Yesterday's money quote was Kathy Griffin saying that watching celebrities come out and defend Michael Jackson's pedophilia was disgusting. Couldn't have said it better, myself.

In a fit of train-wreck watching, I got in about 45 minutes of EmJay before my brain tried to implode.

So, uh, not to see a conspiracy here, but how um, coincidental? Convenient? is it that Michael's celebrity defender du jour was Nicole-Lionel's-Daughter-Ritchie? She who "stars" with her best friend Paris-I-Am-SO-A-Serious-Intellectual-Damn-It-Hilton in Fox's newest reality show. You know, the one where the two rich girls go live for a month in West Mustache, FlyOverState, USA. The one that Paris is unable to hype on the talk show circuit because of her other video?

But, Nicole-Lionel's-Daughter-Ritchie could, if anybody would give her airtime to do it. It's just that, well, let's just say she doesn't have Paris' borzoi-like good looks.

Wait! She just happens to be EmJay's god-daughter. OHMIGAWD! Like, two celebrity birds with one set up and number two shot. Tell me some hot young producer didn't earn their pay this week figuring that out.

I'm not sure if I'll ever do this again, but I'm doing it today.

1. List five things you'd like to accomplish by the end of the year.
2 quilts, drop another 20 points off my cholesterol, master skinning, master CSS, mosaic around the koi pond

2. List five people you've lost contact with that you'd like to hear from again.
Patti Ruiz, my best college bud; Kathy Kirkhardt, from high school; Leapin' Larry, but that won't happen because he's dead; Jill Clark from high school; Kathleen Sullivan, from Texas by way of New York -- last heard to be in Virginia

3. List five things you'd like to learn how to do.
surf, roller skate, sing on key, pilot a hot air balloon, speak French

4. List five things you'd do if you won the lottery (no limit).
Buy a major league baseball team and the stadium to put them in; create a film scholarship in memory of Nick Cannon, my college friend who died of AIDS; create another one in memory of Leapin', who died of war; buy a huge tract of land in the middle of nowhere with a river running through it; build my dream house on it (includes horse and stable)

5. List five things you do that help you relax.
drink; smoke; watch the koi; play with the dog; sew

Damn, I hate these idiots running around my city. Carpet baggers. They claim to be anarchists, and yet they rely on the electronic media to advertise their protests and demands. Here's a little something to chew on: true anarchy would destroy the electric grid, bring down all media, stop running water and sewers, and leave us little better than cave dwellers (not that there's anything wrong with that).

True anarchy would allow the police you taunt to shoot you and damn the consequences, of which there would be none. Well, you may argue, they wouldn't be policemen. And you'd be right. They'd just be pissed off people with automatic weapons and riot gear. Sort of like the knights of old, in their armor, smacking the crap out of the little people wearing rags.

Here's another something to chew on, other than your grainy tofu from your community kitchens: if the average household income in a third-world nation is about five bucks a year, and a 10-year old, who has no chance of going to a non-existant school anyway, is making about 50 cents a week sewing Nike sneakers rather than being a child sex worker, what's the problem? You don't want to support sweat shops in Asia? Fine. Don't buy the products.

You need more? Here's more: You cannot have it both ways. You cannot pay $30 an hour to an American laborer who belongs to a union, and expect to pay bottom dollar for the product he makes. If you pay minimum wage, you can sell for minimum dollar. If you pay through the nose for your workers, their health care, their education benefits, their retirement benefits, and their union organization, then profit must be made somewhere along the line.

Finally, if you want to make changes in the world, don't go out in the streets with banners and jollies that look like a day at Fantasy Fest. Take a lesson from the French students of the 60s, and look like a fucking angry mob of serious people. Or, and here's a real hard thing to swallow: grow up and create change from within.

Vote in every election from Dog Catcher to President. Do volunteer work in your own back yards. Get jobs, and make policies that benefit everyone. You want to live on a commune? Move to Israel and live on a kibbutz. That'll let you get your fill of both politics and socialism.

But, please, take your idealized views of anarchy and get the fuck out of Miami. Thanks. Have a nice day.

No, probably not. Like every other blogger on the planet, it seems, I use Blogrolling. Unlike every other blogger on the planet, I tried to recreate my bloglist during the Laura debacle, and so completely ruined any chance of getting my list back when the lists were replaced with backups.

I'm now waiting for Blogrolling to complete their roll over to new servers so that I can start over.

On the work side of life, my boss is on the other side of the planet for three weeks, leaving me to suffer the slings and arrows of stupidity by myself. Are you, my readers, as tired of the repetition of idiocy here at my office as I am? Today's stupid-o-gram from the PR office asked if I had put information on the web about the Free Trade crap going on down town. Well, no, I hadn't. Of course I hadn't, seeing as how the PR office is the freaking gate keeper of all content, and they hadn't asked for that to go up. They still aren't asking, as far as I can tell from this e-mail, because they only asked if it was up, and what did I think about putting something up if nothing was up already.

What I think, I can't put in an e-mail, and probably shouldn't put here. I think that what ever they want me to do, it's three days late and several dollars short. The damn conference is half over. The crap they're sending me is about street closures and alternate routes to get to work. Hey, genius! People have probably figured it out on their own by now, and what with your crack record for prompt and useful information they won't be looking on the hospital's website for that, anyway. They'll be going to the Miami Herald site, and how pathetic is that, considering that you wouldn't want to use the Herald to wrap fish, much less get information.

I must be depressed, because I'm starting to have accidents that leave marks. I've never been one of those people who intentionally cut themselves, or anything like that. I just get clumsy when I'm depressed. This means that I am currently walking around with a chunk of my left pinky missing (chopping garlic with a recently sharpened knife, and somehow managed to get the finger pad under the blade). I have a bruise the size of a tangerine on my right forearm from getting on an elevator. The woman standing in front of the control panel looked like she was holding the door open button as she watched me get in. She was not. She was merely watching people enter the elevator. Since I was the last one on, I was the one the doors shut on. Hence the bruise.

I'm also stressed, which is leading to a flare-up of perioral dermatitis. For the laymen, that means my face is breaking out around my mouth and chin. Causes? Stress, and being a middle-aged white woman. OK. Got anything in there I can actually do something about, Doc? Cause I can't change the white, aging, female part. And the stress? Well, fuck. Mummy has Alzheimer's and just fell, broke her hip and is in rehab with a bionic joint. Daddy has leukemia and is holding steady. Work sucks left nut. The economy is in the toilet, and Bush is in the White House riding roughshod over the world. The Dems are mounting one of the most pathetic panel of choices I've ever seen, leading me to believe that Bush will actually WIN the election this time and thereby get another four years in power, which leads me to view the world situation with something less than hope.

So there is my fucking life in a nutshell. Ennui or angst?

Those who know me well, know that I have several dirty little secrets. One which I am willing to discuss publicly is this: I am a gear head. I refused to learn to drive until I was well into my teens, failed my driver's test the first time I took it, and didn't own a car until my senior year in college, but nevertheless, I am a gear head from the git-go.

I love, love, love Monster Garage. I remember clearly the first few sports cars I ever saw. My brother (who is seven years older than me) had a friend with a red Fiat Spider. Can't remember the friend's name, but I remember the car.

One of my earliest memories of my cousin Milton was a "date" that he took me on one summer's day in Newport. I loved (and still love) horses, and so he took me to an equestrian event. I don't remember the riding or jumping, but he picked me up in a red Ford Mustang convertible with white leather interior.

My father has a friend in Atlanta who is a sometime auto racer. Paul came to visit us once when I was maybe fourteen. He arrived at night in a white on white Shelby Cobra Mustang. There were chrome hood clips. Chrome wheels. White interior. A real Shelby Cobra, not a kit or a factory labeled edition.

I didn't know why, but I knew it got me hot. Hell, I might not even have been sure about the hot, but I know it did something to me.

I loved Big Daddy Roth and Ratfink. I wanted a woodie for my non-existant surf board. I stole a book from the public library: a how-to manual for chopping a VW bug into a dune buggy.

All of this is just a lead-in to tonight's big entertainment. My honey is taking me to the Auto Show. Vroom. Tomorrow I will, no doubt, have a new must-lust-after car. I guarantee, it'll be a stick, it'll be a convertible, and it'll be red.

I have this little ritual every morning. I read the paper. It's good for me, because there is usually something in those inky pages that starts my heart even better than a second cup of coffee. This morning it was a "style" article about the current hot trend: knitting.

The story featured a woman whose first project was described as an afghan for her living room. And I suppose it was her project. After all, she commissioned me to make it for her. She told me she was so inspired by my work that she was taking up knitting. I'd like to think that maybe, after she bought that first set of needles, she decided that she could knit better than me, and so made another afghan to replace the one she paid me $500 for. The article continued on to say that after the afghan she has knit several shawls and scarves and a purse with a beaded handle. How nice.

That led into a side bar about beading and other crafts. The featured artisan/teacher in that story is another woman I know. She learned to bead from another friend, a jeweler. She teaches alongside that same jeweler, as her assistant. Neither my name nor my jeweler friend's name were mentioned.

Apparently, you are only worthy of ink if you come to be a craftsman as a second career, after homemaking or trophy wife. Those of us with degrees and 20+ years in the field are just shit out of luck.

And so, just like the graphic design profession has been taken over by people with desktop computers and a couple boxes of software and clip art, artisans have been replaced by dilettantes with too much time and sufficient amounts of money to buy supplies. They have "house shows" and they sell to each other. It has become a status thing to touch the pearls at one's throat and murmur that it was purchased from a friend who has become "a jeweler." I guess that saying it came from a friend who has become proficient at bead stringing doesn't have quite the same cachet.

Sort of like saying that the gorgeous afghan tossed oh-so-casually- across one's tooled leather reading chairs was a commissioned piece rather than a knit of one's own.

Well, bite me. When do I get to have a second career? Although, to read my resume, I'm already on my fourth or fifth. I've been a graphic designer (print) and a web designer. I spent several years as a commercial photographer (product work, catalogs, like that) and color printer. I did a season as a political campaign advisor. (Word of advice: if you end up like I did, voting for the opposition, your candidate was no damn good.) I spent a couple of my earlier years in post-production for film. Non-theatrical release, primarily, but I did work on the titles for "Harlan County, USA" which took the Oscar that year for Best Documentary. Got to hold the little gold guy, too, when Barbara Kopple brought it over to the optical house to share.

I used to think my mid-life crisis would involve becoming a professional chef, but that field too, has become overrun with dilettantes and bored second-careerists, and I'll be damned if I follow that trend.