I remember it all very clear, lookin' back.
I'm having difficulty launching this entry, because for once it lacks the strong thematic currents and crisp organization that I would ordinarily take pains to frame here in the pre-cut text.
No, seriously. Here's a mess o' links. Looking for something to read that's even longer than this entry? All finished with JDatE, but still hungry for (now-complete) online serialized fiction? This one has superheroes. Looking for something more in the neighborhood of this entry, both in length and hosting? I found a good post with a javelin in it. Perhaps you're willing to put in the effort of reading both a post and the comments thereto? You really do have to read the comments, at least a few (you'll know when you've reached the essential ones). Promise? Okay. Here's one, and here's the other. And finally, a heart-warming tale from Holland. While you're there, read the whole .pdf. You won't regret it.
On to my regularly scheduled life. Let us consider, for instance, Saturday morning's fire alarm. It's been a while since we had bullet points (or has it? Not looking), and nothing says 'Happy Holidays' like math, so let's see if I can't construct some sort of… thing combining all that.
The fire alarm went off Saturday morning at 3:34.
While on the subject of cats: my wards have become much more friendly. I stay longer and read magazines on the shabby couch, and they come and sit with me, or walk around on the back of the sofa behind my head, or take turns sitting on the pillow and leaping up to bite the butt of the pillow-sitter. I got around to naming them, even: the round female, who carries her tail curled back onto her spine, like a handle, is Teapot. The skinny male, who has basically the same markings (on white) except in orange tabby, not black, is Agenda, since for the first two days he was entirely hidden. As it turns out, their names are Polly and Owen, respectively, but they don't seem to mind.
I'd thought of spending Christmas with them, actually, until I discovered that 1) the collection of "Twin Peaks" tapes under the television is missing episodes 10-19, and 2) the VCR doesn't work anyway. I could have worked around the first problem - the first season is evidently more essential, and in any case there are only so many hours in the day (actually, 29 episodes plus the two-hour pilot would juuuuuuust fit, assuming the usual 3:1 show/commercials ratio, and further assuming no sleep, which considering the subject matter is not an impossibility) - but the second required MacGuyvering, rather than a simple adjustment of expectations. So there went my plans for a marathon of festive programming. I'm not sure why I want to see the show to begin with. I think I half-remember one of my parents mentioning it, likely in the context of "The X-Files" (the Denise episodes are in the lamented 10-19 gap), but whether to praise it or to bury it (or to suggest that I would fit right in to the backwoods-weirdness of it), I don't know. It's not my love of Lynch films, because I've never seen one. I'm also fairly sure it's not because of the amazing acting talent of David Duchovny, or Kyle MacLachlan's later turn in Rich in Love, a movie - and book - that came near to permanently deafening me back in ninth grade, simultaneously sucking and blowing in a way that threatened to rupture my eardrums. I forget precisely why they underwhelmed me so: was it some innate assiness, or only the damning juxtaposition with Boy's Life and some of Salinger's short stories? I mean, even Salinger's novels look bad next to that collection.
Right, so the recaps of "Twin Peaks" are extremely entertaining, and someday I will sit down and watch the series. Not this week, though. I did borrow a few DVDs after Hitchhiker's: first I Heart Huckabees, then The Royal Tenenbaums. I will point out only that mere hours before deciding to watch the latter, I was linked, without explanation, from a DHAK site to this page. Imagine my surprise upon watching the film that evening. Gonnections, my friends, if not quite at the I<3H level. Completing which thought cluster, Jason Schwartzman has a 2-second uncredited cameo in Hitchhiker's. Ladies and gentlemen, the circle of IMDB.
I'm holding back part of my Christmas story until, God willing, I can develop the pictures I took today. I could however give you a quick gift run-down, regale you with tales of my holiday repast, and/or annoyingly hint at future entries that may never come to pass (much like that scariest of all Muppets, except without the life-changing results). I will do the first. Best DVD is courtesy of Virginia, who gave me Moskva slezam ne verit, the film that started me on my comic-booking path and also raised the supremely important questions "What the hell is Gosha doing with that fish?" and "That is a fish, isn't it?" I'm not exactly recommending you run out and rent it, but it's a fun Soviet movie, for those of you into that sort of thing. One of the leads also looks a bit like Dooce, from certain angles.
Best CD comes to me from la_zumo. This category is the only one with real competition, in fact, since she included two in the extremely heterogeneous package she sent: one by Miranda!, and "Music for Two," the 'two' being Edgar Meyer and the always-delightful Béla Fleck. I'm giving the nod to the latter, because in addition to Mr. Fleck's being insanely talented, and attractive in an insanely talented, older, moderately goofy Moldovan way (he's not from Moldova, so far as I know, but the resemblance is undeniable), his website contains the following statement:The recipients of Multiple Grammy Awards going back to 1998, Béla Fleck & the Flecktones picked up the Best Contemporary Jazz Performance, Instrumental Grammy in 2000 for "Outbound", a typically wide-ranging project… built around Fleck's concept of "the banjo being weird."
Preach it, brother. And then haul in fifteen random dudes and their instruments of choice to jam it. I think Béla Fleck is the Yo-Yo Ma of the banjo.
Best Food Product, albeit with a sizeable asterisk, is unquestionably owed to the pumpkin pudding (mix) my mom included in my stocking (not until my family called this morning did I learn that the snowman-thing in the box she sent was in fact a stocking with presents inside. I am observant as all hell). Sadly, I have only 1-1/2 cups of milk in my apartment today, and therefore haven't been able to make it yet, but as a diehard pumpkin fan, I'm pretty sure it's going to be… pumpkin-flavored pudding. Not sure yet if that's a good thing. What would rule is pumpkin-flavored Jell-o. Imagine a pumpkin jello shot. Seriously. Is that not shudder-inducing? Yet that's the one kind I would be willing to try. The color. The consistency. Gah? Or brilliant?
Best Thing makes it two for Mom, who sent me - no lie - a battery-powered color-changing fiber-optic Santa. It's a resin figure, with little holes for the lights. And the lights pulse through color changes. It's unbelievable. I suspect it of all kinds of evil. Perhaps most sinister of all, its arrival means I can no longer give Jackson grief about the cheese-mailing thing, because who am I kidding? My mom mailed me a battery-powered color-changing fiber-optic Santa. The odds are a solid 1:1 that I inherited that gene, so I'd be wise to stop throwing stones in case my house develops adult-onset glassness. If you see what I'm saying.
Then, for the hat trick, Mom blows it all right the fuck out of the water through the subtle, seemingly effortless inclusion of a course catalogue for the John C. Campbell Folk School, an institution in North Carolina that apparently exists to soothe the souls and inflame the minds of acknowledged losers such as 1) me and 2) members of SCA. They don't just teach blacksmithing, they teach courses in recreating tenth-century Viking metalwork. They will help you play the banjo, or build the banjo. In 2006 there will be nine classes in spinning. Thirty-three in weaving. Fourteen in bookbinding. Intriguingly, the catalogue was addressed to me (at home), which I suppose means the Loom Lady is behind it. Note, if you will, her dutiful adherence to the best crack-dealing methods: give 'em a free sample, then rrrrrrrrreeeeeeel 'em in. I'm hooked, y'all. The bait is so tasty I don't even mind knowing that this will all end in sadness and having my brains beat out on the side of a boat and my body thrown into a cooler. That might be more of a heroin metaphor, but either way, Merry Christmas.
Or Happy Chanukah. See if I care.
No, seriously. Here's a mess o' links. Looking for something to read that's even longer than this entry? All finished with JDatE, but still hungry for (now-complete) online serialized fiction? This one has superheroes. Looking for something more in the neighborhood of this entry, both in length and hosting? I found a good post with a javelin in it. Perhaps you're willing to put in the effort of reading both a post and the comments thereto? You really do have to read the comments, at least a few (you'll know when you've reached the essential ones). Promise? Okay. Here's one, and here's the other. And finally, a heart-warming tale from Holland. While you're there, read the whole .pdf. You won't regret it.
On to my regularly scheduled life. Let us consider, for instance, Saturday morning's fire alarm. It's been a while since we had bullet points (or has it? Not looking), and nothing says 'Happy Holidays' like math, so let's see if I can't construct some sort of… thing combining all that.
The fire alarm went off Saturday morning at 3:34.
- That's 3:34 AM. -5
- Our alarm is really stupid: "whoooooooOOOOOP whoooooooOOOOOP BRRRRNNN BRRRRNNN [spoken message that there's a fire and not to use the elevators]" repeated ad nauseam and not loudly enough. I'm not a terribly deep sleeper, but that didn't exactly propel me into wakefulness and out of bed. These suckers have nothing on Rutherford's incredible brain-melting dissonance. -2
- But at least it wasn't Rutherford's incredible brain-melting dissonance. I lived 30 feet from a door there; seven flights of stairs with that thing would be miserable. +2
- When I passed the firemen in the stairwell, we exchanged pleasant morning greetings. +1
- And I wasn't the one climbing ten flights of stairs at 3:34 AM. +1
- There really isn't anywhere to sit in a parking lot, especially on a wet night. -3
- The parking lot wasn't too cold for my quickly assembled attire. Plus the puddles were in a bizarre half-congealed state, and consequently fun to step in. +2
- I saw a kitten! +3
- The dorm did not, in fact, burn down on Christmas Eve morning. +4
- If it had, I could have walked over to EM & Rick's house and gone back to sleep. +1
- There are two more kittens there. +2
While on the subject of cats: my wards have become much more friendly. I stay longer and read magazines on the shabby couch, and they come and sit with me, or walk around on the back of the sofa behind my head, or take turns sitting on the pillow and leaping up to bite the butt of the pillow-sitter. I got around to naming them, even: the round female, who carries her tail curled back onto her spine, like a handle, is Teapot. The skinny male, who has basically the same markings (on white) except in orange tabby, not black, is Agenda, since for the first two days he was entirely hidden. As it turns out, their names are Polly and Owen, respectively, but they don't seem to mind.
I'd thought of spending Christmas with them, actually, until I discovered that 1) the collection of "Twin Peaks" tapes under the television is missing episodes 10-19, and 2) the VCR doesn't work anyway. I could have worked around the first problem - the first season is evidently more essential, and in any case there are only so many hours in the day (actually, 29 episodes plus the two-hour pilot would juuuuuuust fit, assuming the usual 3:1 show/commercials ratio, and further assuming no sleep, which considering the subject matter is not an impossibility) - but the second required MacGuyvering, rather than a simple adjustment of expectations. So there went my plans for a marathon of festive programming. I'm not sure why I want to see the show to begin with. I think I half-remember one of my parents mentioning it, likely in the context of "The X-Files" (the Denise episodes are in the lamented 10-19 gap), but whether to praise it or to bury it (or to suggest that I would fit right in to the backwoods-weirdness of it), I don't know. It's not my love of Lynch films, because I've never seen one. I'm also fairly sure it's not because of the amazing acting talent of David Duchovny, or Kyle MacLachlan's later turn in Rich in Love, a movie - and book - that came near to permanently deafening me back in ninth grade, simultaneously sucking and blowing in a way that threatened to rupture my eardrums. I forget precisely why they underwhelmed me so: was it some innate assiness, or only the damning juxtaposition with Boy's Life and some of Salinger's short stories? I mean, even Salinger's novels look bad next to that collection.
Right, so the recaps of "Twin Peaks" are extremely entertaining, and someday I will sit down and watch the series. Not this week, though. I did borrow a few DVDs after Hitchhiker's: first I Heart Huckabees, then The Royal Tenenbaums. I will point out only that mere hours before deciding to watch the latter, I was linked, without explanation, from a DHAK site to this page. Imagine my surprise upon watching the film that evening. Gonnections, my friends, if not quite at the I<3H level. Completing which thought cluster, Jason Schwartzman has a 2-second uncredited cameo in Hitchhiker's. Ladies and gentlemen, the circle of IMDB.
I'm holding back part of my Christmas story until, God willing, I can develop the pictures I took today. I could however give you a quick gift run-down, regale you with tales of my holiday repast, and/or annoyingly hint at future entries that may never come to pass (much like that scariest of all Muppets, except without the life-changing results). I will do the first. Best DVD is courtesy of Virginia, who gave me Moskva slezam ne verit, the film that started me on my comic-booking path and also raised the supremely important questions "What the hell is Gosha doing with that fish?" and "That is a fish, isn't it?" I'm not exactly recommending you run out and rent it, but it's a fun Soviet movie, for those of you into that sort of thing. One of the leads also looks a bit like Dooce, from certain angles.
Best CD comes to me from la_zumo. This category is the only one with real competition, in fact, since she included two in the extremely heterogeneous package she sent: one by Miranda!, and "Music for Two," the 'two' being Edgar Meyer and the always-delightful Béla Fleck. I'm giving the nod to the latter, because in addition to Mr. Fleck's being insanely talented, and attractive in an insanely talented, older, moderately goofy Moldovan way (he's not from Moldova, so far as I know, but the resemblance is undeniable), his website contains the following statement:The recipients of Multiple Grammy Awards going back to 1998, Béla Fleck & the Flecktones picked up the Best Contemporary Jazz Performance, Instrumental Grammy in 2000 for "Outbound", a typically wide-ranging project… built around Fleck's concept of "the banjo being weird."
Preach it, brother. And then haul in fifteen random dudes and their instruments of choice to jam it. I think Béla Fleck is the Yo-Yo Ma of the banjo.
Best Food Product, albeit with a sizeable asterisk, is unquestionably owed to the pumpkin pudding (mix) my mom included in my stocking (not until my family called this morning did I learn that the snowman-thing in the box she sent was in fact a stocking with presents inside. I am observant as all hell). Sadly, I have only 1-1/2 cups of milk in my apartment today, and therefore haven't been able to make it yet, but as a diehard pumpkin fan, I'm pretty sure it's going to be… pumpkin-flavored pudding. Not sure yet if that's a good thing. What would rule is pumpkin-flavored Jell-o. Imagine a pumpkin jello shot. Seriously. Is that not shudder-inducing? Yet that's the one kind I would be willing to try. The color. The consistency. Gah? Or brilliant?
Best Thing makes it two for Mom, who sent me - no lie - a battery-powered color-changing fiber-optic Santa. It's a resin figure, with little holes for the lights. And the lights pulse through color changes. It's unbelievable. I suspect it of all kinds of evil. Perhaps most sinister of all, its arrival means I can no longer give Jackson grief about the cheese-mailing thing, because who am I kidding? My mom mailed me a battery-powered color-changing fiber-optic Santa. The odds are a solid 1:1 that I inherited that gene, so I'd be wise to stop throwing stones in case my house develops adult-onset glassness. If you see what I'm saying.
Then, for the hat trick, Mom blows it all right the fuck out of the water through the subtle, seemingly effortless inclusion of a course catalogue for the John C. Campbell Folk School, an institution in North Carolina that apparently exists to soothe the souls and inflame the minds of acknowledged losers such as 1) me and 2) members of SCA. They don't just teach blacksmithing, they teach courses in recreating tenth-century Viking metalwork. They will help you play the banjo, or build the banjo. In 2006 there will be nine classes in spinning. Thirty-three in weaving. Fourteen in bookbinding. Intriguingly, the catalogue was addressed to me (at home), which I suppose means the Loom Lady is behind it. Note, if you will, her dutiful adherence to the best crack-dealing methods: give 'em a free sample, then rrrrrrrrreeeeeeel 'em in. I'm hooked, y'all. The bait is so tasty I don't even mind knowing that this will all end in sadness and having my brains beat out on the side of a boat and my body thrown into a cooler. That might be more of a heroin metaphor, but either way, Merry Christmas.
Or Happy Chanukah. See if I care.