All dressed up and somewhere to go

So my friend James is in town for the holiday and we're going out tonight for drinks and dinner.

I met James through my last college boyfriend, Mark: we got to be fast friends throughout my junior and senior years, and when I graduated we still hung out sometimes until he moved out West. James is one of those people who has James Luck. He can be in an accident that completely totals all vehicles involved and walk away with no injuries. He can find incredibly lucrative jobs that let him do whatever he wants. He is James and the world parts before him.

We have an interesting history. It's one that takes a lot more introspection than I can muster at the moment, but one I think might be worthy of writing down, one day. Some of the moments I remember from my times with James are still among the best of my life.

(Summer between junior and senior years of undergrad: I came back from six weeks' study abroad in my old home of Oxford and guess who was waiting for me in the airport, along with my boyfriend and a bunch of other dear ones. Later, he (they) took me out to dinner at the Papermoon Diner.)

He let me drive his Porsche once, and he came up with the timeless phrase of "slipping [individual] the wang" which I still can't help giggling stupidly at. "Did you slip her the wang?" he'd ask with a leer. Oh, James.

It'll be interesting to see how he's changed, or not changed, and it'll be lovely to see him again. On the whole yesterday and today have been truly and honestly days to give thanks for--thanks for my family, whom I love very dearly, and thanks for my friends.

TEASER

So I found the Campbell's Book of How to Commit Atrocities in the Kitchen with Soup and scanned the most egregious of offenders.

Here is a teaser for what lies ahead:

CHEDDAR CHEESE SOUP BROWNIES.

Further sociological investigations

So I've asked a few honest-to-goodness males what the hell is up with this other guy, and the consensus seems to be: he is a creep, run the hell away. Which is all well and good only I need to have class with him Wednesdays for the rest of the semester. Hopefully we won't have to have much contact.

Cate, if you're reading this, please save me a seat on your side of the poetry room.

Also, on the way to class I passed a protest or demonstration or some damn thing clogging up the other side of MLK and now I wonder what they were protesting, because I was too busy, y'know, DRIVING, to get much gawking done.

I'm not going to miss this semester for anything other than the classes, which have been unalloyed awesome. The whole rest of the time that wasn't spent in class was a huge annoying pain in the ass. At least I am currently still employed!

Jubilation and frustration

YES. Source material has arrived. I can spend time today and the rest of this week pounding out articles.

It's not as intellectually satisfying as, say, back-engineering explanations for Transformers physiology, or working out a system of fictitious (meta)physics for Hell, but it's a lot of fun nonetheless.

In other news, I do so wish that when I said things like "I do not go out on dates," "I don't date," "I'm not interested in dating or relationships," and "I need my weekend time alone," people would actually understand that this applies to them.

I've tried the CZ engagement ring with my faux-wedding band. I've tried coldly offensive incomprehension. I've tried honest discussion. I've tried plain old not answering emails. It doesn't seem to get through.

I'm not issuing a challenge to every dingbat who thinks they want to go to bed with me--and I am in no way saying that everybody wants to go to bed with me, but those who do fail to understand that it's not going to happen--I am telling them honestly that no, I appreciate the thought, but they really ought not to bother.

I've tried saying it through class assignments. I've tried saying it out loud in discussion. I've tried saying it face to face and I've tried saying it in emails:

I AM BETTER OFF ALONE.

Sigh. I'm not from this planet.

I am a terrible person and a Bad Blogger. This is partly because holy shit work and partly because a lot of the things I should like to write about should not be seen by the delicate eyes of professors and classmates. That's what other sites are for.

But since I'm feeling guilty, here is an update on the final project. I'm really, really enjoying this. After some initial flailing I've got into the proper rhythm of writing fictitious scientific/scholarly articles again--it really is like riding a bicycle--and as soon as my source material arrives from Barnes & Noble I should be able to provide a lot more content for the site.

Coming up with the name was the most difficult part. Once I had that--tractive effort is a measure of how hard the locomotive is working--everything else fell into place, and I was happy to find that Wordpress' blogging interface is pretty much intuitive. You don't have as much scope as you would on Blogger or LJ to screw with your layouts, but if you have patience with it you can sort of coax it into doing what you like. The whole process of getting the framework of the site set up involved a TON of minor changes and view-blogs and minor changes and view-blogs and so on, so most of the hits on the site so far are from me checking to see if a tiny adjustment has made any change.

I love steam engines because they make absolute sense. They are purely analogue. They are physics in motion. There's no incomprehensible electronic interference, no scram logic, nothing that happens in magic boxes with LEDs on the side: everything in a steam locomotive is just plain physics.

(I would so, so love to drive one of these things. So much.)

abandoned things

I love derelict, abandoned, and ruined things. If I weren't such a complete and utter coward I should love to run around abandoned buildings and take photographs of fascinating things the owners left behind. I'm allergic to being charged with trespassing, unfortunately, which leaves me extremely happy when I come upon something in the public domain that's worth investigation.

Such as this.

Was walking along the Gunpowder South trail in the Hereford area of Gunpowder Falls state park this afternoon and came upon this lovely carcass. From what I can tell it's a mid-30s Dodge or Plymouth (based on grille, body shape, and dash) but that's as far as I can get without writing down serial numbers, which I couldn't do because it was getting late and I hadn't got any idea where on the block to look for one.

It's got a flathead six that looks to me like the sort you'd find in mid-thirties Chrysler Corporation models, and an adorable one-barrel carb that is obviously made out of some magical space-age material as it has not oxidized all to hell like the rest of the car. I really, really wanted this carburetor. I really, really couldn't have it.

Taking pictures of the interior with a point-and-shoot necessitated flash, which meant that I scared a little grey mouse with white feet (LIGHTNING OMG!) that I thought really rivalled the carb for adorability.

I'm still trying to get the year and marque pinned down and also to find out how the hell it got there. It's located on the floodplain of the river a long way away from any remains of decent roads. Why is it there and why was it left to decay?

Bonus river shot.

saturn v (first stage)

It seems all one piece.
One bright white pencil, checkered black,
larger than large in xenon floods:
already alien.

Around its base machines and men swarm.
Daylight finds its steeple first,
impartial light slides down its length,
strikes diamonds from the snow that cases it. Mist flows.

When it begins it seems so slow a rise.

Pillows of flame support it, cradling. Lazily
this spire decides to wake up after all, and
grumbling, shakes umbilicals away.

five F-1 engines take slide-rule sums tipped with people
tiny, dwarfed by their machine,

thrust them forty-two miles up the sky
in not quite three hot minutes,
gobbling four million
four hundred thousand pounds of go.

What must it be
to be the cupped hands underneath a nation’s boot
to light a candle
(that will in some days and two hundred thousand miles
warm the dead face of a distant mythic disc)
to wrench a stack of parts and men
four hundred feet per second out from gravity’s dark womb,
to thrust conquistadors toward their unknown shore?

but it is just those hands that make a step,
the first step.

First stage: not three minutes gone, and spent. It does not let go:
rejected by its successor, eight little thrusts, it’s spurned.
and now the living stack is on its way, past max-Q,
rebelling from the oldest mother anyone can know.

Five guttered engines,
vast and scorched, ablated, mouthless,
still silent in the airless dark, go cold:

what’s left of their force lifts S-1C still,
introduces solitude.

Without the others it describes an arc
(already slide-ruled, predetermined, months before)
higher and higher, till all the world shines blue.

It seems so slow a rise.

Sixty-eight miles up, not fast enough to slip its bonds, it reaches apogee
before it is called home.

Is it pride that crystallizes
on those white flanks, as they fall?
does it know that in its death
it makes possible a life?

The ocean rises to receive its shell. Water is kind.
Embraced and cradled, it is drowned to sleep.

Four days later its journey is complete:
man sets his bootprint
on another world.

narcissism

God, I love Apple. I love Apple so good. My previous MacBook didn't come with Photo Booth but Megatron the MBPro does, and it is just a hoot. You can have yourself andywarholized:



or you can be in fake pencils:



or you can be in high-contrast grainy webcam style:




When I was growing up this sort of thing was utterly sci-fi. You couldn't put pictures on the internets unless you had some awesomely fast modem that'd do like 56K and even then they were mostly low-res .gifs. These days shit is instantly public. In many ways I'm awfully grateful to have got through the bullied-child stage in a pre-internet world.

No, it's not okay to steal people's writing

This post was originally put up on the SA forums.

Story goes like this: Author Monica Gaudio wrote a piece on the historical development of apple pie for a specific website, which mentioned that content was copyrighted.

Gaudio was then informed by a friend that Cooks Source Magazine had printed her article without a) permission, b) notification, or c) credit. edit: they did apparently "credit" her but also made several edits to the copy without consulting her.

Gaudio contacted Cooks Source to ask what the fuck, and was fobbed off with what is probably the most :smug: reply ever (excerpted):

"Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was "my bad" indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things.
But honestly Monica, the web is considered "public domain" and you should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me... ALWAYS for free!"

This rapidly went viral from Gaudio's LJ post to Facebook and Twitter, and over the course of Thursday more and more evidence that Cooks Source and editor Judith Griggs basically sourced all their content from other people's intellectual property.

Links:

Gaudio's LJ entry

Another LJ entry concerning the issue, which spread to other platforms

a pretty comprehensive compendium of data on this clusterfuck

Cooks Source on Facebook, being overrun by commenters

I think this is a pretty good example of the astonishing power of social media via the internet to fuck someone's shit up. Like a lot of the /b/ vs. Terrible People instances--that dreadful woman who posted amusing photoshops of a dying child, for example--it really illustrates how dangerous it is to show your true colors on the internet.

Discuss.

(second edit: Apparently Ms. Judith Griggs is not just breathtakingly ignorant and incompetent as an editor, she also couldn't handle being a town selectman. I can't so far find incontrovertible proof that this is the same Judith Griggs but it jolly well looks like her.)

Thursday drivel

This is c&p verbatim from a newsletter published by the School of Social Work's Promise Heights program (which is a Good Thing on its own merits, but jesus christ).

Dear Friends of Promise Heights:

The University of Maryland, Baltimore and faith based and non-profit organizations have formed a unique partnership to improve educational, health, and developmental outcomes for children and youth by creating a holistic, community-centered education continuum that serves child and families living in Upton/Druid Heights communities of West Baltimore – Promise Heights. By joining forces, this partnership will level the playing field for socioeconomically disadvantaged children by developing and implementing a long term strategic plan that incorporates evidence-based elements of nationally recognized best practice models and will build on the strengths, assets, and knowledge of local stakeholders.

Setting aside the glaring grammatical and punctuation errors, can anyone diagram that last sentence? It's got two "By [doing X], Y" phrases referring to one another and it's reached buzzword saturation point. Any more buzzwords added to this sentence will just fall right off again, unable to go into solution.

What I don't understand is why they think this is in any way a good or pleasant or interesting or inviting way to explain what they do. Even if people can follow the tortuous path through their sentence construction and work out from context what some of the more improbable phrases mean, why would they want to? It puts everybody off. It's utterly distasteful and makes me itch.

SSW is so earnest about Doing Good Things For The Community, because it's sort of their purpose, but they go about it so breathtakingly wrong-headedly. Watching them try to get funding is sort of like watching a turtle try to have sex with a sneaker: it's so ludicrous it's funny, but it's also very sad.

so, chocolate.

This is one of those things where I'm not cool enough to like the Sophisticated Thing. It's like, I don't know, Victorian/Edwardian lit. I honestly do not like Trollope because reading him makes me feel like I am reading the court minutes of some impossibly dull technical disagreement while being repeatedly hit on the forehead with a teaspoon. I honestly do not like Jane Austen because reading her makes me feel as if I am reading the briefs of some impossibly dull technical disagreement re. marital disputes, or possibly Potential Discourtesy. I am not awesome enough to enjoy these works of literature.

I am also not awesome enough to enjoy dark chocolate.

Dark chocolate is just dandy in things. Pain au chocolat is way better with dark than milk chocolate. Similarly, chocolate chips for things like cookies, brownies, or cake are much more effective when they're dark, because the sweetness of the matrix containing them makes up for the bitterness of the chocolate, and the sharp flavor goes much further. I've even had good results making ghetto Mexican Chocolate per sixties cookbooks with melted dark chocolate chips. But for eating?

No.

Cadbury's Dairy Milk, the real thing, not the knockoff you can buy stateside under the sold-out "Cadbury" marque, is to me the acme and delight of milk chocolates everywhere. Lindt's Excellence Extra Creamy Super Awesome Kawaii Milk is absolutely delectable but it tastes much more like honey than chocolate. Guylian's milk/white/praline fruits de mer are certainly worth committing felonies for but they don't compare to the real thing. Dairy Milk is chocolate heaven.

And I do feel chastised and disenfranchised when I see all these chichi chocolate bars in grocery shops and CVS. 60% Cacao. 67% Cacao. 80% LOCK UP YO WIVES, LOCK UP YO CHILDREN Cacao. 95% OH MY GOD THIS SHIT IS GOING CRITICAL Cacao. It all tastes like the astonishing disappointment we experienced as children when we opened up the Hershey's Cocoa tin and stuck a moistened finger into the rich and wonderful-smelling powder: bitter as ashes, bitter as aloes.

Maybe one day I will become cool enough to like Classic Literature and dark chocolate. For now, I cling to my Dickens and my Dairy Milk, and the rest of you can go screw.