…because apparently when i’m too busy to blog, good things happen to me.

that is, i am honored to be bestowed, perhaps festooned, with the heretofore unbeknownst-to-me award entitled, “Arte y Pico”, which has nothing whatsoever to do with my (heretofore unmentioned-on-this-blog) dexterity in making home-made hot sauce, salsa picada, various varieties of chile con queso, and pico de gallo.

oh. i should probably point out that one of the more-frequently drunken bloggers, namely “fairlane”, over at Jonestown, saw fit to confer this award upon me, thus making me greater than Jeebus and holier than thou.

which i already was anyway, of course.

actually, I am quite humbled to receive this award, because my blogging has been significantly short of “stellar” recently. Thank you for the vote of confidence, fairlane.

at this point, however, it is time for me to confer this award upon five other ass-hats whom i love, admire, respect, and enjoy reading. yes, ass-hats is now a term of endearment. deal with it. actually the descriptor is quite appropriate, because, especially recently, i feel that i have been riding on the shoulders of their greatness, or at the very least have been carried by their greatness, or otherwise generally engreatened by simply knowing them. and riding on their shoulders for so long gets all slippery and stuff, and…well….you just probably got more of a mental picture than you ever wanted.

ew. did i really go there? yah, i guess i did. i have no idea why.

yah, anyway, TEH RULEZ:

Now, here are the rules and regulations, as well as my nominees for the next five deserving winners of the Arte y Pico Award:

yay! those upon whom i confer this Award!

1. Kate, over at The Radula
2. Mike, the tangled up one at Tangled Up in Blue Guy
3. The Omnipotent Poobah, who can be found at The Omnipotent Poobah Speaks
4. Corey Vilhauer at Black Marks on Wood Pulp
5. Jack, who is the Radical Atheist

…nothing ever goes as planned, i will be out of touch for a few days, partly for the Fourth of July and all that good stuff, and partly to attend to my mother at the passing of her mother.

peace.

the otherwhirled, as you probably know, is not the only place you can find commander other, who actually does most of his online stuff under the name Synthaetica. at the nudging of a friend, here are most of the places i exist online.

1. MyBlogLog ~ my account here actually aggregates everything else.
2. LinkedIn ~ the “real” me, for what little that is worth. I’ve done a terrible job of linking into others I know up here, so feel free to remind me to get off my ass in this regard.
3. Technorati ~ i don’t know that it does all that much for me, but there it is.
4. last.fm ~ i don’t know why i do this, actually. i became a member years ago, and only recently started allowing it to grab what i play. i’m also not sure if it’s truly “legal” in the technical sense.
5. Twitter ~ i’m not incredibly diligent about this.
6. del.icio.us ~ since i don’t get out much except for within my own little corner of the webosphere, this is almost as useful as roller skates in the desert.
7. Facebook ~ i just started “getting into” this at the nudging of a different friend, which means i’m not really “into” it much at all. feel free to friend me if you already know i like you, or it might be an interesting way to find out if i do.

oh, and I am still Synthaetica on GameTap. now in my third year of testing for them, and even though i don’t have the time to play games very much, i do spend several hours a week moderating the beta-testing forums. i don’t think that regular subscribers can see us beta-testers within the GameTap software, but you’re welcome to add me to your GameTap buddy list and see how little i actually get in there and play anymore.

even more exciting than all this, some of my old high-school band members found me on Facebook, and now i guess i owe them the details of why my name changed back in 1989 and all that stuff. if you’re incredibly bored, or are interested in some of my opinions on the adoption process as it existed throughout the 1960’s through the 1980’s, feel free to check in on perpetual dawnne in a few weeks. i’m about to hit some heavy juggling between overlapping software production cycles for work and photographic post-production for my wedding clients.

…things have slowed down substantially for me on the blogs of late. it is mostly directly related to my having taken on a full-time job, which, even though it’s from home, means i actually have to work. in fact, it has been several weeks straight of 60+ hours, tossed in with TaeKwonDo training and teaching, soccer refereeing, and parenting. in fact, this upcoming weekend is going to be about 4 hours of TKD and at least 18 hours of soccer, and goodness knows how many hours of work. shit, we’ve still got boxes in the garage from the move (to the point that neither of us can park in there yet). waah, waah, i know. we’ve all got our sob stories.

but, the main impact of that has been, however, that my talent for quippy, snarky captions to images has somewhat fallen away, along with, apparently, the availability of decent photos. i’m not sure where tengrain and watertiger are getting theirs, but the ones at yahoo news have begun sucking massively. the poopyheads (yahoo, not tengrain or watertiger). i guess it hasn’t been that big of a deal, though, because my brain just doesn’t seem to be there anymore.

the next few weeks for me are going to be incredibly busy. i’ll be out in Rockford, IL for the USYSA Region II Championships towards the end of the month and we have software production releases at work on either side of that. starting in August, late summer and autumn promise to be incredibly insane between soccer and wedding shoots (and continuing bi-weekly production releases on what will be by then at least 3 products). at least my son and i will be on a 4-month testing schedule for TKD after we get our black belts at the end of July.

all that to say, i don’t know what i’m doing here with the otherwhirled. i’m really pissed at myself that i just had a 6-day gap. and i don’t really have enough time to sit and think about what i really want to do. of course, i can and should keep pushing the JESUS CRAP, and i only did a couple of issues of OtherWhirreds. the LoveDolls and LOLCons are somewhat overdone. shit, i may actually have to start writing or something. that’d be scary, wouldn’t it? hell, i might even have to do a daily meme thingy with my own little acerbic, irreverent twist just to keep myself on track.

of course, i also regret that there’s so many blogs that i haven’t shared with you and added to my blogroll. saturday or sunday might be a good night for that. after a long day of physical work in what is slated to be high-temp, high-humidity weather, i’m not going to have the headspace for much else, but Mrs. Other and the Otherkids will be out of town, so what else is there to do? o yeah, i’m sure i’ll have work to do. sigh.

peace.

Well, here I am, hosting the Carnival of the Liberals today, when I have yet to manage to get a post into one ever. There’s many reasons for this, the primary one being that I’m never really satisfied with my own prose, and another important one being that my “liberalism” has become so ingrained into my personality that I very much tend to simply live it, and not preach it.

I’ve been reading the Carnival of the Liberals for a little more than a year, I think. I’ve even gone through some of the archive links at Leo’s place and read through some of the older ones. I am always fascinated by other people’s abilities to effectively communicate their thoughts and ideals. So, my offer to host this one was driven by that as much as it was driven by a desire to pay tribute to my wife, the lovely Mrs. Other, who did, in fact, successfully bring me around from those thought processes I now refer to as “neo-conservative belly-button twiddling” and into the light of more clear-headed critical thinking.

Today marks the fourteenth year of our marriage. In another random irony, I met Mrs. Other shortly after I left the Army from Fort Bliss, where I was assigned to the 66th MI company. So, my original intent with this, the 66th installment of the Carnival of the Liberals was to focus on what caused us to convert to liberal and/or progressive politics, presuming that at least some of us, like me, came from elsewhere politically.

Alas, literally no one submitted anything along that theme, which I figure is fine. I wasn’t too uptight about it, largely because I am now possessed of this wonderfully progressive mind. The 31 submissions that I received for this edition of the Carnival were all quite interesting reads, and yes, I’m being generous. Because about half of them were right-wingers trying to convert the host, and several others were simply bizarre. After reading them, I wasn’t sure about a point being made or any argument being refuted. Luckily, that left me with exactly ten insightful, interesting, and in some cases, profound writings that are well worth sharing. So, without further ado, however, here are the ten I found to be the “best”. They are presented in the order received, not any subjective order, mind you.

First off, Holly Ord over at menstrual poetry, shows us explicitly how McCain is not a moderate. Given recent primary results and the new bandying about of the phraise “McCain Democrats”, I believe this is a very important thing to consider. Hillary-ites who express the abject refusal to vote for Obama need to seriously reconsider what they’re thinking about doing come November.

In what I found to be a quite interesting read, Greta Christina introduces us to the Harm Reduction Model, which she feels might be applicable to virtually all apsects of life. After reading her piece and continuing on to the link she provides, I find myself initially in agreement.

Ian Welsh, over at The Agonist, has an insightful take on ten issues that certainly obfuscated the Democratic primary process. And interestingly, what were predictions at the time he wrote them, have basically come true.

I found some welcome satire over at Free Cheezeburgerz. You’ve just gotta love people who spell words with z’s. Anyway, Brian Tarcy wrote up a fun little exchange between a NASCAR driver named John Q. Public and his pit-crew chief, named George. I’m sure you’ll enjoy reading it, unless you’re lactose intolerant. Because there’s lots of cheese.

Alonzo Fyfe, the Atheist Ethicist, provides us with some good legal information on the problem with having “under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance, and in “In God We Trust” on our money, through the lens of House Resolution 5872. I thought at first that this would be the same old same old on this topic, but I believe Alonso has some good points. If only someone in Congress would ever think of things this way!

Lisa Spinelli over at Greener Pastures: Personal Finance contributed this article about the Bush Administration’s bizarre tactics when it comes to environmental issues. I say bizarre, because they are ultimately self-defeating in highly personal ways. If you breathe air you might well want to read about How Politics Can Mess Up a Perfectly Good Environment.

This next one comes from Heather Johnson over at the Criminal Justice Degrees Guide, where she reminds us of 20 Civil Liberties Every American Should Know. A very good, detailed read of many of the guarantees provided to us by our Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and one which, in my opinion, should be predominantly references during the national presidential campaign. Because the right wing doesn’t care about this stuff at all, it seems.

Sometimes, we need a reminder that those who tend towards the extreme in either party do so from a completely understandable basis. I would even go so far as to point out that in some ways, extremism provides a perspective that is unmuddled by the vagaries of the day-to-day world. Steve Snyder, the Socratic Gadfly, points us to a fine example of such clairvoyance by Ted Rall.

Doctor Biobrain provides us with a well-written, scathing response to the premise that Barack Obama is supposedly a Marxist. Being the type of post that naturally elicits entertaining stupidity in the comments, I’m still not sure which was the better read: the post or the comments. Either way, you should read it.

This last article came in late the last night that submissions were accepted for this installment, and to be honest, I found it the most intriguing. In it, steppen wolf, the skeptical alchemist, describes some interesting goings-on over in Italy, where it appears that democracy is slowly, skillfully, and mostly silently being replaced with dictatorship. Quite profound, if true. I know I’ll be keeping tabs on Italy a little more closely in the future, and I hope you will, too.

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Issue #67 of the Carnival of the Liberals is scheduled for June 18, 2008 at Situation Awareness. Issue #68 is currently slated for July 2, 2008 on Globally Rational. Be sure to visit, and I’m even thinking of submitting something myself this time!

(my apologies for getting this out so late yesterday. thanks to several things happening at once, i wound up having to reconstruct this entire post over yesterday afternoon, which, as noted above, wasn’t exactly the best of days to spend on the computer as opposed to working on my “honey do” list. well, at least i got it done. the list never goes away.)

There were some great submissions for the Carnival of Liberals, and it’s been a busy two weeks. I will wrap up my reading this morning and have the Carnival posted around lunchtime, Central Time. My thanks to everyone who submitted their works!

On Wednesday, June 4, 2008 the Carnival of Liberals will be hosted here by yours truly. Although I myself have not yet managed to muster up a post for the Carnival, I’m looking forward to hosting it here. The Carnival of Liberals was one of the first carnivals I ever stumbled upon, and it always provides an interesting read and wonderful insight into the minds of other liberal-thinkers.

As June 4 is also the wedding anniversary of myself and Mrs. Other, and despite the fact that I’ve already received a couple of submissions, I would like the topic for this Carnival to be focused on what caused you to be or become a Liberal. Mrs. Other was the motivating factor in my life for becoming a more liberal thinker, and eventually, for becoming a loud-mouthed supporter of liberal, progressive, and Democratic ideals. Many of us, myself included, used to walk around with our heads up our collective asses…er, I mean, used to be possessed of more conservative considerations. I think the stories we have to tell can be inspirational and helpful to those still inflicted with the hyperconservative gene as well as being affirming to ourselves.

So, was it love, circumstance, a general acceptance of reality that brought you to liberal thinking? Was it a long-term enlightenment, a sudden epiphany, or have you just always thought this way? Whatever your own way to coming to liberal or progressive beliefs is or was, we’d love to hear from you. Use this form to submit entries for the June 4 Carnival of Liberals.

Of course, your participation in the theme itself is optional. If you have some thoughts in that regard, it might be very eye-opening for the non-liberal readers, and those who themselves have recently “converted”. However, it’s an optional thing, and will not be used to determine my selections. Feel free to post on anything you desire. Several non-themed entries have already come in!

The Carnival of Liberals is headed by one of my favorite crazy guys…er…bloggers over at the Neural Gourmet.