( KITTEH! )

This entry was originally posted at http://mysticpenguin.dreamwidth.org/358409.html

I have this thing I do sometimes where I'll look at the dog and go, "c'mere, kitty!... wait, no, you're Grace. C'mere, puppy!" even though I know full well I'm looking at a dog.

Apparently I'd been doing the same thing with Josh and Andy's wedding plans, because they got married on Tuesday. Back around a month or two ago a friend of Josh's who knows southern Ontario told them basically, "Windsor's not actually that great a town; there's not much to do there but go to Detroit. There's a town called Leamington across the lake from Sandusky that'd be a lot nicer place to get married." Leamington's a much smaller, more rural town--about a tenth the size of Windsor and forty minutes east--and not so well-known in or convenient to the States, so when they decided to make arrangements for Leamington instead, they were actually able to get someone to marry them on Tuesday. And I've known for a while ago it was Tuesday. But still whenever I talk about it comes out as "Wednesday! D'oh, um, Tuesday, I mean" so that I even confused myself and ended up asking for Wednesday off at work, (which, considering I went to take a nap around eight or nine Tuesday night, woke up for a few minutes around midnight and went right back to sleep until 10:30 Wednesday, I probably needed anyway).
( long story short, we went to Canada on Monday and they got married on Tuesday and it was incredibly sweet )

This entry was originally posted at http://mysticpenguin.dreamwidth.org/355268.html

"Wednesday, Sept. 2, 1908
While the weather continues as it is—very dry throughout the entire country I will omit any reference to it till an appreciable change occurs.

We left Joe's this morning at about 7 o'clock in order to get the 9 a.m. train to Cin. According to promise, Charley took us to [Seamon?]. We arrived in Cin. at afternoon and went to Burkhardt's and met Herschel who took us to a restaurant on 6th Street for dinner and then took us to Mabley's and bought Edward a cap for 49¢. He then took him to the barber and then took us to the Ball park to see the game between the Reds and Pittsburgh's. After this we went to Guthrie's house stayed a while, and went down to the Manhattan for supper, Herschel paying for it.

Thursday, Sept. 3, 1908
Herschel went to his work this morning between 7 and 8 o'clock, but before going he went out got some milk and a coffey [sic] cake so that with the lunch I had brought from Joe's we had a pretty good breakfast. Edward and I stayed at Guthrie's till afternoon. As they were not at home I bought enough for our dinner and then took Edward and went down to the river to see it and the steamboats—took him on the [Chils] and on the wharfboat of the Island Queen and saw a great crowd go aboard bound for Coney Island [what will eventually be King's Island] and then we watched the boat pass out of sight up the river. We went from there to Burkhardt and Herschel took us to the "Zoo"--especially on Edward's account. He soon caught on to the kind of place it was and took great delight in going from place to place. In leaving the cages of guinea pigs and rabbits he said earnestly Good bye little rabbits, good bye little guinea pigs. I never saw him enjoy anything so much as the sight of the zoo."

Dang you guys, I want to go to Cincinnati in 1908.

Or at least I want his garden, because nearly every single entry in spring through fall is about all the produce this farmer-preacher planted in which plot of land he was renting, so it'd be like "blah blah wrote letters blah blah went up to the towns north of Dayton blah blah am a Mason blah planted pole beans and sweet potatoes and popcorn and cabbage and tomatoes and picked cherries and peaches Minnie [who, I'm to December 14 and I still have no idea if this is a relative or a live in maid or what; he doesn't use any last names for his family, and the people he does use full names for I can't find on ancestry.com when I get bored at work and try to find them) and her mother made peach butter then we all went to an ice cream social." And since I don't eat lunch before I go down to the archive, I'll be sitting there like "*type type type type* ....damnit, I want peach butter. And ice cream."

Failing that, I will settle for something as interesting as the harvest and visits. I'm actually nearly finished with this project; I should get the last of it today. And I guess I can't complain about people who write about the same thing every time they touch their journal--I went to Josh and Andy and Maddie's on Friday to try to teach Josh how to knit intarsia, and it was really awkward because he's apparently admitted to Andy that something did go wrong in surgery like Andy kind of suspected from how long it took ("something started bleeding and they say my blood pressure dropped pretty sharply, and I guess for a little while they really weren't sure I was going to pull through") and hadn't told Andy about it because he didn't want him to worry, and now they're fighting about whether Andy should be this upset that his fiance nearly died now that everything's okay! But now I'm to mid-December and every single entry is all about what he's preaching at which church. And it's all in teeny little cramped type. And being that the very idea of organized religion rubs me the wrong way, I really. don't. care (though the snippy little comments he makes about some of the other preachers he hears preach or the unimpressive Dayton merchants' carnival are hilarious).

But I ought to finish it today, and then I start numbering the Dayton Power and Light employee magazines and learn how to enter them in the archive database. And if nothing else I suspect that I'll sort of miss the "ohhh, well yeah!" moments when I figure out something like "the wheel" on which his...person he knows (Minnie's husband, so... brother? Son? In-law? Maid's husband? No clue), Frank, is always going places is probably a bicycle and that things like "preached from Ps. 130-7" probably mean that he preached from Ps. chapter 130, verse 7, not that he's preaching from some weird non-Euclidian gospel where he can preach Ps. 130 through 7.

ETA:
"Sunday, Dec. 20, 1908
The special [church] meetings closed to night. Taking everything into consideration—the variable weather, dark nights the last week, the devil that got into some of the members and etc.—I think the meeting was in some ways a success."

LOL WUT

This entry was originally posted at http://mysticpenguin.dreamwidth.org/353995.html

You know what that news story about the woman who pepper sprayed all those people for an XBox makes me think of?

That scene in "Casablanca" where Claude Rains, playing Captain Renault, scolds Rick for allowing gambling at his bar--"I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here! [a croupier gives him his money, saying, "Your winnings, sir."] Oh, thank you very much. Everybody out at once!"



Which is why it's pissing me off so damn much.

Because as much as all the TV news departments are treating this like it's such a shock and such a horrible thing to happen, they knew something like this was going to happen. It happens every damn year. And for all their tut-tutting now about how greedy and awful people are these days, these are the same network affiliates who saturated their airtime and newspapers who filled their advertising flyers up with WOOO BLACK FRIDAY GET READY TO GET UP BEFORE THE CRACK OF DAWN AND SHOVE SOME PUNKS ads for the last week and a half.

And this would not be a hard problem to solve: if this sales model results in people getting hurt, stop using it. You don't have to keep stupid hours and stock and advertise in such a way as to all but guarantee that you'll have fifty times more people who want Shiny Thing than you have units of Shiny Thing on hand. But no one's going to stop. This same thing is just going to happen a different way next year, and I think it'd be safe money to bet that something worse might happen next year because this thing just keeps building and building; it used to just be Black Friday but now it's Cyber Monday and Small Business Saturday and Black Friday Eve (Thanksgiving? What's that?) and all the advertising seems to have this air of businesses just licking their chops waiting for the money and the mayhem. They're purposely whipping up this spirit of FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT GREED GREED GREED MINE GIMME MINE. And if someone gets seriously hurt, they'll make statements where someone says how sorry they are about the maiming--gosh, who knew that dangling one chicken over a pit of twenty hungry, irritable gators could ever get that scary? Those darned greedy alligators!--but do they care that it happened? Hell no.

Because you know, it's cynical of me, but I think corporations want people to get hurt on Black Friday. It's not like they're out there laying pit traps in front of stores, but they're not stupid. They're purposely egging people on to behave like this. They want people to attack each other over linens and behave like rabid weasels, because it'd be tricky to pin any kind of liability on them, and when the news stations (who also kind of want this to happen, because yay ratings) spread the outrageous Black Friday outlier case across the country, they tend to mention the store it happened at, so hey, free publicity! More attention for their sales next year, when they'll make more money on their human cock fights over crap that no one actually needs. And the news will feature all their stories about how terrible people are to each other while politely ignoring the fact that it's their sponsors whipping up people into GREED GREED GREED MINE frenzies to line their pockets (if they even take it that seriously--I was listening to the weekend edition of All Things Considered while I was driving home and by the tone and the way the presenter was barely keeping from giggling, this incident where someone used the same paramilitary weapon as was shocking when police used it on OWS protesters was going to be their Wacky Story of the Day). And it's disgusting.

Renault is funny when he's wringing his hands over Rick's Cafe because of the irony and his shamelessness; he's being hypocritical and he knows it, and he doesn't give a flying damn who else knows it. Also because Claude Rains was one hell of the actor and knew not to ham the line up too much.

American news, you are no Captain Renault.

This entry was originally posted at http://mysticpenguin.dreamwidth.org/346275.html

I was at work Monday night or so, and I started reading what looked like some notes on printed Powerpoint slides, which had been left on the desk in the workroom. I don't remember exactly what they were about; mostly fiddling details about improving customer service. And I don't know the context, whether this is a change we're going to make or something someone was talking about at a staff meeting, or something from an online class, since the children's librarian there is doing her MLS online. But the one that really caught me up short was that apparently now we're to call weeding--pulling old and uncirculated books from the collection to make room for new ones--"cleansing" instead.

Which, ugh, really? No. Specifically it really annoys me because it's one of those changes that's made because someone thinks that doing our job needs to sound nicer. "Cleansing" is a word with really creepy connotations anyway, and using that instead of "weeding" is just so gooshily sentimental.
( Crabby librarian rant )

This entry was originally posted at http://mysticpenguin.dreamwidth.org/345091.html

Episcopal Church Split on Gay Marriage

This just pisses me off so much. New York state recognizes same-sex marriage, but only about a third of the Episcopal churches will give a same-sex couple a blessing or church wedding. And this is the Episcopal Church, who are supposed to be really liberal for a Christian denomination.

I'm no friend to any organized religion at all. I'm suspicious of the very concept.
( And they really frustrate me when they go as far off-message as they have. )

I'd want to know how in the hell that experiment got past any ethics board, for one. Because seriously, what?

Fox barking on the lawn: interesting, I didn't know we had those out here in outer ring suburbia. I've seen skunks in the yard across the way and shiny little eyes in the storm drains at twilight and we got an opossum in our garage once, but I didn't know we had foxes around here.

Fox barking on the lawn at 4:30 in the goddamned morning: Shut the hell up, oh dear god.
(If you've never heard a fox before,
this. Right outside my window at the aforementioned 4:30 in the goddamned morning.)

Fox--at least I hope to heaven it was a fox--crunching around in the bushes directly under my window until it felt the need to scream very loudly several times and run away: JESUS GODDING CHRIST WHAT IS YOUR DEAL

Unless it was a raccoon--which apparently sound sort of similar to foxes when they're angry--in which case what the hell angry raccoon, why are you climbing around in the bush right outside my open window oh my god.

Guess I didn't really need to sleep tonight.
This entry was originally posted at http://mysticpenguin.dreamwidth.org/330313.html

No, it's not about the constant up and down. I can amuse myself well enough with Ravelry or JournalFen or Dreamwidth or my friends list already loaded from the last time I thought I might actually make the leap between thinking things and writing them in comments. I feel a little bad saying so, but I really don't care when LJ goes down anymore.

I was feeling a little paranoid after reading a couple articles about how sophisticated bots on LiveJournal are getting recently, so I did a quick check to see how obvious my journal is on
the big wide Internet.

And even though I have all my privacy and security options set to basically "opt me out of everything and don't tell anyone this is here," my LJ is still the first hit on Google for my username.

( cut for wide image )
Now, I know that what's on the public Internet is out there for anyone. Ask me about the Italian knitting blog that uses a picture of Bandit for their example of the bed he's sleeping in finished, or the warm clothing drive in São Paulo a few years ago that had a picture of Grace on their promotional blog, or the picture of Jack that made the rounds on Tumblr a bit ago for no obvious reason. I only know about any of them from looking at my Flickr stats, so there's probably more scattered around out there. But there's a difference here--Flickr never led me to think that they wouldn't turn up on Google.

I've been locking more stuff lately, since thank god nothing's coming up associating this name with my real one, but the grad schools and jobs I'm applying for don't need to know everything on my mind if it ever does. I took a photo that I think would look nice on a "friends only" banner in case I ever needed one, but I guess I fell into the trap of thinking that sure, everyone on the Internet could see what I wrote, but why would they want to? I'm not all that interesting. It's probably for the best, but I'm still kind of annoyed that I had to lock everything down right quick without any warning. Annoyed in the way that I also remembered I had been meaning to turn off my automatic payments while I was in there messing around with my settings. Y'all might want to check on your privacy settings on LJ and search results if you haven't yet.

This entry was originally posted at http://mysticpenguin.dreamwidth.org/326540.html

For reasons I forget, I earlier tonight I was trying to remember the name of that guaraná based black currant-y soda Pepsi had out in the mid-90s. I drove all the way home from work like "It starts with a J, I think... J-something-osta? Jo-something-sta? Josta? Nahhh, that's not a word!" Because I'm terrible at names, I ended up thinking that "Jocasta" sounded familiar, but that couldn't be it because she was a queen from some Greek myth. The one who fed the evil king his kid in the legend that eventually because Titus Andronicus, maybe?

So I got home and looked the name up on Wikipedia, and it turns out I was thinking of Procne. Jocasta was Oedipus's mother in Sophocles's Oedipus Rex.

And the page image on the stub about Jocasta is one of the funniest works of art I've seen in ages. It's Odipus et Sphinx by the French Neoclassicist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. You can see it in huge detailed resolution here, though it might not be safe work viewing. Even for figures in a Neoclassical painting, these guys are wearing nothing.

Now, I cannot take high melodrama seriously. I especially kind of snort and roll my eyes at Oedipus Rex. It tries so hard to be tragic and serious and important; it's like a high school production of Les Miserables. The whole thing plays like a really, really morbid episode of "Three's Company" where everyone could resolve everything just by talking to each other for five minutes but instead it ends up with Mr. Furley getting his face pecked off by angry birds to teach everyone that You Can't Fight Fate. And while I can appreciate the work that goes into those giant, busy Romantic/Neoclassical paintings, I'm still the kind of person who looks at something like Liberty Leading the People (warning for further fine art-related nudity) and says "...yes, it's very well done and very important historically, but the... the guy right down there in the left foreground. Why is he only wearing a poet's shirt and a sock? Where are his pants? Did he really go march on Paris with everything just hanging out there like that? And what's with the kid above him who appears to be staring right at his junk?" And the painting makes me snicker because it's lovely, but it's so serious despite having goofy touches like Citizen No-Pants there and that horrified look on the top hat guy's face.

If you didn't look at the painting, the Sphinx is sitting in an alcove in a rocky cliff face with bones strewn below her, as she does. You can't see her face barely at all unless you look at the picture at huge resolution. Her boobs, though, they catch the light well enough to make them a secondary focal point in the picture. And Oedipus, who has apparently come straight from the pool since he's wearing nothing but a beach towel thrown over one shoulder, is staring straight at them from about three feet away with an incredibly intense expression. He's bent over to look at them from eye level, even, and he's probably gesturing to explain a point, but it sure looks like he's pointing at them with a crooked finger. There's some other guy in the background who's thrown his arms up in front of himself protectively, his towel flying out behind him. And I swear to god, when I look at the Sphinx's face at full resolution, it looks like she's frowning and rolling her eyes at Oedipus. It just makes it look like the Sphinx didn't throw herself from the rock so much because Oedipus solved her riddle as because he was such a colossal jackass about it.
( I think if the picture had dialog, it'd be like: )

This entry was originally posted at http://mysticpenguin.dreamwidth.org/323127.html

::bemused sigh::

If the first day sets the tone of the year, what kind of crap am I in for if today I lost my university parking pass for the quarter that starts Monday, made myself a little melancholy for good shows like "Freakazoid!" when I came up with "Aww, nutbunnies!" while trying not to say "fuck" around my parents when I realized how lost it was, and had ( one of my weirdest and most disturbing dreams in a long time? )

This entry was originally posted at http://mysticpenguin.dreamwidth.org/77211.html