While half the nation is getting pounded with ice and snow and yuck, I was running around in a T-shirt today because it was 80 friggin’ degrees in Los Angeles.  I actually had to burn myself a CD of Christmas tunes to take to work with me to make my brain believe that, yes, Virginia — it really is December.  (And no, they weren’t your standard Christmas tunes… the Bitter Jew™ does the “twisted Christmas” thing with angry rock songs that tend to be about how much the Christmas season sucks and giving the finger to various ex-attachments.  Oh, and the occasional ode to Swiss Colony Beef Logs by one Eric Cartman.) So when people ask me how I can stand L.A. with the traffic and the smog and the plastic and the attitude and the astronomical housing prices and the more traffic and the fact that Lindsay/Britney/Nicole/Paris is shown as actual news… well, 80 degrees and sunny on December 4. 

I crumbled and joined Facebook.  Be my friend.

Maybe it’s because I was trained as a copyeditor, maybe it’s because my parents made it a priority that I make everything as correct as possible, but I’ve always been a good speller.  And lately, I’ve been seeing a ton of spelling errors out there in the general public.  I don’t know if this stuff is jumping out at me because I do have that particular background or if I’m just becoming more sensitive to it — or maybe spelling is just getting worse, but it’s really pissing me off.  I’m seeing signs, banners, menus, fliers, TV scrolls and other stuff everywhere that have spelling mistakes on them, and I don’t think anyone knows the difference between they’re, their and there anymore.  I swear, we really are descending into Idiocracy.  And that scares the crap out of me.  Besides, isn’t spell-check widely available?  Can’t people run text through a spell-check before putting it out there into the public?

I’m doing the on-again, off-again dance with Firefox.  For some reason, the stupid program won’t launch a new window when I command-click, it opens a new tab.  I hate tabs.  Anyone know how to fix this?  I’ve set the preferences to launch in new windows rather than tabs, but apparently, Firefox doesn’t like to listen to its preferences.

I was overjoyed to get the new Futurama movie on Friday, and I was so excited to have new Futurama to watch for the first time in over four years — and wouldn’t know what happened next or almost every line — that I watched it twice over the weekend.  And I’ll probably watch it at least once more before the week is out.  Happiness is new Futurama… and some old Futurama too.

Happy Chanukah to my fellow Tribespeople.