Salon is taking a summer vacation, so tonight is a party!

Blue Gal Salon 6/30 hosted by blue.gal.

Join now

---

Chat about what's on your mind. More about public chats.

See you at 9 Eastern.

Blue Gal Vlog 6/30 - The McCain/Internet/age thing

Blue Gal points out that McCain's lack of internet savvy has nothing to do with his age. (3 minutes)

Sandy at the Aristocrats has more to say on the McCain/internet thing.

You can explore my dad's studio/gallery and see samples of his work here. Not to brag, but my Mom has some work there, too.

Salon tonight and there will be no salons in July. I'm traveling for much of the month.

Update: Dad left me a skype voicemail (yeah I know he's totally into Skype, not bad for 72) and said it's not a laserjet it's an inkjet printer and I should be sure to plug some computer thingy called "Adobe Photoshop." You got it, Dad. :)

Temptation

Jones Cola has released "limited edition" Candidate Colas (and yeah, I think the Hillary bottles are for-sure collectibles if you want to "collect" carbonated beverage containers). Some visitors to the website are upset that there is no Ron Paul Cola, and I was tempted to have a photoshop contest to make a bottle for Ron and his followers, but really it's just too easy.

Saturday Songs

I just love me some Gladys Knight and the Pips.

This is not a fashion blog.

This is about Nelson Mandela.

Who had a 90th birthday celebration with dignitaries from around the world celebrating him as a man with his history and courage deserves. Not to mention to thank him for continuing to struggle specifically against AIDS in Africa since his release from prison.

So I don't need to go into what Naomi Campbell wore to the celebration, because that would detract from the honor we owe to Nelson Mandela.

Oh, wait. She DID detract from the honor, etc. I would say shame on her, but clearly she has no shame.

The Hello Kitty Motor Vehicle Registry Death Watch

Loyal readers to this humble blog are well aware of its Hello Kitty Airline Travel Death Watch. Yesterday this phenomenon appeared at the Motor Vehicle Registry in the state where I now reside.

Yes, the good news is I am now a registered voter with a valid Blue State driver's license, and the trusty minivan also breathed a sigh of relief to have some very nice Midwestern license plates of its very own. The Alabama plates, well, some days it's embarrassing enough that they say Alabama on them but then they had to go off with the whole God Bless America license plate and please don't get me started.

The whole process of becoming a legal Midwesterner took less than 35 minutes with virtually no wait time. Thank you, Midwest Motor Vehicle Registry People.

But about the adult woman after me at the vehicle registry. (I have more forgiveness in these matters if the woman in question is under, say, 22. This one was maturing fast into Oil of Olay territory and I should know.) She was wearing these Hello Kitty seashell flower earring thingys AND looking to register her car.

It was so confusing.

Was she forced to wear these as punishment for some vicious crime?

Or perhaps she was wearing these in the hope that they would disguise her horrible guilt?

Could it be that not everyone in the Great Midwest had heard about the thing called "Good Taste in Jewelry"?

Oh yah, that last one there, you betcha.

[It's high time, my friends, to make Hello Kitty Death Watch a Blogger post label...]

Update...

It's true, I would much rather know who McCain slept with and when he did that (though we all know about his family values, etc.) then worry about Lara Logan's sex life.

Sorry if I furthered a smear brought on by those who would tarnish her message that Iraq War coverage is more fucked than, well, Cindy was by McCain while he was married...oh nevermind. I was gonna also ask the total number of extra-marital affairs Rupert Murdoch, Bill O'Reilly, and Newt Gingrich have engaged in but I really, really, really don't want to know.

There.

Thursday quickies?

Really, advertisers around the globe are now trying to figure out how to Get Bill O'Reilly Steamed. Apparently, Madison Avenue, all you have to do his have a gay person in your ad. A big congratulations to Heinz, pulling the ad probably nets you half a mil in totally free youtube hits. And BillO? They don't serve Heinz mayonnaise at the better Key West accommodations, but you might want to check out the Key West website anyway, as long as I can see the look on your face when you do. Hee.

_________________

If you're one of those people who has Tina Fey Lara Logan for your personal (not mentioning imaginary) girlfriend, ahem, you've got company. Lots.

_________________

Holy crap. CQ Politics suggests that Obama not only bail out Hillary's campaign debt, but help Biden, Edwards, Richardson, and Dodd retire their debts as well.

Hell, why stop there? Let's pay off Republican campaign debts, too! Rudy Guiliani is so destitute from his disastrous primary campaign spend-a-thon (53 dollars and change per vote with no delegates to show for it) that he's taken to sleeping on subway cars.

If you ask me, there is something quite vile behind this meme that Obama has huge money to spare, a pernicious hinting at some Obama inevitability train. We know at which station that train terminates, so we ain't gettin' on it. Fight on, Democrats, one day and fifty states at a time.

And hell yeah, let's pay off Howard Dean's 2004 campaign debt. We OWE him.

Happy Thursday, ma hunnies.

Maybe this will get through the skulls of Louisiana and Texas...

Whew. Let's take as many 5-4 decisions as we can get and vote in November to make it 6-3 or better. Fast.

I mean, I know America's embrace of the death penalty gives us common ground with Libya and Iran, but really.

(image from here and also on my bulletin board)

Some (more) cheer up music if you need it.

Silly and fluffy, but the video is so funny and somehow the song came on the radio at just the right time. Gotta face the world and do some bizness today ma hunnies have a good one.

Found Art. Twenty Cents. At the Thrift.

"he just had a bad crying spell. Allie and Nan were here. I don't why he cried."

I love finding stuff with a story attached. I would have paid 20 cents for the card even without the needles.

And yeah, there was once a world where you could buy knitting needles at JC Penney.

File under....

Those who actually wish to live the soap opera lifestyle? Please, please, keep your personal drama off the blog as much as possible. Or, as Morse said at Salon last night, "What a fucking idiot."

From Fabulously Jinxed comes "Dramatic Internet Happening #1". FJ wisely changed the names to protect, um, whomever, and the emphasis below is mine:

Some dude (some of you know who) met some chick via the blogodrama. Dude was married to another woman. Dude met chick at a blog meetup. Dude and chick fell “madly” in love. Dude left wife to go live with chick in another state. Dude and chick broadcast their love affair on their blogs and all their blog buds are all happy for them. Anyway, Dude and chick are lovey-dovey in their new home they just bought in this other state. On the 10th Dude and chick decide to go back to Dude’s home state to take care of business. On the 11th Dude announces on his blog that he and his wife are back together and he’s taking a break. Chick makes no such announcement on her blog. There is no further explanation.

Shit fire, their blog friends are going nuts! One side is all “I’m on your side as long as you're happy”…blah blah blah. The other side is “You dick! How could you do that to us?” And me? I’m like “That’s some soap opera shit right there.”

You had me saying "what a fucking idiot" at the "broadcast and bought a house" part. You know, in school there were always kids who were bad in order to get attention. But bad blogging? Trust me, I never read the blogs involved but that's some soap opera shit bad blogging right there.

But then again back in school, I was (and am) the good girl who didn't need attention, except of course that I do. But this kind of attention? I think posting disembodied panties works so much better, and they're just bad enough, doncha know.


[Allow me to take this opportunity to thank the blog friends who, at no time during the past year, have said to me, not even once, "I’m on your side as long as you're happy." Of course, I wasn't buying a house with a married Kossack.

Nevertheless, my friends, you have no idea how much that lack of insincerity means to me.]

Skype Salon 9 Eastern

Blue Gal Salon 6/23 hosted by blue.gal.

Join now

---

Chat about what's on your mind. More about public chats.

Blue Gal vlog 6/23

Blue Gal on the issue of "black enough/white enough" (seven minutes)

NY Times coverage of the Obama "Kansas values" ad (I excerpt comment 64) here.

Background on Congressman Artur Davis at his wiki page.

Snoop Dog (b. 1972) article at Esquire was appropriately bumped by George Carlin. RIP.

Skype salon is 9-10 Eastern. Just typing, no special equipment needed. Download Skype (seems spyware-free to me) here.

UPDATE: Emailer asks "what's that 'Marxist' shirt you're wearing?" I'm sorry, this is way too Regis and Kelly for me, but the shirt is here.

Don't sweat it, it's summer.

Trust me, by the time that lovely GOP convention rolls around, you'll be glad again you have a blog platform already up and running. In the meantime, it's summer and even the Sunday News Shows seem to feel Kay Bailey Hutchison makes a good talking head for June. Really.

Video blog later this morning. Salon tonight.

Got the burnout meter from Samurai Frog.

Again with the taking on more responsibility than I can handle.

Due to lack of applicants I am now the presumptive assistant quilting editor over at The Aristocrats.

Shown above, "My mother would never have worn red panties", an art quilt from here. Needless to say the quilters are Ohio-based.

xo and get well soon to my much beloved colleague Sandy Underpants.

Saturday Song

A lil' Gin Blossoms with a hat tip to anyone graduating this year.

The Steve Martin School of Political Excuses?

"You ... can be a millionaire ... and never pay taxes." Then he reasons it out. "You say, 'Steve, how can I be a millionaire and never pay taxes?' Two simple words. Two simple words in the English language ... 'I forgot.' How many times do we let ourselves get into terrible situations because we don't say, 'I forgot'? Let's say you're on trial for armed robbery. You say to the judge, 'I forgot armed robbery was illegal'."


Representative Laura Richardson (D in this case stands for deadbeat if you believe the papers-CA)?

"I didn't know my house was in foreclosure."

is really really funny in a Steve Martin kind of way, but no.

Liberal is just another word for smartypants...

Some clever responses to some not-too-kind propaganda coming from the other side...





Search "Obama" at Cafepress to find more.

Thank you, alert readers. (ahem)

I have the best readers in the world. Always watching for panties in the news and then emailing me about it. Many thanks, I think.

Nice of MSNBC to interrupt their 24/7 Tim Russert funeral coverage, and I think this story did not go quite as long as their Middle East Peace Deal story, but I didn't time it.

Back to the video: call me ageist if you like, but I'm close enough to 52 to ask what the heck a 52 yo woman was doing putting on a goddamn thong. When you reach that delightful "certain age," (I turn 45 next month, ma hunnies) comfort trumps whatever sex appeal might come from exposing your butt cheeks in overpriced underwear made in China. Besides...



A reminder to everyone, too, that Victoria's real Secret is, she's a Republican.

Free advice for Madison Avenue

Um, okay, I'll bite. The marketing geniuses at Twix want us to blog about this, obviously.

But I just don't know where to begin with this one.

Let me put this very simply, Madison Avenue: a hairdo in an ugly sweater, who pulls a fucking Twix bar out of his pants at a party will never get into mine.

That, plus he is carrying a Ubiquitous Red Cup, and anyone who reads Hot Chicks with Douchebags knows that proximity to a URC, labels him as a definite douche.

And really, you portray this woman as politically obsessive and suffering from verbal diarrhea. She may be Michelle Malkin, for crying out loud. Lefty bloggers in my experience don't talk politics or blogging at parties anyway. That's shop, and it's tacky.

You wouldn't know this, because you are a Madison Avenue douchebag, but blogging is a bit like sex. One does not talk about it constantly if one is doing it well and fairly often.

What really happens at a party like this is, he pulls out a laser printed business card with his url, gets her email and waits three days to use it. Or he's been emailing her for sex, er, I mean, six months, and then she agrees to meet him at a party. She's already hot for him because he's such a good blogger, and so long as he doesn't use a Twix bar to help him think what to say next, the "apartment" thing might just happen.

All he has to do is make sure she isn't Michelle Malkin. Or Pammy. And lose the fucking Twix bar.

Dear MSNBC Executives: I volunteer...

[Love and kisses to the beautiful people coming from Crooks and Liars. Love on ya, Mike honey. xxx]

Dear MSNBC Executives:

I hereby volunteer to sit under the desk of Chris Matthews with a rubber mallet and hammer his foot hard every time he says the word "women."

Media Matters:

On the June 11 edition of Hardball, discussing an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released that day, Matthews referred to Sen. John McCain's six-percentage-point advantage over Sen. Barack Obama among suburban white women (the poll found an Obama lead among women overall, 52-33 percent), and asserted, "[W]omen are low-hanging fruit, though, in the terms of politics. You can reach up and say, 'I'm pro-choice, he's not.' " He then added, "But you're playing for a close election. If you want to reach up for the higher, for the harder ones to reach, you can win big."

We read your shirt long ago, Tweety...

Salon tonight

Blue Gal's Salon 6/16 hosted by blue.gal.

Join now

---

Chat about what's on your mind. More about public chats.

Blue Gal vlog June 16

Four minutes in my new digs! And shout out to Splotchy, mentioned in the vlog above.

Looks like my webcam is still adjusting to the Midwest lighting. I'll work on that next time.

To those who spend Sunday afternoons writing.

I made no record of when this appeared in The New Yorker but it was a while ago. From a scrapbook I came across as I putter and "organize" my blogging room in delicious solitude.

Happy Father's Day...

I was never a saccharine "daddy's little girl" because he always treated my two sisters and me as beloved intellects. Thanks for that, Dad, and for being the man who always captured me on film better than anyone else ever could. I love you.


Dad took this
picture of me in 1963

Saturday Song

Ride with the tide and go with the flow... and have a Saturday as happy as this song, folks. There's a Greek food festival in town today so I expect to weigh about 400 pounds by evening, not counting the baklava.

Today...

We bow our heads, shocked into remembering just how fraking short life is, and wish his family and colleagues peace and comfort.

Tomorrow, I respectfully suggest we click on our Driftglass bookmarks and search for "Punkin". And remember how Russert, a highly-paid man in a position of marked responsibility, failed all of us over and over again.

Drifty from May, 2006:

[K]eep it simple and clear and remember that Russert (for example) is, for all intents and purposes, a White House operative who occasionally gets bent and cranky over side issues, but will always come to obedient heel over the big stuff.

He is not a journo. He is not in any sense “objective”. He’s not wearing a blue helmet, so why treat him like he is?

Why not come right back at him? Why not simply and directly ask Tim Russert why he doesn’t believe crimes and incompetence at the highest levels of government should be investigated?

Why anyone lying a nation into a war shouldn’t be prosecuted?

We'll never know if Russert planned to mention on MTP this Sunday, the articles of impeachment that were read on the House floor this week. Then again, we never expected him to. That's an added sadness many of us carry today.

Goddammit this made me cry.

h/t David Stephenson xxx

Laff line of the week.

From Emails from Jesus, on whether he spanks the monkey:

no, I do not pleasure myself. Whenever I get the urge, I just flip on Nancy Grace and am good to go for another year. She's the saltpeter of cable news.

Actually, no panties, but...

I know, I know, it's not gonna happen. Nevertheless, I'm wearing this shirt all day.

Yet another sign I am no longer in the deep south...

I keep having to pinch myself. Discussing job opportunities with a counselor here in the great Midwest.

Me: "I see you have job listings under "human rights". What's that about?"

Counselor: "The state's Department of Human Rights."

Me, with severe understatement: "We don't have that in Alabama."

Oh here ya go...

Watch for the terrorist fist bump at 4:02, my friends.

Salon tonight 9-10 Eastern Time. Hope to chat with you then!

Blue Gal Salon 6/9 hosted by blue.gal.

Join now

---

Chat about what's on your mind. More about public chats.

Salon tonight, video blog later this week.

Still getting the house (and my ragged self, oy what a weekend) ready for video blogging.

But we'll salon tonight...I look forward to catching up with everyone.



And when I hear this "Obama is naive" meme I realize the concern of many who celebrate George W. Bush's many years as UN Ambassador...

Oh, that's Obama supporter Richard Holbrooke.

...I meant, celebrating George W. Bush's formative years as an international diplomat...

Oh wait, that's Obama supporter Zbigniew Brzeziński.

That "Obama is Naive" meme is coming from among others international snuggle bunny John Bolton, inventor of the "endless war means good nutrition" meme, and sweetie pie John "my wife is a c*nt" McCain, inventor of "The Surge is Working" meme.

Nevermind.

Saturday Song

This song was playing on the radio as the children and I pulled out of the Alabama subdivision to drive to the Midwest. Seems fitting.

What's your favorite "embedding disabled by request" YouTube? Just kidding.

Must view

I know, I should nevah have gotten MSNBC. Anyhow, don't miss this interview with Zbig. Once you're out of office, you can speak common sense. heh.

Some cheer up music if you need it.

I just like it. And I'm really really happy about the news that Obama, who could have done otherwise, decided to play smart (duh) and keep Howard Dean on as DNC chair. Yay.



and btw, Terry McAuliffe? You've gotta find a better, healthier outlet for your grief than rum, pal. Maybe you'd like to join the DC/metro Cupcake enthusiasts group. Or something.

Oh my god.

I turn on my tv. She's tough talking to AIPAC? This morning?

Oh. My. God.

I see the two Presidential Candidates will be there too. And Pelosi and Reid and, oh nevermind. Nice timing of this convention, but really. I'm a proud anti-AIPAC Democrat.

I had kind words for her as she ends, willingly or not, her Presidential Campaign. As a Senator, I categorize her with Joe Lieberman. She's a radical Zionist, and her disaster-inducing one-sided ham-fisted foreign policy mindset is exactly why she should not be Vice President.

Tonight calls for a little Family Stone, my friends. (yay)

A good fight.

I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Go with God, and God bless you.

She's back.

Well, one died of pills and the bottle, poor talented thing, and the other raised lots of liberal quid, but alas, remains Barbara Streisand to this day.

We're here, [most of]* the yarn and the laptop are unpacked. Yes, it's blue gal now living in a primarily blue state. At least a midwestern one. That makes me happy and the children are thrilled with the house, the yard, the playroom, etc. Mommy gets her own playroom too, shown here:



*Oh shush about do I think I have enough yarn already. There's only a couple grocery bags left and it's mostly purple, so shush.