"There is nothing more to be esteemed than a manly firmness and decision of character. I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it; who sees at once what, in given circumstances, is to be done, and does it." -- William Hazlitt
I once managed to keep my face politely smiling while a 10 year old at a party played a tune I knew only as "The Bonnie Wee Lassie Who Never Said No" on a flute.
The Target chain used the Japanese character Domo (sometimes known as Domo-kun), a brown plush monster with large pointy teeth, as part of their Halloween promotion this year.
I'm sure I wasn't the only one trying to shake "Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten" out of my mind while shopping there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_time_you_masturbate..._God_kills_a_kitten
The word that came to mind about McCain's concession was "gracious," and I've heard a lot of other people who had that impression. Perhaps we're grading on a curve, but maybe we can afford to be generous on that point anyway.
It was a relief to not see the angry, whiny, blinky McCain that we've been seeing so much of recently. Was he relieved too? Or did they change his meds?
Palin's outfit was a real change of mood from her campaign togs. Reminded me of Victorian widow's weeds.
I burst into tears recently from a smell. I'd stopped at a somewhat funky coffeeshop in an old building, went through the back door to use the bathroom. There may have been an apartment further on from the bathroom. The smell was the same as my grandparents' apartment that was attached to their luncheonette, a place I hadn't been to since 1966.
Another smell that hit hard came from the woods surrounding the house I'd lived in until 1966. I'd visited the town recently, parked the car next to the woods. I've parked there occasionally over the years, but never smelled anything notable before. This time it was as if it was flooding all my receptors at once. There was a sense of rightness, that I was bonded to these woods, that I was tuned to take them in and be nourished by them.
It's all the more curious as I've been descending into anosmia for a few years. It comes and it goes, I'm not so sure why. It's harder for cooking and tasting things to make sure I've seasoned them right. But I can summon smell memory so well it doesn't seem to matter.
Sometimes a scent that I associate with a dead relative will momentarily assault me somewhere in public. It's very transitory, I have not idea if it is real or not, but it feels like grace.
Yes, hectographs and Play-Doh and lilacs. We didn't have lilacs when I was a kid, but I knew them from bouquets kids would bring to school for the teacher. They've got an associated sense of ecstatic joy at learning to them.
The smell of a baby drunk on breastmilk. They get all googly and goofy.
Yardley Slicker lipstick circa 1968 (what WAS the dominant smell of those?).
The smell of the tiny janitor's closet in grade school where we washed out the tempera paint containers.
The first whiff of the London Underground when you've just gotten off a plane from America. Not so much the first trip, but subsequent ones, when you've got history behind them.
I got a flyer in the mail from a local candidate this week, urging me to vote for him on line A or E. I realized that not only was he not saying which party he was running under but not a one of the lawn signs I'd seen all over the county gave a party affiliation on it.
David Sedaris said this regarding uncommitted voters:
To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. "Can I interest you in the chicken?" she asks. "Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?"
To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2008/10/27/081027sh_shouts_sedaris
Xopher and I both posted at 8:02 that the movie was playing on the Sci-Fi Channel tonight.
Coincidence? You be the judge!
Those hungering to see the Unearthed and further liveblog it will find it on the Sci-fi channel at 9PM Eastern tonight.
Erik #41:
Are you maybe thinking of the Profiles in History auction house? They offer some magnificent relics of science fiction film and TV history periodically.
Erik, I hadn't realized this was you! Somehow I'd assumed you spelled your name with a C. (I'm an old friend of Erik's mom, and one of my daughters was born on his birthday).
Carol (of Wild Vine)
If the McCain campaign feels that it is appropriate to bring up William Ayers, perhaps it would also be appropriate to review and compare the bombing careers of both McCain and Ayers.
McCain will probably come out ahead because he was a professional bomber, with his institutional support and funding more severely impacting the people he bombed. Ayers was more of a hobbyist in comparison.
In the sixties there was a stuffed two-headed calf in the "Dad and Lad" store in Hackettstown, NJ. As I recall it sold hunting, fishing and farming-type clothing. The calf was kept somewhere up by the ceiling toward the back, and I loved gawping at it whenever I went in with my dad. I stopped in decades later to see if it was still there, but they'd thrown it out, WITHOUT EVEN ASKING ME. Some people are lousy at telepathy. [sniff]
A vendor at our local county fair was selling deep-fried "Oreo's" [sic] this year.
Finding online that over 50 years ago, when I was the first child to be born in that generation, that my beloved great-uncle had written to someone working on a family genealogy that I was "the apple of her great-uncle's eye."
#29 Johan One problem with trying to teach the elderly to fall better would be that they couldn't afford much of a learning curve. If you break something while learning how not to break something, it doesn't do you much good.
What about making some videos that they could watch and absorb on a subconscious level? Some studies have shown that visualising physical acts can be almost as useful as physically practicing.
I'm middle-aged and stout and not very flexible, with no martial arts training. Yet a few years ago, when I slipped on some black ice in the dark, I somehow managed to not only roll with the fall but come up out of it in one smooth motion and land upright on my feet again. I quite astonished myself. I can only assume that all those years of watching Emma Peel came into play, as it happened too fast for conscious reaction.
I guess I'm one of the few who hung on to the Bantam On Wings of Song. I don't recall bonding with the book for the most part, but I see I still have pp. 275-79 bookmarked, the Honeybunny story told to Incubus the dying dog.
On rereading that part just now I see my reaction is the same as it was a quarter century ago -- that this superficially silly confection of an interlude was somehow some of the fiercest, bravest, take-no-prisoners writing I'd ever encountered.
We loved The Brave Little Toaster as a family, because how could we not? It was respectful to those who serve us quietly. I'm sorry to hear that life became hard for Disch, and he became hard in return toward the end. Such sad news.
The old-fashioned way of burying a horse --
When I was in my thirties, my grandmother was up visiting for an afternoon. I don't recall that side of the family ever being much for stories about when they were young, but I decided to try taping a little interview with Nana, not knowing what I'd get.
She sat up straight, folded her hands, and stories came out about growing up on a Wisconsin farm with a psychotic father. She showed me a scar on her arm, and matter-of-factly said it was from when he'd thrown the hatchet at her. She said she had to drop out of school in 8th grade to take care of her younger siblings. Nana's mother had died of appendicitis because her father refused to take her into town to see the doctor.
Nana related how once her father had beaten a horse to death, and then ordered her and her brother (they were the two oldest) to bury it at the side of the road. They dug a pit, but the horse was too heavy for them to drag. She said they had to skin it to make it light enough to move.
Not every email I send arrives at its destination.
I'm perplexed that it wasn't sent as a hard copy.
The "report piracy" link takes you to their page where they tell you that you can report any piracy you find on a "Bulleting [sic] Board Service."
http://www.siia.net/piracy/report_content.asp
Girl Scout troops and church newsletters, now's the time to start living the righteous copyright life. You've been warned.
Does their capitalization of "You" in the agreements constitute a nod to our god-like qualities?
Will we at least see some nattily-dressed bloggers take up the Dog the Bounty Hunter role in the ecosystem, and chronicle their bounty-hunting prowess? Will those bloggers donate their blood money to an organization that fights copyright dimwittery?
Will they arrange for Goofus and Gallant(TM?) to illustrate the copyright Do's and Don'ts? If "Do's" has an apostrophe and s, should "Don'ts" have an apostrophe too?
Check their "Your services" link. Reuters and the Boston Globe and others have joined up.
http://info.icopyright.com/service.asp
From a quick look at their site, it seems that maybe they'll be spidering to locate most of the uses of their tagged material. Will the human stooges be useful to turn in the sites that bar robots?
If you don't have air conditioning and want to spend the day somewhere that does, you may want to check out a few different places to see which one has the best temperature.
It used to be that our local mall was a welcome respite from the heat. But in the past year or so they've been raising the temperature high enough during heat waves that I've sometimes found myself sweating inside the mall just walking.
Does anyone have any recommendations of websites that thoroughly compare the various methods of dealing with window coverings, both for summer and winter conditions? I'd like to know about things I could make myself, rather than laying out hundreds of dollars.
Is there any rule of thumb for dealing with expensive medications that need refrigeration, especially if the power is out for a few days?
Teresa, could we persuade you to expand #32 to a page, with more
fonts, and each comment on identifying the font done in the font that's
being described?
Pretty please?
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 1 |
| 2008 | 19 |
| 2007 | 5 |
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