Why yes, I did spend the day trying to give Apple $10 for my iPod Touch software upgrade working diligently, why do you ask?

The above photo is a shot of my soon-to-be niece Madison, who tagged along with my family, Jessica and Jessica’s mom to Gatlinburg, TN over the weekend. With the exception of Madison’s sudden discovery of saying the word “gah” over and over again on the car ride home, we all had a decent enough time on the trip.

During our trip, I think Jessica and I both noticed some of our Southern ‘heritage’ that had slipped away. Neither one of us has a particularly deep accent, but everyone else’s seemed to be that much more noticeable. Although it wasn’t my only one, my worst offense was to *gasp* describe a soft drink as SODA on more than one occasion. Truly terrible.

Other Thoughts

• Might as well make it official, my web design company finally has it’s own web site. You’d think that with all the experience I have with this sort of thing I would have had one faster…
• Speaking of, this makes me smile. Ladies and gentleman, Ira Glass.

• The cat has been unusually affectionate since we got back. Whenever I sit down for more than 5 minutes, she’ll jump on my lap and start licking my face. At this point, I’m pretty sure the animal shelter lied to us when they said we got a dog.

Image by Cookie_lady1

I know it’s a sign that I’ve been playing too much Mario Kart when Jessica told me the story about the pigs traveling across long distances in flooded areas, finally arriving to civilization, only to be shot by police officers, that my first thought was, “Man, those pigs were blue-shelled…”

So, it’s 11:30, I’m working on some odds and ends, and the cat is snoring.

No, really, she’s snoring.

That is all.

Back when I was designing covers for an entertainment insert at the school paper to pay for college, an all text cover usually meant that the original cover idea fell through, either through a late photo/illustration, or we couldn’t come up with anything tasteful enough to actually work without us getting banned or excommunicated (from the public state school, *cough*…)

More often than not, the all-text cover is usually the Hail-Mary of cover designs*. They’re usually quick, safe, and really hard to screw up, especially with a good writer on board.

This beauty that showed up in my mailbox today, though, made me smile like nothing else. No, it’s not particularly well designed. Yes, it has that heinous orange that Wired Magazine is so fond of. Yes, it probably took the designer 20 minutes to lay it out once the copy was in.

But you know what? It’s the funniest cover they’ve done in over a year. If a flaky illustrator is the reason this beauty came to being at the 11th hour, then they should do it more often.

* Not that there aren’t good examples of all-text cover designs, mind you. An easy recent example of excellent, well though out text cover design is the cover to John Hodgeman’s The Areas of My Expertise.

Yes, there are drawbacks to the life of a “work-at-home”-r. You’re never really away from your work. You’re expected to be a doorman for everything package or repairman that shows up at the house. You’re responsible for the bulk of the housework. There’s no one else to blame but yourself when a disaster happens.

But you know what? Ice cream in the middle of the day whenever you feel like it more than makes up for any of the downsides.

Meet Gypsum.

Jessica and I have been talking for awhile now about getting a pet of some sort. We went back and forth between a dog or a cat for awhile, but finally decided on a cat after a visit to the Humane Society.

I’ve never had a pet before, so it’s taken some adjustment on my part. She’s been a remarkably good cat for the most part. She’s very sociable and hasn’t torn up anything yet. We even have her “trained” to sleep on her own little bed instead of all over the house. I’m told that training a cat to do anything is an exercise in frustration, so I think if this whole web design thing doesn’t work out, I’ll get a job as a cat whisperer.

Gypsum’s been fairly feisty the last couple of days, though. She hasn’t been spayed yet, so she’s looking for some kitty-love, but we don’t have any to give. We’re taking her to the vet Tuesday to get fixed, though, so hopefully she’ll be back to her adorable, laser-chasing self in now time.

Ok, so it was more like 550 feet according to Google Maps but who’s counting?

Earlier today Jessica, Cathy and I went to the Clinton rally at Mishawaka High School, which is across the street from the duplex. Jessica is a huge supporter of Hillary, and I’m always up for taking photos of famous people, so we decided to attend. Mike got us in as his guests. Instead of waiting outside in the bitter cold for at least a couple of hours, we sat in the library for about the same amount of time. The only real downside was that the librarians, being librarians, confiscated everybody’s cellphones, apparently on request of the Secret Service.

Once inside the gym, we grabbed really good seats on the left side of the stage about 5-6 rows back. After some more waiting, a few failed wave attempts and some sing-a-longs with the school choir of “Come Sail Away” for some reason, the show got started. A few local heads of Democratic groups and Hoosiers for Hillary spoke for a few minutes, then the head of the local College Democrats chapter introduced the first real speaker, a person very near and dear to Hoosier hearts. After a failed guess of “Jesus” from the crowd, the one and only Sean Astin made his entrance.

Being a recent transplant to Indiana, I had no idea how much Hoosiers love Rudy! (Imagine if him and Guilliani had hooked up…) The place went nuts for this guy. He spoke for about 10 minutes about how much he loved Hillary, made a few self-deprecating Rudy jokes and smiled a lot. I had no idea that he was as politically involved as he conveyed himself to be.

After that, Hillary came out to huge applause. She spoke for a good 30-45 minutes on the economy and some broad points of how she would fix it. Interspersed in her speech were points about health care and how horrible the current president is for the country. Afterwards, she took some questions from the audience. Most of them weren’t really questions, but people blurting out names of hot-button issues, followed by her talking point response. One girl asked to sing “God Bless America,” which was talked about but never happened, and another question was completely sidestepped because it was more or less a 30-second ramble of words that really never really collected into a single thought.

Her talking points for the day were pretty spot on. Her unexpected bright spot was her thoughts on how to deal with undocumented immigrants. It made me sad that she started to describe an unreasonable solution of hiring thousands of law enforcement officers and giving them broad powers to knock on everybody’s door to rustle up immigrants as an example of what a terrible idea it was, but people in the crowd started cheering anyway.

When she was leaving, Hillary circled around and greeted those around the stage. Jessica made her mom proud by shaking her hand right before Hillary left. I tried to get a decent shot of it, but ended up getting a great blurry photo of the back of Clinton’s head. *sigh*

Other thoughts:

• Despite the lengthy post, I don’t plan on voting for Hillary during the primary. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think she’d be terrible at the job. She’d be a vast improvement over what we’re working with now. Plus, she’s an excellent speaker and has some great ideas on how to better our country, especially with health care.

  However, I don’t want her for president for a couple of reasons. First, if she gets elected and serves a full two terms, 24 years would have past since the country has been lead by somebody who’s last name isn’t Bush or Clinton. I don’t like the idea of an American aristocracy, or at the very least such a blatant show of one.

  Second, Hillary seems to have a very similar “my way or the highway” attitude that drives me nuts about how the country is ran today. Because of her polarizing persona, she seems to have alienated many of the people she’ll have to work with once elected. While there’s nothing wrong with being strong and aggressive, one shouldn’t do that at the expense of colleagues who helped you along the way.

  Also, during today’s speech, I didn’t appreciate the overemphasis she placed of the defense department’s role in the government. I’m willing to let that slide, though, since the whole area pretty much survives on manufacturing of Humvee’s and steel production, and to not talk it up would most likely piss off the audience.

  Early on in the primary season, I really liked Richardson and Obama. While I agreed with with Richardson’s policy points a bit more, Obama seemed just as capable. His 2006 speech on the intersection of religion and politics really worked for me. Since Richardson’s out, Obama’s going to be my guy in the primary and hopefully the general election. If he picks up Richardson as a VP nomination, all the better.

• As noted here, Mishawaka High School was not the campaign’s first choice in venue. Originally, the rally was supposed to be at Washington High School in the South Bend school district. The school board (named the South Bend Community School Corporation. Really, a corporation? You’re just dooming the kids to terrible 9-5 jobs that they’ll hate for the rest of their lives.) decided that the rally couldn’t be held at one of their schools because it would disrupt class.

  Whoever decided to not let Clinton come to the rally is a complete and utter bonehead. Yes, school would have been hectic to say the least today for them. I know firsthand: my own workday was pretty much toast after attending the rally. Jessica had to skip (with permission, of course) her own morning classes today. And despite the sob stories being passed around about unemployment rates in the area, I doubt that there wasn’t a sick day or two called amongst the 4,000 or so people that showed up.

  However, when a potential and still somewhat viable candidate for the role of LEADING THE FREE WORLD comes knocking at your door asking to speak for an hour, you let her come. Looking at it at it’s blandest, it’s an invaluable civic lesson for all the students attending. It’s a great launching point for classrooms for the rest of the day to discuss a huge number of potential lessons on history and citizenship. If nothing else, it’s an experience that the student body as a whole would never forget.

  I mean, really, I got to listen to the guy who saved Frodo’s butt in Lord of the Rings. How awesome is that?

• I’ve come to the conclusion that, although I absolutely love my camera, it sucks indoors in gyms. I can’t get the ISO on it high enough for those low light situations without having ridiculously blurry photos 80 percent of the time, and flashes are for suckers.

And here’s another from the related links off of that video.

There’s plenty to miss (and not to miss) about Memphis. Barbecue, warm weather and the word “y’all” doesn’t come with the territory up here in the Great White North. What I miss most about Memphis, though, is decent radio.

Radio in South Bend revolves around classic rock, alternative and christian music. 17-year-old Brandon would have been pleased, but 17-year-old Brandon also had horrible taste in music. The few standouts (i.e., the ones that don’t feature the afore mentioned genres) are interesting (especially the Urban Christian *sigh* station), but are only listenable for twenty minutes or so. I can only listen to White Snake for so long before going mad. (No wonder the 80’s turned out the way it did).

Compared to South Bend, Memphis technically doesn’t have the variety of music that my selective memory is affording me. Like most major cities, the variety of radio stations in Memphis has been lost in favor of a smattering of Top-40 stations and the occasional genre station. However, the stations in Memphis that play non-Top-40 are so much better than what’s played here.

For example, Power 95.7, the rap station in town has nothing on Hot 107.1. I mean, 107.1 was featured in Hustle and Flow. Not so much for 95.7. They also have better access to a fledging community of performers who want to break into the business. People in South Bend seem to want to either drink beer or stay away from the cold, preferably both.

The soul station in Memphis, Soul Classics 103.5, blows the local soul station out of the water simply because they play Motown on top of their slow stuff. Memphis even has a faux Top-40 station in Snap 94.1, which intersperses the likes of Jennifer Lopez and Justin Timberlake (which, really, what station in Memphis doesn’t play him at some point?) with the likes of older acts like Barry White or the Jackson 5.

And to top it all off, nobody in town has nearly as good of a morning show as Drake and Zeke hands down. Sorry, Bob and Tom, you just don’t cut it, although I suspect your Web site is better…

It makes me sad that when driving around that when I’m driving around in Sunny Mishawaka, the closest I’ll get to some crunk music is Styx. I figure Lil’ John’s got a great breakin point in “Mr. Roboto” about halfway through once they get past the slow beginning.

An aside, as entertaining as endlessly comparing Memphis/Tennessee and South Bend/Indiana sounds in my head, I’m afraid I’m going to break into Yakov Smirnoff territory if I keep going. And while I’m not afraid to tell a good submarine screen door joke, nobody likes a whiner.

Wino’s maybe, but not whiners.