Russell Hoban (Riddley Walker author)’s son Wieland is one year younger than me, is a composer famous in his own right (though I suspect he writes music which is hard to listen to), and has written an article about phone ringtones which references that goddamn Theodor Adorno piece about jazz which makes everyone hate Adorno?
Or did you know that the Muppet special Emmett Otter’s Jug Band Christmas was also based on a book by Hoban?
You didn’t know, but Wikipedia did. Yay Wikipedia!
Also: How many degrees of separation between Russell Hoban and Espen Aarseth on Wikipedia? Two counting the Riddley Walker page, but there’s no indication Aarseth is aware of the novel. I wonder who’s aware of both Riddley Walker and Espen Aarseth? I can’t figure it out from the Wikipedia history page.
Why did this suddenly come up? I’m not far from Canterbury, that’s why.
And now, back to something that was doubtless less obscure to you than this blog post. (Go ahead. No, really.)
Eee hee hee hee! OK here’s what I posted in my profile on a dating site:
Currently I’m trying to figure out why people keep showing up on my blog and asking if I’m Ashton Kutcher….
…You should message me if: you know which text box to put the words in. (You’d be surprised by how many people don’t.)
And here’s the response I got from some poor schmuck who wanted to start conversation:
Hi, what do you mean by text box? I am not sure language has categories that words go into that everyone agrees upon. Did you mean tool box?
charles
Mmm, yes. I’m sure I did mean tool box.
Oh, this guy’s a keeper, for sure. He claims to be 60 and a personal trainer, has no photo on his profile, and is listed as “seeing someone.” Oh, and lucky for us, he also says “I love to chat in chat rooms and i do like trying to express myself in writing. I love the internet.” Are you sure you didn’t mean internets?
So it appears I just don’t blog much over here anymore. Still trying to figure out how to balance the revelation/privacy fulcrum. Gumbaby’s going gangbusters, though — two posts a week now.
As I obliquely mentioned a few posts ago, I’ve started a new blog, over at gumbaby.com, which looks at the moment like it will become central to my dissertation.
The focus is on a phenomenon which has plagued me here at the DSWJ (and plagued Christine over at Sushiesque) for quite some time: people arriving at a blog, apparently failing to read the post, missing the point of the blog, and commenting anyway. My principal aim is to keep track of as many comment threads like these as I can (as well as guestbooks, forums, and possibly even emails, as commenters seem to make little distinction between all of these), so as to eventually analyze them. So if you see threads like these, please send them my way.
(Continued)
Perhaps it’s the beer and cheese talking, but something just came to me as we were talking about copyright law at Christine’s party.
Disney keeps getting copyright extended every time it looks like Mickey Mouse is under threat of falling into the public domain. Right now copyright expires 75 years after the death of the author.
Roland Barthes declared the death of the author in 1967.
All copyrighted materials should thus fall into the public domain in 2042.
Simple.
with much rumbling, it restarts.
This officially marks the end of the longest period in this blog’s history that I haven’t written anything. I guess I last posted in August, then before that in June, but honestly, it feels as if it’s been much longer. It’s been a long, long time since I felt actively engaged with the Dancing Sausage Web Journal.
(Continued)
Precious Roommate made me a tasty drink of his own invention tonight. It involves more alcohol than juice, which is less my style, but it is a complicated drink and involves Hendricks’ Gin, the only kind of gin I ever want to drink from here on. I commented that the sage makes it taste like the San Gabriels. Hence the name. (I’m flattered he let me name it.)
So I haven’t written in forever, and that’s for various reasons not the least of which is that I forgot the URL to my effing blog again (LOSE.) But I thought I should indicate to all concerned that some really excellent pictures of me were taken at a pre-Burning Man party. There’s a whole bunch with light sabers — that’s me on the right, and I provided the blacklight paint causing that guy’s face to glow. (It got kind of sick, actually — the possibility of groovy light effects pulled a raft of photographers, and as they stood there clicking away at us I got uncomfortable, thinking both of DeLillo’s “world’s most photographed barn” and of the time at a protest when there were nearly more photographers than there were police.)
Then there was our Photoboof strip. That’s Precious Roommate on the left, his gal Laura on the right.
And the best photo, as it happens, was chosen by Laughing Squid to lead their wrap-up. Dad and Jon Brier, you must check out that photo! It involves steam-powered vehicles.
Am still enjoying myself but as it happens am looking for employment at the end of this month. Any leads?
I had been about to post a number of theorist lolmemes I found by accident at KSCakes’s lolcat builder, but as it turns out someone beat me to it. There are some missing, though: people (including myself) were doing some on Chomsky (dammit I lost mine!), Henry Jenkins, and McLuhan; and there are some Feynman ones that didn’t get in either, though he’s been kind of done to death. Look for the Freud and Buddhist ones; they’re so cheap, but so satisfying. So many of these theorists brought this on themselves 
I bet these would make good teaching aids in a low-level theory class…
ALSO: See LOLHistory.
O hai,
As you can see, I’ve made some changes. Kellan and a couple of other people kept telling me the last layout was really hard to read, and they were absolutely right; I forgot and broke the cardinal rule NOBODY EVER SCROLLS DOWN. It’s not you, it’s not me, it’s natural baby just go with it. Hence it’s back to a more traditional descending-chronological single-column format.
At the moment, the best way to see EVERY new post is to follow the Archives page, or else subscribe to my RSS; click on the disco sausage icon in the new navigation bar at the top of the screen for the archives page. Otherwise you can just follow academic posts (buck-and-wing sausage), more personal/informal essays (flamenco sausage), or ephemera from my Internet curation (breakdancing sausage).
(Continued)
So I’ve been packing. It looks like I have the job in San Francisco, and anyway I took an apartment out there not even knowing. It was just too great a deal to pass up — Noe Valley, unexpectedly cheap, Victorian, has a garden, around the corner from good friends and my aunt, the roommate has his finger on the pulse of everything interesting in the city — and I figured I needed a change after a gruelling year in school and eight years (!!!) in New York; all the better if that change had a garden and a roommate who was already cajoling me to join him for a bullfight the weekend after I arrived.
I’ve basically moved every year I’ve been in town, what with jobs in Pasadena and Charlottesville and my housesitting gigs in Manhattan, but this one is definitely taking more thought and work. I’ve got the happy circumstance of being allowed to leave most of my furniture behind for future tenants, and the cat is going to summer at the Apthorp with Jess, so that at least is easy. I’ve sold off or given away all of the bumper crop of cherry tomato plants I managed to grow from seed, netting me about $55 and apparently helping a neighbor, Dale, start her own business selling tomatoes to the too-pricey natural foods store on 181st. (I highly recommend the tomato variety, by the way. They are Sweet Pea “currant” heirloom tomatoes from Seed Savers Exchange, and I overplanted because I expected them to die under my dubious ministrations; despite the fact that I transplanted them when they were barely sprouted and mangled their roots, not a single plant died, and many of the plants I just gave away were already beginning to bear blossoms after an April planting!)
The real problem is the books. My collection has probably doubled since I started grad school, natch. I shipped about ninety pounds of books off to my future roommate today, stuff I thought I’d need for the job. I’ve got another thirty to ship, plenty more that is just going to *stay here* (good lord, getting them down from this fifth-floor apartment…), and one box which is going to a book donation drive.
(Continued)
