I'm conflicted

I passed someone the other day having a phone conversation wherein he said that Sarah Palin was unqualified to be vice president because she's a woman. And while I definitely agree with the first part of that statement (she has no qualifications to be VP and haven't we already had enough experience with a folksy halfwit to know that we don't want any more), I'm troubled by the second part, since her lack of qualifications has nothing to do with her gender. She could be just as stupid and incompetent as a man (again, I point to our current president). So on the one hand, I don't want to defend her and I'm glad the guy was going to vote for Obama (I assume, though in truth I don't know that he wasn't voting libratarian or something), but on the other hand, it is quite upsetting to me that in 2008 "she's a girl" is still a reason people use to vote for or against someone.

It's that time of year again

It's banned books week again, so everyone should get busy reading. My selection for this year is Moby Dick. I've never actually read it before, and it's the great American novel, so I feel like I should read it at some point. And why not now?

Well they certainly didn't have to do that for us

A friend of mine just started law school at Tulane. And as part of her orientation, they had an entire day devoted to the art of evacuating the city of New Orleans. How to plan your route, when to get started out, all that fun stuff. I don't know, but that isn't making me sign up to move to a seaside city that is below sea level.

So adorable

Knighthoods are silly. Penguins are cute. Put them together and they're unstoppable.

There's hope for literacy yet

At Barnes and Noble yesterday, they were getting ready for their midnight release party for the new Twilight book (it's a teen romance vampire series - Entertainment Weekly raves about it). It seemed like it was going to be pretty fun, actually. There was a scavenger hunt around the store among the activities planned (they had the clues up around the store, at what I presume was the answer to the previous clue). But I just find it amusing that midnight release parties have become a standard thing that now happens. And especially since they are for YA books. That means kids are getting excited about reading (despite all those people who claim the contrary). And if they're reading as tweens and teens, they'll likely continue into adulthood. And that just brightens my day.

Well I feel stimulated

I got my stimulus check in the mail. And while I don't think they're going to be all that effective toward reviving the economy (You lost all of your life savings in the Bear Sterns collapse and your house just lost half its value, but here's $300 to make you feel better about your life), that's not what really bothers me. It's that two days later I got yet another mailing (at my count this makes at least 5) to explain the stimulus check to me. Really? I need to have the concept of checks/money explained to me? I do live in the 21st century, and not in some pre-modern, barter economy. So in the self-fulfilling prophecy of incompetent governance that is the Bush administration, they decided to show me how inefficient and wasteful government can be by spending millions of dollars to sent out multiple mailings to every American to explain that money can be used to purchase goods and/or services. I know that no government is particularly efficient (they are each monopolies in their own countries and therefore have no competition to force them to streamline), but isn't it just possible that that money could have been spent on something more useful? They didn't have to make the conscious decision to make the stupidest use of the money possible.

There's nothing you can't do on the internet

In case any of you feel the urge to become a born-again Christian, you can sign up for a service that will let the rest of us know that the rapture has happened. It will send out an email to everyone you know 6 days after the rapture, to give everyone else one last chance to be saved.