For the record: reggaeton puppets? Nowhere near a googlewhack.

Sorry to hear that. I can hardly imagine how stressful that would be.

It sucks! We've been lucky Matilda's daycare situation has been so stable. (knocks wood)

Emmett's first daycare provider closed after 7 months, on short notice. I was able to get him into my daycare at work which was cheap, but a pain to do the commute since I had to take him downtown with me everyday.

Then that situation imploded after a couple years (tears, recriminations, biting) and we shared a nanny. She proved to be unreliable (she tried to take Emmett on an unauthorized overnight trip to her grandmother's: "Oh, by the way, I'm in a different county and I'm keeping Emmett overnight. You don't mind right?" "I'm calling the police if you don't have him back to us within two hours.") so we just had an insane scramble for four months to bridge him to pre-school. Which was incredibly expensive and had an expensive aftercare bill on top of that.

But it was stable, and he had a lot of friends and fun, and he learned a lot and he wasn't coming home with two or three new bitemarks a day.

In sum: cherish your daycare provider! Finding new ones on short notice sucks incredible amounts of wad. Because if you don't have a daycare provider you can't go to work.

Farewell, Opus: [link]

sniff

Timelies all!

I am trapped under a cat, once again. (It's a good thing Nova's so cute, or she'd be mittens...)

Of course, that didn't prevent the Economist from being one of Bush's most enthusiastic apologists during most of his presidency. Wankers.

No they weren't. They supported the invasion of Iraq long after it was seemly to do so, but that isn't the same thing. Especially compared to US news sources, they've been very critical of the Bush presidency including the conduct of the Iraqi occupation, and they endorsed Kerry in 2004. In any case, I know of few serious publications that would start an article with "Few readers of The Economist, one would imagine, have seen a one-eyed dwarf with bat-like wings, pointed ears and sharpened talons. Even fewer are likely to have been sodomised by one." If that had been an actual comment on the Bush Presidency, it would have been perfect.

electoral-vote.com has Obama up 20 points since yesterday - I don't see how the debate tonight will change anything, unless the McCain camp thinks it has nothing to lose and takes some big risks.

I think the McCain camp has been running on that strategy for a while. There was that whole "I'm dropping everything to solve the financial crisis!" Hail Mary pass, the "I'm appointing the only person I could find who would be a worse President than the incumbent". But even before then, he was apparently putting his campaign's resources into the ads comparing Obama to Paris Hilton instead of (i.e. didn't have the money for both) building a network of offices to compete in the ground game. Now he's treating going negative in the same fashion. I really get the impression he has no patience for an incremental strategy. He thinks there's one big roll of the dice that will win this for him.

I really get the impression he has no patience for an incremental strategy. He thinks there's one big roll of the dice that will win this for him.

Sometimes you gotta roll the hard six.

Farewell, Opus

I'ma gonna go home and hug my stuffed Opus.

I've still got my Xmas Opus somewhere (he has reindeer horns strapped to his head!).

Farewell, Opus: [link]

The Sunday strip had been implying for a while now that Opus was not long for this (comic) world. I was worried. Poor li'l penguin.

I have two and a half hours before rehearsal. Should I take a nap or paint my nails?