Random rainy Monday thoughts

I went to a tea yesterday. Yes, an actual tea. For charity. With big flowery hats on the ladies. And cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off (which, for the record, turn out to be absolutely delicious).

One woman wore a wildly purple Central American native dress and a red thrift-store hat with bangles all around that looked like a lampshade.

A young acquaintance of hers died last week and she’s aware that our mutual friend J. has pancreatic cancer.

To hell with it, says the lady in the bangled hat and floral-toned muumuu, who last I saw her was quite conventional and proper. I’m going to live and I don’t care what anybody thinks of it.

—–

Ellendra posted a link in recent comments that led me to a site I never knew existed. And I wish didn’t exist.

It’s Regulations.gov. Which touts itself oh-so-cheerily and in capital letters as “Your Voice in Federal Decision-Making.”

Were I tempted to imagine I actually had a voice in Federal Decision-Making, I would be foiled by the site, which is a mindfield of pop-ups and JavaScript.

The cogent point is that, in the last 90 days alone, Our Glorious Leaders, in their Great Wisdom, have gifted us with 6,479 brand new regulations to obey. (No word on how many total pages of regulations that is.)

Ah, it’s sublime to live in the land of the free, where openness and democracy reign and we’re all represented in everything Washington does.

I did finally pry the 6,479 figure out of the site, but only after promising it my first-born son and swearing in blood to sacrifice all my privacy forever. If you’re not willing to make the same concessions to see the result of your Voice in Federal Decision-Making, Ellendra took a screen shot.

That requires JavaScript, too. But at least it’s not the fedgov’s JavaScript.

—–

Is it my imagination or has the TSA actually increased its idiocies and abuses in response to public outcry?

To wit: this, this (H/T Joel), and this.

—–

“A blow to government transparency.”

Wait? We have government transparency?

—–

Which leads me to this: Dmitri Orlov’s five stages of collapse. It’s four years old, but worth a revisit.

UPDATE: Apparently Orlov now thinks he was being an optimist. (H/T to Michelle)

—–

The world is so screwy that even the dogs are going insane (going to the dogs?). One of mine is starting on Prozac or one of its cousin meds tomorrow.

I laugh at all the folks with pets on mind-altering drugs. But I had to do this with a dog a number of years ago. It helped. And for Nadja, who had a few screws loose before I got her and whose anxiety and fear-aggression toward neighborhood dogs have become increasingly unmanagable since we moved into town, the alternatives aren’t pretty.

—–

Speaking of which … just in case you wanted to see the top 10 #ObamaEatsDog pictures, here they are. 🙂