On Election Day…
Vote! Like Ginger Rogers and her mother Lela back in the day….
cross posted at Fluffy Stuffin
Political Stuff
For those eager to discuss politics I have a few posts with observations of the Orange County, Florida political landscape over at my place. I kept at the political yard sign counting in an effort to gauge the political intensity of the Presidential race down here. Since we’re in the swing part of a swing state it actually has some relevance! (Short version: I believe but am not certain that Romney will win Orange County and Florida. Some of the latest polling agrees with that assessment.)
Anyway, I try to avoid politics over here, but not over there. So if that’s what you want please feel free to join in. I’ll be posting about how I’m going to vote soon as well. I’ve been in the Attila the Hun American camp but I’m wavering.
And the REALLY good news is we’ve only got about nine more days of this crap. After the election we’ll get some fresh Hell to blight our political landscape.
A bit o’ delight
I sent this to our bloggeress, as so many folks I know need some cheering up, me included, so why not pass it along to the Ambiance readership?
Astaire and Rita Hayworth, in a production still from 1943’s You Were Never Lovelier.
This story can’t possibly be true.
I saw a story today that was so perfectly awful I can’t believe it is true. It seemed like every sentence made it worse! let’s start with the headline.
Okay, right off the bad this sounds too funny to be true.
BERLIN (Reuters) –
Even the by-line makes the thing sound more unbelievable! Berlin? A story about an undertaker suing a domanatrix for the infliction of pain MUST take place in Germany! The fact that it actually is just seems too incredible. (There will be far too much use of the word ‘too’ in this post.)
A German court has ordered a dominatrix to pay 200 euros ($260) to a local charity as a penance after a client accused her of hurting and robbing him.
She had to pay penance to a charity for thrashing some undertaker?
Cologne district court spokesman Dirk Esser said the plaintiff had accused the woman he hired for sex last month of holding a kitchen knife to his throat before demanding his debit card and PIN number.
The guys name is Dirk, he’s an undertaker, he hired a dominatrix and is upset that she held a knife to his throat and made him do things? You actually CAN make this stuff up! But I can’t believe it really happened. Surely the guys name was Rolf, or he was an accountant, or he didn’t know he was hiring a dominatrix, or something!
The plaintiff, a 49-year-old undertaker, also said the woman had detained him against his will for five hours.
Um, perhaps he didn’t understand what a dominatrix is for?
The court decided that it was impossible to know for sure what really happened because both parties had consumed too much cocaine during their encounter.
AND it was coke-fueled?! This is just too freakin’* incredible!
* I use ‘freakin” because what else would be appropriate?
It dropped the charges but ordered the prostitute to pay the “penance money” to a charity that supports crime victims.
They can do that?! How strange! “Well, we don’t know that you actually committed a crime, but what the Hell, go give some money to charity!” Couldn’t she have just said some extra “Hail Marys” instead?
The 35-year-old mother of four has been in pre-trial custody for the past five weeks, but declined to be compensated for time spent in jail, Esser said.
Of course she’s a mother. And of course she refused to be compensated for five weeks in jail. Right, this all makes perfect sense.
The dominatrix denied keeping the man against his will, adding that he had also asked if a transsexual colleague could join them.
Of COURSE a transsexual colleague would somehow be involved!
The only things this story missed are midgets and ponies. But other than that, it’s too freakin’ freaky to be true. Right? RIGHT?!
More light, frothy content
Cross-posted at The Kitchen Drawer.
Over at Althouse they’re discussing Thursday’s Presidential visit to the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus. They’re shutting down the campus for at least part of the day so the President can have a nice photo-op post-debate. The Thursday timing is brilliant. Most students will have classes on Friday so they’ll stick around. If the event were on a Friday many students (and probably some professors and staff) would just take off after class on Thursday and make a nice, unexpected three day weekend of it.
They’re discussing many aspects of this visit, including whether or not the students should be upset by this intrusion. After all, this is a denial of one day’s paid education. Personally I think they should be upset, but who are we kidding – most of them won’t be because they won’t be thinking of the payments they’re making (or will make) for their education.
One commenter speculated that the lost tuition was worth it for the chance to see the President in person on one’s own campus. Maybe, but I’ll hold to the idea (expressed by others) that we shouldn’t worship our pols.
Nevertheless, this led me to reminisce about the times I’ve been in the presence of a sitting US President.
I’ve seen three Presidents in person. I saw Ronald Reagan at EPCOT for his 1984 Inaugural Parade. (The one in DC was cancelled due to weather, so a few months later they did it down here in Florida.) I got to see him from less than 30 feet away as he drove by in a Presidential limo.
I saw George H. W. Bush twice. Once in the White House from about 10 feet away (pure luck, the family was taking a tour and he unexpectedly showed up with some ambassador from some African nation) and once at Daytona International Speedway during the race in July. I may have even been within 1000 feet at that time!
(Funny/strange story from that one. Our tickets were for the stands right behind the pit road in the infield. Awesome seats! So as we approached the tunnel for the infield in a Ford Explorer we were questioned by the Secret Service. “Do you have any firearms in your vehicle?” “No, sir.” “No bazookas or anything like that?” “No, sir!” “Carry on.” That was it! Like we would have answered “Yes” if we were bringing in a bazooka! And who the Hell was talking about bazookas in 1992?! Very strange incident, but I guess the guy sized us up with a 14 and 10 year-old in the car as well as people up in their 60s and assessed us as “NOT terrorists”.)
And I once saw George W. Bush at a campaign rally. I still can’t believe I went to one of those things.
All in all it was kind of neat, but not awe inspiring. They are, after all, just men.
Now my sister, when she was little, once got to sit in JFK’s chair behind his desk in the Oval Office. That happened through a series of happy accidents, and if anything like that were to happen today it would be a major security breech complete with drone strikes on the houses of everyone in the family.
Mom and Dad lived in DC back in the early 1950s. Dad was out taking a morning walk one morning and bumped into someone on the street. Dad said something along the lines of “Hey, watch it buddy!”, took a few steps and stopped. He turned around and there stood President Truman (who was found of walks), hands on hips, just glaring at Dad! Dad muttered apologies and scrammed!
I’ve also wondered about the time Nixon wandered out of the White House one night to visit some protesters over at the Lincoln Memorial. How strange that must have been for the protesters!
With friends like these ….
Naked man kidnapped, robbed by friends, deputies say
Six Osceola County residents are behind bars after deputies say they kidnapped and robbed a friend then left him naked in Kissimmee early Saturday morning.
Osceola County Sheriff’s deputies say the victim agreed to give friends, 18-year-old Lindsey Saucedo and 33-year-old Rosa DeJesus and their two friends 20-year-old Stephen Batista and 24-year-old Frederick Rodriguez, a ride around 2:45 a.m. Saturday.
Deputies did not say where they five were headed, but along the way, investigators say Batista and Rodriguez pulled out weapons and demanded the driver give them money.
Shortly after the demands, the victim ran out of gas, and the five abandoned the car and walked to meet up with two others — 35-year-old Crystal Gonzalez and 18-year-old Abraham Buil.
After all seven met, they drove to two local banks and forced the victim to withdraw money, deputies said. They also took his personal items, including his clothing.
They ditched the naked victim on McLaren Circle in Kissimmee, where he walked to a Wawa store on Orange Blossom Trail to report the crime.
Deputies caught up to the six suspects.
All six were booked into Osceola County Jail and face charges of armed robbery, conspiracy and kidnapping charges.
You can get a look at the perps here.
On the Sentinel website larryboy77 comments: “you can plan and plan and plan the perfect crime and something can still go wrong”
NOTE: I do have a couple of better posts I’m working on, but the last three days have not been conducive to writing. Nothing like not having a properly functioning toilet in the house to induce writer’s block!
Wax off….
I take my daughter to parks frequently. In my part of town a long-ish bike trail, the West Orange Trail, runs by most of the parks. It is part of the local Rails-to-Trails project, in which old unused rail-beds get converted to bike trails. So I see lots and lots of cycling enthusiasts. Not just people out cycling with the family, or enjoying the Great Outdoors, but hard-core cyclists, complete with the funny shoes and all the spandex.
What I don’t get are the guys that ride bikes and wax off their body hair and wear all spandex. Now I get why professional racers do that, to cut down drag. But they’re actual, you know, racers, doing it not just for fun but for profit, and eliminating every last bit of drag is a professional necessity.
But if you’re just some guy doing it to stay in shape (and not all of these waxed be-spandexed folks have achieved that goal), why cut down drag? Wouldn’t more drag help you get into shape faster? And it isn’t like these guys go whizzing by much faster than the Moms and Dads out cycling with their five year-olds that just took off the training wheels last week, either. A little faster, yes, but Lance Armstrong they ain’t.
WTF, Cycling Guys, WT-f’ing-F?
Falling in Love All Over Again . . .
. . . with Noo Yawk City.
After having a very pleasant exchange with our mail carrier on the phone early this morning, I took the subway down to Canal Street around 10 a.m. to pick up my mail, in which there were, sure enough, several checks.
It is such a beautiful fallward day—cool, sunny, cloudless—in fact, it’s a “September 11 day,” but while we will always note that, we are now well able to note it and then move on and enjoy the day. I decided to walk home. I also had a rebate in the form of a prepaid credit card in the mail, so I used that to buy and compare TWO lattes, sipping as I strolled.
I stopped to admire this painting (click to enlarge and see words for and about “butterfly” in many languages), which the 50something artist, John van Orsouw, was selling, among others, on the sidewalk out of his truck. (I knew he was Dutch, from his accent, before I saw his name.) He has had gallery shows of his paintings and sculptures but sets up shop on the street to supplement his income. If I’d happened to have a spare $950 lying around I’d have walked right off with “Burst Out.” Instead, I wound up getting into a 15-minute conversation with the artist, about the art biz, the weather, and not wanting to commemorate/relive 9/11. After being cooped up in my apartment doing little but working, then plunging into an equally hurried, preoccupied crowd to run errands, it was amazing to find a stranger so open and ready to engage even with a non-customer. But he was just the first.
Next, I stopped by a bookstall selling old natural-history prints and bookplates, which made me feel as if I was in Paris. When I mentioned this to the proprietress, also within arm’s length of my age, she shrugged and said with an unmistakably native New York inflection, “Why not?” Her name is Phyllis Newman, and she is on West Broadway every Saturday weather permits and at the Greenflea Market on Columbus and 76th on Sundays. We talked, too: about last Saturday’s tornado, rising sea levels inundating Breezy Point, weathering Hurricane Irene under a skylight (“It sounds wonderful. I envy you!” she said), and how all our digital wonders have nothing on those delicately meticulous 19th-century depicters of nature, quite a few of whom we’ve covered in Natural History. As an appreciation for the publisher, who has struggled so hard to keep the 110-year-old magazine alive (almost certainly a losing battle), I bought, at a generous markdown, a 200-year-old bookplate, a hand-colored engraving of a clamshell, which occasioned the following exchange:
May I give you a check?
Sure. I’ve never had a bad check.
Well, actually, right now this is a bad check. But as soon as I get to the bank it won’t be.
Phyllis looked at my name on the check, sized me up and said, “Happy New Year.”
I made a left turn on Houston Street and, between LaGuardia and Thompson, was stopped by a downstairs storefront newly painted to look like it was on a waterfront, with a large sign saying that it was soon to open as a membership café, offering “Access to community and a HOME AWAY FROM HOME.” For $25 a month you could come in every day and drink good coffee, espresso, and tea for free (quite a saving if you think about a Starbucks a day), read the paper, and just hang out. They would also have member events “like design previews, tastings, classes,” and discounts on merchandise. The young man, probably south of 30, sitting by the open door waiting for the tile floor man and the city inspector introduced himself as Anthony Mazzei and also struck up a conversation with me. He and his now wife, Aurora Stokowski (Leopold’s granddaughter), avatars of warmhearted hip, had created this encompassing concept blending an “aesthetic club” (on the analogy of an athletic club) with “dim sum retail” and moved it from Manhattan to NOLA and back again:
Started in an old ballroom in Manhattan, this hyper-curated art-design-fashion-culture concept expanded to New Orleans a year ago. In New Orleans, Fair Folks and a Goat occupies an old, bright-yellow Creole shotgun cottage with green clapboard shutters in Marigny. In the front room, there’s a boutique filled with furniture, clothing and art, followed by a design studio, a cafe called Fair Folks and a Roast (which serves the best iced coffee I have ever tasted), art gallery, design parlor, and a one-room b&B with rotating, in-room installations by local artists and designers.
“It’s thought-out. Everything you touch and see–we pull our hair out trying to decide what to buy and where it should go and how it should be incorporated into the space,” says New Orleans cofounder Anthony Mazzei, who runs FF&G with his New York counterpart Aurora Stokowski. “We wanted to do a magazine and thought, ‘What would a magazine look like if you walked through it?’”
We talked about how remarkably difficult it is to find a place just to hang out in NYC—the options are a) your place or mine, b) a restaurant or bar table with the meter running and the babble too loud to hear each other think, c) a public park where no matter how you try to mind your own bidness you get hit on, shit on (by pigeons, at least), and hit up. I told him about my own attempts at a solution when I was their age: open-house Sunday brunch and (later, with J) the funky little health club where non-9-to-5ers hooked up for lifelong friendship and creative collaborations in the Jacuzzi in the middle of the day. I had no idea just how hip these two were till I came home and looked up their website (the Times is writing them up later this week), but let me stress the warmhearted part.
* * * *
Well, what with having this adventure, writing it up, and (inadvertently) sleeping it off, like an overstimulated child with a full tummy (read: bank account), there goes most of the day.
Ambiance 
