If you need to put not one, but five, Planet Audio stickers on it

If your camper shell has an emblem on it that could only be described as a flaming squid

If you think changing the taillights and wheels on your Nissan V6 makes it look faster

Dear Friends,

On this Election Day I come to you out of sorrow, fear, and this growing urge to register nothing but a protest vote. Geof has reminded me that I can choose to not vote on whichever races I don't feel are worthy of my vote, and suddenly my ballot begins to take on worlds of new sarcastic meaning.

I've given most of the Alabama races approximately 0.25 seconds of conscious thought (the 6.5 seconds of unconscious thought, by law, do not count this year) and have come to the conclusion that absolutely none of them matter a damn to me. Most of them are thoroughly unoriginal. Issues like… capital-city bloat. Making sure Jenny and Johnnie Doe get their state-funded educations without actually requiring their parents to pay taxes. Lotteries. State constitutions. Zoning laws. All the nonexistent tax money for OUR district and none for anyone else!

I've got three words for you: blah, blah, blah. (Second place went to "who frickin' cares," - must've been that pesky protest vote showing up again)

I want to know about real issues. The ones that really matter, not this money/taxation/education crap.

I want to know which of the candidates supports my constitutionally-guaranteed right to eat babies.

Not only that, I want to sleep well tonight knowing that the representative I vote for will uphold Alabama's constitutional ban on the import and sale of cantaloupe.

Why cantaloupe? Cantaloupe are nasty, evil, dastardly fruits. They must be stopped! I cannot understand why people continue to prattle on about such unimportant crap as education and taxes when the very root of all evil can be found in every grocery store in northeast Alabama! How are we supposed to protect our beautiful, innocent*, God-fearing† children from the vile, corrupting evil that is cantaloupe?

The fact that the politicians gunning‡ for my vote are obsessed with such minutiae depresses me greatly. Consider the vast sea of four-color, full-bleed flyers I have had to rescue my actual mail from during the past two weeks:

1. Protect Alabama Conservative Values [or die like the heathen scum you are]
2. The Republican Party of Alabama, a non-profit organization [thankfully mud-slinging isn't a for-profit occupation] thinks that Don Siegelman, the current governor, sucks. Parts one and two of a seemingly endless series.
3. Mr. Fargerson made the assumption that I'm all about those conservative Alabama values [he obviously forgot to check with me]

However, in the grand Bush tradition of leaving no children, adults, pets, or idiot slogans behind, I present what is, quite possibly, the dumbest and most irritating ad I've received in my mail this year. This was the ad that got me started saving the ads for today's rant.

I present to you a letter written by Mrs. Sandra Fargerson. "Hand-written," in the best tradition of "hand-written" postscripts on Publishers' Clearing House sweepstakes entries. You may see the letter in its entirety here: page 1 page 2

In the interest of responding in kind, I present my response.

You will now have to excuse me. It's time for me to go vote. Must remember to put my steel-toeds on first. It's awful deep out there.

* Innocence guaranteed until onset of public-school sex education. After that, the little heathens are on their own.

† Fear™ to be made mandatory when the new Alabama constitution takes effect.

‡ Void and prohibited if you are not allowed to own or carry a gun. (this prohibition no longer legal in Alabama as of 1885)

When I checked email after making dinner tonight, I found what was the start of this not-quite conversation. Perhaps I should have pursued it harder. It would have been funnier if I had.

See this sign [popup window], currently located eastbound on Madison Blvd. Read the sign carefully, then return to this post.

A transcript of a phone call I placed to STG Outdoor (256-536-1568) just now:

Wow. I feel so much better now—here I thought businesses were actually being charged for that kind of highly specialized editing. It's good to know that outdoor sign companies aren't overcharging folk here in northwest Alabama for their quality signage product.

It's also good to know that our billboard creators are doing their best to prevent our innocent children from being exposed to bad grammar and spelling. Think of the horror of low SAT scores that would result if they didn't!

(I wonder if this company does copywriting—and, if so, how much they charge?)

By popular demand (otherwise known as "five of you asked") it's Ask Domesticat - the advice column that is neither columnar nor containing any actual advice! [What is Ask Domesticat?]

While taking a moment away from the vagaries of Ask Domesticat*, tonight's plans to see Harry Potter with friends, and the general mishmash that occurs during a lazy weekend, I would like to make the following observation.

A photo unearthed this weekend proves once and for all that no matter how big the kitties get, they're not that much different than the tiny little fluffmonsters they were when they were nine weeks old:

[see full photoset

You would think that cats, being rotten from birth, would become (by percentage) less rotten as their body mass increases. Judging by Tenzing, this does not appear to be the case.

* This completely spurious entry is brought on by the need to test a new bit of code in the add_entry section of Quarto. Thanks. Enjoy the photos. Drive through.

Some major changes to cat.net today - I've completely changed the navigation. I've had the same three-section navigation (words/pictures/etc.) for about a year now. In that time, cat.net has become even more focused on words instead of photos, so I've changed the navigation to reflect that.

New setup should hopefully be a bit more intuitive to new folks:

Our heating system contains a timer. If I'm up past eleven p.m., which I often am these days, it's usually the chill in my toes that tell me of the drop in temperature. My hair—probably close to two feet long now—serves as a slight blanket of warmth around my ears and shoulders, but my naturally chilly toes (a feature, not a bug, my family assures me, though Jeff may disagree) require a bit of help in staying warm.

Last night I lay in bed, half-watching the softly-blue moonlight as it filtered through the slats of the miniblinds and settled over Edmund, who lay with me, snuggled in the covers of the guest bed. The light flowed, soft, indirect, over white whisker and orange stripe alike.I could not sleep. There was no point in tossing and turning in a bed shared with Jeff. He needed his sleep. Better to keep my insomnia to myself, and let at least one of us wake up rested in the morning.

It's just criminal, these days - a girl can't even settle in to write a good chunk of PHP without being asked if she wants to have an affair. Whatever is the world coming to? How will I ever manage to get this silly alphabetizing function to work properly?

Today's winner is Yahoo account jon4hotfunn, whose profile (or complete and utter lack of it) can be found here - perhaps we should all say hello?

Not exactly a site change, not exactly a sleazy update: nautilus-blue.net is now open for business. I strongly suspect that none of you will care, and if so, then I've done things right.

I'd said some time ago that I was thinking of putting together a second site that does nothing but provide a home for the linkfood I run across as part of my daily reading. The posts just don't fit on cat.net, but I was getting really tired of bookmarking and bookmarking and bookmarking endless sites.