DJ Mrs White In The Library With The Lead Pipe's Friends

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Warm. warm, warm...
So warm, in fact, I ran away to my friend's house in Long Beach yesterday and did all my laundry there. As thanks, I baked some oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for the guys, as well as some store-bought peanut butter with Reese's pieces cookies. Being male, they're far more interested in the fact that all the girls are in town for GlamourCon and are busily squiring them about and making sure the girls are happy and making money.

Having now seen someone play MarioKart on the Wii, I desperately want to play, but not in front of anyone else, so I didn't play at the shop with the guys.

Currently, I'm avoiding the real work I need to be doing and contemplating venturing out for food. This has the additional advantage of letting me cheat and use the air conditioning in the car...so it'll likely win.

Worst Man Sandals Evar

Current Mood: horrified

More Recent Reading
One advantage of reading archaic children's books is that you get through them really quickly. The disadvantage is that you run out of things to read really quickly.

Eric, or, Little by Little, by Rev. F.W. Farrar

This is, honestly, the most awful treacly mush I've ever read. It's also, I'm told, one of the three most popular boy's books of Victorian England, alongside Tom Brown's Schooldays (which I've read) and The Fifth Form at St. Dominic's (which I have not). So it's an Important Book, but the reason I was reading it is that Kipling's characters in Stalky and Co. make fun of it. And I can see why! It's chock-full of tearful embraces, soppy interjections from the author, and tragic death scenes. It's kind of structured like Tom Brown's Schooldays in reverse: Young Eric comes to school a beatific young lad who makes all the Right Sort of friends, but slowly slips into vice a bit at a time. Partway through the book, the angelic Edwin dies (but not before having his leg cut off and explaining to everyone how this is all part of a merciful God's plan), and then Eric starts to smoke and drink and cut class and before you know it, he's expelled from school and becoming a cabin boy and being flogged mercilessly. Actually, he's beaten at school pretty regularly too. There's an awful lot of flogging in this book. Anyway, then he finally gets back home, only to find that the shame of it all has killed his mother (who shipped him off to England at age four and has only spent a year with him in total anyway), and the shame of that kills Eric, who slips off to death with a sermon on his lips.

Contrast that with Tom Brown, who comes to school as a young hellion, getting in fights and playing sports and having fun. Then, halfway through the book, the angelic George Arthur shows up and teaches Tom to say his prayers, not cheat, etc. etc. These books, of course, were written mostly as moral guides and any entertainment value came second. Allow me to quote this commentary:

Eric begins as a far nobler and more devout character than Tom, although he strikes the twentieth-century reader as something of a an egotistical prig. The book is more episodic and less coherent than Hughes's novel and is packed with sentimentality, deathbed scenes, tears, beating of breasts, and intimate, passionate interchanges between pupils and masteres.

Seriously. Also, it's hard to overstate the mildness of Eric's "crimes". At one point, he starts swearing. The swear-word? "Devil". Oh my stars! The only reason I knew that was supposed to be a bad word is because I happen to have read Louisa May Alcott's Little Men (in which you can tell that Dan is a bad boy because he says "devil" occasionally).

The version I read was published by "Dodo Press", which has an interesting business model in that they take books that are out of copyright and easily available on Project Gutenberg and print them. If I had done a little more research before ordering it on Amazon, I would have just uploaded it to be Sony eReader.

Jennings Goes to School, by Anthony Buckeridge

Jumping forward to 1950, this is a school story that's not meant to have any moral lesson in it at all. Jennings tries to to the right thing (sometimes) but gets into convoluted scrapes. Then he gets out of them in convoluted ways. I enjoyed it, mostly for the obscure slang the students used. It was also nice to get away from Eric and spend some time with a properly selfish child. He's not as fiendish as Kipling's characters, but at least he does worse things than get wrongly accused of calling a master a "surly devil".

Not so hot :)
I haven't gone outside to test but here inside, it's not as warm as it was yesterday. Not sweater weather but doable.

I figured the ballgame would be a good time to polish off the work work I had from Friday. I figured it would take a couple of hours to knock it all off. Well, I spent more than twice that and ran out of ballgame before I finished. I'll finish it up tomorrow. I'm sure glad I did the stuff I did today, it would not have been fun to do while being interrupted by other stuff on a regular work day.

Miracles of miracles, the Mariners have a 2 game winning streak going. And next the play Detroit, who is the current Worst Team in Baseball. Another crown to snatch!

The cats are napping and I still have half of CBS Sunday Morning to watch yet!

Current Mood: chipper

It's all about sleep
Went to bed at 6am, woke up 3:45pm.

ugh

Current Mood: distressed

The Latest 10 days..

Wanna see all from February?

Current Mood: calm

General Logan

General Logan
Originally uploaded by gstacymd

General Logan, enjoying the beautiful afternoon.

Posted using TxtLJ
IMDB always said it doesn't warn about spoilers. I just stumbled across one for the Sex & The City movie. Damn.

(If you're going to see the movie, I'd suggest not visiting the IMDB entry for it. The spoiler is right near the top on the front page, methinks.)

Current Mood: annoyed

please repost this in your own journal, please

I just bought a new computer
hopefully I'll get it before mercury goes retrograde

The death of days.
I've decided to kill off the Grymm Days project.

Main reason... I'm lacking motivation to take a pic AND write something. When it becomes a chore, and you're thinking to yourself, "Hey, I haven't taken a pic of my slipper yet...", it's time to call it a day, folks.

And, as

niagarabear pointed out, it was getting too depressing. Truth be told, my life ISN'T that bad... my grades ended well (3.13 GPA... damn Philosophy!), I'm making more money than I ever had, and although we're not together, Mack and I have a good rapport going. Whether that'll translate into a future relationship, we'll never know. Not holding my breath, but I'm not locking the door behind myself, either. We'll see.

As for work (which is the only negative thing happening right now, honestly)... the economy continues to suck. Really nothing we can do about it but wait it out. I went through this over 10 years ago, when the other Bush was in office. I'm just glad I'm pursuing my degree still and have a job WHILE doing so.

Current Mood: relieved
Current Music: Arsis - "The Promise of Never"

faces come out of the rain
Dear Reader whose IP address starts 62.78....

I know you're something of a regular reader here, over the last few months, though to the best of my knowledge you've never commented, just lurked. Which is fine and all that, since I'm fairly certain you're not my old stalking nutcase, unless she's proxy-ing through multiple accounts these days, which would be pretty damn fucking nutty even for her ~~though not all that impossible, now I think about it...~~.

The thing is, according to my IP log, you're not getting picked up here because you're reloading and re-reading your f-list multiple times, which most of us do when it's a slow day or we're avoiding work. You're coming specifically to this journal's homepage, and you're coming a lot. As in, 23 separate visits this weekend alone. Which feels juuust a little bit strange to me, to be honest.

Anyway, couple of thoughts. If you tag this journal, using the little push-pin icon thing, then you can get immediately alerted any time I update here, instead of having to recheck over and over and over and over and over etc. Anything I post that's public will show up, it really works perfectly well.

And / or - why not drop me an email and just say Hi, I'm just a hugely bored lurker, so don't be spooked!

Either way, I really don't tend to update more than once a day unless I'm feeling extremely restless, and since you don't generally seem to be re-reading posts for new comments or anything, it all kind of seems like a bit of a waste of your time to me.

Umless... you're a spambot? Am I having an entire post's imaginary conversation with a bot? Now that would be REALLY FREAKISH!

ETA - and back again three times since I made this post: once to read the homepage, and twice so far to check out all the comments. I'm thinking that's not an automated bot thing. Tut tut, Finland, nul points.

Current Mood: weird

Life moves pretty fast...
There's been a ton of stuff going on, and there is a ton more stuff yet to do. Spring is here and it's crazy. The weather has been REALLY nice and all the summer movies are starting to preview. I've seen Narnia, Speed Racer, Indiana Jones, and Iron Man just to name a few.

Tonight is Remember the Party's FlashdanceSF party at the Trocadero Transfer. (The Glass Kat @ 4th and Brannan.)

I'm heading over there now to meet and start setting up. Should be fun!

It's Sunday but it's not over
( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

Current Mood: exhausted

Twittering B2B
Kitchenbeard: Drunk straight people fighting in the street now that the peeps are gone. 9 minutes ago from web

Kitchenbeard: And now my neighbor is playing with a bull whip.... and not in the right way. about 1 hour ago from web

Kitchenbeard: A gaggle of people dressed as peeps are dancing in front of my house. They're wearing shirts that say "peep show" and not much else. about 1 hour ago from web

Kitchenbeard:Photoshoot at 3. about 4 hours ago from web

Kitchenbeard:10 guys with beers pushing a couch and coffee table up my street on the way to Fell St. about 5 hours ago from web

Back at the I-10 Carl's Jr.
They have something called a "Cap'n Crucnch Milkshake."

I'm sure it's low calorie. LOL

((but it tastes delicious))

Current Mood: naughty

hello, possums!
( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Strawberry Letter 23 The Brothers Johnson

[URBAN NOTE] The mosaics of Dupont Station

bitterlawngnome has some beautiful pictures of the mosaic art in the TTC's Dupont Station. Dupont is a station that I not-infrequently use as a base for walks home; I should really pay more attention to its decoration.

For the particularly interested, Transit Toronto has a long article on art in the TTC, while the Ryerson Wire has another article on subway art in general with a strong focus on the TTC's.

Okay. I want to live in the world of the Speed Racer movie. Color! Fun! Fast Cars! Chimps!

Go, Speed, Go!

And yes, I did drive home really fast!

The "Straight Talk Express" has left the building

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/MrSardonic/~3/293036313/the-straight-ta.html

Watch, cringe, and share with others.

and one more

( nick_kaufmann and the best sign ever )

[LINK] "The Most Important European Emigrant of 2008"
Over at A Fistful of Euros, Douglas Muir asks what, exactly, it means that the designers of Grand Theft Auto IV chose as their protagonist Niko Bellic, a Serb (a Bosnian Serb, to be precise).

[I]s this a simple-minded decision, reflecting a vulgar stereotype of Serbs as violent thugs with a taste for organized crime, ignorant peasants who are thrown into culture shock in the modern world? Or is it an inspired choice, allowing the writers to make the protagonist character more complex and morally ambiguous, and position him as a "fish out of water" observer of the madness that’s modern American street life?

Note that Niko Bellic is not inherently evil. Nor unsympathetic. In fact, you can play him as a hero, albeit a rather noir one. (Yes, you can also go around killing people at random, but that’s your problem, not Niko’s.) And he’s presented as likable, and even--in the first few episodes--somewhat innocent.

On the other hand, providing the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto is not exactly a point of national pride. Niko is now the planet’s most famous Serb, and he’s a small-time crook with issues.

Some of the speculation in the comments area suggests that the Balkans might play a useful role for game designers and others of that like, as the collapse and subsequent criminalization of much of the region produced a criminal class that is--most conveniently--white.

Happy birthday, moroccomole!