Ticklish Ideas

Great reading. Singularly bad choice for bedtime.

H. P. Lovecraft : Tales (Library of America) ed. Peter Straub

Posts will probably be extremely sparse for a while. I started a new job last week and I've been bowled over by mass quantities of new information.

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Originally uploaded by mav3n.

You can order one here.

State Board of Education member Connie Morris took exception Wednesday to a picture of a made-up creature that satirizes the state's new science standards hanging on a Stucky Middle School teacher's door.

via Pharyngula

There is a beautiful and relaxing but also addictive deep sea game here.

More Beautiful deep sea images (webcomic) can be found here. A few of the comics are fun to read, but mostly they're just pretty.

I'm hunting for the storyline about the seahorse who finds out he is pregnant and his career-minded wife freaks out because the timing is bad. Can't find it so far.

Tahlequah Daily Press - Can Bush get much lower?

Someone in this equation is destined to turn out stupid: The administration, for expecting the public to swallow this fish tale, or the public, for doing just that.

Jesus' General has the whole debate boiled down to two captioned pictures. Go see for yourself.

(Thanks Em for the recommendation!)

Satisfaction Survey
Originally uploaded by Matthew Baldwin.

Yet another mixed-media masterpiece from Defective Yeti. Flickr won't let me put a readably large copy in my blog, so you'll have to click on the picture, then click on the magnifying glass. Sorry.

This rocks. Particularly the multiple choices for the question "Why did you have a child?" Choice #6 is "Read about parenthood on Dooce, sounded fun"

Late last fall, I stopped reading Dooce's journal because it was inspiring all kinds of unhelpful feelings in me. Babylust. Time-is-running-out dread-ful feelings. I've always intended to not be That Girl, so I quit cold turkey.

It worked. A few months have gone by and I'm totally back to my baseline take it or leave it attitude about parenthood. (I like kids, they are fascinating. After spending time with kids, I really like going home to my quiet, unsticky house where all of the toys are MINE.)

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Originally uploaded by cdibona.
more here.

The milk-drop coronet is an early photo by the strobe's inventor, Harold Edgerton.

Semi local interest: there is a middle-of-nowhere kid's science museum in Edgerton's hometown.

I sat down to read the chapter of Klug's Genetics that we're covering in class tomorrow. I made it about ten pages in before my focus fell apart and I started thinking about sleep. It would've been smart to crash at ten since I'm still a bit sleep deprived from cramming for Monday's exam; this was not to be (for when have I ever acted prudently when fiction is involved?) I picked up The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and had my mind blown by page two. Beautiful book, where have you been all of my life?



I mean, the book opens with dialog between a computer who has been awake for a few months and a micro-mechanic who is the only person who has noticed. They discuss whether the computer's jokes are funny. The mechanic strikes me as a cross between the plumber from Brazil and Winston Smith; he named the computer Mycroft after Holmes's brother because he sits there and thinks. Because he is a loonie, he speaks in the lunar patois, a blend of English, Russian, Spanish and other bits I can't identify, a language that has thoughtfully eliminated all of those frivilous definite and indefinite articles that we put up with every day.

I am utterly charmed.

How could my hometown librarians let me grow up in an environment free of this book? I'll be calling them tomorrow, asking if I can buy a copy for their collection. I'll put a bookplate inside the front cover, "donated by" - it will be the beginning of my life as a philanthropist.

I'm about fifty pages into the book and I've already noticed one reference to dishwashing as the ideal job for philosophers. I think reading Heinlein's Job when I was fifteen permanently warped my mind, at least concerning theology and dishwashing.

consider reading Jane Smiley's Notes for Converts:

. . . you newly-minted dissenters from Bush's faith-based reality seem, right now, to be glorying in your outrage, which is always a pleasure and feels, at the time, as if it is having an effect, but those of us who have been anti-Bush from day 1 (defined as the day after the stolen 2000 election) have a few pointers for you that should make your transition more realistic.

Smiley goes on to list five and a half things that the new converts need to know, starting with

1. Bush doesn't know you disagree with him. Nothing about you makes you of interest to George W. Bush once you no longer agree with and support him. . . . You are now just one of those "polls" that he pays no attention to.

Not an April Fools joke.

Boing Boing: "Marvel and DC comics jointly filed a trademark on the word 'super-hero.' They use this mark to legally harass indie comic companies that make competing comic books. "

Assholes.

BBC NEWS Magazine 10 stories that could be pranks - but aren't:

6. A Belgian police training manual which aims to help recruits understand body
language has caused a row by likening George Bush's facial expressions to a
chimpanzee's.

from the AFD roundup at Making Light.

Does anyone here have a copy of the artist's conception of Burling Library expansion (skyward) published in the S&B on April 1st of (probably) 1995? I would love to see that again.

So, last night I dreamt that I was hanging out in a vacation rental cabin living room with Frank Zappa and family. Frank and I had had a long conversation a few months before at my dad's college class reunion (he and my dad didn't have much to say to each other, but we hit it off), that's how I got invited along for the weekend.

There were a bunch of Zappa daughters my age and it took me a long time for us to warm up to each other - which was silly, since they had grown up with my college roomate Miriam. There was much interpersonal family reunion drama and at one point I went outside and sat on the porch railing to get away from the intensity. Frank was friendly throughout and tried to include me for the day with the other grown kids.

There was a meal of carrotty vegan soup shared with the mom-figure and one of the daughters(the soup was either the cause or the effect of roomate Miriam being included in the dream). As the day wound down and everyone was getting ready to travel off in different directions, I helped someone with a local map figure out the way to the bus station; we were either in Longview, Washington trying to get to downtown Portland, or in Longmont, Colorado trying to get to Denver -- I wasn't sure even in the dream.

The dream may have started here.

If I had one of those fancy blog filing system, this entry would be filed under "who cares?"

First: Shameless sent me the link for Google Romance and, wow. Where do I nominate them up for Joke of the Year?

Second: I just got flamed by this guy C I've been talking to on email (he's been flirting, I've been stalling). I went on a first date over the weekend and plan to go on a second date, so I emailed C this morning and very politely said, "I'm just not that into you." I had my reservations about C, he's a smartie but his conversation has some overtones of pompousity and I suspected that he just might be a bit unreliable under pressure. Well, my suspicions held true. Flamed.

(Last week when I was merely hesitant, I had a wicked little impulse to say, "I'm sorry, but my friend Em asked me not to get involved with any more boys with goofy names. Your name isn't just odd, it is actually derived from the Latin word for crow! Em would kick my ass!")

Next up: Adventures in Ethnology.