Haysbert thinks his '24' role helped Obama
'I'm still asked by people on the street to run,' says former '24' president

Associated Press
updated 9:36 p.m. ET, Tues., July. 1, 2008

Source

RENO, Nev. - Dennis Haysbert likes to believe his portrayal as the first African-American U.S. president on Fox's "24" may have helped pave the way for Barack Obama.

"If anything, my portrayal of David Palmer, I think, may have helped open the eyes of the American people," said the actor, who has contributed $2,300 to the Illinois Democrat's presidential campaign.

( Rest of article is under the cut )

Title: World Enough and Time
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Peter/Caspian
Word Count: 2190
Spoilers: For the movie The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
Notes: This story only wanted to be written on trains, apparently. Otherwise it would have been done a while ago. Comments/crit always adored!

Summary: All time and no time, and things we have to get used to.

( He will have to reacquaint himself with the quiet, learn again how to be at peace, how to be still. )

Mormon missionaries at the door! XD I told them they were very brave to drive down a half-mile-long driveway and knock on the door of a house that positively screams "crazy Alaska woods people", complete with barking dogs. And they were polite; we chatted a bit, I explained that I'm an atheist and not interested, and they were nice about it, so -- bonus points for that. I'm still slightly amazed that they actually braved our middle-of-nowhereness; in the four years we've lived here, it's the first time anyone has showed up at the door who wasn't a delivery/service person or someone who knew us already and had been given detailed directions to get here.

Bidding is now open at livelongnmarry. Lots of good stuff over there, and all the money goes towards a very fundamental human right, the right to select and marry your life partner of choice ... it's a win-win situation!

If you haven't heard about it, livelongnmarry is a fandom fundraiser auction to raise money for efforts to keep same-sex marriage legal in California. Their userinfo explains their purpose and bidding "rules", and has links to organizations such as Marriage Equality USA where auction winners will be asked to donate their pledge. Of course, you can simply donate without joining in the bidding.

Many people are offering fandom-related services (custom fanfic or icons, for example) in return for a donation, but if fannish stuff isn't your thing, there's a wide variety of other goods and services available. Lots of people are offering jewelry, custom knitting/sewing, original art and other crafts. For something a little more unusual, you could get your manuscript critiqued by SF writer Elizabeth Bear, be killed off in a story written just for you, or have a cameo in a webcomic. A number of pro authors are involved, including Elizabeth Bear, Pamela Dean and Martha Wells.

Bidding opens at 12:01 a.m. (Pacific Time) on July 1, so there's still time to offer a creative service of your own -- or you could come back and bid. (Or simply donate.)

According to urban legend, dogs can't see colors, but I'm not convinced of that. Out and about this morning, Lucky zeroed in on a bright blue Pepsi can lying in a field of weeds. It's possible that he was attracted by something else -- the shininess, maybe -- but it certainly stood out to *me*, a bright and not at all natural blue, and he was definitely going for it visually.

He picked it up and carried it back to the house. In addition to being a fossil-hunting dog, Lucky is also a trash-collecting dog. Cans and bottles are the exact right size and shape to be carried in his retriever jaws, and he's never happier than when he's carrying something. If he finds an appropriately-shaped piece of trash on our walks, he'll cheerfully carry it home for me. It's very cute.

He's also discovered the joys of gourds. Last Christmas I got a bag of gourds for decoration, but never really did anything with them, so Orion appropriated them as shooting targets. There are now gourds, riddled with bullet holes, scattered around the yard. Like Pepsi cans, they're just the right size and shape to be carried in a retriever's mouth, which means that Lucky keeps finding them and bringing them back to the house.

I love how, when Alaska makes the national headlines, it's always stuff like this.

Bear mauls teen during Anchorage bike race.

The bit that I found most memorable:

"Rick Sinnott, a wildlife biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game ... said the girl was fortunate to be wearing a bike helmet because the bear had bitten her head."

See? YOUR MOTHER WAS RIGHT. Always bike with your helmet on, because you never know when a grizzly bear is going to try to bite your head off.

I really ought to start carrying a gun when I go on those long woods hikes with the dogs.

001-009 | So You Think You Can Dance 4
010-015 | Nigel Lythgoe & Mary Murphy
016-019 | Mary Murphy
020-020 | Nigel Lythgoe & Mia Michaels
021-023 | Mia Michaels & Wade Robson
024-025 | Mia Michaels
026-028 | Napoleon & Tabitha D'Umo
029-036 | Cat Deeley
037-060 | 24
061-064 | Carlos Bernard & Reiko Aylesworth
065-067 | Elisha Cuthbert & Reiko Aylesworth
068-068 | Kiefer Sutherland & Reiko Aylesworth
069-070 | Reiko Aylesworth
071-081 | The Andy Griffith Show
082-093 | Get Smart
094-099 | Weeds
100-103 | My Boys
104-105 | Numb3rs
106-108 | Mad Men
109-110 | Entourage
111-114 | Burn Notice
115-119 | Nicole Scherzinger



Here @ threedown.

I got back my corrections on the novella from my beta. Her major changes mostly agree with things that my gut was already telling me about the story, and she had lots of minor suggestions that will improve it immensely. Utterly fantastic. Now I need to brace myself for a big rewrite, and then I *might*, just might, have something I can try to sell.

I had a "click!" moment on the novel (not the YA, the other one) when several ideas suddenly came together. I'm starting to see the shape of it now. With this one, I already know the end -- the major events of the climax were one of the first things that came to me. So I'm working backwards, figuring out the plot from there. Sadly, my 12,000 words I've already written on the beginning are starting to look less and less suited to the overall shape of the novel; I think I'm going to have to scrap them, because events are very different now. However, they helped give me a feel for how the characters think and speak, which was very useful in the long run. The world-building in this universe is a delight -- I've been creating languages and cultures from scratch, and, hopefully learning from my mistakes, trying to avoid the appropriation issues that plagued "Raven's Children".

I've also been reading true-northern-adventure memoirs, and thinking about my Alaskan childhood, which led me to the idea of using this journal as a catch-all for anecdotes of growing up in the Bush. I'm not sure if it would be as boring as all get out, since my life wasn't exactly the stuff of which exciting adventure novels are made, but it would give me something to post regularly, and keep me focused on writing rather than surfing Youtube when I'm supposed to be working. (Oh! And we did get the well drilled! I have pictures; I need to get them off the camera. Not that it's an especially photogenic process, but it *is* interesting.)

Seen in front of a coffee shop: two brothers, a five-year-old and a baby, playing some weird, joyous kind of brother-tag with their faces. The older brother would lean in close, following if the baby turned away, and when the baby leaned forward, distractedly, almost as if by accident, he'd jump back. Sometimes the older brother would let the baby catch him -- he'd stand completely still and the baby would reach out and smush their faces together, arms flailing, and then the older brother would wipe his face and turn in circles, laughing, jumping, and then he'd come back and do it all over again.

Title: The Myth of Greatness
Authors: airspaniel and cerebel
Pairing: Emil Blonsky/Bruce Banner
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 6,161
Warnings: dub-con
Spoilers: Movieverse, spoilers for The Incredible Hulk, directed by Louis Leterrier. This fic is an AU ending for the campus battle sequence.
Notes: Yeah, we totally went there. ^_^ The fake cut below links to the story at teampornbomb, the brand-new comm for all fics co-written by cerebel and myself. Go! Join! You know you want to.

Summary: "Banner isn’t going to fight him, not yet, and that’s terribly disappointing. But there are other ways to provoke a reaction."

( The Myth of Greatness )

Question -- a couple years ago someone on my friendslist linked to a website where it collects all the feeling words posted on any blog or in any online journal (like "sad" or "anxious" or "joyful") and provides the context quote, so that when you're reading you just get a tiny picture of someone feeling something, somewhere. The information is arranged kind of like a del.icio.us tag cloud, only it moves as quotes are added and taken away, and it's this beautiful collaborative project and I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the website.

Help? Does anybody know what I'm talking about?

So I rediscovered Like Your Mom by Hoagy on my playlist the other day, and I cannot get it out of my head. There's something unexpected about it, even after I've been listening for days -- maybe the springing, joyful melody mixed with the sadness of the lyrics, maybe the little theremin solo near the end. I think it's just lovely.

One of my friends found me on IMDb. She did a happy dance. ^^

Orion and I have noticed, in our time in Fairbanks, that quite a few of the businesses here seem to regard customers as, at best, a necessary evil, if not something to be avoided at all costs. Any attempt to coddle your customers -- by, say, being on time, or being open the hours that it says on your door, or being friendly, or providing services as advertised -- might encourage them to (God help us all) come back. It's possible that the Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce yanks the license of any business caught helping its customers in a timely fashion; that kind of behavior can only encourage the growth of the economy, which will bring more people here, and no one wants that.

In any case, after trying all last summer to get a well drilling outfit out here -- being put off with vague promises of "we're very busy, but we'll be out next month" and then not returning our calls -- earlier this spring we actually got someone to show up in our yard and promise that they'd come out and drill "sometime". Hey, it's not an appointment or an estimate, but at least someone came out to look at the yard, insult our plans, explain that what we wanted wasn't possible but they could probably do this other thing, and then vanished again, as usual. Two months later *sigh*, just when we'd given up hope and started leaving messages at other drilling places in the hopes of maybe, by next fall, getting someone to call us back, the company owner or representative or whatever she is showed up again on Thursday. (Another thing about the unique Fairbanks approach to business is that it's really hard to tell what anyone's specific job at the company actually is -- they could be the owner, could be a delivery driver, could be some other business's delivery driver who's being blackmailed with vague promises of well-drilling, etc.) Anyway, she said they'd bring the drilling rig out on Sunday and they'd start drilling on Monday.

When I heard "bring the rig out on Sunday" I foolishly assumed that this meant Sunday afternoon, not 3 a.m. Sunday night/Monday morning, as actually turned out. I woke up to the dogs going nuts, peeked out the window, saw a giant truck in the yard, went "oh god" and put my pillow over my head and went back to sleep, because I really should have expected this. And now it's 4 p.m. on Monday, I've been sitting around all day thinking they had to show up eventually, and they're still not here. Are they nocturnal? What are they doing? They can't be drilling someone else's well -- the drilling truck is HERE! At least I have a hostage...

I just hope they don't show up and start pounding pipe into the yard at 3 a.m.; I could never tell them to go away, because just getting them here took a year and a half, and the last thing we want to do is start all over again.

Question. I use AT&T for my cell phone provider, and I hate them with a fiery passion and want to change my plan as soon as possible.

What do you all use? Do you know any horror stories for any of the other wireless providers? Any good stories?