Oh sweet Jesus, it’s been an insane week. But we’ll get to that in a bit.
The big news in here in Casa Kitty is that I have replaced our 16-year old cheese grater with a spiffy new model from Bed Bath & Beyond. It’s bright and shiny and twice as big as the runty model we’ve been using since we got married, and Top Cat and I are are both very pleased with this upgrade. Top Cat grated some lemon zest on it and pronounced it “really nice!” and I am eagerly awaiting my turn at it when I get to use it to shred mozzarella for our Friday Pizza & Netflix Night.
Sometimes the internet (see above) makes you take a long hard look at yourself. I used to be the girl who hitch hiked across state lines to California on weekends so I could hang out with my high school friend’s sister’s Hells Angel boyfriend in Oakland, who always had access to new and exotic kinds of drugs. Thank you, Lynelle’s’s sister’s boyfriend for that Purple Haze that kept me high for two days when I saw Led Zeppelin at Golden Gate Park in 1973.
Now, 47 years later, I get my thrills from a new cheese grater. I did not see this coming.
The other exciting thing that happened recently was I crossed a new frontier in Pet Portrait painting. It’s all explained below.
I got a request for a Pet Portrait from someone who is rather special to Top Cat and me, so of course I said, “Sure!”
Then I got the photo:
Oh, shit. It’s a white dog.
I’m OK doing black dogs:
But a WHITE dog?
How do you paint a WHITE dog? On WHITE paper?
That, Dear Readers, is the question.
I always plot my paintings before I dip a brush into paint, so I studied this image of Piper (the subject) and, since she doesn’t have any distinguishing markings (she’s ALL WHITE) I decided to start with the black smudges that give her face some personality, and make her nose so boopable. Getting that right was going to be crucial to getting her expression right:
The shape of her pupils, and the direction of her gaze, was the other key to getting her face right. I re-drew them carefully:
Although Piper is a rather pink little girl (go ahead, you can check the reference photo), I prefer to use blue to make shadows here:
Her eyes are very dark brown. . .
. . . and her pupils are very large and very black:
I had no choice but to use my white acrylic paint to brush in some furry bits around her eyes and nose:
And I had to pencil in some of her furry texture:
Since Piper is a WHITE dog, and I’m not using up a whole lot of paint to do her, I thought I’d step up my game and give her a body for this portrait. I went to my handy Dog Encyclopedia and looked up Bichon Frise, but all the Bichons in there were adorable fluffy, and our Piper is not.
So I found a French Bulldog whose body looked to be similar, and practiced doing paws. . .
. . . and drew a behind behind Piper’s punim:
Shading with blue:
Next, I layered on the acrylic paint (because I want it to look like I worked hard on this):
Making little spikes for fur — acrylic paint is fun because you can add texture like this:
DONE.
The whole time I painted Piper, I got to concentrate on cute little doggos and shades of blue that weren’t too blue and making sure I cleaned all the acrylic paint our of my favorite brushes…
…I did not give Fuck Face (you know who) a single passing thought.
But comes a time you have to leave your bubble and cope with the madness that is Donald Trump, so let’s get into it, shall we?
We really should have seen it coming. Trump’s whines about the 2020 election being “rigged” is classic Donald Trump.
In 2012, he whined about Scotland and the Scottish:
In 2015, he whined about the entertainment industry:
In 2016, he whined about the Republican primaries:
Trump’s whines would be amusing if he didn’t have the power of being president. This week, he’s using his power to urge Republicans to commit treason:
The final stop on the Trump Crazy Train has always been the Supreme Court. Trump seems to think that all he has to do is ask SCOTUS, stacked with three on his nominees, to void the election results in states that he lost and bippity-bobbity-boo, he’s president for four ore years.
There are two SCOTUS cases that he’s riled up his wing-nut chicken-shit allies into submitting to the court. The first, filed by a Republican State Senator from Pennsylvania (Mike Kelly) to nullify the election returns in PA. This is how that went:
Here is the one-sentence dismissal:
The reason that Justice Alito (who is a prick) wrote the dismissal is because he’s the SCOTUS justice in charge of emergency matters coming from Pennsylvania.
I KNOW!! Me neither! I did not know that SCOTUS divvies up the United States like that! If I had gone to law school, maybe I would have understood the inner working of SCOTUS better, but I’m not a lawyer, so I need someone to interpret Alito’s terse dismissal:
Since Trump and his moron followers are whining about Fox TV being too liberal, they now gather around a social network app called Parler to discuss the latest fashions in tin foil hats, and this is how they are reacting to this defeat:
*Sigh*
The second lawsuit before the Supreme Court comes from the attorney general of Texas, a sleaze ball by the name of Ken Paxton:
The Supreme Court has not agreed to hear the case; on Dec. 8, the court merely ordered Pennsylvania and the other states named in the Texas suit — Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia — to respond by Dec. 10. As I am typing this on the morning of Dec. 11, there has not been any news regarding how definitively SCOTUS is going to ram this pile of shit up Ken Paxton’s ass.
So now we have Red states (Republican), Blue states (Democratic), and Brown states (Republican and full of shit — BTW, Texas should be Brown on this map, but I guess the intent is to show the Red states that are piling on with Texas in this ludicrous lawsuit.
Here’s a mother map of America that Canada won’t like (sorry, Canada), but it gives me comfort:
Anyhoo, here is my refund up on the current status of Texas’s act of sedition:
Maryland’s Democratic Attorney General is Brian Frosh, and this is how he told Ken Paxton to fuck off:
This is from the Republican governor and the Republican governor-elect from Arizona:
And from Idaho, the most Republican state in the union (84% of its elected officials are GOP), there’s this:
And then this happened, of course:
Before we leave the Supreme Court today, let’s ponder this:
If you can stand more crazy, stay tuned.
If you are ready to bail, skip down to the Covid section:
Let’s now catch up on how we’re doing, pandemic-wise:
This obituary was written by Marvin J. Farr’s son:
In case you’re wondering about Marvin J. Farr’s home state of Kansas:
Under an executive order issued by Gov. Laura Kelly in July and reissued in November, Kansans over the age of 5 must wear masks in indoor public settings and outdoors when unable to stay 6 feet apart from people from other households. A state law passed in June allows counties to opt out of the mandate.
This is so true. I love Mexican food so much that I keep a photograph of my favorite cheese enchiladas from my favorite Mexican restaurant, Little Mexico, on my desktop so that when I am down in the dumps I call pull it up and think happy thoughts upon it.
Except, by this week there was a new statistic:
To be exact, 3,053 people died of Covid last week.
Have a great weekend, everyone. Stay safe! Next week is my annual ChrisHanuKwanSolstice post, wherein we get all druidical and pagan and ritualistic and dress up in our best witching gear and compare cheese graters.
You might want to cast a few spells, make some good trouble. You have my permission.