Rat Creature's Journal

...but sometimes I think it would be cool if journalling sites had a function to "suggest me a new journal to read" not a random one, but a suggestion based on your current subscriptions, interests, maybe on some kind of other fuzzy, internal data-mining (the aforementioned "intrusive" part). I'm not sure how these things work, but like what Amazon does when it suggests books to you (sometimes they even suggest me interesting things, though that one is hit and miss, even though I actually tried to refine it manually) or that online music thing, Pandora?, that tries to guess what your tastes music are (that wasn't bad, though I couldn't use it for long, because eventually these location blocks happened). Anyway, something more advanced than the "popular among your friends" feature that LJ offered (offers? I can never really find that on the site anymore), and you could refine its suggestions.

( technically a spoiler for CSI 10x04, I guess, but not for the plot )

As the Archive of Our Own is doing performance testing of the new servers, I was doing random searches, but this reminded me why I normally don't do this. I saw explicit Joseph Ratzinger RPS. Yikes. Just when I thought I couldn't be surprised anymore.

As I was on the bus this evening I saw someone reading a tabloid newspaper. I could only make out the headline which was "Wahlkampf mit dem Kanzler-Busen" (in English: "election campaign with the chancellor-boobs"). I have since tried to find out what this was about, and apparently a (female) candidate of the Christian Democrats in Berlin has a campaign poster with herself in a deep neckline dress and a photograph of the chancellor Merkel (from some opera visit) also in an evening dress showing cleavage, and put onto that the slogan "we have more to offer".

It is supposed to be some sort of comment on the image of the Christian Democrats as a party of stuffy, old guys but show that that is wrong. Or something. And now some of her party compatriots are outraged, also she didn't coordinate with the chancellor and her campaign, who didn't authorize using photos of her in an evening dress.

So much WTF. But-- reading this I found that it actually gets even better -- for some values of "better" -- that is in the same district some other candidate is using an ass shot of herself in tight jeans that also shows off a (temporary) tattoo she has above her ass saying "socialist", kind of in the style of randomly tattooed urban fantasy heroine covers I guess (note that it is not a smear campaign, like it would be in the US, she is the candidate of a socialist party and you can see this here) and another party, the Greens (though not in that aforementioned boob district) has a rather appalling poster which shows a black woman's ass grabbed by white hands (also looking female) with the slogan "the only reason to vote black" (which here is the color of the Christian Democrats) (picture not worksafe for US viewers, I suspect).

What is the proper English term for this slight whiteish coating that some fruit like plums, blueberries or grapes naturally have? In German I've heard it called "Duftfilm" or "Reifbelag" but neither of those gave me results in a dictionary. But surely it must have a name in English as well.

To read all the news about that swine flu panic, while you can hear through the walls how your downstairs neighbor is having a constant, horrible sounding cough, makes the news' atmosphere of impending plague and doom so much more real, even if you are nowhere near any current swine flu cases. I guess a fitting soundtrack always adds to the mood.