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Wednesday, 20 July 2005

If a blogger posts an entry after total silence for a week, does it make a sound?

hold on while I look for the key for question mark.  There it is. 

 

Among other major spanish language keyboard differences, the `shift´ key is so far from its regular spot that I basically have to backspace all the time.  <otherwise this is what would come out.  <who puts that arrow key so near the pinkie. 

 

and look what´s in the place of ´enter´....wait, <i´m trying to find the colon.  <aaaaannnndddd....    :  there!  ´

 

okay, here is what is in place of the  ´enter key´    Ç  now what am <i supposed to do with that_ I mean, what am <i supposed to do with that?  what is the question mark doing all the way up there_ 

 

<in order to get a single apostraphe <i have to hit the button twice to get this<ñ  whoops <i mean to get this: ´´    then, <i have to delete the second apostraphe

 

<furthermore, why in the world do <i have to hit cntrl+alt+2 in order to get the @ symbol_ <i mean, symbol0?

 

<ahºhh, ¬forget it. ¿

by: DJGroovySlug at July 20, 2005 16:22 | link | comments (4) dj groovy slug travels

Tuesday, 12 July 2005

So this morning in my half-awake stupor, I set about making my usual "I don't have to be anywhere anytime soon today" breakfast of a fried egg and toast with strawberry jam.   When I cracked the egg, I was greeted with this:

Double Yolk!

 

The mythical double yolk! Wow!! Of course, my excitement waned when I learned via Google that a double yolk generally means there will be an accident or death in the family. 

 

I fly out to Ecuador tomorrow afternoon.

 

On a related topic, don't try drinking orange juice made from frozen concentrate until you're sure that the concentrate has fully melted to liquid form. Blech.

 

xxx, Luv, DJ Groovy Slug

by: DJGroovySlug at July 12, 2005 10:38 | link | comments (4) random thoughts

Friday, 08 July 2005

Yadda Yadda Yadda: A True Random Thoughts Post

Today is the last day of my temporary position and I have not heard anything from anyone about a job for me when I get back.  Depressing. Thankfully my Ecuador trip is in five days.

 

My current place of employment has lots and lots of posters around the walls and one of them near my desk is a poster that states: Arizona Photographers (it's a museum exhibition poster, apparently).  However, the poster of the image is clearly not a photograph; it's a painting.  That's some pretty bad advertising on the part of the museum.

 

I have this absolutely sick disgusting addiction.  It's a disease.  I am obsessed with Movie Spoilers - websites that explain the whole plot of a movie.  This only becomes a problem when I still plan on seeing a movie in theaters and pay an exhorbitant amount of money for a ticket.  And right now, it is taking all of my effort not to read the extended spoiler of War of the Worlds which my boyfriend said was "disappointing."  God everyone keeps talking about the ending and I'm itching to find out so bad, it's like when you brush your hand across a mosquito bite and now all you can think about is how much you want to scratch, and scratch HARD.

 

Yesterday on the Metro it was so crowded I felt like all fifty people in my immediate vicinity had suddenly become "best friends" if you know what I'm saying.  The guy whose armpit was in my face knows what I'm talking about.

 

So how did Photoblog week go? I enjoyed it immensely, but not with my camera.  While outdoor still shots were fine, the camera was completely incapable of taking a decent picture of anything moving or anything indoors (and if it was moving AND indoors, I would have been better off painting a picture - and I can't paint.) So I decided to buy a new camera and it should arrive today.   It's a low end model Canon A510  but I figure it's still an upgrade from my three year old clunker, considering it's half the size and twice the optical zoom.  I think eventually I'll upgrade to something really nice, but this should do for now given my history of photography.

 

Plans for the weekend include: fancy steak dinner for my father's birthday and the Kirov ballet.  I was unable to see the Kirov last time they were in town so I'm looking forward to their production of "Le Corsaire" even if the WaPo totally blasted them in a review on Thursday. 

 

I've been working very hard on my Egypt scrapbook lately (I went to Egypt back in January, so yeah.  I'm a slacker) and now the hardest part is the writing in the lined pages.  I'm writing them ahead of time so that I don't royall screw up and talk about the finer points of sheesha for two whole pages when I should be talking about my impression of Abu Simbel. 

 

Oh my! I just realized today was my last day of work here! I'm actually really depressed, I liked it here a lot and I hope I can come back (to work for them of course, not just to visit.)  At dinner last night, my friends and I realized that I could work here for the next year doing temp work, since we have three pregnant women in the office.  I liked the idea until I remembered that I needed health insurance.

 

At home I noticed that my blog template has done very funny things since I added those pictures yesterday.  We'll see how it goes.

by: DJGroovySlug at July 08, 2005 15:51 | link | comments (5) random thoughts

Friday, 08 July 2005

Sweet mayhem this is turning into a political blog

I just read a great Op-Ed from the Denver Post responding to the claim that liberals control the media and all journalists are leftists who are too critical of the president, his administration, the war, the right, farmers, white people, religion, apple pie, NASCAR and Kenny Chesney thrown in for good measure.  I've gone ahead and posted the article in its entirety here.  The problem lies in the fact that undoubtedly, Conservatives will point out that a Liberal wrote those.  Damn! Of course! The liberal media would never post a conservative Op-Ed critiquing the liberal media!

 

The mainstream media in this country are dominated by liberals.

 

I was informed of this fact by Rush Limbaugh. And Thomas Sowell. And Ann Coulter. And Rich Lowry. And Bill O'Reilly. And William Safire. And Robert Novak. And William F. Buckley, Jr. And George Will.

 

And John Gibson. And Michelle Malkin. And David Brooks. And Tony Snow. And Tony Blankely. And Fred Barnes. And Britt Hume. And Larry Kudlow. And Sean Hannity. And David Horowitz. And William Kristol. And Hugh Hewitt.

 

And Oliver North. And Joe Scarborough. And Pat Buchanan. And John McLaughlin. And Cal Thomas. And Joe Klein. And James Kilpatrick. And Tucker Carlson. And Deroy Murdock. And Michael Savage. And Charles Krauthammer. And Stephen Moore. And Alan Keyes.

 

And Gary Bauer. And Mort Kondracke. And Andrew Sullivan. And Nicholas von Hoffman. And Neil Cavuto. And Matt Drudge. And Mike Rosen. And Dave Kopel. And John Caldara.

 

The mainstream media in this country are dominated by liberals. For instance, did you know there is an ultra-leftist professor at the University of Colorado named Ward Churchill who wrote an essay three years ago in which he called victims of Sept. 11 "little Eichmanns"? Bet you never heard of him, as the liberal media elite likes to put the kibosh on embarrassing stories like this.

 

The mainstream media in this country are dominated by liberals. Look at how they all gave Bill Clinton a pass on the whole Monica Lewsinsky affair. Remember? It was never in the news. We never heard any of the salacious details. The work of his presidency never came to a virtual halt while he defended himself.

 

The mainstream media in this country are dominated by liberals. They have so poisoned the electorate that no Republicans can get elected. Republicans don't control the presidency. Republicans don't control both houses of Congress. Republicans don't control 28 of 50 governorships.

 

Last year, a lot was made of a report released by The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The report found that 34 percent of national journalists identified themselves as liberal, 54 percent identified themselves as moderate and 7 percent identified themselves as conservative. Twenty-three percent of local journalists identified themselves as liberal, 61 percent identified themselves as moderate and 12 percent identified themselves as conservative.

 

These figures can be interpreted in a number of ways. First of all, if you actually read the whole report, you'd come across commentary that specifically warned against drawing any easy, across-the-board conclusions: "We would be reluctant to infer too much here. The survey includes just four questions probing journalists' political attitudes, yet the answers to these questions suggest journalists have in mind something other than a classic big government liberalism and something more along the lines of libertarianism."

 

But pretend you're doing a story on the Pew report, and the nuanced comments above are not sufficiently dramatic for your medium. You need to reduce things into some digestible sound bites. If you wanted to sound the alarm bells on the right, you could say that national journalists were nearly five times as likely to identify themselves as liberal than as conservative. This would be literally true but perhaps a little misleading, as the same poll results tell us that 61 percent of national journalists identified themselves as moderate or conservative.

 

If you're John Gibson of Fox News, you just make up your own statistics and claim that "80-some percent of reporters are self-described liberals." If you're Rush Limbaugh, you offer up the same lie a day later and specifically cite the poll that proves you wrong: "most of them (journalists) are liberals. Eighty percent of them will admit it in the latest press poll ... ."

 

Just for the sake of argument, let's assume that the media in America really are predominantly recalcitrant leftists. Say you're a conservative media mogul named Rupert and you have the wherewithal to do something about it. Here are three paths you might take:

 

1. You could announce your belief that the reporting of news is always subjective and therefore biased, so you are going to start a news network that comes at things from your own perspective in order to balance out what you perceive to be the bias of the left.

 

2. You could set up your own news network that actually is fair and balanced.

 

3. You could set up your own news network that's consistently and demonstrably partisan, but call yourself fair and balanced.

 

Guess which one he chose.

 

This just in at Fox News ... the mainstream media in this country are dominated by liberals.

 

George McClure is a former stand-up comic who now works as general manager of a Denver marketing firm.

by: DJGroovySlug at July 08, 2005 11:41 | link | comments random thoughts

Thursday, 07 July 2005

I love the subway. Any subway.  And not just Subway®.  But the Metro, the Tube (my thoughts and prayers are with those across the pond.) , the NYC transit system, BART, Métro.  I've been on all of them.  Hooray for public transportation.  I love staring at people and I find something amazingly beautiful about it all.  So I wanted to take some pics of the Metro for my photoblog but was held back by a slight problem.  In DC, only two types of people take pictures: tourists and terrorists.  And we view both with equal suspicion.  Especially taking pictures of the subway.  I guess it would be easier for me if I had a really professional looking camera, but alas, my three year old digital clunker had to do.  So to take the following pictures, I had to act like I was just checking something on my camera and I turned off the flash. 

Metro View

DC Metro: the Retro Metro

 

 

See how that guy directly in the photograph is staring at me? I'm telling you, we hate people who take pictures. I would be staring, too, if I was on the receiving end.  

 

 

DC Streets

Where is everybody going?  We hurry everywhere.

 

 

by: DJGroovySlug at July 07, 2005 21:59 | link | comments (1) dj groovy slug takes some snaps

Wednesday, 06 July 2005

Wednesday Poetry

The only fireworks I experienced on Fourth of July were the fireflies in the backyard.  I love summer.

 

Fireflies in the Garden

 

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,

And on earth come emulating flies,

That though they never equal stars is size,

(And they were never really stars at heart),

Achieve at times a very star like start.

Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

 

-Robert Frost, ©1928

by: DJGroovySlug at July 06, 2005 15:09 | link | comments wednesday poetry

Wednesday, 06 July 2005

Conservatives want to outdo liberals, make frozen treats.

"Political battles spark up everywhere, even in the freezer. Star-Spangled ice cream, a mail-order frozen concoction that promotes conservative values, is now available in mid-Atlantic retail stores and ready to go to war with Ben & Jerry's. Star-Spangled founder Richard Lessner , a Washington consultant by day, told The Post his company takes aim at liberal-minded Ben & Jerry's because 'we disagree with their politics.' However, he admits the conflict is a bit one-sided: 'We challenge them to taste tests. They pretty much ignore us.' Ben & Jerry's spokeswoman Chrystie Heimert told The Post simply: 'They are no perceivable threat to our business.' Ouch." From the Washington Post

 

 

by: DJGroovySlug at July 06, 2005 10:01 | link | comments random thoughts

Tuesday, 05 July 2005

Weekend Update: July 4th Edition

So, randomly, on Friday night, a couple friends called and asked if I wanted to go to Virginia Beach for the weekend.  I'm always up for beaching, cold drinks and fried food, so naturally I said yes.  We drove up Saturday and came back yesterday, there were four of us in all, me, another girl and two other boys.  The boy is actually in Norfolk for Navy stuff and managed to catch up with us Saturday night, so I enjoyed getting to see him, even if it was only for a few hours.

However, the trip was one of those trips that teaches you that boys and girls are truly different.  And we're different about different things. The following is a chart that demonstrates the different arguments speckled throughout the trip.

 

 Issue

 Female Opinion

 Male Opinion

 That girl from Aruba whose name I misremember now but who everyone is making a big deal about it.

 How can any female be stupid enough in this day and age to go out with a strange group of men unaccompanied.

 I feel sorry for her.

   

 Mercy killing (in the middle of battle)

If I saw someone suffering like that, I would put them out of their misery.

 

 

I would shoot them in the head.

 

 

Okay fine.  I would turn away.

 

 How?

 

 

There is no way you could look someone in the eye and shoot them in the head, even if their guts were spilling out

 

You couldn't do it. 

 

Art

 It's a response to culture, society and our environs.

 Art can be good and satisfy someone's need to create beauty but artists are bullsh*t.  They just make that stuff up

 

I show this study not to give examples of the way women think or men think, since obviously some men would disagree with the "Male Opinion" and some females would disagree with the "Female Opinion" column.   Rather, these exchanges show that men and women inherently disagree with each other.  Our entire trip was composed of one gender saying something about something and the opposing gender refuting that claim.  God forbid they agreed with us on anything.  Of course, we should really learn to keep our mouth shut during the opening scenes of "Saving Private Ryan."  Why are men boys so difficult?!?!?!

 

Anyway, here was my tanning viewpoint:

Da Beach!

 

 

xxx, Luv, DJ Groovy Slug

 

 

by: DJGroovySlug at July 05, 2005 18:52 | link | comments (3) dj groovy slug travels, dj groovy slug takes some snaps