Yaargh! It's another year!

• Back from Louisville and a fun trip to visit Steph's family. I wish I could have brought you back a ton of wonderful pictures, but I'm still missing my camera battery and charger from the Halloween party... so no pics till I find one on Ebay. Strangely, it looks like it might be cheaper just to be an entire new camera than get a new charger and battery... good thing you find mine for cheap.



• There's way too much Livejournal to catch up on, so I might just pretend that the last few days didn't exist for anyone but us.



• New Years tonight at the Lowe Mill after we get off work at the restaurant. If anyone is interested in getting a completely yummy (but rather pricey) dinner, please call and make reservations. We're running out of room, but I'd love to have some more friendly faces on the books.



• I can't wait till I have more time to finish painting my house. It was so nice to come home to clean carpet and the absence of stink. Later next month we plan to get mine and Gabe's room recarpeted... I'm really excited.



• My posts seem so sanitary and boring lately. I've also noticed that people seem to add me as of late, then take me off when they figure out I don't post very much. It has always confused me why people would delete someone for NOT posting. The lack of postage when you have a hundred people to catch up with every day seems kind in some way. Oh well, people are goofy... they probably think I don't read their journal just because I haven't added them back... or that I'm making some super-secret posts that they can't read. Maybe I should start making dozens of daily private posts just to mess with the rubes.



• I bought a book at the nifty-keen bookstore that I like in Louisville. It's called The I Hate Republicans Reader: Why the GOP Is Wrong About Everything. More and more, I've begin to enjoy criticism of the right-wing pundits who seem to scream the loudest. I consider myself a centrist in most ways, but my distaste for the extreme right wing grows daily as I watch the faux intelligencia line up rank and file. I understand that the extreme left is just as ridiculous and banal, but the left seems so easy to debate and confront. To consider the extreme left dangerous is about as logical as fearing an explosion of the deer population. Who CARES if there are a million goofy tree-huggers, all it takes is a simple civics, economics, and physics class to disprove half the crap they hold so near and dear. Besides, most of the lefties I know are only there to rebel against the right... The few actual Marxists that I know are a different sort, but I consider them a healthy counterpoint to my Libertarian friends and leave that debate up to them.
  
  The extreme right is a different case.... their dogma seems to be rooted in denial of logic. "Supply-side economics didn't work for Reagan? Says Who?"... "Iran/Contra was nowhere NEAR as big of a deal as Clinton lying in office!" and yet... strangely... they seem to think their platform is 100% logically sound. Worse yet, when you try and confront that platform in a constructive debate, you get painted as a "liberal" and the discussion breaks down into Clinton insults and simplistic jingles. The ONLY way to confront the extreme right is to take individual issues that their heroes seem to focus on, and show them how they've been lied to. It takes betrayal to get a hardcore righty thinking... and the only way to do it successfully is to know the individual issues well.
  
  Not that I've ever actually ever "converted" anyone from a righty to a centrist by my words... but I've certainly gotten them thinking. And once people are thinking, they tend to shy away from the simplistic blacks and whites that the extremes are painted in. They still call themselves republicans... they just don't paint their enemies in a coat of red as quickly... and I guess that's my goal after all... to stop the simplistic stereotyping of people based on bipolar political offiliations. There is more battles in this world than "Dirty Commie v. Honest Worker"...

oh crap

I have no DJ for tonight... ummm... fuck