4:03 AM why am i awake? was my first minkchat session in a long time... too much multitasking, crossed wires a lot... good to see everyone though, like riding a bike.... yesterday was lazzzzyy and i forgot about koi day being early so now Anthur won't get as many free trainings.... hoping there's not some gaping crash after this high, hate that cycle and what it does to me and mine and damn it, doteasy isn't doing a damn thing at all and that stupid snake is intent on bashing her head in trying to escape
too much coffee.
Friday, May 24, 2002
10:46 AM and now for something completely different!
This is horridly funny when you hear it. If I had money I'd track down some Tenacious D... Jack Black is the guy singing it here.
"Tribute"
[spoken] This is the greatest and best song in the world... Tribute.
Long time ago me and my brother Kyle here,
we was hitchhikin' down a long and lonesome road.
All of a sudden, there shined a shiny demon... in the middle... of the road.
And he said:
[sung] "Play the best song in the world, or I'll eat your soul." (soul)
[spoken] Well me and Kyle, we looked at each other,
and we each said... "Okay."
[sung] And we played the first thing that came to our heads,
Just so happened to be,
The Best Song in the World, it was The Best Song in the World.
Look into my eyes and it's easy to see
One and one make two, two and one make three,
It was destiny.
Once every hundred-thousand years or so,
When the sun doth shine and the moon doth glow
And the grass doth grow...
Needless to say, the beast was stunned.
Whip-crack! went his schwumpy tail,
And the beast was done.
He asked us: "(snort) Be you angels?"
And we said, "Nay. We are but men."
Rock!
Ahhh, ahhh, ahhh-ah-ah,
Ohhh, whoah, ah-whoah-oh!
This is not The Greatest Song in the World, no.
This is just a tribute.
Couldn't remember The Greatest Song in the World, no, no.
This is a tribute, oh, to The Greatest Song in the World,
All right! It was The Greatest Song in the World,
All right! It was the best muthafuckin' song the greatest song in the world.
[2-part skat]
[spoken] And the peculiar thing is this my friends:
the song we sang on that fateful night it didn't actually sound
anything like this song.
[sung] This is just a tribute! You gotta believe me!
And I wish you were there! Just a matter of opinion.
Ah, fuck! Good God, God lovin',
So surprised to find you can't stop it.
[skat] All right! All right!
brought to you by D's hand. trying not to become beef jerky for ten thousand years
I am sleepy. I have a horribly messy room, and cleaned a third of my kitchen implements and was splattered by hot oil and my feet hurt. I am probably not making much sense now. I watched Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, RP'd a bit.
And my baby gushed about us.
(Look, I fell asleep before I could post this. :P )
My first thought was, that's exactly what I would have done. Mine. My second thought was, that's exactly what she did. Yours... the feeling is exhilirating and alien at the same time. How did this happen? I've always had friends, support systems, I drew them to myself without thinking I deserved them, just because it was the thing to do... but never 'belonged to.'
It's too early for a lot of things. Ne, Wiggle, isn't this like the longest first date ever? *g* I've run every doubt in the book through my mind and they all ring hollow. Even if something didn't, I wouldn't look back. I can demonstrably make a hash out of my present; I can't do the same to my future.
Thursday, May 23, 2002
8:52 AM pet the kitties. feed the kitties. luv the kitties
Ghost's Anime Kitty page has moved to this address: http://dreamwater.net/ghostofdawn/. Change thy bookmarks! In the meantime, a little fashion show, of some old and new kitten pals. These are the hot bishounen kitties, I left the kawaii ones back at the Neko Room.
Wednesday, May 22, 2002
11:42 AM connecting the dots: history and accident
Not my normal blog.
I became an American citizen in the summer of 2000. I don't even remember when... I was in the middle of my depression and it was just another thing to do. I don't even remember the questions they asked on the test, though I remember studying for them. Do you know who Patrick Henry is? Do you know how many districts are in your state? What do the stars and stripes mean?
Who is the governor of your state?
On the night of October 16, 2000, the local news broke the story that Governor Mel Carnahan's plane was missing. In the morning it was confirmed: the governor, his son Roger (aka Randy), and aide Chris Sifford were killed when their twin engine Cessna crashed near Pevely, Missouri. Randy was piloting the plane; he reported a problem with the gyroscope. The Governor's wife, Jean, had seen them off at the last stop and gone on to the Governor's mansion in Jefferson City.
The Carnahans were on the campaign trail together. I don't remember what Randy was running for, but the Democratic governor was campaigning for Senate in one of the most closely watched battles in the nation. His opponent was incumbent Republican Senator John Ashcroft.
The presidential debates between Democratic candidate Vice President Albert Gore Jr. and Republican Governor George W. Bush were held in St. Louis on October 17. Ashcroft suspended his campaign. The Democrats suspended theirs. Lt. Governor Roger Wilson was sworn in as the new acting governor.
I was home. I was taking my first full semester off. I cried for the Governor Carnahan and his family. I watched the funeral on television. The governor was well-loved and a fair and decent man. Heads of state and several other governors attended. I remember a riderless horse.
Incidentally, that year the St. Louis Rams and the Kansas City Chiefs played in KC for the Governor's Cup. It's a regularly scheduled NFL game, but the winner gets a special trophy from the governor. Kansas City won against the Super Bowl champs, 54-34. That was October 22. I didn't watch the end of the game to see if Roger Wilson did the honors. Just another scheduled appointment that dropped off the books...
The Democrats weren't sure what to do. It was too late to remove Carnahan's name from the ballot. There was talk of Jean Carnahan running, but a write-in campaign wasn't assured. If more people voted for Carnahan than Ashcroft, under state law the new governor, Roger Wilson, would have to name someone to serve two years of the term. On October 23, Wilson called Jean Carnahan and offered to nominate her to the Senate if Carnahan won. On October 30 Carnahan agreed. On the ballot, the incumbent Senator Ashcroft ran against the deceased Governor Carnahan.
On November 7, 2000, just after my 21st birthday, I voted in my first election.
On November 8 I woke to Matt Lauer informing me, slightly amused and slightly sleepless, that they kinda sorta didn't know who was President-elect. Missouri at the time had 11 electoral votes, an important Midwest swing state. I remember thinking that voter turnout for the Senate race might have affected the outcome. Despite shady poll-place stuffing by Democrats in St. Louis, Missouri electors voted for Bush.
In January 2001 George Walker Bush was sworn in as President of the United States. So was Senator Jean Carnahan, without any prior political experience save working with her husband. And John Ashcroft was named Attorney General of the United States. Jean Carnahan voted against his confirmation in the Senate, citing him as "too divisive."
Now it gets fuzzy. Now we get messy.
In the spring of 2001, the attorney general had an extraordinary confrontation with the then FBI Director Louis Freeh at an annual meeting of special agents in charge at Quantico, Va. The two talked before appearing, and Ashcroft laid out his priorities for Freeh [...] "basically violent crimes and drugs," recalls one participant. Freeh replied bluntly that those were not his priorities, and began to talk about terror and counterterrorism. "Ashcroft didn't want to hear about it," says a former senior law-enforcement official. (A Justice Department spokeswoman hotly disputed this, saying that in May Ashcroft told a Senate committee terrorism was his "highest priority.")
[...]
It wasn't that Ashcroft and others were unconcerned about these problems, or about terrorism. But the Bushies had an ideological agenda of their own. At the Treasury Department, Secretary Paul O'Neill's team wanted to roll back almost all forms of government intervention, including laws against money laundering and tax havens of the kind used by terror groups. [...]
And while most of the current controversy is about what America didn't do defensively, Rumsfeld and Bush didn't take the offensive, either. Upon entering office, both suggested publicly that the Clinton administration left America with a weak image abroad. The day after October 12, 2000 attack on the USS Cole, the then candidate Bush said "there must be a consequence." An FBI document dated January 26, 2001 -- six days after Bush took office -- shows that authorities believed they had clear evidence tying the bombers to Al Qaeda. Yet the new administration mounted no retaliation of its own.
By the time the Bushies did get serious and gear up against Al Qaeda, it was too late. The administration says a long process of revamping the strategy against Al Qaeda culminated -- in supreme irony -- on Sept. 10, when the directive reached Rice's desk for Bush's signature. And yet even then there were questions about how serious the administration really was. The new strategy called for little more aggressive action than Clinton had adopted: arming and financing anti-Taliban forces inside Afghanistan. And on the same day, Ashcroft submitted his budget request, barely mentioning counterterrorism.
- Newsweek, May 27, 2002
On another Tuesday in September, my clock radio went off. I had no classes. I was asleep. I am physically unable to sleep in. And today I did not. ".... World Trade Center incident..."
I rolled out of bed and turned on the TV. It was a little after nine central. A little after the second plane. The fact that you know what I'm talking about -- that feeling is history on your shoulders. My friend and I were shocked. We were NOT surprised.
U.S. intelligence agencies were. A young administration trying to "prove wrong" the charisma of a previous administration was as well. And I am awed by the heavy hand of history. History takes away lives every day. There's no way to *truly* figure how the human race pushes against itself, how finding a peace can transmute into terrorism, how a fight can transmute into accord. There's no blame big enough for this one, just as there's no grief big enough.
What would have happened if Governor Carnahan's plane hadn't gone down? It was a tight senate race. Ashcroft was also a former governor, also had a strong base of support. What if he had won? Would Bush have appointed someone else? Would he or she have been able to transition smoothly enough for someone to spot the signs and act? Would the voters have cared if September 11 didn't happen?
How heavy is history's hand, anyway? We Americans live in a democratic society where our personal liberties are protected, sometimes to the point of sacrificing our safety. America is an experiment. It doesn't matter how powerful or how rich we are, there are kingdoms risen and fallen where other governments have built their systems. The intelligence breakdown in part happened because there was a distinct movement to stay out of Americans' daily lives, instead of wiretapping and watching them as was done in the mid-20th century, mostly for political reasons.
Is it worth it? I think so. I chose this system. I could have stayed with the society which gave me centuries of history on the other side of the ocean. But more than any other society in the world, America cannot continue without self-examination. We have to ask ourselves why? What can I do? To refuse to do so is to doom the experiment. Because history does not stop to pick up the stragglers. It can pluck planes from the sky, it can birth babies, it can keep a girl up at 2 am writing a critique for a fic whose author she's never met... yet...
Let no one underestimate how history taps our shoulders. Our own personal stories, the nation's, the world's. Mankind's story is just beginning. It's easy to sit back and think you're too busy or useless or dumb to write in its pages. If anything's learned from that terrible, earth-shaking crime done to *humanity* last fall, it should be that if we don't, history will schedule that last appointment for us.
Maybe it was because I left the window open last night. Woke up at four again. Lay around, feeling restless, feeling annoyed. As five rolled around I got up, made coffee, pre-heated the oven, and went outside to watch the sun rise. The grass was cool under my toes. Went back in to get a lawn chair. It was the light pre-dawn blue in the sky, and the birds were busy with their morning chatterings. I had to return to get my biscuits, honey-glazed and salty and hot. Sat there and raised my cup to all the early morning commuters. Happily talking to myself, plate of hot biscuits on my lap, coffee warm in my belly. Then I fell over on the lawn chair. Saved the coffee and two of the rolls and laughed that if anyone had been there to see it would've been a damned funny sight. Set the chair up on the concrete instead of the bumpy ground. Sky trails colored orange, the main street a half-block down still deserted. And the sky was lightening... I decided to climb the tree to get a better look. By now I had my sneakers on. Alas, I'm short, the chair wasn't enough, nor the stool, and I was getting giddily nervous that I'd miss the sun, I'd miss the moment. Finally settled on a wobbly kitchen stool. Set it on the bumpy ground. Shaky but it was all right. Sleeves went up over my hands so I could grip the crumbly bark, less than a handhold, and hoisted myself up. Oh, to hug a tree. No one saw me up there. I laid my head on my sleeve and watched the gold touch the sky trails, not a cloud in the sky, oh it was like waiting for a cherished friend I hadn't seen in years. I looked away -- a second! -- to see the houses behind me painted gold and turned and there it was! Hello sun. Good morning. Less than a dime's sliver, then more, goodness it comes up fast. Can't look straight at it, but it was really too beautiful to miss. Looked up at the gilded leaves above me, painted with blue splatters where my vision had singed. Bigger than a dime. There it came, floating above the rooftops, and I knew it was turning the river a mile down to pure gold, I knew it was coloring my upturned face. If I prayed it was too private to tell. There it is. But oh, it's time to go back in, chilly boned as I am. How to get out of the tree. Can't go back the way I came, the stool's in the way and I won't clear it. Manuevered around. Och, my butt's stuck in this tree. It wasn't far, I knew, but it looked so far down between my shoes. I sat there for a minute trying to get the courage to jump. You remember how to jump, don't you? Pushed off and here came the ground and bend knees and wave arms and up! I did it. Retrieved step stool. Retrieved kitchen stool. Retrieved coffee and biscuits and lawn chair. Retrieved myself and said goodbye sun, I'll see you again soon.
Beelzemon has four wings. Go me for being so *observant*. >_<
No new Digimon next week. I'd pop the tape in anyway if I were you.
ai zai ren jian, my new Henry shrine, is in its alpha stage. So far the home page and "why" are up, all other links won't work. Bask in the glow. ^^
Naked Henry Forever!
it's the best thing after a quiet morning, to be carrying the radio to the bathroom to listen, and in my hands the acoustic version flows out now that i see what i see i see it'll always be
~60K of graphics :: Koani by
Alice in Wonderland :: Scorpion by Ushikai Background and buttons by Triple Orbit Graphics ~ Sadly it's no longer at its former website.
