Stuff

[plutherus]

'Twas the night before Thanksgiving and all through the house, not a creature was stirring

except for a couple of cats determined to destroy some cardboard boxes. Yeah, OK, I gotta pick up a scratching post or something.

meisha and dragon_gunner are back home, after visiting for a week, having driven out here from Oregon, bringing the aforementioned cats, as well as several boxes of books and other things. The apartment's starting to come together. I get to sit in a real live chair now as I type this. Yay!

Anyway, last week was a lot of fun. Got to visit more of St. Louis than I've seen since I moved here. Forest park was amazing – we spent two days there and didn't get to see most of it. I might go back this weekend. Great place to go when broke – admission to everything is free. We spent about an hour and a half in one section of the history museum, and didn't get to the art museum until about 15 minutes before closing on the second day. We did get to visit the whole zoo, though. The butterfly atrium is amazing huge enclosed room full of butterflies from all over the world, including a Blue Monarch exactly like the one that was fucking with us in Yucatan by opening its wings then snapping them shut every time we had the camera pointing at it. The gorilla exhibit opens in the spring, and it looks amazing. Well-funded place, too – they are engaged in huge conservation efforts all over the world and have many endangered species they are breeding for release back into the wild.

They also found me several other cool places to visit: a coffee shop that's on my way to work, in Union Station. Finally, good coffee in St. Louis. I've had a hard time finding decent coffee around here, as well as convincing my co-workers that coffee and beer are two beverages that you should never be able to see through. It figures that the couple that runs the place are from Seattle originally. St. Louis is an amazing city, but the inhabitants thereof know squat about coffee. But they'll learn, oh yes, they will learn. (Back in 1900 they were the US's largest producers of coffee. I'm not sure what happened in the hundred years since then.

Oh, yeah, and a bar. We found a great little piano bar just a few blocks away from me, with two pianos (which are actually keyboards stuck inside empty piano cases), and a drum set on stage. Great fun, we went back there every night after we found it, even though only one of the musicians had ever even heard of They Might Be Giants, and didn't know the whole Birdhouse In Your Soul. Being rather broke, I haven't been back there again yet, but I'll probably go next week after I get paid.

Got my TV hooked up, too – watching South Park right now. It's the Thanksgiving episode with the mutant turkeys and Starvin' Marvin. Ahhhhh. Oh, yeah, you know how the commercials advertising shows always say things like "on at 8, 7 central"? I'm in Central – everything's on at the wrong time. I tried to watch the Daily Show last night, but found on it's actually on at 10 here. Oh, well.

So, how about all those Bush cabinet resignations, huh? His cabinet is deserting him like crazy. Who's next, I wonder? Heehee.

Let's see, what else? There's a letter to the editor in today's Eugene Register-Guard about the shooting in Iraq that everyone's talking about. If you haven't heard about it, apparently some soldier, followed by an embedded cameraman, came upon two Iraqis – one dead, one wounded, in a building in Fallujah. "This one's alive" says one soldier, and the other one shoots him and smirks "not anymore". So, a lot of people are rather upset at him right now, apparently cold-bloodedly killing an unarmed wounded man right in front of a television camera. There's more to the story than what's seen on TV, of course – like, for instance, not 24 hours earlier a marine was killed when a wounded man turned out to be booby-trapped. Yeah, war sucks, huh? Anyway, there is this letter in the R-G defending the soldier: "War is kill or be killed. This is not a soccer match or an NFL football game where you get a 10-yard penalty. One mistake and you are dead." And, as strange as this may seem coming from me, I totally agree with him. The focus should not be on the soldier. These things happen in war, whether the TV cameras are there or not. War sucks, and innocent victims are inevitable, whether they die by smart bomb that strikes a couple of blocks away from a suspected terrorist house or shot by a scared kid stuck in a situation he's really not prepared for. This isn't an abberation. This isn't a bad soldier. This is what war is. Many of us already knew this, which is part of the reason we were opposed to this war. War should really be a last resort, and this administration lied to rush us into an unnecessary one, knowing full well the consequences of that.

But, hey, as long as Cheney and his friends are raking in the dough, it doesn't really matter, huh?

And, speaking of Iraq, I was late to work yesterday so took a taxi in, and met a taxi driver from Iraq. He had the tiniest copy of the Quran I've ever seen hanging from his rear-view mirror. We got to talking about the country (of course), and I told him I didn't support Bush or the war. He, however, was for it. Like my friend Samoud, he is from Basra (I had to ask, but he doesn't know him :), which is under British control and consequently much less of a disaster than it is further north. Saddam Hussein was especially bad for his family, and he was quite happy to see him go. It'll take time to rebuild, he says, but was optimistic about the future. His family is actually doing better now than before the war. I still don't completely agree with him, but it was good to speak to someone with an opposing opinion who wasn't completely clueless as to the reality of the situation.

Anyway, that's enough for now. I'm still enjoying St. Louis, though dragon_gunner and meisha left just in time, weather-wise. They had perfect weather the whole time they were here, and then it started raining the day after they left, and we got snow today. Hey, maybe we'll have a white Thanksgiving. That'd be cool.

Comments

On the Marine.

[31seel.livejournal.com]

The shock coming from both sides (those on the left criticizing the marine, & those on the right criticizing the reporter) derives I think from teh conscious or unconscious acceptance of the idea that the US is over there on a humanitarian mission. This footage breaks that illusion for both sides.