Sigh.

My son has unfortunately clued into an old trick this week to get himself outta school...making like he is one sick puppy and having the nurse call me to pick him up early. It got him out at noon-ish Tuesday, and then he attempted it again on Wednesday. The nurse, bless her, made it a point to listen to his little lungs the second time around, when he complained of a cough, and found no real congestion in him. After talking to me over the phone about it, she took his temperature again a half-hour after the first time she took it and found that it was dropping - from a number that wasn't all that high to begin with.

I mean, I know every other person is coming down with something these days, what with the weather changing, kids bringing home all the germs they are wont to share (and we wish they'd share their toys more...) and all, but for the little guy to be pulling this kind of stuff?

I just hope he doesn't start spinning himself around and around, then go running off to the teachers and the nurse complaining of dizziness.

Sigh.

I wish blogrolling.com hadn't been hacked into, because then I could add Muckraking Mom, South Jerusalem, and several other blogs of note to li'l ol' me to my blogroll. I guess I should be grateful I still have a blogroll...but I wanna update it so, sooo much, I do! Especially since the Humid Beings web portal will officially relaunch next month. You have until Christmas, Blogrolling folks...until then, if anybody's got any suggestions on what other blogroll services there are out there, lemme know.

Inadvertently, a just-for-the-heck-of-it search for a certain '80's toy for a blogpocheh member got me here, which got me here, and got me seriously thinking about a new blog template. I like it a lot, but I think the instructions for downloading it to Blogger are meant for the old version of Blogger, and trying to cut and paste the XML into Blogger has proven to be an exercise in futility. If anybody can help me out here as well, lemme know. Might be 'bout time for a blog facelift...

Sigh.

It just has to be happening in Louisiana, doesn't it?

As if there aren't enough queries from family and friends in other places on why we moved back to Louisiana in the first place.

My dad called me around Election Day last week and chided me for living in such a red state. This coming from he who lives in Oklahoma. I'm sure I'll get it from him on this some kinda way...and I'll just have to say that at least we now have a good idea who and where the racist dim-bulbs are here. Since the Klan isn't as...errr..."organized" (used very loosely here) in Oklahoma, it's a tad tougher to figure out that sort of information there.

...and sigh again...

Apparently Hizzoner the Walking Id is convinced he's found some racists as well - and that one of 'em is on the City Council, all because she dared to ask the city's sanitation director some probing, highly pertinent questions about the city's questionable sanitation contracts, and the person in charge of 'em evaded the queries over and over and over and over. This time, something really does stink, and it ain't Stacy Head.

Plus, the devil's in Details magazine, once again calling the bloggers out on the carpet for "impeding the recovery of his hometown". The article also reveals the man's choice of reading material, which miffs me to no end, since I have a copy of the book and I haven't even cracked it open yet. As Jacques the shrimp has said, "I am ashamed."

I am incensed, however, at an aspect of this that E points out:

Shock Doctrine has a whole chapter about Ray Nagin's post-Katrina New Orleans. You can find some excerpts of that section at one of Ms. Klein's Huffington Post pieces. Essentially, Klein argues that business forces use the shock of disaster to ram through all kinds of goodies for themselves while the actual victims of the disaster are left waiting on their rooftops. It is a scathing denunciation of neoliberalism. It is one of the most strident criticisms of Ray Nagin's recovery philosophy that exists today.

And Ray Nagin is in the middle of reading it, just not the part about him. He's interested in the part where she explains how business forces exploit people, the part he can interpret as a manual that can instruct the rest of his disastrous reign of terror on this great American city.

I wonder how many times the Walking Id faked some sort of sickness in his school days so he'd get pulled out of whatever predicament he was in. I wonder if he's still doing it.

Sigh.