Archive for April, 2005

Student Cuisine

Friday, April 22nd, 2005

When I lived with MikeDitty, he introduced me to the wonders of “student gourmet” by combining PC White Cheddar Mac & Cheese with PC Jerk Sauce. It was an inspired bit of combination, resulting in something dramatically different from the student standby of regular old Kraft Dinner, but at only a marginal cost increase–and a [...]

I have no ability to resist

Monday, April 18th, 2005

Justina Robson: Living Next Door To The God Of Love

Metropolis is a city of superheroes where you can become anyone you like – fight all day, party all night…Sankhara is a universe where everything is remade by night, according to the inhabitants’ deepest, darkest dreams…Koker Ai exists in another time and space, where Intana, less [...]

Quick and Amusing

Monday, April 18th, 2005

Best headline ever. Somewhere there is Fletch wannabe laughing at the headline he slipped past his editor. (I wonder if gnomes run to the underwater sanctuary to avoid this kind of violence.)
*
You know how sometimes when you’re writing up your Articles of Piracy you wish you had access to some really snazzy buccaneering fonts–just to [...]

Hanging Around The House: More Downstairs

Monday, April 18th, 2005

So, last time it was the couple of things in my office. (Remember that the thumbnails in these posts are links to gigantic versions.)
Now, we’ll move out of my my office into the hall outside:

My office is off this hall on the right, the guest bedroom is off to the left. In the shot you [...]

Can you say “Hack”?

Monday, April 18th, 2005

So, they are making Talking Jesus, Mary and Moses dolls.
I may have to buy a couple of these and join in the long and proud tradition of hacking talking toys. (I admit, it was the Lord of Evil who put this idea into my head.)
Can you imagine how sweet it would be to have Jesus [...]

8 months already…

Monday, April 18th, 2005

Wow. I can’t believe Sarah is already 8 months old.
She’s definitely mobile now, and is on the verge of becoming an efficient crawler. She’s talking (in a special language that seems to be mostly made up of “ba”, “ga”, and “da”–which is fine with me because it includes “dada” a lot) and she totally sings.
She [...]

Yup, that matches my experience

Monday, April 18th, 2005

Writers left to their own devices, as we have already seen, will drive around aimlessly until they are spontaneously afflicted with drunkenness.

Hanging Around The House: My Office

Tuesday, April 12th, 2005

A while back pal Gwenda tried to convince people to do photo-tours of their homes.
I tried to shoot some pictures for something like that, but I found that I couldn’t take pictures that showed things the way I want to show them.
However, it did inspire me to do a series showing the various pieces of [...]

I didn’t forget about the wine tasting

Tuesday, April 12th, 2005

However, I am such a slacker that it’s taken me a month to get around to writing the followup to the initial post about the wine tasting I lead for Trish’s co-workers.
In the initial post we talked about the whites that were in the tasting, and now I’ll talk a bit about the reds.
So, as [...]

A couple of quick book links

Sunday, April 10th, 2005

If I convinced you to check out Stephan Zielinski’s book Bad Magic with my review, or if you came to the book yourself by some other route, you will probably be interested in the interview with him that just popped up at the Agony Column (in both MP3 and That Vile Format). If you haven’t [...]

A few links on language and lexicons

Sunday, April 10th, 2005

Sometimes things seem to pop up in nice thematic clusters.
For instance, I saw an interesting article on Cajun English at PBS (link via Brad Parker) that I found very interesting.
Despite being subjected to abuse and stigmatization for many years, Cajun English speakers abound. Why would this be? Why would a dialect which was considered [...]

Hump Of Hate: Church & State

Sunday, April 10th, 2005

What could possibly be worse than the alignment of highly conservative political factions with fundamentalist Christianity?
Xemu knows the answer to that question.
As an aside, also from my Hump of Hate, even ignoring who this award was given to, doesn’t this sentence from the article encapsulate so much that is hate-worthy about North American society?
Members of [...]

Nick Anderson, Pulitzer Prize Winer

Sunday, April 10th, 2005

The 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning was awarded to Nick Anderson “for his unusual graphic style that produced extraordinarily thoughtful and powerful messages.” You can see portfolio sample at The Washington Post Writers Group.

Hump Of Hate: Texas Textbooks

Saturday, April 9th, 2005

So, I’ve talked a lot about textbooks, primarily about the religously-motivated alterations of their content; most recently it was the homophobic alterations of Texas texts.
Now I read in a post at Ambiguous.org that because a number of Southern states buy their texts as a bloc, lead by Texas, that the national publishers are self-censoring their [...]

Hump of Hate: Fascism Anyone?

Saturday, April 9th, 2005

A while back, Laurence Britt published an article in Free Inquiry magazine entitled “Fascism Anyone?”.
In the article Britt looked at a number of fascist regimes (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’s Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia) and finds fourteen common characteristics of all of them. The “14 characteristics of fascism” [...]