(no subject)

[catsittingstill]

Okay, this is such an amusing idea I need to go with it too.

A Letter To The President



Dear "President" Bush,

I don't want to be protected from gay marriage or pornography, thanks very much.

There are some things I *would* like to be protected from, though, as long as you're in the mood. By great good fortune, some of them are very close at hand for you and should be no trouble at all to eliminate.

I would like to be protected from:

Election fraud, and in particular electronic voting machines a teenager could hack and which are produced by a company whose owner has sworn to deliver his state to the Republican party.

John Ashcroft and The Patriot Act and especially Patriot II.

Packing of the US courts with hard line conservative judges.

Dick Cheny, Paul Wolfowitcz, Donald Rumsfeld and the Project for a New American Century. And especially from hasty decisions to invade countries that haven't attacked us and aren't going to. And *especially* from even hastier decisions to lie about the need for the above.

The two top Administration officials who exposed a CIA operative. (What are you messing around with secretaries and janitors in the State Department for? Pick up the phone and call your *top* staffers and ask them point blank.)

The proposal to use "smart" stamps to track the senders of every single piece of personal mail.

Now as I said--these are all close at hand and should be no problem. So next week, I'd like you to get started on protecting me from

People who talk on the phone while driving.

"Gift cards" whose money leaks out.

Telemarketers

The John Lennon song "Woman"

As a bit of truth-in-advertising that I expect you don't hear very much I'm just going to take this moment to tell you that even if you do protect me from all these things I probably won't vote for you. I'm sorry, but you've had your chance to demonstrate your ability to serve the country as President and you've succeded beyond my wildest nightmares.

Yours, respectful of the office, -Cat Faber



I wasn't sure how many trick-or-treaters we were going to get last night--we wound up getting maybe twenty in little trickles of twos and threes. One interesting demographic was that nearly all of them arrived by car. Okay, New Market is a small and spread out town, but it makes me wonder if more and more people are using their cars for *every* bit of travel.

Some of the kids arrived by bike (about 4). Most of these were not wearing costumes. I gave them some candy anyway, after first asking them what they were going as... but maybe next year I won't. I feel kind of cheated. I give out candy--that's my part of the deal as a grownup. But the kids' part of the deal is that they wear costumes. If you can't afford to buy one, it's perfectly okay with me to make a mask out of construction paper and string and pin a towel around your neck---but these kids didn't even *try*.

Hmpf.

Comments

[elysdir.livejournal.com]

I gather that it's becoming more common for parents to drive kids to nicer neighborhoods to go trick-or-treating.

Re costumes: I think it particularly bugs me as they get older. Seventeen-year-olds (or twenty-year-olds) showing up on the doorstep, sans costumes, demanding candy.... Someone was saying last night that perhaps it's time to stop trick-or-treating around the age when the question goes from "What are you dressed as?" to "What the hell are you doing on my property?"

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Snicker. Perhaps would enjoy contributing to Digby's search for rhetorical frameworks which would make it possible to argue for liberal positions in a sensible way.

I had about five groups of trick-or-treaters last night; I'll write about them over in randwolf.

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

Nice list!

We got quite a few undisguised trick-or-treaters as well, which was dissapointing. But the ones that did dress up were cute.

Out of curiousity, what specifically about "Woman" do you dislike? I admit it's not one of Lennon's *better* tunes, but I never found it especially objectionable either.

[folkmew.livejournal.com]

Well - we took Rowan (3) and Corwin (2) to our friend's house. Sosenna is 3. Lynne and her son Jae (6) met us there. Lynne and Jae live very rurally as do we currently - whereas Jean and Sosenna live in the town and have a good neighborhood for trick or treating.

Rowan was dressed in a cheap pirate costume that Grandma (wisely) insisted on buying because she knew I wouldn't have time to make one as I had planned. The look was greatly enhanced however by his chainmail coif that he wore. Hee. (Ed had brought chainmail for me to wear as Joan of Arc but - let's just say that the shirt was definitely not "one size fits all" especially on my post-two pregnancies body. sigh) Corwin had a very cute "off the rack" dinosaur costume which he put on so we could snap a few pictures and then wore out the door and then before we even got to the first house proceeded to practically scream to have it taken off. Sigh. So since I wasn't wearing a costume anyway I took to sort of hanging it off my head and pointing it out to people saying things like "see - wouldn't he look cute if he'd wear this?" Sosenna also refused to wear her cow costume.

Now - as a fellow admirer of halloween costumes I appreciate your viewpoint and I imagine the kids you were talking about don't fit this category anyway but - trust me - sometimes you don't want to force your child to wear a costume if it means they won't have any fun. However I think if a teenager came to my door not in costume I'd at least say something admonishing to them.

My brother used to go out trick or treating in high school and my mom (who was a bit taken aback at the thought of her 6'5 son knocking on people's doors with his friends) offered to host a party instead thus was born a tradition for years of an annual halloween billiards tournement and party. But yes - they usually wore costumes. :-)

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

The kids I was thinking of were more in the 10 to 12 range. I didn't get any much older than that.

Kip thinks the kids arriving in cars are from the more rural areas where it's a long distance between houses.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I wandered over to have a look and submitted an opinion--at which point I spent hours wandering through the blogs in the area.

You're on my friends list so I won't miss your journal entry :-)

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Arrg arrg arrg. The first time I heard it I wondered if someone had dared John to write a song averaging more than one cliche per line, while still remaining vague and imageless.

"Woman I hope you understand the little boy inside the man" Okay--everyone has a little child inside--but don't you have *any* original way to put that? Why does the little boy inside the man matter--is there something he wants from her he isn't getting? Is there something he did to her he needs to explain? What?

"Woman, I can hardly express my deep emotions at my thoughtlessness" (I think). Deep emotions? What emotions exactly? My deep pleasure? My poignant shame? "I'm very sorry I hurt you" at least has the advantage of being direct and forcefull instead of floating belly-up in the tepid ocean of vague.

"I love you, yeah yeah; now and forever" I'm not even sure how to punctuate that, which is a bad sign. This is, IIRC, the bridge--the musical balance point of the song that is also supposed to move it forward. Please, please, please could we have *something* memorable here. There's nothing wrong with love songs, really there isn't--and if this line were some sort of stark contrast in its simplicty to the rich image-filled lyrics elsewhere in the song it might even come across as deeply sincere (though I'd lose the "yeah yeah"). But it's just more of the same.

Even the form of address he chooses in every verse "woman"--he's not speaking to someone in particular, is he? Or if he is, he never bothered to learn her name, which suggests that those deep emotions can't run all that deep.

Pop songs tend to be bland and generic, I know. (Terrence Chua did a great take-off of that in the Consuite at OVFF, as a matter of fact) But "Woman" carries it to an infuriating extreme. It would be funny if I thought it was deliberate.

Some people must like the song. It got a *lot* of airplay when it first came out. But it's not to my taste.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Well, there's a difference between a 2 year old deciding wearing a costume is just too far outside his experience to be fun and a 10 year old deciding he can get candy without living up to his part of the deal. I would cut a two year old some slack--I did get a few that age who had decided to take off their headgear, which made it a bit more challenging to figure out what they were. Though I spotted the firefighter right off--the little reflective raincoat was a dead giveaway. The kid in the Scooby-doo costume I couldn't identify until he was walking away with Scooby's flayed head bouncing empty and upside down down his back.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

It isn't called "the web" for nuttin'. :-)