Evidence of voter fraud in my precinct

Perhaps an even greater mystery than how a cat was allowed to vote is why my webcam is now taking pictures in mirror image.

Incidentally, it's really hard to get a cat to sit still with a sticker on its head. He's kind of pissed at me now, but I'm sure he'll get over it, what with his tiny brain and my position as the provider of food (the only thing that really matters at the end of the day).

Wild, wild life

We found this little guy crawling around in my parents' yard today.


He's cute, but, despite what the wingnuts will tell you, probably not marriage material.

Some things I noticed

I lived in Massachusetts when gay marriage was legalized there. Now I live in California, which, as you likely know, just legalized gay marriage. Clearly this is no coincidence.

Today I am officially announcing that I will, for an appropriate fee, move to your state of choice for the requisite amount of time to legalize gay marriage in that state. I cannot tell you how I do it. All I know is that my methods work.

*****

So you know how I mentioned that girl at my gym who thinks she's Paris Hilton? Holy shit, she has outdone herself.

Normally, it's just about how she looks. She's got the bleach-blonde hair and usually dresses in tight, all-pink clothing, usually short shorts with a word across the ass. She also wears giant sunglasses, lots of jewelry, and sometimes a baseball cap. While working out. Indoors.

Well, my parents were visiting this past weekend, and they went out for a walk around the apartment complex. When they got back, they couldn't wait to tell me about how they'd wandered into the gym, and there was a girl there with two little purse dogs in a stroller. Dogs. IN A STROLLER. That she parked next the treadmill while working out. Yeah. I asked my parents if she looked like a poor man's Paris Hilton, and they said, why yes, she did! I was sure it was the same girl.

And today, I confirmed it - she was there, with the dogs, in the stroller, at the gym. Oh, and did I mention the stroller was hot pink?

Seriously, who does that? Who puts dogs IN A STROLLER? And brings them TO THE GYM?? I mean, I know people in Southern California can be kind of ridiculous, but this on a whole other level.

Yay, baseball!

As great as it was to see the Red Sox get their World Series rings yesterday, I think the coolest picture from the day has to be this picture of the hawk (or one of its friends - apparently there are three) that made the news the other day for attacking a girl at Fenway*. Seriously, how cool is that? It's got a freakin' rat in it's mouth!



*Confidential to the Boston Globe - the fact that the hawk attacked a girl named Alexa Rodriguez is not irony. Irony would have been if it had attacked a girl named Manuela Ramirez. God.

Baby polar bear tells baby pandas to suck it

So there's this baby polar bear over in Germany that animal rights activists want to kill or somesuch nonsense (because seriously, what?). All you need to know is that it might possibly be the cutest thing to ever grace the internets.

My cat has dreadlocks

No really, he does. Although that may be just a polite way of saying he has, um, a grooming problem. I really don't know what's brought this on. I know long-haired cats often have issues with their fur, but I've had him for over five years, and only once in that time can I ever remember noticing any mats. At first I thought maybe he'd somehow managed to knock something sticky on himself, but I can't find anything spilled anywhere, so I don't think that's it.

Brushing isn't helping, at least not after the fact. So I tried to cut the mats off with scissors, but I only managed to get a few of them before he decided he'd rather claw my face off instead. He quickly learned to disappear as soon as the scissors appeared. But seriously, what the fuck, cat? It's just fur, for god's sake. He reacted like I was trying to cut off his leg or something. This, from the same cat who allows me to regularly clip his claws without registering anything more than mild annoyance.

Whatever.

(See, Dweeze, when you demand that I write more, this is what you get. A story about my cat. Be careful what you wish for, is what they always say, right? And I don't know why Gothmog wants to live vicariously through me. Dood. My life is more boring than just about anything. I'm not joking.)

But anyway, not that this is much of an excuse for going as long as I did without posting, but I did at least spend a substantial part of that time devoting my creative energies to a written piece at...some other site that I decline to name because I have this stupid neurotic obsession with keeping my identities in different spheres of the world and the internet separate, even though everyone knows and no one really cares and it's not like it's a big state secret or anything. Yeah.

So. I've been watching some TV lately. That's exciting, right? Right? Actually, I've been watching less now that baseball is over. What's that you say, it's not over yet? Okay, fine, it's over for my team. But as I've mentioned many, many times before, I'm quite provincial, and I don't have much of an interest in watching once my team is out. Especially not if it means having to subject myself to more of the wretched Fox coverage and the rage-inducing play-by-play stylings of Buck and McCarver.

One thing I have been watching, among other things, is Lost. Apparently a lot of people really, really like Lost. And okay, it's a pretty good show, and I've watched it from the beginning, so I'm not saying it's bad or anything. But I have some complaints.

First of all, I feel like they pulled a bait-and-switch. The show was originally billed as a plane-crash-on-a-deserted-island-castaway-type show. And then they go and pull all this sci-fi shit on us. As I may have stated before, I hate science fiction. I can tolerate a little bit if the show is good enough and it doesn't overwhelm things (see: Alias), but as a general rule, I prefer my entertainment science fiction-free. I know that without all the supernatural stuff, there'd be no show, because there's only so much people stranded on an island can do, but still, I'm just saying.

I hate the fact that there's a character named Charlie and it's not Matthew Fox. It's confusing to me. He will always be Charlie Salinger to me (oh yes, I just admitted to watching Party of Five. Wanna make something of it?), so it bugs me when someone says "Charlie" and they're not talking about him.

They're on a flight from Australia to the U.S. But there's only one Australian person on the plane? (Or, if you want to quibble, only one Australian person among all the survivors?) Yeah, that makes sense.

And here is my biggest problem: haven't any of these people ever read the book Alive? And no, I'm not suggesting that Lost needs an infusion of cannibalism. While that might certainly be dramatic, I'm not sure ABC would go for it. What I am saying is why don't these people get off their asses and explore the fuck out of every inch of that island? If you remember the story in Alive, after many weeks (months? I can't remember), they finally realized no one was ever going to rescue them, and a few of them set off to find help, and they found civilization not very far away. The whole time they were eating their friends, they could have been rescued if they'd just gone looking sooner.

So why haven't the characters on Lost devoted any real energy towards looking for help or civilization or something, anything? Sure, there have been bits and pieces here and there, but nothing major. Obviously the island is worth exploring because they keep discovering things like hatches and crazy French women and boats full of dynamite and planes full of heroin. How do they really know what really is or isn't on the island, or if it's even really an island, if they don't go poking around in some sort of organized fashion?

Or at least, why don't the writers pay the idea some basic lip service, and at least have the characters sit around and discuss it, just so they can say why it's not possible, or at the very least, not desirable. (I am willing to grant that they may have done this at some point, because I don't tend to pay attention to things very closely, since I rarely watch TV without also doing something else at the same time, but even if they did, they still haven't taken the idea seriously at all.)

I just don't get it. If I'm stranded on an island, the first thing I'm doing is wandering around as much as is physically possible to see what I've got there. I can't tell you how much this irritates me.

Finally, does anyone else besides me think that the father from the Schroeder family on The Amazing Race looks just like Jim Mora, Jr.?

Just don't call him fat

Holy crap! A 22-pound lobster! Imagine being served that guy on a plate. Thankfully (for the lobster), he won't be going to the big, uh, ocean in the sky anytime soon.

UPDATE: Aw, geez. Bubba the lobster has died on his own. Seems like it was the stress that did it.

If I were I cop, I'd definitely be one who rides a horse

It looks really fun. And how many other jobs do you know of where one of the benefits is "free horse"?

Poor mountain kitties

I guess their mom never told them that old story about what happens when you lick a frozen flagpole. This could have turned out sadly, but since it sounds like they're okay, it's kind of funny.

Maybe the milk is made of powdered diamonds or something

It must be nice to have so much money that you can afford to buy your boyfriend a $320,000 cow.