geegaw.com

out of the closet

I am now an Amazon reviewer!

Raymond Smullyan writes:

There is a story about a philosopher who went into a closet for ten years to contemplate the question, What is life? When he came out, he went into the street and met an old colleague, who asked him where in heaven's name he had been all those years.

"In a closet," he replied. "I wanted to know what life really is."

"And have you found an answer?"

"Yes," he replied. "I think it can best be expressed by saying that life is like a bridge."

"That's all well and good," replied the colleague, "But can you be a little more explicit? Can you tell me how life is like a bridge?"

"Oh," replied the philosopher after some thought, "maybe you're right; perhaps life is not like a bridge."

Jouke got Brigitte Eaton to put up a survey on webloggers' genders. Last I checked, women were hovering at 40% or so.

I'm glad I didn't take the "non-negative blogging" pledge because then I woudn't be able to say that these pro-anorexia people are uh, exceedingly foolish. "starvingtodeath22" writes,

I have such bad malnutrition that I have screwed up my heart because I have bradychardia (sp?), really low blood pressure from dehydration, brittle bones, low potassium, all from not eating. I eat black coffee and some veggies when I do eat, some days Im so sick I cant eat anything. I think to save ourselves, we should eat a little.

brutal

What's a weblog, after all, but the streaky blur of a .plan file stretched over time (x-axis)?

Discovered abebooks.com, "the world's largest source of out-of-print books," who are selling another lost book from my childhood, The Science Book by Sara Stein. I don't really want it. What I want is a book of science projects for adults. It would include information like how to make bread (not your typical level-with-a-knife kind of recipe but a generalized blueprint for the stuff, showing you how to tweak the different parameters to achieve slightly different breads), how to grow leftover food (e.g. plant citrus seeds in a little bit of soil), how to make your own non-toxic cleaners and detergents based on a few simple chemical principles like acid + carbonate = fizz (thanks!). If this book continues to not exist, I guess I may just have to write it.

Scoot the decimal point a little bit over to the left and me and this little gingham dress will be inseparable.

Turtle: So what've you been up to recently?

Hedgehog: Ah, you know. Sittin' in my cock-suckin den and' tryin' t' come up with an idea fer some goddamn thing t' make people's lives a little less fuckin' brutal.

in my angelhood

I was walking down to the crossroads, past a row of houses, and a sodium light blinked on (motion-triggered), illuminating a funny tendril plant with leaves so thin they looked like thorns. Twining around the rail, it seemed to glisten whitely and I thought I felt a hundred doors slamming shut in my head.

I think it's hard not to be frustrated with the cyclic nature of the day to day. The tide comes in and goes out; dirty clothes pile up in the hamper and get washed and put away and then pile up again. Whereas my inclination is to try to accrue - knowledge, money, power, health, what-have-you (but mostly knowledge) and it really does seem like the world doesn't work that way and neither do I. For me, striving to be well-read is like trying to fill a sink by pouring buckets of water down the open drain; if you were to read from one of the texts I knew by heart three years ago, I'd be hard-pressed to tell you its author.

At least I scored 43 out of 50 on this fiendishly hard spelling test (via swallowing tacks).

First three installments in our Legal Things People Will Put In Their Mouths to Get High series. Available at a health food store, grocery, and weed patch near you - meet kava kava, nutmeg, and morning glory seed (links are to testimonials by brave/stupid test drivers).

more on food

The easy reason for why I haven't updated is that I've been down in Portland, fighting the increasing disconnectedness of my modern life and learning from Laura how to weed gardens. Let's stick with that for now.

In the midst of the New Statesman article weighing in against ReadyEgg, a new convenience product which is a kind of graduated cylinder pouring device containing four shelled eggs, I learned that

It is possible, by inserting a needle and thread repeatedly under the skin of a banana, stitching it round under the skin and then pulling the resulting loop through the flesh, to serve a sliced fruit straight from an apparently intact skin.

Hmm, do you think maybe this works on people?

The sheer X-tremeness of the Turducken was decidedly unappetizing, but despite the conveniently provided pros-and-cons table I'd be only marginally more likely to try the Tofurky:

To begin your feast, we have included 2 Tofurky WishStixs in every box of Tofurky! Made from our new, Tofurky Jerky, these stixs are meant to add a little bit of fun to your meal. Gather 2 to 4 folks, have everyone take an end, make a wish and pull!

	Turkey	Tofurky
Has something to pull?	Yes	Yes
How many can participate?	2	4
Can you eat it?	No	Yes!

unmutual!

Amidst yet another earnest blog-community debate (the topic du jour is, should each blogger take a pledge to be kind to other bloggers? Hahahaaa... yeah, right) the guy from Considered Harmful left behind a link to a great Prisoner website (pictures, episode guides, the works). Good for him. We should all remember conscientiously to be unmutual.

I like the looks of this Poster for a New Revolution by the guy at Oh Messy Life.

Jessie told me to check out Amazon's list of books unique to Croatia. She's right, it's a real trip (thanks!).

And Jessamyn pointed me to an animated online pantoum (Shockwave/ActiveX) about a crazy librarian. It's a little hard to get a hold of what's going on in this poem because the lines keep wiggling around; I think first practicing by reading the rest of the pantoum resources online might help. (I have a special affection for pantoums because I'm told they come from Malaysia, land of my birth.)

a love-hate relationship with the internet

I opened up my credit card bill today and got a bit of a shock: four unfamiliar transactions totaling over $120 are listed on my statement. Yep, most of them are porn sites. Yep, none of them are sites I've ever heard of. Canceled my card, blah blah blah. You can probably guess it'll be a cold day in hell before I buy anything on the internet again. Not like that's any guarantee.

Keep an eye out for these sites on your statement: ibillcs.com, resweb.com, intprc.com.

two short poems with really no relation between them except for making me smile

7.

For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then

the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
"Don't love your life
too much," it said,

and vanished
into the world.

- from "One or Two Things" by Mary Oliver (published in Dream Work, collected here)

---

If You Ask My Name Then You're Asking For Trouble Because Trouble Is My Name

My middle name.

- by Anselm Dovetonsils (via ht)

Time to consider getting

Time to consider getting the hell out of King County: Sound Transit wants permission to exceed nighttime noise limits in certain neighborhoods. If you were woken up at 7am by construction outside your window (as I was) every questionably-gathered statistic will register as a blow to the sternum.

How many generations have

How many generations have been imprinted by the aspirations of Golden Age SF? Sus wanted to be a linguist specializing in extraterrestrial languages. I wanted to be Dr. Susan Calvin. We had such hopes for our future in space. I never noticed that the odds were rigged so humans always win.

Gavin M. pointed me to an image library/retrospective/exhibit titled Space Art in Children's books 1950's to 1970's. It reminded me of a bittersweet poster from the Cultural Revolution called Little Guests in the Moon Palace (click for adorable photo of astro-babies and a panda driving a space shuttle).

Tweaked the layout a

Tweaked the layout a little more. I know it doesn't look as good in Netscape but I no longer care. My HTML matches the standards; it's their table rendering that stinks. Since I added the little picture, A. suggested that I rename my weblog to something along the following lines:
/home/girl
/dev/girl
.girlrc
girld
awk girl
mount girl, fsck girl, etc.

Stuffed animal bondage. Every bit as scary as it sounds.

hyuk hyuk

A. pointed me to the first two chapters of Harvest of Dearth by F. O. Dolor, just one excruciating volume in the MacMillan-Blodel Interminable Canadian Classics Series. From the introduction, by one Theordor M. Smidgin:

Does F.O. Dolor's prose style have "the maddeningly repetitive irregularity of a malfunctioning metronome?" The short answer, again, is Yes. The long answer, as I laboured to make clear in my 1973 Master's Thesis, Minimal Adequacies: Style and Meaning in the Novels of F.O. Dolor (since published by the University of Oakiedokie Press), is that Dolor's repetitiveness is only one weapon in his stylistic arsenal.

A. also noticed that Cherry Red has released British actor Peter Wyngarde's first and last pop album, When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head (banned in 1970). I've been hanging on to this link for for some time because I honestly don't know what to make of it. The label describes it:

The central idea was to string the songs together into one long suite and none were more interesting than the opening quartet of "Come In", "You Wonder How These Things Begin" and "R*pe". ... Is it politically incorrect? I've really no idea. It's about all kinds of r*pe. There is so much r*pe going on r*pe within bureaucracy, r*pe at so many government levels, r*pe of countries. You know, even attempting to explain it totally defeats its purpose.

The listener is unlikely to forget "Hippie And The Skinhead", where Wyngarde reads out a letter written to "The Times" by two Home Counties skinhead girls, or the tale of "Billy the Queer, Pilly Sexy Hippie", sung over an incongruous, Nashville backing.

The Postmodernism Generator is ancient (4yo) but never ceases to amuse me. It's based on a kind of simple state machine called the Dada Engine which is only really good at imitating postmodernists and the mentally disabled. Oh, those wacky postmodernists.

more vanity

I'm in a vapid mood tonight - been organizing another used clothing swap (an activity which GetCrafty.com describes, in depth, under the name "Naked Lady Party"). Whoo! There's very little I like more than funky free clothes, except maybe gossip.

Popbomb links to this convincingly enthusiastic review of Philosophy Hope in a Jar moisturizer. It makes me really want the stuff, but in general I've been pretty wary of trying Philosophy brand cosmetics - they talk their own products up so much that it's almost impossible to believe they might actually live up to the hype. Take their $60 elixir Falling in Love, which "contains pheremones which may increase attractiveness and your sense of well-being." I think the marketing story is, you dab it under your nostrils and it fools your brain into thinking you're in heat, which makes guys want you. If I could get 30 women to chip in a couple bucks each for a drop of the stuff, we could see if we could swarm out of the city leaving a swath of dazed men behind us - or not.

Also today, I finally got my free gift pack from PlanetRx (sorry, promotion over). The Biore facial wipes remind me of nothing so much as those nail polish remover-soaked tissues they sell in individual foil-lined packets: it's a combination of that smell and a strong whiff of Cover Girl's "Clean Makeup", which I swear is strictly for masochists. My eyes started tearing and my face felt so raw I had to slather night cream all over it immediately; can't believe there's any dirt left after that.

I distrust Biore deeply after reading that their "Pore Perfect" nose strips (soak, slap on nose, wait to harden, tear off like band-aid) were made out of basically hairspray. I think it was Paula Begoun, "the Ralph Nader of makeup," who discovered this, but then again I'm not sure if I really trust her either - all I know is that the strips aren't pleasant, and don't seem to do much for me.

So after reading all this, you've either decided you don't give a sh-t, or started wondering whether there's anything cosmetic I actually do like. Well sure, honey - the Body Shop for one. Their stuff is not inexpensive, but the colors are good and they don't test on animals (there was a monkey lab right next to the rat lab I used to work in). Also, I can't get enough of Nivea's body moisturizer, which lasts for up to 12 hours where most moisturizers vanish from my skin within minutes. Okay, okay, enough already!

frogs

This guy Philip Welsh, Amazon reviewer, looks to be a pretty fun fellow. His tastes in books and music are all over the map, but leaning pretty heavily on moderately obscure critical favorites like Paul Celan and the Residents; his reviews are so autobiographical and image-laden that they're often basically useless (the one of Pynchon's Vineland begins "Not as awful as everyone said... or perhaps all those years of amyl nitrate poppers have compromised my sense of smell.") But seriously, I don't think he's as much of a dumbass as I'm making him out to be. I'm really intrigued and I want to pick up Seven Gothic Tales.

But my favorite review of his may be this silly piece, ostensibly on an album titled "The Sounds of Sex," written entirely in French, and which six out of fifteen people rated as "helpful":

[babelfish translated] The frogs of the love are agitated...

Touch, cherished me. Fill your mouth of hot milk, the milk which came directly from the cow. Lick to me head with the toe like a cat. Then plunge your finger in Nutella and stick it in my left nostril. Remove your belt then... Did you take your belt except function? Good, good... My eyes are closed, thus I will have to trust you.

Double the belt upwards. Start now! Whip frogs! Whip frogs! Shout while you beat frogs!

Were all the frogs beaten?

Ah, marvellous. I could also smell it, my expensive. I love you. I love you with my whole heart. I like you because you are the only one who will beat frogs for me...

Kiss me. I love you like a cheese of loves of trainer. I love you like bread desires the radio. I love you like a leek soup bowl...

bugfest

God! I'm such a dilettante! Please don't click on these links if you are squeamish.

An American, an Oriental, and a German cockroach are sitting in a bar... Cockroach Babies of the Midwest. (The German eggs are long and prim; the Oriental ones look as big as horse chestnuts.)

I was kind of grossed out by this soybean porn...
picture is from the strictly hierarchical Iowa State University Entomology Image Gallery, as is this image of virus-infected soybeans (look like Beanish from the Beanworld comics).

music to code to

Thanks so much for your recommendations. Here is a big dump of almost all of them because I am too "sleepy la beef" to write a real entry. I'll hyperlink each suggestion slowly over the next few days.

For mindless, energetic coding music I use the happy brand of melodic punk [MxPx, Millencolin, Lagwagon, etc] ... if you are more a techno person, you should find Moby's "Next is the E" album. It's got fishes on it. It's way better than anything he's done since, but it might be tough to track down these days.

Neu! is good (though a bit obscure and thus hard to find), plus all manner of music that I usually wouldn't like as much, like Tangerine Dream, etc...

I really like groovetech.com's live djs for this sort of thing

i have found Paul Oakenfold's mix Tranceport vol 2 to be wonderful for inducing zen coding trance. also, very plurry, no bad vibes.

You might also try anything (at all) by the Penguin Orchestra Cafe. Or just a loop of their song "Perpetuum Mobile."

1. aluminum group - pedal, wonder boy + and plano. politely called "chamber pop" (according to allmusic.com) and called wuss pop by others. they list sergio mendes as an influence. something about it tho, really nice to work to.

2. floraline - floraline. another "pop" band, in the same vein as the cardigans, a touch rawer sounding.

3. rinocerose - installation sonore. this could be the one for you. hard, fast, fat, crunchy techno from france. definitely run lola run/matrix like. it's not overbearing like a lot of other dance music.

4. le mans - aqui vivia yo. spanish band, thick textures, singer's got a great voice, kinda portishead minus the edith piaf influences. heh--does that make sense?

bound each to each

Arts & Letters Daily links to a reminiscence by Christopher Hitchens concerning his friend Kingsley Amis and Amis's son, "the little shit":

How well I remember the hilarious evenings in the unimprovably-named Hampstead paternal home, Flask Walk. Martin: "Nabokov?" Kingsley: "No good." Martin: "Ian McEwan?" Kingsley: "No bloody good." Martin: "Saul Bellow?" Kingsley: "Absolutely no bloody good." Martin: "Graham Greene?" Kingsley: "Absolutely NO bloody good AT ALL."

Also - some person(s?) have been looking at this site with Acorn Browser, whatever the heck that is. I really think it's cool that you're using a non-standard browser, but maybe you should tell your tech support people that Acorn is leaving behind bogus referrers in my referer logs whenever you request an image. 'Cause I can see what you've been reading and with that kind of privacy you might as well be using Internet Explorer.

colors and the kids

It's redesign city out here in my onto-'burb. I mean, if folks like Barbelith and the Pyra crowd can talk about each other's design, I'll try not to feel bad about linking to the same exact folks I've been linking to for the past six months.... Anyway.... Looks like Dirk from Subterranean Notes has signed up with the ol' "white box" school of log design, joining such luminaries as me, Synthetic Zero, and old-school LemonYellow before she turned all gray around the edges.

(Though on closer inspection I suspect the inside of Dirk's box is actually a very pale green).

Also - trust Judith to come up with something absolutely new, weird, and beautiful.

riding the night horse

I'm in the market for recommendations for music to code to. I'm thinking of something along the lines of the Matrix or Run Lola Run soundtrack or the second Garbage album - kind of mindless and energetic - but I'd prefer not to have the negative vibes, which stress me out. Any ideas?

But, yay! Fresh Hell links to a summary of the unaired Freaks and Geeks episodes. I guess I'm glad I didn't fly down to L.A. to watch these, since the line to get tickets stretched around the block and the shows, of course, sold out. It also sounds like the writers started to get desperate, stretching the limits of character and plausibility in order to get a more soap-operatic story across. Here's a real stunner: in one of the last episodes, Cindy (the nice cheerleader) confesses that she "likes" Sam (the tiniest of the Geeks).

The creators confessed that, once they knew the show would probably be a one-season wonder, they speeded up the storylines; otherwise the Sam-and-Cindy pairing would have taken years to manifest, they said.

Apparently the relationship doesn't last for long once Sam realizes that Cindy thinks Steve Martin's "The Jerk" is stupid. Yeah, right! 9th grade geek boys don't dump anybody. I know how these things are.

belly of an artifex

I just went down to the corner grocery to pick up a pound of asparagus.

Grocery store clerk: "Weren't you just here a couple hours ago?"

Me (embarassed): "Yeah, but I got the munchies again."

Clerk: "Oh, well... you must live around here then."

Me: "Yeah, um. Just two blocks from here. It's a good thing too, because I get the munchies a lot." (Conversation audibly ends.)

It's really terrible but, after two sound nights of uninterrupted sleep (finally found the secret, but I'm not telling) I've started eating like crazy. There is a wonderful recipe for generic vegetable soup in the paradoxically titled How to Cook Without a Book. Basically: sautée or boil a pound of vegetables. Pop in blender with a cup or two of chicken stock. (I add a couple tablespoons of leftover rice, and/or some milk.) Serve.

Trader Joe's sells frozen edamame for about $1.30 a pound. Cooking them is as easy as it looks.

I also can't keep from buying more and more of those Covent Garden brand fresh soups. They come in little milk cartons which you microwave for two to three minutes, and they taste amazing (better than most of the food I've had in Covent Garden itself). Apparently the American market has been slow to warm up to the idea of soup in cartons in the refrigerated section of the store, so they're only sold in five West Coast cities right now. Warning: they're not all vegetarian, even though the packaging and text hint at it.

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May 13, 2000

what a spectacular navel it is i have

Obscure Store is a truly amazing weblog. For example: a San Diego County jury has convicted a man of molesting three sheep, two of them fatally, in an open-air pen last summer.

are both perhaps present in time future

Instead when I was almost halfway home I got off the bus and ambled through the wetlands. The waves, the pebbles lying in shallow water, rustling in the rushes, creaking of the wooden bridges that connect the islands. Got a lot of good old Washington State mud between my feet and sandals. Followed a barely visible trail down into a valley full of wildflowers which ended at a moss-covered concrete pipe. Clambered up on the pipe and tightrope-walked down it till I got to the entrance to the freeway. Picked up a tuna fish sandwich at the Hop-In Grocery and swallowed down a thought of a woman I met for dinner there, about a year ago. She used to flap around in a kimono and made terrific pesto. (Dead now.) No vision, no closure, no afterlife. Nevertheless, difficult to keep from loving the world.

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May 12, 2000

just rambling today, not really an entry

Dagmar_chili: what the hell is this? It's great!

Tonight I wish I could go out and get a drink with John Berryman and also Herzog (from the Saul Bellow book).

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May 11, 2000

shh... don't tell the taste police

With headings like "Intelligence," "Fear," "God," "Love," and "Self," I want to watch every single one of the movies listed at Cybercinema (An Interactive Site Devoted to the History of Computers and Artificial Intelligence in Film). I like it that the design is way too hideous for the site to qualify as pretentious.

Elsewhere, my online life is in an ironic state given my anti-community stance of the 6th. Ha ha ha. Let's see how long this feeling of cognitive dissonance lasts. Maybe under certain conditions I can bend the rules.

precious bodily fluids

Jessamyn logs about librarians forced to look at p*rnography in the course of their daily duties maintaining internet computers for public use... The first thing I think about is this guy who used to use the computer lab in our dorm (his name was like, Fishbeck, right?). He would crouch in the very back corner and turned his monitor to face the wall while he was working. One day he left without closing his browser window and everybody gathered round to check it out. Turned out to be a Frank Zappa site or somesuch (correct me if I'm wrong here).

The second thing I think about is how my friend Heather used to work with a guy who would print out the pinups he'd downloaded from the web. His office was right by the printer, so I guess he thought he could get away with it. Something else he liked to do was openly check out women who came to pick up their printouts of the *real* work they were doing. What a gross-out skank.

But do I support NetNanny-type software? Hell no! I'm a liberal and an army of perverts couldn't make me change my mind.

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May 10, 2000

blah blah blah

Looks like the FTrain is puttering toward the end (beginning?) of the line and Strange Brew doth suffer a sea change. Sigh. Nevertheless I'm sure they'll be back, in some incarnation or other - we will be able to drop their names at cocktail parties and say we read their sites Back When.

Thanks for filling out the ISP survey. Looks like most of you didn't think this site's history of downtime was out of the ordinary. Aww, how nice you all are being about it. If you missed the survey but have something to say, I always appreciate it when you use the feedback box.

Someone asked that links open in a new window. I've added a new button to the right-hand customization area that should do the trick. Caveat: If you use it, it will slow down the load time and require cookies and javascript (which I myself don't use).

stress testing

Apparently "stress testing" is what the process is called where I try to send an email with 32,800 recipients (770KB) - crashing my homegrown mail-sendin' program in the process - and where I watch with disbelief as my mail server just swallows it with a smile (returns a success code) then goes down in flames an hour later.

I am so embarrassed. Don't try this at home, kids!

You can do metaphorically similar things with your computer at the Joe Cartoon company (creators of the frog blender, microwaved gerbil, etc).

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May 9, 2000

grant morrison got nothing on me

They found eight more planets outside our solar system. You know, when I was growing up, they taught us things in a "This is the way things are" kind of format. For example, my third-grade math teacher told me that pi was calcuated by measuring a really big circle. I hope kids these days are being prepared a little better (and more accurately) for a culture where what we know about the world changes monthly. By this, I mean that I hope they are being taught to use tools and exercise skeptical judgment in determining what is and isn't true.

Just imagine how flustered I was to learn that time is not continuous, but consists rather of fundamental units, or quanta, called chronons. And this had been common knowledge for decades!

Inquisitive and logical, BROWN is the color of my personality... but I become BLUE (serene) if I change the answer to just one question (via harrumph).

Better than blank white cards. The Only Way Out Is To Go So Far In and other images (via apathy).

Came to me last night in my dream:

ORDER LIFE CONTROL

SLEEP SEX DEATH

A llisa up way past her bedtime wrote in re Sunday's entry:

oh god that sugar & preserve bitch sucks so much ass! excuse my language!

and, a few minutes later,

god, how awful it would be, to turn into her, that Kim Rollins ho

Boy, do I love llisa.

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May 8, 2000

lessons from psych (10)1

Albert Bandura got a bunch of cute little kids to attack a live clown. How? By showing them a video of a woman yelling while attacking a clown. This oft-cited study, typically used as an argument against media violence, became the basis for his "modeling therapy" where people are cured of phobias by watching other people act normally. (What was the name of the artist who did that "clown torture" series again? - oh, right. Bruce Nauman. Thanks.)

Stanley Milgram and assistants asked forty men in Connecticut to deliver tremendous shocks to actors posing as experimental subjects. All forty obeyed up to 300V, at which a third of them refused to go further - the remainder proceeded to deliver the maximum voltage to subjects who appeared basically dead from the torture.

From 1972-1987, over 150 people jumped off the roof of the Takashimadaira housing project in Ikebukuro, Tokyo. At least 1200 people jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge between the time of its construction in 1937 and the installation of a suicide prevention grill in 1998.

What did I tell you! We are robots! We do what we see other people do.

Well, I can choose to use my powers for bitterness or good. My new resolution: watch lots of feminist movies where brilliant young Asian women battle hardship in a professional (non-romantic) situation, are not exploited, and come out on top. Ever hear of anything along those lines? Well, me either! I guess I'll have to buy A Taxing Woman and its sequel and watch them every night before I go to sleep.

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May 7, 2000

head cases

Maggots are a detective's best friend.

Someday, you will be able to take out the garbage... WITH YOUR BRAIN.

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May 6, 2000

estranged

My lover, the record collector. A hilarious must-read written by a self-described "vinyl widow."

Once again (tonight) I am reminded that I am inherently anti-community. That is my nature.

Take a look at what communities do to a woman whose unpopular views on a minor scandal in "the diary community" I find really quite sensible.

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May 5, 2000

insomnia cures

Wednesday I asked, "What do you do when you can't go to sleep?" Smart-alecky Mister Bovine replied: "why, invoke Hypnos of course." He elaborates:

Take the letters HYPNOS, make some kind of a glyph out of them. Whenever you're just about to pass into blissful sleep, visualise the glyph until your thoughts scatter into the inky black void of sleep (very often the glyph will carry over into your dreams). After some time, you'll easily be able to induce very restful sleep just by visualizing the glyph.

Taking melatonin was the most prevalent suggestion. I tried it last night and I slept quite soundly for the first 5 1/2 hrs - thanks! Maybe if I double the dosage (to 2 mg) I can stay asleep for 11 hrs. Paul also suggested fresh air and meditation, which I plan to try this weekend.

Probably the soundest-sounding advice was:

not worrying about it is important (if possible). Read. drink warm milk. give up and stay awake; it's better than trying to sleep and failing. sometimes it works

That's been my general strategy for most of my life, and for most of my life it worked quite nicely. Hopefully it will again soon. :)

miscellaneous insights

... but man, you "say anything" people are so much fun! Jen from Popbomb (she's finally back from hiatus, and now a weblog instead of a diary! Read it! She gives me too much credit, though. Much more credit than I deserve) wanted a review of the new Gish Jen book - to which Tehshik coincidentally responded,

re: gish jen -- i was so disappointed. i read 'who's irish' in .... the new yorker, maybe?.... and liked it, but the rest of the stories in this book..... kind of blah.

And a long time ago, some anonymous Microserf wrote:

re: short release cycles. When I was working on a certain product with "2000" in its name, I would have killed for the frantic activity of a 3-day cycle. Instant gratification and all. Maybe the compulsion is a bit uncomfortable, but I like to get my little pellet as soon as I press the lever, rather than pressing the lever day after day, month after month, with the promise that many pellets *might* come out eventually. Alas, my prize is at least a year away. Working this way is like being in a sensory deprivation tank 95% of the time (not that I've ever been in such a tank).

And about yesterday's wunderkammer entry, Steve Cook wrote in to say:

Just thought I'd throw out another Brown-hypertext-class observation: Shelley Jackson, who last I heard was teaching at MIT, used the wunderkammer metaphor in one of her pieces. It was a work called "my body: a wunderkammer," and Mark Amerika has it up at his site (http://www.altx.com/thebody/).

Then, of course, I read up all about Frederick the Great's cabinet of curiosities. He collected very tall men! He raised babies in dark rooms to find out what language the angels spoke! Frederick the Great was a prototypical mad scientist, only with the power of the Prussian military on his side. (Who needs an island full of animal people?)

spotted and scanned by jeremy from invisible city

This frame is by Dan Clowes, from Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, and proof to the skeptical that geegaw is in fact a dictionary word:

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May 4, 2000

games for girls

My favorite game ever is probably a 1985 text adventure called Alter Ego (download here) which lets you live out the choices of an entire life, from infancy to old age. It was written by a psychologist and is a little burdened by his moral beliefs, but it's really pretty well done - a damn sight better than the Sims - and I play it over and over, trying to reinvent myself.

Julia K. pointed me to a pretty good study on computer education for girls - basically, our current system sucks, and it has something to do with the lousy quality of computer games:

Women receive less than 28 percent of the computer science bachelor's degrees, down from a high of 37 percent in 1984. Computer science is the only field in which women?s participation has actually decreased over time.

Girls find programming classes tedious and dull, computer games too boring, redundant, and violent, and computer career options uninspiring. Girls have clear and strong ideas about what kinds of games they would design: games that feature simulation, strategy, and interaction. These games, in fact, would appeal to a broad range of learners -- boys and girls alike.

With the all-around crappiness of "pink" software aimed at girls, like that game that came out in the early 90s when you scored points for each purchase you racked up on your Dad's pink credit card, no wonder they don't play games. Me, aside from Alter Ego, I adore puzzle games like Tetris, Bust-a-Move, Ishido, and Pandora's Box. They seem like they would have a low barrier of entry for women, especially Bust-A-Move with its cutesy animal characters.

But aside from puzzles, what's out there these days that doesn't involve violence, sex, or just plain suckage? BTW, it's looking like Panty Raid, the new game from Simon and Schuster (aliens from outer space force you to hunt down supermodels and photograph their panties), is not a hoax...

weblogs as wunderkammern

If you're not already nauseated by the whole business, there's more weblog navel-gazing and a profile of RobotWisdom.com's Jorn Barger at Feed (link posted by Jonathan Prince to the weblogs_reborn list). Here's the paragraph that got the bloggers all excited:

The genealogy of Web logs points not to the world of letters but to the early history of museums -- to the "cabinet of wonders," or Wunderkammer, that marked the scientific landscape of Renaissance modernity: a random collection of strange, compelling objects, typically compiled and owned by a learned, well-off gentleman. A set of ostrich feathers, a few rare shells, a South Pacific coral carving, a mummified mermaid -- the Wunderkammer mingled fact and legend promiscuously, reflecting European civilization?s dazed and wondering attempts to assimilate the glut of physical data that science and exploration were then unleashing.

Just so, the Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world.

The re-popularization of the word wunderkammer (which babelfish translates as "miracle chamber") can probably be traced back to a terrific essay by Lawrence Weschler in Harper's, republished as a slim book titled Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder. I totally recommend it over 99.9% of all weblogs, including my own. Read it! If you live somewhere without access to books, let me know and I can send you xeroxes through the post.

My heartfelt gratitude to those of you who sent in insomnia remedies. I'll post a compilation soon.

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May 3, 2000

insomnia

Christ, not another new day. Have I seemed to be just going through the motions this month? I just can't sleep. Can fall asleep okay, just not stay that way. It's like every night's a marathon I don't have the stamina for, then I stop, wake up, can't seem to muster any strength to throw myself back under the dark water.

What do you do when you need to sleep?

From Edith Wharton's House of Mirth (sloow 740K text from Gutenberg)

She lay very still, waiting with a sensuous pleasure for the first effects of the soporific. She knew in advance what form they would take--the gradual cessation of the inner throb, the soft approach of passiveness, as though an invisible hand made magic passes over her in the darkness. The very slowness and hesitancy of the effect increased its fascination: it was delicious to lean over and look down into the dim abysses of unconsciousness. Tonight the drug seemed to work more slowly than usual: each passionate pulse had to be stilled in turn, and it was long before she felt them dropping into abeyance, like sentinels falling asleep at their posts. But gradually the sense of complete subjugation came over her...

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May 2, 2000

chocolate so dark, light cannot escape it

My mom visited this weekend, bearing a froth of inherited neuroses and leaving behind yummy Tim Tams! (Link includes a recipe for the Tim Tam Slam.)

History of Arnott's, the company behind Tim Tams (now owned by Campbell's soup).

Use of viral marketing in selling Tim Tams

Magazine advertising blitz causes spike in Tim Tam consumption

The most recent Tim Tam ad (involves two women choosing chocolate over men - scarier than it is funny)

letters and sodas

I don't read Salon that often, but I guess I should. I like what Garrison Keillor has to say about getting on with life:

Live your life here and now. Plant some flowers, talk with your children, tell jokes, put Bach in the CD player, fix big salads and make yogurt dressing, read poetry, take long walks -- do all the simple graceful things people do to mightily improve a day. These things have power over ghosts.

Also, I vowed to myself that I would never mention This American Life again, but this month-old link is too good to pass up: Lynda Barry slams Ira Glass (her ex-) in a piece titled 100 Demons: My Worst Boyfriend. How do I know it was Ira Glass? Because of this muckrakin' 1998 article (via robotwisdom)

A couple people wrote in to endorse Pinkwater (whose 5 Novels I'm currently reading. Ha ha, they're great, aren't they? Regretfully, I never heard of them when I was a kid - it's A. who got me into them. I favored Gordon Korman, a Canadian who'd already written his five best books by the age of 17.

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May 1, 2000

May day

Well, I didn't call in sick, but at least I'm f-cking around on my lunch break, eh?

Jessamyn has some good May Day links today.

Having met A. just over five years ago I'm more into him than ever. The spring feverish part is just more about changing my life kind of stuff. Read a friend's manuscripts and they were pretty good (we used to bond over writer's block), so why aren't I writing? Rilke's lines at the end of "Archaic Torso of Apollo" keep drifting into my head. Yes, I do feel under scrutiny by something man-made and yet implacable, transcending the mortal. Probably just my own crazy superego. When I'm walking uphill toward my apartment, past the tulip beds and the patch of silvery skeletons of honesty, I feel like I've taken a turn, have changed something, but the moment I turn that key into the lock I get a sinking feeling.

It's something no number of site redesigns can change.

Elsewhere, this week/month has been declared a period of Enforced Levity. They say forcing yourself to smile actually makes you happier. I tried smiling at people for a five-minute period this morning and it was great - you get smiles back, a bit o' natter - but incredibly hard to keep up.

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