cleolinda

The Lovely Emily calls me last night; we're going to try to see Marie Antoinette on Friday. She's suggested that we all (her, me, and Brett the Vet) take some kind of trip next Septemberish, and last night, she has an idea for the destination. (Keep in mind, also, that the only time I ever left the U.S. was to go to Cuba, I was hoping for a country where I spoke the language--French, English or Spanish--or something at least close to it, and that my friends are better-traveled than I am, so there's an issue of me wanting to go places they've already been.) However, we're both on cell phones, she's in her car, and the connection isn't all that great.

WHAT SHE ACTUALLY SAYS: "We could go to Quebec!"

WHAT I HEAR: "We could go to Tibet!"

CLEO: "... Oh. Well... oh. Yeah, I... I guess."

EMILY: "Come on, it would be fun!"

CLEO: "Isn't it... kind of cold up there?"

EMILY: "Well, I mean, we would go in September, so it wouldn't be that bad."

CLEO: "Aren't there... a lot of mountains...?"

EMILY: "Well, we're not going to climb them or anything."

CLEO: "And... yaks?"

EMILY: "What?"


Democrats take control of the Senate; world welcomes shift in U.S. politics.

Losses on ballot measures jolt religious. "From the country's heartland, voters sent messages that altered America's culture wars and dismayed the religious right — defending abortion rights in South Dakota, endorsing stem cell research in Missouri, and, in a national first, rejecting a same-sex marriage ban in Arizona.
Conservative leaders were jolted by the setbacks and looked for an explanation Wednesday. Janice Shaw Crouse, a conservative analyst with Concerned Women for America, suggested that Republicans — some of them entangled in corruption and sex scandals — had lost some of the selling power of the 'family values' themes they had pushed in recent elections." I think a lot of it has to do with a national sense of disgust towards this particular incarnation of the Republican party--the incarnation that has embraced the divisive, hateful, hypocritical, bombastic Coulter-O'Reilly rhetoric, a party where Coulter can get away with claiming that liberals are traitors. Mind you, I'm not saying that Republican voters are like this, which is precisely the problem--in trying to capitalize on emotions running high after 9/11, the Republican party has turned into a viper's nest of blowhards and bullies. It's ended up where even people with Republican values don't want anything to do with them. Unfortunately, it's taken five years for that to happen.

'60 Minutes' reporter Ed Bradley dies of leukemia.

AP: Startling findings in Pat Tillman probe. Yeah, things are starting to get weird.

11M bottles of acetaminophen recalled.

Lemony Snicket's novel Adverbs to be a movie. Okay, I could have said "Daniel Handler's," but would you have known immediately who I meant?

FedEx seeks support, child custody. "A day after Britney Spears filed divorce papers, Kevin Federline counter-filed court papers Wednesday seeking sole custody of the couple's two children." Ahahaha... ahahahahahahahaha!

And finally, happy birthday to katesti and particle_person!