A brief descent into gearheadery.
I am a Mac baby, because the Spouse is a graphic design professional, and the gearhead of the family, so I usually run her handmedown machines, and graphic design professionals roll with Macs, and also Windows sucks. —Anyway, Boot Camp, about which I have little to say myself except I can now run jobstuff like Summation on my personal machine should I so choose, so yay, but I did want to share this delightful little joke which rather succinctly demonstrates why Steve Gilliard is, well, wrong:
What’s the difference between OS X and Vista?
Microsoft employees are excited about OS X...
Jupiter dropping elsewhere.
Ned Jingo says some things—about creating music, and consuming it—that are not inapposite.
Grandson of the Beast.
On the one hand, April fish. On the other, God damn but the resemblance is eerie, now you point it out.
It’s not just the size of a walnut.
So I’m browsing the latest New York Review of Books and the ad for Manliness can’t help but catch my eye. “Why do men need to feel important? It’s their manliness. But is manliness obsolete? Is it even a virtue?” —How disappointing to discover the author’s rather limited notion of manliness, when the questions are so patently leading. It is, I suppose, cute enough to picture him patiently reinventing a crude wheel, all the while imagining he’s taking the discourse to grounds that aren’t already worn thin by the traffic. Strength is for the weak, Professor, and would you please stop sullying my family’s good name?
Terrence Malick has released two films in the time since you released your last one.
Metropolitan has gotten the Criterion treatment, so Josh Horowitz asks Whit Stillman what he’s been up to. Lately. (Thanks, Anita.)
The net treats censorship as yadda yadda badda-bing.
I was wondering why I was suddenly inundated with searches for “without a trace teen orgy.” —Out of curiosity, you think the American Family Association will also be fined? After all, they’re still hosting a clip of said “teen orgy,” shorn of any mitigating narrative context, and they used it rather prominently in a lurid fund-raising appeal...
It figures that my current favorite song in all the world—
—would also have my current favorite video:
Jens Lekman; “You are the Light (By Which I Travel Into This and That).” (MP3 available here.) (Yes, this would at one point have been a deltiolographic post. I’m working on it.)
Value-added blogging.
Whiskey, tango, foxtrot.
Ariel Schrag is a staff writer for The L Word? (—Hat tip to Sara, who looked just as befuddled.)
What the world needs now—
A couple-three years ago, cruising the net, I found a page with some instrumental MP3s; stabs at what would have been the next Babe the Blue Ox album, in another, better world. There was a note from Tim I think about time passing, and families being raised, and walls stubbornly unfallen even after they’d circled them seven times and seven times again, blowing that horn, and what that felt like; too content to be called resignation, I think. (Boy, turning her back: “I stopped needing to save the world. Saving is what misers do.”) Rose was in law school, or Hanna maybe; time passing. —They were spare and crunchy and beautiful, those MP3s, or the three or four I downloaded; when I went back to get more, and drop some cash in the PayPal slot, the site 404ed, its links all rotted away. Then I lost the songs in a harddrive crash.
Which makes this the saddest and most hopeful thing I’ve read all week, but I’m a fan:
The last time I saw Rose, Hanna, and Tim perform—in 1999 or 2000?—they seemed dispirited, mixing brilliant unreleased songs with fragments that crumbled under their hands, that didn’t end but stopped, just like this.
“Babe may be in a deep deep sleep,” Hanna told me via email in 2005, “but we are all alive and well and in touch with each other too.” She added: “We are the future of rock and roll.”
You were, you are, you will be again. It’s terribly selfish of me to ask, but please: come back. The world still needs to be saved.
Teleautograph.
Over at Making Light, debcha reminds us all to check out Collision Detection more often. Here’s a bit on how Margaret Atwood is, well, not getting out of the house as much as she used to, thanks to a long-distance waldo. Which includes the following:
First of all, this confirms my growing sense that Atwood is among the biggest secret geeks on the planet. After all, she’s basically a sci-fi author masquerading as a writer of “serious” adult nonfiction. Her “what if” novels are so superb—and so manifestly superior to her other books—that I sometimes wish she’d just give up writing about the usual maundering-around-the-kitchen-moaning-about-your-children/divorce/boring-ass-upper-middle-class-life crap that comprises 99% of all of today’s dinosaur literary fiction, and just throw it down old-skool in sci-fi and fantasy, and crank out a bunch of 4,000-page novels with, y’know, dragons and instellar spacecraft and shit on the covers. I would so pay for that.
Ninety-nine per cent? —Anyway, exuberantly presented point taken.
The Rules for Hearts.
I guess today’s my day to friend-pimp.
The cover of the sequel to Empress of the World, due 19 October.
Hi rinktum inktum.
Apparently, a big hit in 1937 (along with “I Feel Just as Happy as a Big Sun Flower”) for sparkling duo Lulu Belle and Scotty. Boys, then girls, trade off on the couplets, and watch me for the changes:
Where are you going, pretty little miss,
My little blue-eyed daisy?
If I don’t find me a young man soon
I guess I’m going crazy.
Hi rinktum inktum diddy deedy dum
Hi rinktum inktum doody.
Hi rinktum inktum diddy deedy dum
Hi rinktum inktum doody, how doody.
How old are you, my pretty little miss,
How old are you, my honey?
If I don’t die of a lonesome heart
I’ll be sixteen next Sunday.
Hi rinktum, etc.
Now can you court, my pretty little miss,
My little wildwood flower?
I kin court more in a minnit an a half
Than you kin in a hour.
Will you marry me, my pretty little miss,
Will you marry me, good-looking?
I’ll marry you but I’ll not do
Yore washin’ an yore cookin’.
Then I won’t have you, my pretty little miss,
I won’t have you, my dear-o.
Well, they aint nobody asked you to,
You yaller-headed skeercrow!
Hi rinktum inktum diddy deedy dum
Hi rinktum inktum doody.
Hi rinktum inktum diddy deedy dum
Hi rinktum inktum doody, how doody.
I’ll say this for 
spinooti: you buy a 19th c. treatise on spiritualism and demonology off her, and she throws in the 1937 Alka-Seltzer Song Book for absolutely no charge. (For extra free copies of this song book, for social gatherings, church affairs, banquets, etc., write to MILES LABORATORIES, INC., Elkhart, Indiana.) —Maybe next time I’ll share some of the popular songs of the Hoosier Hot Shots, or the favorite songs of Lucille Long (“From Aunt Dinah’s quilting party, I was seeing Nellie home,” and also “Nita! Juanita! Lean thou on my heart”), or I’ll cough up Joe Kelly’s ode from beyond the grave, “Gold Star Mother o’ Mine.” —If you’re especially lucky, I’ll even tell you what Uncle Ezra saw.
Gimmie a little toot on the tooter Tommy… (horn)
Another little toot on the tooter Tommy… (horn)
The reason we all feel so swell sir—
We Al-ka-lize with Al-ka-seltzer—
Gimmie a little toot on the tooter Tommy
Station E.Z.R.A.
Of course she would look good in a suit.
Yeah, I’m elsewhere. Why don’t you go take a gander at Alison Bechdel and her best gal at the launch party for Sarah Waters’ Night Watch? —Via the Spouse.
Bad Soldier Apuzzo.
Comrade Apuzzo has coined new buzzphrase, “The New Triviality,” which will further cause of metrocon film studies. Good!
Comrade Apuzzo does not let facts determined by overwhelmingly liberal and homosexualist discourse to disuade him. Good, good!
Comrade Apuzzo forgot Star Wars III was anti-Bush parable, and so product of Hollywood liberal-homosexual cultural elite, thereby ineligible for People’s Oscar.
Bad, Comrade Apuzzo. Very, very bad.
—werewolves and dragons and mandrakes and unicorns and mermaids and Hyperborean amber and the gigantic birds encountered by Sindbad the Sailor and the funeral pyre of the Phoenix and quick-frozen mammoths and shrunken heads and—
Patrick Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: January 31, 2006, 09:14 PM:
cd: We are reissuing Avram Davidson’s Adventures in Unhistory this coming December; that’s why it sprang to my mind.
And already I know what I want for Christmas.
Tonight there came a news that you, oh beloved, would come—
Be my head sacrificed to the road along which you will come riding!
All the gazelles of the desert have put their heads on their hands
In the hope that one day you will come to hunt them—
The attraction of love won’t leave you unmoved;
Should you not come to my funeral,
you’ll definitely come to my grave.
My soul has come on my lips;
Come so that I may remain alive—
After I am no longer—for what purpose will you come?
