Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

First, an irrelevant aside: another "Switch" parody -- "I'm Steve, and I'm a supervillain..." (Thanks to speaker2animals for the URL.)

Hmm. Saturday sort of didn't happen. I woke up -- not feeling great, but not feeling terrible -- and figured I'd take care of my plans for the day. Next thing I know, I'm nodding off again only a couple of hours later, and don't wake up until 16:00. In and out of drowsy mode since. Nastybad headache, but I don't think this one is a migraine. I think it's just a combination of wonky sleep and allergies. Whee. Anyhow, I spent a little while checking email and then grabbed a small bit of food ('cause I still thought I was going to be heading to Bowie later, and Mom usually feeds me), and went to set the VCRs to record the shows I wanted ... and never made it back out of the bedroom again until now. Oh, add hunger to the probable causes of the headache. Only just starting to notice my stomach, but all I've eaten was the aforementioned snack. Whoops. Did not plan it that way. The one good thing was that I was in the room to notice that hockey was on instead of the musical I wanted to tape, thus saving me three hours of tape.

Hmm. Better stop typing and eat or drink something. Be right back.

Oh bother. I just tripped and fell up the stairs. No injury, but I spilled stuff. Just an annoyance.

Anywho, I probably should've given up a lot earlier and just grabbed another snack and gone back to sleep, but as usual, I got less done by trying to hard -- kept telling myself I had to get up and get moving, until it was too late to do anything and I was that more more tired. ( restless, distracted, zoned, unproductive evening )

Then again, it's been so long since I've played mandolin in front of anybody. In The Homespun Ceilidh Band I'm on guitars full-time; and in Thrir Venstri Foetr, either we're understaffed and I'm needed on guitar, recorder, or percussion, or Maugorn is there and it makes more sense for him to play mandolin parts than for me to. I have this vague feeling that I ought to do something about that, but "figure out what I need to do" is going to have to get appended to the end of my already too-long to-do list.

And one more unrelated bit, to bookend the entry -- I just ran across a new, cool word. (Dunno how new it is, but I don't recall seeing it before.) "Outcrufting" Worth adding to my vocabulary. (On the one hand, there are perfectly useful words and phrases for that. On the other hand, the great thing about having so many options for English word-choices is the ability to choose just the exact nuance and mood for the situation. Linguistically, throwing together a word like "outcrufting", even if it weren't for the "cruft" root, strikes me as a particularly Hackish-dialect thing to do, partly for wanting the nuance in conveys in the first place. Or maybe I'm just overthinking it.)

(Closing grumble ... my PPP connection is up -- in fact, I just killed it and restored it to make sure it wasn't wedged funny or something -- but I can't get packets past my ISP's machine on the other end of the phone line and out into the rest of the Internet. Oh wait, I can ping the shell users machine at my ISP but not traceroute to it. Odd. Depending on whether I can hit LiveJournal or not right now, this might not get posted until a while after I've finished writing it.)

And oh yeah, if anybody's wondering whether I'll reply to a comment left recently on one of my entries [sheepish look] I'm way behind on comments (and email) yet again. Hoping to catch up this week.

"Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard" -- from a news story about the monkeys & typewriters experiment.

"See, they are smart! They skipped Shakespeare and jumped right to the concept of flame wars. Next they'll have their own blogs." -- scalpel's response.

• Calories Don't Count, "We have found that with careful eating, it is possible to eat entire (tasty!) meals without consuming a single calorie!" It's a compilation of "rules" about food, such as, "Pieces of cookies contain no calories. The process of breaking causes all the calories to leak out." And, "A bite off someone else's plate has no calories. (If you eat part of someone else's cake, dessert, etc., all the calories stay in the main body of the food. This is known as the peripheral principle.)" Many of these will be familiar, but there were several I hadn't heard before. (A comment at the top explains that it's a composite of many such lists to be found on the Internet.)
• Timeline of the Internet -- includes such gems as, "2003: After 43.2 million spams, and over 2.3 billion pop-up ads worldwide, someone buys an X-10 mini cam." (from The Lemon. I got the link from wispfox, who got it from kightp.)
• NASCAR Sperm, a Flash movie. There's really not much I can say about this ... Definitely giggleworthy.
• I'm not going to improve on ceo's capsule description of this (linked in case y'all want to follow the comments there), so I'll just quote it:

  So there were these three kids who were 10, 11 and 12 when Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, and it utterly captivated them. Most kids would have been content with playing Indiana Jones in the back yard.
   
  These three did a shot-for-shot remake of the entire movie. Including making all the costumes and coming up with creative ways to do the stunts. Took them six years, and the kid playing Indy got his first kiss filming the appropriate scene.

  On the page linked to, there's a link to a trailer as well (with the note, "[...] this'll give you a glimpse [but] the music has nothing to do with the actual audio track in the film."
• Female Merit Badges by Mary Yaeger. (Thanks to merde for the link.) "My female merit badges illustrate female "rites of passage" as well as the myriad physical manipulations women undergo to achieve cultural ideals of beauty, such as weight watching, whether or not to shave or wear makeup, etc. I've created tiny replicas of female products, such as a birth control pill pack and a pregnancy test. The miniature scale and meticulous, hand-embroidered surfaces convey my impressions of growing up female in our culture." (This evokes an interesting combination of reactions for me, being inter/transgendered.)
• The 80s Tarot ties the classical meanings of the cards to 1980s popular culture personalities -- mostly musicians, a few actors, a few fictional characters (Edward Scissorhands is The Moon). Not just the Major Arcana -- the whole deck. Some of these made sense to me (Ferris Beuller as The Fool, Thomas Dolby as The Magician); others just weren't familiar enough to me but would probably work for someone who'd paid more attention during that decade. (And some made sense to me verbally, but I didn't recognize easily enough visually for them to work as an instant visual symbol.) Examples: The Hermit -- Morrissey, sulking, self-righteous and ostentatiously undersexed, illuminated by Light That Never Goes Out, is our Hermit. His isolation is part of the price that he pays for his wisdom and attainment, but it is also his love for the material world and society that makes his struggle necessary to him. He is the ultimate outsider." The Six of Cups: "Full of well-meaning nostalgia, childlike innocence and joyful simplicity, Weird Al Yankovic represents the Six of Cups." Useful descriptions of the meanings of the cards follow the explanations of the images. Note that this isn't much different from the medieval custom of using likenesses of nobles on tarot cards. (And I've got enough ideas of things I want to babble about regarding the tarot that the rest should go in its own entry, later...)
• Exciting news from the world of medicine: New drugs for a variety of ailments. Such as "St. Mom's Wort -- Plant extract that treats mom's depression by rendering preschoolers unconscious for up to six hours." and "Flipitor -- Increases life expectancy of commuters by controlling road rage and the urge to flip off other drivers." (thanks to xpioti)
• Okay, this one's going to seem a rather funny item to be coming from me, of all people, being that it's about shaving and being macho, but it's also terribly funny: "The Shaving Industry Lies", in which the author notes, "That's right guys, you're going to start using women's razors. Why? Because these cheap things are way sharper than the best men's razor. Think about it... these razors aren't made to shave a small area like a face, they're for shaving an entire LEG. Hell, TWO LEGS!" and proceeds to go to town on ways to get around "the whole 'pink' thing". Funnier than I can make it sound without giving away even more spoilers than that. Let's just say that ninjas are involved.
• Looks like Massachussets is the latest hot zone for the same-sex marriage question (Boston Globe, 8 June). A note of patient optimism: "However the SJC rules, same-sex marriage is almost certainly coming to the United States sooner or later. Most developed countries already recognize same-sex partners in some significant way. This month, Belgium will join the Netherlands as the second nation to open the door to full marriage rights. Same-sex marriage is also imminent in Canada and South Africa, where the law already grants lesbian and gay couples rights to just about everything except the M-word. Meanwhile, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Greenland, Germany, Hungary, France, New Zealand, Portugal, most of Australia, half the provinces in Spain, and two Argentinian states give gay couples many to most of marriage's legal rights and responsibilities." (My personal opinion: there are two different institutions that have the same name and are nearly always confused: religious (or societal) marriage, and State (or contractual) marriage. Any church should be free to refuse to marry couples based on its beliefs, but the State should not discriminate on the basis of sex. Will my opinion ever become the dominant one in the US? I don't know.) The article also interestingly notes that, "When full marriage rights for same-sex couples arrive here in the United States, it will be just another incremental step in the ongoing transformation of marriage into an egalitarian institution based on love. Or to put it another way, same-sex couples are following, not leading, changes in our marriage law." Which is something I hadn't considered before.
• A site I just noticed and don't think I'd noticed before: Patriotwatch tracks news related to the post-9/11 erosion of our rights in the US.

(If you don't know the party I'm talking about, please disregard this message.)

There's a certain large party up in NY in a couple of weeks. It involves ice cream. Folks who know about it will find that a sufficiently unambiguous description...

I'm wondering whether I might be able to find a ride up there leaving that Friday evening from Maryland (which would probably get to the site sometime Saturday morning). I've got a schedule conflict -- an Important and Very Visible "exposure" gig for The Homespun Ceilidh Band that looks like it'll prevent me from leaving Friday morning or afternoon. Driving up there myself would probably scare many of my friends who know what shape my car is in. And I really want to go.

Anybody else going from Maryland but unable to get out early? With enough car space for me, a canvas tent, and at least one guitar? (I prefer to bring many more instruments than that, but don't expect to be able to do so when begging spare-seat space.)