And I would want her to go out in a very similar manner as Sam's character in Deep Blue Sea....

Not so secret lovers

Many, many thanks to ravenmb for catching what is, IMHO, the greatest commercial ever made:

Lord of the Rings - Secret Lovers

Are Sam and Frodo a little more than friends? Not that there's anything wrong with that.

And slash fans everywhere lost their collective minds! :)