Wrap up of the day

[thebratqueen]

tzikeh brings us the best movie poster EVER.

gairid alerts us to an asshole down in Florida who could use a slap upside the head (Apparently the people of New Orleans didn't help themselves enough to be allowed to say that maybe, just maybe, the Federal "the convention center's got dying what now" government might have dropped the ball.)

See, lemme do a sidebar here for a sec: I don't think the Mayor or local government of New Orleans are blameless. I really don't. As I've said before, anyone who can remember five years past of NOLA history knows that the Superdome was used for a shelter, there were no food or supplies, it sucked, people rioted. Sure the Mayor gets this manly glow because he told Bush et al. to go fuck themselves but that doesn't mean he was doing his job. The people of New Orleans were let down by pretty much everybody who was supposed to protect them. Mr. Cock-up wasn't just at home in the White House.

I just get frustrated, though, because the blame game that the White House accuses us of playing is one in which Bush et al. tries to run for cover by doing their usual zero-sum bullshit. You remember this ploy: "If you don't support the war in Iraq then you want Saddam in power." "If you don't support the Patriot Act then you like people being killed by terrorists."

They adore presenting the world in either/or statements that just aren't true as a way of forcing their viewpoint onto everybody. Now they're doing it again with Katrina. They want to present a meme that only one level of government could fuck up, and by god it sure as heck wasn't the federal one. This becomes frustrating because then accusations that anybody on a state level screwed up start to become proof that Bush et al. didn't. If people say that yes, the Mayor of New Orleans has all the memory retention of a drunken ferret then Bush et al. get to leap up and go "See? See? It was his fault!" and, by extension, the fault of everybody in New Orleans for being so disgustingly self-centered that they couldn't stop demanding food, shelter, drinkable water, medicine and, you know, life.

And since we don't want Bush to squirm his way out of this one, we start going "Oh, erm, no! That's not true! You were the one who screwed it all up!" and then the Mayor gets to slink out without anybody tapping him on the shoulder and asking no, seriously, what was up with not guessing that riots and looting just might happen again since they'd happened 100% of the time so far.

So put me down firmly in the camp of people who think that in this particular game, there's plenty of blame to go around. But that doesn't mean the guy who wrote that letter isn't an asshole. It's one thing to suggest that there was no screwup on either the state or federal level. It's another to suggest that wanting your government to give enough of a shit that it passes you a glass of water when you're dying of thirst A) at all and B) because of their fuckup is really just because you're a parasite on the welfare state.

Whoo. And this post was mostly going to be fluffy stuff. Guess I didn't stick that particular dismount.

Allow me to try, though:

I very womanfully conquered my fear of sewing machines and played around with the one my boss gave me as a 3 year anniversary present. Can I just say that no book out there, including my instruction manual and Sewing For Dummies (which is a rant in and of itself) breaks down the really dumb-ass stuff that true newbies like myself need to know? I managed to put the whole thing together just fine. I managed to put thread on a bobbin and get that inserted. I even managed to get the needle threaded. But nobody explains stupid stuff like, okay, how do you hold the fabric? Are you supposed to push or pull or let the machine do all the work? How do you get quarter-inch seams to come out even when there's no marking on the machine to guide you for that? (There is a measured grid on my machine, it's just too far over for a quarter-inch seam to line up on.) When you're done working with one piece of fabric do you have to bring the machine back to the exact state it started from or can you just cut the thread off that piece and keep on sewing the next one?

And so on, and so forth. This is when I wish my sewing-skilled friends didn't live in other states or, you know, countries.

Still, I did my best. I first played with an unthreaded needle and just pushed a piece of scrap paper through, based on a suggestion I saw on a website somewhere. That's where I got puzzled as to how much I should be helping the material through because it seemed to go straighter when I left it alone, but not straight enough that I felt confident it could be left entirely alone.

Then I threaded the thing up and played around with sewing bits of scrap fabric that zortified donated to me some time back. That's when I discovered the difficulty of even seams, the ability for my thread to form a god-awful tangle for no reason that I could discern, and the difficulty of getting the thread to start at the actual end of the fabric. OTOH I also discovered that on the right side of the fabric your mistakes don't show quite as much. So I suppose as long as my first projects don't require any kind of precision I'll be okay. Lavendar sachets, anyone?

The upside, though, is that though I got very frustrated by not knowing enough to know if I was doing anything right, I didn't get so frustrated that I'll never want to touch it again. So I'm fine for continuing to play with it, I just wish I had a way of knowing what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong. (I realize I could ask local sewing shops if they give lessons, but that means my hands are tied until I can get to one. I'd be happier if I had something to guide me right now so I could start learning immediately whenever I have a free moment.)

What else, what else? Oh, I've been tagged for those "Name X random things about yourself" or "Name X idiosyncrasies of yours" memes. I'd love to do that except every time I try I draw a mental blank. I can at least say that one of my weird quirks is that I often wonder if I'm in the right car, even when I'm sitting in the driver's seat of my own vehicle and listening to a mix CD of my creation on the stereo. I have no idea why.

Finally, allow me to rec Tiny Dancer which is a Simon/Jayne fic that both exists and is good. I remain firmly in the camp that there are not enough Simon/Jayne stories in the world to satisfy either of those requirements.

And now I'm going to bed.