Just a thing I noticed during the presidential debate:

One of the men had glitter on his suit. It’s one of those things I notice — glitter on a man’s clothing. One piece of something glittery and small on a man’s clothing isn’t especially noteworthy. More than the number I can quickly count without staring is noteworthy. There aren’t many ways a man can get glitter on his clothing in the course of normal daily existence. I’d imagine during the course of teh daily existence of a Senator running for President, it’s even more unlikely. Like I said, it’s just one of those things I notice, having spent some time in my life wearing glitter and getting it on men’s clothing, which, for the record, most men don’t like.

So how did that glitter get there? Inquiring minds want to know!

I noticed other things too, but it’s 2 am, I have to be up early in the morning, and I want to read the transcripts and maybe watch it again first.

But yeah … glitter.

In a world where there are planes flying 24/7 anywhere in the world anyone could possibly want to know, and in a world where communication options of all manner abound so that no one need ever be out of contact with anyone else for even a split second, there is no reason whatsoever that both presidential candidates can’t take a few hours out of their busy, busy day to debate each other. It’s utterly and inconceivably ridiculous to even consider not having the debates at the predetermined times and locations. They are, in fact, just as important as anything else going on at the moment.

And on bailouts: Paulson says the failing companies wouldn’t agree to some of the measures and therefore might not be inclined to take the money? Well, screw them then and let them fail. Since when do people who have made a mess of things and are one-step away from their lives falling apart get to dictate how they are saved with taxpayer money?! I say let them fail. We’ve been through this exact same scenario before with banks failing left and right and the housing market falling apart, and who was responsible for that whole fiasco?

The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Now one of them is running for president, can’t be bothered to go to a debate, and has ridden into Washington on his stallion to save the day … except everything was going pretty well until he got there. Interesting, don’t you think?

Want to know why I no longer care whether or not major financial institutions fail or not? Because it really isn’t going to change my life in any huge and dramatic way. Been through hard times before, we don’t have anything much to lose, and I’ll be damned if I want any of our tax dollars going to some ass that ran a company into the ground so he can vacation in Tahiti. So let them fail if the only option they’ll agree with is a big fat blank check with no regulation or oversight.

And it ought to be interesting to see what happens at the debate tonight. I just can’t wait.

Tesco said it has no evidence that the White Rabbit Creamy Candies it pulled from shelves Tuesday were tainted. The candies were sold in a small number of Tesco’s British stores as part of the supermarket’s ethnic range.

Tesco has also withdrawn the White Rabbit candies from its stores in China and Malaysia, the only two other countries where Tesco sells the product.

At the same time, New Zealand’s Food Safety Authority warned Wednesday that the White Rabbit candies being sold by other retailers there contained dangerously high levels of melamine and advised people not to eat them.

If Tesco only sells White Rabbit in Britain, China, and Malaysia, then how is it that I have been eating the stuff for ages here in the USA? I guess there is a US importer of some sort. I haven’t bought any in a long time, maybe as long as a year, but now I feel ill for all the bags — and I do mean bags and bags and bags of the stuff I have eaten in my lifetime. I know I bought some after I declared I was never eating anything from China again, because it’s addictive, and I can’t freaking resist getting some every once in a while and gobbling the whole bag like a crackhead needing a fix.

I know it’s been a while since I had some, though I do look at the packages on the shelf longingly every time I am at the store. But I don’t think it’s been that long since I bought some, and seeing as this milk mess in China started long before anyone heard about it, I have, undoubtedly, consumed melamine. Quite possibly a lot of it. Who knows?

I feel ill. I am also pissed off, because now the joy of eating White Rabbit has been ruined for me forever. I will never again be able to put a milky white piece of that sweet, sweet candy in my mouth and think it’s the best candy in the world. Just thinking about it makes my stomach churn.

Not White Rabbit! Nooooooooooo!

Can anything I enjoy eating just once not be deadly?

What is it this year with people being subpoenaed by legislative bodies and deciding they are just going to ignore them? That certainly wouldn’t fly very far if it were you, me, or any of the other unimportant little people living in this country. When we get a court order of any kind, we must comply or get into trouble. I don’t especially want to go through the jury duty thing again, for example, and sure, I could blow it off, but it would eventually catch up with me, and then there’d be a rash of hell to deal with. I don’t even want to imagine what sorts of hell would be plopped in my lap if some legal or legislative body subpoenaed me, and I flipped them the bird. I’m sure it wouldn’t be fun at all. Yet over and over this year I read that people being called to testify in front of state or federal governing bodies are doing just that … flipping them the bird.

This time it’s Alaska’s First Dude. He’s been subpoenaed to testify in the investigation into his wife’s possible abuse of powers. But no … he doesn’t want to testify, and so he is refusing to do so.

It’s bullshit. I thought we were a country of law and order, and yet time and time again I see those who have far more power than I doing whatever they hell they want and getting away with it. This pisses me off no end.

Two years ago the world discovered what happens when you feed melamine to dogs and cats. The results weren’t pretty. China now continues it’s grand experiment in non-regulation to find out what happens when you feed melamine to babies. The results are equally not pretty. I remember the pet food recall all too well, and I remember wondering at the time if this problem wouldn’t eventually make it into the human food supply. It was one of the major motivating factors for us to start eating fresh and local foods as much as we possibly could and to avoid anything, edible or not, that comes from China (which is almost impossible). China may not mean to kill us all, but if they don’t start keeping an eye on their manufacturers, they may very well end up doing so all the same.

Someone in NYC is bottling and selling NY tap water, and apparently people are buying it for $1.50 a bottle. Look, people, tap water in most of the USA is perfectly fine for human consumption straight out of the tap, and it’s way, way cheaper than bottled water. We use thousands of gallons of water a month, and our water bill hasn’t been over $15 a month ever … not even when I was watering the lawn twice a week for a couple of hours. If the water in your area has a “flavor” to it that you don’t like, there are innumerable ways to filter that out. Paying someone else to filter tap water and put it in plastic bottles that are likely leaching crap into it is, in short, stupid.

A restaurant in Switzerland has put human milk on the menu. Not glasses of the stuff, but they cook with it. I find myself not knowing what to say about this except that I don’t like the idea. Seems like if the idea catches on, as ridiculous things like this tend to do among the rich and silly, it could be just one more way people are exploited. Yup, don’t like the idea at all.

On the road to Web 3.0, a semantic map has been created and is now being sold to anyone with enough cash. It claims to give computers a vocabulary ten times that of a US college student. Judging from some of the college students I encounter in my daily life, having a vocabulary ten times larger isn’t really saying much. Some of them seem to only know three words: OMG, SRSLY, and PRON. Oh … and LOL.

And closer to home: When I came in to turn off the furnace and close the windows, both cats, which had been wandering aimlessly around the house looking sad and pathetic when I stepped out onto the porch, were stretched out on their backs, belly up and spread eagle, directly under the heating vent in the bedroom. I guess I wasn’t the only one who thought it was feeling a little chilly in the house.

Have you been keeping up with offshore drilling news? Apparently the House passed a bill that would allow drilling 50 miles offshore or more. The Republican members of the house are livid. It’s a ruse, a sham, a joke, they say. All the good oil is between 3 and 50 miles offshore! Who prepared the report saying all the good oil is that close to shore? The Interior Mineral Managements Service … the very same people who have just been in the news for having wild sex and doing drugs with members of the oil industry. We should trust those people?

The Daily Show did a great bit on this subject last night.

And if anyone thinks that offshore drilling is going to save us from our rising gas prices, they need to look at this graph and note what a drop in the bucket it will be and how far down the road that drop will arrive.

I still stand firm in my belief that leases which are already held by the industry need to be used rather than sat upon and that no new leases or offshore rights need to be given until they are using the ones they currently hold. Better yet, no new leases ever. We need to get off the oil teat, and now is as good a time as any.

At the Republican National Convention, one of the delegates — a Mr. Gabriel Nathan Schwartz — met a woman in a bar and invited her up to his room. She proceeded to fix him a drink and told him to get undressed. That’s the last thing he remembers. He woke up to find between $50,000 and $120,000 worth of money and personal belongings missing^†. Mr. Schwartz was a rather outspoken delegate, willingly giving interviews to several organizations extolling his ideas about what the next Republican administration needs to do.

In an interview filmed the afternoon of Sept. 3 and posted on the Web site LinkTV.org, Schwartz was candid about how he envisioned change under a McCain presidency.

“Less taxes and more war,” he said, smiling. He said the U.S. should “bomb the hell” out of Iran because the country threatens Israel.

Asked by the interviewer how America would pay for a military confrontation with Iran, he said the U.S. should take the country’s resources.

“We should plant a flag. Take the oil, take the money,” he said. “We deserve reimbursement.”

Seems to me Mr. Schwartz ran into someone just like himself. She bombed the hell out of him, planted her flag, and ran off with his resources. Of course now that the spotlight is on him, he insists his comments during the interview were a joke and thought the interview was “satire” for a “little known internet outlet” — little known, as in broadcast through DIRECTTV and DISH Network into 29 million American homes. I’m not sure what the guy might have been thinking, but I’m thinking is was a matter of either being under the influence of mind-altering substances (which he seriously appears to be during the interview) or not having a mind at all. Watch it yourself^††:

He also had this to say in a public statement:

“As a single man, I was flattered by the attention of a beautiful woman who introduced herself to me,” his statement said. “I used poor judgment. If there is any good that can come from this humiliation, it is to caution others that date rape happens to men, too.”^†††

Having your very expensive stuff stolen is not date rape! He does know the difference between “raped” and “robbed” doesn’t he?

And, from an overview of the Colorado Republican delegates in the Denver Post:

Gabriel N. Schwartz 29, Denver
Second-time delegate

Occupation: Attorney

Years in Colorado: 28

Political leanings: Common-sense conservative

Why did you decide to get involved in this election cycle? I got involved again this election cycle to be sure our country is led by a qualified candidate and not by someone with a lot of empty promises.

What is the most important issue to you in this campaign, and how would you like it to be solved? National security. We must support our friends in the Middle East.

What’s the one experience you MUST have during the convention? In 2004 in New York, my dear friend Jack Weil and I were being interviewed by The Post while standing in line to a Broadway show, there were protesters across the street screaming some sort of nonsense, Jack politely gave the protesters the middle finger. It was a great experience.

Um, common sense conservative? Doesn’t seem like he has much common sense. Are all 29 year olds this stupid … or only the fat-cat Republican lawyer types who wear $4,000 diamond earrings, $30,000 watches, and carry $1,500 cell phones? I did some pretty stupid things in my early twenties, but by 29, I’d pretty much wised up on life in general. Of course, they do say that 40 is the new 30 or some silly thing like that. I guess he’s still got a few years to be stupid, but I don’t think this one will ever grow out of it or wise up.

1. † He says $50,000, but the claims on the initial police report add up to much more than that. Methinks he was trying to scam him insurance for as much as he could, but now all the attention has made him rethink that idea. [↩]
2. †† And please note the mispronunciation of “nuclear” … it’s as if every Republican on the planet doesn’t know how to pronounce what is really any easy word to work out, even if you don’t speak English. [↩]
3. ††† The police are investigating a theft and not a rape. [↩]

The study of 6,500 traveling executives says 35 percent of them would choose their PDA over their spouse.

That is one of the saddest things I have read in a long time. I feel sorry for their spouses. There isn’t anything more precious or valuable to me than my husband. I could lose everything I have, and as long as I still have him, I’d be OK. He’s irreplaceable. I can always get more things.

It’s been interesting to me how quickly Metrolink has been to immediately blame the engineer driving the passenger train for causing the recent train collision, especially since the NTSB has been saying it’s too early to tell and then this:

At a press conference late Saturday, National Transportation Safety Board member Kitty Higgins said it was too early to determine the cause of the crash but noted that a pair of “switches” that control whether a train goes into a siding were open. One of them should have been closed, Higgins said.

“The indication is that it was forced open,” possibly by the Metrolink train, Higgins said of one of the switches.