Lots of Not In Our Name rallies this Sunday, including one here in Seattle, one in Anchorage, and many other cities.
so whut r u wearing
If you’ve ever used IM systems such as AIM or Yahoo! Messenger, this is too funny…
BinLaden9151: did u get my message
XprezbushX: whut message
BinLaden9151: u know, my message
BinLaden9151: it wuz delivered by airmail
BinLaden9151: right into ur trade towers
XprezbushX: shut up that wasnt funny
BinLaden9151: lol
XprezbushX: SHUT UP!!!! :X
BinLaden9151: r u mad
XprezbushX: yah
BinLaden9151: why??????
XprezbushX: u messed with my country
Thanks to them.ws
NaNoWriMo
I’m not entirely sure yet, but I’ve just run across something that I’m really tempted to make a shot at — National Novel Writing Month, in which all participants have one month, from Nov. 1st to Nov. 30th, to write a 50,000 word novel (approximately 175 pages). Quality isn’t a concern, nor is style, form, or anything of the sort — merely doing it, or attempting to do it, is the point.
National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.
Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over talent and craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.
Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.
I haven’t got the faintest clue what I’d write about. I don’t even know if it’s a real possibility, when I work a full 40-hour week, plus some on the weekends. But I’ve got the next month to think about it, to see if I can come up with something worth writing about (or even something not worth writing about, just to see how it ends up), and to see if I really want to give this a shot. I think I do…
Theologian of the Year
I’d be interested to hear what Dad thinks of this link — ‘The Door’ magazine (who I don’t know anything about at all) chooses their Theologian of the Year:
Perilous times call for bold theology.
Let’s face it. Evil is running rampant. Terrorists strike without warning. Corporate executives defraud the public and their own employees. Politicians tear apart the fabric of national unity for their own agendas. Popular culture has become a banal river of unadulterated trash, a “hellmouth” slowly dumbing down our sense of reality. The people are paralyzed by indecision, ennui or terminal cynicism.
Meanwhile, the ozone layer is perforated, glaciers are melting, and crazies set wildfires that denude the landscape. While Generation X passes the baton to Generation Y, adolescence is still hell, AND THERE’S ONLY ONE LETTER LEFT!
We need someone who can not only deconstruct the problem of evil, but kick it’s hiney; someone with a preternatural sense of comic timing and an eye for fashion.
We need Buffy.
Dad (along with other people) has been telling me for a while just how good of a show ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ really is. One of these days I may need to see if I can rent the DVD season sets and start working my way through it. Neat article, though.
Incidentally, The Door looks like it may be an interesting site to explore — from their ‘About The Door Magazine‘ page:
We satirize something we love — the Church, and more generally people of faith — with the hope that our prodding might generate some course corrections while inducing a laugh or two…or three.
The basis for The Door‘s mission is a scriptural injunction to mock idolatry. The prophet Elijah did it best, during his contest with the priests of Baal. But an expanded discussion is found in the Talmud, that compendium of Jewish oral traditions that we find a continuing source of light on New Testament understanding. The rabbinic teachers said Israel was forbidden to mock or jeer anyone or anything except idolatry. The prescribed epithet was, “Take your idol and put it under your buttocks!”
Laughter is good
However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than perhaps you think for.
— Ishmael, in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick
Oooh – he’s cute!
More or less at random, I stumbled across Because I Say So! not too long ago, and have been thoroughly enjoying Jodi’s posts to her blog. Especially when she comes up with posts like this…
So listen, studs. Looking at someone of the same sex and appreciating his beauty, does not mean you’re (literally) into guys. Admitting that you’ve noticed another man, and admitting that you think he’s attractive, does not mean you are attracted to him “that way”. Marco the Magnificent Magician isn’t going to swoop down on you, black cape a-flappin’, tap you on the dick with his magic wand, and — poof! presto, homo! — you’re a homosexual! (Oh, the horror!) No. It just means you have eyes. Nothing more, nothing less.
The hunt is on: MT, MySQL, and PHP
While I’ve done my best to track any changes I’ve made to Movable Type in my ‘MovableType’ archive category, I’ll freely admit it’s not organized quite as well as it could be.
However, it looks like there’s going to be a lot of good information regarding MT, MySQL, and PHP appearing soon, as Jonathan Delacour and Allan Moult start migrating their MT blogs to new installations. Jonathan will be writing from the perspective of a Windows user, Allan from that of a Mac OS X user. Definitely worth keeping an eye on in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, Shelley Powers sees the migration beginning, and immediately begins her hunt for the wild MT documenters. The game is afoot!
Goodbye Dez!
I just got back from a nice goodbye dinner for Dez, who’s leaving on Tuesday to move to Toronto to live with her finacee. Was a good evening — Dez, her finacee (who’s name I’m completely spacing on at the moment…), Rick, Chad, Don, Kareem, Scott, Mary, Kim, Kayo, myself, and a few other people that I didn’t manage to catch the names of, all just sitting back, joking around, and having fun.
Looks like there’s a chance I may be heading to Toronto over Memorial Day weekend next year, too. That’s the date they’ve set for the wedding, and I might end up providing the music for their reception, also! Pretty cool…we’ll see what happens.
That’s it for now, though, I’m pretty brain dead. Thinking zoning with some DVD’s for the evening will be a nice way to relax.
A link for dad
Just found a new place on the web that I could spend hours at, and I think dad would get a kick out of this too, given our mutual enjoyment of words — there’s even an e-mail list to sign up for…
Welcome to the home of the Word Spy. This Web site and its associated mailing list are devoted to recently coined words, existing words that have enjoyed a recent renaissance, and older words that are being used in new ways.
Each weekday, the Word Spy presents a new word, its definition, and a citation (usually from a major newspaper or magazine) that shows how people are using the word. You also get extra goodies such as background on the word’s formation, a list of related words from the Word Spy database, quotations on words and language, and more.
Thanks to Backup Brain for this one.
Erk – how did I manage this one?
Okay, this is interesting. It appears that I’ve managed to mung up the code for my pages somewhere so that someone using Internet Explorer 5.2 under Mac OS X cannot leave a comment. Other browsers can, however. I’ll use the comments for this post as a testing ground to try to narrow things down.