Moving Day
We're moving, folks. I'm tired of the slow updates and the pop-ups and the all the other crap that comes with Angelfire. You can now find me and my rants at On Life As I Know It.

This site will still be here, but this will probably be the last posting. See you at my new place.

A Man's Right to Choose
Testimony from one Mr. Luke Vander Bleek, R.Ph., Pharmacist/President, Fitzgerald and Eggleston Pharmacies, Illinois:

“Morally, I regard my involvement in therapies intended to terminate human life to be wrong. Additionally, I believe the Illinois Rights of Conscience Act grants me protection to operate my business as I have in the past.”

1.) The birth-control pill does not terminate life, it prevents conception. No life is lost, all eggs (i.e. the potential for life) remain safe in the ovaries.

2.) Since sex usually leads to pregnancy, I think what they find objectionable is a woman’s right to have sex whenever she wants. If she’s married, and doesn’t want children, she still can’t have sex with her husband unless she’s sure she’s not ovulating.

3.) Does this “moral” position also include condoms? Like the Pill condoms do not terminate life, they merely prevent conception. Will the sale of condoms come under fire next? Somehow I doubt it and the reason is because condoms have to do with a man’s right to choose not to father a child.

Hairless Wonder. Almost.
Now Playing: Jack FM
Topic: Life As I Know It
I’ve been experimenting with various forms of hair removal lately (and by lately I mean for about five years or so). Shaving is what I usually come back to because waxing produces a litany of profanity that even my husband finds troubling, but last night I tried something different.

Sally Hanson makes this bottled stuff that you spray on, wait four minutes and then rinse off. Simple, right? Well. The directions say to spray it on thick, but the problem is that it comes out in thick gobby spurts that could in no way be construed as “even”. By the time I got done gooping it all over I had a hand cramp. And then I was waiting. Four minutes goes by really slowly when you’re standing naked in the shower with no water running.

To pass the time I decided to read the directions one more time to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, and of course I totally had. What I had missed was this wonderful little sentence: “Test on a small patch of skin, wait four minutes, rinse off and if after twenty-four hours no redness or rash has occurred use on all parts of body.”

At this point, I was about three minutes in and ready to bash my head into the shower wall. How had I missed this? What did redness or a rash mean? Would it itch? Ugh!

With great angst, I waited another thirty seconds so, debating really over what might be the best course of action (if I rinsed off and there was no redness or rash I would have wasted all this stuff), I rinsed off and discovered to my annoyance that it didn’t really work at all, except on my arms. All that stress for nothing!

And of course I spent all of today waiting for the rash to hit. Luckily, the Hair Gods have spared me once again.

Readers!
Now Playing: Jack FM
My good friend Kristen, who has known me since Kindergarten with Mrs. Hubert (a woman no Kindergartener ever messed with) recently told me that this is more politics than me lately, and requested an update on life as I know it.

The problem is that when things are going well, I don’t complain much and lately things have been…well, pretty good. My job is both interesting and challenging, and while there are bad days there are lots of good days, too. I didn’t think I’d enjoy doing anything other than history but I guess I was wrong.

Also, the husband has been moving up in the world. This spring he scaled back his hours and started looking for something else and it turned out to be perfect timing. The State of New Jersey recruited him to work for them doing just about the same thing, still part time but with the option of increasing his hours.

We’re living on the second floor of a two-family house in a suburb of New York and while it’s kind of cramped we have no plans to move. We’ve been here four years and we pretty much love it. The attic is finished and that’s where we keep the desk and computer, a second TV with a VCR and PlayStation, and the futon. It’s like a mini dorm room so whenever we want to revert back to college we just hunker down up here and veg out. It’s pretty cool. Plus the rent is ridiculously good compared to other places around here. If and when the bubble bursts in the real estate market, that’s when we’ll scoop of a house, but for now things are fine.

The only bad thing is the parking situation. Because we’re renters we don’t actually get to use the driveway so we have to take our chances with what’s available on the street. That can bite.

So that’s it, I think. We work, we play, we hang out with friends (I saw Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants last weekend. Awww, yeah.), it’s a life.

Recently I started volunteering at a local nursing home (only one Sunday a month, I’m no hero) and holy crap are these people hilarious. I was assigned to a table to help two residents play bingo and the man was doing a pretty okay job but the woman was putting the chips (they use poker chips) on all of her squares. And I’m like, well, who am I to correct her? She wants to fill her card with chips, that’s totally her call. But I’m keeping an eye on her, too, because I don’t want her to suddenly accuse me of slacking off (in the back of my head I wondered if it was a test and at any moment she’d stand up, point her bony finger at me and shriek, “You have no idea what you’re doing!”). But she didn’t. What she did do when we made eye contact and I lifted my brows at her nearly filled card was cackle softly at me and wiggle her own eyebrows as if to say, “I’m doing something naughty! And nobody knows! Mwahahahahaha!”

I’ve been seeing some good movies lately, too. We watched the Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which wasn’t as good as The Royal Tennenbaums or Rushmore. Also, I was recently gravely disappointed by Clive Owen. We saw that movie King Arthur and since Clive is seriously dreamy I decided to give another of his movies a go. Beyond Borders was my pick because it was the only one I hadn’t already seen that seemed at all interesting. When it climaxed I screamed at the TV “WTF is that!” So you’ve been warned. Don’t watch if you want a happy ending.

One last thing. I finally let my dentist outfit me with a bite-guard and let me tell you, I’m red hott (quick question: when the hell did we start adding a ‘t’ to this word? When?!). It’s definitely mitigated the grinding of my teeth, but I can’t completely close my mouth so the drool factor has skyrocketed. Sexy!

Asshole Alert
Now Playing: Kill Bill Volume 1 Soundtrack
From the Democratic Underground's Top Ten Conservative Idiot's List

On Fox News, coverage of last week's terrorist bombings in London was, as you would expect, deplorable. Fox News anchors could barely contain their glee as news of the destruction filtered in. To Brit Hume, the death of dozens of Londoners meant one thing - money in the bank.

"My first thought when I heard," said Brit, live on air, "just on a personal basis, when I heard there had been this attack and I saw the futures this morning, which were really in the tank, I thought, 'Hmmm, time to buy.'"

Really? Funnily enough, my first thought when I heard what Brit Hume had to say was, "Hmmm, what an enormous asshole."

And the White House Continues its Silence
From Slate:
"We now know, courtesy of Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, what Karl Rove told Time's Matt Cooper. On July 11, 2003—three days before a Robert Novak column outed Bush administration critic Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA employee—Rove outed Plame to Cooper. Rove did not mention Plame by name, but that hardly matters (except possibly in a narrow legalistic sense, and I have serious doubts even about that). Merely saying that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA was enough to blow Valerie Plame's cover."

Two Assumptions: He did it, and he'll get away with it.
From the New York Times:
WASHINGTON, July 11 - Nearly two years after stating that any administration official found to have been involved in leaking the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer would be fired, and assuring that Karl Rove and other senior aides to President Bush had nothing to do with the disclosure, the White House on Monday refused to answer any questions about new evidence of Mr. Rove's role in the matter.

Rove a Traitor
Right now there's speculation over whether this is actually a crime or not, but I kind of think that if it isn't, it should be.

Rove a Traitor?
From the American Progress Action Fund:
Over the weekend, McLaughlin Group panelist Lawrence O'Donnell revealed (and Newsweek confirmed) that one of the PlameGate sources being protected by Time reporter Matt Cooper is none other than President Bush's senior adviser, the Mayberry Machiavelli himself, Karl Rove. Of course, we have known for some time that Rove played a leading role in the coordinated smear campaign against former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame, the outed CIA operative. (Shortly after Plame's identity was revealed, MSNBC's Chris Matthews famously told Wilson: "I just got off the phone with Karl Rove, who said your wife was fair game.") Yet the new revelations, confirmed by Rove's lawyer Robert Luskin, are important. Not only do they provide first-hand confirmation of Rove's role in the Plame case (contradicting previous claims from the White House), but they represent what O'Donnell calls "the first hole in the Rove two-year wall of silence about the case."

~~

Here's another article on the same thing. Now the real test will be to see if this gets any play on the news. Probably not, because let's be realistic. There's no such thing as the liberal media unless you're referring to Air America.

Angry with Sandra Day O?Connor
I can’t believe how pissed I am at Sandra Day O’Connor. She’s not stupid. She knows that Bush is probably going to appoint some idiot Christian conservative and then Rehnquist will be next and that’s the end of Choice and birth control and maybe even the living wage for women. When we as women still only make seventy-five cents on the dollar, this is no time for moderates to be leaving the Supreme Court. Did you hear me? Do you understand? Seventy-five cents on the dollar. That means that for every dollar that men make, women only make seventy-five cents for doing the same work.

It’s a sad, sad day for women’s rights. If you’d like to do something to help, you can sign this petition.

Do it for yourself, your mother, your aunts, your cousins, your girlfriend or wife. Do it for the women in your life.