So long, baiji

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Entertainments II

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1. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, which I'd never even heard of until a couple of years ago. Because of the title similarity, I guess I assumed it would be something like Cold Mountain, but actually it's more like Oscar Wilde meets Wuthering Heights. A phrase that sticks with me is the characterization of one of the characters as a "trying female." Such a useful description. 2. Jagged Little Pill , the Alanis Morissette album from several years ago that I recently rediscovered thanks to my iPod, which I've been listening to on my commute, since there's only so much NPR you can take at rush hour without getting bored and/or depressed. Lots of cool songs in addition to the familiar singles. That woman has a way with words. I can't help but wonder how many different men she's trashing, how people manage to careen from love to hate, and about the success of her future relationships given her apparently poor track record (and the potential intimidati...
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Tiny crawling demons from hell

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So we just shampoo the child and she's cured and we go on our merry way, right? WRONG. We shampooed, we combed afterwards per instructions, we found nothing alarming, we relaxed, and then we decided to do the same for Sarah just as a precaution. And we painstakingly combed out her hair with the special ultra-fine comb (after first using a regular comb and incinerating it). "Painstaking" is just the right word, because Sarah has longer and much finer hair than Sarah, so the comb caught all the time no matter how gentle I tried to be. So this precautionary task involved about 45 minutes of intermittent shrieking and sobbing, which was no fun for anyone but would have been easy to put behind us had the exercise not revealed a LOT of tiny brown... things, some moving and some not. All I can say is... ICK ICK ICK. It appears Becky may actually have caught lice from Sarah, who had commented in preceding days or even weeks that her head itched, but of course it never occurred to...
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Utter disgust

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What. The. FUCK?! Some obscure GOP state senator wins a special election to fill Ted Kennedy's seat?? Jesus Christ. All I can do is curse and moan. Plenty of blame to go around, apparently. My top choices: Coakley and her aides did not take this election seriously after she won the primary. The campaign was asleep at the switch. And Martha had little to say other than "I'm a Democrat so of course you'll vote for me." The lukewarm Dems and independents likewise didn't think this was worth going to the polls for. Many voters were lukewarm about the health care bill or actively turned off by it, and voted for Brown as a protest. ElectoralVote.com and the Boston Globe both have good analyses. One notion is that even some initial Obama supporters are disappointed in his record so far: watered-down health care reform, Big Business bailouts, etc. Obama voters wanted change in 2008 and haven't gotten it, so they stayed home yesterday, while anti-Obama types ...
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