Can I ever find you again?

Love,

Zuzu

P.S. Send my love to Delete.  Oh, sure, there’s someone here named Delete, but it’s really Backspace in disguise.

This place will remain in business.  Where else can I examine the contents of my navel?

Big Brown won, with great life story of the trainer (whose girlfriend was murdered in the next room from their daughter, who was with him at the Derby) and the jockey (seems he’s got a hearing-impaired son).

Really a great pull-away win.

But.

Eight Belles, the first filly in the race in 9 years, who took second place by more than the same margin that Big Brown beat her, broke down after the race and was euthanized because she broke both front ankles.

I was at Belmont Park for the Belmont Stakes in 1999, when Charismatic was supposed to take the Triple Crown, but he broke down at the end. It was a gorgeous fucking day in Queens, perfect temperature, no discernable humidity. My friends Rosalyn and Kevin were in town from Chicago; Roz was on business and Kevin was along for the ride (though he was from Kearney, where the pork store on The Sopranos is (sometime, remind me to tell you about my (very) peripheral involvement in the North Jersey and Connecticut mobs) and had moved to Chicago to get away from the mob thing).

Kevin lent me $50 to bet, because I had been misled by the Visa Triple Crown ads that they’d accept my debit card there.  I bet on Charismatic and a couple of other horses; Kevin wound up betting on the eventual winner, Lemon Drop Kid, because of a throwaway comment I made about him while I was looking at the race guide, that he was out of Seattle Slew.

In the end, Lemon Drop Kid won, Charismatic broke down at the finish, and Kevin won about $4000 on his bet based on my throwaway comment about Lemon Drop Kid’s parentage.  He also sprung for dinner that night.

The creepiest bit is that I’m fairly certain that the breeders will work hard to extract usable eggs from the corpse of Eight Belles.

Whee!

Of course, I have no idea where I’m going to live next.  I can’t do any serious apartment-hunting until I have the proceeds in hand, and of course I won’t have those until the actual closing.  I’ll have seven days to move out after the closing, but that’s cutting it close.  I’m hoping to either get something last-minute, or put my stuff in storage and get into a sublet for a month or two while I figure out where to go next.

The pets will be an issue, of course.  I definitely have a place to stash the dog, but the cats might be a problem.  OTOH, it’ll be easier to get a sublet with just them while I look for a dog-friendly building.

Apartments around here are pretty cheap, especially on the other side of Coney Island Avenue closer to Flatbush (which is also closer to a much more convenient subway line).  And there’s Astoria, which is very close to where I work, and also fairly cheap.

I’m kicking myself a little for getting the computer now, but it’s not like I could move in anywhere with $1300, even in Flatbush.

Eh.  It’ll all work out in the end.

There were a few moments of frustration last night while attempting to get online wirelessly (and Apple could be a little more clear which device they’re telling you to restart when you’re trying to do setup). But once I got signed in and set up, it was a breeze.

I’m still getting used to the change in user interface from PCs, and especially from Firefox (can a Mac run Firefox? Because I’m not digging Safari so far). But ancient synapses are coming back to life — after all, I learned how to use computers on the teeny-tiny first-generation Macs at my campus newspaper, and I used them (with the exception of a few years of using mainframe-based pieces of crap at the professional newspaper I worked for between college and law school) all the way up through law school, until I arrived in a law firm that was still using MS-DOS and WordPerfect. So I had to retrain myself in WordPerfect and then, eventually, Word (when law firms finally decided to use the same programs their clients did).

My first computer,* purchased third-hand in law school, was one of the ’80s-era Macs. 1 MB of RAM. One.  (My new iPod has 2GB.)  4-inch black and white screen. It was slow, and because it had no memory I couldn’t load any software onto it or use it to get online, but I was able to do my outlines and my exams on it, and print them at the law school’s computer center.

But now I have a sleek, fast, compact little MacBook. With a working disk drive! I’ll finally be able to upload my CDs.

_______

*Of my own — my family had a Commodore 64, not that we did much of anything with it but play games.

It’s always something; car broke down, locked out of car, ill relative, weather, running late.  I’ve spoken to her several times about this, but last night was the final straw.  She called me at 8:30 (I’ve asked her to call if she’ll be later than 7) and left a message that she probably wouldn’t be there before 9:15 because she’d locked her keys in the car.  By the time I got the message, it was already 9:30, so I assumed she’d just gone ahead and walked Junebug anyhow.

She hadn’t.  When I got home at 10, the lights were out, the leash was where I had left it that morning, and the poor dog was practically knocking down the door to get out.

Junebug loves her.  But what am I paying her for, if she walks my dog only moments before I arrive home anyhow?

So.  I’m in the market for a new laptop, and I happen to have enough money saved for one, since I’d been planning to replace the one I have in a few months anyhow.

Suggestions?  I’ve been considering something from Apple, but I’d need to know if I can just plug in my cable modem, camera, etc., and whether the Word available for Macs is compatible with law firm usage.

Seems that a few of the Big Boi Bloggers who have wholeheartedly and uncritically embraced Barack Obama* are a wee bit upset that he appeared on Faux this Sunday and didn’t “take them on” as one of his advisers had told Greg Sargent he would, in order to silence the critics (on the blogs) who were taking him to task for appearing on the network and thus legitimizing it.

Sargent (all emphasis mine):

To be clear, Obama wasn’t obliged to go after Fox. But a senior adviser said Obama would, as a way of quieting criticism of him. And he didn’t.

This will likely further dismay liberal bloggers who had worked very hard to get Dems to boycott Fox as a way of deligitimizing the network and who already criticized Obama for agreeing to appear in the first place.

Obama turned in a perfectly solid performance. He probably succeeded in making a positive impression on many voters he might otherwise not have reached. But the broadcast was clearly a big victory for Fox and Chris Wallace, too.

Matt Stoller:

Greg Sargent’s blog post ‘Obama Doesn’t “Take Fox On,” After All’ kind of says it all. Obama is sucking up to Fox News, and beyond that, the campaign operative who said he would just out and out gave false information.

You can’t trust the Obama campaign, they will lie to you to promote right-wing institutions.

And later, in another diary:

It is very difficult to acknowledge that your candidate deals with you in bad faith, and so I understand the emotional inability of Obama’s most ardent supporters to realize that is what happened. I am an Obama supporter, but I don’t think he’s particularly trustworthy. The issue at hand is that Obama’s campaign simply gave out false information to Greg Sargent to placate bloggers. . . .

I think lost in all this nonsense is just how weakened we [Liberal blogs] have become in all this. When we accept lies from our leaders and openly dismissive knocks from them, it destroys our core argument that Democrats need to have integrity and to stand up for themselves. No they don’t. We don’t stand up for ourselves and we let them lie to us without consequence

Why should they listen to us when we ask them to do something we won’t do for ourselves? There’s probably no point in making this argument, but if I reach one person hopefully it will be useful. When you say that your voice doesn’t matter, it doesn’t. When you enable bad behavior, unethical behavior, it continues. I’m sorry, but the Iraq war happened for this reason. Silence.

If you don’t like that Obama steps on you, speak out. Clinton at least has a reason to step on us since many of us have openly called her a Republican. It’s a fight, and we didn’t back her. Instead we back someone that openly lies to us and thinks nothing of it. Worse still, there are no consequences, only criticism of people who are Obama backers but are frustrated at being lied to. I remember this situation during the Clark campaign, when I was attacked for speaking out about the campaign’s mistakes, until he lost a campaign run with ghoulish incompetence.

It was a mistake for us to endorse Obama, just as it was a mistake for us to do nothing against Clinton after she accused Moveon of intimating her supporters at caucuses. We should be stuffing ads discussing her Bosnia sniper fire in Indiana. But we don’t believe in standing up for ourselves.

So go ahead, accept the lies. It seems to be what we want from our leaders, and so I suppose it’s what we are going to continue to get.

Aw. He sounds so dejected to find out that Obama is, in fact, a politician. I could almost feel sorry for him. Except that he’s been one of the main contributors to the toxic environment on liberal blogs in the past few months, in which anyone who raises criticism of Obama gets shouted down, astroturfed, threatened, mocked, driven out. And you’ll note that even in his depressed and disillusioned state, he manages to get a few digs in at Clinton.

In an update, Stoller links to this post by Lambert at Correntewire which points out that during the interview, Obama specifically threw Daily Kos under the bus. Which shouldn’t be such a shock to these guys, since he’s done it before.

I admit, I’m having a schadenfreudelicious moment here. After having been pointedly and personally savaged for perceived support of Clinton just because I asked a few people to look at the rules they were insisting she was disregarding, let alone for pointing out that his rhetoric about choice and women’s autonomy makes me veryveryvery nervous, I have little sympathy for anyone who bought into the mass delusion that Obama was some kind of new politician (Everything you’d hoped for and more!  Going to bring Unity and Change and Hope to the electorate in some undefined way!) and who, in defense of their delusion bullied and intimidated anyone who criticized Obama (or asked to see his progressive bona fides or who simply didn’t vote for him (damn those racist Archie Bunkers who want to hear about issues! There’s Hope and Change to be had!)).

Still, I’m glad to see that some of these guys are beginning to come to their senses. Hear-no-evil, See-no-evil and Speak-no-evil is not the way to handle legitimate criticism of your candidate, nor is attacking anyone who dares to criticize as out of touch, old, a bitch, a racist, what have you. Candidates *must* be evaluated on their merits, and you can’t evaluate someone on their merits if any and all criticism is greeted with, “LALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU, YOU OLD BITTER RACIST BITCH!!!!

The next few weeks should be interesting. I’ve been suspecting that the longer the primary dragged on, the less able some of the Big Boiz would be to maintain their unqualified and uncritical support of Obama, particularly if he wasn’t winning all the time. No wonder they’ve been in such a rush to put an end to the primary.

Edited for atrocious grammar and run-on sentences.  _______

* Just to be clear: I’ve got no problem at all with people who support Obama. However, if they do so uncritically, and when asked for a reason why they support him, stammer something about hope and change and what a great progressive he is — and he promised a pony! — before launching into a diatribe about how awful Hillary Clinton is, then I reserve the right to mock their gullibility. As here.

And then I start thinking about Bill, and about how long ago that first date was, and it suddenly hits me: Bill is 53 now.  I dated a man who’s now 53.

Which makes the fact that I’ve rejected several guys from OKCupid out of hand for being over 50 somewhat ironic.  Well, if by “ironic,” I mean, “indicative of not quite coming to terms with my own age.”

____________

* In my first job out of college, I worked at a newspaper in Connecticut.  One guy there had previously worked for the Springfield Advocate, which is not associated with the gay paper, but is part of a chain of alt-weeklies in Southern New England.  He said that one of the traditional things to do at someone’s goodbye lunch was to take the box of unclaimed mail from the personals and make the person read the letters out loud.  I’m kind of glad that technological advances have made this particular ritual obsolete.

And to make myself feel even older, I remembered that the daughter of another one of my coworkers, whom I used to babysit for extra cash, is now old enough to be starting college this year.