giantsloth

Here's a draft of a recent story, processed by Wordle. This toy is way too much fun.

Just like on Jeopardy, where you get the answers and then have to construct your own questions:

1. LHD-6 USS Bonhomme Richard, 2. dim sum all day, 3. RJ Reynolds High School, 4. Poppies fields(2), 5. Herakut @ Carmichael Gallery, 6. 'Ol Kentucky Bourbon, 7. New York World's Fair (1964), 8. Strawberry Rhubarb Pie, 9. Happy hanged person, 10. Korean Bell of Friendship, 11. Unfulfilled Dream, 12. sloth

I will skip the meme-ing and tagging and get straight into seven songs I've been listening to lately.

1. "Admiral Cole," Alasdair Roberts. I've been on an Alasdair Roberts kick for almost a year now. This is one of the peppier tunes, but it's still about a sea voyage that, uh, doesn't go very well. Also known as "The Bold Benjamin."

2. "Little Queenie," Jerry Lee Lewis. Yeah, it's a Chuck Berry song, but the Killer does a revved up version of it. (As do the Stones, heck, as does the Velvet Underground.)

3. "Amphetamine," Peter Laughner. The Rocket from the Tombs reunion show and CD were great, but nobody sings "take the guitar player for a ride" like the guy who wrote it back in that strange time known as the 1970s. RIP.

4. "Focus On Sanity," Ornette Coleman. The Atlantic recordings boxed set is my default writing music. I can't have lyrics being sung when I'm trying to type words. I can have harmolodic saxophone, though.

5. "Oh Yoko!" John Lennon. Watched RUSHMORE for the first time in ages a few weeks back. For all its flaws, I still love many, many moments in that movie. Including all the soundtrack stuff, before that particular Anderson move got tired (although I will give him "Search and Destroy" in THE LIFE AQUATIC, no problem).

6. 'One More Minute," Chatham County Line. Local bluegrass boys make with the yearning.

7. "Blues Run the Game," Jackson C. Frank. OK, so this list sucks, because there are only males on it. Mea culpa. But I will end with this one, because it's So True. Maybe it shouldn't be, or doesn't have to be, though.

Or not. We're back. Too many great people, not enough time. As usual, I saw old friends and met a couple of really cool new ones. And it didn't help that norovirus, or whatever it was, was selectively felling people I wanted to chat with. I have managed to avoid the plague so far, although I had a brief scare on Monday probably more related to spicy Thai food and to my ability to psych myself out. For the record, dinner each night was: tapas, tapas, Thai, sushi. Also for the record, sarah_prineas has  some really cool shoes of Spanish leather.

In inside-joke news, Niobium is a real element, o ye of little faith.

Instead of talking about any of the bad craziness, I will instead direct your attention to this baby sloth video (via Christopher).

Did I mention that there were too many great people, and not enough time?

OK, really just five days in between VARF and WisCon 32. And soon enough I'll be in Madison. But I want to be there NOW. Tonight's big excitement includes packing, and doing some final proofing before printing out the 3,000 words of fragmentary somethingness that I'm going to read.

Virginia was a nice getaway, especially with the weather being pleasant instead of sunstroke-inducing. We went to Pyrates sets, caught a few of thatliardiego's shows, looked at stuff for sale but bought nothing. Hummed at the alpacas. Managed to get terribleturnip and the Captain and Brian and Hemloche out with us for Mexican dinner that was not half shabby. Tamales, yum.

VARF's reputation as the Little Fair That Can is well-deserved. I was always surrounded by friendly folks to chat with, including all of the aforementioned plus the talented and charming pyratelady and all the folks at the greyhound tent. skivee exhorted us to check out Mike Oldfield's "Five Miles Out." thatliardiego exhorted me to buy a SportKilt. There were other exhortations, mostly about heaving away and hauling away.

I am so, so, so ready to be in the Governor's Club at the Concourse. See some of y'all there.

From my good friend codename Sumi, this bit of science news: sloths are not as lazy as previously assumed. Huh. I suppose I should consider this inspiring, or something.

Speaking of doing stuff, here's my Wiscon schedule:

156 Delicate Flowers

Reading ♦ Sunday, 2:30-3:45 P.M. ♦ Conference 2

Christopher Rowe, Richard Butner, Ted Chiang, Karen Meisner

Yep, that's it. Actually, taking a quick gander at the schedule, I am far from alone in doing the reading-but-no-panels thing.

I normally prefer classic cocktails and mixed drinks to newfangled concoctions. (Even though I have made up at least one newfangled concoction of my own.) But last night we went to the swanky German restaurant for barbmg's birthday, and I decided to try what they billed as the German Sazerac. And dang if it wasn't good. Ingredients: whiskey, Cognac, Peychaud's Bitters, caraway syrup and Jagermeister. I'm guessing the whiskey was either Canadian or blended American, probably not the rye that's in a real Sazerac. Adding some Cognac hearkens back to the Sazerac's origins when it and many other cocktails were brandy-based. The Peychaud's is canonical. The German angle comes in with the caraway syrup and the Jagermeister substituting for the sugar and Pernod/Herbsaint/absinthe.

It was, as they say, purty neat.

I doubt I'll try to replicate it at home, but I do think I'll mix up some Sazeracs soon. Especially now that NC ABC has started stocking Sazerac brand rye.

This article in the local paper reminds me that I need to spend more time at Western Lanes, the venerable bowling alley near NC State. In the 1990s I was on the receiving end of many a cheap canned beer slid/served by Theresa. I'm glad to hear she's still going strong.

Completely unrelated, a meme that I doubt many folks beyond McLaren will get:

bash-2.05$ history|awk '{print $2}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head
 189 pine
 121 logout
  52 trn
  52 clear
  25 ls
  21 du
  11 cd
  10 lynx
   3 less
   2 /usr/sbin/ping
bash-2.05$

The North Carolina Renaissance Faire 2008. I was there a bunch. It rained a bunch. But there are still lots of good memories:
 

You know the drill: one word answers only.
1. Where is your mobile phone? pocket
2. Your significant other? hottie
3. Your hair? wavy
4. Your mother? tough
5. Your father? gone
6. Your favorite thing? understanding
7. Your dream last night? unmemorable
8. Your favorite drink? varies
9. Your dream/goal? understanding
10. The room you're in? ceilingless
11. Your ex? silent
12. Your fear? decrepitude
13. Where do you want to be in 6 years? happyland
14. Where were you last night? salon
15. What you're not? arrogant
16. Muffins? rarely
17. One of your wish list items? architecture
18. Where you grew up? television
19. The last thing you did? coffee
20. What are you wearing? guayabera
21. Your TV? DVDs
22. Your pets? Boris
23. Your computer? frequently
24. Your life? worthwhile
25. Your mood? distracted
26. Missing someone? definitely
27. Your car? hatchback
28. Something you're not wearing? spats
29. Favorite Store? Hoboken
30. Your summer? inadequate
31. Like someone? duh
32. Your favorite color? poppy
33. When is the last time you laughed? yesterday
34. Last time you cried? driving

I have been and still am sick with an annoying cold. Nothing more than a blip in the grand scheme of things, but still annoying. A few days lost, a preview of future decrepitudes. If I didn't already know that daytime television sucks rocks, well, now I've been reminded of that. We did get The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford in from Netflix, and that was pretty happening. Kind of slow and confusing to begin with (but then again that could've just been the antihistamines) but a great final act.

There was a mallard pair in the creek behind our apartment this morning. Heralds of spring? I sure hope so.

(Post title courtesy SWANS.)

First off, to Alain Robbe-Grillet. I learned of his passing at the Ballardian blog. I first read The Erasers because Jim Sallis had mentioned reading Robbe-Grillet in one of his story introductions.  I was hooked quickly, even though I didn't know jack about literary theory or the nouveau roman. If you haven't read any of his stuff, start by renting Last Year at Marienbad. If you like that movie, you'll probably like Robbe-Grillet's writing.

Another much less important goodbye is me saying goodbye to USENET, which I've been reading since 1992. The only newsgroup I paid much attention to lately was alt.music.chapel-hill, and really that's just a mirror of an email list. My Internet provider stopped supporting my shell account long ago, and a couple weeks ago trn just decided I didn't have access to the news server. Tech support refuses to even look at the problem, and I don't have the time to troubleshoot it myself. So, it's as good a point as any to stop reading newsgroups, even though in many ways the setup and etiquette of the best newsgroups is much more advanced than many Web 2.0 sites. Here's to alt.drinks.scotch-whisky, long may you run.

Chris Nakashima-Brown posted a list of books that changed his life and tagged me to do the same. I tried to stick mostly with books I read prior to meeting Kessel and falling into the deep end of the sf pool. (Thus there are no women writers in this list, and there are problematic individuals such as Hunter Thompson, which sucks but so it goes.) So, submitted without much comment:

1. Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones.
2. Donald Barthelme, City Life.
3. Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Voyeur.
4. A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner.
5. Franz Kafka, The Penal Colony.
6. Damon Knight, editor, the Orbit anthologies.
7. Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
8. Frank Miller and Bill Sienciewicz, Elektra: Assassin.
9. Barney Rosset, editor, The Evergreen Review Reader.

Wow. Kansas City Southern tore down the wildly historic/important Union Tank Car dome. At least the linked newspaper article has the necessary indignant tone. But, indignant tones don't magically bring buildings back. Neither do LJ posts, for that matter. Maybe Kansas City Southern should think about changing their name too, I don't know, Weird Scumbags Incorporated?

No Country for Old Men? Good. I'm Not There? Not.

I never considered myself a photographer, but I thought I did OK with film cameras. I've still got my manual-everything K-1000, built like a tank. And I took some decent photos with little point-and-shoot film cameras (with nice lenses) too, although it felt weird to give up focus and exposure control. So why am I having such a hard time adjusting to digital? I've got a Panasonic TZ-1 and the results look way too ... mushy. I can't quite wrap my head around why that is, though. Sure, it's not some swank high-end digital SLR, but.

This post brought to you by the terminal but.

Those are the directions I traveled in the past few weekends.

( Some trips )

It's true, you can't copyright a title. "Wait, you mean the other CRASH, not the Cronenberg movie from the Ballard book. Oh." Et cetera. Still, it strikes me as weird that Nick Hornby's new YA novel about a skater kid has the same title as Lew Shiner's wonderful 1990 novel featuring skater kids, SLAM.

This will be hopelessly geeky for some of you and completely normal for others. So it goes.

( Maryland trip 2007 )

I met Chris Barzak in spring 2001 and almost immediately ended up doing some workshopping via email with him and Dr. Crossbow and Corvus Rex. And one of the stories Chris sent around was "Dead Boy Found," which ended up in a little anthology called Trampoline. And a book that grew out of that story is One for Sorrow, which has wowed the Florida Society of Goldsmiths and will wow you too. As of this day you can now purchase from the bookselling establishment of your choice. So why don't you go do that, huh?

Begin sloth-related cuteness transmission: