I forgot to mention the latest Carnival of Education! How can any of us have viable opinions about education/schools/teachers if we don’t keep current?

My music is set on random, as usual, and so far the selection has been, well, random. My musical tastes are so varied that when I set my player on random, boy, it’s REALLY random.

1. Waiting For My Real Life To Begin – Colin Hay
2. Two Soliloquies – from South Pacific – Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza
3. What’ll I Do – Allison Kraus
4. Symphony in C – Cake
5. Early One Morning – Nana Mouskouri
6. Pretty Women – from Sweeney Todd – Len Cariou
7. Time Is Running Out – Muse
8. A Tall Stand of Pines – Floating Men
9. Senza Catine – Il Divo
10. Two of Us – Aimee Mann and Michael Penn
11. Papercut – Linkin Park
12. Ah It Mek – Desmond Dekker
13. Unchained Melody – Righteous Brothers
14. Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien – Elaine Paige
15. Cam Ye O’er Frae France – Steeleye Span
16. Death Is Not The End – Nick Cave and Friends
17. Shenandoah – John McDermott
18. Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice – PDQ Bach
19. Flight of the BumbleBee – King’s Singers
20. Falling – from Aspects of Love – Michael Ball, Ann Crumb, Diana Morrison, Kathleen Row McAllen, and Kevin Colson

As I type: Mr. Snow – from Carousel – Jean Darling (as Carrie)

On another forum, people are discussing Barbie. The doll.

I have never cared for Barbie. I never wanted one, and my daughter never wanted any, either.

Frankly, I wonder about a dolly that represents a fully developed woman’s body. Why do people put that in the hands of a little child?

My daughter loved her dolls and couldn’t get enough. She loved baby dolls and little girls dolls: dolls that represented HER.

I don’t buy into the “I have negative body image because of Barbie, boo hoo” thing; I just don’t think an adult doll with boobs and a career would be any fun for a little child to play with. It certainly never appealed to me.

And how DO you play with Barbie? I mean, besides dress her and undress her and dress her again? Wow, that’s fun. Because I don’t believe for one moment that a little child can project herself/himself into most of the “careers” Barbie has had over the year.

Baby dolls and little girl dolls – groovy.

Adult dolls with boobs and careers – boring.

Playing now: Jennifer Juniper – Donovan

Why yes, I do tend to leap from topic to topic much like Superman and his tall buildings. No, I’m not interested in reforming any time soon, but thank you for asking.

TOO MUCH CHANGING OF TOPIC WITHOUT ANY WARNING! CAN’T LOOK! HAVING SEIZURE. . . .

Feel better now, dear? Good.

I love Granny Smith apples. Also, my cats don’t shed much, which is good because my sweeper is on the fritz again.

BANANA HAMMOCK!

Mamacita, Scheiss Weekly

My email is overflowing with inquiries from people wanting me to get political on here and tell people who I feel would be the best president. Most of these emails are asking me to endorse Hilary for the simple fact that she is a woman and all of us women should stick together and elect one of our own to the White House because it’s TIME.

Bullshit.

I am not a political person. I vote, and I have always voted, because I firmly believe that voting is like being on a jury, and if a jury/senate/White House/congress is supposed to be full of my “peers,” well, I want to be sure that it really is, and not full of the kind of people who were on some of the juries/political offices I’ve seen. Peers my ass. It was like a tour through Jerry Springer’s waiting room, and those people are NOT my peers.

Besides, people who don’t vote rightfully forfeit all whining rights. No votee, no whinee. Few things make me angrier than someone griping about a political decision, who didn’t even vote. If someone didn’t care enough to have a voice on election day, that person should shut up forever about anything political. If he really cared, he would have voted.

I know that many people see no connection between someone’s personal life and his/her professional life, but I am not one of those people. I see a person’s personal life as a reflection of their priorities in their professional life, and vice versa. I can not separate the two. If a person is an idiot in his/her personal life, I believe he/she will be an idiot in the professional life, also. And, again, vice versa. Perhaps this is not always the case; I really don’t care. I can’t separate them. We are what we are, and most of what we are we have chosen to be.

It’s not just politicians, as you all well know, either. We all present an image to the public, but if that image is to be believable and viable in any way, we must give evidence that we are sincere by the way we live our personal lives. Politics is full of reprehensible people whose private lives are so filled with chosen horror that I could never in a million zillion years take anything they ever said, professionally, in any kind of serious way. I’m just waiting for the other shoe to fall, because it invariably will. I am not interested in electing a train wreck to political office.

I could never vote for Hilary, and it’s not because of her sex. It’s because I see her as an enabler of a man whose personal life is disgusting. I see her as an enabler of a marriage that is a joke. I see her as an enabler of a man who tries to pass off his inability to keep it in his pants as a ‘disease.’ Please. I also see one/half of a couple whose values are so far removed from mine that I simply can’t accept them in any way. When I think of the Clintons, all I see is a dysfunctional family, a pack of liars, and a woman who stayed in an adulterous marriage so she could climb higher as a politician. I also see a person who supposedly represents a state in which she did not even live. This is a joke, too. Add to all this the fact that the Clintons are milking the taxpayers for all it’s worth by charging the Feds rent for the extra residence they built to house the Secret Service agents – to the tune of the equivalent of their mortgage on that million-dollar home they bought to establish residence in New York – that’s a 10,000 mortgage, folks -this means that the taxpayers are paying the Clintons’ salaries, mortgage, transportation, safety and security, and the salaries for their 12-man staff. Looking out for the common people? The Clintons don’t know what a common person is. They don’t hang out with common people. No, I don’t want either of them representing me in any way.

The Clintons are a joke. Worse, they are a joke without a punch line. A never-ending build-up without any resolution. He is a grinning, selfish, horny old man, and she is a scary cackling oaf with a hard chromium finish. Both are scrambling up the political ladder on each other’s coattails, both are kicking the ladder away beneath them, and neither has a heart, or any kind of ethics other than the selfish kind.

I’m sorry, people who are constantly emailing me to endorse Hilary, but there is no way that will ever happen. Ever, ever, ever, ever.

I would never vote for someone based solely on his/her sex. That is ridiculous. I would also never vote for someone whose personal life was a shambles and whose personal choices were bad. People who break promises, commit adultery, cheat, can’t keep it in their pants or out of their pants, lie, steal, ingratiate, or try to fool me into believing they’d be a good elected representative of me while doing any of those things, make me heartsick and disgusted. Nobody is perfect, but everybody could at least TRY to behave.

No, I could never vote for Hilary, and I will never be able to endorse her in any way, unless she was running for National Joke, or National Bitch, or National Poster Woman for Dysfunctional Relationships, or Enabler of the Year, or some such.

I will not be answering any more political emails, so those who are persistent in wanting me to say something about politics on this blog can save themselves the trouble. You wanted to know what I thought about Hilary and now you know. Are you happy? I bet not.

Besides, who in the world would care what somebody like me thought about a candidate? Certainly Hilary doesn’t care about women like me. Hilary’s “choice” is not the same as mine.

It’s common knowledge that I am a firm believer in choice for all women, and for all men, too. The difference between me and a lot of other firm believers in choice is that I believe the choice comes BEFORE the consequences for the choice. Anything else and you’re just someone who got caught with his/her hand in the cookie jar and now you want amnesty AND the cookie AND no consequences for putting your hand in the sugar; you know, as if your hand being there wasn’t your choice in the first place. Baloney.

So, no Hilary for me. And if you are one of the many women who are planning to vote for Hilary simply because she’s a woman, please stop and think, and think HARD, before you do that. It may very well be high time to put a woman in the White House – I look forward to that day – but this is not the right woman. Not for me, anyway.

I do have a candidate in mind, but his people are not bombarding me with requests for endorsement. That just makes me like him more.

To sum up: Hilary – Absolutely not.

Any questions?

Mamacita, Scheiss Weekly

I am a person who tends to misplace important things, but there are three things in my life that I ALWAYS put in EXACTLY the same place the very minute I walk through the door/go to bed: my purse, my keys, and my glasses.

My purse lives under the piano bench during the day, and my keys live in a zippered pocket on the outside of the purse. My glasses live on my face unless I’m in bed. I never take them off during the day because I can’t see well enough to be without them for any reason.

Summer before last, my keys disappeared. I mean to say, they were gone. Vanished from the face of the earth. They have to be in this house somewhere, because I got home somehow, but after that? Poof. Gone. I’ve scoured the house, removed the cushions from the furniture, looked in places I know very well I haven’t been near, and those keys are nowhere to be found.

And, it wasn’t only keys. The automatic remote for the Honda was on the keyring, too. House keys. Car keys. Post office box key. Every important key was on that keyring.

Bummer.

Well, we changed the locks on the house and Hub had a new Honda key made. (Those little suckers with the computer chip are EXPENSIVE!) I had to do without the car’s remote for many months, but my sweet MIL financed a new one for me with her Christmas gift that year.

I haven’t lost this set of keys yet, but I am really scared that I will. That’s why, when I found one of those noise-making keychains that you buy for absent-minded old people, on the sale table at Goody’s the other day, I went for it.

Got it home, took it out of the box, pulled out the little piece of plastic, and whistled. The keyfinder went off like gangbusters, flashing its very bright little light and giving off a piercing whistle of its own. Perfection.

Tonight, Belle took me out to the Roadhouse for my birthday, and we stopped at Kohl’s on the way home. As we made our way through the store, that keyfinder kept going off. We couldn’t figure out what was setting it off.

But eventually, as we listened to our incredibly squeaky cart, we realized what it was. Every time that cart moved, it squealed like a pig, and every time it squealed, the keyfinder went off.

What, you don’t find that hysterical? I guess you hadda be there.