Bumped up to the top of the pile for administrative purposes

So it seems I've had a few new people friend me after my wild escapades into the land of intentional fiction.

Seems an appropriate time to do a public post about general journal stuff and friending and so forth.

My default is friends-locked. I put stuff out in public fairly often, but only posts that aren't personal and seem likely to appeal to a larger audience (or, you know, someone asks, because I am easy like that).

While I sometimes friend other people on whim, I don't generally do reciprocal add-backs unless asked. This is because a few folks follow my journal just to see updates on my website (at the crackling post of every six months or so) and don't want to be flooded with the details of my cats, how much I suck at dance class, and what the current traffic is like in the greater DC area. So if you've friended me and actually want to read that stuff, you have to let me know, because otherwise I'm going to assume you're just semi-lurking.

On this same note, if I have added you to my friends list and you'd rather be on the outside, just looking at the occasional public stuff, let me know and I'll alter your status. No biggee. I assume that you're here for some reason, but I don't want to flood your pages with a buffet of my life if all you want is a snack.

I post most days, and often more than once a day. I don't do memes or quiz results, and I post all pictures behind cut tags. You can do whatever you want in your own journal, but I tend to view such things as clutter in mine.

Things I do post about: dance classes, chantey singing, why house cats are agents of evil and entropy, nature observations, flirting as a sport, angst, vague attempts to lure my distractable local friends out for adventures, lists of accomplices and alibis for fun events, poisonous things you can grow in your very own yard, failed and successful attempts at the creation of evil in the kitchen, men in kilts, poems, things I do instead of housework, housework, workplace quotes, random zombies, and occasional angry tyrannosauruses.

... you know, I'm not really sure WHY people read this journal, come to think of it. Should I unfriend myself?

While my personal viewpoints are liberal, atheist, and smartassed, I don't claim to be particularly topical or issue-oriented, and pretty much anyone who can hold a decent conversation is welcome. It's just that I'm not much for the argumentative stuff here. I try to be relatively drama-free. You are my guests if I've invited you in, and while I can't claim to be the most mature person, I do believe in being polite as much as possible.

I rarely comment on other people's journals, but I do read all of my friends list pretty much every day, several times a day. If I add you, I will read what you have to say, even if you rarely hear from me.

I've been online since 1992. Seriously, if you put it out there, I'll read it.

I think that about covers it. Hi, welcome.

(Thanks to fjm for the heads up!)

The IgNoble Prizes are out!

My favorites for this year:

• MEDICINE PRIZE. Dan Ariely of Duke University, USA, for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine.
  REFERENCE: "Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy," Rebecca L. Waber; Baba Shiv; Ziv Carmon; Dan Ariely, Journal of the American Medical Association, March 5, 2008; 299: 1016-1017.


• PHYSICS PRIZE. Dorian Raymer of the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA, and Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego, USA, for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.
  REFERENCE: "Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String," Dorian M. Raymer and Douglas E. Smith, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 104, no. 42, October 16, 2007, pp. 16432-7.

I love science.

On the way home from dance class tonight, I drove past a road sign that was displaying the message:

LOCK YOUR CAR

LEAVE NOTHING OF VALUE.

The sign has been displaying the first two messages for a few weeks now, so it doesn't seem to be related to any specific event along that stretch of the GW Parkway. My mind wanted it to be the start of a story. I hope it would say something like "JUST WALK AWAY SLOWLY" or "THEY KNOW AND THEY'RE COMING". Maybe, in case I'm feeling less cynical at some point, "YOU ARE ALREADY CARRYING EVERYTHING YOU NEED."

I'll see if I come up with any additional next messages in my sleep tonight. You'd be surprised how often that happens. Well, if you've been reading here for a while, maybe you wouldn't be.

Bed now.

Skirts

I have nearly finished the big black skirt of doom. All that's left is finishing off the hemming of the bottom. All 18 yards of it. Luckily, I'm free tomorrow night. This may take a while.

THEN I'll start on the big brown skirt of doom. I picked up about five yards of a really pretty cinnamon-y rusty red-brown cotton gauze at the team wench yard sale (looks like it was used as a table cloth at a feast or somesuch, but I'm not picky) and I want to pick up some heavier tapestry-style fabric to make a lacing top, a bit like this style of skirt designed by iridium, although I may add in some more decorations to end up with something like a great big skirt crossed with a tribal-style belt. We shall see.

***
Food Pills and Nourishment

I've been thinking this morning about food pills. These were one of the old visions of the future, along with silver jumpsuits and flying cars, rocket packs and robot maids, the future as seen from the past, or at least what we see of it from the present (what a convoluted timeline that is).

While people still joke about not yet having flying cars, and the old visions of the future neglected such topics as the internet and the sexual revolution, I've rarely heard anyone lamenting the non-invention of food pills.

I've seen a few examples of cook books from the time period when food pills seemed like a good idea, and I can't say I blame some folks then for thinking food pills to be a good alternative (have you seen some of the things they did with jello? *shudder*).

What happened instead is that we became more diverse. Food is more interesting now than it was then. I can get fruit from around the world fairly consistently year round. I can get food from cultures my grandparents probably didn't know existed (and in a few cases, such as some of the more interesting fusion cuisines, genuinely didn't exist). I have more choices than folks even a generation back would have found imaginable.

It would be such a pity to give all of that up, that and all the social aspects of eating, the love of feeding each other, the thrill of "hey, try this" and the pure comfort of comfort foods. I cannot see substituting a pill for the joy of sitting in the kitchen and cooking with friends, or of finding little restaurants with unknown menus, or of the cultural exchange of stories and associations behind recipes, favorites, and oddities around the world.

So maybe, sometimes, when we think we want less, what we really need is just better.

***

And Now, to Close, A Poem

( May Day by Phyllis Levin )

You know your brain lies to you a lot, right? You generally only catch it when it lies badly.

The other day I was stuck in traffic behind a truck with an interesting looking bumper sticker. The writing was small though, and the script fancy, so I couldn't quite figure out what it said. I was behind the truck for three lights, and crept as close as I safely could, trying to decipher the message the black and orange bumper decoration was meant to convey.

I could make out the first line, after a bit of squinting, which said something like: The secret to a complete and happy life is-

but the rest wasn't giving up useful words to me.

This is when I realized how much my brain was desperately and randomly faking it. I tried to read the rest, and found that some part of my brain was giving me a "No, really, it says a yogurt gun. There's definitely something there about a yogurt gun. And possibly a tyrannosaurus."

These are the moments that I think I would have had more interest in drinking hard liquor if I could target which brain cells to kill.

This morning I've wasted a few minutes trying to find the website of the place that sold the bumper sticker, but all I can recall is that it was from [man's name] lounge, Key West, FL., and frankly speaking, googling for a lounge in Key West is like trying to sip from a fire hose. A fire hose that is shooting margaritas and daiquiris, and I keep getting little paper umbrellas stuck in my eye.

Frankly, I'd like to know if the secret to life really does involve yogurt guns, tyrannosaurs, or margaritas. Because one thing's for sure- this stupid brain of mine is not going to figure it out on its own, and if it did, it would probably lie about it.

ETA: I think I found it. Best guess is that it's from Captain Tony's Saloon and the quote is "All you need in this life is a tremendous sex drive and a great ego. Brains don't mean a shit."

huh.

Frankly, I think I'll stick with the yogurt gun and the tyrannosaurus.

Also, now I'm torn between using my brain icon or my zombie t-rex icon for this post.

Pass the plate, pass the message along.

***

Haiti has been hit by three hurricanes in two weeks. They desperately need help. Over one million people are homeless.

Oxfam

MSF (Doctors Without Borders)

Save the Children.


Please circulate this.

The new Prime Minister came into office in the middle of the hurricanes. One very real worry is that this will destabilize the government in a country that is always looking over its shoulder for fear of foreign intervention.

I like graffiti. So I'm spending the afternoon browsing this website, Pictures of Walls.

Some of my favorites, so far:

Think of this as a window

Hold me close

Ice Ice Baby

... and that's just the first gallery.

There are trips I take on a regular basis where I look for familiar bits of graffiti as much as anything else. On the DC metro lines, it's still possible to find a few remaining Cool "Disco" Dans if you know were to look, and Borf is about as well. On the way up to my folks' place, I still look for the "I (heart) you punk rock!" on one overpass, though it's fading now, and I don't know if Punk Rock is a person's nickname or the writer is literally thanking the music. On the way home, the same overpass asks me "Who are you?" as I drive home.

What are some of your favorite bits of graffiti and where do you look for them?

I just opened a text editor to do some, well, text editing. I opened the search & replace dialog box. The program still had the last search strings I'd used in the fields.

It said:

Find: h uncontrolled occipital lobe e
Replace with: yo-hee-ho

I haven't used this editor in a few weeks. I no longer have any idea what I was doing this replace for, but I'm amused.

I was thinking it's past time I reorganized all the junk in my trunk.

The car, that is.

So, in addition to the basic emergency supplies (tire, jack, fix-a-flat, road flares, bungee cords, water, blanket, flashlight), what are some of the other things you'd recommend as basic or reasonable items a person ought to have in the trunk of their car?

Poll #1249017 Car Stuff
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

What are some of the emergency supplies that people should keep in the car?

There seem to be a lot of those little knee-high advertisement signs along the roadways these days. Some are the usual scams and some are political advertisements.

My favorites are the ones that just offer a simple statement, such as "We buy houses" or "We sell boxes". There there's a phone number underneath.

I kinda want to walk over to them and pat them on the top of their, er, post, and say something like "Oh, that's so nice for you. You keep working on that, why dontcha?".

I'm not quite sure why I want to say it in a Minneweagan accent, but there ya go.