Watch out!

Overheard in line for coffee at the county courthouse:

The two participants in this conversation could have come from central casting, cast as contrasting friends. The woman telling the story was tall, blond, had her hair tied back, wore white and light colors, including her boots. The friend was short, with short-cropped dark hair, and she wore dark clothes. The woman was emotional, and given to large gestures; the friend carried herself with a more professional air, and was quieter.

The woman: . . . but then he . . . .

The friend: [some quiet words]

The woman: The thing is, even if we got past this, then at some point I would need to get even with him. I would really really really really really really need to get even.

The friend: Really.

Unexpected poetry of loss from third base coach

A nice eulogy:

Dave Smith, a former All-Star closer who holds the Houston Astros record for games pitched, died Wednesday. He was 53.

Former big leaguer Tim Flannery said Smith apparently died of a heart attack, but the official cause of death wasn't known.

"He's gone. My tears are the rain," Flannery, the San Francisco Giants third base coach, told The Associated Press.


[from Baseball Musings: http://www.baseballmusings.com/archives/030454.php]

Or, in CA: History of the Rainman

Very amusing account of selling what may be an amusing book, "The History of the Snowman:"http://open.salon.com/content.php?cid=64473

Latest dream

Latest dream:

Driving down a wide boulevard, the sidewalks made of white concrete, rather like Century City but the whole dream has a bit of the feel of an Italian movie. I hear a faint voice from behind me, calling my name. I look and see in the distance that it is S. [a friend I haven't seen recently]. She is wearing a purple dress. I drive up on a plaza, where cars are not supposed to be, and dive slowly alongside S., and ask if she wants to get in I'll give her a ride. She refuses. She is now wearing a white dress. In the dream I wonder but do not say, "Well if you don't want to get in the car and talk to me, why did you call out to me?" Also I am a bit curious as to how she managed to change dresses.

The content of award No. 1 below reminds me of a favorite line from the Firesign Theater, part of a longer description of the evolution of the planet. It's the first line of the second paragraph below, with more, for context and further enjoyment:

Well, we were covered with the molten scum of rocks, bobbing on the surface like rats. Later when there was less heat, these giant rock groups settled down among the land masses. During this extinct time, our earth was like a steamroom, and no one, not even man, could get in. However, the oceans and the sewers were simmering with a rich protein stew, and the mountains moved in to surround and protect them. They didn’t know then that living as we know it, was already taken over.

Animals without backbones hid from each other or fell down. Clamasaurs and oysterettes appeared as appetizers. Then came the sponges, which sucked up about ten percent of all life. Hundreds of years later, in the Late Devouring period, fish became obnoxious. Trilobites, chiggerbites and mosquitoes collided aimlessly in the dense gas. Finally, edible plants sprang up in rows, giving birth to generations of insecticides and other small, dying creatures.

from "I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus"

More titles

http://www.cracked.com/article_16818_13-most-baffling-book-titles.html

(hattip: Bookforum: http://www.bookforum.com/)

Jambalaya 2008 Literary Award #1

Best Juxtaposition of Titles on the Jambalaya 2008 Reading List:

Born Standing Up, Christine Falls.

From "Liberation" (Slattery)

After the financial apocalypse, a NY lawyer looks at the NY Public Library from afar:

She walks down to the brass telescope mounted on a table, angles it and gazes down the row of derelict office buildings on Madison Avenue, fastens onto the corner of the public library, the outside of which is being cleaned by volunteers. The building and all of its books are still intact, she knows; the employees of the library made a spontaneous pact to defend it as soon as the police force stopped working, and now they just live in the building. They hauled beds into offices and corners of the huge reading rooms, put plaid couches against the marble walls. An army of cats patrols the halls, has litters on the stairs. She imagines that some of the librarians are fulfilling a long-cherished fantasy. Its just them and the books now, the stamped serifs, the margins smudged with fingerprints. You can still go to the library, to the yards of windows casting long stripes of light across the stone floor, the long tables, the wood paneling, the paintings on the walls. You can still go and read the books. Except for the large firearms that the librarians carry, it is like nothing happened, as if every noon, businessmen are still eating their lunches under the lions.

Recommendation

Remarkable piece of autobiography, in McSweeney's 29: "My Crush on Hilary Duff." By Blaze Ginsberg, from a forthcoming book, "Episodes." Ginsberg has been diagnosed with high-functioning autism (among, apparently other floating diagnoses) and he describes his life in the form a a tv guide to a series of tv shows.

Useful Advice

Inject considerable spicery to your aliveness!


[Culled from, if I remember correctly, a piece of spam offering to enlarge my penis. But the advice is applicable to so much more.
-- Found by reading through old e-mails, in this case e-mails I sent to myself.]

Gender Play #3

More than 130,000 inflatable breasts have been lost at sea en route to Australia. Men's magazine Ralph was planning to include the boobs as a free gift with its January issue.

The cargo is worth about $200,000, which is another blow for publisher ACP's parent company PBL, which is already in $4.3 billion of debt.

A spokeswoman for Ralph said the container left docks in Beijing two weeks ago but turned up empty in Sydney this week.

The magazine has put out an alert to shipping authorities to see if they have the container, but if they don't turn up in the next 48 hours it will be too late for the next issue, she said.
Ralph editor Santi Pintado urged anyone who has any information to contact the magazine.

"Unless Somali pirates have stolen them its difficult to explain where they are,'' Pintado said. "If anyone finds any washed up on a beach, please let us know.''

http://www.watoday.com.au/national/storm-in-a-ccup--130000-boobs-lost-at-sea-20081202-6pa5.html

Gender Play #2

This site http://regender.com/index.html switches the gender in a given piece of text or website. Here is this website, regendered: http://regender.com/swap/http://wipsmart23.blogspot.com/ (It works on earlier pages too.)

The list of books and authors to the left is nice, regendered. But what is nicest is once you are on a regendered page, each link you click on leads to a regendered version of the linked site. With enough clicking, the whole world will switch genders. Awesome. I think there must be someway to combine this with a web translation service to turn myself into, say, a French woman.

Gender Play #1

According to the site GenderAnalyzer, there is a 64% chance that the author of this website is a female. Or perhaps it asserts that the author is 64% female. Not sure how that 64% works.

http://www.genderanalyzer.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwipsmart23.blogspot.com%2F

Song of the Day

"Drank all that I can swallow
Now the moon's going to follow me home."

Moon Song: written by Patty Griffin, but in my head sung by Emmylou Harris.

Just want to add: Emmylou, if you google yourself and are reading this, I'd be happy to be you a drink next time you are in L.A.