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Me & Hill ;-)
I found this photo this morning. It’s from freshman year at AU when Hillary spoke for a Chris Van Hollen fundraiser.
Books I Acquired in the Laundry Room Last Night
» Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin (link)
» Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoyevsky (link)
» Diary: A Novel, Chuck Palahniuk (link)
» Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby (link)
» Comic Book Guy’s Guide to Pop Culture, The Simpsons (link)
All that, plus an unopened moleskine and a new diary.
Can you guess which book is on my coffee table, of all these finds?
But Seriously, Ståy Calm
Daytona Beach Police Chief Mike Chitwood should probably take a PR class, or maybe just not talk so much.
“This killer is one of us,” Chitwood said. “He is our next-door neighbor. He is somebody we go to church with. It is somebody who is a respectable, decent human being on the outside. But on the inside, they are out there preying on women. He is dehumanizing women.
Including pets in the family structure
A Japanese business began offering a small “monthly allowance” for employees with pets. The $9 stipend is a token gesture that recognizes pets are part of a family, and not just a toy or gadget.
Hoping to send the message that pets are life-long partners not disposable accessories, a Japanese maker of medicines for animals has begun giving employees who own dogs or cats a monthly “family allowance” for their pets.“Everyone has the right to own a pet, but they also have the obligation to raise the pet for its whole life,” the company said, explaining why it had decided to offer employees who own dogs and cats a “family allowance” of 1,000 yen ($9) per month.
The same firm is also considering allowing grievance time for the death of a pet, as one Japanese pet food maker currently allows.
This is a good gesture, but I think it’s not what is needed. Owning a pet, particularly one like my 60-lbs. lab, is really a lot like having a child, in that it requires food, training, medical visits, exercise, and lots of other considerations.
I would like to see a policy that begins to equate pets to children, and that gives considerations like child doctor visit time and other schedule flexibility to animal owners. I’m not sure what parents of human children feel about equating my dog to their kid, but that’s not quite the issue. My dog is likely much smarter than their kids.
Measuring a Despotic State
Colin Delany at e.politics points to an interesting post-WWII mini-doc on measuring for if a community or state is despotic or democratic. Colin’s commentary is interesting, and he outlines the main points of the video well.
1099 State of Mind
Some legitimate dog-related tax deductions.
CNN discovers email forwarding.
It appears that the crack news team over at CNN.com did some investigating and found out that people forward email with funny pictures in them. This truly earth-shattering revelation was linked on the front page of the number one name in news. Check out the stunning details:
Dude, you have got to see this. Look in your in-box. Right there between the chain letter promising never-ending good fortune and the Top 10 list of reasons why cats are better than dogs. There it is: An e-mail filled with goofy images of sometimes dubious origins.If you’re like most people, you receive several of these offbeat e-mails each week.
The subject line says something like, “FWD: Re: RE: You think you’re having a bad day?” The images of crushed trucks, endangered daredevils and a horse gone through the front windshield of a car may or may not be genuine, but they certainly are incredible.
Such messages have their roots in chain letters that were once mailed out in paper form. Nowadays, the Internet allows for quick distribution of text, photos and video to many people at a time.
Lerick Johnson, 51, of Alliance, Nebraska, says he and his friends like to send funny photos and messages to each other and forward them on to friends and family. A few years ago, he went looking for Halloween pumpkin carving ideas and ended up sending photos of the more unusual jack-o’-lanterns as a mass e-mail. The photos are circulating again this year.
Stop, stop. You’re saying I can send things to people via email? Fuck off. No way. You’re lying.
I must stop writing. I have to go read I-Reporters’ stories of their mass e-mail horror stories. Have you seen the one with the redneck pictures?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!? LOLzzz!
Every little girl's dream
I just read a wedding announcement in today’s New York Times online, though my original intent was to read a Frank Rich column that I’ll write about later. Once I finished the aforementioned Rich column, I saw in the Times’ Inside NYTimes.com feature a photo of an older gentleman kissing a woman whom I thought was several decades his junior. You know, a trophy wife arrangement. But the dynamic was far, far different from what I imagined. In fact, this woman is psychotic, and he’s a reluctant tag-along. Here is how they set their wedding date:
She began urging him to drop on one knee and formally propose. He balked, insisting that he was too old, his knees too creaky.She offered to bring him kneepads from the garden. When he didn’t budge, she sent out a “save the date” e-mail message anyway.
In place of a formal proposal, he cut her a little slack. “I am happy to get married,” he told her. “I’ll clear my calendar and I’ll show up.”
That is exactly how I always imagined getting married. It’s just so romantic, you know? I wonder if he was cc’ed on the email invitation or if it just appeared on his calendar one day.
I’ll leave it at the title of the page.
Grand ‘Tower of Invincibility’ Planned for Washington, DC
45% of drivers surveyed on the road in Park Slope, Brooklyn were looking for parking
Ezra Klein lifts this stunning statistic in his brief evaluation of Slate’s recent expose of parking regulations in America. Add this is to the NY Time’s revelation that private parking spaces in Manhattan can go for as much as $225,000, and it really makes me wonder why I just bought a car…
What is the alternative?
The sign reads: “Now we serving hot dog with proper sanitizing”
Seen outside my office this week…
Gumption.
President Hugo Chavez wants Venezuelan clocks turned back half an hour and he wants it done in record time — next Monday.“I don’t care if they call me crazy, the new time will go ahead, let them call me whatever they want,” Chavez said on his weekly TV show. “I’m not to blame. I received a recommendation and said I liked the idea.”
The shift will allow children to wake up for school in daylight instead of before sunrise, Chavez said.
Ezra Klein penned a scathing review of Mark Penn’s new book. An excerpt:
His new book Microtrends is so bad that the question—in a fair world—isn’t whether it will destroy his own reputation, but whether it is so epically awful as to take the entire polling industry down with it.
So yeah, check that shit out.
This is an older Atlantic article, but I suggest you check it out if you or someone you know is an introvert: Caring For Your Introvert
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