From my friends list, on yesterday's minor temblor out West

Copied verbatim from a comment on serendipitygirl's page:

>>""Earthquake!" - which, strangely, I look forward to experiencing myself."

You are stone fucking crazy. Seriously. Wanting the earth to move around under your feet, flinging you this way and the foundation of your building that way? Uh-uh. I don't think so. I'll stick with manageable things like tornadoes and massive hurricanes, thanks. At least they come with advance notice.

Congratulations, by the way. Though the yaks certainly had their hopes up.

Half of my own list seems to be posting about the quake, too; I look at it as good news that none of my friends were hurt or had any serious property damage. And having grown up in southwest Louisiana, I can definitely relate to dealing with massive hurricanes. But that yak thing at the end? Ya totally lost me there...

In honor of today being All Hallows' Eve

A repost from a couple months back, with a Happy Halloween/Samhain/Whatever wish for you. (Didn't bother carving a pumpkin, as Songbird isn't here to see it and I won't be home early enough to greet the kids trick-or-treating in my apartment complex anyhow.) Written in response to Jon Coulton's song, "Re: Your Brains."

( Re: Your Zombie Ass! )

The headline says it all

Courtesy of Gizmodo.com:
LimoTrack: For When A Stretch Hummer Is Just Not Deplorable Enough
Money quote: "There's no better way to say 'I have no taste' than riding to your wedding in this thing."
Not to mention "I don't give two hoots in hell about what I do to the environment, oil prices, traffic, other people's lawns, the air, the roads, etc."

Not one of liberalism's more shining moments

Let me be as clear as Waterford crystal on this: I loathe the views of neocon David Horowitz, as my Cajun daddy used to say, "with a purple passion." I consider him reactionary, racist, sexist, homophobic, Zionist (in the most negative connotation of that term) and a traitor to his once-liberal roots.

All of this being said, however, I must be among those to stand up and say that Mr. Horowitz's being shouted down and forced to abandon his scheduled speech at Emory University here last week (see story here) is a disgrace to the school, to its students, administrators and faculty and to liberals and progressives everywhere who claim to value freedom of speech. I wish to denounce this treatment of him in the strongest possible terms.

When we attempt to muzzle or drive away from the podium those with whom we disagree, we accomplish naught save to give ammunition to those who seek to condemn us as monsters and bullies who only support the First Amendment when it's applied to people and views we like. We make the other side's case against us for them when we show such fear of their ideas that we cannot even allow someone to utter them aloud in a public forum.

The way to deal with noxious political views is always—always—to rebut them with facts and intelligent thought, not to bludgeon their holders into silence. If we allow this to happen to them, it sets a terrible precedent that can later be used to do the same to us. Even for the American Nazis who marched in Skokie, IL, even for the Ku Klux Klan, even for the radicals Horowitz labels "Islamo-fascists," and yes, even for Horowitz himself, their freedom to speak is our freedom to speak. The true test of your commitment to that freedom is whether you are willing to grant it even to those whose opinions and proposals make your blood boil and your gorge rise. I stand with Mr. Horowitz—and Voltaire—on this one.