BIG NEWS!!!!!
Your ever-so-humble narrator has finally been graced with an actual full-time teaching job! I will be
teaching a third-grade class in Pasadena starting in two weeks. I got the word just this morning and have spent all day running
around trying to get all the paperwork together. It's not a perfect gig---the school is currently way under construction and
I'll be relegated to a small bungalow in the south forty for who knows how long---but the pay is great and I'll have what
appears to be tons of support from the get-go. It's been a long time coming. So: Congratulate me!!
On to other news....We returned from our lovely three-week driving journey to the great Pacific
Northwest a few days ago wherein we traversed to lovely Oregon Coast, visited g'parents in Salem,
assailed more relatives in Sequim, hiked into the spectacularly gorgeous Olympic Peninsula,
ferried to Victoria, B.C. and back, watched fin-backed whales happily supping, darkened
the doors of several friends in Seattle, saw the Mariners lose again, ate amazing Thai
and Vietnamese food, took a riverboat tour on the Columbia River, and sped home from Salem
in a hard-core 16 hour blast of non-stop driving, just to see if we could do it. Awesome! Here are a coupla pix:
Your host, maniacally chillin' in between burnin' witches in Salem. Oh, wait...
The amazingly mossy denizens of the Olympic Peninsula's rainforest.
Somethin's spurtin' out there somewhere, I swear. Look hard.
The fetching Debstress and I on the ferry toward Seattle
Bridgette, myself, and a Seattle local named Rachel
And while we were gone...
Man alive, could the news have gotten any odder?
TV Evangelist and hyper-rightwing nutjob Pat Robertson calls for the assassination of democratically-elected
Venezuelan President (and classic Castro-style Yank-baiter) Hugo Chavez...
Umm, maybe I'm wrong, but isn't there something in the Ten Commandments that says something about not killing? To be
fair, he has recanted somewhat, stating that when he said our Special Forces ought to "take Chavez out," it could have meant
many things. Perhaps he meant that they should arrange a night on the town for him--a nice meal, perhaps a film or a play,
and a lovely goodnight kiss at the end of the evening. Sigh! We Americans are such suckers for romance!
Interesting words re: peace activist Cindy Sheehan, surely based on personal experience by Joseph
Wilson, former U.S. Ambassador to Gabon and high-profile recipient of the Bush Administration's patented form of ad
hominem reaming:
The
Bush White House and its right wing allies are responding to Cindy Sheehan and the military families’ vigil in Central Texas
in the same way that they always respond to bad news –by unleashing personal attacks and smears against her.
The "Anti-Evolution Revolution" proceeds apace, with its lopsided faith-based attempts to convince us
all that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, that scientific discoveries regarding the past of our species are politically
biased, and that dinosaurs arrived on the planet at the same time as Adam & Eve. The famous Cabazon Dinosaurs,
out on Interstate 10, will be forced by their new owners to sport signs to the effect that the fossil record doesn't
support evolution. Hmmmmm....
