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Friday 4 January 2002
Weird spam received today: "Link to our Kurt Kobain e-card service... I stared at this for a while in befuddlement -- uhh, Revenant? That was my old Mulder/Frank Black story, right? WTF...? And then I remembered that at some point in the story, in an interior rant about Seattle, Mulder mentions ol' Kurt in passing. Ah, yes. Of course, the most hilarious thing is that these people, whoever they are, can't even spell Cobain's name correctly (and also that nobody bothered to proofread for, oh, repeated words, say). And the diction is altogether odd (English may not be a first language here, of course). But more enduringly amusing is the thought of this going out to everyone whose website includes even a single mention of Cobain, scholars who've posted essays on "The Dialectical Zeitgeist of Grunge" or "Suicide and Nihilism in Youth Culture" or somesuch. (A Google search on Kurt Cobain brings up 82,500 hits, btw. D'you suppose these people really sent out 82,500 e-mails??) What's funniest in a way to me is that I wouldn't know Kurt Cobain if he jumped out of my soup, and I've never to my knowledge listened to a single Nirvana song. It appalls me sometimes how totally estranged I am from current music, especially when I look at the long lists of "What I'm listening to" on others' blogs. I think I own six CDs that aren't classical or jazz, and several of those are compilations burned for me by kind friends. Hey, I used to be a rock'n'roll girl, I used to have a collection of vinyl to rival Rupert Giles's. But somewhere back in the late '70s I just stopped listening, and I've never gotten back into it. It's sad, sad and pathetic, that most of my knowledge of popular music these days comes from watching songvids. Wednesday 2 January 2002
Miscellanea . . . First, a little something for the N'Sync fans in the audience, and the Star Wars fans in the audience, and most especially for those who are both (who probably know about this already). I am laughing like a deranged thing, myself. And now, for something completely different, a marvellous tool provided by Dean Allen of Textism -- the Word HTML Cleaner. Man, have I been pining for something like this, not least because one of my tasks at work is collecting Word versions of instructors' course syllabi and getting them up on the web, and I've wasted god knows how many hours of my life stripping out Microsoft gunk-code and muttering anathema against Bill Gates. Various folks have mentioned the Shack Stories, but they're worth touting again. Talk about a box of chocolates. I calculated that if I could ration myself to one per day, they'd last me until early April; unfortunately, that plan's already gone by the board, since I've gobbled at least a dozen. And, as always, one of the pleasures of writing is the odd places to which story research takes one; for example, the Equipped to Survive page, where you can learn more than you ever thought you might about knives, to say nothing of Alaskan and Canadian regulations anent mandatory survival kits. More sidebar links added, of people I somehow managed to miss before, in my maladroit way. Now going off to prod at the thing I'd meant to submit for the Shacks, but which got too long. My first toe-dipping venture into BtVS; we'll see if it ever comes to anything publishable, though.
Tuesday 1 January 2002
A new year. Um. Right. <blinking around blearily> I'm mildly hungover from a half-bottle of red wine; we never even made it into the champagne last night. For years now, my NY Eve celebration has consisted of trying to stay awake until midnight, and this time I didn't really make it -- fell asleep on the sofa as P. clicked around between various late night talk shows and Dick Clark and the Twilight Zone marathon on Sci-Fi. But I woke up in time for the countdown and the cheering, and then gave P. a smooch and sent him home, fell into bed and slept like a bag of hammers. Ah, the thrill-a-minute of middle age. Every new year means I have to readjust my mental calendar; I have a very simplistic mind's-eye representation of time, an image of twelve month-at-a-glance calendar pages laid out side by side, left to right, and as the year passes my concept of Current Time drifts slowly rightwards along the continuum, but then come January 1 I have to heave myself all the way back over to the left, and it leaves me disoriented for a while. (My visual imagination is generally pretty impoverished, though. Does anyone else do this thing of visualizing the action of stories you read as taking place in familiar nearby locales [usually utterly incongruous ones]? In my own mind, a great deal of War and Peace is set along/around 76th Street in Richfield, near the 35W overpass, where I was living at the time; a couple of Anna's Sentinel stories take place where Hiawatha Avenue passes the old Bituminous Roadways plant; numerous scenes [including the interior ones] of AuKestrel's Near Wild Heaven series play out around that very confusing intersection at the east end of the Franklin Ave. bridge. Note that there is zero congruence or correlation between the stories and these settings. My brain's workings often befuddle me.) Am contemplating links this morning. having added a bunch of folks to the sidebar, including aerye, who sent me an e-mail yesterday saying she's recently started a blog (a very cool one, btw, check it out) and asking if it was OK to link to this page, or if there was any particular etiquette regarding such. I realize I've always proceeded on the basis of "Link away!" and of course a quick glance at the sidebar will reveal that I am just a big old link-whore; I tend to keep adding and adding, magpie-like, and am thrilled when others link to me. I was trying to explain to someone last week what this blog/journal thing is all about, and how the coolest part of it is not getting to blat my ego in public, but rather having a thread hooked into this big loosely-woven network of lives, a web that keeps expanding and complexifying. Eventually, I suspect, the link-list is going to get so long as to be unmanageable, but I don't have enough brain to worry about that just now. Anyway, I did want to say that if anyone finds themselves linked here and would rather not be, just drop me a line. I had planned, btw, to launch the New Year by lashing this whole blog over to Moveable Type, which seems to be a very nifty setup and would provide comments, auto-archiving, etc., but I've been too thickwitted to get the templates figured out. If anyone reading this uses MT and would be willing to walk an idiot through the steps, write me. For story-writing purposes, I spent some on-line time yesterday researching frostbite. Found some very eeeuuwww photos, which I shall refrain from linking. What's interesting is that the medical descriptions of what must be done in frostbite cases is clearly not what is usually done by actual Arctic adventurers (e.g. Steger & Schurke) and yet the latter never mention any permanent damage or ill effects. So I shall assume I have some margin of authorial leeway here, which is to the good, since I don't want to plop a bunch of medical-procedure stuff down in the middle of what's supposed to be all emotional-relationship-building. Also while idling around on the web, made the discovery that I am actually -- [drum roll] -- older than Anthony Stewart Head. Only by a few months, to be sure, but this makes me oddly gleeful, for no reason I can figure out. At the same time, it makes me a little sad--I'm very glad we have Giles out there, to say, in effect, "This is what middle age can be like, look like" -- but where are the female equivalents to Giles, in all the shows we dig? The rumpled, cerebral, gutsy, heroic, passionate, aging women? And I happened across a recent weblog entry by Mighty Girl: "I found a crumpled index card on the street. It reads, 'Funny how the freedom of youth turns to loneliness in old age.'" Which struck me as odd, because in my own experience it's been exactly the other way around. My sole New Year's resolution: to get regular exercise. This isn't really for weight-loss purposes (if I felt loathsomely fat [as I did] back when I weighed 125 and wore size 4's, then my body-dysphoria issues are clearly entirely mental rather than physical), but rather because I know that physical activity is essential for my mood and energy levels. I did go work out yesterday, for the first time in an embarrassingly long time, and boy howdy am I sore today. Plus, also, with the aforementioned red-wine hangover. I think a little nap might be in order--I'd been hoping to sleep in a bit today (maybe even as late as 7:00, gasp) but the cat had other ideas. Gack, what a mess of miscellany this all is. Anna's miscellany is delightful, mine is mostly tedious. Ah well, I send it out anyway, egomaniac that I am, with best wishes to all for a good 2002. p.s. Reopened this to add that, after my last entry, I'm delighted to learn that Hth's fiction is indeed back up, at http://gossipflambee.freewebspace.com/. Huzzah! |
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