fine whine

First, to get the painful out of the way, here is a bad Latin pun, of sorts, that has been bouncing around my head for far too long. "Festina Nestle" which translates as "make haste quikly", ha ha ha.

Now that I've alienated all but the hardest core of readers (it takes a certain something, I'd say, to enjoy bad Latin puns) now I can get down to the real business. Lately, I've been noticing things.

First of all, I have again had one of those odd moments of synchronicity with BoingBoing. This morning Cory posted a quick item about a book by John Varley, Red thunder, one which I happen to be reading. That alone isn't as amazing as it at first may seem, since I probably reserved it based on a BB recommendation. What is much more interesting is the fact that I had been preparing to type up a little ditty about it myself, particularly about some references I think it makes. BB's piece centers around its Heinlein connections, though I am not well versed in Heinlein's works to be sure of any specific influence. What I have noticed are a number of references to other non-SF literature including Hiaasen and the Travis McGee series of mysteries. I can't say for sure that I picked up on all of them nor have I encountered them yet so I'll just leave everybody in suspense on that.

In a moment that I didn't have my nose in that book, I noticed that there's a guy (Merlin Mann) making lists of five things, which can be found at the cringe-inducing address of 5ives.com. At least, I cringe, but I've never been a fan of the numbers for letters school of writing. Even Se7en annoys me. But more worthy of note is the page I created on January 31st of 2000 (at least if my changelog is to be believed) inspired by a similar page of lists of seven things written (and since removed from the web) by Alice Matsumoto. I'd thought seven to be too tough, though settling with five hasn't increased my output much. Admittedly Merlin's are funnier on the whole, but when I started out I wasn't going for humor so much as fulfilling the base human need to group things into an arbitrary handful.

[Updated: Site's back up. they've been having trouble.]

I'm not addicted, but I do visit http://www.boingboing.net/ rather frequently. As in multiple times a day. So to try to visit it and be given either an IE error or (as of this morning) an image wishing me "good night" is somewhat jarring. I checked its founders' sites, and none of them mention anything about downtime. Not personally knowing any other boingboingers and basically not corresponding with fellow visitors, I can only speculate as to what happened/is happening.

• Due to raging fires, boingboing had to evacuate and took all the pages, posts and archives out with it, as well as a small smattering of family photos and clothes with sentimental value.
• Content purists organized and executed a massive denial of service and subsequent takeover of boingboing because most of its content is merely linkage to other "real" content.
• Waking up after a long bender, puzzled to be somewhere in the Brazilian jungle, boingboing is still relatively lost.
• Boingboing ran off to Vegas with your boyfriend/girlfriend. That tramp/bastard.
• Ball lightning.
• Amnesia. Since a freak accident on Monday boingboing has been working as a receptionist for a used car dealership in L.A.

Come back!

I am of course a married man (and will tack 'happily' back onto that as soon as Jessica finishes her thesis) so when inspiration struck with a short list of utterly original pick-up lines, I had little recourse but to put them here for everybody's benefit. I'd come up with a nifty name for them like "off the wall flower" but I'm not creative like that.

• Mmmm... do I smell... maple?
• Were you aware that it is perfectly legal to steal home plate?
• You sure look like someone with only positive eBay feedback.
• Do you have a more than passing interest in the recent peace accords, like I do?
• I bet you know at least one Sagittarius, don't you?
• Ever notice that a lot of orange things are round?
• I like your pants. What do you think of mine?
• I'd like to write a haiku about you. Can you count?
• D'ja know what to do with leftover Altoids tins?

Guaranteed babes on every arm. And when I say "guaranteed", I mean, "you're really on your own here".
I'd like to point one thing out: if there is any innuendo in the above lines, I didn't put it there.

Bookblog has updated their Gender Genie to better reflect the differences between fiction, nonfiction and blog entries. For those not in the know, a report was published in Nature revealing a rather accurate algorithm that determined a writer's gender based on certain common words and their usage. More information is provided on the Genie page.

Anyway, according to the new and improved Gender Genie, I write like a girl. I sent my previous entry though the paces as a blog entry, fiction and nonfiction and scored the hat trick. Female every time. This entry, however, is considered masculine by the site. Go figure. So don't buy me that skirt quite yet.

So the wife and I are walking to the library to take back some movies, see, and it starts downpouring. Torrentially, monsoon-style. We're getting drenched, and she says "Hey, it wasn't raining when we left."

And I retort, "Yeah, that's what Noah said."

Bah DUM bum.

I was wandering through a large bookstore today, and found myself looking for some pretty niche titles:

• Chicken soup for the vegetarian's soul
• Mensa for Dummies
• Better time management in just 30 hours a day

Funny, I couldn't find them.