A very crunchy friend of mine just just shared a facebook picture from a group called "Living Off the Grid."

I just had a fit of giggles.

So there's an intermediary somewhere translating patchouli smoke signals into the code needed for JPG uploads?

My aprtment is about 50 yards from a train track, but fortunately it runs under an overpass rather than having a crossing that requires horn blowing.

Tea Party thinking is that anything that forces a small business owner--or any business owner--to do anything is UnAmurrican. And Socialistic. Whatever that means.

I've seen the off grid website. It's irritatingly smug.

I don't always root for the underdog. I root for my team. Sometimes they are the Jamaican sprinters, sometimes they are the Jamaican bobsledders.

Today is the last full day in the villa. To be honest, the non villains are tiresome. Not my family, who are here until two. Her university lecturer friends who should be leaving soon. I don't know them well, and I'm overdue breaking the migraine, and i can't relax. Last night i had to lock myself away, because they kept cranking up the volume. I couldn't get away soon enough from the shrieking and the celebrating. But it's celebrating, and it's not about me...but i can't sulk and ruin things. But it just hurts, and there's nowhere to run.

Hmm. Third world problems.

Third world problems.

::snickers:: Though, surely these days, Jamaica counts as second world?

Also, here's a timely article about Romneycare, both how it works (and it does) and how Romney is running away from the shining jewel of his one-term governorship:

[link]

What was the second world when Third World started being bandied about? Was the the Soviet bloc?

What the hell kind of messed-up studies told the NFL that this series of weird commercials with a guy who talks in a funny voice was just what they needed? I admit I'm probably not their ideal target audience, but those commercials make me want to stop watching.

Friends are asking for help. Their four year old wants to wear "rock opera clothes" and they don't know what that means.

because They hate our way of life and Want To Destroy Us.

We're just evolutionarily imprinted for there to be an Us v Them. Family to pack to settlement to city to state to country with religion and politics and skin color and anything else that can be differentiated and thus dominated thrown in for good measure. And I personally don't think it'd be such a huge problem if people weren't so damned sure that we were special, certainly very different than every other creature on the planet and, in America according to the rhetoric, Christian and thus good. Accept that the deeper parts of your brain are mostly worried about finding dinner, passing on your biological information and not becoming someone else's dinner. Or give up on this civilization thing. My third option is always that we could find alien life and make them the Them. That is pretty much the only scenario where I see people not making it a fight amongst other humans for turf.

My first house as a child was near the train tracks, and I still fun those sounds deeply soothing.

I find racetracks soothing for the same reason. I can always nap there if there's just a little bit of room to lie down. The buzz of the cars is nice.

What was the second world when Third World started being bandied about? Was the the Soviet bloc?

That's the way that we learned it.