"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

"For straight up monster-stomping goodness, nothing makes smoke shoot out my ears like Brilliant@Breakfast" -- Tata

"...the best bleacher bum since Pete Axthelm" -- Randy K.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Saturday, September 03, 2011

Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere - special Wussy-Ass Democrats and Shamelessly Racist Republicans edition
Posted by Jill | 12:45 PM
Here in the Land that We Wish Irene Had Forgotten, the cleanup continues, with gawkers and scavengers haunting the neighborhoods of those still putting their ruined belongings out by the curb and the usual post-disaster scams cropping up already. Meanwhile, another storm is starting to look like it's gong to have to do a 90-degree turn soon if it's going to miss us, my electrician is I'm sure going to charge a multi-thousand dollar premium to get a wired generator setup in here before she hits, and I'm starting to think all this is Mother Earth shaking us off like a dog with a really bad flea infestation -- our just reward for treating her so shabbily.

Today I was in Springfield, NJ and took a side trip to World of Tile, a place I've gone past many hundreds of times in my life, most of them as a child, returning from a trip out to Route 22 to Harmony House to buy records, and perhaps a side stop at the Dairy Queen for a Buster Bar. World of Tile is out on that stretch of Route 22 in Union County that is now a sea of strip malls and megastores like you see on every other highway in the universe, with a few remnants of my childhood and businesses that advertised on AM rock 'n' roll radio still standing, like the Flagship (which is now a P.C. Richard store) and, yes, World of Tile -- a store I hadn't even thought about until I read about it on Retro Renovation. So the extra black wall tiles that I had hoped to get in case I want to replace the American Standard Ming Green bathrub with a shower pan are $12 each, because they are the original 1950's tile, so it's better to just either leave the tub alone or use the Home Depot tiles. But in one of the "showrooms" in the back, it's a cornucopia of retro bathroom floor tile, even an almost exact duplicate of the hideous green quasi-checkerboard pattern that all 1950's bathrooms have. And they have it in many, many colors, at $12.99 a square foot (though why anyone would want to replace one of these floors with the same thing, I have no idea). I was, however, happy to see that they have white 1" hex tile sheets and also black hex tile so that it's possible to do borders and flowers and other cool things with hex tile, and I will definitely go see them again after we recover from certain Generator Sticker Shock, assuming you can get near the place, because now that it's been linked in the New York Times Style section, this quirky little retro store in Springfield is going to become the hottest thing around.

Anyway, it's Labor Day weekend in a country that has been doing whatever it can go eliminate the protections and benefits that 100 years of organized labor brought us. I'm sure that out in the flyover states, where they worship people like Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin and Rick Perry, they're going to fly flags and grill hamburgers and "celebrate" Labor Day and shake the hands of their legislators who are gutting unions in a state of complete cluelessness as to what it really means.

So let's take a trip around the blogroll for some perspectives on some of the fresh horrors that this week in Year Three of the American Racial Freakout saw.

Karen Garcia gives a well-deserved smack to that shandeh far di goyim Eric Cantor.

How does this differ, really, from Obama's allegedly proposed "worker training program"?

If you were hit by Irene, maybe you'll start listening to Kindly Old Uncle Bustednuckles, finally.

Katherine Haenschen at Burnt Orange Report has the top Google searches for Rick Perry.

Cool historical Labor Day stuff at Ramona's Voices.

Driftglass: The Big Jobs Fuck.

You'll never hear about this on your local network news, but Oil is resurfing again not far from the location of the BP Macondo Well.

Gossip or truth? Go read this at Mudflats and decide. I'll tell you this much: whether Sarah Palin runs for president or not, she is definitely going to have a very hard time when the looks start to go -- no matter how much botox or surgery she has. Time bows to no surgeon. We're seeing it already. You could almost feel sorry for her if she wasn't such a bitch.

Helen Philpot, as always, cuts to the chase.

The Perry Platform is the new Shit My Dad Says.

And now I'm going to go pay some bills and wonder if I'll be able to get fresh corn tomorrow. After all, what's the point of making a quinoa salad with summer vegetables if I have to use frozen roasted corn from Trader Joe's?

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Monday, August 29, 2011

We're back
Posted by Jill | 10:23 PM
Well, it could have been worse.

The power came back on sometime this afternoon, well ahead of schedule. How long it'll last remains to be seen, as I am still hearing generators, which means that there still parts of the area not restored.

For some strange reason, our electrical substation is located in the middle of an area prone to flooding in the next town. Why utilities build substations in flood plains and nuclear power plants on faults and areas at risks of tsunamis is a mystery to me.

But our Grand Seepage Adventure of yesterday seems to have paid off. We were doing just fine, and the sump pump was doing its thing until 8 AM when the power cut off. Immediately we started getting seepage, not into the unfinished part of the basement, where it would have been easy to clean up, but the finished part. So we spent the day putting down towels to soak up the seepage, wringing them out, putting down fresh towels, and running to the laundromat to dry the wet towels. Not exactly a fun day. I'm lucky in that my employer has an on-site gym with shower facilities, so I was at least able to go in early and take a hot shower, something poor Mr. Brilliant wasn't able to do until this evening. But while driving to work this morning, feeling grubby and without my morning caffeine jolt-o-rama, I was reminded of that Simpson episode that's a parody of "The Shining", where Homer is muttering "No TV and no beer makes Homer something something." Only for me it was no TV and no coffee.

We were lucky. No trees fell on neighboring houses (Thank you, Almstead Tree Care, for monitoring our old oaks so well; yes, I'm paying you $1500 a year for the privilege, but no houses were destroyed by them). We didn't have so much as a branch fall (again, thanks to Almstead Tree Care, who takes care of these branches when they need cutting), and when I look at photos of the area and people with five feet of water in their basements for the third or fourth time this year, I count my blessings.

I think Ken at Down with Tyranny put it best:

First, to those outside Irene's path, forced to put up with all our yammering: So sorry! I realize how tedious are impending natural disasters that may permanently change the lives of other people. And then when they turn out to be not such a big deal, well, jeez! (Though don't tell that to the folks in Vermont and upstate New York, suffering "Worst Flooding in 100 Years," but what's 100 years really? And heck, they didn't even get a hurricane, just a ratty tropical storm!)

And speaking of the hurricane turning out to be less big a deal than the worst-case scenarios, to those inside Irene's path who were dissatisfied by the outcome: Again, so sorry! What's the point of planning for those worst-case scenarios if they don't happen? This group, by the way, includes people who are offended by official "overreaction," like shutting down New York's transit system, which -- to add insult to injury -- then took hours and hours to begin to restart. Just because these folks are too stupid or too lazy to try to understand (a) why it was thought appropriate to shut the system down (and never mind all the damage that was done by the "disappointing" storm, or what would have happened if, say, populated subway trains had been trapped in flooded tunnels, or populated buses had been struck by some of those 600-plus trees that fell), (b), why the shutdown had to be announced so early and put into effect so long before the brunt of the storm was expected, and/or (c) why the system took so long to reboot (including, for example, the tiresome requirement that every foot of subway track be walked before the trains could be restarted), well, I truly am sorry.

Sorry, folks, next time we'll try to arrange a disaster that lives up to your exacting specifications -- and then just keep it to ourselves. So sorry!

The media is taking no end of crap for hyping this storm, and the excellent response by NYC Mayor Bloomberg, New York governor Cuomo, and yes, even our own bully-in-chief, Chris Christie, are being chalked up to "post-Katrina paranoia." Well, I for one would rather see an excessive preventive plan that turns out not to be necessary than to have to see images like this one (warning: graphic and disturbing image) ever again.

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Saturday, August 27, 2011

Hurricane Irene Open Thread
Posted by Jill | 2:05 PM
I plan to spend Saturday in my basement, giving it a long-overdue decluttering and cleaning -- getting ready to wet-vac after the power goes out and the pump stops working.

So consider this an open thread. If you are in Irene's path, keep us posted on how you're doing in the comments.

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Friday, August 26, 2011

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik - Music to wait for oak trees to fall by
Posted by Jill | 6:09 PM
This is a little premature, but I wanted to be the first (and this version is GREAT):



And more eye-rollingly obvious storm songs:



OK, so it's the wrong day of the week:




And yeah, this is kind of a stretch:


Here at Casa La Brilliant, we've done about all we can do. My biggest fear is of our huge old oak trees falling. We pay an arborist a ton of money every year to keep an eye on the trees, but with this saturated soil and up to a foot of rain coming, who knows? Stay tuned.

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