Cooties.

My new go-to video.

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Oh, if you want the whole thing, it's here.

Geek Week Highlight

And now, a bit of sunshine. I will most likely never get on the Maddow show, but at least now I can say I know somebody who did, and he rocked it. Or pooped it, whatever.

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Geek Week Is Upon Us

And here we go!

Other highlights of “Geek Week” include: Robert Wallace, a former CIA agent who reveals the secrets of a once-classified CIA manual written by a former magician; a tour of the Iwo Jima helicopter carrier in honor of Fleet Week here in New York City; a geek-level tour of the massive rebuilding project underway at Ground Zero; geek-rapper Baba Brinkman, whose most recent project is “The Rap Guide to Evolution”; Infrastructure! - a trip underground with the sandhogs to tour the construction of the Second Avenue subway line, an infrastructure project more than 50 years behind schedule; and Dr. Jim Mead of East Tennessee State University, who oversees the largest collection of prehistoric dung in the world.

One of these segments involves a dear member of la familia Bolt. Living vicariously FTW!

You have GOT to be Fucking Kidding Me

Okay. If you're a semi-regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed that I have a mild fixation on someone who may or may not be named Rachel Maddow. Just search for posts tagged "squeeee" and you'll get the picture. I have so many things to offer, so many brilliant insights, and she's never called me! Not even once!

So my girlfriend did call me this afternoon, and told me she'd gotten an e-mail from her ex. That in itself is no more unusual than the sun coming up in the east; they're still very close and I consider him my brother-in-law, in some weird lesbian extended-family sense. He's a scientist with a fairly significant reputation, rightfully so, and elements of his research have landed him in Popular Science and on the National Geographic channel from time to time. No stranger to the media, this one; Nature Valley Granola even considered using him in a commercial that scheduling conflicts nixed.

Anyway, the e-mail. It seems he'd been contacted by some TV producers for the Geek Week segment their boss wants to run. They're showing up in his town with a live remote crew next week. So he can be interviewed.

By. Rachel. Maddow.

Excuse me while I go shoot myself now.

It's the dung. He has amassed the world's preeminent collection of ancient dung, and Rachel wants to talk to him about it. My son asked me what the chances are that she might want to talk to me sometime, and I said, zero. But aren't you the world's leading expert on some archaeology thing, he asked? Yeah, I said, but nobody cares about Empire points. They care about giant sloth dung. Huh, he said, so that means your work isn't worth shit?

Ha. Ha ha. He'll be here all week, folks; don't forget to tip your waitress.

In Which We Have a Request for Santa

Random poster benefiting the American Library Association.

Want. Wantwantwant. Uh, because I'm a huge fan of reading, of course. That's the only reason. Seriously.

In Which We Have the Glimmer of a Chance

I would point out, for the record, that Boltgirl is also obsessed with The Weather Channel.

Stop the Presses; Boltgirl Disagrees--Gasp--with Rachel

Oh, it was bound to happen eventually.

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I don't see yesterday's escalation announcement as a new iteration of the Bush Doctrine so much as a response to the original Afghanistan situation continuing, albeit in a different venue; instead of blowing the whistle to stop the game and issue the Taliban a well-deserved red card, some cosmic referee has shouted play on as the action has spilled across the border into Pakistan. Except in this case the Taliban have grabbed the ball and taken it up into the stands and both teams are lobbing flares and batteries at each other, and we're somehow simultaneously opponent and referee, and the metaphor falls apart before our eyes. Much like the NATO coalition.

Anyway. Bad shit in Pakistan by the CIA and Blackwater Xe, drones and abduction teams and all, but even that doesn't make it a pre-emptive war by Team Obama. It's simply a new vector in an existing war, just as it's a new vector for Pakistan's ISI and a new vector for India's intelligence service, and for the warlords depending on support from one side or the other, a giant triangulated chess match that devolves into Red Rover more often than not. The Taliban are operating with impunity from Quetta, just as they operated from Kandahar before we got there. Same shit, different day, slightly different setting, same problem.

Amazingly, this has diminished my ardor for Dr. Maddow exactly not at all. Shocker!

Meet the Press

Oh, Rachel. You're going to need a gallon bag of single-malt on a centerline drip after this lovely roundtable this morning. I'm only about ten minutes in on the DVR and already scrambling to get a screengrab of Maddow's perfect BISH PLS look while Tom Coburn claimed that all the Nazi references, Hitler references, and calls for Obama's death are a perfectly understandable reaction by people who are afraid that they've lost control of their government. Oh, here you go:

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She's doing her best with Coburn and Dick Armey, but jello is damn hard to pin to the wall no matter how many nails you have. Ah, but she slaps the Blue Dogs for ceding their majority to fearmongers like Chuck Grassley, and calls out the president for not reining them in. Oh, now Armey says the health stuff is the most hostile government takeover in history. Rachel is sitting next to him trying really hard not to snicker.

Coburn: life expectancy isn't a good indicator of healthcare quality. Medicaid is failing us in terms of neonatal mortality! Rachel comes out of her seat but Coburn shushes her--apparently he can talk without interruption, but she can't--leaving it to Tom Daschle to point out that we currently rank 19th out of 19 industrialized nations in that arena. I was not aware that Medicaid was responsible for all the neonatal mortality in this country. All the dead newborns are Medicaid babies? Because that's the only way that statement makes sense.

And I have now learned from Dick Armey that the best way to handle a question I don't really have a good answer to is to start talking about something else, while leaning forward over the table, waving my finger, and smiling disingenuously. Oh, and talking over anyone who's trying to clarify something I just said. And, finally, Medicare=tyranny! Rachel gives up and just starts laughing.

And I give up and need to eat breakfast before re-watching this and trying to understand it.

Also, These People Are Insane.

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As much as my right-wing brother rails against the goddamn hippie liberals in Boulder who can't--he says--string together three words of original thought explaining to him why they have the political beliefs they do, I have yet to hear a peep from him condemning these right-wing yahoos who flood town hall meetings with the slogans and chants supplied to them by insurance industry astroturf farmers. Or about the people who scream about "government healthcare" in between their Medicare-provided physician visits. Can I have five words of my own? These. People. Are. Fucking. Insane.

Adventures in Adorkability, Part Next

The term "adorkability" comes from Dorothy Snarker. The rest is, well, right here.

I will point out two things. First, I too fish purely for the fun of casting and reeling, having learned long ago not to expect any actual fish to come out of the water at the end of my line. Although, despite that, she manages to reel in some pretty killer fish. And! Second! If we're going to be totally honest here, if Rachel Maddow did use sex toys for bait, well, ... *cough*

Roadblogging: the Fishing Report

Smith Creek, Oregon. See all the fish? Yeah, we didn't either.

No fish here.


Sigh. Is there nothing this woman cannot do better than me?

I guess I can live with it.

Mental Health Breaks from the _______ Treatment Plan Continue

Good news: I no longer have a deadline of the end of the day Friday! Bad news! It's been moved up to tomorrow morning!

So here's a quick Maddow on the DOMA brief:

I may need a mental health break from my mental health breaks at this rate. In other news, the Times noticed that the brief was full of asshattery as well, so it's not just me. Yes, I understand that the DOJ does this sort of thing as a matter of course, and that the brief goes through several markups before it's released and that the final version may or may not even vaguely resemble the first draft, but goddammit, religious righty talking points and code language really have no place here. And Obama's silence on it following his silence after each advance in the Northeast speaks volumes I really don't want to have to think about.

A Story in Pictures.

The size of Boltgirl's rather expansive fantasy life...














...and the chances of any of it remotely coming true.


















Silly, silly Boltgirl.

Just Because.

Sigh. Shamelessly ripped from Dorothy Snarker.

Just Because I LOVE This Graphic

Shamelessly nicked from FUCK YEAH RACHEL MADDOW.

Shameless Saturday Morning

As in shamelessly repackaging from Americablog, but it's only to streamline your viewing experience. I was laughing too hard yesterday to find these videos myself.

The Republicans are protesting bailouts, taxes, and Obama in general with tiny little remixes of the Boston Tea Party, but rather than dressing up like Native Americans, stealing onto ships at anchor in the dead of night, wrenching open large wooden crates of tea, and dumping the contents overboard in protest of taxation by the Crown without representation, they're... well, I'm not sure what they're doing, but I think it involves slitting Lipton's bags open and sprinkling the contents lightly on the ground. Or setting them on fire. Or something. That would be worthy of only a shrug and a meh if not for the really unfortunate name they decided to adopt for their neo-Boston Harbor antics.

With a completely Tobias Funke level of cluelessness, the Republican opposition is protesting in a park near you. And they decided to call it teabagging.

Rachel went to town on this Thursday night, and the impressive thing is that she only lost it once, while Ana Marie Cox kept a straight face throughout.

My right-wing brother has yet to invite me to one of these events. I cannot wait.

Recovery Package

Recovering? Yes I am. The family was here in various permutations for a week, and now that they've gone back home I have taken the deep breath I've been needing... and find myself wishing they were still here, or at least coming back sooner than they actually will. We did far less hiking this time around than in previous years, so I don't have many general-interest photos to share.

We did make it down to the Nature Conservancy's Patagonia-Sonoita Preserve on a horridly windy Friday to search for birds that, like us, weren't smart enough to stay hunkered down someplace sheltered. Sonoita Creek, fed by groundwater, flows perennially and is so clear and surrounded by greenery that it looks fake.






















Sonoita Creek burbling along.

Whimsy! Snakey decoration on handrail on Creek Trail.

The preserve has a few miles of interconnected trails, about half of which follow the creek before looping around through a partially burned mesquite bosque. The birdwatching was probably hampered by the wind, but we managed to spot a thick-billed kingbird (rare in Arizona), a Cassin's kingbird, several vermillion flycatchers or possibly a single, very energetic flycatcher, finches by the bucketload, a black phoebe, and a pair of gray hawks that we heard whistling for an hour and a half before we finally saw them wheeling in the updrafts.

The preserve is notable not only for the year-round stream and numerous bird species, but also for its stands of old-growth cottonwoods, some of which top out at 130 years old and about a million feet tall. These are the oldest and largest cottonwoods on the planet.

Giant cottonwood.

After a day well-spent, we retired to my back yard and watched my aunt grill up slabs and slabs of ribs, and then we worked off dinner in the best possible way.

The family gathers 'round the TV machine to watch Rachel.

Tonight I'm watching basketball and thinking I'm pretty damn lucky to have been born into this family. Good times, people!

Maddow on Prop 8 Hearings

I could try to explain it, or I could sit back and let Rachel do it. Here, let me think about that for all of two seconds.

The Answer

A while back, a commenter asked me what I'd like to pick Rachel Maddow's brain over if we had the chance to sit down, and I have simply not been able to move past the goofy grin and incoherent noises that would be falling out of my mouth if that ever were to happen, since I would instantly and irrevocably be transformed into a babbling puddle of goo.

Megan Carpentier, however, has her shit infinitely more together than I ever will, and unwittingly provided me with my answer with this interview--over cocktails!--with the Good Doctor.

My interview with Rachel would actually go exactly like this one imagined by a commenter on the piece:

My interview with Rachel Maddow would go something like this-

Morninggloria: Hi Rachel, I really love your show gush gush gush gush talking talking talking getting nervous about talking and trying to get to question but ending up asking a question that's not even close to what I intended to ask. Gush gush gush.

Rachel: crickets.

Morninggloria: vomits on self.

'Nuff said.

My Terrible Dark Secret

I may or may not have kind of a thing for Martha Stewart, not in a dykey way, just an awkward awestruckness at her ingenuity. I definitely have a totally dykey thing for Rachel Maddow, as you may have surmised. And I like carrot soup.

Forthwith, what it looks like when my worlds collide.