I heard you missed me. I'm back.

I've been busy getting ready for an upcoming vacation - a much needed vacation. Of course, I'm all stressed about all the things that will need to be done this week at work so that nothing goes terribly wrong next week when I'm not here. I also had to go out and buy some cold weather clothes, since down here it is in the 60's and we consider that "chilly". I just checked the 10 day forcast for our destination, and right now it is predicted to snow. SNOW! You have no idea how excited this makes me. Even if there are just flurries (which, considering that it'll be raining the first part of the week, it may be some actual decent flurries), this would be special because my son has never seen snow. My husband is having second thoughts about his decision to not buy thermals, so this week we get to rush around trying to find some, and I want everyone to get boots since it's probably going to be muddy.

I was recently shocked to discover that Target has appropriated the Japanese advertising mascot Domo-kun into their in-store Halloween advertising. Did no one from their marketing department bother to Google Domo before doing this? Seriously...

For those who aren't familiar, the most common (infamous) Domo-related image to be found on the internet is a photoshopped image of Domo chasing a kitten with the tagline "Every time you masturbate ... God kills a kitten." In internet years, it's quite old, too - been around since the at least the early 2000's. Of course, looking at what we've done to the Sanrio brand, none of it surprises me at all. I'm thinking of buying a Domo doll and putting it in my office (orrr...someone could get me one for Christmas??).


Now for the serious stuff...

In the wake of Colin Powell's late-in-the-game endorsement of Barack Obama (for which Rush Limbaugh is calling the retired United States General and former member of President Bush's administration who donated to McCain's faltering campaign last year an "ungrateful racist"...because Limbaugh isn't either of those two things himself, obviously ...eyeroll...), one of the forums I frequent *a little too frequently sometimes* has devolved into a battleground, divided between a small group spewing vicious jingoistic rhetoric - armed to their sharp little teeth with bigotry and somewhere between seriously questionable judgement and downright ignorance - and the rest of the forum posters, who now get to deal with fending off or downright refuting a rabid chorus of claims of racism and the prediction of the fall of "white society" to socialism and a minority-favoring welfare state full of "traitors".
It actually scares me a little, that the mindset of some people has sunk to that level and actaully spreads to others, ratcheting up their collective vitriol and misplaced anger or sense of middle class "injustices".
I like to think that even though everyone carries a little grain if some kind of biases against others, that there are enough reasonsed, rational people who won't fall for the tactics that are being employed by certain groups...and that in a couple of weeks the majority of citizens of this country will overcome their differences and make the right choice for the future of the nation, so that we aren't represented by those who would drag us down to be mired into this "us vs them" mentality that will reinforce and even encourage divisivness. We haven't come this far as a people and a nation to let ourselves be dragged to the brink of the resurrection of McCarthyism and extreme racial and social discord, have we? We're better than this!