My husband's family's cat passed away today. I am not a cat person at all, but I loved this little critter. She had spunk and major personality. They named her Wheezie because of the funny way she breathed, but no animal could ever have acted more of Wheezie Jefferson. This cat had attitude.

We'll miss you, Wheezie.
Best. Cat. Ever.

Posted by: Sarah at 09:50 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 62 words, total size 1 kb.

Every once in a while you read a line on a blog that's just so good that you want everyone you know to see it. This is one of those lines:

The NYT confused what people read and email each other, with what they will pay for. If those two things were the same, poems about Jesus and pictures of animals dressed up in costumes would have displaced porn and gambling as the internet's biggest industries.

Posted by: Sarah at 11:05 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 82 words, total size 1 kb.

I've been thinking about what happened on The View for days now, and I can't seem to let it go. I heard that Barbara was mean to Elisabeth and Elisabeth was mean to Joy, so I decided to go watch it for myself. I really don't think anyone was mean to anyone. It was a discussion of the morning-after pill; these things can get heated. (I thought the things that commenters said about Elisabeth Hasselbeck on blogs were far worse, but most comment sections are a nightmare anyway.)

What I can't stop thinking about is the Hypothetical Situation that Joy posed to Elisabeth. When we debate abortion, why is it that someone always has to bring up the "12 year old girl who's been raped by her father or uncle"? As if this is the norm and these are the only girls who really need the morning-after pill. I thought Elisabeth was completely right to point out that if we're talking about offering this pill over-the-counter, then the target consumer is not really the rape and incest victim. But abortion is always framed around rape and incest. That's the Rocky Marciano of the abortion debate: "That's they one!" But less than 2% of women who have abortions say they do so because of rape or incest. So why do we always frame the debate around these 2%?

If you're pro-choice, you can't keep trying to trip up pro-life people by throwing in the rape and incest red herring. It's disingenuous. I think being pro-choice is a valid opinion, provided you state frankly that when you say everyone has the right to choose, that means Everyone: the girl who gets knocked up at prom, the married lady who forgets her diaphragm, and even the uppity lady who aborts two of her triplets because buying the big jar of mayonnaise is so middle class. If you have the right to choose and a right to your own body, then you get to choose all the time. Limiting the debate to rape and incest absolutely skews what is actually going on in abortion clinics.

Posted by: Sarah at 04:15 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 355 words, total size 2 kb.

The internet is ablaze trying to find Adnan Hajj fake photos, and everyone wants to be the next Charles Johnson busting the media's chops. I too am shocked at some of the photos that have been taken at face value, but the one howler to rule them all, in my opinion, has to be the photo of the burning Koran.

Ace busts some chops too:

Well! I guess a foreign Muslim photographer just got lucky again to find the inciting, dramatic picture of a burning Koran after an Israeli air strike, huh? It's the perfect visual metaphor for the Islamist cause -- the Jews destroying the Koran itself -- and I just suppose he happened to luck upon a bomb site where one was conveniently still aflame. I would imagine a book would either stop burning, or be completely burned (and hence not burning) 99% of the time you visited a scene two hours after an attack, but this phographer just got lucky once again, right?

Seriously, do people in newsrooms even think anymore? Someone runs to them with a National Guard memo or a photo of a burning Koran and they're so eager to run the presses that they don't even stop to think. Why is a book still on fire in a pile of burned building? The book burned slower than the wood and metal? Please. And a wedding dress would stay white in the midst of bombing too...oh wait, that also supposedly happened.

When the same man and woman keep popping up in photos all over Lebanon, maybe it's time to question these photographers' motives.

P.S. The comment that made me laugh out loud at Ace's post:

That mannequin has clearly been manipulated to look like Rachel Corrie.
Posted by: Kat R. Pillar on August 6, 2006 10:07 PM

Posted by: Sarah at 07:03 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 304 words, total size 2 kb.

My husband read this article in Forbes, and we immediately became 50 Cent fans. We listened to his album in the car this weekend, which is a completely different experience when you know more about him. He wasn't just whistlin' dixie with that "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" slogan. It's extremely amusing to listen to the song "High All the Time" and know that 50 Cent doesn't even smoke weed; he's just a shrewd businessman who knows what sells. He made $50 million dollars in 2004 without even making an album. We can't help but be a tad impressed.

Posted by: Sarah at 01:30 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 105 words, total size 1 kb.

When Kevin Spacey was on The Daily Show, he went on and on about how much better the news situation was in London than in the US. I couldn't help but remember that segment when I read Stressed out and anxious in Beirut. (I found this link in another article called Israeli war deaths go largely unnoticed.) It really is a piece of work: the journalist is sitting with the people of Beriut, musing over where Israel will bomb next and trying to explain his understanding of Israel's motives to the Lebanese people. Hey, newsguy, you wanna understand Israel? How 'bout, you know, going to Israel and talking to them instead of reporting your speculations as news. What a bunch of baloney, which is what passes for "articles" these days:

People keep saying to me, "We are not Hezbollah - why are they bombing our homes?"

The Israelis say that these renewed attacks on Beirut are justified because they are targeting Hezbollah. But for the hundreds of thousands of people in this city who don't support Hezbollah it feels like collective punishment.

Hezbollah's primitive, unguided Katyusha rockets hit civilians too - although far fewer have died in Israel than have been killed in Lebanon by the massive Israeli munitions.

Many Lebanese readily agree that Hezbollah gravely miscalculated when they captured those two Israeli soldiers on 12 July - but now they go on to say: "We were never Hezbollah. But we are all Hezbollah now. The Israeli response is completely unjustified."

I have met some who curse Hezbollah, and who say the Israeli bombardment is understandable. Some, but not many.

And I don't think "But we are all Hezbollah now" is just talk. The more Israel destroys, the more supporters Hezbollah will be able to recruit.

How fair and balanced. Kevin Spacey must be so proud. The article ends with:

Smoking hubble-bubble at a cafe one evening, I heard the sound of a fighter-bomber overhead.

A young man at the next table leaned over to me, gestured in the direction of the menacing rumble, and said: "This - this also is terrorism!"

What a gross misstatement of the definition of terrorism. Provided as the final punch in this craptastic article. Looks like someone at the BBC has been studying his "New Rules" For Mideast Reporting.

Posted by: Sarah at 04:51 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 389 words, total size 3 kb.

I thought that this blog would help me understand the world, but sometimes I think the more I read, the less I grok. The Left accuses the Right of being delusional. The Right accuses the Left of being delusional. And which accusation you believe hinges on which worldview you brought to the table in the first place. Neither will convince anyone who doesn't already agree with him. Our world is a sad and fragmented place.

Posted by: Sarah at 03:30 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 77 words, total size 1 kb.

I just finished reading Mario Pei's The Story of Language. Because I've taken so many linguistics and ESL courses, the basic ideas of the book were not new to me, though it was fun to read a book written in 1948 and see how things have already changed. French was still considered a much bigger player than Russian, Chinese, or Spanish, and 60 years ago, "corny" and "gimmick" were apparently too slangy to be accepted. The most fascinating part of the book by far was the last chapter. After a discussion in the preceding chapter of constructed languages like Esperanto, Pei sets the stage for an international tongue. He argues that "people now alive will be completely replaced, within less than a century, by other people whose habits, linguistic and otherwise, are not yet formed because the people are not yet born, and who can be given, with proper planning, any set of linguistic or other habits that it pleases their enlightened elders to impart to them." And so he goes on to say

What is needed for the solution of the world's language problem is simply a language, any one of the world's 2796 natural languages or of the five hundred or so constructed ones that have at various times been proposed; with, however, two qualifications: the langauge selected must have absolute correspondence of written symbols for spoken sounds, and it must be adopted, by international agreement, in all countries at the same time, not in the high schools or colleges or universities, but in the lowest grade of the elementary schools, side by side with the national tongue, so that it may be learned easily, naturally, and painlessly by the oncoming generations.

Thus within a century, we'd all speak a common native language.

Anyone who's studied a foreign language beyond school requirements knows that the longer you study, the more you realize how tricky communication is. The more familiar you are with the lexicon, the more you see it doesn't match up one-to-one with your native tongue. And true and exact comprehension between two cultures seems hopelessly naive.

Language buffs like me will get excited by Pei's concept. Economists like my husband will say, "That's stupid. The free market already decided on a language and it's English, baby. Lucky for us." But set aside the diplomatic nightmare of implementing a universal language -- and I'm certain that's the reason that it's never been done in the 60 years since Pei suggested it -- and imagine for a moment what such a world would be like. A world where virtually everyone is bilingual and they all have one language in common.

The thought makes my heart skip a beat.

Posted by: Sarah at 03:49 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 454 words, total size 3 kb.

Conversation heard in our house this morning:

Husband: I'm gonna sip Bacardi like it's my birthday. Hey, do we have any Bacardi?
Me: I don't give a f*k; it's not my birthday.
[Much laughter]

The husband's now officially closer to 30 than to 20. We're celebrating at Dollar Hot Dog Night at the ballgame.

He's still as cute as he was at 19. Still fits in the same pants too. Jerk.

Posted by: Sarah at 04:59 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 71 words, total size 1 kb.

John Kerry Proposes Universal Coverage by 2012. Cold Fury calls it "health care with all the compassion of the IRS, all the efficiency of the Post Office, and all the competence of the DMV." We here in the Army have some of that good ol' free health care. I called the health clinic because I need one of those yearly woman appointments; it's not life-or-death, but it's a health care need. I called in the beginning of July and they said they could make me an appointment for 4 August. Then they called me today and said that the doctor won't be there on Friday and we'll have to reschedule for 28 August. Yep, it's free, but it's taking me two months to get seen. I'm just sayin'.

Posted by: Sarah at 11:06 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 132 words, total size 1 kb.