Wondrous Apparitions, Provided by Magicians.

I don't usually like to journal about bodily functions other than the occasional declaration that I have become a plague zombie, which I think is necessary because it lets you know why I haven't been journalling and because it alerts people to the possible necessity to keep weaponry on hand in case my brain runs out my ears and I decide to go visiting. Anyway. I don't usually go there, but this is kinda neat. ( Read more... )

jackbabalon23 is celebrating a Day of Lists over at his place, and has a list of cover songs that don't or can't exist, but that he'd like to hear. He asks "How about you? Any cover songs you'd like to hear done no matter how improbable?".

This is what we in the business call A Dangerous Question to Ask. :)

So here's my list:

• Social Distortion - "Suffragette City"
  
• Nine Inch Nails - "Love Without Anger" (only because Devo covered "Head Like a Hole" some years back, and turnabout is my favorite kind of fair play)
  
• Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - "Shiny Happy People" (bad *and* wrong)
  
• Muse - "A Whiter Shade of Pale"
  
• She Wants Revenge - "Love Will Tear Us Apart" (or is that too easy?)
  
• Tool - "Touch Me" (the one by The Doors, not the one from the Rocky Horror Picture Show)
  
• The Squirrel Nut Zippers - "Heroin"
  

Also, anybody at all covering Lou Reed's "Perfect Day".

What about you lot? What improbable cover would you like to hear? (I say, knowing full well that infintysquared is lurking out there, and is at least as cover-mad as I am....)

Dear Creature:

When deciding to not bring your lunch because you know that there are leftovers in the work fridge, it may be worthwhile to consider exactly *when* the leftovers were introduced to the work fridge. Further, it may be of some use to you to know that the recommended timeline for throwing out a piece of cooked, refrigerated chicken is after 3-4 days languishing in the fridge. There is no need for us to think about how many days the chicken was actually in the fridge, now is there?

Sincerely,
You

So, that was sort of a failure, but, on the bright side, I went down to the shop and I know have a sekrit snack stash that does not consist wholly of jellybeans, but rather includes some things I can actually eat. Hoo-rah. Also, I hear I'm adorable. That's always nice to hear.

In a classic example of wanting what you can't have, I've been dying for some spinach for the last several days. I'm not sure what the deal is with the E. coli, I mean, I'm pretty sure you have that in your intestines all the time. I'm pretty sure I learned that in high school biology. Maybe. I forget a lot of things, you know. Most of my knowledge points went into knowing where information is, rather than actually committing the information itself to memory. That would probably be because I am intellectually lazy, or something. It goes right along with the spiritually immature.

Anyway. In other news, I got an email today about the upcoming Wheel of Time gaming session, and for possibly the first time ever in my life, I don't feel like role-playing. This could be evidence of my abduction by aliens and replacement with an imperfect robot clone. Or, it could be because I'm pretty sure my character is going to either a) die, or b) abandon all his friends to die and ingloriously exit the game. And I don't want either of those things to happen. I'm way too invested in this character, which is not usually a problem for me. Damn you, erusnoctus and your requirement of extensive character backstory! If you kill him off, I'm going to have to write fanfiction, and nobody wants that.

Speaking of fanfiction, last night, triadruid was telling us about an author he had heard interviewed on NPR. She's just written a novel about Godel and Turing, which is about all I know about the thing, because after he said that, kittenpants pipes in with, "Is it slash fiction? The internet exists, so I have to ask." I have to admit, I would read Godel/Turing slash. Hell, I might *write* Godel/Turing slash. (I have forgotten how to make umlauts. Damn it.) Anyway. It's a good thing I have the internet, or I might be tempted to think I'm the weirdest motherfucker in the room.

Also. New icons.

Yesterday I managed to miss out on month-end reconciliation at the jobplace, which was good, but only because I was unpleasantly ill, which was bad. From looking at the emails that accumulated on how the close was to be done, however, I'm willing to claim the whole thing as a victory, since if I had been here yesterday, the Steerpike-o-meter would have definitely gained more than a few points.

Also, taking the day off allowed me to finish the Promethea books, and start digging through the annotation website that adammaker so graciously pointed me towards. I was pretty pleased with the books from start to finish -- the ending is lovely. I continue to find the Jack Faust character weirdly endearing, especially near the end, where he's admitting to not being quite ready for this whole "immanentizing the eschaton" thing. But maybe I just generally have sympathy in my heart for scummy magicians. It's happened before.

The annotations pages are a little odd. The guy that does them knows all kinds of crazy stuff about Alan Moore and comics in general, and is able to pick out things like "In this frame, there's a sign with this name on it, and he's the guy that inked The Watchmen", but totally blows it on a lot of the subject matter. He's got a bit on the issue that's Sophie and Barbara in Tiphareth, where he fails to identify Osiris -- he's like "and then there's some Egyptian guy, can anybody tell me who he is?". And he has no concept of the use of numbers. I may be sending him a note or three. That is awfully like participating in fandom, but I suppose if I have to have a fandom, this would be the one for me.
( And then, there was snarky doom. Cut because I got rambly. )

I think I just took the worst written opinion poll ever created in the history of polling. Now, to back this up, I studied survey and questionnaire design in college as a psych major. Now, I never did do any graduate studies, and I was perhaps not the best of students, but I do like to believe that I know something about data-gathering and creating this sort of instrument. And I would also like to think that the major polling organizations would know something about it, too. And yet.
( The false assumption, the double-bind, and other ways to spend a lot of money to get crap data... )
( EDIT: My letter to Zogby Interactive, in which I am probably too high-handed. But what do you want? Not enough caffeine yet for proper politeness. )

Here's the thing. I wouldn't go around asking to see everybody's bits without a good reason. I'm not sure that this is a good reason, but the request was only hypothetical anyway.

The day after Thanksgiving, we went out for some exploration in Iowa City, which is much more interesting than somewhere in Iowa has any right to be, and we found a gallery. In the window was a larger-than-life ball gown made of twisted silver wire and mesh. It was intriguing, and so we wandered in.

For our house, a trip to a gallery is often an exercise in "I can make that" and/or "Wow, I'm not charging enough for the things that I make that are like that", and this was no exception. We wandered around and rated the pieces on inspiration, difficulty to copy, and likelihood of self-injury in the process. And then, we discovered that the gallery had a basement.

In the basement was all of the stuff they couldn't display upstairs, either for lack of space, or lack of completion, or other reasons. At the foot of the stairs sat a glass display case. On top of the case were some porcelain beetles, which were compelling enough that we wanted to spend some time looking at them. And then, I looked through the case top and spoke the fateful words... "Is that a ceramic chicken with a penis head?"

And lo, it was. Some clever and enterprising fellow in Iowa City sculpts birds. A great number of birds. But where the bird's head should be is, in every case, a penis head. He had a chicken. He had a peacock. He had a woodpecker. He had a kiwi, which was especially disturbing due to length of head, and also due to the lack of an obvious penis pun.

Later, I was discussing it with infintysquared. He said "What do you think the artistic statement is there?" And I said, "I think it's huh-huh, huh-huh, I made a cock. But it was like, a cock. huh-huh."

And it came to me in that moment that what might be very entertaining to do would be to make a chess set in which all the pieces were penises, or bits thereof. So I started talking about this to kittenpants and triadruid. We talked about what the various pieces would look like, and whether you could make more-or-less traditionally shaped pieces that were also penises, and whether if you had the queen as a penis with a rubber on (the reservoir tip taking the place of the traditional ball crown on the queen) people might think it was some sort of commentary on HIV. And eventually, the conversation turned to "But how would you make the pieces?" triadruid asked if I would cast from life. And I thought, "Um. I don't think I could talk enough people into letting me handle their cocks to make that work." He thought perhaps I could, if I told them it was for artistic purposes.

And I think that's where we came in.

If you have borrowed the black leather pants belonging to our household, can we have them back?
I'm certain we loaned them to someone, and odds are good that that person is on LJ, but I have no idea who they might be anymore, nor do I know the circumstances of the loaning of the pants.

Anyway, if you have a pair of black leather pants around your house that you are reasonably certain are not yours, they might be ours. kthxbye.