To the point.

I LOL'ed at this one word summation of Bill Ayers at Confederate Yankee.

iTunes, Part II

My brother gave me a $25 iTunes gift card for Christmas. WORD to your MOTHER.

Last night I decided to take a musical trip down memory lane and build up my 80s library. I loved the 80s. I attended both high school and college in the 80s, and that's where most of our best memories lie. Amid some ribbing from Mrs. Warpiper, who totally does not understand the greatest decade ever (for the same reasons I do not understand the 70s), I began surfing. Let me say that I put together a killer library of stuff that I haven't had since my last cassette player went the way of the dodo. It was a nostalgic stroll through a wonderland of Eurotrash big haired electronica. A Flock of Seagulls, The Fixx, The Police, Talk Talk, Echo and the Bunnymen, The B-52's, ABC, The Clash, and, well, you get it.

Anyhow, after downloading all the music, I decided to throw together a playlist. There is a new function on iTunes called "Genius" and it will automatically make playlists based on the selection of one song. So, I selected The B-52's "Rock Lobster". I hit the "Genius" button, and an entire playlist of 50 songs popped up. It was excellent. It included pretty much nothing but 80s music, with a pretty good representation of all the music I had downloaded, plus a bunch of stuff that was already in my library. Everything from Toad the Wet Sprocket (not quite 80s) to The Clash to Rush (yes, Rush- I love Rush) to Simple Minds.

I started playing the lineup as I did other things on the computer, and I must have zoned out for a while, because the playlist had been going for about 20 minutes when I was snapped out of my zone by something that sounded out of place. It was Dan Fogelberg. Not just any Dan Fogelberg, but one of his mellowest tunes: "Longer." Now, Dan Fogelberg (God rest his soul) put out some really cool stuff in his day, and he IS associated with the 1980s. However, how in the hell could anyone honestly build a playlist off of "Rock Lobster" and wind up with "Longer" on the dang list?? It's a buzz killer. It really busted up the marble game for me, I can tell you. So, the iTunes platform allows you to hit the Genius button as much as you want until you arrive at a playlist you like. I hit the button again. Another great playlist, with good ol' Dan Fogelberg stuck in the middle of it again. After five do-overs, I still had Dan in the lineup. The same song. I swear if I listened hard enough I could hear evil giggling from the same pencil necked geek up at iTunes headquarters who took "Dixie Chicken" off of Little Feat's "Waiting for Columbus." 

I swear I didn't even know I had Dan Fogelberg on my iPod. Mrs. Warpiper must have put it there. I feel like Austin Powers disavowing the Swedish sex toy.

Waiting, waiting.

The calls for the January 2009 FSO orientation class came and went a couple weeks ago. Now that the dust has settled, it looks like I am somewhere in the area of number 30 on the Consular list. The State Department has now given extensions to folks who were set to age off the list, so this makes it seem as if they expect that there will be more positions to offer than they will have candidates for. Current foreign service officers advise that during this time, one should just live one's life as usual and not get to worked up about the wait. I have been doing a pretty good job of that, I think.

It is getting harder to do now that the list continues to shrink and my rank gets higher.

Yes, blogging was nonexistent during the holidays. I like to unplug from time to time. A couple highlights from the last two weeks:

Redskins - Giants:

Also, when we got back to Chucktown, Tater decided that she did not want to wait for her bath, so when Mrs. Warpiper wasn't looking, she hopped into the tub as it was filling up.... fully clothed.