Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"It was just a spur of the moment thing. I really don't even consider it art. I consider it a psychology project. ... He seems to be upbeat, so I consider this a success." -- Luke Trerice, after covering everything in a friend's apartment with aluminum foil.

I slept a lot (for me) last night/this morning. (I crashed about 23:00, woke too briefly to note the time twice or thrice, woke for real at 06:00, fell asleep about at 07:00, and woke again at 09:30) This bodes well for tomorrow (I have a really long day tomorrow) if I don't screw it up today. But I woke with intense back pain, so I took something for it, and the caffeine in the drug I took gave me a headache (caffeine does help with headaches sometimes, but it can also cause them for me) so I traded one problem for another. Oh well. So today is going to have to be a "rest up for tomorrow" day, though I'll try to get out of the house briefly this afternoon.

Two friends have helped out with bills lately. I'm still in trouble, but being able to fend off a couple of creditors for another month helps quite a bit. And I bought gas so I can drive to the Southern Maryland Celtic Festival tomorrow for our gig there. *whew* Thanks!

Someday, someday ... I look forward to some shiny future when I can be the one providing such help to others instead of receiving it. But now, while I need what help I can get, I am simply grateful.

A mailing list I'm on has something fun going on -- old-timers and newbies alike are posting "let me introduce myself" messages as though they'd just joined (except that most include "I joined back in ______ because of so-and-so" statements). Bits of list-history and personal history have been coming up as a result, and one person has started putting together a "who got whom involved" diagram.

In the middle of the day yesterday, as I was driving down Frederick Ave., I saw a woman on rollerblades in the oncoming lane with a line of cars behind her. She was taking off her sweatshirt as she pumped along at a decent clip (but not fast enough for the cars she was blocking). I pulled over to load the camera I had with me and turned around to get a picture, but she had vanished (up some side-street, I presume) by the time I got ready. Drat. (She was wearing something black underneath the sweatshirt -- a tube-top, I think, so I assume she was simply removing a layer to keep cool, not performing a rolling striptease.)

I saw a lot of police officers standing on streetcorners yesterday, which seemed odd because they didn't seem to be doing anything and didn't have their patrol cars nearby. Then I heard on the evening news that it was some special program to clean up the most dangerous corners and increase police visibility in the city. Funny -- the corners where I saw them had never registered as "dangerous" or especially suspect to me. But I only drive past them, so it's likely that there's just a lot I didn't know about those spots. On the news they said that some "normally bustling" corners were deserted yesterday because of the police presence, and that says something discouraging to me. It's encouraging that the police are Doing Something (though I'm not sure how long this initiative is planned to last -- it might have been a one-day thing?), but it's discouraging that so much of the pedestrian traffic that one might otherwise think was a sign of a healthy and vibrant city when seen from a distance turned out to actually be the sort of thing that has to leave when the police show up -- symptoms of the city's sickness.

How long would the police have to stand, bored, on those corners before ordinary community activity re-emerged (presuming that the less-savory element the cops just frightened off had previously scared the law-abiding local citizens off the sidewalks and behind closed doors)?

None of the police were in my neighbourhood, which I choose to interpret to mean that mine is not one of the Problem Spots.

I'm not just jealous of silmaril's groovy grammar geeking threads, honest.

Okay, I just looked it up: the correct spelling according the the 1967 Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (which also contains the word "dingus", by the way) is "whee", with two 'e's.

But it looks wrong to me. Maybe it's just in this typeface (the one in my Telnet window, 9 pt. "Terminal" regular)? I know that extra 'e's get added on for emphasis or certain subflavours of sarcasm, but I can't help thinking that even a 'vanilla' "wheee" looks more natural with three than with two. "Wheee!" So is this a case of usage drift (perhaps caused by supernumerary vowels being used too often? (And would that make them supersupernumerary?) Or is it a subculture/cyber-dialect thing? Or is it just me, and everyone else thinks "whee" looks fine?

In other "news", I just noticed the following:

If you want to disable <lj-cut> tags on your Recent Entries page, but still have the <lj-cut> tag show on your friends' Friends pages, you can go to the Admin Console (http://www.livejournal.com/ admin/console/) and type the following:
    set opt_ljcut_disable_lastn 1
[...]
If you want your Friends page to always display your friends' full entry, without respecting other users' <lj-cut> tags, you can go to the Admin Console (http://www.livejournal.com/admin/console/) and type the following:
    set opt_ljcut_disable_friends 1
[...]
To undo these choices, [...]