Natter 34: Freak With No Name
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
Except for the urban Northeast -- Boston area, suburbs (but not city) of New York, Baltimore area, okay maybe Philadelphia area although I have spent exactly no time there -- the Bay Area is the only place in the US I can really imagine myself living. Like, Arizona is pretty, but it's a different galaxy from anything I know.
(I don't think I could handle New York. Once, I drove from DC to Brooklyn -- across Manhattan -- and then on to Boston in one long moving day, and the only thing that freaked me out about that day was driving and driving and driving out of Brooklyn, and never getting out.)
(Okay, we did get out eventually, but the tightly-spaced, no-trees, mashed-together-falling-apart 3-story buildings made it feel like I was going in circles.)
Of course, it helps that I was introduced to the Bay Area by a Massachusetts expatriate, and 90% of the people I know who live there are immigrants to there. They want to live there, you know? And don't just live there because they haven't thought about living someplace else.
The Texas GOP Party Platform is an amazing document.
Dude, the Republicans here won't even consider the bill offering life without parole as an option for punishing criminals (this bill is by a Dem, incidentally). That's right; the state with the highest death penalty rate in the US (and one of the highest in the world) doesn't allow juries to consider life without parole as an option for punishment of criminals. It's kill 'em or let 'em move in next door to your daughter when they get out.
One of the amazing thing about working with the TX Republicans up-close and personal is that so few of them are moderate. You'd think, with so many of them, statistics would hold that more than a tiny handful would be considered moderate Republicans, but the vast majority of them are from the more extreme side of the party, so extreme that it takes backroom dealings to merely, for instance, fund a program providing drugs to children with HIV.
Having written this, I'm struck by a sudden desire to change my online name.
Kansas City is a pretty nice place, and relatively cheap as well.
I'll have you know that research concerning the sexual habits of tree frogs is vital to our country's interstate highways.
Actually, that'd be a fairly easy connection to make. Environmental review, and all that. It might have to be an endangered tree frog, though.
Wow, Hayden, yours are weirder than ours...only just.
( Which is partially why I look at ads for other places and think "Three meals is just a guideline, right?")
It might have to be an endangered tree frog, though.
Living on an interstate sounds like a pretty endangering lifestyle to me.
"In the 1950s someone said that the undoing of the Catholic church in the 20th century wouldn't come from Marxism but from Buddhism. They were right."
To be honest, even if he didn't use the word enemy, the message that another religion is going to end the Catholic church, when that religion hasn't done anything but be, seems to be the same thing, again- to me.
The "enemy" rhetoric seemed much worse to me. Without context, I can't speculate that this is about anything other than the ideologies, not people.
It may be otherwise. I couldn't find a full translation of the article online. My searches seemed to hit on it, in some larger context some issues the church administration must be having with priests assigned to areas where Buddhism is the ideology of the majority.
From what I understand about Catholicism and Buddhism, some of the fundamentals of the two ideas are worlds apart. If Catholic Priests are importing Buddhism into their theology, it would change the actual stuff of orthodox Catholicism. The reverse would be true, as well. And, if that's the issue Ratzinger was addressing (priests incorporating doctrine that is ideologically opposed to Catholicism), Ratzinger's "undoing" comment is probably aimed at his own, not at Buddhists who are going along, minding their own business.
I don't think my uncle was prepared for CA. He was transfered there and it wasn't a first choice for him. I don't think he had any idea of what the cost of housing would be or what housing would be like. Sunday he kept going on about his first apartment -- how tiny it was, how expensive it was, it was on the fourth floor (and no elevator!) -- this was a place he had to himself. It was after that he had to adjust to the idea of having roommates and sharing housing.
Unfortunatly around here the mentality for sharing housing and public transportation seems to be that it's only for students or poor people. The man who just left as head of the city bus system was rather proud of the fact that there were basically no changes in the 15 yrs he'd been there.
There's plenty more where that came from, Erika. We have a bill to ban nudist youth camps, for instance.
Certainly, bunnies, deer and woodchucks are in interstate danger. Luckily, they breed like -- like bunnies, deer and woodchucks, and are not altogether missed. Unluckily, not missing a deer can be a dangerous proposition for those of us on the interstate.
