she sang goodnight to us all
goodnight you cats she sang
Now is the time for all good cats to go to sleep
there are things to do tomorrow
And you can do them then
but now its time to sleep
and you can dream

Abbie The Cat Has A Posse

It's true that, thanks to the Electoral College, if you're not in a swing state, you can't help elect or defeat a candidate. Vote anyway.

1. There's a chance the polls are wrong. Students and cell phone users are the secret swing voters, because the polls are not designed to reflect their choices.
2. Though the Electoral College obscures the sentiment of the American people, it can't hide it entirely. Bush may have been legally selected, but the American people rejected him by half a million recorded votes nationwide.
3. This vote will tell the world whether the US supports Bush's policies or rejects them. The degree of support or rejection matters.

I was thinking the other day how each of us has his or her own timetable. Maybe one person has advanced further than you in one area, like their social life or their financial earnings. But you may have other things that you've advanced in, such as you really know the value of a strong family relationship or you've had enough varied experiences that you have material to write several books. Perhaps if there were a bar chart of each of our lives, we'd all have something of worth down in big, boldly colored bars, even if it seems the visible things like money, career, marriage and kids are the first things that tend to come to mind.

We all--or I do, anyway--tend to look at people who seem to have more than we do, and envy them, or wonder how they got so much further than we have in certain areas.

But we do need to remember that even if we don't have as much money as someone else, or may not have advanced in a career as much as someone else has, we may be more advanced spiritually, or intellectually, or in some other way more blessed or evolved. Interesting to think about, and something that it's important not to forget.

This was the quote that made me stop for a moment:

Other conditions included photographing the home for posterity, preserving and donating an organ inside a special organ room and preserving some copper objects.

One would assume that "donating an organ" doesn't have its usual connotation, although that's what I though at first.

Link from Cult of Mac.

Even declared nonmembers, it would appear, responded to our efforts. In Chitral, Pakistan, for example, a recent al-Qaida recruit remembered the way an elderly American tourist once made an encouraging remark about his English, and how, as she made the remark, she touched his arm, like a mother. In Gaza, an Israeli soldier and a young Palestinian, just before averting their eyes and muttering insults in their respective languages, exchanged a brief look of mutual shame.

Link from George Saunders Land

At this point she finally got it, and her whole affect changed. She wasn't snobbish about it. But it was obvious that, in her mind, the sort of writer who actually made a living from it was an entirely different creature from the sort she generally associated with.

Link from Ceej

I also meant to mention a wonderful essay by one of my favorite writers, George Saunders, at Amazon:

My understanding of literature at this time was: Great Writing was Hard Reading. If written properly, you could barely understand it. Often, a scene I was imagining indoors suddenly sprouted stars and a riverfront. At a fictional dinner party where I had understood there to be three people present, six were suddenly required, based on the sudden appearance of three unfamiliar names.

Some Bad Ideas: Art larger than 3 x 5 feet (I am being generous here), photo albums with more than 50 photos of one signing , things that squeak (living), anything fragile (it will get broken), live animals of any kind, anything weighing over 50 pounds, pictures of you and the writer blown up to poster size that your friend took at a signing, your ENTIRE collection of his/her work to be signed, anything you recorded while on drugs, open liqueur bottles with hand done labels in a foreign language, and anything you have to preface with "I found this in a graveyard...."

Neil Gaiman (Advice given by the Fabulous Lorraine, Gaiman's assistant.)

This quote is about his new album, which hasn't been released yet:

When you hear it, don't worry about me. I'm fine. I just don't typically trust or like music that isn't, in it's heart, the blues. Yeah, there's happy stuff happening all the time. I recently got engaged, for example. But why sing about that. Or...how do you do it without sounding self congratulatory and smug. I find doubts, fears, heartaches to be interesting. For me, music is the place to express these things so I don't have to do it the rest of the time.

Beautiful stuff.