09:01 – The taxes are in the mail, so I can forget about taxes for another year. Except, of course, for quarterly estimated tax payments, quarterly sales tax returns, and so on.
Barbara and I are watching The L Word and series five of Mad Men. Both are excellent, but The L Word is the better of the two. Oddly, it appears that only one of the actresses playing major roles in The L Word is actually gay. Several of the others are married (to men) according to Wikipedia. A couple of the primary actresses have never been married, but that of course says nothing one way or the other. I’m rather surprised that there was no outcry from the gay community, or at least none that I heard about. Having straight actresses playing lesbians seems a bit like having white people playing blacks.
Mad Men, as always, is well written but very dark and depressing. Nearly all of the major characters are weasels or weaselettes. The one exception is Megan Draper, wife of the lead character, played by Canadian actress Jessica Paré. What is it about Canada that it turns out so many adorable women? I think we should invade Canada and steal their women. In return, we can give them some of ours. I have a list, starting with some female politicians who are frequently mentioned in the comments here.
14:31 – Barbara got a call from her sister about 1:30. Her dad apparently collapsed at lunch and the EMTs were on the way. Frances told Barbara to meet them at the hospital, so Barbara got dressed and headed for the hospital. Frances is driving Sankie to the hospital. At this point, we have no idea how serious Dutch’s condition is. Of course, Dutch is 90 years old, and we all fear the worst.
15:00 – Barbara just called from the emergency room. Her dad is okay. He had a temperature around 103F (39.5C), which is enough to make a young person feel pretty ill, let alone someone who’s 90. The EMTs also had a hard time finding a pulse. Barbara says he not in any serious danger now other than the obvious for someone 90. They’ll probably admit him. Barbara is going to come home. As she said, there’s nothing she can do there.
Bob, what have we done to deserve you wanting to offload your trash onto us? Was it Celine Dion? Who puts the lie in the Canada makes adorable women line, BTW.
We make adorable women, because we ARE adorable. Simple as that!
I don’t think it’s fair to hold Canada as a whole responsible for Dion. She’s Québécoise, right? Of course, so is Paré.
“I’m rather surprised that there was no outcry from the gay community, or at least none that I heard about. Having straight actresses playing lesbians seems a bit like having white people playing blacks.”
I really don’t see why they should care. They’re actors after all. You don’t need to be a scientist to play one, or a Christian to play one, or an atheist to play one, or a virgin to play one.
I’m sure you’re old enough to remember the Black and White Minstrel Show. White guys with black paint on their faces. (Actually, red paint as black didn’t film well in BW.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_and_White_Minstrel_Show#Controversy
There is one lunatic fringe female Democrat that the US should keep: Kirsten Gillibrand. She’s too cute to give to Cannukistan. OTOH, giving them Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein might provoke another war.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear. It wasn’t the actresses I was surprised hadn’t protested. Most actors and actresses will play any role anyone’s willing to pay them to play. And many women are ambiguous enough about their sexuality that many straight ones wouldn’t find it difficult to do nude/sex scenes with another women, and many gay actresses wouldn’t find it difficult to do nude/sex scenes with a man. (Although I confess that I suspect straight actors find it difficult to do nude/sex scenes with another man and gay actors have similar difficulty doing nude/sex scenes with a woman. Men are just too one-way-or-the-other; they typically don’t switch teams.)
I was surprised that the gay community didn’t object, in the same way that the black community objected to whites wearing makeup and playing black roles. And just as I suspect that there would be outrage in the religious community if, say, Richard Dawkins was chosen to play Jesus in a movie. Conversely, atheists generally wouldn’t care if, say, the pope was chosen to play Richard Dawkins in a movie. We’d be rolling on the floor laughing.
You were clear, the “they” I referred to was the gay community.
Dawkins stared as the antichrist in some art displayed in a Brisbane gallery that was picked up by Jerry Coyne:
http://www.holygreencow.com/TGSETII.html
I was amused by Dawkins’ role but annoyed that Paris Hilton was co-opted on the side of evil. I thought everyone knew she was a churchgoer, at the late Ronald Reagan’s Bel Air Presbyterian church no less… 🙂
Hey OFD, I just remembered this pic of a cat doing its evil work and a dog on its way to intervene:
http://www.holygreencow.com/theycamepages/wasntmyfaultmum.html
IIRC, there was some mild criticism of the casting, but not much. The series creator/producer/writer is a lesbian, and that may have tempered it and the joy at having a show about lesbians on TV at all played into it.
I see. I think the series portrays lesbians favorably, that is as ordinary people with ordinary goals and desires and ordinary problems who just happen to be lesbians.
Except, of course, for quarterly estimated tax payments, quarterly sales tax returns, and so on.
This is why I have an part-time accountant for my business. The amount of monthly, quarterly and annual taxes that we have to pay is unreal. And I have a small business with only 12 employees. It takes a lot of time to fill out the forms and calculate what we owe. And that is in addition to our semimonthly payroll, invoicing, accounts payable and accounts receivable nagging.
And we have to calculate sales taxes monthly and let The Great State of Texas draft our checking account.
Have you guys heard of software?
I think the series portrays lesbians favorably, that is as ordinary people with ordinary goals and desires and ordinary problems who just happen to be lesbians.
Yep, much like the series “Queer as Folk” did for gay men. There also were some criticisms that the characters were living lifestyles that required a lot of money. I’ve never watched it, so I can’t say. But most people on TV live lives that their real-life counterparts’ salaries wouldn’t support. “Friends” was particularly unrealistic.
Have you guys heard of software?
Yes. Without Peachtree and Excel it would take three people to get the job done.
We got a US Census mandatory business report a couple of years back. It took my accountant 80 hours to fill it out. It was 40 pages of numbers and data that we had to constantly lookup the categories on their website. I was tempted to fake it but if you ever got crosswise with these guys then they can make life tough.
http://www.census.gov/survey_participants/business_surveys/is_my_business_required_to_participate_in_this_survey.html
Bob, it looks like there is a concerted attack on WordPress hosting sites. Although the attack vector seems to be on poorly selected admin passwords -and you would be very unlikely to be owned- I thought you should be aware of this. If you are targeted you will probably see quite a number of login errors and higher activity than usual.
Article is at:
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/04/huge-attack-on-wordpress-sites-could-spawn-never-before-seen-super-botnet/
Thanks. I just installed the Limit Login Attempts plugin. My password isn’t trivial.