Month: November 2001

Oh the places you’ll go… Once again, where I’ve been today:

The Spam-L FAQ: Blocking Spam

Believe it or not, I’m tired of receiving offers for home refinancing and hair loss programs (see below). I continue to filter them into my trash, but they keep coming back. Bear in mind, if you’re the one sending this stuff to me, I am not amused.

Ftrain.com

I’m on the update list. He added a photograph. So I went and looked. It’s very red.

Phobias at UselessKnowledge.com

I followed a link from Mighty Girl. Did you know: hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is a fear of long words. Kind of ironic that, don’t you think?

annotated: bec links

A weblog. There’s a link to me. What can I say? I check my logs.

How Dare They?

Sometimes, I like to imagine we live in a democracy where everyone’s voice counts and government is not in the hands of the inept and the money-hungry. And then I follow links from Alternet.org and the dream starts to fade.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail: Scene 3, “Constitutional Peasant”

I was translating it into Russian and then back again. It’s probably best you don’t concern yourself why. The results, although amusing, were not what I would call drop down dead hillarious. “I’m thirty-seven, I’m not old!” became “I thirty-seeds, I not age!”

The Most Awful Poetry in the Galaxy

Douglas Adams died too young. Yesterday’s e-mail discussion about “Jabberwocky” led, somehow, to a defense of Vogon poetry. It’s really not that bad once you get used to it. Here, let me recite some for you. Oh frettled gruntbuggly…

Rhymezone Semantic Rhyming Dictionary

Every year, my fellow cappers and I like to change our handles in recognition of the holidays. For instance, at Halloween, I went from UnReality to UnDeadality, and in the spring I may change again briefly to EasterBunReality. It’s silly, but it’s become something of a tradition. And it is next to impossible to find a Thanksgiving related word or phrase to rhyme with UnReality. Which, yeah, is what I was doing.

Liquid Pong

Even if I almost never win, I’m hooked. Just what I need–even more games to distract me from the work I don’t want to do. The Ping Pong is kind of neat, too.

Travels With the Snow Queen

An amazing excerpt from a short story by Kelly Link, found via Boing Boing because I didn’t follow the link when I saw it this morning at Salon. I now have to go buy her story collection, Stranger Things Happen, the first chance I get.

I have just been offered, for at least the third time via e-mail “the first drug-free ‘total attack’ program that aggressively combats hair loss internally and externally.” Internal hair loss? I don’t even want to think about it. I seem, unfortunately enough, to be getting a lot of spam e-mail lately, and though I keep hoping some of it will be worth sharing here for a laugh, most of it never is.

Let’s review some of the places I’ve been today.

Planet Ketchup

I followed a link from Metafilter. I do that sometimes. I had been led to believe that Henry John Heinz had inadvertently invented ketchup while trying to reproduce chutney, but both Planet Ketchup and the Heinz website offer decidedly different versions of what happened. Honestly, it’s bottled tomato paste, and I can’t really bring myself to care.

PROMT’s Online Translator

I was trying to see if the phrase “struck dumb”, when run through an English-to-Russian translator and back, really does yield the phrase “beaten senseless”. Apparently I was lied to again.

The Academy of American Poets: Emily Dickinson

Via e-mail, someone suggested that you can sing Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” to the tune of “Amazing Grace”. I replied that I had been told (perhaps once again erroneously) that you can sing any Emily Dickinson poem to “The Yellow Rose of Texas”. This is primarily why I have never bothered to learn the music to “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” I like Emily Dickinson. I have the feeling that would ruin her for me.

The hills are alive with the sound of…vampire slaying!

I didn’t watch last night’s episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (it was taped for me by a very nice person), but I was naturally intrigued by this Salon article. I like what author Stephanie Zacharek writes:

Unlike “The Practice” or “The West Wing,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” isn’t a show made by a guy who’s working overtime to show us how much drama there is in the prosaic; it’s made by a guy who understands that when you’re living high drama, you long for the prosaic. What Buffy Sommers wouldn’t give to be a presidential aide or a lawyer arguing a malpractice case! Instead, in a setup that’s formally classical despite the fact that the characters wear the latest fashions and live in Southern California, she’s destined to slay demons and vampires for the rest of her days — and possibly beyond.

Jabberwocky Variations

Just making sure I really do have it memorized. All mimsy were the borogroves.

Top Ten X-Files Episodes

Looking for a specific quote: “I didn’t spend all those years playing Dungeons and Dragons without learning a little something about courage.”

Medieval Themes and Topics: Some Interesting and Essential Stuff

A brief line in that Buffy article about melancholy as one of the four humours led me to wonder what the other three were. I’m an inquisitive sort sometimes.

Are You a Blogaholic?

Another one of those links from Metafilter. I am told that I am “a casual weblogger. You only blog when you have nothing better to do, which is not very often. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if you’d post a little more often, you’d make your readers very happy.” Do I have readers?

I understand that most of my visitors are here by accident (I probably need a disclaimer somewhere to ward off people looking for Unreality the gaming system), but if you’re interested, more photographs from this year’s Homecoming parade have been posted to the Penn State Monty Python Society website. I am in none but this photograph, since I took all the others.

I know I risk revealing my true geek colors by saying this, but I’m genuinely bummed out by the news that the Sci-Fi Channel is apparently cancelling The Invisible Man. I don’t get the Sci-Fi Channel but I’ve been able to watch it for awhile now in syndication, and it’s quickly become one of my favorite shows. Silly, I know, but then I guess so am I. Ironically, the Sci-Fi Channel will pick up future episodes of Stargate SG1, another favorite of mine which (and here’s the irony) comes on right after The Invisible Man (every Sunday night at 2 am). At least I’ve been able to see Buffy the Vampire Slayer (hands down still my favorite show on television) thanks to fellow capper lil_amish_boy, who has been sending me tapes and asks only that I not repay her in scrapple.