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Showing posts from December 19, 2004

Our first Christmas dinner.

I'm in a tryptophan-induced doze at the moment having successfully cooked our first Christmas dinner. Turkey was fine, roast potatoes, carrots in cream and some Paxo stuffing. Mmmmm. Everything turned out just fine and now I've finished carving, we have about a kilo of turkey breast, sliced and on a plate in the fridge.

A Christmas Cat

We had a visit from next door today, and basically, they wanted to know if we wanted to take over ownership of one of their cats. Dory, the little black and white cat is really unhappy over there with the dog etc. So now she's ours. We've got the scratching post, and Russ has gone to get some eukanuba and some fancy feast so we know what to feed her. We'll be off to the pet store this afternoon for a collar and a bed for her.

Profound statement.

"This year's election campaign was marked with the oxymoronic "free speech zones" where people who disagreed with Bush were cordoned off into areas where they would never been seen by the president. The symbol of free speech restricted to special areas surrounded by barbed wire should make everyone stand up and take notice." From a thought-provoking look at the similarities between the neocons of today's America and the rising popularity of the Nazis, and ultimately between Hitler and Bush. Unsettling reading for sure. http://signs-of-the-times.org/signs/bush-hitler.htm

Christmas time, and an important lesson.

White Christmas! Yay! It snowed all day yesterday and everything looks nice and Christmassy now. The temperature has plummetted to a -10°C too. Nice and chilly. I learned an important lesson this morning too. Don't drink Sprite that has been in an open can on your desk for 3 weeks. It's not pleasant. Blogging will be sporadic for the next couple of weeks because of vacation time :-)

And I thought I was a mild conspiracy theorist.

This blog is quite an amusing read. The guy predicts a mossad / CIA operation to remotelydetonate a nuke in Houston on December 27th and blame it on Iran. Apparently the device is already there and armed and it just waiting for a button-push. If it were true, it would certainly be all over the news, not just on one conspiracy site. Question is of course, that behind most of these things, there's a grain of truth somewhere which spawns the rumourmill. What is the grain of truth in this case? Are the powers-that-be planning some sort of operation to scare the public into supporting an invasion of Iran? We all know B*sh wants to......

B*sh not learning from his Dad's wisdom

So - 22 dead and 51+ injured in an attack of some kind on a US military mess tent near Mosul this morning. Page 489 of Bush (Snr) and Scowcroft's book, A World Transformed (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), talking about not taking down Saddam, nor going into Baghdad. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome. It's a shame B*sh does

Cellphones on aircraft.

The FCC has relaxed its regulations regarding cellphones on aircraft. That means that tech companies and the airlines and airframe manufacturers are now free to see if they can accomodate cellphone-idiots onboard and in-flight. The first person who uses a cellphone within earshot of me on a flight is going to get it rammed up his or her asshole. Cellphones are a technology blight as it is. Being forced into close company with hundreds of babbling morons on these things whilst in-flight is going to be absolute torture. You know what the next step will be, of course. The airlines will offer more expensive tickets in exchange for "quiet" cabins.....

Suh-weet! Green cards!

Paula got a letter on saturday from the Dept. of Homeland Security. I got mine today. Our change of status has been approved. In short - we've got green cards. Next week we have appointments with the INS to give photos and thumbprints whereupon we get the Visas removed from our passports and replaced with "permanent resident" stamps. The cards arrive within 6 months or so.

Time Magazine loses all respect.

Verbatim from the Time magazine website: For sticking to his guns (literally and figuratively), for reshaping the rules of politics to fit his ten-gallon-hat leadership style and for persuading a majority of voters that he deserved to be in the White House for another four years, George W. Bush is TIME's 2004 Person of the Year Unbelievable. They've made him man of the year for going to war on a lie, bullying politicians into nonsensical decisions, and rigging the vote for another 4 years. I thought Time magazine was objective but it seems they're red-state patsies.