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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Rika Youngblood's LiveJournal:
- Drug dealers have been setting up pot farms on hills in the East Bay and booby-trapping them with hand grenades and trip wire.
- East Bay residents: My friend Susi Ostlund is running for the East Bay MUD Board seat 5. Vote for her! She is knowledgeable and concerned. A link to her campaign web page will appear here shortly. (This item is not related to the previous item. :) )
- AUM does not stand for Animal Unit of Manure, as G first supposed, but Animal Unit Monthly, which is a measure of how much pasturage an animal requires per month. A bull might require 60 AUM, for example, while a calf might need only 20 AUM.
- For water filtering it's more expensive to filter out the fine ash of a grass fire than to remove traces of animal dung. Once water has been permeated with ash it's difficult to get rid of that burnt taste.
- For ready-to-wear Browncoat clothing in large-chest sizes, visit the Orvis store in San Francisco (and Palo Alto?).
- About a potential event based on Mary Shelley's seminal visit to Lord Byron's villa on Lake Geneva: "They did not dance at the house party! They were too full of dope!"
- Regency Speed Dating...The Indecent Spectator (Its motto: "Published and damned!")...Harriette's List
- About the upcoming War and Peace Ball: "Do you need someone to whip?" "We have oppressed peasants coming!" (Apparently they will also be known as "Potemkin peasants.")
| Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 | |||
| 8:34 pm | Late-Blooming Linkage Boo hoo hoo, all those touch-screen voting machines are going to waste. Oh woe oh sadness. A Field Guide to Surreal Botany A Comprehensive and Totally Universal Listing of Every Problem a Story Has Ever Had The Mad Scientist Hall of Fame | ||
| Friday, August 15th, 2008 | |||
| 4:17 am | Animal Unit Monthly Sparkling conversation at tonight's Regency dance group planning meeting. It's been a few years since I had so much fun at one of these annual/semi-annual get-togethers. ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} chrisber and tamago, I hope it was as much fun on your end of the table. Down at the other magnetic pole I found myself compulsively taking notes on the info-nuggets and Regency in-group humor that flew by:At the end of this Thai-fueled evening of controlled brainstorming, we succeeded in planning the coming year's calendar of events. Not too shabby. | ||
| Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 | |||
| 7:21 pm | Food meme 1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions. 2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten. 3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating. 4) Optional extra: Post a comment at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results. (I got this meme from ayse, who added a * for "if I've cooked or raised it myself")The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred: ( That is one crazy list. ) | ||
| Monday, August 11th, 2008 | |||
| 11:45 pm | "Feed off" might give the wrong impression (via sovay)
In a similar vein, AustenBlog points out that "The Thunderbird Theatre Company in San Francisco is presenting a tongue-in-cheek takeoff of P&P, Pride and Succubus. Darcy is a vampire, Elizabeth a slayer. We’re sure they think it’s terribly clever. Perhaps it even is terribly clever. If anyone goes to see it, we’d love to hear about it." | ||
| Friday, August 8th, 2008 | |||
| 10:35 pm | There could be worse memes If there are one or more people on your friends list who make your world a better place just because they exist, and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the Internet, then post this same sentence in your journal. | ||
| Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 | |||
| 12:34 am | |||
| Monday, August 4th, 2008 | |||
| 11:53 pm | Why teenagers can't get summer jobs I'm in the middle of watching a program, Small Business School, TiVoed from one of the local public broadcasting channels. Its stated purpose is to offer tips on making one's small business work; what lured me as a cattle fancier into recording it was the program's focus on a company that manufactures a line of skincare products "for the American cowgirl." Artificially Wide-eyed Host, bla bla bla, small business CEO described how she mixed her first batch of Cowgirl Cream in her kitchen, sure, financial officer told AWH how she figured out what types of direct mail works best (use photos of your product), all sounded good. But then the CFO told us that they had trouble finding anyone to work with their size of packaging operation. Cut to a picture of weathered hands wrapping paper around a bar of soap. The camera pulls back and it becomes clear we're in a men's jail, where inmates are putting stickers on boxes and prepping Cowgirl Cream for shipping. "Why did you volunteer for this?", the AWH asked a young redhead in beige jail scrubs as he carefully packed soapboxes in a plastic bag. "It's better than being other places in jail," he replied. "I'd rather do this than be locked in my cell." A Boulder County Jail official told the AWH that they ask every inmate, male or female, whether they'd like to go to school or to work, and that 80 percent of them say they'd like to work. 25 percent of the money earned (amount unspecified) goes to restitution, said his voiceover, 25 percent goes to child welfare payments, 25 percent goes to "cost of care," and for the last 25 percent the inmate can (notice the different verb form) stipulate a family member or dependent to receive it. Okay, it's one solution. I'm very, very iffy about the cavalier use of prison labor -- the line between allowing inmates to develop useful skills and turning inmate workers into slave laborers is extremely fine. But it's theoretically possible to have this type of arrangement be only mildly exploitive, I thought to myself. Why I'm posting this now, filled with revulsion, is the next scene, where the AWH has just explained with preternatural perkiness how the Cowgirl Cream CEO is trying to build her virtual corporation: one full-time employee, several part-time employees, a lab for the liquid products, two other companies for the soap bars and lip balm, "and of course, jail prisoners do packaging! This is the new way to run a business!!" She continued: "The old way is to hire employees -- the new way is to form alliances!" In other words, the old way was to create jobs, while the new way is to farm things out to established concerns who don't need new workers. This program is a commercial for indentured servitude. Jesus freakin' Christ. In a related note: one out of every 100 Americans is reportedly in prison in 2008. | ||
| 8:15 pm | Looking for help getting sound turned back on in my ancient Mac G3 Dear LazyWeb: I'm posting this question here because the suggestions from the ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} macintosh community didn't bear fruit. Maybe someone out there knows a geek who knows a geek.I hope someone out there can help me find the right Sound-On toggle switch for my Mac. (An ancient iMac G3 running 10.3.9) The key seems to have been something that happened after I ran Audacity. Note: I've powered up Audacity before and this hasn't been a problem. I did not turn off any sound while running Audacity. All sound is off, everywhere. No alert noises, no noises even when the computer comes on. I've checked the Sound slider bar in the upper right hand corner, System Preferences, the Audacity preferences, and combed through control panels in an effort to find what's been flicked off. At the suggestion of the macintosh community I've checked the Audio MIDI utility -- the Sound Output section there is set to Headphones and is grayed out.Suggestions on other places to check or recheck? | ||
| 7:38 pm | Ladycelia made me do it I did this meme years ago. That's probably enough time to come up with eight more items of interest. RULES: * 1. Post these rules. * 2. Each tagged person must post 8 things about their self on their journal (that other people don't know) * 3. At the end, you have to choose and tag 8 people * 4. Go to their pages and send a message saying you tagged them * 5. No tag-backs. 1. These days individuals can't fight all the political battles that need to be fought, or not all at once, especially now that the current administration seems hell-bent on damaging everything it touches before it's turfed out of office. There's only 24 hours a day, the rest of one's life needs to be lived, and so forth. Therefore I've followed advice I heard somewhere and picked a single issue to focus on for now: fair and accurate elections. Especially in the US, of course, but around the world as well. (The major players in vote-counting equipment export their deprecated technology to other countries you'd think would know better. It's all one big ball of wax, gentlemen.*) Who knows, I might even blog about this subject. If you happen to see any interesting links along these lines, feel free to forward them. 2. My iced-tea spoon habit has almost progressed to a fetish. I've been known to ask restaurant staff whether I may buy one of their iced-tea spoons outright if the design appeals to me. Most of them say, "Oh, just take it," but I always offer to pay. A few of them ask for a couple of bucks, which I happily hand over. If they say no, I leave it be. My favorite spoons so far came off the cooking equipment rack at an Andronico's. I can't remember which Andronico's, though! Probably more fun that way -- now it can be a low-level quest. 3. I play Kingdom of Loathing on a semi-regular basis. I haven't ascended yet because I'm having too much fun making virtual cocktails and Meat. 4. For the last couple of months I've been wending through Alice Water's The Art of Simple Food. I don't mean to try every recipe, but I'm enjoying everything I do try. 5. My attraction to the color green, especially a restrained but bright lime green, is not going away. Absolutely no idea what it means to me symbolically. 6. Photocopies of six progressive fMRI slices of my brain, taken one evening when I served as an experimental subject at Stanford years ago, are pinned to my bedroom bulletin board. 7. My family used to live next door to one of the last semi-rural plots in that section of the San Fernando Valley. Through the chain-link fence and the eucalyptus trees we kids could watch the horse and the cow walk aimlessly around the corral, when the owner's ill-tempered little dog didn't warn us away. By the time we moved out of that house the lot had been sold into suburbia. 8. I like collecting postage stamps and sheets when they interest me, or when they have particularly gorgeous art. There's a sheet of "American Journalists" a foot away from me as I type this. I should admit I'm some kind of stamp collector and get a stamp album. Whom to tag, let me think. How about holyoutlaw, wild_patience, twindowlicker, and 19_crows? Only tagging four people rather than eight, because, like, dude. | ||
| Friday, August 1st, 2008 | |||
| 7:31 pm | Catch-22 Posting now from an SF net cafe. Manager has a genial conversation with a well-dressed homeless man, who asks if he can take a couple of magazines outside. "Sure," says the manager, "just leave the Vanity Fairs." Afterwards he tells me confidentially, "If I don't ask them not to, they always take the Vanity Fairs. And then they take the Vanity Fairs anyway." "Next time, tell them not to take the National Geographics," I say. "But then they take the Vanity Fairs." | ||
| Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 | |||
| 3:47 pm | RIP Roger Hall Hall, who wrote the cult classic You're Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger, refused to join the CIA after his stint in the OSS during WWII. Instead he made a living as a freelance writer Hall died this Sunday, of congestive heart failure. Here's the best obituary I've seen so far, written by Adam Bernstein of the Washington Post, who also wrote the introduction to You're Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger when it was reissued by the Naval Institute Press in 2004. Hall initially joined the Army and finished the war at the rank of captain. After his discharge, he became a press box announcer for the Baltimore Colts. The job ended because the Colts' management did not appreciate his reaction to a referee's call against the team on what could have been its winning field goal. | ||
| 1:22 pm | This post nearly came to you live from the recording studio at Foothill College, where last night I did my first solo stint as a recording engineer, recording three regular Regency-dance musicians. (Unfortunately divertimento couldn't participate in this round because he's gone on vacation -- next time, though.) I started to liveblog the evening, but as it turned out I needed to keep paying attention to the mixing board, who'd'a thunk it. I'm not doing anything fancy at this level. My probable goal is an upscale version of what people hear on the dance floor of a Regency dance event. The mixdown from this session becomes my final project in Recording Studio Basics. The most euphemistically-entertaining part of the session came at the beginning, when I couldn't get any sound levels even though everything was plugged in and record-enabled. The lab tech on call for problems during my session discovered that the miscreants who'd used the studio over the weekend had *completely switched around the wiring on the back of the console* and not replaced the plugs in their original order. It took the tech and me an hour of "how about this one? does it work in #6 instead of #7?" to get everything back in place. The tech said that somebody was going to get a "full-scale asswhupping" today (Tuesday). Then after that we discovered through further painstaking "can you get levels now?" experiments that two of the five microphone cables needed to be swapped out. Mofo! Once out of the pit, as they said in Bored of the Rings, everything went swimmingly. No take was completely glitch-free, though a couple came very close -- now I get to see how well I can try effects like cross-fading to snip out the occasional bobble. Yesterday was a good day for music in general. Despite my expectations from the previous night's practice, I did well on the piano exam. I'm still having a spot of trouble with keeping my arms angled correctly, and with using the pads of my fingers instead of the tips, but the piano lessons instructor says I've definitely improved -- I'm about to see what the piano techniques instructor thinks. Also, yesterday my voice teacher was pleased to hear that I seem to be finding my head voice -- not exactly thanks to him, since what I've been doing to get there was voice exercises I had to glean from another student -- but now that I'm there he's given me tips to stay there. Next week I'll sing my song and accompany myself on my spindly ukulele. Three easy chords and picking on a simple string; I can handle it. It's interesting to find myself awash in learning music all of a sudden. I've tried for years with various instruments to get a grasp on this, but always dropped away. Now I'm totally into it. I've seen similar things happen with several friends, where suddenly they immerse themselves in music for no obvious reason, as though they'd entered one of those Montessori "sensitive periods." Odd to experience it first hand. No complaints, though. | ||
| Monday, July 28th, 2008 | |||
| 3:25 am | Dude! Protecting and maintaining your heterosexual house of cards -- YouTube link. | ||
| Friday, July 25th, 2008 | |||
| 12:47 pm | Memo from Wile E. Coyote Your result for The Logical Thinking Test... Epitome of Genius
You are the brightest of the bright. Breed as often as possible for the sake of bettering the species. | ||
| Thursday, July 24th, 2008 | |||
| 4:27 am | Wanted (the movie) Alan and I figured we could use some dorky, mindless fun to reward us for our daily grind and agreed on the movie Wanted as a way to satisfy that urge. But escapism wasn't in the cards for us, because we were unable to even lift our disbelief, much less suspend it, under the movie's weight of improbability. We sat far enough from our few fellow patrons that we could keep up a running MST3K-style commentary. My one-phrase review: Prince Caspian for Tom Clancy fans. Set and setting in several scenes almost made up for the lack of believable plot -- the steampunk influence crops up all over, and the filmmakers let us glimpse the beauty inherent in weaving large-scale textiles. What a good art installation one of those looms would have made. Some of my favorite scenes involved rats, especially (trying to keep this spoiler-free, heaven knows why) the rat in flight. And of course there was always Angelina Jolie, unexpectedly skinny but still heart-stoppingly gorgeous. For all I know the director is a confirmed Brechtian who *wants* viewers to maintain their distance from the story. When we weren't laughing or applauding Alan and I kept a running total of thievery from other action movies. Maybe it's a good date movie for snark fans. | ||
| Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 | |||
| 1:01 pm | LjTxt post that should have appeared yesterday Today and yesterday: spent in front of either computer or piano. Or, today, other voice students. Am getting my first two chords set on the uke. Now I have to go draw a design and see if it works. Not back-breaking toil, but still solid effort. A walk around first to settle the stomach. [This is the third time I've tried to text LJ where the post fails to go through. So far the average is 3/2 against the process.] | ||
| Monday, July 21st, 2008 | |||
| 10:02 am | Yahoo stuffs Carl Icahn's mouth with dollars I didn't think it would be possible for me to feel sympathy for Yahoo. But this announcement did the trick. Carl Icahn: more loathsome than Yahoo or its existing policies. On the other hand, good for Yahoo for finding a way to shut Icahn up, at least for long enough that existing Yahoo management won't face a complete rout on August 1st. On the third hand, I see that Robert Kotick, like the pig, slowly got up and walked away -- and who can blame him. Just reading about this deal made me want to take a shower. | ||
| 12:59 am | The Introverts Bar and Lounge, and other tidbits What we need around here as much as we need the county cooling centers. Actually, I'd settle for a multi-roomed version of the local Peet's, which has air conditioning, loungeable furniture, pleasant music at a relaxing volume, and good coffee. http://naohai.livejournal.com/433903.ht Other links from my backlogged email: Carved Crayons http://www.petegoldlust.com/carvedcrayo Researchers Map the Math in Music http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/arch It’s going to be really hard to get the furry animal costumes on the robots without ripping or tearing. ...What? Vintage Archie McPhee catalogs (The following quiz result is posted as a PNG file because Quizilla wouldn't give me the code, though it offered to post the results directly to Livejournal for me if I kindly tendered my LJ password. Start holding your breath waiting for that to happen.)  | ||
| Sunday, July 20th, 2008 | |||
| 1:34 pm | For those who've watched Dr. Horrible: an alternate ending In case you weren't quite satisfied with how things turned out. Spoilerish stuff, of course (as holyoutlaw points out, the entry itself is an anti-spoiler).http://amaliedageek.livejournal.com/279 | ||
| Monday, July 7th, 2008 | |||
| 5:15 pm | Posted using TxtLJ Turns out there's no sheet music for the song I wanted to sing, so I said wotthehell & got a cheap! ukulele: will lrn 3 chords & ape the original uke stylings. | ||
