Miss Piggy Lunchbox

It’s time to fix the Senate.  The way you fix a howling male dog.

Republican Senator Richard Shelby has put a blanket hold on EVERY one of Obama’s 70 nominations currently on the Senate calendar for confirmation.  Because he can’t get some pork project for Alabama moved through.  Because, yeah, this is clearly what those rules are set up for.

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has put an extraordinary “blanket hold” on at least 70 nominations President Obama has sent to the Senate, CongressDaily (sub. req.) reports. The hold means no nominations can move forward unless Senate Democrats can secure a 60-member cloture vote to break it, or until Shelby lifts the hold.

…

According to the report, Shelby is holding Obama’s nominees hostage until a pair of lucrative programs that would send billions in taxpayer dollars to his home state get back on track.

…

A San Diego State University professor and “Congressional expert” told the paper “he knew of no previous use of a blanket hold” in recent history.

This is exactly the problem with our government.  Each senator has too much power.  You wouldn’t dream of writing up a system of government where you have 101 Presidents, yet that’s essentially what we’ve got, where any single Senator with a bone to pick can bring the government to a screeching halt.

Break up the Senate.  Blow up all of their rules.  Get rid of this individual hold BS, and destroy the filibuster so badly that it never ever comes back.  Hell, get rid of the chamber all together…what a waste of breath those people are.  Except for Franken, my all-time second-favorite senator.  He’s cool…and he holds the same seat as my all-time favorite senator: Paul Wellstone.

And Jesus H.  This is the group that thinks they’re going to design a college football playoff system?  I mean, even beyond being a waste of their time, I can’t even imagine what a playoff system would look like if it were designed by the same a-holes who crafted the Senate rules.  So let’s see, there’s 8 teams, and one-third of those teams changes every two years, and you have to beat six of the other teams in order to win the championship, and if nobody beats six other teams then there is no champion.  And there’s only a championship held every two years because everybody’s scared to play anybody in the year when the new playoff teams will enter so really there’s hardly ever any change in membership.

For those of you interested, which should be all of you, in the outcome of the pick-a-CD-for-fetus task I was assigned by My Baby, I have the results.

I didn’t make it through the 80 CDs I had picked out.  The deadline buzzer rang as I was about in the I’s.  And even then I couldn’t settle on just one, giving My Baby no fewer than three: one jazz, one classical, and one pop/rock.  The winners are…

Bach: Brandeburg Concertos 4, 5, & 6 (thanks uncle J-mez for Our Baby’s first gift!)
Miles Davis: Kind Of Blue
Beth Orton: Trailer Park, which got me through the last couple of days of thesis writing, so it was front of mind.

I’m a bit disappointed I didn’t end up with a male vocalist in there, but the kid’s got plenty of time for that, I suppose.  Besides, if she’s anything like her dad (don’t read too much into that, I don’t know the sex and we’re pretending it’s a girl this month), she’ll take an instant liking to them anyway.

The kid’s a regular music critic, already strongly preferring Bach to Miles Davis, My Baby reports.  I love that the kid’s right.  I mean, Miles Davis is great, but I’m not sure I’d put any musician in front of Bach.  Besides, the Davis and Orton CDs are definitely intended to be the sleepy-time CDs and, apparently, Bach will now be how she gets her exercise.

This story is slightly outdated now that Toyota has announced (with very few details) their plans to repair (not replace) their crappy accelerators causing deaths nationwide and now that the probe expands, deepens, and finally it seems like somebody is paying attention to the baby killing machines that Toyota produces.  This aspect of it is still relevant, though, and angers me to no end.

Toyota is sending new gas pedal systems to its factories rather than its dealership service departments, The Associated Press learned Friday. The move angered some dealers who say they should get the parts to take care of the millions of car owners whose accelerators may stick.

Dealers?  Good god, what about the customers?  The fact that Toyota sent this to their factories, so they could sell new cars, before fixing all the death traps they’ve got on the road is one of the most unforgivable things I can imagine.  They’ve got “precision cut steel reinforcement bars” on the way to dealers now, but I don’t find that phrase, nor its other name, “shim”, nor the fact that it will take a significant amount of time to train their servicepeople to do the repair, comforting at all.  This is almost certainly the last Toyota I’ll ever buy.

Can somebody please string these assholes up by their sphincters?  Are we really going to let them hide behind their lawyers as their dawdling costs lives, money, and lost productivity as many parents are now, quite reasonably, not putting their kids in these car-to-coffin transformers?

It has been an incredibly mild faltering.  We’ve had a few wind storms, hardly any never-snow, and much warmer temperatures then normal.  In fact, it was the warmest January on record in Seattle.

It’s been nice, that’s for sure, in terms of driving conditions, general comfort, and the gas bill.  The cloud contained in this silver lining, though?  These warm temps, while nice in January, are more typical, not of February or March, but April.  Meaning I have a lot of crappy Aprils to look forward to.

The really crazy part about it, though, comes at the end of that blog post.

Today while walking through the UW campus I was surprised to see a number of the cherry trees in blossom and many daffodils in full flower.

I’m not even sure I believe it since I haven’t seen it myself.  The last three years those trees haven’t reached bloom until spring break, which is the last week of March.  This puts them two months ahead of schedule, which is just plain eerie.  Though I have noticed some bushes blooming around here several weeks ahead of schedule.  Still…two months?  Might faltering end early this year?  I won’t get my hopes up.

Given that all the other lists of this sort come out on December 1, I’m two months late with this.  But we’ve been over the reasons for that.

This is the second annual MPL’s top ten CD list.  2009, however, was relatively light on the CD reviews, due mostly to busy spring and fall quarters, reviewing massive collections like Beethoven’s symphonies and Melvins v. Minneapolis, and spending a lot of my time reviewing Wagner’s Ring.  As a result, I only reviewed six CDs that came out in 2009.

So here they are, MPL’s top ten six albums of 2009:

4.5 lunchboxes:
1) The Bad Plus: For All I Care

4 lunchboxes:
2) Iron And Wine: Around The Well

3.5 lunchboxes (in no particular order):
3) U2: No Line On The Horizon
4) Melvins: Pick Your Battles, Live in Berkeley 1989/Boston 2008

2 lunchboxes: (in no particular order):
5) Bruce Springsteen: Working On A Dream
6) Covered, A Revolution In Sound: Warner Bros. Records

Last year I reviewed 10 2008 albums that received four or more lunchboxes.  In 2009 I only reviewed two that achieved that score.  And 2009 didn’t have a single five lunchbox album, at least not that got reviewed here and, really, did it even happen if it didn’t get reviewed here?  Sucks to be 2009.  But of course that’s been covered elsewhere.  At least Melvins made the top ten list two years running.

The other night in childbirth preparation class, between watching explicit videos of birth and practicing breathing, my offspring got the hiccups.  It was bothering him as well as My Baby.  He’d move violently with each hiccup and thrash around after each one; My Baby attributed the secondary thrashing to him being upset by the hiccup.

But never fear, Daddy’s here.  I applied some pressure to My Baby’s abdomen with my hand and rubbed firmly and slowly.  From the minute I started rubbing his hiccups stopped and they didn’t come back.

My accelerated path to World’s Greatest Dad continues.  I’ve got this s**t down.  Bring on the teenage years.

So Toyota sold me a death trap.  Thank god they talked me out of that Kia with the whole resale value argument because I bet these death traps are really going to hold their value.  If they were a house, I think you could talk about my loan/mortgage as being underwater right now.

Not that resale value’s that big a deal for us…we were planning to drive this into the ground.  Looks like we’ll be driving it into a wall instead.

The best part may be their response.  “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

If I am an owner of one of the affected vehicles, what action do I need to take?
Toyota is working quickly to prepare a correction remedy and will issue owner notifications in the future.  No action is required at this time unless you feel you are experiencing this condition.  If you are experiencing this condition, immediately contact your nearest Toyota Dealer for assistance.

Maybe they’re right.  After all, how bad could the problem be if they’ve STOPPED SELLING SEVEN FUCKING MODELS, including their flagships the Camry and Corolla.  O. M. F’ing. G.

I have to take it in to the dealership for an oil change this week (we got a few free).  I’m pretty sure I’m going to walk in with a t-shirt that reads “Ask Me About My Death Trap” and start loudly asking questions about whether I can get my money back on my death trap.

Toyota. Death trap. Toyota.

So that happened.

Defeat -> Jaws of victory -> Vikings -> Snatch!

The Red Sox of the NFL strike again, managing to get oh so close and once again amaze us with their ability to lose in new and unimagined ways.  Our biggest rival’s greatest player ever joins us to be thwarted by a 12 man in the huddle penalty to push us out of field goal range?  Wow…didn’t see that one coming.

I’m very sad, natch, but am handling this one in stride, much unlike the disaster of 1999.  It’s just who the Vikings are.  If they were different, they wouldn’t be the Vikings.  It’s just their way…you don’t know what it’s like when we’re alone together.

Besides, since 1999 I lived through the W presidency, and two financial crises (and two respective turns of unemployment), and the health care reform and Haiti disasters of the last two weeks served to provide some immediate perspective as well.  So I’m not completely distraught, and I’m not disowning them like I did for a few years after 1999, either.  I’m owning them, wearing them like a battle scar, a badge of…not honor…but a badge of something.

The Vikings are like sun spots, managing to lose NFC championships in stunning, painful, head-shaking fashion every 11 years.  1988, dropped pass in the end zone.  1999, the best Vikings team ever lost as the only field goal kicker ever to make every kick in a season missed a relatively easy kick indoors.  2010, well, we’ve covered that.  And don’t forget about that one year we needed to beat an awful Arizona team in the last week just to make the playoffs and we let them score a last second touchdown on something like 4th and 25 from midfield.  I’ve got money on an excessive celebration penalty in 2021.

I can’t remember why, but for some reason over Thanksgiving my mom turned on her cell phone, something she never does unless she’s on a road trip.  When she turned it on the phone made an audible alert.

Mom: Oh, somebody’s calling just as I turned it on.

Me: It’s probably just telling you you have a voice mail.

Mom: Oh.  No, wait…it says ‘new voice message.’  What does that mean?

Me: …

Mom: Is that the same as voice mail?

Me: Yes.

As My Baby pointed out, what’s odd here is that “mail” in “voice mail” is really a misnomer.  There’s nothing mail-y, in the postal service sense of the word, about receiving a voice mail.  But here they’ve tried to be more accurate in their naming and it’s only confused things.

Someday I will be old.  This fact is often presented to me in such stark ways that there is no way I could overlook it.

I signed a contract that will keep me working at least through March and seems likely to be extended until July.

I don’t know if I’m mature enough to make it work, though.  I may end up sucking my thumb curled up in the bouncy, animal-covered chair waiting for somebody else downstairs.

Probably just typical new-job jitters.  Man there has been/is a lot of change going on around here.  Still, I have a blessed life.