Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
My mother objects to my providing Bach with a drum track. Philistine.
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(7)
09:45:09 PM,Tuesday 7 October 2003
I want to write catches. A catch is a round, also known as a canon, set to an English text that's always light-hearted, and usually bawdy. "When Celia was Learning on the Spinnet to Play" is a catch. Purcell wrote lots of them. If I write 102 catches before I die, I'll consider my life well spent.
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(3)
06:07:02 PM,Tuesday 7 October 2003
What a remarkable little device. Moss should have been one of those inventors in clockwork two centuries ago, because then we would all have clockwork automata for servants; but virtual clockwork automata are very nearly just as good. Yay, Moss!
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(3)
05:22:38 PM,Tuesday 7 October 2003
Woo! Ok, I cheated. But still. Woo!
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(6)
07:42:49 PM,Monday 6 October 2003
Last night I dreamed about hiring this chick to give me a small black tattoo on my right inner elbow of Don Giovanni in a three-cornered hat riding on a broomstick, but she couldn't get the hat right, so she slipped me a mickey and when I woke up she had tattooed a gigantic flaming skull on my chest surrounded by concentric red, brown, and black squiggles. I also thought she had given me an incredibly realistic tattoo of a violin on my right forearm, but then I realized that she had just glued my actual violin to my right forearm. I was rather upset.
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06:58:18 PM,Monday 6 October 2003
This is long overdue, but -- T.I.A.I.L.W.: Isak Dinesen. Mmmm, yes.
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(1)
06:37:44 PM,Monday 6 October 2003
My childhood idols:
Cowards, Doctors, Bastards, and sometimes Soldiers.
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(2)
03:36:05 PM,Monday 6 October 2003
Installing AIM fixed my mother's web browser, which always used to hang on login pages due to her screwy English-Norwegian alphabet switch. Thanks, AIM! Oh, by the way, I've got a new screen name. I'll still use Cnidarae, but I might use this one too, according to whimsy. It's "Nepomuk Aspic" because, unbelievably, "Nepomuk", "Asafoetida", "Ockeghem", and "Cabbaged" were all taken.
You always hear about the rat experiment, either the one where they take cocaine until they kill themselves, or the one where they press the button hooked up to their brain's pleasure center excluding anything else, even eating, and starve to death. But those rats are always in horrible small barren little cages. Has anyone ever tried the experiment when they were free to roam at large in natural, social, stimulating environments? It would be much more hassle, sure, but you could use radio collars. I'd be interested to know what would happen.
I was talking to my nephew last night. What he wants is a degree so he can be a math teacher, go down to California, work at his mom's high school (she's also a math teacher), find a wife, have kids, raise them while his wife works, be with his family, be happy. It's a good dream. I read Lileks and see how good that sort of thing can be. But, man, I don't want it. Or, at least, not for a long, long time. I'm living the good life at the moment, of course, but I'm still the kid, not the responsible one. These past ten months have been just like high school except with more money, fewer friends, much less homework, and much more spare time. It's wonderfully comfortable and pleasant. But it's not my dream. It's not even my dream to take over from my parents and have a kid take my place -- not yet, at least. Not for so long I can't even fathom it. I want to go somewhere, make something, have adventures, be threatened, prove my courage, see suffering, live in a gadget-infested cyberpunk future, read and read and read until I don't feel ignorant, have hundreds of mournful lovers to write mournful songs about, live in a garret, live in a cave, live for something that's not me and my pleasure, be lonely, forget myself, live.
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(2)
03:32:34 PM,Monday 6 October 2003
I wrote a stream-of-consciousness story in high school (it was due the next day in English class and I stayed up all night to do it having procrastinated the several weeks previous, natch) called "Absentee Soufflee". No one else was able to figure out what it was about, but I liked it. I'm wondering whether I'll be reduced to stream-of-consciousness in order to keep up with the NaNoKids. I don't want to, 'cause nonsense, much as I like it in its place, is of limited interest and even more limited value when it comes to saying anything of substance. I just downloaded a program recommended in the NaNo forums called "Rough Draft" (it looks very cool so far, not least because it includes a link to The Elements of Style on the help bar.) And, because I was sick of typing "Kublai Khan" after doing it so much tonight when I was testing busted and non-busted keyboards, I decided to type out what first came into my head instead:
"The umber nonchalance of the static observation ever startled the unpleasant mastersachs in venous climes. Fortinbras humbered obsolescently underneath the georgian elms. “How?” He asked. “How ever will I never whatsoever what?” He was clearly unbalanced. For when we went over the adolescent hills we clambered into clapboards and sledded down whooping “Hallelu, Halloo!” And then the nights came shadowy dusky overbearing into the undermensch of the leatherbacked lizards."
Do I really want 50,000 words worth of this silliness? No, I do not. Looks like it'll have to be Reason and Wit and Diligence instead. Quaking in my boots. The main thing is that I'll have to do most of my writing at work. I'm very very lucky in that I get about four or five hours of guiltless free time; I have to clean the house and make lunch, which takes an hour or so, I have to check attends, which takes 15 minutes every two hours, and do laundry, and get the clients up in the morning or make breakfast, which goes from 5:45 to 7:00, but from 11:00 to then, exclusive of the rest, I can do anything at all that I please. Lately, of course, it's been consisting of lying on the EXTREMELY comfortable leather couch and watching bad T.V. 'til my eyes glaze over. This is naughty and lame. Sometimes one of the people I work with turns the T.V. off (oh great and glorious mercy!) and we read. And that's insanely nice. But that's maybe for an hour or two every other week. Ugh.
My alternative is to go into the office, where I can barely hear the T.V., which is good. The whirly chairs in there aren't as comfortable as the EXTREMELY comfortable leather couch, but I can hardly fault them for that. The one thing that sort of keeps me out of there even when I'm desperate to make a retreat from the bloody T.V. (and, sometimes, the eyeball-grating snores), is that it's got a security camera. It's not like I'm doing anything wrong, even -- they just have it so if someone steals narcotics from the medicine cupboard they know who to bust. But it makes me nervous. I guess I gotta get over it. I could lie on the mat in the room adjoining the dining room instead, I guess, but that's near enough to the T.V. that it's still too loud to hear myself think. I could drown it all out with music, too, I suppose... hm. I dunno. I just keep thanking my lucky epicycles that I got such a perfect job. I'm forced to stay in one comfortable place with no internet and scads of open hours, and I get freaking paid for it. It's a NaNoist's dream. Here's hoping I can whup myself up enough to take proper advantage of it.
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(6)
02:33:04 AM,Sunday 5 October 2003
This keybard is extremely me up. It cn't type the letter "", and the arrw keys wrk intermittently, and it kssseeps beeping at me wheneve I type a letter. I think I suld rebt. ssed
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(15)
10:30:48 PM,Saturday 4 October 2003
Baseless linguistical prediction: in the next 50 years, the word "fewer" will become obsolete, being replaced in all cases by "less".
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(2)
09:34:25 AM,Saturday 4 October 2003
Dude, I am totally gonna enter the Sexiest Gamer contest, mainly because of the fortuitous fact that I actually am gonna be in L.A. on December 12th this year, hee! I think I'll get gussied up in my suit and clutch my Mozart-Headed Pong Machine with a smoldering passion. Yeah.
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(1)
11:44:59 PM,Friday 3 October 2003
After all, what's so hard about standing on your head in a lake of fire for a thousand years, anyway?
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(2)
02:27:23 PM,Friday 3 October 2003
I've decided to prepare for NaNoWriMo by reading nothing but Fairy Tales all through October. Unfortunately, I'm in the middle of two books at the moment (Ulysses and The Royal Physician's Visit, which is one of those historical novels which are incredibly fascinating because the unbelievable story they're telling is actually true, and also incredibly frustrating, because there's all sorts of fiction mixed up with the truth and you're unable to sort out which is which without two years of research in the collected annals of the Danish Enlightenment). See, I wanna write a novel that's like a Fairy Tale, only not, 'cause real ones have to be naive, first off -- worn down like pebbles over years and years into odd rippled shapes that can't be anything like the stories that start out trying to be only one step away from normal experience. The counterfeit ones, Hans Christian Andersen and George MacDonald and Oscar Wilde, take a lot more practice and finesse than I've got time for, and anyway, Fairy Tales are short. This is supposed to be a novel. But I don't want to write Fantasy. No. Not my thing. And not Magical Realism either, though something like it, maybe... I dunno. I got no ideas, no plan, no toe on the webbing. I just got this feeling like I should read lots of fairy tales. And then write for a month. And then who can say? But being in the middle of books and then putting them down is... grrr... hm. I'll play winsome, hang it. Whatever.
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(13)
02:26:11 PM,Friday 3 October 2003
Holy hot damn on a stick, I am sooo I.L.W. Alexandra David-Néel. Thanks crazy much, PF, for bringing this massive stud to my attention.
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(3)
11:59:48 AM,Friday 3 October 2003
It's been a while since I gushed about my Nomad Jukebox 3, so, I beg your indulgence, but I'm gonna. IGN just today ran an article comparing their top 3 contenders for portable mp3 players -- the iPod, the Nomad Jukebox Zen NX, and the iRiver meaningless-alphanumeric-series. All the guy's arguments seemed carefully considered to me, and I'd agree with just about everything he said. The machine that came out on top was the iRiver one, which isn't surprising; it's the newest thing on the market, and benefits from the successes and failures of previous-generation models. It's quite small, looks very nice, and has plenty of splendid features. Guess what, though? With the exception of the USB 2.0 (I don't have a 2.0 card), the ability to read ASF files (I don't want to), optical output (I don't own anything compatible with it), and driverless drag-and-drop (which would admittedly be nice), my NJB3 can do everything it can, but with six more hours of battery life, a logarithmically-scaled 8 decibles better signal-to-noise ratio, four times the capacity, and for $50 less -- and I bought it back in February. The disadvantages? It's ovoid instead of golden-rectangular, and it's a fair bit bigger and heavier. Boo. Hoo. It fits in my pocket no problem; it goes everywhere with me. It fills my life with lotus-eating bliss. I think it proved a fine choice, if I do say so myself.
(one grumble: the wired remote is a fragile bastard. I had to send back the first one because the wire became intermittent in the first week, and now the new one they sent me developed a similar problem within three days, so back it goes. I took good damn care of it, too... they must make the buggers out of spun sugar or something. Third time better be freaking Prince Charming, or heads will roll... The actual jukebox itself, though? A warhorse. A gem. A glory.)
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(17)
10:26:04 AM,Friday 3 October 2003
Rufous racks and roiling loins
Splits the over-eager poins.
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(3)
07:08:58 PM,Wednesday 1 October 2003
I think this might be my most boring bloglet page ever. All the entries that are more than two sentences long, and a good measure of the ones that aren't, are just self-absorbed mundanity. That's awright. I don't know if I've mentioned this, but one of the main reasons I keep this blog is in the vague hope that someone'll stumble across it randomly Googling in the middle of the night, go, "Ooh, ain't she witty and intriguing", and, like, hook up with me, or something. So I try to keep a balance between the entries that are all revealing about my fascinating foibles and the ones that show off my anegoistic (dude, there's no way that's a word) high-mindedness, see. Unfortunately, I also feel like I gotta update at least eight times a week or else this blog ain't nothing but sterile tumbleweed. So I let fly with everything off the top of my head, which is good when it's good, but lame lame lame when it ain't. Anyway.
I just wanna give props to the chick at Rockin' Rudy's tonight. I have half a heart attack 'cause six shelves of the classical section's gone missing, and she laughs politely and shows me into the card room where they've moved 'em to. Then she bitches candidly and familiarly about how they're moving around the whole store so that the jewelry and clothing gets first priority, the dumb little toys second, and the music third. And I ask her to find that new one-on-a-part St. Matthew Passion, even though I don't know anything about it except that it just came out recently, and she finds it by scrolling through her database at the rate of knots. Damn cool. I wasn't sure if it was the right one, so I didn't have her order it, but I just looked it up and by jiminy it was, so I guess I'll go back sometime soon, after I get my paycheck. Anyway, cool store, cool chick. Good on her.
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(2)
08:58:58 PM,Tuesday 30 September 2003
