TMcG

jenlev, this reminds me of your lovely coffeeshop tradition, and I'm pretty sure I'll be copying the idea.

Found in a bookstore on January 2nd.

The History of Science Fiction rendered as a kind of tentacle porn / world-tree / circulatory system / interdimensional space squid. Gorgeous, mesmerizing, and clever.

Xmas 1970 My grandmother, my mom, and me, Christmas 1970, grabbed from a video capture of old home movies transferred to VHS.

Happy holidays, everyone.

The quickie report on Italy, with snapshots:

( Montefollonico )

( Toscano )

( Venezia )

( Firenze )

( Roma )

There's more I'd like to record about the trip, and so much more I'd like to say, about adventures in communication and about people we met and about trying to read Calvino's Invisible Cities in the original in Venice and about cultural subtleties and culture clash in unexpected places and all kinds of things. But this is the gist of the trip, anyway, and more than I thought I'd manage to post, so I'm content. So much happened that only the people we traveled with could really appreciate, so much comes down to "it was hilarious at the time, but I guess you had to be there"; and it's always interesting how articulating an experience, the act of describing it and the description itself, can change the quality of the memory of it, fixing it in words that maybe can never be exactly the right words and inevitably color it with all the other associations those words conjure; there's a cool passage about that in the Calvino book, which I'll have to find and post as a quotation. Photographs can facilitate memory or overlay it, take the place of it; telling a story can change the story. So I don't grieve what I left unrecorded in pictures (well, except for some cool shots I could have taken from the gondola if my film hadn't run out) or what I leave unrecorded in words; some of it might stay safer and truer that way, and all of it will no doubt, over time, leach into fiction, which, since I'm not a very good travel writer or memoirist or blogger, is where it's best used anyway. :)

On a lark I did this celebrity collage thing, and then forgot about it until sharan posted hers.



I tried it again hoping to tempt it into recognizing Pikachu in the full picture (taken by Scott Janssens at ConJose; it's Erin Cashier Denton's Pickachu knapsack I'm holding), but it just wouldn't.

Needless to say, I'm most amused by the Malcolm McDowell resemblance, and most tickled by the Linda Hamilton resemblance, since I've wanted to be her Terminator 2 character for some time.

From last week's episode of The West Wing, "Institutional Memory":

Toby: I read the Constitution. I think I found a typo.

CJ: In the Constitution?

Toby: Yeah.

CJ: Did you call the publisher?

Toby: I think it's a typo in the original.

CJ: Constitution?

Toby: Yeah.

CJ: Seems unlikely.

Toby: I read two versions--because I have time--and there's an inconsistent comma.

CJ: No.

Toby: So I looked at every English-language publication that exists. Half of 'em have the comma, half of 'em don't.

CJ: Really?

Toby: Yeah. So I called the National Archives and had some woman look at the original. She said she wasn't sure if it was a comma or a smudge.

CJ: There's a smudge?

Toby: Yeah. A smudge. Of law.

CJ: Does it change the...?

Toby: It changes the meaning of the Takings Clause.

CJ: Seriously? I'm sure it doesn't.

Toby: I called Tom Merrill. He thinks it does.

CJ: Really? Should we--do something?

Toby: I'm gonna write it up. I have a window in the calendar.

You scored as Idealist. Idealism centers around the belief that man is moving towards something greater. An odd mix of evolutionist and spiritualist, you see the divine within man, waiting to emerge over time. Many religious traditions express how the divine spirit lost its identity, thus creating our world of turmoil, but in time it will find itself and all things will again become one. </td> Idealist 69% Cultural Creative 63% Postmodernist 56% Existentialist 38% Modernist 31% Materialist 25% Romanticist 25% Fundamentalist 19% What is Your World View? created with QuizFarm.com

Gakked from cardigirl.

On the third hand, the How Sinful Are You? thingie told me "You will die with your hand down your underwear, watching Star Trek."

Cool. There are worse ways to go.

(I watched the end of "The Corbomite Maneuver" yesterday on DVD because I wanted to get to the credits [to prove once and for bleeding all that "Jefferies tube" is not spelled "Jeffries tube," because the guy it was named for was named JEFFERIES] [and this wasn't even fandom neep; it keeps coming up in copyedits], and 38-year-old Shatner was hot. )