Ratzafratz!

George H.W. Bush, after winning the 1988 election through a nasty campaign emphasizing Willie Horton and the Pledge of Allegiance: "No hard feelings.  It was all in a generous spirit of competition." (Do the American people know when they're being insulted?)

I was late ordering the new monthly pass for my Presto card. (The opera's been distracting me...) Last night I tried to order it, but kept getting a message that my credit card needed verification.  Funny it worked OK last month.  The message also showed a toll-free number which I called and started to get somewhere, but then our service provider (the well-named Fido) cut me off!

Today I tried to call again. There was a message at the start estimating that my call would take five minutes, but I ended up waiting twenty minutes before the phone's batteries went dead! (The thing we plug the phone into to keep it charged, it turned out, had itself been unplugged from the outlet...) Tonight I tried again, but the message said I could expect a 30-minute wait. Meanwhile, I can't even open my Presto account.

I haven't been in the best mood the last couple of days.  Only two people besides me came to discuss The Wizard of Oz Sunday, though Debi brought an interesting-looking annotated edition  that I should read someday.  I was going to watch episode 138 of the subtitled Dragon Ball, but couldn't open the Anilinkz connection, so I watched the dubbed version, which isn't nearly as good! (I saw the subtitled version today.)

And the news is full of toadying to the memory of the first President Bush, one of the biggest weasels to occupy the Oval Office--and competition is strong!  My favorite GHWB quote came after an American cruiser shot down an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf in 1988. (Is it really a coincidence that terrorists blew up an American airliner over Scotland just six months later? But I digress.) The then-Vice President said: "I don't care what the facts are!" Think about that one a bit--Orwell lives.  

I also remember a 1989 editorial in the neoliberal British newspaper The Guardian contending that the President "seems to be more liberal than the policies he espouses." So he's just an enabler rather than a believer, see?  Scant consolation...

Oh well, the opera opens this Thursday.