Open Letter to Nancy Pelosi (and Anyone Else Who Might Be Listening)

The Election is Over: Why are You Still Here?




Speaker-Elect Pelosi,
It gives me a chill to address you that way; a long-awaited, much-overdue chill, but I at least got some good goose bumps out of it. I am writing to congratulate you on finally burrowing your way out of the dung heap that has been the U.S. Congress for so long. I truly believe that the Democratic Party will now begin to clear the way to true and desperately needed reforms. But I urge you not to drop the idea of impeaching the "president." "Accountability is un-American," said Berkeley Breathed in one of his Bloom County cartoons. Let's not let that be our nation's motto: or its epitaph. Bush and his lackeys have done enormous damage to our country's reputation abroad; they've pilfered the needle from our moral compass, made us less safe, less sure, less kind. They've destroyed our schools and encouraged the destruction of our environment. They've made many of us ashamed to be Americans. For all their lies and misdeeds, Bush and Co. should likely be tried for treason, but I'll be happy to start with a simple impeachment. Now is not the time to be magnanimous, despite the happy flush of victory. In times like these, just days after the most acrimonious election in recent history, forgiveness smacks of hypocrisy, particularly when those whom we forgive are unrepentant. We owe it to ourselves and the world to show that we do not suffer liars, criminals, bullies and cheats. Impeach him. Impeach Bush, then impeach Cheney, and only then can you truly begin to clean House (and Senate).

Thank you,
RaggedyAngst

Notice: Putting the Baby Down is NOT the Same as Putting the Gerbil Down

The pros and cons of choosing child-less-ness:

Pros:

• My cats don't need me to set a "good example," and if they do, not peeing in the bed qualifies.
• There are no strained (sprained, stained) veggies in my house and there won't be until toothlessness recurs.
• I don't have to kiss boo-boos, explain where babies come from or feign amusement in a solid hour's worth of knock-knock jokes.
• If I want to go somewhere, I go. I don't have to arrange babysitters or try to figure out the intricacies of car seats. I don't need to make sure I have 47 noisy toys and 11 different varieties of mashed former food in an enormous shoulder bag that has fluffy sheep on it.
• The only thing in my home with fluffy sheep on it is my Wallace and Gromit video.
• No diaper shall enter my home until incontinence recurs.
• Teenage angst is something I hear about but will never again have to witness unless I start watching Dawson's Creek or some other equally insipid teenage-angst-soggy television show.
• All the food in the fridge is mine. So is the beer.
• My furniture will never be be-drooled, be-shat or be-teethed on. Except by my cats, and for them, all is forgiven.
• There is no danger that my cats will turn out to vote Republican.
• All the whining in the house is my own.
• My cats are highly unlikely to get pregnant, caught shoplifting, arrested, or in a car accident with my Jetta and some horror Monster-in-a-Mom-Suit driving a Cadillac Escalade that costs more than my mortgage.

Cons:

• I have to go to animated movies by myself or with other adults. On second thought, this really belongs on the "pro" list.
• My cats will probably not take care of me when I'm old. Fortunately, the way the things are going with the current world leadership, I likely won't have a chance to grow old, so this is irrelevant.

Beveled without a Cause

It's 11:06 on a Tuesday morning, and I really want to pop open a bottle of champagne. This is inconvenient, since everyone I care about is at work or otherwise unavailable to share in my celebration, including Toasty, the boyfriend. Getting pissed on your own at 11:07 on a Tuesday morning is pathetic, even if it's on champagne that has a reason for being there.

My reason: I just finished the first edit of the second draft of my second children's book. Most people would likely celebrate finishing the first draft. I do that too, but since editing is infinitely more onerous than actually writing, finishing an edit is much more of a cause for celebration in my world. But there's that Tuesday-at-11:08 factor to consider. So the party's on hold (your accomplishment is important to us. please continue to hold) until further notice. Or until 5-ish.

So at whatever time it's acceptable to celebrate, wherever in the world you might be, raise a glass with me. Honor something worthy in your life: finishing a major project, running that marathon (or Ironman, as my superjock friend Rachel recently did), getting that promotion or not getting that pink slip. Or go the other way and celebrate something totally frivolous, just for the fun of toasting the final healing of a papercut, taking the last cup of coffee from the pot and not making a new pot and not getting blamed for it! or having an unsavory neighbor hauled away by the Feds. My last book was self-published, the first set of books printed had a tendency to shed pages like a mangy dog, and my tepid marketing strategy resulted in sales well into the thousand. But the second one's ready, and hope springs eternal, and now I have to relearn PageMaker, and someone pass me the bottle, 11:17 be damned.

Update on Shady Neighbor

Well, it seems the DEA have taken my neighbor for an indefinite stay at some detention center or other. I remain cautiously gleeful. "Gleeful" because he wasn't nice to my guest cats and because he had unsavory types banging in and out of my building in all of the wee-est of the wee hours. "Cautious" because he might come back. I have since spoken to other people in my building, one of whom went out on the morning of the raid to move his car, and apparently there were some 15 body-armored DEA types surrounding the building. I feel for the guy or two who got stuck with the duty at the back of the building where there is no pavement, only blackberry thickets, a rather sudden drop-off to the highway below, and squelchy raccoon turds in-between.

Since then I have heard several people approach the building and key in the now-obsolete entry code, only to be met with "entry de (wait for it) nied." I keep wanting to sing out a "he's in jail" response to the tune of "Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah," but so far I've managed to restrain myself. The body armor lingers in my mind: body armor suggests the notion that our guy had weapons. Of the variety that require body armor. Which suggests the possibility that his bosom buddies are also packing heat. I'm not quite brave enough to taunt drug users who are (a) potentially armed, and (b) needing a next hit. There is a crabbiness quotient here reaching into the lethal zone, and I'm really more of a duck-and-covergirl.

So until I know that neighbor Shady McDealsSomeDrugs is truly gone for good, I'm outfitting the guest cats with wee little flak jackets and hunkering down behind my sofa to sing the Nyah Nyah song quietly to myself.

Life Among the Special People

Five o'clock this morning, I hear the sound of heavy boots outside my bedroom window. It's dark, still, at 5 o'clock in the morning, and as my bedroom window is below ground level and hidden from public view behind some dying rhododendrons, I'm less than thrilled about the heavy boots and the feet that are likely in them. I hear the sound of a police radio and somebody somewhere says, "Roger that," -- surely the last sound someone's drug stash hears before it heads down the great u-tube toward oblivion. But then I hear Boots keying in the numbers to open the front door, so I figure he lives in the building, and I roll over and attempt to go back to sleep. Seconds later there's a bright flash, a *bang* big enough to shake the building, and there's heavy boots running and heavy fists pounding, and before I know it, I've got my cordless phone in one hand and a panicking cat wrapped around the other, and I'm high-tailing it for a room with fewer windows. I hear someone shouting, "Police, open up!" from mercifully far away (2nd floor, toward the back) and then I'm not sure what happened for the next few seconds as I was busily dialing 9-1-1 and extricating the cat from my neck. The operator assures me that yes, this is a police "activity" (I imagine them making Christmas tree ornaments out of pieces of felt and colored pipe cleaners: this is an "activity." Men in full body armor setting off percussive devices and pounding on doors is not an "activity," it's a raid.) and I should stay inside. Really? I want to ask. Inside? And here's me, all set to stroll out in my jim jams and ask some really pertinent questions.

I can hear cops posted all around my apartment. I live in the corner unit, and I have exits on either side of me, so the police are hovering close. I realize that my Midwestern training has kicked in, and I am wisely cowering in a doorframe. That's the strongest structure, you know: the doorframe. But like a double-wide in a tornado, no amount of doorframe burliness is going to help me now, so I go sit on the couch and try to figure out what's going on. I can't see anything, so I'm listening like nobody's business. I'm all ears. I'm ears from here to here. Even my skin is listening. Prurient curiosity, I know, but I'm pretty sure the guy they're taking away has kicked my stray-cat foodbowl a time or two, so there's no love lost between the crazy cat lady and the psychopath on the 2nd floor. Good riddance, say I, and take your cat-hatin' drug-dealin' attitude-havin' . . . self with you. I realize this makes no sense, but I'm operating on little sleep and waaaaaaaaay too much adrenaline.

Parenthetically, I'd just like to add that (I used to live in one of the crappiest neighborhoods in the city. There were methheads littering the streets, and I had my own personal crack addict living under the stairs. Not once, in the year that I lived there, was I aware of a raid. My current building is the safest one I've been in in years. Go figure.) End of parentheses.

In any event, justice has presumably been done, at least temporarily. My little building is properly a-buzz with post-raid excitement, and my cats are down off the ceiling fan. I can continue feeding my guest cats with gleeful abandon, knowing that their foodbowls are safe. That is, after all, what it's all about.

Immigrant Bites President on Leg -- Millions Rejoice

A title from Yahoo! news today:

"Bush says immigrants must learn English"

missing subtitle:

"Immigrants respond: 'You first!' "

Oh Father, Who Art Serving Half-Price Pitchers Between 3 PM and Eternity

God, as of last Friday night:

As I was driving home today, I saw a white van with a bumper sticker that read, "When the last trumpet sounds, I'm outta here!"

I find that depressing. Since when did people start having the same attitude about life that most of us have about a bad day at work? Gee, I can't wait until this is over so I can go home? You realize you're not talking about getting in the Ford Explorer and driving to the 'burbs here, folks, you're talking about dying, right?

And what does that say about heaven? Is it some sort of eternal happy hour except all the drinks are Shirley Temples, and you can eat all the nachos and cocktail weenies you want and not get fat?

It is exactly this attitude toward life that makes me want to say to those banging on about religion and "finding" Jesus as though they'd misplaced him somewhere: "Yahweh ain't necessarily mahweh."

I'm taking my ballsy and I'm going home

There's a reason this picture is here, I swear. Read on.





Thanks for the picture:
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/wnor/spleen.jpg

"Ballsy" (meaning "brave") is such a great word -- it's crass, yes, but it's also direct, succinct, powerful and playfully daring. Sadly, if unsurprisingly, there's no really good female equivalent. Some might argue that this is because females are traditionally more craven and cowardly than males, but then those who argue that might soon find themselves on the business end of a botched circumcision. So, for the rest of us, it's time to find an appropriate feminine equivalent. There are a lot of brave, gutsy ("gutsy" is just too gender-neutral and frankly a bit ick-making) women out there who deserve a term of their own.

"Titsy" is, I think, a strong contender. It's fairly gender-specific (moobies notwithstanding), and has the same mischievous air of its south-of-the-border brother but not quite the level of Tropic-of-Capricorn vulgarity. Is "titsy," however, too playful? Is it a bit frilly, a bit girly, a bit . . . Barbie? It's a fun word to say, and I challenge you to say it now, out loud, wherever you are, however inappropriate it might be. What's the reaction? Did people ask you what you were reading (and did you tell them, 'cause frankly, I could use a broader audience)? Did they expect a profile of women's soccer in Sports Illustrated or a foldout in Penthouse? No, I think "titsy," while amusing, is a no-go. It's just a little too lightweight, lacking the gravitas of "ballsy."

So "ovaries," then? Ranks high on the gender-specificity, but a touch clinical, perhaps? "She's got ovaries," seems perhaps more accurate than descriptive and invites quizzical looks rather than high-fivin', fist-pumpin' shouts of "yeah!" and "you go, girl!" Possibly this could catch on as a term of admiration, but I don't have high hopes. Ovaries are mysterious, and most of us have only the most nominal idea of what this elaborate, interior scrollwork actually looks like. And there's no good adjective version available. "Wow! That was an ovary-ish thing to do!" is awkward at best. Ovarzish sounds like a Russian surname. Though that could just be the italics.

There are lots of seriously offensive possibilities that we're not going to discuss, so don't even start with me.

Perhaps the best alternative is to find a comfortable, gender-neutral term that has all the ooomph of "ballsy" but without its concomitant inequalities and its other-side-of-the-equator earthiness. "Brainy" is, tragically, in use, and in our cowboy culture, not as much a term of approbation. What other parts of the body denote strength, courage, fortitude? (If we must stick with the body-metaphor, and in the interest of space, I'm going to.) Well, according to several medical websites, the heart is the hardest-working organ in the human body, and the enamel of teeth is the hardest substance, but "hearty" and "toothy" are busy describing other things.

So I'm going to go for the obscure, the unexpected. That's what "ballsy" really means, isn't it? It's unexpected acts of bravery, surprising courage, the lunge for home plate or the top of the mountain against all odds. So I'm going for that most underrated organ: the spleen. The Rodney Dangerfield of the human body, the spleen is responsible for "creating lymphocytes which destroy and recycle red blood cells." (http://www.mamashealth.com/organs/spleen.asp) It is the body's eco-terrorist, staging midnight raids on used red blood cells that would otherwise hang around, reliving the glory days and littering the body like so much toxic waste. Like courage, we can live without our spleen, but how much poorer would life be then? So, the spleen it is.

The next time someone makes a bold, unexpected move, reward him or her with a thumbs up and a "Wow. Seriously spleeny."

Help us, Karen Yarbrough; You're Our Only Hope

Illinois General Assembly House Joint Resolution 125, introduced by Representative Karen Yarbrough on Thursday, April 20, 2006. Please contact her to show your support. http://karenyarbrough.com/index.html

WHEREAS, Section 603 of Jefferson's Manual of the Rules of the United States House of Representatives allows federal impeachment proceedings to be initiated by joint resolution of a state legislature; and
WHEREAS, President Bush has publicly admitted to ordering the National Security Agency to violate provisions of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a felony, specifically authorizing the Agency to spy on American citizens without warrant; and
WHEREAS, Evidence suggests that President Bush authorized violation of the Torture Convention of the Geneva Conventions, a treaty regarded a supreme law by the United States Constitution; and
WHEREAS, The Bush Administration has held American citizens and citizens of other nations as prisoners of war without charge or trial; and
WHEREAS, Evidence suggests that the Bush Administration has manipulated intelligence for the purpose of initiating a war against the sovereign nation of Iraq, resulting in the deaths of large numbers of Iraqi civilians and causing the United States to incur loss of life, diminished security and billions of dollars in unnecessary expenses; and
WHEREAS, The Bush Administration leaked classified national secrets to further a political agenda, exposing an unknown number of covert U. S. intelligence agents to potential harm and retribution while simultaneously refusing to investigate the matter; and
WHEREAS, the Republican-controlled Congress has decline to fully investigate these charges to date; therefore be it
RESOLVED, BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE NINETY-FOURTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, THE SENATE CONCURRING HEREIN, that the General Assembly of the State of Illinois has good cause to submit charges to the U. S. House of Representatives under Section 603 that the President of the United States has willfully violated his Oath of Office to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States; and be it further
RESOLVED, That George W. Bush, if found guilty of the charges contained herein, should be removed from office and disqualified to hold any other office in the United States.

All the Buzz

Somewhere under there is a biker.
Can you find her?








picture thanks to the guy who took it at
http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/bees/misc-pics.html


Once a week I don the fancy biker pants complete with inset butt extender (otherwise known as a "gusset," or something equally unattractive) and commute from one of my jobs by bike. It's a sexy thing to do, I know: I'm all decked out in my padded pants and my used and rather tired hyper-fiber clothing originally from REI but recycled through previous bikers and a second-hand shop. Add to that look my perpetually worried face as I wonder if I'll make it home this time without a tire exploding somewhere en route, usually in some far-off BUFU locale where the only sounds are duelling banjos and the dripping of road-kill-possum fat into the campfire. I have those nifty shoes that clip into my pedals which are, I know, relatively awe-inspiring except when someone's Darwin-reject child darts out in front of me, and I can't get my foot loose from the pedal, and I go down with a very unBikerDudelike thump, hopefully taking the child with me and thus doing a public service in the name of tidying the gene pool.

All of this is merely a preface to my real discussion, which is about yesterday, when I rode, open-mouthed and oblivious, through a massive swarm of bees. "Open-mouthed" because I was panting from the exertion of biking. "Oblivious" until the Holy-Crap-I-Just-Rode-Through-a-Swarm-of-Bees awareness dawned. I had visions of a cartoon funnel of angry bees, disrupted in one of the more stressful moments of their busy little lives, coming after me, all butt-beweaponed and churlish. I could ride my bike into the lake, I realized, and likely drown because I wouldn't be able to get my feet loose from my pedals, but never mind, at least they wouldn't be picking bees out of my nose with tweezers at the hospital as they counted the stingers and wondered what I could possibly have done to piss off these relatively benign flying honey-pots.

Amazingly, despite riding pretty much right through the center of the gang (visions of swaggering, leather-jacketed tough bees, smoking last year's honey comb, beating up the larvae and shouting, 'Hey, biker, you want a piece of me? How 'bout an abdomen?'), I came up unstung. Even the one that blundered through one of the vents in my helmet and pinballed around my ponytail for a while opted to keep his stinger to himself.

Nothing much else happened, all the rest of that day.

Gary Paulsen Chews Off Own Leg!

Just say "no" to macho.




Sorry, just read The Foxman, and I'm so nauseated by the heaps of manly-man crap this guy is shoveling, I don't know whether to write him a nasty letter or vote for him for president. Don't read his books. You'll only encourage him.

Paranoia Strikes Deep in the Heartland

Honey, get the spray. We've got cats again.





That's my cat, actually, and I promise that no animals were harmed in the making of this blog. That's Clio, and how that fat girl managed to squeeze herself behind the blinds, I have no idea. There's a hole in the blinds that my much more svelte cat BeeBee made (she's too impatient to wait for me to actually open the damn things), but ordinarily where BeeBee goes, Clio is unable to follow.

No, Tell Me What You Really Think

(#2 pencils -- I find that students
comment less if I don't sharpen them.)

Tonight is student evaluation night. Tonight is the night that my students -- to whom I've been giving grades and occasionally rather frank criticism for the past 10 weeks -- get to tell my boss precisely what they think of me. Their evaluations are anonymous, and, just in case I might somehow be able to tell who the evaluator is by the highly idiosyncratic way he fills in the circles with his #2 pencil, eval. results are staggered so I don't get this quarter's evals for at least two more quarters. By then, the thinking goes, the names and particulars of these students will have been mentally flushed and I won't be able to retaliate, grades-wise. Which begs the question why do we do this anyway, if by the time I get the answers I'll have forgotten the questions, but that's bureaucracy.

If I were writing the eval questions, I think I'd ask an entirely different set of questions. The questions are not subject-specific, so the math teachers and the English teachers and the communications teachers and the physics teachers and the Professor and Mary Ann all get the same stock Qs for the students to A. So let's ask the questions we really want to know the answers to. To wit:

a. Is the teacher an easy grader?
b. Does he/she give too much homework (translation: any)?
c. Does she wear fetchingly low-cut shirts or do his pants go all the way to his shoes or stop somewhere mid-shin?
d. Can I sleep during class? Will I want to?
e. Is it like a soap opera where I can miss several weeks and when I come back, I won't have missed anything?
f. Does the teacher use words like "rigorous" and "disciplined"? Can the teacher even spell words like "rigorous" and "disciplined"? Will the teacher expect me to be able to spell them?
g. Is the teacher (a) charmingly absent-minded, or (b) charmingly absent at least half-a-dozen times each quarter?

Tragically, teachers can no be longer educators, we now have to be entertainers as well. We must compete with TV, computer games, cable, MP3 players (some of which students are sporting during class, like I can't see those wires trailing down either side of their heads), etc. I have learned how to tap dance and am now taking lessons in rapping. I'm even considering purchasing a pair of jazz hands for when I make a particularly important or pithy point. (Can't you see it? "We no longer use footnotes in composition; now we use endnotes." Jaaaaazzzz haaaandsssss!) Faced with not so much a classroom, more a cemetery, I have to either perform some arcane, occult ritual to raise my tired students from the dead (and frankly, I'm running out of goats) or bring in the marching band. Perhaps the question that should be elected Most Notably Missing from the Evaluation is, "Is she entertaining enough to merit turning off the TV?"

Thank goodness for those jazz hands.

Ratatouille

There's an enormous dead rat on my doorstep. It was left there by a grateful stray cat that I've been feeding for awhile. I appreciate the present, I really do; it's a sweet, well-intended gesture. But it's been there for over 24 hours now, and the blood that leaked from its head has now glued it to the pavement. I have a little alleyway that leads past my back door, and it's seldom used by people. Here the rat lies, testament to the kindness of strangers and the cruelty of cats. Later I will gird my loins (if I can find my gird, or, for that matter, my loins), wrap myself in cling film, put on my ski gloves, snorkel and mask, borrow a hazmat suit from the meth lab next door, and throw the poor dead critter down the hill and into the jungle.

I must write a hundred times on the blackboard, "I am a feminist; I will not play the girl card." It's tricky when it comes to heavy things and icky things, I know, but the girl card is evil. It is wrong. It speaks of weakness where there is really only squeamishness and unwillingness. The girl card allows for the pat on the head, the "there there, don't worry your frantic-haired head about it, little girl," and the next guy to do that is likely to lose a finger.

So, even though the rat has its upward eye open, and there are likely all kinds of vermin on it, in it and around it, even though I'll have to burn my ski gloves, I will not ask some big, strapping man to do it for me. I'll wait until he offers.

Meanwhile, has anyone seen my gird?



Rat Hearse











Rat Cemetery

The Man in the Big Pants

George W. is the rodeo clown; we -- the American public -- are the bull. It came to me just this morning. Think about it: every time we're on the trail of scandal, every time we catch someone with his hands in the till, his fat, smiling mug posing for the photo op. next to some unacceptable dictator, despot, tyrant, terrorist or quotidian corruptoid, every time it looks like this time the sh*t's going to stick to Karl Rove or Trigger McCheney or Tom DeLayMeDownInStacksofCash, there's ol' George, waving his hands and running around in the Big Pants, distracting us from goring whomever so desperately deserves goring this time. (The original Gore distraction being the 2000 elections, of course). George does it well. He fails to get through a door, he chokes on a Mr. Salty and gives himself a black eye, he calls some woman a cupid stunt sotto voce and then claims he didn't, couldn't, wouldn't. He has that smile that 34% of us still mystically warm to and the rest of us want to see someone put a fist through. He's the rodeo clown with his fat, frat boy head at the bottom of the barrel, and his hilarious, o-so-distracting clown shoes sticking out the top. How appropriate an image for a "president" who has had his head in the dark places for the entire duration of his reign.

For awhile, I thought everyone else was supposed to be distracting us from noticing what an inept yodel was occupying the White House and decorating its walls with the deluxe 128-pack of Crayola™ crayons (with built-in sharpener that had to be removed to "ensure the president's safety"). How generous of the "president's" staff and advisors to throw themselves in front of the sword or under the guillotine by accepting large piles of illegitimately gotten dosh or shaking hands with some guy who still has suicide-bomber residue on his shoes and bits of innocent bystander in his pant cuffs. But I was wrong. Those guys, those politicians, those advisors and corporate executives were actually doing those things because that's what they normally do. It's just that they're usually sneakier about it.

But now, they don't have to be sneaky. Sneaky is no longer required. In a world where there is no accountability, no responsibility (beyond saying, "I take full responsibility" which is an entirely meaningless gesture), no consequences, and little public outcry (more a sort of outwhimper or outwhine), we are no longer at home to Mr. Sneaky. Now they just do the corrupt, mind-bogglingly immoral things they've always done right out there in the public eye with a big smile and a $1500 haircut. Why? Because they know they are cloaked in his shadow. They are hidden behind his song and dance, his tap shoes, his glittery suit, his Colgate (Watergate, Irangate) smile and jazz hands. As long as George does his "look over here, America!" and we continue to look, they can do what they like with impunity.

And George has big, scary, jazz hands. George has terrorism and 9/11 and BinLaden and most of the Middle East in his Big Pants. Whenever we start to grumble about the excesses of this administration, about how desperately Bush and his cronies are overreaching the legal limits of their power, George just reaches into his Big Pants and pulls out a terrorist, a suicide bomber, a nuclear weapon program that may or may not exist. He takes out nationalism thinly disguised as patriotism; he takes out racism, xenophobia, intolerance, ignorance and fear. This is a man of Very Big Pants.

But we need to remember that the bull has power. No matter how rigged the rodeo may be, no matter that we've been drugged senseless with fear mongering, no matter that our horns have been cut with the Patriot Act (the most cynically named piece of legislation ever) and we've been fed lies instead of truth; no matter that we've been dragged into this ring very much against our wishes, we still have power. We can still trample a cowboy or two, if we have the will.

Regardless of what political parties we ascribe to, regardless of what religious doctrine (or none) we adhere to, we can surely all agree that tolerance is better than intolerance, cooperation is better than turf wars; we can agree that truth and honor in government is better than being led by those at the bottom of the barrel. Government must be according to the will of the governed. Our “leaders” have forgotten that, so we need to once again take the lead. There are Congressional elections coming up in 2006; with the proper representatives back in the seats of Congress, we can reclaim the rodeo.

Groining Pains

I have a groin pull. This may seem like rather an odd way to begin a blog, or to begin blogging at all, which is what I'm doing, but if the old stand-by is to "write what you know," then this is what I'm knowing, rather emphatically, just at the moment. I had sort of always assumed that, like prostate cancer and hernias, groin pulls were a boy thing. Wrong with bells on and spikes poking you just east and west of the naughty bits. I'm not sure that's even what I've done, only that's where it hurts, so that's what we're calling it. It's sort of onomatopoeia, actually, since groin is much the noise I made when I tried to roll out of bed this morning. Lots of groining and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Anyway, enough about me and the ramifications of athletic overconfidence. This is my first attempt at blogging, as will shortly become apparent, if it isn't already. In fact, I'm going to stop right here and see if this works.