Juggling (naturally, in no particular order):

Leaking windows on house

Leaking coolant system on the Mini

Job

Ghost Recon 2

Prince of Persia 2

Resident Evil 4

As many episodes of Top Gear as I can find

The dog

Spending time with the fiancee

Spending time with friends

Cooking

Drawing

Painting

Swimming

Cleaning the house

Man. Can’t keep up with more than like 25% of any of those things at any one time. 😛

So they’re apparently making the wounded Iraq war vets pay for their own meals while hospitalized and recovering from their injuries. This strikes me as particualrly callous and disgusting. So part of me thinks, let’s start up a charity event that raises money from Democratic causes, and donates it to cover the costs of the vets’ meals? The other part of me thinks that then that makes it ok that the government isn’t paying for them.

But if it’s not done, it’s the vets that get screwed. It is sort of strange. Being completely mercenary for a moment, this could be a tremendous PR coup for any Democrat with the organizational acument to raise enough money to cover the vets’ expenses.

Hell, maybe I should look into how to do such a thing.

So it’s Tuesday, and so far this week, I’ve made lunch, dinner, a brunch snack (from last night’s leftovers), and lunch again. Dinner tonight is up in the air, but I suspect we’ll just scrounge from the kitchen, and then tomorrow, we’ve got steaks that we just need to defrost. Not a bad start to the week, no doubt, and hopefully, I’ll get some exercise tonight. Fun fun.

Ei-Nyung made some chocolate-dipped strawberries last night that were *unbelievable*. The strawberries weren’t super-perfect, the chocolate could probably have been a little darker, but overall, they were just stunning. There were at least two instances where they were just astonishingly perfect, and I felt like my mouth just exploded with awesome flavor. Great stuff. Simple, too. I’m tempted to go by the grocery store tonight and get some more. 😛

Oh, also, there was an orange/strawberry/raspberry/peach smoothie to be had Sunday evening, which was mighty tasty.

Been watching a BBC show (via BitTorrent, since it’s not available anywhere in the states) called Top Gear. It’s a show about cars, but rather than just being staid sorts of car reviews, they review cars, have a guy run the cars around a track, where they rank cars by lap time, they have a segment called “Star in a Reasonably-priced Car,” which has such luminaries as Patrick Stewart and Jamie Oliver taking a cheap Suzuki sedan around a race course.

And that’s the tame stuff. Other sements include playing darts with a bunch of used cars and a giant hydraulic ram, or trying to make it from London to Edinburgh and back on one tank of gas, or racing minivans with British Touring Car champions. It’s nuts, and entertaining as hell.

Gah! Both the windows, and the freakin’ Mini leak. There’s a leak in the Mini’s coolant system. I thought I caught it yesterday, but I guess not. Problem is, that everything anywhere near the leak is covered in rusty residue, but unfortunately, it’s also impossible to see *anything* near where the origin appears to be, ’cause it’s so cramped inside the engine bay.

*shrugs*

I suppose I’ll give it another go next weekend, if it’s sunny.

Also got a speeding warning, for going too fast through the Mandana/Lakeshore intersection. Oops. 😛 The cop was really nice.

Hoog. So the Mini’s had some sort of overheating problem. That is, it had one, single overheating problem, and that was that the radiator was empty. Empty? Yes, empty. Not a goddamn drop. Well, that is, there was liquid in it, but by the time I got to a place where I could stop the car, there was a lot of steam when the cap was opened (with sufficient protection, thanks for asking), but no liquid.

That seemed odd, yeah? So after filling it up, and driving it home, I realized that there was actually a leak somewhere. Water was spraying onto the engine block, and steaming up. It’s impossible to see while driving, and so when you stop, you end up with steam pouring out from under the hood. Yet, I couldn’t see where the leak was.

So, finally, after putting it off for ages, I tried to flush the radiator today, and check for leaks. I was only able to access one point towards the bottom of the radiator – it’s *really* cramped in the engine compartment, but was able to loosen a hose (if I had taken it off, I would have had to pull out the entire radiator just to get it back on) to let some water out, but then just undid the inlet to the radiator at the top from the block, and ran water through the whole thing. Not sure if that’s the *best* thing to do, but it seemed to clear things out. Once the water ran clear, I ran the engine for a bit (after putting the proper hoses back on, thanks for asking), and did the whole thing again. Whee. Then, I took the Mini for a spin around Piedmont, loosened that hose again to blow some of the hot water out the bottom, and topped the radiator off with coolant. I’ve probably got a relatively high water to coolant ratio, but it’ll have to do for now.

So, there’s this Armstrong Williams thing, where he was paid nearly a quarter-million dollars to shill for the No Child Left Behind thing. Pretty egregious, right? But at least you can say, well, minority conservative, paid to sell privileged white boy’s policy to people who aren’t quite as likely to just take everything privileged white boy says on faith. So you figure, at least they’re getting something for their, I mean our, money.

But then there’s this thing that this pundit Maggie Gallagher got paid by Health and Human Services to push Bush administration marriage and family policy. Link here.

Now, it’s much less money we’re talking about, but Josh Marshall brings up the point that this really doesn’t *do* anything. These aren’t people who are likely to push competing policy, and that this really just looks like a make-work thing, where the administration just hands out cash to people they like, and keep them employed. So that’s weird, right? Or is it?

I mean, let’s say there’s no other payola out there – that we’re just talking journalists, at this point, and there’s not egregious amounts of money changing hands. I know it’s unlikely, but it’s not necessary for the point. Let’s say that you’re a journalist. A conservative-leaning journalist, but a journalist nonetheless. Now, let’s say the Bush administration thinks maybe, since you’ve got a head on your shoulders, there’s some chance you’ll actually put 2 and 2 together and come up with 4. They, of course, want you to say 80 million.

Well, maybe it’s just that the public’s gotten lazy, or maybe it’s that Karl Rove is way more of a mastermind than I’d ever conceived. But basically, let’s say he’s instituted a tremendous program that our national media buys into, where conservative journalists, and even marginally conservative-leaning people are essentially told that they don’t have to actually do any work, but they’ll still be kept on the payroll, and to just kick back, relax, and let the cash roll in. Don’t worry about the journalism bit. We’ll tell you what to say – all you need to do is say it, and we’ll take care of all the work that you do. Oh, you’ll still have to print your name at the top of your column, and in some cases, you might even still have to write it yourself. But we’ll take care of the research, and we’ll take care of the fact checking. We’ll even brief you on the specific terms to use, so you won’t even have to come up with the language yourself.

Instead of working, go play a game of golf. Spend time with the kids. You won’t lose your job, because this is really how the institution works, now. Just come in after lunch, and you can have your weekly column banged out by 2:30, out of the office in time to catch a matinee with the kids. Or get high on Oxycontin. Or have phone sex with your producer. Whatever. No problem.

We’ve made the institution such that not only will no one care, all you have to do is ask whether they’re impugning your integrity when they call you on your bullshit. And your defense? “Everyone does it.” Don’t worry – they all do. We own *everyone*.

In essence, I’m saying that I think the *entire* right wing of “journalism” is in on this cash-for-hucksterism scheme. I don’t think they’re getting checks from the government, necessarily (though I’m sure that there will be many, many more that are discovered), but I do think that the government is basically doing their “work” for them, and that these so-called “journalists” are perfectly content to chill out, say what they’re told, and live the high life.

So, Starbucks has this “beverage” that’s called “Chantico” – it’s called “drinking chocolate,” by the marketing gurus at Starbucks. I was skeptical, but it was pretty good. So I decided to make something similar at home. Ended up taking three tablespoons of cocoa, half a cup of milk, and half a bar of Ghiradelli chocolate. If it’s not the same, at least it’ll utterly destroy any want I have for chocolate.

So Aura didn’t make the cut. It didn’t get onto the gbadev.org competition cart. I’m disappointed, and in some senses, almost disgusted, because some games are *clear* ripoffs of pre-existing games, like Battleship, or Magical Drop, which was expressly prohibited by the competition rules. One game has Battlezone’s original tank as the splash screen.

So, I’m disappointed. I’m irritated, and sort of pissed off as well, that after two months of waiting, we end up on the short end of the stick.

But, at the same time, I couldn’t be happier with Aura, I couldn’t have been happier with the experience, and it’s genuinely something I’m extremely proud of, and happy to have had a hand in creating. I think that we actually have a shot at making this a *commercial* success on the PSP or the DS, to be honest, and that rejection from these guys is like having your high school music teacher tell you you’re no good, then go on to write a piece of music that’s a tremendous critical and commercial success.

One thing that seems to me to be a recurring theme:

Republicans, by and large, seem to keep getting caught in scandals that make them seem explicitly hypocritical. “Family Values” types who get caught in illicit affairs, or gambling, or drug habits, say. O’Reilly and Limbaugh come immediately to mind, but Bennett, and a whole host of other right wingers, or evangelical Christians also come to mind. Then there’s the fact that while anti-abortion rhetoric and moral purity is supposedly high in the red states, abortion rates are higher, as is teen pregnancy and such.

And it seems to me that this is a critical distinction between extremists and moderates – and I’m not talking Republicans vs. Democrats, in this case, because moderates in both tend to avoid these sorts of traps, and extremists on both sides fall into them – it’s just the nature of extremism. The reason I use right-wingers in the previous paragraph is that they’re explicitly quite un-moderate. But the point being that the moderates tend to take human nature into account, whereas the extremists seem to think that idealism is all that’s necessary to form an ideology.

I’d love for the world to be a utopia, where there is no upper class, and no poverty. That’d be great. But it doesn’t take human nature into account. We will always want to strive to be better than others – to have someone subjugated, to have some lead. We’re not able, on a large scale, to accept forced homogenaity, and I think that that’s a *good* thing, not a bad one, and one that needs to be taken into account when forming an ideology. We also make mistakes. We also have desires that aren’t going to be controlled by rhetoric.

So… what’s the point? The point is that the less an ideology takes human nature and diversity into account, the more doomed it is to abject failure. And the more radical someone is in buying into an ideology that doesn’t take human nature into account, the more stupid they’re going to look when *their* nature makes them do something that doesn’t line up with that ideology.

Yeah, it’s obvious. I know. But that doesn’t explain why so many people continuously look like morons by falling into that trap.