Oh, my god, oh, my god, oh. my god. Hunter S. Thompson has killed himself. Words fail. This is deeply saddening. The world could use more journalists like him right now.
knew I shouldn’t have checked the news before going to bed. well, how about this: his suicide is a compelling argument for gun control. not that he would have wanted it that way.
Okeyyyyy! We’re back, and as you can see: New year, new URL, and new look, for me as well as the site. I got glasses, and my hair is longer than it may ever have been since I was maybe four.
I’m sorry I’ve been gone so long. The comment spam really got me down — I got 800 PIECES OF PR0N COMMENTS IN ONE DAY, all of them with titles so dirty even I was frightened by them. I have half a mind to start billing the posters if it happens again, provided they don’t originate in some place where going after them wouldn’t work, like Russia. For now, I am pretty confident in the ability of newer versions of Movabletype to control spam, and seeing as I’m on a new server run by more people I know, I figure updates will be easier to pull off.
I have really, really missed blogging and I think I’ve suffered from its absence in my life. No amount of talking to other people, even trained professional talkers, can substitute for getting my ideas down in text and being able to go back to reconsider them later. I literally haven’t been writing at *all*. And not having you all there to add to, adjust, or affirm my ideas has also been very depressing. I was really enjoying some of the heated arguments which developed in response to some posts here. I hope they’re not gone for good.
So welcome back; I missed you. I promise I’ll try to be in better touch. Things will still be filtering into place for a while — you’ll notice a lot of dead links and no coherent archive pages for the moment, but I’ll be working on that in my free moments.
A lot of people seem to think how good a dancer you are depends on how fit you are, but I’ve found that some of the best dancers I’ve ever seen are significantly overweight. Take Chris Farley, for example. Damn, but that man could dance — he could do things people much skinnier than he couldn’t pull off, or wouldn’t dare try. And then there’s this guy. He’s kinda chubby. He’s only dancing upper-body. But he’s dancing with an elegant abandon most people never manage. And he’s doing it on the Web. Dance along!
OK, I know this already went up on Adorablog, but certain members of my family, sisters especially, need to get their screens cleaned for free. Absolutely 100% worksafe. Make sure the sound is up when you play this one.
Yesterday I went looking on my hard drive for some file which I was pretty sure had the word “what” in its title. I didn’t find it, but I was rather amused by the list it generated, so I thought I’d share it with you. Here’s a list of all the questions the computer thinks I could answer, if the titles of files on my hard drive are any indication:
How People Learn
How to Draw
How to Remove Toupee
How To Become A Hacker
How compwork’s difft from other
How to GIP
How to Copy Icons
How the Republicans and Democra
how to kill a process
How to install HDST 3D icons
How gamers develop jargon
howtoplay
who’s unemployed
grad schl – who where
When the Albatross awoke
Where’s the manual?
where’d the boys go (inside, inside) notes
where_to_donate
where to find skelly
Where is the mystery
why designing
why people use media
whyjohnnycantpost
young=smart posts- WhyWorkSux
why opinion matters to Frank
cat_why_god_why
Why? I’ll tell you why.
Why Cows Hate Snow
why teachers don’t talk ghetto
forgot why
why dance
bio of a geek – WhyWorkSucks
Why this process sucks
WHY am I writing this crap?!
whats_new
what’s going on
What was installed(and where)
What’s new in release 13
What’s wrong with “program-length commercial” study
what is reality television
what collaboration looks like
what it is is
What is HyperCard?
What I Did
What’s Ethnography?
What site is missing
What’s wrong with this site
what you’ll get
What Translators are included?
Say What?
what do you want?
(I know, I know. Someday I’ll post something significant on this site again…)
August, being Housesitting Month, is also Gorge On Cable Month. This time, I’ve discovered Penn and Teller’s show Bullshit!, which goes above and beyond the usual bounds of scientific skepticism (ESP, alien abductions, etc) to cover a surprising range of social movements. The first show I saw was about PETA. I have to say I was a little taken aback at how harsh they were on them — they really don’t temper their scorn for “anti-scientific” organizations in the least. (Their inability to admit to the shortcomings of science is a definite flaw.) But a show speaking skeptically about just about anything — especially fundamentalist Christianity, which they cover — is much needed these days. I am waiting for them to do Sc!3nt0l0gy and get their asses whupped. Someone needs to; those loopy bastards have started putting up ads around Columbia. Not only is this show likely to become my dad’s favorite (every time I go home I get an earful about how the local PBS affiliate is taking money to do shows on religion), but it should also be required viewing for all Hampshire students. It’s on Showtime.
August again! Time for my favorite part of the whole summer:
Living with Winston Churchill.
Bill Crosbie was over last night and pointed out that’s who Henry looks like. He’s absolutely right. Henry is the best cat ever, and I wish he was mine. He is so peculiar looking and so floppy and personable that I hardly think of him as a cat at all. Just a very small hairstylist with unorthodox techniques, like using his stinky snaggly maw.
Churchill pic thanks to 64 Baker St.
At the request of Mary of puzzling.org, I have created a new shirt! Isn’t Internet life splendid? Play the game of seeing if you can figure out which one it is!
For far too long now I’ve had a recycled salsa jar about 1/3 full of small slips of paper kicking around my room. At some point earlier in my life I had decided this system of writing down and randomly choosing ideas would be my means of staying fresh as a writer, of staying disciplined and busy. I had thought I’d started the jar in my late high-school years, but judging by the content of the slips I’d say this was contemporaneous with my late Martin Espada phase and my time at Bread Loaf. Say, six years ago.
I never made use of the jar — aside from putting things in, I don’t think I ever cracked it open. Systems like that have a way of frightening me off once I devise them. So I’m getting rid of it now, but I thought I’d post the contents for the sake of posterity and a good laugh.
Some of the ideas seem laughably dumb as writing topics from this vantage point. “Elegy for a grey Chihuahua” was going to be about a dog I became particularly attached to at the Humane Society, and it wouldn’t have been anything but maudlin. Except that these were the Espada years, so it would also have been political (even worse). “An Excuse to Eat Butter” was something Martin once said about lobsters, a one-off joke — I can’t imagine what I was going to say about that. The “puppies on the beach” poem would not have been worth revising. It only meant anything to me and a few high school friends. And I should clarify I don’t have any kind of authority to write half those ruined love poems.
Some are just mysteries. What did I want to write about Jake and Javier? Who was Doug? (oh, no, now I remember.) What was it I wanted to say about the incident where a kid got kicked out of my junior high school? What was Last Resort?
Others I actually did write about, even though I hadn’t opened the jar. The Florist’s Daughter got mostly written; it was a piece of fiction. So did the poem about minnows, blow jobs, and the spa, which I still remember fondly although I imagine if I went back to re-read it now I’d find it hopelessly jejeune. One or two things I think got written about in some form on the blog: the rubber hamburger incident, and the sunflower seeds, which got written about twice as they’re a rather formative experience in my life as an educator. I guess this is a good thing: the jar never worked, but the blog certainly has been impetus enough to keep me excercising my writing.
ghazal
Doug leaving
The Florist’s Daughter
Jake
accidental celibacy
Ode to Sivvy, incl. the line “thinking myself born into the world/ an androgynous leaf-bud”
revise an old one
day of seven dead squirrels
Walking with Caruso
Check the last few pages of your Norton Poetry
Robert’s hand
Javier
Returning to Maine for the 1st time + learning you live where you are/ you’re from where you’ve been
Ruined love poem: Distance
Ruined love poem: Abusiveness
What comes down from the teachers is…
Last Resort
Rework the puppies-on-the-beach poem
Ruined love poem: Revulsion
The Cliff’s Notes for…
Ruined love poem: Emotional drift.
those sunflower seeds
revise an old one
Miki, Ben, and other boys who left ****
Will sd: each prof thinks his own field best. Writers have best of all worlds: expert so long as we speak well
narcissism
elegy for a grey chihuahua
Ruined love poem: Married men.
An Excuse to Eat Butter
You could write about Greg I**** and the rubber hamburger… maybe not a poem?
minnows, blow jobs, + the spa
Ruined love poem: Gay men.
Ruined love poem: Lutte des idees.
revise
progress had the decency to fix what it broke: distance/travel/email
looking for a father
one thing (a story w/o lists + ands)
sestina
ars politica
Ruined love poem: Jealousy
Rework an old poem
ode to ink
Prufrock parody
walking around wearing breasts and a skirt
I met a current Hampshire student this past weekend who didn’t look too stoned and told me there was a movement afoot to institute grades at Hampshire. This of course has sparked some student unrest, protests, manifestos in the Omen, etc. My trust of his claim was somewhat undermined by his additional claim that said movement was being run by Steve Weisler, who I wouldn’t think would be up to something like this. I have been unable to confirm or deny — there is some limited detritus on various school websites which alludes to the protests, and one of the manifestos is apparently up online but the link is broken. Noting that these kids are calling this a “re-radicalization movement,” and that they’ve mispelled their own damn email address, makes me wonder if this isn’t just a return of the Kawecki Poltergeist (“we’ll learn about film by smelling the camera!”) If other rumors are true, though, some good things might be coming of all this — the student I talked to said the leader of the movement was getting The Making of a College reprinted and distributed to all incoming students. I’ll believe it all when I see it.