Weepy Patriotism

These past few weeks, I have been feeling blinding anger about the new TSA procedures which include the "backscatter" machines and the "enhanced" pat downs. (Remember the last time we added the word "enhanced" to something in the "War on Terror?")
I've been fighting the good fight, so to speak, over on Facebook because, apparently, a lot of people don't mind giving up their rights for an illusion of safety.
So I've been pretty exhausted as far as writing anything here. But I do want to state one thing unequivocally here for posterity.
Over my lifetime, because of my über liberalism, I have been accused many times of being the antithesis of a patriot, literally called a "traitor." Yet I doubt many of those people (who usually call themselves patriots) would say what I'm about to say and feel the truth of the emotion behind the words.

I would rather die with my Constitutional rights intact than fly "safely" without them.

New Feature (for blahgblahgblahg, maybe not for you...)

Last night, I added apture to my blog. The code allows links to "pop up" when you hover over the links I include, so that you do not have to navigate away from the page to read the page/watch the video/see the picture/whatever.

When you see a link there should be an icon (book, film frame, photo) before it:

If you hover your cursor over the icon a window will open showing the content:

There should also be a bar at the top of the page with a button to share the page on Twitter, Facebook or by email and there is also a search box:

You can type your query in as normal:

Hit enter or select from the suggestions:

And click on your chosen link:

Additionally you can highlight a word or phrase [here I highlighted "dentist's mercury, but the highlight didn't show in the screenshot] and a little "Learn More" icon will pop up:

Click the icon and search results will pop up:

You can then select the result of which you want to see more:

Finally, you can also hover over my Twitter link at the top of the right column and read my tweets without leaving my page:

And that's about it. You may or may not ever ue these on my page, but I thought I'd share in case someone wanted to use the code on their own site.

Drink Recipe: F*ck Me Gently with a Chainsaw

F*ck Me Gently with a Chainsaw
a.) On Election Night tell all of your Facebook friends this:

"couldn't decide if I should venture into the cold and cry into (an admittedly delicious selection of) beers or put my cozy jammies on and hide under a blanket on the couch. I've opted for the latter accompanied by a heap of Peanut Chews, a huge Iron Man cup of HFCS containing ginger ale and Hoarders and NCIS on the DVR. No live TV for me tonight."

b.) Immediately start checking Facebook, Twitter and online news media and commence live-blogging for close to four hours until everything is pretty much over.

c.)pour

• 2 oz Knob Creek into a shot glass

d.)then in a highball glass mix:

• splash of unsweetened orange juice


• 2 maraschino cherries, muddled and a splash of juice from the jar


• splash simple syrup


• 1-2 shakes Angostura Bitters


• 2 (or 3 or so) oz Knob Creek


• some ice

Directions
Shoot c, then sip d.

Alternate names for this drink are "shot of bourbon with ghetto old-fashioned back" or "Post Election Sorrow Drowner: Democrat Version."

Paris Daydreams

A Facebook friend of mine (the incomparable Muffy Bolding) is looking for a sublet and a friend of hers suggested a site in which he invested start-up money, airbnb.
I decided to check it out because I have quite liked the idea of home stays rather than hotels for a while now.
Of course, for the destination I entered the one place I will always choose to go if it's totally up to me: Paris. BIG mistake. I'm about to take the joint AmEx and run away for a week or two or five.
The windows, the balconies, the tucked-in-the-eaves garrets with exposed rough-hewn beams and tiny kitchens tucked in corners and handheld showers in teeny tiny tubs and the artist's flare for decorating that many people who sublet because they travel a lot seem to have, especially when they travel with their ballet or theater company or antiquing journeys across Europe for their boutiques as many of the subletters seem to mention. The Nutella and croissant and baguette and cheeses displayed in many of the artfully arranged kitchen pictures. The views of Parisian rooftops and La Tour Eiffel and canals and La Seine and Notre Dame de Paris. The little cobbled lanes one must travel to reach the flats.
MUST. Go. Back.
SOON!

blahg-er is blah

Words haven't been floating around in my head so much the past week or so. Images, ideas, pictures, maybe other people's words if I feel like reading for a bit but I'm just not chatty. Not in real life, not on paper, not on the screen. Or in a box with a fox eating lox.
I think the stressing out over the lady parts and the fact that I fucked up and missed my ultrasound on Wednesday and now have to wait until Election Day for the damn thing is just too much to think about so my brain has decided to just not think the way it normally does. Or I had a stroke. (Ah, just kidding. )
So Election Day promises to be... interesting? As I've said before, I do not have the good luck with which my husband has been blessed. For him November 2 is a promising day. For me? It's a terrifying prospect of Republithugs and hysterectomies.
On the other hand, if they see something during my ultrasound, even if it's not good, at least I'll have an answer and hopefully a treatment will be decided for me. Because if they see nothing then I have to decide if I want to roll the dice on a hysterectomy since "it may or may not help with the pain of unknown causes." I'll probably vote no; Nate feels the same. But we are both also hoping for an answer. Ack! This whole thing is just one big-ass conundrum. I don't want to have something "wrong" with me, but I know something is wrong because I don't feel "right." But the doctors--so far--say it is nothing, basically.


As a side note: I finally disconnected my Tumblr account from my Facebook account because I was overwhelming too many people with posts. I know I'm usually too prolific for some people, so the addition of tumblahgblahgblahg to my normal load of blergh scared some people off from reading my page at all anymore.

My favorite part of Blogger is the stats page.

I don't know how long the stats tab has existed on Blogger, but I only came across in the beginning of September when I started trying to be an active blogger again. I learn so much from this tab that I like to check it even on days I haven't actually blogged.

I do use Feedjit on my homepage, but that shows me my own views and I have to click a few times if I want to see where from where people are arriving. The stats page puts that all within on or two clicks and doesn't track my own pageviews.

So my favorite things I have learned over the past month:

1. If my post title sounds confessional or dirty pageviews zooooom!
2. Despite how hipster everyone always seems to want to sound when discussing their computer usage, check out the following: 48% of my audience uses Internet Explorer. The other 52% is split between a dozen other browsers. (Congrats to that one person who is the sole Java web browser member of my audience. Who knew there was a Java web browser? I had to Google it to be sure it was a real thing.)
3. Again, the hipster quotient is blown to bits: 73% of you use Windows operating systems. The rest? Macintosh (12%), iPhone (6%), Other Unix (5%), BlackBerry (1%)
4. Much of my audience arrives here from NetworkedBlogs on Facebook, so I'm glad I installed that. Thanks FB friends for reading.

A few things I learned from Feedjit, but I love so much that I have to share:

1. A lot of my traffic also arrives from Zen Comix whose author has included me on his blogroll, so thanks to him! Check out Dave Dugan's funny and timely political cartoons and political musings.
2. On Google, I am the third listing when you search for "hey hey you get into my car" which is a lyric from a Billy Ocean song from the '80s. To be honest, I don't even remember why I titled this post "Hey! (Hey!) You (You!): Get into my car!" but I did, so there you go.
3. For a very long while, if you Googled "24 hour pH study" on Google images, my HAAAAAWT picture from "Adventures in Tubeland" was the number one image. The Google started their "instant result" bullshit and this picture disappeared entirely from the results. Like, that day. What's up with that, yo? (By the way, even if you Google 24 hour ph study hawt the picture does not exist, but a lot of non-hawt pictures do. Weeeeeiiiirrrrrrd...)

And something I learned a long time ago, but alwaysalways forget until it's too late. (This has nothing to do with Google, Blogger or Feedjit. Or anything else in this post. But it is bothering RIGHT NOW, so I will share it anyway.) When you give you dog's horse hooves to chew on, your house will smell slightly like horse piss and horse manure until they finish them. Apparently that whole sterilizing thing they do to the the hooves can't even remove that stank.

PS Blogger's spellcheck thinks "hawt" is not a word, but "ha wt" is a totally acceptable substitute. Also? Tubeland does not exist, but "Tableland" does. Huh, go figure. I wonder how you get there...

PPS Blogger's spellcheck has also never heard of Facebook, blogroll, or BlackBerry. Get with it, Blogger's spellcheck!!

Words I Say Regarding Stuff: An Introduction

You may notice that about twice a year for the past couple of years I seem to decide to try to make this blogging thing work. This is one of those times again. I may not always have something interesting to say, but I want to try to post something--anything--every day. We'll see how this goes.
It does bother me that I can share some witty, deep, or important things on Facebook which, essentially, disappear after a week or so. I don't have an archive. I mean, I know that the words are floating around out there in cyberland forevermore, but I can't easily access it. So that is what brings me back to this page every once in a while.
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One pet peeve I have about some of the blogs I've been reading lately is that they no longer seem to follow that format of backwards chronology from the top of the page to the bottom and then you click "older posts." I rather liked that. I liked seeing the posts in some kind of order and feeling the accomplishment of completing the reading of a page. I guess because I'm a book girl, I like my information in a linear format like that. But many blogs are now using that--um--"thing" where there is one post (the most recent) on the homepage and then six to twelve blocks at the bottom of the page to choose from for further reading. That's too difficult. I don't want to read a Choose Your Own Adventure blog. I want a narrative of some kind. Granted my narrative, when read in said linear format may make a reader wonder whether I have schizophrenia or ADD or some other mental disorder which makes it difficult for me to stay on topic. Yes, I do have mental illness, but really I'm just interested in myriad, disparate topics. I apologize in advance to any new readers for the bursts of flotsam and jetsam. If you don't like it, don't read it. I'm totally cool with that. Also, I do not claim to be a writer or an artist. So if you're looking for that, you might want to go elsewhere.
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I rather like the meta element of this post. Blogging about blogging.
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I just spell-checked this and Blogger doesn't recognize the word Facebook. Weird.