Random Thoughts

This one is for Paige: Helplessly Addicted to eBay Barbie.

The more I read about Diebold voting machine problems, the more angry I get. How did anyone let this happen? We really are sheep. And it's more than a little disturbing how Diebold is repressing news of the fraud and succeeding at some universities.

Check out this Halloween lit quiz. I only got six right. How did you do?

Yaaah! Pop Culture Gadabout loads quickly now! It was all because of that pesky blogspot archive function, that sometimes works and often doesn't. The archive problems are why my archives are manually done and on a different server... *sigh*

I finally gave up and added a link to Google's translation of La Cárcel de Papel, since I was only getting the gist of the posts, and wanted more. Of course, as soon as I do that, he gets server problems. *sigh*

Here's a great overview of DC's Spectre, the perfect go-to guy for Halloween. via Fanboy Rampage

Also from Fanboy Rampage, DC has a minisite up for the new Plastic Man series. This entry is for hubby-Eric.

Happy birthday, Paul. Sorry I didn't say anything yesterday, but I was rather down. I'll post a short "ghost" story I wrote later today for you. Actually, I can't say I wrote it. It was one that wrote itself, I was just lucky enough to be the one putting the words down.

Jason had some thoughts on my review of the Kim Stanley Robinson book (no permalinks, scroll down).

The Wonder Twins! on PvPonline. I'm liking this comic better and better. And, if that wasn't enough for a comic book fan, check out today's Sluggy Freelance. I love it!

Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo made a comment about going to cover the New Hampshire primaries, and suddenly was deluged with contributions, before he'd even set up a drive for the money. I wish I could tap into that potential to pay my mortgage! But I figure there's several problems with me trying to get money from blogging: 1) Most of my readers are probably as poor as I am, 2) I would need to use the money to get a new computer and to pay off debts, not do something cool and interesting that I could blog about, and 3) I don't have any way for anyone to contribute, anyway! Yeah, I have a link to a support this site page, but you'll notice there is no way to directly contribute to us there. The only way anyone could directly contribute to me is to buy me something from my Amazon.com wishlist, and that's not likely since, as far as I can tell, no one has even bought anything from Amazon.com through any of my links for themselves, why would anyone buy something for me? Everybody is poor. Still, I can dream about saying something like "Gee, I'd like to blog about the San Diego Comicon" and getting enough money to cover expenses... *grin*

Everyone knows about the fake Riverbend site, right? To sum up, some idiot has been trying to pass himself off as the Iraqi blogger Riverbend, with a similar blogspot name, and identical set-up. The posts on the fake site are mostly cut and pasted from elsewhere, and are rabidly pro-American.

I keep seeing this pop up on other blogs, so I thought I'd add it here, as it illustrates an important point, in my opinion, about the "No Child Left Behind" act: Experienced and award-winning social studies teacher no longer allowed to teach social studies.

Another educational blogger discovered that hubby-Eric's Wizard of Oz page was a resource for them before hubby-Eric started blogging. Excuse me while I burst with pride.

I take exception to Jeff's characterization of Seattle as a town "without a long baseball history". Sorry Jeff, Seattle has had baseball from the beginning, including many championship teams. Seattle has a huge history of being a baseball town. I don't disagree with the rest of the blog, about bringing a Major League team to Portland, but don't call Seattle a city without a baseball history.

And on that note, off to work...