So really the most sickening thing for me is the way the newscasters seem about ten times as outraged about high gas prices than the concept of dead people floating in the streets down south. No matter how many crocodile tears were shed on camera over Louisiana and Mississippi, they kept segueing back to those FUCKING GAS PRICES. One newscaster in particular, his eyeballs just about popped out of his head as he described a station charging $6 a gallon.

Be honest–are you really surprised? Last week it cost me about $42 to fill up the minivan, and it hurt, but my feelings about it are much like Mum of Twins. The prices are annoying, but Americans have been getting away with something the rest of the world hasn’t for ages, and now we’re just catching up. The disaster down south is just convenient gouging excuse for the oil companies.

Bruce said he heard on the radio they even had trouble sending the National Guard to help, because so many of them are busy being blown up in Iraq. At least we know where our priorities are, hey.

Tonight Bruce’s soccer team kindly set up a bouncy house for the soccer orphans at the game, but this turned out to be less than a blessing. Even though the other kids were close in age, they were boisterous enough to require me to act as a human shield inside it for the twins. The girl that was supposed to be watching and refereeing the kids—she didn’t do much of anything except talk on her cell. Despite all this things were fine for quite a while. The girls had just about gotten their fill when, oops, a close encounter slammed a little boy’s foot into Darcy’s face. With kids this age I don’t really expect an apology, obviously. But there was no acknowledgement at all, which was a little interesting, because usually even the most oblivious kids will at least pause for a second when they realize they have collided with another object and caused it to scream. Nope, he continued to blindly bodyslam himself into everything like a kangaroo on crack. It took me about ten minutes to calm Darcy down from her injury, and after that we got out. The other kid exited also (though I didn’t know it). Darcy had just mellowed out and was about to put her shoes back on when out of the blue, the little shit ran up to her and kicked her leg, hard. I was stunned. “Please DON’T do that,” I said sternly, and sort of frowned at him. He had no particular expression on his face, and I have no idea what posessed him to do this. His mother was on the soccer field, playing, so I was on my own. At that point I simply took the girls to the other side of the park to play. I told Bruce at halftime if he figured out who the mother was he should break her leg (no not really, but boy was I pissed off).

I am starting to get a bad attitude about little boys. I don’t want to. But every time we’ve had a problem at a park, it’s always been a boy, usually doing shit like the above. Pissing on the park trees (yes, and the mother was actually present), throwing rocks at people’s heads, hogging toys, hitting, kicking, shoving, etcetera, etcetera. Now I know there must be some hellion little girls out there, but if girls start to bother the twins, it is usually because of the opposite problem. They try way too hard to be friendly and frighten them. But this is obviously somewhat preferable to having little snotnoses trying to kick their kneecaps in.

On a different note: three Movable Type upgrades completed on three different servers and no problems whatsoever. My God, Six Apart finally got it right: an upgrade that doesn’t require a bottle of Excedrin.

And yes, now that fall’s approaching, the new blog look is the old look. I missed it.

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Hurricane K photos
Too bad there’s no Picasa for the Mac
Ever wonder what life is like in Dubai?
Print your images from Flickr
This, frankly, really doesn’t seem to belong in Costco
What kid didn’t have one? ME.
This guy, he had too much time on his hands