Poop-oop-a-doop

I was hoofing it round the ‘hood yesterday morning, as I often do, & I came across something that wasn’t there earlier in the week. But it certainly caught my attention.

At first I thought it was a piece of paper some kid had dropped in the rancher driveway on the way home from the elementary school a couple hundred yards away. You know—bake sale notice or something.

(Although I suppose that stuff all goes out by email these days. Or Facebook updates. When I was a kid they used to pin those things to our shirts. Um.)

Anyway, it wasn’t. It was an attempt at threatening vigilante justice. Digital vigilante justice:

I have to say that I doubt it’s going to have much effect. But I like their spirit, & I like that it goes along with the criminal dog poop theme I established a couple of Fridays ago.

Clearly a universal problem. Why wasn’t it on the G8’s agenda?

Tottering into decrepitude

Are you feeling old? A research study by Engage Mutual insurance company in Britain has helpfully provided 50 indicators that you’re getting on.

Interesting about the sherry drinking—is that any sherry? & the face cream/anti-aging products. In California women (& probably men, too, now that I think of it) buy that stuff, because once you get your first wrinkle you start becoming invisible.

& I don’t know about always driving in the slow lane. I’ve noticed a lot of the silver-haired set around here not in the slow lane…but going at 50mph & oblivious of cars whizzing past them on either side.

As for falling asleep in front of the TV—well, I can’t focus on most of what’s broadcast long enough to fall asleep.

A Guardian piece takes the analysis further. I like his elegy on the Stone Roses. But I’m a little uneasy that I actually got all his poetry references.

If I learned them in high school, does that mitigate categorizing my age?

Masturbating fetuses? Really?

Okay, every time you think our congressmorons have reached the absolute pinnacle of ignorant buffoonery, you find out they’ve only got to the base camp & still have 3000 more feet to climb.

I am, of course, referring today to Rep. Michael Burgess, who is, of course, both a Republican & a Texan.

As part of the GOP’s never-ending war on anything that’s not white, male & possessed of a value system from the 1950s, Burgess was speaking—in the same chamber that once heard the reasoned arguments of Henry Clay, Thaddeus Stevens, Sam Rayburn & Tip O’Neill—in support of yet another bill to eat away at Roe v. Wade. This one would ban abortions at 20 weeks into the gestation period.

& what Burgess said was, "Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful. They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to think that they could feel pain?"

Here are my questions:

As a Republican & a Texan (& presumably a fundamentalist Christian, although frankly I can’t be arsed to look it up), I wonder if Burgess doesn’t feel a little bit conflicted about the allegedly masturbating fetuses? Because I’m pretty sure he’d be one of the ones to tell teen-aged boys to keep their hands out of their pants.

He’s been a practicing OB-GYN. Does he really think only male fetuses put their hands between their legs? Or are those the only ones he bothered to look at?

He’s been a practicing OB-GYN. What’s up with him disregarding all the studies refuting the notion that fetuses feel pain at that stage?

& finally, he’s been a practicing OB-GYN. Who the hell would want to have him anywhere near her lady parts?

Recruiters 34

This came into the queue of the email address I use for Dice.com a while ago:

I can’t even think how even a data mining algorithm could have scanned my CV and come up with a match for a clinical trial manager.

There’s really no point in me commenting on any humanoids that might have been involved in the process, because I’m guessing that they spent even less time on my details than the machine did.

Gratitude Monday: Laughter & tears

This Gratitude Monday I’m grateful that there are things that make me cry, and that I still have tears to shed.

I’m grateful there are friends who remind me that I used to laugh, and who look forward to hearing me do so again.

Because, let me just say that life without either laughter or tears is not really worth living.