I SWEAR I DON'T LIKE KIDS

BUT THIS IS SO CUTE!

Stupid ovaries! Stop almost crying over how adorable this is.

Also, I'm pretty sure that this was my default expression as a kid.

(Oh fine, here's just a link to the site.)

If this is beauty...

I'll happily stay ugly.

Yes, symmetry is important, but our appreciation of beauty is as much about the differences and oddities and the stark contrasts as it is about perfection. I don't think a single one of the slideshow photos makes the person in it look more beautiful. More cookie-cutter "pretty" perhaps. (The woman at the start of the article is positively a different person with the manipulation and not more beautiful for it.)

I'm also weirded out that James Franco looks almost the same in his "after" as he does in his "before." I've honestly never thought about him in any context of "beauty." Mostly because his defining feature for me was determined when my former roommate called him "Johnny McSquinty" after we saw Spider-Man. I suppose he is very classically beautiful. I don't think he's striking (not like Paul Newman, say, who is another called "classically" beautiful). Perhaps that solidifies my thesis that beauty is deviance from the golden mean of perfect symmetry. James Franco has never provoked me to heights of ecstatic slut-itude. Not like this guy, or this guy, or this guy. (Or even this guy, and I only just started watching his show!) It's sort of the same as my reaction to Denzel Washington. I read in People magazine ages ago, that he had the closest to a perfectly symmetrical face of just about any star in Hollywood. I agree. Denzel Washington is gorgeous. But he doesn't do it for me.

And I thought she LOOKED like the cutest person ever?

She is the cutest person ever.

She's effortlessly classy, too. As a bonus, she is so in a way that defies the label-I-don't-understand-how-it-is-a-slur "elitist." And she does it without having to change her speech patterns to seem less threatening. COUGHCOUGHPALINISNOTFROMALABAMACOUGH

Fuck no

Not again.

What is with Republicans and this bullshit about people voting who shouldn't be? The problem is people who are registered being denied! For every yahoo who manages to spend at least eighteen years of their life in this country not knowing that you have to register to be a voter and who walks into a polling place in November, you have thousands of people who registered and did the right thing being disenfranchised unfairly. For every one voter who votes illegally on purpose to skew an election, you have people who lose track of where they're registered and aren't trying to sabotage anything but are just honestly mistaken. I mean, I hate the vapid know-nothing scum, but didn't Ann Coulter have that problem?

So what, precisely, the shit is with this:

On Monday, the Ohio Republican Party filed a motion in federal court against the secretary of state to get the list of all names that have been flagged by the Social Security database since Jan. 1. The motion seeks to require that any voter who does not clear up a discrepancy be required to vote using a provisional ballot.

Republicans said in the motion that it is central to American democracy that nonqualified voters be forbidden from voting.

Do I believe they're really and truly worried about this? Yes, they're stupid enough to assume that's where vote discrepancy comes from. What worries me is that I am sure that they know that! They are aware that facts are against them! Voter fraud is not the problem, but it's a convenient cloak to challenge voters in hotly contested areas; who are probably new, young votes and therefore less likely to vote Republican; and as a way to cut down the slight lag their candidate is suffering in the polls.

Barring catastrophe--Rovian or real--McCain is going to lose this election if we can trust the trending we've seen now. (That's another can of worms, one marked "DO NOT OPEN.") If things stay the same (and they won't because jesus look at the last few weeks), the only way he could win is if voter monkeying happens en masse. We've already had two elections in a row decided in ways that left sour grapes. If it goes McCain's way, there'll be hell to pay.

(If everything stays the same, which: see above.)