Nuts & Mutton

or shared an apartment with others, you’re just going to LOVE this site!

So Missus Palin has a voice coach, a makeup artist who’s charging lawyer-type rates, and the GOP is spending a mint on dressing her. So much for the natural, down-home beauty we’ve all been hearing about. Reminds me of the old joke about the bride who, on the honeymoon night, takes off her wig, pulls out her false teeth and glass eye, and unstraps her wooden leg before hopping into bed and leering invitingly at her bemused groom. “Come to bed,” she coos. “I’m thinking I might be better off getting in the drawer with the rest of you,” he replies. Ba-dum-ching.

Slate, the original and still my favourite online ‘zine, has a wonderful article by Johann Hari on Rose George’s The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters.

The article, and I assume the book, is full of wonderful little nuggets like this one, on London’s sewers:

Her journey opens by tramping down at midnight into the place where that road began—the sewers of London. This city beneath the city can be deadly: Stinking clouds of hydrogen sulphide—the “sewer gas” that forms when sewage decomposes—will suffocate you if you get caught in them. Before these tunnels were built, London had “on-site sanitation.” This is a polite way of saying people shat in a covered-up, set-aside space, and their feces were collected and sold to farmers as manure. But in the early 19th century, London’s population rapidly doubled, and the city’s buildup of excrement became unsustainable. The cost of having your private cesspool emptied spiked to a shilling, twice the average workers’ daily wage. So, people took to emptying their cesspools into the Thames, which soon ran brown. By 1848 cholera outbreaks were killing 14,000 people a year, and then came the “Great Stink” of 1858. London reeked so badly people were vomiting in the streets. The drapes of the House of Commons were soaked with chloride in a (failed) attempt to disguise the stench.

It seems we are living in a golden age – somewhere between a time when humans wallowed in their own excrement and a not-too distant future when the world will drown in shit – unless we can come up with an alternative in the next few decades. Where’s Joe the Plumber when we really need him?

I came across this site the other day and, the times being what they are, I thought “what the hey, let’s see what this is all about.” I was right up against deadlines on a keynote speech, but I hadn’t squeezed them hard enough, so I had plenty of time to waste.

I tend to be a bit (okay, make that very) cynical about these self-affirmation rituals – no matter how hard I concentrate on being “worth it”, it’s still The Mother’s wrinkled face staring back at me from the morning mirror, not the smooth puss of Claudia Schiffer. But The Happiness Project piqued my interest, and I emailed Gretchen for her Resolutions Chart, which she sent me this morning, with commendable promptness. Guess I might give this happiness thing a whirl, and see how it goes – maybe I’ll end up happy to see the Old Dear every morning. Stranger things have happened.

It sings (iTunes). It dances (more iTunes). It finds my way when I’m lost (which is often – I’m still trying to master the difference between turn right and turn left and have never got the hang of the Canadian custom of giving directions by vector!) It finds the nearest Timmies for me (thanks to a sweet little app called Where) and one of these days, it’s actually going to make the coffee for me, just as soon as Jobs and his geeks in Cupertino get working on it. BUT IT WON’T MAKE OR TAKE A PHONE CALL! ARRGGGHHH!

For the past three days, every call – incoming or outgoing – has failed, so now I’ve got to carve out several hours in my day to spend on a land line with some tech in Mumbai and find out what the hell is going on with this multi-talented piece of crap!

So, Colin Powell has finally come out for Obama. Does Powell have any credibility since his despicable UN whitewash of the Iraq invasion? Perhaps among Republicans, although I suspect that he, like Clarence Thomas, was one of the GOP’s token African-Americans. The few black faces at the XCel Energy Centre in Minneapolis-St Paul last month reminded me of a quote from a novel I read years ago, in which a black student in a white college said he stood out “like a black-eyed pea in a saucer of milk.”

Joan Walsh praises Powell for this response to the question of whether Obama is Muslim:

“I’m also troubled by, not what Sen. McCain says, but what members of the party say, and it is permitted to be said such things as: “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is: he is not a Muslim. He’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. “But the really right answer is: What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is: No, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she can be president?”

It is a far cry from McCain’s response to the question – something along the lines of “No, Senator Obama is not a Muslim, he’s a decent, honourable man.” Duh, what? Although, to be brutally honest, I have no respect for the practitioners of a religion that condones – nay, propagates – the ill-treatment of women, viewing them as the property of men, and turns a blind eye to their abuse by the mad mullahs of Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, to name but a few Islamic theocracies. We need look no further than Obama’s respect for the reproductive rights of women to know that he is not Muslim.

I’m really worried that a little peek at his “nice” side will be enough to make Americans forget that McCain is a querulous, hot-tempered old geezer who should not be allowed within a donkey’s roar of the Nuclear Button (or “noocular” to Missus Palin.) Even as he mounts a charm offensive, finally showing up on Letterman last Thursday, McCain’s sickening robocalls continue. And, as TPM points out, these are not the work of the lunatic fringe of the GOP, they are produced and paid for by the RNC and the McCain campaign.

Anyway, Obama’s turn at the Al Smith dinner was way funnier than McCain’s, so there!