Radical Georgia Moderate

…and I’ll bitch if I want to. Wednesday was all like, “We know you’re helping your girlfriend move this week, but we need you to build out 60 or 70 web pages. By Friday.”

And today was all like, “Uh, yeah, I’m running on three and a half hours sleep, as you knew I would be, so you better push that bitch out to EOD Monday.”

Somebody needs to pay me for something that doesn’t involve work.

Thanks to then-U.S. Rep. Denise Majette following the advice of the voices in her head and running an ill-advised campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2004 (and abdicating her House seat), my current U.S. Rep. advocates for my interests by punching security officers in the face and proposing bills to archive Tupac Shakur’s documents. Stellar. I think Ms. Majette’s whole political career has been an elaborate object lesson meant to demonstrate that God doesn’t really care about U.S. elections. If she wins the schools superintendent race she recently entered, maybe she’ll integrate intelligent design into the curriculum just to prove that it makes kids dumber.

New column is up. Enjoy. Work is sticking a rhubarb in every available orifice this week, and I’m helping Amber move at night, so I don’t know how much blogging there will be today and tomorrow.

Washington Post “omsbudsman” Deborah Howell on Ben Domenech, the 24-year-old GOP operative hired to write the newspaper’s Red America blog. Ben resigned within the same week when evidence emerged that he was a serial plagiarist.

“I can’t defend it. It’s a fuckin’ disaster.”

As promised, here is the original uncensored version of the column I wrote for Georgia Political Digest earlier this week. It seems fellatio is a taboo subject for a political web site trying to keep a wholesome general audience. Substituting the slightly less evocative “Lewinsky” for “fellatio” still didn’t get it past the Standards and Practices. Whodathunkit? Without further ado…

When did almost everybody in the fucking world get a MySpace account? Even the most computer-illiterate people I know seem to have one. Surfing around the site, I noticed comments from people I hadn’t seen or heard from in years. Since I’d mostly prefer to keep it that way, I probably shouldn’t sign up for an account myself. And why is it that close to everyone on there chooses the most hideous background images and unreadable color schemes? Most of those pages look like visual diarrhea.

There are already good tutorials on the Internets for how to crack open the case of your Mac Mini to upgrade the RAM, so I’m just going to post pictures.

I should have taken a photo with the putty knives jammed in its crevices. Note I said knives. I think having two putty knives makes the job hella easier, though it theoretically can be done with one. I was surprised with how rough I had to be with it, and was momentarily seized with panic when I did get it open, thinking I must have broken something… the Bluetooth/Airport antenna seems especially delicate. Everything seems to be running fine though.

The AJC did something good, if you can believe it, in converting the Jim Galloway-Tom Baxter Political Insider column into a blog. Its state Legislature coverage is one of the few places where the AJC actually does a good job. I enjoy that column.

It even has an RSS feed, which means you can subscribe to it in Bloglines now! That could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on whom you ask. My Bloglines subscriptions are out of control, with more than 90 sites. Basically, sites without RSS feeds don’t exist to me anymore.

My second column is up, check it out here. It’s about U.S. Rep Tom Price and (who else?) Lt. Governor candidate Ralph Reed. Tom should appreciate one particular turn of phrase. I’ll post the uncensored version tomorrow, which has all the fellatio references that Standards and Practices asked me to remove. You might notice there’s now a category for Georgia Political Digest, which will serve as an index for my columns.

The writing is a little snooty and pretentious, but I think the outsider’s perspective makes the article (login) worth a read. I have yet to visit the Aquarium, so anything I say is conjecture. From what I’ve heard, my concerns about it are the same as the author’s were here:

The lack of information and the inconsistency of imagination are strange, given the ambitions and accomplishments of this institution — including an educational program that draws schoolchildren with an apparently detailed curriculum. It is as if once the big effects were created, the creators relaxed into routine. Why though, is there a reluctance — here as in so many other museums — to provide real information for those who want it? Or to design exhibits that don’t just create atmosphere but spur understanding? The now requisite messages about conservation are pumped into a 3-D cartoon, but even they have no real import.

As I’ve come to understand from other people’s accounts, the focus on spectacle rather than on education, for better or for worse, is what seperates the Georgia Aquarium from Chattanooga and most other aquariums.