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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) merle_ | |
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When I was quite young, I developed distinctive eating habits. One is fairly common: if there are several components on a plate that are part of an integrated meal (say, turkey, potatoes, gravy, and cranberry salad), I will attempt to eat them in equal proportions throughout the meal. A lot of people do that. The other is likely uncommon: if there are simply disparate things, like chips and a sandwich, or like salad and steak, and one is distinctly less tasty than the other, I will finish the less tasty item first. The last bite should always come from the best component.
(This also explains why I'm not keen on dessert: I've never been big on desserts, and why ruin the great taste of my meal with something I don't like? The last thing you eat will be what you taste for a while, and I would rather have it be vindaloo or what not.)
Apparently this rule extends to other things. I started taking chewable calcium pills, and the bottle contains three different flavours: red (yes, I think red is a flavour), orange, and fruit punch. The tastiest of these is the purple fruit punch. So I would open the bottle, glance in, snatch a pill out, and eat it. I wasn't even thinking of choosing one pill over the other. But lo, when the bottle was 3/4 empty, I looked in and noticed all that remained were the purple pills. Subconsciously I had been eating the less tasty ones first, leaving the best for later.
I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. If I were sharing the pills with someone else, it would clearly be bad for me, since I'd be getting only the icky ones (unless we had different preferences and formed an agreement). With food it's okay; I'm big enough now that people don't snatch food off my plate without permission. But it surprised me that my selection style extended to calcium pills.
Maybe it's an argument for intelligent design! This unnamed supreme creator (yeah, everyone knows it is supposed to be that "God" character.. whatever) made all sorts of life, decided the Cro-Magnons and dinosaurs and what not were less tasty, and smote them first, leaving us around. Uh huh. Probably not. I don't think I taste like fruit punch or like vindaloo. Mood of the Moment: selective
Auditory Hallucination: Paramore, "Crushcrushcrush"
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ksej | |
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Blackpool is rarely a fun place to visit - in fact, many of our visits have been horrible in one epic way or another. But my mum offered me a free hotel room, and I just couldn't help myself.
The day started reasonably enough: rising ridiculously early after another November all-nighter, an easy run up to Leeds with the bonus of free on-board wi-fi, and a long haul across country to Lancashire. In Leeds, the sun shone brightly; in Burnley, a rainbow sparkled on dark clouds; in Blackpool, it was tipping it down. We managed to avoid a repeat of the Mancunian navigational fail, but the walk to the hotel, with the rain soaking through our clothes, was long enough to be unpleasant.
Having checked in, we caught a tram down to the opposite end of Blackpool. On arriving at the football ground, we realised what a thoroughly rotten day this was going to be. Bloomfield Road is still partway to being a very nice ground, but the shiniest and newest stand still lacked its safety certificate. This meant that, for twenty-four pounds fifty a ticket, we would be sitting in the same temporary stand we occupied three years ago. The one without a roof. In the rain.
We made the best of it, huddling under umbrellas and singing about how we were getting wet watching Scunny, but I was thoroughly fed up before the match was fifteen minutes old. True, Scunthorpe had improved several hundred percent over their miserable performance last week, but we weren't putting the ball in the back of the net. In any case, I was so wet and cold that nothing short of double figures would have warmed me up.
Andrea, without my ties of loyalty to the team, began the pleas to go back to the hotel after about half an hour. We bought her a waterproof poncho to stop the damage getting any worse, and Karen fed her steadily with Starbursts to keep the crisis at bay. Half time came with the score 0-0; we talked longingly of matchmaker's tea, hot mulled wine, and five Scunthorpe goals in the second half.
As the second half got underway, Andrea demanded a trip to the toilet - quite an undertaking, in a poncho made for an adult. As we returned to our seats, I asked Karen whether we'd missed a goal. "No," she said, "but Hayes should have scored. He was just one-on-one with the keeper." Almost as soon as she'd said that, Hayes was through again, racing clear of the defence to lift the ball gently over the Blackpool keeper. I watched it roll into the net, but I was still too cold to celebrate.
For a few glorious minutes, it looked as if our insane devotion was going to be rewarded. We had a couple of other chances, notably when Sparrow got through down the wing but mistimed his pass to Hayes, and Blackpool had offered very little thus far. I tried not to tempt fate, but I could almost feel the warming effect of three points.
Then we started to let them attack us. The ball was spending too much time at the far end of the field, which I couldn't see because the people in front were standing up. I didn't see the move that let to the goal, but I heard the roar from the hitherto silent Blackpool fans. That was not the best way to ensure three points, but I didn't give up hope. We had let in an equaliser against Derby and gone on to win.
And so we might have done here except for what happened next. Another Blackpool attack, and the ball was fairly harmlessly out of play. But there was a knot of players surrounding the referee, and a flash of red. The news came down the stand to us that Murphy had carried the ball slightly outside the penalty area; according to the most ridiculous law in football, this is a sending-off offence. Murphy trooped off, and Sam Slocombe hastily prepared to come on. After a long delay, Blackpool had a free kick on the very edge of the penalty area. It went through everyone, and Slocombe had his first opportunity to pick the ball out of the net for the Scunthorpe first team.
His second came soon after. I don't remember much about it, but we were suffering from lack of ideas as well as lack of personnel, and it showed. At one point, Karen suggested that Blackpool had four or five extra men, rather than just one. The steady rain had given way to a vertical downpour, and the only reason I didn't get up and leave was a sense that we'd suffered enough that we might as well see the whole thing through.
The scoreline was now identical to my last visit, the glorious day when we won the league despite defeat. The contrast between that day and this struggle was almost too much to bear, so Blackpool helpfully added a fourth goal to erase the parallel. The Scunthorpe fans who were marginally less stubborn than me departed; Andrea had fallen asleep in her seat to give me an excuse not to follow. The announcement of four minutes of stoppage time was met with a groan: the match was long gone, and every minute was another sixty seconds of soaking.
As if to prove us wrong, loan signing George Friend worked his way down the wing and put in a ball to Forte. The ball rattled around the penalty area, and someone stabbed it into the net for a much-needed consolation. But no, the flag was up over on the far side, and we were denied even that. It seemed to sum up our afternoon.
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elainegrey | |
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Went grocery shopping when hungry -- actually it was my walk to make up for not walking during the week. I bought rose mochi -- soft chewy rice flour buns filled with a rose sesame bean curd. I do love the rose flavor! I wonder how long they'll keep now that i've opened them. *** Thursday i read Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol as my mom sent it to me. It was a perfect diversion for my sense of being out of it, but i was so often disturbed by my sense that some readers pick up on these books as if they're historical fiction. I was intrigued by just how defensive of the Masons Dan Brown's Mary Sue/Gary Stu is. If i recall correctly, there was a great deal more portrayal of the Vatican City residents as a maleficent cabal of Other. These Masons though are My Best Friends and The Leaders of Our Great Nation. This was not the disturbing thing, though. The noetic science bit is the part that kept causing me to twitch. I've heard of noetic science as i was growing up as my Grandmama keeps up with folks in that intellectual/spiritual circle. But there's something about my mother's recent enthusiasm for self-hypnosis and her enthusiasm for this book that nags me. Her uncritical acceptance of book-jacket authorities.... *** Yesterday we watched Longitude, all 200 minutes of the A&E miniseries. It was delightful, although it too had me wondering about how we portray science in this country. On one hand, the issue of class in England is alien to me. I am aware that the social class issues are something i do not know from my experience: thinking of Inspector Linley mysteries, the 17th century penalties for not giving hat honor or using thee/thou with one's "better," Sense and Sensibility. I believe that much of the actual tension must have been a craftsman intruding on the purview of gentlemen, not a mechanic intruding on the purview of astronomers. I cannot tell. Again, my enjoyment is tempered by a nagging awareness that something else is going on. Tags: log, reading notes, watching notes
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elainegrey | |
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Yesterday Christine and i visited a number of cat boarding places. The incredibly inexpensive place that is near by is not particularly friendly. I can imagine them being good with dogs but they aren't cat people. On the other hand, i can see it being a suitable place to leave the cats. Personally, i'd be just as happy leaving the cats there as at the PetSmart PetHotel. Christine had a strong aversion to the folks running the place, though, so we tried tracking down a PetHotel that had room. With all those booked up, we tried the (relatively) expensive cat place up the Peninsula. Cat heaven! And they have room. So, job done. A little stressful as we negotiated our different values (Christine wants the best for the cats, i question whether "best" is truly best). It's less expensive than the sitter and i will feel far more confident of everything with the cats in a good facility. And really, the place seems like cat heaven. *** I'm feeling much better today, which makes me want to spit in frustration. I like feeling better, but correlating my energy level and sense of well-being to anything is impossible. *** Another small achievement is the apple stuffed pumpkin in the stove. I think it will be edible, at least, as i am unfond of baked orange things like carrots and yams and squash, but perhaps it will be good. Enough brown sugar and anything is good, right? Tags: cats, health, log
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merle_ | |
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I've stayed away from discussing whether the government should step into the arena of health care or not. Now that they're voting on it today, and it seems likely to pass, I'm annoyed, resigned, and scared.
Scared because it started out as a document longer than even a Robert Jordan book. As soon as it appeared, dozens of offspring, distant relatives, and outright strangers appeared, and all of them wafted around intermingling to see which would be the last one standing. Most of them underwent so many revisions that I doubt a single page has not been altered. And yet, even though I take more interest in the news than many people, I have no idea what their plan precisely is -- and I somehow doubt that those in Congress know either. They probably have the Cliffs Notes summary from their aides, who got a summary from their assistants, who probably got their information off of twitter or something. I would be willing to bet good money that there is something in that bill requiring an expensive bridge to be built in the middle of nowhere. I would also bet that not a single person in Congress has read the entire bill cover to cover, but that's a sucker bet.
Imagine you are on the street, and see a piano rolling down the hill at you, about to crush you. What do you do? Jump left? Jump right? Duck? Jump onto it and pose like a surfer, hoping someone catches it on video to post on Youtube? I'd suggest right or left, since pianos rarely stop rolling gracefully, but either way it doesn't matter: you need to decide now or your tombstone will read "not a great piano tuner; comes with extra sauce".
If instead you are on the street and see a piano at the top of the hill, you have time to prepare. Time to think and reason. Time to run up the hill and attempt to secure the piano, possibly, but certainly time enough to decide which way to dodge so you aren't standing there like a deer caught in the headlights.
I don't think the piano is ten feet away and bearing down on us. Does health care cost citizens a ton of money, mostly used to line the pockets of executives and boost the companies' stock prices? Oh, yeah. Is it any worse than war costs, the hidden taxes found in every service that make things look half as expensive as they really are, or insane compensation packages at major companies? No.
I wish they would take the time to say "whoa, too fast, let's take a step back and meet again in two months; each of us can bring three points to the table". But I fear that this will be the Patriot Act all over again: passed into law before even the supporters realize they have been railroaded. Mood of the Moment: resigned
Auditory Hallucination: Billy Joel, "Pressure"
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cretaceousrick | |
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I look the bookish type, so from time to time people will ask me for book recommendations. Every time, I realize just how few books I've actually read in my life. I read voraciously as a young man, devouring 400-page novels on a daily basis. Unfortunately, I happened to live in a car at the time, so my reading material was limited. Not to mention the fact that my father was a paranoid schizophrenic and was reluctant to let me get new books, seeing as how every single author ever published was working hard for the Homosexual Agenda. Eric let me read some classics, rarely anything newer than 1920. Even then, he would go on tirades about how notorious the likes of Verne and Conan Doyle were for filling young boys with their devious screed. One year I kept a list of the books I read and got up to 183 books, each more than 150 pages long. But I just read the same books over and over again. I read Jurassic Park upwards of forty times over the course of a few years. I could tell you all about the (pre-1999) life work of Michael Crichton, or just about every shitty dinosaur novel ever published. But aside from Moby Dick, some Twain, the Sherlock Holmes stories, and War and Peace, I didn't read many things in my childhood that I would read again today, let alone recommend to anyone. (Here's a tip: James F. David's Footprints of Thunder is a terrible book in every way.) Once I lived on my own I made an early effort to catch up. I have fond memories of sitting alone every night in the pathetic motel room I rented by the week, across the street from Wright-Patterson AFB, reading Dune while Moby spun on my discount CD player. After I joined the army, my attention-span (not to mention my free time) plummeted. I would bring a cheap paperback with me to work in my cargo pocket, and attempt to squeeze in a few minutes here and there while my battle-buddies took their cigarette breaks, but it took me weeks to wade through even a pulp novel. Part of the problem was, I had discovered the internet, a device which soaks up free time like nobody's business. Even today, I'm typing out this mess instead of finishing One Hundred Years of Solitude. After the military, I again made strides to get my reading act together. In 2005 and 2006, I kept reading lists in an effort to step up my game, tallying up a mere 38 and 37 reads, respectively. On a positive note, almost all of those books were new reads, but still, there's no reason for someone who reads as fast as me to take half a month to read a single novel. Keeping those lists was a good idea. For instance, I had forgotten how much I liked A. A. Attanasio's The Last Legends of Earth and the travelogues of Bill Bryson, until those lists reminded me. Right there, I finally have something to say when someone asks for recommendations. The lists also make a disconcerting statement about my memory. I don't remember anything about Ursula K. Le Guin's Rocannon's World, except for the fact that I own a musty used copy of it somewhere. I didn't remember even reading it. It's sort of funny to see how much my tastes have changed in just three or four years. I struggled manfully through the Wheel of Time series in 2005, getting as far as The Fires of Heaven before giving it up as a bad bet. But I loved the books at the time, enough to read several thousand pages of Robert Jordan's prose. Recently, inspired by the upcoming conclusion to the series, I tried to reread them from the beginning of The Eye of the World... and I just can't do it. I got about eleven pages in before I couldn't pretend anymore. It's too late for this year. I've read maybe a dozen books all year, and this semester is too crazy to even think about reading more than a few pages at a time. I love One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I've been wading through it for more than three months. I'm pathetic. Can anyone recommend a good book for me? Tags: books, reading
Auditory Hallucination: A Hawk and a Hacksaw, "God Bless the Ottoman Empire"
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crisper | |
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I had apparently been dispatched to London (by Apple, same as last time) to work with the guys at BERG on an augmented reality demo. The technology apparently involved a choice-driven experience overlay deployed on trains from London to other parts of the country. As the trip progressed, some sort of (projected) story would begin to unfold, both in and out of the train, and along the way you could make choices that would change the direction (and thus display) of the story - including other people on the train, weather outside, etc. We were going to deploy on above-ground trains but the initial demo was to be run on one line of the Underground and involved something vaguely urban-fantasy-ish, some kind of CHUDs & fire thing. But we were just getting it started when I suddenly realized that we did not have two weeks to get the demo running, rather only two days - it was Wednesday night and I needed to demo on Friday morning and then fly home. Cue the deadline panic. Amusingly enough, all the BERG guys lived together in a giant converted firehouse/loft, like GHOSTBUSTERS, and wore Devo-like uniforms. Every morning, the communal alarm clock went off like an air raid/launch pad klaxon and they would all scramble around in Keystone Cop-like hijinx. I did not manage to get out into the rest of London to see if it still resembled what I had last visited in my sleep. ------ For consideration: augmented reality, mass transit, communal living, trains, alarums & excursions Tags: dream, technology
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deza | |
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We finally got orders! Yes, we are still moving to NC, and now we know when. Looks like next week.
o.0
This is a good thing. We can vacate our friends' basement and head for the beach. Woohoo! We'll most likely get an off-season beach rental until a spot opens up for us on base. Then the Navy will pay big strong guys to come load out our storage units and cart our stuff over to Marineville.
Even better, early word indicates that when Andrew deploys, he won't be in an active combat area. Yes, he'll be in the right part of the world, but he'll be wherever they keep the folks who are staying out of danger. Shut up, it's my lie and I'll enjoy it while I can!
Sunday, Rowan is singing a small solo part at church, so we can't move til after that. She's rather upset that I don't want to stick around for her friend's birthday party the next week, but really I don't want to overstretch our welcome here. Besides, I like having my own space, although I very much appreciate the friends who have taken us in for the time being.
It's almost over. We can survive this.
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spookyhandle | |
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You lack any sense of structure, character or the Aristotelian unities. --Wednesday Addams/Christina Ricci, Addams Family Values I just saw this in one of my LJ communities and had to share:  I'm still deeply skeptical about Nathan Lane as Gomez, but I must admit he does look the part. I'm also slightly amused that with each incarnation featuring live actors the children seem to get older and older. Adam Riegler (Puglsey) appears to be about the same age that Jimmy Workman was in the movies (although he was a few years older than Ken Weatherwax was in the original TV series)... But Wednesday! In the old black and white series, Lisa Loring was only about 5 when the show started. When Christina Ricci played her in the 90's, Wednesday was not only six years older, but suddenly the older of the two children* (although the actors were about the same age). And here, Krysta Rodriguez appears to be well into her teens, at the very least. Also, am I imagining things, or have they done away with her trademark braids? On an related note, while checking ages on IMDB, I discovered that Jodie Foster voiced "Pugsly" in the 1973 cartoon series. Random. * In fairness, Charles Addams's comics never gave anything resembling a clear family tree (or even character names) and the movies--while taking a lot of character cues from the series--also clearly returned to the original comics for inspiration, and wrote their own version of the Addams family tree.Tags: addams family, pictures, public, theater
Mood of the Moment:  tired
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elainegrey | |
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Malingerer. Lazy. I do call myself names. By the standards of my family of birth i can walk, i'm probably not contagious, so i really ought to be putting my nose to my responsibilities. Instead i slept late, read stories from a copy of Fantasy & Science Fiction this morning and have slowly reviewed my incoming feeds. ( The usual whining )*** I just went and made more private my account at MySpace, deleting some "friends" who weren't really friends. I partially want to just close the MySpace down, but i'll admit to being an identity squatter. It's "my" name there and i don't want anyone else using my internet handle there. Meanwhile, Google has made it easier to find out what they know about you. Right, Orkut. Which all reminds me a bit of some of the things i learned about at the conference this week. Think about facebook and myspace and how there are these snippet feeds. These are now being standardized into something that is interoperable the way email is interoperable: activity streams. I might allow BookSite to post to SocialSite when i do something. I might also allow OtherSocialSite to display all my activities from SocialSite. The format for this is activity streams, and Facebook and MySpace are just two of many places where you can be inundated with all the activity of anyone to whom you connect. There's another project, salmon, where a comment at OtherSocialSite "will swim upstream" to wherever the activity started, say BookSite, and then it can propagate back out to everywhere that activity is listed, eg SocialSite. I have no idea how the privacy layer is going to work on this. I can just imagine someone writing a review at BookSite that they're proud for the world to see associated with their name, the activity being propagated into all the circles of their life, and a more private comment -- say a comment about remembering that the review author seemed to really hit it off with book author at small event, nudge nudge wink wink -- and that gets pushed all the way back to the very responsible review.... Yay. Tags: elimination or exclusion diet, health, morning writing
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merovingian | |
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I park up the hill from my house, because gravitational potential energy is a good way to keep car thieves at bay.
In the driveway near me was a car with a bumper sticker that read "MY OTHER CAR IS TOTALLY PANTOMIMED" and as I started up my car, I saw a guy (dressed in normal clothes and without benefit of greasepaint) walk out to the empty part of his driveway, about ten feet to the left of his existing car, mime sitting down and turning the keys, and suddenly become whisked off by some unknown force at the speed of an automobile.
I followed him, of course, as he sat hovering a few feet in the air, zipping along the street at the speed of traffic. He got to a gas station, and parked in a spot with no pump, then paid the attendant nonexistent mimed money, went to a blank spot in the parking lot, and pretended to pump his nonexistent car.
While he was inside getting his change, I was tempted to pretend keying his car, but I didn't. I just sort of stared at it.
He came out and we had a conversation. Well, I talked but he communicated his side of the conversation very effectively with gestures. He's proud of his pretend sportscar (but he does have a mimed bumper sticker on it that says "MY OTHER CAR EXISTS") and likes his job.
He works for the worldwide sinister conspiracy that watches over us all! He doesn't do the spying work, though. He's a technical writer. He takes all the data from the spying, and the Panopticon camera, and so forth, and compiles that information into the clean, concise, glossy-photo dossiers that you always see the conspiracy has in the movies. There's a lot of hard work in collating all that data into a meaningful dossier, but it's engaging work that uses his skills, and the benefits are great, so he's pretty happy.
Technically, he's not allowed to talk about it, but, you know, technically, he didn't.
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allyra | |
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So, I didn't get called in to work at a precinct, which didn't surprise me: when I went to vote, there were about 6 people just sitting around doing nothing. And because my internet connection wouldn't behave, I spent most of the day getting ready for a fundraising event I'm selling Avon at on Saturday. (Yes, I'm an Avon lady, for those of you who didn't know! Yes, I know that probably seems odd.) While I'm disappointed at the Republican sweep at the executive level in Virginia, I'm not surprised. However, I don't think it's the "referendum" on how Virginians view Obama that so many people seem to be saying it is. I think it's more a comment on how thoroughly Tim Kaine (current governor - Democrat) screwed things up. I don't think any Democrat had a real chance, and Creigh Deeds (IMO) ruined any possibility he did have by focusing his campaign almost exclusively on what Bob McDonnell wrote in his master's thesis. I mean, seriously. If you have to go back THAT far to scrape up some dirt on someone, there's something wrong. Hey, here's an idea: run on the issues! Y'know, what you actually plan to do if you're elected? Irksome. Anyway, my take on this, as a pretty much lifelong Virginian, is that, when a governor screws things up, the person from that party who runs next loses. If McDonnell turns out to be a Jim Gilmore-esque disaster, the next governor will most likely be a Democrat. I'm just sayin'. Don't read too much into this. It seems that often happens with Virginia gubernatorial elections. I guess because they're in an off year, so no one has much else to talk about. How 'bout them Yankees?! *runs away* Tags: politics
Mood of the Moment:  pensive
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Previous
discontent![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
drained
pissed off... still
pleased