Someone very recently found my site by searching for “princess buttercup naked”, and I can’t help but be grateful that it wasn’t “inigo montoya naked” or “the dread pirate roberts naked”. I’m not sure I could have handled that.

It’s a little after two o’clock, and I am once again trying to will it to be five o’clock, using the awesome mental superpowers with which, it should by now be abundantly clear, the universe has not seen fit to grant me. A full two minutes have passed since I first sat down to write this, but that isn’t really the same thing as making it be five o’clock through the sheer force of one’s will, and it still leaves me with almost two hundred more minutes to fill up before the end of the day. I’ve spent most of today retyping addresses to create mailing labels for the books we have on order (and which we plan to ship out after they arrive sometime next week), but there’s only so much of that you can do before you go mad, blind, or both. So I’ve been puttering around online, trying to stave off boredom, hoping to get through to the end of the day, and halfheartedly cursing my luck for not having been born with mind-boggling powers of telepathy, telekinesis, or whatever it is one would use to make three hours pass by in a flash. What do people with real jobs do with their time?

Happy birthday, Willa Cather.

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still,—and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!

– Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

And happy birthday, Tom Waits.

Well things are pretty lousy for a calendar girl

The boys just dive right off the cars and splash into the street

And when they’re on a roll she pulls a razor from her boot

And a thousand pigeons fall around her feet

So put a candle in the window and a kiss upon his lips

As the dish outside the window fills with rain

Just like a stranger with the weeds in your heart

And pay the fiddler off ’til I come back again

– Tom Waits, Time

If I were a work of art, I would be Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.

I am a beautiful and alluring composition, not afraid to show off a good deal of bare flesh. People surround me and gaze at me with the adulation due a goddess and friendly breezes gently push me along my path in life.

Which work of art would you be? The Art Test

If I were a James Bond villain, I would be Oddjob.

I enjoy bowler hats, golf caddying, and killing people in hand-to-hand combat.

I am played by Harold Sakata in Goldfinger.

Who would you be? James Bond Villain Personality Test

I am a Lobster Telephone.

For nine potatoes have my multi-throttled keys subdued the nice leaves of strangers. Sprays of wild satin guacamole enters my document. I relish four mushroom deals with metal.

Do you bite the wax tadpole? The Utterly Surreal Test