Somewhere between mid-afternoon and late afternoon naps, and in between the fits of incessant shopping that mark the season, I managed to fit three movies and a novel into my busy schedule this past week. I think I even gave up my monthly visit to the gym. However the scheduling worked out, I managed to find the time to relax and enjoy the escape. The novel was Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: A Novel by Susanna Clarke, and the movies, in no particular order, were Danny Deckchair, Lemony Snicket’s A series of Unfortunate Events and Stealing Sinatra. Of the four escapes, my favorite by a good lead was Danny Deckchair, so I will discuss the novel first.
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Oliphant Parts
Reframing Reality
Archives: December 2004
Three Movies And A Novel Too (but neither weddings nor funerals)
The Good Life
I really do have it good. I work from home, get paid well and do not have to visit Kansas or the east coast all that often. Sometimes it is difficult to remember how good I really have it. Today is one of those days. The rain falls sideways, and the sky is various shades of grey. Thunder rolls through on occasion, shaking the windows and terrifying the dog. I guess she isn’t totally deaf after all. Even the with all the skylights and large windows in the house, it feels dark and empty. The cat, staring longingly out the dining room window, has in his gaze captured my mood perfectly (assuming that he is thinking about how cold and miserable it is outside, yet how depressingly trapped he feels inside rather than just thinking that it’d be nice to nip out back and pee on something).
Warm inside, cold dark and wet outside. And yet the insecurity of outside is what I want right now. Or maybe I just want to sleep through noon; most likely it is sheer laziness rather than unhappiness that prompts me to give up on what I have.
The Penguin Hates Me
. . . and Gentoo Linux still doesn’t play nice with my VIA 8237 SATA controller. I was really hoping for some improvement in the past six months. Sure, there are supposed to be ways to work around this, but none that are guaranteed to work or have worked so far. I don’t want to install a standard IDE drive and copy the system over from that after getting things all set up. I want everything (well, the SATA controller, at least) to just work, like it does under the latest versions of RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake and Libranet. Damn you, Gentoo! Extreme frustration, unusability and a top-notch homepage are all hallmarks of my Gentoo experience. I don’t ask for much, just for the world of Gentoo to bend to my will and create a more SATA-positive experience. Maybe it’s time to do some real work instead of banging my head on a stubborn Linux distro.
Caution, Children At Play
Sunny day, kids gone wild. I can hear the boy-child screaming with delight and charging about several room over. the “Wheeeee!” THUD! can only be the sounds of him leaping from the couch. The occasional staccato of small pieces of something bouncing along the floor after him is hopefully just a toy he has dropped or thrown on landing, not the complete destruction of all lamps and photo frames in the room. I love my children, really, but I also really look forward to school starting back up.
Both were home yesterday. That meant the screams were more of pain and frustration, the thumps and thuds the sounds of the boy-child being pushed, pulled, tripped, slammed and occasionally kicked by the girl-child. Which one is supposed to be made out of sugar and spice again? Must have been chipotle seasoning, ground habanero and a sugar extracted from battery acid . . .
Help
It’s going to take a while to convince Bush to stop murderdering Iraqis, so here is something you can do to improve the world right now: Provide some relief (tsunami or otherwise) and donate to Red Cross/Red Crescent
Even Worse Poetry
And now, for anyone who has forgotten why I should be neither a poet nor a political commentator, I offer my latest poem (also available replete with graphics from a link off of my poetry page).
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Celebrating A Season Of Hate
Wow. I had no idea Ann Coulter was so incredibly stupid. Blonde, somewhat attractive in a very cold, stick-figurish way, sort of like a praying mantis. Offensive, grating and hateful. But judging from what I just read on her site, she’s also a raging moron. Which makes it much easier to attack her (read a little of what she has to say; her tenuous grasp on reality and overwhelming hatred for pretty much everything make her very easy to ignore).
“To The People Of Islam:
Just think: If we’d invaded your countries, killed your leaders and converted you to Christianity YOU’D ALL BE OPENING CHRISTMAS PRESENTS RIGHT ABOUT NOW!
Merry Christmas”
– Ann Coulter, Hate-whore
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Top Eleven Disappointments
It is year-end, the time one traditionally turns to making resolutions that fail by week’s-end and drinking oneself into a stupor so that the falling of the New Year’s ball coincides with the rising of the last meal of the old year. I do not want to follow tradition, however. I want to blaze new paths and find glory in being the first to create a new, well, anything. To that end, I provide you now with a list of my Top 11 Disappointments 0f 2004:
1. No matter how hard I try, I can find no way to make a living reading best of craigslist.
2. Bush is still in the White House (on those rare moments he is not in Crawford, Texas, that is).
3. Someone else thought up using Gummi-bears to represent the Seven Deadly Sins before I did. Damn you, person whose name I have forgotten and am too lazy to look up!
4. I did not have the foresight to make this a “top 3″ list.
5. Karl Rove has not spontaneously combusted.
6. Condoleeza Rice has not spontaneously combusted. Crap!- I am going to use up all my entries pretty darn quickly this way. Make that everyone associated with George W. Bush and anyone who can be described as a neo-con has not spontaneously combusted.
7. I have not finished either book I started writing this summer. And one is still nothing more than a title on a whiteboard and a vague idea.
8. Thinking about exercise is still nowhere near as effective as actually exercising.
9. None of the really impressive tsunamis ever hit anywhere appropriate (like Crawford, Texas).
10. I still have Halloween decorations to take down.
11. My bank account still falls short of my year-end balance goal of $6.23 million. By almost $6.23 million.
apt-get christmas
Hello. You don’t know me, but you probably know of me. I am a Linux user. I’ve read “Running Linux” “Linux Network Administrator’s Guide”, subscribe to Linux Journal and have at one point or another tried almost every flavor of Linux out there. I think my first distribution was Caldera OpenLinux 1.0, back in the days when there were no evil Linux versions. That said, I am not a geek; I am an end-user.
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Integrity Schmintegrity. We Just Want To Win!
Cons to Libs: No recount! No recount! Um, damn, you’ve won . . . RE-COUNT! RE-COUNT! RE-COUNT! Funny how quickly they turn.
License
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