Tonight will mark my third time seeing one of my favorite bands, The New Pornographers, in concert. This should confer upon me some sort of groupie status, but I’ll probably have to be content with admiring Neko Case from afar. Their new album hasn’t left me with the same kind of goofy smile I get when I listen to their previous works, but as long as they play a smoking rendition of “Letter from an Occupant”, I’ll be happy.
I was never the best student in law school, but I did abysmally in my Contracts class. I did so poorly that I became a little unnerved and wondered if I was cut out to be an attorney. The material just never clicked in my head; all that business about consideration and offer and counteroffer struck me as dry and irrelevant to the kind of work I was interested in pursuing. But now that I’m actually writing and amending contracts as part of my job, I find that I kind of like the work. I suppose it appeals to the left side of my brain; contract drafting requires attention to detail and the careful parsing of words. I’m not sure that I would want to do contracts on a full-time basis, yet I feel compelled to apologize to Professor Matheson for not being more attentive in his Contracts class. I was young and foolish and did not appreciate the value of the wisdom you were attempting to impart to me.
My computer can beat up yours. It’s cherried out with:
All it’s missing are the leather seats and cupholders. And it’s so quiet. My last computer sounded like a blowdryer that had been left on, so this will take some getting used to.
The new computer is up and running. It should have taken two hours to complete the build, but my friend and I ended up finishing after four hours thanks to some poorly worded instructions in one of the component manuals. Nothing like the smell of a fresh Windows install. I’ll post the specs tomorrow.
This optical illusion is supposed to determine which half of your brain is dominant. If the dancer is spinning counter-clockwise, you’re left-brained. Clockwise means you’re right-brained. I’m apparently left-brained, which is a complete blow to my carefully constructed self-image of a poetic dreamer. It turns out I’m Spock. But even Spock got lucky once in a while, so I suppose I shouldn’t feel too bad.
Blogging may be light over the next couple days. I’m finally getting around to building a new computer and I found someone who wants to take my current system off my hands. But first, I have to scrub the hard drives clean and do a fresh install of Windows. My old computer is going to a nice family and I can’t risk letting the kids find my cache of granny porn. Be back soon.
The stress of political implosion must be getting to movement Republicans, because some of their recent behavior is truly bizarre. In their zeal to deflect criticism from the president’s veto of the popular State Children’s Health Insurance Program, conservatives have launched a smear campaign against 12-year-old Graeme Frost and his family. Graeme earned the ire of Michelle Malkin and others on the right when he appeared on a Democratic radio address to talk about how SCHIP helped him and his family. Malkin and her associates quickly accused the family of being welfare cheats who exaggerated or lied about their finances and medical conditions. Malkin visited the parents’ home and business to snoop around for information on the family’s finances. A poster on the FreeRepublic website posted the family’s address.
Over the last few years, movement Republicans have resorted to character assassination with increasing alacrity when confronted with opposing viewpoints. They no longer seem interested in debating issues and defending their viewpoints; it’s easier to simply shut the debate down. And let’s not forget that these tactics worked, at least in the first few shellshocked years after 9/11. They successfully waged an ideological war that browbeat much of the country into political submission for the better part of four years. But the fight has made them twitchy and paranoid. In their unceasing vigil against dissent, they have lost their perspective, so much so that they feel justified in targeting a kid as “fair game“.
Conservatives like Malkin are continuing to play a game they’ve already lost, sacrificing their own decency in the process.
PZ tagged me with an interesting meme experiment. Now, pay attention:
Below are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] in [genre] is …”.
Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them
in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone
extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not
viable.
Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, The 19th Floor, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.
My parent is Pharyngula:
1. The best dystopian novel in SF/Fantasy is…
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
2. The best romantic movie in Historical Fiction is:
A Lion in Winter
2. The best sexy song in rock is…
Raspberry Beret by Prince
3. The best spy movie in Thrillers is…
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
I’m spreading this meme to:
I know this is a little complicated, but you guys are smart or else you wouldn’t have your very own homestead on these here internets.
Congratulations to my friend Derek, who just passed the bar. There’s still the small matter of the midnight ceremony and the sacrifice of a small animal, but that’s really just a formality. I have fond memories of my own initiation. Holding the knife hilt between my teeth was tricky business, but I managed okay. Good thing I was wearing safety goggles; those arteries can be real gushers.
I’ve always had a special fondness for SF anthologies and I always make it a point to pick up the annual “Year’s Best” volume that is edited by the incomparable Gardner Dozois. In Best of the Best, Dozois assembles his picks for the best short stories from the past twenty years’ worth of the annual collections. It includes stories from genre luminaries such as Robert Silverberg, Nancy Kress, and Gene Wolfe. Some of my favorites from the collection are:
If you have any interest in the science fiction short story, this is a worthy addition to your collection. One might argue that Dozois excluded some classics (the omission of John Varley’s “Press Enter” is almost criminal), but anthologies such as this are inherently open to such criticism. I see that Dozois has released a sequel of sorts that collects longer novellas, which I’ll be sure to check out.