What a great musical / romance is Bride and Prejudice! I love it. It’s definitely my favorite of the Pride and Prejudice movies. I love the music and the dancing.

I just think this is frikking awesome:

In celebration of our planned trip to Japan, I bought an intro course to Japanese from Amazon. Unlike the Spanish course I was doing, this one is all audio and actually intended to be solely listened to without any book consultation. So far (half way through Lesson #1), it’s great. I’m under no illusions of actually learning Japanese. In fact, at this point, I’m pretty sure I’ll never really learn another language. However, it’s a fantastic distraction in the car. (They should probably ban learning languages while driving, as I have to admit my driving does deteriorate.) So far I’ve learned to say “Excuse me” and “Do you understand English?” and “I understand Japanese” and, more useful, “I do not understand Japanese.”

Now all we need are plane tickets.

I was listening to NPR, and they were talking, of course, about Katrina and the five-year anniversary. Anyway, the first thing I heard was an old clip of W praising “Brownie.” It made me really cringe. I don’t really think Bush was a bad guy, but he was in over his head from 9/11 until the end of his presidency. He should not have been president. He was a complete blow to the idea of meritocracy.

Then they had the current FEMA head on talking about how great FEMA is now and how much it’s improved. Specifically he talked about how they’ll use social media to communicate with people, like Twitter and Facebook. First, I’m tired of hearing about Twitter and Facebook. (Both have been around for a long time; why are they constantly in the news lately? I feel like I’ve had a Facebook account since around 2005, and it seems like Sarah and Becca have been twittering forever.) Second, during a disaster like Katrina, who’s going to have power to run their computer and access twitter and facebook? Sure, some people will have phones that’ll last a day or two, but Katrina went on for a while. I hope they aren’t devoting too many resources to their Facebook page.

I find it interesting that the former chair of the Republican party is gay. Republicans are so wrapped up in conservative “values,” but it doesn’t make sense that objections to gay marriage and abortion and support for capital punishment go along with fiscal conservatism or support for the war in Iraq. They’ve got this values platform, and a war / defense platform, and a low tax platform. I fail to see how the three are related.