sorry if i've been kind of a pansy lately. too much work has turned my brain into a gooey gelatinous substance that lacks sufficient consistency to actually get pissed off. but after an evening and most of a day playing still more simcity 4, i'm feeling more like my normal self. and noticing that there's a lot that happened while i was too busy to pay attention to or rant about it. so enough of that happy horseshit. let's see what we can do here.
okay, both my readers know where i stand on religion. it ain't for me, but obviously everyone else is welcome to theirs. until of course, they decide to shove it in other peoples' faces. 'course, that happens every day, too, so it'd be kinda exhausting to get too pissed off about that. but now, now we have a truly egregious example of it, because it's not just any idiot. it's a judge. you know, someone capable of making rational, dispassionate, and wise decisions? but not this guy. this guy chooses to tell everyone who enters this public building wth a 5,000-lb statue that their religion is less right than his. and there are people whose asses are in his hands. and this guy's not any judge, he's one of his state's top judges. how can this guy be expected to rule on the inevitable nativity-scene-in-the-public-park question, among others? naturally, judges are not robots, they are human beings who do have opinions. but those who bring those outside opinions (no matter how heavily weighted) into the courtroom cannot be tolerated. and thousands of people support this idiot. makes me sick.
and of course, california. with all the hoopla over arnold, gary coleman, and larry flynt, let us not lose sight of the momentous event that got this all started. a rich republican, dissatisfied with the fact that a democrat (an apparently loathesome one, to be sure) won, fair and square, spent $1.5 million dollars setting plans in motion via petitions and tv ads to engineer a do-over. i don't care who's running, i don't care that gray davis is or isn't the spawn of satan, it doesn't fucking matter. the primary concern of the citizens of california should be to tighten up that loophole in their law. hell, if i'm the person that was elected, that'd be first on my agenda--otherwise, who's to say there's not going to be someone who spends the fat cash to recall me? the partisanship isn't the issue. schwarzenegger is probably, sad to say, an improvement on davis in some ways (except for his already reagan-esque forgetting of his meetings with kenny-boy lay of enron during the energy crisis of a few years ago), and does not seem like a bad guy. but you know what, if i were the biggest fan of his, i'd be disappointed in him. here he is, the fucking terminator, and he doesn't even have the balls to step up and try to win his rumored dream job fair and square. instead he's trying to sneak in via this chickenshit recall thing. come on, even stallone could do better, and he's dumb enough to be considering another 'rocky' movie. the whole thing is just embarrassing, and it's shaping up to be the second nauseating travesty of representative government in the past few years. this isn't a good trend.
not to imply that it was not in fact heartwarming and lovely and reminiscent of that cheesy scene in spider-man to see all the people in new york having a good time and helping each other out in the dark the other night, but contrary to what cnn's coverage implied, the blackout did happen elsewhere, too. and as much fun as it looked to sleep on a warm sidewalk in new york, the headlines are less warm and fuzzy elsewhere. cleveland, now that it has water again, will still have to boil it for a day or two longer. detroit still has its auto plants dark, costing milions of dollars. ibm's had its powerpc g5 production shut down upstate, even! to say nothing of what happened in toronto. according to these before and after pictures, toronto was completely dark. disappeared from the civilized world--kind of a bad thing for such a huge city. seriously, though, obviously the whole thing was resonant of what happened two years ago, and there's some added drama to what's going on in manhattan, i watched probably two or three hours worth of cnn on thursday night, partially for that reason, admittedly. but i maybe saw 90 seconds worth of footage from somewhere outside of the five boroughs. people live there too, nice people and lots of them, i'm sure, but the initial reporting of this event essentially ignored them completely. this is why people in 'flyover country' resent the coasts and their dominance of the media's attention.
anyway, i'm tired now. rant over.
