The Blogventure Begins... Later!

Thanks to those of you who have already turned in requests for the all-request blog month. I'll just mention that the event will actually start on the first of October and continue until Halloween, at which point I will have a Blogventure Blowout and write posts on every topic that hasn't been covered yet.

I was figuring that I'd be lucky to get 30 requests, not thinking that of course people would immediately think "I'll give him a dozen or so just for fun" At first that made it seem like I would get to pick and choose, but no: I'm going to write a post about all of them. Even if that means some posts end up like this:

I have a request that I cover the financial crisis. I haven't really been keeping up, but I have noticed that inflation stories make for very dull news coverage. I was lifting weights and trying to watch CNN and I was just about bored to tears.

I did increase my reps by 10% today, though. Booyah!

Thanks to Steve-o for the idea.

Or, if things get desperate:

Joe Biden sucks and is super-lame.

Thanks to Amy for the request!

No, no, I shan't be so dismissive. I will have at least three poorly-sourced paragraphs based off of unconfirmable source stories explaining why Joe Biden sucks and is super-lame ('Cause he is, man. He is). You deserve my very best, and so I'm going to at least give you something half-assed. We're committed around here, even if the things we're committed to are pretty stupid.

Choose Your Own Blogventure

I've been posting off and on for a bit without any real momentum, so I just thought I'd set a goal for the next month of posting every single day. In order to meet this goal, I thought I'd give myself some motivation:

I will, for the next month, post on whatever topic is requested by a reader. Literally anything. Leave a comment or send me an email, and I will post on it. Regardless of what the subject is. I'm good for it.

Bring it on.

Not every expression means something, right?

Has the expression "all politics are local" finally become a completely useless expression? Can people stop saying it now? I understand the theory of how every bit of government only affects people on an individual, one-transaction-at-a-time level, and all management is done by local officials - police, etc. - but it's still complete nonsense now, right?

I pay taxes which are taken out of my check electronically, and the check itself is deposited into my bank, a national chain (WaMu), which was recently bought out by an even larger national chain (Chase). When I do my tax form at the end of the year, I do it online as well, because I do everything online. I move to another area of the country for a week, absolutely nothing at all changes. My life is fully portable, because it's all tied into the grid.

The massive, massive majority of people have no idea of the names of the people who are their selectman. A huge percentage of those also do not know their mayor, or their congressman, or their governor, or their senator. Our only concerns are fully national - we know the president, we know national issues: the war, immigration, gay marriage, and so on. The issues that are fully local, economic ones, the debate on them is always a national one. Even a state as proudly self-reliant as Texas fails to even pretend to try to fix any of the problems. Anything of any importance is decided on a national level.

So why pretend it's any different?

For the record, my congressman is Kevin Brady, my governor is the tiresome Rick Perry, my senators are John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison, and my town is in flux over who is in charge until we incorporate in a couple of years.

Things are pretty normal now. Except - oh, yeah, I blew up my apartment.

There are a certain percentage of things that can only happen to me. Bizarre coincidences leading to disaster, things like running into a skunk while skiing, or having a plow truck dump all the snow from an overpass onto my car while I was driving underneath. Twice. The first time I ever drove in a blizzard. This week had one of those.

Sunday afternoon, I was watching football at home and decided to flip over to the other game. Since I don't have cable, I pick up all the broadcasts via an antenna made out half a dozen coat hangers and a paper clip. Understandably, whenever you change the channel, you have to re-twist the metal a dozen different ways in order to pick up the new broadcast, and I've gotten fairly used to the general idiosyncrasies of each channel: CBS - down and to the right, Fox - straight up and over the TV, ABC - attach to the doorknob, NBC - don't even try. Still, it can take a couple minutes of struggle to finally get an only vaguely fuzzy image.

On this occasion, I was wrestling the wires and jerking things back and forth when the paper clip burst free from the coaxial input and slipped off the edge of the hanger. Purely coincidentally, it managed to impale itself inside the outlet that the television was plugged into, in the millimeter of space between the plug and the outlet. There was a small, brilliant explosion as the paper clip melded itself to both the outlet and the plug, leaving a large, dark circle around the outlet and knocking out all of the outlets and lights in my apartment. I whacked the plug out of the outlet with a wooden spoon and went to flip the breaker a couple times. Nothing. I had shorted out my apartment.

I called my apartment complex to tell them that my outlets didn't seem to be working for some reason. They were appropriately apologetic for my baffling loss of power. I managed to be magnanimous about the whole thing. "I'm sure it's just one of those things," I told them.

Hopefully they'll forget about this incident quickly so that they can't start putting a pattern together. This sort of stuff tends to follow me around.

Here's another sale I'll be missing.

I went to renew my Social Security card and discovered that their office was stationed in what turned out to be the world's ugliest shopping mall. For one, it had the world's least appealing clothing store:

Immediately next to the the least appealing place I'd ever want to order a pan-seared salmon.

Which is surprising, considering their excellent street exposure.

And we wonder why there's a recession.