The Annual Pig Card Argument

Every time we go to King Soopers in Fort Collins and present our Pig Card (from Piggly Wiggly) at the checkout, they will not accept it. Dude, Piggly Wiggly IS Kroger, just like King Soopers. We go through this every year, them telling us it won’t work, we insisting it’s worked in the past. When we finally persuade the to run it through, they finally run it through, they’re silent. Hmm.

Checked the receipt and we got $16.27 in Sooper Coupon Savings. There’s our Pig Card “not working.”

Next time, it’ll be the same thing all over again.

Because He Wouldn’t Be Caught Dead Using a Ladder?

Yesterday I was outside surveying our parched morning glory vines and my coleus collection, when I hear a beeping noise coming down the side street in front of our house that intersects our main street. I see a large orange JLG Lift Series 660SJ maneuvering its way down the road. (I’d take a picture of it, but that would give away where I live, so here’s google pics of the brand and series) I figure that it’s the city either going to trim trees or fix power lines or something. Boy was I in for a surprise. Continue reading Because He Wouldn’t Be Caught Dead Using a Ladder?

That Wasn’t a Toy Mouse

Last night, right after I had fallen asleep, Apollo furiously scrambled onto the bed behind our heads. Lately in the hot summer, he’s not been coming to sleep with us except in the early morning if at all. I turned the light on on the headboard to see what all the ruckus was about. He was pawing between the mattress and the headboard, like he’d dropped a toy down there in that black hole where sometimes Carmex, Kleenex, and toy mice often end up. He was pretty frantic about it, and rather than have an upset cat trying to get his toy back while we try to sleep, I thought I’d help him. Continue reading That Wasn’t a Toy Mouse

It Was a Sign

So to be consistent with and in solidarity with the sentiments of my previous posts, I decided to delete all Google AdSense ads from this blog. I was especially annoyed with seeing an Eric “Angry Young Candidate” Hovde ad at the bottom of my page. Just a thought…find some liberal blogs, click (but only once so as not to penalize the blog owner) on any ad you see for a Republican or Tea Party candidate. It will make money for the blog owner, and make the candidate and their supporters pay.

Monetize This: Piss, YouTube, Royalty-Free Content and Copyright

I have been plagued with copyright problems since I first got on the internet in the mid-90s. If it isn’t some little imbecile copying my original hand-created site design and content word for word and slapping their name on it, then it’s some Digital Internet Content Korporation that claims copyright on my video because I used a royalty-free sound-clip I am legally licensed to use in an original video I created and uploaded to YouTube.
Continue reading Monetize This: Piss, YouTube, Royalty-Free Content and Copyright

Vacation

I have both a written account and a movie I put together about the trip Stan and I took toward the end of June. One note about the movie: I included a lot of my own audio creations as well as royalty free clips included with the iLife suite. After I posted the video on YouTube, I was sent a letter from YouTube saying some of my material my be copyrighted. Some copyright holder must have some snazzy algorithm that sniffs out certain wave sequences, but don’t they know that this stuff is part of the royalty free stuff Apple uses in their software for the end user to use as part of their creations? Jeez. I’m not the only one with this problem either.

Anyway, I won’t let the YouTube legal dept get me down. I know I’m in the right to use Apple’s clips in my movie. So here it is….about 15 minutes long:

And here’s the written version:
Continue reading Vacation

Art Gallery Dream with Bill and Candy

I dreamt Stan and I were with Bill in some art gallery that he was partially in charge of. It was a very colorful dream. I was trying to find more of my art there, but couldn’t. Stan actually had more pieces showing than me, which made me a bit jealous.

Also, and this part is very strange, while I was dreaming this IRL I had the radio on in the background and the Joy Cardin show was discussing “classic candy” like Boston Baked Beans and Good ‘N Plenty, etc…you know, the kind we used to get at movie theatres? I’m not making this up, they really were discussing this. (I don’t know what they currently offer at movie theatres.) Well, this transformed in the dream to a surreal banquet of candy layed out like art opening food, but instead of crackers and cheese and assorted crudities, it was candy. All candy. All sugar. I tried a few things, and they were very artfully done, but it was weird.

I also remember taking some political posters I had designed (like the ones I used for the protests in 2011) home with me. As we were leaving, it was windy, and one of the posters blew away, up into the sky, never to return.

I’m sure this is symbolic for something, considering the High Park Fire, however I haven’t figured that out yet.

I also dreamt that Stan couldn’t find Apollo in the house. I looked under the bed with a flashlight and didn’t see his eyes glowing back. Stan then left the house and went to look outside. It was quite scary.

Sick of the Tea Bully Bullshit

First of all, I’m monitoring the High Park Fire on Twitter. I know people DIRECTLY impacted by it. First of all, there’s our dear friend Bill who lives on Horsetooth Mountain near Lory State Park. We called him Sunday and he evacuated, packing as much stuff as he could into his truck and his sister’s vehicle. I cannot tell from maps whether his house is ok or not. It is breaking my heart to think something would happen to it. He just put a new addition onto it recently.

Second there’s my mom who lives in Fort Collins. Since she is elderly, I worry about all that smoke impacting the city. I’m not so worried about my dad who is in a nursing home.

And I just found out that our next door neighbor’s son works at a ranch just 5 miles south of the fire border. Wow. That’s a coincidence.

But there’s all these assholes on Twitter that have a cussing hissy fit anytime anyone mentions anything political, telling people to take their political bullshit elsewhere, and that #highparkfire is for INFORMATION about the fire. Oh, really? Since when is Twitter a public service? As far as I know, Twitter is a private company, and although they have rules about abuse, there is nothing saying anything about using hashtags relating to disasters to discuss politics. Nothing. You should appreciate that, teabillies, with your free enterprise libertarian no regulations. From what I have seen in my sporadic and sometimes obsessive twitter monitoring over the last few days is people being attacked by these self-appointed right wing twitter cops for posting anything from sarcastic comments about Romney wanting fewer firefighters to people simply posting a link to what a Colorado congressperson says about pine beetles. If anyone is abusive, it is the the bullies cussing at the people posting with political views. One thing those who have been scolded have in common is they all seem to be from the center or left politically. I’m sure if someone posted a right wing view point with the high park fire hashtag, their political post would not be attacked and they would not be told to go elsewhere. And funny how so much “God” and “Pray” tweets there are, and no one from the left is screaming “Take your religious post bullshit elsewhere…*highparkfire is for information only!” Maybe because although atheists have no need for “Pray for the victims” or “God please make it rain” tweets, they realize that people have a right to say what they want on Twitter. This concept unfortunately seems to be lost on the fascists.

One more thing. This dream seemed like some kind of premonition of what was about to take place a few days later.

My Wisconsin Recall Election Vote Rigging Conspiracy

Me? I don’t cry right away. It takes me a couple days. Like today. Wednesday was just surreal, emotionless, flat, shadowless. It was literally like the world had no shadows or shape. It was two dimensional, like the media I was immersed in.

I read this on Democratic Underground:

I’ll bet Walker actually lost yesterday, but the Democrats were too clueless to catch him stuffing ballot boxes. At least some Wisconsin counties vote on DeBold machines. It would be no trick at all to invent 50,000 votes spread through fifteen friendly counties, and steal the election.

What I thought was odd was the day of the election, TV clips showed “PerpWalker” voting, seeming unusually unconfident, stating he was “cautiously optimistic.” This was not his normal, cocky, confident self. It appeared there was something going on beneath the surface. There are only two explanations I can come up with:

1) He really was being cautious about his confidence. He understood the great grassroots groundswell against him, of the roughly one million people who signed the petition for his recall. He really was afraid of being recalled, and being “cautiously optimistic” was a way of him not getting his hopes too high. He could have been authentically scared, and even though Koch & Co. had it all planned out, they let him believe it was going to be very, very close.

2) It was all an act. He knew the fix was in, the paper trail-less touch-screen Diebold machines hacked in his favor. (I’d like to see a breakdown of which counties used the above mentioned voting method and which used the optical scanners which leave a paper trail. My county, Dane, uses the latter, and it was deep, deep blue.) In this scenario, Koch & Pals let him in on it, and Koached him to act straight-faced for the obligatory “candidate goes to the polls” media shot.

This is why I suspect the person who wrote the snippet from the Democratic Underground post may be right. Tea Party Repubs did not want a repeat of the Kloppenburg/Prosser fiasco “oh look, Kathy Nichlaus just found 14,000 ballots!” of last year. They wanted a fast, decisive win that didn’t look suspicious. Instead, they rigged it so it was so decisive it could only have been faked. Not even Republican voters believed it would be that much of a margin. After all, exit polling showed Obama leading Romney 51 to 44, a difference of 13 points. That’s just too much of a disconnect to jive with Walker’s 6 point win over Barrett.

One thing that really pisses me off is not enough was brought up before the recall by either Barrett, the TV Media, or even the Twitterverse about the Deer Czar. This totally screws Wisconsin hunters who currently pay $24 a year license to hunt. Under this regime, that would be raised to $750-$1000 or more. This will directly affect many Wisconsinites, probably a majority of whom voted for Walker. Did they even realize this is happening?

I’m not a hunter, but when the choice is keeping a $24/a year Wisconsin tradition alive, thinning the deer herd to prevent them from painful starvation and car collisions vs. hunting them behind fences on private land at prices reserved only for the wealthy, the choice is pretty simple.

To paraphrase the old statement:

First they came for the Unions,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t in a union.

Then they came for Badger Care,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t on Badger Care.

Then they came for the Equal Pay Law,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Woman.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Dream with Explosions

Very hard to describe dream, but I was walking around at night amongst small/modest-size houses, but it seemed like the houses were enclosed inside a very large structure, like a huge cathedral. I had to take cover in or by one of the homes which was an early 20th century bungalow. There was a woman who lived there who seemed Aspergersy/Autisticky. She said there was no where to sleep, although there was a floor and there were blankets/sleeping bags that we could use to sleep on. Although I’m not sure what was going on, there was some sort of disaster and everyone had to stay where they were, even if they weren’t at their own house. I would have been perfectly happy to sleep on the floor considering the circumstances. Then there are a whole bunch of explosions, and we look down a hallway (which might have been outside her house) and see an incredible display of colorful fireworks and fire and collapsing buildings. It was beautiful and scary at the same time. After it was over, there was asbestos and sawdust and all kinds of particulates falling from the sky. I went to a bathroom to get a wet towel to cover my face with. I know there was more to the dream, but I can’t remember/describe.

Flying Dream with Tim

Very mixed up dreams. I dreamt Stan and I were going to fly on a plane with Tim. We were getting in line to check in and we wanted to make sure we all got to sit together. It was very mixed up and difficult to describe. Stan took some small leather carry on purse of mine (nothing I actually have IRL) and put it in the checked luggage. I didn’t want him to do that. Then later I see him pushing a shopping cart around with a bunch of luggage. And we go out to this place where all the luggage is. Also, the interior of the plane looked more like a movie theatre. People kept sitting in our seats and it was hard to be able to sit together, but we finally did.

Izzy Mandelbrot

If I had the extra money, I’d do a site completely devoted to fractal art and call it “Izzy Mandelbrot.” Seinfeld and Fractals. Can you beat that?

I’m surprised the search yields no results.

Yeah, I know, I haven’t posted for a long time.