Month: November 2001

You can learn so much just from reading your e-mail. For instance, did you know that “it is now quick, easy and inexpensive for you to permanently achieve the bust line you’ve always wanted”? Well it is! If “S. Sanders” is no longer embarrassed to change at the gym, why should you be? And with that increased bust size, isn’t now the perfect opportunity to “get involved with the $35 billion dollar a year adult XXX industry”? Maybe then you’ll be able to afford to refinance your dream home, buy that herbal penis enlargement treatment you’ve had your eye on, and double your life insurance policy at no extra cost! What fun!

Why doesn’t anybody I know ever send me e-mail? C’mon, even dead people don’t have an excuse anymore!

Because it’s three days later and I don’t think they’re ever going to print it, here’s a short letter I wrote to Penn State’s student paper, The Daily Collegian, in response to another letter to the editor.

While I agree with Robert J. Thompson that Penn State football fans are perhaps not always on their best behavior—and while I suspect he meant to call the hostility he witnessed at the Southern Mississippi game disheartening in light of recent terrorist attacks rather than in lieu of them—I wonder why he feels the need to reference the tragic events of September 11 in his letter to the editor at all. Certainly “vulgar and lewd comments” about one’s university and team are never appreciated or acceptable, and fans of opposing teams should be made to feel welcome on the Penn State campus, but what does this have to do with terrorism? Is Mr. Thompson trying to suggest that animosity between athletic rivals will in some way “let the terrorists win”? Please. The actions of a few mean-spirited football fans are not an affront to American solidarity, and although the hostility that visiting fans might sometimes face is unfortunate and deplorable, it bears no relationship to the terrorist attacks of September 11.

I’m not entirely convinced I said what I was trying to say, but that’s what I wrote, and there you have it. I’m just a little tired of this idea that every action or event in our lives now has to be viewed as having some sort of direct relationship to the events of September 11, or that every insult we may receive is now somehow especially disheartening in light of recent events.

I think maybe I broke my watch. It fell into the tub last night when I fell asleep, and it sat there underwater for at least a few minutes until I woke up and noticed it wasn’t where I had left it. On the front it says “water resist 50M,” and I’m sure my bathtub isn’t that deep, but there’s condensation now on the inside face, and I can’t read the time beneath it. Oh well. The band was beginning to break anyway.

At lunch, because I had a little time to kill (but mostly just because I wanted to), I bought a copy of Tori Amos’ new album, Strange Little Girls. I especially like her cover of “I Don’t Like Mondays” by the Boomtown Rats.

And finally…well, just because you might not have read this elsewhere, gentle reader: Wil Wheaton, known far and wide as the ever-annoying Wesley Crusher, will reprise the role in the next Star Trek movie. How d’ya like them apples?

If you’d like, you can comment again. I have to assume there’s somebody out there. Reblogger didn’t work, or it worked only intermittently, and I got a little tired of it to be honest. Comments were lost, internal server errors kept showing up, and, more importantly, there was never any feedback or warning when these things might happen. Even when I e-mailed to ask for feedback. I understand that it’s free and somebody’s hobby, but if it doesn’t work, what really is the point? Blogger itself works marvelously most of the time, but then it too fails miserably in some strange way, stops working, won’t load, won’t always do what I want or need it to do. But I apparently can’t run Perl on my account (not without paying more money), so an alternative like Greymatter is out. I probably wasn’t smart enough to figure it out anyway. That’s okay. When Blogger works, I really do like it.

So anyway. It’s Wednesday. How’d that happen? Last night, because I’ve given up on Kal-El’s Creek, I watched the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (thank you again, amish!). I am such a geek for saying it, I know, but I am in awe of Joss Whedon. The man’s storytelling abilities continue to amaze me, and that he has never won an Emmy is, quite frankly, a crime. This wasn’t just a silly, throw-away episode, even if the songs and dance numbers were cute and clever. There were revelations, developments, and I realized that, fundamentally, each of these characters is now alone. They are part of a group, but that group’s dynamic has changed (perhaps irrevocably), and they are, each one of them, alone. As Stephanie Zacharek writes in Salon, it “was just a little more than an hour’s worth of television, but its gently layered tones suggest something infinitely more complicated than either your standard contemporary musical or your standard contemporary TV episode. It’s an all-singing, all-dancing full-moon fever dream. Now that’s entertainment.”

In other news, today is Claude Monet’s birthday, which I know only because Google told me with their spiffy new holiday logo. Apparently (and I only know this because somebody at Metafilter told me so), Google keeps a cache of these special logos for their users’ amusement. Clever, personal touches like this are part of the reason I like the search engine so much. But, alas, it’s not all happy days and sunshine over at Metafilter. Civil liberties are threatened in England, as they continue to all but disappear in the United States, while “Big Tobacco” buys the rights to anti-cancer drug treatments. And now I’ve got to contend with this, which seems to suggest that our war with Afghanistan was planned well in advance of September 11. Great. It’s like the Reichstag all over again.

Here are some more links along the same troubling lines, sent to me through e-mail:

It’s Tuesday, and…well at least the boss is out of town for a couple of weeks. I spent most of the weekend in Maryland, visiting my sister with my parents, and while I wish I had photographs–Baltimore’s inner harbor is especially nice on a sunny afternoon–some things, alas, are just not meant to be. My digital camera has been acting hinky lately anyway, so maybe it’s for the best. Reblogger is also acting kind of oddly lately. Of course, I don’t delude myself that their are thousands of you out there desperately trying to comment, but I still would like to find a workable solution. Greymatter looks pretty nice–better archives, built-in searching, comment posting–but I’m not sure I’m smart enough to figure it out, and it would mean moving my weblog away from Blogger. We shall see. In the mean time, if you’re reading and want to comment, why not send me some e-mail?