Category: general

sometimes i wonder if [God] lets these things happen to convince me he is the only true support i have. if so, it has worked

I have no response for that.

This is the aunt who’s recovering from a heart transplant, whose husband died suddenly and unexpectedly, whose goat pen was attacked by wild animals, and who just lost one of her treasured dogs. All within this past year. But she’s known pain before this…abuse, divorce, losing both her father and her son in a tragic car accident some twenty years ago.

I love her, and I wish I could do something.

Yes, that is my new title. You may begin fawning and showering me with gifts.

(Thanks to Eric Burns for the inspiration. And no, I don’t have to actually live on a cul-de-sac to have this title. In fact, it’s better if I don’t, because it makes less sense that way!)

(As Dad might say.)

Nike and Bausch and Lomb have developed contact lenses for sports professionals that block out UV rays and unnecessary color information, making it easier for baseball hitters to see the seams on a ball, for example.

Imagine the possibilities for beauty, though. When you essentially wear sunglasses on your eyes, you won’t have to squint as much, meaning you’ll develop fewer wrinkles over time. (The colors of the lenses are also pretty striking.)

Hell, these could be marketed to anyone who’s outside a lot. Think about truckers. Sure, they can wear sunglasses, but those can fall off or break or be misplaced easily. When you’ve got stuff in your eyes, you tend to leave it there until you’re done with it for the day. “Never lose your sunglasses again!”

I just think the whole idea is cool.

I haven’t had cable since 2002, and the air stations don’t come in very well even with rabbit ears, so whenever I go home to visit my family, I spend a goodly amount of time watching TV with Mom. She likes to tape all the shows she follows and then watch them in the evenings or on weekends.

One of the many programs I watched with her this time around was Smallville. And I have got to say…it rules.

At first I didn’t really think I’d like it. It seemed to me like it was going to be Smallville, 90210. But while there is an ample measure of teen angst, the show is smart, and distinctly sci-fi. There were all kinds of things going on that I want to know more about. One of the most clever and intriguing aspects is the fact that Clark Kent and Lex Luthor are best friends. I really mean best friends. They have this amazing bond that makes you just flinch, knowing how they will (presumably) be bitter enemies in the future. It’s absolutely perfect.

[Just as a side note, Mom watches it as it’s shown on ABC Family, which I’m pretty sure is far behind the current seasons. Of that, I’ve only seen about five episodes. So I really have no idea what’s going to happen, and I prefer it that way. If you’re thinking about posting spoilers, why not just buy me the DVDs instead? :)]

Here’s why being a nice person at your job could stick you with all the shit work. (Well, duh.)

This is funny. I wish I’d seen the whole thing!

The first thing is that I think the use of “[sic]” for misspelled words and badly worded phrases might be passe. This is because the only reason it’s used is to indicate to your reader that it isn’t your typo. When quoting text on the Internet, though, that’s obvious, because you didn’t retype it, you copied and pasted it.

Oh well. I think I’ll probably keep using it, because I like it, and I’m an elitist bastard.

[Note: I don’t think “bitch” and “bastard” are analogues.]

The second thing is pretty much me being annoyed with Google, MSN, and Yahoo. I was searching for the post in which I mentioned the Japanese funerals. I searched for “pixelscribbles funeral” in all three of those search engines, with no results. What did I end up having to use? AJ’s favorite search engine, Searchalot.

I mean, no one ever talks about Searchalot. Searchalot isn’t in the news. So why is it better at finding stuff I’ve written than the so-called top search engines?

I assume Google hadn’t indexed my April posts yet. But maybe it had, and maybe it left that post out of its index. Maybe posts on my blog don’t warrant finding in searches. Which sort of sucks ass, considering that I like people to read what I write. (And hell, if it’s just a matter of being slow on indexing, then that means people will find my posts only when they’re old and stale. Lame.)

If people aren’t going to be able to find stuff I’ve written with the major search engines, then I guess I should work harder at advertising myself. :P

Here’s a nice tutorial on how to politely use your chopsticks. It includes some items I didn’t know, such as:

When you finished [sic] using disposable chopsticks (wari-bashi), put them back in the bag and fold the bag in half. This indicates that they are used.

It also has a couple of things I did know, including the following taboos:

Sticking chopsticks vertically into a bowl of rice.
Passing food from your chopsticks to somebody else’s chopsticks.

The site doesn’t mention why these are bad, but I already know. These things are done only at funerals. I learned about the first one from Todd when I was in Japan. The second one I read about here (and mentioned here). Suffice it to say that the imagery of the second one is nasty enough that anyone would want to avoid doing it.

From Wil Wheaton Dot Net:

COPS is our full-on guilty pleasure. One time, several years ago, Anne and I had a COPS-a-thon. We invited all of our friends. None of them showed up, but we didn’t care, man. We watched four hours of COPS alone, and it was awesome.

hahaha. That reminds me of the time I had a Star Wars marathon back in high school. People did come to that, but only a handful, and they didn’t bother to stay for all three movies. I remember being so frustrated and flabbergasted by that. ;D

Ruth Phillips has a lovely rumination today about art, true beauty, and “the zone”.

In my past as a young ‘modern’ cellist, my gestures were stillborn for fear of them being imperfect. Since, by their very human nature, they were bound to be nothing but, I was frozen; cramped within the tiny world of trying to make something beautiful and perfect from control rather than flow. In the baroque and classical movement over the last twenty years and in my own personal movement towards it, gesture, controlled abandon (since we must have some control in the ‘gobetis’; some discipline in the organic mix) and intention have become the priority as opposed to control alone. Thus any beauty (and there is so much) that appears as a result comes from grace.

I am enjoying Ruth’s writing quite a bit; it’s a window into the life of an artist and her artist husband and their adventures and soul-searching in Provence. It’s not a life even remotely similar to mine, but we are connected through writing and through the thoughtful analysis of life. I’m glad to be able to read her.

I think the real reason this upsets me is because on Saturday morning, when I got up at 6 am to get ready to drive home, my sweet father said, “They found that girl! She was kidnapped, but she somehow got away and was able to call the police. Finally, some good news for a change!”

Of course, the expense to the local police, the Albuquerque police, and the FBI also annoys me. But that pales compared to how she effectively betrayed the feelings of my father, the feelings of the hundreds, maybe thousands of people who searched for her and watched helplessly on TV for updates on her story. Those people cared with all their hearts. It’s obvious that Jennifer Wilbanks didn’t care at all.

Wilbanks decided to call her fiance and police with the story about the kidnapping when she found herself broke in Albuquerque, according to authorities.

“Oh, gee, I’ve run out of money. Let me get home at taxpayer expense. That’s what the government’s there for, right?” Not even a thought about all the people who were worrying about her…even though she, like a moron, fled her home without telling anyone where she was going.

I guess this proves that age has little to no connection to maturity.

The drive took about nine hours. I didn’t really stop much, but I didn’t really exceed the speed limit, either. (Actually, I didn’t go to the bathroom at all, the whole drive. That’s kind of shocking.)

Anyway, I’m back home in Augusta now.

As I was driving I had all kinds of thoughts that I wanted to share, and I kept thinking it would be cool if I signed up for an audioblogging service that I could call with my cell phone, so I could make posts when I wasn’t near a computer. I am such a nerd.

One of the thoughts was just that it was so beautiful out. It was rainy (intermittent rain for most of the drive), and water was cascading down those beautiful shale/limestone shelf cliffs that you see all along I-75 in Kentucky. Mist had alighted on the tree-covered hills, and everything was just so green. I didn’t take any pictures (I was driving, you know), but I sort of wish I had.

I had a thought that I want desperately to remember because it was just so weird–I remember that I was hoping something for someone who either I don’t know personally, or who is a fictional character, and I went off on a long tangent about it, and then thought, “I like to make up stories about everything.” At the career advising interview I went to, the counselor focused on my personality and what kind of jobs I would like, and to do that I had to take the Keirsey sorter yet again. I remembered one of the questions being something about speculating in great detail internally versus noticing everything around me (introvert vs. extravert), and I thought about how true the former is for me. I tend to be oblivious to details that don’t have any direct relation to what I’m doing; the rest of my mind is fully occupied with its own amusement.

I also thought about my parents, how they were both standing in the doorway smiling at me when I went out to my car, filled with so much love. And then how Dad went to move his truck out of my way so I wouldn’t have to back around it, and Mom smiled and waved adoringly from the doorway. It made me tear up. I love them both so much. They are such wonderful people.

First: Mari’s hafla is in the newspaper!! It’s a very nice article, with some choice quotes from Mari. Here’s one:

“This was always one of those things I was going to do when I lost weight, when I became that perfect person I was always going to be,” she said. “Then I decided I would give myself a break and try it. That’s when I discovered that this is a style of dance really open to everyone – all body types, all ages, all sizes and all levels of experience.”

Secondly, Ed quotes an article in full (and doesn’t link it, but I found it by googling, and it’s here) about pitting respected auction houses against each other in a high-risk game of janken for millions of dollars in profit. Just goes to show that there is strategy to rock, paper, scissors.

In a post entitled “A kind of obsolescence“, Eric Burns writes the following:

When you grow up, Christmas becomes more exciting for what you’re getting for others than for what you’re getting. Your birthday becomes vaguely embarrassing. You walk through toy stores and see more and more things you want to buy because they’re ironic, and fewer and fewer things you want to buy because they’re cool.

And eventually, your computers become boxes that run your software. When they can’t run your software any more, you get a new one. Until then, who needs it?

That’s so sad, in a way.

I actually think that’s neat. While I’m not one of the “must have the latest and coolest” types, I do have my own childish wants and desires. It’s heartening to me to think that someday I will look forward to Christmas because of what I’ll be giving to others. I like that thought. I think I’m already on the road to that–Christmas presents aren’t much of a big deal to me anymore. The only problem is that I haven’t been buying presents for other people. ;>

The smugmug site has a cool “hacking” section where innovators can mess around with the application and do all sorts of neat things with it. For example, somebody has created a script by which you can display your last five uploaded photos on a website elsewhere (apparently similar to a Flickr function). I would like to see a “last five comments” script. I think that would be cool. I’m going to install the “last X comments” plugin for WordPress when I finally get around to switching over, because I like being able to track when and how dialogue is being had, and I think it would be nice to have that functionality for my picture site too.