"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this [chuckle] this is working very well for them."

In general we don't think Barbara Bush is an idiot. So when she says things like this (audio swiped from here; subject to removal in case of slashdotting), it seems entirely plausible that she's doing it on purpose to distract attention from the idiotic things that her son has been saying.

"The good news is -- and it's hard for some to see it now -- that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch." (Laughter.)

Good to know what when things get bad, Bush stays sympathetic to the sufferings of the rich and powerful. (Anyone have audio of that? That'd be a keeper.)

Can't blame him, really. He was raised rich and powerful, his family is rich and powerful, all his friends are rich and powerful, and he hangs out with rich and powerful people. So being a simple kind of guy, those are the people he instinctively worries about. Can't really hold it against him.

Not that you'd want to let someone like that be President or anything.

I have a college pal who
  says we can pay one price for two
Just ask for Roger
  at Video Bargainville.

Love Moxy Früvous.

Llamas:

Again?

Yes, again! (Again!) I forget if I did that on purpose, of it the little boy was just chanting it again so I wrote it down again.

Llamas:

she said. Llamas. Great animals. So . . . friendly. I did a movie with llamas in it once.

Yo, Iris!

Mia?! *Our* Mia?!

Well, that's always the question, isn't it? Mia is mysterious.

broken koans

Those would be here.

The Bicycle Pedaling Frog dreams of the fen of his youth, and knows the joy of being fungible.

Fungible in the Fens (as seen on TV).

Paris Hilton is Faction Leader of the Slacker track.

Ah, this reminds me of the Good Old Days of Plurp and the Meme Mixing. Ou Sont Les Bits de Yestereve, eh?

How about "Randia" and "Karlsland" ?

Yeah, we could do that. Course we'd probably name the ideal capitalist state "Karlsland", and the ideal socialist state "Randia", just to keep things interesting.

Working on a weblog entry for life growing up in East Chatham. The tax assessor who flew aerobatics down property lines. The postmistress who successfully delivered the letter to the right person in the hippy commune when the extent of the address was "Mom / 12060". The culture mix between the weekenders from the city and the country folk ("When Cindy does it, it looks like art, but when I hang old stuff on the walls it looks like we didn't have another place to store our tools"). Finding it amusing that Tri Sodium Phosphate and the Taconic State Parkway had the same initials (shows ya what sort of an upbringing I had...). Anyway, URL coming in a few days.

I'd like to read a weblog entry like that. *8) It's entirely possible that I have the URL (and even that I've read and appreciated the entry), and then forgotten.

I have always wondered why you didn't call him "the little son" too.

I'm mysterious also.

And, from Hitherby rather than Llamas:

"If we'd wanted to make gelatinous mammals unhappy," explain the shimmer-things, "then we could have stacked them much more efficiently in the first place."

Yeah.

Let's have some Sims pictures embedded right here in the weblog for a change! Gina finished school (as you know), and waited patiently at the Bus Stop outside town while I finished building a house for her.

Here she is looking it over proudly, just after taking ownership:

("Hm," she thinks, "what's that silly blue door on the right for?" Slip of the mouse on my part.)

She quickly got rid of the extra door, put up a few decorations, and had some friends over.

She also called up her sister:

(note the essential hot tub in the background), and her Mom:

(I'm very proud of the landscaping work in the front there, too, with the multiple levels and stairs and stuff). She'd sort of lost touch with them at college, but now they're all close again. (The usual Sims 2 Welcome Wagon also showed up, and led to another new friend; that story is elsewhere.)

And finally here's Gina, having a nice twilight bath by the big picture windows in her bathroom:

Such a nice well-ordered lubricious Bush-free world it is in there...

Readers should be sure not to miss the Big Sixth Anniversary Issue, posted at some random confusing time last week basically unrelated to its nominal date.

We're home now, and the kids are off to the First Day of the School Year, and I'm trying to remember just what it is I do around here at work, as usual. Something involving computers, apparently.

I've also been reading some of these "weblogs" and things. Geegaw apparently got married or something; which is neat. ftrain posted another of those entries that everyone should read. And Medley has had a recent bunch of heartfelt and infuriating entries about New Orleans, how bad things are there, and how much worse Bush and crew are than you thought possible.

From the mysterious HTML o' the Day (which differs from the usual weblog in that it appears in my inbox), a weblog from the New Orleans recovery. And also, moving toward frivolity, Nintendo patents insanity, Stuff on my cat ("Do you like to put stuff on your cat?"), and Cats in sinks ("Show me another cat in a sink!").

"The next Synthetic Zero event is currently scheduled for Sunday, October 2 at 7pm and Wednesday, October 5 at 6pm."

I very briefly wrote up the Grisham novel that I read over vacation. That was the easy one; I'm still putting off the hard ones ("Stations of the Tide", and from the last couple of days "David's Sling"); they're hard because they were good, and for some reason that's harder to write down (maybe because I feel like a good book deserves more thought than a mediocre one).

I saw an ad on TV the other day (while pretending to cross-country ski at the Club or something, probably), for Jeanine Pirro (who's planning to run against Hillary Clinton for U. S. Senator from New York in 2006). The ad first showed a grainy picture of Clinton, then three or six noun-phrases of awful left-wing things that Clinton supports, then showed a less grainy picture of Pirro, with the implication that Pirro is against all those awful things.

The two awful left-wing noun phrases that I remember are "Gun Control" and "Mandatory Gay Rights". Presumably Pirro is therefore, in the same wildly oversimplified namespace, in favor of "Uncontrolled Guns" and "Optional Gay Rights".

There's lots of room for squirming around in the area of gun control and what "control" means. But do even the people in the target audience of this ad think that a right can be optional?

Heh.

But enough about the real world! In Sims news, all sortsa stuff has been going on (despite the fact that I was away from my Sims 2 computer for a week, and the little daughter wanted to use it most of the rest of the time; things move real fast in there).

First of all, a reader asked for some pictures:

I want to see pitures of your Sims reading books. Many books! Books about toys. Books about boys. Books about sad things and obscure presentations! Books about bluetooth hacking and the little girl and thousands of commuters stranded on the Moon! Books that only have pitures and are just the gynophilia talking! And stuff.

Okaaaay...

Here's a piture of a Sim reading a book (or more accurately a book being read by a Sim):

And here's a notebook (as, I think, used in college):

And here's little Hermes Zoom (back when he was a kid; he's a teenager now) working on his homework:

(Finally some clues to Sim orthography there! The previous ones are too blurry to really see anything. Hm, I wonder if it would help to crank all the game video settings up to their maxima?)

And as a final special bonus, here's the cover of a book that Brandi was reading one evening at the Raptors':

(It seems to be a romance novel involving a maid; amazingly appropriate to the household.)

So that's books. *8) For other news of my Sims I'll send you offsite again. Let's see: