My Archives: February 2005

Friday, February 25, 2005

Skot at Izzle Pfaff! reflects on the probable emotions of Omaha steaks after they reach their destination. "There is a lot of food in our freezer now, where it is probably bummed, after all its travels, to be confined with some homebody blackberries and old hamburger. I can hear it sighing: 'Man, I really liked traveling. Idaho was beautiful, and I liked the plane rides. Now we're just stuck here in loser city with these lousy peas.'"

Posted by Anita @ 04:19 AM PST [Link] [Add a Comment]

Thursday, February 24, 2005

I've been having some email trouble since yesterday morning, darn it! If you've sent mail that I need to see during that time, please leave a comment attached to this entry and I'll send you my contact info (I can send but not receive).

Posted by Anita @ 04:40 AM PST [Link] [Add a Comment]

Next Tuesday, it's the East Side Weblog Meetup for March! Location is Crossroads Mall, 15600 NE 8TH Street in Bellevue (map). Look for us at Crossroads Mall food court, between the stage and the giant chessboard. Start time is 7 pm. You don't have to be a Meetup.com member to attend, but joining (free!) means I can let you know of any last-minute changes.

Posted by Anita @ 04:33 AM PST [Link] [Add a Comment]

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

The Mysterious Traveler gives details on what it's like to have a Roomba (robotic vacuum sweeper) in your house, in Roomba Madness. "A few weeks ago, on the advice of a friend who knows both technology and housekeeping, I purchased a robotic floor cleaner known as the Roomba. I was in the middle of drafting a product review for this blog when my friend Nina came by to visit. Before I could give her a demo of the Roomba, we heard a cheery series of beeps behind us and turned around just in time to see it come roaring out from under the buffet (where its home base charger is positioned) and go zooming across the dining room. It had a small stuffed mouse riding on top of it and our cats Kaylee and Zoe in cautious pursuit."

Posted by Anita @ 07:13 AM PST [Link] [Add a Comment]

Monday, February 21, 2005

When Jack and I were married, we had a figure of Roscoe on the stage with us and our officiant Andy Hooper. Roscoe is a fannish ghod, and he's a beaver. There's a poem (a hymn?) about Roscoe by Arthur Rapp, dating from 1949:

Now, Roscoe helps his followers in many, many ways;
just to list them would consume about a hundred billion days:
he reduces typing errors; he makes fanclub laws more stable;
he keeps laid-down pens and styli from a-rolling off the table.

He makes mimeos print legibly, makes typer ribbons last;
he keeps hacks from pulling boners when they're writing of the past;
he climbs into crowded newsstands, ferrets out the stfsh zines,
and attracts the fan's attention via telepathic beams.

Posted by Anita @ 06:27 AM PST [Link] [Add a Comment]

Friday, February 18, 2005

Via Dangerous Meta, a study from the CDC says "sweet drinks -- whether Kool-Aid with sugar or all-natural apple juice -- seem to raise the risk of pudgy preschoolers getting fatter." Seems likely! I usually give my grandson fruit instead of juice, but I'll try to be more consistent about this. More in a CNN story. The original article in Pediatrics journal.

Posted by Anita @ 08:22 AM PST [Link] [2 comments]

Thursday, February 17, 2005

We had a fun time at last night's Seattle Weblog Meetup! We rearranged the furniture to our preferred traffic pattern as was done last month -- we get much better flow of conversation now. I'm glad Ralph's doesn't mind our doing this! We do move things back to the original setup after the meetup is done. The list of attendees:

We also had new member Bill Brown who hasn't started his weblog yet. He asked questions and we shared our ideas about what every new blogger should know. Bloggers are rarely short on opinions, you know. Because my sister was kindly caring for our grandson, I got to join in conversations and catch up with folks. Fun!

Posted by Anita @ 02:48 PM PST [Link] [Add a Comment]

Hamburgerlad wrote about some differences between his spouse and himself on Valentine's Day. "Noodles and I had a knock down, drag out argument in front of the kids the other day. Somehow the movie Back to the Future came up and she started explaining it to our inquisitive young'uns. Soon, however, she tried to tell them that the crux of the plot was that Marty McFly went back in time to fix his dysfunctional family. I hit the roof. I loudly and lovingly explained how the true gist of the plot was that Marty went back to 1955, interfered in his parents lives and had to restore things to their proper course. The subsequent wealth and social status were but a side effect. Anyway, the whole incident brought back a concept that I hadn't thought of in a while: Noodles and I are incompatible."

Posted by Anita @ 04:26 AM PST [Link] [2 comments]

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Via Robert Scoble's Link Blog pointing to Sound Politics, I read about James J. Na's piece in the Seattle Times: Urge to rant propelling blogs to status of mainstream media (read quick before it goes in the archives). James (a Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at Discovery Institute) was at the Blogger Bash I also attended last month, hosted and instigated by Andy MacDonald. He describes himself as new to the world of blogs, and I wrote to him to disagree with some of the conclusions he drew from the party experience.

Hi, James!

I was at the blogger bash because Andrew kindly invited me, but it certainly wasn't a gathering for all area bloggers! Andrew specifically said on the evite that it wasn't to be publicly blogged ahead of time. The attendees were those who were part of Sound Politics or friendly to that group. (I was the odd non-political blogger in the mix -- I'm liberal but I rarely write about politics. I hadn't met Andrew or anyone else there before that night.)

Sorry I didn't get a chance to talk to you; you seemed to be in a tight conversational circle during most of the time I was there.

I think the Seattle weblog meetup (happens tonight! join us if you can!) gets more of a cross-section of the local blog population, but even we are only a small group compared to all the people who blog nowadays around here.

But bloggers are certainly not a "a decidedly conservative lot". Scan the list at Seablogs for a more representative spectrum. Most bloggers don't write about politics, liberal or conservative. It bugs me that political weblogs seem to get all the oxygen, but it's like the blind men and the elephant: one sees the world from the lens of one's own experience. Perhaps when you write about politics it seems like everyone else does, too!


Posted by Anita @ 10:57 AM PST [Link] [Add a Comment]

Céline of Naked Translations wonders about this expression: as dull as dishwater/ditchwater. "I'll hazard a guess here: maybe, as populations became more urbanised, ditchwater turned into dishwater because washing the dishes was a much more familiar experience than peering into ditches, which are rather rare in towns. I bet you that before long, as dishwashers become more and more common in households, dishwater will turn into dishwasher, and then no-one will laugh at me because of it. Although they will probably have found something else."

I do get some unusual search hits because the word "naked" appears on my daily crawl list.

Posted by Anita @ 04:35 AM PST [Link] [Add a Comment]

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

(This is Jack William Bell, doing a rare guest entry on Anita's blog)

Today one of our local newspapers, the Seattle Post Intelligencer, really belied the 'Intelligence' part of their name with an incredibly stupid article attempting to classify people's personalities by the kinds of video games they play. The story is not only bogus, but it veers deeply off into insulting.

Normally I would ignore this kind of ignorance as being par for the course with the MSM (Main-Stream-Media), but when the article mentioned a game I play (Unreal Tournament) and classified those who play it as 'Alpha Dominators' - powerless individuals in real life who attempt to be king of the hill in virtual space - I got a bit ticked off. It 'torqued my jaw' as we used to say. Speaking only for myself I can say that I don't play UT for personal glory; I'm too crappy a gamer for that. What I do is play the team maps, the Capture-The-Flag and Assualt games, where the focus is on team-play and assisting other players to attain goals. Pure Death-Match fragging holds little interest for me.

The rest of the article is just as bad, calling those who play GTA 'Sociopaths' and those who play The Sims 'Control Freaks'. And on and on; read the article and, if you are a gamer, I am can pretty much guarantee you will find something there offensive. So I wrote the author and copied the PI's reader representative with the following:

I don't know if your article "What do the video games you play say about your personality?" was tongue in cheek or just really bad writing. Based on the content I am guessing 'really bad'.

Why? First off I think you did zero research on something which you then presented as fact. Second off I think you gave no thought to how gamers who don't fit into your bogus classification schemes might feel about it. Finally; even if you meant the article as humor it failed as such rather miserably - coming off more as a hit-piece unfairly stigmatizing people as sociopaths and failures.

Care to argue with this characterization? I would be very interested to see the sources for your article if so. If not, I would appreciate a retraction.

Posted by Jack @ 12:49 PM PST [Link]

Monday, February 14, 2005

Do look again at the shadow puppet play that includes most February holidays: Lincoln Sees His Shadow and Falls in Love. This is certainly one of my favorite Cacophony events from when the Seattle Cacophony Society was active! Pictures in 1998 and 1999. I've pointed to it on past Valentines days, too.

Posted by Anita @ 12:18 PM PST [Link]

Don't miss Matthew "Defective Yeti" Baldwin's take on jury duty at The Morning News. "While some waiting jurors read magazines and others chat with their neighbors, an astonishing number just stare at the floor, the ceiling, or the walls. An elderly woman sitting to my left finishes her paperwork and simply shuts down; her eyes glaze over and her face goes slack. I used to carry matches as a college student, in case any of my many smoker friends ever needed a light. Now I’m wondering if I should start toting Reader’s Digest Condensed Novels to distribute to old ladies who don’t have the good sense to carry a copy of World’s Best Word Searches in their handbags."

When I was on jury duty, I didn't actually get placed on a jury. I told the court that being on a longish trial would be a hardship because we were trying to ship IE that summer.

Posted by Anita @ 05:42 AM PST [Link]

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Check out Ernie of Little Yellow Different's Chinese Yahoo Avatars! "The second I found out that there were new ethnically appropriate outfits, I simply had to IM all my Yahoo! Web Developer friends of Chinese heritage so we can get fantastic and apropos. [...] Me, I like how the phrase 'Gung Hay Fat Choy' is in air quotes, as if to be ironic. Also, a HORSE! A MUTHAFUCKING HORSE! You know, I'd make an inappropriate comment like 'into the pot you go with the penguins,' but that's probably inappropriate."

Posted by Anita @ 08:25 AM PST [Link]

Friday, February 11, 2005

Britfan (now in Austin, Texas) Nigel R has had a weblog for a while, but he really seems to have been liberated by starting a LiveJournal for topics he doesn't think appropriate for the existing blog. I especially was impressed by his piece called Breed or granny loses her entitlements. "Stanley Kurtz's 'Demographics and the Culture War' in the Hoover Institute's Policy Review is nutty stuff (right now, you can tell that these guys are trying too hard when they feel the need to incorporate the murder of Theo van Gogh in their Grand Theories) but it is a useful overview of how the non-evangelist conservative see the world going. [...] So the choice is between 'secularism, individualism, and feminism' vs. population growth? I think I'll go for the first answer, Bob. But not so fast..."

Posted by Anita @ 05:52 AM PST [Link]

Thursday, February 10, 2005

Wednesday, February 16, it's the Seattle Weblog Meetup! Start time is 7 pm, and the location is Ralph's Grocery and Deli, 2035 4th Ave in Belltown across from the Cinerama theater. We meet in the deli area at the front of the store. Ralph's has food and drink, plus free wifi! There's a friendly group of regulars along with new faces every month. This is the gathering that got Seattle described as a "blogger's mecca," -- we have a good mix of tech and non-tech webloggers attending. Hope to see you there!

Posted by Anita @ 04:38 AM PST [Link]

Wednesday, February 9, 2005

Our friend Julie McGalliard is now blogging at Goth House Parlour (she even pinged recently!), in addition to her main Goth House site. (She's been drawing Goth House since 1991.) I loved this entry comparing the Star Trek TOS episode Devil in the Dark with a Next Generation episode, The Quality of Life. The dialogues between Julie and Paul Carpentier are especially tasty:

Julie: "It's a terrific story about overcoming xenophobia."
Paul: "It's a guy under a rug."
Julie: "You're confusing special effects with story."
Paul: "It's still a guy under a rug."
Julie: "I thought you liked Doctor Who. Doctor Who had the worst special effects ever."
Paul: "Doctor Who is different."

Posted by Anita @ 04:25 AM PST [Link]

Tuesday, February 8, 2005

This is certainly a craft project that I don't need to do right now (especially when a sweater for my grandson lies unfinished on top of the book case) but reading about it makes me crave it: photo stitch markers made with shrinky dink! The cuteness of tiny things that have shrunk! "Arrange your shrinky dinks on a paper bag (weird, I know) and then put the paper bag on a cookie sheet. Bake them! Every oven is different. Mine takes 10 minutes at 300 degrees F. WORD OF CAUTION: If you don't let them finish baking, they will curl up. If they curl up, you didn't mess up. They curl for the same reason stockinette stitch curls. The middle is bigger than the edges. Since the edges bake first, the edges shrink first. If they are curling, just leave 'em in there for a while longer. You will know that the shrinky dinks are ready to remove from the oven if they are laying flat." Via the Knitlist.

Posted by Anita @ 03:39 AM PST [Link]

Monday, February 7, 2005

I slipped on a toy at the bottom of the stairs yesterday and sprained my ankle! It's a second degree sprain according to this page. I did put ice on it and try to keep off it, but not consistently enough, I fear. Jack was involved in a project of moving and rearranging our home theater equipment so I ended up going up and down stairs and wrangling our grandson too much. I really feel it this morning! But it's not 24 hours yet, so I can retire to the couch this morning and not get off it. I wish I had a freezable ankle wrap like this one!

Posted by Anita @ 04:14 AM PST [Link]

Saturday, February 5, 2005

I know I've been reading Hedgetoad for quite a while (from before she was a student teacher, I think). Now she's a teacher (subject is English) and the locale has changed from Eastern Washington to a town somewhere on the coast. Honest and fascinating accounts of the classroom!

Care to Dance?
I promised one of my students that I would dance in front of the entire class if he passed the class. At the time it seemed like only a miracle would save him from flunking... This afternoon he presented me with a stack of assignments and had finished two AR books overnight. Apparently, I'll be doing the Hammer dance. Anyone know where I can get some gold pants?


According to student gossip, my class is hard. I actually expect that reading will be done as homework and assignments are completed - there are a lot of assignments. I teach literary vocabulary and expect that students use it and use it correctly. I demand paragraphs that include at least 5 sentences and refuse to give full credit for those that are not even if the answer is correct. I demand that students speak properly, are nice to each other and make them wash (and sandpaper) all desks if they swear in class. I don't suffer fools or lazy ejits gladly. The list goes on and adds up to me being a total hardass bitch.


Posted by Anita @ 04:17 AM PST [Link]

Thursday, February 3, 2005

Richard Sprague works on voice recognition at Microsoft. He's been trying a demo of Dictomail and was curious and impressed -- they claim to transcribe a voice message, then forward it as a text message to a cell phone, pda, or so on. His conclusion: "Mystery solved! I'm now convinced that Dictomail is a human and not some great new telephony-based dictation system." Clues:

Posted by Anita @ 05:09 AM PST [Link]

Wednesday, February 2, 2005

I'll bet I've borrowed a book or two then never returned it, though I don't remember a specific incident. We do currently have a DVD set borrowed from friends that we need to finish and return. Fred of Fragments from Floyd tells the story of a loan to a student; of course, the student disappeared after the books were lent! "I was honestly quite impressed with the student--older, more mature, obviously sincere and highly motivated to become a lawyer, he said. In a semester almost entirely devoid of a sense of having made any difference at all in the minds and hearts of my students, my hour conversation with T. sent me home feeling that I had helped steer this nice young man toward a better future. I had challenged him, encouraged him, particularly along the lines of his proposed ecology research topic. I so wanted him to get to the meat of the issues that in full confidence, I loaned him four out-of-print books from my personal library. I have honed a keen sense over the years of who to trust, and I could trust this chap. I was sure of that. Then, I noticed he rarely came to class during the three weeks before the research papers were due. He missed the third test. He didn't hand in his paper. And by the end of the term, in spite of three emails that grew increasingly impatient and threatening, he never came by the office, never called and didn't return my emails."

Posted by Anita @ 04:25 AM PST [Link]

Tuesday, February 1, 2005

We had our best turn-out yet for what I would consider a "normal" East Side weblog meetup tonight. (When Robert Scoble combined the meetup with a geek dinner with visiting celebrities in October 2004 we had a larger crowd, but I don't count that as a normal meetup.) I'd say there were about thirteen people there tonight!

People had fun looking at and playing with the Tablets -- Lora is an evangelist for the Tablet -- and chatted about being new in town. Job tips were exchanged.

Posted by Anita @ 08:45 PM PST [Link]

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