Yay Us!

WOOT Gold Star!

So now if you use Teh Google and search the words "cool" and "Hartford," this site is number 5!

Alright, everyone! Awesome!

And thanks to an"anonymous" Invaluable Benefactor, I also now appear on Connecticut Weblogs! http://www.ctweblogs.com/

Cool as Hartford would like to thank the Academy, her hairdresser, her agent, God, the guy in Row 11, the Internets, Fluffy Bunnies of Doom, Todd and his Llamas (where ever you are, Todd, love you man!), Senator Chris Dodd and everyone else who helped make this possible!


And now as a reward, SQUIRRELLY GOODNESS!

See that Mountain Over There? Someday I'm going to Climb That Mountain....

So first the election updates...Eddie Perez won the primaries easily, Kitchen Scandal and all. Yay Eddie! So here's an update on the job search and the Great Mountain Thing. Sorry about the graphic, it just popped up when I did an image search on Avon. Heh, hysterical much on my part?

So as I told you, Gov Rell had issued a temporary ban on truck traffic on Space Mountain. As luck would have it, that ban was out in force on Monday morning as I drove to my interview with a certain unnamed insurance company. I kid you not - cops EVERYWHERE and as luck would have it, Miss Rell herself was giving a news conference on the apex of Avon.

(BTW, rumor has it that the truck ban has now been made permanent! Yay, us!)

Now I don't entirely understand the ethics of press conferences as you drive by...are they like Union Rallies where you honk? Like...Honk if You Love Truck Bans? Honk if Your Republican Governor Starts Behaving Like a Democrat?

Meanwhile, the jerk who steals my paper continues to steal my paper...and I have a cunning plan. So I think I don't want to confront this jerk head on at first, only if he continues his asshattery. So here is what I am going to do: on Saturday, I will get up really early and replace the coffee, er, paper he normally steals with last week's Times, with a note taped inside.

So here is my first poll...should the note say

A) Please stop taking my NYTimes, you are STEALING from me, or

B) I just watched you steal my paper.

????

My Car Cannot Deal with this Shit

So I have an interview Monday with an insurance company. Totally cool but the drive? Takes me over Avon Mountain, which if you do a search for in Google leads you to pages and pages of disaster.

Witness:

http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/east/2006/01/18/64291.htm
http://ctlocalpolitics.net/2007/09/08/rell-ban-trucks-on-avon-mountain/
http://blogs.courant.com/capitol_watch/2007/09/another-avon-mo.html

Yes, that shit is going to be fun fun fun in the Winter. Riiiiight.

The big problem seems to be truck traffic, and there is a movement to stop it on the mountain, which makes sense if you are, you know, driving on it. If you love Kim, call Gov. Rell and ask her to support the truck ban:

http://www.ct.gov/governorrell/site/default.asp

My poor Saturn doesn't seem to like driving up and down the mountain too much, it bitches and moans the entire way.

Like I told a good friend, I am just going to have a pre-emptive heart attack, to get it over with!

Run for the Hills, the Candidates are Coming!

Fortunately, they move slowly, like zombies.

OK, so here's Hartford's Motto. Yeah, I mean it's okay. The actual visual reinforcement of the "rising star" thing is kinda funny, it's all like "get it?!?!" Anywho, Hartford is really proud of this, you literally see this motto everywhere. After a weekend of being infused with civic pride, what are you gonna do, right?

So the mayoral primary is the 11th, which means I need to get thyself down to the DMV to register to vote and to get a CT license, natch. Which is good, because I hate my photo on my NY license. It looks like a "before" picture from a makeover show. I need an after!

So what was I talking about? Ah yes the mayoral thing. So Eddie Perez is the current Democratic party mayor. I don't know toms about him, except he used to deal drugs or something like that (Wikipedia confirms that) and pushed the whole school uniforms thing. It's too bad I'm not more of an informed electorate, but hell, this is a country that based its idea of who to vote for for President on whom they'd like to have a beer with, so whatever.\

As per Wikipedia:
Perez has also put in place one of the largest WiFi networks in the USA. The WiFi effort has the goal of closing the digital divide in one of the poorest cities in the country.

I've kind of met another candidate, Minnie Gonzalez. Actually, she came to our apartment to introduce herself 2 days after we moved in, so I spent all of the time rooting around in the closet while Peter talked to her. I remember being sort of freaked out that she showed up like some sort of welcome wagon, but it was just dumb luck on her part, as she was just knocking on random doors. She told him a bit of shocking news - there is only one registered voter in our entire building. Isn't that indicative of the greater problem, and why so many fools get elected to office (see above with the have a beer with meme). She's in or was in the Connecticut House O' Reps.

That's about it, there are some other people running but I don't really know anything about them. Hey, I'm new here!

So the weirdest business in across the street, get this combo. It's a shop that does Western Union, sells smokes AND has a drop-off laundry business. I think you can pay cable bills there too or something. It's one stop shopping, if your shopping is very very odd.

The Adventures of Mark Twain

I thought I'd throw this little gem in, it is from a 1985 stop-motion film called The Adventures of Mark Twain. And this is where is goes psycho.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak3z2Pm7Iwg


WTF?

A description of the movie, that you apparently need serious Schedule 1 drugs to watch, can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Mark_Twain_%281985_film%29

(they had the movie for sale in the museum shop. I am soooo buying it.)

If You're Not Careful, You Just Might Learn Something

So today was awesome in a completely historical way. We finally did it - walked a 1/4 of a block and went to see the Samuel Clemens House. I have finally discovered my deep connection to this neighborhood. The house itself is amazing, like Victorian era on crack. What was truly striking was Clemens' deep and abiding love for his children, and his complete devotion to the cause of non-prejudice. One of his quotes is "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness."

Mark Twain, you know who you are.
I also learned a lot about my neighborhood. This area used to be called Nook Farm, and all the famous artists settled here. One thing I did NOT know was that (obviously many years later) Katharine Hepburn grew up in this neighborhood (Hepburn's mother was a co-founder of Planned Parenthood).

http://www.angelfire.com/journal/difleys/nookfarm.htm

But the coolest thing is that Mark Twain's publisher used to live in Nook Farm on the very ground I live on now. My address is his address. His house is long gone but here we are, occupying the same space as the man who published Tom Sawyer and The Gilded Age. Every great person has a cast of people around him, who will never be known, and maybe it's cool in a weird way that here I am sharing the space of a ghost who made Mark Twain possible. I find the thought numinous.

So I bought a book that everyone should buy their girls, How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson and Other Tales of Rebellious Girls and Daring Young Women http://tinyurl.com/33mp5k

Clemens also hated sexism, and taught his girls how to be strong, smart, brave and proud. That is some shit I can get behind.

As a weird coda to this, one of my best friend's grandfather was a critic. He was an original reviewer of The Mark Twain Society's edition (obviously containing a lot of educational material) of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. He said that the "Yankee [is] a jewel. Nobody will be able to read, much less teach it, without this book."


I cannot believe that, today, I stood in the room that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was written in. Awesome.

(Side note: the shop for the house has some kick ass anti-censorship material. Good for them. And us.)

Not Quite the Trail of Tears

Dr. Pete and I went on the Eastern part of the Connecticut Wine Trail today. The happy news is that I was not abducted and planted with various chips in my head. The better news is that you have a great video with Dr. Pete discussing the better points of a wine from the Jonathan Edwards Winery. Not the politician.

http://s7.photobucket.com/albums/y286/KimberleeJean/?action=view&current=petermovie.flv


The winery site:

http://www.jedwardswinery.com/