Remember Kelo v. City of New London, where the city of New London, Connecticut decided to use eminent domain to take a neighbourhood and give it to a real-estate developer? It went to the Supreme Court in 2005, and the Supreme Court ruled this was just fine. I railed about it.

Anyway, "four years after that decision gave Susette Kelo's land to private developers for a project including a hotel and offices intended to enhance Pfizer Inc.'s nearby corporate facility, the pharmaceutical giant has announced it will close its research and development headquarters in New London, Connecticut." The former neighbourhood is still a bulldozed wreck. Awesome, is it not?

Current Mood: sleepy

The Droid: smartphone, or palantir?



This silly 'shopping brought to you by inspiration from enotsola's weird brain, although in his defense he has been reading The Lord of the Rings lately.

(click for bigger if you don't see what's photoshopped about this. hint: it's not the red eye-thing; that's original.)

Rhode Island governor Donald Carcieri (R) vetoed a bill that would allow same-sex couples control over their partners' funerals, calling it an assault on marriage, or, his words, part of "a disturbing trend over the past few years of the incremental erosion of the principles surrounding traditional marriage."

I want to punch Mr. Carcieri in the face until he stops. That's not a treat to do so; just a desire.

Current Mood: tired

I'm still feeling weird, didn't risk a walkies on Tuesday though had a nice time doing the Tesco Online shop, the way I'm feeling right now that's a much better way of getting tasty foods to the house. And I meant to get an early night except I got hooked on reading an amazingly good book, The Hunger Games - teen, post-apocalyptic, present tense with a dysfunctional society and televised violence, every single thing I normally avoid but its damned good, click link to read the first chapter. Hooked as in didn't look up from it till nearly 3am and had to scamper to do bedtime stuffs and actually go to sleep.

I'm less miserable though have gone a bit panicky and tearful at times, grr. Its wearing off bit by bit though. And I did at least manage to do some Chinese today, about half an hour of my reader book while resting after my shower, though I'm not sure I was quite with it enough to trying to learn new vocab. And I watched some of James May's new toy series: his plasticine garden was fab but the meccano bridge seriously rocked, am now lusting after meccano, I always wanted it as a child but just like train sets it was way too expensive back then..

Ooh and dinner was tasty, Tesco brought sour dough bread which I've never tried before and I had that with Pie d'Angloys cheese (like a very creamy brie), spread thickly on the sliced bread with some butter, and then other slices with chicken liver paté and this amazing caramelised onion relish, mmm.

Think I should go offline and curl up with a good book now, the second Karen Rose is shaping up to be as good as the one I read the other day. Earlier night might be wise too.. :)

Current Mood: sleepy

( Pictures, not that image heavy as they're thumbnails, but hey )


Recipes (sans their pictures, sorry):

Potato gratin
Fancy mashed sweet potatoes
Cheese autumn "wreath" (cheese slices cut in the shape of leaves and arranged on a platter)
Pumpkin carrot cake
Pumpkin and pasta soup
Sweet potato - leek soup
Savory autumn leaf hand pies
French apple tart

Poems:

Love is Like Late Autumn
Autumn Movement
Autumn in the Garden
An Autumn Evening
By an Autumn Fire
Autumnal Sonnet
Merry Autumn
Autumn

Four different links here:
Various autumn poems
Various autumn poems
Various autumn poems
Various autumn poems

Salon has a good article up on the Stupak amendment, which they call Stupak-Pitts because Rep. Pitts's office put together a lot of the structure of the actual text, and how their connections to the Family, a cross-party fundamentalist political organisation, helped it all come together. This short article is worth reading in its entirety because of its discussion of the rising role of the evangelical and fundamentalist right in Democratic party politics.

Aside from that, there is of course also the important role of the US Catholic Bishops in rejecting the status quo as a mere accounting gimmick in this new context.

eta: Elevated from darksumomo's comment: Rachael Maddow's outing of eight pro-Stupak-Pitts Family Democrats.

Current Mood: blah

In need of comfort or soothing? Someone linked a friend to this site, which is a looping track of rain and distant thunder ... very relaxing stuff. They suggest adding nice music too but just the rainy sounds are doing it for me, mmm.

RainyMood.com

Current Mood: relaxed

Zuldraz is a level 70 troll shaman, resto spec.  In order to keep his sanity, he's been advised to keep a Rage Diary, so that he has a safe place to vent his frustrations.  Trust me, you don't want an irritable healer in your party....

Last night, I was in The Nexus (reg, of course.)  We wiped... countless times.  This was on the trash mobs just before we hit the Librarian chick.
I will freely acknowledge that there were a couple of mage/warlock deaths because I wasn't paying attention to them as carefully as I might've.
However, the tpks were all of the form:  tank is down under 50% health, I start pulling out heavy heals, tank loses aggro, I die, everyone dies.

Tank should not be losing aggro to my heals.

And I should not have to be healing tank that hard from single groups of trash mobs.

So, in an attempt to dissect where the problem is, I inspect our tank (71 orc warrior, btw).  Three or four of his pieces of armor (didn't check his weapons) were purples.  From level 60.  At the time, they looked like pvp rewards, to me- it turns out that at least one of them was tier 2.

So, I said- friendly like, I thought- "[Tank], it looks like you're wearing a lot of level 60 pvp gear?"
"I AM NOT"
(btw, that one was verbatim.)
Me:  *links the three pieces I noticed*
Him:  Don't argue with me!
Him:  All I see are purples, baby!  Don't be hatin!
Me:  Level 60 epeen gear doesn't really cut it in Northrend, dude.
Him:  Then get someone better or learn how to heal!
Me:  I'm out.
(rest of group:  Me too.)
Him:  Can't take a couple of comments, huh?
Me:  No, I just don't feel like educating the ignorant. 
Me:  /ignore

The rest of the group, btw, more or less thanked me for trying and apologized.

*sigh* They will all pay, come the Day of Reckoning.

EDIT:  He's also specced for dps:  http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Shadow+Council&n=Tabitan

Anna's got a novelette in the three-writer collection Defiance, released today(!) by Drollerie Press. It'll be on Amazon soon, or you can buy it from the publisher website linked above. (This is her second release, the first being the novel Faerie Blood, available several places, just follow the link.)

Current Mood: pleased

Personally, I'm working, but apparently the Department of the Interior is letting everyone into National Parks (and other stuff like National Forests) for free today.

Care packages for current soldiers.

Navajo Code Talkers head to NYC Veteran's Day parade.

Posts about WWI.

Photos of the Great War.

Daily Mirror's collection of less heralded pictures.

BBC photos of Armistice Day 2008. (Apparently, those three gents are now dead.)

(That latter news story is careful to note they were the last WWI vets living /in the UK/. Does that mean there's someone in New Zealand or something? I suspect there's a news article somewhere today that'll tell someone, but I'm sure not finding it.)

Been a couple of days since I posted, in part because I've really been stuck on a song that I've been fighting the last few days, fiercely, and so accordingly I've been falling behind. The new one is not from notes. It's also one of those songs that I'm pretty sure I'll be revising heavily after the month is out. But! It's complete, if rough, so I can count it! It can be played from start to finish, there're four verses and... well, it's better performed as a piece than the pieces where when I was writing it. It's called "Taking Away," tho' like much of the rest of it, I'm not completely happy with that title yet. (I like "Nothin'" better in terms of the song, but much less as a title. So.)

Taking Away (2009 Crime and the Forces of Evil): 4m long. Also a tiny instrumental piece - untitled at the moment but does kind of stand on its own - makes another 2m. Day 10 total: Five songs, 16 minutes of music, and I am back on schedule. o.O Yay!

This post originated at ソラバドのおん: Solarbird Makes Noises, on Dreamwidth.

Current Mood: surprised

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

'In Flanders Fields' is by John McRae, a Canadian surgeon. Written sometime after the battle of Ypres in 1915. (Original.) He himself died of injuries sustained in World War I, in 1918.

This is the last autumnvent post, everyone. I'll have a bonus post tomorrow with some odds and ends I didn't manage to put in anywhere. Thanks to everyone who read along!</a>

Golden wheat harvest by Ben



Slow, but sure, the enemy comes,
His breath we may almost feel,
And the flowers of earth must yield their lives
'Neath the tread of his frosty heel.
The flower-queen from her throne has stepped,
And bowed her stately head,
And the leaves of Autumn have fallen fast,
To cover the lovely dead.

--from "November" by Mary Dow Brine



Pumpkin soup in shell


Pork Loin with Apple-Cornbread Stuffing

Check it out, dudes:



That's my comic! In that I selected this order of the panels thrown up by a randomizer, and created a title and tooltip text for them. I actually sent in like six submissions, carefully whittled down from fifteen or so, and I was surprised when Gregor's response said he was going to use them all. I doubt it's that I'm a comedic genius, rather that he probably takes anything that's mildly funny, not a troll, and not obscene, but still, hey.

The Stupak amendment is worse than most people thought at first, like I expected it would be. But so is the whole health care bill, so. I'm mostly just posting this for my own memory.

Women's health, schomen's smealth. Not that it's the first time. Anger at the Stupak Democrats. More on what Stupak does. Stupak's news release. Calls for primary opponents for the Stupak Democrats. How Catholic Bishops swung the anti-abortion amendment. David Frum gets it right.

Mostly I'm waiting for the next iteration, where no health provider that also provides abortion can receive exchange-group insurance funds at all. And possibly, given that contraception is out of the bill, contraception as well.

Basically what you need to take away here is that the GOP hates most civil liberties (pretty much everything except gun rights) and women's rights in general, and there's not a civil liberty or civil right that the Democratic party won't sell out to achieve some goal. (Plus some they just hate, like gun rights.) That's just how it works. If you're a straight woman, well, here's an example, and welcome to the GBLT fuck-you treadmill.

eta: Mr. Obama says Stupak must be changed back to the Hyde Amendment status quo. We'll see whether that means anything as this unfolds. (Pointer courtesy rfunk.)

Current Mood: tired

To be fair, today started pretty well. I had a good night's sleep and the grumps were pretty much gone once I woke to blue skies and sunshine, and I got lots done first thing, various chores & sorting, and mum made chicken soup for everyone for lunch, and I was going to get walkies after my shower, except got the timing wrong as dad was in the way so I ended up getting lunch first, then just chucking clothes on to get a walk while the sun was still out, and met my dad coming back from the library so we walked together.

And then mum planned to make corned beef stew for dinner so I was busy peeling the potatoes, and then started feeling very odd, had tea and biscuits, didn't help, had more milk, didn't help, ended up lying on her bed under a duvet as I felt too fragile to go very far but needed to be lying down *right now*. After which I managed to get upstairs and crawl under a blanket, suspecting a seizure would hit. Luckily napping seems to have averted it and I did finally manage to get a shower round 9pm, then made dumplings to go with the stew which was delicious, and other than that have been reading and trying not to move around too much cos I keep going very shaky, urgh.

So much for the plan to do some Italian and read Chinese today, have to be tomorrow I guess. At least I managed to extract Zebedee's shed skin from his tank - had I tried last night I would have been nibbled but today he just popped his head up as though to say "What *are* you doing?" and then ignored me. I measured his shed, which is a semi-accurate measure of a snake's length, give or take an inch and he's 29", thats 2ft 5", getting to be a looong little snake, about double what he was when we first got him.

Current Mood: sleepy

Its been a rotten day - started out ok but I went really ill this afternoon and couldn't cope with talking to anyone, so apart from a few text messages I've barely spoken to a forest, who texted to say he was on MSN for a bit before bed, so I scampered in here to the PC, tried to launch Messenger and it refused, saying I had to update. Fine, fine, clicky button...

And 35 long minutes later, by which time Forest has texted to say he's off to bed so I didn't get a chance to chat, I finally have a working Messenger. And ooh, a Windows Live folder in my Start menu too. I've got a blogging tool! (do not want). I've got a photo gallery thing !(do not want). I've got some kind of Mail client (still happy with Eudora for all my email needs after 13 years, thanks....)

I also had the option of checking the box to make Bling my search provider *and* ensure no programs could change it. Er, no.
And have MSN as my start page. Er, no.

I think Silverlight has crept in somewhere as well, not sure either way on that.

So 35 minutes installing stuff I don't want or need and will never use, plus trying to help me to use even more unwanted services, and meanwhile I don't get to be silly and snuggly online to my man for ten minutes or so which is all I wanted.

If I ever get a laptop, its having Ubuntu. No question.

Grrr.

Current Mood: annoyed

Yesterday I grabbed Fergus and we headed out to Musquodoboit Rails to Trails. It’s part of the Trans Canada Trail system. I wanted to head out there because there are loads of geocaches along the trail, and Fergus would get a good walk.

We probably walked about 6km or more in the 3 hours we were on the trails, but that include many stops while we hunted the woods looking for geocaches. Of the 8 caches on the trail, I found 0. But we had a good time.

I’ve learned that geocaches aren’t ‘on’ the trail, you need to leave the trail and head into the woods a little ways to find them (looks like rainboots would have been handy in some spots). Also that trying to tromp through the woods with a dog on a leash is just a recipe for tripping hazards and tangles. We would come to a tree and I would go around it one way, Fergus the other.

Fergus did have loads of fun digging and carrying branches, trying to tear branches off the trees, and walking on felled trees like it was a balance beam (I wish I’d had my camera in hand, it was too cute.). He also met loads of other dogs that were out for a walk, and he was a bit better mannered. Perhaps he’s learning?

Unfortunately I had slept in yesterday and we got a late start, and we ended up walking the last 30-40 minutes in complete darkness because I kept hunting for one particular cache I was convinced I was just about to find. Thankfully I had my headlight in my backpack and was able to cast a bit of light on the path, although I didn't think of it right away and so we walked without it for most of the time.

I will go back and try to find those caches, but perhaps when Fergus is better behaved and I have some company to help in the search (or at least hold on to Fergus while I hunt about the woods). We might visit the trail again just for walking, the scenery was amazing!

Current Mood: accomplished