Digressing madly... Mel, I want to take issue with "activities requiring thought and creativity, rather than just sitting around playing video games all day." Sewing is cool, as is beading, and I've just spent multiple hours today knotting plastic laces because it appears that having skill in plastic lace-knotting (known, unfathomably, as Scooby Doo in the playgrounds of London) is a good way for eight year olds to raise their social stock.
And all of those activities, which presumably count as 'requiring thought and creativity', hit exactly the same brain receptors, for me, as the 'more mindless' sort of video games. You know, get in the flow state, happily knot plastic laces for a bit, think about what comes next, happily zap aliens for a bit, that sort of thing. The less mindless sort of video games engage my brain on the same sort of level as, say, Photoshop or cooking.
People are forever dissing video games, to the extent that we must presume that if I sit around this evening playing Monopoly with my family we're having a warm bonding experience, but if the four of us play Mario Kart Double Dash together it's the end of civilisation as we know it. The only thing wrong with spending hours playing video games is, you know, spending hours; it's no worse than spending hours noodling on guitar or watching telly or beading or whatever.
I'm not sure what any of this has to do with drugs, because of course the chattering classes don't have anything to do with that sort of thing. Whoops, we seem to have finished another bottle of red wine. Shall I get another one out of the cellar or do you fancy a G&T?
One of the odd things about getting old is you tend to do fewer things for the first time. But one of the things I did for the first time in 2004 was get behind a drumset and play a bit. Very very badly. As did my son (aged 4). Rather better because he wasn't trying to do timing or play particular drums or anything; he just hit stuff with abandon. Every couple of minutes he had to stop for a giggle. But he couldn't use his ankles on account of how they weren't anywhere near the pedals.
Chin up, chaps! Stiff upper lip and all that.
I don't know how third grade class presidents work, but my daughter's infants' school, which she left in the summer (she's 7 now) had a School Council with representatives from each of the year 1 and year 2 classes (I think they decided that the 5 year olds were just too tiny). They decided that the playground needed more seating and launched a plan of action to get it, and they set up a system so that kids who were feeling lonely could get linked up with a buddy at playtime.
The Guardian has a 'Corrections and Clarifications' column which can be compelling reading. But my favourite correction of all time was one read out on the News Quiz a few months ago, from a local paper: "Last week we reported that long-service award winners who had completed five years at Legoland had received a large five-figure sum. In fact, they received a large figure 'five' made out of Lego".
Absolutely 'turf out', and I don't think it's from the Enclosures. I found exactly one web reference to the etymology, which said, roughly, latter half of the 19th century, perhaps from a notion of 'thrown out onto the turf'.
Safari appears not to have the generic Mac OS X spellchecking, which is odd, because the other browsers do, and it's right there in the OS.
Mmm. I have the weird Panther bug that causes my iMac to suddenly seize up, that's characterised by long periods of non-response punctuated with a few seconds of music. I sometimes manage to spot when things are getting shaky, but often I don't. The browser extension I really need is the one that says "Ok, girl, you now have 13 windows open with a total of 58 tabs. You'd probably be able to get away with that, but not while editing a picture in Photoshop and shuffling your entire music collection in iTunes."
Yeuggh. BSD's dystopian vision gives me that awful sinking feeling. Not only does this feel very nasty, and that you could get an entire novel out of it without difficulty, it's got that sense of 'not only could this future happen, but it could be just around the corner' (eg Gattaca).
Lagavulin has been a favourite drink of mine for a long time, and it's very nice, but it's a standard product, made in large quantity and sold everywhere. I wonder if rarity is critical to the quality of 'best in the world'; that something that can be straightforwardly bought at Oddbins for the price of a theatre ticket doesn't quite cut the mustard.
I've had various special malts that I think probably top it, though it's hard to tell because of the tendency to drink special malts on special occasions, whereas Lagavulin is very much my 'everyday' whisky. (Though Oddbins does also have a 25 year old cask strength Lagavulin... if only I had a legion of ass-kissers handy...)
We're doing Weight Watchers, rather idly. Steven's nearly at goal -- he appears to be doing the diet that Lilian characterised as 'most men will lose loads of weight the second they stop eating every darn thing they see'. I, meanwhile, have lost a stone and a half since the summer, but am *very worried* about Christmas.
I'm a bit croggled at the stuff about 'who Peter Jackson thinks the heroes are'. I think it's clear that he personally identifies with hobbits (to the extent that his and Fran Walsh's pictures hang over the mantlepiece at Bag End, and he bought the set so he could build it into a hillside sometime). And there's lots of context in TTT (especially in the extended version) to suggest that he too sees Sam as the protagonist of the tale. Added to which is the fact that...
(possible small spolier for RoTK)
we know that Elanor Gamgee is played by Sean Astin's daughter.
Most people in the UK can still get milk delivered each morning in bottles if they want. It's relatively expensive.
However, even some of the milk we buy from the supermarket is un-homogenised (Waitrose Organic); Marianne particularly likes grabbing the cream. That's home-delivered too, of course, along with all the rest of our groceries.
We buy semi-skimmed milk (2%), but in Britain it's possible to buy delicious gold top milk, which comes from Jersey cows and is a stonking 5% fat. Nothing better for your Weetabix.
I'm leery of giving skimmed milk to my kids; milk is full of fat-soluble vitamins, and I'm not sure where else they'd be getting them from. We also buy full-fat plain yoghurt; just because it tastes so much nicer than non-fat.
This is happening to me too, and I'm very miserable about it. I'm off on a residential course tomorrow; I don't want to disable comment posting on Macadamia, and I fully expect to come home to new comments on every single posting.
If we don't crack this problem, it will stop me blogging, or at least stop me blogging with open comment threads. I'm not prepared to have links of this kind hanging off my site.
Sulk.
Well, of course; you should design your site to be however you like. If you're collecting data on people who don't normally browse at 800px wide or more, can I put my hand up? I normally browse in windows somewhere between 650 and 750 pixels wide. (My screens are, variously, 1024x768, 1280x960, and whatever the TiBook is). This isn't really an issue of archaic screens or browsers; I do it because it gives me a comfortable width of text to read on the average site I read. It is, however, no problem to increase the size of window for Electrolite.
The belief that people browse the web in maximised windows seems to be pervasive in web design.
Yup, herd creatures. True. That explains why this chap finds himself a national hero:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3018456.stm
oh, ok, perhaps I was being humour-impaired. It was morning, after all.
Text messages are the key to modern flash crowds, for sure. But the chap you link to is so gloriously naive, as he explains that the mobs he's creating will never become disrespectful, no matter how large they get. Mmm.
In 1979 my family drove from Pennsylvania to Texas via Florida, with a holiday in the middle. Which means that I've already done some of the finest bits of Florida tat. Not that I would mind going back.
Frank, the worst section of road trip we ever did was the journey from San Antonio to El Paso on I-10. I guess that was in the summer of 1980 or 1981. It's unbelievably empty; full-blown four-way freeway exits lead onto dirt tracks; presumably roads to individual ranches. It's not even beautiful in the way that much desert is. We were pretty dependent on roadside eateries, too; the lowlight of that day was a stretch of hundreds of miles with nowhere to eat other than Dairy Queen. Combined with my father's cast-iron refusal to exceed the speed limit (55 at the time), it's stuck in my memory much more clearly than many more pleasant memories from the same holiday.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 3 |
| 2004 | 8 |
| 2003 | 21 |
| 2002 | 20 |
Total: 52 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Alison Scott:
Show all comments by Alison Scott.