It's always refreshing when politicians do something that, well, sucks less than the things they usually do: I was extremely heartened that the Senate told the ban-gay-marriage-amendment people to go engage in conjugal relations with themselves. If the enemy of your enemy is your friend, is the defeat of an attempt to defeat you your victory?

That's "Mr. Amok" to you

I realize this means I'm incredibly easily amused, but how cool is it that there's a guy in the Bible named "Amok"? (When I first encountered it in the index of the book I'm working on, I was really hoping it would be a place name—a city, maybe—because then you could say the guy in charge of it was "running Amok.")



(I always thought that a good place name, especially for a bar or a small resort town, would be "Loose Ends," because then if someone asked where you were, you could say "I'm at Loose Ends" and mean it.)



(Did I mention that I'm incredibly easily amused?)

Did you ever have one of those days when you get so caught up in your work that you forget to eat until 1:30? Yeah, I usually don't either, but it's happened two days in a row now. Unfortunately, after I remember to take my lunch break and start the afternoon's work, I don't retain/regain that level of concentration...it turns into a long, long slog from 2:15 to 5. (For instance, right now it feels like the past 45 minutes have actually taken an hour and a half.)



Humph. Everyone should be allowed to leave work early on sunny summer Fridays...

Why don't they just go ahead and call the annual event in Pamplona the running of the idiots? (Linking to this particular article because the picture was cited on Fark.com with the headline "If there ever was a running of the bulls photo that epitomized 'total loss of bladder control,' this is it.")

I'm a toolbar tool

I'd like to be a Mozilla Firefox person, really I would—I've downloaded and installed it and everything—but darnit, I'm a toolbar junkie, and I can only get all my toolbars to work in Internet (H)explorer.





click for bigger image

I've gotta have my Merriam-Webster toolbar so I can look up words on the fly when I'm copyediting (or doing the Times crossword on my computer);





I need my Yahoo toolbar because that's where all my bookmarks live (plus it's the fastest way to get to my primary e-mail);





click for bigger image

and I don't need my Google toolbar, I guess, but I like all the search tools and the extremely aggressive pop-up blocker,





and I especially like the option where you can toggle highlighting of search terms on the "found" page.







Oh, I know Mozilla is wonderful. It handles Unicode brilliantly, and you wouldn't believe how good right-aligned Hebrew looks in it. But...but...my toolbars! I want my toolbars!

20 Questions to a Better Personality

Okay, I'm not going to be the last person online to take this...I've found it a few different places, most recently at Tenth Muse.

Wackiness: 32/100

Rationality: 46/100

Constructiveness: 44/100

Leadership: 40/100



You are an SEDF--Sober Emotional Destructive Follower. This makes you an evil genius. You are extremely focused and difficult to distract from your tasks. With luck, you have learned to channel your energies into improving your intellect, rather than destroying the weak and unsuspecting.



Your friends may find you remote and a hard nut to crack. Few of your peers know you very well--even those you have known a long time--because you have expert control of the face you put forth to the world. You prefer to observe, calculate, discern and decide. Your decisions are final, and your desire to be right is impenetrable.



You are not to be messed with. You may explode.

I took it three times and kept getting the same result...okay, okay, so I'm evil. (I'll take "evil" if I can keep "genius." And every now and then I've been know to asplode.) It's a more interesting result to read than the INTP I always get on the Myers-Briggs.



Go take it yourself at Jenny Turpish Slapped Me.

Frozen drinks

I left off on Friday with a mention of "a freezer full of cosmopolitans and margaritas and rum punch." And while I have (surprise, surprise) other backlogged things I want to post about the weekend, I'll provide, for the time being, a quick Frozen Drink Tutorial:



Never mind all that crap about putting drink mixes and ice cubes in a blender and then having a blender to clean and more ice cubes to make. Frozen alcoholic beverages are easy. Just mix up your drink of choice, preferably in quantity (six servings is a good number), put it in a container—I recommend zip-lock freezer bags, quart or gallon size—and put it in the freezer for six hours or so. The alcohol keeps the mixture from freezing solid, so you wind up with a nice cocktail slush. Scoop or pour or ladle it into a glass, stick in a straw or a spoon, and pretend you're lounging on a lanai watching the fairy terns swoop among the palm trees. Heaven.



While I'm here, my recipe for the metropolis, which is a lot like a cosmopolitan but better:

2 parts cranberry juice

1 part each mandarin orange vodka, Triple Sec, and Rose's lime juice

A batch of six fits perfectly into a standard 64-oz. glass Ocean Spray cranberry juice bottle, which is very convenient. I'm never without a bottle in the fridge and/or a bag in the freezer. I've got a good margarita recipe and a luscious rum punch, too; but those would require going downstairs and finding the cards they're written on. Maybe tomorrow...