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November 4th, 2009
10:38 pm - three good things
1) While Neil Gaiman was in China, the guy who maintained his blog experimented with several journal styles (http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/10/i-have-chart-dragon-chart.html). Scroll down and check out "Journal as Academic Paper."
2) Slate has been running an ongoing parody of an Obama Facebook presence. It skewers both Facebook *and* politics, and I giggled so hard I made embarrassing noises in my cubicle when I discovered the October 30th entry: http://www.slate.com/id/2234008/
3) Though I watch SPN, CW/J2 RPF generally just doesn't grab me. But yesterday Crack Impala recced Neros' This Is the Ultimate (http://neros-violin.livejournal.com/4587.html), an AU set in the UFC, and I stayed up later than I should have to read it all in one go.
There is never enough time/sleep in my new life. However, BG continues to be AWESOME, brilliant and hilarious and OMG SO CUTE!!!
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July 5th, 2009
03:31 pm - Happy Independence Day yesterday! plus rambling
I had all these plans to take the BG to the fireworks in Takoma (=less crowded than the ones on the Mall and perhaps more like my childhood memories of the ones on the Mall, before they created an elaborate, celebrity-filled celebration and then created elaborate security protocols to deal with the resulting crowds).
Instead, we went to the neighborhood parade in the morning. It was led by a delegation from the Marine Band, and an excellent local high school marching band brought up the rear, and in between there were cars advertising real estate agents and a couple women dressed as the Statue of Liberty and lots of parents and kids marching on behalf of one school or another. (My favorites were the kids who tossed candy to the bystanders - and then ran to grab the pieces that fell short for themselves.) After that, I felt like we had celebrated pretty well
I keep thinking of Minotaur at the most random times -- editing an article about San Diego at work, or dabbing a bit of diaper cream on the BG's taint. Still, I don't know if it will really hit me that he's gone until CON.TXT. RM is *really* going to miss him -- he looked forward to hanging out with Stuart at slash cons.
Lately I've been watching TrueBlood and Burn Notice (though not slashing either). It's a fun exercise to watch TB and compare the plot structure to the books; the TV writers often take a wildly different path to get to a similar place.
I've also been watching a lot of this video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Za-V_lhwGg. I thought it was awesome to begin with, but I made the mistake of watching it with BG, and she likes to replay it 5 or 10 times every morning.
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June 22nd, 2009
10:48 pm - Gah, it's been a while.
memo to the washington post: The phrase A Tense Calm is something of an oxymoron. A "tense quiet" might be more apt.
memo to my left wrist: As it is unlikely I will be able to stop picking up a squirming 25+ pounds anytime in the foreseeable future, please to stop hurting now. Thank you.
memo to whoever created the heavens and the earth: perhaps You were a bit hasty in dismissing a 25-hour day. Heck, 26 wouldn't be so bad.
memo to my daddy: thank you for being an awesome father and an even better grandpapa.
memo to Alan Ball: I actually think it's cool that you are using the Sookie Stackhouse books as a starting point and moving forward in different directions. But I don't think I can sit through another episode about the Jesus Fellowship of the Sun camp. (I was raised an uptight Episcopalian, evangelical fervor makes me SQUIRM.)
memo to Charlaine Harris: Eric>Bill
memo to the BBC: I don't think you meant to say that grizzly bears live in "Canada and North America." I think you meant Canada and the northern United States. Don't be like those people who think "South America" refers to the former confederacy. You're the *Beeb*.
memo to myself: Get to bed already!
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May 4th, 2009
08:15 pm - a series of nonsequiturs
I am molly-o on dreamwidth now, but I'm not abandoning LJ anytime soon. I'll gradually be switching over to read people over there that are over there, but I'll keep on reading people here that are here. (That's barely intelligible, but y'all know what I mean.)
RM & I saw Wolverine, and already I can barely remember the details, except that I liked how Liev Schreiber *bounded*.
BG is doing really well, except that we can't convince her to sleep past 6 am. Yesterday I put stuff over her windows to make it darker in there, and this morning she was up at 5-freakin'-30.
I know there are other things that have happened in the past month or so that I contemplated posting here, but I have no idea what they might have been.
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March 19th, 2009
March 7th, 2009
January 20th, 2009
12:43 pm
At 11:55 or so I turned on the TV and corralled the Baby Girl in front of it. She would have preferred to roam, but I was having none of it: "You won't remember this, but I will tell you about it when you get older, that you were here and saw this happen, saw this man become president."
She quieted down during Simple Gifts -- which is good, because I was transfixed by the expressions that moved across Yo Yo Ma's face as he played -- and made it through the swearing in, but fell asleep as we listened to Obama's speech.
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January 17th, 2009
08:50 am
So I'm googling this Sullenberger guy -- who did seven years in the Air Force -- and it turns out there's a Sullenberger stables, and for some reason that seemed like a bizarre coincidence, like we're in the AU where John's last name is Sullenberger and Dave is running the stables while John is a commercial pilot. Or maybe that's just because I read this yesterday.
Also, should I be concerned that the character on TV who always says just what I was saying a minute ago is Dean Winchester?
( not really spoilery, but ... )
Also, I am slightly embarrassed by how much I want to see My Bloody Valentine in 3D.
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December 13th, 2008
09:46 pm
In our edition of Goodnight Moon, you say goodnight to the clock and the socks -- but the clock and socks are never introduced. Is that really how the book goes? The lack of parallelism annoys me Every Single Time I read it (currently 8-10 times a week).
Also, ( watching SGA last night ... )
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November 19th, 2008
03:45 pm
I guess LJ was down? I didn't notice so much, seeing as how RM and I are halfway around the world with a small person who pretty much has to be touching one of us 24/7. (She is shaping up to be a Daddy's girl, and RM is all worried my feelings will be hurt, and I'm like, dude? I'm allowed to sleep without a 24-pound dead weight on my right shoulder all night long, I think I'll get over it.)
She is so fucking AWESOME. (I suppose I should say f-ing awesome, being a parent now.)
She will eat ANYTHING. She has eaten and apparently enjoyed every single thing we've tried out -- and mostly, we buy her adult food and give her little bits of it; it's one of the wonderful things about becoming parents to an 11-month old, all the food restrictions that apply to infants are pretty much done. The only thing she seems not to like is strawberry yogurt. (She's doing much better than Mark: he's eaten half a cheeseburger and one scrambled egg in the four days we've been here. OK, that's an exaggeration, but not much of one.)
Today at the national palace museum, she got bored with the cheerios I was feeding her one at a time and started feeding them back to me. It was so cute I almost died on the spot.
She hates baths, diapers changes, and clothing changes with a hatred that burns like a thousand fiery suns. During those events, she screams at a pitch I would think only dogs could hear, except that we can totally hear it. The whole block can hear it. Yesterday one of her socks fell off somewhere in the hotel corridor -- I have no idea when/where -- ad they brought it straight to our room, because there's no mistaking which room has a kid in it. But she doesn't hold grudges: As soon as the torment stops, she's fine.
She LOVES walking outside and looking at everything -- mopeds, fountains, flashing neon, you name it. When Mark and I are both in the room, she much prefers to be held by daddy (baba), but as soon as I step out in the hall with her in the carrier, she gets all quiet, and then we'll take a walk to the park together and I'll give her some milk and cheerios and bits of nori (I think it's nori -- they call it dried laver, it's the sheets of dried seaweed you use to make sushi rolls? that is one of her favorite snacks ever, her foster mom gave us a package with 50 individual packets of little strips of it, and it's been a godsend), and she hangs out on my lap and then dozes off and sleeps on me.
She doesn't say anything yet (in English or Mandarin, that we can tell), but she knows her nickname -- if you say Ai Ai, she'll turn and see what you want.
When baba is carrying her and she drinks from her sippy cup, she flings her head back and throws one arm out, and it's so sweet, and you can tell she *trusts* us, which is just amazing.
I will try to post some photos sometime, the internet is iffy here.
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November 2nd, 2008
08:28 pm - whoa
I'm doing some spring fall cleaning, and I ran across a box with letters and cards and clippings from way back when -- mostly my freshman year of college, but some earlier.
Buried at the bottom of the box was a copy of a school newspaper from June 1981 announcing the student body leaders for the 1981-82 academic year: Susan Rice and Heather Langenkamp.
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October 31st, 2008
08:58 pm - random observations
1. If you go to the SGA page on the SciFi site (http://www.scifi.com/atlantis/), there's this image of the various cast members with one person big in front, and a couple people medium-sized and set slightly back, and the rest smaller at the back. And if you hit refresh the arrangement changes -- it's all the same pictures, but they rearrange them and resize them to put different people up front.
And if you hit refresh so that Woolsey is up front? John and Ronon are holding hands. No, really -- try it and see!
2. Jensen Ackles lip-synching "Eye of the Tiger" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMOUdtEqymQ&feature=related) is one of the more hilarious things EVER. Gah, he's just so darn CUTE.
3. There was probably a 3 at some point, but I lost track of it daydreaming about Jensen Ackles.
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September 19th, 2008
10:10 am - Bitch PhD always brings the good stuff!
A couple days ago, it was a tax chart comparing how Obama's and McCain's proposals would affect each bracket. There's an issue with math in the average, which may or may not have been corrected, but I find the bracket-by-bracket data more relevant than the average, anyway. (The average doesn't actually apply to anyone.):
http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2008/09/lies-and-taxes-ii-real-average.html
Then this morning she linked to this post from Margaret Cho that made me really happy:
http://www.margaretcho.com/blog/2008/09/17/im-a-christian-you-fuckers.html
Meanwhile, just so I can have some non-political, fannish content:
RM & I watched Supernatural last night, and it was classic, classic SPN, in all the ways that are good and bad. The opening credits alone were worth the price of admission: I love AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long," and OF COURSE Dean's Car is gonna be "she" during the lyrics about fast machine, motor clean. But then they get to the lyric about fighting for air, and all of a sudden the she of the song becomes all the unreliable-and-occasionally-outright-evil women of the show. And finally, when it gets to the you shook me all night long part, there's no she anymore, it's the brothers fighting together.
And that, right there -- before the actual episode has even begun -- perfectly captures the fun and misogyny and slashiness of Supernatural. If it were edited a little better, it almost could've been a fan vid.
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September 15th, 2008
12:52 pm - I found the metaphor I needed!
It's a job interview: If you were applying for a position, and you knew who the other applicant was, would you spend your whole interview talking about how terrible the other applicant would be and pointing out the problems with his or her resume? Or would you spend your interview talking about how great you would be for the job?
In the endless interview that is the presidential race, Obama is doing a great job of focusing on what he would bring to the position. But all his friends are calling the HR department to point out how much the other candidate sucks. And the folks in HR (=the American public) are saying, "We like this guy, his resume is solid, he's a great interview -- but what's up with his friends? They're acting like jerks. If we hire him, will we have to work with them?"
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September 4th, 2008
10:09 pm - i swear, if we lose another one, I think I'll go insane
So, I finally figured out how to articulate what's been bugging me about Sarah Palin -- or really, what's been bugging me about the liberal reaction to Palin. (And by "liberal reaction," I pretty much mean the various blogs/journals I read. At this point, it's easier for me to keep track of which bloggers *haven't* posted something indignant.)
The last two elections, hanging chads and all, really came down to the culture wars. Twenty years ago, no one talked about red states and blue states; now it's practically an inescapable part of political analysis.
The promise of Obama is that he refuses to get into the culture wars. He doesn't say, "Pro-life people suck!" He says, "Hey, if you believe life begins at conception, we're never going to agree on that. But can't we agree to work together to reduce unintended pregnancies?"
*That's* the change that has so many people so motivated to elect him: Not a change from R to D, but a change away from partisan politics and toward a united nation.
So now Palin comes along, and she embodies all these things that send liberal folks (including me, definitely) off the rails -- she's pro-life! and she thinks schools should teach creationism! and she like to kill animals with guns! -- and all of a sudden, we're back in the culture wars.
So voters who are pro-life but aren't single-issue voters, and who like to hunt on crisp fall weekends, and who feel like the war in Iraq has just gone on too long, and who are sold on the need for universal health care? Those people, who were seriously considering voting for Obama because McCain isn't doing much for them, are now running across all these rants about how much people who think like they do are OUTRAGEOUS and IGNORANT and RUINING THIS COUNTRY.
Way to bridge the divide, people. Way to be the change you want to see.
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September 2nd, 2008
07:08 pm - V is for Variety ...
V is for Van Halen, the Violent Femmes, Suzanne Vega, and Vixen.
Also, when Sherman Alexie and Dan Savage join forces, the results are genius. NSFW, but *genius*. (Keep reading to the end of the column.):
http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-09-03/columns/where-can-i-find-native-american-porn
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September 1st, 2008
11:14 am
I've been watching "80 Hours of the 80s" on VH-1 much of this weekend. When I think of the 80s, I think of *my* 80s, the New Wave-ish 80s: Duran Duran, A-Ha, New Order, Soft Cell. Madonna and Prince, of course, but also the Police and the Smiths and the Cure and Depeche Mode. I cherish some less well-known acts like Icicle Works and Romeo Void as art of "my" 80s.
I acknowledge hair bands (Ratt, Poison) as 80s bands -- they weren't *my* 80s bands, but they were definitely part of the era. And of course both Michael and Janet Jackson were part of the era for me.
I'd completely forgotten about .38 Special, and Toto, and the Pointer Sisters, and even Hall & Oates - all the bands that were there, and part of the landscape, but not part of the ... I don't know, signature musical movements of the decade? It's been really nice to realize how diverse the music of that decade was.
On an unrelated note, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) toft_froggy's Healing Station Argh is an SGA OT4 fic that is not only scorchingly hot but also will make you spew your beverage of choice in all directions.
I think my favorite line ever is: ( not spoilery, but behind a cut just to be on the safe side ) But the ice farmers are pretty darn hilarious, too.
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June 29th, 2008
11:43 am - Anne, Jane -- whatever
So RM and I were at the movies a while back, and we saw a trailer for Get Smart. And I asked, "Would you want to see that?" And he said, "Not unless it has Jane Hathaway naked."
And then I had this mental image of RM's face if Miss Jane Hathaway appeared naked before him.
And then I giggled for, like, five minutes.
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June 16th, 2008
12:56 pm - More Things I Learned at CON.TXT ...
Day 2:
+ The dorkiness of John Sheppard is beyond contestation
+ If it’s good writing, it’s fanon; if it’s bad, it’s crap.
+ If you watch SE’s John/Ronon vid “Red Moon” before you watch Shalott’s John/Rodney vid “Bohemian Like You,” the line about the “who’s that guy” is EVEN FUNNIER.
Day 3:
+ The lovely and talented Shoshanna is a fantastic auctioneer. (To be fair, I knew that already.)
+ CON.TXT is the friendliest, least wanky slash con ever -- but we need to schedule panels sooner.
+ Everyone feels sorry for the VHS tapes, but no one wants to take them home.
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June 14th, 2008
09:12 am - Three Things I learned on the first day of CON.TXT
1) Relax, by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, is not a particularly good accompaniment to a photo of Brokeback Mountain's Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist. It just does not work AT ALL.
2) Soft Cell's Tainted Love, on the other hand, works a lots better than you might expect.
3) A slash fandom wiki that helped orient newbies would be a useful thing. My first panel of the day (Fannish Lore and Terminology) and my last panel of the day (Creating a Safe Space for Fans of Color) were in agreement on this.
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