Rayne Today

Oh pooh. I said I was going to try and post more often after opening this new blog and I've already fallen off the wagon. But I think it's part of the whole blogging experience. There are cycles of creativity and productivity and I've simply hit a low spot. A very low spot. A veritable sinkhole. Externally I'm in a bit of a rut right now, between things. I feel as if I'm waiting for a shoe to drop and I've absolutely no idea whose shoe it might be, let alone the size or style. It's easier to ride others' coattails; I love hanging at FireDogLake , so much easier to let Jane and ReddHedd do all the heavy lifting every day. But at some point I'm going to have to put my shoulder to the wheel and do something. I can feel the guilt building, nagging at me to do something more each day. It's also a weather-related lull. Spring is still more than a month away, the Lenten season only beginning tomorrow. The sun sets later each evening -- but I don'...

The Veep "accidentally" shoots a fellow hunter. From here on there is absolutely nothing good about this story. It stinks like curdled milk and three-day-old fish on a summer's day in Dallas. How do we even begin to count the ways in which this reeks? The 22-hour gap: WTF? There's absolutely no excuse for this, we can all agree on this point. But why? Was a key person in this story under the influence of a substance that would take a day to clear? Were they trying to get their stories straight? Heck, could they not come up with a story? Or was the victim not in the clear for that long? The "group" of hunters: Why did it take even longer than the 22-hour gap to identify the third hunter? Why is the media repeatedly using the word "group" to describe two people (Dick Cheney and Pamela Willemore)? The composition of the party: A divorcee ranch owner. An older man who does not appear to be married at this time. A woman sans spouse....

The eight-year-old brought a bug home last week, has been complaining of a runny nose, sore throat and a headache. He's been moody and tired, too. And now Mom has it. He was just starting to come around late this past week when he decided to be more affectionate than he has been. This should have been the tip-off that the virus was ready to move to fresh meat, having exhausted its welcome with its current host. The little guy laid a big, sloppy, wet, dog-like kiss on me. Bingo, viral load delivered. All that nagging about sneezing into his inner elbow and handwashing for naught. For all their minuteness, viruses are incredibly savvy and smarter than the average mother. Now who will be my object of viral tranmission, I mean, affection? Stay healthy and keep your distance, whereever you are. Heh.

Hey Salon Bloggers! Check out the new experimen t and see what you think. I've set up a meta-blog for us to use until Salon gets its act together about its new blog space (ostensibly before the end of the year, heh, not holding my breath). Dave Pollard , Mark Hoback , Paul Hinrichs , I've already sent you invitations to join as members of the meta-blog. Check your email boxes (probably in spam or bulkmail!) and see if you have them. Art Jacobson, I'll send you an email invite shortly, still checking out the comment problem you had. If you're a past or present Salon blogger and you want to join the meta-blog , leave me a note in comments along with current contact info. (Be sure to use caution posting email addy's so spambots don't pick it up.) I'm also going to rely on other Salon bloggers to spread the word, let others know about this. Hope to hear from you about this!

Nuts. I tried to post a rather long piece yesterday, attempting to create an expandable post so that only a lead-in appears on the main blog and the body is expanded only on selection of a link. I'm tripping over the auto-formatting that Blogger inserts into posts; it insists on embedding a begin-font tag all over the place, but no closing font tag. It's driving me nuts! I guess I'll have to try using a post template so that the text on all posts is the same unless indicated otherwise, to try and override the default fonting. Bear with me; you might see what looks like an old post appear between here and the previous post. But enough about me -- how are you?

DailyKos diarist judybrowni wrote a moving essay about the impact of Betty Friedan on her life; she talks about her mother's painful life and her own struggles through the women's movement. Quite literally "moving", this essay; I am now moved to think more deeply about the lives of the women in my family. My mother has always been a bit restless; she went into nursing, one of the only acceptable careers in the late 1950's for women. She came from a very small town in northern Michigan; there wasn't much opportunity to learn about the rest of the world or travel, simply not much see or do. I don't know if the restlessness I felt as a kid and still feel emanating from her were borne out of an isolation or conditions over which she had no control. Or was she simply hardwired that way? She pushed the boundaries in more than one way; she one of a very few (quite possibly the only one) who went on to college after high school from her small town. She met a man ...

It's been awfully quiet here in this new blog. I miss my Salon peeps stopping by whenever I posted in my old blog. Had a passing thought, though, while contemplating this new-found quietude: maybe the trolls won't find me here. [Sigh] There are tradeoffs for everything.

There's been so much lately to write about, but the cosmos conspires against me to keep me from speaking out. Desktop dying, blog software failing, laptop limping along, relearning new software... Perhaps it's a good thing that I haven't been able to speak, so to say. I'm furious; my outrage has no bounds. I can't even begin to put into words the anger I feel. What would I say that would be coherent? There's just much to be flat out pissed off about right now. What frustrates me and enrages me even more is the sleepwalking -- the torpor of the drug that is every day living in America, that has blinded people to the truth. Even my spouse, the man with whom I spoon every night under the fluffy down coverlet of our suburban middle-class bed, plods along every day pulled inexorably by the demands of his work and the life he's constructed around it. He gets the news in little bits and pieces, soundbites in the car between pop tunes and flashes on CNN in terminal ...

I'm recently migrated from Userland Radio; I used to have "categories", a method for posting content to subordinate pages that I could link on the front or splash page of my blog. How do I do this in Blogger? Any help would be appreciated!

Especially you, Matthew L*nh*rt... Actually, I'm picking on Matthew (Matt? do they call you Matt?) because I've seen some of his emails; there are others for whom this message is equally suited but whose emails I've not yet read. Dude, stop sending your f*cking personal emails from your work account. Really. If you worked for me I'd fire your *ss because you're too stupid to work at Enron. Let alone the amount of company time you piss away on personal emails. Gad, they're not even quality stuff, no conversations with friends about quantum physics or politics, just shallow fluffy stuff like pre- or post-vacation chatter. Shocked that somebody you don't even know read your emails? You shouldn't be. Remember back in 2001, that little thing that happened with your firm? The implosion after all the high mucky-mucks little book-cooking scheme fell apart? Yeah, that little thing. Well, the Feds did this other thing during the early phase of prosecution after En...

I'm sick of his windbaggery. Friedman's on The Today Show this morning, literally pontificating about the U.S. and its "addiction to oil"[TM] and the Middle East. Host Matt Lauer lets him go on and on, rambling, rambling, lets him exhaust his hot air without forcing him to make concrete points about oil and democracy and the U.S. role in Middle East politics. Gah. This *sshole apparently has no clue about his responsibility in relation to the current mess in the Middle East. It's idiots like him who were rah-rah about the Iraq War that encouraged this situation, and now he's making a buck off people who think he still has something relevant and prescient to say. Just like his book, The World is Flat -- jeepers, wow, globalization! -- Friedman acts as if he discovered this concept. I'm surprised he hasn't tried to trademark that term before the White House gets to it. I can only figure that companies like NBC's corporate owner, General El...