There has been a good deal of interest in Sarah Palin paper dolls of late; I don’t intend on doing any more, but they do exist elsewhere. Here’s a reasonably respectful Flash game with her, and here’s a more critical take, done as a traditional doll.
And the last in my four-day series of 2008 American presidential election figures, Sarah Palin. This is the outfit she wore for her interview with Katie Couric.

I’ve got some people searching for Palin’s pink jacket, so here’s the image that I used as reference: Sarah Palin Meets With Foreign Leaders During UN General Assembly. There’s more from the same set, which can be found by going to Getty Images and searching for Sarah Palin, date range 9/24/2008 to 9/24/2008. This is also how I found my pictures of the other three, if anyone needs reference for them.

I expected her to do a little better in the poll, considering the splash she’s made in American news for her “sexy librarian” look, but she’s just barely holding her own over Hillary and the pantsuits as I post this! Well, one more day to vote…

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to do a month of Halloween costumes; politicans have been well and amply covered, but please feel free to post other suggestions!

For someone like me who is enamored of skirts and frills, Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits are alien, but I suppose if I was a tenth as busy as she must be and people were following me around hoping for a picture of me looking unkept, I would probably switch to the pantsuit as well. Also, after looking at dozens of pictures of her in pantsuits, this picture of her jackets being checked against stage lighting completely cracked me up. It’s not like there’s anything inherently funny in it, but just the fact that the jackets are all the same except for the color made for an amusing tableau. It feels like online shopping for clothes, where you select a different color on a skirt or something and the color switches but the picture stays the same. You can almost see the intern fussing around with Photoshop sliders. (I tried changing this image that way, but had mixed results.)

Anyways, this is a rendition of the pantsuit that she wore on the second day of the Democratic National Convention. Not quite right, as usual — the doll’s body is too long, which is a lot more forgiving to work with for skirts than for pants!

And don’t forget to vote…

I’m listening to Deadwood Dick’s Doom, or, Calamity Jane’s Last Adventure, a dime novel western by Edward Wheeler. At three hours long I will probably be done with it by tomorrow, but if you like westerns or Deadwood, which I do, it’s an enjoyable three hours. The reading is a mite uneven, as with a lot of LibriVox books read by many readers, but overall it’s great, and some of the readers really put some life into it. I mean, how can you not love this line:
“Yes, I am Deadwood Dick, the celebrated cuss from Custer clime– the diabolical devil-may-care devotee of road-agency, from Deadwood the hunted hurricane, Harris, just as you see me. And according to a recent act of Congress, if you or any other two-legged individual attempts to harm yonder girl, whoever she may be, I’ll agree to furnish him with a free pass over Jordan by the most direct ethereal line. I mean business, so let some pilgrim of enterprising disposition open the market.”

Bullock couldn’t pull that off, but just imagine Swearengen chewing on it, preferably while waving around a pistol, even if the chivalrous sentiment isn’t quite his department…

Anyways, this is a drawing of Calamity Jane’s outfit, based off of this picture of her scan courtesy of this Calamity Jane site, Calamity Jane gets to show off in this book, putting a bullet through the neck of a bottle midair, but at the moment she’s in mortal peril. I’m not worried, though, Deadwood Dick has a 3 for 3 record of protecting helpless women, so far, and I predict that tomorrow she’ll be out of her predicament and back with him.

I downloaded Puzzle Pirates the other day — it just looked too cute not to give it a try. And indeed it was very cute, and I played a good deal of it for a couple of days. There’s a lot of puzzles to try, although I only really liked one or two of them, and the world is fun too: you can do puzzles by yourself, but you can also do them as a team, everyone working on a different kind of puzzle to make your little pirate ship sail smoothly, and it’s a lot more fun doing puzzles when you feel like it’s contributing to the speed of the ship or patching up the holes. You can also buy items for your house, or cute clothes to wear, which is where today’s paperdoll comes in.

The game has a lot of different items of clothing you can buy, and then the colors can be customized. Today’s paperdoll is based on a captain’s hat, a buccaneer jacket, flare pants and buckle shoes. One interesting thing about the clothing system is that different colors cost different amounts; this ensemble uses two of the most expensive colors, black and gold, making the estimated cost well over $100,000. Changing the colors to brown, green and white lowers it to about $7,000. So, of course, Sylvia is an admirable pirate, very skilled at plundering and puzzles, and wears plenty of black and gold. (My in-game character wears plenty of white and a shirt she got for free.)

I found this site when thinking about this paperdoll: Quid Pro Clothes, which is the website for one of the in-game tailors. (Players can just do puzzles, like me, or they can get into the metagame and the economy and start their own stores, buy their own ships, etc.) This site essentially removes much of my need to play the game, because of one reason: if you sign up for the site, it lets you play with the clothes without having to spend hours and hours saving the money first. You can also look at other people’s creations; I like this take on the Greek gods.

On a side note, apologies to Mom for driving her crazy today as I enlist her help in resume creation. “Remember it goes like this: letter first, paperdoll second” she says.