We've Got a Nice Big Batch of Funky Search Requests This Time!

And here they are:

instant badass: Just add water!

gurps lexx stanley tweedle: You know, I did at one point keep saying that I was going to make a character based on Stanley Tweedle, possibly even for a GURPS game, but, doubtless to the relief of my fellow players, I never actually did.

movie library bookmobile future aliens: I have no idea what this refers to, but, I gotta say, it sounds like my kind of movie!

sneezing fanfic: Again with the sneezing!

naked marathon seattle: Do they really run a naked marathon in Seattle?

barbies heads: For some reason, this particular search request just kinda creeps me out. I think it's giving me flashbacks to that doll-mutilating kid in Toy Story.

bad habit nose hygine: Ye gods, that's worse than the sneeze obsession. And I have got to learn to spell.

search go expand sincere wrap warp watch video: Ladies and gentlemen, let this be a warning to you: do not drink and google.

pictures from my nude vacation: Nope, I just got my own vacation photos back, and I'm glad to say that the photo place did not mix them up with your nude vacation photos, as all the people in my snapshots are fully clothed.

nude pictures of Alan Rickman: Hmmm, what? Oh, sorry, I went a bit, uh, unfocused there for a moment... Ahem.

sample test questions verbosity: That's right, loyal readers, there will be a quiz to see if you've been paying attention to this blog! Here's some sample questions to help you prepare: 1) What kind of robot is Betty? 2) Who's the coolest Harry Potter character? 3) Why should you be watching Farscape? Please be sure and use a number two pencil and show all your work!

futurama "hidden messages": I hear that if you play the theme song backwards, you can hear the words "Fry is dead."

"answering machine messages" "three stooges": Leave a message! Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk!

grannys with sex: Well, disturbing as it is to think about, I suppose having sex is pretty much a prerequisite for being a granny.

family pics "loose tooth": This sounds awfully "aww, cute," until you realize that they're only going to find complete strangers' "family pics." Upon which realization it instead sounds kinda disturbing.

nude star trek characters: Sorry, I still haven't completed my set of search requests for nude Farscape characters, and I'm not starting on a different show until I have.

Brownie Explosions recipe: The key is to get the flour-to-gunpowder ratio exactly right.

creepiest moments in Gaiman's Sandman: Hmm, well, the one that sticks with me is the "air burial," where the undertaker dismembers the body and leaves it on a mountain to be eaten by birds. Which I believe is actually based on a real practice from somewhere...

characterization in short stories how the minor characters help to understand the main idea: Listen, kid, attempting to get a search engine to do your homework for you is never a very good idea.

In Which I Spread a Wild Rumor

This probably isn't true. But, man, one can hope, huh?

I Don't Feel Like Posting Anything Containing Actual Substance. How 'Bout Some More Stupid Quizzes?



Hey, that was a really cool movie.



Don't know him. Was he in the movies at all?

I am an Asteroid. I am a drifter. I go where life leads, which makes me usually a very calm and content sort of person. That or thoroughly apathetic. Usually I keep on doing whatever I'm doing, and it takes something special to make me change my mind. What Video Game Character Are You?

Wow, I remember Asteroids... Come to think of it, I remember that, when playing Asteroids, I would make it a point to never, ever leave the center of the screen, 'cause once I did that I tended to feel kind of lost, and usually got hit by a chunk of rock immediately afterwards. Wow. What a profound connection to this quiz result that is...

I'm Not Much Inclined to French-Bashing, But This Is Just Too Funny!

Go to google, put in "french military victories," and hit "I'm feeling lucky." No, really, go do it.

(Link via Amanda Peterson, who got it from Dork Blog.)

Still More Harry Potter

Well, OK, I finally finished Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. So this is going to be something in the nature of a book review, I guess. But I'll try to avoid spoilers for the moment.

Anyway, I definitely enjoyed this installment. The writing and the story elements really are getting more sophisticated as the series goes on, and that's something I very much appreciate. In this one, Harry and his friends come across very believably as real teenagers. Hogwarts feels enough like a real school to give me a few uncomfortable flashbacks to my own high school days. The Dursleys are far less cartoonish and boring than they have been (something that really bugged me in the previous books). And there is an increasing sense of a larger wizarding world out there beyond Hogwarts, with its own politics and a variety of adult concerns that Harry is only just starting to become aware of. Good trends, all.

At 850 pages plus, I can't help but think the book wouldn't have been hurt by a certain amount of editing, but it never dragged badly enough to become annoying, and the last few chapters flew by at a breakneck pace that kept me reading until well past what should have been my bedtime. It didn't have quite the same kind of intricate mystery-story plotting that we mostly got in the earlier books, but there were enough mysteries, large and small, to keep up a decent feeling of suspense through the whole thing.

In a way, though, having finished the book, I almost feel a little disappointed. Not because there was anything wrong with it, simply because I'm left with a feeling of wanting more. The series is clearly building up to something very, very big, to an ultimate confrontation, surely, between Harry and Voldemort. In the end, though, that's all Order of the Phoenix really is: build-up. It's good build-up, but it leaves me hungry for a climax, and I don't want to have to wait two more books and who-knows-how-many years for it! But then, I never was any good at delayed gratification, I admit.

There are plenty of other things I could say about the book, but I think I've gone on enough for one post, and, in any case, if I wanted to talk about stuff in more detail, it really ought to be in a separate post labeled with spoiler warnings. So I'll just say one more thing before I go: Snape is cool. I don't care what Harry thinks, he is. So there!

Harry Potter and the Voices in My Head

I'm currently on page 600 of the new Harry Potter book, and I can now answer with certainty the burning question I posed a few posts back. The voice of Snape in my head is pretty much the same as the one my brain conjured up for him in previous books, though it takes only a tiny (and occasionally involuntary) shifting of mental gears and he immediately slides into Rickman's voice instead. Which actually makes for some rather strange effects...

Oh, and Umbridge, the new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, is really making me wish I couldn't hear characters' voices, because hers is insanely annoying. Gahh.

A Sensible Quiz

Here's another pretty cool online quiz which tests your sense perceptions and your knowledge of the body's five senses. Playing around with the optical illusions is particularly fun, and apparently if you do well enough, you can enter to win an MRI scan of your own brain. OK, surely I cannot be the only one who thinks that's a really cool prize?

For the record, I scored 14/20, not good enough to qualify. But I take exception to the question involving caviar. No way I'm ever gonna consider that stuff tasty...

(Link via The Presurfer.)

Has It Been Another Year, Already?

Happy Birthday to Patrick Stewart, and to Harrison Ford, and, oh, yeah... to me! I'm thirty-two today. And I can't decide which thought frightens me more: the fact that, most of my life, I feel like I've just been faking being a responsible adult, or the fact that, more and more of late, I'm having moments when I start thinking of myself as a responsible adult...

There Once Was a Hollywood Movie...

Via Ferro Lad, here's a fun quiz that challenges you to identify movies whose plots are described in limerick form. OK, it isn't exactly that much of a challenge -- I scored 10/12, and I'm not exactly Ms. Movie Geek -- but the limericks are highly entertaining.

Yeah, I'm Nothin' But a Trend-Follower...

Well, I finally started the new Harry Potter. I've only read one chapter so far, but, wow, Harry really did turn into a sullen teenager, didn't he? Quite believably, too, I might add.

Anyway, give me a few days and then y'all can actually talk to me about what happens...

Why, Yes, I Am an Obsessive Fan...

I just ordered a copy of the second Farscape cookbook. This despite the fact that I've never actually cooked anything from the first cookbook. (My fault, I hasten to add, not the cookbook's. It's actually a very cool cookbook. I just don't ever really cook these days.)

A Friendly Friday Five

1. Do you remember your first best friend? Who was it? I honestly don't think that I've ever had one. Which probably makes me sound more pitiful that I actually am... The thing is, to me, the term "best friend" has always had a certain mystique about it. As a child, television presented me with this mythos of the "best friend" as a sort of platonic soulmate, someone unconditionally loyal, someone so close they most likely knew you better than you did yourself. And me, hey, I was such a loner that all the way through 'til the end of high school, I figured I was doing well if I had somebody to sit with at lunch. I've gotten a lot more social since then, and these days I have a number of people I consider reasonably good friends, but the term "best friend" has to my mind always implied a special Sam-and-Frodo sort of closeness that I don't think I can really lay claim to.

2. Are you still in touch with this person? Well, my non-answer to the last question pretty much dictates a non-answer to this question, too.

3. Do you have a current close friend? That, of course, depends on how you define "close," but I'd say I've got at least a couple. There's an internet pal of mine I consider a very close friend despite the fact that I've only actually met him in person a handful of times. I feel like I can genuinely talk about absolutely anything with him, which has to count for a lot. And I've got a friend in Albuquerque who I talk to a lot, who's usually the first person I think of when I need someone to go to the movies or on a road trip with, and with whom I've weathered some pretty bad times (hers and mine) over the years.

4. How did you become friends with this person? The first guy I met through Phoenix APA, though we mostly got to know each other via e-mail. The second, I went to college with.

5. Is there a friend from your past that you wish you were still in contact with? Why? There's another friend from college I keep drifting in and out of touch with. The "out" periods tend to last for years at a time, and I always feel guilty about them. When we do get in touch, we always really enjoy each other's company, but for some reason vague promises to "get together again real soon" and "drop by when I'm in town" never seem to materialize, alas.

New Who!

Yes, that's right, Doctor Who is coming back, this time as an animated show! It's not clear to me from the news items that I've seen whether this is going to be a series or just a one-shot production, but either way, it's very exciting news. The new Who will feature the Ninth Doctor, to be played by Richard E. Grant, who I'm only familiar with from his earlier, humorous stint as the Doctor in the comedy sketch "The Curse of Fatal Death." Well, hopefully he won't be licking any mirrors this time. The script is being written by Paul Cornell, who's witten a number of Who novels which I've thought were very good, but which have generally been a bit removed from the traditional Doctor Who sensibility (to the extent that such a thing actually exists). Should be rather interesting...

I wonder if this is going to air in the US? And if it doesn't, I wonder who I can get to make bootlegs for me? Damned NTSC-PAL incompatibility.

Wow, Apparently I'm Popular!

I just got an e-mail from a friend of mine who works at my ISP saying he just thought I might like to know that "your webpage is in the top 10 pages we serve... #8, to be precise." (He means my home page, of course, not this blog, which is hosted on the blog*spot server instead.) Wow. OK, it's a tiny little ISP, but, still, I'm pretty impressed. I had no idea I was getting that many hits, as I've never gotten around to sticking a hit counter on the site. Apparently the "You Know You Watch Too Much Farscape When..." page is really, really popular. Which is kind of surprising, considering that I don't think it's linked to from anywhere but my own pages. A glance at the stats page he pointed me to, though, appears to indicate that "farscape" is in fact the number two search string for their entire collection of web pages. I guess it's good to know there are that many other people out there who also watch too much Farscape...

If You Ask Me, This Story's As Moving and Suspenseful As Anything He's Ever Done As a TV Script.

I'm not normally the kind to pass on stories about kittens, but I had to share this one. A friend e-mailed me a copy of this usenet post by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski relating an absolutely incredible real-life story that, to be honest, came damn close to moving me to tears. Yeah, OK, sometimes I'm a sentimental sap. But go read it and tell me the reaction isn't warranted...

Thursday is Wacky Search Request Day!

Yeah, can't ever get enough of these! Here's the latest batch:

personality quizzes funkiness: Hey, I think that's probably the only internet quiz I haven't taken. Damn. Now I want to know how funky I am.

Natira seattle: I wonder if that's the Star Trek Natira or the Farscape Natira. I think the latter would be pretty conspicuous in Seattle.

"strange new worlds" rigged: I never heard any accusations that the contest was rigged, although I have been known to question the judges' tastes... Hmm, think maybe this person entered and didn't win?

catchphrases underwear in a marathon: "Underwear in a marathon" must not be a very catchy catchphrase, because I certainly haven't heard of it. Whatever it means.

NASA listen for space aliens andrew ragan: Hey, you think maybe I've got a relative at NASA listening for space aliens? That would be cool! Of course, everybody already thinks my job involves listening for space aliens.

angst Spock stories: Haven't got any, but, I admit, I do quite like that bit in "The Naked Time" where he breaks down and cries.

cures for rug burns: Alas, for eons, Man has striven in vain for a cure for the dreaded and deadly rug burn.

nude nephew jacuzzi: Well, I wouldn't really expect this nephew (whoever he is) to jump into the jacuzzi fully clothed.

sex pictures vacation naked "home page" -free -amateur: This has got to be the first ever nude pictures search request I've gotten where they didn't want the pictures for free. I'm left wondering, though... Are there people who take professional naked vacation pictures?

nude: Talk about simple and to the point!

firefly references blake's 7: Actually, I believe they both stole the "I was aiming for his head" line from The Magnificent Seven.

"ascii animation" "star trek" enterprise: If you ask me, Enterprise could only be improved by doing it in ascii animation. At least that would be original.

charlton heston's july 4th party: He didn't invite me. Sniff.

spike's nude planet: At last, the new Buffy spinoff concept revealed!

The Voices in My Head

Greta left a comment on something I wrote a couple of posts back that I was going to respond to in the comments section, but I quickly realized that I was rambling so much it made more sense to just write it up as a separate post.

Anyway, Greta was saying that she tends to hear specific voices for characters in books. I'm much the same way, although I find that some characters have very strong individual voices that I can "hear" in my head while many others don't. And, as with Greta, characters in books based on a movie or TV show inevitably have the voices of the actors who played them. Well, unless the characterization in the book is really bad. The vast majority of the time, I simply can't hear dialog in a character's voice if it's not actually something that character would say.

I'm thinking that it should be very interesting, by the way, to see what happens when I read the new Harry Potter book... When I read the first four books I had a very clear and distinctive voice in my head for Snape, and it was most definitely not Alan Rickman's. But in the movies, I totally accepted Rickman as the character, so I'll be interested to see whether the book version will now have Rickman's voice, the original voice I gave him, or some other voice entirely.

It can certainly be a bit jarring when the voice a character adopts in your head turns out to not be quite right. I remember reading a Hellblazer graphic novel a friend lent me a while back and immediately getting a very clear voice in my head for the main character, John Constantine. But I was about 50 pages in before I realized the guy was from Liverpool, not London, as I had assumed, and I'd given him entirely the wrong accent. The mental re-arrangement that immediately followed felt really, really odd. It was sort of like the auditory equivalent of erasing the wrong voice from some kind of mental blackboard and then quickly chalking in the right one. After that, he sounded perfectly fine, though. Same voice, different accent. I was actually kind of amazed by my brain's ability to make that change so efficiently.

I gather people who are more visually oriented than I am experience this sort of thing fairly often. They'll develop a mental image of a character only to experience a serious jolt when it's revealed on page 97 that he's brunette rather than blond, or will have trouble accepting a movie adaptation of a book because the characters look nothing like their own visualization of them. Not being a visually-oriented person, I'm not terribly used to that sort of thing, so I guess that's why I find it so startling when something like it happens.

Betty's Handy Travel Guide to Universes That Are Out to Get You

I've been thinking a bit about some of my favorite fictional -- well, OK, TV -- universes and the way things work in them... It's often been said, particularly of science fiction stories, that the setting itself acts as a character, and I think there's definitely something in that. Different universes can have very different "characterizations," and that can make a big difference in the tone of the show. Hell, in large part it is the tone of the show.

And one of the things I love about Blake's 7 and Farscape -- you knew I was going to be talking about those, right? -- is that the universe is not necessarily a nice "person." It feels absolutely no obligation to cut the good guys a break just because they're the good guys. In both shows, the protagonists often do fail, sometimes very spectacularly, despite the best of intentions. To my mind, that's much more interesting than knowing that the hero is always going to win through at the end of the day. The suspense is greater, the stakes are higher, and it's much more realistic. Plus, you get a lot more character depth when you actually get to see the characters reacting to failure once in a while.

But the two shows are nevertheless very different in tone, and the way the universe tends to operate isn't quite the same. Here's an analogy I thought up in a moment of sleep-deprivation:

If the characters are ants, the B7 universe is like a man -- no, an endless parade of men -- in heavy boots marching down the sidewalk. It doesn't care whether you're underfoot or not. Being quick and clever may allow you to escape being crushed for a while, but it's bound to happen sooner or later, anyway. Meanwhile, all the ants are ruthlessly attempting to make sure that somebody else is going to be under the boot this time rather than them. But the main point is that, while the universe is completely unforgiving of wrong moves, it doesn't deliberately set out to screw with your mind. The characters do a good enough job of doing that to each other.

The Farscape universe, on the other hand, is like a kid playing with ants. And it's equally interested in how the ants react when you suddenly deposit them on top of a huge pile of food as it is in how they react when you pull their legs off. It likes to think up weird, random shit to throw at them, preferably at the times when it will provoke the most interesting stirred-up-anthill reactions. It's thus much more likely to cut a character an improbable break than the B7 universe, but it's also much more deliberately and inventively cruel.

Anyway, all this musing came about because I was amusing myself by putting together a couple of not-terribly-original but hopefully nevertheless diverting lists of how things actually work on each show. If you ever fall through a wormhole or a looking glass and find yourself in one of these places, these are definitely going to be good things to keep in mind:


The Laws of Blake's 7

If you have the slightest reason to suspect the situation might be a trap, it's a trap.

Even if you don't have the slightest reason to suspect that the situation might be a trap, it's probably still a trap.

Trusting the wrong people leads to disaster.

Not trusting the right people leads to disaster.

Trusting the evidence of your senses often isn't a good idea, either.

Keen intelligence and good self-preservation instincts won't get you nearly as far as charisma, stubbornness, and sheer dumb luck.

Being able to laugh at your own misfortunes only serves to creep your shipmates out.

The more effort and sacrifice you put into achieving a goal, the more likely it is to turn out to be completely illusory.

Superweapons are seldom worth the trouble it takes to obtain them.

Even god-like aliens have psychological issues.

No matter how dire the situation, there is always time for sarcasm.

The Laws of Farscape

When you suddenly realize that the person you thought was the good guy is actually the bad guy (or vice versa), you're probably wrong. And then when you change your mind about it, you're probably wrong again.

The enemy of my enemy is still my enemy, but it does tend to make things confusing.

The greater the moment of happiness, the more horribly the universe is about to punish you.

The likelihood of an event happening is inversely proportional to the number of people who have earnestly promised that it's going to happen.

Even if you do see the body, it doesn't necessarily mean the person is dead.

The more elaborate and well-thought-out the plan, the less chance there is that it will actually work.

However, plans that everyone immediately agrees to are absolutely guaranteed not to work.

Anyone contracted to perform a medical or mechanical service will invariably screw you over. And not just by overcharging on the bill, either.

Speaking in such a way that nobody understands what the hell you're talking about is a great way to confuse your enemies. It's also a great way to confuse your friends.

Technobabble never gets you anywhere.

The universe will always arrange for the wrong person to be in the wrong place at exactly the wrong time, because things are much more interesting that way.

My Brain Is an Odd Place

Interesting psychological phenomenon: If I watch two or three episodes of Red Dwarf in a row (as I just did earlier today), then any words I read in the next several hours will be in Lister's Liverpool accent inside my head. This is the second or third time this has happened to me, and it's just bizarre. Does this kind of stuff happen to other people, I wonder, or am I just as weird as I sometimes think I am?

Heat Delirium

Have I mentioned lately how friggin' hot it is here? I hate New Mexico in the summertime. A couple of hours ago I got in the car for a five-minute trip to the post office -- in other words, not long enough for there to be any point in turning the air conditioning on, since by the time the car started to cool off I'd already be there -- and by the time I got home I was covered head to toe in sweat and was already feeling the faint beginnings of a heat-induced headache. Not that the house is that much better. The swamp cooler brings the inside temperature down 20 degrees or so, but when it's over 100 outside that still puts it way too far above the comfort zone.

The really annoying thing is I can't even put on shorts unless I want to go to the trouble of changing before work, because they've got the air conditioning turned up so high in there that it induces goose pimples. And people wonder why I get sick...

Currently...

Look, it's this again!

Current clothes: Khaki-colored jeans. A black t-shirt that says "So many books, so little time." (Man, they can carve that on my tombstone!) White tube socks. Black sneakers.

Current mood: Ehh.

Current music: In the stereo right now are Something of Time by Nightnoise, Lay It Down by the Cowboy Junkies, and Mascara and Monsters: The Best of Alice Cooper. Let it never be said that my tastes in music are not broad.

Current hair: Still behaving itself.

Current annoyance: The fact that I'm still coughing up big wads of goo. And that my throat's started hurting again (doubtless from all the coughing).

Current thing: Wild, crazed DVD-buying sprees.

Current desktop picture: I'm back to the Farscape screencaps again. This time it's this lovely shot of Zhaan and Stark from "The Locket." Which I may have used before at some point; I can't quite remember.

Current song stuck in head: Various selections from the Cowboy Junkies album, mostly.

Current book: Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History by James A. Morone. Interestingly, I seem to be reading a lot more books on subjects like politics and American history in the last few years than I ever used to. Then again, it doesn't take huge numbers of books to qualify as a lot more than "none."

Current video in player: Most recently, the Doctor Who parody "The Curse of Fatal Death." Currently in the DVD player is Red Dwarf II, since I had half an hour to kill before work, and that wasn't long enough to watch a Buffy.

Current refreshment: A cough drop.

Current worry: Mostly involves my sister, who's having some personal problems I'm not about to get into here.

Current thought: I can't imagine why I ever thought I liked the taste of Hall's honey-lemon cough drops.

More Gratuitous Quizzage

Well, I'm not all that up on my B5, I have to admit (though I did just finally order season 1 on DVD, yay!), but from what I've seen of Marcus, he seemed like a pretty cool guy.



You're toast, burnt radioactive toast. While
you're ducking and covering, you might as well
just kiss your ass goodbye.


Will You Survive Nuclear War?
brought to you by Quizilla
Yeah, well, I'm probably better off that way. On the off chance that I do survive, though, I do have the advantage of being in good with the guy I'm convinced is going to be the local warlord after the apocalypse.



Gimme some sugar baby.
Which B-Movie Badass Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
Works for me!

I Like to Think of Them As "Early Birthday Presents to Myself"

Just got a big ol' box from Amazon, containing, among other goodies, the latest set of Farscape discs, season 4 of Buffy, and, yes, the new Harry Potter book (which I figure I have to read soon, just so I can have a conversation that doesn't involve me shouting, "I haven't read it yet! Don't tell me how it ends!"). Man, now I'm feeling the sudden urge to call in sick again... Maybe for a week or so.

Literary Pursuits

Recently, I participated in a fun project for the Phoenix APA with my Phellow Pheeners JK Parkin and Greta Northrup. The idea was that each of us would write the beginning of a story -- I believe the theme was simply that the first chapter should involve a character getting a letter with important news -- and then pass it off to the next person to write the middle, who would then pass it on to the final person to write the ending. (Imaginatively, we called it the "Beginning, Middle, and End" project.) The final result was three complete multi-author stories. I mention this because I see that JK has just posted the first of the three on the Phoenix website, and it happens to be the one I started: a silly space opera sort of thing which features a rather Han Solo-ish character but which was in fact almost certainly the result of me having watched one too many episodes of Firefly. I'm really pleased with this, actually, not so much because my opening chapter is anything to be particularly proud of (although I did have fun writing it), but because it was great to see Greta take the characters I'd created and flesh them out so well, and even greater when JK came along, captured the tone I was going for much better than I did, and wrapped the plotline up in a brilliant, unexpected, and very funny way.

So, anyway, for anyone who might have been wondering whether I ever write anything other than rambling blog entries... there you have it. Shrug.

Miracles You Mostly Didn't See in the Last 50 Years

Man, I love reading stuff like this 1950 article predicting what life would be like in the year 2000 AD. A few of the predictions are at least kinda-sorta right, like weather-predicting computers, an extension of the average lifespan to about 85, and the fact that people would eat a lot of frozen food. Some of them are sadly optimistic, like the prediction of cures for multiple sclerosis and the common cold, or, more amusingly, the assertion that "[w]ith storms diverted where they do no harm, aerial travel is never interrupted." Others fall more than a little short of reality:

Fast jet and rocket-propelled mail planes made it so hard for telegraph companies all over the world to compete with the postal service that dormant facsimile-transmission systems had to be revived. It takes no more than a minute to transmit and receive in facsimile a five-page letter on paper of the usual business size. Cost? Five cents.

Heh. Well, I suppose it would have been far too much for someone in 1950 to have been able to predict e-mail. Then there's the usual off-base 1950's predictions: that the dominant power source would be solar (well, at least they didn't say "atomic"), that families would have their own personal helicopters, that telephones would all have video screens. Oh, and they also predicted factory robots (sort of), but kinda blew it when they got to the part mentioning that "only a few trouble shooters are visible, and these respond to lights that flare up on a board whenever a vacuum tube burns out or there is a short circuit." Oh, yeah, those blown vacuum tubes are a major problem in modern automated factories!

It's easy enough to see where all that stuff comes from, right or wrong, but some of these predictions have a serious WTF? quality to them:

When Jane Dobson cleans house she simply turns the hose on everything. Why not? Furniture (upholstery included), rugs, draperies, unscratchable floors--all are made of synthetic fabric or waterproof plastic. After the water has run down a drain in the middle of the floor (later concealed by a rug of synthetic fiber) Jane turns on a blast of hot air and dries everything. A detergent in the water dissolves any resistant dirt. Tablecloths and napkins are made of woven paper yarn so fine that the untutored eye mistakes it for linen. Jane Dobson throws soiled "linen" in the incinerator. Bed sheets are of more substantial stuff, but Jane Dobson has only to hang them up and wash them down with a hose when she puts the bedroom in order.

Mind you, as bizarre as that image is, it's the blithe assumption that of course it's Jane Dobson and not her husband who's going to be doing all the cleaning (and, elsewhere, the cooking and shopping) that strikes the oddest note to my own 21st century mind. Social trends are so much harder to predict than technological ones...

(Link via Presurfer.)

Next Thing You Know, I'll Be Watching Matlock...

I'm feeling quite a bit better today, except for the occasional coughing spasm and the fact that I still don't have a whole lot in the way of energy (which is probably as much due to how flippin' hot it's been here as to my cold). I still don't much feel like going in to work tonight, but to be honest, when is that ever not true?

Anyway, lingering germ-induced lassitude made for a very good excuse to sit around most of the day watching The Simpsons. I've now watched through all the episodes, commentaries, and extras on the season one and the season two DVDs. Guess that means it's time to go and get my hands on season three when it comes out next month.

One of the things I noticed while listening to the commentary tracks this time is how often the commenters would point out a joke that had become a bit dated since the season first aired in '90/'91, or an idea that was new at the time but has since kind of become a bit old hat. I dunno, the episodes still seem pretty fresh to me. But it does get me to thinking about the fact that, wow, there are kids in high school now who were not even born when The Simpsons first came out. And there are probably young twenty-somethings who don't get references my own brain hasn't even yet bothered to categorize as "dated." Man, if that don't make me feel old... Maybe I'm just dwelling on this stuff now because I've got a birthday coming up, but it's a thought that seems to keep crossing my mind more and more often lately. Sigh.

Ooh, I Like This Friday Five! (Even If I Am Answering It Late.)

1. What were your favorite childhood stories? I was then, as I am now, a voracious consumer of stories of all formats and types, so it's a bit difficult to single out any specific ones. But I do recall being especially besotted with the Oz books, to the extent that I expected to be able to look back one day and say, with a considerable (if metaphorical) degree of truth, that I spent my childhood in Oz.

2. What books from your childhood would you like to share with [your] children? I don't have children, nor do I intend to, but I've already bought a copy of The Real Mother Goose for my two-year-old nephew. My mother swears this book taught me how to read, by simple virtue of having it read to me enough times that I was able to associate the spoken and written words, and, even though I couldn't have been more than three or four, it made such an impact on me that I actually do still remember it. As he gets older, I'm sure there'll be many, many more books from my childhood that I'll look forward to sharing with him. Boy, I really do hope the kid turns out to be a reader.

3. Have you re-read any of those childhood stories and been surprised by anything? Oh, all the time. Sometimes I'm surprised by how disappointed I am by them. For instance, I have re-read the first couple of Oz books, and while they're fun, they totally don't evoke the same sense of wonder I got from the series when I was a kid. Other times, I'm surprised at how well they hold up. The Pooh books, for example, where just as delightful to me as an adult. I honestly had forgotten just how clever the language in them is. Sometimes I do re-read kids' books and see things I never noticed as a child. Certainly the religious allegory in the Narnia books flew right over my head when I read them at age 9.

4. How old were you when you first learned to read? I honestly don't ever remember not knowing how to read, though I certainly remember not knowing how to read very well. I do remember being very proud of myself for being able to read all the words on the door of my first-grade (or possibly even kindergarten) classroom (though not, of course, what the sign actually said).

5. Do you remember the first 'grown-up' book you read? How old were you? Depends on your definition of "grown-up." If it means books that are mostly text, as opposed to picture books, I have memories of two that were, at the very least, the first "grown-up" books that I owned. One was called The Boy from Outer Space and was about, you guessed it, a boy from outer space. As I recall, the kids on Mars, or wherever he was from, thought the funnest thing in the world to do was sit quietly and watch grass grow and think, and the Earth kid had to teach him how to run and play and do typical Earth-kid stuff. I remember rather wishing I could go and live on the space kid's planet, where enjoying sitting and thinking was considered normal and acceptable behavior for a kid, and nobody ever tried to make you go and play baseball. The other was called The Adventures of Calico Cotton, and was about a girl who gets swept away on the tail of a kite to an enchanted land in the clouds where everything has a holiday theme -- there's a Christmas area and a Halloween area, and so on -- only the inhabitants don't actually realize they're in holiday-land until she somehow removes the enchantment. Thinking about it now, it sounds stomach-churningly cutesy, actually, but I remember being utterly infatuated with it then. I think it actually was the first "grown-up" book I read, in the sense of being an adult-length novel (the Kid from Outer Space book was shorter and on a lower reading level). It was a bit of a challenge to read, but I plunged right in, and I've never looked back since. I honestly don't remember how old I was, but I'd say no more than seven. Yep, my infatuation with fantasy and science fiction goes back a long, long way...

Eww, Now I Feel Really... Unclean.



Which Blake's 7 villain are you?
this quiz was made by Auntie Krizu(:>)

My Exciting, Fun-Filled Weekend

I got a phone call from my Dad a few hours ago. "I could tell you were still sick," he said, "because you haven't updated your web page." Alas, 'tis true. I actually feel rather less sickly today than I did yesterday, but my cold has now moved down into my chest, as almost invariably happens any more. Based on my record, I'll be lucky if it doesn't change into bronchitis and settle in for six months.

So, most of what I'd planned on doing this weekend ended up not happening. I was supposed to go to a BBQ and a gaming session today, and I tried to talk myself into doing so... But BBQ seems pretty pointless, given my current inability to taste anything; my hacking, phlegmy cough doubtless makes me not very fun to be around; and I'm feeling listless and fuzzy-brained enough that I probably wouldn't have a whole lot of fun, either. So, well, here I am, sitting in my PJs at home.

My friend from Albuquerque did end up coming down to visit, even though I warned her that I really wasn't up for any activities more interesting that lying around in front of the TV. This actually seemed to suit her well enough... She got access to my extensive multimedia library, and in exchange ended up making me tea and listening to me bitch and moan endlessly about the state of my sinuses. We watched eight episodes of Farscape, three entire seasons of Blackadder, a Doctor Who and a couple of Red Dwarfs. I should mention that this selection of viewing material was entirely selected by my friend. There are reasons why I hang around with the people that I do!

Oh, yeah, and we also watched (most of) Planet of the Apes on AMC. It'd been a long time since I'd seen that one, and, frankly, I'd forgotten how much of a classic it really was. It's interesting: despite the lack of expression on the latex ape-faces and the fact that Charlton Heston's acting mostly consists of a lot of shouting and ranting, the movie actually does prove that even heavy-handed social commentary can be done interestingly and well and still hold up 35 years later.

Anyway, after three days of taking it easy, I'll hopefully be feeling well enough to be OK at work on Sunday night. The only annoying thing is that I'd kind of like to just curl up and go back to sleep now, and I really should try and stay awake for a while so I can spend the day asleep tomorrow and be rested for the night shift. Hmm, maybe I should have gone gaming... At least that would have kept me awake.

Still Sick

I was feeling a bit better yesterday, and the sore throat was definitely starting to fade, so I was kind of hoping I was successfully fighting off whatever it was I was infected with. No such luck, though. I started feeling considerably worse about halfway through my shift last night, and when I woke up today (too damned early, yet again), it was pretty clear that a fairly nasty cold had taken up residence in my body and was in the process of making itself quite comfortably at home. I've already sent word to the boss that I'm not going to be in to work tonight; I'm really hoping that if I spend today resting I should be able to shake this thing quickly, as I've got a friend who's supposed to be coming down for the 4th of July tomorrow and I'm meant to be gaming on Saturday. Sigh. You know, there are occasional times when, I admit, I find myself thinking that it would be nice to come down with a little mild illness just as an excuse to stay in bed and read or something. But, of course, during those times, I inevitably stay robustly healthy. It's when I've got things to do (places to go, people to meet), that the germs always decide to pounce. Stupid germs.

I should really go and try to get some more sleep, but that's kind of hard to do when you can't really breathe, so maybe I'll just prop myself up here in front of the computer for a while...

Hey, Remember This?

It's Thursday (well, technically, anyway, since it's after midnight), which means that, after a brief hiatus due to me being away on vacation, it is once again time to present for your enjoyment the panoply of strange and interesting search requests that have recently landed misguided websurfers on the shores of this humble blog. Ready? Here we go!

BoomBox for 02 Expedition: Expedition to where, I wonder? Somehow, I've now got this image of Antarctic explorers with boomboxes perched on the shoulders of their parkas, possibly in hopes of soothing the savage penguins...

"Timmy's in the well" means: Er, it means that Timmy's in the well. Or, in dogspeak: Bark, bark, woof woof, pant, BARK!

"dukat" and "servalan": Ooh, now those are two interesting characters to compare! Personally, I think that Dukat is a far more interesting and three-dimensional bad guy than Servalan, even if they did take him a bit over the top in the final season.

hardware store insane al yankovic: Yeah, that's a pretty nutty song, I'll grant you... Listen closely to the lyrics; there's a really strange item or two on Al's shopping list.

malcolm reed sneezing: I don't know what this obsession is that people have with characters sneezing. A while ago, somebody was looking for a sneezing Spike. Hmm, maybe he gave Malcolm his cold.

"joss whedon" "crappy episode" season four: OK, I'll bite. Which season 4 ep is the crappy one?

I want to leak somebody's boobs: Um, are you sure that's the verb you really want?

angsty quotes: Erm, OK. How about: "I am so much better dead." -- John Crichton. Or "There should have been another way!" -- The Doctor. Or "Of all the things I have known myself to be, I never recognized the fool." -- Kerr Avon. (What, you were expecting Hamlet?)

Hong Kong Phooey nude: And here I thought I'd seen enough freaky "nude pictures" search requests that they were no longer capable of making me boggle.

free clips of traveling down a wormhole: If you happen to have any, I know a certain Scarran-Sebacean hybrid who would be very interested in having a word with you.

wayne pygram nude: Heh. Speak of the devil... You know, I'd dearly like to count this as another item to check off on my "search requests for nude Farscape characters" list, but, damn it, the rule is that it has to be characters, not actors. Sadly, I don't know that I'll ever be able to check Pygram's character off, since I'm not actually at all sure that suit of Scorpy's is even removable...

lego impereal star destroyer shopping: Today's shopping list: milk, eggs, soda, a lego star destroyer...

dumb statements: Hey, I like to think I don't make that many!

shakespeare srudy guide: Yow, did I actually somehow manage to type "srudy?" Ruh-Roh!

Speaking of The Lack of Good SF TV Shows These Days...

OK, here's a news story that's simultaneously hilarious, stupid, and kinda sad. Apparently Activision, the game company that holds the rights to make Star Trek videogames, is suing Viacom for not keeping up the Star Trek franchise, given that there are no plans for a new movie after Nemesis and that Enterprise kind of sucks. (OK, they didn't actually say that last part, but I get the feeling that it's sort of implied.) The general gist seems to be that, since Trek is declining in popularity, Activision wants out. Quote: "'Through its actions and inactions, Viacom has let the once-proud Star Trek franchise stagnate and decay,' Activision said in a statement." Ouch. True on an unfortunate number of levels, but... ouch.

(Link via Snarkcake.)

Preach It, Matt!

Have I mentioned lately how much I love TV Guide's Matt Roush? Here's an excerpt from his latest online "Ask Matt" column.

Question: There have been a slew of fantasy/science-fiction shows over the years (Hercules, Xena, Andromeda, Stargate, and The Lost World) in syndication. However, the networks (with the exception of WB and UPN) just don't produce these sorts of series. Why not? - Lee C.

Matt: Don't forget Fox, which has tried for years to find the next X-Files, and most recently went into outer space with Firefly, however briefly. The networks don't seem to have the patience anymore to nurture or bankroll these kinds of shows. Blame a lack of nerve and imagination. Many of these shows take time to build a following, and even then, most attain cult level at best. (X-Files was the exception with its mainstream success.) But when one really works, like Buffy, look what that does for a network's image. You'd think if some of these dinosaur networks truly wanted to get into the 21st century, they'd take a risk with a visionary producer (calling the next Gene Roddenberry) and stick with it, especially if the show is good. Now all of a sudden I find myself missing Farscape again.

Take That, You Evil Phone Spammers!

I've just signed myself up for the National Do-Not-Call List. Man, this thing was sorely needed and far too long in coming, but I embrace its advent with heartfelt rejoicing. Now, after October 1st, telemarketers will not legally be allowed to call me! Huzzah! I think I ought to have a party that day.

Ick.

By the time I left work last night (or rather, this morning), I was developing a pretty bad sore throat. When I woke up today, it was much worse, and my nose was pretty stuffed up, to boot. A decongestant and a throat lozenge did a reasonable job of relieving the symptoms, but then I just couldn't get back to sleep... Which means not only do I appear to be coming down with something, but I'm now going to be operating on about four hours of sleep. Bleah. Coming home from vacation and immediately getting sick is not my idea of a happy time.

Funnily, enough, I remember picking up a fragment of cookie that had fallen onto my tray table on the airplane coming home and thinking, "Oh, I really shouldn't eat this. These airplane surfaces are crawling with germs." And then eating it anyway, of course. So maybe it's my own damned fault. Then again, there does seem to be something going around. The guy I relieved last night said he wasn't feeling well, and thought he might be calling in sick today. Which probably means it's a pretty bad idea for me to call in sick, too. Which I might very well want to do if I start feeling any worse. Sigh.

There Goes the Neighborhood

When I went out this afternoon to go do some laundry (always a necessary thing when you've been travelling for two weeks), I noticed that they were getting ready to pick up and move the trailer next to mine. The people on the other side of me bugged out a few months ago, as well, and the one two doors down from me -- correction, that used to be two doors down from me -- has had a "for sale" sign on it for quite some time. All of which has led me to the following thoughts. Thought #1: Is something horribly wrong with this trailer park that I'm not aware of? I mean, it's definitely not an upscale park, as trailer parks go, but it's not remotely as bad as some of the other parks in this town, especially given how cheap the rent is. Yeah, there was that flooding problem last year, but supposedly they've taken steps to improve the drainage since then. (Though, as far as I know, we haven't had any long periods of rain so far this year, so it's impossible to tell yet whether it worked or not.) Thought #2: Gee, I hope it wasn't anything I did! Thought #3: Hey, now I can crank the stereo up at 2 AM, and they'll be nobody near enough to be bothered by it! Yay!

Comment Oddness

Hmm, for some reason the line at the bottom of a post that says how many comments there are hasn't been updating when someone adds a new comment. How very annoying.

Where the Frell is My Farscape?

Looking through the e-mail that came while I was gone, I found a message from the Save Farscape people mentioning that a few weeks ago should have been the fifth season premiere. Man, now I'm depressed. Maybe in some alternate universe[*] there's a version of me that now knows how that cliffhanger came out, but somehow I'm not finding that thought very comforting. Sigh.

[*] Or unrealized reality, if we're going to use the Farscape term.

See, I Told You We'd Now Return to Blogging as Usual...

For the record, I stole all these from Ferro Lad:



You are Meddle - laid-back, free-form, one of the
most incredible albums to date: too bad it
didn't sell big when it came out.

Which Pink Floyd album are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Hmm, that's not remotely what I would have expected... Not that Meddle isn't a good album, but it's far from my favorite.



What rating is your journal?
brought to you by Quizilla

Yeah, that sounds about right. Even if I wanted to answer "none of the above" to a couple of the questions.



Al-shurprais! You shudd speaq ARABIC `as al-
lankhu'adj.


What language are you supposed to speak?
brought to you by Quizilla

Huh?

Back Where the Land is Dry

Well, I've now arrived safely home in New Mexico... Sad as I am to see my vacation end, I am actually very glad to be home. Although I'd almost forgotten how hot and bright it is here, after spending the last two weeks in cool and cloudy northern climates. Anyway, we now return to blogging as usual. The full and detailed trip report I promised (or possibly threatened you with) will probably be making an appearance a bit later in the week, when I've had time to type stuff up.

Some trip statistics:

Number of miles travelled round-trip on the cruise ship: 2,487.

Books read on the trip: The last hundred pages or so of Altered Carbon, Books One and Two of the Dragonlance Legends trilogy and 126 pages of Book Three. Also the latest mailing of Phoenix.

Number of e-mails waiting for me when I got home: 585. (So if you sent me some and I don't get around to answering it for a while, you know the reason!)

Back on Dry Land

That's right, folks, I'm back in Vancouver and currently posting from a friend's computer. I'll be back home sometime tomorrow, and at some point, I'll be sure and write you up a laboriously detailed account of how the entire vacation went.

For the moment, I'll just say that I very much enjoyed the whole cruise ship experience. If you haven't been on one, believe me, people who have are not lying about the food thing. I swear, I must have gained twenty pounds on this trip. It seemed like I was eating constantly; I'd finish breakfast, and fifteen minutes later it was time for lunch. And it was all terrific, too. You could get very spoiled very quickly living like that. It's not just the food, either... I won't say the service was always 100% impeccable -- goodness knows, my mother complained enough the day we only got one clean washcloth in our stateroom -- but I did get the rather bizarre feeling that these people honestly did believe that their job was to cater to your every whim and anticipate your needs before you had them. And, you know... I liked it.

The scenery was gorgeous, too. The sight of islands slipping slowly past the ship in the deep blue after-midnight twilight is one I'm going to take with me for a very long time.

It was also nice to see several of my relatives (two aunts, an uncle-by-marriage, and my mother) again, though perhaps the circumstances were not the best. My stepfather should have been on this cruise in my place, had he not died in March, and I know it was very hard on my mother to be there without him. I know she had a few bad moments; I only hope the good moments managed to make up for it.

For myself, I was hugely reluctant to leave at the end of the cruise. Ah, if only I could have stowed away somewhere and done the round-trip voyage again! Oh, well... I supposed they'd be missing me at work next week if I'd done that, anyway...

Another Quick Trip Update

We're currently sailing away from Hubbard Glacier, which was a decidedly impressive sight. The weather's been kind of chill and drizzly, but they had blankets and hot cocoa available up on deck, and we had a pretty good view of the glacier from the balcony of our stateroom, too. (Though, personally, I haven't minded the cool damp weather much at all. It makes a nice change from the desert. Even if it was actually raining a bit in New Mexico when I left.)

Yesterday we were in port in Skagway, where we took a ride on a narrow-guage railroad through an area featuring some beautiful scenery and rich in Alaskan gold rush history. Tomorrow we're putting into port in Ketchikan (I hope I'm spelling that right; I don't have the info in front of me), which is supposed to be a good place to go shopping, though, unlike my family members, I think I'm starting to get a little tired of looking at the same tourist stuff.

I'm still definitely enjoying shipboard life. Tonight, I'm planning on a soak in the indoor whirlpool tub and probably going to a midnight comedy show. Oh, and stuffing my face with still more excellent food, though that kind of goes without saying...

Juneau Where I Am?

Yep, that's right, we've just pulled into port in Juneau, Alaska! I'd love to give you guys a detailed trip report, but I'm paying 50 cents a minute for internet access here, so you're going to have to wait until I get back for the full "maximum verbosity" version. Here's the short version: Yesterday was a shipboard day. Very, very relaxing. The ship itself is great, and we've passed by some really nice scenery (although it has been a little chilly on deck or outside on the balcony for extended sightseeing). For those who've asked about the food, it's been wonderful. I feel like I've been eating pretty much constantly for the last couple of days.

Much as I've enjoyed hanging out on the ship, I am starting to look forward to getting outside and seeing Alaska firsthand. So I suppose I should get off the 'net and go do that!

More updates later, if and when I get the chance, but if you don't hear from me, you can pretty much assume that I'm too busy enjoying myself to notice the pangs of internet withdrawal.

Trip Update #1

Well, I'm here aboard the cruise ship, currently sitting in the harbor in Vancouver! Yeah, yeah, I know, I couldn't even wait until we left to get back on the 'net, but it's been nearly 4 days, and I'm starting to go into withdrawals...

I gotta say, I really think I'm gonna like this whole cruise ship deal... They really do seem quite intent on providing something for everyone, not excluding us introverted types, as evidenced by the library, the internet cafe, and the coffee and book lounge. So far, we've had lunch at the buffet (where the food choices were varied enough to be mildly overwhelming), walked around the ship a bit, and took a tour of the spa (generally not my thing, but the massage services actually look very tempting).

We're sailing in a couple of hours, after the madatory lifeboat drill. And much as I like Vancouver, I find that I'm really looking forward to getting under way and off toward Alaska.

I'll try and stop back here a few times through the week and let you know how it's going, so you can all be horribly jealous!

Well, It's Time for Me to Make Like a Tree and Get Outta Here.

That's right, tomorrow morning I'll be taking off for beautiful British Columbia and six days and seven nights of cruising the Alaskan coastline. So this is likely to be the last blog entry you'll see from me for a while. According to the cruise line's website, the ship does have an internet cafe, so it's quite possible that I'll be checking in once or twice to let you know how it's going. On the other hand, I suspect it's extremely likely that my family members will drag me bodily from in front of the computer and insist that I join in on something "fun" and "social," so I can't really make any promises.

Anyway, if you don't hear from me before then, I'll be back in a couple of weeks. Try not to miss me too hard!

Oh, Yeah, And At Some Point, I'll Probably Pack Some Clothes, Too.

Well, I think I've decided on which books I'll be taking on the cruise. I've finally settled on the following:

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan, because I'm almost certainly not going to finish it before I leave. I started it last week and figured I'd be long since done with it by now, but I'm having trouble getting into it. It's got some good worldbuilding, and started out looking like it was going to have a really interesting mystery plot, but quickly wandered off into the realm of gratuitous sex and carnage. Not that I object to that in principle, really -- hey, I bet it'd make a great Schwarzenegger flick -- but it's just not what I've been in the mood for lately.

The Dragonlance Legends trilogy by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman (Time of the Twins, War of the Twins and Test of the Twins). Undemanding, entertaining, turn-your-brain-off vacation reading.

Hellfire Nation by James A. Morone, which I just got in the mail today and which looks like it will do nicely for when I get tired of reading fluffy Dragonlance books.

That should probably do me, although, of course, I as soon as I say that I'm hit by the nagging worry that I might finish them all and -- gasp! -- find myself with nothing to read. Even if I don't get a whole lot of chance to read on the ship, those are pretty long plane flights back and forth to Vancouver, after all... Maybe I should add another book or two to the stack. Hmm.

Blogger Update

Well, my archive links are back! Better still, they're actually all there now! I'm not 100% sure exactly what the problem was -- something didn't translate over properly when they made the switch -- but the Blogger folks have apparently fixed things, and with any luck I shouldn't have any more trouble with disappearing archives in future. (Well, here's keeping my fingers crossed, anyway!)

The funky problem I was having where I'd try to edit posts and it kept reverting back to old, pre-edited versions was apparently due to their spiffy new auto-save feature, which they're very proud of. Whatever. I haven't had too much trouble with it since then, so maybe it and I can manage to coexist. Worst comes to worst, they say they're planning on (eventually) enabling the ability to choose the LoFi interface instead of the troublesome one with all the bells and whistles...

I have discovered another problem, though, which is that a number of the longer posts in my archives have gone missing, replaced with a message that says "BIG POST ERROR." Apparently the new version has some maximum post length limit or something. I really hope that's just another switchover problem and not something that's going to affect future posts. I mean, really, this blog ain't called "Maximum Verbosity" for nothin'.

An Addition to an Earlier List

Thinking about the upcoming Alaska trip reminded me of yet another show I'd love to get on DVD if they ever release it: Northern Exposure. Man, I loved that show!

In Which I Start Bitching About My Sleeping Problems Again

I went to bed at 10:30 last night and tossed and turned for ages, in part because I'm excited about my upcoming vacation, but mostly because my body thinks 10:30 is far too early to be going to bed just at the moment. I gotta say, I pretty much agree with it on this point, too. Stupid morning shift.

The last couple of nights, I've had a bunch of odd dreams, most of which I don't really remember but all of which seem to have been at least mildly unpleasant. I woke up after one of them at 6:15 this morning, which was very ugh, but given that I have to be at work at 7:45, it seemed kind of pointless to try and get back to sleep. Sigh. Today's going to be fun. I'm so glad I've signed up for tomorrow off...

This Blog Has a Past

My archive links are still MIA, and I'm still waiting to hear back from Blogger on this and the other three issues I've reported to them since the switchover. In the meantime, just in case anybody's interested in browsing the archives, I thought I'd repost the links to 'em here. Hey, it'll give you something to read while I'm gone...

April '02
May '02
June '02
July '02
August '02
September '02
October '02
November '02
December '02
January '03
February '03
March '03
April '03
May '03
June '03

OK, I'm Almost Embarrassed to Post This One, But It Was a Highly Amusing Quiz.


Your ultimate Farscape sex toy is Stark. But
remember- that glow thing has the same effect
as a street lamp. Be careful!

Who's your ideal Farscape sex toy?
brought to you by Quizilla

OK. Huh. I'm not remotely sure how they got that from my answers, but, um... Oh, hell, I honestly can't deny it...

Things I Need to Do Before I Leave on Vacation

Mostly for my own benefit, but what's the point of having a blog if you can't share your inane to-do lists with the entire world?

Do laundry, so I have clean clothes to take.

Pack (duh).

Give key to the wonderful person who's going to stop in and look after my cats while I'm gone.

Buy catfood and litter, so said wonderful person doesn't run out of them.

Send out some e-mails letting people know I'll be gone and taking care of a couple of other little bits of business.

Call gas company and get them to fill up the propane tank. (What's in there would probably last the two weeks with no problem, this being summer and me not being home, but ever since I came home from vacation that one time to find the tank on "E" and all my pilot lights guttering low, I've been paranoid about running out.)

Polish the scuff marks off my black boots, so I'll have something other than sneakers to wear at dinner, during which they apparently want you to make an attempt to look nice. (They've apparently got a couple of nights during which dress is expected to be formal, but I am definitely skipping those.)

Put my swiss army knife in my check-in bag so airport security doesn't stop me again.

Copy one more Farscape tape, so I've got the complete first season to hand out to my sister and the friend I'm meeting in Vancouver.

Set VCR to tape the Farscape reruns that will air while I'm gone.

Get rid of all the food in the cupboard that's likely to sprout mold in the next two weeks.

Decide which books to take.

Pay bills, so nobody's screaming for money or slapping late fees on me while I'm gone.

Man, I hope that's everything...

More Blogger Weirdness

Hmm, now Blogger's giving me the "LoFi" version of the posting interface here on my PC at home (as opposed to the work one I was using last night). Odd. I'm using Netscape 7.0. You'd figure that'd be up-to-date enough for them. I think I'm liking this upgrade less and less. Maybe I'm less likely to have the weird editing problem I was having last night on this bare-bones version they're giving me now, but it's rather more inconvenient to use than the old version. Deep sigh.

Read Any Good Books Lately? How 'Bout Any Bad Book Reviews?

For those of us who are easily amused by such things, it's a blog which collects really dumb and/or silly Amazon.com reviews. Here's a sample, "reviewing" The Great Gatsby:

I've tried every diet in the book(s.) But Mr. Fitzgerald has hit upon th perfect balance of low-carb dining and exercise. His insights into plums are unparallelled. Thank you Fitzy, you truly are a "great" gatsby.

OK, I have no idea what the point of that was, but, hey, it amused me.

(Link via Generic/Synthetic.)

Making an Attempt to Answer the Friday Five

OK, I am feeling really, really pissed off at Blogger at the moment, but, damn it, I initially logged in with the intent of answering the Friday Five, and I'm damned if their idea of a helpful "upgrade" is going to keep me from doing it! I just have to be careful to say what I mean the first time and not make any typos, because apparently once you hit "post," editing the current post then becomes something astonishingly like pushing Sisyphus' rock: you keep getting it where you want it, and it keeps slipping right back to where it was a moment ago.

Anyway. Right. Friday Five. Here ya go:

1. What's one thing you've always wanted to do, but never have? Visit England. I grew up watching PBS in general, and a lot of Doctor Who in particular, and I thus developed an irrational but deep-seated conviction that London is actually the centre of the universe. I fully intend to make a pilgrimage there sometime before I die.

2. When someone asks your opinion about a new haircut/outfit/etc, are you always honest? I almost never lie outright, but I don't necessarily feel the need to give a direct and unambiguous answer to questions like that, either. If I genuinely think the person is looking for an honest opinion, I'll give them one, though I'll try to phrase it diplomatically if it's a negative one. Otherwise... There are strategies to employ to avoid hurting the person's feelings without actually lying. Changing the subject often works, e.g. "Hey, where'd you buy it?" Often when asked my opinion on an item of clothing, I'll say something like, "Well, it's not something I'd wear, but hey." Given that I pretty much never wear anything but jeans and t-shirts and that I have zero fashion sense whatsoever, people who know me generally don't take that as an insult. Hell, they'd probably be justified in taking it as a compliment.

3. Have you ever found out something about a friend and then wished you hadn't? What happened? Listen, if it was that horrible that I wish I didn't even know about it, I certainly wouldn't want to tell the entire internet, would I? I mean, sheesh.

4. If you could live in any fictional world (from a book/movie/game/etc.) which would it be and why? I think I'd have to say Iain Bank's Culture (which I was initially introduced to in rip-off -- er, I mean, homage -- form in Ben Aaronovitch's Doctor Who novel The Also People, but have since read about in several of Banks' own novels). The setting is a very high-tech one, in which nanotechnology provides all the material comforts anybody could possibly want, and nobody has to work. The basic unit of society is essentially the "interest group." Everything that gets done, from the important to the frivolous (and I don't think the members of this society actually make a distinction between the two), gets done because a group of people who are passionately interested in whatever-it-is gets together voluntarily to do it. There is no such thing as vocation, only avocation. And, man, that is so the way I want to live my life.

5. What's one talent/skill you don't have but always wanted? I dunno. The list of useful things which I cannot do is so huge that it almost seems pointless to single one out...

Whoa!

Whoa, Blogger looks all... different. I guess they've finally done that upgrade. I wonder if my missing archives have come back now. Let's see...

(Later: No, now they appear to have disappeared entirely. And a lot of things in the way this new interface is working appear to be seriously flaky. Sigh.)

North to Alaska!

I'm starting to get kind of excited about this cruise I've got coming up! Check it out: this is the ship we're going to be sailing on, and we've got one of these staterooms with a private balcony. (I think that's the right picture, anyway!) We'll be leaving from Vancouver, visiting Juneau, Skagway and Ketchikan, and cruising by Hubbard Glacier. You know, I've never actually seen a glacier in person, but I guess I'm about to get the chance, huh?

It's Wacky Search Request Time Again!

Last week, I complained that I'd gotten a pretty weak batch of search requests and that I really thought you people could do better. And you did! Here's some of the more interesting things people have come here looking for this week:

BETTY BAD all skins and boobs: I am not bad, nor could I remotely be described as "all skin and boobs."

naked tenctonese: Yes, as with the Trill, those spots do go all the way down.

"joke recipes": That wasn't chili powder! It was itching powder! Ha ha ha!

what happens in the last episode of buffy: The world ends and everybody dies. (Well, really, like I'm going to tell you...)

quicksand sites/mud puddle visuals: It's a measure of just how used I am to getting pornographic search requests that my first thought on reading this one was, "Wow, that's an odd kink."

pics of humans having sex: And it's a further measure of the above that my immediate reaction to this one was, "How refreshingly normal."

nude grannys: Case in point.

levity mood elevation formula: I usually just go and listen to really depressing music, and that almost always cheers me right up.

monkey sex: Yeah, I knew I was leaving myself wide open for that one.

who would win in a fight, the scarrans or the klingons: Well, there's a question. Hmm, are we talking spaceship battle or hand-to-hand? If the latter... Well, Scarrans are awfully tough, but Klingons are more maneuverable. And they'd undoubtedly do much better under the Scarran heat weapons than, say, a Sebacean would. I think I'd call it about even, but if forced to bet I'd probably marginally favor the Scarran. If we're talking space battles, well, I never did particularly enjoy those heated "U.S.S. Enterprise vs. Imperial Star Destroyer"-type arguments that seem to be endemic among hardcore geeks. It seems to me that it's really impossible to tell who'd win without knowing how the technology matches up. Do Scarrans have the kind of shields that can deflect Klingon disrupter beams? Who knows? They've never encountered them! I say just make up any answer you like.

free nude skydiver pictures: Wow, talk about being able to feel the breeze...

Do you put the title of a song in quotes?: Yes. (That was much easier to answer than the Klingons vs. Scarrans question!)

unstuff your nose naturally: This is generally referred to as "blowing" the nose, and in polite society is always done into a paper tissue or a handkerchief. Hope that helps!

Hey, All I Know About the Stock Market, I Learned from Playing Pit.

Apparently this blog is worth $1,014.29 on Blogshares. Is that good?

And Then I Can Cancel My Cable and Program My Own Damn TV Station.

I've decided that my new goal in life is to build up my library of TV shows on DVD until I no longer care about the fact that there's nothing on TV any more because no matter what time it is or what mood I'm in, I'll always have something good to watch. I've already got a good head start on this project, I think. I just need to do a little prioritizing and start making some decisions about what I want to spend my money on and in what order. Let's see...

TV shows I own complete runs of on DVD:

Blackadder

Alien Nation. Full run of the TV series, but none of the TV movies (yet).

Ultraviolet. Though, it only ran, what, six episodes? So that's not saying much.

TV shows I own part of on DVD and still need to get the complete set:

Angel. Though how I feel once I've seen season 2 will probably determine whether I feel a burning need to collect the rest of the series or not.

Buffy. I'm planning on putting in an order for season 4 as soon as I get back from vacation.

Doctor Who. At the moment, I've only got the "Key to Time" episodes. Unfortunately, the idea of collecting the whole series (assuming the whole series comes out on DVD eventually), while highly appealing, is also more than a little daunting.

Farscape. I've been buying these as fast as they're putting them out. Currently, they're up to the middle of season 3.

Futurama. When is season 2 coming out, anyway?

Red Dwarf. Got season 1, and season 2 is in the mail to me as we speak.

The Simpsons. Just got season 2.

South Park. Just ordered season 1, but don't actually have it yet.

Shows I don't have on DVD and am determined to get ASAP:

Babylon 5

Deep Space 9

Shows I'd like to get eventually:

Fawlty Towers

Monty Python's Flying Circus

Star Trek: TOS, which I'm sure I'm going to have to pick up sooner or later, just because, you know, it's TOS.

Star Trek: TNG, though mainly for completeness' sake. (I do have most of the series on video, so there isn't much of a hurry.)

Lexx, though I'm a bit conflicted about that one. The completist in me would insist on getting the whole series, but I'm not entirely sure the ratio of brilliant episodes to terrible episodes is high enough to make it worth it.

Daria, although I think all that's out are the TV movies.

The Avengers

Shows I want to get if and when they come out:

Blake's 7. This is supposed to be out soon, but the release date's been pushed back so many times that I don't think anybody actually believes that any more.

Firefly. Don't know when this one's coming out, but it's supposed to include episodes Fox never bothered to air. Yippee!

Forever Knight. As far as I know, there are no plans to release this one on DVD at all, but if there were, I would most definitely buy it.

Hmm, I'm sure I'm forgetting some. Ah, well, that'd be a pretty good TV library to start with, don't you think? Sigh. Now all I need is to hit the lottery so I have enough money to buy 'em all, and quit my job so I have enough time to watch 'em all.

Warning: Scary Signage Ahead

Today's featured humorous link: street signs you do not want to see. OK, some of these are a lot funnier than others, but the best ones are decidedly chuckle-worthy. (Via Presurfer.)

I Know, Way Too Many Stupid Quizzes Lately. But How Could I Resist This One?


Cyberman. I shouldn't need to tell you to stay away
from gold, though i will anyway since you
probably have a deep routed desire to visit
Voga, the planet of gold.

Which Doctor Who monster are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Aww. I've no home planet, no influence, nothing! I think I'll go skulk about the galaxy and shoot things.

Yeah, I'm Sure This'll Surprise the Heck out of Everybody...


you are a science fiction novel.

what type of book are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

+5 Comic of Rib-Tickling!

Anybody who's so much as cracked open a D&D manual should find this amusing: The Irregular Webcomic features geeky gamer humor based on D&D, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, etc., etc., etc. Also much gratuitous mocking of that Crocodile Hunter guy. And it's done with Legos! What more could you ask for? (Link via Angels from Another Pin.)

Not Just a Genius in France

Just picked up the new Weird Al Yankovic album. Great stuff, and I'm not just saying that because "Party at the Leper Colony" has one of the most disgusting and groan-worthy puns I've ever heard and I want to spread the misery around, either. I mean, how can you not worship at the feet of a man capable of writing a song composed entirely of palindromes?

I gotta say, though, it's a rather sad measure of how out of touch I am with the current musical mainstream that I no longer recognize the majority of the songs he's parodying. Still, it is oddly comforting to know that, no matter how much the world changes, and no matter how much musical tastes might alter, Weird Al will always be around, making fun of television.

Wow, Maybe I Am a "Power Blogger"...

I see by the sitemeter counter that this blog has just passed 10,000 hits. How utterly, utterly amazing. Of late, I seem to be getting quite a few hits from people other than the six usual suspects and the deluded googlers looking for nude pictures, too. So, howdy, lurkers! Thanks for stopping by! Leave a comment and say "hi" if you feel like it. (That's assuming the comments are working, of course. They seem to have kept appearing and disappearing over the last few days...)

Yet Another Reason to Bow Before Me!

[take the test] - [by krystaljungle.com]

House Calls from the Doctor

If you are a Doctor Who fan (even a little bit!), run, do not walk, to this site and listen to everything on it immediately. It's a series of prank phone calls made by a guy doing a very good impression of Tom Baker who calls people up pretending to be the Doctor. Targets include telephone directory assistance, which he attempts to use to look up the Master; a hardware store where he's checking to see if they have sonic screwdrivers in stock; and a bookmaker's, where he attempts to place a bet on a sporting event that already happened a year ago (whoops, got the time coordinates wrong!). He also phones up Sylvester McCoy, who believes it's really Baker and seems rather worried about him ("Have you been to the pub?") and Tom Baker, himself, who takes it completely in stride and proceeds to upstage the prankster completely. I swear, these are quite possibly the funniest things I've ever heard, especially the Tom Baker one. (I have to offer major thank-you's to the friend of my sister's who drew my attention to these by sending me some of them on tape. I finished listening to them half an hour ago, and I'm still grinning!)

Bow Before Me, Lesser Bloggers!


Power blogger, you are a voice to be heard! Your
blog attracts a lot of attention, for what ever
reason that is. You are a master of your page
and writing is in your blood!

What kind of blogger am I?
brought to you by Quizilla

Not sure what that picture has to do with anything, though.

That Damned Chicken Sure Gets Around

I've just been reading Martin Odoni's list of Blake's 7 chicken jokes and laughing my butt off. Admittedly, these probably won't be terribly funny to anyone who isn't a B7 fan, and even if you are a B7 fan, a lot of them are in-jokes about various fans and mailing-list denizens and people who worked on the show and still might not make all that much sense to most of the general populace. But I mention it here mainly because I'm referenced twice. Is this like being parodied by Weird Al and means that I've "arrived" in the community of Blake's 7 fans?

UPS and Downs

We had a huge windstorm here yesterday, and the power was down for something like five hours. Being the conscientious person that I am, I ran home[*] and shut the computer and everything down before the UPS batteries got drained. When I got home later that night, I booted everything back up, and all appeared to be well. Then, when I got up this morning, I walked into the computer room to find that both the PC and the monitor were completely without power. It seems my earlier UPS glitch was more than just a temporary problem. Sigh.

I was inclined to blame myself for buying the cheapest UPS system I could find, but the power is hugely unreliable here in Socorro and several friends of mine have told me they've had to replace their own UPS systems on a semi-regular basis. So maybe cheap (and thus more easily replaceable) really is the way to go.

This annoys me greatly, though, because now I have to go out and buy a new one, and I'm not even sure I'll be able to find one in town. I really don't want to have to drive all the way to Belen today just to buy a new UPS. Grrr.

[*] From a friend's house, where I spent most of the evening gaming by lantern-light.

Currently...

The regular monthly update on boring stuff you never wanted to know about me.

Current clothes: Blue jeans, slightly rolled up at the bottoms. A blue and white tie-dye t-shirt. (No, I didn't do the tie-dying.) White tube socks. No shoes just at the moment.

Current mood: Moderately upbeat.

Current music: Let's see, in the stereo right now are the Shrek soundtrack, Pachelbel's Greatest Hit: Canon in D and Jimmy Buffett's Barometer Soup. Currently in the walkman is the Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense.

Current hair: Just got it cut. Nice and short.

Current annoyance: Having to work for a living.

Current thing: Oh, the usual stuff. A bit of reading, a bit of writing, a bit of gaming, a lot of web surfing...

Current desktop picture: This collage of images from the Buffy episode "Storyteller." Which I picked not so much because "Storyteller" is all that great of an episode (it's not), but because it was one of the few wallpapers I could find that featured a picture of Andrew, and I felt like looking at Andrew for a while.

Current song stuck in head: The theme song to Hong Kong Phooey. Ah, the inside of my head is such an interesting place...

Current book: The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution by C.P. Snow.

Current video in player: The Doctor Who tape with the Hartnell episodes on it that I mentioned earlier.

Current refreshment: Nothing at the moment. I just finished my usual three cups of morning coffee not all that long ago.

Current worry: I'm a bit worried about some of the details of this vacation I've got coming up, particularly about organizing my time in Vancouver (where I'm spending a few days both before and after the boat leaves). The friend I'm going to be staying with for most of the time I'm there keeps sending me e-mails with vague changes of plans: "Well, I've got movie passes for the night you're coming in, but I should be back by... Oh, wait, I have to babysit that day and I promised I'd take the kid to see The Hulk, but by the time you get into town we should be back... There's this concert the next day, do you want to go?... Hang on, I'm not sure what time it is... They changed my work schedule, so I won't be around most of Saturday..." Etc., etc. Meanwhile, my mother is scheduling tours and wants me to keep her company in the interval between when we get back and when her plane leaves, and my sister and other relatives are coming in a various times... I have the feeling the logistics of it all are going to be a bit difficult to work out, especially without hurting anybody's feelings by cutting short my time with them.

Current thought: This vacation should be a lot of fun, anyway.

Just Shelve Me Under 020![*]

I want to stay here.


[*] Really obscure Dewey Decimal reference. Sorry.