High-grade semi-important link!spam for your perusal:

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/dont_arrest_journalists/?rc=homepage

They arrested Amy Goodman. This woman comes into my living room to report news a couple of times a week, has recovered from what looked like a stroke while we watched, and has generally been a good and decent human being all her life to the best of anyone's knowledge, and those jackbooted thugs at the RNC went and arrested her. Note: this is not the first time that non-mainstream journalists have been arrested in recent years. Nor the second. This is not the first time somebody's been pepper-sprayed for exercising first-amendment rights.

I mean, Christ on a cracker, they arrested Amy Goodman! You just don't do that.

Ah well. In other news, I was concerned this weekend by an infestation of small bootlace-like things in the yard, AKA baby snakes. I wasn't sure they were not king snakes. I also was not sure they were not baby copperheads. Whichever they were, however, our local redtailed hawk thought they were delicious. Since the couple of days of hawk swooping down, gulping something too small to see, and going back up to lurk in one of the perimeter trees, I have not seen another little animate bootlace whipping through the grass.

I turned down an offer on the house today. After subtracting what we still owe and the realtor's commission, the offer came out enough in the red for us to simply keep paying the mortgage for several more months. I did make a counteroffer below our asking price, which our realtor thought was awfully generous since the asking price was already pretty low. At least these people who want the house love it properly, which I like in return, so if they can just keep us out of total howling debt I am content.