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Below are the most recent 25 friends' journal entries.
| Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 | |||||
| sams_cafe | 2:40p | Man, winter showed up on Monday and settled in. No lead up, no warning, just all of a sudden WINTAAAAAAR. It's snowy here, and what my best friend in undergrad used to call "buttfuckin' cold". I'm not sure if that was an indication of what kind of sex was required to warm up, or some kind of metaphor, or maybe she was comparing the pain of being outside to surprise buttsecks. But it seems apt, on some primal level. I have christened the steps of my new building by falling on my ass on the ice this morning, so that's over with. In other news and for grate internet linkage: ![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} dramaturgca pointed me this morning to The Ultimate Geek Crossover, Star Trek characters done up in steampunk. I've been meaning to post this for a bit: abigail_nicole, at the behest of an anonymouse on my journal, has created a Sam's Cafe group on Ravelry, for cafegoers who do things with yarn. Go ye forth and purl, or something. :DAnd finally, juniper200 tossed me a story wherein John Barrowman's peen is so powerful that even though he only took it out on the radio, the radio, the BBC has been forced to apologise for him exposing himself. I can only imagine that his cock somehow came through the radio speakers and earfucked some poor asshat who bitched because he was ashamed of how much he enjoyed it. | |||
| sams_cafe | 10:54a | Hey, so remember my teeny tiny Christmas tree? I asked you guys for words to make into Christmas ornaments, and you...certainly did oblige. It's time for SAM'S READ AND LEARN CHRISTMAS ORNAMENT EXTRAVAGANZA. I figured since I'm probably not going to use very many of them (see: Mum sending me a fuckton of ornaments) I would turn all the words you gave me into ornaments and set them loose on the internet to see what they may wreak. I made three tree-toppers, two garlands, and several pages of ornaments of varying sizes. All are laid out onto American standard 8.5x11 paper, most in Landscape orientation, so they should print on American paper fine and on A4 paper with some rather excessive margins. If you look at these pages and don't see your word, drop me a line and I'll add it in -- there's a little space left over specifically for words I may have inadvertently missed. A preview, with sized-down versions of the final pages, is available ( under the cut! Image-heavy, fair warning. ) There are a couple of ways to acquire these pages. For people who just want to print 'em out, there is a PDF file available from Sendspace (megaupload mirror here). If you'd like to fuck around with the JPGs, there's a completed zip file also available from Sendspace (megaupload mirror here). Or you can go to my Livejournal Scrapbook and download single images if you just want one specific page. Crafty tips: For all pages, I'd recommend either printing them on card stock or gluing regular printouts to card stock (if you want the ornaments to hang around -- HA, see what I did there? -- for a while, I would use acid-free spray adhesive) before cutting them out. When I make paper ornaments I often glue the backs to construction paper, which adds some colour. Little kids think this is MAGIC. How is the paper two colours at once? For the garlands, you can punch holes in each letter and tie them together with string, but that gets time-consuming. Easier is to glue the letters along a strip of ribbon or onto the links of a paper chain. For the tree-toppers, I'd recommend gluing a bit of wire between the topper and its backing, then twisting the wire into a coil that you can settle over the top of the tree. Or, only glue the very edges of the topper and backing together, like a seam, leaving the bottom open. Then fit the pocket that creates over the tree. With the Doctor Who topper in particular you could probably also make the bottom word into a circle, glue it together, and settle it on the tree. But, you know. It's your art! Go to town, do what you want, have fun. | |||
| sams_cafe | 9:10a | Book Review: The Great Pretenders, by Jan Bondeson I am reading a lot more since I found out that I can special order books to be sent to my branch library. :D I don't know how I actually came across The Great Pretenders, though it may have been one of those books I grabbed off a shelf or a display at the library because it looked interesting. It's subtitled The True Stories Behind Famous Historical Mysteries, and it's written by a doctor who takes a decidedly medical, scientific approach to some of the "Pretenders" of history -- people who have claimed, or been acclaimed as, royalty and nobility who died years before. Jan Bondeson has written a handful of books in a similar vein, exploring medical mysteries and the psychological roots of live burial, among other things. The Great Pretenders presents the historical facts of various cases of assumed identity, then delves into rumour and gossip, then returns to fact with an assessment of the proofs and sometimes DNA testing to settle the question once and for all. It explores the mystery of the missing Dauphin who, on his father's death, became Louis XVII; the true identity of Kaspar Hauser, whom some saw as a European prince; the connection between a Russian Tsar and a hermit in Siberia; two people claiming noble blood that they might not have a right to; and whether or not an eccentric English nobleman posed as a cabinetmaker in the late 19th century. ( The Review. ) Final Verdict: If you're interested in history or in the techniques used to debunk popular historical myth, it's a good read and reasonably fast. You can skip the bits that bore you and not lose much along the way, and certainly I'd never before read about most of these people so it was definitely an education. Worth a fetch from the library or a purchase in a second-hand shop; I wouldn't buy it at full-price, but a bigger history buff than I am might not think it was money wasted. Aaaaand ( Quotes! ) | |||
| Sunday, November 30th, 2008 | |||||
|
ceria |
8:14p | I think my fingers are going to fall off now.
Elf, I'll email you back tomorrow. Must get away from computer. For views and clicks (if you like). I'm not posting these to dragonspam tonight. No way.  &  . | |||
| sams_cafe | 12:49p | I have cleaned my desk! I found two credit cards, $17.45, and many coupons. I have scanned all there was to scan, and I really should do a Photo Update soon but I have to clean out my "Current Photos" folder first. Getting to be time to make my photo yearbook, too (and print out last year's). I like the photo books; they're a slim, pleasant way of documenting the year. Walgreens does them up nicely and for about the same cost as anywhere else. I now have neat piles of "Stuff that needs to go into a poster frame", "Stuff I need to deal with tomorrow", and "Bookmarks". I put old cards and letters into books, which is a habit Mum got into so that now, when I go home, occasionally I'll take down a book from the shelf and find a letter from Gran in it. It's rather nice, though after Gran died Mum didn't go near the books for a few weeks. Makes sense. I have done laundry and taped my rent check to the doorknob so that I can't leave without remembering to put it in the Rent Check Box downstairs. I was going to do some Christmas shopping online today, but stupid Windows 2008 saved my shopping list as a ".docx" file and docx is apparently not backwards compatible, since I can't open it in OpenOffice or import it into GoogleDocs. I don't know what I've bought for whom! CHAOS! I also hung up a curtain over my kitchen door window so now, if I want, I can cook naked. :D It's a typical work-with-what-ya-got curtain: two nails, a bit of picture-hanging wire, and half a shower curtain with holes cut in it (the other half is hanging in front of my bathroom window, blocking the draft). The place is sealed up pretty tightly, which is nice. I spoke to Mum about staying here for a couple of years and she thinks it's a good idea; the housing market may be ripe for the picking but I need to build some credit and frankly I like it here, plus I got the parental stamp of approval for it in terms of location and setup. Hilariously, when she arrived, she oohed and ahhed over my hardwood floors and then immediately started measuring EVERYTHING -- counters, windows, floor space -- for various improvements. I think she's really come round to the idea of me living in Chicago, which is nice. We could both wish that she lived a little closer, but you can't have everything and anyway she's the one who decided to move to Texas. :D | |||
| sams_cafe | 9:24a | And jack_and_ellis has been updated! You can find Chapter Thirty-Seven: Revelations by following the link. Ellis meets a doctor, Jack meets a chef, and the Wiradjuri tribal elders meet a very different Clare Fields... | |||
| sams_cafe | 12:47a | I just woke up and wrote the bit of Jack & Ellis I've been wanting to write since, oh, about page twenty. Why yes, I am weird. I wordcounted the whole story too. At the moment it clocks in around 150k. Unfortunately, only about 25k of that is from November, which means I Did Not Win NaNo. Fortunately no cash prizes were involved, and I'm two for three so I'm doing okay. I'm estimating it'll finish around 200k, and then I'm going to slash and burn it down to manageable readable size. I reckon I'll end up with three versions -- this original, the hugely edited version where a bunch of stuff I love but don't need will be cut, and a YA version because folks tell me that's where all the interest is for publishers right now. After all, there's very little sex in Jack & Ellis; all I need to do is tone down the subversive subtext and I could probably get away with it. Back to bed for me! *stealth sleepy sam* | |||
| Saturday, November 29th, 2008 | |||||
| sams_cafe | 8:26p | And I am safely home! The flight was decent, nobody in the middle seat and arrived a few minutes early. I was seated behind a family with two small kids, which normally is annoying but they were very well-behaved -- more fascinated with flying than terrified of it. Though at one point the little girl got loose and made a break for the bathrooms and I automatically put out my hand to stop her -- the standard parental palm-against-the-head maneuver that makes them laugh. I was very glad that her mum was grateful she didn't have to chase her, rather than horrified that some stranger had restrained her child. I've had a shower to wash off the travel grit, and my flat seems intact -- the roaches didn't throw an orgy and nothing caught on fire, though all the bread is DEEPLY MOLDY. Another few days and it might have claimed the baker's rack in the name of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Otherwise, all is well. I'm going to make dinner, catch the Notre Dame game, and fall asleep. *conk* Zzzzz. | |||
| sams_cafe | 9:12a | Good morning Saturday world! A note to all -- I've just caught at least four spammers with actual LJs commenting in my journal. The comments are often only partially relevant; the journals themselves are filled with the kind of half-coherent babble that spam emails usually contain. If you get a comment that seems nonsensical or only half-relevant, especially if the user has no icon, plz ignore; now that they've tipped their hand I'm deleting and banning as I go. I don't think this has anything to do with the friendbots or the hack, but I have no way of knowing. Just one more hazard of the digital age, I suppose. Hey, when you guys see this post, does the icon show a guy in a uniform with the word "classy" on it, or does it show my "The Internet Isn't Going To Surf Itself" slogan? Because in the semagic preview, I get the classy sleeping uniformed guy. Technology is exciting but sometimes I want to beat the internet with a large stick. Except it'd probably enjoy it. | |||
| Friday, November 28th, 2008 | |||||
| sams_cafe | 8:34p | I was going to say "Let me tell you about how much I ate yesterday" but it came out "Lwr mw twkk" and then I had to go facepalm. But we did have turkey and stuffing and all the delicious Norman Rockwell fixings, and then had leftover sammiches today. And had the mental equivalent of a nap all day. This must be what it is like to be a cat. Also I pillaged my hosts' music library. New mixtape soon...ish. I fly home tomorrow night, hopefully on a flight as pleasant and empty as my flight out here was. One of these days I will be a True American and go to the mall on Black Friday, but this year I was just fine not going. Besides, the El doesn't go to malls. Which should be some kind of Chicago slogan. "You can't get to a mall from here." I've been seeing a lot of NaNo finishing banners on my flist today -- congrats to those who are getting their count in and beating the block. :) | |||
| Thursday, November 27th, 2008 | |||||
| sams_cafe | 2:33p | I have just discovered that there are few things in life more satisfying than polishing tarnished silverware properly. It's just beautiful watching all that blue and gold disappear. Yeah, there's a reason I invented Nicholas. Other than the cooking, we're mostly lounging; I've spent the past forty hours in my pyjamas-with-cats-on, watched a metric fuckton of Top Chef, and been pwned by the magnetic poetry kit, which is Not Cooperating with my sonneteering efforts this year. A++, would Thanksgiving again. | |||
| sams_cafe | 8:29a | Good morning, Cafe, and happy Thanksgiving! Or if you do not live in the United States, happy Thursday! We will think of you as we commit ritual gluttony. And as with every year I am Still Thankful. Particularly that I could resurrect that post. Once the slaughtered bird has been consumed with savoury bread and roasted root vegetables, we will begin the long and dolorous preparation for Sammastide. Or, as I like to call it, a Christmas to Dismember. Get your scythes out, everyone! | |||
| Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 | |||||
| sams_cafe | 11:59a | Good morning! I had ginger pumpkin cranberry toast for breakfast, and you didn't. Nyah. It's just starting to snow here, and we've been watching food network and mocking some of the more pathetic examples of the new gen cooking shows. Soon, there will be Cooking. OH YES. Hope you're keeping warm and safe out in Internet land. :) Currently the TV is tuned to the Dark Angel marathon and man, this show is WAY MORE INTENSE than I remember it. DARKEST ANGEL. Still pretty amused that the goofball from NCIS is Eyes Only, though. | |||
| Monday, November 24th, 2008 | |||||
| sams_cafe | 3:43p | You guys, there is a lot of crocheting going on in this world, and all of it is for sale on etsy.com. | |||
| sams_cafe | 12:52p | Hey, does anyone know if a book exists anthologising the letters between Groucho Marx and TS Eliot? Somehow I feel this is something I need to read. I don't usually go in for letter anthologies, but it sounds like it would be right up there with the twenty-year correspondence between Bernard Shaw and Lord Alfred Douglas, which is much funnier and more even-handed than that review implies. This morning is intense; I'm prepping the desk and "Sam's Guide To Temping For Him" as well as fielding calls from people who want to get everything done today so that they can leave tomorrow or Wednesday for wherever they're going. I myself am taking a hiatus from Chicago starting tomorrow, staying with friends over the Thanksgiving holiday. Which is just as well because my family had Thanksgiving this past weekend -- well, when I say "my family" I mean Mum, Emmy, Lucky, and his entire family. Apparently it was a firestorm of dysfunctional from beginning to end, which is not all that shocking given Lucky's siblings and particularly their children. I was literally hovering the mouse over the post-bar to post this when the month's rent-and-facilities invoice was delivered and I dropped everything to get it done, because if it doesn't get done today then we'll be paying our rent late. As it is, we may anyway, because I kept adding up and adding up and adding up and it kept being wrong, significantly wrong, and it took me almost forty minutes to decide that perhaps MY MATH WAS RIGHT and the building office was, in fact, incorrect. Which turned out to be the case. This says something about my relationship to mathematics, but it's nothing you all haven't heard before (short version: Math is useful but not to me. Plz to use it to build bridges and rockets and stuff, and stop making me learn it.) Anyway, yes, their math was wrong, mine was right, and so I have filled out all the paperwork I can and am entrusting BossBoss to actually put it in the interoffice mail tomorrow. I live in fear that the temp filling in for me tomorrow will be Incompetemp; I want whoever it is to have as little power to screw things up as possible. And now I have to post this while I still can, because my lunch sub is coming at one and I've just spent twenty minutes helping someone from another branch who has OBVIOUSLY SHOWN UP ON THE WRONG DAY for a meeting and is living in denial that his meeting was a week ago. Oh my god. | |||
| Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 | |||||
|
ceria |
9:27p | I have to say, I'm proud of myself. Got to meet maderr (on Lj) today and finally apologized - in person no less! - for never finishing the story I owed her.Which makes me feel better, at least. And I got to talk slash and fandom in person with some friends, how cool is that?? | |||
| sams_cafe | 8:21p | Hey, so. Life On Mars In America. I'd forgot it was coming out, and I'm not sure if it's tanking or what, I don't really watch live TV anymore. But I am watching episode one on the computer. I'm only about ten minutes in and the majority of it is...so visually similar to the original LoM that it's eerie, but I just hit the moment where Sam turns around and ( spoiler! ) Wow. I have no idea if the rest of the show is going to suck or not, but that was a pretty goddamn awesome moment right there. | |||
| sams_cafe | 5:00p | I just saw the trailer for the Doctor Who Christmas Special (I was linked ages ago, I know it's old meme, but I can't watch videos at work). I have to say that, while informative it is not, it is very effective at inducing vertigo. Could they spin the camera around him a few more times, maybe? Just in case we hadn't got the 360 already? Also, smarmy Doctorgänger is smarmy. And yet, my instinctive reaction is to make the toddlerfists of glee and shout THIS IS GONNA BE AWESOME. Fanbrain. Go fig. | |||
| sams_cafe | 4:44p | Review: Cosmicomics, by Italo Calvino I've been meaning to write a review of Cosmicomics for about a week and a half, and if I put it off any more I'm going to have late fees on it, but I'm really not sure how to talk about it. As with much of my high school lit classes, when I read Italo Calvino's work I'm often haunted by the feeling that I am missing something. Something important, some vital theme that's just out of my reach. Which makes it hard to review his books, actually. I don't know that I am missing anything, I think maybe I'm overthinking it, but I dunno. It's not unpleasant, and no reflection on the book, but it makes it hard to be coherent about it. Cosmicomics, like Invisible Cities, is very episodic in nature. Calvino takes several of the laws and theorems of physics and the creation of the universe and retells them as if one person had lived through them all, linking the impersonal science to the personal experience. It's kind of like what would happen if Stephen Hawking and Rudyard Kipling had a love child. ( The narrator, Qfwfq... ) ( Quotes! ) | |||
| sams_cafe | 4:06p | jack_and_ellis has been updated! I will finish this story if it KILLS ME. :D Chapter 36</b> is up in its entirety; Ellis plots an economic crisis, Jack investigates "aeroplanes", Clare is inadvertently charmed, and Purva's job future is secured. | |||
| sams_cafe | 12:39p | Yesterday I did not go out, as intended, because OMG Michigan Avenue Lights Parade and Michigan Avenue was where I needed to go. Also it was cold. Also I am lazy. Instead I stayed in and did stuff around here. I assembled my new TV stand and got the TV up onto it. I apparently had the Digital antenna plugged into the Analog antenna jack, which was why all I could get for a whole day was "THIS TELEVISION IS NOT READY FOR DIGITAL TV" on every single channel. Now I get cable-quality visual and about four versions of every channel. I get two channels dedicated to weather. I have not yet managed to get the DVD recorder hooked in again, but I suspect that might be something of a lost cause. The problem is that the DVR/TV connection needs to be two-way, because I have to be able to record from the TV but also to see the function screens on the DVR in order to program it correctly. I'm positing that an S-Video cable between TV and DVR might fix the problem. Mission for the day: Locate the S-Video cable! But the TV gets great images now, so yesterday we watched two football games before R fell asleep on my floor (the floor's better for his back than sitting on my admittedly awkward futon, apparently). He slept through me doing the dishes, making dinner, and prepping for Epic Laundry (I've just finished folding the fourth load). I finally sent him off home around six, I think. He had initially come over to bring me a CD so that I could burn him a CD of various covers of Tobacco Road, since I have the tech to record them off YouTube and his laptop currently isn't working anyhow. I heard ten different versions of Tobacco Road in a single morning. I'm pretty sure I could sing most of it off by heart, and I would like to warn you all that The Nashville Teens cover of Tobacco Road is not the blues. The real problem is that Tobacco Road is a very simple song with a very basic blues riff, so a lot of assholes out there think it's not enough and want to improvise. Cue ten minute guitar solos and lots of wailing into the mic. Lou Rawls did it best, especially the talky version where he talks about all the regional names for the poor part of town. I was born in a dump; My mama died, my daddy got drunk Left me here to die or grow IN THE MIDDLE OF TOBAAAAACO ROAD! | |||
|
apple_pi |
8:07a | 1. My laptop is still in the Dead Zone; we're waiting until the start of December to buy a new hard drive for it. So I'm using Mr. Pi's computer, which means I have to wait my turn for it (wah!), which means I'm online a lot less. ( There's stuff about SGA, Psych, and my family under here. ) | |||
| Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 | |||||
| sams_cafe | 3:19p | R's over today -- he came over to drop off a CD and just kind of stayed. We've been watching college football (Notre Dame and...someone in Orange), but I've been doing my weekend cooking thing too. R: What's that noise? Is that your trash can? Sam: No. R: Is that the Roomba? Sam: No, it's off. R: What IS that? Sam: The bread machine. R: You live in the Disney automated house of the future. Hard to argue, really.... | |||
| Friday, November 21st, 2008 | |||||
| sams_cafe | 2:22p | Bulletproof Coworker showed up at my desk just before I left for lunch with a Crate & Barrel box for me, which was interesting because I hadn't ordered anything from Crate & Barrel. Turns out it was a reused box that was full of stuff from my Mum. You know what's coming next. She sent me: 2 shirts (too small), a pair of trousers, and a pair of pyjamas with cats on (U CAN HAS NAPTIEM NAO) 1 garland and approximately 1,000 christmas ornaments for my tree (I will still use some words!) 1 bag each: Mini Snickers Bars, Mini Kit Kat Bars, Mini Peppermint Patties (for the office) 1 quart bag of "brown sugar shortbread mix" (?) 1 box of quart bags (??) 1 package of paper bowls (??!) AND A GODDAMN TOTE BAG. Seriously, I have a tote bag full of tote bags. I'm thinking of just passing out tote bags on the street. Except that would make me look insane, because who owns that many tote bags? ME. | |||
| sams_cafe | 12:12p | So, I have this tree. This tiny tree. That I would send you photos of, but I think my camera is broken (another whole post that I'll get to later). And for this tiny sad Christmas tree I have six whole ornaments. Which obviously is not enough. Back in undergrad we had a Christmas tree for the department and in my junior year we were forced to get rid of several of the better ornaments, including the garland of condoms and lube that I had made sophomore year, because we had a huge shipment of prospective freshmen coming in late that year and we didn't want to terrify their parents. So we had to come up with new ornaments, and I decided to take a bunch of photos I'd snapped of the students and faculty, on and offstage, paste colour printouts onto green and red construction paper, and hang them as ornaments. Because I'm just that awesome. I've kind of done the photo meme thing, so I thought instead I would make a literary tree. My tree is too small to hold a word if everyone donated one, but please feel free to suggest a word (note: A SINGLE WORD. Don't post me a word list!) that I should hang on the tree. I will choose the ones I like most, print them out, and hang them up. Foreign languages welcome. And....GO! | |||
