Archive for June, 2009
Monday Open Thread: June 8th, 2009
Here’s some of what happened in history today.
68 – The Roman Senate accepts Galba as Emperor
793 – Vikings begin Scandanavian invasion of England
1191 – Richard I begins his Crusade
1783 – Laki Volcano eruption in Iceland kills 9,000 and begins 7-year famine
1789 – James Madison introduces what will become the Bill of Rights
1861 – Tennessee secedes from the Union
1906 – Theodore Roosevelt signs the Antiquities Act into law, empowering the president to reserve land with historical value
1928 – City of Peking captured by revolutionaries, renamed Beijing
1959 – Missile Mail delivery attempted on USS Barbero
1968 – Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral in Washington, DC
1995 – Captain Scott O’Grady rescued by US Marines in Bosnia
What’s on your mind today?
What are people in your part of the country talking about as the big stories this week?
Shameless Race-Baiter Charlie Rangle Is At It Again
Rep. Charlie Rangle should be ashamed of himself.
Technically, he should probably be ashamed of himself while sitting in a jail cell somewhere, if prosecutors and the Justice Department weren’t so afraid of being called RAAAAAAAACISTS! and actually did their jobs and investigated Rangle on corruption charges.
Here Rangle goes again, race-baiting, completely forgetting that ALL race cards expired at 12 noon on January 20th, 2009.
Sorry, Charlie, but you need to get a new racket. You, Spike Lee, Eric Holder, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, John Lewis, and James Clyburne are all out of jobs now — because the race-baiting industry you industrious charlatans cultivated for decades officially ended the day this nation swore Dr. Utopia in as President.
And no bail-out for race-baiters will be coming.
You don’t realize this is the case, yet, but you will in time.
We don’t know how long it will take, but already people who normally would have said nothing while the Charlie Rangles of the world roll around on the floor screaming RAAAAAAAAACISM! are looking at these clowns in a new light.
Rangle claims it’s racist for a white candidate like Attorney General Cuomo to challenge New York Governor David Paterson for the Democrats’ nomination next year. We actually really like Paterson around here for the way he humiliated Princess Caroline of Kennedy last December, making an absolute fool of her as she tried to claim her Camelot legacy demanded a Senate seat for someone who typically spends her days opening new Armani stores on Fifth Avenue. Paterson allowed Princess Caroline to blunder and flounder for a good month before finally picking Kirsten Gillibrand to fill Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat, in what will ultimately be seen as the absolute last gasp of the Kennedy family’s power and influence. So, thank you David Patersn, for doing what someone should have done three decades ago after Chappaquiddick: removing the Kennedys from their privileged perch at the front of the line for everything, and making people see them as the spoiled, unremarkable, dentophobic, hams they all really are.
But, Paterson, as Governor, has been ineffective and generally bad for the people of New York. We don’t know enough about Cuomo to weigh in on whether or not he’d be better that Paterson, but we find it hard to believe he’d perform any worse. Because Cuomo is white, Rangle says he should not challenge Paterson — which is absolute nonsense. If Paterson’s the best person for the job, he should be able to survive any primary challenge, regardless of the color of his opponent.
It’s going to take a few years, but black politicians like Rangle are going to ultimately be forced to evolve or leave political office, because the old race-baiting tricks used to keep opponents from challenging them aren’t going to work any more.
The current president is black.
A black man has served in the highest levels of the executive.
There has now been a black governor in New York state.
No one is holding the black community back but the black community itself, in the form of race-baiters like Rangle.
Ultimately, Americans everywhere will wake up to these facts…some politicians will adapt, but others won’t. It remains to be seen what Paterson will do, but if he thinks he can dodge primary challengers by making race an issue, he’s going to have another thing coming — and will thus deserve the loss that he’ll take in the end, doing to himself what he did so marvelously to Princess Caroline.
Cinnamon Rolls Stapled to My Head — by Sebastian Gray, for Gray Matters
Dear HillBuzz,
A few years ago I went to a comic book convention with my friend Panda, who was there primarily to stalk the guy who played Xander on the defunct WB TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but was prepared to settle for chasing around any random guy dressed up as a red-caped, leather-diapered Spartan from the movie 300 (because Panda remains ever the pragmatist, in his celebrity stalking, if not his actual life). This was in Chicago, at one of the fancier hotels in the Loop, where I just happened to have event-managed several weddings, mitzvahs (both bar and bat), and, most proudly, a lesbian commitment ceremony with an Annie Oakley/Wild West Rodeo theme (where I scattered enough bales of hay on the parquet floors to make a crystal-chandelier-ed big city ballroom smell like the inside of an Oklahoma barn, complete with goats, chickens, piglets, and a giant cake shaped like a saddle that made it almost all the way through the evening before a goat ate one of its marzipan and fondant buckles, to, thankfully, the knee-slapping amusement of everyone). Backstage, the hotel’s service areas were a warren of twisting hallways, stairwells that went apparently nowhere, and random elevators joining a floor here and there haphazardly, the building remodeled and repurposed erratically over the last hundred or so years. “I think I brought pigs through here once,” I told Panda, in a long corridor stretching towards an apparent dead-end. “This stairwell knifing to the left goes all the way down to the ballroom level and a back bathroom where I washed farm animals off my hands for an hour while I waited for the hoot-a-nanny to start, so I think we can sneak in this way.”
Panda was beside himself with excitement, because my old catering experience found a way to slip passed the long lines queued up to meet people who played Romulans, Klingons, or Care Bears in various things through the years so he could get close enough to the Buffy actor to potentially trigger any court-ordered restraining orders that may well have been in effect (“That wasn’t Nicholas Brendan, I keep telling you, it was Joey from New Kids, but it wasn’t a restraining order, it was just that they won’t let me back on another New Kids cruise, and that’s really my friend Ashley’s fault anyway. I wouldn’t get back on a Carnival ship if you paid me, so that means I actually have a restraining order against THEM, not the other way around. I never really liked Joey McIntyre anyway either, so he can just STUFF IT”).
“I just want a picture to put up on Facebook of me and Nicholas so I can tell Ashley to STUFF IT,” Panda assured me. ”I won’t do anything you can complain about later or write about on the Internet, I promise”.
Panda promises a lot of things, to be honest, but there’s only so much of these celebrity-stalking adventures I can take before I need to wander off and leave Panda to whatever recycled I Love Lucy episode he’s destined to restage, without my being sucked into the role of Ethel. So, I left Panda in the first row of seats in the ballroom, waiting for a panel discussion on The Best Buffy Episode EVER, where Nicholas would appear, to explore the strange world of SciFi and comics fans gathered around little booths and folding tables pouring over memorabilia from hundreds of TV shows and movies, including a hefty amount of Star Wars paraphrenalia.
At one of these booths, a documentary played about the making of the original film, A New Hope, where Carrie Fisher talked about landing the role of Princess Leia, a job she really needed, then having to endure the bizarre cinnamon-roll hairstyle George Lucas personally designed for her. ”Oh, no George, I love it. It’s the most beautiful hairstyle I’ve ever seen,” Fisher said, remembering how at 19 she was so desperate to stay in the picture she pretended to love the ridiculous way she was dressed and styled for her adventure through space. But, really she hated those damn cinnamon-rolls — she just needed the job so much that she knew her pride didn’t matter.
These days, I think about that snippet of the Star Wars documentary I saw at that comic convention with Panda a lot, actually, as I’ve been forced to take on freelance projects I don’t particularly want, in an economy that’s brought an end to the days of lavish Annie Oakley/Wild West Rodeo lesbian commitment ceremonies and the lucrative event planning fees that went with them. It is a real struggle these days just to pay the bills, with so many people I know laid-off and facing the reality that they may very well have to leave Chicago, since the city’s suddenly become completely unaffordable to them. Instead of working on glamorous projects like public art dedications or fashion shows, I feel lucky to have any work on my plate at all, adjusting to the reality that more mundane project management assignments in the corporate world are things I need to be very grateful for at the moment.
On one of these assignments currently, I’m working on benchmarking data for a small private company whose CEO is an absolute ogre to deal with. He’s rude, ill-tempered, and berates his employees – most especially the freelancer (yours truly) brought in for the limited-run engagement, who doesn’t really matter in the big scheme of things, from this CEO’s perspective. A few years ago, I would have walked off the job, figuring I could have recouped that fee on another project, saving myself the hassle of dealing with the ogre. But, I’ve learned a lot of humility in the last few months. So much, I realize, that no matter how many metaphoric cinnamon rolls the ogre staples to my head, I just keep smiling, telling him how wonderful they all are, and how happy I am to be working on this wonderful assignment benchmarking all this data in such a wonderful company to work in.
Carrie Fisher, eat your heart out, because the acting job I do on a daily basis lately puts your whole oeuvre to shame.
My friend Panda hasn’t had a steady job in a year or so now, bouncing around from one temp assignment he finds on Craigslist to another every few weeks (survey administrator, telephone psychic, guerrilla marketer handing out soy bar samples on Michigan Avenue, you name it). But, this weekend Panda was off to Brickfest, a Lego convention near Chicago where he planned to stalk a Lego master builder named Gary McIntire (“who is totally the Joey McIntyre of Lego master builders, in a good way, but spelled different”, according to Panda). I, fortunately, have never brought any pigs through that particular hotel, so I’ve skipped this current Panda adventure, but I do admire his indominable spirit. ”Look, things are bad for all of us right now, but we’re all in that together. All those idiots thought we’d be riding around on unicorns with the hope and the change right now, but those people are just stupid. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get any better, and there’s not much we can do about it but keep our heads up, you know. And Ashley can just STUFF IT because I’m totally going to get my picture next to something big and crazy made of Legos and she can be jealous, because I might not have a job, but I’m still better than ASHLEY, who can STUFF IT”).
Sometimes the universe brings you the wrong French toast and you find yourself in situations you never thought you’d be in, struggling in ways you never thought you’d struggle. Sometimes you have metaphoric cinnamon rolls stapled to your head that you have to pretend are as glamorous and amazing as the well-paying, truly wonderful jobs you enjoyed (and maybe took for granted) in the past. Apparently, there’s an inexhaustible supply of breakfast-related, Fate-inspired idioms in my own private cosmic bakery — forever pointing to the fact that no matter how bad things get, I know I’m resourceful enough to keep going.
Remembering that no matter how lost any of us feels in twisty mazes or dark labrynths and old stairwells, that there’s always a way around the crowds and mobs if you look for it. There might be hundreds of people in Chicago applying for a job I want, but if I use all my talents and put my mind to it, I can get to where I need to be if I’m as resourceful as I’ve always been.
Sebastian Gray
Chicago, IL
His Master's Voice: Falafel the Hutt Gives Dr. Utopia His Orders. Will He Obey?
No American President has ever prostrated himself so humbly before Arab royalty in the way Dr. Utopia has. His Apology Tour of the Middle East is correctly read by many in Riyadh as the first step towards American dhimmihood, in the same way much of Europe has resigned itself to an eventual caliphate that will soon succeed where the Ottomans failed centuries ago: the domination of the West by the backward misogynists, antisemites, homophobes, and gluttons of Islam (Saudi Arabia, in particular).
Dr. Utopia owes his Harvard education, and a good part of his election, to the Saudis (whose money so mysteriously appeared whenever he needed it). When he stooped so low before King Abdullah and eagerly kissed his ring at Buckingham Palace, he did so with the relish and practice of a loyal servant greeting his master, thrilled to do his bidding once again.
Well, King Abdullah, Falafel the Hutt, is barking his orders to Dr. Utopia — to “impose a Mideast solution” that will, by nature of its source, cater to the terrorists in Gaza at the detriment of our strongest ally, Israel.
According to the article above, King Abdullah’s “patience is wearing thin” — thinner than the wool/linen blend on the knees of Dr. Utopia’s pants, worn away so enthusiastically on encounters with the Hutts. Cloaked in all his flowing robes, perched on his sweaty throne, the master of the House of Saud is vexed, a fat toad croaking his orders in between gulps of sugared dates and candied figs, demanding return on his investment in Dr. Utopia. “We want from (Dr. Utopia) a serious participation to solve the Palestinian issue and impose the solution if necessary,” the autocrat dictates…a very pregnant “or else” unsaid, but hovering in the air with the clouds of noxious belches and flatus expelled by the enormous Saudi.
Typically, “or else”, to corpulant desert-palaced space slugs like King Abdullah, means freezing someone melodramatically in carbonite and displaying his plasticized form in a filthy throne room, while all manner of petty thugs, kooks, loons, and scum of the galaxy chitter and twitter joyfully.
Will Dr. Utopia abandon Israel to the Hutts, and destroy a friendship that’s endured through all challenges for over 60 years?
He’s already broken over 200 years of tradition, in which America’s President has bowed TO NO ONE, so why should any of us believe Israel’s best interests matter to a man who, by all outward appearances and collected evidence, seems like he’d gladly don a leather and silk bikini and dance at the end of a golden chain if King Abdullah told him to.
Change you can believe in!
Images we can’t stomach!
Sunday Open Thread
It’s Sunday June 7th and the weather is gray and lousy in Chicago. What’s on your mind today? What are people in your part of the country talking about?
Gray Matters launches
We’re delighted to announce the beginning of what we hope will be a twice-weekly or so feature here on HillBuzz: Gray Matters, a column by essayist Sebastian Gray. We’re setting up a special page for him here on HillBuzz, where Sebastian will write on politics, current events, social issues, and life in general here in Boystown, Chicago. We hope eventually Sebastian’s column will be syndicated beyond HillBuzz itself, so a moderate, Hillary Democrat, pro-woman, pro-American, bipartisan take on the LGBTQ community can bring a centrist’s viewpoint to various debates, while continuing to show conservatives and Republicans of all stripes that not all Democrats are bad, and that the negative stereotypes of the LGBTQ community held so firmly by many on the far right are outdated and ridiculous. Sebastian will give you the scoop on what people are saying and doing here in Boystown, with adventures and insights like only he can share.
If you have anything you’d like him to tackle in upcoming columns, feel free to note those ideas in comments on this thread or the Gray Matters page, or email Sebastian directly at: SebastianGrayMatters@gmail.com
As he starts this new column in earnest, we’re sure he’d love to hear from you!
NOTE: Many, many thanks to our good friend Teresa for the Gray Matters logo — and for other design-related surprises coming to HillBuzz in the days ahead!
Run, Sarah, Run
Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is in upstate New York today, celebrating the founding of Alaska at ceremonies around Auborn, New York, including nods of respect to Harriet Tubman, former Secretary of State Seward, the women’s rights and abolitionist movements, and the rest of what the fingerlakes region is known for.
This is one of those trips east Palin takes where we wish she’d change planes in Chicago so those of us here could put on a fundraiser or other event for her — which would be an absolute joy to have her so close to Buzzquarters.
At her appearances in New York, in addition to the shouts of “Sa-rah! Sa-rah! Sa-rah!” there’s also “Run Sa-rah Run!”, which we couldn’t agree with more.
Kooks and loons in Alaska are fairly successful in keeping Palin boxed into the state, making these appearances by her in the lower 48 too rare. We hope that changes in 2010, after she’s re-elected Governor and can take more of a stake on the national scene — coming to Chicago at last.
But, more importantly, to Iowa…and New Hampshire…and South Carolina…and all sorts of other places too.
Run, Sarah, run indeed.
Israel News Roundup – by Laura Rosen Cohen
Dear HillBuzz,
I thought I would try and put together a few items before the Jewish holiday of Shavuot (“weeks”) begins this evening. This holiday is a celebration of the Jewish people being given the Torah, and it is customary to read the Book of Ruth and eat dairy foods. It’s a fantastic story – it’s got everything, love, joy, intrigue, royalty – if you have a chance, do read the links.
I really enjoy reading articles in The Jerusalem Post by Khaled Abu Toameh, He’s a Palestinian journalist who has found, over the years, that he has the most press freedome working for The Jerusalem Post, rather than the Palestinian news outlets. He frequently lectures in North American and is very well connected in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. This article takes a look at the situation facing Mahmoud Abbas on the eve of his visit to Washington. One of the most interesting recent articles was a piece in which he observed that anti-Israel, or anti-Zionist, activism in North America is pretty much worse than anything Yasser Arafat ever spewed out.
Here’s a piece in which Amnesty International’s obsessive focus on Israel is discussed. Do you feel AI is obsessed? Are there other countries and causes that receive similar levels of attention? I think the NGO-world’s focus on Israel is suspicious – do you? I think there is selective outrage in the world when it comes to Israel. Phyllis Chesler has written a lot about the left’s disappointing abandonment of women in need in the Muslim world. I generally find that Pajamas Media has the content. If you don’t read it, you really should. Lastly, I’ll leave you with an item that makes me question if France will ever, ever learn. I’m leaning towards never, but perhaps you have different thoughts.
As always, if there are any questions or subjects you are interested in, please jot down a note in comments. I’ll put together some more book recommendations in my next round up if you think they are useful.
Sincerely,
Laura Rosen Cohen
Toronto, Canada
NOTE: Because of technical issues, we couldn’t get this post up on May 28th when Laura sent it to us, so the holiday reference was for last week, not this week. The information was so good we wanted to make sure you all got it, even if it was a little late. Sorry to Laura for not being able to get it up sooner — we really appreciate these Roundups and learn so much about Israel from them. For some reason, this upsets some people out there and always causes arguments to start in comments — but we think it’s important for everyone to learn more about Israel and to see through the MSM’s decades-long propaganda efforts on behalf of Islam and antisemitism, which we clearly see as going hand-in-hand more often than not in the Middle East.
Will this be the last straw for Gordon Brown with the British?
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is an embarrassment to himself and others.
It’s a wonder he’s not a member of the United States Congress.
Not only did he bungle the D-Day commemoration this year by not inviting Queen Elizabeth II (the only world head of state to actually serve in the military during WWII), but now he’s re-named Omaha Beach “Obama Beach”.
A vote of no confidence in the British government is coming — and will be here by the end of summer, no doubt. Cabinet members are resigning from Brown’s government by email, not even showing him the respect of following standard operating procedures for rats jumping off such a ship.
Soon Brown will have plenty of time to not watch all those DVDs our Illustrious President gave him when he visited the White House (DVDs he can’t see, because he’s legally blind, and can’t play, because they won’t work in his Region-2 DVD player).
Who’s likely to replace him as British PM?
With any luck, we’ll have a replacement of our own in 2012 and “Obama Beach” can go back to being called “Omaha Beach”, the way everything being renamed for the current president should ultimately revert back to whatever it was called before The Golden Age of Hope and Change befell us.
Technical Difficulties and the Wrong French Toast
So, this week has been a frustrating blend of Mac and WordPress-related technical problems that we’ve finally had time to sit down with a computer tech and resolve. Wordpress occasionally does this thing that locks us out, so that we can’t make it passed the green glass door and into the posting functions. It’s happened probably 4 times since we switched over to WordPress from blogspot last year — making the switch because the same thing happened to other sites, but not ours, on Blogspot. It’s completely some sort of technical thing we don’t understand, involving servers and hundreds of thousands of blogs out there and things like this happening. In the heat of the campaign, it seemed that when things like this happened, there was some conspiracy behind it, but in this case we think it was just a flaw in WordPress…probably exacerbated by the fact that WordPress seems to work better when we use PCs to post, but we’ve been running things on a Mac laptop and a desktop, so things get a little wonky sometimes.
If you are thinking of buying a new computer in the future, please do not buy a Mac. It’s the worst purchasing decision two of us here ever made, and we made those choices after listening to “computer experts” go on and on about how wonderful Macs are. Well, they’re not. They are inferior machines gifted with sleek exteriors and packaged with fabulous marketing — after you bring them home from the store, all shiny and new, filled with hope and change, you quickly realized how badly you were conned. It is funny how quickly all the non-Mac users can relate to this, as The Golden Age rolls on.
So, it was frustrating to not be able to post as usual the last few days, between whatever was going on with WordPress and the computer trouble we deal with on a daily basis with two junky machines.
But, sometime the universe brings you the wrong French toast, and something unexpected that really makes us think comes along when we least expect it.
It’s rare for us to realize just how much of our lives this little site takes up, and how many things we turn down and skip to be able to spend hours on the Internet researching and writing pieces for HillBuzz. Not having this platform for a few days, we were able to enjoy the momentary nice weather in Chicago, spend more time in the park playing with friends and their dogs, going out to a movie or dinner, and just taking a few hikes around parts of Chicago we’d never been to before, finding all sorts of great new places to go and things to try. Sometimes we realize how much we resent this site and the power it has over us — it demands so much attention and sacrifice from us, with nothing really coming back to us in return. We work harder on this amateur volunteer effort than most people work at their actual paid jobs (and, as sad as it is to note, we put more investigative journalism into the snarky business we get up to than actual reporters put into their fluff propaganda pieces these days). Friends of ours go to parties, but we head home to give another 4 hours to HillBuzz. People take impromptu road trips to go camping or swimming somewhere, and we cloister ourselves off somewhere to talk about ACORN or wasteful spending or call the MSM out for its latest lies. Other people have day jobs, then leave work at 5pm and have a blast enjoying themselves. Some of us here work two jobs in this economy trying to stay afloat here in Chicago, and then put in a third shift producing free content to put out into the world.
There are days, and today is one of them, when we all miss our old lives from pre-2008. None of us ever wanted to run a website, and we certainly didn’t want to spend so much time each day writing about politics and current events. But, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign prompted us to start this online adventure, and we saw a need to continue things beyond the primaries, into the general election, and now months and months after that. We also see that need going forwards, and are touched by the many good people who comment on what we write and help us always improve ourselves. So, part of why we keep going is that we love that community that spontaneously evolved around us. We love that there’s a TXMom and a FLMom out there somewhere reading us, and a girlpower here in Chicagoland who we love hearing from, and a GarlicNosedHo out west who is always a delight. All of you, and many, many more (like NeeNee and SkatingOnGlue and EricP etc.) are so interesting and thought-provoking and supportive — so much so that collectively all of the commenters have a real and decided impact on us that we are so appreciative of. We put our essays and opinions out there knowing we’ll have instant fact-checking, critical analysis, and neverending suggestions for improvement that truly benefits us, and not just for this site, but for everything we do going forward.
And that’s an interesting dynamic we’ve missed over the last few days. Though it’s been very, very nice to enjoy Chicago and many of the things we stopped doing because we were so focused on this site, it felt strange to not hear from the regular chorus of voices out there giving their opinions on what we say, think, and do. No one else in our lives has something like this — nobody else has people all across the country chiming in every day, like disembodied electronic fairy godmothers, to root them on and make them better, smarter, and more successful. And for that, we are truly blessed, because it really is such a gift to be very grateful for.
And then there are the trolls, who keep coming back here to post their nasty, hateful remarks — even on days when we aren’t able to post anything, the trolls are still there. And, really, it’s worth an entire essay unto itself because troll behavior is fascinating. Spam filters keep most of you from being able to read this filth, but they are there every day, ripping us for saying this or not saying that and generally being obsessed with a site they supposedly hate — yet seem to spend more time on than we do ourselves. A few of these people post their comments from their work computers, so their IP addresses come from law firms in Florida or US Navy stations in San Diego or hospitals in rural Ohio, where we assume the trolls are professionals of some kind who have become obsessed with the antics of a handful of gay guys in Boystown, Chicago. They hate HillBuzz, hate us, hate Hillary Clinton, hate Sarah Palin, hate Boystown, hate everything we are about, but when we are not around, it’s like they lose their sense of purpose and have no idea what to do with themselves. It’s so twisted and sick it’s hilarious.
But, like we just wondered above, is it better to totally ignore these people (lest we encourage them), even if it means never getting to share the behind-the-scenes stuff that goes into this site that just makes us laugh for hours. Because, honestly, it is a laugh riot sometimes.
We just need to find a better balance between HillBuzz and actual lives. Columnists like Michelle Malkin put out a piece a day, with several little updates on other things, but Malkin’s paid full time to do this. We all have day jobs (with some having second gigs too, to make ends meet), so we actually work much, much harder than the “professionals” out there. Maybe we need to evolve into a format that’s more condusive to having a better life-work balance for us. Regular readers can sure help with that — by keeping us updated on all the latest news and points of interest to keep our research time down, so we don’t have to hunt for info as much on our own and can instead lean on you to do most of that for us, freeing us up to put out more essays and other pieces instead. We’re sure there are a lot of great ideas out there and would love to hear them…because the French toast the universe served up this week definitely told us we need to shift things into a new gear. It’s summer, and we certainly don’t want to miss it cloistered indoors at the computer…but we also don’t want to leave our post when there’s so much that needs to be done to get this country back on track, with many in Washington seemingly Hell-bent on destroying us all.
We also need to get rid of these Macs and switch back to PCs by the end of the summer, so we’re pooling our resources to do that, which should eliminate some of the posting problems (and moving to a new site totally under our control with great security features should improve on WordPress’s spotty reliability).
It’s all a lot of work, but it seems to be worth it. We’re touched people miss us when we aren’t able to post, and hope you know how much that means to us — but remember we’re doing the best we can every day, juggling a lot, and sometimes life and technical difficulties and the wrong French toast gets in the way.
