wRog

05:49 pm - King County residents

so for those of you who haven't voted already, this is looking to be a very low-turnout election, so your ballot, if you send it in, is going to matter more than usual...
.... and there's Stuff That Matters (as always):

• R71 YES already covered
  
• I-1033 NO they tried this in Colorado and are still digging out from the rubble
  
  
• King County Executive - Dow Constantine
  I realize folks on the Eastside find it annoying to have to vote for Yet Another Seattle Person; the logic for not doing so would have made sense if either Fred or Ross had made it out of the primary (and it rather annoys me that they couldn't have flipped a coin or something back in April),... but they didn't. Hutchinson is less qualified than Sarah Palin and about as loopy even though she's better at hiding it. I particularly like how the Discovery Institute (she served on their board) scrubbed their website pretty much the moment she announced. It's appalling how many people think she's some kind of moderate, but that's the problem with actors and TV personalities; they get a free pass on all sorts of crap...
  
  
• Port Commission - Rob Holland, Max Vekitch
  It's sort of weird how other ports on the west coast manage to turn a profit whereas for some reason we have to subsidize ours. Pat Davis is finally gone (yay), but unfortunately so is Lloyd Hara, so getting that reformist majority (or at least a majority not in favor of stupid/corrupt real-estate deals) is still going to be work...
  

05:20 pm - notes to my subconscious

• BSG ended already; everybody died.
  Nobody asked you to make new episodes.
  In fact, I'm guessing there's already a glut of fan-fiction out there.
  
  
• Also? Land of the Giants?
  Really stupid, even by 1968 standards.
  Not something that gets better with age,
  Hence, not good source material
  for new episodes for BSG, or anything else. Really.
  
  
• Also, also?
  Dreams with Philip as a ghost
  (as in, I see him, nobody else does)?
  Set in the house where I grew up?
  Classify under: Extra Special Creepy.
  That's right up there with the the complete sentences thing.
  Don't do that again.
  

04:00 pm - R-71 (Washington residents)

someone posted this with comments turned off, so I'll reply here since this is generally worth knowing (even if you don't live in WA, your state's referrendum system may be similarly braindead...)

One of the biggest deceptions the [religious conservative asshats] are peddling, one of the strongest tools they have to get you to do what they want is the language of the referendum (Referendum 71 BTW) that requires that the state vote FOR it in order to maintain the status quo. Their opponents need to vote FOR their piece of shit referendum in order to defeat their true goal.

Let me rephrase that.

If Referendum 71 gets on the ballot in order to maintain current partnership rights for everyone in Washington State, people need to vote YES.

• If you like the law as it was passed, you do nothing and if someone offers you a petition to put it on the ballot you make sure you don't sign it. But if it does make it to ballot, then you have to vote YES to keep the law in place.
• Conversely, if you don't like the law, then it's sign-but-then-vote-no.

12:50 pm - Asshat Opera Company presents: Die Walküre (The Valkyrie)

I am so going to hell for this.
And, of course, this being emmacrew's favorite opera,
I get to sleep on the compost heap for the next month, probably.

N.B.:  This is the 2nd opera of a series. You may want to catch the first episode if you haven't already. Or not.

Dramatis Personae

  SIEGMUND     Wotan's mortal bastard son
  SIEGLINDE    Siegmund's twin bastard sister
  HUNDING      Mr. Sieglinde and owner of the all-important Hut
  WOTAN (Odin) Head God Dude from previous opera
  BRÜNNHILDE   a Valkyrie
  FRICKA       Mrs. Wotan, Goddess of Marriage from previous opera
  SIEGRUNE     another Valkyrie
  WALTRAUTE    yet another Valkyrie
  GRIMGERDE    and another
  ROSSEWEISSE  and another
  SAURKRAUTMITWURSTE ... oh bother, I forget, 
     there are 9 of them, and they are all Very Loud, okay?

Act I

Scene One

[HUNDING's living room, which,
 for some reason that is never fully explained,
 has this tree growing in the middle of it.  
 Whatever.

 Outside, it is a dark and stormy night.  
 No, really.(  ... and so on )

01:53 am - more of those stupid list all countries/counties/whatever quizzes

so if you're impressively bored, feel free to try Counties of Washington or Cities of King County. The latter is likely to be pointless unless you actually live here, and maybe not even then.

And of course, I can now do them both in about 1m20s; please shoot me.

For firni we also have Cities of Snohomish County and folks further south might want to try Cities of Pierce County

(which of course gives away three of the counties on the counties quiz, oh well...)

11:24 pm - BSG 4.∞ microreview

(... I'd like to think this isn't actually a spoiler, since the thought of somebody reading my stuff closely enough to pick up on this to the extent that it would be a spoiler scares me more than a little bit... ( but I'm putting it behind a cut anyway... )

12:59 pm - BSG "No Exit" picoreview

aaand... Wendy gets to Issue #20.

ETA: yes, it's an Elfquest reference. sorry...

11:06 pm - BSG "The Oath" picoreview

( spoilage?... )

04:28 am - hm, maybe I *have* shifted

to me, this is the most interesting bit:

Average of All Quiz-Takers:



mayhaps we have a bit of skew here?

( oh wait, you wanted to know *my* views? )

01:11 am - Tale of Two Cities

 
Olympia vs. Tumwater:

( I really want to say NSFW, but it's just a satellite photo )

10:14 pm - Today's dig

 
Lake Forest Park

Which is it?

A park associated with Lake Forest?
Or with the lake forest (i.e., "lake" disambiguating one of several forests)?
Or maybe there's a forested park that happens to have a lake named for it?
Or "park" disambiguates a particular forest and the lake is named for that?
Or "park" is disambiguating between several lake forests? or forest lakes?

Never mind that the actual entity in question is neither a lake, nor a forest, nor a park, but rather a city (*).

This has been driving me batshit.

(New rule: Maximum of one (1) noun in place names. Yes, I know, being able to use two nouns is occasionally useful, but you've now abused that privilege; too bad).

(*) which is to say "city" in that stupid Western sense where anything that has any sort of local government at all qualifies even if the only inhabitants are a dog and two cactuses, but don't get me started on that...

Current Mood: aggravated

12:21 pm - Disneyland nanoreview

absolutely rules when you have the special Autistic Kid Pass (= no lines, ever);
we must have ridden Space Mountain about a billion times.

Small World still closed for renovations;
evidently they weren't quite finished removing Iceland.

12:20 pm - I think I've got it, now

Just in case you were wondering, things happen in this order:

• ST carryover loss becomes* ST loss
• LT carryover loss becomes LT28 loss
• ST loss kills LT gain (i.e., just the net part: LT28 gain first, then LT25 gain, then LT15 gain), then kills ORD3000**, then carries over
• LT28 loss kills LT25 gain, then kills LT15 gain, then becomes LT loss
• LT25 loss kills LT15 gain, then kills LT28 gain, then becomes LT loss
• LT15 loss kills LT28 gain, then kills LT25 gain, then becomes LT loss
• LT loss kills ST gain, then kills ORD3000, then carries over
• ORD loss kills LT25 gain, LT28 gain, LT15 gain, and QDIVs in that order
• 15%MAGIC*** turns LT25 gain ordinary (15%), then turns LT28 gain ordinary (15%), then kills (as of 2008) LT15 gain and QDIVs

03:05 pm - Yeah, I know these are still random

I guess I need to remember to check back with these folks periodically to see if the Random Number Generator has come up with yet more insights.

11:44 pm - Sarah Palin and the oil companies

From someone I know at one of the big oil companies (I actually got this very shortly after the pick was announced, before the media frenzy):

Sarah Palin?! Ugh ugh ugh. She has quite a reputation in the oil industry! Not as being a "tough and crafty negotiator" as she probably thinks she is, but just as being an unpredictable, difficult, and frankly insane negotiator.

( ... and, yes, you read that right: INSANE.  There is, of course, more... )

01:12 pm - Aida picoreview

I guess I've seen too many episodes of Stargate SG1 to properly appreciate this one.

"Ethiopians invading!"
"Can we get a team out there?"
"SG-2 is ready to go."
"Dial the gate!"

(... and if this were 15 years ago I would have been saying Battlestar Galactica instead, but since Ron Moore's remake tossed all of the gratuitous Egyptian set design and costumes, that reference won't make sense to anyone anymore, alas...)

09:36 am - dorkery

looking at today's xkcd and then finding out that the actual numbers (for today, at least) are 6920 and 784 respectively, and that they jump to 12800 and 2390 respectively if you take off the "I".

And then if you replace "her" with "me", then it goes to 1540 and 1250.

03:37 pm - EOC

(...for the 3 or 4 people who read my journal but not emmacrew's...)

sort of weird to be driving along pondering the notion of trading in one's car for something newer, ( discussion of various methods for achieving this effect )

11:04 pm - Something I probably won't present to the state Rules Committee in 2012

You may not have been aware of this, but III.F.1 of the WSDCC's 2008 Delegate Selection Plan reads as follows:

Alternates shall be listed and seated in the order in which they were elected,
and must be of the same presidential preference, and, to the extent possible,
of the same gender and from the same electing jurisdiction as the delegate being
replaced.

Current Mood: accomplished

04:21 pm - homophobe smackdown redux

Previously:

And yes, I've left off the name since it was 17 years ago after all and we were all Young and Stupid once (would that Google would show me the same courtesy...).