occasional fish

2007-12-08T18:09:00.001-05:00

You might notice a few kinks with this weblog as I try to migrate over to WordPress over the next couple of days. Most of the heavy lifting has been done, and now it's down mostly to design and layout, but for now at least you'll probably notice a few problems here and there. (Like the redirect from the old link.) Hopefully not too many problems, but we shall see.

2007-12-07T23:59:00.000-05:00

It's still Friday somewhere, right?

This evening, I attended a live performance of A Prairie Home Companion, which was a lot of fun, but also really long. Tonight was just the dress rehearsal for tomorrow evening's radio performance, but it was still the full three-hour show. And it came at the tail end of a pretty busy day, with a lot of work squeezed into a few less hours than usual because of our company holiday party. Which is where I was for the three hours before I walked over and met my parents for the show. I might have more to say about it when I'm not so tired, but here's the basics: it really was a lot of fun. It is, however, designed as a radio show and maybe works better that way. That said, Odetta was pretty phenomenal.

Anyway, for now, the Friday Random Guess 10, because this blog exists mainly as weak excuse to post this every week. And so, if I didn't, the world could very well end.

I serenade the walls
Don't give me songs
And you were not a dot dot dot
I will not be afraid of women
There were twenty-seven companies of female Marines
Kalico, Kahlia, come tell me the news
You have slipped from beneath me like a false and nervous squid
There's an army on the dance floor
Why sing a melody as a soliloquy
My rehearsals last for hours and hours

Guess the lyric, win no prize! And, as always, good luck!

2007-12-06T15:07:00.000-05:00

Here's why I don't think I'll be attending World Fantasy next year after all: basically, it's the money.

It's $125 to register, plus $50 if I want to attend the awards banquet. Then the hotel is $165 a night, which for three nights translates into roughly $500. Assuming I can even get into the convention hotel at this point. Just getting a passport would cost me $97. And the flight...well, I may be able to score a break here, if I can make use of my father's Delta Sky Miles. I don't know what sort of discount, exactly, I could swing...but even if somehow my flight is effectively, miraculously, $0...I'm still out of pocket close to $800. Plus transportation to and from the airport, incidentals, and anything I buy while in Calgary. I can fiddle with that number a little -- stay only two nights, skip the banquet, etc. -- but not enough to really bring it down to something I can easily afford. Especially not if I plan to attend this year's Readercon in July and schedule that trip to Los Angeles I've been planning in September.

So while I've been seriously tempted by the idea, I just don't see how I can afford it.

2007-12-04T21:52:00.000-05:00

Following up on yesterday's post, I'm trying out Blogger's new OpenID comment option, which should allow you to comment (hopefully with backlinks) even if you don't have a Blogger/Google account. I don't know if this is the best option, or even if it will work for everybody, but I thought I'd give it a go. It's only thanks to the comments at Thud's earlier post that I even know this option exists in BloggerDraft. (Which I also didn't know about.)

Let me know what you think, assuming you're able, in the comments below.

2007-12-04T18:30:00.000-05:00

From Yahoo News:

A CAIR spokeswoman, who said the audio was not a four-minute segment, but a series of clips separated by beeps, called the suit, filed in federal court in San Francisco, "bizarre, sloppy and baseless."

Yeah, that sounds like Michael Savage all right.

2007-12-03T16:07:00.000-05:00

Apologies to my non-Blogger readers. Apparently, Google does not want to play well with others anymore.

I'm not sure if this is enough reason for me to leave Blogger altogether -- I'm running more than a couple of weblogs off it at the moment -- but I am looking into alternatives. Certainly Haloscan is starting to look a lot more appealing. In the meantime, I do hope you'll consider still commenting, at least to some extent.

The thing I don't get is: who benefits from this? Does Google really think this will encourage more people to sign up for Blogger accounts, or that their users want to exclude comments from people who don't?

2007-12-03T12:05:00.001-05:00

Can someone explain this? The nomination deadline for the annual Pushcart Prize is December 1. However, if Amazon.com is to be believed, the book with this year's selections will be available on December 10. That seems like an awfully unlikely turn-around time to me, suggesting that the final table of contents was set long before the nomination deadline. In fact, Amazon is already listing the book as in stock. I don't see how a nomination that reached Pushcart on December 1 has any shot at making the final cut, quite frankly.

Which is something I wish I'd known when I made my own six nominations last month.

2007-12-03T12:04:00.000-05:00

The most viewed Yahoo News photos this morning were mostly of dinosaur mummies and ancient sea scorpions that lived before the dinosaurs and, of course, the Spice Girls. Y'know, lots of ancient fossils.

2007-12-02T15:38:00.001-05:00

So I haven't had many people take me up on my mix-CD-a-month, and there's only one month left, but here's what I listened to in November, more or less:

"Union Song" by the Nightwatchman
"Don't Marry Her" by the Beautiful South
"That's Why They Call it Rome" by Holly Palmer
"Learn Chinese" by Jin
"Understanding Marx" by Red Shadow
"I Need a Lover" by Pat Benatar
"Goodbye to You" by the Methadones
"You're the One that I Want" by the Beautiful South
"The One I Love" by Rosie Thomas
"Teen Line" by Hello Saferide
"Faith" by the Boy Least Likely to
"Stand By Me" by Ben E. King

It was sort of a light month for new music discoveries, and at least half of those tracks are cover songs, but that's just how it is sometimes. If anybody wants a copy of this mix, or any of my previous 2007 mixes, just let me know.

2007-12-02T15:16:00.000-05:00

So, um, snow!

2007-11-30T22:11:00.000-05:00

The Friday Random Guess 10:

Their small-town eyes will gape at you
There's a reckless feeling in your heart as you head out tonight
Heads turn when you hit the room
Let your legs loll on the lino
Tear me apart, including this old heart
Blue morning, blue morning, wrapped in strands of fist and bone
They stencilled their drum heads and guitars with their names
I was eight years old and running with a dime in my hand
So roll me over, over, over while you turn your head
Oh ladies, pleasant and demure, sallow-cheeked and sure

There's even something approaching a theme this week, even if it did sort of need to be shoehorned in there for a couple of the lyrics. (Can you guess it?)

Anyway, that's what these are: song lyrics. You guess the song title and band, and we all clap and cheer uproariously when you get it right. Sound like fun? Good, because that's how it works. Oh, and we did this last week, too, if you were wondering how that played out.

As always, best of luck!

2007-11-26T23:24:00.000-05:00

How is that I never saw an episode of QI before this evening?

2007-11-23T21:06:00.001-05:00

I was getting the following error message in my e-mail program: "Recipient address rejected: need fully-qualified address."

It was easily fixed -- I needed to remove an "x" I'd accidentally typed on the cc line -- but it should tell you something about me that my first thought was, "You don't hyphenate compound modifiers if one of them's an adverb."

2007-11-23T21:04:00.001-05:00

Wait -- today's Friday, isn't it? I've already lost track. Anyway, here's the Random Guess 10:

"Carry On Wayward Son" by the Oak Ridge Boys (orig. Kansas), guessed by Betty
Once I rose above the noise and confusion
"New York City" by They Might Be Giants
We met in the springtime at a rock and roll show
"Leaving on a Jet Plane" by Peter, Paul and Mary, guessed by Kim
There's so many times I've let you down
"Dreaming My Dreams" by the Cranberries
And there's no other place that I'd lay down my face
"Ballad of Ira Hayes" by Johnny Cash
And their land grew crops of weeds
"When Doves Cry" by the Be Good Tanyas (orig. Prince), guessed by wormbrain
Maybe you're just like my mother
"Long Black Veil" by New Riders of the Purple Sage (orig. Johnny Cash), guessed by Betty
Oh, the scaffold is high and eternity's near
"The Soldiering Life" by the Decemberists
The call to arms you liken to a whisper, I liken to a radio
"I Feel Fine" by the Beatles, guessed by Eric
Baby says she's mine, you know
"The Chimbley Sweep" by the Decemberists
"O lonely urchin!" the widow cried

If you don't know how it works, just watch how others do it and you'll figure it out.

I know I haven't been terrific lately about posting answers, but I will get around to it, hopefully sometime tomorrow. It's just...well, it's a little bit of tedious copy-and-pasting. And that's always assuming I can remember where I saved the right answers...

Anyway, for now, and as always, good luck!

Update: Okay, at long last, here are last week's answers. And here are the answers from the week before that. I think I'm all caught up now.

2007-11-23T20:50:00.001-05:00

I'm having a tough time figuring out if No Country for Old Men is a really great movie, or just an exceptionally well-cast version of a great book. It's exceptionally well made, that's for damn sure, one of the Coen Brothers' best.

2007-11-23T20:46:00.001-05:00

How did I not know that Patricia Quinn, who played Magenta (a domestic) in The Rocky Horror Picture Show was also Livilla in I, Claudius (a miniseries of which I am inordinately fond) and also had a memorable (which is, perhaps, to say memorably naked) role in Monty Python's the Meaning of Life?

I came to this information in a sort of round-about way.

I was watching this week's episode of Pushing Daisies -- a show which, if it's never quite again reached the peaks of its first episode, has at least continued to be a lot of quirky and silly fun.

A lot of that fun comes from impeccable casting. It's tough to dislike for long a show that allows for Kristin Chenoweth or Ellen Green to occasionally break out into song. Most people will probably remember Green best as Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors, and it was after hearing her sing a little of "Morning Has Broken" in this week's episode that I thought, "Hey, I'd like to hear a little of her singing from Little Shop." Particularly, I was interested in hearing "Suddenly Seymour." No real reason; I just remember it being a really good song from the movie.

Anyway, I wandered over to YouTube and played a few clips. And then, because I was in a musical mood, I started playing clips from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And then, because that's how these things work, one thing led to another and I was looking cast members up in the IMDB.

I'm seriously surprised I never noticed it was the same actress before.

2007-11-23T19:03:00.000-05:00

November 23 is too early to string up Christmas lights and start playing Christmas music. And twenty-four hours of that music, for a full month, will be appreciated by no one but seasonal retailers and the clinically insane.

It's too early, if only because it will get those ridiculous "war on Christmas" arguments trotted out by the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Fox News. We don't need that, ever, and we certainly don't need a month and a half of it before the holiday season even begins.

2007-11-22T09:21:00.001-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving!

2007-11-21T10:55:00.001-05:00

I have to admit, it looks tempting. Way too expensive, but tempting.

2007-11-20T21:14:00.001-05:00

My favorite part of Kelly Link's new short story, "Light":

She touched her hair. "Maybe you didn't notice, but I have two shadows. So I'm part of the weirdness. People like me are the people that people get ideas about...."

It's available in the recent Fantastic Women issue of Tin House and also online in full here.

2007-11-20T21:12:00.000-05:00

When I read this article earlier that Victor posted about how the internet is going to slow to a dead crawl, I didn't think it was going to happen tonight!

2007-11-18T23:12:00.001-05:00

Brave new world:

"U.S. discount retailer Target Corp, known for its innovative marketing, is staging a "model-less" fashion show in Manhattan next week that will feature holograms strutting down a runway in its merchandise instead of size-zero models." [link | via]
"New technology that can make tanks invisible has been unveiled by the Ministry of Defence." [link | via]
"No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely." [link | via]
"Under the cloud cast by Steve Fossett's apparent accident, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic moves forward with the ambitious Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert." [link | via]
"Genetically modified plants that can break down pollutants may be an effective way to clean soil contaminated by industrial chemicals and explosives used by the military, according to scientists." link | via]
"The biggest retailer in the world covers an area larger than Manhattan." [link | via]
"University of Minnesota astronomers have found an enormous hole in the Universe, nearly a billion light-years across, empty of both normal matter such as stars, galaxies and gas, as well as the mysterious, unseen �dark matter.� While earlier studies have shown holes, or voids, in the large-scale structure of the Universe, this new discovery dwarfs them all." [link | via]

2007-11-18T21:03:00.001-05:00

You know, Dan Hopper isn't wrong: this does sound like every Kitchen Nightmares episode. Yet I still sort of like it.

2007-11-18T02:24:00.000-05:00

Hmm, obviously a mistake but still sort of amusing: on the IMDB page for Beowulf, Ray Winstone is listed as "Drunken Thane," not the title character. Apparently nobody was Beowulf.

As to the movie itself...eh, it was okay. I saw it in IMAX, which is unusual for me, and I don't know if that's part of why I feel oddly disconnected from what I saw. I didn't dislike the movie, but I can't help thinking that maybe Tasha Robinson is right that the animation, the decision to make this an animated movie, is the heart of what's wrong with it.

2007-11-16T22:09:00.001-05:00

You know, I love me some Sarah Michelle Gellar without her shirt on as much as the next guy -- or with it on -- but naming her Woman of the Year does seem a little shaky, even by Maxim's standards.