Joe

03:27 pm: Checkmate
"Oh yeah? Well, I wanna take my iPhone and, um, play it like an ocarina! Yeah, an ocarina! Hah!"

"We've got an app for that."

03:17 pm: Devil's Advocate
If the Devil had gone down to Georgia, this is the fiddle he would have been playing (note especially the bit starting at around 2:30), and he would have kicked Johnny's peach-eating ass. "Chicken in the bread pan, pickin' out dough"? Are you fucking kidding me?

11:34 am: LoBoReMo-1: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
...by Terry Pratchett

Along with eafm, I'm making November something of a readathon. I read a lot anyway (two train commutes a day aren't good for much else), but I tend to grab comfort books -- books I've read so many times and know so well that I can just sink into the world without effort. Which is a fine thing, surely, but new books are nice, too. So, this month, I'm going to make an effort to read books either I haven't read, or have read so long ago that I don't remember anything about them.

So, the first book, which I've owned for quite some time but haven't read: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, by Terry Pratchett. It's set, nominally, on Discworld, though aside from some place names, this is not an essential element. It's theoretically a children's book, and, as you would expect from Pratchett, partakes of the older style of fairy tales, where the happy ending is, by and large, bought with the blood of evil-doers.

Keeping the spoilers down, it's a story about a clan of rats who, having eaten from the refuse pile out behind Unseen University, have had sapiency unexpected (and in many cases unwelcomely) thrust upon them. Along with them for reasons of mutual benefit are Maurice, a cat who has suffered a similar fate by a different means, and a boy named Keith (that the boy even has a name comes as a surprise to Maurice some halfway through the book, which tells you a little about the book and a lot about Maurice). There is a tale being told, of course, but what the book is mostly about a group, suddenly finding themselves having a concept of "me," trying to figure out who that "me" is, and more importantly, who it should be, and why.

It's a wonderful book -- some bits made me think of Flowers for Algernon, and some of Brin's better Uplift novels. At its heart, though, it's all Pratchett, which by my reckoning is more than enough reason to read it, and I recommend that you do.

(LoBoReMo: Local Book Reading Month. Very local -- like, in our living room.)

09:41 am: Truly awesome costume idea
Guys! We have to do this next year!

03:00 pm: Why for is Russian bowlink ball havink handle?
Gasp! We has kettlebells!

[blink, blink]

Wot I do wif dem?

09:37 am: Can't sing; can't dance; is a little cute.
So, as eafm mentioned, Taylor Swift had a live performance on Dancing With the Stars last night. She was singing "Love Story" (I mistyped that "Lost Story," which would have been a more honest title), which I have had occasion to mock in the past. It was even worse live.

As eafm noted, the girl has no stage presence. This would be bad enough, if not for the fact that she also can't sing. Now, I understand that performing live isn't recording in a studio -- even quite excellent singers will make the occasional goof, which is entirely forgivable. This wasn't like that -- this was like listening, well, to someone who can't sing. She was off-key for entire passages, and not always in the same direction. She danced a little once or twice -- displaying a shocking lack of rhythm and grace coupled with the sex appeal of a caterpillar -- which few people were likely to have noticed because, due to the aforementioned lack of stage presence, she certainly couldn't hold your attention against the scantily-clad professional dancers.

It was so awful that I felt bad for her. Watching her live, on stage, in front of an audience was like watching a kitten trying to navigate a four-lane highway during rush hour. That it was a tone-deaf, clumsy kitten only made it that much more pitiable.

03:27 pm: The October Country, also
The bright silver sun,
The brilliant vermillion leaves;
October is here.

04:09 pm: The October Country
The chill, saw-toothed wind,
The churning, lead-grey Hudson --
October is here.

08:51 pm: Autumn winds will blow right through me
It's been stuck in my head for a few days now. As it's one of the saddest and most beautiful songs I've ever heard, I suppose that's not very surprising.

( Old and Wise )

06:34 pm: Happy Anniversary, eafm
We decided that the first ceremony should be private, and held on the Equinox.

"We'll go up to Castle Point during the storm," I suggested.
"How do you know there'll be a storm?"
"There will be."

And so it was, fifteen years ago, that we stood out on Castle Point, as the rain hammered down from the sky and the wind howled in off the Hudson, with no-one to see but each other, the silent gods, and the storm we had called to bear witness. We joined our lives together then, the first time of three -- anything worth doing is worth doing three times.

07:07 pm: "Hi, I'm Thudthwacker..."
[Text message chime from Blackberry]

"Oh, hey, that reminds me -- I have to go start my Neopet on a training session."
"You set a timer on your phone to remind you to train your Neopet?"
"No! That would be dumb. What I did was set up a script on my workstation to use the e-mail/text message gateway to send me a message to remind me to train my Neopet. That way, whenever I get a session started, I can easily get a message 12 hours later to start the next one."
"... You have got to put this on LiveJournal."

04:29 pm: Um, yeah.
So, we're down in the basement today, pulling down rotting sheetrock in order to find out where water is coming in. Behind the sheetrock was ... wood paneling. Groovy. Behind one section of the wood paneling was ... a small door. Well, that's nice.

ETA: And, having cleared the space a bit more, there were several inches of dirt packed in front of the door. Methinks this is, indeed, where the water is coming in. I think the previous owners (may they get pimples on their asses) managed to seal the thing up just well enough that it wouldn't leak too much during the couple of months they were trying to sell the house. Now, to get a contractor in to give his opinion on possible solutions to this horror.

10:07 pm: Life with eafm: Pandaemonium Business District
"Yeah, they're the Devil."
"Aha."
"That's not to say, well ... I mean, I can work with the Devil."

03:33 pm: I should have gone into nuclear physics.
If only because, then, I might have occasion to say things like "Damn! We had a magnetic reconnection in the tokamak, and the resulting sawtooth crash caused a containment breach. We're leaking plasma all over the place."

09:04 am: I can't even seem to pick a favorite.
Man, I need all of these on tee shirts. Safe for work, unless you work for Disney.

01:02 pm: Monstrous Regiment
I'm just finishing up a reread of Terry Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment, and happened across this:

"Revenge is not redress. Revenge is a wheel, and it turns backwards. The dead are not your masters."

Revenge is a wheel, and it turns backwards. That's going to be echoing around in my head for weeks. Or, possibly, the rest of my life.

01:09 pm: ... but you'll lose 2D6 SAN.
This is safe for work.

06:40 pm: Or don't try again, even better.
A brief note to young girls writing pop songs:

If you are in deep, epic, teenage-angst-ridden love with a boy, but can't be with him because your parents don't approve, then yes, this bears a passing resemblance to the story of Romeo and Juliet, if you pass it at speed and don't look too closely. Staggeringly unoriginal, but what the Hell -- it's been unoriginal for over 400 years, and the story still seems to have some wear left in it.

However, if your beau's solution to this classically-tragic problem is to square things with your daddy, buy a nice ring, and propose to you on bended knee, you're not Romeo and Juliet -- you're Ward and June Fucking Cleaver. So how about you tear up the song and try again, yes?

06:29 pm: Star Wars
I've been thinking, for awhile, of reading some of the various Star Wars novels that have been written by them wot knows how to write (ie: not George Lucas). However, I don't have the vaguest notion where to start, and figured that, out among the folks on my friends list, there are likely to be some suggestions.

So: these I now request. If I want to get into the Star Wars novel universe, where should I start?

02:19 pm: I don't bike, and I couldn't stop laughing at this.
I'm cross-posting this from mizerychick, because it reminds me very strongly of things I've read by andygates and especially ravenbait:

A few things from the bike shop