Victory Soap v. 2.0

I got about 10% of the sleep I needed last night because of the freaking mosquitos -- my apartment is infested with them, and all of them are the biting, high-pitched-whiny-buzzing type. I'm going insane, and I will count myself lucky if I don't come down with West Nile virus or something. I am going to speak to the apartment management -- this can't go on.

I'm not a happy camper.

Another day wasted.

Update: on the other hand, I just got a call from another placement agency (after a nearly two-month dearth of contact from anybody) offering me the possibility of some sort of employment at least by the first of the year. As much as I've been enjoying the late mornings, I am getting more and more conscious of the fact that my unemployment benefits aren't going to last forever, and I need to get back in the grind. Sigh. Anyway, I've got an interview tomorrow morning.

Still sinus-y -- I do believe I've caught a virus -- here's a musical interlude: Tones On Tail's "Real Life" (plus something from Tricky).

Well, I've been stuck in this house all week with a sinus infection and I am going nuts. I have jury duty next week -- they finally found me. (Well, I'd had jury duty letters before but was always able to get out of it. Not this time.) I also have another job interview. I don't care much for the sound of the job (claims processor for a large insurance company) but I need a job, so...

Feck it. I'm going out for a drive.

Later: God, traffic sucks during the holidays. I can't wait until Christmas/New Years/Whatever is all over and done with. I am just not into it this year.

Really, I'm sick of this: today's liberals are so obsessed with not being mistaken for Haters!™ that they can't even read straight. Note to Jim Henley (whose cutesy liberal sincere/snark shtick wore off on me long ago): your self-righteous diatribe and a quarter won't even get you a phone call these days. And your "correction" -- where you stand by calling Steyn a "douchebag" for, well, I don't know, daring to reveal something about Muslims that clearly makes you uncomfortable makes you look even more like an idiot. (Via Ace of Spades.)

PS: by the way, concerning that whole treating of Islam as some sort of race -- has no one checked the birthrate of white girls that go Muslim and marry? I'll bet it's higher than that of their non-Muslim counterparts. Or is that racist to speculate that people might base their childbearing decisions on something other than their skin color?

Next Day Update: if only our leaders were as dismissive of these past-their-shelf-lives loons. (Via Kathy Shaidle.)

Now in me news: one of the HVAC units outside my window (not the one connected to my a/c, at least) is making a hideous loud rattling noise. That's just great. This sort of thing never, and I mean never, happens when the office is open. It always happens at 3am, or on Sundays and holidays.

Just sticking this here update: guess what -- right after I called the emergency maintenance number (for the aforementioned hideous loud rattling noise outside my window) the noise stopped. Someone must have turned their thermostat up -- or else I have special psychic powers that really would have been convenient in many other circumstances previous to this. I'm not getting rid of my microwave just yet... (And yes, I know which unit it is -- I went outside and checked.)

And a little later...: it started up again. Grr.

Hello there. I spent all night killing mosquitoes. No, really. I must have killed about two dozen of them, including the evil one that had been buzzing around me all night and drinking my blood, as was evidenced by what happened when I squished it. I even got bitten on the face. Does anyone know where I can get my hands on some DDT?

Update: oh, I forgot -- I have jury duty tomorrow. I have to go to the Criminal Justice Center in lovely Sanford. Joy.

Okay, I was all set to go to jury duty today and then I couldn't get out of bed. Lack of sleep, &^*&%! mosquitoes, lingering illness, blah blah blah... Anyway, I called them and got a new number and rescheduled to next Monday.

Argh. It's that time of year again, when I do my annual Christmas bleg. (Do I do an annual Christmas bleg? I don't remember. I probably do.) Anyway, it's the usual -- money short, jobs low (I have an interview Thursday, but who knows when this job actually starts much less if they will actually hire me), but offers are slow to trickle in. It must be the season. Did I tell you how much I hate the holidays?

Actual content coming up, maybe.

Oops, forgot to say: Paypal and Amazon tipjar links on the right, you know what to do. Don't let those lotto winnings and inheritance millions go to waste! Donate them to your favorite head charity case, me.

This is just plain shitty. Is there some reason we stopped tar-and-feathering people?

Because I refuse to subject myself to crap like this:

"This isn't the worst thing that will happen to you today."

Said to me by a woman working behind the counter for a major airline as I checked my bag today and complained that the instructions on the self-check-in screen were confusing and flashed off before I could figure out what I was supposed to do next.

But travelers put up with bullshit like this all the time in order to get where they are going and not get arrested by security. And as long as they do, the bullshit will not only continue, it will get worse. People are garbage -- if you give them the slightest leeway in letting them think they can get away with murder, ninety times out of one hundred they will take that chance. As for me, if I ever do go to Europe again it will be aboard a cruise ship, norovirus or no. At least a virus doesn't insult you to your face and expect to get a tip.

I just received word, via Old Grouch, that blogger and longtime commenter on Tim Blair's site "triticale" has recently passed away.

I'm not in much of a Christmas mood this year.

Update: then again, I must say I've got Santa's back here. You go, jolly (what about all the people with Seasonal Affective Disorder?) fat (what about all the starving Third World Children™?) man (oppressor!).

I must say that the Clintons look much happier in this picture of the couple in their "hippie" days than they do now. That's the Sixties experience in a nutshell if you ask me.

There's nothing like nearly killing yourself by almost chopping off your finger and bleeding to death while preparing a healthy meal of salad and falafel. The reason more people don't eat more fresh fruits and vegetables? The deadly knives wait. I nearly passed out and had to lie down with my hand up in the air until I quit gushing blood.

Also: you realize just how much you use your left middle finger to type when it's wrapped in a mile of bandaids.

Quick! Form a committee in some remote land and fly everyone there.

It's in the 50s outside and it's 66 degrees inside my apartment. I am wearing a jacket. I have become weak.

And in other news -- Paris Hilton = Auton. Am I right or am I right? The gold paint can't disguise her plasticky evil!

Now I just jammed a splinter into the index finger on the same hand whose middle finger I sliced yesterday. I'm not going to make it to New Year's Eve, I just know it.

I just found out I'm not the only person who hates that Louis Armstrong song "What A Wonderful World." Now here's a greater challenge: am I the only person in creation who can't stand that awful Dan Fogelberg song "Same Old Lang Syne," the one about stalking his ex-girlfriend? And that goes double for that "Leader of the Band" song, blech. If he hadn't just recently croaked I'd never have to think about that song again, since I don't listen to AOR (MOR -- whatever) radio, but the blogiverse has become inundated with sobbing Fogelberg fans who can't believe the Great Mushtunesmith has passed into the great beyond. Yeah, yeah, cancer sucks, but as most of us are going to die of it, unless a heart attack or stroke gets us, I don't see why writing treacly songs gets someone a special send-off. That's like giving my encoffined remains a parade because my X-Files/Doctor Who slash fiction became* a surprise bestseller in the 2040s.

Okay okay. Cue hysterical male rebuttals: "It's about fathers and sons! And he wasn't stalking her, she was glad to see him!" Blah blah blah.

(*Will have become? It has occurred to me that a civilization of time travelers should have at some point devised a special verb tense just to handle time-out-of-joint scenarios, and if therefore so how would the Tardis translate that into English? Discuss. God I'm bored.)

I'm not leaving my apartment until January 6th. It should be semi-safe by then.

I had to leave the house and venture into a Walmart today.

I don't want to talk about it.

Anyway, I couldn't stand my own hair -- my head looked like a mop that had been soaked in rusty water and then left out to dry -- so I went to the Hair Cuttery and had them hack it all off. Now I am back to a nice short cut, and I bought hair dye in a color that I hope will go on better than the last pitiful mistake. (My current dye job, from one of those grocery store boxed sets, was supposed to be a medium auburn, but it came out instead in the aforementioned rusty water shade.)

This cheered me up a little, but I am still disappointed from my discovery last night that instead of picking the actual fourth Harry Potter movie (Goblet of Fire) from my Netflix queue I chose and was delivered of the second "bonus" dvd, which just has a bunch of crap on it (interviews, etc., I guess) that I don't care about. This means that I can't watch the fifth movie (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) which I also received in the same mailing, because I am anal retentive and despite the fact that I have read books one through six I know that if I watch the movies out of sequence the universe will collapse or something. So I have nothing to watch but dvds I already have, or television, until I get the fourth movie. The holiday season continues to suck.

My eagle eye spotted this little grammar mistake in yet another pity-stroking article about Katrina "victims" fucking up their lives:

“What am I supposed to do — leave my daughter and my grandkids on the street?” said an emotional Priscilla Mercadel, 57, whose eyes were red from sobbing last week.

Is it any wonder that the media is so easily taken in by nonsense that a normal person (that is, not a "journalist") wouldn't accept as gospel from a four year old, when they can't even use the English language correctly? "Sobbing" is something you do with your vocal chords. The sentence should have read "...whose eyes were red from weeping" or "... whose voice was hoarse from sobbing." This sort of thing crops up all over the place and it drives me crazy.

(Via Kathy Shaidle.)

Not being a total electronics geek (I squint at my Doctor Who dvds on a teensy little 13-inch screen tv) I noticed the hardwood floors long before I realized that was a 60 incher in this poor, downtrodden woman's apartment. I'd just like to say I wish I could afford a place with hardwood floors -- they jack up the price of apartments here at least $150 for that privilege, and you can only have declawed cats. (Note -- this is an update to the previous post.)

(Via Kathy Shaidle.)

Happy Boxing Day, folks. I didn't do much over Christmas, just lazed around. I'm with Kathy here -- I'm not going to be able to do a serious job search until after the holidays are over, the season sucks. In the meantime, I hope everyone had a great Christmas and have a Happy New Year. Now if I could just get my brain working again, maybe I could post something interesting.

More superior nuanced humanity from the so-called "liberal" side of the brain pan as this... person finds a silver lining to the manufactured global warming "crisis": at least all those parts of the country that are full of rightwingers will get flooded. Just in time for Christmas, visions of drowned or displaced and homeless red-staters dance in the heads of progressives... That'll teach 'em to vote for Republicans! (Via Instapundit.)

I just saw a commercial for the Television Without Pity website on the Fox Reality channel.

Notice how all the characters in these movies are 1) blond, and 2) all wear denim jackets? Even Santa Claus. I swear this is true.

As you all (all five of you who still read my site, anyway) probably know, every year I close the current blog and open a new one. Well. I've been kind of lazy this year, so if you don't get a brand new blog to read tomorrow it's because I got tired of uploading approximately five million blog installation files one by one (CuteFTP sux BTW) to my site and went to bed, or passed out on the couch from excess Andre champagne consumption, whichever comes first. Also I never did figure out a new domain name so now I'm thinking of getting around to doing so, but it will take a couple of days to propagate...

Where is that bottle?