News and Updates

1. Tabitha has joined the Dungeons and Dragons club at Local Businessman High.  She seems to be enjoying it so far.  She was worried at first that they would not let her join, since she didn’t discover the club until well into the school year.  “Nonsense,” I told her.  “I know exactly what the membership of that club looks like, because – while I never got into that game in high school (God alone knows why, as I was precisely the target demographic for it) – I was friends with most of the guys who played it.  You are an attractive young lady.  Trust me – they would KILL to have you in that club.”  And it turns out that Father knows best, at least in this instance.

2.  The benighted kids who make up that club insist that dwarves are not fireproof, however.  Honestly.  What good are flammable dwarves?  How can you expect to use them as projectiles when facing dragons if they are not fireproof?  Kids these days.

3. The Home Campus Trivia Team emerged victorious from this year’s annual fundraiser for the local orchestra, recapturing the crown that had been ripped from our grasp by Local Parochial School by a rather healthy margin last year.  This year’s victory was a near thing, and we look forward to trying to defend our title next year.

4. The girls went skiing for the first time this year this past weekend.  From all accounts they had a grand time.  Rather than sit in the lodge all day and grade papers, I ended up on another trivia team at a fundraising event for a local baseball team.  It was a good time and we came in second, in large part because you needed to have grown up in that town to know a good portion of the answers.  “Name the last six mayors”?  Seriously?  I don’t think I could do that in the city I grew up in, let alone anywhere in Wisconsin.  And yet it was a good time anyway.

5. We would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids.

6. Every time I hear about the budget proposed by Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) it just gets worse.  Today’s fascinating reveal was the part where he used the bill to cut the salary of the Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.  There are a number of problems with this beyond the fact that it is toddler-level petty, but perhaps the biggest one is that it is flatly unconstitutional to reduce the salary of a sitting judge during their term in office.  But since the right-wing extremists currently staging their psychotic episodes in the name of the GOP firmly believe that laws, constitutions, morals, and ethics are for other people to follow but do not apply to the special little snowflakes that they are themselves, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by that little stunt.  Stay tuned for the further adventures of Sock Puppet Governor (tm) in his quest to subvert a once-proud state and become the GOP presidential nominee.

7. He just might become that nominee, despite the fact that his grasp of issues and ability to speak coherently on any topic other than his own purported magnificence has been compared unfavorably to the former half-term governor of Alaska.  Given the announcement by his owners that they would be spending nearly a billion dollars in the 2016 election cycle it is entirely possible they may just buy the nomination outright, which would put Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) front and center.  Free market capitalism in action, folks!  That whirring sound you hear is the Founding Fathers spinning so frantically in their graves as to create electricity.

8 I kind of feel bad for the non-insane conservatives out there who have nobody to represent them in the American political arena anymore.

9.  I got my first invitation to join the AARP this week.  I think it might be worthwhile, if only to legitimize my demands that those meddling kids get off my damned lawn.