Christmas Bits and News Linkage
Last night was our gamer Christmas, and just all-around a hell of a busy day.
The day started when I rolled out of bed about 11am, and directly into the shower, to be up and going. I had to finish my Christmas shopping. With no coffee and hardly any sleep, and dragging Art sleepily along with me, I headed to the mall to finish our Christmas shopping — things for Lil’ Art.
You know the Nintendo Wii doesn’t actually exist — just a cruel hoax perpetrated by the Nintendo people with assistance from retailers, to piss common folks like you and me right the hell off before the holidays. I reported on that a couple of days ago. As it turns out, the Nintendo DS is also part of the hoax. That was our second choice for Lil’ Art’s present, and also not to be. Hello! Nintendo! Did you actually manage to manufacture anything this year? Jebus.
So, we ended up buying several games for systems Lil’ Art already has. We’re getting him the newest EQII expansion, which is an online download, so we’ll probably do the download Christmas Eve and have it ready for him Christmas Day. We got him about six video games that looked cool, including Dirge of Cerebus, the sequel to FFVII. We also got him Sid Meyer’s Pirates, because it just looked like fun. I had gotten him a book, Wizardology, which is six kinds of cool, and some odds n’ ends for his stocking. We went up and down toy aisles, and as far as I can tell, no one really put out any cool toys for Lil’ Art’s age group this year. Everything looked kind of stupid.
That took a couple of hours, after which I came home and wrapped everything up. Meanwhile, I had finally located my gamer gift, which was coming in the mail, and had not been delivered yet. That was bad, as the gamer gift exchange was last night. I needed my gift, damn it! So, I finally figured out how to track the package, only to find the UPS claimed they had delivered the package on the 11th.
With dawning suspicions, I headed outside and around to our front door, which we don’t use, to discover my package, where it had been sitting, inside the screen door, hidden from view, for a week and a half. Nice. I also discovered that part of what I had ordered had been sold out, so instead of many Pirates cards, I had only two booster packs. This necessitated an emergency run to the local gaming shop for more cards. Fortunately, they had some. It’s a bit hit and miss there. You never know what they’re going to have.
But, everything turned out well. We got all our Christmas shopping done, and now I can just sit back and enjoy the holiday. The gamer Christmas was pretty cool — I ended up with the whole collection of the old D&D cartoons on DVD, which I think I’ll watch a bit of tonight. I made a ham dinner last night which turned out extremely well — I was so pleased with it. I slow roasted a boneless ham with red skins and carrots, in a sauce made of pineapple, brown sugar, and honey, just like my turkey dinner a month or so ago. The ham came out so tender we could cut it with a fork. I was just amazed. I’ve never seen ham come out like that before.
Today will be a lazy day, I think. I have a couple errands to run, and some house-cleaning to do, and I was considering making more Christmas cookies. We’ll see if that actually happens or not — Christmas sugar cookies are a pretty involved process, and I don’t know if I have the motivation for it or not.
And now, a bit of news linkage, and then I’m out to get my chores done.
NJ Allows Civil Unions for Gay People — New Jersey became just the fifth state to extend some rights of marriage to gay couples, but many of the speakers said the law was just a stop on the way to full gay marriage - possibly in the next two years.
When this whole mess became an issue, my opinion was that the best way to solve the marriage/gay getting married/religious issues, was to make everything a civil union. If two people want to hook up, they get a civil union, which would confer all the same rights and legalities that a marriage did. If these two people also happened to be religious, then they could also have a marriage ceremony at a church, and the church could “marry” them.
When you get right down to it, “marriage” as it stands now, is really all about the legalities. If two people really love each other, they shouldn’t need rings and ceremonies and legal papers to make it permanent.
Projected Numbers For the “Flu Pandemic” — A GLOBAL flu pandemic could kill up to 81 million people, experts warn.
A global flu epidemic . . . kind of a scary thought, as I live on the front line, so to speak. Working in customer service, I’ll be one of the first people to catch it. Just thinking about it kind of makes you wish we’d spent some of those billions we used to bomb the fuck out of Iraq on making sure we were ready for this kind of thing, doesn’t it?
The Draft — Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson gave qualified support yesterday to renewing the draft - a suggestion that rattled the White House. “I think that our society would benefit from that, yes, sir,” Nicholson said of replacing the all-volunteer force with a tough draft purged of the deferments that allowed many to avoid service in Vietnam.
If this were an honest war, for honest reasons, I don’t think we’d need a draft. I don’t support a draft. You shouldn’t force young people to go kill other people. That’s wrong. Perhaps if you’re running out of military, you ought to reconsider why you’re still fighting.
