Friday, June 02, 2006

SOLUTION FOR POSTING PICTURES ON YOUR BLOG

HAVING TROUBLE POSTING PICTURES TODAY?

DANGER CHIHUAHUA HAS THE SOLUTION! (honestly, it works.)
update: THIS IS BULLSHIT, BLOGGER.COM, IT'S BEEN THREE DAYS NOW! COME ON!
in your 'edit posts' screen, go down to an earlier published post....mine was 5-5-06, for example.
1. open the selection in 'edit post'
2. select the 'edit html' tab.
3.put your cursor at the very first character and 'space' down three or four spaces, just to give yourself some viewing room. now return your cursor to the top of the page.
4. now, using the regular old 'upload pictures to blogger' controls, upload your picture. and voila! it will load in no problem; at least it did for me.
5. now highlight the entire html code containing your picture and copy it
( ctrl + 'c' )
6. open your NEW post in the 'edit post' screen and paste the code (ctrl + 'v') wherever you want it to be. in doing this, the picture disappears from the old post when you hit 'yes' at the 'contents have changed' warning.
7. repeat as needed.
7. publish.
UPDATE:
Some commenters complain this fix does not work for them. Why that is, I don't know. anyway, THE PICTURE BELOW PUBLISHED on Saturday afternoon, June 3, 2006 AT 5:54 PM PACIFIC STANDARD TIME, U.S. using the method described above. Don't give up if you haven't tried it yet. Yes, regular Blogger picture posting is still down for me.

All together, now!
Whos the leader of the club, thats made for you and me?
Get your shit together, Blogger M-O-U-S-E!

Thursday, June 01, 2006

The Diabolical Devil-Face Crab Red's Magic Commandment!

The Stainless Steel Amazon burst in this morning seething with rage. "Listen to this!" she commanded, and played back the latest message from her landlord
WHO IS A STUMP FUCKING ASS-DOG
and whose sad drawling attempt at a superior tone shrieks "Oh! Mah God! Mah penis is
SO little! Everyone come look at mah tiny wiener! MAH WIENER IS SO TINY IT LOOKS LIKE A BABY TOE WITH A HOLE IN THE END!"
Oh, what effort he put into his snide delivery! Positively Shakespearian, if Shakespeare had written for six-year-old girls. Good Lord.

The thing was, he had all of his facts WRONG. All he had heard when my daughter initially called him was 'I'm going to be moving at the end of my lease" which in his mind translated into "WOOP!WOOP!WOOP! Decline in revenue!" and off he went on his abusive tirade without registering the rest of the message at all.

How do people like this survive? If he was in my town I'd fucking cut his brake lines.

This is the type of shit I dealt with all while I was single. I'm sorry to say, there is a certain type of man who sees a single woman as dirt beneath his feet. Simply put, he knows he doesn't have to be nice (because he perceives her as not having the power to MAKE him be nice), so he isn't. Fronted up with this, they will accuse you of being 'oversensitive'. Oho, yeah, I hear that booming, paternal, impatient, 'talking to a retard and resenting every minute' tone and I just go fucking ballistic to this day, not that you could tell or anything.

Certain people only hear cash register bells. You give them a bunch of testosterone and a couple of credit cards and you have a bully who is going to get his way unless you refuse. Either be richer than them and use it, or have nothing to lose and be smarter. And WAAAAAAAAAY meaner. (Voice of vandalism-um, experience. )

And I'm sorry, but to retain any sort of self respect and to maintain your place in the world, YOU HAVE TO REFUSE TO BE REAMED. I remember the 'Seventies feminists that were going to create an alternative order and failed again and again miserably. I remember the assertions 'women don't need to act that way. We aren't that way, and we don't have to be that way in order to get things done. Hierarchy is a tool of the patriarchy'

Uh-huh, yeah.

Hierarchy is the way THINGS WORK. Shit rolls down hill. This may not always be pleasing or serve ones purposes, but there's nothing wrong with it and there's nothing immoral or dastardly about it. It is also not a quality at odds with being female, or feminine. Ever been part of an all-female organization? Ever belonged to the PTA? Ever been a mother? Yes? How do things get done in those circumstances?
My point proven.

You simply cannot have respect without earning it and without defending it. That means WOMEN TOO. You don't get to sit back on your pear shaped ass and receive fair treatment merely by virtue of menstruation.
Germaine Greer was one of these stupid ivory tower twats. Man, I laughed out loud when she moved to Catholic, conservative rural Italy. *snerk* Oh, honey. Ivory tower? Meet Reality.
She, of course, does not live there anymore.

Anyway, Mr. 'Delusions of Donald Trumpery', Mr. "Doctors mistake it for a vestigial teat' I pity the fuck out of you. My Amazon is going to BEAT YOU DOWN.
Then it's my turn.

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

geology. geology, dammit! or, our vacation east of the cascades

small update: I have a post here
http://bitterbierce.blogspot.com/
where i was asked to guest. it's a good blog! and not just because the guy was classy enough to ask me to contribute (which he did, despite the instructions at the bottom of the post. really. honestly, he did.)
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I have just returned from a vacation-ette in Wenatchee, Washington. Unlike here, where the ground is covered with vegetation and used surgical gloves, Wenatchee is a paradise of sagebrush and stone, Mexicans, people driving trucks randomly entering the traffic flow and fruit trees.

Really, it is a beautiful place and we love it there. It has odd street names and strange vernacular architecture. Verdant farms and gardens exist seamlessly next to office buildings, or groves of peaches ripening in their millions, or desolations of baking stone. And the stone itself is on awe- inspiring perpendicular display everywhere. Cropping up in the middle of a parking lot will be a blade of basalt...In the middle of a manicured city park, an aircraft carrier sized slab...Even the stone hillsides sport strange irruptions of alien rock, like evidence of a meteor bombardment that I'm really glad I wasn't around for.

This is the first time we have gone in the springtime. We usually go in August, which in retrospect was kind of demented of us. The place is known for extreme summers. But we just slathered on the baby sunblock and rode merrily around in our tank tops and enjoyed the smell of the sagebrush.

Oh, but in the springtime Wenatchee is wonderful. All the hills have a wash of green and wildflowers burst out of the bare stones. It almost looks phony, like some crazed cat lady stuck bouquets of silk flowers in random crevices...The only thing giving lie to that hypothesis being the lack of cat ladies rappelling down the rock faces or hovering in helicopters. But that would be cool, wouldn't it?

The town of Wenatchee is medium-sized for eastern Washington. It's economy is based on fruit growing and shipping. It is divided by the Columbia River, which is dammed off into various lakes above and below the city. Cholo guys hang out in front of tiny ramshackle homes with swept yards, Mexican rap blaring out of beater whips, next door to over-the- top-mansions bristling with laser security and Escalades and satellite dishes. What strikes me as odd, in this agricultural town, is that most residents live behind a fence. Gated communities are everywhere, too, some with armed security guards. I wonder if this is prejudice or experience?

Wenatchee is surrounded by mountains, soft and rounded at the tops and jagged on the sides, green spread around their bases and creeks runnelling their sides; creeks lined on each bank with ribbons of lush,lush, lush verdure. These arroyos are the home of dream ranches from the pages of Dream Ranch magazine, elk, deer, lost antelope, coyotes and amazing small lizards which appear to be made out of gravel and sand. Some of the hills are snowtopped all summer, or begin the day white and melt to sueded brown by noon. Ravens and buzzards glide overhead. Doves call in the evening. Quail run everywhere in between like handfuls of rolling marbles, two scoops of bird with a flurp! on top and a kamikaze heart.

In the evenings, around sundown, a wind rises from the ground. This is how it feels, anyway, if you are standing outside when it happens. Your hair lifts and breezes tickle up under your shirt. This wind expands and fills, an invisible balloon of warm air perfumed with roses and sage and dust. Then it rolls down the hillsides and through the town to the river. From our favorite motel on a hilltop we can watch it gather leaves and curls of dust at a lazy rate high into the air overhead, and drift towards the river, and roll on downstream with the current.

Most days there is a thunderstorm, if not in the immediate vicinity then somewhere visible. Distances are big. Later in the year the rain falls as virga*, never touching the ground, but while we were there it rained and cleared by short turns all day, never ruining our plans in the least.

Our time was divided between hanging out at the cool, retro motel, watching the Food Network in the nice room that other people had to clean, and driving. We drove up and down the river and as far around nearby Lake Chelan as the road permitted. We explored many of the small towns along the way and made plans to retire in each one. We selected our homes from the number of wonderful Craftsmen style places everywhere and laid out the landscaping. We discussed whether it would be better to live up a canyon with only one road in and out, or whether living in the middle of the big open would be the wiser decision. We wondered, 'does the DEA run overhead infrared scan and then stage raids, or do they simply wait at the intersections and check cars at random?' (We are going to be *ahem*farmers in our golden years.)

We went up one canyon to the end of the maintained road, beyond which the highway department assured us lay two more towns. But it was in Ardenvoir, where the pavement ended, that we were accosted by the Arm Stroker and his wife, and that decided us against proceeding any further up the valley.

Now downtown Ardenvoir consists of one crappy, charmless, battered building . It contains a general store, a post office (closed in defiance of regulations, with a faded quilt for a curtain nailed across the window) and a tiny cafe floored in old license plates.Two old gas pumps stand outside bearing evidence of having stopped many a car, with their hoses all patched with prehistoric fluttering duct tape.

We bought a soda and marveled at all the beer on display in the the ancient windowed coolers still in use, the type insulated with rags and cotton, dating back to the days when ice was hauled up from the Columbia by mules and bedded in sawdust all year. There were lots of mounted elk heads looming above giving us the stinkeye. Buffalo jerky was for sale. Horseshoe nails were in stock, as were unreasonably numerous liters of Coke and plastic milk jugs (used for baling dope and jarring shine, respectively.) Everyone in the place knew each other. The clerk could barely wait on us for shyness.

The Yummy biker was putting in a fresh chew when the Arm Stroker approached out of nowhere. "Niiiiiiiice tats!" he enthused, circling my biker and stroking his arms. "Where did you get them? How old are they? Is that red? Whats that supposed to be? Wow!" Then he drifted over to me me, grinning. "Niiiiiiice tats" he reiterated. Then he reached out and ran his knuckle down my arm lovingly. Just as quick as it takes to read this it happened; it was over and he was gone, with his 11 lb. crack wife and her crennelated smile in tow. We never did figure out where they came from. Honey, we just LEFT.
But we are hardy, and we are easily amused too, particularly at the expense of the less fortunate. Nothing daunted, we antiqued; we shopped. We ate to excess. We had a great time!





*i had written 'verga' there, but upon looking it up discovered that 'verga' is an anatomical term for penis. Which would be interesting, provided you could observe it from afar, but i wouldn't want to be flying an airplane and run into a front of it. suck a few of those into the engines and see what happens to your lear jet, boy. try explaining it to your insurance company.

Monday, May 29, 2006

one tired hippobottomous (but tanned nicely!)

My darlings, I have just returned from vacation, and I am pooped and tuckered out, like. The Yummy Biker neglected to book us separate beds so I have spent the last two nights lying awake next to a comatose, sleeping man who yet manages to sleep all over the whole bed, gurgle, snort, snore, gag, flap, ask me to cosign checks, yell incoherently, wander around, curse in the bathroom, hold entire rational conversations which he does not remember the next day......yeah. like that. So y'all just be patient and tomorrow I will recount for your reading pleasure the adventures of Muk in the Hindermost Hinterlands!
Right now, night night.