Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
Splunge.
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(1)
03:04:00 PM,Thursday 5 March 2009
"Intervention" came out "ointment adventure".
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(2)
03:03:54 PM,Thursday 5 March 2009
There's a Chinese restaurant in Midtown called Sun Yip.
Whenever I walk by it, I see the sign out of the corner of my eye and think it says "Bunyip".
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(3)
11:30:38 PM,Sunday 22 February 2009
"Look at the letters up there on the screen" came out "Look at the heteros up there on the screen".
Increased the sensitivity of my R key to compensate for that one. Heh.
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(6)
10:00:47 PM,Sunday 22 February 2009
This guy's office is badass. Damn.
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(3)
08:47:49 PM,Sunday 22 February 2009
This is a corollary to my recent (lost with the death of Muxtape)
Apocalypse mix, The Ephemeral Artery. That mix was about running
for the hills at the first vague signs of catastrophe, with uncertain
success. This one is about being in the middle of it when it comes,
and what happens next. I'm still burning these, but they should be
shipping out in the next couple of days.
Fleeing the Fire
(Theme: Doom, from Remi from Liz! That's what I get for making assumptions)
1. Pulp - The Fear (7:09)
You know that feeling of inescapable dread? That feeling that steals
up on you in the middle of the night, the feeling that something horrible
is just about to happen. You'll be left broken and alone in a dying
world. You can't trust anyone, least of all yourself. What's the
point of living when everything is on the verge of falling to pieces?
Existential angst, it's usually called. But sometimes it's called precognition.
2. Cass Elliott - California Earthquake (2:43)
A more cheerful view of the same circumstances. Something is in the
air, and anyone can see the fault lines if they look for them. The
question is not where or how, but when.
3. Martin Carthy - Such A War has Never Been (3:36)
Everything is under control. Surgical strikes, satellite intelligence,
and clean computerized combat means no collateral damage and no messy mistakes.
What could possibly go wrong?
4. Sirenia - First We Take Manhattan (3:56)
Oh, a band of insane drama queen bioterrorists who choose to
unleash a pandemic upon the world for no reason other than
that they feel vaguely hard done by, maybe?
5. Shearwater - Rooks (3:21)
Should all those birds be falling out of the sky like that?
6. Pink Floyd - Two Suns in the Sunset (5:01)
The government retaliates. Who knows which government, or against whom,
or who gets caught in the middle, but never underestimate the
utility of Cleansing Fire.
7. Franz Ferdinand - This Fire (4:13)
Hey, everything's burning or about to burn anyway -- let's help it out
a little. Grab your matches and your kerosene, kids!
8. St. Vincent - Paris Is Burning (4:20)
It's a great day for High Art.
9. Steeleye Span - You Will Burn (4:53)
And here come the death cults, salvaging souls one bonfire at a
time. Expiation via incineration: it's for your own good.
10. Venus in Furs - Baby's on Fire (3:18)
Or if you'd like your murderous bands of pyromaniacs ideology-free,
that's fine too.
11. Rasputina - A Retinue Of Moons / The Infidel In Me (7:05)
What's this? Plans for the remains of the world's elite to quit
their undisclosed locations for a less grotty solar system than the
one they've just blown up? Ah, but they didn't count on their chief
planetary engineer defecting to the Infidels, one of the last organized
groups on the outside that isn't simply an instrument of mindless
violence.
12. Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band - Infedel Tants (8:43)
At the Infidels' camp, a celebration in honor of their newest
member. Their dance retells the story of the plague, the war,
and their struggle to survive in the poisonous rubble of the city.
13. The City Waites - London Mourning In Ashes (4:08)
One of the Infidels sings an old song of remembrance, of fires that
burned and burned and finally burned themselves to death, and of a
city rebuilt.
14. Leslie Fish - Black Powder & Alcohol (3:03)
The youngest Infidels, some of them born not long after the Inferno, sing
their first and most important lesson, the song that's kept everyone
alive this long.
15. The Decemberists - When The War Came (5:06)
The defector knows of a store of seeds, guarded by scientists and well
hidden, who might be sympathetic to their plan to steal the transport
of the ones who started all this and leave to rebuild civilization on some
other chunk of rock. If the seeds have been stolen by the mobs outside
or eaten by the scientists inside, there's no hope. But if the stronghold
still stands and the seeds are safe, they might be able to resurrect
the art of agriculture, and the human race with it.
16. Julia Ecklar - Hope Eyrie - (4:14)
The cinder that was the earth gets smaller. Humanity moves on.
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(3)
11:09:00 PM,Tuesday 17 February 2009
So I've been struggling a lot with my steno machine lately. The frustrating thing about my old machine was that it didn't have any sensitivity controls; I had to pound the keys relatively hard to get anything to register, and I couldn't compensate for weaker or stronger fingers. The blessing of the new machine is that each individual key has a sensitivity control, and there are also controls to make the stroke deeper or shallower, heavier or lighter, but because I want to be able to write with the least amount of effort possible, when I set the controls to their shallowest and most sensitive, it throws everything else out of whack, and I have to go about messing with each individual key to make my translation at all accurate. It's been pretty frustrating the last few days, but I'm slowly getting it to where I want it. Part of the problem is that I can't just turn a key's sensitivity to maximum; if I do that, it thinks I'm pushing it down and not letting it go back up, and it keeps all the other keys from working. Anyway, this is by way of an amusing error that I made today at a political science convention. I was trying to write "Ironically," (AOEURPB KHREU RBGS), but the last two strokes were registered as having been pressed together, so it translated as "Iron clerks". I told this to K. "That sounds like a terrible show," she said. "Yeah," I agreed. "Whose filing is the most beguiling? Today's secret form is... W9s!" Not exciting.
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(6)
07:26:18 PM,Monday 16 February 2009
Today K. and I heard Bruce Dickey (probably the best cornetto player in the world) and Concerto Palatino at Corpus Christi Church down at 121st street. Now, of course the music itself was lovely (though we both preferred the Italian stuff to the German stuff), and the musicianship impeccable, the acoustics sublime, all that. Of course. But there were moments where I had no idea what note had come before and didn't care what note was coming next. Just the sheer velvety, caressing, sly, vulnerable voice of live cornetto music, no matter what it's in the service of, transports me. It's basically the aural equivalent of $240 worth of puddin'. And we got over an hour's worth for far less than that. Pretty damn kickass.
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01:02:47 AM,Monday 16 February 2009
So I finally worked my way through the 100 push-ups challenge. I'm currently on week one of the 200 sit-ups challenge. But what I really need is a 1 pull-up challenge. Seriously, I've never been able to do a pull-up in my life, and it makes me feel like a puny weed. I even sucked at the flex-arm hang, which we were allowed to do in elementary school for the Presidential Fitness Test when we couldn't do a single pull-up. (Oh, how they laughed, jeering in their sneakers with retainer-free mouths. Oh, how I burned, in my silver moon boots and my maroon corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches and my glasses on a string. The fools! I'll show them all!) What do you have to do in order to be able to do one pull-up? I'll never feel properly butch unless I do at least one before I die.
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(9)
03:15:39 PM,Tuesday 10 February 2009
I do live in a place of power; it's not just books and wishful thinking. For some reason, I always assumed the natives wouldn't know it, but they do. The smart ones, anyway.
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08:17:44 AM,Tuesday 10 February 2009
We've had a lovely day for food. First, our traditional weekly bagels (with tomato, red onion, cream cheese, lemon, and capers) and sable and lox (from Murray's Sturgeon Shop) at K.'s mom's place. Paper-thin, smoky, meltingly rich deliciousness. Then up to Garden of Eden (where we found the Miracle Fruit) for vegetables and JAS Mart for Japanese delicacies, and home to a feast. First we found some storebought guacamole that actually tasted like guacamole (miraculous), which we had with corn chips to tide us over while we did a bit of work before dinner. Then K. made a sauce with garlic, scallions, ginger, celery, and peas, which we had over somen, plus vegetable gyoza, plus miso soup, and oranges for dessert. My belly is singing.
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10:31:05 PM,Sunday 1 February 2009
"he has no choice" came out "he has nachos".
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(3)
11:57:03 AM,Friday 30 January 2009
"with a fresco" came out "waitress could"
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10:04:53 PM,Thursday 29 January 2009
So Muxtape is back up again, but as a sort of MySpace-without-the-eyeball-searing-hideousness, rather than as a place to share online mixes. I really miss making mixes on a regular basis. I think my last one, A Nasty Bit Of Business, turned out pretty well, but that was months ago, and I started making it when my old computer and its 60 gigs of mp3s was still online. Now I've just got my Gigabeat, which has around 30 gigs of my most listened-to stuff, and the two dozen or so albums I've gotten from eMusic. I miss having a vast heterogenous sea of music to choose from, even if plenty of it is godawful. There's a monthly themed mix CD meetup here in the city, and it sounds fun, but knowing myself it's sadly probable that I'll be too antisocial to make it out. Besides, burning CDs is the boring part of mix making. I just wish there were a replacement for Muxtape, somewhere music can be uploaded, listened to, and downloaded, song by song or as a bolus. And a corresponding community that allowed for the crafting and propagation of themed mixes according to a loose schedule would be perfect. But whenever it got to a serviceable size, the RIAA would leap on it and crunch it up in its stupid self-destructive jaws. Sigh.
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(136)
11:43:59 AM,Wednesday 28 January 2009
"by Franz Kafka" translated as "Biafrans Kafka".
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(1)
08:17:26 PM,Friday 23 January 2009
"resistance patterns" came out "resistance fat terns". That was a misstroke and not a boundary error, but still amusing. Vive la resistance!
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04:21:59 PM,Thursday 22 January 2009
"hair embedded" came out "harem bedded".
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(1)
04:57:41 PM,Wednesday 21 January 2009
O.o.C.Q.o.t.D: (to the tune of Common People)
"You wanna eat some Tortoise Wheaties!
You wanna eat whatever Tortoise Wheaties are!"
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09:06:56 PM,Sunday 18 January 2009
Married on a Monday, home again on Tuesday, back to work on Wednesday. It's been a glorious break, though. I got to see Leonard and Sumana, Moss and Julia, Derek, Martin, and nearly all of the home crowd. We also went to see the Wet Spots, spent many lazy days lying in sunspots and bothering the cat, and I even had a moderate but steady stream of transcription and theater captioning work to do throughout, so I wasn't as stressed out about money as I had been this time last year. But Monday was what it was all leading up to.
We got up early and headed down into the subway. Right away our train came. Got to Penn -- the Acela showed up early and we moseyed on with time to spare. The whole trip was like that. We figured the luxury of having a two-person wedding party was not having to freak out when something goes wrong, but things just kept not going wrong, one after the other. It was almost eerie. We also breakfasted on the train: gravlax, sour cream, Melba toast, fresh fruit, boiled eggs, and Jarlsberg. We checked into the B&B -- about which much more later -- changed into our suits, sped off to City Hall, and quicker than you can say "That city clerk circa 1922 has simply the dreamiest moustache," we were admitted to the chamber of our Justice of the Peace.
The first thing we noticed was the framed photograph of her and Pope John Paul II. The second thing was the amazing antique telephone and typewriter mounted on her wall. And the third was her kind face smiling at us as she asked us how long we'd been together. "Nearly five years," we said. "Then you've made this sacred to each other already," she said. "And it's my privilege to make that sacred promise a public promise."
She went on, chiding New York for not letting us get married at home but praising it for recognizing Massachusetts law, along with a few other enlightened countries that gave our promise the respect it deserved. She offered us Kleenex. We accepted. We stood by her bookshelf (a good place to make a start, we both thought) and exchanged vows, rings, kisses. More Kleenex.
She took a picture (it came out blurry, but I like it.) And that was that. We floated into a cab and back to the room.
The room, incidentally, was perfect. Fresh flowers, exposed brick, insanely comfortable bed, and when our host heard that we had picked the Bernstein Room partly because we were big fans of Lenny, he left and returned with a recording of the last concert he conducted, Britten's Sea Pictures and Beethoven's Seventh. I can't describe how gracious it all was. I ate a metric ton of boiled eggs, croissants, cheese, banana bread, and other delicacies the next morning -- and that's after the dinner I'm about to describe -- because the food, the company, the decor, the ambience, and the event itself all just lifted me into a state of ravenous rapture. I get hungry when I'm happy.
But even my massively married appetite was no match for Gaslight. They gave us free champagne and put us in a booth in a shadowy spot. We dined on beetroot salad, lavender violet (Thanks, K.!) mustard chicken, bar steak with shallots and mashed potatoes, roasted wild mushrooms with thyme, plus beer for her and, because I'm kind of a Gussie Fink-Nottle, orange juice for me. It was unbelievably delicious, all of it, but we couldn't finish it all. Back to the room and there I'm bound to silence. The next day: a walk in the snow, K. photographing the local landmarks, and another blessedly uneventful train ride home, twining our fingers and listening to Robert Louis Stevenson on my mp3 player. So sweet, so simple. Just right. And now she's mine, suckas!
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(11)
01:14:51 PM,Friday 16 January 2009
