More on last night and Xanga vs Blogspot

It seems that Panda and his girlfriend read entirely too much into the fact that I am a fan of the show "Weeds" (largely because it is so reasonably priced on Blu-ray) and the Harold & Kumar movies & figured I seemed like a guy who be cool with them smoking pot in my house. Just in case I wasn't cool though, they've better try to do it covertly. After leaving his room, they went downstairs, ate a frozen pizza and some nachos and watched Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical (which I watched today. It's quite good.) and Puff, Puff, Pass. A little consulting with my friends says it is not unreasonable to throw his ass out. It doesn't help his girlfriend has been increasingly bitchy. Today, she went on a rant about how my house has boxes everywhere. She's correct, but this is largely because my parlor is full of Panda's stuff, leaving me little place to put anything.

I've been reading my book on Alexander, which finally arrived, and find myself frustrated keeping the characters straight. (Note: Since this is Greece, you can't keep them all that straight.) So far, there are two Alexanders, two Philips, two Cleopatras (neither of whom is the famous one), two Bagoases (Bagoi?) and two Pausaniases (Pausani?). The cultures of the time apparently had only a handful of names available. To his credit, the editor is explaining this well in his footnotes.

I've been missing many of Xanga's features lately. While Blogspot has a better spell-check and doesn't lose posts, it still doesn't have track-back, which doesn't seem available free in general and, more upsettingly, lacks Xanga's footprints feature that told me who had visited. I have no idea if anyone has read even a single post here. I'd like a stable home, but must determine where.

A different topic for today

I was going to write about Alexander today, but a different topic has caught my attention. I smelled something odd in my hallway. It seemed to be coming from my brother Panda's room. His girlfriend saw me sniffing the air and immediately said someone must have turned on the oven. I know what an oven smells like and I know what a defensive reaction looks like. I verified this with my roommate, Fox. He confirmed I was indeed smelling weed. I am not opposed to marijuana use in general and support its legalization, but I certainly don't support using it on others' property without their consent, especially when I'm reading horror stories every day about people having their houses and such seized by the government as evidence every few days. The question is what to do? He hasn't been paying rent, and it was bad enough supporting his electricity-drinking, space taking ass. I'm certainly not going to cover for him as well. The question is what to do. I could take his room apart looking for his stash tomorrow while he's at work and possibly fidn naked pictures of his girlfriend in the deal, but I suspect she actually keeps the stach (and naked pictures) at her place. I think I shall have to drop hints.

What I read

I haven't forgotten about the other stuff I intended to write about, but there's is only so much time per day. One of the things I want to do is highlight the other bloggers I read. First up is Ed Brayton at Dispatches From the Culture Wars. He goes first not because he's the best or anything, but because he wrote something I want to link to.

Media Focuses on Irrelevancies in GVSU Shooting

Here's the short version: Cops do a marijuana raid and apparently shoot an unarmed college student for no good reason, but won't talk about it. Presumably, if they had a good reason, they would talk about it. Rather than address the details of the warrant or what happened, police talk about how the victim was a druggie. News reports just quote the police and do no actual critical analysis of the situation. I think Ed summed it up well. This is, in a very real way, the equivalent of talking about what a rape victim was wearing. Unless we're shooting stoners now, none of this is relevant.

I've been hangign otu with hippies lately (more on this later) and many basically regard the police as armed criminals running an extortion racket. I can see the necessity of police and even understand that when you give anyone the power to shoot people if they have good reason, this will inevitably lead to them occasionally shooting people without good reason. However, this must be minimized and the first step to minimizing the problem is calling bullshit on this sort of thing. While it's important to understand that accidents will happen, it's even more important to understand that using this as an excuse leads to more accidents that get less accidental.