Springtime Rebounding and Redounding

I need to update this blog but I might not be able to do so until Sunday.

This image above is once again looking into the yard at 4800 Calvert Rd., College Park, Md., just like in my previous entry. However, in this case, it is a sunny day with a bit more of the yard visible. It was taken 2:09PM, April 23, 2009, Thursday.

I was already a half hour late for my Thursday class. Sigh.

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Here is the view looking along the fence of the aforementioned house, looking west along Calvert Rd. (away from the College Park Metro station):

I think those flowers are creeping phlox, but I'm not sure. Naturally, my cellphone camera image was crummy. Picture taken 2:09PM, April 23, 2009.

The mulch, by the way, that gets put down everywhere this time of year really smells awful. I've never liked it. To me it smells like perfumed shit.

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Tomorrow (Saturday) is Maryland Day at the University of Maryland and I've volunteered to work the public policy school tent's between 1PM and 230PM.

After a nice cool and wet period, the weather has suddenly warmed up -- and pollen levels have skyrocketed and I am in misery and have to take allergy medication, much of which makes me groggy since I couldn't readily find any anti-drowsy kind. I also need lots of eye drops since my eyes get so watery and itchy.

It's supposed to be near frickin' 90F tomorrow and Sunday, which most people love but I don't.

This was the view outside my apartment building at 6:41PM, April 21, 2009 (Tuesday) during an early evening thunderstorm / downpour here in D.C.

The air was rather unstable and the downdrafts brought quite a bit of cold air to the surface so temps were only around 48F after wards. This pattern has ended. Boo.

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I applied for three jobs this week, two of which I might have a chance at any interview. The third -- an EPA job with the U.S. Government -- is an impossibility. People such as I don't get Federal jobs applying "cold".

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In a bit of political commentary, please read Glenn Greenwald's good commentary in Salon.com on the American whore-media's role of complicity in wanting to excuse the Bush torture memo authors and enablers. He refers to it as the media's "three key rules" in "framing" the torture debate.

Here is picture is of Glenn Greenwald. He is a Constitutional and civil rights lawyer, a blogger, and a liberal pundit. He is also gay. (I'm not sure if he lives here in D.C. but I've never seen him.) He is 2-1/2 years older than I am.

On a personal note, Greenwald is basically what a "successful" version of me would have been like rather than the nearly 40-year old, barely-hanging-on failure that I am.

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As for the crazed, self-devouring Republican Party's current role of all-torture, all-evil, zero-policy ideas all-the time, it's a bizarre thing to watch. I like Talkingpointsmemo blogger Josh Marshall's take on it, namely, that the GOP is acting like a military junta party immediately after it loses power but still flails about in a scary but increasingly powerless way. At least I hope that's the case.

Ha ha -- go right ahead and secede, Perry. That will INSTANTLY give the Dems a fillibuster proof Senate majority.

One of his readers wrote an interesting counterpoint that says today's GOP is similar to the GOP of the early 1930s shortly after FDR assumed power.

The writer argues that then, as now, the Republican Party was a leaderless, agitated, and highly regionally concentrated one. Of course, there are some differences: back then it was the Southern Democrats at the time who filled the socially reactionary role since the end of Reconstruction, to wit, that of the black-oppressing racists in old Dixie.

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I took a walk from the UMCP campus (Van Munching Hall) to Prince George's Plaza via the trail in the woods into College Heights Estates and University Park. I went to the Macy's at the mall to buy a few clothing items. Above is the forested trail, 6:07PM, April 23, 2009.

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I don't think the Southern Democrats were -- like today's GOP -- both a regional racist - reactionary party AND the party of Big Business, of corporate plutocracy and kleptocracy. True, the Democratic Party leadership in Washington is almost as bad when it comes to whoring themselves out to Big Business, but at the end of the day, the GOP simply is fascist, whether in a red meat socially reactionary way or in a corporate-plundering kind of way.

I think that's enough political stuff for now.

The plush-grassy intersection of Chansory Lane and Calverton Drive at the dead-end of College Heights Estates, Md., near the foot trail in the woods to the UMCP campus, 6:09PM, April 23, 2009

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I may update this entry later tonight to include more pictures I took this week. I'll also explain all the trouble I had breaking a $100 bill in the campus cafeteria, including why I had such a large note ...

--Regulus