Well, it’s my turn to fill in for Doug, and no, I have no idea why he and John so kindly gave me the keys to the place either. And yes, I can think of ten other people that deserve it more than I do too, but I’ve often been luckier than I probably deserve and as the least successful early adopter of this blogging thing, I certainly appreciate the encouragement.
Since it’s a holiday and with apologies to Anne Laurie for stepping on her meme, I’m starting with a shameless attempt to ingratiate myself to the Balloon Juicers with a pet memoriam for Phoebe.
Phoebe was my parents’ cat. She died tragically in some kind of mysterious seizure right before their eyes. No one knows what happened. I was crushed with grief. Still am. Of the three they had, she was “my” cat. Pickles and Jack like me well enough, but Phoebe really loved me.
All three were rescue cats. In fact, my Dad and Mom are a two man cat rescue league. Stray cats find them like hobos with a secret mark on their gate. Over the years, they’ve literally rescued dozens. Some few became house cats. Some they find other homes for. The ones that are too feral, they catch, have them neutered and return them to the wild.
Phoebe has been gone for two years now. She rests under the lilies they planted on her grave. And this month two new recruits arrived. CeeCee, which stands for Cardboard Cat because she was so thin when she showed up, will probably never make it indoors. Too skittish. However, despite my Mom’s adamant denials, I’m predicting the latest arrival, who has yet to be named, eventually will. Probably sooner than later.
General Stuck
Welcome Libby. I’d say you earned the gig on FP ing at BJ.
I can report a near disaster last night that is cat related. The room where I have the computer, I usually keep the window wide open during the summer, and last night a cat jumped onto the window sill and was fixing to burgle the joint, and I shood the little bandit just in time. With the door closed and a snoozing Charlie dog on the end of the bed, it all could have gone south.
Charlie popped up and growled a little, looked around with a WTF?, and went back to snoozing. It would have been interesting if the cat had made it inside.
gogol's wife
To Gen. Stuck #1: Well, I had the opposite experience about 12 years ago. I couldn’t sleep at 3:00 AM and got up and was reading in the living room (first-floor apartment). Someone must have thought no one was home and had left the lights on, so they pulled up a garden chair to the window and were getting ready to climb in. My two cats Buddy and Freddy immediately jumped up into the window and scared him/her off. Watch-cats extraordinaire.
SIA
Welcome Libby! Now all you need to do is start a flame war with Obots v. Firebaggers and you will be assimilated!
Libby Spencer
Yikes and thanks for the welcome.
General Stuck
LOL, indeed
Roger Moore
Your shameless attempt to ingratiate yourself is a success. Welcome to the blog. Just don’t put your feet on the sofa and everything should be fine.
Violet
Welcome to the front page, Libby. Phoebe was a really pretty kitty.
Southern Beale
Libby!!!!!
Umm … because you’re awesome??
{ hugs }
In other news, there’s a “Firefly” marathon on the Science Channel. I’m so excited.
Libby Spencer
Thanks everybody. Appreciate the kind encouragement. Sadly, I’m on the road today and won’t have internet until tonight. Looking forward to checking in later.
Creature
Great to see you on the front page!
Valdivia
Welcome! So sorry about Phoebe, she looks adorable.
SiubhanDuinne
Welcome, Libby Spencer! Glad to see you on the BJFP.
Phoebe was beautiful. Thanks for letting us see her.
merrinc
Welcome, Libby. I share my life and household with a female gray & white tuxedo kitteh so I know quite well how special they are.
SIA
Testing. Why am I in mod? FYWP
ETA Abd my comment @ #3 has disappeared. Oh well, Libby welccome!
JPL
Welcome Libby and Happy 4th.
I finished my yard work, well not finished but somehow I disturbed a bees nest. I stripped out back where my clothes still lay in a pile and I’m donating them to the bees. I have several stings which I covered with calamine lotion and took some benadryl after a cold shower. Is it 5 o’clock yet?
burnspbesq
@JPL:
No, it’s not 5:00 yet, but by the good graces of Lord Tunch, the drinking lamp is lit all day today.
burnspbesq
Happy Fourth, y’all.
Snarkworth
Welcome, Libby!
I am down to my last of four cats, a wizened barn cat who is probably close to 20 (not sure because she came with the place when we bought it). She has a sort of crib in the basement for night time, and I carry her out to the porch during the day.
JPL
Tonight is the night that brings joy to all pet owners who live to close to the local fireworks. The dog runs around in a manic behavior and the cat just hisses.
WereBear
Never to late to remember a beloved kitty.
Cats do seem to know a sucker (I mean a kind-hearted kitty lover!) from miles away. They probably have grasped something about string theory that still eludes us.
This is something I muse upon now and then:
Cats do not obey the laws of physics
Montysano
Hey folks, I gotta great idea! It’s blistering hot here in the Deep South. Let’s build a fire and stand over it!
Happy 4th everyone.
Roger Moore
@WereBear:
That would explain their great delight in playing with string whenever possible. As an alternative, you might consider Darwinian selection. There’s a strong selective pressure for cats to be able to identify friendly humans. Ones who have this ability get free food, shelter, and medical care, which is a huge selective advantage. It’s only recently in an evolutionary sense that those advantages have become a reproductive dead end due to surgical sterilization.
Jennifer
My kitty continues her celebration of summer by bringing me dead things. Last night was another mousie, bringing her 2-week running total to 3.
OT but on topic for the 4th: shameless blogwhore. I’ve reposted my Independence Day post from last year, since IMHO it’s the best blog post I’ve ever written and the Gateway Dumbshit made it topical again.
burnspbesq
This is comical on several levels.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/meast/07/03/iran.us.prosecution/
burnspbesq
Some patriotic citizen of Texas needs to file a petition in the appropriate court to have Ron Paul committed to an institution that can help him with his mental disorders.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/28/news/economy/ron_paul_bankruptcy/index.htm
Any volunteers?
arguingwithsignposts
Music tip: the itunes festival is happening all month in london. There’s an ipad app where you can watch archived and live shows too. I believe you can also watch free on itunes.
jwb
Frank Rich decides to make his debut at NY Magazine with a long piece in full concern troll mode.
arguingwithsignposts
@burns: ron paul knows about national finances becaus he slept at a holiday inn express last night. With his son, the constitutional scholar rand.
gogol's wife
jwb #26: God, I wish I hadn’t clicked on that. I was really enjoying not reading him in the Times. But they have a new Frank (Bruni), who complains about having to hear about the Obama kids. It was okay when it was Barbara and Jenna, I guess.
burnspbesq
Although I have lived in SoCal for 23 of the last 25 years, I grew up in Jersey, and will always be a 201-fa-life Jersey guy. So I feel like I have a dog in this fight.
http://blog.nj.com/njv_tom_moran/2011/07/democrats_cry_foul_at_gov_chri.html
It’s unfortunate that the New Jersey Constitution doesn’t allow for recall of a sitting governor. Perhaps the Legislature could look into an amendment. Because two more years of Christie could be pretty awful.
burnspbesq
@jwb:
Apparently Rich has never heard of Raj Rajaratnam. And has forgotten about the $500-million-plus that Goldman paid to settle with the SEC. And doesn’t understand that it takes time to build cases. Oh, well …
jwb
@gogol’s wife: I liked his Times pieces even when I thought they were wrongheaded because they almost always had these marvelous epic curves to them. It worked in the form of the longish ed-op columns that he wrote. Not so much in this long form essay, however.
@burnspbesq: I thought it was interesting that Geitner is cast as the villain here. I’ve always taken Summers as the villain, and I still see no reason to change that opinion despite (indeed because of) Summers’ recent attempts to squirm out of having given Obama bad advice about the stimulus. Knowing what I know about Obama it makes far more sense that he would be overly deferential to the former president of Harvard than to a bureaucrat like Geitner.
Maude
burns
And Christie went on vacation for two weeks without answering any questions.
I wonder if he could be declared incompetent.
burnspbesq
@jwb:
I think I’m kinda with Krugman in thinking that the problem is with the politicians, not the economists.
I certainly think that Roemer and Bernanke, the academics-turned-policymakers who are known for their scholarship about the Great Depression, knew that far more stimulus was needed than what we actually got. And I think that if Obama had come out of the box asking for $1.5 trillion skewed heavily toward expenditures, we would have ended up with more than the $700 billion that has turned out to be inadequate. It’s hard for me to imagine Rahm backing down from that fight.
So when I look for a scapegoat, my eyes fall on Axelrod.
Jinx
If you remember it was 900 million until Ben Nelson and Olympia Snowe decided to whack away 200 million-which was to go to the states for jobs and unemployment. That would be jobs for teachers, cops, fire etc. and remeber, we didn’t have 60 votes without those two.
Valdivia
@burns re Christie, but apparently he is the bestest governor in the US using the power of his office, according to the blowjob published today in the NYT in the guise of an article…
http://politicalwire.com/archives/2011/07/04/christie_maintains_his_momentum.html
no matter that his poll numbers are sinking and people don’t approve, he has momentum!
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
unanswered question: does doug j dougie?
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
unanswered question: does doug j dougie?
J
Welcome to the front page, and thanks for posting the lovely photo of Phoebe and sharing the memories. So sorry to hear about sudden and tragic end. Made me give my shelter rescue kitty Nola an extra snuggle and wish for good health.
Jinx
Correction to the above post. It was Arlen Specter, Olympia Snow, Susan Collins and Ben Nelson. And it was originally 900 billion.
See this article from the time of the passage:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid faced a different task — finding enough GOP moderates to give him the 60 votes needed to surmount a variety of procedural hurdles. To do that, he and the White House agreed to trim billions in spending from the original $820 billion House-passed bill, enough to obtain the backing of GOP Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.
Frenzied bargaining
As the final compromise took shape in a frenzied round of bargaining earlier this week, it was trimmed again to hold the support of the moderates, whose opposition to a new program for federal school construction caused anger among House Democrats.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29179041/ns/politics-capitol_hill/t/dems-power-stimulus-bill-through-congress/
burnspbesq
@Fucen:
If he doesn’t, he could take lessons from a kid named Myles Jones (Dougie at approximately 1:46 in the linked video).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scj0-_Sw9JM
It was pretty funny. Good that he got that out of his system before he gets to Duke. I don’t think Coach Danowski would be a big fan.
Roger Moore
@burnspbesq:
I think there was some interaction between the economics and the politics on that point. The economists underestimated how bad the situation was- remember that Obama’s economics team predicted that unemployment would peak under 10% even without a stimulus- which made it hard to demand as large a stimulus as we really needed. It would have been a lot easier to ask for $1 trillion plus if the prediction had been for 12-13% unemployment.
ABL
Welcome to the jungle!
Head Bulshytt Talker in Chief of the Temple of Libertarianism(superluminar)
Just read this in the comments on a British wingnut site, and well…they’re not any smarter over here…
In the 1980’s the top rate of tax inherited from Gordon Brown’s predecessor James Callaghan was 83% (for every £1.00 I earn I have to give .83p to the government for the less numerate amongst us)
JCT
@Valdivia #35
That NYT piece pissed me off.
But, hey, given that momentum = mass x velocity, maybe it’s hard to argue with the Times on this one.
Just imagine how much MORE momentum Christie could achieve should he fall off the GWB or fall out of his helicopter. One can only wish.
And welcome, Libby.
Valdivia
@ JCT
the thing is that if a democrat were doing anything like this in the other direction the articles would be about overreach n’est-ce pas?
now I am not going to wish accidents on anybody, ahem, but yeah, that GWB sounds about right…
WereBear
This is from the 4th of July post on Fred Clark’s blog. (If you ever want to understand what Christianity should be, that’s a place to go.)
One paragraph shows that even in 1852, the same tricks were trying to be played:
It’s a wonderful speech. Go read the whole thing.
Martin
Elections have consequences. Maybe the people will someday figure that out.
Yutsano
Elections have even starker consequences when one does NOT vote as well, which is even more germane.
Head Bulshytt Talker in Chief of the Temple of Libertarianism(superluminar)
You are expecting airborne porcines at your place?
Head Bulshytt Talker in Chief of the Temple of Libertarianism(superluminar)
@Yutsano
No no no!
Nobama is just the same as Christie! Why bother voting?
I’d add some dots, but there’s not much point
.
.
Martin
Well, we’re reliably voting the Rs out, so it is possible.
Mark S.
This is pretty geeky, but it’s something besides GLOBAL FINANCIAL ARMAGEDDON NEXT MONTH! A mathematician wants us to stop using pi and start using tau, which is 2pi. I understand some of his arguments, but isn’t the area of a circle pi X r^2? You’d have to do 1/2 tau X r^2, which is less elegant (since that seems to be the guy’s main objection to pi).
Eh, I never really liked geometry anyway. Back to fretting about GLOBAL FINANCIAL ARMAGEDDON NEXT MONTH!
ETA: That was some interesting formatting. It actually looks better than I thought it would.
Yutsano
Porco Rosso we hardly knew ye.
jwb
@burnspbesq: Axelrod would make a much better villain than Geitner in Rich’s tale. Seriously, I’d love to hate Geitner, whom I do not like at all, but he just doesn’t strike me as the guy with disproportionate influence in the administration, and this would have especially been true in the early days of the administration when most of the major miscalculations were made. (And I don’t know many folks, even Obots, who think that the early dealings with the stimulus and the malfeasance in the financial sector were handled very adeptly.)
Dr. Morpheus
No Mark, read the article again, circumference is 2*pi*r^2, hence why they’re arguing for tau.
harlana
Valdivia: don’t know if I can stomach the article, but that is indeed the meme being pounded into the soft, pliable brains of the masses until they start to believe it, like the meme that government spending on social programs has created major unemployment and all the other miseries we suffer today.
Mark S.
Dr. Morpheus,
No, it’s 2*pi*r, or pi*d. Area is pi*r^2.
harlana
Wow, seems like a lot of people thought these republican governors were going to give them all a pony, and, woops, didn’t quite work out that way and now they’re all disenchanted, awww.
burnspbesq
Woo-Hoo! The Un-Handy Man successfully installs a new venetian blind in the home office.
Said blind was purchased in August 2009. In addition to being The Un-Handy Man, I am also a world-class procrastinator.
Head Bulshytt Talker in Chief of the Temple of Libertarianism(superluminar)
Porco Rosso is awesome (as are all his films), he should primary the President!
@harlana
Shame if youre the large minority of people who didn’t vote for the assholes though.
burnspbesq
@ harlana:
Well, they gave us part of the pony.
Corner Stone
There is absolutely nothing I enjoy more than a good pi fight.
burnspbesq
@ Corner Stone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AOeSrLCD-U&NR=1
Head Bulshytt Talker in Chief of the Temple of Libertarianism(superluminar)
@CS
You’re totally getting the pi filter for that appalling pun.
gbear
Worst patriotic song ever (Via Wonkette, of course):
I saw Jesus Waving The Stars And Stripes
SiubhanDuinne
O/T but holy shit, just heard about the Twitter hacking of Fox news this morning and am sick. Not at the idea of hacking Faux but the content the hackers decided to send out.
Jesus on a Popsicle stick, folks — not even as a joke. Just DON’T.
Corner Stone
The fucked up part about that hack – what percentage of their viewership did a Tiger Woods fist pump in exultation?
Which is to say, it’s 100% fucked up. But you know there was some even sicker shit going on in some quarters.
Amir_Khalid
@gbear #65:
I made the mistake of listening to that God-awful song. I found myself needing this for an antidote.
FlipYrWhig
Re: Geithner’s influence, IIRC Geithner’s parents knew Obama’s mother. I wonder if Obama may trust Geithner as an objective Numbers Guy because he’s not an operative: he never was part of the Obama circle, or the Democratic party circle for that matter. He’s like the accountant character in The Untouchables.
Southern Beale
Shame, shame, shame. Wake up, America.
MikeJ
Stupid thing to tweet. Had they tweeted “morning joe eats cocks” people would have laughed it off and tut tutted about morons using bad passwords. Now there’s something the Secret Service can possibly see as a threat.
jwb
FlipyYrWhig: ok, if you give me that sort of back story, I might be willing to buy it. But Rich didn’t do that. It’s just Geithner is the Wall Street mole somehow managing to poison Obama’s mind.
Southern Beale
Oh gross. Nothing is more dangerous than the “God loves us more than everyone else” message of the clueless Christian Nationalist brigade. It’s so un-Biblical too.
FlipYrWhig
@ jwb: The connections between Geithner and “Wall Street” have always been overblown. He literally has never worked on Wall Street. It comes from early muckraking about how as head of the NY Fed he supposedly was too cozy with the big I-banks. But even looking at it in the worst possible light, he’s not a Wall Street Guy in the way you’d think such a characterization would work.
Southern Beale
So, trying to bone up on my pop culture … is “Firefly” considered “steampunk”?
Head Bulshytt Talker in Chief of the Temple of Libertarianism(superluminar)
Oh, and happy Independence Day, traitors!*
*Nah you’re ok; I support it. Wait…does that make me a traitor? Ahh, who cares…
MikeJ
I would say no, because in the places where they use tech, they have high tech. Low tech is just more commonly used as a way to hide from the government.
The steampunk aesthetic is based on high tech uses of low tech materials, but the materials, while low tech, are presumed to be the highest tech available.
This of course is just my reading of it. YMMV.
WereBear
I consider Firefly part of the great “wagon train to the stars” tradition of Star Trek.
Of course, we’re talking revisionist Western.
jwb
FlipYrWhig: Sure, but without Geithner being the mole of Wall Street, Rich’s essay really doesn’t work. At some level, Rich is examining a perception problem, so he might claim it doesn’t matter. But I just don’t see that Rich has really advanced anything, except his own hand-wringing.
Yutsano
This qualifies more as steampunk, though in the end it’s more of a mixed bag.
The series itself is pretty awesome too, but that was the first example of the genre that popped into my head.
Mnemosyne
I think that something like The Rocketeer is closer to steampunk than “Firefly.” Or if you saw Robert Downey Jr. version of Sherlock Holmes, that had steampunk elements in it like the giant death machine.
Steampunk is high technology showing up in low-tech eras, not the other way around, IIRC. Though you now have reminded me of one of my all-time favorite exchanges in “Firefly”:
Wash: [about River] Psychic, though? That sounds like something out of science fiction.
Zoë: We live in a spaceship, dear.
WereBear
Wild Wild West is classic steampunk, not really a Western at all, just to make things more confusing!
Roger Moore
@MikeJ:
It’s not so much a question of materials as a question of the development direction of technology. The idea is that you get to something like modern results but with linear developments of Victorian era tech rather than replacement of Victorian tech with newer ideas. So you have steam power instead of internal combustion, airships instead of airplanes, and clockwork instead of computers. I guess there’s some material aspect, too, in that there’s no plastic or stainless steel but a lot of leather and brass. But I still think the material side is secondary to the tech side.
MikeJ
@Roger Moore: You are correct. I was using “materials” as a higher level concept like pneumatic tubes v microprocessors.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrNick
Of course Geithner should be President Obama’s SecTreas!
Libby Spencer
Just getting back on line. Thanks again for being so supportive everybody. Balloon Juicers so rock.
And J, Phoebe’s death was so tragic. Folks were so upset about it, they had her autopsied and the vet couldn’t find any apparent reason for the seizure. She was in perfect health.