I’m leaving shortly to see Borat with a friend. I’m familiar with the Borat character from Da Ali G Show (which I thought was a masterpiece of improv comedy) and I’m curious to see how well the film can sustain the joke for two hours. The nearly universal glowing reviews for this film look promising. I’ll try to post thoughts on the film later.
I’m not sure how much time I’m going to have in the next couple days, so here are my semi-educated predictions for Tuesday’s elections:
MN-Senate: The only question about this race is Klobuchar’s margin of victory. She’s run one of the best campaigns of this election cycle and has effectively portrayed Kennedy as the Republican tool we all know him to be. Klobuchar by 12%.
MN-Gov: This is a tight race and the Hatch campaign has flubbed things over the last few days. Note to Hatch: calling someone a “whore” is not considered Minnesota nice. Note to Dutcher: read your briefing books more closely, preferably with a highlighter in hand. But I think the (R) after Pawlenty’s name is going to hurt him in this season of discontent and I suspect that the inner-ring suburbs are going a deeper blue, giving Hatch enough votes to win. Hatch by 4%, with IP candidate Peter Hutchinson garnering somewhere between 6%-8%.
MN-06: I would love to see Patty Wetterling send self-proclaimed “fool for Christ” Michelle Bachmann back to the private sector, but this race makes me twitchy. It’s a conservative district where lots of voters are loyal foot soldiers in a culture war they’ve already lost. And Bachmann has hypnotized lots of them with her unnerving Stepford wife stare. Bachmann by 5%. I get solace from the fact that Bachmann can be counted on to make a complete ass of herself as soon as she is sworn into office.
MN-01: Who knew this would be a race? Tim Walz is getting good turnout at his rallies in this independent-minded district. And I just gave him fifty bucks, which has to count for something. Walz by 3%.
US House: Control of the House will undoubtedly return to the Democrats. But will we see a tidal wave or a tsunami? I’m going to be somewhat conservative and project 22 pickups for the Dems, but I won’t be surprised if it goes as high as 30.
US Senate: Definite pickups include RI, OH, and PA (bye bye, Santorum, you self-righteous, gay-bashing twat). I think we’ll also get MT, VA, and (crossing my fingers) MO. A slim Democratic majority, if the stars align just right and Democrats show up with their ground game.
Feel free to praise or savage my picks. I’ll be in Chicago beginning on Election Day, so I won’t be able to defend myself anyway. I’m probably being a little optimistic with some of these, but I think we Democrats are entitled to a little optimism after all these years.
An Army general recently compared the escalating chaos in Iraq to the creation of a great work of art. Someone should ask the families of the 105 American servicemembers and the 1,289 Iraqis who died in October how they feel about being a part of the world’s bloodiest art project. Bechtel must be a bunch of art-hating Philistines, seeing as how it’s puling its contractors out of Iraq. And Richard Perle, famed neoconservative and warmonger–er, I mean, artistic visionary? He’s apparently having some artistic differences with the Bush administration.
Every time I think we’ve hit the bottom of this rabbit hole, the ground gives way and we fall even deeper.
As part of a team-building exercise for work, I had to complete a Myers-Briggs personality assessment. The last time I did one of these was in college and I’ve no idea what I scored back then, but this time I came out as INFP. According to the accompanying reference text, this means that others perceive me as “introspective and complex.” Somehow, that seems like a polite way of saying “aloof and cryptic.” This isn’t exactly news to me. I mean, if I was an extrovert with a highly ordered mind, would I be sitting here writing this blog entry? Everyone who knows me knows that I live in my head. And let me tell you, it’s damn messy in here.
Kudos to NASA for scheduling a shuttle mission to save the Hubble orbiting telescope. The Hubble is one of the space program’s crowning achievements, providing a wealth of scientific data as well as some gorgeous pictures of the universe. Speaking of, here’s a short video about the Hubble Deep Field image. I might have done the video sans wispy New Age-y music, but that’s just me. Otherwise, it’s not bad.
Despite my best efforts, I was not invited to any Halloween parties featuring women in fishnet stockings. Which means I’m sitting here at my computer, trying to distract myself from my own feelings of inadequacy. Which means that I just wasted appropriately eight minutes of my life watching this. A warning: the video’s refrain of “Killer!” has completely invaded my brain, occupied it, and set up a puppet government. Then I wasted another ten minutes watching this, and I felt a little better about life.
Happy Halloween.
I’ve noticed an ever-so-slight uptick in traffic to this site, some of which is probably due to Bethany Broadwell’s mention of me in a recent article about blogging that appeared in Quest magazine. Thanks for the mention, Bethany. But with new readers always comes a bit of performance anxiety. I feel like I need to be particularly clever and witty–at least for a few days–or else newcomers will shrug and click their way to some distant corner of the internets, never to return. And we all know that my sense of self-worth is intrinsically tied to the number of hits I get each day.
New readers will also quickly learn that I post links to stories about research into neural implants with annoying frequency. Oh, and I tend to post glowing reviews of any concert involving a band that has a hot female lead singer. I’m sure veteran readers can offer more comments regarding my assorted blogging idiosyncrasies.
The Strib is currently running a series profiling people who are struggling with debt and looking for ways to stabilize their financial circumstances. The profile of the young woman in her 30s who is racking up credit card debt on clothes and eating out was the most familiar to me. Until a few years ago, I had similar issues with money. If I wanted something I couldn’t afford, I would charge it, figuring that whatever amount I was spending wouldn’t make much difference to the amount of debt I had already accumulated. But then I finally got serious about managing my finances. I stopped charging things I couldn’t pay off at the end of the month, I refinanced my existing debt through my credit union at a much lower interest rate, I started making serious contributions to an emergency fund, and I’m using Quicken to keep track of my cash flow. I’m also a sucker for personal finance blogs.
My generation’s money issues have a few root causes. First, our schools do a terrible job when it comes to teaching basic financial literacy. Most kids come out of high school not knowing a thing about managing credit, living within a budget, or the minor miracle of compounding interest. And then these same kids are targeted by credit card companies as soon as they step foot on a college campus. If I had received a little more education on some of the predatory practices of credit card companies (like suddenly raising interest rates after a missed payment), I might have exercised some restraint in my spending habits.
The rampant consumerism in our culture is a contributing factor. Particularly in my demographic (young urban dwellers), there’s a certain amount of pressure to maintain a certain standard of living. It’s awkward to admit that you can’t afford to eat out with your friends or take that weekend trip to Vegas. We all want to live large, but that’s just not sustainable on salaries of $30 or $40K.
I wince when I hear friends telling me about how they spent money they don’t have. Many of us are likely to be in debt for decades to come, refusing to learn from the mistakes we’ve made.
In the wake of the initial hulaballo surrounding Michael J. Fox’s television ad in support of stem cell research, a conservative friend (yes, I actually have a couple) repeated the Limbaugh line about how Fox had deliberately refrained from taking his meds to appear more impaired. I reacted much more strongly than I typically do when I have a political disagreement with someone. I think it’s the implications raised in the statements of Limbaugh and his ilk on this issue. They want to have it both ways: Fox is a victim of his condition and being exploited by others as well as someone who is using his condition as a means to get what he wants.
This is the duality that conservatives possess in their regard of people with disabilities (when they think about us at all). We’re either pitiable victims (this got a lot of play during the Schiavo fracas) or we’re uppity cripples who are being just a little too in-your-face with our gimpiness to get “special treatment” (especially when “special treatment” involves civil rights or access to health care). Since conservatives seem to have some sort of aversion to simply arguing with a person with a disability on the merits of the issue (maybe because they’re afraid we’ll start crying or something–I don’t know), they resort to characterizing them as victims or manipulators.
I thought Fox’s response to Limbaugh’s attack was elegantly plainspoken, making it clear he is neither. But Rush and his followers will continue to believe otherwise for no other reason than because they can’t conceive of an effective political message that doesn’t rely on victimization or manipulation.
I’m digging my new BlackBerry. I was sitting in a waiting room this morning and I used it to check my e-mail and send one response. If it wasn’t for my disability, the thing would probably be in my hand all the time and I’d be one of those annoying people who is constantly checking it during meetings. But it will come in handy during those times when I’m offsite for meetings or out of town. Let’s see…cell phone, iPod, BlackBerry…I think my accessorizing is complete.