And by the way...

Sorry if any of you encountered the fifteen or so previous attempts to get the "Head(line)s up" post published, with all the crappy-looking versions of the table. Blogger has been reeeeeaallly slow for the past two days; maybe I'll have to make the mythical future date when I work on my Web site a sooner mythical future date when I work on my Web site.

Head(line)s up

Yesterday was a great day for Fark.com headlines—to heck with the stories, these tell tales on their own:

		Poland to pull out of Iraq. Bush: "Don't forget Tonga"
		Latest poll shows 49 percent for Bush, 49 percent for Kerry. In other news, 49 percent of U.S. voters are morons
		This week's headline: Onlookers flock to Mt. St. Helens. Next week's headline: Onlookers critical of government's inability to rescue them from oncoming lava

I bet that last one actually is going to be the gist of a headline next week. (It's a volcano, people! Not a tourist attraction!)

Fall's fallen

Hi, October. Nice to see you. You're my favorite month, really. (We even had our wedding in you!) But one thing: Could you ease up on the allergens and the early-season colds? Nothing spoils a gorgeous blue-sky crisp-air autumn day like that nagging itch at the back of my throat and the front of my sinuses that says "You're going to be coughing your lungs up by the end of the week, you'll stop being able to breathe through your nose by Wednesday, and you'll have a sore throat as soon as you wake up tomorrow that will last until St. Crispin's Day. Tell all your friends to buy stock in Benadryl and start using NyQuil as a cocktail mixer, 'cause the Season of the Post-Nasal Drip is just beginning."



Disclaimer: No, I don't really drink NyQuil recreationally. Hot rum and lemon juice is much better.

Bad headline alert

Reuters headline: In Rural USA, Republicans Win with Guns, Abortion. I know what it's trying to say...but doesn't it sound like there are Republicans banging on farmhouse doors, holding people at gunpoint, and threatening to give them abortions if they don't vote for Bush?

Feed of the Day

Those of you who are cooler than me probably already know this, but I just found out about it (via cheryln, one of the LiveJournalers I Bloglined this morning): the "What's New" page at Snopes.com has an RSS feed, which, as Cheryl says, "makes it a lot easier to check up on the breathless rumors that flood the rest of your friends list and your inbox."

Where's your line?

How massively cool is this?: Bloglines can subscribe to public LiveJournals, not just blogs whose authors* have created their own feeds. Since I got my online-journal start on LJ, and still have friends with whose lives I want to keep up who use LJ, I'm tremendously psyched that I can add them to Bloglines and have convenient access to them in a browser sidebar, instead of having to make a separate trip to my LJ friends page (which, I fear, I haven't been doing nearly as often as I should). Of course, I'll still have to check the private journals and friends-only entries by hand, but hopefully having the other journal feeds and public entries right there in front of me will remind/encourage/shame me into signing in and reading the rest.



*Anyone have a better word for "person who does the blogging"? I tried "owner," "proprietor," and "creator," but none of them felt right. "Blogger" is the default, of course, but "blogs whose bloggers..." was too redundant, even for a Monday morning.

Political potpourri

Well, for the first election year since 1988, I didn't watch a presidential debate. For one thing, I was painfully tired (I accidentally took my nighttime medication in the morning yesterday, and the side effects had me just about falling face-first into the keyboard until early afternoon); I wasn't in the mood to stay up till 11 watching anything. For another, I just can't stand listening to George Bush talk, and after months of swing-state campaign ad saturation, I'm not too interested in hearing Kerry talk, either. (I don't mind hearing what they have to say; I just don't like hearing their actual voices.) And, theoretically, J. and I already know who we're voting for; there isn't much that could change our minds. (J.: "John Kerry would have to tell me, in person, that he went to Thailand to f!ck small boys to make me vote against him. And even then I might reconsider because of the Supreme Court.")



And, goldang it, I'm tired of the sniping and the back-and-forth soundbites and the taglines that have been said so often they don't mean anything anymore. A thought I had this morning on the whole waffling/flip-flopping/inconsistency issue:



Are people supposed to go through life without ever changing their mind about anything, regardless of their maturation process and personal experiences? If people never changed their minds no matter what happened, Saul wouldn't have let being stricken blind on the road to Damascus make him give up his busy job supervising the execution of Christians.



I forget exactly who said this about Bush—I think it was Jon Stewart, but whoever it was, I like it: "He drove straight into a brick wall, but he didn't blink." And while I casting about for "Republican for Kerry" gear, I saw this on a t-shirt: "Bush just flopped."



(Republican? Me? Well, technically; I'm registered as one. [No! Wait! Come back!] There's going to have to be a lengthier "Me and Politics" post pretty soon, I think. If I try really hard, I might even be able to piece something together before the election. [Try really hard, or get really liquored up; the latter sounds more fun than the former, and whatever I write would probably be a lot more fun to read.])