Five-year-old dance party

Soundtrack: Modest Mouse, “Fire it Up” and “Float On,” and Outkast, “Hey Ya.”  Then after Clipse’s “Wamp Wamp (What it Do)” came on (probably a bad idea; the ipod was on shuffle), our cd/ipod player thing stopped working.  Piece of crap.  We have to update our audio.

Allison Two Speakers

Sarah’s dad was a 1960s/70s audiophile who liked fancy stereo equipment (fancy equipment of most kinds, actually — video, ski, camping, etc.) and when she was growing up, the family living room featured these two enormous Allison Two audio speakers. Allison was a cult/boutique audio company based in Boston (I think).
Five years ago we [...]

Feckless Budgeting and Bad Math

This is an amusing article (with a poignant side):
Kathy Peel, a Dallas-based family manager (that is, a life coach whose niche is training families to run their homes like businesses), said that incidences of feckless budgeting and bad math seem to be on the rise, at least judging from the reports of coaches trained in [...]

Mortimer Adler’s Syntopicon

This photo cracks me up:

It’s from this NY Times book review:
In “A Great Idea at the Time,” Alex Beam presents Hutchins and Adler as a double act: Hutchins the tall, suave one with a gift for leadership; Adler “a troll next to the godlike Hutchins,” with a talent for putting students to sleep. Making the [...]

The year CBS killed everything with a tree in it

Re: Wasilla Hillbillies, I found myself watching The Beverly Hillbillies recently with the sound off (but with subtitles) while working out on the Arc Welder or whatever it’s called at the Y, and thinking “wow, this is a really good show.”  The writing and acting seemed sharp and hilarious; I especially admired the physical comedy [...]

End of the Southern Strategy?

Two NY Times articles today suggest that the Southern Strategy — the Republican party’s coded appeals to racist working-class whites to peel them away from the Democrats — may now be dead.
Less than a third of Southern whites voted for Mr. Obama, compared with 43 percent of whites nationally. By leaving the mainstream so decisively, [...]

Girls’ birthday/ Airheads candy cake

Celie and Iris’s 5th birthday party today.  We felt like we were keeping it really small: just five kids invited, no parents or siblings for the most part (drop-off); no friends from school other than one neighbor friend.  (We sold the girls on the rationale that they had a separate party at school — we’d [...]

Australian Slang

Am almost done with this Australian mystery novel, The Broken Shore by Peter Temple.  It’s very good although to tell the truth, I’ve sometimes had trouble following the plot because of the Australian slang/jargon.  There’s a whole Glossary at the end which is helpful.  Here are some good items:
Quickpick: A lottery ticket that spares the [...]

Ice Cream Social

Everyone’s feeling kind of happy and giddy.  Last night we went to an “ice cream social” at Obama headquarters downtown for volunteers.  It was nice.  The building they’ve been in used to house Tortilla Flats, but then (Steve tells me) they sold their liquor license and later lost all their business and gave up.  So [...]

“Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus”

Wow.  Just soaking it all in now.  What a great day.  And an especially nice fillip of frosting on the cake that Indiana went blue!
I’ve seen saying/thinking that some crazy stuff is going to be coming to light about the McCain campaign and Palin in particular.  Here are some choice bits from Newsweek:
NEWSWEEK has also [...]