Saw this over davehogg‘s way, and it amused me. Of course, It took me a while to find a photo of myself that was facing front enough to register, since I’m usually behind the camera, but I found one of me and Debbie Ohi on her Flickr site, and it came up with this.
Meme snared from radiantbaby and baiku:
Look through your LJ calendar and post an entry from this day (or the nearest day with an entry) for all the years you’ve had a livejournal. If all your entries that day are dull, I give you license to look at 2 days either side.
As I often posted sporadically, here’s the NEAREST post to the date in question, regardless of dullness, if there isn’t a post within +/- 2 days:
I often get scolded for finding Good Stuff here and there and forgetting to tell people about it. So here’s the beginning of an irregular feature, where I collect cool things for your consideration. I’m hoping this will be more than just link sausage, but we’ll see how long my attention span holds out.
- Around the World With Nellie Bly and Drawing Conclusions
Around the world… and Drawing Conclusions are a pair of newspaper features prepared weekly by Glenn Falls Post-Star editor and rec.arts.comics.strips regular Mike Peterson. Each week, Around the World… takes a focused look at a current events story, while Drawing Conclusions examines how editorial cartoons address the world around us. Aimed primarily at middle-schoolers, these features are an excellent resource for teachers, whether public, private, or home-school, and are well written and engaging enough to be thought provoking to adults as well. Go check out Nellie Bly’s webpage.As a bonus, Mike’s blog is syndicated right here to Livejournal by adding nellieblogs to your friends list. Mike is definitely one of the people who makes rec.arts.comics.strips worth reading on a daily basis, and his blog contains useful thoughtfood as well.
- Medium Large
Speaking of comics, there are any number of webcomics you just have to read, and first among them is Ces Marciuliano’s wickedly funny pop-culture riff Medium Large. By day, Marciuliano is largely unknown as the current talent behind the syndicated strip Sally Forth, but in his spare time, he reels off one of the most hysterical and off-kilter webstrips on the net, five days a week. While the strip does include some amusing repeat gags, most notably centered on the “hit WB show Teenage Girl President”, the strip is at its best when it takes right angles to pop-culture icons. The BC parody in Week 46 is one of my favourites.Medium Large can be syndicated to Livejournal via mediumlarge.
- Inside The Actors Studio
While its improbable that most of you aren’t familiar with Jame’s Lipton’s amazing interview program on the Bravo Network, this is my journal and you have to indulge me. Truth is, I long ago ceased bothering to tune in when my favourite actors appear on talk-and-gawk shows (Leno, Letterman, and the like) because its really just another performance, most of the time. Inside The Actors Studio is one of the few places where your really get a chance to see the people who craft most of our better entertainment as real people. Lipton is probably one of the best interviewers working on television: prepared, probing, and clearly fascinated with his subjects. He also knows what many journalists have never learned, which is when to shut up and let his subject talk, and when to draw his subject towards the topic he wants to explore. It doesn’t hurt that he’s an unashamed fan in every sense of the word, and because he focuses on the life and work of his subjects rather than whatever their current project is, it humanizes the various actors and performers who appear on his stage and gives us a glimpse behind the masks and glamours. There are many worse ways to spend an hour than watching someone have an hour long chat about the craft of performance with James Lipton.If you don’t get the Bravo Network, Inside the Actors Studio can now be downloaded from iTunes.
- Paste Magazine
If you’re a music junkie like me, and want to keep up with what’s going on outside the mainstream, then you need Decatur, GA based Paste Magazine. The magazine is jam-packed each issue with well-written articles reviewing albums, films, books, and concerts, but what really makes it worth the $8 you’ll plop down every issue is the CD, which contains a couple of dozen tracks from a variety of mostly independent artists. Some you’ll have heard of, some you won’t. You won’t like every track. But good gosh, what a great grab-bag of new music, every issue, for half of what normal CD costs. - The Show with Zefrank
Who is Zefrank? I have no idea. I don’t even remember now how I found this very odd video blog. Every weekday, The Show with Zefrank features about 3-5 minutes of stream of conscious monologuing, commentary, and reaction to viewer comments from this Brooklyn-based humorist. “Good morning, sports racers,” he signs on every morning, and then he’s off to the races himself with whatever has caught his eye, talking directly into the closely zoomed camera. The pace of the monologues is frentic and sharply edited, and the commentary is at turns thought provoking, amusing, and sometimes just downright silly, and I’ve grown to look forward to my daily moment of Zefrank every morning. He’s thinking so you don’t have to….give him a try.
Nicked from cadhla, who got it from smallship1, who got it from Agnes….
Make up a title for a story I didn’t write, and I will respond with details of those non-written stories. You may, if you like, include details, such as pairings or fandom or whatnot. Any fandom I know is fair game. (Not, I hasten to add, necessarily fanfic, since that really isn’t my thing, but I wouldn’t rule it out either.)
Happy Birthday today to Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967), who in 1926 founded Amazing Stories magazine, ensuring that, as one thing led to another, I’d have something interesting to do on weekends. 🙂
I’ve really been sort of absent from these pages lately, and in large part that’s because the last several weeks have revolved around kitanzi‘s work schedule, which has her at her office 12 hours a day five-six days a week, and as a result I’ve been trying to pick up most of the household chores. This plan has been hampered by the fact that I’ve been having more troubles with my back, finally coming to the point where I got myself referred to physical therapy in an effort to get it fixed.
For the last two weekends, kitanzi has actually gotten the weekend free, giving us time and energy to actually be social with folks. Last weekend, we headed up to Colbert, GA for ApheliCon 2, the second annual Aphelion Webzine barbecue, hosted by my old friend vila_resthal and his lovely new wife, Lyn. Attendance was light, as usual, but Lyn’s delightful daughter Michele was there, along with Bill Wolfe down from Tennessee, and mrjaimie and his wife over from Marietta. We had barbecue and chili, discussed writing and science and art and politics and music, and I played my guitar a bit, at the command of the hosts, who insisted. (I also played them a bit of cadhla‘s amazing live album, and got at least a couple of converts, I think.) We stayed until about 10pm, and decided to drive back home rather than get a hotel room in Athens, which was a prudent financial decision, if it means I didn’t really get down into Athens at all on this trip.
This weekend was full of people too. Saturday evening, we went to the monthly Gafia housefilk, hosted by Alice and though it was lightly attended, the company was great, with mrpsyklops, his wife and daughter, and also joyeuse13 and abovenyquist, and we had a good deal of conversation and played some good music and had a grand time.
Sunday, we met up again with joyeuse13, abovenyquist, and Alice at Oglethorpe University to see the Georgia Shakespeare Festival’s production of Metamorphoses, a play based on the works of Ovid. Rather uniquely staged around the centerpiece of a large pool of water, the players retold several important stories from the Greek/Roman myths, all of which centered on the theme of transformation and change. All of the stories were familiar to me, but the presentation was so original that I found myself spellbound for the entire 90 minute production. If you are in the Atlanta area, I highly recommend you try to catch the show before it closes on August 20.
(Digression: I used to see a great deal of live theatre, but I’ve fallen out of the habit in the last few years. The last time I saw a play was, if I’m not mistaken, when I went with tigerbright, browngirl, and magid to see Copenhagen in Boston four years ago. That’s much too long.)
In other news, I got kitanzi a copy of The Sims 2 as an anniversary present, and we’ve both become rather hopelessly addicted to the game. I remember I used to watch telynor play Sims 1 on her laptop (I even got her a couple of the expansion packs), but I never really ‘got it”. But now that I’m actually playing it myself, there’s something strangely compelling and zen like about directing these imaginary people through their lives. Kit likens it to playing dolls for grownups, and that’s certainly fitting. It certainly does eat up a lot of time.
And that’s the news from Lake Unionhill. May all of your days be full of joy.
I almost never win contests or drawings. And on the rare times when I do, I usually don’t win something I really want.
So, for once, I did. Someone in our office got concert tickets for tonght’s Steely Dan show, and I won the drawing.
And today I am sick, and I’m not up for going. Bother!
I’ve called the HR manager who ran the contest to see if one of the other people who entered would like to pick them up at the last minute. Shame for them to go to waste. But dammit, I really wanted to see that show.
It was today, just two years ago, that kitanzi and I were married in a courthouse in Atlanta, in front of friends, lovers, and several dozen strangers.
I cannot imagine anyone I’d rather spend every day of the rest of my life with.
Happy anniversary, sweetie. I love you, forever and always.