Maru's Mun Journal

So, after last night's election in the USA, I have this cheerful political goddess in my head going hornfingers all over because the brokenness of the system and all those shitty voting computers couldn't steal the election this time, and all the shady creeps were thwarted. After all, her canon is all about voting computers and why they are a Bad Thing. She is making atrocious jokes in my head about people being fired because the dubious fix in Ohio didn't work out after all. Her own Xanatos gambit in canon started in Florida, so she's quietly cackling to herself that Florida STILL didn't get its stuff together.

And then, I have this dead Ostrogoth king being grimly satisfied at the defeat of wishful thinking this linked article declares, and finding his view of 'fate' mirrored in the facts-and-faith dichotomy of it. The world is all that which is the case, what has happened stays happened, and people have to deal with it instead of flailing and acting entitled. Nobody is entitled to their version of reality. Nobody is entitled to ANYTHING except that which is granted in laws and contracts, and if those aren't kept, you can sue in due process. All the rest just clouds your vision and makes you unable to deal with what's coming -- and while there is never any guarantee, it is better to go with the most likely event, and prepare accordingly. Sandy could have pulled an Irene, but it's better to prepare for an Irene than face a Sandy unprepared. Same goes for intricate mathematical projections of likely election outcomes, so the pity for dramatically sore losers is limited. That's what Teja is about, actually: his idea of 'fate' combines the 'that-which-is-the-case' type of fact-set, plus a very likely projection of the immediate future, growing uncanny by adding an complete lack of wishful thinking when facts + accurate projections clearly tell otherwise. Teja, although 'conservative' to the bone, would very much approve of the suddenly restored good political sense of those strange people in the Lands Beyond The Sea.

I think they both get an EP tonight where they can get the chance to voice those opinions to all comers, and to drink to Obama's victory. Poins can be hung over for a change and shut up with the blank verse already so I have the brainwidth for my political pups.-

Long ago, when Big Ben was a little pocket watch and I was first playing Margolotta in the old Discworld RPG, I learned of the existence of a certain Carla Bruni, who made quite charming contemporary chansons, with rather cracky lyrics in French, via Ji (whose DW user name I don't know, if any).

I liked. I liked her second album, which was in English with even crackier lyrics, just as much.

But then, colour me extremely dismayed when suddenly she turned up in the tabloids as having an affair with (and then even marrying!!) that miserable little populist and wannabe Napoleonoid that France had just elected president, Nicolas Sarkozy. I kept wailing how she used to make good music, and what a terrible terrible waste, and aberration in taste, that was. What the fuck was she doing there, out-glamouring Michelle Obama??

Today, Sarkozy was voted out. Now, Carla Bruni can go back to making music. If her next album has nice and cracky lyrics again, and that sauntering rhythm I like about her first two (the third, which she made while first lady, was too tame and somewhat unremarkable, as she probably didn't want to offend anybody), I might forgive her aberrations and buy her music again...

Triumph no. 1, done as a facetious letter:

Dear Liberal Democrats of Germany, you are fucked. You are so fucked, there isn't even a word for it. It's only one state, you may say, but two more are set to vote soon, and you will cease being a part of the political landscape. We hate you now the way you've deserved to be hated since 1982. Absolutely no love, your former* electorate.

Triumph number 2:

The first mosquito of the year came inside tonight. The cats hunted it, but I ultimately killed it, flattening it against the wall. I won't be stung tonight!



* I never voted for them, as I remembered they are a bunch of opportunistic traitors ever since 1982, but everybody else has now, after 30 years, woken up to that fact as well.

Even though I am not a failing national economy, I got a radical haircut -- actually, in preparation for my departure to rehab* tomorrow. I don't want to have to bother with hair after sports and swimming and showers and that sort of thing. So, off with that hair!

The only odd thing is the total lack of dye -- I feel I ought to be more purple somehow. But with all the sweat and water ahead, purple dye will have to wait until after my return.-


*Link is in German, but you do get an idea what a nice kind of place they are sending me to. I have been looking at the pictures and been thinking 'Yes please! This will be good for me!'

In some places, things are still very much not okay.

This is utterly haunting -- even in gawky Google translation, the atmophere of casual hate this blogger from Berlin reports from Belgrade gives you the willies.

I think that in the US, they need a Moist von Lipwig round about now...

Today, the state government that caused this spectacular clusterfuck over a mere train station was successfully voted off, and the state of Baden-Wurttemberg, or Swabia, is getting the first ever Green Party-led state government ever.

After 58 years of straight conservative rule.

See them cheer on this short vid from a bloke on my blogroll on blogger.de

This is a political cat, and a LOLcat to boot, because it has a caption and is at a demonstration:


The picture is by German blogger and journalist Richard Gutjahr, and can be used under a Creative Commons license, with proper attribution.-

These are apolitical cats enjoying their new blanket in their old basket, in genuine sunlight; they have no captions, but one of them seems to have thumbs:


This picture is by me, just now, and of course we all three want to show our support for the democracy movement in Egypt! At least, I am pretty sure my cats would if they knew about the black-and-white LOLcat on Tahrir Square.-


ETA: Seems there are more pictures of that bloke and his LOLcat about!

Remember the political uproar around the Stuttgart train station, the police using water cannons on schoolchildren and old age pensioners that I blogged about two weeks ago? The old man with the bleeding eyes?

I just heard that some of the cell phone videos of the event that were up on YouTube have been classified as 'not suitable for minors', and you only can view it when you log in. And it really is not -- it shows RL violence as dealt out by some big burly Uruk-Hai policeman.

Now the joke: one can assume that it was the police who denounced it to YouTube as too violent, in a vain bid to suppress it!

I went to a little protest rally in solidarity with the Stuttgart21 protests that I blogged about earlier. That blogger from near Stuttgart had pointed me there, and wanted to look whether anybody turned up there, and just show my nose in general support.

( Pictures! )