Apparently a personal history including the Holocaust, Charles Manson, and being unable to accept one’s Academy Award in person is enough to give someone a free pass for rape, sodomy, and drugging children. 13-year-old children.

“What?!” you scream, outraged. “That’s impossible!”

Not if your name is Roman Polanski.

How is this a question, exactly? I don’t give a flying fuck who did what to you when, sexual assault of a child remains one of the most despicable crimes a human being (I use the term loosely) can commit. Fleeing the country before you can be sentenced of your crime, and going into exile (oh, woe is me, I am exiled, like a Russian aristocrat in the 1920s, have pity on me, just never mind that little girl I got all stoned and then fucked her little girl brains out, that doesn’t count; I suffered as a child during WWII AND my wife was murdered! I get to do pretty much anything I want now) doesn’t mean you can avoid the fact that YOU RAPED A LITTLE GIRL AND NEVER SERVED A DAY IN JAIL.

I’m sorry about your shitty life. I’m glad the girl has been able to move past it, I think that’s very fortunate for her. It’s still a crime against society, however, whatever some socialites may think.

Enjoying the nice weather.

Back on Enzo (got my parking back, yay).

Got some decent players for my hockey pools.

Planning on making an actual turkey in Mr Wolf for Canadian Thanksgiving (his first!) to share with some friends and neighbours. May try to bake a pie for my Main Distractor.

Heading to Whistler for annual junket this afternoon. May detour and show the Main Distractor Bowen Island on the way back, he’s never been.

Why I read him even though I don’t agree with every little thing he says:

The protestors keep saying that they want their country back. Sorry, my fellow small-governmenters, but this country is a democracy, and you didn’t lose your country, you just lost an election. You had your chance for eight years. You blew it, and you lost. What Obama is doing is what he was elected to do. The principled response is not a massive, extremist-riddled hissy fit a few months in, but a constructive set of proposals to build on universal care for a more market-friendly and cost-conscious system in the future. You have to win some political credibility for that; and then you have to beat the man you lost so badly to last year. That’s the civil and civilized way forward for the right. It also seems, alas, to be the one they are currently refusing to take.

(My emphasis.)

today to learn that I know an actual living, breathing creationist. Who is under the age of 80. And is convinced of the high quality of the education that led to that belief. (I think indoctrination would be a more accurate name for it, but whatever.)

I have a hard enough time trying to comprehend theists, really, anymore (although it’s the actual, corporate, religions that disgust me, while theism tends to just bewilder me), but trashing all of the science of the past 150 years or whatever it is, deciding that you know better than Charles Darwin?

How does anyone do that?

I had an eye doctor’s appointment the other day, sent by the guy who checked my prescription. Because my pressure was high (right up there at the high end of normal). OK, I don’t know the first thing about glaucoma, so I looked it up on the wikipedia, and got fair enough scared. My baseline testing appointment isn’t for more than two months, so I guess it’s not something I’m really in imminent danger of having trouble with my eyes, but still.

So I asked the Main Distractor, “Honey what would we do if I go blind?!”

And he answered me, “I guess we’d get another dog.”

OK, I opened up my credit card info online this morning to find the last straw of weirdness.

Last Monday, I was charged four times for the day’s parking charges by Impark. (My credit card company won’t lift a finger for me. Yay CIBC! that’s why I love you!)

Last Friday, I was charged twice for boingo mobile wireless access for my iPhone. (Boingo fixed that right up, kudos to them.)

This morning, I was charged twice for our hotel in California. (Telephone all over North America to no avail, we now try the e-mail route. Why do I have to put myself out all over the damn place to fix everyone else’s mistakes, by the way?)

No wonder my available credit seems to be melting for no apparent reason.

Free Will Astrology for Leo:

KFC is test-marketing a flamboyant new menu item at selected restaurants in the U.S. This remarkable delicacy is an exotic sandwich that consists of bacon, two servings of cheese, and special sauce, all held together not by bread but by two slabs of fried chicken. I nominate this spectacular creation to be your earthy metaphor of the week. In accordance with the astrological omens, I hope it inspires you to head out to the frontiers of extravagance in both your spiritual affairs and your romantic life. The coming days will be an ideal time to pray to both Christ and the Goddess while making love, for example, or to get sandwiched between two delicious devotees while meditating naked, or to perform a boisterous ritual to invoke emotional riches with the help of a genius of love.

Save the Words, from Oxford Dictionaries, dedicated to preserving the arcana of the English language, a subject dear to my heart!

I’ve adopted obarmate.

Look it up.

I have had four random strangers with realllllly long gmail addresses subscribe to this blog.

I’ve deleted them on principle, since I don’t know them, and it’s easy enough to bookmark the blog if you have an overwhelming interest in it. Subscription doesn’t confer any posting or editing powers or anything.

If there’s some reason you want to be subscribed, random strangers, comment and tell me so

Actually, it’s even weirder if you consider that there’s nowhere to subscribe on the page, that I can see.

I tweeted this thought some time ago, making me guilty of what I am about to decry. Yay me!

With the social networking that so many of us are involved in, we have tons of opportunities to talk to each other. Most of my friends, both real life and strictly internet-based, are available to me through any number of the following media: public message boards, private message boards, livejournal, facebook, blogs, email, and twitter. There are a few with whom I communicate only using one of those, but mostly it’s two or more.

There is a certain amount of overlap, obviously. People briefly announce on facebook something that may occasion a more substantial blog or board post. There is the devil’s tool which automagically tweets your facebook status updates, or is it that it facebooks your twitter updates? I’m not sure, but several of my twitter friends are also facebook friends, and there’s nothing like getting same-day reruns…kind of like staying glued to a cable news channel for too long. There are people who disseminate stuff on one or another medium which you are fully aware they have found through a mutual friend…who is not given the customary hat-tip. SHOCKING!

So I maintain that the modern social networking reality requires, and will, with luck, engender, Modern Grace.

Modern Grace is knowing which immediate things to disseminate on Twitter; which longer-term things are made for Facebook; and which substantial thoughts really belong on a blog or board. Which isn’t to suggest that boards are worthy only of substance, because they aren’t, exclusively. To me, it also means crediting your sources. And most importantly, acknowledging and apologizing if necessary for heinous cross-posting, which may make your friends decide to pare down the number of places in which they interact with you.

Or may not!

I don’t find that “networking” with so many people in so many places is redundant—well, not in the cases where the people have attained at least a modicum of grace.