Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Ensure *your* right to vote

hanging chads A great page, GottaVote, summarizes the requirements for voting for each state, so you can see whether you will need new ID, what documents are required, and how long you have to get things straightened out. Look it up, be sure you have what you need to have your say in November.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Our once-proud nation...

This is a sentence that we shouldn't allow to be truth:
Almost half of middle-class workers, 49 percent, will be poor or near poor in retirement, living on a food budget of about $5 a day.
Seventy-five percent have less than $30k in their retirement accounts on the day they depart -- this seems like a clear failure of the 401k model (and a clear explanation of all the elders visible in low-end service jobs). We need to get sane about this before we're right back in the postwar grandma-eats-dogfood days -- actually, I guess we are already. Shameful.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Quote of the day (political edition)

If you were to design a tailor-made plutocratic villain to run for the Presidency in the post-crisis Occupy era, you could barely do better than Mitt Romney. The guy quite literally has the very job and personality that Gordon Gekko's character was based on.
- David Atkins

New kitten!

Yes, we have gotten a new kitten. There was some advance promise to Speck that such a thing would occur this summer, and the wealth of summer kitten rescues gave us a heap of choices. (Those visits are pretty good recreation in themselves!) So here he is, Milo!

Milo's face as he sits atop Speck's rocker

He's still living in a bedroom, being sniffed (and sometimes growled at) under the door by our other cats, but we've let him out for a few supervised adventures, and we hope to be introducing him around more formally in the next couple of days. The cats are bitter, but I hope his insistent and resilient playfulness will win them over.

Milo, a vision in orange and white, sipping from his water bowl

As for us, we're pretty taken with him -- he prances up to anybody who comes into the room, looking for love and/or play, and he has slept many nights already snuggled in the curve of my neck -- and Speck is making her peace with the high energy and unpredictable pointiness of kittens (which I think are different in reality than imagination). One forgets, however, how much feist and play there are in a small kitten, and right now his energies peak around midnight, so it's not uniformly good for our sleep or toes...

Milo waits for a toy to move

Monday, July 16, 2012

This is what happens when summer eats you

That is, you end up with a giant backlog of links and no time to really make a post out of them. Or even hope that anybody will want to sort through them. But here are a bunch of things I've caught in my net over the last few months in the category of Cheerful Bits, yay!

Happy Fascinating