damn kids…

not only does this kitten act like a baby Katushka

she looks like one too:

i see vampires

so All My Children was never one of my addictions (that honour belonged, very briefly, to General Hospital because i was hard in teenage lust with Thaao Penghlis, then his character came to justice or died or something and i lost interest in General Hospital then, when i was fifteen, one Christmas vacation, i stumbled upon his face on some other show and thus began my thirty-year secret devotion to Days of Our Lives~when you’ve watched something for that many years it just seems inappropriate to give it up, but that is far beyond the point…)

I have other, well-known-and-no-need-to-mention reasons to be pleased by this:

 

Sarah Michelle Gellar returns to 'All My Children,' makes us pine for soaps' good ol' days

 

Sarah Michelle Gellar made her triumphant return to daytime TV today (just one week after making her triumphant return to all of TV in Ringer!), appearing in one episode of her old stomping ground, All My Children, which goes off the air for good Friday. (Sob.)

Despite saying she would be playing a whole new character, Gellar appeared as a hospital patient with amnesia who can’t remember anything about herself — except that she is Erica Kane’s (Susan Lucci) daughter, the role she originated nearly 20 years ago. One highlight? While chatting with the nurse, Gellar describes her unique condition and alludes to her future star-making role in a tongue-in-cheek way:

Gellar: “So I see vampires, that doesn’t make me crazy!”
Nurse: “No, vampires are very popular…”
Gellar: “I saw them before they were trendy!”

Gellar, who won a daytime Emmy for her work on AMC, was only in two brief scenes, but it’s nice to see her back on daytime — it helps us remember the good ol’ days when she played Kendall Hart, personal assistant and long-lost daughter to Erica, in the ’90s. Still, we forgive her for moving on to play a kick-ass heroine in a show about vampires… yes, before they were trendy.

i just can't help it

i have to post this because it is so like the world i am living in:

Erin McKean redefines the dictionary | Video on TED.com

why the hell can't blogger just leave my formatting alone?!?!?!

Apparently, one of the ways my obsessive-compulsive tendencies make themselves known is in formatting. I want my stuff to appear the way i intend it to appear, the way i slaved over making it (for some reason i like to compose my book thoughts in the same font, or a close proximity to, as the font the book was published in {yes, i know this is strange}, i'm one of those people that actually reads the little publishing note about the typeset {and i'm annoyed if a book doesn't have one}.)

I remember when i was young (high school and college), back in the early days of word-processing that it would take me a few hours to write a paper and then something like thirteen hours to format the damn thing (and that wasn't even due to my pickiness, it had to do with the fact that the programming wasn't set up to format the page for you so you had to set each margin, line break, page break, etc. yourself just so you could meet your teacher's expectations.

Now, it seems, i take that long re-formating my blog posts (usually in HTML) just so that it appears the way i originally intended, because blogger seems to think it knows better than me and inserts new line breaks, fonts, colors, etc.

Why can't it just trust that i know what i'm doing (even if i do type all my "i"s in lower case, and otherwise knowingly disobey rules, and even if what i have decided upon is a little hard to read). And god forbid i decide to add a word or something after i finally get the formatting right in its published form because then the process has to start all over again!

I think, since i am probably the only one reading this, that my opinion and vision should take the highest priority!

E-books drive older women to digital piracy

The Telegraph

by Christopher Williams, Technolgy Correspondent 1:44PM BST 17 May 2011

One in eight women over 35 who own such devices admit to having downloaded an unlicensed e-book.

That compares to just one in 20 women over 35 who admit to having engaged in digital music piracy.

News that a group formerly unwilling to infringe copyright are changing their behaviour as e-books take off will worry publishing executives, who fear they could suffer similar a similar fate to the record labels that have struggled to replace lost physical sales.

The picture across the entire e-reader and tablet markets is even more troubling for the publishing industry. Some 29 per cent of e-reader owners of both genders and all ages admit piracy. For tablets the figure rises to 36 per cent.

The findings are part of the Digital Entertainment Survey, an annual assessment of consumer behaviour online by the law firm Wiggin.

The online poll of 1,959 consumers also found that the potential damage to publishing is likely to increase, as a quarter of those who admitted to e-book piracy said they would continue.

And the iPad and Kindle were both in the top three most wanted devices across all consumer groups.

The Publishers Association recently revealed the number of physical books sold fell by 3 per cent last year, and although consumer e-book sales grew strongly revenues were just £16m, compared to £3.1bn in physical sales.

Announcing the figures, the group’s chief executive, Richard Mollet, placed emphasis on preserving copyright protections.

"The innovation in the digital marketplace and the strength of British publishers’ export performance is only possible because of the robust and flexible copyright framework which underpins the UK creative industries," he said.

"Copyright ensures that authors, writers and researchers get rewarded for their talent and expertise, and that the publishers who support them see a return on their investment – particularly in their digital infrastructure."

Maybe the people over 35 are just more honest than those under 35 (although i have found that "kids today" don't even seem to realize that copying cds you don't own as wrong/illegal {at least when i do it, i know it's wrong} And that downloading book texts from sites like scribd is violating copyright (somehow, i am less likely to do that~although i do seem to reprint entire articles on my blog~is attribution enough?)

There are not a million stories in the naked city.

 There is only one story, but a correct translation cannot be unanimously agreed upon and no one can believe the ending, so it is in a constant state of being retold.

now the year needs to expand

or just make a new calendar (after all if we are moving into a Post-Modern version of our language, why not a PoMo calendar...)

Past, Present, and the Quantity of the Year

New York TimesPublished: May 3, 2011

How long is a year? Ask most people, and they’d say 365 days and not nearly long enough. The year, of course, is the time it takes the Earth to orbit around the Sun, a rate that is slowing fractionally each century. For many reasons, scientists need a more precise definition of the year than its length in days, yet the only unit of time defined in the International System of Units is the second, which is measured in oscillations of cesium atoms.

(i'm not sure i love this word, though

Recently, a task force of geologists and chemists proposed a new unit of measure called the annus — the Latin word for year — which would use the length of time between one equinox or solstice and the same equinox or solstice a year later. Because the Earth’s orbit varies in temporal length, the annus is keyed to the year 2000, which was 31,556,925.445 seconds long.Astronomers prefer to use the Julian year — which is 31,557,600 seconds long — and they, like some scientific journals, are not likely to adopt the annus. Many working geologists are objecting to the proposed abbreviation for annus, which is “a.” To the task force, the symbol Ma means mega-annus, or million years. But to geologists, Ma means “million years ago,” and 90 Ma, for instance, means a specific point in the Cretaceous period.
However this is resolved, we are left meditating on a remark made by a pair of geologists who note that a geological date like 90 Ma, or 90 million years ago, implies “before present.” Unfortunately, these geologists write, the present “is not well defined.” We know the feeling. We also know that whatever you call it, the year gets shorter and shorter the older you get.

(do you remember when the days, and weeks, and months, and years went by so slow you couldn't stand the wait?)but then, of course, all of our years will run out. . .

Someday the Sun Will Burn Out and the World Will End (but don't tell anyone)

The New York Times By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: February 14, 2006

I've always been proud of my irrelevance.

When I raised my hand to speak at our weekly meetings here in the science department, my colleagues could be sure they would hear something weird about time travel or adventures in the fifth dimension. Something to take them far from the daily grind. Enough to taunt the mind, but not enough to attract the attention of bloggers, editors, politicians and others who keep track of important world affairs.

(is this anything like my raising my hand to argue with my high school teachers?)

So imagine my surprise to find the origin of the universe suddenly at the white hot center of national politics. Last week my colleague Andrew Revkin reported that a 24-year-old NASA political appointee with no scientific background, George C. Deutsch, had told a designer working on a NASA Web project that the Big Bang was "not proven fact; it is opinion," and thus the word "theory" should be used with every mention of Big Bang.
It was not NASA's place, he said in an e-mail message, to make a declaration about the origin of the universe "that discounts intelligent design by a creator."
In a different example of spinning science news last month, NASA headquarters removed a reference to the future death of the sun from a press release about the discovery of comet dust around a distant star known as a white dwarf. A white dwarf, a shrunken dense cinder about the size of earth, is how our own sun is fated to spend eternity, astronomers say, about five billion
years from now, once it has burned its fuel.
"We are seeing the ghost of a star that was once a lot like our sun," said Marc Kuchner of the Goddard Space Flight Center. In a statement that was edited out of the final news release he went on to say, "I cringed when I saw the data because it probably reflects the grim but very distant future of our own planets and solar system."
An e-mail message from Erica Hupp at NASA headquarters to the authors of the original release at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said, "NASA is not in the habit of frightening the public with doom and gloom scenarios."
Never mind that the death of the sun has been a staple of astronomy textbooks for 50 years.
Personally, I can't get enough of gloom- and-doom scenarios. I'm enchanted by the recent discovery, buttressed by observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, that an antigravitational force known as dark energy might suck all galaxies out of the observable universe in a few hundred billion years and even rip apart atoms and space. But I never dreamed that I might be frightening the adults.
What's next? Will future presidential candidates debate the ontological status of Schrödinger's cat? That's the cat that, according to the uncertainty principle of quantum physics, is both alive and dead until we observe it.
Apparently science does matter.
Dreading the prospect that they too may be dragged into the culture wars, astronomers have watched from the sidelines in recent years as creationists in Kansas and Pennsylvania challenged the teaching of evolution in classrooms. Never mind that the Big Bang has been officially accepted by the Roman Catholic Church for half a century. The notion of a 14-billion-year-old cosmos doesn't fit if you believe the Bible says the world is 6,000 years old.
And indeed there have been sporadic outbreaks, as evidenced by the bumper stickers and signs you see in some parts of the country: "Big Bang? You've got to be kidding — God."
When the Kansas school board removed evolution from the science curriculum back in 1999, they also removed the Big Bang.
In a way, the critics have a point. The Big Bang is indeed only a theory, albeit a theory that covers the history of creation as seamlessly as could be expected from the first fraction of a second of time until today. To call an idea "a theory" is to accord it high status in the world of science. To pass the bar, a theory must make testable predictions — that stars eventually blow out or that your computer will boot up.
Sometimes those predictions can be, well, a little disconcerting. When you're talking about the birth or death of the universe, a little denial goes a long way.
That science news is sometimes managed as carefully as political news may not come as a
surprise to most adults. After all, the agencies that pay for most scientific research in this country have billion-dollar budgets that they have to justify to the White House and the Congress. It helps to have newspaper clippings attesting to your advancement of the president's vision.
It's enough to make you feel sorry for NASA, whose very charter mandates high visibility for both its triumphs and its flops, but which has officers recently requiring headquarters approval before consenting to interviews with the likes of me.
The recent peek behind the curtains of this bureaucracy has been both depressing and exciting. So they are paying attention after all.
They should be paying attention, but I'm not looking forward to having to include more politicians and bureaucrats in my rounds of the ever-expanding, multi-dimensional universe (or universes).
I'll do it, but, lacking the gene for street smarts, I fear being played like a two-bit banjo. I'm even happy to go star-gazing with Dick Cheney, if duty so calls, but only if he agrees to disarm
and I can wear a helmet.

I loved going to the planeterium as a child, one of the programs showed (what they imagined to be) the solor system's birth to death. The idea that it would all die out wasn't so much frightening as incomprehensible to me.I also remember being in church and finding it so hard to contemplate a never-ending eternity (like a ring that has no beginning and no end.) It hurt my brain and i was left in the void not being able to contemplate either ending or not-ending.Luckily it looks like i'll have 7.59 years to work it out...

In the end, there won’t even be fragments.

we all have different priorities

My dad is under the mistaken impression that i could have bought a house with the money i have spent on earrings over the years. Every time he and my stepmother come to visit me i see them shaking their heads and issuing a silent "tut-tut" at the collection of earrings i have hanging on my wall.

First of all, this collection has been amassed over thirty-some-odd years, and it isn't like i spent inordinate amounts of money on the things (i couldn't afford to~both because i never have inordinate amounts of money available to me and also because i'm always loosing earrings.)

Losing earrings has somehow been one of the biggest, oft-occurring tragedies of my life. I buy earrings because i like something about whatever pair it is, its uniqueness, it's catitude, or whatever. Often the ones i own are irreplaceable (not because of their monetary worth, but because of their availability.) One lost earring is usually not that big of a tragedy because i seldom wear matching earrings (i figure different earrings in each available hole offers more display room and, along with my black toenails, is one of my signatures.) The main problem comes when i loose my only remaining earring or the pair happens to offer two different "perspectives" (the same image only mirrored, one earring has the western hemisphere and one the eastern, or, one of my favorite pairs "IN ONE EAR" and "OUT THE OTHER".) Occasionally i will catch an image of myself in the mirror and wonder how i ended up with matching earrings.

Because i have such a tendancy to loose these precious baubles i am always paranoid of vacuming my living room floor or sweeping my bedroom floor for fear of loosing them eternally. If i do either of these dreaded activities (not that i'm dying to anyway) i search through the debris for any strays and have admonished my mother to do the same...

Best day ever!

1. Demetra somehow managed to open a closed box, open the cellophane packages inside, and rip apart the new toys i had ordered for her.


2. I pinched a very sensitive part of my body when i tried to close the recycling bin.


3. The ATM ate my debit card.


4. I lost my license.


5. I almost T-boned another car because i could not stop my car from sliding into it.


6. I locked both my keys and my phone in the car and had to call a locksmith who demanded $65 from me (i was praying to someone's god that the charge would actually go through..)


7. Finally got home and spilled coffee all over my brand new carpet.


8. About 11:00 pm the power went out to my entire house (and ONLY MY house,) had to call the power company who sent someone out only for him to be completely baffled by the situation.

I'm just hoping that the universe is just letting my bad luck run out before the new year starts.

or maybe not--now 12:17 am, January 1, 2011 and i just dumped red wine all over myself and my new couch...)

(1:17: now my computer has completely ceased to work...)

patty cake, patty cake, . . .

kitty say what

some days

are just like that

(and this is so apropos to my life as i have not been able to print anything on my printer for centuries because of some non-existant paperjam!*#%&*! ~ no matter how many times Demetra has tried to remedy the problem!)

i remain unimpressed

I write like Stephen King

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

was my result with my recent blog posts (i've never been a fan) i tried sticking in a poem and another random piece and got:

I write like David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

i'm really not sure what to take from that. but then i tried one more poem and got this:

I write like Vladimir Nabokov

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

i cheered at the thought of being compared to my favorite author and decided it was time to stop trying (and stop questioning.)

i have always longed to be compared to Margaret Atwood, what she says and the way she says it is who i want to be ~maybe it's the woman in me (and my temperment probably matches hers~being more than a little cranky and all...)

poor little turtle

only wants to be kitty's friend and the cat is having none of it...



(not one of my cats, by the by...)

finally (even if i don't know where anything is)

so, i have been talking about remodeling my living room for years. Had it all planned out (and, believe it or not, this wasn't my plan) but have been thinking that the next day would be the perfect day to procrastinate day after day, after day. My sister, who i suppose has grown quite weary of hearing about this project, is visiting, apparently, with the express purpose of tackling this job herself.
I go to work, take naps, whatever only to find more and more of my living room gone. Now all that is left is the tv and its accouterments, the sofa and some pieces of cat furniture. I have no idea where anything is (and, since most of my clothing was spread all over the living room, getting dressed has become quite an adventure.) Yesterday i went to retrieve the cat food from my trunk and found some things stashed there.
I still have all my masks up (and i suppose i shall not take them down until after the carpet is ripped up and i am ready to paint. The first pictures here are of my entryway.

I have masks in every room my house. I began collecting them about twenty-five years ago because of my theatre major, my love of Shakespeare, and the fact that i believe they are unique. All told, i have no idea how many i have as there are still some packed away (over 200, i believe.)

So this is the current state of my living room (i'm planning on trashing the green curtains for blinds, although i suppose they match the plant.): the carpet is probably over 25 years old and has had too many cats live in it over the years (the entry way is completely ruined by former feline residents as well as my own sixteen-year-old feline who thought that because the odor was already there that was the place to go. I am afraid of what the state of the sub-flooring there is but once the damage has been mitigated i plan to replace it with tile in the hopes that it will be easier to clean)


I have never been a huge fan of red (everything i like tends toward the cool side,) but, as of late i've been obsessed with all things red (and i'm trying to go to the cool side of red.) I hope i don't hate it once i have to live in it...For my carpeting i have always wanted to do carpet tiles because of the beasties and the clumsiness of their owner, but found myself turned off by the colors, textures, and lack of ability to install padding underneath. FLOR finally came out with a solution to the first two and i decided to sacrifice the third to the greater good. I was thinking of doing yellow blinds for my window so that the living room was all primary colors but i'm not sure how that whole effect will go. I do have a celestial (blue sky, yellow stars, moon or something similar running throughout my house so the yellow is there, but then again yellow is from the wrong side of the spectrum and yellow hasn't grown on me like red has.

Ikea provides my desired sofa and chairs (time to relegate the futon to the basement~and only if Ikea would actually PROVIDE the sofa and chairs so i didn't have to use my imaginary cash...) I have decided to pack away my hundreds of cds instead of displaying them since i have everything on iTunes now and then i might actually have space in my tiny living room for the furniture.

I still have black furniture/accents remaining from my early household fantasies of every room a color accented by black and the dark grey was the only color i liked in the styles i wanted.

After i complete the living room, my next wad of imaginary cash will be devoted to installing a platform in my bedroom (i am becoming too old and crickety to launch myself off my beloved futon~and though i still love to sleep on it i need it to be a bit higher off the ground~i could also use the extra storage space drawers would provide.)
this is my current bedroom look with the usual feline decorations.

if you could only see the ENTIRE bedroom you would get a sense of the type of mess my sister had to clean up in the living room...

My mother told me that when i got a housekeeper i would have to learn to put up with people putting away my stuff. And i said, "But mother, i have no more imaginary cash to spend on a housekeeper." To which my wonderful mother said that she was going to pay for it (she never did my housework when i was growing up~i suppose she is tired of visiting me in chaos...
Although i love my family for all their help i hate that my migraines prevent me from doing much myself and feel so guilty that others have to do it for me.

(and once upon a time i had matching lamps~i have a replacement shade somewhere but i know not where.)

I am much too picky to ever accomplish anything!

thoughts?

damn, missed yet another Pagan holiday

Now however will i predict my future?

"This is an excellent time for rites of divination."

Humanity has been celebrating Litha and the triumph of light since ancient times. On the Wheel of the Year Litha lies directly across from Yule, the shortest day of the calendar year, that cold and dark winter turning when days begin to lengthen and humanity looks wistfully toward warmth, sunlight and growing things. Although Litha and Yule are low holidays or lesser sabats in the ancient parlance, they are celebrated with more revel and merriment than any other day on the wheel except perhaps Samhain (my own favourite). The joyous rituals of Litha celebrate the verdant Earth in high summer, abundance, fertility, and all the riches of Nature in full bloom. This is a madcap time of strong magic and empowerment, traditionally the time for handfasting or weddings and for communication with the spirits of Nature. At Litha, the veils between the worlds are thin; the portals between "the fields we know" and the worlds beyond stand open.

i've done it before

i'll probably do it again...

(and somehow they totally fucked up the picture/description corespondence in the above~and the below, just so you know. . . i may not be as weird as this makes me seem . . . or i could be even stranger...)

the question is

how many different mes

are there???

if only...

and for the friend who commented:

"Sassy gay friend" isn't exactly an archetype you'd stick in a tragedy. That's probably why he's missing from Hamlet. He does show up in Romeo and Juliet, but luckily he gets stabbed to death in the second act, otherwise he might have interfered with the suicide scene in act 5.

here ya go:

to which said friend adds "That's why Mercutio had to die."