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I’m providing the link here for anybody who’s feeling particularly masochistic.  This is the speech Sarah Palin just gave in Des Moines that a lot of people are saying is the most embarrassing thing she’s ever done.

I don’t know.  That’s a pretty tall order.  Sarah Palin has had some pretty embarrassing moments.  To me, the all time greatest has to be the Katie Couric interview when she couldn’t think of the name of any newspaper she read.  Nonetheless, it was pretty embarrassing.  There were a couple of audience shots (somewhere around the rambly bit where she seemed to endorse Hillary Clinton, although I’m sure that’s not what she meant) where people were looking a bit stunned, like “egad, is this woman really as stupid as everybody says.”

Nonetheless, they gave her a standing ovation at the end.  She hit, with her very screechy voice, all the basic conservative talking points.  Obamacare is bad, free college is bad, Obama  let the ambassador die at Ben Ghazi,  Ronald Reagan (oh, a lot about Ronald Reagan), flags,  guns, flags,  front porches.  It didn’t matter that she was sounding like a cross between Victoria Jackson and Miss South Carolina, such as.

I remember when Clint Eastwood   gave his rambling, almost senile speech at the Republican convention in 2012, where he spoke to the empty chair.  All liberals thought it was the nail in the coffin for the Republican party, and the Tea Party wing of it in particular.  In the weeks following, conservatives were hanging chairs up in trees as if old Clint was the reincarnation of William Jennings Bryan.

Because, to them, it doesn’t really matter that the speech was crap.  As long as they all stand up and cheer at the end, the next day they can say it was a great speech and the game goes on.

We can’t count Sarah Palin out yet.

I avoid all facebook games and,  in fact, video games of all sorts, and frequently express disdain for them in public.  However, I do occasionally get sucked in.

Our latest family addiction is Pixwords.  My wife has it on her phone, and so does my son, although he usually plays it in Czech, so I’m not even  tempted to participate. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why my wife plays in English.  Sneaky.

Anyway, it’s basically a mini crossword, just four words, and the clue for each is a picture.  Sometimes it’s a little bit tricky but often as not it’s straightforward and the only trick is knowing what the object pictured is,  just knowing the word in English. Once you get all four, you get a brief congratulatory message and it pops up with the next level right away.

Helena assures me that it is possible to complete the game,  that there are not, in fact, infinite levels, but I haven’t seen an end to it yet.  It is kind of addictive.  I suspect that the appeal of these games is that repeated flashing of “Level completed!”  Even though it is absurdly easy, it feels good to complete a task and have somebody – even a machine – tell you how smart you are.

Another one I got sucked into today, on facebook, was “How Well Do You Know ______?” It was from somebody I know in real life, although not terribly well, so I took the quiz, trying to match her up to her favorite food, which emoji best described her, what animal she would be, stuff like that.  The results told me what I already knew, that I didn’t really know her all that well.

I  think I’ll keep trying to avoid games and quizzes.  Life is short, there is so much to see, so much to learn.  There is no time to waste.

I do not relax well.  Having a day without obligations and distractions makes me nervous.  Today was such a day.

Sam left early in the morning, off for a school ski-trip and he’ll be gone for a week.  I knew that was happening so I was not surprised.  I figured that would give Helena and I the peace and quiet needed to go through our to do list and get caught up to date.  Then Helena told me that she was off up to the cottage.  Of course, Isabel went with her so I’m on my own for the weekend.

‘Great!’ I thought.  I will get a lot done without the distractions.  I’ll  be able to watch TV in English and eat things I like that nobody else in the family does.  Well, I did do that, but I watched a bit more TV than I should and the day was not massively productive.  I took the paper and plastic out, cleaned the rabbit’s cage, and watered the plants but most people would have had that done before breakfast.

One thing I did get done was my “Rheets 2014” book.  This is a writing project I’ve been doing once a year for three years now.  Rheets is a scrunched up word  for rhyming tweets.  I write one every day,so at the end of the year I have a collection and I finished writing that book today and OMG the keyboard just died  in the middle  of that sentence so I hit publish, still could navigate via mouse but not type so  this is being finished Sunday morning had to call my  help desk (AKA wife).  Anyway,  the Rheets book is done, should have that up on  Kindle  soon, it’s a little summary of the past year in  rhyming couplets.

In the learn  something new every day department: today I learned that Brazil Nuts are not actually nuts at all, but seeds.  A whole bunch of them grow inside a hard shell that looks a bit like a coconut.  I don’t know how any birds or forest creatures manage to break them open, which must happen for them to be worth a damn as seeds and also because that’s the way nature works, everything is food for something else, but I’m guessing there must be some seriously sharp beaked birds in the Amazon rain forest.  Human beings need a hammer.

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I don’t know if Congress cozying up to Benjamin Netanyahu behind Obama’s back is technically illegal or not, certainly in the barroom debate definition of words it could be considered treason, but the thing that I don’t understand is: what the fuck is it about Israel?  I get offended when people I know (and I know a few) start in with their conspiracy theories about how Jews control the world and the Mossad did 9/11 (which I think is more plausible than Al Qaeda doing 9/11, but I still think Occam’s Razor prefers Cheney and Co.), and then we see something like this.  Somehow, for some reason, Israel has the U.S. by the balls.

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King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is dead.  This is the nice thing about death.  It happens to the nasty, horrible

What happens at Camp David stays at Camp David

people of the world just as surely as it happens to the good people.  I don’t think his death will actually change much.  His successor has vowed “continuity and stability” which means they will continue with all the beheadings and floggings and denying rights to women and treating immigrant workers like slaves, and the U.S. government, protecting the interests of U.S. oil companies, will be behind them all the way.  It does not make sense.  Israel and Saudi Arabia.  The U.S. can’t say that both are our best friends, because they are each other’s bitterest enemies.  Yet the U.S. gives billions of dollars worth of weaponry to both of them.

I wonder if  George Bush  will go to the funeral?

Fifi is a rabbit

She is a lot of fun

but everywhere that Fifi goes

she poops a fucking ton

Yes, you read right.  We have a pet rabbit and her name is Fifi.  We’d decided on Fifi for a girl or George for a boy (“Tell me about the rabbits again, George” was what went through my mind when I heard that name, but I’m sure the film reference was totally unintentional) but then we just started calling her Fifi because we didn’t  know and I was quite relieved when the vet told us she was actually a girl and we didn’t need to change the name back.

This is not Fifi, but it looks a lot like her

She’s beautiful and soft and I actually  like her, although rabbits are perhaps even below cats on the giving a fuck what human beings think scale.  For the first week or so I couldn’t pick her up at all, if I got anywhere near her she would run like hell, although it’s not actually  running.  She can skitter along on those hind legs pretty well, and can hide in places we can’t get to.  Like a rat, to which I’m pretty sure rabbits are actually related.

She does poop a lot, though.  Our plan for the weekend is to get that sorted out, apparently you can give them a litter box like you would for a cat, so we’re going to try and set that up.  People think “Hey, stop complaining, it rabbit poop.  Tiny little pellets, they look like chocolate chips.  It’s not as if you have a pet elephant or anything.  Now, there you have a case.

Her other bad habit is she likes to chew at cables, which we have plenty of.  That was why my  computer suddenly bleeped out on me yesteday.

We borrowed the cable from a friend, though, and now I’m back in business.