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November 30, 2005

Job Hunt

Oh.

My.

God.

I've been job hunting since 12:30 today. 7+ hours of walking around Manhattan talking to bar managers and owners and attempting to sell myself as a bartender.

Please please please tell me if there's a job out there that will take me now.

Please. Someone.

I'm literally on my knees begging here.

Posted by Kat at 08:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 29, 2005

A rant directed towards media people

Make up your minds. If they're homicide bombers, suicide bombers, insurgents, terrorists, yellow-bellied cowards, or frat boys with underwear on their head, then call them that. Don't use two things to describe the same person in the SAME ARTICLE!

I mean, really. That's just bad journalism.

Posted by Kat at 10:23 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 28, 2005

What in God's Holy Heaven are they thinking?!

PETA Tells Kids to Run From Daddy

...comic books that portray fathers as homicidal maniacs.

The handout, titled "Your Daddy Kills Animals," features a grinning lunatic gutting a fish, and warns kids to keep their puppies and kittens away from Dad because he's "hooked on killing."

Is that all? No, not in the least.

PETA claims its only goal is to reduce meat consumption by changing children's eating habits.

Right, because making sure that kids are terrified of dad is really going to change their eating habits.

Remember, kids, PETA kills animals!

Posted by Kat at 02:17 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 24, 2005

Happy Thanksgiving!

For some reason, I don't have a holiday category.

I may fix that error at some point, but not right now.

Meh.

I'm working on a scholarship essay. Pain in the ass. Alternative energy.

It's taking up all my energy.

The onions on the stove aren't helping. Damned onions.

Posted by Kat at 05:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 23, 2005

Bored

I have nothing to blog about.

I have rants.

I have raves.

I have things to share and opinions to hand down from on high.

I have nothing to blog about.

I hate Thanksgiving.

Posted by Kat at 06:02 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 22, 2005

Thanksgiving

I'm off to VA for Thanksgiving. 5+ hour train ride.

I hope I can get some work done.

Anyway, I may or may not have internet while I'm there, so blogging may be nonexistant. Don't worry, I'm ok.

Unless you hear about a train crash on the NY-DC line. Then you should start worrying.

Posted by Kat at 08:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 21, 2005

Me smaht

You Passed 8th Grade Math
Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!
Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

Although #9 is kinda fucked up, because...well, take the test. If you figure out what I don't like about it, come back and comment. I'll tell you if it's what I thought.

Posted by Kat at 06:41 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

France

Three weeks of rioting.

Is the country collapsing?

Posted by Kat at 11:54 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 18, 2005

A child is missing

A child in Colorado is suspected to have been dead for 18 months.

She's 6.

How in hell did someone not notice? A SIX YEAR OLD CHILD HASN'T BEEN SEEN FOR 18 MONTHS.

Only now do her parents say "oh, she ran away a few days ago after I wouldn't give her a cookie."

BULL.

SHIT.

I'm disgusted. People want to protect children, but they always forget about the ones who really need protection in favor of stupid things like the VChip and a woman's tit or naked back.

Posted by Kat at 12:08 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Dreams

I had a dream last night that Jeff died.

Feisty was the one who emailed me.

This scared the shit out of me, because it felt real. It felt like something that could happen, and that she would be the one to tell me.

Fucking brain. It can't stop for a few hours so I can get decent sleep. Argh.

Posted by Kat at 09:09 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 16, 2005

Responsibility and youth

Dr. Helen doesn't seem to have trackbacks, so I'll just write my reaction to her entry about the Pennsylvania case here and post a link to it in her comments.

While I agree that personal responsibility is sorely lacking in American society these days, I think that the inclination to place the blame on the lack of boundries placed by parents and culture is wrong. Many kids are acting out and reacting to a situation they aren't comfortable with. There's a reason the Youth Rights movement is gaining strength, and a large part comes from an educated populace that realizes they are expected to shoulder responsibility while having to wait to be given rights.

I have a number of issues with how this story has been presented in the news, not least of which the constant description of the girl as a "kid". When I was 14, I was in no way a child. I was responsible for my own life and my own actions. Many teenagers are. To claim that someone becomes a full-fledged person at a specified age with no reason for said age doesn't work. Why is someone not a person one day, and then the next, because of something as silly as a birthday, they become a member of the social contract?

I'd like to see parents teaching their kids responsibility when they are young, rather than being shocked at their rebelliousness once the child grows up and new rules are suddenly instituted. As it is now, parents brush off things as "kids will be kids" and then one day, they start making all these new rules.

The best comparison I can think of is the Patriot Act. A large portion of the population, when suddenly faced with this new set of rules, flipped out. It's the same thing, on a smaller scale, with teenagers. Institute new rules at what seems like random, and they're going to react accordingly.

People forget that those little things running around have brains. Guess what? They think and react the same way adults do.

Another issue I had has to do with the comments on her post. One of the commenters wrote about statutory rape - Once the person is post-pubescent, and able to consent, there is no way in hell that should be a crime. It falls under the nanny-statism that Dr. Helen talks about.

Oh...Nanny-stating...right.

*sigh*

It is just as possible to have a mini-nannystate within your own home. If a person is controlled by an authority figure, with no ability to make their own decisions, that is just as bad as if the government was making the decisions. Parent or government...at times, it can be the same thing.

Work with your kids, rather than trying to control them.

Posted by Kat at 12:38 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 15, 2005

A big FUCK YOU to everyone who said "Saddam didn't have WMD"

Commenting on Saddam's enriched uranium stash after the U.S. Energy Department removed it to Oak Ridge, Tenn., in June 2004, top physicist Ivan Oelrich told the Associated Press:

"[Saddam's] 1.95 tons of low-enriched uranium could be used to produce enough highly enriched uranium to make a single nuclear bomb."

Oh, ladies and gentlemen, THAT'S NOT ALL...

In a March 2003 op-ed piece for London's Evening Standard, Norman Dombey, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Sussex, calculated that Saddam's yellowcake could have yielded a staggering nuclear arsenal.

"You have a warehouse containing 500 tons of natural uranium," Dombey wrote. "You need 25 kilograms of U235 to build one weapon. How many nuclear weapons can you build?

"The answer is 142 [nuclear bombs]

No WMD's, huh?

(Thank you, Ace. Although I noticed that the story about MDMA talked about abuse, not moderate use. Abuse of anything will fuck with your brain.)

Posted by Kat at 04:49 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Kids are nasty, no question

I'm gonna disagree with Feisty on this one. Yes, to some degree, kids need to learn how to deal with crap. But if they were really tormenting her, which I suspect they were, the school should have done something about it. Since they didn't, the parents' only recourse was to sue. I just hope it taught the school a lesson.

Oftentimes, things are brushed off as "kids being kids" when, if it was a group of adults showing that kind of behaviour, they would be arrested. If, by 7 years old, the kids don't understand what is appropriate behaviour and what is not, that's the parents' problem and needs to be dealt with within the home. However, if the parents aren't doing anything, then the school needs to step in and enact some discipline. If they don't do anything, SUE THEIR ASSES.

If my school had stepped in when I needed them to, I think I probably wouldn't struggle with the problems I have now. It's taken me nearly 15 years to come to terms with how nasty girls can be, and realize that it was their problem, not mine. There are some seriously fucked-up kids out there, and it's the adults' responsibility to straighten them out when they're young.

I don't mean to say "put every kid on Ritalin" or "send them all to gulag camps", because neither of those is a solution. All it does is fuck up the kid more. But parents do need to institute discipline, with the kids' consent. Sit down, talk to the kid when everything is calm, and agree to have certain results for certain actions. Prepare them for real life.

Oh, and in no way was I oversensitive. Even now, people ask how I survived the crap I went through as a kid. Apparently I got it worse than anyone else at my school.

Posted by Kat at 11:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 13, 2005

Find out why DUI arrests are making our streets more dangerous

Here.

Damned good and informative read.

Posted by Kat at 02:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

BANCAKES!

If you fuck with the founding members of a message board, you will be banned.

Just a little PSA for all potential trolls out there.

Posted by Kat at 01:20 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 12, 2005

Yodakitty!

yodakitty.jpg

Inspired by Bitchypoo. Miz Robyn always has great cat photos.

Posted by Kat at 08:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

MOM!!!!!!

momshesteppingonme.jpg

MOM! ATHENA'S STEPPING ON ME AGAIN! MAKE HER STOP!

Posted by Kat at 06:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 10, 2005

Offended

If you make me censor my language, I will be resentful. And upset. And offended.

For a very long time.

Posted by Kat at 12:40 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

November 09, 2005

French use blogs to both incite and quiet violence

Something I haven't seen much in the blogosphere in the last couple weeks is about how the French are using blogs to incite violence, but also to try and quiet it.

CNN has a story about it, though.

Young rioters are using blog messages to incite violence and cell phones to organize attacks in guerrilla-like tactics they have copied from anti-globalization protesters, security experts say.

This goes along with the concept of a post I've been working on about the intersection of modern free-market economics and the internet, as well as how the current consumer generation treats the internet. It's not very long, but is written out longhand and needs to be transcribed. Hazard of writing blog entries on the subway.

Posted by Kat at 05:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Welcome back, Jeff.

He's back...

And with things to say, plus a spiffy new design.

Here's an interesting observation:

And it occurred to me: the world is a great boulder rolling down a hillside, and we are the moss that covers it. We squabble among ourselves. We bicker and wrestle and strive. And from our perspective — you know, the little bits of moss — it seems like our daily struggles are the most important things in the universe. But from a wider angle, we’re just moss on a rock. We can’t stop the stone from rolling down the hill; we can’t significantly change its course. Oh, sure, if we all work together, we can nudge it a little bit this way or that. From the point of view of a piece of moss, that’s a world-changing event. But from the wider view, we’re all still just stuff on a rock.

I'm not totally sure I agree. Yes, I admit that we are all victims of history, as well as of our own inexorable slide towards the future. But I don't think it's so much of a hill that we roll down as a river...to use another bad metaphor.

Life is life. We go along, we try to find some meaning, and hopefully we have some great relationships along the way. Life requires effort, and that effort is what keeps us rolling along.

Posted by Kat at 04:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

City University of New York

If my call is so fucking important to you, YOU WOULD PICK UP THE GODDAMNED FUCKING PHONE AND ANSWER MY STUPID LITTLE FIVE SECOND QUESTION!!!!!

Posted by Kat at 03:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 08, 2005

Racism

You know there's a problem with narrow-mindedness when a neighborhood newspaper has the headline "Black Long Island Nanny Accuses Her White Employer of Abuse"

Posted by Kat at 06:39 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 04, 2005

Paris

They brought the riots on themselves.

Their own welfare system fucked them.

I hope the people I know, and their families and friends are ok.

The rest can go fuck themselves.

Posted by Kat at 12:02 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 03, 2005

Sorry, commenters...

I apparently blocked "http" in blacklist.

Hazard of de-spamming 35 trackbacks in five minutes.

Oops. Sorry. Try again.

Posted by Kat at 05:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Looks like another essay is in order...

Tiny paragraph from 'Gang of 14' article

"Although he didn't go quite as far as (Chief Justice) John Roberts (search) did in his hearing, he satisfied me that he recognized this to be one of the unenumerated rights in the Constitution, this basic right of privacy. And he led me to believe that he felt that it was an established right," Durbin said Wednesday after Alito visited with him during the nominee's third day of meetings and photo-ops with lawmakers.

I really need to write about privacy and the Constitution. I've done some research on it, and while I don't consider myself to be anywhere near competent when it comes to Constitutional Law, I have some ideas and suspicions.

For now, I'll let it brew and see if I get any comments from my readers that I can use to fill out an essay.

Posted by Kat at 10:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 02, 2005

Meryl

Is anyone else having problems getting to Meryl Yourish's site?

UPDATE: Nevermind, I got it now.

Posted by Kat at 05:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 01, 2005

An open letter to mommy

Mommy, you know we love you.

But please. We're trying to sleep. This means

So, got it? Those are some of the rules. At least when it comes to sleep. There are still fifty billion more, but we'll get to them.

And that's not including the food rules. We'll get to those, too.

Posted by Sarai at 08:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

How many blogs?

The Blog Herald (found through a message board for internet marketers) says there are over 100,000,000 blogs. I assume he means active blogs.

I disagree. I think that when you count out the splogs, one-post inactive blogs, and people who have stopped blogging but have left their sites up, you probably have less than 10 percent of that. I know I have at least three or four out there that might still be "on the web" but not active.

I call bullshit.

Posted by Kat at 01:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Disillusionment

I find myself not only irritated with those on the left for not listening, but also those on the right, for continuing the partisanship and making gross generalizations.

It started when I was reading Blog, by Hugh Hewett. I got annoyed with all the "lefties" and Democrat-bashing.

Maybe I just actually see it now. Maybe I was missing it before.

Either way, I'm sick of it.

Posted by Kat at 09:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack