Well, that was a rather lovely antidote to three weeks of doom and overwork. Really, I should have more such weekends.

So today I fought the entropy, and entropy beat me like the proverbial red-headed stepchild. On the other hand, having spent a fair amount of the last week hors de combat, even being able to strike a blow for honor's (and order's) sake is a distinct improvement.

I have no content, and not much in the way of good camera skills, but I have ducklings!

Computer desk, used but in decent condition. Now that I mostly use a laptop, I don't need this much desk, and I don't need a desk that's laid out for a tower machine and monitor.

38" tall, 30" deep, 54" wide. Particle board and steel, with slide-out keyboard / mouse pad tray.

The desk breaks down into its component pieces (and I'll have to break it down a bit just to get it out the door of the room its in) and can be carried in most decent-sized cars when broken down. The desk top is the biggest individual piece.

Available for pickup at my place near Medford Square. First one who can get this thing out of here gets it. :-)

( pictures under the cut - computer and other cruft not included )

Huh. Turns out I haven't abused my friends list with one of these since July. :-)

This is the eigth in a series of some of the memorable quotes from our gaming log. (We log every session, both for recordkeeping purposes, and for the edification of players who were out a particular session) The previous one of these is here.

( Dramatic Personae )

( I quote... )

Courtesty of http://lolthulhu.com/

La!

(And foodporn and WaterFire. Must write those up, when I'm not overtired. The nice thing about having my birthday on a Sunday - I don't have to work my birthday. The less nice thing is a condo board meeting right after.)

(I blame this entire post on WERS, and YouTube)

Alanis Morissette as Bing Crosby - "Let's Fall in Love"



Remember when Alanis was bitter, snarky, and heartbroken? Seems like a whole different person.

The Taco Bell Canon



At least one of the local a cappella groups (Possibly Brandeis Voicemale?) does an even better version, which sadly I can't find on line.

The "Kingdom Hearts Star Wars Choir" (The Music is "Star Wars", by Moosebutter, after John Williams. Far, far, after John Williams.



Moosebutter are also the people who brought you "Psycho, the Musical"

http://www.moosebutter.com/moosic/moosebutter_psycho.mp3

The United States was officially involved in the Second World War from the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941 and the surrender of Japan on August 15th, 1945. 1,348 days.

We have been in Iraq for longer than that now.

At the time of Pearl Harbor, the United States Army had a total of about 1.7 million personnel, having expanded rapidly from a core of only 174,000 regulars and 200,000 national guard between 1939 and 1941. By the end of World War II, the Army had 8.3 million people in uniform, out of over 12 million Americans under arms in all branches of the service. Americans put up with price controls, rationing, long lines, scrap drives, and victory gardens.

Between the invasion of Iraq and now, the authorized size of the army hasn't budged from the 500,000 it stood at in 2002, although the wholesale call up of reservists and the guard has effectively increased the army's size. (There appear to be about another half-million personnel in the guard and reserve, although they are not all on active duty at any given time. Call it about 750,000 or so, today.) Americans demanded, after September 11th, to know how they could help, and were told to go shopping.

George W. Bush has described the "global war on terror" as the defining conflict of our age, and the right wing base does not seem to disagree with him. That said, and with four years of GOP control of every branch of government drawing now to a close - why has our president and his congress never shown the will to actually apply the vast resources of this nation to that war?

George W. Bush, and the GOP received a stinging rebuke earlier in November, when voters, even in the absence of anything that could be called a Democratic agenda, and even in the face of Mr. Bush and his inner circle repeatedly pointing out that a win for Democrats would be the same as a win for Al Qaueda, overwhelmingly pitched Republicans out of the House and Senate, in spite of all that six years of gerrymandering could do for the GOP majority.

Well, Mr. Bush isn't going to take that sort of insult to his unchecked sovereignty lying down.

He's renominated John Bolton (a man who he had to squeak through via recess appointment even when the GOP solidly held the Senate) for UN ambassador, in spite of Mr. Bolton's unalloyed hatred for that institution.

He's renewed his call for Congress to, ex post facto, legalize warrantless wire taps. Presumably on the theory that if Congress is willing to condone outright torture ex post facto, mere eavesdropping should be trivial.

He's also renominated some failed right-wingers to the judiciary. Because, well, that's just the way he rolls.

This week's insult, of course, though, is the appointment of an avid opponent of birth control, to run the office that oversees Title X and therefore has authority over hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding meant to provide access to contraception and reproductive health information.

Planned Parenthood suggests that this is striking proof that the Bush administration remains dramatically out of step with the nation's priorities.

I don't think that's true. I simply think the White House branch of the GOP (which will, I expect, be disowned shortly by the rest of the GOP, assuming the latter ever wants to see national political power again) has simply concluded that the game is up, and in its few remaining moments or relative power and access, should do all it can to further its mission of turning back the clock on the rights of anyone in this country who isn't a heterosexual, white, christian male, finally unfettered by the need or desire to even pretend to give a damn.

The unwisdom of Nancy Pelosi stirring up a fight over the majority leadership (and subsequently having been fiercely rebuked, as Steny Hoyer won the seat over Jack Murtha by a wide margin) rankles. But it seems like just as the GOP proved, with the Medicare drug bill, that they could spend the taxpayers' money and pull the pork more extravagantly than the Dems ever could, it appears that Mr. Bush and the remnants of the congressional GOP are planning to set up a circular firing squad the likes of which even the worst of the Democratic party's defeats never engendered. It's quite unfortunate that the stray bullets are falling among a lot of innocent women as a result of this latest disastrous appointment.