Blogosity

Just for the heck of

Just for the heck of it, I created another nation: The Free Land of Kleptopia I wanted to see if I could figure out how some of the questions in the set-up behaved, since you can't twiddle the knobs after the country is created. I deliberately pushed the choices to extremes; what's surprising is how reasonably the place turned out. I was expecting something much less habitable-sounding (maybe not choosing "psychotic" as the style of rulership had more to do with it than I thought).

One nice thing about Spirited

One nice thing about Spirited Away winning that Oscar is that it's being rereleased to theaters starting this Friday (and it's coming out on DVD on April 14th). The Usual Suspects are coming with me to see it again on Saturday. Woo, as they say, hoo!

Meanwhile, as befits the ruler

Meanwhile, as befits the ruler of a nation-state, I've been rereading Meditations (or is it really rereading if it's a translation that's new to you?) A balm to the soul in these turbulent times (as if there were ever any other kind).

Don't like the way the

Don't like the way the world's being run? Create your own nation, and run it yourself! Mine is The Empire of the Empirical. Come on over: our civil rights are Very Good and our Political Freedoms are Superb!

It's time for the dentist

It's time for the dentist again tomorrow...at least this time I know what to expect, since it's just a repeat of last week except on the other side of my mouth. I kind of like my dentist: he's the first one I've had that's really explained to me e.g. what my teeth are supposed to feel like after I brush.

No bites on the Match.com

No bites on the Match.com profile yet...

This Victorian Sex Cry Generator

This Victorian Sex Cry Generator is hilarious. Warning: the site itself seems to be some sort of porno humor site, so you may see banner ads with nekkid wimmen 'n' such; there might even be pop-ups (surfing with Mozilla, I wouldn't know).

My friends M, W, and

My friends M, W, and The Librarian came over Wednesday night for pizza and some anime, although M had to leave early to teach a class. I showed them Fancy Lala, which they enjoyed, and Dragon Half. "That was really random!" the Librarian enthused. Randomness Rules! had been the motto of the Science Fiction Club at the University that we both attended (albeit serially) back when she was President of the club, so this was pretty high praise indeed.

For what it's worth, according to an online quiz I'm the heroine:

What Dragon-Half Character Are You?

I actually made a character based loosely on Mink for a MUD that Lizzard was heavily into, and later on after I had showed her Dragon Half, I think she introduced her as an NPC

I'm currently reading a completely

I'm currently reading a completely jaw-dropping book: Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Sokal is the guy who wrote the parody essay, published in all seriousness in the journal Social Text, which argued-- in a deliberately impenetrable and obscure academic style replete with actual quotations from contemporary theorists-- that gravity was just a social fiction. Fashionable Nonsense is a book that grew out of the research that Sokal did in mining the literature for quotes to string together in his parody essay "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." He and co-author Bricmont decided to put on display some of the ways that some "postmodern" theorists abused concepts--or sometimes just terms and jargon--from science to produce clouds of bafflegab. Being scientists, they are very careful to draw the distinction between "there exists X such that" and "for all X", so that their thesis isn't taken to be a blanket condemnation of postmodernist theory, or even necessarily of the theorists whose misuse of science they are dissecting. Nevertheless, the overall effect is astounding: sort of like reading entries in the Bulwer-Lytton contest, except done by participants who are in earnest and who are taken seriously by certain substantial segments of academia. I alternately laugh, groan, and shake my head. It's wonderful.

The visit with Job went

The visit with Job went well...almost too well, in fact. I'll get back to that. Job is looking pretty good: he's been exercizing regularly to stave off loss of muscle control, and as a result has dropped about twenty pounds and feels a lot better generally (not really to do with his disease). His new girlfriend, K, is sweet and charming, and they seem to have a pretty good relationship; Job has a pretty strong personality, but so does K, and although they wrangle it all seems good natured.

Because they met via match.com, they were both really interested in my profile, and we spent a lot of time talking about how best to present oneself, and I ended up heavily revising my description of myself and my "ideal mate." Most of the advice boiled down to be more positive, less wishy-washy, more focused--in short, the standard advice to essayists; heck, I've dished out that advice myself in other contexts.

So, after spending much of Saturday afternoon working on this, we went out to dinner with C, K's former roommate, who we were all agreed turns out to fit my description of my ideal woman to a T. This is the "almost too well" part, since C is just about everything I'm looking for in a woman except: she's in a city on the far end of the state, mentioned that she's against long distance relationships, and is probably going back to Argentina when she finishes her dissertation. Also, she says she's looking for a "simple" man, and I'm not sure I qualify, although from context she might just mean not an academic. Some of my friends don't see any of that being insurmountable, but I'm not so sure. On the other hand, since my ideal has been spotted in the wild, as it were, perhaps it's not as rare as I feared.

The drive was nice, the weather perfect, the roads relatively clear; there were fewer cows this time of year, and the trees were all bare, but it was still quite beautiful and relaxing. One advantage of the bare trees was that there were no extra stops to wash sap and pollen off of my windshield so I could see.

Best bumper sticker: Don't have strong opinions about issues you don't understand

Well, I'm off to visit

Well, I'm off to visit my friend Job this weekend. It's about a five hour drive (somehow I always remember it being longer than that, but I suppose it's because I stop to stretch, eat, get gas, etc. rather than plow right through), so I plan to leave pretty early in the morning. It's a pretty drive, though, if you like cows, trees, and rolling hills. I do, as scenery; I wouldn't want to have to live among them.

Of course, now that I'm ready to take a vacation, even though it's only one day off, I'm starting to come down with a cold. This happens every time: it's like my body knows I'm about to take a break, so it figures it'll use the down time to catch up on the latest diseases.

Over in Badger Bag, Lizzard

Over in Badger Bag, Lizzard has touched on one of the (many) things that really drove me bananas during college, and one of the things that so far has kept me from pursuing a graduate degree despite the fact that in many ways I was born to be an academic. One of my roommates used to call it the "In my many readings of Moby Dick" syndrome: the way that in almost all classroom discussions whatever material that's ostensibly being covered just turns into grist for each participant's particular mill.

Of course, the problem isn't limited to academia. As the saying goes, "If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." There was a Dilbert cartoon of one of the ways that plays out in business, with consultants in a meeting all responding to a particular problem: the first smugly announces “This problem is best solved by the Schwarzburg Least-squares Linear Regression Method, which I know so well.” and so on until the last, who turns out to be a porcupine shouting: “Curl up into a tight ball, and stick them with quills! It’s the only way!”

Still, it seems to me to be worse in classrooms, and I'm not sure why. Maybe because there's very little downside to participation, no matter how inane, whereas in business nobody would dare to bring up Ayn Rand and Nazis just to be saying something. At least nobody has in any of the meetings I've attended in the last fifteen years, whereas it happened enough in college that when Lizzard mentioned it in re her class I thought, "Hey! I know that guy!"

The good news is that

The good news is that I survived the dentist; I didn't even have to clutch the teddy-bear that he keeps on hand for emergencies. (I kind of admire my dentist for that.) The bad news is that I have to go back next week, and the week after, and then after that I may have to see a specialist. sigh Let this be a lesson to you all: it's not enough to brush and floss regularly; you have to do it the right way.

My teeth feel all smooth and slippery now, though.

Match.com has started sending me

Match.com has started sending me suggested matches, and it's really made me wonder about their scoring algorithm. They keep suggesting women who list "brainiacs" among their turn offs, and who dislike cats. It appears the fact that there's a "match" wherever they've put a wildcard in a category outweighs the fact that in the only category they have concrete preferences they disagree with mine. I bet a few minutes with a text dump of their database and grep I could do a better job... hmm, you know, if they anonymized the information....

Well, I have a dentist's

Well, I have a dentist's appointment tomorrow morning, and as usual I'm dreading it. Something about dentists seriously creeps me out. Maybe it's the whole painful poking around in your tender vulnerable mouth with sharp instruments thing. I'm such a wuss when it comes to things like that.

Actually, I hate going to any sort of doctor. My well-honed procrastination skill kicks into overdrive whenever I contemplate dealing with the medical profession. I'm probably lucky that I seldom have anything seriously wrong with me, or I'd likely leave it until it's even worse...

You know, the thing with

You know, the thing with the reviewer and my sister's book makes me wonder about people's capacity for self-delusion. For example, I was watching the "Inside the Actor's Studio" show when they had all of the actors who voice the regulars on the Simpsons on all at once. It was a pretty entertaining group, and there was James Lipton, as pompous and sycophantic as ever, and they showed the clip from the episode where Rainer Wolfcastle was being interviewed by Lipton on Inside the Actor's Studio. (Lipton voiced himself.) Cute, right? But in this sequence the writers completely nailed Lipton, as he asks Wolfcastle to do McBain and Wolfcastle as McBain shoots him...he lies there in a pool of blood gasping out what an honor it is to have, I forget, something like "eaten McBain's hot lead."

So my question is: What the hell was Lipton thinking when he first recorded this? Oh what a good sport I am? Is his manner of interviewing itself a put-on, and he's glad someone gets the joke? Or is he completely oblivious, and just recited the lines without really grasping how they related and why they were funny?

If I were ever in a position to interview Lipton, I'd ask him that, not what's his favorite word, or what would he want to hear God say when he arrives in heaven.

What is the plural of

What is the plural of virus? I just geek out over stuff like this page: What is the plural of 'virus'? Haha! Who says Latin is useless? (The right answer, by the way, is "viruses"...at least in English.)

What cracks me up is the people who argue that, despite any etymology, virii ought to be acceptable because many English speakers use it. This seems to me to get the usual egalitarian, non-prescriptive grammar argument exactly backwards: viruses is what the ordinary naive English speaker would say; only a pedant (and a sciolist at that ;) ) would go for a latinate plural in the first place.

I promised you logomachy, didn't I?

Meanwhile, on the family front,

Meanwhile, on the family front, my mother's postponed her proposed visit from the beginning of April until mid-May. The tricky part of receiving news like that is not to bleat "Woohoo!" into the phone: it's not the done thing.

I love my mother, or at least I tell myself I do, but I love her even better far away. On the phone, we're fine together: mutually supportive, concerned, interested, helpful, etc. etc. Put us in the same room for too long, though, and I start to feel like a surly adolescent. What I can accept with perfect equanimity as an expression of motherly concern for my well-being as long as it comes from three thousand miles away and mediated by electronic impulses, in person turns into an intrusive stream of teeth-grating nagging.

I'm sure that the flaw is in me, but that just adds a leavening of guilt to the mixture without changing the feelings I experience at all.

My sister's latest romance novel

My sister's latest romance novel came out this week, and I snagged a copy at Brentano's; this is her fifth, I think, and the first one that I haven't read still in manuscript. I'm only a few chapters in, but it feels more polished; I don't know whether that's because I hadn't seen it in its rough state, or just her continuing to get better at it.

The one just prior to this was definitely, I don't know, fluffier, and she says it's gotten the best reviews of all of them. There's one reviewer who she particularly hates, who gave it a rave review. What makes it funnier is that she wrote this reviewer into the book as a rejected suitor: an obnoxious, narrow-minded art critic, a completely over-the-top caricature of everything that's smug and self-satisfied in reviewers. Fortunately the reviewer didn't recognize himself, and not only did he love the book, but his only complaint was that he felt a bit sorry for the art critic character. He thought the heroine didn't really appreciate the character's better qualities.

The callaloo was a big

The callaloo was a big hit, although afterward everyone seemed too stuffed and giddy to get any real gaming done. I had made this once before, for a group of friends including MMcC (who will eat fish but not chicken or pork), so I had used water and no bacon. RH, who had been there, declared that she had liked the previous incarnation, but this one "kicked its ass."

One important thing I discovered while preparing it is that if you get too much oil from the jalapeños on your skin, rinsing it with tea provides instant, almost magical, relief from the burning. (Water doesn't do squat.)

RH played the what was probably the worst Yes song ever for us (I'd say picking the worst Yes song ever is the very definition of being spoiled for choice but RH likes Yes). We wouldn't believe her that the lyrics went:

Here is my heart
Waiting for you
Here is my soul
I eat at Chez Nous

So she had to prove it to us. We stand corrected. Appalled, but corrected.

Callooh! Callay! I'm making callaloo

Callooh! Callay! I'm making callaloo today! Callaloo is a Caribbean crab and coconut milk soup that I love. My friend JL introduced me to it, and gave me the recipe from James Peterson's Splendid Soups

• 3/4 lb bacon


• 1 large onion, finely chopped


• 2 cloves garlic, same


• 1/2 lb fresh okra (I skip this. Okra's too slimy for me)


• 4 jalapeños, seeded and finely chopped


• 7 cups chicken broth or water


• 3/4 lb crab meat


• 1 3/4 cups coconut milk


• 1 large bunch Swiss chard or spinach (about 1 1/2 lbs) stems removed, rolled and cut into 1/8 inch strips; traditionally this is taro leaves, but where do you get those?


• salt, pepper, Tabasco sauce

Cut the bacon slices into 1/4 inch strips and crisp them in a 4-quart pot (about 10 minutes); drain them on paper towels

Cook the onion, jalapeños, garlic and (ugh) okra in 1 tbs of the bacon fat over low/medium heat for about 25 minutes, stirring every few minutes. Add the broth and simmer another 10 minutes (skim off any fat).

Add chard, crab, coconut milk and simmer for 4 minutes. Season w/salt and pepper and serve with a bottle of Tabasco sauce handy.

I'm serving this to my Sunday night fantasy roleplaying gaming group, who are--appropriately enough--involved in a campaign adventuring in the frp-world equivalent of the Caribbean

Filling out my match.com profile

Filling out my match.com profile is proving more difficult than I thought: the urge to joke is nigh overwhelming. I've always used humor as a defense mechanism (like there's another purpose?), and apparently having to describe myself in terms that are at least vaguely honest and yet sound attractive is making me feel very defensive.

My solution is to dump jokes that I can't resist here, and do my profile as seriously as I can. Thus, the following is not going to appear in my real profile:

When I was in High School, I was desperate and lonely, but now that's all changed. OK, I'm still desperate and lonely, only now you're desperate and lonely, too! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

So many ways to sabotage myself, so little time....