Yeah. For D, that was the Eyeore costume. He picked dragon over pumpkin the next year, but now he's all opinionated....

The first year, Halloween is really for the parents anyway. Even last year Frances was more overwhelmed than anything else.

Yeah. My thinking was, "Cute! Her size! Cheap!"

As my only other idea was to stick her in gold lame for the visual pun of it, I think the lion's saved me from myself.

Aims, did MM go to work today? I don't know if his office is anywhere near the fires or not.

I don't think so, but he went to work.

I just had lunch with Thomash!!

I think I want to put these on my Mom-mobile (boxy Toyota Scion):

[link]

Reasons to limit my internet surfing to my LJ friends list and b.org:

The good thing is, I am a "the glass is half full" type of person. If the USA could rebuild Europe and Japan after WWII, we will rebuild the Gulf states, bigger and better than before. (Except maybe for New Orleans--the people there acted like ungrateful bastards--sorry, but they SHOT AT my cousin Sean who is a Deputy Sheriff from Lake Charles--sent in to help rescue them. They embarassed the rest of the state of Louisiana, but then, they always have. (Go look and see who has been the murder capital of the USA for the last 40 years...now you know why they act the way they do. It's not a race thing--it's just New Orleans.)

Meara: No plans for Halloween again. One day I should get a pink wig, make up all glam and be "Gwen Stefani tips her Tour Bus" though. My "Wire" love is vast and unseemly and approaches an addiction in its own right. It is becoming hard for me not to say "Mos def" in public. Mos def. I know more about Baltimore than my own town that I've lived in for thirty years. My livejournal background is Domino Sugars. I would think I have a problem only here I am among my people, you know. It's all in the game. Dana, have never even been to that city, but would be happy to misdemeanor homicide that dumb bitch for you. That must not be allowed.

Buy beluga caviar today, for tomorrow it shall be banned:

The United States Fish and Wildlife Service will begin banning imports of beluga caviar and other beluga products from the Caspian Sea on Friday, after caviar-exporting countries in the region failed to provide details of their plans to conserve the fish, which is listed internationally as a species threatened with extinction.

but would be happy to misdemeanor homicide that dumb bitch for you.

Oooh, I don't know what that is, but it sounds good.

Dana,

how's your blood pressure? A comment about Charles Murray's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Below is text from his actual piece:

Which brings us to today's Wall Street Journal atrocity. Penned by Charles Murray, he of The Bell Curve fame, it argues that what we're seeing post-Katrina isn't poverty but a once-again visible "underclass," a sort of shadow society of unsocialized black men with no appetite for work, no capacity to hold jobs, and no ability to be helped through conventional methods. They are, quite literally, savages, unable to function in the world the rest of us inhabit. They are, as he puts it, the "looters and the thugs," not to mention the "inert women doing nothing to help themselves or their children." And government attempts to craft helpful policy will fail because, after all, it doesn't matter if you give a gorilla a college loan, it's still a gorilla.

I've no idea where Murray got the idea that the New Orleans evacuees lacked jobs rather than cars and social skills rather than transportation -- from deep within his own prejudices, I'd guess. And where he got the concept that these men and women are somehow incapable of holding jobs and unwilling to send their children to school -- that's all similarly obscure. The absence of autos affects the social and the unsocialized alike; the folks you see on buses are often en route to jobs they hold, contra Murray, perfectly well.

But if his argument is flawed, its aim is clear. All those stories of urban anarchy were, to Murray, accurate, everyday manifestations of the Black people we'd hidden from sight. The normal explanation, that their assumed bad behavior was a reaction to extraordinary circumstance -- that was the wrong part. This had nothing to do with Katrina; it was part and parcel of an inferior race, an incorrigible culture.

Murray's actual piece

[...]

Other images show us the face of the hard problem: those of the looters and thugs, and those of inert women doing nothing to help themselves or their children. They are the underclass.

We in the better parts of town haven't had to deal with the underclass for many years, having successfully erected screens that keep them from troubling us. We no longer have to send our children to school with their children. Except in the most progressive cities, the homeless have been taken off the streets. And most importantly, we have dealt with crime. This has led to a curious paradox: falling crime and a growing underclass.

[...]

When Ronald Reagan took office, 0.9% of the population was under correctional supervision. That figure has continued to rise. When crime began to fall in 1992, it stood at 1.9%. In 2003 it was 2.4%. Crime has dropped, but criminality has continued to rise. [Huh?]

[...]

Criminality is the most extreme manifestation of the unsocialized young male. Another is the proportion of young males who choose not to work. Among black males ages 20-24, for example, the percentage who were not working or looking for work when the first numbers were gathered in 1954 was 9%. That figure grew during the 1960s and 1970s, stabilizing at around 20% during the 1980s. The proportion rose again, reaching 30% in 1999, a year when employers were frantically seeking workers for every level of job. The dropout rate among young white males is lower, but has been increasing faster than among blacks.

[...]

The government hasn't a clue. Versions of every program being proposed in the aftermath of Katrina have been tried before and evaluated. We already know that the programs are mismatched with the characteristics of the underclass. Job training? Unemployment in the underclass is not caused by lack of jobs or of job skills, but by the inability to get up every morning and go to work. A homesteading act? The lack of home ownership is not caused by the inability to save money from meager earnings, but because the concept of thrift is alien. You name it, we've tried it. It doesn't work with the underclass.

Timelies all!

I have no Halloween plans, hence I have no costume.(nor have I thought of one) I do need to hit the mall to see if there's anything wenchy I can get for OVFF.