navelgazer

Instrumental. I think I have found the music I have been looking for all my life. The composer does everything on the computer, which I thought would turn me off. He says on his website that he tried to learn to play the guitar but it didn't work out for him. I'm glad he didn't let that stand in his way. The scenes in the video may have been shot in Scandinavia, but I swear they look just like the mountains of my home, the Pacific Northwest.

Those five most-read stories from Politico or Politifact or I can't remember where exactly scare the shit out of me. Every one of them was false Russia bot bullshit. Seemed to me like a narrative lesson for how the stuff inside of the FAUX Noise/Brietbart bubble finds a way to leak out.

I am rapidly developing a thing for Secret Agent Clint. (Great handle for him, @oakville, thanks!) Watts just has this steely spine look about him, that he could take a marshmallow like Trey Gowdy or Devin Nunes and make them wail for their mommies. Have to say thanks to Mika for actually adding the 38% who blame Cheeto with the 18% who blame congressional Republicans so that the total number who blame Democrats is far overshadowed by the total of the other two numbers. Ms. Ruhle and Ms. Jansing yesterday both framed things like more people blamed Democrats. I was beyond irritated at that collective uselessness.

I missed Bill and am so glad he's back. I wish he'd been on when Gillabrand was on her Lady Godiva high horse. Maybe Bill would've been able to help save Al Franken and his Senate seat. I don't think Andrew Sullivan realized who he was talking to. Saru Jayaraman is an academic, so her only job is data -- collecting it, analyzing it, theorizing from it. If you're even marginally intelligent, you should know you can't get into a data debate with an academic in her specialty and have a remote hope of winning.

Kasie at least still seems to be trying to present the current state of things re: how the Republicans need air cover from Trump in order to compromise with the Democrats on DACA. Kasie truly is a gem.

One wish is for them to start writing for Amy Acker to exploit her talents as a cold-blooded killer a la PoI's Root. My most fervent wish is that they never, ever, ever dream up a character for Stephen Moyer's real-life wife Anna Paquin to play. That would make me violently ill.

Damn. I always tell myself not to fall in love with a show until Season 3, but I can never stick to it.

Congrats, Chris, but I'm really glad you're back. My head 'sploded from the kyute.

I've had a combination of Linger and Zombie in my head since I first heard this news. So sad, she was so young!

Cranberries front woman Dolores ORiordan has died at age 46. Cause of death not specified.

The parents Caroline and Lloyd played by Judy Davis and Kevin Spacey in The Ref. He was a buttoned-down, resentful drone and she was a flighty, angry, combative whiner. They both needed permission from the man with the gun (Denis Leary as Gus) to say what had really been on their minds for 15-plus years. Glynis Johns as the poisonous matriarch gets an honorable mention here.

Too much mawkish sentimentality from both Rachel and Senator Harris re: DACA and the DREAMERs. Yes, it's all horrifying, but I started to feel goopy just listening to them try to out-earnest each other. That being said, I like Senator Harris and I would love to fall in love with her and her chances as a candidate in 2020, but I usually don't like to fall for a presidential candidate until the last possible moment, so it's going to be a uber-long courtship. I just hope Rachel keeps her own fondness for any particular candidate in check, unlike what Rachel did in 2016 with her worship at the altar of HRC. I transcribed conference calls for 12 years and I have to say that most of the time the stuff Rachel read out would not have been typed. Usually the transcript starts when the operator introduces things, date, time, title, call moderator, etc. And a lot of the calls I did had that sort of chaotic beginning before things settled down and everybody got down to business. Rachel even said "we got the Mandarin translated," which is over and above the usual practice.

Brian's show was in progress when McCain came in to the Senate well and did his famous thumbs down vote on OCare R&R. I thought MSNBC was fortunate to have Brian on the air to cover the story and that he did good work.

Re Joe's mini rant about how you want the best neurosurgeon or the best plumber but for a politician he may not know much, but hey, I like him, they should have Tom Nichols on the show to talk about his book, "The Death of Expertise." Yeah, it's a thing.

I really wish Joy would just stop having Jen Kerns from the Washington Examiner on the show. It's like Joy enjoys how easy it is to debunk this woman's generalities of who she's quoting, where did she read the talking point she just spewed out, etc. Sorry for the cliche, but Joy is shooting fish in a barrel. It's not a real contest of wits since the woman is so used to spewing her nonsense in the soft, comforting arms of the RW media machine.

Squeeing all over myself, I can watch any of the movies whenever I want now commercial-free with having HBO On-Demand. Happy dance!!!

Truly relieved the Seahawks missed the party. Goddamn morons and their personal fouls cost them this game, that and knowing they were out anyway, so WGAF.

They just ran a "how we got here" montage re: Trump/Russia narrated by Mika and it was actually pretty good.

"Lay Down" by Melanie. Bruce Springsteen, "Last to Die." They both never fail to make me cry.

Commercial radio is a repetitive, focus-grouped wasteland. I get stabby when I'm in the car and three of my six programmed stations are all playing "Hotel California" or "Breakdown" at the same time. I let music go when I got obsessed with politics, but now seems like as good a time as any to get back into it again. My favorite way of finding good music is talking to musicians. I used to hang out at Mike Portnoy's web site and I found all of the black/death/power/prog metal I could ever listen to. I used to subscribe to Alternative Press, but not Rolling Stone. And I'm lucky that I have a fantastic music store in Portland that hasn't gone out of business or cut their carried music section down to the top 40 like the big chain stores have done. One other favorite tool is the Music Map. You plug in a band you like and it will map out spatially other bands that are similar/related so you can see which direction you want to go in. For example, I plugged in a band named Haggard, a sort of gothic/symphonic/folk metal combination, and I got Orphaned Land, which is everything I could hope for and more.

I have a couple songs that fit here. One is "25 Lovers" by Jennifer Rush. She was huge in Europe, didn't do so well in the US. She wrote "Power of Love," one of Celine Dion's greatest hits. Another band that remains on the mainstream fringes but has a huge following is Marillion. "Kayleigh" is off of "Misplaced Childhood," which is one of the best albums from cut 1 to cut 10 that I have ever heard.

Seahawks fan here, too. I'm happy that they won, but at the same time I know that their lack of a running game/decent kicker/healthy secondary is going to keep them from going too awfully far if they even make it to the playoffs. I almost wish that they had lost and would be out of it and I could begin the five stages and then pick who to hate and be happy that they lost, too. NE and Pittsburgh will eventually be tops on that list.

We actually got a White Christmas here in Portland, Oregon -- something that rarely happens for us. I'm sitting here drinking spiced rum and grooving to some Celtic Nots/Lothlorien flute, which I just accidentally found through a rec by YT. Happiness all around. ;)

The Other Woman with Cameron Diaz, Kate Upton, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. It's stupid upon over-the-top stupid and yet I just can't help myself.