matthearn.com

This video is intoxicating:

Cats are messed up animals. Pete, for example, has developed a somewhat fatherly relationship with Josephine. Occasionally, when she’s being fed or resting in her bouncy seat, Pete will come by and gently lick her head, or rub against her.

She, of course, loves him. When he saunters by she can’t keep her eyes off him. It’s rather amusing. I have been told that cats tend to bond with humans of the opposite gender, but my anecdotal experience hasn’t borne that out. The cats at my parents house always prefer my father. (I guess he smells like a boss cat. Who knows.) At our house, Pete usually likes to sleep with me (until I start tossing and turning), and Poly’s always been Mommy’s girl. (JD and The Cheat didn’t seem to care.)

The best part about Fatherly Pete is that if Josephine is upstairs, and is crying, and we don’t go up to get her right away, Pete will sit at the bottom of the steps and stare at us, as if to say, “What the hell! She’s crying! You gonna do something about it? Jerks.”

Poly, of course, has responded to the appearance of another child by being annoyingly ingratiating. There’s been a lot of dragging of slippers and little plush toys all over the house, and a lot of loud midnight meowing, as if to say “Hey! Look at me! I’m still here! Look, I brought you a present!” until finally we kick her out so she doesn’t wake the baby.

The Cheat is now an outdoor kitty, since I couldn’t teach her not to pee in the basement. Sometimes she seems to be handling it well, and sometimes I find her huddled behind the air conditioning unit with a wild look in her eyes. She does at least have a cute collar now.

It’s terrifying to think that not only do these people exist, but they’re in positions of religious (and sometimes secular) authority.

The biggest hypocrite in the world is the person who believes in the death penalty for murderers and not for homosexuals. Hypocrite. The same God who instituted the death penalty for murderers is the same God who instituted the death penalty for rapists and for homosexuals – sodomites, queers!

…And you know who they’re after? Your children. …[T]hey’re being recruited by the sodomites. They’re being molested by the sodomites. I can tell you so many stories about people that I know being molested and recruited by the sodomites. They recruit through rape. They recruit through molestation. They recruit through violation. They are infecting our society. …The only way to stop it, you say “how do we stop it?” … You want to know why sodomites are recruiting? Because they have no natural predators.

The implicit thought being that fanatic right-wing cultists might impress their god by preying on homosexuals. I guess I missed the verse in the Gospel where Jesus told us to hate and murder people.

Would you rather have government bureaucrats or big business bureaucrats making decisions about your healthcare insurance eligibility? I know which one Sophie’s Mom would prefer.

Just as our Blue Cross plan was set to start, we received a notice from them stating that they considered Sophie to have a pre-existing pulmonary problem (due to the amount of doctor’s visits for pneumonia), and that while they would cover her in general, they wouldn’t cover any pulmonary/respiratory issues until she had gone two years without needing medication or problems…

All of a sudden, Sophie was without coverage for pulmonary problems. This was absolutely terrifying. What if she got sick?! What if she needed to be hospitalized?! We spent the next couple of months researching every insurance company that we could, begging them to take Sophie. Nope, it wasn’t going to happen.

And then our biggest fear came true: Sophie got very, very sick. And I’m ashamed to say that although we knew that she was incredibly ill, we actually considered keeping her home from the doctor’s office, as we knew that this would be yet another strike against her getting insurance. Luckily we pulled our heads out of our asses and took her to the doctor anyway, and it’s good that we did, because Sophie was so critically ill that she was sent straight from the doctor’s office to ICU. She was so sick that we couldn’t even wait for an ambulance; they helped me throw our limp, blue daughter into our car, and I drove like hell to get her to the hospital next door.

Let me state that very clearly one more time: we almost didn’t take our baby girl, who was in severe respiratory distress, to the doctor because we knew that it would hurt her chances of getting insurance.

As a wise man once said, “I ain’t got the words.”

(roflrazzi.com)

In case I’d forgotten to show you before this, it is vitally important that you start reading Basic Instructions. Example:

Even as we speak, a supremely competent fellow named Joe is installing Verizon FiOS in our new house. (Well, new to us. The house was built before my great-great-grandparents were born.) My excitement is ExxxxTRREEEEEEM. I’ve wanted to try FiOS for a while, since a package including basic TV, internet, and phone is the same price as my comcast package. So I’m basically going to save the equivalent of a phone bill every month, which is not insignificant. I’ll also not have to deal with Comcast, who do not offer ESPN Classic as part of their digital package, an oversight for which I’ve been waiting years to punish them.

Moving continues apace; we’ve been hauling boxes and bags of anything that fits into our cars, and I donated my motorcycle to a buddy who hauled a bunch of furniture up for us. Hopefully we’ll actually be able to start actually sleeping here in a few weeks, after we rent a massive truck to haul our beds and other furniture.

Like I said: excitement. EXXXXxxxXtreeee3AM excitement.

I could watch this over and over. And, in fact, I shall probably do just that.

Here’s a nifty graph about support for gay marriage:

I’d love to see a few graphs like this over time to see how feelings have changed. Still, Ryan Sager points out:

Just how big is the gay marriage age gap? Between the under-30 crowd and the over-65 crowd: 35 percentage points.

Or, try this on for size, at the state level: If people over 65 in each state made the laws, 0 states would have gay marriage; if people under 30 made the laws, 38 states would have gay marriage.

In a few years, this battle is won.

Good ol’ Barney Frank:

My question is, why aren’t more politicians reacting this way? They keep trying to have civil conversations with people who are clearly there to disrupt debate, and they try to actually engage them. I used to think that the PR hit they’d take from having these people thrown out would be bad, but let’s face it the only people who would care are on Fox News, and they’re not going to support a “leftist” agenda anyway. In fact, a savvy politician like Barney Frank might make their heads explode.