Random Things

I spent the weekend volunteering in Reno. Tangentially, I spent the night in a hotel room with three other friends who also don't own a television, and thus we giddily spent the night watching trash like We Are Marshall, Project Runway, and the ridiculously good-looking Gina Carano kicking the snot out of Kelly Kobold.

After the debate last night I went to a talk by Seymour Hersh. I completely respect the guy's journalism, but I was disappointed by his talk. He flitted about from tangent to tangent, and would jump from moving and traumatic stories about the My Lai Massacre or Abu Ghraib (for example, when he first went to visit a soldier involved in My Lai, Paul Meadlo, his mother told him "I sent them a good boy and they gave me back a murderer,") to jaw-droppingly crude ad hominem attacks. I guess I'm torn about it--I agree with what he was saying, I just would've liked a little less bloviation.

My folks live in California, which I'm pretty sure Obama has wrapped up, so I wonder if I can use Sarah Silverman's hilarious video idea to get my parents to vote no on Prop 8. Please? Pretty please?

I love the sign in this Kos post.

I finished reading Kent Haruf's Plainsong. I realized I don't read a lot of fiction, and I've had this lying around for a while, so I moved it to the top of the pile. It was just OK. It's about regular people in a small town in Colorado doing regular-people things. Oddly, other than one offhand mention of Nancy Reagan, the book seemed entirely timeless and could have been set any time since the invention of the automobile. It followed several different people from the same town who didn't overlap in a very significant way, so it seemed sort of disjoint to me. I was also mildly annoyed by the lack of quotation marks around dialogue or indication of who exactly was saying the dialogue. Anyway.

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