The fundamental squalor of the American right wing

In the third (and final) Obama-McCain debate, McCain said this about the right of women to have an abortion in cases of medical necessity:

[Obama says he's for the] health for the mother. You know, that's been stretched by the pro-abortion movement in America to mean almost anything. That's the extreme pro-abortion position, quote, "health."

The transcript (from the LA Times) has that last "health" in quotes because McCain actually made air-quotes as he said that. No, really. I'm not making that up.

PNH described John McCain's eye-rolling about assassination of Columbian labor leaders as "moral squalor". But really, the explicit contempt shown to the concept of abortion as a possible health issue is even more shocking. I think it's better described as Sam Bee does in this clip from The Daily Show: "John McCain has put women's health where it belongs: in derisive air quotes".

( No more of this supposed concern for 'rape' or 'incest' or 'incest rape' )

McCain to women: Drop "dead".

One good linkwhore deserves another

drelmo liked my link to Funny or Die, and I like his link to Ed O'Neill's semi-in-character endorsement video for Obama.

( Screw you, Rupert Murdoch )

Master of My Pants, November Edition: What I've been up to

As you might have guessed from the blizzard of posts I've made, many of which are links to stuff snarfed from other people's LJs, I have spent most of today catching up on my flist. I was thirteen days behind yesterday morning, and I'm caught up now. (Modulo a lot of things open in tabs or windows to read later, of course.)

I fell behind in part because work has gone back into "kick womzilla around" mode--being in the trenches of the complete collapse of the American financial system has taken some toll on my free time. Things should improve there, though--we've finally managed to hire a replacement for my assistant, who was let go in a poorly thought-out batch of layoffs in mid-April. My boss, and his boss, both realized how bad an idea it was to lay off my assistant. But the headcount reduction was mandated two levels above my boss, and any other choice would have been even worse. It didn't take very long for the person who made that decision to realize he had cut too deeply, but it took us a surprisingly long time to find a good replacement. Even though Wall Street firms are firing left-and-right, it's not the technical staff who are being let go; the big companies are trying to do more and better trading with fewer human traders and salesmen, which means more automated trading, which means hanging on to programming staff. Anyway, the person we eventually found is so good I can hardly believe it, so that side of things is looking up.

I also fell behind because my weekends have been tied up by a side project: I've been doing a lot of work for the new edition of Tales of the Arabian Nights, which is now scheduled for December 2008 release. Tales was created by Eric Goldberg in the late 1980s, one of the last games he designed and published before he was fired as the president of West End Games for getting too successful. (No, really; that's another story for another time.) Eric retained the rights, and in the early 1990s he decided to use his new software company, Crossover Technologies, to create an electronic version. I was hired, thanks to wild_irises, to do production assistance work on it and through a series of accidents ended up being the main writer on the new project, helping re-write the entire "Book of Tales", a collection of 1400 or so story fragments which form the core of the game.

The computer game was never completed, unfortunately--it was somewhere between 75% and 90% done when we realized that it wasn't going to get a distribution deal from a real publisher, so we shelved it. However, the revised Book of Tales (which also included work from a wonderfully funny writer named Brad Freeman) was used in the 1999 German edition from Editions Erlkonig. That was my first professional boardgame publication, and I'm inordinately proud of it and long wanted to see it in English.

Zoom forward another nine years. The original Tales is now one of the "holy grails" of the serious boardgamer community in the USA--one of those games everyone has heard of and agree is a classic but no one can buy. Zev Schlasinger of Z-Man Games decided that the world needed a new edition. The project is spearheaded by long-time gaming pro Anthony Gallela, who has done a simply smashing job of streamlining the rules and expanding the Book of Tales to nearly twice its original length. I was invited to consult on all aspects of the project, and over the last couple of months I have spent a lot of time over the weekends editing the new portions of the Book of Tales, writing some new content for it (and for the rulebook), copy-editing, proofreading, giving feedback to the brilliant artist/graphic designer Peter Gifford, and generally being up to my elbows in flying carpets, magical springs, and vengeful djinn. The project is nearing completion--I probably have about three hours of work to do on it tomorrow, then scattered little bits right up until it goes to the printer--and because I'm also taking Monday off from work, I could afford to goof off today reading all of you folk.

I'm taking Monday off to visit my hemotologist, for two reasons. First, we've just discovered that my mother inherited from her father a gene for hemochromatosis, a blood disorder "characterized by excessive absorption of dietary iron resulting in a pathological increase in total body iron stores". My mother's half-sisters on her father's side all have it, and Mom's a carrier, so I need to be tested. More immediately, I need a round of pre-surgical blood work so that I can get authorized to have my deviated septum fixed. (You may remember that I mentioned this a few days ago in the context of recreational sinusoscopies.) This surgery is a process I've been putting off for a decade or more, but I'm committed to getting it done now. While he's in there, my ENT is going to widen the openings to two of my sinuses and reduce my turbinates. He's also talking about installing vinyl siding and upholstery in rich, Corthinian leather, but I'm probably just going to stick with the more conventional surgical processes.

So, there I am. Caught up. I expect I'll start slipping behind again over the next couple of weeks--next weekend is the monthly NYRSF Work Weekend, and then I hope I'll have the surgery this month--but it feels good to be caught up on you all for now.

Oh, I've barely actually started the nineteenth-century fiction project: I've read "Lady Windemere's Fan", which I enjoyed. Very witty, Wilde, very witty.

Whoops--I'm about to get caught in a time warp. Quickly--to the (wom)bat-bed before Standard Time arrives!

Constant F_cking Lawbreakers!

On Friday, Philadelphia Phillies second baseman Chase Utley told 100,000 people attending a celebration for the team that the Philles are "World Fucking Champions". This revelation was legal, shocked approximately three people in the audience of 100,000, and was not an abuse of power in any way.

On Friday, an anonymous employee of the US federal government told Ruper Murdoch's Times of London that Barack Obama's half-aunt Zeituni Onyango is under investigation for living and working in the United States illegally. This revelation, unlike Utley's, is a violation of federal law and was undoubtedly intended to sway the election against Obama.

Which one of these utterances had you heard any outrage about?