Soul-Devouring Worry
¤ Daylight, again.

Life's Too Short For:
¤ Never quite having the time to finish that novel.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May corn chips satisfy your every gustatory craving.

Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "mostly".
¤ Usage: "They mostly come out at night.  Mostly."
¤ Synonyms: N/A
¤ Deviations: Most any qualifying word you can use in a sentence, and then repeat afterwards for extra emphasis.  Eg: "probably," "sometimes," and so on.
¤ Origin: Newt's famous line in Aliens.
¤ Notes: Cribbed from Cartman who cribbed it from Aliens, this word and its deviations spice up most any conversation.  Malaya and I have developed it to a science, where one of us will speak a viable sentence, and then after a momentary pause we'll both repeat the repeatable word in almost perfect harmony.  Yes, we realize how sickeningly cutesy this is. 

The best usage yet? When I said, after we saw the results of this boxing match: "Who kicked Oscar de la Hoya's ass tonight?
*pause*
*M and F speak together*
"Mosley." -- September 18, 2003

In the second she's just demolished a handful of her favorite snack... white cheddar flavored Trader Joe's popcorn.  Yes, popcorn.  The crunchier the better. In fact she won't eat it once it's no longer crunchy and fresh, though she'll lick and gum at it a bit to extract most of the cheesy flavoring. Dusty is dozing on the couch in the background.

The cheese and popcorn love came in handy when we were trying to train her to go into the little shed through the swinging door to poop in the big litter box. Basically we'd get her attention near the door, hold out a kernel so she could see it, and then toss it through the trap door.  Yes, it's pretty gross to throw her food down on carpet remnants that are covered in drifts of cat-kicked kitty litter, but hey, when the alternative is continuing to smell Jinx's yellow ropes of doom, you do what you have to do.

We washed all of the carpets in the house on Wednesday, and of course that night Jinx horks up a gooey rope of orange crunchies with a little hunk of chicken on the leading edge.  One of three pieces of chicken she was given as a special treat after much begging (on her part), something like 8 hours before she puked.

It's a good thing she's so cute, or we'd throw her off the back balcony, sometimes.

I'll write more about her tomorrow with a bunch of new photos, but just for now, yes she eventually returned to her normal, frequent pooping schedule on Tuesday.  Resuming just as Malaya had gotten up and gone in to take a shower, and not yet moved the Jinx box from the overnight bathroom to the daytime living room.

The one positive benefit to the product of Jinx's digestive tract?  We no longer have a single living fly in this house.

¤ So the California special ballot went off and it wasn't a complete farce.  True, a democratically-elected governor was booted out of office after just 11 months due to some vengeful and very rich Republicans funding a massive petition drive to get a special election, but at least a couple of really bad propositions were voted down. CalPundit made a nice post about it, and since he follows California politics far closer than I ever will, you might as well read what he had to say, if you give a damn.  His take on what this means in larger terms: not much.

As for national implications, I don't think there are any. The recall was a one-off, an opportunistic power grab fueled by a unique combination of a huge budget mess, a weird state constitution, and a universally reviled governor. It doesn't mean California is turning Republican, and it doesn't mean George Bush has a chance of carrying the state in 2004.

I didn't think Arnie would win, a few weeks ago.  He was a novelty, a movie star with zero political experience who had no plan whatsoever, aside from a bunch of promises with no details.  Sure he's famous and all, but I really thought that when it came down to it, people would get a moment of conscience and realize they were putting Conan the Barbarian in charge of the world's fifth largest economy and the most important and influential state in the US.  Wouldn't they want to keep the current governor who was elected just a year ago?  Or failing that, wouldn't they want a politician who actually knew what he was doing?  Guess not.

And as usual in our lazy democracy, the will of the few governs the many.  There was something like 49% voter turn out, and Arnie got about 1/2 of the votes, which means that less than 25% of voters wanted him.  There were 4.4m votes for the recall, and 3.7m for Arnie.  With a state population of around 35m, that's barely 1/10 of the population voting for him.  Not exactly a sweeping mandate; not that any politician gets one anymore. And no, I didn't vote, I've never changed my voting address since moving up here and I didn't care quite enough to fly to San Diego for one day.

This article on Yahoo has some Arnie quotes about how he'll handle things now that he's in power. It doesn't really cheer me.

LOS ANGELES - On his first full day as governor elect, Arnold Schwarzenegger expressed confidence Wednesday that he would make a seamless transition to the governor's office, but provided no new specifics on how he plans to cure California's ills.

His campaign in a nutshell; promise everything wondering, give no specifics on the difficult nuts and bolts changes. People are such sheep to go for this sort of thing time and time again.  No politician has ever gone wrong telling the people want they want to hear (and not telling them what they need to hear.) To quote some clueless tool from the news item:

"For the first time, we'll have somebody who will probably listen to the people and figure out what it is that has to be done, not the same old thing the way politics goes," said Jim Hall, 62, as he worked out at a health club in Camarillo. "Bring on Arnold. He'll fix it. Gray Davis is history."

Yes yes, of course he will, Mr. Hall. With a wave of his dumbbell.

So what's Arnie going to do to get California out of the hole?

In a news conference at a Los Angeles hotel, Schwarzenegger said he had spoken with an array of leaders about his victory, including Nelson Mandela of South Africa and President Bush, who he said promised to do "whatever is possible to help California."

"I'm looking forward to working with him and asking him for a lot, a lot of favors," Schwarzenegger said, adding that he hoped to meet with the president when he is in the state next week for fund-raisers.

This sort of depresses me.  I mean yeah, you elect someone who can do good things for your city, state, country, whatever, but when the guy you elect seems to have no solutions other than to ask for favors from friends in powerful places, what good is he really?  What happens when his friends don't want to do him any more favors, or start to want favors in return?  Let's think a little more long term than next month, shall we Arnie?

Also, Bush was asked for help back during the energy crisis when Enron and others were raping the state's treasury to the tune of billions of dollars.  Bush refused to lift a finger to help the people then, preferring to help his corporate friends.  Thanks, George.

On a lighter note, you know the guy who does the state stationary must be pissed.  He just printed up all the damn "Governor Davis" letterhead and seals and all of that, he was looking forward to 3 years without needing to redo it, and here he is canceling vacation to get back to work. And it's not like "John Smith" was just elected. Noooooooo, he's got to find a way to fit in 14 letters after the "Governor" part.  And he has to remember how to spell it! Can't you just see them toiling away at at the press release center, "Schwartze... um, Shawartsenager.... um, Schwarzenager... Oh shit on it, call him Governor Arnie."

Of the many photos, this is the only one I found interesting enough to comment on. It's scary, but remember, Halloween is coming up soon. Maria is looking like the crypt keeper lately, she's so bony and frail, but how about her mother?  Yikes!  Arnie, you'll be waking up next to this in about 20 years.  Runnnnnn!

¤ Just a short article, but it amused me.  You might want to rethink those Canadian hamburgers now that you know that the meat-packing plant is in a prison.

A meat processing plant staffed by convicts in southern Ontario was shut down today by provincial authorities who are investigating "questionable practices" involving meat inspection.

The Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food suspended the plant's licence after the warden of the Pittsburgh Institution near Kingston, Ont., called them to report "allegations of questionable practices at the abattoir."

The minimum-security Pittsburgh Institution houses about 190 male inmates and runs an agri-business which includes cattle, vegetable gardens, and a greenhouse, said the Correctional Service Canada website.

It's nice that they have the whole job training and work experience thing going, rather than just the big prisoner warehouses we have in the US, which do nothing to cut recidivism, but all the same, do you want to eat food prepared by convicts?  License plates, carpentry, metal working, even art.  That's fine.  But perishable foods that can be pissed, spit in, shit in, and poisoned?

In September I blogged about weird guy behavior in the Laundromat, so it's been done, but today I must add to the body of evidence.  Since yes, there was another weird guy there, and he was doing things I'd never seen any other weird guys do.

This guy was about 45, moderately overweight, in jeans and a t-shirt.  White, little moustache, slightly scruffy, imminently unremarkable.  He looked like any random guy you'd see trying to find parking for his SUV at a Fuddruckers while his plump wife yelled at their hyperactive 3, 7, and 11 year olds in the back seat. The amusing thing about him was that he was packing his laundry completely in big, black, plastic, garbage bags.  He was already there when Malaya and I arrived, and while we threw our clothing into our four machines and packed the rugs into the heavy duty machine, this guy was in the back corner of the place, using one of the heavy duty machines (which cost $4, double the other machines) and putting his clothing into it.

He would pull a pair of jeans or a shirt out of one garbage bag, shake it out and look it over, then throw it in.  Every now and then he'd see a bad stain and would liberally squirt it with a plastic spray bottle of some sort of stain remover (I assume), before tossing it into the machine with all the other stuff.  We didn't watch him for that long, but it took him longer to get his one machine half loaded than it took Malaya to load up all four of our machines, and she does the whole "sort by type and pigmentation" thing too, so it's not like we're just stuffing clothing into the machines as quickly as possible.

Weirder yet, he was throwing in much clothing that could not have been his.  Shirts and shorts and pants that were far smaller than he was, and Malaya said she saw a few women's items that were also way smaller than he was.  On top of the garbage bags he brought stuff in, he had a whole box of bags, presumably for the carry home.  So hey, at least he used clean bags for the clean clothing. After all, when you're throwing your clothing into a big plastic sack, you want to be sure it's a clean plastic sack.

I can see some slovenly bachelor using trash bags for the clothing; never mind that a laundry basket or two costs about $3 each and holds more than a bag and keeps the stuff in it from fermenting when it's dirty and from wrinkling and squashing when it's clean.  Bachelors aren't exactly known for their intelligence and practicality when it comes to household matters.  But how in the hell does dad end up doing all of the family's landry, and how does his wife let him get away with using trash bags to carry it in?

Malaya and I weren't watching him that closely, mostly since he was of the "don't make eye contact with it" type, but it was hard to miss his sitcom'esque antics.  And then he somehow hurt himself in a "goddamnit that stings!" way, for he began to hop up and down while shaking his hand the way you do when you miss while driving a nail, and issuing muffled curses as he shook it.  I asked Malaya about it, and she saw it, but doesn't have any more idea than I do as to how the guy managed to hurt himself putting laundry into a washing machine.  There wasn't anything hot there, and there weren't any sharp edges that I could see (we used an identical machine for our rugs), so it's a mystery.

He was still carrying on like a bear with a wounded paw when we finished loading everything, started up our machines, and left to do some window shopping while they washed. And when we returned 20 minutes later to put stuff into the driers, he was gone and his machine was running.  I didn't see any blood on the floor, and anyway, if he'd bled on any of his clothing he had that stain remover stuff handy. His trash bags were also gone, and he never returned while we dried our stuff, so he could have driven himself to the hospital, for all I know.

Just looking at his actions, they sort of make sense.  If you didn't care that all of your clothing was getting mixed in together, using just the one heavy duty load machine wouldn't be a bad idea.  It holds up to 30lbs, while the smaller washers take just 8lbs, and the medium ones take up to 20lbs.  The problem is that the bigger ones aren't any larger inside; they just have better springs or stronger drive wheels and such, so you can wash blankets and throw rugs and such in them.  If you actually packed in 25lbs of clothing you would in theory pay $4 for what would cost you $2 a pop in 3 or 4 regular machines.  Of course the downside is that your stuff wouldn't get very clean, with so much of it packed in so tightly.

So the guy was weird and behaving weirdly and managed to injure himself in a relatively child-proofed area.  But hey, at least he didn't try to strike up a conversation with me about which driers worked best or how big the folding tables were or which machines there were the best value for the money.

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