[UPDATE: Actually, these are now categorized as “quick hits”, because itty-bitty should really ever only be applied to a kitty, not a blog post.]
So I have this habit of thinking “oh, I could blog about that” and then forgetting thinking there isn’t enough for a post or just plain lazing away from blogging about that.
I don’t know how much I could do about the lazing and forgetting (hm, I wonder if those two are connected. . .) but I have put together “quick hit” posts to collect the bits into one respectable post. I don’t want to offer a single appetizer (or snack or tapas or amuse bouch) but a full meal; not just a single shot, but a bottle; not just a song, but an album; not a trailer. . . okay, this is getting out of hand, isn’t it?
Anyway, the point is, I try to offer a full thought, and when I can’t, I, um, don’t.
BUT NO MORE! Today, in exciting blog news, I’ll try to offer itty-bitty posts about what hits me when it hits me and see if this, ah, well, to see if this works, I guess.
1. Trickster loves ice cubes. If she sees me grab one out of the freezer she jumps over to wherever I am to bogart the cube.
It works.
She doesn’t get the popsicles, however.
2. Anthony Weiner stated months ago that there likely were more pics of him floating around in cyberspace, so. . . there you go.
I take it I’m supposed to be upset that these pics apparently date from the same time in which he was trying to get his life back together, that they were from a year rather than two years ago, but POLITICIAN LIES ABOUT SEX is not exactly news.
Anyway, I can’t be arsed to care much since I don’t support him in the mayor’s race. If he wins I’ll be upset because I think he’s too conservative and I’m not at all convinced that he would actually be a good mayor, not because he turns into a thirteen-year-old boy in the presence of a smart phone.
I thought he showed terrible judgment when this first came out, but I also thought it wasn’t worth resigning his seat over. If his constituents decided to vote against him because he flashed his dick, so be it, but as what he did was just kinda-creepy, but not illegal, it didn’t debar him from the House.
And I was sad to see him go, not because he was a great legislator—he was a terrible legislator—but because he played a particular role in the House and for the Democrats that I think is crucial: as the self-appointed pain the ass, the rat-terrier barking at and occasionally biting his and his party’s opponents.
It would be terrible if everyone in the House behaved in this manner, but in a chamber with 435 members each party needs its pains-in-the-ass. The GOP has rather too many of these at this point, and the Dems, too few. Weiner’s resignation was a loss for the Dems.
And if he wins the mayoral primary, that, too, will be a loss for the Dems.
3. Yes, I bought a new fan. Not as quiet as the old one, but still, pretty good.
Am not at all glad to see that prison officials are considering force-feeding the protesters.
Jesus fucking christ. I am not a progressive but this is the twenty-first century: can we not figure out a better way to deal with criminals than this?
I get that some people really cannot live in society, that by their deeds they should be keep apart, but is this really the best solution we can come up with?
5. I’m listening to Q with Jian Ghomeshi and the guest host is talking about flip-flops with Dana Stevens.
Dana Stevens is against them anywhere outside of the shower or the beach. I am with Dana Stevens on this crusade.
On the other hand, that people insist upon wearing them oot-and-aboot gives me a chance to be smug: Whenever I see a rat on a subway platform, I get to say “and this is why you shouldn’t wear flip-flops in the city.”
6. I am also, for the record, against people clipping their nails on the train.
So two things happened today: A future king of England was born, and my fan went out.
Naturally, I’m more concerned about the fan.
My parents bought me this fan when I was in college, lo those many years ago. Decades ago, actually, and it has moved with me from Madison to Minneapolis to Albuquerque to Minneapolis. . . well, you get the point: I’ve had it for a long time.
There was no obvious brand name—this sucker’s so old, it was built before companies thought to embed their brand on every available surface—but according to the sticker inside, it was made by Lakewood Engineering & Mfg., Co. of Chicago. (And, actually, when I got up to check the manufacturer, I noticed—for the first time ever—the name of the company on the fan-speed sticker. Subtle branding, then.)
It’s been a good fan. I’ve had to replace the knob, and over the years I’ve knocked out a few of the tines, but on low speed it’s very quiet and on medium, still pretty quiet. It’s been rained on and knocked over and dropped and had shit dropped in it, but other than a yearly cleaning, I haven’t had to do much with it other than pull it out of the closet and plug it in.
A coupla’ years ago I bought another box fan, but returned it because it was tippy and thin and loud even on low. I do have one of those dual-fan window fans (also from my folks), which I’m using now, but it’s not really a replacement for the box: not as big, and not as versatile.
I have, of course, tried fixing the fan—connecting wires broke, so I went in, stripped the cord a bit, pulled out more wire, and tried wrapping it around the connector piece (I have no idea what that’s called)—but while I was able to dis- and re-assemble the fan-speed module, I wasn’t able to get it to work. I know there’s electricity flowing (yes, I shocked myself testing the reassembly), so I’ll give ‘er another go later, but it’s just possible that I’ll have to break down and buy a replacement.
Goddamn. I really did want to keep this sucker working for another decade or so.
Oh, and for the royal baby? Well, as an avowed republican, I officially have no interest in the future king of England, but as a human being, I like babies. They had an apparently healthy baby boy.
That’s a good thing.
~~~
(And yes, at some point I’ll get back to more substantive posting, but I’ve warned you: my brain melts in the muck of July. Once things cool and dry out a bit, I should be able to string more than two thoughts together.)
As I’d mentioned previously, at some point in the summer I cut off all my hair—and yesterday was the day I was shorn.
My hair is short. Really really short. It’s possible that I’ve had it cut this short before, but I don’t think it’s ever been shorter.
(At one point in grad school some of my friends suggested that I shave my head. My response? Why do you hate me?
Yes, some people look amazing with shaved heads, but those are usually people who look amazing, full stop. I am not one of those people.)
Anyway, I’d say it’s “dyke-short”, but as a mere half-dyke I don’t know that I can get away with saying that. And no, I don’t look particularly butch with the cut, mostly because I don’t look particularly butch.
It does give me a certain ain’t-got-time-for-this-shit look, which could be translated as a bitch-look. I guess I could go with that.
So: I now expect the date requests to just start rollin’ in. . . .
Kitty boy changes where he sleeps at night: sometimes at the end of my bed, sometimes on the bedroom chair, sometimes on the small chest, and sometimes in the living room.
But with some regularity, in the middle of the night, Jasper will creep up on to my chest and purr and peep and squeak until I wake up enough to scritch him. And if the noises (or his weight or a misplaced paw) don’t do it, he’ll nudge around one of my hands until I bring it to his head, then he’ll settle in, a block of purring fur.
Okay, I don’t like being woken up, but he’s just so affectionate and. . . yeah, I’m a sucker, so yeah, he gets away with it.
Actually, the purring and blocking wouldn’t be so bad, but at some point he’ll get super affectionate and start to lick my chin or my neck, and I have to move my hand to deflect him—because I know that after the licks come the nips and then the chomps.
No, I can’t recall that Jasper—who I did once call the Vampire Kitty—ever has bitten my neck, but having had my toes be on the receiving end of the lick-nip-chomp routine, I ain’t taking any chances.
I don’t know what’s going on with him; it’s entirely possible he’s just being. . . cat.
Trickster, on the other hand, never bothers me in the middle of the night, but when the alarm goes off in the morning, or if she hears me stir, she’ll jump on to the bed or come up from the foot and sit, just sit, right next to me, waiting for me to wake enough to throw a pettin’ her way.
Of course, then she’s got this weird step-dance she goes through where she arches her back and circles around and smashes her head into my hand, to which I almost always respond, “weirdo”.
The summer between my third & fourth years at Madison I worked “maintenance” for the university.
I put “maintenance” in quotes because we didn’t really do any maintenance—that was left to the regular civil service staff; mostly, we cleaned.
I’d worked food service the summer before, but “maintenance” was much better because there were more hours: full-time, M-F, in the Southeast dorms (Sellery A & B, Ogg, and Witte).
The first 4 or 6 weeks we cleaned all of the windows in all of the dorms, inside and out. The supervisors (also students) would come around and stand sideways to the windows to check for streaks and missed spots and ponies, telling us to re-do a bunch if we were on schedule, or just to wipe up the errata if we were behind.
Then they’d task us with various bullshit—cleaning out window wells, cleaning and painting dumpsters (not as bad as it sounds, actually), removing the tar that seeped up through the cracks in the basements. (Word was the Southeast dorms were built on a swamp, and tar had been used as filler. I don’t know if that was true, but tar really did ooze out of the cracks.) Anyway, they kept us busy until the end of the summer, when they needed us to do real work again.
A big chunk of that real work was cleaning up after bankers. The university ran seminars for businessfolk, putting them up in the dorms, so we did the maid-work, cleaning rooms, bathrooms, etc., during and after their stay. It wasn’t a bad gig: the dorms were air conditioned, and the bankers would often leave booze and food behind.
We were supposed to toss these leavings, but, c’mon, who does that? The regular civil service staff and the student workers had a silent understanding, each taking what was left and saying nothin’ to nobody.
As we worked these various jobs, our work crews would shift. I ended up maid-ing with a couple of girls I didn’t know very well, and, really, hadn’t been terribly interested in. Nothing awful: they had their group, I had mine.
They, however, turned out to be the perfect pair to work with. There were no awkward conversations about keeping the booze, and, like most (although not all) of the student workers, saw no point in working too hard. We did what we needed to, nothing more.
Anyway, what prompted this reminiscence was the one girl, whose face I can barely make out, but she had straight blond hair, who’d walk around muttering “she’s sure fine lookin’ man, she’s something else” at her friend (also blond, but curly), and they’d both crack up.
One lunch hour—for which we had to punch out—we took some of the leftover beer and whiskey and found a spot decently away from the main office and all ate together. I finally asked her about the line.
“Eddie Cochrane,” she’d said, then repeated, “She’s sure fine lookin’ man, she’s something else.”
I didn’t know the name of the song, but remembered Eddie (after briefly confusing him with Tommie) Cochrane, and way later found a best-of cd with, (what else) “Somethin’ Else”.
So, after that verrrrrrrrrry long prelude, for your listening pleasure:
I was listening to it early this evening. It’s a great song.
This is not a “why I am not a creationist” piece. Oh no. Even though I’m not.
This is a hit on a “why I am a creationist” piece.
Virginia Heffernan, who can be an engaging writer, has apparently decided to disengage from thinking. In a widelycommented–upon piece for Yahoo, the tech and culture writer outed herself as a creationist. It is a spectacularly bad piece of . . . well, I guess it’s a species of argumentation, but as she kinds of flits and floats from the pretty to the happy and fleetly flees from sweet reason, it might be best to consider this a kind of (bad) performance art.
My brief with her is less about the God-ish conclusion than that flitting and floating: she rejects science because its boring and sad and aren’t stories about God sooooo much better?
You think I’m exaggerating? I am not. To wit:
I assume that other people love science and technology, since the fields are often lumped together, but I rarely meet people like that. Technology people are trippy; our minds are blown by the romance of telecom. At the same time, the people I know who consider themselves scientists by nature seem to be super-skeptical types who can be counted on to denigrate religion, fear climate change and think most people—most Americans—are dopey sheep who believe in angels and know nothing about all the gross carbon they trail, like “Pig-Pen.”
I like most people. I don’t fear environmental apocalypse. And I don’t hate religion. Those scientists no doubt see me as a dopey sheep who believes in angels and is carbon-ignorant. I have to say that they may be right.
Uh-huh.
Later she mentions that she’s just not moved by the Big Bang or evolution, and that evo-psych is sketchy science (which it is) this must mean all of science is sketchy (which it is not).
And then this stirring conclusion:
All the while, the first books of the Bible are still hanging around. I guess I don’t “believe” that the world was created in a few days, but what do I know? Seems as plausible (to me) as theoretical astrophysics, and it’s certainly a livelier tale. As “Life of Pi” author Yann Martel once put it, summarizing his page-turner novel: “1) Life is a story. 2) You can choose your story. 3) A story with God is the better story.”
(Would it be fair to mention at this point that I hated Life of Pi? Too beside-the-point?)
To summarize, she likes technology—because it’s trippy—but she doesn’t like knowing the hows and whys technology actually works, i.e., the science.
This would be fine—after all, there are all kinds of things I like without necessarily being interested in how and why they came to be—were it not for the fact that she’s a technology writer.
Perhaps she’s a closet Juggalo, or maybe she thought Bill O’Reilly waxed profound on the movement of tides, or maybe she just ate a shitload of shrooms and floated down to her keyboard, but I’d be very—excuse me, super-skeptical of the views of a tech writer who apparently thinks angels make iPhones.
~~~
I have to admit, I was more amused by her piece than anything, and her Twitter exchange with Carl Zimmer left me gasping; to the extent I can make out any kind of coherent line at all, it seems to be “I like stories more than theories—so there!”
As someone who likes both stories and theories—yes, Virginia, we can have both—however, I hate her feeding into the Two Cultures divide, not least because dopey angel-mongering tends to diminish even further the humanities.
I am a science enthusiast, but I am also a critic of the some of the more imperial epistemological claims by some scientists (what often gets branded as “scientism“). To note that the methods of science (methodological naturalism, nomological-deductivism—take yer pick) and knowledge produced from those methods are bounded is often taken as an attack on science itself.
And, to be fair, sometimes—as in the Storified Twitter spat, when Heffernan (big fat honking sigh) pulls Foucault out her nose to fling at Zimmer—it is.
But it ain’t necessarily so. It is simply the observation that science is one kind of practice, that it hasn’t escaped the conditionality and history of practice into some kind of absolute beyond.
Now, there’s a lot more behind that observation that I’m willing to go into at this late hour, so allow me to skip ahead to my ire at Heffernan: her dipshit argument makes it harder for those of us who’d prefer our critiques both dip- and shit-free.
So, thanks Virginia, thanks for stuffing your face with shrooms or replacing your neurons with helium or whatever the hell it was that lead you to declare the moon is made of cheese.
But next time, if there is a next time, Just Say No.
Late afternoon and all I could think of was how sticky I was. An ice cube where my cleavage should be wasn’t going to cut it.
Time again for the a/c.
The cats reacted predictably, giving me reproving looks along the lines of what took you so long, cheapskate? They’ll get theirs, tomorrow, when I turn off the air and open the windows and abandon them for my office.
Anyway, I finished watching Eureka last night and have moved on to Fringe. Eureka will likely make it into that round of shows which I re-watch because I like the characters and I like the dialogue and I’m having that kind of day or week in which I like knowing how things turn out.
This actually gets in the way, the liking knowing how things turn out: I re-watch old Bones and Numb3ers and Buffy and Waking The Dead and shy away from movies I’d probably like and shows which, once I’ve seen them, I’ll want to see them again.
I did, on dmf’s suggestion, watch Wallander, and I’ve seen a chunk of the first series of Luther, but too often I’m unwilling to stretch myself beyond the familiar. I’ve heard good things about The Bridge and Orange is the New Black, but will I bother with something that might catch me unawares?
That’s really it, isn’t it: I don’t like to be caught out, and that dislike has metastasized beyond defensive behavior and into defensive viewing. Which, to be frank, is silly.
Oh, I don’t have a problem deepening all kinds of bitsy issues, but, honestly, some days I do just need to get over myself. I fret about stagnating and changing my defaults and on and on and then I fret over watching a fucking television show.
Which, to be frank, is silly.
So I’ve watched the first episode of Fringe, and it’s sci-fi-y and police-procedural-y and it stars Joshua Jackson and Blair Brown and Kirk Acevedo who I like and Anna Torv who I don’t know but who has great eyes and—wait while I put my hand where my cleavage should be—Lance Reddick, who is always the most interesting man on the screen.
(He lives in Brooklyn. My chances of running into him are nil and my chances of making any kind of impression on him are less than nil but oh my. My oh my.)
Fringe and Lance Reddick and sarcastic cats in the conditioned air: it ain’t much, but in the bowels of July, it’s all right.
AbsurdBeats 