Happy 4th.

OK, I admittedly just got this in under the wire.

Happy American Independence Day, to you and yours.

We dined on homemade spaghetti and meatballs, and played some d20 Modern, giving the fireworks a miss.

I hope yours was equally successful.

Sims 3

One thing that didn't get added to the list of things eating my time yesterday is that I took the plunge and picked up the Sims 3 when it was released in early June.

It's a huge step above the Sims 2 (though I miss some of the goodies in the expansions).

Also, it led to somebody creating this, which is probably the best of storytelling I've seen with a version of the game.

It's June, Guess it's time for an Update

I've been spending a lot of time with the following this month:

Running games of D20 Modern, or more specifically, Thrilling Tales, the 1920's and 1930's era pulp add-on for D20 Modern.

Running Star Wars Saga Edition, specifically the Dawn of Defiance Campaign. Easily the best RPG system I've ever played or run.

Playing Battlestar Galactica, the Board Game. Highly recommended.

Playing Pandemic. Also highly recommended.

I've also gone to a couple of movies, but nothing that sticks in my mind.

I miss BSG. Fortunately, True Blood is back, and looks better than ever.

What have you been doing?

Killing Time

Of Bimbos, Nipple Slips, and US Americans

Like every other asshole in America, I have an opinion on Carrie Prejean, and hapless Katie Rees, and it's an ugly one.

Frankly, I had no problem with Carrie Prejean's answer to Perez Hilton's question. She's entitled to her opinion, just like any other religious right Neanderthal. She's also entitled to lose the contest if the judges don't like her answer.

I have no problem with her nude shots (and judging by TMZ, there ARE nude shots). It's the 21st Century. Just about everybody's doing it, including people we'd probably prefer to never see naked. It does make her a bit of a hypocrite, if I remember my summer before high school reading of the bible (a reading which did more than anything to help me realize that the various sects of Christianity were nucking futs to base an organized religion on it), but ultimately that's between her and her invisible sky being.

The line of departure was when she decided to go Full Metal Anita Bryant (minus the talent, plus the silicone funbags) and hold her self up as the latest spokesmodel of hate.

Consider, by comparison, poor hapless Miss Nevada, Katie Rees. Yes, her photos are racier, by a good factor or two. But unlike Miss Prejean's actions, Katie Rees's photographs don't actually hurt anybody. Her actions will not prevent a loving, committed gay or lesbian couple from seeing their significant other in a hospital, or create a situation where the family takes their daughter's or son's money, leaving their long-term lover high and dry in a nasty probate dispute. Miss Prejean did that.

Yet Miss Prejean, silicone funbags and lousy work habits (has she attended one contractual event in her role as Miss California?) gets to keep her job, Miss Rees is out of luck.

Let's not pretend that beauty pageants are any great thing. As a heterosexual male, I like looking at scantily clad beautiful women as much as anybody. Beauty pageants are nothing but soft core porn for people with nothing but basic cable (minus the topless shots; those, apparently come two weeks after the contest, if this year is any guide). The talent competitions are laughable, and the pretense that a 19 year old girl/woman, chosen almost exclusively on her looks in as little clothing as one can show on TV without bringing down the wrath of the FCC, can offer up anything in the way of deep thinking about world peace, civil rights, the economy or anything else is a farce.

If anything good comes out of this at all, it's that we just keep getting closer to the day when these dog and pony bikini shows wink out of existence. It's a day I look forward to, frankly.

Weekend Random Ten

You know the rules. Grab your IPod or Zen (poor you) or Zune (if you swing that way) and set it to shuffle. Pick the first 10 music tracks that show, and post them if you've got them.

And no skipping over shitty cover versions of the Smiths, or that ill considered Pat Boone sings metal album purchase. Keep it real.

Al Stewart-Carol
The Romantics-Shake A Tail Feather
The Police-O My God (Live)
Kate Bush-Sunset
The Moody Blues-Question
New Order-Working Overtime
The Yardbirds-I Ain't Got You
Blind Faith-Sleeping in the Ground
Vanessa Carlton-A Thousand Miles
The Police-Next to You (Live)

And finally, one more because all in all this isn't a bad one...

New Order-Regret

Bonus Music Video:
Devo-Freedom of Choice

Lux Interior, 1946-2009

As somebody who came of age in the late 1970's and early 1980's, I am still hugely fond of the music that came out of the era. No, not the atrocity that was disco, or the boring, overproduced shit that was arena rock. I'm talking Rockabilly. Punk. New Wave. New Romantic.

So it was a shock to read that Lux Interior, frontman of the rockabilly/garage punk legends, The Cramps, died after a long bout with heart problems.

Kim Morgan sums it up best in article for the Huffington Post:

3. The Cramps blasted rockabilly out of the tired retro affectations of the perfectly coiffed, Eisenhower youth, rock-and-roll-at-the-hop-hop-hop-hop tedium. They knew Link Wray was a bad-ass. They worshipped crazy man Hasil Adkins. They dug the Sonics, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, The Ventures and they brought bump and grind to Jimmie Rogers. Fuck Fonzie. Long live Lux.

I couldn't have said any of it better. Forget the heavily overrated Stray Cats. The Cramps made Rockabilly cool again.

FYI. None of these are certain to be safe for work.

The Cramps-Tear It Up (from the movie Urgh! A Music War):


The Cramps-Bikini Girls with Maching Guns:


The Cramps-Creature from the Black Leather Lagoon:

It Isn't The End of the World...

...but you can see it from here.

Who the hell ever thought the Cards would play in, let alone host, an NFC Championship Game.

I'm not actually a Cardinals fan (I'm a Seahawks fan), but it's got to be good for the three people in town who are Cardinals fans, right?

Killing the Bowls

Count me among the many that think Obama could be elected for life if he were just about to bring about a playoff system.

The flip-side of naming a real national champion in a playoff is that we'd be able to chuck a lot of meaningless bowl games and or turn them into more meaningful bowl games. Let's face it, nobody wants to attend, or gives a damn about the Aloha Bowl, featuring two teams that finished fifth (or sixth) in their conference, are 6-6, and barely bowl eligible.

There's a reason the Pac 10 Representative has sometimes declined to attend this one, and heaven knows there are other bowls in other areas of the country just as meaningless.

Accordingly, this article in the Onion is basically spot on, and funny as hell to boot:

Weekendish Random Ten

In the saga of true stories, the Rat Family recently took a week to go back to Oklahoma to spend Christmas week with Mom Rat (or Grandma Rat, from my boys' perspective).

My venerable 60 GB Ipod died on the trip. I ordinarily play the thing through the car radio, was lugging it in with some other stuff, and dropped it. Fortunately, I had some money, and couldn't contemplate a drive back home without tunes, so we replaced it with a 120 GB one. There were other fun things about the trip, including a bout with a stomach/intestinal virus that passed through the family, finally hitting me the day after we got home to Phoenix. Happily, we were not devoured by locusts, so it could have been much worse, I suppose.

With that, on to the random 10.

Family Snapshot (Live)-Peter Gabriel
Night in the City-Electric Light Orchestra
Hannibal's Boogie-Spyro Gyra
Angel of Mercy-Al Stewart
Secret Garden-Alan Parsons Project
Help Me Angel-Steve Winwood
Waiting Game-Todd Rundgren
Kashmir-Led Zeppelin
Dekalb Blues-Leadbelly
Philadelphia Freedom-Elton John

And since my IPod seems to be stuck in the 70's (with the exception of Leadbelly, anyway), let's try 1 more.

Standing On Higher Ground-Alan Parsons Project

This last is from 1986. Guess I'd better cut my losses.

Bonus Music Video:
Yes-Owner of a Lonely Heart

What About Social Security?

This post (and the bulk of the comments), forget one big elephant in the room when tracing the steady decline of Bush's popularity since getting reelected in 2004.

Terry Schiavo, and the Iraq war certainly played a part (and a very big part) in the Spring the Spring and Summer of 2005, as it turned out. But the thing that really sent Bush's death spiral into motion was the attempt to privatize Social Security.

Bush came out of the election in 2004 assuming he had a lot more political capital than he did, and immediately wasted all that political capital on the third rail of politics, Social Security.

It was an incredibly hubristic move at the time, immediately severing any goodwill that may have come to the GOP and Bush from seniors, a group that had been a big part of why Bush got elected and reelected in the first place. It cost him. Katrina, and the Terri Schiavo matters also played their parts, but it was Social Security that got the ball rolling.

He's been in pretty steady decline ever since.

Update: Yes, I know Katrina was actually in August/September 2005. I'd really meant to say 2005 as a whole, but was thinking of the Schiavo affair when I typed Spring.

The Death of Monetary Policy.

The Fed is finding out that you can lead a maxed out credit card shopper to the mall, but you can't make him put more money on that credit card.

WASHINGTON — Policy makers at the Federal Reserve appeared almost stunned by an economy that was sinking faster than they had expected on almost every front in December, so much so that they even toyed with the idea of not announcing an official target for overnight interest rates, according to minutes of the meeting released on Tuesday.

At the meeting on Dec. 15 and 16, Fed policy makers jumped through the looking glass and slashed the benchmark federal funds rate on overnight loans between banks virtually to zero. Vowing to use “all available tools” for stimulating the economy, the Fed then outlined a radical new approach of pumping money into the economy through its own lending programs and through heavy purchases of mortgage-backed securities and possibly longer-term Treasury bonds.

Despite having already created a raft of new lending programs to financial institutions and even corporate borrowers, Fed policy makers as well as the Fed’s staff forecasters began the meeting with sharply reduced forecasts. They all expected a severe economic contraction that was likely to last through at least the first half of 2009.

“All meeting participants agreed that the economic downturn had intensified over all,” according to the minutes. The housing market was still weakening, credit conditions were tighter than ever, consumer spending had fallen for five months in a row. Even exports, which had been the one bright spot, were being hurt by a global economic slowdown.

I've been explaining this to friends since the last rate cut. Monetary policy as a tool to deal with this recession will be about as effective as prayer in solving this problem.

The cure for this economy is fiscal policy. Specifically spending. Targeted spending that creates working and middle class jobs, and puts money into the hands of those people. The more the better.

Tax cuts for the rich and tax cuts for big business won't do it. Neither will the half measures being proposed by the Obama Administration. After his first stimulus package, which appears to be a lot of business tax cuts aimed at companies that don't need them, and get too many already anyway isn't going to work, Obama will have to try something more aggressive. One only hopes the real economy hasn't cliff-dived before he realizes that this is no time for half measures. From what I've seen, I'm not optimistic.

(h/t Atrios).