Pollyanna

When I first wrote about this, about 9 or 10 hours after I'd see in it Booman Tribune, I'd held off at first because, in my end-of-day ennui, I couldn't find the source. Bright-eyed and anybody-but-Bushie-tailed the next morning, I posted it, thinking it would be just a little footnote in the blogaxy.

But then last night, Amanda, who came across the story via completely different sites (this in spite of our both being rather contrary and inconveniently non-party-line feminist bloggers, who are supposedly blinded in our "single issue" mindset, which only goes to show how only Pollyanna can presume to lead anything called "the netroots") coined (or picked up on) the perfect meme for this story: the turkey baster. And it caught on.

In this day and age, where progressives are met with hostility from the right, as well as by many who claim to be of "the left," it's kinda nice to have even a part-time blogging day lifted by seeing such an hysterical meme stick to radical conservative ambitions of female subjugation.

Let's hope this turkey-baster eugenics bill the Republicans are cooking up gets dumped where it belongs: in the doghouse November next. Meanwhile, may they roast in the heat of their misogyny and lose their stuffing.

Now I'm the first to admit that I've been pretty snarky towards the right. In fact I did it again in a post just a few moments ago. I'm kind of surprised at this development, because I've always considered myself a sort of moderate to the extreme, if that makes any sense. I mean, to me, fiscal restraint is only smart going, but to slack on environmental protections or public health or public education is just plain stupid, and to pass laws to endorse all sorts of unexamined personal sexual hangups and social phobias is just fucking offensive. I didn't change, but the GOP sure as heck did!

So now, on this dark day where Hell's Kitchen (if not hell) is freezing over, I take a smidge of reassurance and find a speck of hope in the fact that right-wing bloggers seem to be as upset about this no-bankruptcy-for-you-peasants-consumers-suckers bill as those of us of the reality faith. I fear there's little hope to prevent passage, but when reason triumphs over jingoism over there, I begin to indulge in my pollyanna tendencies and believe that progressives and true conservatives can find common ground on some of our most dire challenges on this planet.

Yet here we are, with the public overwhelmingly against this bill -- at least to the extent that the mainstream media has reported on it at all -- and all the Republicans and a lot of the Democrats are poised to pass it into law.

Don't the people count for anything when the Senate is about to pass the most hateful piece of class warfare/corporate welfare legislation since Coolidge was president?

Oh yeah, that's right. We're just supposed to shut up and go shopping. American politics isn't about what the people want, it's about what the corporations want.

Could it be true? Have we been barking up the wrong paradigm all along?

As some of you may have noticed, little things have been changing on the site of late. I'm going through a gradual revamping of the site, adding some new features and replacing some others. I will make announcements of anything major, but, as many of these things will just suddenly show up (alas, I have no sandbox set up, which is my own lazy fault), you may see them before I can get off of of the debugging horse and pick up the megaphone.

That relates to function.

I've also been working on a re-templating of the site. That's a slow process with lots of trial and error as PHP is not my forte (though I'm learning a lot just looking up things on an as-needed basis -- a process called, "What the f--k does that mean?!" independent study, which I've learned is also a way to enjoy multiple unkept hairstyles throughout the day).

To say this in programese....I'm retooling the current default xtemplate theme into a phpTemplate theme, with some hacks added. phpTemplate is a much more powerful theming engine for Drupal and will allow me to (eventually) offer some really kewl layouts and features.

As all this is happening, I'll also be working on some new looks for mediagirl.org. One of them may end up being the default view here. (However, as long as nothing breaks with ongoing upgrades, I will keep the existing themes as preference options for anyone who registers.) If anything works out well, I may offer up some themes and maybe even a module or two on the Drupal site. But that's a while off yet.

All this is happening while I'm turning the corner into the last few miles of the marathon double-DVD project with 80 programs and some 20 moving menus.

And all of this is happening while I participate in the top-secret programming project that I'm finding very exciting.

Who'd'a thunk that me, the English-majoring, MFA-toting, no-math-after-calculus-thank-you-very-much-I-just-want-to-create dreaming pollyanna idealist media geek, would get into programming? Not me!

But then, I'm always full of surprises. Except when I'm boring.