Dogs run free...

Candy Monsters

We finished with our Halloween distribution of over 400 candies at around 7 pm. Alison, Steve and Carole all stopped by, so it was a jolly evening, sitting on the porch, Steve quizzing the little kids as to the exact nature of their costumes. "What are you?" They all answered. We had a girl from Long Island with her White Trash friend (dressed in a white trash bag), many pirates, Supermen, hobos, ninjas, etc. There was one guy with a riding-a-dragon costume. A few indolent youths with no discernable costume at all. One kid came by a second time. When challenged as a double-dipper, he blurted out that he had no idea where he was. We believed him. Just as we ran out of candy it started to rain. Cleared them out right quick.

Sanctity and marriage.

With the recent New Jersey Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage, or rather on gay legal rights related to marriage, this post from Digby is great - "...the state should not be in the "sanctity" business." My point exactly. Everyone should enjoy a state-sponsored civil union or domestic parternship, or whatever you want to call it. If the loving couple want to be married, they should go to a priest, or rabbi, or senior cleric, or religion guy of their choice.

But do the styles change, too?

This looks like a great product for those with many fast-growing feet in the house. Some children (and their parents) may be too style-conscious to allow such a device into their homes, however.

Josh in traffic.

This may be what he thinks about, except not the wanna hang out later bit. He does have two children and a fine wife.

The Intertubes

With the ever present internet available to assist undergraduates toiling on a research paper, some think all is well. Yes, there are many online resources, in some cases even the text of research papers. (An aside to the two youngest daughters - libraries are better for those things called books and all of the old articles that have yet to be sucked into the Intertubes.) In any case, my sense of the internet and research is well dipslayed in this image. Poor student, working hard, using the expensive computer as a lowly typewriter, while on the internet it's Party Time!

Dogs may be the only free things left.

Eric Alterman has a good post today:
"It's a tossup in my mind as to whether it serves one's interest in greater measure to be incompetent, dishonest, purposely ignorant, ideologically and/or religiously obsessed, cavalier about the loss of human lives and the destruction of tens and hundreds of thousands of families, fisacally promiscuous, or sexually promiscuous with innocent 16-year-olds, and hence, quite possibly guilty of statutory rape, to rise in the modern Republican Party."
He then goes on to discuss Condi-the-Liar and her lies regarding warnings of the 9-11-01 attacks. Great, if somewhat depressing, read.

Over at Unenumerated, Nick has a post on the recent loss of one of our basic freedoms - the right to challange any detention by the rulers.