Tell your Representatives how you feel about the Stupak Amendment!.

I'll quote the Feminist Majority page regarding the recent health care legislation that was passed:

Women's rights advocates, however, were delivered a major defeat Saturday night by passage of the outrageously restrictive anti-abortion Stupak amendment to the Affordable Health Care for America Act (HR 3962) by a 240-194 vote of the House of Representatives. The amendment, co-sponsored by Bart Stupak (D-MI), Joe Pitts (R-PA), Brad Ellsworth (D-IN), Dan Lipinski (D-IL), and Kathy Dahlkemper (D-PA), bans abortion coverage for women in both the public option and private insurance. Under the guise of no federal funding for abortion in so-called keeping with Hyde Amendment restrictions, the Stupak Amendment goes way beyond Hyde. This amendment bans abortion coverage even if women pay for it with their own money in the public option or private plans in the insurance exchange (Emphasis mine.)

Again: Tell your Representatives how you feel about the Stupak Amendment!.

It's a form letter, it only takes a second to fill out and send. Do it. Federal funding has never covered abortion in health care, but the Stupak Amendment is even more unnecessarily restrictive than that. If forces women to forgo abortion coverage even if they pay for health coverage out of pocket and that's wrong. Abortion is legal, like it or not - it's my money and it's my choice The government should have no say in whether I can have an abortion when they're not paying for it. It's as simple as that.

Tags: feminism, politics, women
maybe he's caught in the mood: cranky
he just sings whatever he's seen: The Splendoras - You're Standing On My Neck

• Submitted my art for the SGA Big Bang.
  
  
• Went out for anniversary dinner. Fondue is yum.
  
  
• Proposed to significant other, proposal accepted. Shiny black stainless steel wedding bands deployed. Really like our rings, they're interesting enough and no conflict diamonds were involved. (I don't care for diamonds or traditional wedding rings, so I wanted something fairly simple that would still stand out. And I especially hate gold-tone jewelry, no matter its material or form).
  
  Ignore my wrinkly "old man" hand. My hands super dry because of the recent shift in weather.
  
  
• Mrs. Bunny chewed my main mouse's cord in half and nibbled at my backup mouse's cord. Mea culpa, I should have been supervising her but wasn't.
  
  
• Finished reading In the Cut. I don't know why, but all of the sudden I wanted to read it. Must have lost my mind, as I knew how it ended and knew I wouldn't like it. Not my most shining example of the return to bookdom.
  
  Mini-review: Needlessly dense, dull, distant, stuffy, waste of time.
  
  Long review: Any possible edge is blunted by the slow meandering crawl towards a resolution. Dull vagueness isn't the same as mystery.
  
  The use of an unreliable narrator coupled with first person voice is pure laziness on the part of the author. Why bother writing the important parts when you can just say that the character doesn't have that information?
  
  There is no urgency from the characters, despite the protagonist's multiple brushes with murder and mayhem. She is attacked and also stalked by multiple men, yet doesn't seem to care. If anything, I felt she was suicidal and was simply waiting for death to conveniently appear, generously meted out by one of her improbably numerous male admirers.
  
  The ending appears as if by magic, and while clues and hints are scattered throughout the story and the plot inevitably to leads up to a climax, the build-up is incomplete and unfulfilling. It's probably meant to seem sudden and shocking but is instead abrupt and jarring.
  
  The book was considered edgy in 1996 for its portrayals of sex and female sexuality, but I find the sex suffers from romance-novel omission and euphemism even while struggling to shock with its pseudo-explicitness. And I find the faux-feminism of the book useless, the female characters are passive, letting things happen to them that most women I know would rail against or take precautions to prevent. In almost all the sexual encounters the men all take the lead. The lead character just accepts everything they do, she wants it in some way - even when she professes otherwise.
  
  The book is short, and doesn't make use of that at all. It could be a one-two punch in the gut, visceral and sharp but instead it's like one of those nightmares where you try to run but never move. I don't know what I was thinking. ::smacks own hand::
  

Tags: life
maybe he's caught in the mood: accomplished
he just sings whatever he's seen: Michael Penn - No Myth

MBGNPOMGWTFBBQ in search of willing (or unwilling, I don't really care) art betas. Likes: Long walks on the beach, constructive criticism, helpful comments. Dislikes: hairy toes, brown eyes, orange Kool-Aid. Will make exceptions for brown eyes. Will not make exceptions for orange Kool-Aid.

So, I'm nearing completion of my SGA Big Bang artwork and would like some eyes that are not housed in my skull to peer at it. I'm still poking at it, but I'd like to know if it's generally acceptable and/or won't cause spontaneous eyebleeds (I'm not really picky).

Tags: sga big bang 2009
maybe he's caught in the mood: artistic
he just sings whatever he's seen: Simon & Garfunkel - Bleecker Street

Wednesday I pretended to be an IT project manager so I could attend Microsoft's Portland Windows 7 launch. I went for a variety of reasons: for the novelty, to experience the sheer ridiculous geekery firsthand, to observe the ratio of men to women (50 to 1, without a doubt). But most of all, I went for the much vaunted free copy of Windows 7.

The advertising slogan Microsoft is using - "The New Efficiency" - sounds like some creepy Cold War-era code name for Nazi medical experiments or something. I don't know that I would have chosen it for my advertising campaign slogan. Too bad I don't have any need of advertising slogans. "The new mapsandlegends, same as the old mapsandlegends!" "mapsandlegends, not synonymous with cheese wheels!" "We switched your regular mapsandlegends with this instant mapsandlegends. Let's see if these pygmy mountain goats notice the difference."

The first hour and a half was boring as hell. First, I wandered around because I apparently got there super, ridiculously early, then I sat through two short talks by IBM (blah Hyper-V, buy our blade servers for $10,000 blah) and En Pointe (we do stuff, but we can't really articulate what that is without 5.2 million buzzwords). At least it was somewhere I could relax while I nommed on my peanut butter granola bars.

Scant snackery was provided, two kinds of granola bars, one bag of trail mix, a bottle of water or a can of soda. And pears. I hate raw pears because they're usually not sufficiently washed and they have that bitter aftertaste to the skin. Were apples just too expensive, or was Microsoft afraid that they might be indirectly referencing the competition? I'm jealous of the morning attendees with their fancy continental breakfasts. But hey, at least I didn't have to roll out of bed at six a.m. to get ready for my prentend career day. I should probably be grateful that there was even any free food made available. I'm sure I could have toddled over to the Little Caesar's just down the road and jawed at some cardboard pizza slices, but thankfully that wasn't necessary.

I expected the Windows 7 presentation to be as dry and dusty as the first two, but the speaker, Chris Avis was actually informative and interesting, as interesting as four hours worth of technical minutiae about new operating systems can be, anyway. I didn't care about the whole DirectAccess and security group policy bits, though that was more because I find them inherently boring and ultimately useless for my purposes. I'm not sure if I like BitLocker, considering that I like to use my USB cards and drives to move data between computers and I don't want the added hassle of dealing with encryption and passwords just to transfer files. I don't like that it makes USB thumb drives invisible to Macs and unusable to PCs without Vista or Win 7 (you can read files if you have the password, but you can't write to the drive).

All in all, it was a worthwhile five hours, with the end result being that I'm now the owner of one shiny, free copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. Retail for this version of Win 7 is $320, which I think is completely insane. It would need to be able to cook me dinner and run a hot bath before I'd be willing to fork over that much cash for a single-license operating system. I'm not sure I'll be upgrading right away, considering that I'm not having any problems with XP on any of my computers, but some day I may feel the urge to get with the times and stop using my eight year old operating system.

Tags: geekery, life
maybe he's caught in the mood: geeky
he just sings whatever he's seen: The Beatles - Mother Nature's Son

I put it to you, internets, that no one these days needs 30 or more SCSI cables (along with 10+ SCSI terminators). You remember SCSI, right? Back when it ruled the computer age, before this newfangled IDE and SATA crap, SCSI was a mysterious force to be reckoned with because if you didn't terminate your SCSI chain just right your devices and drives would petulantly refuse to show up.

Why, oh, why do we have 30 SCSI cables sitting around in a box? And that was just one box. I know we've got a least two or three more boxes of mixed power/computer/a-v cables. Oy vey!

I also found like 15 pairs of size 50-56 men's pants. The lowdown here is that in my early 20s, I felt strangely compelled to wear giant pants and belt them down to a wearable size. I'll freely admit that I may have been insane, but that phase has long since and thankfully passed. Now, nobody in this household has ever come close to fitting into those pants, nor has anyone worn them for many, many years, yet there they are, sitting in my closet, taking up space that could be filled with more SCSI cables (when I find them). Out with the pants!

Untangling myriad serpentine cables and sorting through ginormous pants is backbreaking work, I tells ya. Time for lunch.

1 metric ton of towels, 2 quadrillion t-shirts unearthed. How the hell did I end up with so many t-shirts? And none of them are my Smiths shirt. ::shakes fist:: At least I have three boxes of clothes that I'm leaving by the dumpster and an entire trash bag of clothes that I'm putting in the dumpster. And ewwwww, they're all so musty and dusty after two months in storage. I don't even have allergies but my nose is still very angry with me for breathing this noxious odor.

While I approve of the large amount of Legos that we (as mostly grown-up adults) apparently own, I think it would be nice if they were all in the same place. Do I really want to root through 30 boxes to make that happen? No.

Damn. I found a letter from my dad in an old photo album. It's 20 years old. Written only three months before he died. I just...I can't believe it's been hiding in an empty, unused photo album for eight years and I just now found it. I can't believe he's been dead for 20 years. On one hand I'm glad I've had time to grieve and heal but something like that, the way I found him dead that morning, that's something so visceral and immediate that you can't ever really forget. Normally, I'd be all John Sheppard-like and just ignore my feelings, but this is actually making me cry. I couldn't reread the whole thing, it just makes me want things I can't ever have.

I will now take a break and watch NCIS to recover from emotional fragility and crick in back from picking up heavy, cloth-filled totes.

Tags: life
maybe he's caught in the mood: full
he just sings whatever he's seen: The Decemberists - Sons and Daugters

I'm made of fail on memes this week. Bun has been sick and I've setting her back to rights. She's doing well, though, so I'm happy. Will pick up posting again once I've had some solid, contiguous hours of sleep.

I had a package show up today, but I was so tired that I couldn't even make it to the door on time and the UPS guy took it over to the office. Still haven't mustered up the energy to go get it. (I don't care if the office is only 100 yards from my apartment, it's sooooooooo faaaaaaaar awaaaaaaaaaaaay.)

But I did actually manage to set my alarm and wake up in time to claim which story I wanted to do artwork for in the SGA Big Bang. So, I'd say my priorities are all in their right and proper places: 1. Bunnies. 2. SGA. 3. Packages. 4. Sleep. (Shut up.)

Tags: big bang, bunnies, meme, sooo sleeby
maybe he's caught in the mood: sleepy
he just sings whatever he's seen: Pink Floyd - Hey You

Arrr, me hearties! Today, of course, be International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Should you wish to be celebratin' this glorious and grand day by talkin' like a pirate, or by just singin' like a pirate, I be directin' ye ta last year's ITLAPD post, where I was postin' an aaaaaaaaaaaaaar-ific music mix fer just this here occasion. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

Avast, ye landlubbers!

Tags: itlapd, pirates
maybe he's caught in the mood: excited
he just sings whatever he's seen: Pirate Jenny - A Pirate's Life is Peaceful ('Til Someone Cuts You Up)

I skipped a day, but I don't want to take away from the beauty that is today's photo by posting two day's worth of content at one time.

For one week, recommend/share:

Day one: a song - Sarah Siskind - Falling Stars
LISTEN TO THIS SONG. Because it's catchy and Sarah Siskind's voice is gorgeous and you won't be able to stop singing it afterwards. This is a song that I'm going to use someday in my SGA fanmix, if I ever get around to finishing it.

Day two: a picture - NSFW! ( Black and white, on his knees. )
You don't even know how badly I want to paste in John Sheppard's face.


Day three: a book/ebook/fanfic.
Day four: a site.
Day five: a youtube clip.
Day six: a quote.
Day seven: whatever tickles your fancy.

Tags: meme, naked people, penises, pictures
maybe he's caught in the mood: sleepy
he just sings whatever he's seen: Neko Case - Rated X

The Freecycle Portland mailing list is like Craigslist except everything's free and most of it's used because. People try to give things away because they don't want it to end up in landfills. It's a laudable goal, to be sure.

But the people offering the nasal hair trimmer? The USED nasal hair trimmer that's been "cleaned with alcohol so don't get too grossed out"?

HOHNO. I will get grossed out and you can't stop me. Aside from the fact that it's had someone else's snot all over it, alcohol isn't nearly strong enough to kill everything that could be potentially living on it. I'm hardly a germaphobe but I think that's pretty disgusting. Maybe for their next trick, they can offer some used retainers or contact lenses that they've cleaned with alcohol. Because that makes everything okay.

Please just throw the freaking thing away already.

Tags: crazy people
maybe he's caught in the mood: confused
he just sings whatever he's seen: Sarah Siskind - Falling Stars

I have now stolen this "one week" meme from the internets, including gblvr.

For one week, recommend/share:

Day one: a song - Sarah Siskind - Falling Stars
LISTEN TO THIS SONG. Because it's catchy and Sarah Siskind's voice is gorgeous and you won't be able to stop singing it afterwards. This is a song that I'm going to use someday in my SGA fanmix, if I ever get around to finishing it.

Day two: a picture.
Day three: a book/ebook/fanfic.
Day four: a site.
Day five: a youtube clip.
Day six: a quote.
Day seven: whatever tickles your fancy.

Tags: meme, music
maybe he's caught in the mood: cold
he just sings whatever he's seen: Boy Eats Drum Machine - Planets + Stars