doubting thom

In a scathing column in The New York Press, Michelangelo Signorile justifiably takes Mary Cheney to task, not just for her silence in the face of her father’s reverse on the issue of who should determine the legality of gay relationships, but for her complicity in this position by joining the vice president’s re-election campaign. Signorile angrily asks:

“What the hell happened to you? Are you just another spoiled rich brat–the lesbian Paris Hilton–worried about getting a chunk of those 30 million Halliburton bucks should Dad’s heart conk out?…

“It would be one thing if you had simply slithered away into the background when it was announced that your father would be Bush’s running mate in 2000. (People can’t, after all, pick their parents, as Patti Davis and Ron Reagan Jr. are painfully aware.) Instead, you became active in the Bush/Cheney campaign. As the lesbian poster child, you helped sell the snake oil of ‘compassionate conservatism.’ You went along with the program, tricking people into thinking that your father and W. would be tolerant on gay rights….

“…[T]here will be a lot of political gay bashing, the kind that fuels the Christian right as well as thugs on the streets. The impact of that can’t be underestimated, and yes, Mary, blood will be on your hands too. I’m sure you think that’s unfair of me. But life is unfair. Just think: You could be a poor dyke getting your head bashed in a rough, urban neighborhood every day of your life. Instead, you’re a woman of privilege who has done a lot of damage and now needs to take responsibility for it by stepping down from the campaign and speaking up. History, Mary, will judge you by what you choose to do in the coming months.”

Came across this link to MyWorld66 from JaseWells.com. Select the countries you’ve visited, and it will create a map with those countries marked in red.

Here’s mine. Sadly, for someone who thought he was so worldly, I’ve only visited 13 countries so far. I need to get moving.

create your own visited country map

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I found a similar application for creating a map of the states I’ve visited. Here I’ve done a little better, having visited 36 plus the District of Columbia. I just need to take one train trip from Mississippi up the middle of the country ending in the Dakotas. Well, that and two flights to Alaska and Hawaii.

Yesterday I stayed home from work, feeling a little under the weather; my stomach and gut had been bothering me since the weekend, when I had attributed it to the rich food Jeff and I had been eating, and Monday when I ascribed it to the greasy Johnny Rockets burger and fries.

On Tuesday night, we decided we would watch the State of the Union farce speech, and it’s probably no great surprise that it angered, distressed and even sickened me; I actually felt physically ill throughout the speech, and slept very poorly later that night, getting up several times to use the bathroom. So, even though I don’t have much sick leave and probably could have functioned reasonably well at the office, I decided to burn a sick day anyway to rest and remain close to the toilet.

Today, when I returned to work, I discovered that several of my colleagues had been experiencing similar gastrointestinal symptoms over relatively the same period. My boss reported having felt sick over the weekend, and one of my employees had stayed home on Monday when both he and his son were experiencing the same thing. So maybe it wasn’t the food–and maybe Bush only exacerbated the discomfort, rather than being solely responsible–but some sort of mild bug we were passing around.

Interestingly, Alex (the cat) has just been back to his litter box–which sits in a closet not far from the computer desk–three times in the last five minutes, so this bout of diarrhea doesn’t even seem to be confined to the humans of my acquaintance.

I was eating some Triscuits with my soup tonight at dinner, and on the back of the box noticed that one recipe called for, and I quote, “KRAFT Roasted Garlic Flavor Cheddar Pasteurized Process Cheese Food.”

I rather suspect that anything that has to assert in its name that it’s food, probably isn’t. And anything that includes “x flavor” in its name doesn’t really taste like x.

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve participated in a blog meme, but as Mac at Go Fish notes, this one’s about books and therefore was difficult to resist.

The items in bold are the books/series I’ve read. No, I don’t know why these particular books were chosen, that’s just the way this meme was created.

1984, George Orwell
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy [in Russian]
Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
The BFG, Roald Dahl
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
Catch 22, Joseph Heller
The Catcher In The Rye, JD Salinger
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky [in Russian]
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
Dune, Frank Herbert
Emma, Jane Austen
Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
The Godfather, Mario Puzo
Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell [nor have I watched the entire movie]
Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
His Dark Materials trilogy, Philip Pullman
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
Holes, Louis Sachar
I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
Katherine, Anya Seton
The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, CS Lewis
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
The Lord Of The Rings, JRR Tolkien
Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blighton
Magician, Raymond E Feist
The Magus, John Fowles
Matilda, Ronald Dahl
Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
Mort, Terry Pratchett
Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
On The Road, Jack Kerouac
One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Perfume, Patrick Suskind
Persuasion, Jane Austen
The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
Pride And Prejudice, Jane Austen
The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
The Stand, Stephen King
The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Tess Of The D’urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
The Twits, Roald Dahl
Ulysses, James Joyce
Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
War And Peace, Leo Tolstoy [in Russian]
Watership Down, Richard Adams
The Wind In The Willows, Kenneth Grahame
Winnie-the-Pooh, AA Milne
The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

[Via Go Fish]

I posted this originally just as a quicklink on my serendipity blog, but decided I wanted to note it here on elf-reflection, too.

As the president prepares to unveil in his State of the Union speech tonight his administration’s election-year $1.5 billion dollar plan to “rescue marriage,” and as the push for a constitutional amendment against gay marriage continues to gain steam, a columnist in Newsday notes that research shows that the four states with the highest divorce rates in the country (50 percent more than the national average), outside of Nevada, are Tenessee, Arkansas, Alabama and Oklahoma, all Bible Belt states that went for Bush in 2000. Moreover, divorce rates are higher among Baptists (29 percent) and nondenominational Christians (34 percent) than among atheists/agnostics (21 percent). In the “legendarily devout South,” 27% of adults are divorced, while the lowest divorce rate of 19% was in the “liberal Northeast.”

As Jeff noted at Rebel Prince, he and I took advantage over the weekend of DC’s Restaurant Week 2004, in which a number of the metro area’s tonier restaurants offered 3-course prix fixe lunches for $20.04 and dinners for $30.04. Because we found out about it so late in the week, by Saturday morning when we were trying to make reservations, there wasn’t much left. I’d heard a lot of great things about Butterfield 9, but they only had one reservation on Saturday, for 10:30 p.m. (and I was worried that by then, only one half-hour before closing, they might be out of many of the limited choices), so we went for an early 5:00 seating at Red Sage, to which I hadn’t been in probably ten years or more.

It was an incredible dinner, with perfectly seasoned, substantial portions of food and wonderful service. I started with the ginger cured salmon, only lightly seared and deliciously accented with wasabi oil and salmon roe. I had a pork tenderloin as my main entree (which now doesn’t seem to appear on the dinner menu, apparently updated since this weekend), and finished with a bread pudding that had been marinated in butterscotch and then served with a caramel sauce and homemade butter brickle ice cream (also no longer on the menu). Yum. Red Sage also has such an interesting, unique interior, with the adobe-inspired walls and seating, and the water feature running along the wall at floor level like a small arroyo. (Though this was unpleasantly mirrored in their men’s room after dinner, where I discovered that the urinal wouldn’t stop running, overflowing quickly onto the floor like a sudden desert flash flood.)

On Sunday morning, Jeff asked if I still wanted to go to Butterfield 9; he’d checked again and at that point they were showing an open reservation at 7:00, which he went ahead and snagged just in case. While the dinner there certainly was worth $30.04, overall I have to confess to some disappointment, beginning with the discovery that the menu at table was slightly different from the one promulgated for Restaurant Week on their web site, specifically in that the entree I had most wanted to try–the venison mignon–was being substituted with a filet mignon instead. That said, the filet was the best part of the meal, though relatively unseasoned and requiring some salt and pepper to bring out the flavor, and the pistachio bread pudding was sweet, tasty and an interesting match to the filet. The duck confit and wild mushroom risotto starter, however, was overly bland and heavy, with the mushrooms looking suspiciously to me like cultivated button rather than wild while the duck was overcooked and dry. The crème brûlée was good though nothing special, and the accompanying “house made cookie” was chewy nearly to the extent of taffy; I probably looked like a cat eating peanut butter trying to get through it.

I think we overindulged on rich foods this weekend, though, and then made the mistake of stopping last night for burgers at Johnny Rockets at Jeff’s request after I picked him up from work. We both spend the rest of the evening yesterday feeling a little sick, and even this morning I’m wishing I had my bottle of Prilosec here with me at the office.

Last night I started playing the LucasArts/Bioware RPG set in the Star Wars universe, “Knights of the Old Republic.” Wow! I’m just barely into the game, which has received multiple awards for game of the year for 2003, and I’m so hooked on it already. The voice acting is incredible, and the storyline seems well-written and engaging.

Continue reading →

Earlier this week I had my annual review (“Performance Appraisal Report,” or “PAR,” in State Department parlance) with my supervisor. Granted, this is the government so I’m told there tends to be a fair amount of the equivalent of grade inflation, but even so I was very pleased that I received the highest possible rating (Outstanding: This is a level of exceptionally high-quality performance. The quality and quantity of the employee’s work substantially exceeds the fully successful standard and rarely leave room for improvement.) for each of my individual job elements and for my overall rating.

My boss and I also had a wonderful, honest and thought-provoking discussion about the highlights, successes and challenges of the past year, and about my expectations for 2004. I admitted that while I enjoy the environment in which I work, I’m really not sure where I want to be over the longer term, noting particularly that the current position doesn’t provide me any real intellectual or operational challenges; we agreed to work together to try to find ways to offer me greater challenge and opportunity, and she offered her understanding if, in the future, I realize that the Institute doesn’t have any growth opportunities that meet my wants and needs, and her support in identifying and pursuing opportunities that might, even if elsewhere. That’s the kind of manager I’ve always striven to be, and I appreciate it when I find it in my own supervisor. We’re very sympatico in that regard; she also came into government service relatively late in life, and doesn’t see it necessarily as a lifelong career, nor her responsibility to ensure that I spend my life as a paper-pusher. My previous supervisor here was somewhat the opposite: my first day on the job, he pulled me into his office to welcome me. Rather than the speech I expected about the quality of the workplace, or the breadth of my responsibilities, nor the congeniality of my peers, his first words to me were along the lines of “You’re a lucky young [sic] man to have gotten hired by the government at so high a level; now you’re set for life, because it’s almost impossible for them to fire you.” Now there’s an inspiring philosophy that makes me want to come into work and give my all day after day.

Everyone else at work yesterday was making grand plans for today in their hope that the predicted snowfall would cause the federal government to close today. I was much more cautious, noting that the predicted accummulation of 1 to 3 inches wasn’t likely to shut down the government, just make the commute even longer and more difficult than usual for most.

Still, a childlike part of me was full of a gleeful hope as well that the predictions would turn out to be wrong and that we’d see half a foot or more, giving me a holiday from the office drudgery.

And the predictions were wrong. Unfortunately, they just were wrong in the other direction: by dawn this morning, not only wasn’t there an inch or more of snow, there wasn’t even a single flake to be seen near my home, either in the air or on the ground. And the National Weather Service had replaced its prediction of snow with just a wind-chill advisory, and even that paling in comparison (though thankfully so) to the arctic-like temperatures across New England.