Well, it looks like I was right about the next Supreme Court nominee. Makes me feel all squishy inside. Must be the bile.
TPMCafe || What It's Like: "The last thing this President wants is the first thing he needs: someone to slap his spoiled, pampered, trust-funded, plutocratic, never-worked-a-day-in-his-life cheek and make him face the reality of his foul-ups."
So Harriet's been withdrawn. That's good. Unfortunately, I suspect we're in for a bumpy ride with the next nominee. Here's why:
Democrats don't have much leverage at this point, so no matter how extreme the next nominee is (and I fully expect a doozy), they're going to have a tough time wringing information out of the nominee and/or White House without Republicans solidly on board with them. If the next nominee is as bad I fear, the only option for them will be a filibuster. If they resort to that, then we get the whole nuclear-option dance again, and god help us all.
Just implemented a fix on the transparent media web site for that freaking lunatic of a browser's (a.k.a., IE for Windows) inability to deal with alpha channels in png graphics properly. Of course, with it being 11:00 and me sitting on the loveseat with my PowerBook I don't actually know for sure whether it's working or not, but I guess I'll check on that tomorrow when I get to work. Maybe it'll be a bee dance day.
So after getting home and dealing with the squirrel remover, Chandra tells me there's a message on the machine that she can't decipher. Our machine's audio quality is not what it could be, so this is not that unusual. I take a listen and gather that Marie wants us to call her back, and that her number is something-oh-nainen, eight-two-nainen something something something. After listening a couple of times I figure out that the "nainens" are actually "niners." Maybe Marie's a Marine? So I do some digging on Google and figure out that the company is called "B and B Plastics," and they're out in California.
I called Marie, and said that I wasn't sure why she was calling but that I was returning her message. She said, "What's the name of your company?" I'm thinking, "How do you know I have a company? You called my home phone." I say, "Transparent Media." She responds with, "Do you have any plastic to sell?" Now at transparent media I do web development and the occasional short film or shareware, so there's no plastic anywhere. I tell her this, and she thanks me then hangs up. Weird.
It's been just over six months since I finished "A Civil Discussion," and while there are a log of festivals out there I could still submit it to, I think I'm ready to focus more on the next project. For those keeping score, I've submitted it to a total of ten festivals and it's been accepted into two (yes, that's counting the local Athens festival where competition is light-- particularly in animation). There are still two submissions outstanding, so my success ratio could be as high as 40%, or as low as 20%. I may even submit it to a few more fests if they catch my fancy but as I say it's time to focus my limited time on the next show.
So-- I'll try to post something every once in a while here to mark my progress. The new film is an order of magnitude (or two) more ambitious than "A Civil Discussion," so I anticipate lots of updates. This first image is of one of the character's legs. Sexy, yes? The initial idea was that they would be a wire mesh resembling fishnet, but it also needs to look solid enough to support the character's weight. Chandra's already said she wishes her legs looked like this (minus the transparency, I'm sure), which I take as a sign that I'm headed in the right direction.
From Juan Cole:
So let's get this straight. The Republicans roiled the country for two years and impeached Clinton for lying about sex under oath, but now all of a sudden perjury is a minor crime not worth bothering about. Remember that 1998 was a period when Clinton needed to focus on the threat of al-Qaeda, but he was being distracted by the Republican bulldogs and everything he did about al-Qaeda was dismissed as 'wag the dog.' Vicious partisan politics was put before the benefit of the nation. (Many of the major Republican figures who impeached Clinton had themselves had affairs and covered them up, and besides, who cared or cares?)
Law Breaking For the Rest of Us:: "Remember: politics is criminalized when criminals get into politics."
I'm not thrilled at the glee with which some bloggers are referring to the impending indictments as "Fitzmas," but it will be good to see people in the administration held responsible for their actions.
At any rate, we might want to keep this list of quotes handy over the next few weeks, and compare them against what the same people say when the announcements are made.
What's about 1.5 inches round, and has suspicious fluff coming out of it?
The hole in the side of our house.
Stupid, stupid woodpecker! It's not bad enough we've got a family of boarders living upstairs pooping in the insulation and having the nerve to refuse the tasty treats we're offering, now we've got some loopy redhead trying to bang its way into the house. In what way does our home look like a tree?
FAL.net - Horrton Hears a Heart
I buried him under the theedlewog bush
And jumped in a pool to rinse blood off my tush.
How smart I was, Sam! How sane was my plan!
So sure I'd be implicated by no man! -
It was then I stopped splashing. I heard a queer sound...
A faint tumpata-tump - but there's no one around!
Crony Jobs - Choice government careers for the taking. No experience necessary.
This looks like a great Christmas present, realism be damned.
If anyone is wondering what we've done to deserve the recent spate of hurricanes and earthquakes...it's probably for stuff like this:
With major companies and nations large and small adopting similar logic, the Arctic is undergoing nothing less than a great rush for virgin territory and natural resources worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Even before the polar ice began shrinking more each summer, countries were pushing into the frigid Barents Sea, lured by undersea oil and gas fields and emboldened by advances in technology. But now, as thinning ice stands to simplify construction of drilling rigs, exploration is likely to move even farther north.
Last year, scientists found tantalizing hints of oil in seabed samples just 200 miles from the North Pole. All told, one quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas resources lies in the Arctic, according to the United States Geological Survey.
There's something perverse about a species that screws up the planet with fossil fuels, and then embraces the destruction of said planet as an opportunity to dig up more fossil fuels.
Some kind of church art, courtesy of my (undoubtedly gifted) niece. Note the Van Gogh influence, sans absinthe.
Kung Fu Monkey: Lunch Discussions #145: The Crazification Factor
Is it me, or does boot-licker cum supreme court nominee look suspiciously like Grampa Munster?
I'd like to see brownie blame this on Louisiana:
The somewhat befuddled heroes of the tale will be truckers like Mark Kostinec, who was dropping a load of beef in Canton, Ohio, on Sept. 2 when his dispatcher called with an urgent government job: Pick up 20 tons of ice in Greenville, Pa., and take it to Carthage, Mo., a staging area for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Mr. Kostinec, 40, a driver for Universe Truck Lines of Omaha, was happy to help with the crisis. But at Carthage, instead of unloading, he was told to take his 2,000 bags of ice on to Montgomery, Ala.
After a day and a half in Montgomery, he was sent to Camp Shelby, in Mississippi. From there, on Sept. 8, he was waved onward to Selma, Ala. And after two days in Selma he was redirected to Emporia, Va., along with scores of other frustrated drivers who had been following similarly circuitous routes.
At Emporia, Mr. Kostinec sat for an entire week, his trailer burning fuel around the clock to keep the ice frozen, as FEMA officials studied whether supplies originally purchased for Hurricane Katrina might be used for Hurricane Ophelia. But in the end only 3 of about 150 ice trucks were sent to North Carolina, he said. So on Sept. 17, Mr. Kostinec headed to Fremont, Neb., where he unloaded his ice into a government-rented storage freezer the next day.
