(Who|what|where) is love

I have no idea what this thing really is, or what it's for, but I've seen it around (most recently at Tenth Muse), and damn, it is psychic, isn't it?

mixed drinks are love
brought to you by the isLove Generator

Yeah, I love me my mixed drinks. And J. discovered and perfected the recipe for my all-time favorite, the Metropolis,* which is like a Cosmopolitan but better. So the guy I love mixed the drink I love; I'm not sure that "...is love" tag could be more apropos.



*Metropolis: 2 parts cranberry juice, 1 part each Triple Sec, mandarin orange vodka, and Rose's lime juice. A batch of six fits perfectly in a 32-oz. glass Ocean Spray cranberry juice bottle.



N.B. The Metropolis is not to be confused with the Metropolitan, another Cosmopolitan variation, which uses blackcurrant vodka instead of citrus (Cosmo) or mandarin (Metropolis).

The ongoing Daily Show media watch

The complete list of Grammy nominations showed up as one of my New York Times e-mail news alerts for the Daily Show. On the 8th of the 14 HTML pages the list took up, I found their nomination:

77. Comedy Album: "Come Poop With Me," Triumph The Insult Comic Dog; "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents ... America: A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction," Jon Stewart and The Cast of the Daily Show; "The Funny Thing Is ... ," Ellen DeGeneres; "Live at Carnegie Hall," David Sedaris; "The O'Franken Factor Factor -- The Very Best of the O'Franken Factor," Al Franken.

(Can I just say how incredibly amused I am that the New York Times had to print the words "Come Poop With Me"? It's almost as good as the year "Bring In Da Noise, Bring In Da Funk" was nominated for a lot of Tonys, and all these grand dames and highfalutin' artistes of the the-a-tuh had to go onstage and say it when they were presenting the awards.)



As I clicked through the pages, I was wondering, in these exact words, "How the fuck-hell many Grammy categories are there?" After finding the Daily Show's nomination, I skipped ahead to page 14 to get the final number: 107. Jesu Cristo, that's a lot. My favorite "who'da thunk?" category—even more than "Traditional Tropical Latin Album" (there's no category for non-traditional tropical Latin albums) and "Small Ensemble Performance (with or without Conductor)" (yeah, conductors, you heard me, we don't need you!)—is "Album Notes." Yes, really. It's nice to know they're recognizing the contribution of album-note writers, I guess; if the producers and the arrangers and the composers and the lyricists and the conductors and the singers and the instrumentalists and the spoken-word speakers and even the box-set designers are getting awards, the person who writes down all their names and makes the album make sense deserves something too.

How long do you macerate a Shmoo?

Cartoon character skeletons. Two words: Frea. Ky.



This has apparently been all over the Web in the past few days; I later came across it at BoingBoing and J-Walk, but my first encounter was via No Fancy Name:

Skeletal Systems



A character study of 22 present and past cartoon characters.



Animation was the format of choice for children's television in the 1960s, a decade in which children's programming became almost entirely animated. Growing up in that period, I tended to take for granted the distortions and strange bodies of these entities.



I decided to take a select few of these popular characters and render their skeletal systems as I imagine they might resemble if one truly had eye sockets half the size of its head, or fingerless-hands, or feet comprising 60% of its body mass.

The Powerpuff Girls—Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup—fare the worst, in my view; those giant, perfectly-smooth and perfectly-hemispherical eye sockets make them look like predatory insects. On the other hand, the small birds—Tweety and Eggbert—actually look a lot like real bird skeletons: big skulls and tiny bodies are normal proportions for most avian anatomy. My favorite thing is the Shmoo's vestigial arms; there's a whole evolutionary process implied there. The mind boggles.

Brrrrrrrrrr

Crosspost from my journal, because Blogger wasn't loading this morning and I wanted to get the post up somewhere. Apologies to those of you on LJ who have both my journal and my blog RSS feed on your friends pages.



Okay, our office is f!cking cold—and I don't usually complain about any temperature under 80°. (Which is what the temperature in here was most of the summer.) The thermostat says it's 65° and it's already on "Emergency Heat," but my manager reports it's only gone up one degree since he got here at 8 a.m. I'd hate to find out what non-emergency heat is like.



About ten minutes ago:

Manager: Okay, whoever can find a barrel, I'll start the fire. [General laughter, less "amused" than "don't we know it, I wish we could."] I've got plenty of old [Client From Hell] stuff that we can burn. [More-enthusiastic laughter, "yeah"s.]



Another employee: That would warm my heart.

Mine too. If only it weren't a violation of the fire code...



(We've had people come in and poke at the temperature-control system, trying to make it cooler in summer and warmer in winter; I wondered aloud if they'd mixed them up: "maybe we're getting the air conditioning now." Manager: "No, with the air conditioning it was warmer.")



Breaking news (11:41): It's up to 66°! That's an increase of half a degree every fifty minutes; at this rate, we'll be up to 70° by 6:30 p.m....just in time to go home. (Well, at least I can move my fingers without creaking now.)



Update (12:21): After turning off the emergency heat, the temperature went from 66 to 71 in 40 minutes. So the emergency heat not only doesn't work, it prevents the regular heat from working. (Maybe I'll turn on the emergency heat next summer when the air conditioning won't go below 79°.)

Sleep, glorious sleep

So, why didn't someone tell me about this "sleep" thing sooner? Dang, does it make me feel better. I should do it more often.



Yes, after being strung-out dead-dog-tired yesterday, I decided it was finally time to actually go to bed early, instead of saying I would and then staying up till 2 a.m. anyway. So as soon as I'd had sufficient dinner, I began the pre-bedtime tooth maintenance—both to ensure that I wouldn't let myself get sidetracked by eating or drinking anything else, and as a Pavlovian "this is what I do before sleeping, so it must be time to sleep" cue. I got distracted by Spider Solitaire for a while, but dragged myself away after a few fruitless rounds of a four-suit game. Took my meds at about 9—one of them has a soporific side effect, so about half an hour after I take it I'm just about knocked out. I sat on the living room couch next to the birdcage long enough to do a crossword puzzle and let the bird get her fill of jumping all over me and sitting on my head and chirping at my ring; at 9:20 I was almost keeling over, and at 9:23 I was upstairs, in bed, lights out literally, and after some tossing and turning, it was lights out figuratively too.



I drifted semi-awake at about 5:30, looked at the clock, went back to sleep; J. gave me a shake and turned on our full-spectrum sun lamp at 7:15; by 7:45 I was upright and downstairs, and feeling astonishingly, luxuriously well-rested. It's almost a pleasure to be awake; my brain's working, I feel like I've at least got the potential for having energy, and I swear my clothes even feel better. (J.'s comment: "Imagine if you felt that way every morning? Just a thought." Yeah, but...but then I wouldn't appreciate it as much, would I? Right? Right? [Someone back me up here!])



No, really, I do need to try it more often; not tonight, maybe—12:23 as I type this—but except for last night, I don't think I've gotten to bed before 1:30 a.m. any day in the last six weeks, so hell, I'm still on track to make an early evening of it. (Night. Morning. Whatever.) Rules: "Tonight Show," okay; "Late Night," monologue, maybe first guest; "Last Call," sorry, Carson, gotta skip you. (I was skewing the "18-to-24-year-old male living at home with no girlfriend playing video games all night" Nielsen-demographic market share anyway.)



12:31, "Tonight Show" musical guest—the mouse-feeding, tooth-brushing cue. In bed before 1 a.m.? I'll give it a shot. Anything's possible, right? I can do it, really I can.



12:38; "Late Night" monologue starting. Okay. Post entry. Log off. Do not even think about Spider Solitaire. Or FreeCell. Or TriPeaks. I mean it. One, two, three...now.

In which I am very dull

Oh, I'm so useless these days. It must be the continuing lack of sleep; despite my stated goal of going to bed before 2 a.m. last night, and even though I was exhausted from having woken up at 6:30 yesterday morning and dragging myself and my overnight bag all the hell over the city, I still didn't get to bed until 2:45 last night. Bad girl. No biscuit. My morning allotment of two cups of strong coffee and 20mg of Ritalin gets me up and about, and I don't feel particularly tired after about 8:45 a.m., but the way I just stare blankly at my computer screen so often during the workday, and can't think of anything to write about, and can't get much work done, probably means my brain isn't functioning very well behind my over-dilated eyes. It's probably directing all its attention to things like "don't walk out into traffic" and "don't spill hot coffee on yourself" instead of "write a regular expression to find the remaining transliterated Hebrew words in this Bible commentary" and "do a blog post about that interesting article in the New York Times this morning." I'm awake, even somewhat alert, but I don't have any energy. Feh, feh, feh. (Oh well. If I don't have any energy, I'm not manic. [Yet.])



Yes, this is a pretty lousy entry, but I know if I don't post something every weekday, I'll get out of the habit, and, for whatever it's worth, I don't want to do that. If I write about something every day, even if it's boring or stupid, I'll have the momentum behind me to write about something interesting or intelligent when it actually happens. So here it is: a boring, and perhaps stupid, entry, but an entry all the same. And I've been staring at the screen trying to think of a way to end it for about five minutes, so I'm just going to say "the end." The end.

Mid-week memery

"Getting to know you" meme, via Bonnie at what kind of sick weirdo are you? Like her, I'm going to do it as a blog post instead of an e-mail.

Welcome to the Autumn 2004 edition of getting to know your friends. What you are supposed to do is copy (not forward) this entire e-mail and paste it onto a new e-mail that you’ll send. Change all the answers so they apply to you, and then send this to a whole bunch of people including the person who sent it to you. The theory is that you will learn a lot of little things about your friends, if you did not know them already.

1. What time did you get up this morning? 6-frickin'-30. Yuck. (Usually, J. shakes me at 7:45 and I stagger downstairs around 8, but I was in Delaware last night, so I had to catch the 7:19 train to Philly in order to get to work on time. Those of you who regularly wake up at 6:30 or earlier, feel free to snort with derision, but for me it's ungodly-early.)



2. Diamonds or pearls? Sapphires. (My engagement ring stone is a padparadscha sapphire—pinkish-orange, like a sunrise. [Sapphires and rubies are both corundum; red corundum is a ruby, any other color—blue, yellow, pink, green, purple, white—is a sapphire.])



3. What was the last film you saw at the cinema? "Fahrenheit 911" on June 29th (J.'s birthday present); we don't go out to movies much. (The last movie I saw in a theater before that was back in December '03, or maybe '02. I'm pathetic.)



4. What is your favourite TV show? Daily Show Daily Show Daily Show! Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm, Jon Stewart. (Down, girl.)



5. What did you have for breakfast? My mom's homemade coffee cake at 6:45, before leaving Delaware, and a bacon-egg-and-cheese bagel sandwich after I got to work. (I always get hungry the same number of hours after breakfast, no matter when I eat it; on days when I get up early and eat breakfast before 7, I'm hungry for lunch at 10 a.m.)



6. What is your middle name? Used to be Cathleen; I did the marriage name-change and made my maiden name my new middle name. (It starts with M, but I'm not saying what it is.)



7. What is your favourite cuisine? To eat, Japanese; to cook, Italian.



8. What foods do you dislike? Plants with enzymes that try to digest me while I'm eating them: kiwi, eggplant, fresh pineapple. (Cooking pineapple breaks down the enzyme; cooking kiwi might, too, but I don't know why you'd bother, since they just taste like rancid strawberries anyway.)



9. What is your favourite crisp flavour? Tart apple.



10. What is your favourite CD at the moment? I hardly ever listen to them; I've got some "soothing ocean sound" ones at work for white noise when there's too much going on in the office.



11. What kind of car do you drive? No car; I rely on public transit, family members with cars, or walking.



12. Favourite sandwich? Falafel, hummus, and tzatziki on a whole-wheat pita. (Now I'm hungry again.)



13. What characteristic do you despise? CYA-itis—cover-your-ass syndrome. If you screw up, say so; or at least don't say it's someone else's fault instead. (I was thinking about our not-very-partner-like partner company when I wrote that, but I just realized it's the same thing that cheesed me off about Ashlee Simpson's SNL lip sync debacle.)



14. Favourite item of clothing? The cashmere robe J. gave me last Christmas. It is unutterably soft and wonderful; if I never had to leave the house, I'd never wear anything else.



15. If you could go anywhere in the world on vacation, where would you go? Rome, by way of Tuscany. The food, the wine, the art, the architecture, the 2500 years of accumulated culture...and the wine, did I mention the wine? The wine.



16. What colour is your bathroom? White tile (except for the mildew), light blue paint, blue and green leaf-print shower curtain.



17. Favourite brand of clothing? I don't much care about labels, but I'll go to the ends of the earth for Dansko shoes (and, when I'm wearing them, it feels like I can walk to the ends of the earth; they're insanely comfortable and actually attractive. I wish they didn't cost so much, but I'm willing to pay for quality.)



18. Where would you retire to? Ack, you want me to think that far ahead? Somewhere semi-rural but not more than 45 minutes away from a major city. And not Florida. It's hot and there are giant bugs down there.



19. Favourite time of the day? Early evening—5 to 7 p.m.—I'm a sucker for sunsets, and on weekdays, it's when I get to leave the office.



20. What was your most memorable birthday? 20th, in a hotel in Kharkiv, when the Yale Russian Chorus was touring in Ukraine; I was the only woman in the chorus (yes, I'm a tenor), so it was me, twenty guys, lots of vodka, and loud renditions of every dirty Russian, Ukrainian, or Georgian song we knew. Na zdorovja!



21. Where were you born? Wilmington, Delaware.



22. Favourite sport to watch? Figure skating or bull-riding—no, there's not much of a viewership overlap there, but I like 'em both.



23. Who do you least expect to send this back to you? Not e-mailing it, so N/A.



24. Person you expect to send it back first? N/A.



25. What fabric detergent do you use? Anything that doesn't frippin' stink—no perfumes, no dyes, no nothing. I just want my clothes to be clean; I don't want to reek of Outdoor Fresh Scent all day.



26. Coke or Pepsi? Root beer.



27. Day time or night time? Night, the later the better.



28. What is your shoe size? 10 with socks, 9 1/2 without (yeah, I have huge feet).



29. Do you have any pets? Peri the parakeet (she runs the house, we just live there), nine spiny mice.



30. Any new and exciting news you’d like to share with your family and friends? Now that J.'s doctor has prescribed him testosterone, we're having sex again! (I probably shouldn't share that with my family, though. "Hey, Mom, guess what...?")



31. What did you want to be when you were little? A horseback-riding novel-writing falcon-training Egyptologist. (It could happen!) (Well, actually, it probably couldn't.)



32. What are you meant to be doing today? Working, buying food for the critters, picking up prescriptions from CVS, going home, maybe grocery shopping, watching the Daily Show, going to bed before 2 a.m.