A simple country mouse's confusion on politics

I've talked to a few folks about this lately, but there's something I don't exactly understand about the current tone of the presidential election.

McCain started it, talking about how Obama is a celebrity. You may remember his ad and the subsequent rebuttal by Paris Hilton.

Now, if my former colleague and his current colleagues are to be believed, the Obama campaign was a little worried pre-speech about Obama's celebrity, too.

Wait, why?

This is America.

We love celebrities.

You may remember Ronald Reagan, for example. Or, like, Arnold Schwarzenegger (both elected by the great state of California, where one eighth of Americans live). Jesse Ventura. Sonny Bono. Gopher. Cooter.

Celebrities rule.

As I was discussing this with a friend (who proudly subscribes to People magazine), she reminded me that the whole idea was "to show lack of substance." And she's right, but.

But we love lack of substance. Love, love, love it. See most of the people mentioned above.

We like popular.

I mean, by definition, since that is what popular means.

So — what's the drawback to Obama being a "celebrity?"

I am sure there's something here I'm not getting.

Sometimes I hear that song and I start to sing along

Do you know this song?



There are so, so many things wrong with it.
Here are a few of them:

• It's by Kid Rock.
• He rhymes "things" with "things." In the chorus.
• In the next line, he rhymes "bottle" with "tomorrow."
• He rips off a minimum of two real classic rock songs, and I think I count a third.
• He's, like, my age, and therefore I prefer to think it's too early for a "Remember those nostalgic old days when I was 18" song, even though that was 19 years ago. Gimme 25, please.
  
• Don't even get me started on the things that are more wrong with the video than the song. That is covered in "It's by Kid Rock."

And yet, I don't care. I love this song.
That nostalgia/classic rock gimmick has entirely worked on me, to the point where I actually think of this as a song I was listening to when I was 18.
A sign of my countrification? Or of my willingness to let Big Music dictate what I should like via the car radio?

And the seasons, they go round and round

Our next installment of "marking time on a college campus" is on how we know school has started.

• Not Hippie Birkenstock Silver Jewelry Guy
• Not Hippie Birkenstock Tapestry and Flowy Skirt Gal

No indeed.

• Giant Tent of Posters, Including but Not Limited to Scarface, Monet, and Dali.

Composeur

For my birthday, I asked for a compost tumbler. My loving parents were kind enough to indulge me.

This weekend, I finally set it up. I find that I am strangely compelled to eat more fruits and vegetables, just to have something to put into the compost. I don't eat enough fresh fruits and vegetables as it is, and I don't really have a lot of eggshells or teabags to add to the mix. I produce no coffee grounds. Someone else mows my lawn and takes the clippings. This may be a very small composting effort.

I would like to think that a compost tumbler marks me as a real country-dweller, but am afraid that having a brand-new store-bought bin on rollers for composting (as opposed to a compost pile) marks me as a wannabe city-slicker transplant.

Really, the composting is a big highlight of the weekend. I also:

• attended a lecture on how our local mountain is more than a mountain,
• paid a dollar for water at a bar where a pint of beer was $1.50,
  
• saw my sister and her husband on their return to the U.S. from a vacation in Indonesia, and
• watched most of Season 3 of The Facts of Life and several episodes of Psych on Hulu. (WARNING: Hulu is fully dangerous. Do not go there if you are not prepared to devote all your time to watching stuff. Possibly, this is less of a concern if you actually have access to TV reception.)

Gettin' theyah from heah

Last night, I offered to pick up food for my parents from a restaurant that is almost, but not quite, on the way from my house to theirs.
In establishing that I knew where this restaurant was, I had this exact conversation with my mother.

Mom: It's on the left.
bzzzzgrrrl: I know. I'm just not sure where.
Mom: Right across from the fence place.
bzzzzgrrrl: Um...
Mom: It's a little past the foreign car place. Or where the foreign car place used to be.

It should be said that, for many New Englanders, "where the foreign car place used to be" is a fully legitimate landmark.

There oughtta be a law...

Did you watch Arrested Development?

If not, why not?

I watched a couple of episodes last night, and, gotta say, just as funny as I remember.
Watch me segue into what I really wanted to talk about by quoting from the TV show I was watching. I learned it from sermons.

Michael: What comes before anything? What have we always said is the most important thing?
George Michael: Breakfast.
Michael: Family.
George Michael: Family, right. I thought you meant of the things you eat.

I am not sure that the people out here in the country get the importance of breakfast.

As you know, there are no sports bars here open for breakfast. What, breakfast isn't important enough to watch television during?

And now, hold on to your hats, city-dwellers.

I went to a breakfast meeting earlier this week at which there was no Diet Coke.

What the hell kind of a breakfast meeting is that? How do you expect me to function without such a major category of breakfast food?

Coffee and danish? Are you kidding? That's not breakfast, it's a coffee break from The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Tagged

Frequent commenter Kay Bailey has tagged me. I'm totally it. Or a bird. Something.
Anyway.
Here's how it goes:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules to your blog.
3. Write 6 random things about yourself.

• I have grown nearly an inch since college.
• As a child, when I had an occasion that warranted me getting to pick dessert, I picked Sara Lee black forest cake almost consistently until they stopped making it.
• If I were to go back to teaching, it would be to teach junior high math.
• On my kitchen counter right now, there is an empty bottle of prosecco, a nearly empty bottle of Magic Shell, a half-full bottle of rum, and a full bottle of seltzer. I take responsibility only for the Magic Shell.
• I used to be an orthodontic assistant.
• If you are reading this blog, I forget when your birthday is, and wish you would leave it in the comments so I can add it to my calendar right now. I like to think of myself as someone who would be good at remembering birthdays, but I am not. If you are the one exception, please don't say so, because then everyone else will know you're my special favorite.
  

4. Tag 6 people at the end of your post and link to them. (This was hard; I had seven I wanted to use. But rules are mostly rules.)

• But I digress
  
• Hadokat
• Publish Your Comment Weblog (if you have to do it as a comment here to stay within the theme of your blog, it's OK with me)
• MaternityLand
• Hopeful Pessimism
• ToddP dot com
  

5. Let each person you have tagged know by leaving a comment on their blog. (I am cheating a little bit, and just e-mailing you people.)
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is posted.

Workin' on the rail

I've been messing with what's over there on the right hand side of the blog a little.

I took out "What I've been reading," because you don't care about what books I'm into right now, and neither do I, at least not enough to update that. (But Life Before Man and Omnivore's Dilemma and Dry.)

I added a few and took away a few from both blogrolls. If you are my friend, and you're gone now, it's because you never, ever update your blog. If you're my friend, and you've never been there, I don't know or forgot that you have a blog. Both situations are easy to rectify.

Not all of the blogs I read regularly are in the rail, but most of them are, now. The most notable exceptions are R-rated, and there are some things that some of my readers are simply not ready to just stumble across. Also, I have not listed the many, many advice columns I read, because I am really very embarrassed by how much I like them.

So, what's missing? What do you wish there was more of?

California dreamin'

I think and hope you already know that California gave the thumbs-up to gay marriage a few months back.

Yea, California!

So now Ellen and Portia are married.

Maybe I will send them a bike and a GPS and a year's supply of Lipton tea (or, as it turns out, much more than several years' supply) like Ellen gave me that one time. Probably, I will send them something more like my warmest congratulations.

And double congratulations to California for getting it right.



This post has not in any way been about me living in the country.

A kiddley divey too

This is what my window at work looked like on February 26:
You will notice there is some debris up there, but nothing actively growing on the window.

This is what my window at work looked like on July 9:

That is the point at which people would come into my office and say, "Cool! Ivy!"

And this is what my window looks like today:It is starting to scare me. Time to bring the pitchfork to work.

Bumper picker

I am sorry I am so behind on posts. It's not that I don't have anything to say, or that I don't appreciate that you're still reading. I do. Really.
Anyway.

I finally got my New Hampshire license plates.
When I lived in D.C. proper, I didn't have a car. It is one of the great tragedies of my life that I never had this plate design as an option:

Sigh.

Up here, the options are this:


or this:

I went with the moose plates. They cost a little more, but the money goes to conservation efforts. And I am:

• all for conservation, and
• too lazy to identify and contribute to conservation charities myself

But that is not why I got the moose plates. I got the moose plates because it makes me sad that we keep clinging to a symbol for our state that does not, in fact, exist anymore.
I don't know what to think of this.

Please don't be a spaceship

The last owners of my house were very concerned with fire safety. They installed smoke detectors everywhere.
I think there are seven, in fact.
They're all hard-wired into the house, with battery backup. I feel very well-protected.
But.
But seven smoke detectors in a house this size means that at least some of them are very close together.
Which means that, if a person were wakened from a dead sleep at, say, 3:12 in the morning by the once-a-minute, ear-splittingly loud chirping of one of those smoke detectors, it might take her a long time to figure out which one it was. Once-a-minute is a horrible interval. It is not long enough to go back to sleep, but it is too long to be useful in trying to figure out which of the four smoke detectors in a ten-foot radius it is.
And once that person figured that out, her awareness that she was behaving exactly like this:

would not prevent her from behaving exactly like that.

Hamm and eggs

Note: This post talks about women's soccer. It contains no spoilers of any matches. It is safe for you women's soccer fans to read.

I like soccer. You may have noticed, this year, the Olympics are on the other side of the world. Which means if a game starts there at 7:45 p.m., it starts here at 7:45 a.m.

Now, in Arlington, Virginia, there are at least two sports bars where a grrrl could watch that game and have breakfast. If a grrrl was willing to travel to D.C., the possibilities open up even more. And, naturally, that would be desirable, because OMG-we're-playing-Norway-in-the-first-round!

So yesterday, in preparation, I e-mailed to ask a friend where I could go to do that here. The main sports bar in town has recently closed and reopened due to an unfortunate Fourth of July party damage episode. But surely they'd be open, right? Or there'd be some other place? I mean, sports bars serve breakfast. Especially during the Olympics.

Here is what I got back:

Tomorrow MORNING?
Are you nuts?
The only option I can think of is to go to the Best Western and take the lounge TV.

(Yes, I know Mia Hamm doesn't play for the USWNT any more. Do you have a better title?)

In which I compare my family to a wide receiver

There is much to post about. I'll try to get to it.
It has been a family-filled week, though, and so much fun I have wanted to use my time this week pretty much entirely for working, playing, and sleeping. There has been not much blogging, no cooking, very little cleaning. My exercise has consisted of walks (around assorted New England towns) and swims (to islands full of blueberries and away from whoever is It in our game of tag). I even keep forgetting to eat, and those of you who know me well may find that shocking. We are a slow-moving beast, but we have a good time.
And right this second, on the last full day of this very full week, my little house has seven of us in it, in various types of repose: reading, sleeping, playing video games on silent mode, checking the Internets. It is raining (it rains all the time these days). It is cozy here, where we are warm and dry. One of the cousins just commented to me that it is a perfect lazy afternoon, and she is right.
And it is totally quiet.
As, you know, a mouse.

Speaking of quiet, congratulations, Art Monk. About time.