MemeMachineGo!

Today is Berkeley’s 125th Birthday . Mayor Bates has been quick to deny rumors that the city has been an elaborate practical joke.

Neal Pollack confesses his superheroine transformation fetish :

Instead, nothing, and I mean nothing, gets me hotter than when a so-called “ordinary” woman changes into a superheroine. Other crushes have passed me by, but this one’s stuck. I used to swipe Wonder Woman comics from the barbershop if they contained a transformation I liked. When I dreamt, I would often imagine catching Diana Prince mid-transformation and making her do it over again, just for me. Sometimes, I still have those dreams. I had my first orgasm stomach-down on the floor of my bedroom, watching Diana Prince transform on a thirteen-inch portable TV.

Alter Ego is the site he refers to, and this is the yahoo group .

(Via SexBlogs)

Brunching Shuttlecocks scores again with the Apathetic Online Journal Entry Generator? :

My life’s been generally bland today, but what can I say? Oh well. Pretty much nothing seems worth thinking about, but so it goes. I’ve just been letting everything pass me by recently. That’s how it is.

(Via lactose incompetent )

Amy Alkon continues her ever sensitive dating advice :

That’s what it comes down to here: Speak up or step aside. What’s stopping you? Maybe you’ve heard that the meek are supposed to inherit the earth. Well, the place should be a real ball of laughs after the assertive take off with all the women

First teenage girls giving up meat and now

The Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources commission has taken a peek into the future and seen a disturbing trend: Kids aren’t hunting as much as they used to. […] It’s little wonder, then, that the commission has established a free junior hunting weekend. This will be a permanent season held on the Saturday and Sunday after Christmas. […] The two-day hunt — for deer, squirrel, rabbit and quail — will be open to anyone 15 and younger at the time. No license will be required, but regular bag limits and other regulations will apply, including the hunter education requirement. (Those younger than 10 don’t need the hunter education card if accompanied by an adult who remains ”in position to take immediate control of the child’s bow or firearm at all times,” according to state regulations.)

(Via Meat Facts )

The Songs Inspired by Literature Project is a non-profit seeking to promote literacy through music. They have two CDs of, um, songs inspired by literature, including Motherless Brooklyn, Ghost World, Siddharta, by musicians that include Aimee Mann, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, and more. And they’re a little strapped for cash now, so if you want a great CD that supports a great cause, go get one.

Given my frequent vegan anti-defamation league posting here, and citations to Vegan Porn , it would be understandable to have concluded that I’m a vegan. But I’m not. At the beginning of last year, I resumed eating eggs, but only from organically-fed free-range hens who even have intact beaks, that I get at the Berkeley Farmer’s Market . So I’m functionally vegan outside the house. Except for honey, which I don’t go out of my way to eat, but don’t strictly avoid either. So “vegan” comes a lot closer to describing my diet than anything else I could say nearly so quickly.

The farm from which I get my eggs has the usual range of sizes — medium, large, extra-large, jumbo — and then they have… squawkers.

Squawkers are the eggs so large they don’t have cartons to accommodate them, named for the sound effect as a hen passes one. They sell them more cheaply than jumbo eggs, due to the pain in the ass factor of spacing them out six to a dozen-egg carton, that won’t close such that you need rubber bands to hold it close to shut (which you the customer get to do yourself.)

I’m amused by the ridiculously oversized eggs. And cheap. So I get them whenever they have them.

On Saturday, I was getting some at the same time some nice little old lady was. “Why are they so big?” she was asking the person at the table. “These are from the hens that have been irradiated,” I said, helpfully.

The person at the table laughed, but the little old lady was greatly distressed that I was invoking a dirty word relative to food she was buying.

According to Locus Online :

Dr. Lister Matheson, director of the Clarion Writers Workshop at Michigan State University, has announced a recall of the classes of 1996 and 1998. “We have only recently discovered a minor defect in the pedagogy from each of these years. We have decided that it is in the best interests of the genre and Clarion that we act promptly to rectify this problem. However we want to reassure the public that no readers have been placed in danger as a result of this defect.”

Matheson announced that a remedial workshop will take place July 18-20 at Owen Hall on the MSU campus immediately after this year’s Clarion. Fees for the weekend will be a nominal $100, including room and board. He urges all affected students to attend. Clarion alumni Margaret Atwood and Thomas Pynchon have agreed to teach this special session.

Although Matheson declined to identify the defect that prompted the recall, there have been widespread reports that writers from these years were never taught to foreshadow. This can result in pointless subplots and abrupt denouements. Locus critic Rich Horton was not surprised at the announcement. “It’s a shame really, since these are some of the most interesting new writers working today. But their endings come straight out of left field.”

Nuts, and I was planning to be at Readercon that weekend! But it’ll be nice to see my Clarion ‘98 classmates again.

Inuits in Greenland are being poisioned by their previously safe traditional diet :

Researchers have for the first time documented “unacceptable levels” of man-made environmental toxins in the Inuit population of Greenland. […] There is little doubt the toxins originate from the traditional local diet of polar bears, seals and whales […] The toxins accumulate in animals high up in the food chain, and especially in marine mammals. […] Greenland generates no notable pollution itself, and the Inuit population are in effect suffering from toxins produced elsewhere, by the world’s most industrialised nations.

I find it striking that, even without local pollution, eating the highest on the food chain has resulted in the worst build-up of toxins seen in human communities. And, obviously, if we don’t clean up our act, this is going to spread further down the food chain.

(The article has other good points I’m not focusing on here.)

(Via Die Puny Humans )

Personally, I think the Oxford English Dictionary, in which one can see the history of a word, in context, from original sources through the centuries, is one of great strengths of the English language. I own the Compact OED, an unabridged single volume in type that can’t be read comfortably without magnification (I can make it out unmagnified, to the astonishment of most people.)

Personally, I think Oxford University Press is making a big mistake with their pricing. The CD-ROM costs $295 ; online access costs $550 for a one-year subscription . Put the CD-ROM into the double-digits and half the geeks in the English-speaking world would splurge for it — I know I would (despite the obnoxious copy-protection scheme, even.)

Well, my father gave me this tip — join the Quality Paperback Book Club and online access to the OED is a perk . Joining costs less than $20, for which you get 6 books and an obligation to buy one more within a year. So far as I know, there isn’t a purchase obligation to maintain your membership; you just need to go to the bother of opting out approximately monthly from being sent their Main Selections, which you can do on-line.

(I have no relation to the QPB save as customer; if I seem to be plugging them hard it’s only because, for people who want access to the OED, this really is a great bargain.)

My PC’s firewall is configured to not allow Internet Explorer access to the Internet by default. On the rare occasions I launch it, it has to ask me special permission every time.

Beg for it.

This gives me great satisfaction.

Bruce Sterling on the missing link between the Contras and al Qaeda

The next Iran-Contra is waiting, because the contradictions that created the first have never been resolved. Iran-Contra wasn’t about eager American intelligence networks spreading dirty money in distant lands; it was about the gap between old, legitimate, land-based governments ruled by voters and the new, stateless, globalized predation. The next scandal will erupt when someone as molten, self-righteous, and frustrated as John Poindexter uses stateless power for domestic advantage. That’s the breaking point in American politics: not when you call in the plumbers, but when you turn them loose on the opposition party. Then the Empire roils in a lather of sudden, indignant fury and strikes back against its own.

Rabbit gets dissed by her special pillow

special pillow: You’ve lost your edge, buddy. You’re just a working stiff now — except you don’t even shower or leave the house! You’re the worst of both worlds — ugly as an unemployed loser, and dull as a salary man!

rabbit: Dude, I’m still edgy. Look at me! I’m listening to a song by Interpol that I downloaded from the World Wide Web!

Last Friday I was at a dinner party. It came up in conversation that Emeryville, where I work, is host to about every retail chain out there, and Berkeley merchants complain that it’s sucking the life out of their businesses.

“I am, however,” I said, “grateful to finally have a Body Shop in reach.”

A woman whom I’d just met that night replied, confused, “You mean The Body Shop? Oh, no, you must mean a car body shop.”

Which didn’t even make sense in context, but the idea of a man grateful for a Body Shop inspired in her so much cognitive dissonance, that she was grasping for any other explanation.

Me! A car body shop! As if!

Once, early in our relationship, Pocahontas was lamenting that she didn’t have any moisturizer with her.

“I have some,” I said.

“Uh, no, it’s okay,” she said.

“It’s no problem,” I said, retreiving my Body Shop body butter

Her eyes got big. “OK, thanks!”

“What, did you think I was talking about Vaseline Intensive Care?”

“Yes.”

She has since remarked that I’m the only man she’s ever gone out with who had better hair and skin products than she did. And, further:

“You’re the closest thing I can get to a gay man who’ll still fuck me.”

(A line from Six Different Ways I’d told her about when I saw it there.)

Today I wrote the part of my screenplay in which the writer learns he’s gotten a huge book contract and quits his day job to write full time.

Hey, what are movies for?

Funny paper reviews the funnies.

DOONESBURY: On the ground for Gulf War II, B.D. reunites with his Gulf War I buddy Ray Hightower. “Today we got the whole planet wicked off at us—” Ray says Tuesday , “all because a half-dozen power drunk chicken hawks want to get their empire on!” Funny Paper can remember when lots of characters in Doonesbury used to talk like that. Nowadays, only a minor black character is able to tear down the U.S.A. That line would seem ridiculous coming from prosperous Republican Mike, or Beltway insider Joanie, or even—especially—happily domestic-partnered public-radio host Mark. So dies the dream of the ’60s—that the world could change, that hypocrisy and greed and deceit might be flung down in the name of freedom and justice , that the president would not send troops off to kill and die while lying about the cause . The angry young Yalies, fictional and real, slowly absorbed a grim (yet comforting) truth: The System that maimed Vietnamese babies, that starved the poor in ghettoes, that denied basic dignity to billions of human beings around the world … why, life under that System wasn’t too uncomfortable, after all, was it? You could live pretty good, and there wasn’t much point yelling about it.

Except life hasn’t been so good for everybody, in those years since graduation and Watergate. So the black man has become a symbol of the project that Trudeau’s generation wandered away from, of the people left behind the color line or the poverty line. Ray Hightower speaks as the Soul Brother Voice of Conscience, saying things that would be platitudinous or hectoring coming from the mouth of a white person (hello, Michael Moore). Like the court jester, he has license to utter the stinging truth—which is to say, he plays the fool. And the king and the court wince and chuckle. And when the sun goes down, the king is still king.

(Via Cogito Ergo Sumana , where Sumana cites MemeMachineGo! as her source. A Tangled Web!)

When I began the blog, I expected to spend much more time discussing what I’m reading. But it routinely proves to be the case that the things I want to say about books are involved and get complicated, and to do them anything close to justice would take longer than I’m usually inclined to devote to writing them up.

Currently I’m reading Tom Robbins’ second novel, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. It’s sheer delight. I found this passage, discussing Tule Lake , the WW II Japanese internment camp for the “disloyal”, to be chilling in light of the current situation .

Perhaps the author is telling you more about Tule Lake than you want to know. But the camp, in Northern California near the Oregon border, still exists, and while time, that ultimate diet pill, has reduced the 1032 buildings to their concrete foundations, the government yet may have plans for them which may someday be your concern.

Published in 1976.

I also recently read The Deep Blue Good-By, the first of John MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. A lot of sf writers are mystery fans, and I’ve heard several recommend this series. I was particularly struck by Tim Powers saying “Every day I would rather sit in the sun and reread an old John D. MacDonald paperback than work.” As a science fiction fan, I’m used to tendentious tones, but, man, MacDonald leaves even Heinlein and Eric Frank Russell in the dust. It was pretty good, but, based on the first book alone, I’m not especially drawn to the series.

Finally finished Ursula Le Guin’s translation, Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching.

Though I’m trying to cut down on book purchases, when I visited The Other Change of Hobbit yesterday and saw Mojo: Conjure Stories, a new anthology edited by Nalo Hopkinson with stories by Neil Gaiman, Steve Barnes, Andy Duncan, my friends Barth Anderson and Nisi Shawl and more, and Custer’s Last Jump, and Other Collaborations, a collection of Howard Waldrop’s collaborations, I couldn’t resist. I’ve started reading both, despite still being in the middle of Cowgirls, and am enjoying both a lot.

Every day I’d rather sit in the sun and read than work, too.

Fascinating tale of cultural differences in a game company's FAQ:

In the game I noticed that in the first game Abe and Mudokons have 4 fingers then in Abe's Exoddus they have only 3 fingers. What happened with the 4th finger?

A: Well, it's a long story that needs to be told. So here it is... Japan has a strict discriminating policy against any simulated characters entering their country with four fingers. Historically, Japan has had a subclass of meat packing workers that were typically looked down upon in their society. In later days, the blatant displaying of a four fingered hand gesture, intentionally directed at another, came to mean that you were calling them a member of the meat packing sub class. Which, we understand, was not at all a compliment.

It appears that the four finger connection with the meat packing class was due to work related accidents, but was so frequent that it came to symbolically represent the sub class. It seems as though this is a part of the Japanese history that some groups within Japan would like to see forgotten. Therefore, it is at great risk that you publish four fingered characters in Japan, as you may very likely end up in legal battles with a vociferous pressure group. This group claims that this type of representation is equivalent to and as degrading as the yellow star forced to be worn on Jews by the Nazi's during the Second World War.That is, it's offensive and degrading unless they can extort enough money out of you. Then it's all okay. Case in point: We were told that the Walt Disney Corporation is charged five million dollars a year by this group so that Mickey Mouse may live in Japan and retain his original four fingered design. Otherwise, old Mickey would need to see a surgeon and have something done about that insulting forth finger.

(Via Rambling Coyote)

Screenplay due on the 9th, Improv show I’m directing on the 12th, taxes due the 15th. I knew I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue month to commit to daily blog entries.

Vertigo: Then and Now compares the San Francisco of Hitchcock’s Vertigo to today with side-by-side photographs.

Y’know, the war’s been bringing me down. Even worse, the justifications and apologists. Even worse, the polls saying that something like 60-70% of Americans believe Iraq was responsible for 9/11 — that the administration’s spin has been that effective, the so-called liberal media’s failure to call Bush on his bullshit has been so lame that that’s just eased into accepted fact.

And with that as accepted fact, I don’t see how Bush can possibly lose in 2004 to anyone at all critical of the war.

But dwelling on these things has contributed to a noticeable decline in my well-being. So for the short term, I’m laying off reading the news, or many of my favorite blogs. I in no way recommend sticking your head in the sand as the best general approach to unpleasantness in the world… but I do recommend taking a break when you need it.

And I am.

So yesterday I picked up Matt Ruff’s Set This House in Order at the library. I was much too busy to read it right away, of course, but I made the mistake of looking at the first few pages .

Man, I can’t remember the last time I devoured a book this compulsively. It is so good. The two viewpoint characters have multiple personalities. From an interview with Ruff

Probably the most gratifying response has been from real-life multiples. Since the day the novel came out, I’ve been getting emails — sometimes two or three from the same address — complimenting me on the accuracy of my portrayal.

I’ll let you know how satisfactory I find its conclusion, but it’d take a tremendous comedown from my enjoyment of the book thus far to keep me from recommending this widely and loudly.

A Geek Code for multiple personalities: the Multiple Code.

Number (N*)

The number of (known) people who make up your system.

N---! Huh? There's only one (1) to this body!
N--- Two (2) to Three (3)
N-- Four (4) to Ten (10)
N- Eleven (11) to Twenty (20)
N Twentyone (21) to Fifty (50)
N+ Fiftyone (51) to Sixty (60)
N++ Sixtyone (61) to Eighty (80)
N+++ Eightyone (81) to One Hundred (100)
N++++ One Hundred (100) to One Thousand (1,000)
N++++! Over One Thousand (1,000+)
N~ Not one, not many -- mid-continuum.
N? Darned if we know!

The other parameters get much stranger from a singleton's perspective, covering the species of the personalities, which can range from human to familiar animal to dinosaur to alien to vampire, the worlds the personalities exist in when they're not in the body, and how the personalities came to share the body (which offers lots more choices than splitting.)

It really makes me feel I should be doing more with my brain.

I found this on Astraea's Multiplicity Resources, where there's lots more fascinating stuff. I found that on Matt Ruff's Multiplicity Links page, from his Set This House in Order page.

And I finished the book. It is wonderful. Read the excerpt. Buy the book. Lose sleep finishing it.

Everyone’s heard of Pentagon pizza orders predicting crisis but this Kinsey sex interview example was new to me:

“Each girl would spend the first hour talking to him about her pre-intercourse history,” she said. “If she was not a virgin, she would spend a second hour with him talking about her post-intercourse history.” Cohn said the boys quickly learned this, and would swarm around those girls who came out of the room only after two hours.

The article Amorous Propensities quoted is now pay for play .

Finally finished Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Some quotes:

It doesn’t matter what activity anyone chooses. If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic. And it doesn’t matter what it is that you select, because when it has been pushed far enough it contains everything else.

and

When life demands more of people than they demand of life — as is ordinarily the case — what results is a resentment of life that is almost as deep-seated as the fear of death. Indeed, the resentment of life and the fear of death are virtually synonymous. Does it follow, then, that the more people ask of living, the less their fear of dying?

There are a lot of things presented as dichotomies I find to be false. Thinking and feeling is one of them. Most of us, most of the time, are responding from simple habit and justifying it after the fact as coming from the heart or rationalizing it as only making sense.

Some people lament too little acting from the heart, or too little exercise of rationality as the cause the world’s problems. But we don’t need more or less thinking or feeling. What we need is more authentic experience, more actual choices being made, rather than habits continued.

Which isn’t to suggest that habits are bad in the general case — good habits spare a lot of wasted effort. The question is whether the habit actually helps you to achieve the things you want. And if you haven’t examined either your habits or what you want, odds are it doesn’t. But that’s a topic for a different, longer essay.

Screenplay, check. Directing an improv show, check. Taxes, check. Play time!

The skies finally turned mostly blue after a weekend of rain, so I walked in the sunshine, went to the library, got a decaf soy mocha at Tully’s and read from One Continuous Mistake and Summerland, listened to Michael Masley play his bowhammer dulcimer on the street, saw the sun shining on the Bay, had dinner at an Indian restaurant, and saw Bend It Like Beckham , which was pretty good, though some of the dialogue at the start of Act 3 was pretty on the nose, he says with film school pretension.

That’s my life as a slacker. I love Berkeley.

An interview with Matthew Branton :

The culture industry in Britain since the early Nineties has come to consist almost entirely of consumer capitalist propaganda dressed up as ‘better living’: young people are made to feel that living some kind of cross between Sex and the City and Cold Feet with a swindling mortgage and a swindling pension and a house stuffed full of cheap tasteful shit manufactured for sub-breadline wages in China is the best you can hope for in this life. Lots of people (not just let’s-run-a-vineyard type yuppies) have rejected this and pissed off out of it to try living another way that doesn’t make you so ashamed. Do you remember that census last year that showed a million young men unaccounted for? The only comment was facetious: maybe they’re all in Ibiza. No. We’re in the remote places of the world, growing our own food, working in kind for what else we need. You don’t hear about us because really, why should we tell you?

Branton , an established author, is giving away his new novel free on the web over the next 4 weeks, in lieu of book publication or making money from it.

Meanwhile, Michael Swanwick gives props to Warren Zevon in a short short, a sort of memorial-before-the-fact for the fatally ill Zevon .

It’s the sensibility. It’s the voice. It’s the perspective. We’re talking a guy who was so far out of the consensus that he saw things as they are. We’re talking someone who was angry at the shit that the people in charge are trying to force down our throats and wasn’t willing to call it chocolate.

The news fast is a mixed success. It’s tough to avoid news of the war — its influence is everywhere. In today’s word of the day , for Pete’s sake, Anu notes:

After a recent week of words from law, where many of the words are of French
origin, I received this email from a reader: “I propose you no longer feature words which have a base or stem from the French language. I no longer see that as a positive e-mail.”

Words fail me. As they’d fail all English speakers who sought to avoid French-derived words.

Tonight we reviewed the video of Saturday’s improv show. While I was getting a veggieburger and fries to go at Smart Alec’s on the way there, I ran into Jason, one of my fellow platypi. “How do you think the show went?” he asked.

I thought about it. “I have no idea,” I said.

It’s hard enough to gauge how an improv show is going as a performer. As director, I’d been so involved with it, so worried about so many details, that it was totally a blur.

I’m pleased to say that, on review, I think it went really well. The rhythm of the show worked. That’s the thing I was most directly responsible for — with improv, I couldn’t predict any of the contents, of course — all I chose was the set list of what kinds of scenes we’d be doing, and who was in them. But that involves choosing short scenes vs. long, more game-like scenes vs. more dramatic scenes, how much audience participation there’d be when (and how direct it would be), how many players would be on stage when, what we’d start and end the acts with. And it flowed nicely.

Watching myself, I did notice some personal cliched body language I want to work on varying. I no longer always go stage right, something I was working on after previous reviews. My voice was good.

The players made a lot of funny choices throughout — I was proud of ‘em all. And the audience had a good time.

The last scene made me laugh hardest (I wasn’t in it.) Normally we use no props whatsoever — we mime everything. The last scene was Helping Hands, a traditional improv game in which Player A puts his arms behind him, and Player B, standing behind Player A, sticks her arms through the loops A’s arms form, and they act as a single cohesive (more or less) person. This scene was played between two such pairs, sitting down to breakfast. With props. It largely consisted of food being smeared on people’s faces, stuffed in people’s faces, and thrown at people. Utterly sophomoric, and totally hysterical. (The props were someone else’s last minute inspiration — Helping Hands wasn’t even necessarily going to be in the show — it was designed to be an optional extra scene if one of the sets ran short.)

All in all, a success. And I’ll be glad to be just a player in next month’s show.

Scott wrote

Is it wise to cut ourselves off more from the world and seek enlightenment on our own? How can it be, when the whole point is that all humanity is in reality one great indivisible being, and the divisions and separations and distinctions between one person and another are only illusions? Isn’t there something self-contradictory about the idea of pursuing enlightenment in isolation from other people?

and Alan replied

I have occasionally tested the waters of various religions. When I looked at Buddhism, I found myself dissatisfied with something that seemed to me essential to Buddhist metaphysics: a sense that enlightenment consists of turning inward, away from the world. My own spirituality is inspired by the world and the wonders in it; to turn away from this feels to me like betraying something important.

and I was confused ‘cause both of these presumed a great number of things that had nothing to do with the Buddhist spirituality with which I’m familiar (not that Scott claimed to be referring to Buddhism, per se.)

In the Buddha’s own story he explicitly rejects asceticism and withdrawal from the world.

Only a small minority of modern Buddhists are Theravada Buddhists, who state as a goal of their practice the attainment of enlightenment and escape from the Wheel of Life. Most are Mahayana Buddhists (which includes Zen and Tibetan Buddhism) who, instead, aspire to Bodhisattva-hood, where a Bodhisattva is one who is committed to returning to the Wheel of Life to assist in the liberation of all living beings.

To become a Buddhist one takes refuge in the Buddha, takes refuge in the Dharma, takes refuge in the Sangha. The Dharma is the body of Buddhist teachings, and the Sangha is the community of Buddhists. Without participating in a community, you’re not a Buddhist.

Like most religions this side of Judaism, Buddhism includes a monastic tradition. But nowhere does Buddhism suggest that everyone should be a monk, or live like one. Secret remote mountain monasteries are the stuff of pulp fiction, Madame Blavatsky’s channeling, and old self-help books — actual Buddhist monasteries are explicitly conceived as a part of a greater sangha, supported by, and giving support to a community.

There are dozens of organizations of socially engaged Buddhists , but as Phillip Russell Brown notes :

It is strictly speaking incorrect to see Buddhism as “engaged” or “disengaged”. There is simply Buddhism and it is by its very nature “engaged”. So when we speak or socially engaged Buddhism” we are in fact implying that a significant degree of “engagement” is part of the particular Buddhist practice being discussed

The heart of Buddhism is to be present in the moment. This is the exact opposite of withdrawing from the world. It includes learning to quiet the chatter of monkey-mind so that you actually have the opportunity to experience the world as it is. It’s not about not taking enjoyment in material pleasures, it’s about being able to do so without being caught up in comparing it to past experiences, wondering how long it’ll last, regretting the end of the enjoyment you know is coming, worrying about whether you’ll have that experience again, and how soon, etc., etc.

It’s about not being attached to pleasures, not about avoiding pleasures. And freedom from attachment doesn’t mean detachment. It means freedom.

Eat the strawberry. Carry the woman across the river. Eat when you are hungry; sleep when you are tired.

=v= I was thrilled when I stepped into the bathroom at an Omaha pizza place and saw that somebody’d written "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US." A little dated by Bay Area standards, but a very good sign, I thought.

Then somebody came along and "corrected" the grammar. Actually, they changed it from an irresistable English-as-second-language grammar error to a charmless regional dialect grammar error: "ALL YOUR BASE ARE DO BELONG TO US." I yam flabbergasket.

Fun fact. Today, it takes 22 minutes to get from downtown Berkeley to San Francisco on BART under the best of circumstances.

100 years ago, you could make that trip by mass transit in 36 minutes.

The Key System’s interurban mainline reached the downtown Berkeley station on Shattuck Avenue in 1903. Offering 36 minute service to San Francisco via the Emeryville ferry, trains initially ran once an hour. The route was so popular that service was soon increased to once every 20 minutes.

I really can’t figure out whether this is a fetish site.

Summerland is not a tenth so inventive as it seems to like to imagine it is, and I’m tempted to give up on it.

I’m looking forward to seeing “A Mighty Wind” this weekend.

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About finally came in at the library, and is in my hot little hands.

A panhandler had a fresh approach tonight: he needed money for bike parts. I gave him some.

There are a lot of different versions of Prometheus’ story, but I was surprised to find that it seems that it was not for giving fire to humanity that he was sentenced to having his liver eaten out daily.

I just received a safety recall notice for my uninterruptible power supply. In the corner of the postcard, under the company’s logo is the trademarked slogan: “legendary reliability.”

One of the things I really love about the Berkeley Y is that, unlike just about all places that call themselves “health clubs,” there actually is an emphasis on health. Most health clubs would be better named vanity clubs.

Not coincidentally, exercise clothes at the Y tend toward the utilitarian. Such that it was really conspicuous to see one young woman in cardio kick-boxing tonight wearing a color-coordinated ensemble of sky blue track pants, jacket (a jacket!) and baseball cap, and perfectly made up.

I was, like, “What — are we in LA?”

Today I returned 2 books and 2 videos to the library. And I’d read and watched, respectively, all of them.

And they were early!

I feel so on top of things.

So a month ago I committed to a regime of original content daily. Which I’ve kept up, even if it’s been admittedly lame a couple of days. And I announced a contest, copies of The Meme Machine to a lottery winner and a commenter during the month. These are, respectively, Marissa and Jimcat .

And I kind of like the idea of a monthly book giveaway, so the writer of my favorite comment between now and the end of May gets a copy of one of my favorite books, John Crowley’s Engine Summer, mailed anywhere in the U.S. or maybe other places if the book rate thither is still reasonably cheap, he says specifically.

Blogging daily has been a challenge, and one I’m cheerfully giving up a commitment to, though I am vain enough to have some attachment to the increased hit rate I’ve had this past month. We’ll see how it goes.

Finished Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About. I did a lot of laughing aloud, which is recommendation enough. As the title suggests, the book’s a relationship study. It sort of has a plot, but one that feels incidental… a series of events for our hero to react to, and to provide variously direct and indirect fodder for arguments. The coverage of working in a bureaucracy is some of the best I’ve seen, as well.

Began writing a new story I’m really enjoying, a Prometheus retelling. Hermes’ dialogue is cracking me up. (So at least someone will have enjoyed the story.)

The bad news: my passport expired today. The good news: I can still renew by mail for the next five years. I find myself waffling on my next planned international travel, to Toronto on Labor Day Weekend for Torcon, the World Science Fiction Convention, anyway.

=v= Road vehicle crash deaths are the highest since 1990, and about 1/4 of the problem is SUV rollovers. Surely this can’t be what Detroit had in mind when they promised, using the mellifluous voice of Peter Coyote, to "Keep America Rolling."

=v= Today’s Boston Globe has a tell-all story about Uday Hussein, which included this revelation:

Uday Hussein, eldest son of Saddam Hussein, loved nothing better than to be thought of as an eccentric, brutal despot, according to a former top aide. Even his email address, shahrayar2000@yahoo.com, spoke to Uday’s persona: Shahrayar was the bloodthirsty king in ”The Arabian Nights.”

Naturally I had to check out his profile, which describes him as male, 36, and living in Toronto. His hobbies: "likes to try new things."

I realized immediately that if this email address had a 2000 in it, that meant some other bloodthirsty-king-wannabe had already grabbed shahrayar@yahoo.com. A peek at his/her profile confirms this. I shall alert the authorities, forthwith.

(Via the Muted Horn)