Mortaine’s Blog

Representative Cunningham Resigns.

So. First of all, I had to do a bit of digging to learn that Cunningham is a Republican. For *some* reason, the “liberal media” did not make mention of this in the reports I’ve heard on this subject. Granted, those reports are few and far between, but the party mention was missing, and there was language in the radio report that made it sound like he was a Dem.

And since my liberal blogosphere friends haven’t seen any reason to mention this case, I wondered if, perhaps, this latest example of corruption might be a Democrat. I mean, it’s happened in the past. Democrats are human, too.

But no, because if that were the case, then my Republican friends in the blogosphere would be hopping all over him.

Anyway, during the time when I suspected that Cunningham might be a Democrat, I thought to myself “Gosh, should *I* mention this? Will bringing attention to this corruption serve anyone?” And at that time, I started mentally composting a blog post that went something like this:

You know, I’m not exactly proud of this latest scandal– certainly, it can only hurt the Democrats to have one of their own brought down for corruption. And I’ll say it right now, that Cunningham deserves to go to jail for this. He deserves it. He took money in exchange for preferential treatment. He took bribes and then lied to everyone for months about it, steadfastly maintaining that he hadn’t done anything he was accused of.

But I know what the line will be from the Democrats: At least nobody died. It’s a really sad state of affairs when the bar is so low, you can be excused for bad behavior just because your lies didn’t result in two thousand servicemen and women dying. Actually, it’s a really sad state of affairs if we think we can excuse this kind of thing at all. Ever. Even when it’s in our own party.

Anyway, now that I’ve learned that Cunningham is, in fact, a Republican, I can’t really say that I’m surprised. Taking defense contract bribes? Yeah, that sounds like SOP in the GOP these days.

Seriously, though, I keep waiting for all those middle-of-the-road Republicans to come rescue the rest of us from this farce of America, but I’m not sure there are as many of them as people keep claiming. I mean, I have two of you on my friends list– where are the rest?

Anyway, I guess you can distill the rest of my thoughts down to this: Bad Congressman. No biscuit!

PS: Yes, I know I have an old userpic for this political post. Deal with it. That’s how often I post about partisan politics.

This is an archive of my shorter book reviews and notes, which historically have been posted over at the 50 Book Challenge on LiveJournal, but which I’m starting to move over here. I’m posting them with altered date-stamps, but they might show up in my LiveJournal cross-post anyway. Bear with me, please.

Note: Many of these books also have full reviews available in the book review podcast (RSS).
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If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, (even if we don’t speak often) please post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL memory of you and me. It can be anything you want - good or bad - BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE. When you’re finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people DON’T ACTUALLY remember about you.

is where the January Novel Writing Month project will take place in 2006. The rules are very similar to NaNoWriMo. The exception to the normal NaNoWriMo rules is that, if you participated in NaNoWriMo in November, you can add 50K words to your November novel. Why? Because the purpose of starting a new novel is so that you can have a fresh start. If you did that in November and just need to finish your fresh-start novel, this is a good way to do it. Also, it’s what I’ll be doing, so I made it a rule. ;P

We’ll have a thread in the community to post any auto-generated word counter graphics so everyone can see their progress as they go.

There will be T-shirts and swag available for purchase, probably from CafePress or a similar website, but this is not a commercial undertaking. Just a fun free-for-all.

At the end of the project, if you win, your prize is personal enrichment. This is a prize that’s otherwise elusive in many of our daily lives, so embrace it. Enjoy it. Honor it.

Food: Potato-leek soup is an awesome thing to do with leftover mashed potatoes.

Sore throat: Woke up this morning at 3 AM with a “tickle” (and a cough) in my throat. Took a zinc lozenge. Woke up at 6:15 with partially-dissolved lozenge still in my mouth, and my throat feeling like it was burned by acid all night.

I went shop-happy on Amazon.com yesterday. They gave me a free 3-month trial of their premium membership. I am already loving it– free 2-day shipping on anything? Oh, yes. That is joy.

So my “I finished NaNoWriMo” self-presents shipped this morning (as did Mom’s Christmas gift). I got two books for SCA-ing: “Medieval Calligraphy” and “Pleyn Delit: Medieval Cookery.” The first is apparently *the* book for scribes in the SCA wanting to develop a “period” hand. The second is for folks wanting to cook period food (I’m secretly hoping it will also have recipes for rapini and other weird tasties that my organic CSA keeps delivering to us).

We had a winner at the write-in last night! Someone new(ish)– I gave her her winner’s medal and a bunch of congratulations.