Demons! Demons!

Clearly I should not have eaten that Halloween candy.  Bad things are infesting my world.  First my dryer busts, now my computer (the one at school, not this one) went blue screen.  Also, we're stony fucking broke.  Also other hard stuff is happening as well.

Maybe I need an exorcism.  Can atheists get those?

"Hello?"

"Yes, my child?"

"Can you come over and expel the demons I don't believe in?  How much would that cost?"

"You don't...."

"Yes, I'm an atheist.  Do you charge more for us or less?"

"...more?"

"That's too bad, since I'm stony fucking broke."

"...."

"Hello, Father?"

"Maybe you should try the Wiccans, child.  Do you have that number?"

Bad Economy Blues Part II

Krugman's column in the NYTimes today is worth reading -- well, it almost always is, but today especially.  He's talking about the need for more stimulus.  The bit that's been done already has helped some, and, as Krugman admits in the column, that's nice; but nowhere near enough.

What I keep hearing from Washington is one of two arguments: either (1) the stimulus has failed, unemployment is still rising, so we shouldn’t do any more, or (2) the stimulus has succeeded, G.D.P. is growing, so we don’t need to do any more. The truth, which is that the stimulus was too little of a good thing — that it helped, but it wasn’t big enough — seems to be too complicated for an era of sound-bite politics.

Of course, we've got the Teabag fringe, wailing (now, not when Bush was running us into debt paying for that useless war) about how our grandchildren will be SADDLED with DEBT!!!1!; but, as Krugman also notes, this is classic pennywise thinking.

Deficit hawks like to complain that today’s young people will end up having to pay higher taxes to service the debt we’re running up right now. But anyone who really cared about the prospects of young Americans would be pushing for much more job creation, since the burden of high unemployment falls disproportionately on young workers — and those who enter the work force in years of high unemployment suffer permanent career damage, never catching up with those who graduated in better times.

And, as I'll point out, to anyone who isn't living in that Winger alt.world (we'll just make up the planet we want to live in, where global climate change isn't happening, and the Iraq War is being won, and Reagan Was a Great President), things are dire out here in the actual world. Yesterday I had the third student of this semester alone drop out of school b/c she could no longer afford to be a student.  This one was a junior -- the other two had been underclassmen.

Rent and debt and food and health costs and fuel prices are so high these students are not able to stay in school.  It's not tuition.  It's the cost of living.  My freshman who quit mid-semester said he just couldn't spare the time off work.  (He works at Sonic, by the way.)

We're eating our seed corn.  For what?  To pay for a useless war?  To make health insurance executives even richer?  To prop up some demented old white guy's notion of what this country should be?

When will this be enough?

All Hallow's Eve

The kid was going to skip Halloween this year, because what's the point, she said, gloomily, no one does it for the costumes anymore, they're just interested in the candy, and I can't eat the candy anyway (which she can't, given that nearly all candy is made with corn syrup these days and she's got the corn syrup allergy).

But after she and Herr Dr. Delagar carved the pumpkin (a cat pumpkin, and very impressive indeed) and it was out on the porch and our first few Trick or Treaters arrived (we only got about a dozen all night, because Trick or Treat is EVIL in Pork Smith, the local Pentecostals preaching violently against it, and most people not participating, to the extent that the city has developed a code system -- if you are participating, you turn on your porch light and put out a pumpkin, and if you aren't, you don't: I'd say one house in six, if that, was participating in our neighborhood last night).

Anyway, after about 20 minutes, the kid got restless and began looking very gloomy.  "We can still go out," I told her.

"I don't have a costume," she said.

So we built a costume -- a hat with ears, and I painted a nose and whiskers, we put a skirt over her leggings, and she was...well, I guess she was the Crazy Cat Lady.

We had an excellent time wandering the neighborhood, knocking on the cool houses -- despite the preaching, many people had gone all out, decorating their houses, and those who had pumpkins, had fine ones.  Also it was a chilly brisk night, cold and clear, with a nearly full moon: Halloween weather.  I told her about Halloween when I was a kid, when we roamed the streets in packs, without any adults around, and every house gave out candy, none of this "we don't believe in Halloween," because anyone who didn't give us candy got TP'd or their trash cans knocked over.  Hah!

"Not that I'm in favor of that behavior," I added hastily.

Now the kid is eating the candy she is allergic too.  I have warned her she will be sorry.  She says she'll be sorry later.  Right now it is good candy.

Yeah, she's growing up.

Is that a peanut in your Snickers bar?

Or could it be Satan?

Jeezly pop.  Just when you thought the Christers couldn't get anymore whack.

During Halloween, time-released curses are always loosed. A time-released curse is a period that has been set aside to release demonic activity and to ensnare souls in great measure ... During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities. These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.

I do not buy candy during the Halloween season. Curses are sent through the tricks and treats of the innocent whether they get it by going door to door or by purchasing it from the local grocery store. The demons cannot tell the difference.

Rats

The dryer broke two days ago.  Of course we cannot buy a new one -- we can barely afford to get it repaired.  We had to wait until today, when we got paid, to go to the laundromat, that's how stony broke we are these days.  It is very sad.

Today, this morning, at dawn, we loaded up all the laundry, which was piles and piles of it, because the dryer has been breaking for days, and drove off to hunt down a laundromat (these are both scarcer and pricier than they used to be -- I will appall you later with tales of how much it costs to wash a load of laundry*).  The kid had never been to a laundromat and was terrified, who knows why.  I kept telling her she would love it.

"They have chairs," I said.  "Nearby will be a small store to buy chips and crap.  We can read and talk while the laundry spins.  It will be warm and smell good and we can watch the interesting people.  I got several of my best details for my best stories watching people at laundromats.  You'll see."

I was right, too.  She loved it.

"This is so cool," she told me, returning from a lengthy circuit of the laundry.  "We should come here every week!"

(Herr Dr. Delagar, I must tell you, was much less sanguine.)

*I forgot to include this. $2.25 a load.  But this is for the big machine, the front-load triple loader.  The smaller machine was only $1.50.  The dryers are a quarter for every 9 minutes.

Yeah, But I Was Making it Up...

This is the premise my SF world starts with: in about 2100, I say, America completely privatizes its prison systems (the real religion of America, as I frequently tell my students, being not Christianity but Capitalism).  

This is an idea I have seen floated about on a few right-leaning economic blogs already; left-of-center bloggers responded with why it was a really stupid idea, which was that once you make something profitable, d'oh, people do more of it.

The commenters on the blogs, though, were who interested me.  You can imagine the comments.

Anyway, I ran with that idea, especially since I had been reading half a dozen other books at the same time -- Billy Bragg, and Octavia Butler's work, and Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains, and I forget the others.  I didn't read Douglas Blackmon's Slavery By Another Name until later, but that book got folded into my research on the revision level.

However: look here.  Apparently what I thought was fiction, ain't.  And I am entirely off on the year. Go figure.

Oh: and here is why this is a really bad plan.

And What Do You Do?

So we're at the memorial service for the kid's uncle's father, and it's in Fayetteville, which is still a fairly small town. Herr Dr. Delagar and I lived there for about ten years about ten years ago. Everyone knows us, more or less, in certain parts of that community, specifically in the academic community, which is who was at this service, since the uncle's dad was at the university for, heavens, 30 years? Something like that.

So, well. We're doing the bit after the service, where we mingle and chat, and an older doctor of something inquires what I am doing now, and Herr Doctor Delagar tells him how I am teaching at U.A. Fort Smith and how I have a book coming out.

"Oh?" he asks. "What sort of book?"

"It's a novel," I tell him. "Science fiction."

He looks very much taken aback. Then, with the air of one striving to be kind, he tells me, "I hear that's very respectable now."

Yes

Here, read this.

I cannot tell you how happy it made me, recently, when the kid, apropos of nothing, commented, idly, "I really like my body."

My heart slammed inside my chest.  I looked at her sidelong.  "Yeah?" I said, trying to sound calm.

"Yes," she said.  "I look good.  You know?  It's...a nice body."

"It is," I agreed, doing my utter absolute best to sound calm: like I hadn't been working full-out the past eleven years for just this moment.  

(We have no scale in our house, no one in our house ever goes on a diet, any discussion of food in our house has to do with recipes and what we like to eat, not with what we weigh or whether we're fat, I never, ever, ever, comment on anyone's weight, ever, we take walks because we like walking, we hike and such for the same reason, we don't keep crap in the house -- bad food I mean -- but that's because we don't eat bad food, it's nasty, not because we want to be skinny, blech, we have better things to do than fuss about who weighs what, when I was a kid growing up that was ALL that ANY girl every talking about, ALL girls were on diets, ALL girls were judged by their weight, ALL girls weighed themselves five and six times a day, and EVERY girl who weighed over the prescribed amount was WORTHLESS, I spent 90% of my adolescent years fretting about my weight, when I could have been -- shit, who knows, studying algebra? Learning Latin?  Learning to write deathless prose?  Hell if I know, because instead I memorized the # of calories in Oreos and carrots and mashed potatoes and tried like shit to weigh the "perfect" weight for my height, which would have, at long last, made me a real human being, instead of a valueless bit of filth, this was not happening to my child, no way, no how.)

 "You've got a fine body," I said.

"Yeah," she said, and went on reading Lemony Snickett.

SCORE!

Hee!

The bacon/hummus split!

Right-Wing Reality

Here it is in action.

If you don't like the world, make up your own world.

One where Right-Wing Idiots aren't idiots at all, they're just pretending, see?

Drrrrrrr

Herr Dr. Delagar is trying to print his dissertation, to submit it to the graduate school archives, which is the last requirement before he's officially done with the PhD hoops.  

Maddeningly, his evil computer has glitched on him (twice); then his printer wouldn't print; now he has run out of toner, which he did not discover until he had destroyed so much paper (of course the dissertation must be printed on %100 cotton bond) that now he has to go buy more extremely expensive paper, as well as another extremely expensive toner cartridge.

Grr.

What?

Over at P.Z.'s place, he's got a post up about the -- I don't know what I'd call them: advertisements sort of sounds wrong to me, but okay, we'll call them that: ads for atheism being runs in NY city subways.

The post isn't really about the ads, which are fairly non-controversial (Put up by the Coalition for Reason, all they say is A Million New Yorkers are Good Without God -- Are you?).  It's about that, oh, how shall we phrase this?  That miseducated, overpaid Fox-news Republican-Welfare recipient, Sean Hannity, who, having heard about these ads -- I'm guessing someone sent him a link -- hopped around on TV fulminating, "Can you imagine?  What if some Christian group ran pro-God ads in the subways?  Can you imagine the outrage?"

Dude.

Apparently Sean has been living in a cave, I would respond, except, well, he and his ilk are always responding this way, aren't they?  Almost everything they say makes it clear they don't live in the same reality as the rest of us.  They live on planet Wing-Nut, Planet Xtian Loon-O-Sphere, where Obama is trying to take their guns, where there really is a War on Christmas (despite the huge decorations being put up in my public park as we speak, and the aisles and aisles full of Christmas crap that has been for sale in every store in Fuck Smith for a good week already), where White Christian Males are the truly persecuted people in America, where those huge signs on I-40 (COME ON OVER TO MY HOUSE BEFORE THE BIG GAME THIS SUNDAY -- GOD) do not exist and where, as PZ points out, the hundreds of different sects of Xtian advertising in the subways and every other public space -- why, not allowed!  Just like no little Xtian boy or girl is allowed to pray over his school lunch or read the Bible at school!  Because of the evil Lie-brals!  Because we're the ones who hate!  We're the ones who are truly intolerant!  Not them!

Gah.