Just wondering, Rush Limbaugh:

I’ve been browsing news headlines while waiting for Barack Obama to take the stage at the DNC, and this CNN story about how the GOP says Obama’s stage is too much caught my eye.

The conservative online magazine The American Thinker remarked that the stage made use of the “basic stagecraft of visual illusion.”

“He has 300 foreign policy advisers — and for his convention speech, a football stadium equipped with a movie set that looks like a Greek temple,” nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh wrote on his blog Thursday. “He claims to be the one that ‘we have been waiting for,’ and he can lower the seas and promise and deliver universal love simply by showing up.”

“The polls are overestimating Obama, just as he is overestimating himself,” Limbaugh said.

Um, really?  Do you remember the time that W. held a press conference on an aircraft carrier?  And even though he could have just taken a helicopter, he decided he needed to arrive via jet landing on the carrier, wearing a flight suit?  His own personal Top Gun photo-op?  And then W. apparently thought he could unfurl a “Mission Accomplished” banner and announce that major combat was over in Iraq, and it would be true?

Lazy Sunday Music: Gabriella Cilmi

(I know, I know: I haven’t been posting.  In my defense, it’s hard to post when AT&T refuses to fix your internet, and also says that you’re being unreasonable to complain about your phone service going out about every 10 months, because that isn’t recurring problems, that’s just normal!

Sigh.)

Anyway, here’s some music for your lazy Sunday.  This is Gabriella Cilmi singing “Sweet About Me” on Jools Holland:

I love Cilmi’s voice, and especially that it holds up live (give it at least until the first chorus).  If you’d rather see the official music video (with the slightly more up-tempo studio version), it’s here.  Oh, and also?  Girl is only sixteen.  Yeah.

Deviant lolcats

It’s been a while, but I found this caturday-for-nerds lolcat that I made a while back:

See also: Merton’s theory of deviance explained on Wikipedia.

When Worlds Collide

One of my favorite things in cities is seeing the “old” city juxtaposed with the “new,” and Boston is no exception.  This is the only thing I photographed the entire time I was there:

The collision of worlds in Boston wasn’t only architectural, of course, because both my Indiana life and my Connecticut life met in Boston–two different worlds of work and family, and my work juxtaposed ever the more clearly against my father’s (chemistry).  I knew that the meeting of my Indiana life (where I am 26 years old and am responsible for a house, a car, a living creature, an office, a career) and my Connecticut life (where my father still often refers to my 23-year-old brother and I as “Kid #2″ and “Kid #1,” respectively) would be strange, but I didn’t expect my livelihood and all of my colleagues to be compared to chemists the entire time.

My father, who of course now has a career that has involved many a nerdy conference and several staged at the same place in Boston, raised the level of caffeine coursing through his veins to epic proportions and then set about narrating the entire experience of walking through hotels and malls and convention-y things.  This served the dual function of being helpful, if you assume that I cannot read the signs and navigate my own way through a shopping mall, and being highly embarrassing, which is probably why my father took such delight in it.

He also took this opportunity to compare my brethren to his own world of chemists, commenting on all the ways our conference was clearly inferior to chemistry conferences.  For example, my, what a flimsy little conference bag they give you!  Our conference bags are much more sturdy than that!  And where are all the free pens emblazoned with the names of prescription medications for embarrassing problems?  (Okay, he didn’t actually say that last one out loud, but you know he was thinking it).

The best part, though, was when he suddenly decided not to limit is helpful-slash-embarrassing commentary to only those linked to him via DNA and stomped over to two confused conference-goers looking at a map and trying to figure out where to go. He herded them in the appropriate direction, and then announced that the difference between my colleagues and his own was clear:

“the chemists always know where they’re going, when we have conferences here.”