Happy Halloween eve. That's right, it's the day before the day before All Saints Day! Woo. *shoots finger guns into the air* I'll be wearing the same witch's hat I always wear. Simple, classic, flattering, impossible to mistake for a non-costume, goes with everything, the perfect solution. How about you?
I'm tired, y'all. I want to spend a week in a hotel, supplied
with beautifully clean sheets, fantastic breakfasts, an enormous and
luxurious bathroom, lots of sex, and a fantastic reading library. Just
to be perfectly clear, the hotel should merely provide the setting for
item #4, not the partner, thanks.
No thanks to you and your old trombone.
I won a
prize! I'm not going to write down the name of it, because it would
ruin the tenuous anonymity of this site, but it is a nice prize that I
didn't apply for, for the best [something something] article published
last year. Obviously, this makes me very happy. It was all a little
odd, because I learned about it second hand, and had to write to the
chair of the awarding organization to confirm that it was true. The
extremely nice chair wrote back right away to say that she was very
sorry not to have let me know sooner, but she only had an (old)
physical address for me, and yes indeed I HAD wone (typing
quickly, clearly). This pleasing typo prompted Snark to compose the
following couplet: "All the prizewinners I have known / and all the
prizes they have wone." Catchy.
Hello hello hello! I sent off an article and a bunch of other stuff that was hanging over my head, which makes me flop happily on the ground. Flop flop. So gratifying. Flop.
And don't forget, you are stuuuupid.
There is an awesome episode of Dexter's Lab called "Dexter and Computress Get Mandark!" A six-year-old made up a story about Dexter and recorded it on a tape, and sent the tape off to the producers. They correctly identified it as excellent and animated an episode to go with it. All the sound comes from the kid's tape, and the animation is a charming, kid-style version of the show. They do a great job wittily matching the action to his narration, with a few little gaps in the story bridged very neatly in dialogue-free moments, and fantastic visualizations of the kid's revisions, odd transitions, and trailing off moments. The plot is that Dexter's nemesis Mandark has a sister, or perhaps brother, Computress, who is ticked at Mandark and decides to team up with Dexter to get his/her revenge. They build a shrinking ray to shrink Mandark's head, but Computress accidentally sets it to "grow". As a result, Mandark's head grows and grows and grows until it explodes, causing a ton of little Mandark heads to rain down upon the earth and Dexter to tell Computress that she/he is stupid.
Anyway, one of the clever bits is that Dexter and Computress have a plan to get DeeDee (Dexter's sister) too, sort of incidentally, and the plan is that "instead of having a free spirit, she would have no spirit." I thought that was surprisingly witty, especially for a six year old. Last night I told Snark that instead of a free spirit, I had a nose spirit. When I am displaying my nose spirit, I mostly just poke my nose over whatever he is reading and say "I have a nooooose spirit." It cracks me up every time. Pretty sophisticated over here, that's me!
Iyz-n-the-Hood
I bought new ice cube trays. They are a sort of horrible shade of pink,
because that's what they had at the store, and made of silicone, so
they're bendy. Also they don't smell weird and freezer-ish like our old
trays. But what is really exciting about them is that the ice cubes
they produce are really-truly cubes, with eight whole right angle
corners. So far, I still find this entirely exotic. Every time Snark
brings me an iced drink (which is every night, because I must have my
daily bourbon on the rocks, which by tradition Snark makes for me,
because I am a 1950s salaryman, I guess) I cry, "My ice is a cube!" My
ice is a cube. Is yours?
Actually, your corners are a little too poky for that to work so well.
This thread on Unfogged did not wind up being very well directed towards answering Ogged's original request, but it made me very happy by sending me on a trip through Books I Love Land. Oh, hello, A Change of Climate! Wonderful to see you, A Maggot and Woman in White and Mating and An Instance of the Fingerpost! I don't really have anything more to say about any of it, but I had just been feeling super cranky as I tend to do when I am working to many deadlines at once and thought it would be pleasant to revisit the way that thread pepped me up. C'mere books, let me give you some snorgles.
Then she said, "ahh. smell that lovely decomposing vegetation."
While I'm reminding myself that, in fact, this week has not been devoid of cheer, I should also remember that I got to spend a lot of time reading around in MICASE, the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English. This is always a great treat for me, because it is chock full of delights. It's a nice big corpus of some 190 hours of recorded and transcribed speech from lectures, seminars, lab meetings, advising sessions, campus tours, dissertation defenses, and various other academic adventures. I think my favorite are the off-campus labs where people are doing field research on fish and birds. Like this!
SU-f: you're not dictatorial you just want your own way.
SU-m: he's a despot (face it.)
S1: <LAUGH> yeah, pleased to meet you too. <SS: LAUGH> can you think what it would be like if you ever had me as a patient?
SU-f: (xx) is this mine? over there?
SU-f: um, yeah they were over there.
<PAUSE:30>S1: dee di dee you know it's a really tough job but, someone has to do it.
SU-f: <LAUGH> me
<PAUSE:11>SU-m: uh oh
SU-m: uh oh
SU-m: uh oh
SU-f: <GETS THROWN IN WATER> oh
About damn time.
Annnnd, we had a really good speaker at the department colloquium this week, smart and charming and practical and organized. So what exactly I have to be grumpy about, I really do not know. My hug meter is so low LOOOOOVE MEEEEEE
A couple of weeks ago, someone signed up for a match.com account using my email address, presumably in error. As a result, I've been getting lots of emails about all the people who have expressed an interest in "me," redfox120. Eventually, I tired of this, so I went poking around the website until I found a form for sending an email to customer support. I wrote, "Someone (redfox120) seems to have given you my email address in error. I have been receiving all of her emails and don't want to! Can you perhaps fix this situation? Thank you very much."
A bit later, a reply appeared in my inbox:
Dear redfox120,
Thank you for contacting Match.com.
We received your inquiry regarding your account.
We have now requested that all emails cease being sent to the email address you contacted us from. Please allow 7 to 10 business days to stop receiving emails, as lists may have been selected in advance.
To edit this type of information in the future, please follow these steps or feel free to contact us for assistance:
1. Go to www.match.com
2. Sign in with your username and password
3. Click My Account at the top of the screen
4. Click on the Email and Phone Contact Options link
5. Click the Change Preferences link on the section you wish to change
6. Make any necessary changes and click SaveRepeat steps 5 and 6 for any other sections you wish to make changes to.
For immediate answers to most common questions, please visit our help section at: http://www.match.com/help/help.aspx.
Thank you for visiting Match.com.
Okay, thanks, customer support bot. Because I cannot leave well enough alone, apparently, I replied to this email, saying,
Thanks for taking care of this. Just for the record, I am not actually redfox120, and do not have a match.com account. Therefore, I could not "edit this information" according to the procedure you suggest.
The reply:
Dear redfox120,
Thank you for contacting Match.com.
We received your inquiry regarding canceling your membership.
This email confirms we have completed this request for you, hidden your profile/portrait, and removed your email address from our mailing lists.
Whoops. Poor redfox120.
I woke up in the morning, I looked behind the wall
I like to ask Snark, "What country am I from today?" meaning: so, given what I'm wearing, where might you think I was a tourist from? The answer today was Canada.
"Your outfit is practical, and your shirt is dark green," he explained. I don't know, man.
The skeeters and the bedbugs were having a game of ball
I have a super cute umbrella that I bought in Italy, though I think it was actually made in France. It's a kid's umbrella, green (and kid-sized small), with a green wooden handle ending in a green wooden frog's head. It's a great umbrella. However, I am starting to think that I need a second umbrella, of the collapsible variety. (Great story! Tell us more!) Further, I feel that this second umbrella should be fuchsia. Maybe this one. I hear it's "translucent for easy carrying." Opacity is awkward to tote around all day.
The score was six to nothing, the skeeters were ahead
You know that space under your desk? The one that can be so terribly inviting when you contemplate how easy it would be just to slide off your chair and curl up under there, and sleep and sleep and sleep and sleep? Mm. Stop coming on to me, space under my desk. You know it wouldn't work out between us. Plus, how long has it been since the maintenance guy vacuumed you? Too long, too long.
The bedbugs hit a home run and knocked me out of bed.
Our friend Rose and her law school friends introduced us to a very entertaining party game called "Celebrities" (I think). Here's how it works. Everyone gets five or six slips of paper and writes the name of a famous person, or fictional character, on each slip. The slips go into a bowl. The group is divided into two teams. Then the game itself is played in three rounds. Each round is made of one-minute turns, in which a player picks slips out of the bowl and tries to get her team to guess as many as possible in a minute. You go back and forth between the teams, rotating through so each player takes a turn being the clue-er, until you've used up all the slips.
Here's the fun part: In the first round, you can say and act out whatever you like, other than the actual name, to get your teammates to guess the name. In the second round, you get only one word (though you can say it as many times, and in many ways as you like) plus charades, and in the third round you have to be completely silent. So as you go, you often wind up doing as much to remind other players of how a name was clued in earlier rounds as actually coming up with your own clue. I really liked it -- it was a lot more fun, even, than I'd expected. Recommended!
Just for the record, despite the depiction of vast laziness in that last post, Gary Indiana works hard.
Snark and I have an ongoing thing about this. Any time you drive into Chicago from the east, you drive through Gary, Indiana first. Gary is an industrial city in decline, like so many steel towns that went before. But there is still a lot of belching smoke and industrial activity of the sort going on there, and much of it is visible from the freeway. It also has a tendency to smell not so great along this route. So one day we were driving through there and in response to a comment about the smell, Snark took on the role of Gary Indiana (who talks about himself in the third person, much like Rickey Henderson). "Gary Indiana knows that he doesn't smell so good. But Gary Indiana can't help it! Gary Indiana works hard. Hard work smells bad. Gary Indiana has to work hard to support his family!"
Now whenever we want to comment on how hard we have been working, and how virtuous but ground down we feel, that is what we say. Gary Indiana works hard. He does.
Martha Stewart ain't got nothin' on me.
It's Sunday! Which means that I ought to be working hard in my spotless kitchen, making dinners for the coming week. But my kitchen is not remotely spotless, and instead I am sitting here with uncombed hair, dinking around on the internet. Also I should be working on this pile of letters of application and my article draft. All in good time, all in good time. First I have to clean my fingernails and stare at the wall. That wall won't just stare at itself, you know.
On Friday night we went to the house of our friends, where we played cribbage and worked on a jigsaw puzzle of a shiny Art-Deco train, because we are all seventy-eight years old. We had a rousing good time. Then everyone's sciatica started acting up so we went off to bed. Somewhere in there we decided that "The Muffins" would be an excellent name for one's country estate. Join us tomorrow for cocktails and tennis at The Muffins. This year's grouse-hunting party will depart from The Muffins at ten o'clock sharp. A casual breakfast will be served in the pavilion, beginning at eight.
We know how to party.
Last night we went to a screening of Blackmail, Alfred Hitchcock's last silent movie (he also released a version with sound, but since not all theaters were set up for sound yet in those days, there was also this silent version) with live music written and performed by the Alloy Orchestra. I was feeling sluggish and reluctant to go out, but then I got over myself and was glad I did. It was really great. Alloy does such great work, and although Blackmail is pretty low-key for Hitchcock, it's got some great moments and is really delightfully shot. Also we bought a DVD of one of my all-time favorites, Man With a Movie Camera, with Alloy score. Woo.
Veritably, as if it were nineteen-hundred and ninety-nine.
And, actually, on Thursday we went out too. Good lord, that's not like us. We went to game 5 of the Indians/Red Sox series. It was, as I said afterwards, a musty game. The Indians did not bring it. But I had a good time wearing my borrowed baseball cap and (not borrowed) tweed jacket, and waving my little "Tribe Time" towel as if it were a hanky and I was waving goodbye to my friend on a train. (You are supposed to hold it by one end and whip it around and around in excited circles.) We didn't get to sleep until one thirty. From the way I felt the next day you would have thought I had been up tripping all night, instead of watching a baseball game until a little past my bedtime, but I guess being seventy-eight is starting to catch up with me.
