Monthly Archives: April 2008

Ya know, I periodically subscribe to silly feeds in my RSS reader (Google Reader, get on it!!), ya know the kind of faddy (is that a word? fadish?) blogs that light up the blogEsphere for a few days at a time. Ya know, blogs like Stuff White People Like and Mickey Feo (hmmm… both WordPress…). Every few weeks I’ll tidy up my subscriptions and weed out these blogs with the kind of “What was I thinking?” mentality usually reserved for memories of freshman-year romances.
Well, I’m happy to say that Garfield Minus Garfield has not gone the way of Lucinda, the hedonistic dancer from Milwaukee with the endearing gap in her teeth. It still manages to yank a chuckle out of me, and in fact on occasion even compel me to burst forth a hearty belly laugh, as when I viewed this particular strip:

Das ist güt, ja?

Wow, the sound-bite hunting and gaffe-baiting is so blatant and shameless that I actually felt sorry for Hillary! Lay off, Gibson! Every question is asking for a promise. They don’t owe these asshats anything.

P.S. Someone needs to get Obama a latte, stat! My boy’s about to fall asleep.

Ugh… These are the WORST debate questions I have ever heard. Flag pins, William Ayers, etc. Come on. They keep asking them to make promises, as if they owe George Stefanopolis and Charlie Gibson anything.

They both look tired though. Obama isn’t at his best, but he pulls it together when attacked.

Now, y’all know I’m a fan of bad CNN headlines. Well here’s a blog that not only collects them, but illustrates them as well!

CNN is like the worst “news” source. Ever.

April 15 2008 – Pit bulls kill cancer boy’s miniature horse

Did they really use the term cancer boy???

(see also WTFCNN?

We’ve started rehearsals for The Little Death, my erotic Christian pop musical.
Here we are at the Icehaus:

That’s Melly there playing piano and singing, and Pete in the back playing some floor glock.

Heavens! How did Obama let this one slip?

Ok, seriously? They’re riding him over use of the word ‘bitter‘?? The level of debate is so shockingly juvenile. Hillary Clinton has shown herself to be a person I simply do not respect, that is unworthy to lead. She knows how Obama used the word, she knows she is full of shit, but she continues to freak on it. This is either an impressive display of cognitive dissonance, a facility in lying, or she’s as dumb as the people she thinks will buy this crap, and I don’t believe she’s dumb.

Now, I don’t think Obama will change politics as we know it. I know his hope stuff is pretty much a load of crap. I disagree with a good amount of his policies. But the fact that he is even attempting to raise the level of discourse in this country is enough for me.

Wow, really terrible news:

Gretchen M. Snedeker packed a lot into her short life.

At 24, she was already the principal French horn player in two orchestras, had earned her master’s degree from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, was an adjunct music professor at Colgate University and was being groomed to take over as principal horn player at Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown.

Thursday, the Baldwinsville woman’s life was cut short when she died from injuries suffered in an accident earlier that day in Oneida.

I always dug Gretchen. Really talented at the horn and a genuinely sunny person. I used to love saying her name in a funny old man voice (“Gretchen! Snedeker!“) and she would grin and bear it, even though I’m sure it was annoying after like 800 times; great name though, like from a Mark Twain novel. I hear that Gretchen took over the new music horn geekdom after I finished at Eastman, becoming the go-to-gal for Ossia and Musica Nova; I always dug that she challenged herself and went gung-ho into the scary world of new music for horn.
I hadn’t spoken to her in a while, but it seems that she had been doing really well musically upstate. She was also engaged which is nice to hear, but of course makes it all the more tragic. My thoughts are with her friends and family.

Oh sweet lord, I just had a coffeegasm.

From Why I let my 9-year-old ride the subway alone:

“How would you have felt if he didn’t come home?” a New Jersey mom of four, Vicki Garfinkle, asked.

Guess what, Ms. Garfinkle: I’d have been devastated. But would that just prove that no mom should ever let her child ride the subway alone?

No. It would just be one more awful but extremely rare example of random violence, the kind that hyper parents cite as proof that every day in every way our children are more and more vulnerable.

…

The problem with this everything-is-dangerous outlook is that over-protectiveness is a danger in and of itself. A child who thinks he can’t do anything on his own eventually can’t.

UPDATE: Lenore Skenazy has a blog, check it out: Free Range Kids