Confession Time!

Yes, my blogees. I'm Bet, and I'm a wayward blogger. It's been 16 days since my last blog. And I'm back to make a couple of confessions to you all.

The first confession is that I'm going to quit apologizing for not updating my blog more. I'm sorry about it, to be sure, but less and less sorry, and something has to be afoot that's making me not make time to do it. I don't know if it's that I just don't care that much anymore (I'd like to think I do), that I don't have anything worthwhile to say (sadly, I'm feeling this more and more), or that I have that newly-diagnosed mental illness, Blogophrenia, which makes blogging impossible (I don't, and I made that up anyway).

So all I can say is that while I try to get back into blogging shape, I hope you'll all be nice enough to check back every week or so to make sure I'm still alive and still typing. If you do, I'd be ever so grateful. But don't expect miracles. Election day this year should tell you that.

Speaking of election day this year, that's kind of where my second confession comes in. In a roundabout way.

See, my buddy Stennie and I do the Hucklebug podcast together, and we made a solemn pledge to our listeners. We took on the Herculean task to watch Sarah Palin's new reality show on TLC so our listeners wouldn't have to watch it themselves. We were being extremely selfless when we made this pledge, but it was an honest pledge. We care about our listeners, and wouldn't dream of having them suffer through Sarah's reality show.

An aside here, because if there's anything you know about me, it's that I love a good aside like a fat baby loves mashed potatoes. TLC stands for "The Learning Channel," and they have shows like "Jon and Kate Plus Eight," "19 Kids and Counting" (about the horrid and ever-mulitplying Duggar family), "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant," "Say Yes to the Dress" (about bridezillas and their gowns), "Sister Wives" (about a polygamist family), "Toddlers and Tiaras" (about child beauty pageants), and "LA Ink" (about tattoo artists). What exactly we're supposed to learn to enrich our lives about all this is a mystery to me. In fact, my sister has lovingly renamed TLC "The Trailer Trash Channel."

OK. So the premiere of the Palin show, which if I'm not mistaken is called "Sarah Palin's Alaska," like it's actually about Alaska, was Sunday night.

Sunday was not an especially stellar day for me. I learned while visiting the parents that day that one of our neighborhood gang of kids when I was young, a guy one year older than I, had passed away. It was also the 40th anniversary of the Marshall University plane crash (which wiped out their football team), and I spent much of the evening watching the documentary about it, "Ashes to Glory." It's an amazing documentary, and though it ends on a high note, the interviews about the actual crash are just gut-wrenching.

Then I watched "The Amazing Race," and got all pissed off about winners and losers. Then - it was time for Sarah's show.

I duly turned in, just like I said I would. I watched. Well, I watched until I decided I absolutely could not watch anymore. I looked at the clock at the point I could not watch anymore. It was six minutes into the show.

Yes, apparently six minutes of Sarah Palin is all I can stomach.

And I marveled at that. I mean, I'm the person who rails against Glenn Beck on the podcast while Stennie yells, "Quit watching that shit!" I can watch over half of his show, screaming at the TV screen, blaspheming. I don't know how I do it but I do, vitriol at the boiling point.

But I couldn't stand more than six minutes of Sarah Palin and her brood.

Because, in six minutes, here's what I saw.

Sarah in her palatial estate. Not the Governor's Mansion, her own home. Now, I thought her husband Todd was a fisherman. She lives in a huge waterfont estate. They obviously didn't move into it after the book deals and money from the TV show. And I'm sure there's dirty money involved in that house.

And - Sarah and her neighbor. Of course, a guy writing a book about Sarah rented the house beside of hers, which is his God-given right, and we got to see Todd and Sarah making fun of him and talking about how he was writing a "hit" piece on them, and playing the "victim" card at every turn.

And - Sarah whoring out her youngest daughter. There she was, cutely licking cupcake batter off a spoon. Sarah's already whored out Bristol (and we see how well that went), and the little disabled one (and she should be ashamed), and the middle daughter, Willow - well, I don't know if you've seen it yet, but Willow and Bristol got involved in a Facebook flame against someone who dissed this very reality show that, well, I don't even know what to say about it. Willow was calling people "faggot" all over the place, but what distressed me more was that the poor girl can't distinguish between "your" and "you're." Uneducated heathens.

And - Sarah talking about, to counter the "hitman" author writing the piece against her, they're building a higher fence around their huge estate. And Sarah said, with a wink to the camera, "Just like people think we should build a big fence around the country to keep illegal aliens out."

And that was it. That was the point where I said "enough."

Because that's when I also realized, "Holy Lord and Holy Shit and Jesus H Christ, this is nothing but a nine-week political commercial." Which I knew anyway, but wasn't expecting it to be so obvious, for some reason, there on the Trailer Trash Channel.

And that pisses me off. I mean, I can't tell you how this pisses me off.

While other politicians who are hoping to be president someday have to wait till election season and then pay millions of dollars to come up with 30 minutes of show for their campaigns, here is this empty-headed vacuous shithead with a nine-week reality-show-campaign commercial - that she's being paid for!

And that's just not fair.

Our country is fucked. Our country is fucked beyond repair.

I could go into the whole "Dancing With the Stars" thing, which I'm only watching with one eye (I promise), and how Bristol Palin was one of the three worst dancers in the stable and has now made it to the final round, because her mom shows up in the audience and right-wing websites beg people to call in and vote for her.

But I won't.

All I can do is hope that somehow, somewhere, Sarah Palin will fuck up enough that even the "on the fence" crowd will see what a sham she is. (The teabaggers wouldn't care if she killed puppies with her bare hands.)

But something tells me it won't matter. You know, when she and the whole teabag thing started rearing its head, I talked about how it scared the shit outta me, and everyone said, "Aww, you're crazy. People will see through that."

I won't say, "I told you so." I hope I won't, anyway.

But I probably will.

Betland's Olympic Update:
* You know, my regular camera is broken, that happened the last night of Oktoberfest. (Don't ask me, I was drunk.) So I'm using an old camera and the pics just aren't that good. However...

* Saturday the 13th was Mr M's birthday. He came down to the Pod, and we had a lovely evening. Helped by the fact that the Gang at the Poderosa spent the whole weekend making him a birthday card. I tried to get some photos.











































The inside contained pictures of all the Poderosa Gang, plus some added hijinx (Sherman and Huckie playing Jenga, and even the Dwarves). Mr M was happy.