Just been too darn busy with Real Life^TM to follow LJ for a while.



What's been happening? Well, it started with a snowstorm. At first it was pretty big fun: we'd been hoping for snow this winter. Then the power fails, the roads ice up, trees fall, and I get an e-mail from my daughter's teacher that the kids had been praying hard for snow since they came back for Christmas break: Could you ask your little darling to stop, now please?.

Then we got involved in the auction project: making puppets as I described:





What I didn't post was that my husband was building a puppet theater to go with and donate. By mid-February it was all hands on deck helping us to make the March deadline. God willing and the creeks don't rise, life will ease up a bit.



So that's what I've been doing. You?

So here's the timeline: The Catholic Church in America raises a huge embarrassing stink about ObamaCare. Now the Vatican City has been put on a terrorist watch list. The fracking Vatican.

Those leftwing gonzos voted for Nixon.

Oy.

She built a Tardis!



Hattip to topless robot.

I, on the other hand, am building muppets with 21 eight-year-olds. They are smaller, but every bit as much fun.

The muppets, I mean. Well, and the eight-year-olds, too come to think of it.

Here's a wonderful little video that made me laugh even as I admired the aesthetic and the catchy chorus: Just Put Some Gears on It and Call It Steampunk

It's right up there with The League of Lady Conspiracists in I've Got My Tinfoil Hat On

No hattip for the former (curse my steel-sieve memory), but the former comes from Epbot: Geeks, Girliness, & Goofing Off.

If you haven't discovered it yet, Epbot, is definitely the place to go to discover how to stick gears on it and call it steampunk. In a good way.



This is from one of her posts on making a steampunk-themed Christmas tree. Aside from bringing entertaining vids your way, and being a generally amusing sort of blog, the writer has a wonderfully positive attitude. It's not just the overall good cheer (because that's there) or that her first choice is to see the ridiculousness of what life throws her way, because that's there in spades. I've noticed that whenever some geek-girly ujustitude to other folk comes up in her blog, she's the last person who'll jump on the Bandwagon-O-Outrage. What the Epbot writer does instead is find a way to light a great big whopping candle. And to encourage her readers to Go And Do Likewise.

So there you go: three fun things for one blog post. Now I have to get off this thing and go out and go sledding with the Mighty Mite

In honor of the Christmas season, my awesome 8-year-old co-writer and I bring you a holiday favorite. A holiday favorite seen through the lens of a Thanksgiving break Munchkin marathon...

Dashing through the dark
in a dungeon dank and cold,
armor-clad feet crunch
on skeletons of old.
Hearing monsters yell
makes us squeal in fright:
Oh what fun it is to sing a slaying song tonight!

Hey!

Dungeon crawl! Dungeon crawl!
Fighting all the way!
Oh what fun it is to find
a plushy skull to slay!

Dear OWS activists,

Here's some protesting 101. The trick is simple: you protest government. You boycott companies. You can't do it the other way 'round and expect that either bad governments or bad companies will change.

Have you considered both protesting and boycotting the people who claim to be giving you a liberal college education? Because you got cheated, big time.

Yours faithfully,

Carbonelle.

I know I told you so, but I have to admit the extent of the crazy, the screwups and the just plain dumb to which President Obama and the Democratic congress that rode in on his coattails have aspired is so bad, they're making Shrub look like a rocket scientist with the political savvy and ethics of George Washington. On the bright side, thanks to OWS, protesting is cool and patriotic again, right?

Thanks to Pres. Obama and Sen. Pelosi's health care plan (one which no one, not even the congressmen themselves was permitted to see in toto until after it was passed!) the Federal Government will shortly have the power to do anything to anyone for any reason whatsoever so long as they can couch it in terms of money.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington upheld Obamacare individual mandate:

"Broad regulation is an inherent feature of Congress’s constitutional authority in this area; to regulate complex, nationwide economic problems is to necessarily deal in generalities, wrote Judge Laurence Silberman, who has a reputation as one of the court's most conservative judges. Congress reasonably determined that as a class, the uninsured create market failures, Silberman said. Thus, the lack of harm attributable to any particular uninsured individual, like their lack of overt participation in a market, is of no consequence."

( If I had more time, I'd be more succinct. Sorry )
Thus endeth your rant for the quarter. Next(ish) post: cute pictures with obscure pop culture references!

I'm not a fan of bumperstickers, but I think I want this one:

My library patrons are cuter than yours

(and yes, I had a run of adorable kids/charming teens this week)

Once upon a time a fellow came out to a Texas farm from the city. After looking around a bit, he went up to the farmer and asked him why that cow--the one in that field over there--had no horns.

"Some cows, sir," replied the farmer, "some cows don't have horns because they're special-bred not to have any. And there are some cows where only the bull has horns, so that cow could just be female. And there are times when we have to remove the horns from a cow for some reason.

"But this cow has no horns because it is, in fact, a horse."

This story came to mind for several reasons, one being a comment by John C. Wright on another topic entirely:

We live in the midst of a Dark Age, that is, an age when intellectual and literate things are despised by the intellectuals and the literati. A Dark Age approves of emotional rather than intellectual response.

I've been reading Mr. Sowell's book on intellectuals, and one of the points he makes over and over again is how so many of those who belong to what might be termed the intellectual class: those who make their living, or call their vocation, the things of the mind: professors, media analysts, commentators and the like; how they prefer rhetorical flourish to reasoned argument. They have abandoned logic, reason, proofs and evidence.

Worst of all, should any of these once-revered tools of the intellect be brought to bear against a treasured belief, these modern intellectuals will scream Anathema! and run with torches to burn the heretic.

Therefore, it seems to me, that in a United States made up of millions and millions of individuals, it would have to be true that there are some people who are anti-intellectual because they have a burning resentment of the well-educated they suspect (rightly or wrongly) are their social betters. There must be some people who are anti-intellectual because they really prefer to wallow in pop-culture and inanity.

But it's most likely that modern intellectuals are despised because they are, in fact, barbarians

Mom and Dad have left.

The Bunnybright's cool Aunt S. has left.

I won't see any of them again until the end of December.

...

I wish I could tesser.