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Monday, December 24, 2007
11232214.1Catalogs. This particular one, just so I won't hurt their feelings, I've renamed slightly to Touche of Clawss, as befitting its style. ![]() I sent them a kindly email, Dear Touche of Clawss: Thank you for the lovely catalog. It was a complete surprise. However, after studying all the fine offerings very carefully, I find that it just isn't right for me at this time. Please remove my name from your list. Should I decide to open that whorehouse at a future date, I will be sure to contact you. Regards ..You never know, you know? Macherat
Thursday, December 20, 2007
11232213.1I did my part. While pouring (about half a million pieces of) Instant Rice last night, I was reminded about that Free Rice website. So tonight, with The Season and all, I went over there. First, I missed couple of words to see what the penalty would be. Seems there is none, except you get no rice. Bummer. Then I went on to score an impressive string of correct answers, raised my Vocab score to a 10 and sent 680 grains of rice to somebody starving. Cool. Then I lost interest in it. Am I cynical about this too? You bet. See, we'll give, give til it hurts, but only if we're amused. If the concert sucks .. well let somebody else cure that disease, whatever it was. Sad thing is, very little would be given to charity without some kind of hook. I learned that when I got volunteered (decades ago) as the company representative for United Way. We'd have our little meetings and presentations - sometimes a good-looking fireman would come by and join in, and I guess they're all good-looking if you're a hotel maid who has already cleaned 15 toilets today and it's 3:15 and you get an unexpected 25 minute break before the 16th - and our progress charts, and was it all ever gawdawful. We sent our money in and it got added to the pot and the city totalled it all up to $25 million or $250 million or whatever, and all those organizations survived for another year. And that night we all got ripped and went to a concert and I think we gave some more money to something else and felt really, really good and warm about it as we sang along sort of and tried to light something to wave. It was a very boozy cause, I remember that. Did I say boozy? I meant worthy, a very worthy cause. Macherat
Saturday, December 15, 2007
11232212.1Bali. It had everything - exotic clothing and wouldya just look at the diversity, ![]() unpronounceable names, "we gotta work together" speeches in more languages than you realized we had, extreme America-bashing .. the list goes on. In the end "The resulting “Bali Action Plan” contains no binding commitments. The plan concludes that “deep cuts in global emissions will be required” and provides a timetable for two years of talks to shape the first formal addendum to the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change treaty since the Kyoto Protocol 10 years ago."Is that beautiful or what? Absolutely nothing happened except the setting of an agenda for the next meeting. They didn't even decide where to have it except all agreed it should be someplace warm and exotic if practical; no more Montreals in winter! If for no other reason that Montreal in Winter is a bad place to trumpet Global Warming. The reason why I'm completely and utterly and every other adverb you can think of cynical about Climate Change and Global Warming? Because is has only about 1% to do with science and climate and 99% to do with the young American suburbanite female driving a 2.5 ton SUV with 2.5 spoiled children in back, going somewhere (in her own world.) It might seem hard to understand because we see (endure) the phenomenon every day, but to the rest of the world it is a wasteful, moving, dismayingly expensive carbon-dioxide spewing example of everything that is America and its excess. And up until now they (the squalid rest of the world) has been unable to do anything about it. Yes, they have voted, and in two years they will have another meeting and THEN they will do something about it (us.) Oh, and Death to America (when it runs out of money.) Macherat
Thursday, December 13, 2007
11232211.1"The Asterisk Era" That's what the Keith Olbermann program is calling it, the baseball steroid scandal. He is witty at all costs. They played a statement from the lawyer for Roger Clemens who said it ain't so for him .. "Roger Clemens adamantly and vehemently [pause] and whatever other adjectives can be used [inaudible] denies [blah-blah] steroids [blah-blah] performance something-something." That's good. Only those are adverbs. P.S. Over 500 other blogs mentioned the adverbia. Baseball and grammar, hand-in-hand I always say. Macherat
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
11232210.1My Cane. Did I ever show you a photo of my cane? Don't think so. My great-uncle Ed made this cane many years ago for my father after bypass surgery. Turned out he didn't need it, and it was a bit too tall for him anyway. Like things do in our house, it stood where it was last left, pretty much undisturbed. It wasn't as if someone would come along and dust it, but occasionally it did get picked up and wowed over. Ed was about 75 when he made the cane, and he lived 20 more years after that. People who use canes don't get many visitors to their blogs, because they're usually old. I don't care. There was a woman on the television the other morning, reporting what the "blogosphere" thought about some recent political nonevent. (All the events of this campaign have been nonevents so far. Am I the only one who wishes it would just die?) She was young. All the writers she spoke about were young. They knew everything. Most people who use a cane don't really need one; it just helps a bit. Hard to explain, kind of a balance thing. You spend most of your time looking for where you left it. For some reason, elderly thought processes do not include, "Remember, you're leaning it against the back of the the television instead of someplace sensible where you'll see it." My irrelevancy permits me to use up an entire megabyte or better of info-electrons to upload this picture, which I took with a filmless camara (amazing, aren't they?) and experience no guilt about the virtual wastefulness of it all. I'm very happy to have this little treasure, especially given the fact that I'm there now, cane age. It is a very fine piece of work, and it reminds me to think of my dad and my great-uncle Ed every day.Macherat WHAT WE ARE FACING IS A PLANETARY EMERGENCY.
Sunday, December 09, 2007
11232209.1Multiple choice. Who made the following statement? WHAT WE ARE FACING IS A PLANETARY EMERGENCY. A) Jor-El, 1938 [the year 8751 on Krypton]Macherat
Thursday, December 06, 2007
11232208.1A little cross tonight. The loser kid who shot up the mall .. he wanted to go out famous, and CNN and the others granted his wish and continue to grant it every hour. Why not try anonymity just once, huh? "A 16-year-old kid shot 43 people today, then turned the gun on himself. We're not going to tell you anything about him." For the youngsters out there, some advice: go ahead a kill yourself if you feel that life is wretched but, please, for the rest of us (1) do it quietly and alone, (2) be as neat as possible. Someone has to clean up the mess, you know. I think it's WONDERFUL that Brad Pit is building houses in New Orleans. He makes about three movies per year at $20 million each, and that would allow for about 300 houses per year! I don't think you understand. Huh? It's an 'I'll put up a little money to match what other people give' deal. He's more into giving of his valuable and beautiful time here. Besides he has a film coming out. Oh. We interviewed all six-and-one-half trillion people on Earth and sent two winners to New York to do talk radio shows. Yes, the best we could come up with was Don Imus and Howard Stern. Sorry.Rick Macherat
Monday, December 03, 2007
11232207.1Doing catalogs, watching it rain. Everyone knows about our rain, but 4" is a lot even for us. Nine inches in Bremerton. Winds 100+ in "the usual windier places." This particular storm won't have a name unless it lasts a few days longer and becomes the Pearl Harbor Day Winter Storm. It just might have the legs to make that. Things have never been as flooded at they are in Seattle right now. I told Brother just not to go down to the basement. No point in ruining a perfectly good night's sleep over something hopeless. Wind. We have funny-sounding state park names and big trees here in the northwest. One fewer tree today: the Sitka spruce, Picea sitchensis, at Klootchy Creek County Park came down in the windstorm. At 206 feet tall, this 750-year-old giant had been in place since The Crusades. Imagine that. I saw this product in a catalog, ![]() a camera on the end of an extension rod. Just the gizmo you need for those difficult up-the-skirt shots. One of the debate programs was on when I went by that channel, and I lingered for about four seconds. Two grim thoughts came to me, 1) on of those people is going to be our next President and, 2) The 2012 campaign will begin on the day after the election. Macherat
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