10.20.06
I’m going through a bit of a rough patch just at the moment. It’ll pass, like anything else, I know. They always do.Some things I miss:
No, really. I can stop spamming you with photos any time I want to.
10.18.06
Link Salad
Did you know that next year, the laws will change to make it necessary to have a passport to go between the USA and various nearby countries (Canada, for one), for travel that formerly did not require a passport? NYT reports that “The State Department proposed creating a wallet-size passport that Americans could use to travel to Bermuda, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. The card, which would include radio frequency coding to link it to a database of biographical data and a photograph, would be used when a new rule goes into effect next year requiring a passport for travel to those countries.”
Righty-o, then. RFID for personal ID, incidentally, has been noted to be a source of significant problems including massive potential for privacy breaches. Security expert Bruce Schneier seems fairly satisfied with the encryption/protections the USDept of State is planning to implement in its RFID for passports (or what they have indicated they will be planning, at any rate), but if you’re not as sanguine as Bruce is maybe you wanna get the fullsize passport now.
Not, of course, that this’ll keep them from RFID’ing your passport when you have to get it renewed down the line, but perhaps it will keep you from being a guinea pig for the first-gen version. Again, if you care. Which you might or might not.
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Shrub’s megalomania took a giant step forward yesterday when in the first wholesale revision to NASA/space policy in ten years, he decided that all your space is belong to us.
(Yes, I know it’s “base,” not “space,” but that doesn’t work here, see?)
Quoth the WaPo, “President Bush has signed a new National Space Policy that rejects future arms-control agreements that might limit U.S. flexibility in space and asserts a right to deny access to space to anyone ‘hostile to U.S. interests.’ ” (Link) Well done to you, George, and while I don’t think you have to worry about Al Quaeda sending up a manned explorer any time soon, I wish you good luck keeping, say, China from launching spacecraft if they damn well want to.
Whadda maroon. Someone needs to sit him down and make him watch all of TOS Star Trek. Possibly Clockwork Orange-style. ‘Cause clearly a childhood of Tom Swift and His Gigantic Space Ray of Obliterational Righteousness ‘n’ Doom has gotten far too deep into what passes for his brain. (Or has he been reading those drecky books about life apres-Armageddon that I always see heaped on the remainder table at CostCo? I can’t tell any more. Clearly he is suffering some 2-D/3-D conflict of some sort, since he’s not dealing in the World As We Know It, but what the source of his 2-D delusions is I know not.) Surely Gene Roddenberry would not object to his work being used for conscientious reprogramming purposes.
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And as your reward for reading the depressing news links, go play with this: Altar-Ations, a lovely little bit of interactive media educational art that manages to be funny, insightful, and scathing all at the same time. Brava Juliet for pulling this together.
10.17.06
How To Wash The Dishes
Someone emailed me and asked if I would explain how to wash the dishes properly. It seems that this person and hir housemate have been having some differences of opinion about how this task should be done. Me, I don’t pretend to have the One True Method for washing dishes properly. I feel that any old way you do it is fine as long as they get genuinely clean. But if you want your dishes to get genuinely clean when you wash them, I suppose you could do worse than to do it the way I generally do it, which I shall now outline for the sake of the general amusement and possible edification of the reader.
10.16.06
So Sorry to Disappoint
I was just checking my server stats and decided, on a lark, to see what my top referral strings were, in terms of what search engine queries were bringing people to hanneblank.com. Here’s the list:
virgin stories
porn week
nuns raped
raped nuns
nun rape
rape virgin
nuns sex
would a virgin girl lie?
stories on virginity
large object in vagina photos
losing virginity for uncircumcised men
penis with no testicles function
argument from outrage
eunuch penis
free sketches of tasmanian devil
cilantro cup
berlin virgin brothel name
apron
anus vagina anal hymen women
stories virgin
sex stories pdf
virginity of girls
I no doubt failed to provide these people with what they were looking for. Except maybe for the person searching on “apron.” I am not sorry about this.
Who knew nun rape was so popular?
Housekeeping: Ten Easy Pieces
The comments I’ve been getting in relation to the housekeeping posts have been very interesting. Both in e-mail and in the blog, people have run a wide gamut on their opinions.
Some people are reading what I’ve got to say about housekeeping and then defensively insisting that this is all very interesting but they still can’t deal with housekeeping and that, by implication, I have the obligation to understand that they can’t deal with it and cut them some slack. (As if I were judging you in the first place? I’m not, this is my blog, and as such is essentially a narcissistic exercise. Maybe you need to cut yourself some slack, because clearly your guilty conscience is getting to you. But looking to me for housekeeping absolution isn’t going to get you anywhere, I’m just going to look at you and say “Well, if it bothers you so damn much, why don’t you do something about it?”)
Some people are asking me for my “secrets,” as if I had any such thing. My house is not self-cleaning, my meals are not self-cooking, and my kitty litter box is not self-emptying. There are no secrets. It isn’t magic. It’s just work done with a greater or lesser degree of skill, craft, and efficiency. (You know, like any other art form. By which I mean “human endeavor.” But you know that.)
Some people are just glad I’m talking about housekeeping because it’s so often devalued and treated like some filthy little secret or revolting necessity. And a lot of women, specifically, seem to be glad to see me talk about housekeeping because they end up doing the lion’s share of it and no one ever seems to acknowledge how much they do, and reading what I say about it feels validating because I’m acknowledging publicly that it often is a lot of work and that doing it is valuable.
Me, I’m going to keep talking about housekeeping until I become bored of the topic, because I can and I want to. And because I think it’s important to do so, both personally and politically.
Today I am going to talk a little bit about what I am for the sake of convenience calling the Ten Easy Pieces of my housekeeping life. They’re just routines, little ones, that I do often. Every day or every week. Sometimes several times a day. No less often than twice a month. Stuff I do often enough that it quickly becomes rote when I decide to add some housekeeping fillip to it.
They are not etched in stone or even scratched into no-wax flooring. I added them to my regular schedule bit by bit as they occurred to me. Some of them I am still working on refining; I find that I often end up adding little things to my most regular housekeeping routines until they do exactly what I need them to do, whatever that is.
Still and all. Doing these things transformed my experience of dealing with housekeeping. They made it possible for me to see housekeeping as a regular cycle of little things, not difficult, not torturous, not punitive, not nasty, just little bits of effort here and there that taken all together made life a whole lot easier because taking care of things was just so much simpler when it didn’t mean having to deal with some gigantic shitpile every time.
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