Chicago Nighttime Glow, by Monika Thorpe

Headed to the Windy City today to meet with some terrific IT students from DePaul. They’ve been doing a great job on a volunteer project for CBHC. I really like working with student volunteers. They are often willing to work very hard for little compensation, and to be cheerful about it. Not only that, but they tend to be really smart and capable people.

The downside of this trip is that it’s going to be really short, just up for the meeting and back down again. No time to enjoy being in Chicago, which is a shame. It really is my favorite city. Oh well, the kids will make the trip worth it. Working with them has been a real pleasure, and I hope I get the opportunity to do it again.

In preparation, I’ve installed a new WordPress theme. This is Redline,by Yulian Yordanov. I like it a lot, but knowing me I’ll need to get under the hood and tinker a little. Yulian seems to have made that easy to do, thankfully.

And here’s your pretty picture for today. We’ve had some intense thunderstorms here lately. Here’s what they look like from the outside.

Anvil-shaped Cumulus by Flagstaffotos. Published under a GDFL license.

Something I’ve noticed about the hard-right contingent: they really hate being ignored. They’re fine with being called crazy, fanatical, even fascist. But call them irrelevant or, even worse, fail to mention them at all, and they go apeshit.

For example, I always felt Ann Coulter’s increasingly bizarre pronouncements last year were her way of railing against her decline into obscurity, the equivalent of a dog peeing on the carpet to reclaim her owner’s attention. But that attention was stolen away by a new, more wholesome-looking puppy from Alaska, and poor Ann has been left to stew in her own… juices.

Witness the grandiose Tea Party plan to storm the Capitol and presumably frighten our elected representatives into killing health care reform. Teabaggers got some attention last August by going around yelling at people at town hall meetings, but that didn’t prove to be a successful way of derailing health care reform. Since then they’ve been out of the spotlight. But now, thanks to the New Sarah Palin, they’re coming back to grab fifteen more minutes of fame. I’m sure they’ll get it too, much like Balloon Boy.

The thing is, that’s their whole plan: get attention. The have no real agenda other than earning media coverage. They hope that will translate into a popular uprising against the Democrats, but they don’t really know how. It’s a bit like appearing on a reality TV show in hopes of winning an Oscar. It sort of seems possible, but the actual sequence of  events necessary to make it happen is blurry.

Never mind! Take a whizz on the floor and the rest will follow!

But I appreciate the idea of National Novel Writing Month, while utterly rejecting the possibility of my own participation. And to those brave souls who are giving it a go, especially the one I know personally, I wish you the very best of luck. In solidarity, I personally pledge to write an entire blog post over the month of November.

And here it is. Bright, shiny and squeaking in at just under 150 words. I might even do two!

Then I ran across this.

And really, despite my very best intentions, all I can think of to say is:

Wow. These people are unbelievable dumbasses.

Image by erin m, used under a Creative Commons License