Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
I just heard someone playing "Misty" and said to myself "that sounds like a flugelhorn." And then I looked over and saw a dude playing a flugelhorn. #stillgotit
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12:22:04 PM,Thursday 22 March 2012
My favorite childhood action figure is on YouTube.
You press his back thing in and then pull it out and it makes him stick to walls, or if you do it in the bathtub it makes him squirt water. And he has a freaking crossbow.
It's a cliche how much pleasure there is in using today's technology to dredge up artifacts of one's youth, but it's true all the same.
That is all.
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06:02:07 PM,Tuesday 17 January 2012
"Man is for the Woman Made", eh? You're not fooling anybody, boys.
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04:57:42 PM,Tuesday 17 January 2012
O.o.C.Q.o.t.D: "It's like kombucha with botulism and crumbs."
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(1)
11:18:16 PM,Friday 23 December 2011
232 tracks from Il Giardino Armonico for $33. That's 14 cents a track, for an incredible variety of music from the best Baroque ensemble ever. Staggeringly good deal. If you're an eMusic subscriber, it's even better -- only $21! Yeeee!
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(3)
08:45:40 PM,Friday 16 December 2011
Leonard just put my favorite story of his online. You've got to read it.
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(2)
12:31:34 PM,Tuesday 22 November 2011
Sometimes I feel weird about sharing music stuff on Google Plus 'cause so many of the Deaf/HoH people I work with have me friended, and I don't want to seem like I'm gloating about my ability to hear. I dunno. Anyway, have a gorgeous rendition of Pergolesi's Quando Corpus. I just bought the countertenor's album. Mmmph!
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(1)
01:11:18 AM,Friday 18 November 2011
K: Do you think anyone's ever done a T.S. Eliot/John Mayer mashup called "Your Body Is A Wasteland"?
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(2)
02:32:12 PM,Sunday 31 July 2011
Whoah. I just discovered that my first New York apartment was one block away from Maria Callas's childhood home.
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(5)
10:29:54 PM,Thursday 14 July 2011
Agh, double post. On Bloglet, see, we can edit posts but not delete them, so either I leave two Zelazny posts up or I fill this one with something else. I guess it's as good a time as any to make that podcast post I've been thinking about lately. So my cell phone's contract came up in January and renewing entitled me to $100 credit on a new phone. I picked a refurbished Droid 2, which meant I didn't pay a penny, and I've been horribly addicted to the thing ever since it arrived. So much worse than the Crackberry, which had been bad enough. The games are bad enough -- Abduction 2, Fruit Ninja, and Infinite Rufio Brothers are the worst offenders -- and of course the unlimited web access is now essential to life itself. But what's really kept me tethered to the thing (and what led me to buy a $65 extended battery for it so it didn't die before noon every day from constant use) is the podcasts. I use Google Listen, which is kind of buggy, but really convenient for keeping tabs on all of your podcasts, especially the infrequently updated ones. Unfortunately it doesn't usually go back through all the archives, so I've had to download a bunch of them manually from the podcasts' websites once I've listened up to a certain date. When we moved from the old apartment to the new one, podcasts were what kept me schlumpfing down the hills carrying heavy stuff and then climbing back up for more. Music is great when you're packing stuff up, but for carrying heavy stuff, I've found that audiobooks and other narrative-style audio is essential, because it gives you a thread of thought for your brain to hook onto, and you're able to forget what your body is doing. Even now that we're happily ensconced in the new place, I've been listening to them when I work out, when I do the dishes, when I go to get the groceries. Part of that is not having most of my music on my phone, and my poor bulky mp3 player being on its last legs. But part of it is just being able to download one hour-long file in a bolus and then not have to worry about building playlists, skipping songs, or getting disconnected from the stream when I go down into the subway.
So these are currently my favorite podcasts, in no particular order:
Oh, man. I love this show so much. I think I first heard about it from some Johnny on Twitter, but I can't remember which one. I got hooked instantly and plowed through the archives at a rate of one or two episodes per day. Now, unless I'm forgetting something, I think I'm down to only one left, which is heartbreaking. Funnily enough, I recently met one of the co-hosts, Robert Krulwich, during a CART job I was doing, and got the chance to tell him how much I loved the show. It's about science and words and music and the weirdness of humans and their planet. It's seriously well done, and about 80% of the facts and anecdotes I've related to my friends and family over the past several months have been directly lifted from it.
Another show I've been mainlining like no tomorrow. I think I only have about 11 left in the archive, but I'm saving them for a rainy day. Sadly, I think the more recent episodes have lost their edge a little bit (or maybe it's just cyclical; Mat Fraser and Liz Carr, the two original hosts, have been on vacation for the past several months. Kiruna Stamell and Rob Crossan, the two substitute hosts, are good supporting players in the show, but aren't usually as snarky or as incisive as Mat and Liz.), and it seems like the show is trying to become less radical and more palatable to the mainstream, which is a pity. Still, there's tons of good stuff on there. The show at its best is funny as all hell, without trivializing any of the real issues it brings to light. It's a fantastic example of cross-disability advocacy with a heady dose of political satire woven through. One of my favorite elements is the old theme song, which they sadly discontinued a few years ago. It goes: "You're so special, we made this podcast for you! Disabled people can have fun too! They can do anything we can do! Say thank you to the BBC. Dry your eyes and listen in to people just like you. Confined to a website, the Ouch Podcast!" Yeah, it's pretty much all like that, and I hope it continues to be, now that it's moving to BBC News. I also had the honor of providing CART for an event at which Mat Fraser did his famous striptease (somewhat NSFW) a few years ago. I swear this post isn't all about me meeting celebrities. I've never met any of the people in the other podcasts I listen to (except Julia, but I met her before she started doing her podcast, so she doesn't count).
This one is all Julia's fault. She kept on talking about how fabulous Mark Kermode was, and I kept on thinking, "Okay, fine. I'm sure he's great. But I don't care. I hardly ever get the chance to watch movies, and when I do, they're rarely the top 10 box office hits. I can't even remember the last time I went to a movie theater. Why should I care?" But finally I decided to give it a try, and she was so completely right. You don't have to care about the movies. Kermode uses even the most dreadful blockbuster trashballs to produce hilarious, brainworthy radio. He uses both the good movies and the bad ones to discuss bigger issues in the society that produced them, from a Socialist/Feminist/Slightly Commie perspective (he's been known to bust out into The Internationale more than once in the middle of a review), and he gets so excited about even trivial little details that you can't help but giggle. Mayo is a great foil and straight man. Again, whenever Kermode is off-duty and they bring in the adequate but unremarkable substitutes, I think to myself, "Why the hell am I listening to a radio show about first-run movies again?"; it kind of feels like a waste of time. But then every time Kermode comes back on I know the answer. And now I finally understand the Kermode Horror Corner!
I've been reading Ursula Vernon's blog for a few years now. I like the way she writes about her art career and her garden, and some of her art I like a hell of a lot. (Some of it is too cutesy for me, but she's undeniably talented, and seriously smart.) I've also been trying to eat better lately, and K. has been a sterling influence on me. We cook from scratch using fresh ingredients -- heavy on the vegetables, light on the animal products -- several times a week, and it's lovely delicious stuff. But the sneaky little demon of my early 20s still lurks within me, reminding me how great those frozen White Castle cheeseburgers were and begging to taste just once more the forbidden nectar of Smucker's Uncrustables. I (mostly) stave off these cravings vicariously, by listening to Kevin and Ursula eat their way through the most ungodly prepackaged foodstuffs ever devised by man. "We eat it so you don't have to" is their motto, and I hope it doesn't lead them to an early death, but damn they're funny suckers while they're at it.
It's Julia, brilliantly interviewing LGBT speculative fiction authors and other luminaries of the field. What's not to love? Not only is Julia's voice like a balm to the ears, but she has a talent for directing the conversation in a subtle but calculated way, so that there's a minimum of dithering and a maximum of oomph. The guests tend to be quite interesting, sometimes there's excerpts of fiction, and it makes me really happy to realize how wide and weird the queer spec fic community is.
I know opinions are sharply divided on Mr. Savage. I think he's a good guy who occasionally enjoys being a stubborn obnoxious buttwad, but his opinions tend to be more nuanced and reflective in the podcast than in the newspaper column, partly because he can actually call up the people asking for advice and have conversations with them, which makes it harder for him to keep up his half-joking-half-serious authoritative prescriptivist front. Also, even though they never actually speak or reveal their identities, I like getting glimpses of the behind-the-scenes commentary and criticism from the Tech-Savvy At-Risk Youth.
Honestly, I liked it a bit better when it was over at Freelance Switch and included John Brougher, who tended to have a nicely tempering effect on the conversation. But there's still some pretty good stuff in there, most episodes. It's two designers and a copywriter, so their actual jobs don't have much overlap with mine, but the administrative tips are occasionally useful, and it's just kind of nice to hear from people who are making their own way of it and negotiating with clients one-on-one. If you're not a freelancer, you probably won't care much, but until I set up my own podcast (I'm gonna call it "Gigging", and it'll be specifically about freelancers like me, who get paid for doing what we do live, by the hour, in front of the client -- as opposed to just getting a project, going home and doing it, and then turning it in by a particular deadline, like the vast majority of freelancing sites tend to focus on. I figure it could be a CART provider, an ASL interpreter, a pit or session musician, and some other self-employed onsite worker like a housekeeper, electrician, or welder. If you know anyone who might be interested, pass 'em along. ('; )
So those are the podcasts filling up my phone most often these days. Any recommendations for me to add to the list?
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(5)
02:30:38 PM,Monday 20 June 2011
"Unicorn Variation", was written as a result of Zelazny having been asked to contribute to two different upcoming anthologies — one collecting stories set in bars, and one collecting stories about unicorns. When Zelazny mentioned these requests to his close friend George R. R. Martin, the other told Zelazny of a third upcoming anthology — one which would collect stories about chess — and jokingly suggested that Zelazny write a story about playing chess against a unicorn in a bar, so that he could sell the story three times. Zelazny did just that and then went on to win a Hugo Award for the story.
Okay, that definitely explains a few things.
I talk about this story all the time, primarily to K., who is skeptical that anything with a premise like that can be anywhere near as good as I insist it is. I was going to post the mp3 I found of the story, but then I realized it was narrated by some standoffish British guy; must have been the UK version. The one I used to listen to constantly on cassette tape in my youth was narrated brilliantly by Rene Auberjonois, and sadly I can't seem to find his version online anywhere. Too bad, 'cause he did all the voices and everything.
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02:30:10 PM,Monday 20 June 2011
Pulling an all-nighter tonight, editing the play I'm captioning at noon. Yeah, I put it off a little too long; I'll try to lay out my week better next time, so it doesn't happen again. Script editing is tedious work. Every little flub or substitution I spotted during the preview has to get incorporated into the final captioning script. That means lots of tiny word changes, from "start" to "begin" or from "it's" to "that's". It's a three-hour, 15,000-word play. It takes a while. My brain gets restless if I don't give it something to chew on while I'm doing all this scutwork, so I tend to listen to podcasts or watch movies on my other monitor. Tonight, for some reason, my brain decided it wanted a double feature of Robert Redford movies: The Sting, which I hadn't seen before, and Sneakers, which I've seen at least four times. Why not? Makes as much sense as anything else, I suppose.
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(2)
05:33:24 AM,Saturday 18 June 2011
I can't live this lie any longer. The strain is just too great. I have to come clean.
Yes, it's true.
I'm actually a 62-year-old Canadian lumberjack named Ernest Willibart Throckmorton.
I apologize to everyone I've hurt by my deception. I was just trying to bring the plight of 30-something New York City lesbian stenographers into the public eye. WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE 30-SOMETHING NEW YORK CITY LESBIAN STENOGRAPHERS?!
If you feel that your trust has been abused by the fictitious persona represented on this blog, I'm very sorry that you're such a credulous idiot.
Suckers.
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(11)
10:00:18 PM,Monday 13 June 2011
Opinions about this picture, please. Would you hang it on your wall? If it was hanging on your wall and you could jump into and out of it at will, would you?
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(7)
03:46:36 PM,Wednesday 8 June 2011
