Burn!

(Why do we use extreme temperatures to illustrate that something that is really bad? At first, I almost called this post “That’s cold.”)

So it turns out that maybe the Weinsteins and Lifetime had a point, and NBC Universal/Bravo didn’t want to pick up the option on the new season of Project Runway. So why the delay, then? Um, maybe because Bravo has a Project Runway knockoff in the works and is using this injunction to get a leg up on their competition? Machiavellian. Bravo, indeed.

The one where everybody lies

I was talking last night to a good friend who lives in Virginia, when she brought up the election. I know that she’s usually pretty indifferent to politics and her husband are generally skews right, so I wouldn’t have introduced the subject at all. But once she asked me who I was voting for (Obama) and whether I vote in every election or just presidential (all of them, baby), I felt comfortable asking her the same. She said that she was as yet undecided, which was kind of monumental for her. Usually she just votes for whoever her husband supports, so the fact that she has not definitively decided to do so made me realize that she was actually kind of invested in this election. So I told her the specific reasons for my choice, and phrased it in such as way as to say why I was not voting for John McCain, rather than why I was voting for Obama. I think that enough people can enumerate all the rah rah explanations for their choice of Obama, and I didn’t want to appear too partisan. So I stuck with the policies of McCain that I don’t like, such as his support for continuing Guantanamo Bay, his tax plan, his reversal of his initial stance against torture, his health care plan (this is a big one, as she is in the health care field), and his pick of a running mate.

Surprisingly, my friend wasn’t too big on Palin, either. I somehow thought she might be into her, but thankfully this isn’t the case. I said that Palin seemed to be unable to separate her personal religious beliefs from other peoples’ rights, and that I did not want my life to be governed according to Palin’s understanding of Christianity. My friend, whose husband is religious but is herself actually atheist/agnostic, seemed to understand where I was coming from with this one, and furthermore brought up Troopergate. I don’t think that Palin did herself any favors with that one. We agreed that Palin does not seem to have the kind of temperament that one would want in a (vice)president, and that John McCain, with his frequent expressions of intense anger doesn’t either.

Then we finally got to the part of our conversation that, to me, illustrates why we are such good friends: we are in complete agreement that politicians are pretty much lacking in something (integrity, decency, honesty, some essential human thing), and that there’s probably something wrong with you if you want to be one. Probably. I do know a couple of people who have expressed an interest in entering local politics, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say it gave me pause and made me reevaluate my opinions of them. You pretty much have to sell your soul to participate in American politics.

The thing that we all have to remember is that politicians will say anything. It’s better now that we have youtube and cell phone cameras and whatnot, because they can’t just go around saying whatever they want without fear of being held accountable, but still… As a politician, you learn that not only will you compromise, but you will do so in key situations and at some point go back on your word. You are a professional liar, hand-shaker, and meeting-attender. Why would anybody sign up for this? Because there’s something fundamentally wrong with them, that’s why. I know that we need politicians and, anyway, politics are a great way to funnel all the self-promoters into a job that 1) gives them the recognition they crave and 2) allow us to identify them on sight and avoid them, 3) sometimes results in good things happening for the rest of us.

I’m really into politics because I care what happens in this world, and I want to feel like I have a say in the direction of my life, but I know that this is a flawed, flawed system. Maybe I should run for office and fix it.

Kidding.

Be still, my Mac-loving heart

So I’m a bit of a fangirl already, and I’ve only had my computer since Friday. That’s right, it got here early. From Shanghai to New Jersey in two(ish, given the extreme time differences) days. Apple keeps going up higher and higher in my book. The learning curve exists, but this system is so LOGICAL, that honestly, after puzzling things out for a bit, you can definitely figure it out yourself.

Case in point: I kept reading about MultiClutch, a piece of software that allows you to use the new trackpad gestures that a built into this generation of MacBooks (and previous gens of MacBooks Air and Pro) and decided to get it. I already like this feature of the MacBook, and wanted to import it to Firefox, the application that I use most frequently. The problem is, MultiClutch came with no instructions. Once installed, it plopped itself in my System Preferences folder and sat there, silently mocking me. Every time I tried to add a gesture, it was assigned the same keystroke combination, which didn’t make any sense to me. How could everything be the product of Command-H? It took a couple of hours of leaving the conundrum simmering on the back burners of my mind, but then I had a DUH moment and realized that there had to be a way to edit the keystroke combo for each gesture. I doubleclicked (won’t give up that one) in that section of the line, and sure enough, it worked! I was able to enter an existing keystroke combination and give the expressed action that keystroke’s functionality. Rock! On!

I’m loving how quickly I was able to transfer all of my songs and playlists from my iPod to my Mac, and how painless it was to then sync said iPod to this MacBook. This was always a particular nightmare on my Windows PCs.

Touching this computer is heaven, it’s smart, it’s stylish, it’s so freaking good-looking that I keep waiting for somebody from Apple to come to my house and demand to have it back.

Plus, I already got geek love from a guy who found out that I own a Mac. Silly, but fun.