I Like September

If you're looking for a great vacation spot and are within a day's drive of the Gulf Coast, get some friends, bring your blender and your favorite books, and rent a house at beautiful, secluded Ft. Morgan off the coast of Alabama. I spent a wonderful four and a half days there with family and friends, and am ready to start planning next year's trip!

Each evening I would take a nature walk down the beach and observed some awesome wildlife. Stingrays (no, I didn't kill any!), jellyfish, TONS of fish, crabs, you name it. Board games were played, seafood was eaten, margaritas were imbibed. No one got too drunk, keelhauled, shark-mauled or otherwise injured, except for a nasty sunburn on my part. That's the price you pay when you stick a gal of Anglo-Irish descent much closer to the equator when her genetic code hasn't evolved to catch up.

Now I am back among the land of the nerds, enjoying beautiful fall weather, and a great stash of library books. Sweet!

Book of the Week - and Woe Betide All Slumlords!

Finished Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be, and I am now reading The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Penman. I've managed to get a lot of my English history from her books so far - why is it you're always more interested in learning when you're no longer in school?

Anyway, The Sunne in Splendour is about The War of the Roses, and follows the battles and intrigues of the Houses of York and Lancaster. So far it's focused on the rise of the Yorkist Edward IV and his reign, and then (it is a VERY long book) goes into the succession of his younger brother, Richard III. I've been trying not to read too much background, because I don't want to spoil the ending! This also shows how woefully inadequate my knowledge is of some of the most pivotal events in English history. Oh well.

I am also on a crusade to get my neighbors pit bulls removed from the renters next door. It is infuriating. When we first moved in they had four dogs chained in the back yard of the house. Yes, chained 24/7. Not kept as pets. Definitely breeding them, and, I am 99% sure, fighting them. The dogs got loose on several occasions, threatening me, my husband, and others in the neighborhood. After animal control and the police were called several times, I think the landlord forced them to keep the dogs elsewhere. So, we had relative peace all last year, but now the dogs have returned. I am also fairly certain that my neighbor is selling pirated DVDs, and have it on some authority that he may be dealing drugs as well. Arrgg!! I've called the landlord twice now, and have gotten no response. What is wrong with people? This guy is a slumlord, the house looks like hell to boot. Today I am going to call animal control, on the grounds that it is a matter of time before the dogs get loose again, and there is not a sufficient fence to keep them in. I gave the slumlord ample time to call me back - too bad for him.

Why Wait?

As I was driving home this afternoon, I happened to listen to Waiting on the World to Change by John Mayer. It's a lovely sounding song - Mayer has a lot of talent and great pipes - but I don't agree with his lyrics. It is interesting in this era of an unpopular war to listen to this generation of protest songs. Click on the link above for the full set of lyrics to the song.

Basically Mayer's message is that our generation is misunderstood and people think we don't stand for anything. "Now we see everything that's going wrong/ with the world and those who lead it/ we just feel like we don't have the means/ to rise above and beat it." Wow, what an amazing attitude - that will get you places.

Now, if you're reading this you may think I am taking a song way too seriously, but it's a serious topic and raises some questions. First, we live in the richest country in the world. We can vote, we can say what we like without the gestapo whisking us away in the middle of the night - we pretty much have every means at our disposal to make change happen. If you're bothered about what's going on, use your head, use your voice, use your youth and energy. If you're over 25, start a grassroots campaign and run for office. We live in a NOW society, but change can take a while. It took time to get where we are, and it will take time to change direction.

The second thing in Mayer's lyrics that bothered me was "and when you trust your television/ what you get is what you got/ cause when they own the information, oh/ they can bend it all they want." Ok - this is incredible. If you're getting all of your news from television you may need some more help than one woman can provide. Never in the history of the world have we had such amazing access to all sorts of media - not only newspaper and radio, but a cornucopia of web content. With the web, nobody owns the information. Download an RSS reader and subscribe to newsfeeds! Make your own information in a free blog or web site. Rank the importance of a news story at Digg.com. I am a librarian and therefore I try to get my news from a variety of sources, and I can guarantee you I am not seeing only pro-war content out there. Salon and the New York Times are huge and freely accessible on the web if you want perspectives that you feel you aren't getting from the Fox News network.

Finally, the third line I want to take to task is: "It's not that we don't care/ we just know that the fight ain't fair/ so we keep on waiting/ waiting for the world to change." A fair fight? I'm sorry, but the fight began when we were suckerpunched by suicidal monsters in airplanes. That wasn't fair.

Even if there was no link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, we took down an absolute despot. This is a guy who would have his countrymen arrested, strip them naked, hang them by their hands with their arms backward, and have them beaten or electrocuted to death. In any case, I am sure Saddam Hussein would not have refused the opportunity to have a go at the Great Satan with Osama bin Laden. I find it interesting that those who say conservatives see things only in black and white tend to have some of their own monchromatic viewpoints.

So John, I have to say I give it a 5 for the music and a 0 for the lyrics. I'm just not buying it. Being passive and being a pacifist don't mean the same thing. Remember, my young minstrel - a man of thought AND action gets more chicks.

Book On Deck

Next up on the reading list: Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be: A Rock & Roll Fairy Tale

I am excited about this one. I have gotten on a biography/authobiography kick lately, and this one looks very cool. It's a memoir by a woman named Jen Trynin. Apparently she was on the verge of making it big around 1994 - she was on the cover Billboard and in Rolling Stone and had Aimee Mann as her friend/mentor, and things just sort of bottomed out and it didn't happen. Anyway, the book came out this year. I haven't read it yet so I can't recommend it, but it looks very promising! Here is her site: http://www.jentrynin.com/enter.shtml

Almost finished with Savage Beauty. If you don't read any other poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, read "Renascence." http://www.bartleby.com/131/1.html

Yes, I am Just Going to Be Cryptic Today

A Series of Tubes

I had heard about this on the news, and looked it up and found a hilarious recap on BoingBoing:

Sunday, July 2, 2006
Sen. Stevens' hilariously awful explanation of the Internet
Senator Ted Stevens, a neutricidal maniac who wants to allow the phone companies to charge Google and others for delivering their packets to you, gave this incredible description of his understanding of how the internet works. This man is so far away from having a coherent picture of the Internet's functionality, it's like hearing a caveman expound on the future of silver-birds-from-sky and why we need to keep them from flying so high they anger the gods.

"I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially...

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

It's a series of tubes.

And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."

But, It Goes to Eleven

I am so excited. I just found out that there will be a new Christopher Guest movie next year! If you have not experienced the joy of a Christopher Guest movie, sequester yourself for a weekend with "This is Spinal Tap", "Best in Show", "Waiting for Guffman", and "A Mighty Wind".

All of his movies are absolutely hilarious mockumentaries, and Spinal Tap is probably the most well known. The sentence-long description of the new one, called "For Your Consideration" is already cracking me up: "Three actors learn their respective performances in the film "Home for Purim," a drama set in the mid-1940s American South, are generating award-season buzz."

What I love about these movies is that it has introduced to me the genius of actors I have usually seen in more "character actor" parts over the years. Eugene Levy (the dad in American Pie), Fred Willard, Jennifer Coolidge (the hairdresser in Legally Blonde). So the first time you watch one them, you're going "that's the guy in...!"

Christopher Guest is amazing because of the range of roles he can play, and really become a different person in each one. I think my favorite is Corky St. Clair in Waiting for Guffman. In this, he is an actor who moves to Blaine, Missouri from NYC to direct community theater and is always seen buying clothes for his wife "Bonnie" who is mysteriously never around.

One Man's Trash

Real estate terminology, Alabama style:

Curb appeal - Any detritus from your house remodeling or any piece of junk whatsoever that you throw out on the curb for the trash guys and 30 minutes later, it's gone.

I'm not kidding, people will take anything.

Last year we ripped a bunch of nasty astroturf off of our front porch and put it on the curb, - this stuff was moldy and had to have been there at least 15 years - anyway, I was talking to my neighbor a couple of days later and she told me her son was looking out the window one day and saw the guy from the across the street come over while we were at work and cart it off.

When we had contractors working this fall to reside and reroof our house, they told us all kinds of people were stopping by to pick up old aluminum siding, moldy awnings, you name it.

The reason I bring up this topic today is because we ripped up a lot of carpet from inside the house today - mulberry colored old lady carpet - and put it outside. Today is Saturday, and the trash pickup is Monday. Wonder how long it will make it. I predict there will be one happy grandma somewhere tomorrow.

Book of the Month

Currently reading Savage Beauty - a biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford. I am excited because I think it will be pretty juicy. I love really good biographies, especially about people who wrote great poetry and had lots of love affairs.

You may have read this poem before, called "First Fig"

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends –
It gives a lovely light!

On Modern American Poetry, the critic JoEllen Green Kaiser says of this poem:

"Her most famous poem, after all, does not mourn absent love but rejoices in love’s impermanence."

What Would a Megalomanic Read?

Kim Jong-il's favorite book club:

http://www.dearreader.com/

I just can't help myself sometimes.

The Man Who Wanted Sounds

I've decided that I need to write down some of the strange but true experiences that fate kindly bestowed upon me over the past few years, before I start to forget them. Most of them came from, you guessed it, when I was working at the public library. The first tale is set in the summer of 2002, when I was working in the library before library school that fall, to see if it was something I wanted to keep doing. har dee har har.

This particular day I was working in the audiovisual department:

Patron - a black man in his thirties

Me - clueless

Me: Can I help you?

Patron: I'm looking for some sounds.

Me: Well sir, we have all kinds of CDs with sound effects. Train sounds, scary sounds...

Patron: No, no I want sex sounds, like with a woman.

Me: Uhhh....

Me: Umm, we don't have anything like that here....maybe you could try an adult store?

Patron: Well I know that! (turns around and walks off)

Stay tuned for our next story, "The Strong Woman of Queens."

Rocking-horse droppings?

Funniest thing I read today:

"Illegal aliens didn't invade in one day. However, if our nation devoted every available federal, state and local resource to their removal, in 90 days, they would be as rare as rocking-horse droppings."

- From a letter to the editor in the Huntsville Times.

Neigh!!

Annie Gets Introduced to Physics

I was watching NOVA's Elegant Universe on PBS tonight, and the discussion was about uncertainty at the sub-atomic level and quantum mechanics. What I understood was that Einstein was of the idea that there were rules that explained the behavior of the universe in the somewhat rational and expected manner, but then this new wave of scientists said, hang on, these subatomic particles (protons, neutrons, and electrons) will actually behave in very bizarre manners that we can only predict. One example they gave was that you could walk into a wall, and of course, not go through it, but there is that CHANCE that you might be able to phase through it at some point. Of course, the probability is practically infinite, but it's there. I found all of this fascinating, even if I don't understand the science behind it, and it made me think of a social quantum theory.

People broken down singularly are bizarre and eccentric creatures, ranging from our little peccadilloes to major perversions and stuff that gets one into the Darwin Awards and News of the Weird. Yet, as a whole, we somehow manage in most parts of the world to come together as functioning societies. I suppose your black holes would be places like Darfur or East Timor, and your dark matter would be uncontacted tribes in the Amazon.

"O.K., that means our whole solar system could be, like... one tiny atom in the fingernail of some other giant being...
This is too much! That means...
-one tiny atom in my fingernail could be--
-Could be one little...tiny universe....Could I buy some pot from you?"

Mud Spelled Backwards is Dum

Yes, you would be spelling it as "dum" too if the simple minds of the Simplifed Spelling Society and American Literacy Council managed to push their agenda through public schools. This CNN article caught my eye today. Interestingly enough, Andrew Carnegie, he of the philanthropic Carnegie libraries and Melvil Dewey, the Father of Librarianship, were both past proponents of simplified spelling. The basic gist of "simplified spelling" is that you spell a word phoenetically, rather than in all of its rich etymological glory. I can see it now. Take the word "pen." You've got some Alabama kid that's going to spell it as "pin" because of course that's how you pronounce it down here, but some other kid in Virginia is going to say "pehn." Or some other person in Michigan who spells roof as "ruf." Total chaos!!! Kind of reminds me of those parents who won't toilet train their kids because they're afraid of giving them a complex about going to the bathroom. I guess they won't be able to figure out the restroom signage either when they finally learn.

Well, I guess that's enough ranting for one night. I'm going to the liberry.

Best Bun

I am excited because I have had my camera since Christmas, but only got around to figuring out how to upload the pictures today. I was getting grumpy because I couldn't figure out how to do it, and then Matthew asked if I had turned the camera on :-)
He is in tech support, so he is used to this.

This is our most adorable rabbit, Georgie Phillips.

Going to the Chapel

We're already married, but this is a picture of Matthew and me before we left for my friend Tamara's wedding on June 24. I was a bridesmaid.

Are You a Yankee or a Rebel?

Due to my having lived in the South, Mid-Atlantic, Midwest and Northeast, here was my score:

43% Dixie. Barely in Yankeedom.

This was lots of fun!

http://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/yankeetest.html

Suri!

Oh yeah, I promised Maggie I would post this. We were watching Batman Begins the other night and were a little giddy from being almost done with our "boot camp" at KSU.

These are my "Suri" quotes:

Suri you have Tom Cruise as a dad

Suri your mother has to marry Tom Cruise this summer

Suri you got turned into a Scientology 'bot

Suri your dad is such a nut job he caused the phrase "couch jumping" to come into existence

These don't begin to match up in awesomeness to my friend Beau's brilliant Tom Cruise haiku. Which, for the record, he came up with several years ago, before the Tom Cruise madness. I'll post them if I can still find them (and if he's cool with that).

PS - a big thanks to Melanie for the wonderful "Suri" image!

Back in Bama

I've been incommunicado for a fortnight. Two weeks ago today I got hit with a nasty stomach bug. Nasty, enough said, I won't gross anyone out with the details. I was actually worried that I wouldn't get my appetite back, but that charmed condition didn't last very long. The day after I felt back to normal (not wobbly) - which was last Saturday - I flew to Kent State University in Kent, Ohio for a week-long workshop with my job. This consisted of me and my other co-workers training teachers on how to help us develop our product. I won't go too much into that, but most of the time at KSU was very pleasant. The weather was very cool, which was a wonderful break from the 90 degree temperatures here in Silicon Holler. I was very curious to see the memorial and markers of the four students that were killed duing the riots on May 4, 1970. If you don't know about the "four dead in Ohio" from the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song, you can learn more here.

http://speccoll.library.kent.edu/4may70/exhibit/chronology/index.html

The memorial was beautiful, four simple slabs of polished stone (maybe granite) and a marker with the names of the four dead and nine wounded. Near the memorial and right next to the dorm I stayed in was the area where the students actually died. It is now a parking lot, but each spot where a student died was marked with lights and a marker with their name. It was very moving.

Kent State is also populated with black squirrels, which I remember seeing when I lived in Ft. Riley, KS. According to one of the professors, these squirrels were brought to the campus about 15 years ago and have since populated about a 12-mile radius. They seem to be genetically dominant. There are still some grey ones here and there, but the little black ones appear to have taken over. I was able to unwind each night with a nice quiet walk around campus and a bit of squirrel watching.

Strangely enough, having to be "on" each day and having to present and teach didn't leave me as stressed and drained each night as I thought I would be. I think it had to do with the fact that for a week, after I finished work each day, all of my meals were cooked for me, I didn't come home to a messy house (just a small room) and I had no TV or internet to distract me (consequently no depressing news to listen to), and some great books to read. I must be afflicted with modern life.

The Egg Song

Blech! Twee as can be! I can't stop watching! Actually, the ninja eggs are really cool.

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/eggsong.php

On the bedside table:

Culture Jam by Kalle Lassen

Just Finished: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides