no, i da snowman!
Netscape 4.x folks: I hope the new font/layout is a little easier on the eyes? I casually dislike Verdana but you know, desperate times.
Woo, our storm gets news coverage.
Re: yesterday's Jack Frost comments, Happycat points out Roger Ebert's corrosive review of the Michael Keaton picture.
So the last workshop of the semester is tonight: dinner at Ethan's house. I'm on beverage duty, so obviously it's my job to get Ethan drunk. The plan was to make something called "Dublin punch" which unfortunately only exists in a bar book in Happycat's closet, which is currently inaccessible because he's renovating his room. If memory serves, it contains Irish whisky, water, sugar, honey, lemon juice, cloves and nutmeg, but proportions are anyone's guess, so it's going to be dicey. Well, fuckups are the mothers of invention.
Workshop stories this semester have seen an amazing amount of carnage visited upon animals. I've done a body count and the total number of dead animals this semester is 75 plus or minus a few, depending on how many dead raccoons it takes to fill four sacks. There's been a dog on fire, a cat eaten by a jealous electric pet disturbingly like Sony's AIBO, and a pig overdosing on methamphetamines. I personally have killed no animals and am contemplating some sort of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in Literature (PETAL) movement.
Gail Sheehy's October profile of Dubya is starting to look disturbingly prescient. Excerpt:
Even if he loses, his friends say, he doesn't lose. He'll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play until he can beat him. "If you were playing basketball and you were playing to 11 and he was down, you went to 15," says Hannah, now a Dallas insurance executive. "If he wasn't winning, he would quit. He would just walk off.... It's what we called Bush Effort: If I don't like the game, I take my ball and go home. Very few people can get away with that." So why could George get away with it? "He was just too easygoing and too pleasant."
Another fast friend, Roland Betts, acknowledges that it is the same in tennis. In November 1992, Bush and Betts were in Santa Fe to host a dinner party, but they had just enough time for one set of doubles. The former Yale classmates were on opposite sides of the net. "There was only one problem-my side won the first set," recalls Betts. "O.K., then we're going two out of three," Bush decreed. Bush's side takes the next set. But Betts's side is winning the third set when it starts to snow. Hard, fat flakes. The catering truck pulls up. But Bush won't let anybody quit. "He's pissed. George runs his mouth constantly," says Betts indulgently. "He's making fun of your last shot, mocking you, needling you, goading you-he never shuts up!" They continued to play tennis through a driving snowstorm.
The School of the Americas - the infamous Ft. Benning, Georgia institute which has been training Latin American military officers (including several future dictators) in counter-insurgency techniques since 1946 - reopens 17 January 2001 under the new name "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation." A January protest vigil is in the works as response.
And with that, I have to trudge off and buy a snow shovel.
