Nuts & Mutton

1. Enough with the Dubya farewell tour. Get him out of there and let the new administration get on with cleaning up the mess he and his Dark Lord, Cheney, have made of the economy, the constitution, and America’s standing in the world.
2. Israel’s incursion into Gaza causes me to be conflicted. As I have written before, Israel has always been the good guys for me, the triumph of good over evil. But what is happening now in Gaza is beyond comprehension. I get that Hamas rockets are deliberately targeted at Israeli civilians and that they are using their own people as human shields against the Israeli invasion, but it cannot justify carnage on the scale that is happening now—over 1100 dead and 5200, mostly women and children, injured in Gaza. And it can never excuse exploiting a loophole in the Geneva Convention to use white phosphorus on civilians.
3. I’ve been craving some solitude.
4. Non Sequitur always makes me laugh. Especially today’s strip, which is a keeper.
5. I wish I could go to Italy next week. Or any week, for that matter.
6. Self-improvement has been on my mind lately. Which is a bit of a cliche at the turn of a new year, but what the hey.
7. And as for the weekend, tonight I’m (not really) looking forward to attending a wine-tasting and silent auction for a charity, tomorrow my plans include attending a wake for a decent man, too early departed, followed by a birthday celebration with the Krazy Kristians (family joke) and Sunday, I (don’t) want to work, but I have no choice!

Thank you to Janet for the template.

This post from Boing Boing is beyond disgusting. Although by no means a “foodie,” I have enjoyed my fair share of delicious smelly cheeses … but live maggots that want to eat my eyeballs? Blechh.

Surreal pictures, like the one above from HuffPo, all over the interwebz this afternoon. TFH and I will be travelling to Florida, via Charlotte NC, on US Airways next month, so I threw a bit of a wobbly when I saw this. I hate flying at the best of times, but to read that a frigging BIRD brought a whole flight down just freaks me right out. Although, if we’re to look on the (slightly ghoulish) bright side, given the law of averages, US Airways should be safe for a few years now.

I’m not really sure how it came about, my fear of flying. I used to spend hours at Baldonnel Aerodrome as a kid, when my father was in the Air Corps, and I loved everything about airplanes. I read all the Biggles stories by W. E. Johns and I was bound and determined to take flying lessons as soon as I turned 18. Then I got an inner ear infection when I was about 12 years old, which left me with a severe balance problem for a few months, as well as a lifelong fear of heights. I can’t even look down when I’m walking down a staircase, and my one and only trip up the CN Tower in Toronto did not go well, especially when I found myself in a glass express elevator that shot up the OUTSIDE of the building and I was looking the WRONG way. But I digress …

I freaked out the first time I travelled on a commercial flight, when I was about 16. It was between England and Ireland on a Vickers Viscount, the pride and joy of Aer Lingus at the time, and the mainstay of its fleet. The air pockets between those two countries can be pretty ferocious and those old turbo-props used to suddenly drop what seemed like hundreds of feet every hour or so. I was a basket case by the time I got off the aircraft, and had to make the return journey on the Mailboat, much to the consternation of my father. Needless to mention, the flying lessons vanished in a puff of smoke.

Even in my 20s, when I lived first in Germany and then in England, I would only travel home if I could be guaranteed that the flight was on a jet, which in those days was not always the case. Jets seemed to me to handle those air pockets much better. I would try to bag a window seat, just so that I could jam the blind down immediately, for fear of seeing the ground fall away as we took off or banked before landing. And I insisted on a seat in the very tail of the aircraft, because I read somewhere that it was the safest place in a crash.

I’m much better now … so long as I have TFH with me and can hang on to his hand, with white knuckles and eyes closed, during takeoff and if there’s any turbulence. I sometimes even look out the window as we take off and land. And these days, I insist on sitting as far forward as possible, because I now know that the tail, while it may be safe in a crash, is damn’ uncomfortable in any kind of turbulence, as I found out when we took off from Las Vegas one time in a sandstorm.

But still, given a choice between flying and poking myself in the eye with a pointy stick, I’m strongly tempted to choose the latter. And there is no way, in this life or any other, that you will ever get me up in one of those huge, size of a football field, Airbus A380s, with their 550 passenger capacity and onboard casinos. Now that’s really defying the laws of nature.

Courtesy of The Canadian Design Resource

For a neat encapsulation of all that is wrong with our world, you need look no further than this post by Johann Hari in today’s HuffPo.

He writes, about the decision of one corporation—United Fruit—to take a single species of the banana out of the jungle and mass produce it on huge plantations:

There was an entrepreneurial spark of genius there – but United Fruit developed a cruel business model to deliver it. As the writer Dan Koeppel explains in his brilliant history Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, it worked like this. Find a poor, weak country. Make sure the government will serve your interests. If it won’t, topple it and replace it with one that will.

Burn down its rainforests and build banana plantations. Make the locals dependent on you. Crush any flicker of trade unionism. Then, alas, you may have to watch as the banana fields die from the strange disease that stalks bananas across the globe. If this happens, dump tonnes of chemicals on them to see if it makes a difference. If that doesn’t work, move on to the next country. Begin again.

It seems the banana is dying—of a fungus called Panama Disease—and it is taking whole third world economies with it. This is happening because of the stupidity and greed of one huge conglomerate. So, tell me again why we are urging politicians around the world—through so-called stimulus packages—to pour vast sums of taxpayer’s money into huge conglomerates? Doesn’t matter whether their ‘product’ is bananas, cars, or financial derivatives—they’re all the same, interested only in amassing profits for themselves. And, when things go wrong, it’s never the corporate jets, the executive suites, or the expense account junkets that are jettisoned. It’s always people.

… by the steam coming from your ears as you watch this:

Why do I torment myself with this bloody woman? She offends me in every fibre of my being, but I still click on posts like this one from HuffPo. And then I sit in front of the monitor, pounding my desk and screaming OH SHUT UP YOU STUPID BITCH!

Unfortunately, she’s not stupid. As Earl Ofari Hutchison points out she’s a marketing genius when it comes to peddling herself and her noxious views.

How about this for a New Year’s resolution? I shall never mention That Bloody Woman again on this blog. Not now … Not ever … NEVER!!

… for finally electing Al Franken. Maybe.