I’m getting a much higher quality of spam than I used to

“Enjoyed reading through this, very good stuff, regards . “Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings.” by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.”

Nice to know that I do stop bleeding

Even with all the warfarin in my system.

They are starting on the roof.
Tomorrow morning the tear-off people will turn up at 8am.
Then all week with putting the new one on.

My thought is that the feral and semi-feral backyard population will not be happy with this.
So I have been getting them in today.

Habeeb and Doc are simple.
Sisko is out there somewhere napping, but will come in for dinner.
Wolfie took two tries, but I lured him with new fishy fud and just stashed him inside the back door.
Those are the easy ones.

Albert the Orange has been coming in to steal food for months, and cleverly hiding from us under the stove and in the laundry room
So I just brought in all the outside food, and then snuck around and closed the kitchen door on him.
He’s in the laundry room with Wolfie, the pair of them thinking Dark Thoughts at me.

Sextus was the first one I tried to get, though, and he’s still evading capture.
I’ve been able to pat him since he moved out back.
So I thought I could pick him up.
HA!
Hence the title.
The little creep is now out back in the bushes bein all feral on his lonesome.
I’m not quite cross enough to let him just cope with the roofers.
But I’m somewhat punctured and annoyed at this point.

So I’ve set the have-a-heart trap out there, baited with tuna.
I expect I’ll spend the afternoon catching the little black tom who’s been hanging around.
(I’m hoping he lives next door, where they appear to have a number of black cats.)
But Sextus missed breakfast because the black cat gave him the evil eye, so he’s probably hungry.
I have to go out around 6, so I’m hoping he’ll make a mistake by then.
But not betting on it – he’s clever in a sneaky cat sort of way.

Sigh.

And more

Googling my new reader’s username + name, I came up with an interview with her, including this gem:

“My career is public relations – very much putting me squarely in a perception is reality world. What a thing appears to be is often more important than what it is in many PR circles. We do a lot of “messaging” to put the best face on every situation.”

Lovely.
I had, of course, noticed the disconnect between reality and the case argued by Knox’s defenders.
But it is nice to see the philosophical underpinnings so clearly stated.
And the PR connection as well.

It is all a rather peculiarly intense effort to shape US opinion.
I mean, here is a PR flack trying to move in on my pitiful little blog, with my dozen or so readers, just because I used it to air a few facts in the case two years ago.
Seriously, folks, doesn’t that seem to be a little like overkill?

Anyway, yet another long screed in the pending-forever file.
A lot of lies.
One interesting claim, that “besides the families guest appearances had NOTHING (I repeat NOTHING) to do with any type of PR Firm/Effort/Anything you wanna call it.”
I guess Oprah just turned up randomly on their doorstep, and the news folks coughed up travel money out of sheer goodwill….
And the overall explanation that it was all this was done to protect their daughter’s fair name.
When, frankly, no one would have heard or cared about a murder in Italy, or remembered their girl’s name in connection with it, but for the family’s PR push.

And, “I’m sorry if this offendes you, but the fact that someone says something that you don’t agree with and it riles you up this much makes YOU look like the one with issues, not me.”
Except, Crazy Lady, I didn’t go searching the interwebs to find posts from you to go pontificate on.
I hadn’t even posted on the subject for two years
Not until you tried to put your lying PR crap on my old blog post.
Just because someone, somewhere, was saying a discouraging word.
I think somebody has issues on the subject, but it isn’t me.
There is a whole cottage industry based on Amanda Knox: The Pure Innocent American Abroad.
Books to be written, opinions to opine,.
But no explanations on how she randomly happened to get her dna mixed up in the blood of her murdered roommate, beyond that DNA is all sciencey, and couldn’t it also be, crap.
Oprah also failed to ask how, after only about a month or so in Perugia, Amanda already had the number of a local coke dealer in the contacts on her cell.

Which is to say, yes, I do know more about this case than probably I should.
Some of it was just the temporal coincidence with my own kid being overseas.
And there is the sense of real loss: this is the victim, the girl on the staircase:

A lot of it, though, was just watching the horrific US PR campaign unroll in real time.
I do have issues.
They have to do with injustice, racism, and American chauvinism, all of which the Amanda PR defense depends heavily upon.
I don’t know what Crazy Lady’s issues are, whether she is just a nut, or whether this is a professional matter, and frankly I don’t really much care.
But she isn’t using my blog as a forum.

So funny

About two years ago a very white-washed movie version of a murder in Italy came out.
I posted about it at the time (http://lauowolf.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/so-did-anyone-watch-that-lifetime-movie-last-night/#comment-7729), because I had been following the story closely.
I think that was because the murdered girl was doing a study abroad the same time Sair had, and thinking about her family’s loss was devastating to me.

The killer was a girl named Amanda Knox.
She’s been in the news again lately, because the long and involved Italian judicial process went through another step.
FYI, trials in Italy are in three stages, an initial trial, an automatic appeal/review, and a final review of both.
No verdict is final until the third step has been completed.
Amanda and her creepy boyfriend were found guilty at the first stage, and that verdict was overturned at the review.
Most recently, the final review by the Supreme Court has ordered the review/appeal trial to be re-done, because their decision was screwy.

And it was.
Basically the judge just decided to throw out DNA evidence because perhaps sometimes DNA evidence could be contaminated.
Not that the defense had demonstrated it had been, just that the possibility existed, theoretically.
And they also just ignored a lot of material, or came to strange conclusions.
Like, luminal reacts to blood, but also some other odd things do, like — was it beet juice? bleach? – it’s been a couple of years since I looked at this stuff.
So despite the presence of a bloody murder in the back bedroom, and no evidence of beet juice/or whatever on the premises, the court decided that the luminol-located footprints that demonstrated a clean-up, might not be blood.
Nearly comical, except that the family of the murdered girl sat through it and saw the smirking monsters who had killed their girl set free because of it.
The verdict was entirely weird, was descried in Italy as a miscarriage of justice  immediately, and now will be set right.
If anyone is interested, there is a vast corpus of information here: http://truejustice.org/ee/index.php

Anyway, one of the interesting features of the whole grand mess was the PR war fought on Amanda’s behalf by a strange array of fringe types, sock puppets, and self-serving headline chasers.
Many of them fairly loopy.
And, I guess, because of the recent flurry of news, these various weird types are crawling out from under their rocks again.
And one of the strangest of them actually dug out my old post and just tried to comment on it.

With outright lies, of course, because that’s how PR works.
But I draw the line at PR crap being posted on my blog.
It’s all just words on a page, so if, oh Crazy Lady, you puts lies on my page, welp, then there they sit, seemingly valid.
I don’t know you – though I know of you – and you aren’t part of the community of people I speak with on-line.
This is my blog, and I really don’t need or want to provide a forum for someone defending a brutal murderer.
I will take on the comments you made though, this one time.

Your first comment was the more general one:
“and Amanda is everything opposite from what you “think”. So unless you nkow her personally, you might want to think twice before speaking so incorrectly. How would you like people saying such things about you? Seriously…”
Welp, like many people, in fact, everyone, I say and think things about people I don’t know all the time.
I don’t know Obama, or William Shatner, or Charles Manson either.
But I know enough about them, and about Amanda too, to have opinions, and be willing to express them.
On the basis of a fair amount of time studying publicly available information, I’d say Amanda is a cruel and manipulative person.
Her involvement in this murder has made her a public figure – and her family courted public attention in the matter – so I have no difficulties with discussing her in public.
And, considering that I believe that she assisted in the sexual assault, torture, and murder of an innocent girl, I think my language concerning her is, overall, somewhat moderate.
And, you know, if I ever instigate and participate in similar actions, anyone is welcome to say whatever they please about it.

As for your second comment – really, two comments on a complete stranger’s blog from 2011? – Don’t you have a life?
Anyway, you claim: “There isn’t a “big Knox PR well funded effort” thing. That is a big fat lie.”
Oh yeah, that’s me always falling for the big fat lies.
Or am I the liar?
It’s a little unclear, and if it’s the later, that’s really rather rude of you.
Considering that this is my blog, and you don’t know me from Adam, and all that.

But, in response, I would say that as far as I am concerned, and I think most people, for that matter, hiring a big-time PR firm would, in fact, constitute a “big Knox PR effort.”
And, they got bang for their buck too: they sold their story for a movie ($$); there is a book deal; and they trailed the family through all the usual daytime tv crap fests, which, I understand, paid for “access.”
Hence the “well-funded” part.
The PR firm in Seattle, btw, brags about her being their client.
It’s on their website: http://www.gogertymarriott.com/showcase/amanda_knox
So it sounds like a big PR effort to me.
Someone here wields big fat lies, but it ain’t me, babe.

I actually caught the family on Oprah, with her mom crying as usual.
(I think Mrs. Kercher was mostly stoic at the trial, but then she only had the details of the butchery of her daughter to deal with.)
Oprah was all sympathy.
I lost any vestige of respect I might have ever had for her when she failed to ask about why sweet dear Amanda falsely claimed to have witnessed her black boss murdering her roommate.
Much after the fact she admitted to just making it up..
But she didn’t retract her story at the time, even after she heard he’d been arrested.
The poor man was dragged out of his home in front of his wife and child, and  jailed until eventually a customer came forward testifying that he had been working that night.
Of course, spending a few weeks in jail wasn’t all that good for his business, which went bust.
Oprah just sat there listening to the family’s dog and pony show about how the Italian cops arrested the poor girl because they hate sexy women.
(Psycho boyfriend was also arrested, but the less said about that, the better.)
PR, at its — is finest really the word I want here?

Grrrrrrr
I guess I’m getting riled up again.
But, the good news is the review trial is being re-done, this time competently.
And since in the real world, PR actually does not necessarily become reality, there is a very good chance that the final verdict will reflect the facts in the case.
And, since I didn’t just randomly form some half-assed opinion, but actually know what I am talking about, I’m not going to let your stupid comments sit unquestioned on my earlier page.

So, crazy lady Michelle, nice try, but no chance.
Go peddle your lies on your own pages, and keep off of mine.
And, thank you, Word Press, for comment moderation.

Have just spent an hour sorting out a drawer

Do you think Robert Louis Stevenson was being sarcastic with that “The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings” thing?

Because an unbelievable amount of those “things” appear to be somewhere in this house, and I’ve been bailing the place out for months and things are still all over the place.

And the prospect of another fifty or so Bags of Stuff getting hauled off to the Goodwill doesn’t really qualify for “happy as kings” status in my mind.

Snail Mail February!

I have just emailed up the updated list of addresses to everyone already on it.

If you haven’t gotten an email from me, and you want to be doing this, you need to email me about it, and I will catch you all up with everyone.

 

Snail Mail February

Can people tell me if they want last year’s mailing list.
Or if they have changes to their information from last year.
Or if they want to be added/deleted from the list.
It went out via email and has “snail” in the title, so you may be able to ferret out the old list that way too.

 

NOTE:

LittleOddMe, Capn Steph, and Jaypo have new addresses.
Email me to get updated information