Friday, January 03, 2014

Friday randomness.

Just some musings on a slow Friday at work.

Yes, I know it's old and has been floating all over the Internet forever.


And, yes, that's pretty much how I feel, despite the good work the present Pontiff has been doing shaming the shit out of the plutocrats. If you want a God to hug because it makes you a happier, gentler, kinder, more humane person? Good on you. You are part of a lovely, inconsequential majority. The relatively small minority of Bible- (or Koran-, or what-the-hell-ever-Buddhists-bash) bashing, snake-handling, sectarian-hating religious nutjobs out there are doing a terrific job of making you all look like credulous tools.

What the fuck, over?


We risked our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor...for this?

And yet the fuckin' Teatards are all pissed off about the wages paid to public schoolteachers.

[Facepalm]

................

One of the many things I love about living in the Northwest is our weather. Yes, the Black Months are gruesome (try spending weeks in the gray drizzling rain with temperatures that rise from a low of 44 Fahrenheit to a high of 46 and back and see how you like it...) but the rest of the year we enjoy some moments of aching beauty.


Winter mornings are often among them.

The combination of cold ground and cool are produces dense fog. The mist enfolds the land, softening the hard surfaces of civilization and returning us to those pre-Conquest dawns when the only noises were the slow dripping of the dark fir-boughs and the calling of the wild geese rising from the morning waters.

I love to emerge from the house to see my little street dim and cool with whorls of miniscule gray beads of vapor, hot coffee steaming in my hand and all the sounds of the city around me dampened and far away.

Makes for some lovely sunrises, too.


(To give credit where it's due, both the above images are from a wonderful little photoessay by Thomas Boyd from the World's Worst Newspaper. Even the deepest dungheap produces the occasional gem.)

I am so fucking totally going to name my next garage band "Chinese Donkey Meat".
(And I should add that the whole question of "Who put the fox in the can of delicious donkey meat?" does sort of highlight how foolish the notion that usually goes under the general heading of "small government".

China - and the U.S., and Brazil, and Australia, and about every other goddamn polity outside Andorra - is an immense, complex, insanely complex and interconnected industrial state. This isn't the fucking colonies circa 1789. We are, daily, constantly, confronted with things we don't control, made by people we cannot see and cannot influence, in places we do not know or understand, that can, if they are badly made, or poorly designed, or simply capable of being shipped, or stored, or used, in certain ways that will injure, maim, or kill us.

And, frankly, those that make them may not understand the actual dangers. Or, worse, may know and not care, counting on the distance from source to destination, the weakness of the intervening polity, or their own desperation and/or greed to shield them from the punishment appropriate for their negligence.

There is no other organization other than ourselves acting in concert (that is, as some sort of public corporation - which is more-or-less the same thing as an arm of government) that has the power to prevent this malfeasance or the power to punish it if it occurs.

It's really just that simple.)
The silly season for soccer here has been more-than-usually-silly. Especially with our women's soccer club, Thorns FC. After winning the league in 2013...


First we parted ways with our manager, Cindy Parlow Cone, who guided the team to championship in it's very first year of existence.

Then we added another U.S. Women's National Team player, Amber Brooks.

Now we're looking down the barrel of the first expansion draft gun next Friday; the new team in Houston gets to pluck a yet-unknown number of players from our team. And right now we, the supporters, have no idea how many players we can protect.

And speaking of footy, did I tell you I scored the awesome Cat Scarf?
Nitty Kitty seems unimpressed, having never had any balls to begin with. But I love this, perhaps the silliest soccer scarf I've ever come across.

And with that I really have to go clean out the equipment storage room. Back with some Friday jukebox in a bit.

2 comments:

Leon said...

Chief, fox meat adds that special something to plain old donkey meat.

Hey with a over a billion people, you can't get too picky on where the meat comes from.

FDChief said...

I gotta say, Leon, I was a little baffled by the whole tsuris; fox, donkey, WTF? Not to mention the stuff I've eaten; monkey, probably coatimundi (see the "Monkey Meat" post above this one), iguana, heaven knows what the hell is in MREs...

And apparently fox is no different than any other meat; presuming that the animal itself is healthy when killed and then the meat is clean there's no danger - it's not like getting mad cow disease from bad cow brains...

But I can see how Chinese consumers - at least those wealthy enough to shop at a WalMart (which has to be a boutique brand in China, given what I've seen of the run of Chinese food stores...) - are kind of fussy, given the large number of tainted-food problems turning up there...