Disjointedness: Prospect Hill Park; stupid LJ scrapbook; Bare-Faced Messiah
Mar 19, 2010 14:52
Um, so I guess there's this quite large park in Waltham? These days my route to work takes me right by the entrance, but I'd never gone and checked it out until recently. It's on an impressive hill (the second-highest place in eastern Mass, the Internet tells me, after Blue Hill), so walking around there gives you some dramatic overlooks as well as being perilously close to Legitimate Exercise. It's also a bit derelict and scuzzy. Broken glass aside, though, that's not a bad thing, since it means it's dotted with bizarre structures like this and a pair of these and best of all this.
Fah, why must LJ's scrapbook feature be so incredibly weird and buggy? Srsly, it's the most aggressively un-QC-ed thing ever. Sometimes I try to flip a picture 90 degrees to the right and I get an error page saying "Validation error. Refusing to rotate picture without being sure you meant it." Or I create a gallery, click on "Upload picture," and am taken to a page that just says "Upload Picture." I mean, what? Yes, yes I would like to upload a picture. How might I comply with this order, LJ Scrapbook?
Speaking of mandatory compliance, I've spent the last week obsessively reading two evilly mesmerizing online things about Scientology: Counterfeit Dreams and Bare-Faced Messiah. The former is an ex-Scientology marketing bigwig's blog/autobiography; it starts out in the late 60s, but has a lot to say about the post-Hubbard Miscavige era. The latter's from 1987, so it doesn't really get up to Miscavige-rather it's a tell-all, interview-laden biography of Hubbard himself. Writing quality's meh; content is balls-out, rabbitholesomely fascinating. I won't say it was precisely good for my mental health, reading about this crazed mountebank and his depredations, but . . . great stuff, nonetheless.