This is why I'm voting Obama

On watching Last of the Mohicans for the millionth time

Daniel Day-Lewis is fucking SEXY.

You know this is true.

Sounds like throwing in the towel to me...

So McCain "may" drop by his own election-night watch party at the Biltmore in Phoenix, but it looks instead as though he'll allow his campaign workers to contine busting their asses while they tally all those second-place votes while he addresses his elect on the front lawn.

A bit of a harsh goodbye to those who stood by him throughout the race.

Anyway, I have to go take an aspirin and break into a friend's house so their dogs can get fed and poop outside instead of on the kitchen floor.

I wonder how much they had to offer her to go on Hardball...

I haven't taken Government since my senior year of high school.  Granted, I may have been absent the day we learned about the executive branch, but I'm fairly sure the role of the Veep is not "to be in charge of the United States Senate."

Chris Matthews reduces Palin's spokesperson Nancy Photenhauer to a stammering mess in this clip:

On a related note, let's get the media to root out all the anti-Americans in Congress!

Having finally finished with the Puritans, my AmLit class is moving on to the Enlightenment.  I am making them read the introduction to The Assault on Reason by Al Gore and crossing my fingers that maybe one or two of them will get it.  And no, it's not because I'm voting for Obama and want to use my position of power to feed my liberal agenda to the impressionable minds of today's youth, but because that section has everything to do with what the Founders had in mind when framing the Constitution: that it was necessary for a conscientious, informed public to use reasoned, rational thinking to enact the best policy decisions.  The review from the NYT explains better than I could, and with quotes even:

Mr. Gore’s central argument is that “reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions” and that the country’s public discourse has become “less focused and clear, less reasoned.” This “assault on reason,” he suggests, is personified by the way the Bush White House operates. Echoing many reporters and former administration insiders, Mr. Gore says that the administration tends to ignore expert advice (be it on troop levels, global warming or the deficit), to circumvent the usual policy-making machinery of analysis and debate, and frequently to suppress or disdain the best evidence available on a given subject so it can promote predetermined, ideologically driven policies.

That's my rehash of recent politics.  Go nuts, kids.

Tattoo

I may just have to get the picture of T-Rex in the last panel permanently etched onto my body.

Then I could give myself the giggles whenever I felt shitty.

Divine!

Sourdough toast with Nutella is perhaps the best breakfast food anywhere.

That's Infotainment!

Sacrifice

Several really, really great questions came up at the debates last night, but I want to talk about one in particular, in which the questioner reminded Obama that during wartime, presidents during the first half of the last century asked the American people for sacrifices, and what sacrifices might he ask for during these times.

That's something that's been bothering me throughout the Bush administration, and I was glad to hear Obama talk about this.  I was disappointed that he didn't mention that no government in the history of the world has ever LOWERED taxes during wartime, but I guess on a scale of what people want to hear to what they don't, nobody really wants that little tidbit thrown back at them.

But I was glad to hear him say Bush had basically been a moron to respond to crisis by asking people to go out and shop.  It's a resentment I'd been harboring since 2001, and it was good to hear it echoed by someone who actually stands to make a real difference, not just six English teachers around a lunch table.

Then I got to thinking:

While the little voice of rampant teenage idealism in my head tells me that we should all just stop being so materialistic and spending beyond our means, I know that no politician alive can say that because spending beyond our means is what drives our economy (into the ground, it turns out).  But I decided last night that where our generation can make the kind of sacrifices that will make the biggest difference is in our time.  Obama almost got there on this question last night, but I would love to see a widespread, grassroots effort to get people involved in service.  First, I think THE REASON for the world being the fucked-up place that it is is that technological progress has done away with too many human interactions.  Actually, I LIKE drive-through pharmacies and automated phone systems and having all my questions answered by the Internet instead of real people, but by and large, I think we're losing something important by limiting social interactions between strangers.  Second, the more people are involved in helping members of their communities, the less the government is going to have to do to help people.  And who knows better what the people in the community need than, say, other people in that community? While I think the government's prime responsibility is helping people, it usually takes twice as long and uses ten times as much money as the groups who are already doing that work.

So that being said, I am volunteering with the Pumpkin Triathlon in Boulder City next weekend, and offering extra credit to students who come and help.

Advice

I have a test to write.

So of course I am playing on the internets instead.

I am a dork.

Those of you who know me only by reputation (or from my blog) may see me as this hipster cool twentysomething living it up in Sin City, bypassing the mile-long lines at the ultralounges, calling in sick so I can go to Ditch Friday at the pool at the Hard Rock and chat it up with celebrities, but really, that's just the image I try to cultivate.

Because my secret identity as a sappy D&D dork must be protected at all costs.

Thanks to my friend-in-law, Kurt, I have been playing Neverwinter Nights for about five years now.  (I have a very long attention span for games I like a lot and tend to play them over and over again.  I'd like to say I take an analytical approach, playing them differently each time to get the most out of the game, but I don't.)  This is easily the best D&D RPG game ever, although it's also the only one I've played (not counting a half-hour of WoW, in which I only barely mastered the controls).  I've beaten it a bunch of times, created dozens of different characters, and probably spent more hours of my life devoted to hacking up bad guys than I would care to admit.  When I first started playing, I had to make myself a schedule where I was limited to skipping only one class a week so I would not have to explain to the advisors in the education department why, exactly, I failed my freshman-level composition class.

Anyway, in this one expansion pack, one of the optional members of your party you can add is this fighter/weapon master tiefling, Valen, and if you are a female character and not a complete twat, he eventually harbors a massive hard-on for you. 

I am not kidding.

This is a picture of Valen about to confess his passionate and undying love for me.  We just got duped by a powerful demon and sent to Cania, one of the Seven Hells (the frozen one, I guess).  Now we are on a quest to discover this demon's True Name so we can get out of here and go get all hitched or whatever.  (He does not normally glow green, I am just holding the mouse over him.  By far the best feature of the game is that, essentially, all you have to do to beat bad guys is click on them, and the badassery of your character does the rest.  My Whirlwind Attack can take down four drow warriors at a time with just one click of the mouse--way easier than enrolling at that Kung Fu studio was going to be.)  

The grown-up part of me understands that this is all just a video game, that neither Valen nor my patently made-up character who wields two +7 katanas with energy-draining, electrical-zapping powers and can run around all day with 533 pounds of stuff (thanks to my +24 strength!) and beat up all kinds of undead dragons and such are not actually real people, but I have to say I was looking forward to this chapter of the game since I started playing it again.  Something about making a broody, angsty, ass-kicking boy go all weak-kneed and sappy is just so yummy.

And I think it's not quite as pathetic as reading romance novels?

Well, shit.

I lost my only motorcycle key at work yesterday.  It was in my pants pocket, then it wasn't.

Now we are trying to figure out the cheapest way to combine a blank key we can pick up from Yamaha, a locksmith, and a bike that won't go anywhere unless we sweet-talk someone with a trailer.

Ugh.