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July 7th, 2008
smofbabe
 | 05:14 pm - The Book Meme
Going around... The Big Read estimates that the average adult has only read 6 of the Top 100 books they've printed. Below is my total. The list is a bit odd in that it lists some complete collections (like The Complete Works of Shakespeare) but also individual works separately (like Hamlet). Some books also seem awfully recent to be in a Top 100, such as The Secret History and The Lovely Bones.
My markings are a little different: bold means read, italic means tried and gave up. Some of these I think I must have read in school (like The Great Gatsby) but if I can't really remember reading them, I haven't marked them. I'm embarrassed that I haven't even completely read half of the list; my total is 42. ( The list )
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greenshadows
 | 12:04 am - it's after midnight, so
happy birthday to my beloved, and the lovely and talented ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kejn. Oh, and Ringo Starr. :b
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richardthe23rd
 | 11:30 pm - All the Marbles
Nabbed another first place at The Finish Line (my oft-maligned rival finishing in fourth place), so altogether not another bad week, what with two first-place finishes and all. The dealer was the new guy, the same one who dealt me my win at This Is It! earlier in the week. Must tell Fidel to have this guy deal to me more often. I also have that third place finish at Mill Hill yesterday, if that's worth anything. (Well, it's worth a pizza, apparently.)
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/smile.gif) complacent
Current Music: Karoake night
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rowanf
 | 10:32 pm - WesterCon & LV
The Con is pretty relaxing. Friday I went to a reading by Kage Baker which was quite fun. emberleo was hanging around outside the reading room and we hooked up and decided to go into LV to the Voodoo Lounge at the Rio. Unfortunately, it was 4th of July and that being a rooftop restaurant it was totally sold out. We wandered the Luxor but it is under construction and the cool Egyptian store is gone. Bah. We ate the buffett and had nice conversation. We went back to the hotel and I feel over, not feeling very well.
Saturday we got three more local caches and DNF'd one (we didn't really look, we realized it was a fair walk and didn't try). Then Ember & Albert & Kurt & I went to breakfast at the Omelet House. Back at the Con, Ember & I did a docent tour of the art show with Theresa Mather as the docent. The lighting was awful in the art room and I am sooo glad I did a docent tour. We all had flashlights and we made our own light to see by. Hm. Of course if I hadn't seen things in the light I might not have bid on so much art. There was a jewelry maker in the art show who really caught my eye.
We then wandered off to hear Theresa interview Lubov. It was interesting, except there were some low social skills fen who kept sort of off-tracking it. And after standing for the docent tour, the seating was really getting to me. I finally stood in the back to listen. This Con is very spread out and I'm definitely getting my walking in. I did ask about Metamorphosis, the Lubov piece I have in my bedroom. She says she doesn't like the line of it and that is why it is cut off on her web site. She said the women is a swan maiden. Cool to know. I have always liked swan mays.
After sunset we went out to the pool but I thought it had cooled down too much. We wound up watching Meet the Robinsons which was being shown poolside. Cute kid's flick. We grabbed a hamburger to go from the pub and I realized I was getting headachy because I was hungry. Somehow I'm not reading my body's signals very well here.
Today we slept in instead of geocaching. We had breakfast in the hotel. We went to the art auction and got a couple of pieces. I bought a wedding present for my brother that I like alot. I got the jewelry I had bid on and a couple of other pieces. There was a wonderful potter in the show. So no, not a lot more flat art to add to the stack at home.
Tonight Kurt & I went to the Rum Jungle for dinner and had the "Fire Pit" which is their Brazilian BBQ buffet equivalent. Oh my. The meats were chicken, chorizo, beef, salmon, scallops, shrimp and lamb chops. With black beans and rice, salad and roast veg. I am so going to stay at the Mandalay Bay some time and just eat at Rum Jungle for lunch and dinner every day. And drink volcanos.
Then we headed to Treasure Island and saw Mystere. This is classic Cirque... a celebration of the strength and grace of the human body. Wow. I could have done without the "baby" clown. But the show was marvelous and I'm very glad to have seen it. I looked for a postcard of one particular bird woman in red and black but alas there wasn't one. Pomba loved her.
I'm close to breaking even on the slots, I think Kurt is a bit ahead. Nice.
Current Location: Summerlin, LV
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://www.conjure.com/LOG/moods/sleepy.gif) sleepy
Current Music: Kurt typing
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replyhazy
 | 12:00 am - phase 1 of their evil master plan
The cat tries to take me out on the stairs.
I would toss off a little weekend update post about all the cool stuff we did this weekend -- the money we spent, the fun party we went to, the lunch my mom made me -- but it's all been knocked from my mind by falling down the stairs due to a cat.
Yes, it was Supper! Time! and Scout thought my walk down the stairs was to provide him with food. He put himself between my foot and the stair, and down I went. I caught at the banister to slow my descent and wrenched my shoulder. The back side of me feels as though I have been lovingly tapped with a baseball bat all over, as if I had a very cruel masseur.
I'm sure tomorrow is going to be just spectacular.
On the plus side, at least I didn't have a migraine today.
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vgqn
 | 09:30 pm - Attn: Greenshadows
Hey, greenshadows, this one's for you!
Picked my first White Stallion cucumber on 7/4. And very tasty it was too.
More prosaically, beans Kwintus (left) and Smeraldo (right) both started producing by 7/1, beating all others by quite a bit:
Both have a full and delicious beany flavor. Smeraldo seems to be a bit sweeter, though I'll wait on further taste tests to be sure. I'm also not sure if sweeter is good in this instance. Btw, those tiles are 8 1/2" on the diagonal. These are long beans!
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vgqn
| 08:16 pm - Busy holiday weekend
It felt like the weekend started Wednesday when we went out to a kaiseki restaurant with spikeiowa and voidampersand to celebrate the latter's birthday. Due to some odd pauses in the service, it ended up being an unusually long meal, ending well after 10:30 (from a 6:45 start). We were having fun, so it wasn't a problem, except I woke up the next morning and realized that I couldn't go in Friday for the fasting blood test for my check up next week, because Friday was a holiday. Normally a 12-hour fasting period is no problem, but with the late dinner....
So I felt out of whack all day Thursday due to the odd beginning, but in the afternoon I managed to talk myself into going through two sections of one of my file cabinets and tossing out about 80% of the contents. I have a goal of combining the two file cabinets in my office into one, and I do think it will be possible with appropriate pruning. This was certainly a great start!
Friday morning we went to our newly revived neighborhood parade, a very home town affair with lots of kids on bicycles, as well as some dignitaries in classic cars, scout troops, the Sharkmobile fire truck, our neighborhood calliope (resides just down the block from us), etc. Here's a link to more of magscanner's pictures.
It seemed like the right day to try out the Spanek vertical roaster I had just bought, so I invited spikeiowa and voidampersand over for a last-minute Fourth of July barbecue. The chicken really did turn out beautifully, with deliciously crispy skin all the way around and moist, tasty meat. The Galena Street spice mix from Penzey's that I liberally sprinkled inside and out didn't hurt either. Afterwards we headed downtown for the fireworks display, managing to effect a fairly easy entry and exit from the area, traffic-wise.
Saturday morning magscanner was reading an article about declining agriculture in Morgan Hill which quoted Andy Mariani, our local national treasure fruit grower. I suddenly remembered that he was having a tasting and tour that morning, one of only two this summer. So we managed to hustle out of the house and get there in time for the last of the orchard tours. The big treat of the tours is being able to taste and pick fruit as you go. My hope, which was realized, was that the last of the cherries would still be hanging in the some of the trees. Black Tartarians and Black Republicans, in particular, have this lovely trick of drying and shriveling on the tree, sort of like tree-ripened dried cherries. What a treat! We picked over 10 lbs of cherries. I spent much of today pitting large bowls of them and freezing them for future treats.
Then there was a Master Gardener picnic Saturday afternoon, a brunch party on Sunday, picking up some free Adirondack chairs from a friend, and a little light gardening. Saturday night I was suddenly taken by the urge to organize my huge stack of unfiled recipes -- and I did it! It didn't even take that long. I was ruthless too, with many clipped pages going into recycling instead of the files. I could probably stand to go through the files and toss stuff too, but hey, it's a start.
Time to go finish my Colin Cotterill book, The Coroner's Lunch. Someone at Fourth Street recommended him, and it's marvelous! Have you read it?
And how was your holiday weekend?
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gerisullivan
 | 10:48 pm - Twinzy Toy success doubled
I suppose it's fitting that my first eBay Twinzy Toy success would immediately be followed by another. The second auction wasn't for another toy, but rather for the December 1940 issue of Baby Talk magazine. Twinzy Toys are mentioned in its pages, most likely in the washable toys article shown in the picture. A few of them look right, but I won't know for sure until the actual magazine arrives. I won the auction tonight at the minimum bid and quickly paid the seller. It's coming from Louisville, so I should have it soon.
I've had the Twinzy search set up on eBay ever since I finally registered for an account a year ago. Having the second hit show up just two days after the auction on the first hit ended was amusing. I almost find myself hoping that the seller noticed that somebody out there was interested in Twinzy Toys and added mention of them to her description. That would make sense. Otherwise, it was sheer happenstance, and that's just plain weird.
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jennimoo
 | 07:23 pm - Home again home again
hippity hop.
Just got back from SF.
My Mommy 2B massage was fantastic, we ate WAY too much, walked too much, and took naked pictures out the window of out 31st floor hotel room. I got to see Kung Fu panda, that was very cute. Now I'm exhausted, but I managed to reply to one of the clueless in my LG developmental studies class, so I'm done with that for now. Thank the gods.
Dear Classmates,
Seriously people, we're in college here. If you haven't got enough social filter to not refer to people as "the gays", and you are still making the assumption that in a class of 45 people, not a single one of those people might be different than you, and could possibly be one of those gays, you need to go back to lower division work because you've missed an important point somewhere along the line. I will do my best at supporting you through this difficult transition, without being an asshole and without the use of the term "BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA!"
Love,
One of THOSE people
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heartssdesire
 | 07:06 pm - weekend ramblings
Posting from home for once, because... ta dah! we have DSL now. I was listening to a BBC program the other day about how the lack of broadband access to rural West African villages limits the economic opportunities of the people living in them, and the UNESCO programs being extended to address that lack. So it's good to know that here on my mountain, an hour from the heart of Silicon Valley, we're slightly in advance of technological progress in rural West Africa. :D
We had a busy long weekend away from home. Most of it was spent in Watsonville working on the hearse monster. With notable highlights spent in the company of seathroughghost and dyingeagle and a convivial Thursday night drinking and laughing with the south bay pirate crew. Saturday we took the evening off from automotive slavery to go to the Santa Cruz boardwalk. The last time I went there was on an early date with dionysusdevotee. Apparently that's where his parents went on their first date, too. So that about set the tone for the day. Amusement parks, I find, are best enjoyed as a sort of pretense, where you pretend to be interested in the rides and games but really are there mainly to walk around with a moony smile on your face holding hands and kissing in the dark in the haunted house. I forgot how much fun a haunted house is if you go in there in the right company. Also I forgot that Santa Cruz is a beach town, and thusly not hot even in the summertime, and one should probably wear something more substantial than a silk wraparound miniskirt. Particularly if one plans to get tossed about the sky on windy rollercoaster rides. I got cold. Spicy Indian food with hot chai fixed me up though.
I managed to fail to view any fireworks, although I heard some premature ejaculators firing them off Thursday night round the neighborhood where we were. Fireworks are pretty and all, but I could take it or leave it. Whenever I've been to a 4th of July fireworks display I usually find myself captured into an anthropological frame of mind by the spectacle of the way people celebrate it. Drinking a lot of beer and blowing shit up seems to be requisite activity and then everybody clusters together to gaze at colorful explosives and listen to the national anthem chanting about the rockets red glare and the bombs bursting in air and generally have a moment of unconsciously worshiping explosive warfare. It just strikes me as an odd kind of holiday. But very, very Merkan.
Last night I had some deep dreams.
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smofbabe
 | 10:56 am - Peeps in Space!
Thanks to shsilver, this site detailing the Adler Planetarium's launch of a marshmallow Peep into space, including photos of their rigorous training regime.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/growf/pengies/amused.gif) amused
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July 6th, 2008
alanbostick
| 03:45 pm - Thomas M. Dish 1940-2008
http://www.spicejar.org/asiplease/archives/000705.html Thomas M. Disch 1940-2008image source: Strange Horizons Thomas M. Disch was found dead in his apartment in New York City, apparently a suicide. Quoth Ellen Datlow: I've just found out that Tom Disch committed suicide in his apartment on...
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surliminal
 | 11:38 pm - Not Dr Who
Oooooo!
<ahref="http://www.kasterborous.com/news.asp?id=1595"> I Wantz ! </a>
Just watched Dr Who Confidential for the finale. Some interesting spins on the more interesting and controversial bits with Rose, DR and Donna :)
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://eusl01.lj.mocko.org.uk/mi/sad.gif) drained
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supergee
 | 06:00 pm - RIP Thomas M. Disch
The author of much excellent sf (Camp Concentration), horror (The Businessman), short fiction, poetry, and criticism killed himself on July 4.
This should not surprise readers of tomsdisch. The combination of widowhood, illness, threat of eviction, and the utter injustice of being generally remembered only as the author of The Brave Little Toaster left him seriously depressed and embittered, and his lj made that all too clear.
The Universe should have been kinder to someone who gave so much reading pleasure to me and others.
Thanx to lizhand/![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) theinferior4
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flyingsauce
 | 10:34 pm - Lives in passing: tomsdisch
I think that I shall never read
A tree of any shape or breed –
For all its xylem and its phloem –
As fascinating as a poem.
Trees must make themselves and so
They tend to seem a little slow
To those accustomed to the pace
Of poems that speed through time and space
As fast as thought. We shouldn't blame
The trees, of course: we'd be the same
If we had roots instead of brains.
While trees just grow, a poem explains,
By precept and example, how
Leaves develop on the bough
And new ideas in the mind.
A sensibility refined
By reading many poems will be
More able to admire a tree
Than lumberjacks and nesting birds
Who lack a poet's way with words
And tend to look at any tree
In terms of its utility.
And so before we give our praise
To pines and oaks and laurels and bays,
We ought to celebrate the poems
That made our human hearts their homes.
– Tom Disch, 'Poems', 2000.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/charitycam/aliens/sad.gif) saddened
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athenais
 | 02:27 pm - Music!
Poll #1218851 Music
Open to: All, results viewable to: AllMy favorite kind of music is My favorite way to hear music is My idea of a musical genius is My music collection is
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spacecrab
 | 12:20 pm
Potlatch, the Pacific Northwest literary s-f convention, now has a hotel and definite dates for 2009.
Potlatch 18 will take place February 27 - March 1, 2009 at the Domain Hotel in Sunnyvale, California. There are a number of good restaurants and points of interest to visit in the vicinity of the hotel.
The general member registration rate is $50 until July 31 and will go up after that. The committee is still caucasing to select a Book of Honor.
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ethnobotanicals
[cheesenoonions]
 | 01:40 pm - New Member
Name:
Rob
What interests you about ethnobotanicals?
I think it has to do with the anthropological aspect of ethnobotanicals. I've never tried, nor am I interested, in legal highs, but I've grown many. I've read about many. This led me to a research team with cornell in the Dominican Republic. We ran around the country interviewing the locals and assaying various plant specimens. I was the "mushroom" guy. It was a very good experience. I joined a PhD program in Pharmacology at Vanderbilt, but had to leave eventually when the grant money didn't come in. In hindsight, this was a good thing. I had deviated from my original interests and landed in a pharmacology lab. I am now working in Texas at a major medical school pursuing a Master's in Public Health.
Speaking of that, how did you find this community?
I searched on LJ
Hobbies?
Orchid Culture, Mycology, running, exercise, reading, Internet-ing
Favorite food:
Mushrooms
Any favorite books/music/movies?
Books:Cocaine the Unauthorized Biography, White Rock, Anything by Gary Jennings, Popul Voh, Anything by Paul Farmer.
Movies: Primer, KungFu Panda, etc. I prefer biopics... I'm not too big on fiction.
Music: Oh jesus.... I could go on for days and I'd still leave stuff out.
If you had a whole day to yourself to do whatever you wanted, what would you do?
I have no idea... I'm usually so busy. I'd prolly take my fiance to a nice park or go look at orchid or mushroom farms.
"Life is like a *fill in blank*" (No copying Forrest Gump!)
kick to the balls......it doesn't always sound so great and sometimes it feels kind good.
What's your favorite use for ethnobotanicals? (ie, in medicine, tripping, shamanism, etc)
Medicinal.
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brisingamen
 | 11:17 am - A brief hello from Kansas City, Missouri
Where it's very hot, where there's lots of public sculpture, lots of other interesting art, a fair amount of Civil War history to consider, and also the excellent company of classics_cat and ranj_the_obscure. Tomorrow we head for Lawrence, Kansas and a few days' more R&R before the SFRA conference.
Meanwhile, I have bought a new book about grilling, and have many ideas I urgently need to try out when I get home!
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kate_schaefer
 | 08:41 am - Thanks for Your Generous Response to CW Dorm Burglary
Due to the swift and generous response of the SF community, Clarion West has now received nearly enough money to replace the four student laptops stolen July 4 from rooms at the workshop residence. Clarion West staff, volunteers, and students all express their thanks for your very timely help. They especially want to thank BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow, Jay Lake, and many more for their generosity and for alerting others to the need for money and laptops. Donations began coming in from around the world just hours after the theft.
“If we collect funds that are much in excess of the cost of replacing the stolen computers, we will return them proportionally to the donors,” said workshop administrator Leslie Howle. “The use of PayPal makes this relatively easy to do.” She added, “We are all overwhelmed, and the students are immensely grateful. They were devastated by this theft, and it’s been amazing to see the community rally to support them.”
Thank you so much!
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