The Amazon People Want Me to Remind You
February 9, 2010
. . . that the Amazon Kindle DX makes a terrific Valentine’s Day gift.
Done, and done.
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So, Where Is This?
February 9, 2010
I take it that this is a public square in Boston; it’s pretty. I’m curious about where it is. (And, sadly, less curious about whatever happened to Victoria Principal.)
I am not obsessed with Banacek; no, no, no.
And I do not keep my electronic desktop all messy. I don’t care for the accusation, either!
UPDATE: Does anyone know where I can get some good turtenecks? One can never have too many of those, to wear three months out of the year . . .
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Electronic Rat Traps Do Work.
February 9, 2010
They are just very expensive, and a bit more fuss to set up. But nothing beat the process of disposal: with a mouse trap you just open it, and empty into the trash. With a rat trap, you tilt it out into whatever bag you’re using as a burial shroud. (Rose gave me a ziplock, which made sense; I prefer opaque bags, though. Once I’ve evaluated the size of the thing, and estimated how long it took me to get to it from the stage of decomposition, I don’t want to look at it any more.)
I still like the price point on the snap-types, and the fact that you can throw the trap out along with the rodent. Though maneuvering them into place fully armed is even more of a challenge for a clumsy girl like me than it is with a mouse trap. At least, the stakes are higher: I don’t want to find out what happens if a rat trap snaps on my finger.
The final “wooden snap versus electronic shootout” will be decided when we find out whether having nabbed one rat in an electronic type will deter others from going into it; rats are such cautious, crafty creatures that the stench of their dead can keep them away. That would argue for the wooden snap-types. (When we lived in the hills my spouse managed to disinfect the traps he used to keep rats out of the attic, garage, basement, and water-heater closet—but he had a huge area to patrol, and a workshop to perform tasks like that in, so it made more sense.)
This time, the casualty was a full-sized, adult rat, as opposed to the youths we’ve been getting (a few of ‘em even in well-placed mouse traps, before I was sure whether the larger species had moved in for sure, or whether they had thoroughly taken over; if the rats are small enough, and hit squarely on the head, they’ll die in the small traps). The light that’s supposed to indicate “occupancy” wasn’t on, but there was no mistaking the tail coming out of the trap.
“Are you sure there’s a rat in there?” she asked me. “‘Cause I checked it a few days ago, and it was empty.”
“There is absolutely a rat in that little metal tunnel, unless the thing grew a tail itself.”
I just didn’t want to deal with it until we got back from dinner, and even then I wasn’t thrilled. Rose was happy that one was dead, but I felt like this might be a mere drop in the rodent-bucket—after all, she left the windows wide open all summer last summer, with no screens, over my vocal protests. These rodents have had months to get entrenched, and she won’t let me touch any of the clutter they are using as harborage.
So, we get back from dinner and we hang out until her back starts to hurt and she mentions that she needs to go to bed, soon, and I wince and remind her that I still have to empty the trap. And she says, “well, Joy—do you want me to do it?”
“No,” I respond. “But I want you to go in there with me and lend a little moral support me while I take care of it. This one is full-sized; it may not be quite as big as the ones up in the hills, but it’s the biggest one we’ve taken here so far.”
And so it was.
Some sources I’ve read suggest that rats breed all year ’round, and some say it’s primarily in the spring and fall.
All sources say that gestation is just under a month, and that litters range from 6-12 pups. Some sources put that upper range at 18.
Eighteen.
I’m not really being allowed to pursue this with the aggressiveness I’d prefer, and I’m further limited by the clutter problem and the need to protect the dog, but there are plenty of things I can do, at least in the rooms that are blocked off from dog-access.
And if spring is prime breeding season for rodents, I only have several more weeks.
“Remember,” my husband reminds me. “She won’t let you really attack the problem, so you really have to stay away from worrying about the results.”
And so I do, but it’s hard to detach sometimes.
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Jay’s Side of the Story: About that Letterman Promo with Oprah ‘n’ Me . . .
February 8, 2010
He massages it a bit, of course: we know that some of the network brass at NBC approved that SuperBowl commercial, so I’m skeptical about them expressing concerns to Jay after the filming. But it makes for a better story this way.
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“Does Your Conscience Bother You?”
February 8, 2010
Stacy on how the Tea Party movement may turn Alabama into an even redder red state:
A native of Trinidad who came to the United States with his parents when he was 8, Phillip could become the first black Republican elected to Congress from the Deep South since Reconstruction. His message of American exceptionalism and limited government draws enthusiastic applause at Tea Party events and has earned the endorsement of Mike Huckabee.
As with Barber’s primary contest with Roby in the 2nd District, however, Phillip finds himself contending against the GOP establishment. The NRCC is pledged to support Griffith, as a spokesman for the campaign committee explained last month: “Parker Griffith is now a member of the Republican conference, and by definition the NRCC is the political arm of the House political conference. He is in effect a member of the NRCC.”
Campaigns by political newcomers like Barber and Phillip show how energized Alabama Republicans are in 2010, according to the state party’s executive director. “We’ve got so many people who have never run for office before,” Ross said. “They’re saying, ‘I’ve got to step up and do my part.’”
Odom is also stepping up to do his part as a Tea Party activist. The 47-year-old Dothan trucker explained that, before being inspired by Fox News host Glenn Beck to join the movement, he hadn’t considered himself responsible for the failures of government.
Charles Johnson called to tell me that it is racist of Stacy to want black candidates in Alabama to run and win as part of the Party of Lincoln. When asked how that could be racist, he replied, “well—it’s complicated.”
I’m sure it is.
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Goodbye, John Murtha.
February 8, 2010
Philip Klein is ready to bury the Democrats’ version of healthcare “reform” along with Rep. Murtha. But I don’t think there’s any chance Pelosi could have pulled it off at this point, irrespective: the political climate has changed too much.
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Okay; I Can Cope.
February 8, 2010
I’m the only one who liked the SuperBowl Census ad.
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Ha! Palin Pokes the Left in the Eye Again.
February 8, 2010
She’s making fun of the palm-writing meme.
Of course, I’m a palm-writer from way back.
Via Insty.
UPDATE: Hi, mom and dad:
Joy with the Heaths.
UPDATE II: Andrea Mitchell is bummed out about it.
Cheer up, Andrea: it turns out that Palin’s palm-writing at the Tea Party Convention merely said “the ’s’ in ‘corps’ is silent.”
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Eight Days Until I Leave for D.C.
February 8, 2010
I’m flying out on the redeye a few days early, and I’ll be staying a few days late. And there still won’t be quite enough time . . .
In related news, Bank of Kev now has a blog! McKeever’s plan for world domination is rolling right along.
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Paul Lockhart Just Made The New York Times.
February 8, 2010
That’s kind of cool.
Read the column, which is pretty good—though it skimps just a bit on the specialness of prime numbers; I’ll have to go remind myself just what’s so fundamentally different about them versus ordinary odd numbers. (Hm. “Ordinary odd numbers.” How oxymoronic.)
Now go buy Paul’s book:
Paul is my second-favorite tall ginger in the entire world, by the way. (And Conan O’Brien comes in third.) I’d post pictures, but 1) he’d kill me, 2) I don’t have a scanner, and 3) all my photo prints were either lost by the Bad Person Who Loses Things in my household, or they were placed into storage by the Bad Person Who Puts Things In Storage.
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Dear New Orleans Fans:
February 8, 2010
Congratulations; now can we go back to spelling “go” G-O?
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George Will
February 8, 2010
On what the GOP should say “yes” to:
Some calamities — the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, Sept. 11 — have come like summer lightning, as bolts from the blue. The looming crisis of America’s Ponzi entitlement structure is different. Driven by the demographics of an aging population, its causes, timing and scope are known.
Funding entitlements — especially medical care and pensions for the elderly — requires reinvigorating the economy. Ryan’s map connects three destinations: economic vitality, diminished public debt, and health and retirement security.
Via Cafe Hayek.
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Yes.
February 7, 2010
By all means, prepare to stop.
Always.
Now, stop.
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How That Letterman-Winfrey-Leno Superbowl Spot Came Together.
February 7, 2010
I saw it live, and was blown away. Even The Spouse was impressed. And we were too startled to argue about the relative merits of Jay Leno vs. Conan O’Brien one more time: that is how good the commercial was.
UPDATE: Some context from 2007:
And the one that ran today:
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“Too Late To Apologize”
February 7, 2010
I’m the only one in the rightosphere who hasn’t run that video, probably because I only liked it, rather than loved it.
But here’s Sissy, who’s always worth reading. And she’s got the vid. Watch it.
Me? This is my favorite story of the Revolution. On years that I haven’t misplaced the DVD, I usually nag my husband into watching that; we usually take one or two episode every weekend in between Flag Day and the 4th of July. When I can’t put my hands on the DVD, we substitute Band of Brothers or on occasion The War of 1812.
(Okay: we can’t watch Band of Brothers any more, because the copy we were sent by the Television Academy “for your consideration” wore out. How does a DVD wear out? But it did.)
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Palm-Writing, Writ Large
February 7, 2010
Althouse has the scoop.
I have made lavish use of the palm-writing technique, both when I was a managing editor at a national publication, and when I worked as a wedding coordinator. (Except for my own—for that event, I managed to keep a pristine palm; I also took my watch off when the limo showed up late and it became apparent that the day was not going to unfold in a timely fashion. I made it through the entire day without losing my cool. Okay, I did get short with the florist, but that was it.)
But now it's different.
h/t: Insty.
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I Might Switch Over to Heroin; I Hear It’s Very Slimming.
February 7, 2010
My writing teacher sends this along:
I have taught in MFA programs for many years now, and I begin my first class of each semester by looking around the workshop table at my students’ eager faces and then telling them they are pursuing a degree that will entitle them to nothing. I don’t do this to be sadistic or because I want to be an unpopular professor; I tell them this because it’s the truth. They are embarking on a life in which apprenticeship doesn’t mean a cushy summer internship in an air-conditioned office but rather a solitary, poverty-inducing, soul-scorching voyage whose destination is unknown and unknowable.
If they were enrolled in medical school, in all likelihood they would wind up doctors. If in law school, better than even odds, they’d become lawyers. But writing school guarantees them little other than debt.
. . . . . . . .
The 5,000 students graduating each year from creative writing programs (not to mention the thousands more who attend literary festivals and conferences) do not include insecurity, rejection and disappointment in their plans. I see it in their faces: the almost evangelical belief in the possibility of the instant score. And why not? They are, after all, the product of a moment that doesn’t reward persistence, that doesn’t see the value in delaying recognition, that doesn’t trust in the process but only the outcome. As an acquaintance recently said to me: “So many crappy novels get published. Why not mine?”
The emphasis is on publishing, not on creating. On being a writer, not on writing itself. The publishing industry — always the nerdy distant cousin of the rest of media — has the same blockbuster-or-bust mentality of television networks and movie studios. There now exist only two possibilities: immediate and large-scale success, or none at all. There is no time to write in the cold, much less for 10 years.
. . . . . . . .
At the risk of sounding like I’m writing from my rocking chair, things were different when I started. My first three books sold, in combination, fewer than 15,000 copies in hardcover. My editor at the time told me there were 4,000 serious readers in America, and if I reached them, I was doing a good job. As naïve as this may sound, it never occurred to me that my modest sales record might one day spell the end of my career. I felt cared for, respected. I continued to be published, and eventually, my sales improved. I wrote a bestselling memoir, appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and published a subsequent novel that found a pretty wide readership. My timing has been good thus far — and lucky.
But in the last several years, I’ve watched friends and colleagues suddenly find themselves without publishers after having brought out many books. Writers now use words like “track” and “mid-list” and “brand” and “platform.” They tweet and blog and make Facebook friends in the time they used to spend writing. Authors who stumble can find themselves quickly in dire straits. How, under these conditions, can a writer take the risks required to create something original and resonant and true?
Perhaps there is a clue to be found near the end of Solotaroff’s essay: “Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer’s main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer’s main means of relating to otherness. Similarly, his wounded innocence turns into irony, his silliness into wit, his guilt into judgment, his oddness into originality, his perverseness into his stinger.”
The writer who has experienced this even for a moment becomes hooked on it and is willing to withstand the rest. Insecurity, rejection and disappointment are a price to pay, but those of us who have served our time in the frozen tundra will tell you that we’d do it all over again if we had to. And we do. Each time we sit down to create something, we are risking our whole selves. But when the result is the transformation of anger, disappointment, sorrow, self-pity, guilt, perverseness and wounded innocence into something deep and concrete and abiding — that is a personal and artistic triumph well worth the long and solitary trip.
Yeah. But since when has any artist been entitled to get along without a day job? Since never; that’s when.
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Cavanaugh on Weisberg
February 7, 2010
Tim makes the Slate editor his bitch.
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At the Old Homework Hotline . . .
February 7, 2010
kids need a little adult help—maybe even some supervision.
We should all head over there from time to time, and school ‘em in our Austrian perspective.
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“It’s Not Your Business Model That Sucks; It’s You That Sucks.”
February 6, 2010
Via Small Dead Animals, the always-wonderful Andrew Breitbart:
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