Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

a taste of fruit

Originally uploaded by monkeyc.net.

If you know the answer to “What’s yellow and equivalent to the Axiom of Choice, this corny a cappella YouTube video is just for you:

The path of love is never smooth
But mine’s continuous for you
You’re the upper bound in the chains of my heart
You’re my Axiom of Choice, you know it’s true…

Oh, and the answer is “Zorn’s Lemon.”

OK, well, I thought it was funny. Maybe, somehow, you just had to be there.

Breaking news!

Republicans will give US juries a brand-new new option–to find a defendant “Not guilty by reason of sounding sincerely sorry. ”

Rove’s latest PowerPoint playbook (leaked yesterday) tells GOP lawmakers it’s getting too hard to play on the heartstrings of people who find out you’ve been abusing their trust.

“I want to make it very clear I am remorseful. I accept the responsibility. There’s no way that I can turn back the clock. And I’m not that individual that I was years ago.” (Statement to the court by yet one more wealthy defendant, quoted in the NYT.

Until the new law gets passed, Rove urges his new crop of GOP felons-to-be to avoid the over-familiarity of “I take responsibility.”

There’s even an online playbook, Rove points out, of less hackneyed ways to say “I don’t want anything bad to happen to me as a result of the bad things I already did to you”:

It was a very very bad thing to have done and I’m really very ashamed of myself. I can only say it won’t happen again. To have murdered so many people in such a short space of time is really awful, and I really am very, very, very sorry that I did it, and also that I’ve taken up so much of the court’s valuable time listening to the sordid details of these senseless killings of mine…

Yep, that’s Episode 27 of Monty Python.

Elsewhere in the leaked file, Rove suggests a new law requiring judges to hand out probation, not prison, when a defendant’s lawyer uses this magic formula:

“Hasn’t my client already been punished enough?

Homecoming band practice at UNH

Originally uploaded by Edward Faulkner.

I wasn’t thinking about football until MontaukRider blogged it:

Tomorrow is Homecoming at my alma mater. I’ve attended the Homecoming Football game with my family since I was in my teens. It was my Uncle Shane who started the tradition. He’d buy reams of tickets and arrange huge tailgating parties. Shane was exceedingly gregarious, and nothing pleased him more than to have family and friends all together for food and quaff.

His children have continued going to the annual festival, as have I and my children. My two sons went to every Homecoming Game that’s been held since they were born. Now they both attend the University: Now I travel to see them at the Game. There’s a satisfying symmetry in this.

Autumn may be a season of change for some things…not for others!

A “shadowy group pouring untraceable millions into this fall’s campaign”–that’s how one reporter describes “Progress for America.” One thing that isn’t shadowy about this group? Close ties to the felons who brought us the PhoneJammerGate:

• The names of president of Progress for America Brian McCabe and its executive director Chris LaCivita both figured in reports of the trial of convicted phone-jamming felon James Tobin.
• Convicted phone-jamming felon Chuck McGee made a point of contacting “veteran strategist Brian McCabe” to describe his idea of blocking Democrats’ phone lines. (John DiStaso, Manchester Union Leader, August 11, 2006) Of course, as Tobin’s lawyers repeatedly told the jury, knowledge that a crime is being planned is not, in itself, a criminal offense.
• Tobin’s phone records show multiple phone calls and attempted phone calls with Brian McCabe’s NH-based company.
• Chris LaCivita was James Tobin’s boss at the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2002, (although he’s more often mentioned for his later work with the Swift Boat Vets.)
• McCabe, LaCivita, and Tobin are all current or former associates of Washington’s powerhouse GOP lobbying firm DCI Group, most recently outed for trying to pass off a polished hit-job on Al Gore as an amateur YouTube video.

More about the DCI Group and its phone-jamming ties from a recent New York Sun:

Progress for America’s fund-raising and ad buying is run by employees of a Republican political consulting firm, DCI Group, which also helped run another anti-Kerry organization, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth…DCI Group is a regular landing spot for Republican Party loyalists. The firm has employed some people other GOP firms might have turned away, such as a former Northeast regional political director for the Republican National Committee, James Tobin.

Tobin took a job at DCI Group while under investigation for involvement in a scheme involving jamming of Democratic get-out-the-vote phone banks in New Hampshire during the 2002 election. Last year, he was convicted on two felony charges relating to the case and sentenced to 10 months in prison. Tobin is free pending appeal, but a DCI employee said yesterday that he is no longer working for the firm.

…Mr. McCabe, who was not available for an interview for this article, was not charged in connection with the voter-suppression scheme.

Yes, the moral values that brought us NH phone-jamming are now spreading millions all over the current election.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that no matter how long you wait in line for a resident parking sticker, there will be some reason that you can’t get it today:

“I’m sorry, but you need to show, not only your car’s registration, but also three pieces of mail delivered to you within the last 30 days, at least one of which must be a utility bill, bearing in mind that cable TV bills don’t count as utility bills.”

So tonight at dinner, I was proud to announce that it had taken me only TWO separate trips to our City Hall Annex to get one new resident sticker.

Frank may well have an insight into this problem. “Maybe any time they actually give you a parking sticker, some penalty gets deducted from their pay check?”

Reward for sore muscles after stacking firewood

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

It’s October–people who live in NH are just entering fireplace-marshmallow season!

This old fireplace was built in the 1890s by grad students of a Yale classics professor. The legend goes that he’d take “bad” boys to NH for a summer and have them build a small house from start to finish, with marshmallows and Latin verbs at night.

amo
amas
amat
amamus
amatis
amant

I love October, marshmallows, and fireplace fires.

Our logpile, or what Frank and I did this weekend…

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

…otherwise, the red squirrels who live in your neighbors’ yards will tease the red squirrels in your yard about what a slipshod homeowner you are.

Winter’s long and hard enough for the little squirrels. They shouldn’t have to get through it without their own woodpile.

…I’m one of many new people exploring Second Life.

This twilight scene comes from the garden store of Julia Hathor, who creates fascinating stuff with pale textures like waterfalls and (for Halloween) a little ghost-generator. Want one in your garden?

My favorite spot so far, however is Robin Wood’s store, not because I want to buy pink hair or a crystal ball but because she generously provides a free tutorial “temple” and a small garden full of lovely birdsound.

I bought the wings you see here from Robin Wood. How could I resist them? And really, I bought the wings for her.

My fellow “citizen journalists,” blush with me. After reading 700+ placeblogs, Lisa Williams has our number! “You know, a lot of citizen journalists are a bit shy. They don’t like to do cold calling and interviews. So what they do instead is dig into public documents, maybe put stuff that’s out there into a spreadsheet. Maybe in a way this is a kind of journalistic research that substitutes for stuff they don’t like to do. Or maybe it’s the kind of journalism you can do at 3 a.m.” That’s a quote, not from Lisa’s blog, but from her talk about her new project Placeblogger, last night at Harvard’s Berkman Thursday group. A few more favorite quotes, from my TextEdit jottings….

The (shy?) citizen journalists at GothamGazette.com are doing something Lisa says is great.

“They pick a public document of the week each week and actually read it and talk about what it means.”

How Lisa found the 700+ placeblogs she’s studied so far

“It was very low tech. I kept typing placenames from the atlas into my browser–and every time I threw that net into the water, I came back with more fish!”

Lisa’s good news for old-line newspapers about the zillion web-versions they’re creating:

“I don’t understand why newspapers aren’t trying to make money from technology transfer programs like the ones that universities have. Newspapers around the country are building out tomorrow’s legacy technology today–and they’re not making any money on it because every newspaper is building its own one-off.”

We know how a “real” reporter would cover a fire, a car crash, a meeting in Yourtown, NH. But how does somebody local tell the story? Lisa Williams says:

Placeblogs reveal a fiercely non-generic America that’s not about national big-box retailers, and they don’t feature the kind of broad, blunt coverage that results from driving by communities at highway speed, or flying overhead.

There’s little Red vs. Blue America or fad coverage here. They show America at the level of detail you get at a walking pace. Many of them are also delightful — they give a snarky insider’s view of a community that’s the closest you can get to teleportation — it’s like being there and listening to conversations on the street.

Tomorrow at Harvard, Lisa will launch Placeblogger, her project to aggregate headlines from 700+ placeblogs around the US, plus one in Antarctica!

Citizen journalists, my fellow snarky insiders, we have been notified!