You birds, always cracking foxy...

The blurry redhead

Bruce wanted pictures of the new hair color. So, here:

Ever take a picture of your own head? It's not so easy. Not to mention that the cute little camera I just got takes wobbly distorted pictures about a third of the time when it's on the high-quality setting. And the low-quality setting is all chunky pixels. Feh.

Wobbly distorted me:

Yikes. It's way past sleep time. Fighting a cold today. And, of course, we're having a party tomorrow. (How do the viruses know??)

Aw, jeez

Waxy.org reports that the Star Wars Kid has hired a lawyer and is looking to sue the kids who first digitized his video and put it online. Some people who contributed to his gift campaign are asking for refunds.

the good, the bad, and the geeky

I actually spent five minutes this morning arguing with Jason about whether an Orc or an Elf would ride this. Urgh.

Hey, wow, Mark Morford's column didn't suck so much today. Or maybe it's just my fondness for run-on sentences.

And Brucifer, duckling, you are not the anti-christ of relationships. The Damien of relationships, at worst.

Why?

http://www.hotornot.com/r/?emid=BUKEGE — that's me on hot-or-not. Know what? I am usually the only person on the site to have my same keywords (except for the lame ones, like "reading" or "sushi"). How is this possible? I don't even like particularly obscure things. Major-label musicians and fox tv shows.

This planet confuses me.

Oh, right, interesting link time. Um, here: Warren Buffett's take on the new tax cut.

what are you doing online?

It's a holiday weekend. Go play!

For me: X-Men, and new books to read.

And a visit to Ocean Beach where Jason and I went the night we first met offline, ten whole years ago this week. Our first date-like object was me inviting (daring?) him to meet me and some friends at a Three Day Stubble show. Afterwards, we tried to find a bonfire some other friends were having, but failed. So we walked, and talked. Jason thought I was foolish for walking on the beach alone with a strange man. I was a jaded twenty-five, with leather boots and burgundy hair. He was a funny, articulate, nervous twenty-three, just back from UCLA and hoping to meet a girl. He met one.

Tomorrow: Perhaps a Memorial Day Firefly marathon.

Too shiny

This digital camera is so very very cool. And it's mine, all mine!



The thing you don't really get from the picture is that it's tiny and pretty enough to wear as a pendant. Which is what I plan to do.

detention, thrift, music

Traffic school is OVER now. Excellent instructor too, go figure. Fast talker, bright and witty as hell. Maybe late 40's/early 50's. I'm assuming gay. He was great.

Still, there's only so much you can do with the material. And good gawd did the videos suck.

Came home to three new (to me) CDs by The Magnetic Fields: "Get Lost", "Holiday", and "The Wayward Bus".

Plus the thrift shop across the street had paperbacks for pennies apiece. So I picked up some books during the lunch hour. Just old stuff — Marge Piercy, Tom Wolfe, like that. And Tripmaster Monkey by Maxine Hong Kingston for fifty whole cents.

Pain report: Owwwwwww. But I'll live. I started a Stretch Club at the back of the classroom during every break, so that helped.

detention for grown-ups

Note to self: never speed again in a county that does not allow online traffic school.

But never mind that. Bjork! Is coming here! This Summer!

Gosh

Someone just left the nicest comment. Well, I'm interpreting it as nice, anyhow.

(No, you have to go find it yourself.)

Tonight: The Last Buffy Episode Ever. Rob is extremely upset. And yet still willing to come over and eat pizza with us while it happens. That's the spirit.

Car Break-In Update: I cleaned out the car so I could park it by my gym with its broken window, and I found the garage door opener. It was all jammed under and kinda behind the front passenger seat. Like where it could not have fallen by itself. So the people who broke into the car were trying to maybe hide it? Like so the next junkie or whoever to pass the open car wouldn't take it and break into our house?

It's just too too strange.

NYT and the Star Wars Kid

Wow, neat. The New York Times just published an article on Ghyslain, the Star Wars Kid. He's quoted as still wishing that the video had never been released. How sad. Sad for him, sad for every asshole who mocked him, and sad that the ratio of cruelty-to-applause is backwards. This geeky kid practicing his moves with such joyful sincerity is a delight to behold.

Geek pride, man.

On the moving-awkwardly-yet-joyfully front, I start my first yoga class soon. Made special arrangements to get a couple private lessons first so I don't up-fuck my hip any further. And the teacher specializes in yoga for rounder women, so there won't be that nasty competitive I'm-more-pretzely-than-you-are thing, I hope.

Pain report: Ow (up a notch from ow). If you haven't guessed that I'm on muscle relaxants by the writing yet, you don't know me very well.

Media report: Also saw Identity this weekend. Still trying to suss out how it managed to get good reviews. Completely forgettable flick.

Smash & Grab

Car got broken into (right on Van Ness St.) while we were seeing Matrix Reloaded tonight. They took the garage door opener (real bright of me to leave it in the car, I know), which made for some extra-bonus fear and worry. My brave-yet-foolish Jason and a brave-yet-foolish cab driver went into the house themselves, without waiting for the cops. I was still waiting by the car, mistakenly thinking I needed to fill out a police report on-site.

House was intact, garage opener disabled now, garage manually locked. Now all that's left is the paperwork and repairing/replacing of things.

Jason only had 8 bucks on him, which I think counts as a cabbie's Worst Tip Ever for risking your life for a customer, but we've since left a thank-you card containing more cash with the dispatcher. Hopefully it'll get to him.

Oh yeah, the movie was pretty good.

Mighty Fine

Just came back from seeing A Mighty Wind. Pretty funny, but I still liked "Guffman" better. Jason liked it much more than I did — said he felt what amounted to a real nostalgia for the (fictional) band, because he liked the old SNL sketch so much. But me, having been raised in a cave, not so much.

Also had snack and drinks at the rotating tourist restaurant on top of whatever that hotel is at Market and Drumm. Um, the Hyatt? Cheesy, but it was a Happy Date Thing to do, so yay for that.

Pain Report: ow (as opposed to Ow). Gonna try these guys. They claim to have had success with sacroiliac joint dysfunction.

Also, burgundy hair dye. Most excellent.

Linda Nagata

Brand-new novel by the wonderful Nebula-award-winning author Linda Nagata. It is just wrong that her books are not more widely known and available.

Paper covers Spock

Stuck somewhere boring with a friend? Your troubles are over. Meet the new variant on Rock-Paper-Scissors: Rock-Paper-Scissors-Spock-Lizard.

Hee!

So I'm stealing a lot from Boing Boing lately. It's a much better blog, too. So if you got here via the Gibson board or something, and you don't know Boing Boing yet, you should go there. Plus, you know, they're all famous and stuff. I'm just me.

like there's nobody watching

this kid is my new hero. I love that blog readers are banding together to buy him an iPod, too. There's the mockery, sure, but it's nice to see geeks taking care of our own.

Tim LaWho?

"One of the problems the Democratic Party has to deal with is a certain cultural aloofness from the country . . . Not in normal democratic voters, but the democratic party has become the party of highly educated coastal people. And many of these people don't know who Tim LaHaye is, although he's the best selling author in america, they don't know about pentecostalism, they couldn't tell you what rank a soldier is based on looking at his uniform."

- David Brooks, Senior editor, The Weekly Standard (Washington, D.C.) and Contributing editor for Newsweek, on Talk of the Nation this Wednesday.

We're so screwed. If getting a Democrat in office means bonding in any way with followers of this guy, I give up.

I am fangirl

I have a new media-crush on Pamie. Anybody who does recaps on TWoP and knows how to use the word "snarky" properly gets plenty many gold stars from me.

Hee!

The tree project is waaaay too familiar.

Learning Math

There are no more excuses for math anxiety here in The Future. I wish stuff like this was available when I was a kid.

P.S. Check out the author's home page. Awww. It's so loveably hideous, in that mid-nineties way. Now I'm all nostalgic and stuff.

Trouble with Tumors

Mrr? Whoa.

You should meet Rob

Especially if you are a cute, geeky, 30-40-ish single chick in the US. The boy needs a girlfriend in this country, already. Plus, he's the second-funniest guy in San Francisco (Jason takes first place, sorry). You go now.

Leonard Cohen, except not

I absolutely cannot stand any song recorded by Leonard Cohen. I like his voice, but the arrangements all give me hives. And yet easily five of my all-time top 100 favorite songs are songs he wrote. They're just covers done by other people. Since his recordings are purt' much before my time, it actually took me years to realize that some of these songs were written by the same guy.

• "Everybody Knows", performed by Concrete Blonde
• "Hallelujah", performed by John Cale
• "Chelsea Hotel", performed by Lloyd Cole
• "Bird on a Wire", performed by Johnny Cash
• "I Can't Forget", performed by the Pixies
• "Suzanne", performed by Nina Simone

And I bet there are others that I'd love if I knew about them.

Oh man. Okay. these are covers I have to hear.

Blog Status: Haven't quite achieved not-boring yet, but I'm working on it. All you imaginary readers, you just hang in there now. Heh. Right. And magic sky-man will take me to the happy place when I'm dead.

Boring Entries

It must be the new lack of pain and the increased time spent gardening. Will try to say an interesting thing next entry.

Hypnotized

Listening to Heather Duby (thanks Rob!) and working on a new project proposal and clicking the odd link as it comes in. Am I the only person who becomes completely hypnotized by this image on Mainichi Daily News?



I don't know if it's mostly the repetitive movement, or me imagining the times and places in which that week's forecast could really happen. Maybe it's just because I'm a Californian.

The good kind of tired

From getting back to the gym, then seeing a stellar show last night at Slim's, and staying up past dawn talking with Jason about nothing in particular, then getting up and doing mother's day lunch in Oakland (Tropix restaurant - decent food, casual-comfy back patio), and buying mom presents in the shops on Piedmont, then later picking up new plants for the garden, and wrapping up the day with a light dinner and a great episode of Six Feet Under. This is a life I could keep.

P.S. Grammatical rules are sometimes meant to be broken. Long day, long sentence.

Throwing Muses

We got tickets after all, because Rob is smarter than I am. (Many good things happen because my friends are smarter than I am.) Tomorrow. Yippeeeeee!

Boooks!

I got a letter from A Clean Well Lighted Place (local independent bookstore - I signed up for their newsletter and discount program and stuff) saying, in essence, "help, the recession is strangling us". So after the long-awaited appt. with The Best Shrink in San Francisco, I went book shopping. Here is ze loot:

• David Boring, graphic novel by Daniel Clowes, who wrote the brilliant Ghost World.
• Look at Me, well-reviewed fiction by Jennifer Egan.
• The Year's Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois.
• Dervish is Digital by Pat Cadigan, whose writing I love so much it gives me stomachaches.
• Nebula Awards Showcase, 2003, edited by Nancy Kress, who I do not know.
• Video by Meera Nair. Short stories by a contemporary female writer from India.
• Number 9 Dream by David Mitchell. The cover blurb says "'A novel as accomplished as anything being written' - Newsweek", which I think is meant as a compliment??

Oh, and some artsy books for Mother's Day gifts. Industrial design, stuff like that. She digs it.

There's guys been awake since the second world war

Awake too late, as usual. But if I had been asleep, I might not have found Kiss Machine. It's so very.

Hah!

I so predicted this two years ago. Jason now officially owes me five bucks. The only sensible response to commercial-skipping devices like ReplayTV and TiVO is, in essence, blipverts.

From a (v. good) Salon article on PVR tech:

" . . . the device may just jump to the last five seconds of the commercial, because there's the theory that you'd put the logo there. Or, because there's this kind of intelligence in the box, it could skip to an abbreviated version of the commercial resident in the box -- so you thought you were skipping, but you've seen a subtle version of the ad instead."

20 goto 10

NetNewsWire is so cool. Which you'd think I would have known before I installed Movable Type and started yakking away.

Short-Staffed at the Gene Pool

That's the name of an album by a band called Ruby that Rob just introduced me to. I am liking it very much.

Throwing Muses are playing in SF soon and neither Rob nor I were clueful enough to get tickets. Argh. I need to write a local-music searchbot. The spam I get from the likes of tickets.com is unreadable HTML crap, not to mention irrelevant and incomplete. I'm thinking something simple — upload your iTunes song list and it spiders the local venue web sites and reports back on any artist name matches.

Marriage Report: Temperatures in the high 70's, not even partly cloudy, sunshine predicted all weekend.

Injury Report: Ow. Need more physical therapy. Or better drugs. Or both.

Random: Reiko has chicken pox. Dude!

still absorbing this one...

Stuart Hameroff has some interesting things to say about states of consciousness, quantum physics, and anesthesia.

WTFerret?

Oh no! The bad pirated software killed my ferret!

I really, really want transcripts of the design meetings for this site.

Silly me

I keep forgetting that women have expiration dates.

According to William Gibson, the 34-year-old, drop-dead-gorgeous actress Sadie Frost (pictured on the left) would be "too old" to play his Molly character in any film that would be made today.

Thirty-four is too old for Molly? With her toughness and skill and her history? Not to mention that the actress looks younger than 34 anyhow. Grr. Gnash.

Oh yeah

I got another writing gig. Neat. I love when work falls out of the sky. Plus, possibly a book deal. Just techie stuff, but fun anyhow.

Who knew?

I actually can get sick of laying on the couch taking muscle relaxants.

I am so very very tired of this back/hip injury. Jason is being heroically kind to me, though.

I also have many good books and good music. Gave up on Greg Bear's Vitals — I kept feeling like I was forcing myself to get through some airport thriller because I had no other choices. But W^3: Women in Deep Time (three stories/novellas by the aforementioned author) was most excellent. Now I'm reading Zeitgeist by Bruce Sterling. And listening to Cat Power and the new Johnny Cash and old Throwing Muses and medium-old P.J. Harvey and I know this is a run-on sentence so sue me I'm on drugs.

I want my hip to get BETTER, damnit. (Last year's hip injury is the source of these intermittent back spasms, is my theory.) Whine. I miss doing the leg-press at the gym. I'm a big girl, with strong legs, and being able to leg-press 500 pounds (as much as the muscle-bound pretty boys) was such a source of pride. But no longer. Or at leat not for a long time. Ligaments take what, a year to heal?

P.S. I think P. is no longer reading these pages. Evidence: I was not corrected on my egregious misspelling of "canon" as "cannon" the other day. I had to live with this nagging feeling that I'd done a Word Thing wrong (besides the random typo or sleepy run-on) until I figured it out for myself.

Feh.

Jeez

I was cleaning up the living room, reaching over to pick up a pillow off the floor, and ZOT. Major back spasm. I am now officially 102 years old.

Spent the day on my pilates mat, doing old physical therapy exercises and stretching and napping and gobbling muscle relaxants between the usual conference calls and server crises.

Bad news is, I missed my long-overdue appt. with my shrink, on account of not being able to stand so very much up. Good news is, he got my cancellation message and phoned in a scrip' for valium for me, to soothe those angry back muscles. To which I say a very relaxed yaaay.

I would like my normal life back now please. If you see it, please tell it to come home.