AOL News has been reporting on the Congressional hearings for Condoleeza Rice's nomination for Secretary of State, which has kept me thoroughly amused as every time I log into my AOL account, I see Condi's face, alternately scowling (presumably when some meany Democrat Congressman asks her a question she doesn't like) or smiling (when general approval shines down on her from the majority). It's been amusing watching what has seemed like an up-to-date report on Condoleeza's mood.
This article was interesting/disturbing:
Looking at the personnel of eight federal agencies chosen at random, the GAO found that 463 employees showed up on the enrollment records of just three unaccredited schools. (It actually looked at four colleges, but only three responded to its request for information and only two fully cooperated.) This was merely a sampling of the dozens of mills operating nationwide, not an exhaustive audit; given the limited nature of the GAO's investigation, the true number of federal employees who are academically unqualified to fill the positions they hold could be in the thousands.
Agencies tasked with defending America from terrorism were among the top employers of workers with phony diplomas identified by the GAO. The Department of Defense employs 257 of them. Transportation has 17. Justice has 13; Homeland Security, 12; Treasury, eight.
Also interesting is that whoever edited this piece let this gorgeous bit of irony slip into the final sentence:
The American people need to know that the best-qualified workers are running the war on terrorism, not a bunch of hacks and cheats.
Yes. Yes we do.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Strindberg and Helium
Last night, we had our first rehearsal on our feet, and today my butt has informed me that it is very displeased with me. I woke up this morning sore and in need of a good stretch and a run of calisthenics to get my muscles working again. Instead, I sat on a train for an hour. Which didn't help. I'm thinking that six nights a week of jumping around in rhythm like a monkey and weilding a sword like a Viking is just what I need to get into shape. I should be significantly less doughy by the time this show goes up.
My friend Jamsky (whose name is Jen, but has been Jamsky ever since I forgot whether her name is spelled with an "i" or an "e") sent me Strindberg and Helium, which is...well...exactly what one would expect from a cartoon pairing the Expressionist playwright, August Strindberg, with an ebullient pink helium balloon. I can't recommend it enough. It is only possibly surpassed in its weirdness by the home of its animator, Eun-Ha at Milky Elephant, which has all sorts of fun flash animation to play with (but is a little hard to sort through).
Tres strange. Enjoy.
My friend Jamsky (whose name is Jen, but has been Jamsky ever since I forgot whether her name is spelled with an "i" or an "e") sent me Strindberg and Helium, which is...well...exactly what one would expect from a cartoon pairing the Expressionist playwright, August Strindberg, with an ebullient pink helium balloon. I can't recommend it enough. It is only possibly surpassed in its weirdness by the home of its animator, Eun-Ha at Milky Elephant, which has all sorts of fun flash animation to play with (but is a little hard to sort through).
Tres strange. Enjoy.
Monday, January 17, 2005
Fun Facts, Links, and Updates
A few fun and interesting links...
My friend, Sam, sent me this article, which proposes a plausible explanation for the weird lump on Bush's back during the elections. I don't know if it's true, or not, but as my neighbor, Jim, pointed out, the fact that the Administration denied that Bush even had a bulge, when he clearly did, is a good sign that something is amiss.
Personally, I wonder how Bush feels being one of the few presidents whose inauguration is met with protests and jeers.
Jeff Vandermeer's blog has a couple of interesting entries on it, including an entry about automatons with lots of informative links, a neat essay on shortwave radio, and the most recent, an article about a collaboration between Mexico's most famous crime novelist and Subcomandante Marcos. If only more revolutionaries had such artistic leanings as Marcos, the world would certainly be a better place.
And from Neil Gaiman's site, dated January 11, Theresa Nielsen Hayden provides links to nigh every article she's written to date on the subject of writing. My favorite being Namarie Sue.
I finally decided that, since I reference the Wikipedia every time a term comes up that I want to explain, I really ought to just post the Wikipedia in my sidebar. So I did that. Makes life easier for everyone. Not to let the Wikipedia stand on its own as my sole reference book, I've also added the Urban Dictionary, which can be equally useful. Amanda (the friend who was in town last week) led me to the Urban Dictionary, explaining that her mother uses it to sort out the slang in her students' papers. Which I think is a much smarter approach than just failing her students, outright, which is what many teachers would do.
I've added a link to my friend, Adam Verner. He's a voiceover talent, and just a talent, in general. He's the single most Aryan-looking human being I've met outside of Denmark. And since I've never been to Denmark, that means he's at the top of the list.
Back to life...
I dropped Amanda off at the airport, last Sunday, and then went to watch the season premiere of Carnivale (the best show on television) with my friends. Was overjoyed to hear from her after the show. Then I went home, and my bed felt terribly empty, and there was the impulse to reach out and hold someone who wasn't there. So life is back to something like it usually is, with the exception of the fact that I'm still fairly glowing from our visit. And the miracle of cellphones makes it so much easier to keep in touch with her.
But life back to normal means I've been sitting in coffee shops, writing--fighting desperately to finish a few short stories before rehearsal starts tonight. Because, once rehearsal starts, I'm enslaved to my other art for a little while and I don't get much time to write. So.
And life back to normal also means appreciating the strange and beautiful things I find. The other day, a few of us from my office went to Chinatown for lunch. Across the street from the restaurant was an herbalist/Chinese grocery store and after lunch, I dodged away from my coworkers to see if they had any star anise on hand (star anise being a key component in my next absinthe recipe). A pomegranate tree sat in their window, its fruit literally bursting with the little ruby-gem seeds.
As I stepped in, the girl behind the counter looked at me with a slightly confused glance, as though I was the only white guy who had set foot in the place in weeks.
"Can I help you?" she asked.
"Yes," I said, "Do you have any star anise?"
"Star anise?" she said, shaking her head. "It is a fruit?"
"No, no," I said, "it's a spice. I don't know what else it's called."
Again, she shook her head.
"It's star-shaped," I continued, "and it tastes like licorice."
She thought for a moment, and then produced an enormous bag of brown, woody shuriken, smelling sweetly of licorice. The bag was labeled, clearly, "Star Anise." I asked for two ounces of it, which cost me a dollar (when she said "one dollar" I was so convinced that couldn't be the price that I thought she was saying something in her language to one of the men who worked language. It was just too cheap to be true), and then left to rejoin the people from work. All day long, the little envelope of grey paper that she had wrapped the anise in filled my office with a sweet potpourri of licorice candy.
So life back to normal is not life back to boredom.
But I still miss my friend.
Off to write for a bit, and maybe a haircut today, in preparation for Ragnarok.
Happy MLK day.
My friend, Sam, sent me this article, which proposes a plausible explanation for the weird lump on Bush's back during the elections. I don't know if it's true, or not, but as my neighbor, Jim, pointed out, the fact that the Administration denied that Bush even had a bulge, when he clearly did, is a good sign that something is amiss.
Personally, I wonder how Bush feels being one of the few presidents whose inauguration is met with protests and jeers.
Jeff Vandermeer's blog has a couple of interesting entries on it, including an entry about automatons with lots of informative links, a neat essay on shortwave radio, and the most recent, an article about a collaboration between Mexico's most famous crime novelist and Subcomandante Marcos. If only more revolutionaries had such artistic leanings as Marcos, the world would certainly be a better place.
And from Neil Gaiman's site, dated January 11, Theresa Nielsen Hayden provides links to nigh every article she's written to date on the subject of writing. My favorite being Namarie Sue.
I finally decided that, since I reference the Wikipedia every time a term comes up that I want to explain, I really ought to just post the Wikipedia in my sidebar. So I did that. Makes life easier for everyone. Not to let the Wikipedia stand on its own as my sole reference book, I've also added the Urban Dictionary, which can be equally useful. Amanda (the friend who was in town last week) led me to the Urban Dictionary, explaining that her mother uses it to sort out the slang in her students' papers. Which I think is a much smarter approach than just failing her students, outright, which is what many teachers would do.
I've added a link to my friend, Adam Verner. He's a voiceover talent, and just a talent, in general. He's the single most Aryan-looking human being I've met outside of Denmark. And since I've never been to Denmark, that means he's at the top of the list.
Back to life...
I dropped Amanda off at the airport, last Sunday, and then went to watch the season premiere of Carnivale (the best show on television) with my friends. Was overjoyed to hear from her after the show. Then I went home, and my bed felt terribly empty, and there was the impulse to reach out and hold someone who wasn't there. So life is back to something like it usually is, with the exception of the fact that I'm still fairly glowing from our visit. And the miracle of cellphones makes it so much easier to keep in touch with her.
But life back to normal means I've been sitting in coffee shops, writing--fighting desperately to finish a few short stories before rehearsal starts tonight. Because, once rehearsal starts, I'm enslaved to my other art for a little while and I don't get much time to write. So.
And life back to normal also means appreciating the strange and beautiful things I find. The other day, a few of us from my office went to Chinatown for lunch. Across the street from the restaurant was an herbalist/Chinese grocery store and after lunch, I dodged away from my coworkers to see if they had any star anise on hand (star anise being a key component in my next absinthe recipe). A pomegranate tree sat in their window, its fruit literally bursting with the little ruby-gem seeds.
As I stepped in, the girl behind the counter looked at me with a slightly confused glance, as though I was the only white guy who had set foot in the place in weeks.
"Can I help you?" she asked.
"Yes," I said, "Do you have any star anise?"
"Star anise?" she said, shaking her head. "It is a fruit?"
"No, no," I said, "it's a spice. I don't know what else it's called."
Again, she shook her head.
"It's star-shaped," I continued, "and it tastes like licorice."
She thought for a moment, and then produced an enormous bag of brown, woody shuriken, smelling sweetly of licorice. The bag was labeled, clearly, "Star Anise." I asked for two ounces of it, which cost me a dollar (when she said "one dollar" I was so convinced that couldn't be the price that I thought she was saying something in her language to one of the men who worked language. It was just too cheap to be true), and then left to rejoin the people from work. All day long, the little envelope of grey paper that she had wrapped the anise in filled my office with a sweet potpourri of licorice candy.
So life back to normal is not life back to boredom.
But I still miss my friend.
Off to write for a bit, and maybe a haircut today, in preparation for Ragnarok.
Happy MLK day.
Monday, January 03, 2005
In the Company of a Dear Friend
I'm in The Grind with Amanda, who is reading Sleeping in Flames and periodically looking up to catch me watching her as I write this, and frankly it feels like she was never anywhere else. She just belongs here or just always is here somehow. Or something. We've done little more this week but sit in my apartment and talk, go grocery shopping when we realize the woeful lack of food in my apartment (I have parts of recipes, but no real whole recipes), and just be in each other's presence, which I think is really the point of it all. Just to be with each other.
We had an interesting New Year's, in which we spent the first couple of hours of the night walking around looking for the party we were supposed to show up at, and then spent the second half at a different party, drunk off of the French absinthe Amanda brought. Then we walked home and went to bed at dawn.
Every time Amanda visits, it's a new visit, which seems like an odd thing to think but really isn't. Some people visit after a few years and you come at each other from the same place as the last time you saw them, and even if you've kept in touch, you still act like the person you once were or you expect them to be the same person they once were. Amanda's never been that way with me. We just take each other as we are. We've seen each other's worst and our best and we can just be around one another whoever we are. It's a friendship that I'm always amazed by and grateful for.
And now I'm going to go back to being with her. Because that's better than blogging.
(as a final aside, our absinthe came out of steeping yesterday; it's painful to drink and has a flavor like an herbal medicine and even mixed with cranberry juice isn't particularly palatable...but it sure makes the world all shimmery for a while)
We had an interesting New Year's, in which we spent the first couple of hours of the night walking around looking for the party we were supposed to show up at, and then spent the second half at a different party, drunk off of the French absinthe Amanda brought. Then we walked home and went to bed at dawn.
Every time Amanda visits, it's a new visit, which seems like an odd thing to think but really isn't. Some people visit after a few years and you come at each other from the same place as the last time you saw them, and even if you've kept in touch, you still act like the person you once were or you expect them to be the same person they once were. Amanda's never been that way with me. We just take each other as we are. We've seen each other's worst and our best and we can just be around one another whoever we are. It's a friendship that I'm always amazed by and grateful for.
And now I'm going to go back to being with her. Because that's better than blogging.
(as a final aside, our absinthe came out of steeping yesterday; it's painful to drink and has a flavor like an herbal medicine and even mixed with cranberry juice isn't particularly palatable...but it sure makes the world all shimmery for a while)
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