Date: 31 Jul 2020 19:17 Subject: PSA: I'm not tracking you Security: Public

I've turned off the so-called Your Guests feature; I'll never know you've been here unless you choose to leave a comment.

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Date: 25 Nov 2009 06:55 Subject: Damn Midwestern face Security: Public

Things having been what they is, I needed a break. I signed up for the mobile pedicure van that shows up at work every other week -- you may all pause to glare at the screen before moving on.  I said in the appointment that I was really stressed and wanted a chance to chill out.

What I got was information on all the following:

• The proprietress's unhappiness with her nail technician, whom she had just fired the previous day for failing to pay her station rent, including repeated enumerations of the technician's vices.
• The proprietress's having been up until 3 AM at the hospital with her personal assistant, who had broken a clavicle.
• How much time the previous appointment, posing for photographs to promote the business, had consumed.
• Life histories for all three of the proprietress's dogs, past and current, including tragic deaths.
• The proprietress's infertility and subsequent divorce, twenty years ago.
• The proprietress's having raised her nieces after her sister died young.
• What the proprietress said to her mother on the latter's deathbed.

This flow of information continued after I explained that because we were running late, I needed to begin reading a work-related book.  At least once she said something requiring an answer, then popped up "But you're supposed to be reading, so I won't bother you!"  My toes are moderately shiny, but the proprietress is nowhere near as good at nails as her technician.  Sigh.

I need to hire a New Yorker to give me lessons in I Don't Talk To Anybody face.

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Date: 24 Nov 2009 16:48 Subject: Sir John Keegan isn't paying attention. Security: Public

In a linkspam, Brad DeLong destroys John Keegan's recent work. I had read the recent New York Times review that proved Keegan hadn't done his research on the Civil War -- . “The Ohio and its big tributaries, the Cumberland and the Tennessee form a line of moats protecting the central Upper South, while the Mississippi, with which they connect, denies the Union any hope of penetration.” Um.... ever heard of a boat?

It turns out, however, that Keegan is equally unreliable on the location of Bulgaria and that, furthermore, he testified for David Irving in the latter's libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt, Lipstadt having called Irving a Holocaust denier.

Keegan: "[Irving] has, in short, many of the qualities of the most creative historians. He is certainly never dull. Prof. Lipstadt, by contrast, seems as dull as only the self-righteously politically correct can be. Few other historians had ever heard of her before this case. Most will not want to hear from her again. Mr. Irving, if he will only learn from this case, has much that is interesting to tell us."

Sigh.

The Times review I linked to is riveting, if you, like me, enjoy watching one scholar cut another to shreds.

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Date: 24 Nov 2009 06:52 Subject: Not just falling but leaping off the pedestal Security: Public Mood: tired Tags: rants

In the space of a week, RWA has moved from taking the genuinely risky and courageous step of confronting Harlequin, a major RWA National supporter, to ... well, let me quote.

That was sent to Jane Litte of Dear Author. Dear Author is one of the most visible and successful romance-review blogs. As a review blog, it posts both positive and very negative reviews. Dear Author's "romfail" thread on Twitter consists of one-line snippets from novels the authors found particularly amusing,. Sample #romfail posts:

• "Emmy flung back her head, rubbing her breasts on his chest, jouncing vigorously on his lap as her channel rippled".
•  "Their bodies were still joined since she refused to release his cock from her ferociously gripping cunt".  
• "after masturbation & showering, Quentin exits the bathroom to find an angry dark skinned young man delivering Kamaria's summons".  "everyone is no color or dark skinned. Because dark skin apparently is an abnormality worth mentioning" 

Dear Author has also criticized RWA's reluctance to acknowledge E-publishing.

Let's get this out of the way. Organizations have the right to choose their members, blah blah blah. RWA has the right to do any damn thing it wants to about membership qualifications.  However, RWA looks profoundly petty by throwing out a well-known critic because she criticized both romances and the organization itself. That's what critics do.  An organization that can't stand criticism is showing itself to be weak.

RWA is infamous for "the cult of Nice".  Early in my membership I was warned by a respected author never to speak ill of a member's book in public, because memories were long.   A critic, by definition, cannot be Nice;  Q.E.D.  It's the inverse of Snacky's Law; RWA is terrorized by those Nice GIrls From High School, where "nice" means "we don't say things like that here."

Dear Stephen Sondheim, always with the mot juste.

You're so nice.
All so nice.
You're not good, you're not bad,
You're just nice.
I'm not good, I'm not nice,
I'm just right. This entry was originally posted at http://jonquil.dreamwidth.org/901789.html. comment(s) on that entry.

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Date: 23 Nov 2009 10:38 Subject: I'm going to WisCon! Security: Public Mood: squeeeeeee

I have ordered my membership and made a Concourse reservation.  See you there!

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Date: 23 Nov 2009 06:44 Subject: Gleee! Security: Public Mood: informed Tags: top hat

 A friend (edit: ) linked me to The Black Tie Guide, which is full of pleasing minutiae of men's evening wear, written in a style that reminds me of Tim Gunn.  I'm not great on men's dress etiquette -- Emily Post et al., really prefer to lay down the law to women -- so it's enlightening.  Some morsels  I loved:

•  Strict social etiquette dictates a choice [of boutonniere] from only four “correct” flowers:  a blue cornflower, a red or white carnation or a gardenia.   Cornflower?  Who knew?  I'll never see a man wearing a gardenia in this country, at least unless he's gender-bending.
• Truly classic cufflinks are connected with links or a chain (thus the name) and are decorated on either end in order to dress both sides of the shirt cuff.  If choosing common single-sided cufflinks instead, opt for a finished backing to provide at least some decoration for the opposite cuff.The exposed working hardware of most hinged backings is incongruous with formal cuffs.
•  Although there is no specific etiquette regarding the number of miniature medals that can be worn, it would be prudent to limit yourself to a maximum of six.  Any more and you may be mistaken for a head of state.  Heee!

Edited to correct link.
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Date: 22 Nov 2009 14:17 Subject: A friendly note to humanity Security: Public Mood: grumpy Tags: rants

(I have a feeling that I've ranted this rant before.   I nonetheless feel that it is worth ranting again.)

Weight loss can be caused by "willpower", diet, and exercise.  It can also be caused by ill health, both physical and mental; medication reactions; personal stress; and other Bad Things.  

When you compliment somebody on weight loss, and especially when you praise her willpower, you may in fact be reminding that person of recent misfortunes, and, if you persist, forcing her to reveal those misfortunes in order to get you to shut up. 

When you equate weight loss with virtue, you are implicitly equating weight gain with vice.   The person you are complimenting on his virtue may be aware that the weight loss is temporary, and wondering if, when it reverses, you will be silently criticizing his lack of "willpower".

When it comes to weight loss, why not just say "You look GREAT!"  This is nearly always welcome.   Next, if the person has, in, fact, worked hard to lose weight/increase fitness, she is free to volunteer, "Thank you, I've lost 20 pounds!"
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Date: 22 Nov 2009 08:35 Subject: Okay, this is just NOT FAIR Security: Public

 For the last few weeks I've been having pains in the ball joints just below both big toes.  I will, of course, be going to a doctor for a diagnosis, but I very much fear that this is the bunions that have plagued my mother.  (Another fun possibility is the gout that plagues my husband.)

In the course of my life, with the exception of my disastrous six-month telecommute to an investment bank* during the tail of the dot-com boom, I have worn high heels on the average of once every six months.

*Hint:  Yes, they were absolutely as corrupt as you think they were.  I was told in so many words that "The Chinese wall [between research and the investment bankers] is just a myth."
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Date: 21 Nov 2009 17:34 Subject: Geektalk Security: Public

• Okay, I replaced the hard drive and the power supply on the 2002 Tivo and it's just dead. It was a good 7 years, little Tivo. Thanks
• Ebay is biting the wax tadpole. Ever since I joined a software service firm my first reaction to a really juicy outage has been, "Oh, thank God it isn't us." Robust is hard, y'know?
• I am so grateful that nobody in my profession is expected to carry a pager.  I would hate to be the person responsible for figuring out why $MAJOR REVENUE SOURCE$ has been down for 45 minutes. 
• I ♥ BART.  People who bathe in Ben-Gay and then ride, however, should get migraines.
• I also ♥ my Droid.  Mostly.  Except when it annoys me.  Overall, though, smartphones are love.

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Date: 20 Nov 2009 07:09 Subject: Holy cow Security: Public

 I'm coming late to the quarrel; I'm sure half my flist have commented by now.

For those of you who don't follow the publishing world, Harlequin just cast around for a new source of income and found it.  Harlequin has opened a vanity press, originally to be called "Harlequin Horizons".  Whenever somebody is rejected from Harlequin, Harlequin will send the would-be author a long letter encouraging him or her to pay to have the book published.  This letter includes such lies as that the bound copy of their vanity publication would be just what should be sent to a would-be agent.  Jackie Kessler has a fine, fine, rundown (alas, on an orange background) of everything that's wrong with Harlequin's offer.  

There was, justifiably, an uproar:  Yog's Law: "Money flows toward the writer."    Harlequin, offended, said, "What's the matter, you don't believe in self-publishing?"

Self-publishing with Lulu and the like is completely legitimate because nobody is promising best-seller status.  With Lulu, you plunk down your money for the prepress setup, you buy as many of Lulu's services as you find appropriate (you're welcome to design your own cover and interior layout, to provide your own ISBN, and so on), and you set the price and royalties for the final book.  You're paying Lulu to facilitate your setting up a tiny publishing business.  

With Harlequin, you pay truly outrageous prices (compare Lulu, which offers both packages and unbundled options) for basic industry services, and then Harlequin demands half of the net.  For what?  For what service?   Harlequin hasn't invested a clipped penny in the book, but they're demanding half the net for the use of their names, in perpetuity.

Last night RWA, SFWA, and MWA laid the hammer down: no publication by any branch of Harlequin will be considered a qualification to join those organizations, and Harlequin will be listed in their records as a vanity press.  Harlequin has backed off using their name on the vanity press, and  is whining that these organizations just don't get the brave new world of self-publishing.  In fact, Harlequin just sold  their reputation, and are now complaining that its value has diminished.
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Date: 18 Nov 2009 09:04 Subject: THIS CAN STOP NOW Security: Public Mood: exhausted Music: Warren Zevon, your sh*t's f*cked up

It's the day after a severe migraine;  all I did yesterday was sleep, take the cat to the vet, and take the cat back from the vet.  I feel like death on a stick, with no hope of resurrection.

The phone rang just as I was pulling into work.  The test reports came back on the kitten.  He has giardia.  Which is contagious to humans.  (I've been hand-washing after touching litter, but now I need to make sure I hand-wash after petting the cat, too.)  Also I need to pick up more drugs to treat that.

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Date: 18 Nov 2009 07:47 Subject: Question Security: Public

This week's Newsweek has an unfavorable cover story on Sarah Palin. The cover picture was taken in a shoot she gave to Runner's World. It shows her in a cheesecake leg pose, leaning up against a draped American flag, holding two Blackberries.

Palin is complaining that the Newsweek cover is out of context, that she posed for Runner's World in the context of promoting fitness, and that reusing the picture for a political piece is sexist.

(P.S. The cat is fine. The diarrhea was probably a reaction to the ringworm med, which has worked so well he doesn't need it any more. Furthermore, the biopsy results showed that the thing in his nose was an enormous polyp, but the thing in his ear was granulation tissue; this means he won't need ear surgery. Yay! The only dark spot is that he needs his ringworm baths even more now that he's off the internal med; I've been skimping for two weeks on account of my own health.) This entry was originally posted at http://jonquil.dreamwidth.org/899123.html. comment(s) on that entry.

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Date: 15 Nov 2009 17:16 Subject: Rode hard and put away wet Security: Public Mood: acquisitive

I was up in the City yesterday, so I headed across to Lacis. Lacis is heroin for people interested in historic needlecrafts. If you can do it with any form of string, Lacis has the string, the books, and the specialized tools, as well as salespeople who know how to use them. A saleswoman had an informed ten-minute discussion with me about the best hand needles for use in home handsewing. (We agreed on size 8 embroidery needles. I like embroidery needles because the large eyes are easy to thread. She likes them because they aren't too long and because they tend to push aside the cloth threads rather than piercing through them.) I allowed myself to go hog-wild. Tatting shuttles of bone, plastic, and silverplate (I'm trying to find a small one that doesn't fang me with its point), a silverplate metal ball for holding the thread and keeping it from tangling or being pounced on, a small wooden needlecase that I delude myself I shall decorate, a small porcelain head and hands I delude myself I shall make into a closet sachet, a book on lace as used in costume, the catalog for a lace exhibition, and a reproduction of the patent clothing square (think L-square, but with arm and bust curves) required by the Women's Institute pattern-drafting series the originals of which I own. Glee! Ti-ra-la-la-i-tu! I gloat!

But that wasn't the highlight. The highlight was that Mr. Jules Kliot, co-founder of the store with his late wife Kathe, was giving tours of the Lacis bobbin lace collection. (In 2004, Lacis was re-incorporated as a textile museum; the retail store is now the museum store, and its proceeds go to support the museum.)   If you're in Berkeley on a weekend, you must go. Mr. Kliot loves lace, tells the story of it with informed passion, and has an enormous collection that includes the "priceless Mechlin" you read about so much in historical novels; one piece he has, a "lappet" (lace for draping across the hair), would have taken 24 years to make. The collection room is carefully set up with hand magnifiers so that you can inspect individual pieces, as well as a microscope for examining fine detail. If you're into the technology and sociology of upper-class European clothing it's a must-visit. You can make Mr. Kliot very happy if you share his enthusiasm even a little.

Then, drained, to the BART station.  A man came up to me and said "If you're a lady, you must be interested in fine perfume."  I said, in utter exhaustion, "PLEASE leave me alone."  He sat down at the other side of the bench and grumbled, loudly, about how rude I was.  I sat eyes ahead.    He did warn me when I headed to the train without my patent clothing square, which is 3 feet high, but it was still a very unpleasant encounter.   I need to work on my LEAVE ME ALONE glare, thus preventing such encounters.

Woke up this morning determined to do one thing, replace the failing hard drive on our oldest (2002) TiVo, the one with the lifetime license.  In that TiVo's life, I've added a hard drive, replaced the power supply, and upgraded the fan.  Fourth time, alas, was the anti-charm; I appear to have managed to brick it.  Ah, well.  We'll have to re-up on a lifetime membership for another machine, and hope TiVo doesn't go bankrupt.  

During the TiVo frustration, I took time out to install a smart power strip in the living room; now the video games'  and second DVD player's wallwarts drain power only when the TV itself is turned on.  That's something.  

I'm batting .500 for the day, but I'll give it a solid .750 for the weekend.
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Date: 15 Nov 2009 09:28 Subject: Diction, always diction Security: Public Mood: annoyed Music: Sir Roger de Coverley Tags: rants, reviews

I admit that I'm an odd reader; I love the English 19th-century novel, from high to unbelievably low (Ouida); I also love British social history. This makes me likely to pick flaws that the ordinary romance reader may miss.

Or maybe not. Regency readers, after all, are saturated in the prose of Georgette Heyer. Hers is an invented prose, but founded on scrupulously-researched period sources. It is inimitable, but can serve as a model. There is also, slightly earlier, Jane Austen, with which we have been pounded over the head for twenty years. (I remember when liking Austen and Mozart wasn't a cliché.) You would think, then, that the bar for a Regency would be fairly high.

Which brings me to C.S. Harris's What Angels Fear, which I bought on the recommendation of a friend. It's the first of yet another Regency detective series; it's a thriller in which the hero, a psychically wounded alpha male with yellow eyes who can see in the dark -- I say no more -- must defend himself from the accusation of hideous crimes. I cracked the book open on BART, coming home from an exhausting but exhilarating visit to Lacis.

p.1 "It was such a foul, creeping thing, the yellow fog of London." The infamous late-century London pea-souper was caused by coal fires everywhere. The London population in 1887, the publication year of A Study In Scarlet, was between 4 and 5 million. The London population in 1811, when the book is set, was 1,303,564. In 1811 the pea-souper was not yet notorious. That's a nit, the sort of thing that most people wouldn't notice (and that I might be getting wrong; I await the lash of oursin, madrobins, and sartorias.)

p.2 "She hadn't expected to be so edgy." "Edgy" sounded weirdly modern to me; when I looked it up, "edgy" in the sense of "on edge", was first attested in 1837.

p.5 "Maybe he won't show", said Sir Christopher. "Maybe" is a classic Americanism, so much so that it's called out for comedy in late 19th century plays and novels; in any case, "Perhaps" is the more formal word, and the speaker is upper-class.. And "won't show" seems suspicious to me; "show up" is from 1888.

p.7 "Shut up about it when Talbot threatened to call him out -- for naming Talbot a liar." "Shut up", first recorded 1840.

p. 16 "But it seemed somehow disrespectful, a violation of that poor girl lying there against the wall, to be tromping heedlessly through what had once been her lifeblood." Tromp, 1892, variant of tramp; mainly Amer.Eng.

Trust me on this; there are clangers throughout the text. But that's not all; the characters' attitudes are weirdly modern, and there are some physical impossibilities. "The inescapable tang of semen still hung in the air, mingling with the heavy metallic odor of blood and the pious sweetness of incense and beeswax." Hands up everybody who could smell semen at a bloody murder scene in a church. (No, the speaker isn't our yellow-eyed hero, who also has superhuman powers of scent.)

On p. 30 we have this, from a noble speaker who is said to be "the power behind the Throne."

"You're a sophisticated man, Sir Henry. Surely I've no need to explain to you what it means, to have the son of a prominent peer -- a member of the government, for God's sake -- implicated in such a crime. If we are seen to hesitate" -- he swept one well-tailored arm in an expansive gesture toward the streets -- "if the crowds out there believe that being born to a position of privilege is enough to allow an Englishman to get away with rape and murder, and sacrilege --" Jarvis broke off, his arm falling back to his side, his voice dropping to a deep, solemn hush. "I was in Paris, you know, in 1789. I'll never forget it. The sight of blood running in the gutters. Of men's severed heads, stuck on pikes. Of gentlewomen snatched from their carriages and torn limb from limb by the howling mobs." He paused, his gaze sharpening suddenly on Lovejoy's face. "Is that what you want to see here, in London?"

That's not the way it worked. The nobility did not, in 1811, make decisions based on what would please the mob, not when it was a choice between their own class and the vulgar sort. The crime would have been hushed up from the moment it was discovered; the constable would have been told to keep his mouth shut if he valued his position, the investigation quietly quashed. If by some chance the story did get out, the worst that would have happened would have been that the suspected murderer's influential father would have been told in no uncertain terms to get the criminal out of the country, by force if necessary. The trial of an upper-class man for a violent crime would have been seen as far more damaging than his speedy transfer beyond the reach of the law. Earl Ferrers, to whom the text refers, was notoriously insane, and committed his crime in his own home in the presence of witnesses. In the case on which this book turns the only link between the hero and the victim is a monogrammed gun left at the murder scene, a difficult basis for a conviction now and an impossible one in 1811. The hero need only claim theft and the entire case would have collapsed.

Sigh. I think I'll go reread Daughter of the Game.



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Date: 13 Nov 2009 07:55 Subject: Decisions for the weekend Security: Public Mood: dilemmish

1. AMC remake of The Prisoner.  A terrible idea on so many, many levels.  It's an icon for a reason.
2. But Ian McKellen!
3. As the same Number Six every day.  Wrong Wrong Wrong.
4. Three-part miniseries with conclusion.  See above.  Part of the point is that everybody is being mindfucked, most definitely including the viewer.
5. Ian McKellen!

Maybe I can watch this in the  "I know this is going to be a bad movie, but Sam Neill and swordfights!"  spirit I brought to the most recent Three Musketeers remake.

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Date: 11 Nov 2009 18:23 Subject: Your mama ought to whap you upside the head with a skillet Security: Public Music: The battle hymn of the republic (go with me here) Tags: rants

The SF Chronicle kept giving me ads for "Dollie Marie's Fine Southern Dining", so I clicked to the menu.

Oy-everloving-vey.

Let's run some quick credentials here. My mother is a Texas native; my father was born in Missouri but mostly grew up in Texas. I grew up eating beans and skillet cornbread, fried chicken, stewed tomatoes, and trying hard to avoid collards. My husband's family is Georgian. He grew up eating the same. He likes grits. Need I say more? We lived in Charlotte, North Carolina for seven years. I have informed opinions on why Georgia barbecue is fundamentally better than North or South Carolina (mustard sauce! The heresy!), and on why Texas is trying admirably but has failed utterly to grasp the gospel that is pork.

I know from Southern food. I won't claim to know the whole South -- nobody can -- but I know what I learned from my family, from being a disconsolate Yankee in the Bible Belt, and from reading the kind of spiral-bound cookbooks the church ladies print up to make money. These people, whoever they are, got their menu items from a magazine article, not from down home experience. A Southerner could certainly cook any of the dishes on the menu, but that doesn't make them Southern; just because the cat had kittens in the oven don't make 'em biscuits*. 

Here are the few items I could read before my eyes became veiled with tears.

Ruby Mae's Pan Roasted Crab Cake
with vanilla bean aioli and a butternut squash and pecan salad with a spicy tomato mushroom sauce

Stop right there, missy. Thing about Southern cooking? It is not fussy. The only Southern dish I've ever seen that combined that many unrelated ingredients was a Jell-O salad. Crab cakes are an American classic. Take crab. Mix with breadcrumbs, seasonings (Old Bay should be in the mix), and mayonnaise to bind. Fry. Die happy.

I'm good with aioli with crab cakes. I'm good with a salad alongside crabcakes. These are flourishes that don't mess with the essential dish. But vanilla bean aioli? Butternut squash and pecan salad AND A SPICY TOMATO MUSHROOM SAUCE? Somebody hates the taste of food and isn't afraid to admit it. (edit: The tomato sauce doesn't belong to this dish. Faked out by copy-paste.)

New Orleans Style BBQ Shrimp & Grits Aunt Helen Jean's gulf shrimp simmered in a spicy herbal butter sauce over grits 
That's like saying "Seville-style bangers and mash." Shrimp and grits is a classic LowCountry South Carolina dish; it has nothing to do with New Orleans, Louisiana. I have no idea what the word "BBQ" is doing in this menu item; proper shrimp and grits is sauteed, as specified in the next line.

Aunt Ida Mae's Boudin Blanc Triangle creamy filling of smoked chicken, brown rice, bacon, vegetables and spices, coated with panko bread crumbs, then pan-fried golden and finished with a hot link gravy and grilled garlic croutons.

Boudin blanc is a Louisiana specialty. It's a pork-and-rice sausage, served in a crackling natural skin. How you get this mess from that name, I do not know. I can only assume that at this point the chef was well into his sixth bottle of Everkleer and had begun tearing pages out of Paul Prudhomme at random, and that we  narrowly escaped a pecan pie made of ahi tuna. What the hell is a "hot link gravy"? I'm guessing somebody once heard of sausage gravy but never ate any.

Lester Jenkins' Orange Duck & Black Penne Pappardelle  fresh black pepper pappardelle pasta and duck confit, tossed in a spiced orange marmalade sauce with orange segments, walnuts and chives

We don't eat pappardelle in Muskogee. Trust me on this. Duck a l'orange and duck confit are French. Pappardelle are Italian. None of them made it into traditional cooking south of the Mason-Dixon line.  And, oh, God, does that ensemble sound vile.

Big Mama Nancy's Blackened Catfish Filet.  on a bed of crawfish risotto, sauteed spinach, and gumbo pot-licker.
"Gumbo pot-licker"?  "Gumbo" is a dish all to itself.  "Pot-likker" or "pot-liquor" (your call) is what's left over when you stew greens.   "Gumbo pot-licker" is the dog you're using to clean the saucepans.

These people deserve to have Edna Lewis rise from her grave and pee in every single one of their stewpots.

* (Which proverb is actually from New Hampshire, but so it goes.)
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Date: 09 Nov 2009 15:16 Subject: World-shaking question Security: Public

My kitten does not have a cat tree.  My kitten likes to look down on things.   I don't have the spoons necessary to build a cat tree, and in any case I do not want to teach the kitten that sometimes it is okay to claw carpet.  http://www.moderncat.net/ has many cat towers that are exquisite but ridiculously pricey.   This mini-cat tower is cheap.  http://caboodlecats.com/

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Date: 08 Nov 2009 08:56 Subject: Flotsam Security: Public Mood: very very tired

• I have washed up on the shores of a three-day migraine and will be moving very carefully today lest it return.
• I love it when an annoyed reviewer lets his or her inner wordsmith out to play. The NYT dislikes the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport.

  Many Bugatti buyers surely have access to racetracks, yet I’m equally sure that 90-some percent of them won’t have nearly enough driving talent to exercise this car. Mostly, I picture Euro-poseurs needing valet assistance to back up the Bugatti in Monaco, while jaws drop and the owner barks orders into his diamond-encrusted cellphone. When your car makes a Lamborghini seem tasteful, there’s a problem.

• The kitten spent all day yesterday sleeping with and/or on top of me, thus paying for his keep.  
• The rigged choice of the final three of this season's Project Runway was bad enough, but it is indefensible that [deleted] didn't win the episode challenge.  You could tell that Tim knew s/he was doomed in the critique: "I don't know what the judges will think, but ..."  Oh, yes, you did, Tim.
• I need something simple and brainless to do today.  Sewing requires brains and patience,  I never like watching TV when I'm tired, and Bujold is failing to satisfy.  I  can't explain why Diplomatic Immunity never hit my narrative kinks, but it didn't.  Perhaps it's because the antagonist was offscreen and unintelligible throughout.

Postscripts:

• Friday night on NPR, the reporter mentioned that roughly (she had all the numbers, I don't) 25% of Russians believed that the Russians had put up the Berlin Wall.  The remainder believed that the Americans had done it, the Germans had done it themselves, or some combination of the true.  I am being reminded more and more how labile "truth" is; what people need to believe (see: the birther stories) is far more powerful than any recitation of fact.  This should not be news to me.
• I need to give the cat another sulfur bath today.  Ugh.

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Date: 07 Nov 2009 10:15 Subject: Just .... arrrrgh. Security: Public

My school district needs to cut $1.5 million from the budget this year. $900,000 of that comes from "an accounting error". Think about that.

http://smdailyjournal.com/article_preview.php?id=119273

Wouldn't you think that *somebody* might have been suspicious of a miraculous decrease in special ed costs, given that special ed is both expensive and needed by more and more students?

Sigh.

(Why, yes, I am stuck in bed Saturday morning with a migraine, why do you ask?)


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Date: 07 Nov 2009 07:57 Subject: Stuff I learned on Project Runway this season Security: Public

• Guys with greasy hair covered in headwraps are hot.  Everybody tells me so.
• Professionals, including fashion design students,  ALWAYS send out their prototypes to be done on buttonholing machines.  (This came from comments at Project Rungay.  God I love Project Rungay.)  Home sewers, if you consider buttonholes a nightmare?  You're right.)
• I thought the show was all about Tim Gunn.  Actually, it's all about the trio of Kors, Garcia, and Gunn.  Fortunately, the bitchy members of the triumvirate will be back next season, as will New York City.
• Christopher has Polaroids of Heidi shopping at Wal-Mart.  Think about it.  You know it makes sense.  Tim Gunn is nodding his head.
• "I don't know anything about fashion" is a choice, not destiny.  There are books.  There's the Internet.  If you're going to self-educate, more power to you.  Use the resources that are available to you in the smallest of small towns.  So you didn't get to go to design school?  That's a loss and a wrench.  It doesn't release you from the responsibility of learning about things outside your own head.  When I know more about construction than one of the designers?  That's bad.
• If you can buy 30 yards for $300?  Trust me, baby, it's not outerwear.
• Bitchy is not required for talent, is not a substitute for talent, but can certainly accompany talent.
• I miss Merlin.  And Santino.  And all the other people I hated who had flair and imagination and the ability to go big and fail big.
• I miss Uli.  And Korto. And all the nice people who had talent and quietly went their own way to demonstrate it.
• When the trailer for Models Of The Runway starts "You've seen them walk..." but does not continue "But you've never seen them talk", there is a reason.  Models don't have a lot to do in between their trips down the runway.  They also don't have a lot in the way of an inner life..  Girls Hang Around is not a concept for a stellar show.    Models highlights the fundamental problem -- the models have absolutely no control.  A great model paired with a terrible designer is dead.    PR designers prefer to learn the quirks of one model's body and then stick with her to avoid wasting time on remeasurement.
• Next year, back to New York City.  HURRAY!  Please cast a set of people who have style by the yard, who have a vision, and who, most of all, can produce more than one outfit.

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