Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
More in the same, um, vein--
I, and by extension my membrum virilis, which I shall liken unto a ferocious and large snake, am not interested in the performance of the sacred marital duties, unless the Creator has endowed you with a voluptuous form pleasing to the baser instincts of man, dear heart._
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03:12:57 PM,Saturday 20 August 2005
Harry Potter parody of The Waste Land. I stand in awe.
Awe.
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02:39:58 PM,Saturday 20 August 2005
Haqvfpybfrq ybpngvba? Gung'f Uhagre Pbyyrtr!
{ynhtuf nff bss}
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03:13:46 PM,Friday 19 August 2005
Death to comma splices!
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02:52:32 PM,Thursday 18 August 2005
Before I forget -- Quantum Physics explained with only Anglo-Saxon-derived words:
via Cataptromancer.
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02:29:12 AM,Wednesday 17 August 2005
Insomnia fistulates.
K. discovered that the solo in possibly my all-time favorite Cake song ("Frank Sinatra") steals a line from -- shock, horror -- Puccini's "Quando M'en Vo". It's totally true, though. Nutso.
Damnit, if she were here, I could sleep.
Grumble grumble.
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02:11:28 AM,Wednesday 17 August 2005
Operation Stop Being a Goddamn Layabout made some significant advances this evening. After work, I took the train to Grand Central instead of Times Square (during which I had a conversation with a lovely gentleman violinist, who told me to look into playing with the New Amsterdam Symphony) and bought myself an hour with Psychonauts at Game Time Nation, after wandering around a Halloween costume store and buying a Nevermore raven to put over the red bit of my Stentura (incidentally, on the train home, the dude sitting next to me was reading a book about Steno! No connection to machine shorthand, of course, but damn I love that man's shark.) Then I went to an electronics shop and tried on the Thump. Pretty good sound quality and remarkably light-weight, but not very comfortable, and both cheap-looking and way overpriced. I wanted to sit in Union Square and read The Confusion, but it started raining, so I put it away and hid under a tree while I watched at least a dozen big and little rats frisk and gambol about on the lawn, back and forth and round and about. Lovely little things. Much sleeker than wild animals have any right to be, but that's brains for you. Brains and self-respect. My jukebox's batteries died and I switched to my Muvo, all loaded up with Magnetic Fields ("I Think I Need A New Heart" is the new song that's wormed its way deepest into me so far. Brilliant and devastating, ugh.) I hopped on the crosstown and found myself in the part of Chelsea that's full of Dutch names and rich people, disorientingly like the books I'd been reading -- so I hightailed it to the part of Chelsea that's full of faggots, which was much better. Walked around a bit more and went home. Am happy.
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11:43:41 PM,Tuesday 16 August 2005
I'm captioning a show set in Santa Fe. Now, I never got as attached to that town as Annapolis, even though I went to school for the same amount of time in each, but I've been back to Annapolis plenty of times since I left, and I haven't seen Fe since 2002. I have to admit I'm getting kind of a pang. Sigh.
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04:04:20 PM,Tuesday 16 August 2005
Rzrevy, V ernyyl qba'g jnag gb urne nobhg gur yvggyr cebat va lbhe cbpxrg gung lbh hfr gb fgvpx va guvatf naq tb, "Bbu, vg'f shyy bs whvpr!"
V ernyyl, ernyyl qba'g.
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04:57:54 PM,Monday 15 August 2005
My final word: if it's good enough for Dostoevsky, it should be good enough for anybody. Humph.
Not to be confused with this unfortunate specimen, by the way.
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(4)
07:31:44 PM,Sunday 14 August 2005
Giant clap of thunder!
Third thunderstorm this weekend. One in the country yesterday, one driving home, and one that started up about half an hour ago. God, it's fantastic. The air smells good, there's whooping and whistling in the street (happy Dominican Day!), and-- HOLY *(&*#$ was that close. Wowza. Yikes. Car alarms going off on the next block. What did that hit? Nothing's on fire, as far as I can tell, but there's a huge traffic jam down St. Nick's. And it's still booming all around.
We were up in Massachussetts (or "Mange-Une-Chausette", as Grandmere apparently used to call it). We swam all about and rescued two frogs and sang a requiem for a dead mouse and found a deflated inflatable owl and learned how to grow a pear in a bottle and ate the best damn corn on the cob there ever was. Highly satisfactory.
I also finally caught the Maurice Sendak exhibition at the Jewish Museum on Thursday. Beautiful man. The main Wild Thing's name is Moishe, apparently, and Sendak's favorite book is Melville's Pierre, which I haven't read yet but wanna.
What makes me a little peevish about the whole stenography thing is that, when a person's heard of the word at all, they usually associate it with secretaries and steno pools and that old '50s gum-popping crowd. So it used to be; it doesn't take much to learn how to stroke things phonetically, and taking dictation or writing form letters doesn't require terribly much skill or intellect. It's marginally quicker than a manual typewriter, once you get the hang of it, and you can look up the hard words in a dictionary on your own time when you're transcribing your notes.
Modern day court reporting, captioning, and CART reporting is much, much harder, and I think its trade-school reputation causes the unambitious to go after it and flunk miserably, while the word geeks and finger demons consider it beneath them and their skillz. The fact is, realtime (that is, computer-assisted; automatically transcribed) reporting requires finger speeds of between 225 and 280 words a minute (whereas dictation probably hovers around 160), extensive phonological knowledge to prevent conflicts (in the old days, you only needed one stroke for any given homonym; you'd figure out which one applied from context while making the transcripts. Now you've got to have separate strokes for each one, and that includes soundalike syllables at the ends and beginnings of words), and a massive personal dictionary, constructed piece by piece over years and including as many obscure and technical words, names, and phrases as remotely practical.
So what you get is: terrible attrition, a shortage of qualified reporters, and confused, slightly deprecating looks when someone groomed for a Graduate Degree in Litrachaw starts waving her hands all excitedly about a career thought fit only for manicured doxies. But, damnit, it's gonna be bloody hard, and it's gonna be bloody interesting.
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(5)
07:13:36 PM,Sunday 14 August 2005
Apparently the ideal steno practice sentence to stroke is:
Much fresh bottled milk spawns damp lunch desk film.
At this point I haven't the foggiest idea how to stroke it at all, but I'll see if I can get it down by the end of summer.
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11:34:52 PM,Wednesday 10 August 2005
Actually, I have thought of how to describe it, by way of a simple snapshot:
Two nekkid girls antipodally in bed together, twining their toes and reading Neal Stephenson*.
Got a hell of a letter from Katherine Nehring today. Will answer it or I ain't worth half a plumb bob.
Also graduated from captioning training and am going to be doing it full time starting tomorrow, so hey. I'll miss transcribing, though. I'd just gotten the knack of it.
Going up to the country this weekend, which will be grand. Have been spending blissful evenings and slightly shorter but still blissful mornings with the girl, and it frustrates me that I don't have the words to lay out just how goddamn good it all is. As soon as I try to compose something it sounds pat and played out, but maybe that's a good sign after all. Either I'm a no-account writer on such subjects or I'm just not living in a novel. Both, I figure, which is how I like it.
My poor jukebox is beginning its slow but inevitable decline, I think -- its power button had been sticking for quite a while, and then after a plunge out of my pocket on the stairs refused to work at all. I can still turn it on just fine by removing and reinserting the battery, and it turns itself off after five minutes sitting idle, but it still makes me a little sad to see it in less than tip-top health. Damn but that thing's served me well for far longer than most electronics these days do, and there's no reason to think it won't continue. Yay for redundant systems, I guess, is my point here.
Strong Bad just told me to go have a date with some creme brulee ice creme. I may have to do that, seeing as it's been in the freezer keening for me since last evening. Possibly dinner first.
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09:04:27 PM,Wednesday 10 August 2005
A year and a day ago, I moved to New York.
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01:04:23 PM,Tuesday 9 August 2005
I posted a picture of the Stenoshark way back in 2002, but I think it's going to have to start being my mascot during this whole fearsome endeavor.
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01:26:22 AM,Monday 8 August 2005
Naq gur Whiravyr Favpxre bs gur Qnl njneq tbrf gb... Gur QVL argjbex!
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(1)
09:18:52 AM,Friday 5 August 2005
As far as I can tell (at least, according to this), that's my name up there. Damn tricky to write. Damn fun, too.
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11:24:49 PM,Thursday 4 August 2005
