Most of the time I just kind of hate them.

My nearly 80 year old mother has four adult children (and one adult grandson) living with her currently. Well, three adult children, because one of my brothers is currently in jail for allegedly hitting my nephew. Mom is going to bail him out right now.

And they're all fighting.

And my mom feels helpless, because they're her kids, and she wants to take care of them.

Except that she turns 79 in a month and a half, and they're all in their forties, and should be able to take care of themselves.

I've told her to look into a senior living center nearby, and as soon as she can, move in there, and let them fend for themselves. She said she's going to, but I don't think she will. And I don't know what I can do.

Oh, joy. Now my sister's on the 'phone with me. You know, I'm the youngest. "The baby." (No, you may not call me that.) I'm not supposed to be in this position. I should not be the "voice of sanity."

Is it any wonder I want a cigarette?


ETA: Some rare good news, I'm not going to be arrested for contempt of court for failing to appear for my jury summons on Monday (they'll just send me a new summons), and I finally got my license plate sticker (which expired April 30), so I don't have to worry about getting pulled over for that anymore!

Actually, this was probably yesterday. Chainmail Bikini is ending.

It's really, really funny, and the writing is by Shamus Young, the same guy who did DM of the Rings, and I really like the artwork (even if I can never remember the other guy's name, but hopefully this other project he mentions will be something we can all see). Even though it's ending, unfinished (unlike DMTR, which ended, finished), I strongly suggest you go read it. It's not that long, unfortunately, but if you've ever played a tabletop RPG, you'll appreciate it. (Same with DMTR, and also Darths and Droids, which is doing to the Star Wars movies what DMTR did to the Lord of the Rings movies.)

This is really cool. I didn't realize Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed were still together. They seem like the perfect couple, though. They always have.

Congrats, you crazy kids, you.

I just got a new computer here at work. It's super fast. Not only that, but the old one "only" had 512M of RAM.

This one has 3 gigs.

w00t

Nazi war criminals are still sought so that they can pay for their crimes. The Second World War was over 63 years ago.

A woman who escaped from prison 32 years ago has been caught. Her husband says, "Our family is threatened to be destroyed by something that happened to her as a 19-year-old teenager 34 years ago in Michigan."

I'm far too busy to be doing this, but I figure I want to preempt any nudging by samsausage.:-P

Stolen from many people, like alice_bunnie, retro_rider55, and mezzominty. But it's long, so ( behind a cut it goes. )

verlaine does not post nearly as much as he should, which is less than he used to, but it's still more than he does lately. I think this even though he has the horrible misconception that elk are somehow superior, or at least equal to, moose.

This week, he is collecting information on playground slang, and discussing the relative merits of American and British slang for, erm, physical displays of affection, for lack of a better phrase. Go join the fun! Really!

Big, black dogs are the hardest to place from shelters?

My favorite breed is big, black dog. Seriously. Give me a 60 pound or larger black mutt over any little yappy pedigreed dog, any day.

Big, black dogs are the best.

My mom's dog Caesar is a big, black dog. I bet he weighs close to 100 pounds. All he ever wants to do is play and get petted and lie down with his head in your lap. Real scary.

My mom's old dog Sapphire was a big, black dog. I think she was about 65 pounds, and she used to get excited when the mailman would come by, because he'd throw the ball for her. Yeah, real scary.

Chihuahuas, now, that is a scary breed.

Well, or maybe not. I have one, and it's an old favorite! But I just don't have the energy. Eventually you have to learn that there are some walls you can't knock down, no matter how many times you beat your head against them.

There's this guy, Dinesh D'Souza, who wrote a 'blog column about Darwinism and how the Creationists should sue the schools saying that the teaching of evolution promotes atheism, which would be against the First Amendment. Well, that's bullshit, but that's not what I want to rant about (although I could, you know I could).

Then there's this other guy who commented on it a couple times, and I followed the link on his name to his 'blog, The Atheist Handbook. (The title of which seems extremely familiar, but I can't figure out why, unless it's the similarity to The Anarchist's Cookbook.) This is what I want to rant about. I really do.

I have said this before, and I will say it again ("I'm not proud. Or tired." Thank you, Arlo.). You cannot really prove that anything in the past has happened, including that you ate breakfast this morning. The belief that the Universe sprang from (essentially) nothingness, without the assistance of any "supernatural" being or event, is just as based on faith as the belief that it sprang from a "supernatural" being or event.

I am a Fortean, and Forteans eat atheists for breakfast. Would you like me to prove it?

My eldest child, Thing One, is 10 today. I told her she's in the double digits and she said, "That's good!" I wanted to tell her it isn't, but I was good and didn't. She has plenty of time to learn the value of cynicism. I hope.

She figures this makes her an even bigger big sister, because now she has twice as many digits in her age as Thing Two or Little Cat Z. I don't follow the logic, but that's par for the course with her. The first words I said after she was born were, "She's purple!" She's rarely made a lick of sense since.

I'm writing a song. A blues song. I need blank staff paper, and I need to learn how to write guitar tablature. Quickly. It might help if I knew more than two chords on the guitar, too.

It will be cool, and you will all like it. Even J.S. Bach would like it. He wrote a whole cantata about the same subject.

*My apologies to Barry Manilow.

I have a request. A couple months after you break up with an obsessive and violent — although not physically abusive — person, don't call my work number early in the morning and leave a cryptic message saying that you'll call back later, and then not call back all week long, and then go out of town for two days to meet your new girlfriend's mom and have your cellphone go straight to voicemail.

Yes, I was pretty certain that my best friend H's cryptic message was just saying that she'd lost her job ("Don't send me e-mail" was the big hint), although not in so many words. She and I can generally tell when something's really wrong with each other, even though she's in Pennsylvania and I'm in Illinois (we've known each other for almost thirty years . . . which is frightening enough in itself). But by Saturday, when she hadn't called, and I couldn't get anything but voicemail, I had really horrible visions of what could have happened.

Luckily, I didn't freak out too much. I thought about calling her dad and seeing when he last talked to her, which depending on how often they talk (I'm not really sure), could have gotten him freaked out, too. I tried calling again Monday morning before going to work, and she answered, and told me it was all (mostly) okay. I mean, it's generally never okay to lose your job, but aside from that, things are fine.

(I hope that was sufficient, samsausage.:-)

You know the drill, don't you? I give you a lyric, you give me title and artist. Using a search engine is cheating!

1. "Cause the man from Mars stopped eating cars and eating bars/ and now he only eats guitars" "Rapture," Blondie, booraven22

2. "But I'm quite sure that you'll tell me/just how I should feel today" "Blue Monday," New Order, booraven22

3. "I'm the only John Wayne left in this town" "Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)", Big & Rich, jethro

4. "Battleships confide in me and tell me where you are"

5. "There behind the glass stands a real blade of grass" "Karn Evil 9 1st impression part 2," Emerson Lake and Palmer, satanismyname

and still the campus shooting at NIU is in the national news. Hasn't there been enough? Isn't it time to let people move on? I understand hearing about it on the radio, since one of the stations I listen to is in DeKalb, but why do I still occassionally see articles about it on the Google News page?

This past weekend, we drove through DeKalb for the first time since the shooting. As we passed the driveway for the Convocation Center, I felt a pain in my chest, and started tearing up. I don't know if this was empathy or just sympathy, but the feeling didn't go away until we got past the East Lagoon. (Those are pretty much the west and east boundaries of campus.) I'm not saying that this wasn't an immense tragedy, and that it should have no effect on the local community, nor even that the national community shouldn't be concerned. Is the intense spotlight really necessary, though? Does it really help? Did it help Virginia Tech?

Governor Rod Blagojevich and NIU President John Peters had planned to tear down Cole Hall. That's where the shooting took place. Now Peters is asking for input from the "NIU community" before making any final decision.

There's nothing wrong with the building, so far as I can determine. It's just that some people may feel uncomfortable there because of what happened. So they want to tear it down and put up some sort of memorial.

The plan — endorsed by our supposedly fiscally responsible governor — would cost $40,000,000.00. Forty million dollars. $40M. 4 * 10⁷ dollars. Does it look like a particularly small amount any way that you write it?

Maybe they should keep Cole Hall and spend some of that excessively large amount of money on fixing the heating and air conditioning in Reavis Hall, and making sure that the addresses used for acquiring parking permits match those in registration (actually, they might have fixed that since we lived in DeKalb, but I doubt it). Then, since those two projects won't use up all that money, maybe the rest can be spent on education throughout the state (that means not just in Chicago and the collar counties), so that school districts aren't struggling to make ends meet.

Gary Gygax died this morning.

I'm very sad.

D&D hasn't been the same since he left TSR.

Or, maybe, the really big things. A combination of the two?

Picturing a guy Pete Townshend's size with a ukelele, singing at a pitch so high it strains my (admittedly low) range tickles me no end. It doesn't hurt that I really like "Blue, Red and Grey" anyway, but the imagery just makes it that much better.

I would say that I'm going to stir some controversy here, but I used this icon for good reason.

First, let me say that you cannot use the laws of physics to refute Creationism and then ignore them when you want "clean" energy.

Every time energy is changed from one form to another, entropy is created. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. A butterfly beating its wings in China can cause a hurricane on the Atlantic.

Wind farms may be harmful to whooping cranes, one of the rarest birds in the world.

Trees or solar panels? Two neighboring families in California spent six years in court trying to decide which was more important. The solar panels won, mostly because money doesn't grow on trees.

When are people going to realize that "clean" energy is anything but? No matter how renewable an energy source is, it is still going to cause problems when you use it.

If you really want to cut down our dependence on petroleum, there's a very simple way to do it! Stop using so much power!

Stop insisting that every child who is born lives (unless the mother doesn't want it to, and then it should be allowed to die, also known as allowing hospitals to refuse medical attention for late-term abortions who are delivered alive, but that's an argument for another time), and that third world countries must be brought into the industrial age, and that everyone — men with cystic fibrosis, women past menopause, women with uterine cancer, everyone — be able to sire/bear children.

Stop buying a new cellphone everytime you see one with better bells and whistles. Stop buying individually wrapped servings of everything from juice to steak. Stop buying crap you really don't need just because the idiot next door was showing off his.

Learn to live with less, instead of insisting on having more while complaining about the cost.

There is no such thing as clean energy. Every form of energy has a cost, even if you can't see it immediately.

Everything is connected. Everything. To get one thing, you have to pay for it with another. Until we really learn this, we will continue to ruin the world with our selfish conceits that we know better than nature.

Some days I think 2012 can't get here quickly enough.