Tag: politics

Halloween

Thursday night we went up to Anaheim to see a showing of The Nightmare Before Christmas.  It was the new 3-D version, and it was at a theater (Cinema City) that looked astonishingly like the Irvine Spectrum theater on the inside (in decor, not layout), but wasn’t an Edwards or Regal theater.  We wondered if it had been built or renovated right before the whole industry went through its consolidation phase a few years back.

There were maybe 12-15 people in the theater by the time it started, all adults  Perhaps some high-schoolers at the youngest.  Naturally the pre-movie programming was aimed at children.  It’s animated, right?

The movie was good, as always.  It was the second time we’d seen the 3D version, which works quite well, though there was one problem with the presentation: This theater uses all digital projection, and the resolution isn’t quite as high as it should be.  In scenes with high contrast or fast movement, we could see the pixels at the borders.

Halloween itself was a bit of a bust.  alenxa had made herself up as a vampire, and we’d bought three bags of candy, but I was so exhausted when we got home that I flopped onto the bed for "10 minutes" that turned into an hour and a half.  But the entire evening, not a single trick-or-treater knocked on our door.  Katie saw groups tromp up and down the stairs right next to us, but they passed us by entirely.  She figured there must be some sort of signal you’re supposed to put on your door to say, "We accept trick-or-treaters," and no one told us.  So I figure I’ll just take most of the candy into work on Monday.  It’ll go pretty quickly.

Saturday we ran some errands down in Lake Forest (among other things, checking for post-Halloween sales at Costume Castle) and drove through a No On Prop 8 rally on the corners of El Toro & Rockfield.  We waved, honked the horn, and Katie woo-hooed.  [Edit: forgot to mention, there was at least one person holding a handmade sign that said something like "Christians voting against Prop 8."  Nice to be reminded that not everyone falls for the false dichotomy.] We had lunch at the original Peppino’s (a bit expensive for lunch, but the leftovers will feed us for 2 more days) and realized that we hadn’t been to one since the restaurant in Tustin closed.  Then I spent the afternoon doing laundry catch-up, while Katie got started on Nanowrimo.

Obama Campaign Headquarters: One Day More

Finally logged onto Facebook after something like 2 months, and one of my friends had posted this.

Genius. Absolute Genius.

(Still trying to figure out whether they used the London or Broadway cast recording of Les Miserables. The most distinctive voices — Valjean and Eponine — were the same. There was a time I would have been able to tell instantly. I think it’s the London cast, but I’m not sure.)

Current Music: One Day More (still in my head)

Question to Californians

I realized yesterday that during the entire campaign season, I hadn’t seen a single sign, commercial or mailer for the Senate race (unless you count the “Please make your entire ballot look like this” cards that various groups send out). Hadn’t heard a radio ad. Hadn’t even received a robocall. Nothing for Feinstein. Nothing for Mountjoy. Nothing opposing either of them. If I hadn’t read the sample ballot, I wouldn’t have even know who the challenger was.

I can only infer from this that, at least in the LA/OC area (since we get the same TV stations), the race was presumed to be a slam-dunk and both candidates decided to focus their campaigns elsewhere. Either that or I really wasn’t paying attention.

(Similarly, in our House district only the Democratic challenger posted campaign signs, and the incumbent Republican still won handily. But then, this district has run Republican since dinosaurs roamed the Earth.)

Did anyone else see any serious CA Senate campaigning?

Sleeeeeeep

Up too late repeatedly this week. (What else is new?) Tuesday night it was writing down ideas for a joke website (which will remain nameless until it’s a bit further along). Sometimes when I’m trying to go to sleep my mind will start writing. Often it’ll be some rant about something that’s been bugging me, or sometimes it’ll be about something I found interesting, or an email to send someone, or ideas for my website. The problem is that I generally don’t pick these up again the next day, and I had some good ideas. I’m still kicking myself for completely forgetting what I was absolutely convinced would be a great stand-alone website idea, so obvious I wouldn’t have to write it down, and… well, I should have written it down.

So Tuesday night I got up and wrote stuff down.

And last night I finished the taxes. I’d done a rough draft a few weeks ago, just to confirm we were getting a refund that could significantly finance our vacation, but put off finishing the federal taxes and doing the state taxes, which are usually simpler… only the rules about deducting interest paid on student loans are different. CA only lets you deduct interest payments during the first 60 months of repayment, and I graduated in 1999, so I had to track down exactly when the loan went into repayment in order to figure out whether I could deduct the whole amount, or whether I had to estimate 11 months, 10 months, etc. In the end I had to run everything through another 1-page worksheet that exactly cancelled out the decuction, so it didn’t really matter when the 60-month cutoff date fell.

Sometimes I think tax preparers must have lobbyists in Congress and at the state level, trying to make sure the forms are as complicated as possible. I know it’s mostly about incentives, encouraging or rewarding certain types of behavior, but taking a different cut from every type of income seems a bit extreme.

Anyway, about a half hour ago I realized I was staring dumbly at the monitor here. The energy rushes from morning, breakfast, and lunch had each worn off, and when I finally got around to heading for the lunch room I was very glad to find there was still coffee. (I can’t even remember the last time I had work coffee.) It reminds me, actually, of college, when the class I was most likely to fall asleep in was generally the one mid-afternoon. Of course, now that I think about it, the only classes I can remember sleeping in on a regular basis were Early American Literature (with the exception of Ben Franklin’s autobiography, it was a slog) and, a class on Old English. It doesn’t fit the pattern, because it was mid-morning, and the subject was fascinating. And I really hated falling asleep in there, because aside from the interesting subject matter, it was a 10-person class held around a conference table in a tiny office.

Well, I guess it’s back to battling with server hardware.

Current Mood: 😴sleepy
Current Music: does the jet engine on my desk count?

Mistargeted

One of the *ahem* “perks” of registering to vote as “decline to state” is that you get political propaganda from all sides. But this is far beyond anything I’ve seen before.

Someone from the NRCC Business Advisory Council called me, at work, to invite me to the “annual dinner with President Bush.” (Not surprisingly, the NRCC is the National Republican Congressional Committee.)

Someone really missed the boat on that research.

(Meanwhile, having looked at their website, I’m trying to figure out how an agenda can be both progressive and conservative.)

Admittedly, the Democratic party doesn’t line up perfectly with my ideals either, but they seem bigger on things like civil liberties, good citizenship (at home and internationally), consumer rights, and—in a bizarre twist—financial responsibility than the Republicans are these days, and the Libertarian party is too far on the “business can do no wrong” side to be taken seriously. Even small-l libertarianism doesn’t work for me: while I like the idea of small government, I also like the idea of government-as-watchdog, making sure businesses don’t totally screw us over. (Even then, they can go too far, like the eternal cries of “Comic books/movies/TV/video games are corrupting our youth!” that never stop, just jump to a new medium every decade or so.)

I suspect I will eventually find a party I agree with, but there will only be three other members, none of whom want to run for office.

From the department of… huh?

Last night I dreamed that John Ashcroft was following me around the cereal aisle in the grocery store. After a bit he introduced himself: “Hi, I’m John Ashcroft. We met briefly in a shopping mall in Washington, DC ten years ago.” And since this was a dream, I started remembering the previous meeting. Which was essentially the same as the other one. Just about the point that I started to say “Oh, yeah, I remember now!” he was gone.

Current Mood: 😕confused

Politics, press, and lip service

Was listening to the White House press conference on the way to work. Someone said “Mr. President, you may not have had a chance to hear this, but it appears Yasser Arafat has passed away. What are your thoughts?”

Now, this turns out to be inaccurate, but at the time my reaction was a mix of “Holy $#!7” and “Maybe the Israeli/Palestinian peace process can get somewhere now.” It’s sad, but I’ve come to the conclusion that Arafat is perhaps the Palestinians’ biggest obstacle to peace, and they don’t see it. (Although now that I think about it, an interesting parallel can be made over here: no matter how clear it is that Bush is likely to keep us at war, people still voted for him in droves.) Perhaps Arafat being ill and out of the region will help other Palestinian leaders work towards a peace settlement. At least W has figured out by now that resolving the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is important. If he’d caught onto that at the beginning of his first term, instead of virtually abandoning the region, things might be a lot less messy today.

Meanwhile, Bush has again promised to be a “uniter, not a divider,” (as if that held last time) and is calling for the support of Kerry voters. Peter David put it this way: “I assure you I will give Bush as much of a chance as the GOP gave Clinton.” Here’s a hint: there are reasons we voted against you. Look into them, attempt to compromise, and maybe you’ll get people supporting some of your policies. Ignore them and you’ll just see more anger.

Depending on how they are handled, I can get behind things like fighting the AIDS epidemic, reigniting the space program, even simplifying the tax code. But there’s no way I’ll support your overwhelmingly conservative social agenda, there’s no way I’ll support poorly-planned unilateral preemptive strikes based on flawed intelligence, and there’s no way I’ll support financing the nation on the credit card model. People are worried enough about individual Americans living in debt up to their eyeballs, but it goes all the way to the top. (Fiscal responsibility? Sure, I’d like to see some.)

Elections and the other DoD

Props to the brave souls standing out on a street corner in the heart of Irvine waving Kerry/Edwards signs!

No, seriously, they need better props — the Bush/Cheney people across the street had a 6-foot banner, and the Kerry/Edwards people only had regular stake-in-the-front-yard signs. Although they did at least have a US flag to go with them, something the BC supporters did not.

Also, woke up to an interesting combination of music this morning: First, Dans Macabre. Then, after a snooze cycle, Stars and Stripes Forever. Elections from beyond the grave? What is this, Chicago? (Admittedly, to judge by the signs outside the OC Conservative Resource Center, they actually are running Reagan for office again… but I digress.)