Open the floodgates, it's the US version of the running of the bulls, otherwise known as Black Friday. It's an all out orgiastic, adrenaline-fueled buying frenzy. And the worse the economy, the more people seem to turn out. People don't even look at the tags, they just buy, buy, buy.
Then they spend the following year trying to pay off all the charges, so they can do it again!
Since I have been in the wonderful positions of being:
I'm not real fond of this time of year. You could skip right from Thanksgiving to New Year's and I'd be really happy. I like Thanksgiving, turkey and dressing is one of my favorite all-time meals, I even know how to cook a turkey if I have to. But the next five weeks?
Here's a great quote from an article titled Predawn bargains drive retail frenzy
To people in other countries this may look strange, but Americans are conditioned to completely freak out and buy everything they see as soon as Thanksgiving dinner is over. Some stores were open on Thanksgiving day, Garden Ridge Pottery has been open 24 hours a day this week and will stay open through Sunday (I'll bet those are some happy employees). I'm beginning to wonder if the turkey distributors put something in them, maybe steroids, or speed. Or maybe it's the stuffing people, who knows...
I'm sorry, it's not worth it to me to drive around in circles to find a parking place, get bumped and pushed by other shoppers, and then wait in endless lines to actually buy the stuff. If you're just going for the one or two bargains, good for you. But most people can't stop at one or two "good" bargains. Especially if they have a credit card, I've been there.
And while Americans are lining up in the cold at 4 am in front of Wal-Mart and Sears for $20 DVD players, people in other parts of the world are standing in the cold for slightly more important reasons...
I know it's wishful thinking, but....
I'm not going ANYWHERE today. I spent my entire life living with and working in retail (my dad worked his butt off at the same place I did) and this time of year just makes me feel guilty, broke and frustrated. And I hate crowds and standing in line. Trust me, the stores will still have stuff to buy next week... (And a lot of their really good sales don't happen for another week or two, honestly)
OK, I must have just listened to (from my office where I can hear but not see the TV, I do that when I have to actually go right back to work after dinner) Friday's Countdown on MSNBC so I didn't catch the joke that he was going on vacation this week. Really, he should have made an announcement and said "I won't be here next week so please don't flip out, I'll be right back". It freaked me out when a woman started doing the voiceover for his show tonight, Sparky and I were both like "Where's Keith?". But early in the show there was an inserted video of Keith saying "I swear, I'm just on vacation", which was a smart thing to do. And when you think about it from business terms, he's been working his ass off all year with the election, so logically (had everything turned out correctly) this would have been a perfect week to take a vacation. But he is still dutifully doing his blog (or at least we're told it's him, hmmmm).
But of course, things didn't work out correctly, and now all the rats are jumping off the Neocon ship, and even nastier rats are climbing on. Randi Rhodes was gone two days last week also, for female problems and a one day vacation herself, so it does make one a little nervous. Especially after Phil Donahue just disappeared into thin air last year (Phil, where are you now?).
Speaking of Phil's, I also missed all but the last glimpse of the clip on Jon Stewart tonight with Dr. Phil's patronizing platitudes about how well democracy is working now (I was in the garage doing laundry, oh well). He's from Texas, and apparently much more of an optimist than he pretends to be. Or high, or just part of the whole rght wing takeover of the media. I haven't been watching him much this season, one dysfunctional family after another, and I've been to the little Texas town he's focusing on this season as being one of the worst places to live, it's a few miles outside of Houston. I went there for a fireman's benefit picnic in the 80's, got to help direct traffic, and ended up with a bunch of fire ants in my car (discovered the hard way on the drive back).
But I've got to go to bed early today, Sparky was talking to his mom the other day about his making a will and how I had to legally change my name to be on it. I don't, BTW, we really did get married. I want to keep both my last names, but I don't want a hyphen, I did the hyphen thing with my last husband, it's annoying. So I get to drive down to the local Social Security office this afternoon with all of the proper paperwork and try and add a fourth name to the end of my name. Should my maiden name be a middle name? I've changed most of my things like doctors and prescriptions over to my married name anyway, I don't want to confuse them even more by having a hyphen in my name. And Sparky's last name is much easier to tell people and spell. My maiden name has, gasp... an X in the middle of it, just freaks people out. Seriously, it's two syllables but it might as well be in Greek letters, they cannot pronounce or spell it. But I want to keep it, there's only a few of us left.
But speaking of rats, hasn't this last week or so been a whirlwind of weirdness? Arafat drops dead ("I'm not dead yet!", Monty Python reference), oops, not, then he's in a coma... OK, now he's gone. No official cause of death given (someone hinted he might have been poisoned, the timing sure makes sense, I dunno. All of Dubya's people (either in fear of prison or of burning in hell) have been fleeing. And Condi's getting a promotion?? WTF?? At least they found Scott Peterson guilty, maybe we can stop hearing about him on an hourly basis now. At least until he's found beaten to death in a prison bathroom...
Off to bed, crap - I've got wet clothes in the dryer I've got to hang in the bathroom still... I want one of those big $1000 dryers with the cabinet on top for hanging and folded clothes, I've got too many cotton things.
Lots of things you can do to help stop the madness without even having to get out of your chair...
More urgent news relating to the voter fraud investigation (yeah! MoveOn.org is finally getting involved!)
Questions are swirling around whether the election was conducted honestly or not. We need to know -- was it or wasn't it?
If people were wrongly prevented from voting, or if legitimate votes were mis-counted or not counted at all, we need to know so the wrongdoers can be held accountable, and to help prevent this from happening again. That's why we believe that:
"Congress must investigate the integrity of the voting process in the 2004 election."
In the news today Kerry and his people have also been taking an interest in Ohio, and the New Hampshire investigation is under way. (I'll take back everything I ever said about Ralph Nader if he can use his position as a candidate to force the states to investigate this mess).
Almost singlehandedly keeping the ball rolling in the media:
Organizations in need of urgent help to keep the investigations going:
And there's a huge and very simple "to write to" list here with links and everything, all you've got to do is click and email :-)
Just checking in to let everyone know I haven't slit my wrists... During the weekend I went and got Mac Panther and found out when I was upgrading I had an "overlapped extent allocation" on my main hard drive, which resulted in me trying to upgrade for about 48 hours, then finally installing it on my backup drive just so I could get to my hard drive to backup files, then I had to do a CLEAN INSTALL (gulp!). I've never done one of those before, ever, and I'm still reinstalling everything. I had to dump half of my backup drive to get everything on there because I could not get my Toast to work (sigh), so I couldn't even dump anything onto a CD.
I haven't even tried to reinstall Suitcase yet, I tried the little Font Book think that came with the system, don't think it's going to make a dent in my fonts... Meanwhile I have stacks of eBay stuff piling up to list. But at least my newly reformatted Mac seems to be running much quicker now. Sparky also bought me a new LCD monitor, which came today and my eyes are still getting used to it but it's gorgeous! I read CNET's reviews for a week solid before picking this one out and I'm so glad I did. Now all of the photos I did on my old CRT monitor look really washed out, even my weblog looks much lighter.
So now I have a lot more desk space, a giant malfunctioning 19" CRT monitor sitting in the middle of the floor along with my fax machine, which is working fine, we just decided to drop the phone line it was on because all we were getting was paper-wasting junk mail. And supposedely I can now fax with Panther. We're going to keep the fax machine around, just in case, it's not really worth enough to sell and anything is better than having to go to Kinko's to fax.
I even had to get a new USB hub, I have no idea why, but my old one just sort of stopped working. And continuing on our buying spree for this week, I bought a halogen desk lamp which I'd always said I'd never buy, but I saw it on the way out of Microcenter and it was reasonable, and I'm SO sick of having bad lighting in my office so I caved. And so far, I have to admit I really like it. I'm trying to convince the cat that it's not a good thing to play around, I think she believes it's the sun, but she's been getting too close for my comfort. I had a friend with one at my old office and he used to burn things on it (banana peels being one of his more fragrant ideas).
Back to work, I'm drowning in eBay stuff because I took a hiatus last week (which turned out to be a good thing because apparently eBay's systems were screwed up all week). But now I'm behind because I couldn't use my computer for several days and I need to make at least a little bit of money this week to buy groceries, etc.
Crap, I just went to Apple to get the link for Panther and in 24 hours they have an even newer update than the one I spent the weekend installing (aaaaggh!)... not tonight...
When I woke up yesterday, I had this really bright idea... I was going to take a little image of the US and superimpose a black mourning ribbon that said "2004" on it and make a little JPG that people could put on their websites to represent how most of the US really feels. And make a little page they could link to explaining what it meant. But the more the day went on, the more I realized that instead of mourning, we need to act. Do something right now before all of this Enron accounting we call our Presidential election has been run through the shredders.
So instead, I've been trying to think of ways to get involved in trying to fix, or at least expose the truth about this election. If you watch the mainstream "liberal" media, they're all trying to cover their own asses and say that the exit polls must have been wrong, and that the majority of Americans really don't want a chance at health insurance, jobs and peace. No, they're more concerned with whether two gays can get married. That is just SO wrong, on so many levels. I know there is a little cult of Bushies out there that would kill for him in the name of God, but I really don't think the majority of Christians in America are mindless robots.
And for some reason even intelligent, educated people are completely thrown by the fact that computers counted the votes, and computers can't be wrong.... NOT!! It's like the OJ DNA thing, "whoa, science...". That's crazy, even if you have had just casual contact with computers you should know they screw up all the time. And if you've ever gotten a computer virus from an email or a shared disc (does anyone use floppies anymore?) you know easy it is for even one idiot to screw up the system. Imagine what a group of computer savvy corporate jerks could do with millions of dollars and giant corporations behind them.
So I'm with Randi Rhodes, I don't care if people think I'm nuts, I want all of these damned machines examined. There is a group dedicated to doing this already and they are trying hard right now, starting with challenging the election results in New Hampshire, where the variance in the exit poll and the electronic voting tallies are so opposite that it will make your head hurt (click here to see an example graphic comparing exit polls in states with paper ballots compared to those with electronic ballots)
We really don't have to just lower our heads and concede that intelligent Americans are outnumbered by brainless cult members. And we don't need to move to Canada. What makes you think you'd be safe in another country when the US is on an Empire-buuilding rampage? And we can't wait another four years to start thinking about the next election. If they fixed the last two elections, don't you think they already have 2008 all planned out? We don't have to be polite, we need to be demanding AND constructive. So if you can't do anything else, at least go to Black Box Voting.org (the .org NOT the .com people, they're some sort of lookalike scam) and give them the couple of bucks that you might spend on latte or a magazine today to help them with their cause. They've been tracking electronic voting problems since the last "election". The discussions I've heard today even state that some of the voting machines were programmed to start counting BACKWARDS when Kerry's totals reached 50%. I live in Houston, I had friends that worked for Enron, we've seen what can be done to deceive us before, especially if we don't expect people to answer our questions.
And while you're in a mood for justice, sign the petition at Impeach Bush.org (Crap! I just clicked this to check my links, and it says "Site Temporarily Unavailable", here comes Big Brother...)
P.S. The masks are coming off of some of the extreme Neo Cons (and just conservative bullies in general), they seem to feel like they don't even have to pretend to be nice to us anymore. If you don't believe it, watch the re-broadcasts of Bill Maher's last show for the season on HBO this week. He did a live satellite interview with Former U.S. Senator Alan Simpson (R - Wyoming) who went off on him like Zell Miller before he could get two words out. (Interesting threads here and here. It was really quite scary, reminds me of stories my dad told me about growing up in small town Texas during the Depression and how his mom would beat the crap out of him every day for his own good (to make him a better person, my dad is a saint, BTW), and let any of the neighbors beat him too if they thought he needed it.
So if you don't mind old coots and pumped up religious fundamentalists going off on you and whacking you with a stick for "your own good", do nothing. Or move to Canada...
More proof:
Glitch gave Bush extra votes in Ohio
I was a big student of Weimar Germany growing up, and as a psychology buff was fascinated with how the people "let" Hitler rise to power and get as far as he did so quickly. A large part of it was that no one believed that a "civilized person" would actually do the things he did, but we've seen in the last four years how fast a "civilized country" can be deceived. At least Hitler did not do it under the guise of religion, but instead preyed on the anger and frustration of a once proud country who had gotten their asses kicked in WWI and were now destitute and had been forcibly humbled by the winners. So Hitler promised, pride, prosperity and power to the embittered German people. Then when he got the ball rolling, he relied on fear and threats to keep people in line.
My parents had lived in Germany while my dad was in the service during the occupation after WWII and I grew up with their stories of the people (and bitter cold, frozen toilets). And for the last 40 or so years there has been a picture frame collage full of discarded Nazi coins hanging in my parents den over the TV. They picked them up literally out of the streets because they were worthless after the war and had been discarded in disgust by the German people.
A really well known psychic once told me (without knowing my fascination with WWII era Europe) that my last past life ended in the 1930's in France when the Nazis invaded and I was targeted because I was a loud-mouthed opponent of the Nazi party who worked somewhere in the entertainment or media field and apparently people listened to me so I was one of the first to be taken out. (The Randi Rhodes of WWII, perhaps ;-) I don't know if I believe it, but when she told me it made me cry because it really rang true. And I've spent a large portion of my life trying to protect and warn people, and honestly speak my mind. Now I just do it from the internet instead of in a uniform with a patrol car...
When I was studying German language in high school, our teacher also worked a lot of history into the lessons. One of the things that stuck in my mind was a short verse by Martin Niemoller, which seems really appropriate for this bizarre mindset we're sinking even deeper into now. I was worried that after the election (and a Kerry victory) that the country would go back to being apathetic instead of vigilent, but we don't have that luxury anymore...
Sparky woke me up this morning to tell me Kerry was about to give his "concession speech". I honestly got the same feeling I did when he woke me up to tell me an airplane had flown into the World Trade Center. Really. I'm not exaggerating. And yes it's a fair analogy, thousands of people have died because of the insane group of people that are running our country.
And poor Sparky. OMG, he's been so fatalistic all day. He actually believes that the country actually agrees with the fundamentalist psycho fear mentality that we are living under. He almost made me believe it. But I don't, I can't, I honestly don't believe the majority of America is that stupid and superstitious. I can't believe people stood in the rain for seven hours to keep the country exactly the way it is. No jobs, no healthcare, people dying daily in a fake war, a fascist monarch regime... I'd lose my mind it I actually believed that. I'm the one who can't watch movies without questioning "how could they do that?" "why would they react that way?". I'm too logical, it drives Sparky nuts, I just have a great deal of difficulty turning my brain off, even to watch a movie.
I'm not a conspiracy nut, it's just so fricking obvious from the results THAT THEY CHEATED! If you know ANYTHING about computers, you know it's not hard to do rig the stupid things. And they would do anything, including starting a war for no good reason, to stay in power. I'm even wondering if they had something to do with the Osama video ('you won't be safe no matter who wins') I worked in the middle of the corporate greed and power trip in the 90's so I saw it all up close and personal. And it scared the crap out of me.
I'm listening to the rebroadcast of Randi Rhodes on Air America right now and she is expressing the righteous anger and disbelief that I know a huge portion of the country is feeling. She really is a goddess, she's been fighting for our rights since the 2000, she lived in Florida in 2000 and experienced the voter fraud personally. She gives me hope and keeps my brain focused. I'm looking at the little sticker I put on the side of my scanner, which I pulled off my tee shirt when I got home yesterday that says "My vote counted", it's making me nauseous. Sparky pulled our yard sign down and ripped all of the stickers off of both of our cars before I woke up today. I really wanted to keep mine. I still have an unused one, thankfully it's still on my desk...
There is already so much evidence of vote tampering it's making my head spin:
More purging of voters in Florida
25 million NEGATIVE votes pop up in Youngstown, Ohio
We've got to do something to change this screwed up system. Now. They knew that it was almost all going to be untraceable, as did John Kerry apparently when he gave up. My father was speculating on the potential for future civil unrest and violence because of the frustrations of this mess. If we thought it was bad before, we ain't seen nothing yet. And the intelligent MAJORITY of this country now has to spend another four years fighting apathy, stupidity and fear.
And I was really, really looking forward to just the POSSIBILITY of things like health insurance, the return of common sense, a decent economy and possibly world peace.
One last attempt to help this mess before bed, I was reading the thread of fired up, frustrated and pissed off Dems on Democratic Underground and one of the ideas listed was to donate to Kerry's Legal fund so I forked over some more money. I'm self-employed with bad health and no insurance so if I can donate something towards this cause a lot of you kids can too. I've been giving since the Dean days whether I could afford it or not, despite my husband's comments that I was "wasting my money" and I haven't regretted a dime of it. And I'm VERY glad both of our boys are lawyers, it can't hurt.
Now another attempt at going to bed, Ambien take me away...
Halloween is my favorite holiday. Always has been, always will be. I just hate all the crap that's going on at Halloween time this year. Our party went well enough, and somehow we managed to come out exactly right with the candy for the kids this year even though I was generous and several kids double-dipped. We only had two incidents, one a crying kid refuding candy because his father reprimanded him for ringing the doorbell three times, and the other a scuffle with a bunch of overly enthusiastic 8 year olds who ended up knocking over one of our lighted porch figures and falling into our bushes spilling candy all over the ground. Which caused their adult escort to come running out of her car offering to pay for anything damaged (just a broken bulb, it's OK).
Then Monday comes and my dad calls Sparky because they've got water leaking out of the walls in a closet. Which apparently has been going on long enough to cause mildew to grow all over the walls, yuck. And the water leaked under the wall into the adjoining dining room. What a mess, like they haven't been through enough crap lately. Neither one of them can hardly walk right now, my dad can't breathe and now they've got fans blowing gunk all over their house to try and dry the remaining carpet out and people tearing moldy sheetrock up. The same thing happened to me when I lived in a townhouse in Austin, my neighbor decided to install his own washing machine, which promptly drained through my kitchen right into my den. The fans blew dirt all over my house. My parents problem is due to a leftover AC condensation drain that wasn't rerouted properly when that part of the house was remodeled from garage into an extra wing of the house, and stopped up. We have a similar problem in our middle bedroom where AC condensation drips out of one of the air vents when it's really hot and humid outside.
What else happened on Monday... Oh yeah, it rained all fricking day! And all night! And into Tuesday... Not just rain, flooding, earth shattering thunder and lightning. Monday night the power actually went out (while I was in the middle of a long blog entry) so I gave up and took a nap. So I couldn't sleep Monday night. I'm considering going to bed earlier tonight,my brain hurts from all the election crap today and I feel a sinus infection coming on, good grief, that's what I need, to be dizzy on top of everything. And I know Sparky won't let me sleep on Wednesday, he's going to be way too freaked out...
Well, after a completely sleepless night/morning, Sparky woke me up at 9:30 in hopes we could hit our voting place in between rushes. And we did, it was like 20 minutes total, as opposed to most of our friends who voted early and faced long, slow lines (one friend was over 90 minutes). We actually stopped by our early voting station last Thursday and decided to wait and vote on election day because of the slew of people that were waiting. But then I'm in Texas, where no one cares enough about our vote to bother with us (hopefully), and in other states people are spending 6 and 7 hours waiting.
But alas, patience is going to be a huge factor again it seems. Here we go again, hopefully with different results this time, this time perhaps ALL of the ballots will actually be counted. There are already allegations of voter fraud in, of course, Ohio and Florida, which is really apparent because those are the only two states where the results of the exit polls are way off (in Dubya's favor, imagine that).
Black Box Voting also issued a warning on 11/1 for polling places to disconnect their modems and manually bring the boxes in to be counted because they had evidence of hackers targeting the central computers counting our votes.
There's definitely something fishy going on, all of the millions of new voters did not register to keep Dubya in office. That goes against logic, though the Neocons whole campagn is completely at odds with logic. But here at 2am, Ohio voters are STILL standing in line to vote (yes, really), so everyone hang in there. As John Edwards said this evening, we've waited four years, we can wait another day. Or eleven...
I'm still up listening to Air America, which is helping to keep me sane. Sparky is passed out and snoring thankfully. It's been really hard trying to keep both his and my spirits up for the last four years, and he spent most of the evening watching MSNBC, who like Fox, are calling states early in favor of Dubya again. On the other hand Dan Rather is being the cautious, pragmatic one (he actually learns from experience unlike our current administration who proudly repeat their mistakes).
I'm glad I decided to take a semi-break from eBay this week, it's going to be difficult to concentrate until this is all sorted out. And somehow I don't see hordes of people shopping this week, unless it's out of manic depression (I've binged financially that way myself, especially after 9/11). But I've got lots of little mindless, comforting things I can do this week... take photos of things to get ready to list, I've got a whole file cabinet worth of stuff to sort and two new boxes of pretty colored files and my new Brother P-Touch to make legible labels (my handwriting is anything but legible). Unfortunately, Phoebe thinks an open file cabinet is an invitation to explore, I've actually closed her inside twice now which scares the crap out of me. She's been sensing the rising tension the last few days and has been extra snuggly and attentive.
Just heard of a website set up to keep everyone updated on the misadventures of this election and to help frustrated voters take action. Thank Al Gore for the internet, to give us immediate access to this constantly changing world and not making us slaves to the networks...
Double check your polling place, look in your local newspaper or click here
And courtesy of the Democratic National Committee:
VOTER BILL OF RIGHTS Know Your Rights | Exercise Your Right to Vote
Voting is the most direct way for you to affect your government - don't let anyone deprive you of this precious right! Read through the list below and be aware of your rights before you go to the polls, and use the information below if you encounter any harassment or intimidation.
:: You are entitled to vote without being harassed or intimidated by anyone.
:: Bring personal identification with you to the polls (driver's license, government ID, bank statement or utility bill).
:: If you forget your ID, you can still vote. In some states, all you need to do is sign an affidavit. In others, you can vote by provisional ballot.
:: If records show you have moved, you can vote by signing an address confirmation.
:: If you are in line at the polling place before the polls close, you can vote.
:: You have the right to receive a demonstration of voting equipment before voting.
:: If you are disabled or are over the age of 65, you have the right to an accessible polling place and help in voting.
:: If anyone challenges your right to vote :
Ask for the name of the person who is denying you the right to vote and write it down.
Ask to talk to a supervisor and lodge a complaint.