One time on a walk some time ago, passing by something smelly probably, it was determined that I am able to shut off my nose voluntarily without holding it and breathe through my mouth, and Tim can't. I am still wondering if this is an odd trick like my ability to flip my tongue over, or if it's something most people can do. This voice coach gives instructions on how to learn to do it. Maybe that argues for odd trick? Help me out, blogmass, the google is useless on this. Can you toggle your nose?
_
respond?
(9)
11:06:23 PM,
Tuesday 31 May 2011
-
A small technical frustration led me to a strange hysterical law today. I was sitting with the cat on my lap and took a picture with my new phone. He jumped at the shutter sound. I was like, ok, I'll turn off the shutter. No setting for it. Huh? I went to the internet and found out that H.R. 414 or the Camera Phone Predator Alert Act, a law proposed by U.S. Representative Peter King of New York, mandates that all camera phones (not all cameras, just all camera phones) have a shutter sound that you can't turn off. It looks like this hasn't actually become law yet, but apparently Motorola is trying to get ahead of the curve. Because there has been a rash of cell phone creeps on subways in Korea and Japan, I can't turn the shutter sound off on my phone, unless I turn the phone to silent mode or download a different camera app, which I will do next time I want to photograph the cat. Real creeps, of course, can use google as well as I can. So it is a mandated annoyance that can be expected to have precisely zero effect on the crime it is targeting. I can't find anyone who supports this law except the people who thought of it, and it's completely senseless, but it's enough of a threat that people are acting on it (though it might be just keeping things the same between phones sold here and in Japan).
I find this sort of thing fascinating. On a similar note, the town of Marshfield, MA is trying to lift the ban on public videogames that it set in 1982. New technology and law does not mix well.
_
respond?
(1)
11:10:59 PM,
Sunday 29 May 2011
-
Kurt Vonnegut graphs stories
_
respond?
11:50:40 AM,
Friday 27 May 2011
-
By the bike rack where I go swimming. Spring is ending, ack!
_
respond?
(2)
09:51:42 AM,
Tuesday 10 May 2011
-
Since Tim hasn't talked about herons yet, I will.
Just past Medford I saw a large bird. It flew to the other side of the bank, and we saw another one. Funny herons, which turned out to be night herons. There were at least five of them all hanging out on the shore. They retreated into trees as we passed, and were in the same spot when we returned. Strange birds, and strange to see them in a somewhat urban enviornment.
_
respond?
(2)
07:14:15 PM,
Monday 9 May 2011
-
Two headlines on my Google News feed for Arlington this week:
Arlington Police receive grant for hoarding response team
Arlington Police have received the first-ever grant awarded by the state to a police department to address hoarding.
'Roadshow' appraiser to help with benefit for Arlington libraries
A professional appraiser will be in Arlington's Town Hall next week to inspect antiques in a benefit for town libraries.
I guess Arlington is attic central.
_
respond?
(2)
08:03:57 PM,
Saturday 7 May 2011
-
Brilliant invention that I don't want to see implemented of the day: Vehicular emoticons.
_
respond?
04:48:40 PM,
Thursday 28 April 2011
-
I was listening to the radio the other day and they mentioned the outage of Amazon's cloud service and it struck me, just momentarily, how once upon a time it was cool and strange to hear about the internet on the radio. It was like this subculture world I was part of was peeking through to the mainstream. Now it happens every day. Celebrities and pundits move comfortably between radio and tv and internet, and of course it's everybody's business when a major service goes down.
This got me to remembering predictions of how the internet is going to Change Everything. It certainly has changed a lot of things, and I suppose it isn't done changing things yet. What has it changed? I'm not sure. Lots of stuff. Not everything. I find it kind of odd that I should have a hard time assessing the impact of technology that appeared within my lifetime. It's so easy to take it for granted.
_
respond?
(1)
12:41:48 AM,
Tuesday 26 April 2011
-
I took a slightly different route on my usual walk through West Farm park yesterday, and found a treasure trove of rusted out farm equipment.
_
respond?
01:54:48 PM,
Thursday 21 April 2011
-
_
respond?
09:29:45 AM,
Wednesday 20 April 2011
-
_
respond?
09:26:10 AM,
Wednesday 20 April 2011
-
Our refrigerator has been inhabited by a dragon that roars to itself every so often.
_
respond?
04:47:14 PM,
Monday 18 April 2011
-
Dream: Tim and I are in a field, watching an old fashioned pistol fly around chasing geese and occasionally shooting one. We are debating what could possibly be going on, and I say well we know that there is really a gun up there because real geese are falling down, but we go over to look at one and it's just feathers, which somehow makes it easier to explain.
An unusually surreal and dreamlike dream.
_
respond?
(5)
10:49:51 AM,
Sunday 17 April 2011
-
Erika's suburban fashion report: hot pink shirts are the fashion statement of choice for today's Minuteman Bikeway user. Everyone is wearing them. Ok, about five people were wearing them. Still.
_
respond?
(4)
06:35:09 PM,
Thursday 14 April 2011
-
I just read The Great Gatsby, part of my occasional browsing of the canon of great American literature I probably would have read in high school English if I hadn't skipped a year of it.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn't a big pretentious book about Issues. In fact it is basically a thriller with wild parties! huge mansions! illicit sex! betrayal! crime! It had the virtues and vices of this kind of book. I found it a fast read. The lasting sensation is of Gatsby's house as a kind of haunted carnival.
So then I'm like, huh, why does it have the reputation of being this challenging novel about Issues. Why is a thriller considered dull? And then it dawns on me, every single book you read in high school English is about Issues. You can always pull an Issue or two from just about everything*. And the sentence structure is occasionally just plain bad**, so it's challenging. English class has a way of making everything boring. So of course it has a reputation for being boring. Fortunately, it's not.
* Except William Gibson. It has been empirically determined by the St. John's science fiction book club that there is nothing to say about William Gibson. Surprising but true. We just looked at each other and said "I liked it" a lot.
** I found myself repeatedly running into trainwrecks where I completely mismatched subject and verb and had to start the sentence over. I can't think of another book where I've had this problem, so I blame the author. The author gets no credit for some sort of artfulness on this particular matter: sending the reader on a grammatical wild goose chase is not cool.
_
respond?
(2)
05:23:55 PM,
Wednesday 13 April 2011
-
Cat, for the millionth time, I am not a weather god. No matter how much you mewl and bat my ankles and look pointedly at the door, it will still have nasty rain behind it, just like it did thirty seconds ago. I'm not holding out, that's just how it is.
_
respond?
(2)
02:46:00 PM,
Wednesday 13 April 2011
-
Good cold spring air today. Refreshing.
_
respond?
05:17:11 PM,
Tuesday 12 April 2011
-
Also in the annals of things that are real: the organization Students Against Destructive Decisions.
_
respond?
(1)
02:24:36 PM,
Thursday 31 March 2011
-
Because I sometimes forget that this is actually true: the New Mexico whiptail (official state reptile of New Mexico) is all female and reproduces by parthenogenesis aka virgin birth.
_
respond?
02:21:20 PM,
Thursday 31 March 2011
-
Going insane is a sucky way to spend a week or two. Gah.
_
respond?
(9)
05:49:24 PM,
Tuesday 22 March 2011
-
respond?
05:47:35 PM, Tuesday 22 March 2011
-
respond?
05:47:22 PM, Tuesday 22 March 2011
-
respond?
05:47:07 PM, Tuesday 22 March 2011
-
It's like I'm self-drunk for St. Patrick's Day. Whirly, whirly, goes the brain. Gack.
_
respond?
(1)
11:19:56 PM,
Thursday 17 March 2011
-
A nice collection music made with household objects. If you only watch one, watch Gravité.
_
respond?
(1)
04:52:58 PM,
Friday 11 March 2011
-
What gets me with the Charlie Sheen thing is the "ooh, maybe he's crazy" thing, when he is obviously and overtly having symptoms of mental illness which is the only reason anyone is paying attention. There has to be a way of taking mental illness seriously without making a pseudo-diagnosis, of saying "crazy by which I mean actually ill and not just goofy" without saying "bipolar I manic phase according to DSM IV" or whatever. It's just a symptom of the whole way it's treated, generally. The "ooh maybe he's crazy" type of thinking: that if he were crazy, that would mean he was other, was some sort of feral thing, subhuman or superhuman, with no there there, unfit for human society, and therefore it is wrong or impolite or treading on the profesionals' territory to talk about experiences of craziness outside a diagnosis.
This has cost me a great deal of angst in my own life. Was I crazy? But that would mean doomed and cursed and outside of shared experience, and that would have made some very dramatic experiences automatically meaningless. But how could it have been anything else? Officially, I was not crazy, according to doctors who I asked directly. But I was. I was very crazy. I was as crazy as I've ever been, as broken as I was later, when there were hospitals and things involved. More so. I was just painfully in control.
I don't know what this "crazy" is. In my life it's a word for "the worst bits". Sometimes I'm not even there, sometimes I'm not myself at all, sometimes I don't remember. But there's a there there, even at the center of the cyclone. And maybe there are good reasons why we all don't want to go there, don't even want to think about it. I don't, myself. But the pretense that we can't understand each other is stupid, that we might not know what's going on with Charlie Sheen, that some expert might understand it better than what is blatantly obvious in front of everyone's face. It's the systematic ignoring of what's in front of everyone's face that creates the ignorance and the stigma. I'm not going to look at his twitter feed again, because I know that kind of thinking, and bleh. Yuck. Crazy.
I don't know. There's understanding, and "understanding", and understanding... Going crazy is painful and a big deal and something that happens to humans. Like breaking a leg. It's not that much more complicated. It just tends to touch on weak points. Going mad is not rude or impolite. It's not willful. It's not stupid. It's not contagious. It's not a mistake. It's not quite outside the self, it's not quite inside the self. It insists on pointing out difficult ambiguities about the self, which is very irritating. It's sitting right there on a bunch of fault lines in everyone, which is why it makes everyone so uncomfortable. I don't know how to start talking about it, or whether I want to. I do know that last time I lost it, I had a bunch of friends visit me in the hospital, like I had a broken leg. Would have signed my cast if I had one. Not everybody gets that. Maybe hardly anyone does. So thanks, y'all.
_
respond?
(5)
09:21:26 PM,
Thursday 10 March 2011
-
I invite you all to a mixapp party this evening, starting at some point after you receive this message.
_
respond?
(4)
06:32:22 PM,
Wednesday 9 March 2011
-
_respond?
09:18:04 PM, Monday 7 March 2011
-
respond? (2)
07:32:52 PM, Monday 7 March 2011
-
respond?
07:30:14 PM, Monday 7 March 2011
-
respond?
07:29:00 PM, Monday 7 March 2011
-
Metaphors are cute and fuzzy, but require careful handling.
_
respond?
02:56:50 PM,
Saturday 5 March 2011
-
Q.o.t.D. "Killing seeds isn't herbicide."
_
respond?
02:28:26 PM,
Thursday 3 March 2011
-
I wanted spring to come, so I planted some herbs in their indoor starter pots, and brought in a Forsythia branch that should flower soon.
_
respond?
(1)
06:42:04 PM,
Wednesday 2 March 2011
-
Take a cup or so of yogurt, and half a little jar of Maraschino cherries and half the syrup too. Add a spoonful of sugar and blend. Strain it to get the lumps out. It's like cherry soda, only a smoothie. Super yummy. (Or, if you're Tim, hiss-spit yucky. If you are more like Tim than like me on the edibility-of-Maraschino-cherries issue, do not attempt this smoothie.)
_
respond?
09:25:34 PM,
Tuesday 1 March 2011
-
Neighbor children who have the right idea about things have made a 4-5 foot high snow drift into a comfortable looking snow cave with nooks and crannies and passages that go out of sight.
_
respond?
07:14:46 PM,
Wednesday 23 February 2011
-
site & script courtesy of Moss