{"id":8682,"date":"2014-04-25T07:01:56","date_gmt":"2014-04-25T11:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/?p=8682"},"modified":"2014-04-25T07:14:01","modified_gmt":"2014-04-25T11:14:01","slug":"friday-120","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/2014\/04\/25\/friday-120\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A strange thing happened yesterday &#8211; when I went to write a post, all my little quickie toolbar thingies were gone.  Now, I don&#8217;t actually need them since I know any html I might want to incorporate into a post but it&#8217;s still kind of a pain in the ass.  For one thing, if I was writing this in the development tool I use for work I&#8217;d at least have keyboard shortcuts, code snippets, color coding, and tag completion.  Here, I got nothing. Just a plain textbox staring back at me. And that kinda sucks (I mean, my typing stinks as it is &#8211; the less of it I need to do, the better). So until I figure that one out (and I&#8217;m reluctant make too many changes around here, lest I break the smilies or the embedding or something &#8211; then there&#8217;d be hell to pay), I guess I won&#8217;t be adding too many links or fancy formatting.  <\/p>\n<p>Anyhow, it&#8217;s Friday, which is always a good thing.  But I don&#8217;t have Monday off, which is always a bad thing.  But Bill Maher is back this week, which is a good thing. This week, his guests include Tom Steyer.  Since he didn&#8217;t go to SU I&#8217;m not familiar with him, but he&#8217;s apparently a hedge fund manager and billionaire. He was born in 1957 and Wikipedia says his net worth is valued at $1.6 billion, which makes him about three years older than me, and roughly $1.6 billion wealthier (you know, depending on how many significant digits you want to round it off to). <\/p>\n<p>Yet he also seems to be a &#8220;liberal&#8221; and an environmentalist who has pledged to give away half his fortune.  So that&#8217;s nice. I pledge to give away half my fortune as well &#8211; but I&#8217;ll have to wait until I croak, &#8216;cuz after we get a Republican House, Senate, White House, and a Supreme Court packed with nine <strike>Republican Stooge<\/strike> Conservative Justices, I might be needing it to buy dog food in my old age (and not for the dogs, either). Plus half my fortune is probably about what old Tom spends on a six month&#8217;s worth of haircuts.  But you folks in the Bay Area will probably know more about Steyer than I do, so I&#8217;ll defer to your opinion(s) of him.<\/p>\n<p>Also on is Annabelle Gurwitch.  I don&#8217;t know her net worth (though she&#8217;s a scorpio whose birthday is the day after Roseanne Barr, Charles Bronson, and Adam Ant and she&#8217;s about a year younger than I am), but I do know her from her being on WTF as well as her having hosted Wa$ted! on the late, great, Planet Green network (which has now been rebranded &#8220;Destination America&#8221; &#8211; &#8220;&#8230;targeted mainly towards Middle America and featuring mainly American-centric travel, food, and natural history programming&#8221; because we don&#8217;t have enough teevee geared toward &#8220;middle America&#8221; these days, and certainly not enough shows about food).  On Wa$ted, she and her co-host would go around to slobs and show them how much shit they were throwing out could be recycled, and how much money they were wa$ting.  I liked it.  But, hey, I&#8217;m sure a show where they visit diners in Ashtabula would be even better.<\/p>\n<p>Next up is John Avlon, who I don&#8217;t really know much about, but if I were to judge a book by the cover, I&#8217;d say his book is all about assholes.  Plus he&#8217;s married to Margaret Hoover, who isn&#8217;t the biggest Republican asshole in the world, but, let&#8217;s face it, that&#8217;s a pretty high mountain to climb, and she&#8217;s young yet. I&#8217;m guessing Avlon is on to be the token &#8220;moderate,&#8221; which means he&#8217;ll be a right-leaning putz smart enough to toss out an applause line or two to the left-leaning (or so Bill always seems to say) audience.<\/p>\n<p>Then there&#8217;s this week&#8217;s token &#8220;libertarian&#8221; douchebag, Charles Murray.  Oh boy. <\/p>\n<p>Rounding out this week&#8217;s guest list is Glenn Cove&#8217;s own Christine Quinn &#8211; a &#8220;Democrat&#8221; so far up Mike Bloomberg&#8217;s ass she couldn&#8217;t even get elected mayor as a lesbian in New York City.<\/p>\n<p>She does look a bit like Edie McClurg, though, so I&#8217;ll give her that.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;ve been paying attention to my posts of the past weeks, months, and years, you&#8217;re probably asking yourself, &#8220;hey, didn&#8217;t that guy used to use a lot of semi-colons? Where have all the semi-colons gone?&#8221;  Well, yes, yes I did (and thank you for noticing).  Then a few weeks (or was it months?) back, I read this quote by one of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut:  <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>\u201cMy advice to writers just starting out? Don&#8217;t use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Now, I have to admit that the term &#8220;transvestite hermaphrodite&#8221; is somewhat confusing, because (IIRC) a transvestite is one who enjoys wearing clothing associated with the opposite sex, while a hermaphrodite is an organism that has the naughty bits normally associated with both male and female sexes (like an earthworm or Ann Coulter).  So I&#8217;m not quite sure what the wardrobe of a  transvestite hermaphrodite would actually consist of.  <\/p>\n<p>But if Kurt says no semi-colons, then that&#8217;s good enough for me.  So I&#8217;ve been trying to avoid them ever since (trying to cut down on the commas, too, but they&#8217;re harder to give up than beer), though I notice I&#8217;ve fallen on hyphens as kind of a crutch.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve also been avoiding settling down and getting to work this morning, but I guess I can&#8217;t put it off much longer so I better get to it (or at least have another cuppa joe).  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A strange thing happened yesterday &#8211; when I went to write a post, all my little quickie toolbar thingies were gone. Now, I don&#8217;t actually need them since I know any html I might want to incorporate into a post but it&#8217;s still kind of a pain in the ass. For one thing, if I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8682"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8685,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8682\/revisions\/8685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}