Hoist On His Own Petard

Doesn't that make you wonder what a petard is? Oh, I know you know what the phrase means, but do you actually know what a petard is? I had to look it up. I'll tell you, also, because when you go to click on the link, Wikipedia might be shut down to protest SOPA and PIPA. I thought I read yesterday that the revolution was successful and those outrageous miscarriages of justice were dead in the water, but perhaps I was mistaken. It happens, you know.

Anyway, a petard is/was a small bomb used for breaching gates and other fortifications. It now means 'firecracker' in French, and is slang for 'handgun' or 'joint'. If the bombmaker blew it and the bomb went off prematurely, he or she might be lifted by the explosion and thus 'hoist'. The phrase 'Hoist with his own petard' was coined by Shakespeare, in Hamlet.

Fascinating, right? And why the hell am I talking about petards anyway? Good question, my friends! Check out the pictures from my backyard this afternoon. Apparently, while I was at work yesterday, there was some sort of fishing line trap fashioned in the vicinity of the swing. I'm not sure what it was intended to catch, or how it was constructed. I've learned the hard way not to ask too many questions, see. In any event, Shane was snagged in the snare of his own devising; don't you hate it when that happens? And do you like how I took pictures before snipping him free? Oh, don't get your panties in a bunch, there was no blood, OKAY? And I think he has learned a valuable lesson, don't you? I'm pretty sure he'll build his trap in a more advantageous location next time. And as for the rest of us, we now know what petards are. So yeah, a good day all around!

On the snow front, we are anxiously awaiting the promised megastorm; it is supposed to dump like crazy today. I will keep you posted!

News

Is it just me, or is everyone WAY crazier than usual these days? I swear, I am going to stop listening to/reading/watching the "news". Have I said that before? I'm pretty sure that sounds kind of familiar. Anyway, I mean it this time. It's like we're living in some kind of bizarro universe where the three stooges are serious contenders for president, teachers and other public servants are lazy, greedy parasites with outrageously cushy jobs and unreasonable benefits, and Jesus would rightfully withhold healthcare from a sick kid in just retaliation for his parents' poor capitalism skills. Corporations enrich themselves on the backs of the environment and the increasingly marginalized and desperate labor force, then use the cash to lobby the congress and bribe the Supreme Court, all so they can make MORE money and pay less taxes. Our elected representatives battle amongst themselves like toddlers who all want the only Elmo toothbrush and can't even keep the government running and airports open while they wage unsustainable wars. Yet somehow, the guy that issues my passport and makes 40k and the school lunch program are the reasons we're awash in red ink?

I'm terrified that the next news I see will inform me that two plus two now equals 43,873, gay people cause hurricanes, and that the law of gravity has been suspended because the tea party thinks it might be socialist. Oh, I could go on. And on and on and on, but just thinking about it makes my head start to throb like it's about to explode, and then I just get exhausted and want to lay on my couch drinking beer. Not that there's anything wrong with that! I believe in moderation in all things, and too much beer/couch time will cut into my beer/screen time, so I'm on a mission, and I think you guys can help me out. Here's what I need: news that won't make me insane. More insane, I mean. My friend MeLissa has already come through, with this story from King 5 on cooking with the bug chef. Thanks, MeLissa! That's more like it. Put your suggestions in the comments or email me at womanwithadeadcat@gmail.com; my sanity is in your hands!

Highly Illogical

Wow, my kid is so ILLOGICAL. Shane was busy 'making magic' in the bathroom when I called him into the living room to pick up the four thousand tiny pieces of string he had cut up earlier. I TOLD him he was going to have to pick it up when he was doing it, so he shouldn't have been SURPRISED, but somehow he was. String that is purposely cut into many small pieces must be eventually picked up. Everyone knows this, right? It's a clear consequence of flinging string around all willy-nilly. Then, he pitched this huge fit and screamed that he was too tired to pick up the string. So, I told him if he was too tired to pick up the string, then he needed to go to bed. Totally logical and sensible, right? He should have been HAPPY; he got to go to bed and NOT pick up the string. But no, he threw another full on tantrum and ripped his pajamas off. So I told him he could sleep naked. You'd think he would have been happy, since that's what he said he wanted, but no.

Then he wanted me to stay in there with him, but of course I couldn't, because I had to pick up the string. Clearly, if one has to be picking up the mess created by others, one can not also be laying in bed at the same time. Again, he failed to see the utter logic in this and screamed MORE, not less. And that's not the end of the insanity. He began hollering for an imaginary toy. It's a green squeaking toy shaped like a star THAT HE HAS NEITHER OWNED NOR SEEN. EVER. He calls it 'Squeaky' and CANNOT POSSIBLY LIVE WITHOUT IT.

How do people live like this? With this complete and total lack of reason and a propensity to rail ever louder, as if sheer volume will suddenly render an absolutely ridiculous and indefensible position rational. Oh, HOLY HELL. I just realized the intellect of my four year old bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Newt Gingrich. AND that little charmer Michele Bachmann. On the plus side, for me, at least the small boy will grow out of it.

Oh yeah, here is a picture of the 'magic' that was made in the bathroom, and damn if it doesn't remind me of the Ryan budget.

Hamster Ball

A hamster ball could be any one of a legion of things: a hairy little testicle, a party where rodents go dancing, a party where people dressed up as rodents go dancing, or a game where you kick hamsters into a goal or whack them over a net. The possibilities are endless, and I now have about a zillion new ideas just awaiting further development; feel free to borrow them! Look away now if you are a PETA member- it's just going to get worse and I'm not at all squeamish about inventing other, more bloody, ways to entertain myself. Judgmentalfreakball, anyone? BYOBAPOB (Bring your own bat and plenty of beer)!

But I've been thinking about a different kind of hamster ball lately- the clear plastic kind that the little critters can cruise around the house in without getting stepped on or peeing on the carpet. Not that we have any hamsters, of course. The boys simply refuse to try them, even when I fry them up like nuggets and serve them with ranch and a nice side of fava beans. I swear, kids today, they're so SPOILED. The truth is, the hamster ball is for me.

Remember that John Travolta movie where he played the boy in the plastic bubble? I got to thinking about that the other day because I am very, very sick of dead soldiers, earthquakes, tsunamis, radiation, psycho politicians, the Supreme Court, corporate greed, the economy, the dreary weather, and all the rest, making a plastic isolation bubble extremely appealing. I need to move around, though, and I'm pretty sure a giant hamster ball would be an outstanding solution. It will have a number of attractive design features, including my friend Lisa's idea for a wine-filled drinking bottle. It will have curtains that I can draw when I can't look at the worms in my living room or the pee in the boys' tub anymore, an artificial source of sunlight for all those super rainy days, and some high-grade soundproofing. For work.

I even have the perfect name for it: The Nut Ball. Interested? Call me!

Smoking

I hate cigarette smoke as much as the next guy, maybe even more; GROSS! Here in Washington, you can’t smoke anywhere anymore. Not even in a bar or an adult video store. I bet you want to know how I know that, so I’ll tell you. Over the weekend, we went to an ice cream/beer/video game shop in a seedy suburb. It has a bad reputation, this town, but I drive through it pretty often because it is in between my sister’s house and one of the Goodwills I like. They vary, you know- the Goodwills. I have my favorites. Anyway, I have always defended the ratty place and when people criticize it, I call them snobs and tell them to go back to their McMansion and pick up a Starbucks on the way. I wasn’t concerned at all about going there to play Pac Man and eat ice cream. But the shop was down a street I don’t need to drive on to get to Goodwill, and I’d never seen it before. Just let me say WOW, and that it was the first time I wasn’t glad Weston could read. I had to explain what Payday loans and junk gold and diamonds were. Fortunately he didn’t ask what XXX means. Because I don’t know.

The strip is apparently popular- it was very crowded and we had to park quite a ways from the place, in back-in only angle parking. Who invented that? It’s the worst idea ever. I had to drive through a pot-holed parking lot and over a sidewalk to turn around and drive straight in head first. To get to the ice cream shop, we had to walk the gauntlet of drunks on the sidewalk in front of the dive bars having their smokes. Now, loud and cheerful hammered bikers don’t bother me, of course. Some of my best friends could make the Olympics in boat racing (the kind with beer, not actual boats, because that would be boring as hell). But Weston was terrified, never having encountered a drunken moron. Well, maybe one.

Once we got there, the shop was fun in a dingy sort of way and delicious ice cream and a good time was had by all. Unfortunately, we then had to retrace our steps, only this time it was more fun because Weston was clutching my legs while Shane ran on ahead as we picked our way through the throng of friendly pickled smokehounds spilling out of the various establishments. My favorite was the grinning toothless woman who informed us that she LOVED little boys; she had three of her own and adopted eight more. I told her how lucky she was and we continued on our merry trek. We barreled into the van as fast as we could, and it was then that I figured out that parking headfirst in back-in angled spot was not actually the greatest idea I had ever had. For the love of all that is holy, LET THE TOKERS SMOKE IN THE BARS! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Blame Game

I used to live in Pensacola, and there is no more beautiful place than the Gulf Coast. Weston was born there, and this picture was taken in our house there on his first Christmas. We really liked it there- the beaches were gorgeous- white sands, turquoise waters and pale green sea grasses. The oil spill makes me sick, but what makes me sicker is the disingenuous placement of blame solely on BP.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending them; they are a bunch of greedy bastards for sure. This morning, though, I heard someone say that the executives should be lined up and shot, as if they exist in a vacuum created by their own selfishness, and sadly that's just not true. If it was true, we COULD prevent future spills by shooting them. But the truth is, we ALL did this. BP is just the middleman. A dirty, slimy one, obviously, but still just a middleman. BP is only drilling risky wells because there is an insatiable market for cheap oil. They're just going after the money. Gotta keep the shareholders happy, right? What's good for business is good for America, after all. And what's good for business is fast profits. And BP's not the only one: the other companies aren't any better, they just haven't been caught yet.

Yep, we all did this. Every time you take a plastic bag home from the grocery store, you might as well toss a few tar balls on the sand. When you order takeout and end up with a bag of styrofoam leftovers big enough to choke a T-Rex, it's just the same as dipping a pelican in a barrel of crude. Driving alone to work instead of carpooling or taking the bus equals hucking a few water balloons full of diesel at a sea turtle nest.

Now, if we were willing to acknowledge the obvious truth that drilling for oil is environmentally risky, and unsafe (don't forget that eleven workers died on the Deepwater Horizon), and were willing to pay the true cost of our lifestyle up front, say around $10 a gallon for gas, maybe we would have a leg to stand on when an oil conglomerate bungles and/or underfunds a cleanup, because we would have a legitimate right to expect that safety and cleanup costs had been accounted for in the pricing of the product. But to keep sucking up oil at the going rate and demanding Government subsidies to keep the prices down, then heaping blame on oil companies after the inevitable catastrophe is hypocritical in the extreme.

This kind of mess is just going to happen again and again, if we don't change our ways. And we probably won't, but that's okay too. Eventually the oil reserves will be depleted, the oceans will be wastelands and most of the people will be dead, because much of our food supply and almost all of our oxygen depends on healthy oceans. Then the survivors will have to devise alternate energy sources. Maybe they can capture the methane from all those decomposing corpses.

Genius, Free to Good Home

Corporate America, never bothered by grinding the downtrodden consumer deeper into the ground, or hosing over an innovator slaving away in the trenches, has done it again. Check out Pampers' latest offering: Designer Disposable Diapers. You may recall that just the other day I introduced my own DeadCatLine, which features disposables in a variety of high fashion styles. Can you believe this blatant thievery? Seriously, they didn't even try to be sneaky. Next thing you know turban helmets will be flying off the shelves at Wal-Mart and every prego in town will be wearing a DCL rip-off and they'll all be thinking how great those big box chain 'designers' are while true brilliance goes unrewarded, once again.

If you've been reading here for a while, or if you used to read Stories from Korea, you may also recall my frequent objections to many of the most disgusting practices of big business and the assistance they get from our government and legal system, or as they call it, 'business as usual'. But no more. This latest affront to my intellectual property rights has pushed me over the edge. You win, soul-sucking bastards. I hope you're happy, Supreme Court: I get it. Corporations ARE more important than people. Okay, elected representatives: It's not just okay for the laws of the land to be written by hacks funded by the very industries that require oversight; it's BETTER! Enjoy the swag! You deserve it! Thanks for doing such a great job. I don't know what I was thinking before.

I've been assimilated; what's good for the Board of Directors and the House of Representatives IS good for America! AND for the rest of the world, hallelujah! So with that in mind, I offer up all my best products and schemes , free to a good corporate home. This includes such gems as the ninja flight attendant airline commercial, the mini-beers, the fully automatic funnelator, the fully completed childrens' story/screenplay set in the near future about how the Canadians have bombed the US to smithereens, my various housekeeping breakthroughs, and my newest brainstorm: Coke with the Excedrin already in it. This one would work for Pepsi, Gatorade and coffee, too. Surefire winners, every one of them. Gold mines, I tell you. Well, except for maybe the story with those dastardly neighbors to the north. It might be a little too apocalyptic for the grade school set. It does have a stellar vomiting scene, though- it would light up the big screen. Where are you now, Disney? Dreamworks? Probably busy setting up some more of those nifty product placement deals, all for the greater good.

Take heed, food giants, pharmaceutical barons,entertainment behemoths and HFCS peddlers to us unwashed masses! It's all there for the taking. If you would do just one thing, though. Maybe you could throw a few extra bucks to those lobbyists of ya'alls to clear up that pesky labeling issue. We consumers don't need to know all that complicated chemical stuff about what's in all that stuff you make. We know you're just looking out for our best interests. Thanks, you're the best. But you knew that. And so do I.

The Search for Truth

We’ve been looking for a church lately. Sort of. We don’t know where we’re going to be living, and looking for a good church is really hard work so we don’t want to put in a lot of effort just yet. We always have a hard time- Lloyd and I are both picky but about different things. He likes an old-fashioned type church with hymns instead of contemporary music, and he likes for the building to LOOK like a church. He will not set foot in a metal-sided building that calls itself a church, no matter what. And no overhead video screens; he hates that. I have to have a nice peaceful-feeling place with no yelling and not too much of that ‘greet your neighbor’ crap. I like sermons that teach things about the context of the time and place. And I’m not a fan of fancy rituals, so an Episcopal church is out no matter how much fun their parties are. We agree on only two criteria: the pastor has to be sincere, and we won’t go to a church with a weird name, like ‘Holy Redemption Water of Life’. The warning words are ‘Redemption’, ‘Harvest’, ‘Blood’, ‘Life’ and ‘Water’. Just so you know, if you see any of the red flag words, and the church is in a metal-sided building, stay clear for sure: There are definitely snakes in there. Maybe even more than one kind. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. And of course, it has to have a good program for the kids. Usually we end up with a Baptist or United Methodist church.

Not wanting to try a bunch of new places, because I REALLY hate that, we have been going to the church we went to a long time ago when Lloyd was first stationed here. Some people love going to new churches and even do it for fun, but I loathe it. All that talking to new people who are ridiculously friendly, the not knowing when to sit and when to stand or where the bathroom is, and the worst of all: not having any idea when it’s going to be over. The old church is a pretty long drive, but the kids like it. Lloyd doesn’t like the music but I had no major complaints until this week. I know what to expect, the sermons are interesting, it’s always over on time and the part where you have to say good morning to your neighbor is mercifully short.

So, what’s the problem, right? It’s political. Twice during the service, I heard comments that were clearly meant to disparage any political views contrary to those of the church leadership. A Christian church is supposed to be for everyone, regardless of their political viewpoints. WWJD and all that. I lack the arrogance necessary to act like I know what God thinks, but I am snotty enough to put my opinion on my blog, so here goes: Taking a political position and ascribing it to God is like thinking he cares who wins the Super Bowl, or whether the cartoon is Tom and Jerry or Little Einsteins. GOD DOESN’T CARE, PEOPLE! He doesn’t care if you’re a capitalist or a socialist, a Libertarian, a Democrat or a Republican or anything in between. Capitalism and Democracy are no more sanctioned or directed by God than are the Dallas Cowboys. God doesn’t care about whatever puny systems we set up to govern ourselves. I guess Democracy and Capitalism are marginally better than some other systems that have come and gone, or that operate in other parts of the world, but they are nothing to write home about. We should be trying to create a system where there are no starving children or people dying because they can’t afford or don’t have access to medical care, and where millions of gallons of expensive poison don't destroy delicate and important ecosystems instead of trying to stamp out other ideas in the misguided name of God.

I can barely stop myself from going off on a tear about people who still think that our great white forefathers were destined by God to come to the new world and slaughter the natives in the name of manifest destiny, then exploit the natural resources and less fortunate labor pool in the name of a God-sanctioned political/economic system that fills their pockets. They were chosen by God to rule the world, didn’t you know? So anyone who thinks otherwise is going straight to Hades, and you better vote for the guy that’s going to cut the capital gains tax and those profit-cutting environmental and safety regulations, and then bomb the hell out of anyone who gets in their way, or else don’t come to their church anymore. OKAY BY ME! On second thought, maybe I should check out those nice Episcopalians again. I hear they have the best wine and they're generous with the portions.