Maybe Caribou Barbie got fed up

There has been a lot of talk in the past few days about Sarah Palin going "off message" and having the audacity to speak what is on her mind, rather than the scripted remarks that the RNC has fed to her. Good for her. I wouldn't vote for her in any case, but I'm rather pleased that she's starting to stand up for herself a bit.

What bothered me most about the whole $150,000 wardrobe thing and the makeup person thing was that it really does seem like the RNC is happy playing with their Caribou Barbie -- dressing her up and making her say what they want her to say. I don't think she's the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, but no woman should be treated by men as just something to manipulate for their own agendas.

The whole thing just is another example of how little regard the RNC has for women in general.

Oct 22

Even though I'm on the fifth day of a migraine, I thought I'd post this:

Some birthdays

• 1811 Franz Liszt, romantic composer/virtuoso pianist


• 1845 Sarah Bernhardt, actress


• 1887 John Reed, journalist who reported on Mexican, Russian revolutions (his story is the subject of the movie Reds)


• 1917 Joan Fontaine, actress (Ivanhoe; Rebecca)


• 1920 Timothy Leary, Harvard prof, LSD taker


• 1929 Dory Previn, pop singer (Love Be My Cover)


• 1936 Bobby Seale, black activist


• 1938 Christopher Lloyd, actor (Taxi; Back to the Future)


• 1938 Derek Jacobi, actor (I, Claudius; Cadfael)


• 1939 Tony Roberts, actor (Annie Hall; Edge of Night; Lucie Arnaz Show)


• 1942 Annette Funicello, actress (Mickey Mouse Club)


• 1943 Catherine Deneuve, actress (Repulsion; Hunger)


• 1951 me


• 1952 Jeff Goldblum, actor (The Fly; The Big Chill)


• 1952 Patti Davis, aka Patricia Ann Reagan, 1st daughter (House of Secrets)


• 1996 Sofia Vassilieva, actress (Ariel on Medium)

Some other events on this day

• 4004 B.C. Universe created at 8:00 PM, according to the 1650 pronouncement of Anglican archbishop James Ussher (presumably, that was GMT)


• 2136 B.C. Chinese make 1st record of a solar eclipse


• 1692 Last hanging for witchcraft in the United States.


• 1844 The Great Anticipation: Millerites, followers of William Miller, anticipated the end of the world in conjunction with the Second Advent of Christ. The following day became known as the Great Disappointment.


• 1934 Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd shot dead by FBI in Ohio


• 1936 1st commercial flight from mainland to Hawaii


• 1938 1st Xerox copy made


• 1957 First United States casualties in Vietnam.


• 1962 JFK imposes naval blockade on Cuba, beginning missile crisis (I thought my dad came home from work early because it was my birthday.)


• 1962 Pacific Science Center opens at Seattle Center


• 1964 Jean-Paul Sartre is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but turns down the honour.


• 1966 USSR launches Luna 12 for orbit around Moon


• 1968 Apollo 7 returns to Earth


• 1975 Soviet spacecraft Venera 9 soft-lands on Venus

Truly beyond the pale

Newsletter by Republican women's group depicts Obama with watermelon, fried chicken, ribs

RIVERSIDE, Calif. - A San Bernardino County Republican group has distributed a newsletter picturing Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on a $10 bill adorned with a watermelon, ribs and a bucket of fried chicken.

Linking Obama to demeaning racist stereotypes drew denunciations from various GOP officials after the illustration appeared in the October newsletter of the Chaffey Community Republican Women, Federated, the Riverside Press-Enterprise reported Thursday.

Diane Fedele, president of the group, said she had no racist intent.

"I never connected," she told the newspaper. "It was just food to me. It didn't mean anything else."

The Obama campaign declined to comment, saying it does not address such attacks.

The newsletter was sent to about 200 club members and associates last week by mail and e-mail. The club is a volunteer group that is not directly responsible to the state party, said California Republican Party press secretary Hector Barajas, who denounced the newsletter.

Fedele said she had received the illustration in e-mails and decided to reprint it to poke fun at a remark by Obama that he doesn't look like other presidents.

"It was strictly an attempt to point out the outrageousness of his statement. I really don't want to go into it any further," Fedele told the newspaper. "I absolutely apologize to anyone who was offended. That clearly wasn't my attempt."

Sheila Raines of San Bernardino, a black member of the club, complained about the image to Fedele.

"This is what keeps African-Americans from joining the Republican Party," she said. "I'm really hurt. I cried for 45 minutes."

Source

Right. She didn't connect those foods with racism. If you believe that, I've got this really nifty bridge you might be interested in.

Finished something!!

I finished the baby afghan I was working on. It's so satisfying to see something grow under my hands.

I'm not sure how well the color will come out in the pictures. The yarn is a combination of an off-white strand and a thin strand of baby colors. It looks to me like the colors in an opal.

Who do you love?

Sometimes it's handy to look at the issues apart from the candidates themselves. There's a little quiz sort of thing that lets you do just that.

Match-O-Matic

I came out with one McCain-ite answer. The rest was all Obama.

New project

I'm putting aside the cross-stitching for now. I need the magnifier/light combo, but it ends up making the frame too heavy and unwieldy. I know what I need, but I can't find it. I don't want one of those clamp-type lap frames. I want an easel sort of thing, with a shelf to prop the frame on, but all open in the back so I can access both sides. And everything being adjustable. I wish I could do carpentry.

So, for the time being I'm going to put it aside and go back to knitting. I've got some yarn left over from a baby afghan I made for a friend's daughter. It's the color "1323", in the last row on the page with the yarn. Baby colors. :) It's very soft and it's also machine washable and dryable. I wasn't sure that I would have enough for a good-sized afghan, though, so I'm pairing it with some off-white Dazzleaire that I got from ebay. (Dazzleaire was discontinued years ago, but it's really nice -- soft and also machine wash and dry.)

I'm going to use a free pattern I found on the 'net, that is a variation on the old feather and fan pattern. I like it because it starts in the middle and works outward, resulting in a square blanket. It's great to use that sort of pattern when you don't know exactly how your yarn is going to work out. I've made some that were intended to be wide, but then ran out of yarn before it was long enough, making the width longer than the length. Majorly weird.

This will go to a site a found last night called Miracles Happen which sends out items to young mothers in crisis. I liked the site because it's not associated with any religious group and she specifically says that she's not going to talk about the politics of choice. I like that. At the point when a baby is born, choice is rather a moot point. I tried to find a crisis pregnancy center locally to take something like this, but all of them that I could find were run by religious groups and did talk about their political opinions. I'm going to let her make the decision as to where it will go. It also lets me have a little distance emotionally, which is something that I need.

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ION, a while back, Steph had a post about misheard lyrics. As I've been listening to Pandora, I remembered a couple from my past.

Dan Fogelberg's "Part of the Plan"
Correct lyric: "Someday we'll all understand" (emphasis on the "der" in understand)
What I thought: "Sunday will fall on Thursday" (Why or how this would happen never made any sense to me, but I thought it must be something very deep and poetical.)

The other one isn't actually a mishearing, but a misunderstanding of what the lyric meant.
George Harrison's "Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)"
Lyric: "Keep me free from birth"
Correct meaning: "Give me freedom, starting at the moment I was born"
My interpretation, when I thought I might be pregnant and hoping I wasn't: "Keep me free from being in the position to give birth"

A Day in the Life

Yesterday we went out for our weekly late lunch/early supper. It's really the only time every week that I actually get out, aside from short walks in the apartment complex. We've only got the one car and Jim is using it during the week to go to work. Besides, I wouldn't trust myself driving still.

We went some place different than the normal list of restaurants, a little further from home. We drove on a road I hadn't been on for quite a while. I noticed several things...

• A hand-lettered sign on a telephone pole, advertising for a "BRAISTA" at one of the corner coffee places
• A larger home-grown sign over the door of a business in one of those little industrial strip-mall places that said "I am Da Boss". I'd love to find out what sort of business it is.
• A bumper sticker in the back window of a car that said: "Keep Portland WEIRD".
• On the door of the restaurant (actually a soup-and-salad place) were their hours: "Sunday-Thursday -- 11 a.m to 9 p.m; Friday-Saturday -- 11 a.m to 9 p.m."

(BTW, "A Day in the Life" was on the radio when we were driving. The station doesn't usually play oldies, so that was a nice surprise.)

After lunch we went over to Michael's Crafts to pick up some things for my cross-stitching. Like always, though, within 10 minutes of looking at stuff, I was starting to get dizzy and weak. We paid for the things that I had picked up and headed out to the parking lot. By the time we got to the car my vision was beginning to get cloudy. Jim unlocked the door and when I was able to sit down I was a lot better. Within ten minutes I felt fine.

Back at home, I fell asleep on the couch for a couple of hours while Jim watched college football and then worked on my cross stitch stuff for a while. Oh, the excitement of our lives!