Happy birthday, a day late, to the man who gave us "Re: Your Brains"

The king of geeky soft-rock, Jonathan Coulton, turned 38 yesterday. Ordinarily, someone on LJ who has friended him would have been notified of this in time to wish him the old "hippo, birdie, two ewes" on schedule. However, he is apparently only accessing LJ through his own blog and the fan community page j_coulton, so I did not find out until this afternoon.

Therefore, I hereby apologize for the snafu and belatedly wish JoCo many more years of making us laugh (and occasionally creeping us out) with gems like "Skullcrusher Mountain," "Re: Your Brains," "Creepy Doll" and "The Future Soon." Hope your natal day was a blast.

A polite request to some of my fellow LJ addicts

Especially you LiveJournal newbies and you meme fans out there who just can't resist posting "100 things I've done" or "200 movies I've seen" or the like...you know who you are. (I'm not immune to long-list memes myself; scroll back through my calendar a year or two and you'll see.) Please don't misunderstand; I do enjoy reading all of your posts, or mostly all (this is why my friends page bears the heading "People I enjoy hearing from"). BUT...

You should remember that those of us who are on your friends list usually have friends lists of our own. And some of us have friends lists, and resulting friends pages, that are already verrrrrry long due to the quantity of friends, RSS feeds and communities we have chosen to include. (And weeding out no-longer-wanted ones, even monthly, will only get you so far in cutting down the length.) In the really hard-core cases (like, oh, say, moi), being off LJ as little as half a day can mean scrolling back through as many as 200 individual posts to catch up.

So if you feel the need or desire to post anything, and I mean ANYTHING, longer than about 2-4 short paragraphs on your page at one go, please use that handy-dandy LJ innovation known as the cut-tag to screen it so that you do not lengthen your friends' friends pages (and the time needed to read and/or scroll through them) unnecessarily. If you do not yet know what an LJ cut-tag is or how to use one, go here for a detailed explanation. (LJ's Rich Text Editor also contains a cut-tag button, just to the left of the Insert Table button.) I had this explained to me when I first started using LiveJournal, and I have found my longer posts much better received (and flame-free) when I use the cut-tag. Cut-tags are also very useful for reviews and comments on books, movies, TV shows and so forth, when such posts include spoilers for those who have not seen/read them as yet. (I try to keep my reviews spoiler-free, but when I can't I use the cut.)

Thank you for doing your part to conserve your fellow LJ users' websurfing time and bandwidth. That is all.

Leger's 3rd Law of Politics strikes again

One of my long-standing three most certain political laws is: "Low election turnout always gives the advantage to the noisy minority." This was demonstrated in California last month with the victory of Proposition 8, whose proponents were better able to mobilize their vote. But here in Georgia tonight, low turnout (barely a quarter of those who voted on 4 November) actually worked for the majority—the overwhelming conservative majority in this reddest of the red states that finally put paid to Democrat Jim Martin's hopes of unseating Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R) and giving our party a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

The Associated Press and the local NBC TV station just called the election for Chambliss with 85% of precincts having reported. Right-wingers are posting by the bushel on one station's website, exulting that "the balance of power" has been maintained ("At least maybe we won't become a full fledged socialist country in the next 4 years now!"). Posts lamenting the outcome are few and far between. Loath though I am to admit it, local newspaper pundit Jim Wooten may well be right in his recent assertion that "Georgians do not knowingly elect liberals to statewide office." (Of course, all the money poured into the state by at least four right-leaning political groups to air "issue advocacy ads" slamming Martin sure as hell didn't help.)

I can't say I'm surprised, but I am still pissed off. Unless "Shameless" gets nailed for election fraud (see previous post—one may hope, however faintly), the GOP can spend the next two years mulishly obstructing any progress our new President and Dem leadership in Congress hope to make, at least on Senate-specific things like confirmation hearing for appointees (appropriations bills, thank God and the Founding Fathers, are still the purview of the House, where Dem domination is more assured). One more incentive to finally get my skinny white Cajun ass outta this state full of right-wing yahoos (not that my own home state is much better) and go live with the Songbird in Africa.

And for those who are wondering: Law #2 is "If neither side is completely happy, it must be the right law/policy" and Law #1 is "No matter the candidate or the issue, everybody votes their pocketbook."