Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart will lead fans in a special 7th Inning Stretch celebration. In an attempt to set an official Guinness World Record for the world’s largest kazoo ensemble, Hart will lead more than 7,000 kazoo playing fans in “Take Me Out To The Ball Game.”

via San Francisco Giants Announce Plans For Jerry Garcia Tribute Night On August 9th | Grateful Dead.

I can’t believe it’s been 15 years.  I’m not a baseball fan, at all, and I’m not going to this, but it still sounds cool.  Mickey leading the crowd in a song on kazoos reminds me of seeing Timothy Leary when I was in college.  My then-boyfriend Bryan took me and it was pretty fun.  The best part, though, was when Wavy Gravy (who was the opening act for Leary) had us all put paper bags over our heads and blow fart noises.  Heh.

I’m sure I’m going to regret the following, but we’re having a very unusually… cold… summer. May and June are usually mild months for us, and then things start heating up in July. August and September are the really hot months, but we have plenty of warm weather earlier in the summer. It’s not that we haven’t had a bunch of days in the 90s, it’s that we’ve barely had any days out of the low 70s. It’s supposed to be in the mid 60s most of this week and with the breeze off the Bay, it feels pretty cool. In the evening, it’s like early spring, very cool, not quite cold.

Now, me, I am not a fan of the hottest of the hot summer days, but Ed loves warm weather and this continuing cold is bugging the crap out of him, especially on days he’s riding his bike to work at 4:30 in the morning, or home from work at midnight or 3:00 a.m. Also, my daughter will spend every available moment in the pool, except the weather isn’t warm enough to heat the pool and the water is too cold for swimming. She’s gone swimming a handful of times, some of them when it wasn’t really warm enough. This week, though, forget it. I don’t really want it to turn HOT, truthfully, but I’d be happy for some days in the 80s so the rest of the family could be more comfortable and happy.

Now that I’ve said this, it will be 110 tomorrow and every day after that for a year.

I’m on Day Two of a migraine. I am not happy.

What I don’t understand is how corporations were granted their immunity. How it is axiomatically understood that their interests come before those of people or even their governments? Why must they be defended against reform? How do they recruit their friends in politics and reward them? How do politicians win support from voters whose own wages and safety are threatened?

Via Roger Ebert’s Journal.

It’s a special kind of torture, my reunion. I see my son standing in front of me, but he’ll never be mine. It is what it is, we can’t go back. But it’s hard loving him with all the ferocious love of a mother, and I’m practically a stranger to him.

Pfft. I will probably delete this entry later, I haven’t spoken to E about my blog and I feel pretty sure he’d be uncomfortable knowing I’d written about us like this here.

I say this as I’ve just been gathering some things to send to some friends and I’m picking off cat hairs and then I look away for half a second and there’s more cat hair! Gaaah! I’m always worried I’m going to send something to someone who is deathly allergic to cats and my stuff is gonna send them to the hospital unable to breathe.

My new favorite thing is a stamp I got from Vozamer’s Etsy Shop. I wanted to buy all of the stamps, but this is the one I got (for now):

First thing I stamped it on was my kid’s forehead.

Someone asked me the other day how we “survive” without paper towels. Heh. It’s honestly not a hardship and I know of lot of my regular readers are also either fully or mostly paper-free in the kitchen (or, well, paper towels aren’t just for the kitchen, are they?).

I only use paper towels for pet messes. I use about one roll every 3-5 weeks-ish (since Handy is getting old, she throws up more, one roll used to last me two months, easily).

On top of my microwave I have two baskets, one filled with hand-knitted wash cloths. The other is filled with larger cloths, a combination of small towels, cloth diapers and a couple of old receiving blankets. Most of these things have been in use in my home, in one way or another, for at least five years and some of them as much as ten. I have a couple of wash cloths that I knitted when I was first learning to knit, when Becca was a tiny infant. I have two little kitchen towels that I bought when I was married to my ex-husband and that was… a really long time ago. I use these towels for all the things you would use paper towels for, all my household cleaning, everything (except cat barf). I have a small plastic trash can in the kitchen where I toss them when they’re dirty (I hang them over the side or over the edge of the sink if they’re wet, I need to get a little towel rack or something). And then I throw them in the wash when I’m doing laundry.

It isn’t hard. It doesn’t add any time or effort to my week except perhaps a few extra minutes in folding time when I’m already folding the rest of the laundry, but really, sometimes I don’t even fold them, I just cram them in the baskets all messy-like. When I look at my baskets of colorful rags and towels, I like to think of all the paper towels they replaced. Sweet.

I sometimes read on blogs or forums that a woman’s husband has been reluctant or flat-out refused to switch to cloth from paper. Wtf kind of crazy is that?

The point is that it’s easy to be paper towel-free, better for the world, better for your wallet. Whee.

/psa

One reason local governments have not been more successful in instituting carryout plastic bag bans is the threat of lawsuits by the plastics industry. In many cases, municipalities have moved forward with trying to pass an ordinance without obtaining an environmental impact report (EIR). Under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), a public agency undertaking a project that may cause a significant change in the environment must prepare an EIR.

Industry’s general argument is that by banning the distribution of plastic carryout bags from some stores, the locality is undertaking a project that will increase the manufacture and distribution of paper bags. Since this may result in a significant adverse change in the environment, the locality should be required to prepare an EIR before adopting the ordinance or else be in violation of CEQA.

via California plastic carryout bag ban movement gaining ground.

This whole thing pisses me right off.  I mean, I support the ban, but I don’t get why it doesn’t just happen.  Wtf is the hold-up here, people?  Sometimes, I swear, I don’t get …. anything that happens in this country.  At Trader Joe’s the other day I saw a woman loading her reusable bags into the back of a fucking enormous vehicle.  Like the largest Suburban you’ve ever seen or something.  I’m not necessarily interested in criticizing what people drive, there’s always some excuse for driving some huge gas-guzzling monstrosity, so whatever.  But why even bother with your stupid reusable bags, they can’t possibly cancel out your vehicle.  It’s like people don’t even think twice about their waste. I see people doing the most wasteful crap. At our apartment complex, we have three dumpsters, two for trash and one for recycling. But people are too stupid or just don’t care and there’s always trash in the recycling dumpster and OMFG, probably half the stuff in the “trash” dumpsters could be recycled. Seriously, we should have two recycling dumpsters and one trash. People would probably just pile the trash on the ground or something, such is the state of things.  Here’s an inspiration: A Year Without Garbage. A couple from Oregon reused, recycled and reduced until the only actual trash they had, for an entire year, fit in a shoe box. If they can do that, I’m sure everyone else in the damn country could make a few changes, yes? *fuming*