From The Morning News:

Surrick: Malcolm, there’s already a bill being pushed through Congress to make it legal for a citizen to shoot – in the stomach – anyone in possession of a snakehead. Those little bastards aren’t going to be allowed to step one stinking creepy foot-fin in this country.
Ostrom: Well, God bless America.
Surrick: Hey. Hey. Stick your finger in this Bible and tell me where it says, ‘and lo, God created this fucked-up carnivorous snake-fish nightmare and it was good,’ and I’ll welcome it with open arms.

Hee. More working now.

House Approves Homeland Worker Amendment. Because civil rights are pesky annoyances that get in the way of our dictator -- whoops, president! silly me -- doing whatever he wants, whenever he wants, to whomever he wants! Labor protection laws are for whiners, right? Thank god we got rid of those! Whew!

Exaggeration aside, this is a slippery slope if ever a slope were slippery. First the Department of Homeland Security, then the Department of Defense (what if that guy working in the Pentagon is a terrorist? we need to be able to find out!), then the entire government ('cause if that lady cleaning trash cans at the DOJ doesn't unconditionally condone its actions, we should be able to fire her without warning!), then the whole airline industry (your friendly baggage handlers could be assisting terrorists! no unions for them!) It's endless.

I saw these bumper stickers on my drive home from New York last Sunday; a few days ago, I found them here, and this nice woman is mailing them to me for free just so they'll be displayed prominently somewhere. I usually think bumper stickers are a little naive and overly reductive -- I'm not usually a bumper sticker kind of girl, but I'm considering wearing these on my forehead, damn it.

Too bad Dante didn't stick around for the invention of, you know, roads and stuff. The Holland Tunnel at 6 p.m. on Sunday would have been its own separate level of hell, I swear. Evil dirty traffic aside, my weekend was hectic and fun. I watched one of my best friends get married -- technically, get "blessed," because he and his British wife really got married in February for greencard purposes -- and actually quite enjoyed it. See, I'm not necessarily a bitter old hag at weddings; however, I am also definitely not what one would consider a Wedding Person. I won't go into the (not interesting) reasons presently, but let's say this one was an exception. I was quite the inverse of a bitter old hag. Ross just looked so, so, so good and so happy and so everything -- I felt rather like jumping up and down and clapping my hands in glee.

Did you note the sixty zillion British-isms in that last paragraph? We have the Harry Potter reader guy to thank for that. Ten CDs of his melliflous accent and I'm "quite"-ing with the best of them. On the phone tonight with H., I couldn't stop saying "expecto patronus!" in his voice, and I've been doing it in my head since we hung up. Expecto patronus! Expecto patronus! Quite!

I stole that little Javascript footnote thing from a few people (mostly these two people who I'm sure will never read this page, but thank you just in case). Now, whenever I have some fascinating parenthetical comment to make, you will see a blue word that first appears to be a normal link. But no! It will be different! You will see a little dotted line like so beneath the words. You will click on it, and then you will be handsomely rewarded. There are two in the previous post -- see if you can spot all the clicky goodness.

The prospect of a long, long drive up evil, evil 95 this weekend was making me despondant, and I've completely exhausted
all the books on CD at the library, so this morning I checked out Talking Book World. Yes, Talking Book World. (Who, may I ask, came up with that horrific name? Hello? No self-respecting patron of any fine establishment could ever say the words "Talking Book World" without a distinct ironic grimace and a "you know, whatever the hell that place is called" wave of the hands.) For the not-terribly-cheap rate of $7 per week, I'm now the proud renter of Bill Bryson's "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" and the third Harry Potter book. The Bryson book was an easy choice because I've been wanting to listen to it for a while; the other was a toss-up between "Prisoner of Azkaban" and "On the Road." But seriously: If Harry Potter and Jack Kerouac were in a fight, who do YOU think would win?

Wow. Last post was July 2. I am negligent. Very busy, somewhat distracted and negligent.

I am supposed to know how to use GoLive now. GoLive is a reasonably complicated piece of web publishing software made by Adobe, so it looks exactly like Photoshop and ImageReady and all these applications you actually do know how to use, so it tricks you into thinking you know how to use GoLive too. But, see, then you don't. Even after taking a reasonably expensive two-day class all about how to use it (and just the teeny tiny bit of school-like-ness of that class made me long to be in some sort of school-like setting again), even when that class was extremely helpful and worthwhile -- I still don't really understand how to use it. Dirty software. And I don't have the time to figure it out the way it should be figured out, which means I really don't have the time to be blogging.

Television Without Pity is recapping the new season (who knew there was a new season? who will ever watch this show? although you do have to watch it just once to know what the loser people look like so you can visualize while you laugh your way through the recaps) of "Big Brother." I don't have time to be reading that either, so you go do it for me, OK?

If you're cute and tall and red-headed, clap your hands.
If you're funny and nice and like dancing, clap your hands.
If you're smart and you work for Bill, and you live in See-aaa-til,
if it's your birthday and you know it, clap your hands.

You had better be sitting at your desk clapping those hands like crazy, mister. Happy birthday. :)

And Jason, I am sorry I didn't have a fantastically original birthday song for you, too -- you certainly deserve one because you are also marvelous. Change "like dancing" to "like video games" and "work for Bill, and you live in See-aaa-til" to "have a dog, and I'm not sure if you like to jog" so it can be your song too, OK?