Month: March 2004

Been a while since my last update. On the 20th, my fiancee got a bunch of my friends together, and we went to Speedring, over in the south bay area – an indoor go-kart track. This isn’t like Malibu, or what have you – these things are *fast*. I have no idea what the actual top speeds are, but I’d guess maybe 40MPHish? (Turns out the FAQ says that that’s about right) The track was about 30 seconds long, whatever that ends up as – you’re going substantially under 40 for most of the stretch. Maybe 1/4 mile? I dunno. But it was a *BLAST* a lot more tiring that I’d expected, and after a 15 minute warmup, and a 25 minute sprint, I was beat up. Bruise on my inner right knee from the fuel tank, sore spots on the back of my calves from the steering rods, and a sore lower back, right forearm, and left shoulder from fighting the g-forces.

Awesome fun, and pictures will be up eventually in the pictures section. Other’n that? I dunno – played some Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles the other day. Fun stuff, but I guess I expected a substantially more polished and refined interface, and am feeling let down in that regard. Still, gameplay was entertaining, and I’m expecting to have fun with the game.

The house is good – we put up curtains in the bedroom last night, which is nice, and got a new cheap hammock from IKEA, when the rope hammock I got from Amazon a couple years ago finally broke.

Mobius? How’s Mobius? He’s alright. We’re training him, he’s training us. He throws a fit every night when we put him in his crate to sleep, but ends up sleeping alright, I guess. He’s quite obedient when he feels some need to be – whether he thinks there’s a treat involved, or when there’s no other distractions around. Figuring out how to train him when there’s stuff he’d *rather* do is gonna be a bit tricky. But we’ve got ourselves enrolled in a class for early April, so hopefully, we’ll pick up some pointers.

Yeah. Got a 2.5 day work week this week. Fun fun!

Ah, wonderful. The President seems to be framing this election as a choice between whether you want to raise taxes or not. Vote for him, and you don’t want to raise taxes. Vote for Kerry, and you do. All Kerry has to do is explain that he only favors rolling back the tax cuts for people making $200,000 or more, and if the American public isn’t completely, utterly, totally moronic, they’ll say, “yeah, that sounds like a good idea.”

Do I trust the American public? Of course not. But this should be such a trivial argument to dismiss, I’m curious to see whether Kerry will be able to handle it effectively or not.

It’s frustrating for me to read about the current campaign for President. McCain was on TV the other day, and he said that it’s going to be a nasty campaign because of the polarization between the parties. What he utterly fails to mention is that the current administration has created that polarization single-handedly. Post 9/11, the Democrats did everything possible to unite the country. In many respects, too much – they simply gave the President a blank check to do whatever he wanted to do, however ridiculous and stupid it was.

But now, because of Bush’s failed policies, because of his extremism, because of his complete and utter inability to adapt to changing circumstances (tax cuts for a surplus, tax cuts to create jobs, tax cuts for skin cancer, whatever), he’s created this polarized environment where to “support” the President, you have to apparently simply do whatever he asks, without debate, without review, or be labelled some sort of traitorous “divider.”

That’s such bullshit, I don’t even know where to start.

These maliciously extremist Republican fucks did this on their own. And now they have the fucking GALL to say that it’s a polarization that just “happened?” Fuck you, Bush. Fuck you and your administration. YOU did this, and you did it all on your fucking own.

So when your service record comes back to bite you, when the lack of WMD comes back to bite you, when your selling-out of Valerie Plame comes back to bite you, when your attempts to write discriminatory language into the Constitution comes back to bite you, when the ridiculous deficits you’ve incurred come back to bite you, when the brazen politicization of 9/11, and the war in Iraq come back to bite you, when the hundreds of Americans you’ve sent out in a needless, pointless war come back to bite you, remember this, asshole – you brought this on yourself.

Woohoo. Filed my taxes, paid a bunch of bills. Got my first paycheck when I had $214 in the bank. Talk about good timing. Mind you, I’ve now got $43K in debt to pay down, but such is life. Now that I’m getting paid, it’s just a matter of time. 🙂

seppo