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.