Half a Dozen Books...

Right now I have six books on my bed. In order of their arrival here, they are:

1) Euripides III

2) Expert Legal Writing

3) "I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & the Inside Story of the Mafia, the Teamsters, & the Last Ride of Jimmy Hoffa"

4) The Handmaid's Tale

5) Children's Writer's Word Book

6) Writing Picture Books

Variety! The Handmaid's Tale counts towards the Classics reading goal, and the two children's writing books clearly have to do with translating this into a fully-fledged story. (Hint: it involves hitchhiking! No, really, it's okay though. Probably.)

The Greek dramas (supplemented by a volume of Aristophanes comedies in my purse) are light research for supplemental brain learnin'. Yeah I dunno. I just felt inspired to take out some ancient culture from the library. It may or may not have something to do with my percolating idea for NaNoWriMo this year. We'll see.

I checked out "I Heard You Paint Houses", et al from the library today on a whim, pure and simple. I did that thing on Wikipedia where you just keep clicking the intratextual links in the articles until you end up really far away from your starting point... I went from The Golden Girls to Jimmy Hoffa, only, it only took one click. Sofia apparently once claimed to know what happened to him. So clearly that meant I should check out the first book I found at the library about him, right? Right.

And finally, I bought the legal writing book to sort of start preparing myself for law school. When I started college, I was a little behind most of my peers academically because I graduated 14th in my high school class... in Florida. Brightest crayon in the 16-pack of classic colors, but the 64-pack of college includes those damn neons and metallics and, well. Metaphor beat to death, but you get it. So I googled around a little and found that the columns collected in this book assisted practicing lawyers in writing their briefs. One day, I hope to be a brief-writing, practicing lawyer, ergo I should read the book. Maybe I'll get luck and it will teach me how to make that paragraph more interesting?
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Hahahahahha

Ooops. Got of schedule again... so I'm going to do a really quick summary of things to get back on track.

1) Finished reading The Enchantress of Florence last week. It was delightful to read solely in terms of language, but I take issue with some significant anti-feminist elements of the story... I intend to write a short essay on this sometime very soon. But we all know how well I actually do the things I intend to do, so... we'll see.

2) Started reading Atlas Shrugged; I'm now 125 pages in and... wow, I thought Rushdie was antifeminist. Otherwise, I'm still really confused about the book's philosophy. I've read about objectivism and I feel like I know what Ayn Rand thinks, but... to me it doesn't really seem to be advocating any particular viewpoint at all - except that indifference is plaguing the modern world and, like, destroying EVERYTHING. More forthcoming on this as well.

3) In order to better facilitate drabble-writing, I started a scraps file in notepad so that I'm not looking at a blank page every time I try to write anything. Writer's block has not wholly been defeated, but it is slightly mitigated. It's something. I'm stuck on this one image and I'm trying to figure out how to make a whole decent story out of it. I'll get there.

4) This has absolutely nothing at all to do with knitting, but it is creativity and therefore is marginally pertinent: I've sewn my first throw pillow with piping! I put in for 15 yards of saree fabric (in three patterns of five yards each) on ebay, and I won, and I paid, and according to the seller in India, they've shipped... and it's been ten days. Four more and I'm filing a complaint. This is getting absurd... I'm trying to start an Etsy shop here! No, really, apparently there's a large market for throw pillow covers, and I like sewing and I spend a lot of time watching TV - I figure I can at least try and capitalize on that a little bit. My camera battery's low so it's taking really crap pictures indoors right now, all grainy and stuff, so I'm not going to post one of the pillow just this second - but it's beautiful and you have to look really closely to see where I messed up, and I'm really proud of it. So take my word for it. You have to. It's my blog.

5) Speaking of pictures, I'm putting up four SPTs to cover from... I guess February 16th was the last time I posted? Oh well. See below the cut. I'll take one tomorrow for this week. (Hint: most of the SPTs are actually taken on the weekend.)

6) Music rerating is going well. I took a cue from my dad and decided to play my whole library in reverse alphabetical order, from $$$$ to A.O.K. This helps songs stand out a bit more since I'm ripping them out of the context of their albums, but has the major drawback in that I sometimes hear up to four versions of the same song in a row. (I'm lookin' at you, 405.) The one thing I can tell you I've discovered is that I really don't care at all about 98% of the Smashing Pumpkins' discography. Don't ask why I have it, I won't for very much longer.

7) Speaking of music, I have a couple new artists that I like that I plan on reviewing shortly. Preview: Yeasayer; Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros; and MGMT. Yeah, I know I'm late to the party on that last one, but I was purposefully avoiding them because of all the hype and I feel it's now sufficiently passed that it's once again uncool (and therefore legitimate) to listen and be into them.

8) Speaking of MGMT, I updated my resume this week to start preparing for a northward move. This has nothing to do whatsoever with my goal list, but moving to New York has been my number one goal since before graduation, so it merits an update.

9) Daily Show! April 5th, 2010 - Chelsea and I were the first to show up at 1:15, but the third, fourth, and fifth people arrived within the next twenty minutes - so I feel it was completely justified. Um, yeah... they start don't even set up the lines until 2:30, and they don't open the doors till after 4, seat you till after 5, or start filming until 6. But SO WORTH IT. Picture proof below the cut.

10) Ten is a lot. I'm done for tonight. To the pictures!

March 11, 2010 - Absolutely nothing remarkable about this. It is already well-documented that I'm infatuated with my Christmas lights and amateurishly adjusting the aperture settings on my camera.

March 18, 2010 - Yeah, nothing exciting here, either. I... I bought this shirt while Ali was visiting that week? ...Woo.

April 1, 2010 - On the first night of my trip, my friend Katy happened to be in town as well from Chicago, and our friend Mollie was about to be going out of town on Spring Break, so we threw a party. This picture was probably taken shortly after midnight... because I had woken up at 5:30 that morning to catch my flight. Yeah, I was in New York by lunch time. I RULE. Things I missed while passed out: chat roulette, Mollie's ever-entertaining rendition of Soulja Boy, and a 1:30am run to Best Buy. Yeah. That tired.

April 8 - So, basically, the Kate Spade store down in Soho was doing this window display with pinwheels, and since many of them were within reach of street level, and the pinwheels were on the exterior of the windows instead of the interior, people had swiped them - which was probably what they were supposed to do anyway. So Chelsea wanted one, and I wanted to steal one, so I climbed up on the ledge and tried to push it up out of its holder inconspicuously. Surprisingly, they didn't just pop out, they literally had to be lifted up and out, and in this shot, you can sort of see that I've got the green one up to the very bottom of the stick... I couldn't reach any higher while sitting. Clearly, this was hilarious, and Chelsea took my picture. Shortly thereafter, I just stood up and pulled it out, and we lived happily ever after with our lime green pinwheel yay.

And now, the moment you've all been waiting for...

FIRST IN LINE!

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It's just so much easier to do them in batches...

Below are four (4) SPTs. The first doubles as evidence of my first four hours on a Habitat worksite; the second doubles as evidence that I'm pretending to learn June on the West Coast; the third and fourth together serve to prove that I'm running out of ideas for these when nothing special is going on.

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A Nervous Romance

Oy. I forgot to dropbox the Iceman article files, so I'll have to make the pdf tomorrow. In the meantime, an update of a different sort: I watched Annie Hall on Saturday night, the second of the twenty-five greatest movies of all time ever I have viewed since starting this whole shebang. I loved it. The story was adorable without being fuzzy, the script was hilarious, and the little extra bits Woody Allen threw in, like the animated scene and the subtitled "yes we're talking but we should be fucking" scene, just made it an excellent piece of film work. I also loved how it is obviously one of Jerry Seinfeld's favorite movies, or Larry David's, or both.

Oh! On Friday last week, I donated $25 on Donors Choose to a fourth grade class that needs posterboard and markers to make maps of the US and the world. As you may recall, I am a huge fan of coloring maps in order to internalize geography, and there was some special corporate matching thing going on in honor of President's Day... it was timely. I'm now 10% done with the Donors Choose goal!

I like quantifiable progress. I should actually figure out how many stitches are required when knitting a sweater... if I were to estimate, I'd say I'm about 73% done at this point. Progress has ground to a near-halt because I'm at the cap of the right sleeve, and I knit it in the round so I'm not entirely sure how to close it off since it needs to taper up. Ugh. I'll get there.
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I'm gonna do my best swan dive...

The following is untitled and will likely permanently remain unfinished. But it's something I wrote a while ago and I'm trying to be courageous and less of a perfectionist, and that means posting something imperfect and letting it just... be. It's a start.

---

So, anyways, that’s all that’s going on here. Miss you, come home soon, write often, all that.

Really, though.
Love,
Me

Elena dabbed at the drop of water bleeding the “M” in “Miss you” into a fuzzy, inky snowball, salvaging the “iss” and the sentiment of her sentence. Before folding up the sheet, she surveyed the letter and its strange geography of similarly blotted characters and entire words interrupted by a sudden upstroke, like an EKG, or a seismograph, detecting strong beats. She considered that if she were sending this to anyone else, she would have been too ashamed and rewritten the entire thing. Her big sister, though, was the one who had always stayed up with her at night when the thunderstorms rolled onshore, telling her stories to distract her from the sharp cracks that still made her jump. She would understand. Elena giggled, figuring her sister would even appreciate the gesture of sending along the evidence of the storm. She slid the letter into its equally rain-spotted envelope, licked and sealed it shut, and glanced up at the clouds as she scrambled, barefoot, down the porch steps and across the lawn to the mailbox.
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St. Patrick's - January 15, 2010

I visited St. Patrick's three weeks ago with my friend Chelsea, approximately two and a half hours after landing at JFK. It was literally that much of a priority for me. Architecture innervates my soul, and, having escaped the suffocating clutches of Daytona for the weekend, it was a delightfully symbolic way to start the trip.

I'd been there once or twice before, years and years and years ago with my family, and when I was twelve, I read this book, a thriller in which a rogue IRA cell takes the cathedral hostage for no apparent reason. Most notable line: the 50/60 something Irish dude tells the young chickadee who seems to be his sidekick, "Girlie, I've been shot at more times than you've had your period." Most notable image: some dude climbs up on of the spires outside, either to light the building on fire, put that fire out, or set up some sort of signal for the cops. It's good times.

Anyways, Chels and I had an excellent time peering at all the saint shrines, conjecturing about why Catholics light candles for them, sneaking glances at people crossing themselves to find out if it's left-to-right or right-to-left, and, you know, just generally being slightly less respectful of the space than we probably should have been. I took quite a few pictures, most of which did not come out quite as well as I'd have liked because I didn't want to use the flash. I've culled the best and dumped them into a new photobucket. I got bored while I was uploading them so I ran the "old photo" script on my favorite; it is now below the cut and is the link to the full album. If you don't want to flip through all the pictures manually, there's a slideshow before the first one. Technology, woo! I also stuck the SPT from that week below the cut here, since it was taken while I was there and everything. The three subsequent SPTs should be posted before it's time for the next one to be taken. Hopefully.

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101 is a lot to remember...

So, oops, I totally forgot that one of my actual goals (#9) was to knit a sweater. For some reason, in my head it got folded into #40, Create an entire outfit by hand. This is actually really beneficial that I just remembered, because it means I am on the verge of completing another goal just as one got shot down. Yep, that's right, it's the end of January, and you know what that means, folks - the Foreign Service finally emailed and of course it was a no, because I just graduated and I really don't know anything about anything yet and.

It's still disappointing. It's the only thing that I very clearly know that I want to do as a career, that I can see myself doing for the next 20 or 30 or 40 years. Insofar as I can see myself doing any one thing for approximately the same amount of time I've been a self-aware human being, anyway.

But anyway so as I mentioned in yesterday's post, I'm looking at grad school options, and my top two choices are this program at Columbia, a Masters in International Affairs with a concentration in Social Policy, and this program at NYU, which gives an MA in International Relations and Journalism. I have yet to discern the distinct merits of being a "Master of Field X" versus being a "Master of Arts of Field X," so that is my next task. It looks like they both start accepting applications in August - which for some reason reminds me that I need to sign up IMMEDIATELY for the GRE. Okay, that is my real next task. Stream of consciousness what?

tl;dr: Foreign Service = not this year. Grad school = life plan for 2011. Goal #9 = remembered, almost completed.

Next up: St Paul's Patrick's, Habitat, SPT x2.
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Picture Dump

Too tired to narrate. Click for pictures. Soon: SPT 19, Cathedral #1, and, for real, drabbles.


Lost SPT - December 4, 2009

Swingset #6 - Boone Park, Jacksonville, FL

SPT - December 31st

SPT - January 7

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who, me?

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So glad I'm not one of those people who made a goal about posting frequency...

So as it turns out, the business of living my life has actually gotten to the point of interfering with my ability to write about said life. Oops. Here's a quick run-down of the last I-don't-know-how-many-weeks.

• Swingset #5 (picture unavailable) - Ponce Inlet lighthouse playground. Swung late at night, and this set is literally right underneath the lighthouse. There's a large oak(?) tree that was filtering the lights overhead (the lens is fractured, and there are two or three strong beams and four or five thinner ones on each rotation) and it was sort of magical except for the strong odor of fish coming in off the docks across the street.



• I started knitting a yellow cardigan (loosely pictured here) while out at the bar with my friends. I have to date completed the back panel, three quarters of one front panel, and have about seven inches or so (of more than 24) on the second front panel. After that, there will just be the arms and the two buttons/collar strips to complete the front, and sewing it all together. Monday will be the end of the third week I've been working on it, so it should hopefully be done by New Year's. I say hopefully both because Florida's cold season is very very short, and because I promised each of the bartenders who initially made fun of me that I'd knit them something, too - fingerless gloves for Pete and a knit replica of his work t-shirt for Jake, complete with the bar's logo on the front and 'CURRENTLY WORKING OFF MY BAR TAB' on the back.



• Knitting is fun, but it isn't actually progress on goal 40. Luckily, I purchased fabric and a pattern to sew a strapless dress, and it really shouldn't take too long to complete once I actually sit down and get to it. Of course, a dress isn't a whole outfit; I am thinking that if I get really ambitious, I might make a lightweight black trench jacket to go with it. My friend Katelyn insists that I also make the, um, unmentionables to be worn with this outfit... this is already a multi-stage project, so why not?



• As a sort of combo step towards achieving both goals 67 and 79, I did in fact purchase a watercolor journal, paints, and brushes. I won't really say any more about it, other than this: "snails."



• There's an SPT of me in a moose hat, an SPT of me trapped on my camera, and 13904810 SPTs from last night of me acting with a questionable amount of class at a semiformal event. These pictures will hopefully be posted shortly.



• Writing is slow and not actually going where I initially thought, but I am making an effort to at least think about it everyday, if not actually putting words together into real sentences. I just feel like I'm not being very... artful, as though four years of essay and technical writing ruined my imagination. But that's what all this practice is for, right? Right.
  
  On the non-fiction front, I am thinking about writing an alternative history book (a la Lies My History Teacher Told Me) aimed at kids. Or, to be more precise, writing a history book whose primary purpose is not the indoctrination of American children into a brouhaha of blind national pride or Eurocentric elitism. As Joel Stein put it, I love America, like an adult loves another adult - I see her flaws and I desperately want to help her overcome them. I believe in being honest about those flaws, not trying to hide them.
  
  This may or may not be inspired by the fact that my little sister and another girl I met separately who happened to be in her high school class don't know who Nelson Mandela is. Worse, they can't even comprehend why that might be a problem.



• Article reading is still going along nicely, although now that I have paper copies of two of the three magazines, posting links and blurbs seems more trouble than it's worth. Now that I'm, uh, caught up, if there's a particularly interesting thing, I will post about it. Swear. No more batch posts, because that's what seems to be slowing me down. If I like it, I'll post it. End of story.



• Book reading is going okay, too, but I keep getting sidetracked by new books and going out and knitting and... well... I haven't actually finished a book in over a month. I'm about halfway through three, and started two others, if that makes any difference. I really want to finish the Terry Prachett book I'm in the middle of, The Wyrd Sisters, before Christmas. New mini-goal. Woot.

Can't really think of anything else I was in the middle of... Free Rice has sort of faded back into obscurity, it's the wrong season for Walks for the Cure, and Rosetta Stone is still on hold. Oh! I did get an email from Donors Choose, with a follow-up thank you letter and pictures from the teacher of the class I donated the Scholastic Weeklies to a couple months ago. Second graders are ADORABLE and curious and their teacher says they were ecstatic to learn that the magazines are theirs to keep and take home. I'm so glad that they have a new outlet for that inquisitive energy, and hopefully it will inspire them keep researching things they're interested in outside of the classroom. So anyway, that's that. Pictures soon. Articles in the next week, as they become interesting. And, maybe possibly soon I'll finally get the confidence to post my two-month-old drabble.
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Surprises

1. New hair in SPT 13; SPT 12 is still in transit.

2. Short-chained swingset = lots and lots and lots of fun.

That is all; see below.

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ENID: It’s probably the slang.

Still busy busy busy. Last weekend I swung swingset #4, a picture of which should hopefully be uploaded shortly. So too will last week's SPT, after my friend whose camera such a picture should be on uploads them to Facebook. The past two weeks, my drabble has turned into the inkling of a Something, and it's up to about 400 words now. (That doesn't sound too impressive, but keep in mind that a drabble is only supposed to be 100 words and an attempt at a semi-self-contained short story to keep your creative juices going.) It's using the same character as the last Oversized Serious drabble I wrote over a month ago, which I will post tomorrow or Friday, and then after a suitable period of introspective judgment, I'll post this current one, too.

I also began knitting a grocery bag, although I have three sweater patterns that I really want to get to work on. I just needed something a bit more simple to get back into it. I unfortunately did not buy a watercolor journal last week as I said I was going to, because Michael's ended up being on a different (and much further away) street than I thought and I was in a rush to meet a friend for his going away party. I could have bought it by now at Walmart, but I'd prefer not to feed the giant - and, it turns out, there's one even closer than where I was going to go that is legitimately local, Southern Paint and Supply. They supply Actual! watercolor tubes, so I can use something other than a dinky little Crayola tray. Not that I'm knocking my mad elementary school art skillz or anything, but... yeah. I want rich colors, ergo, real paint.

In terms of wine connoisseurship, yesterday I got a call from my mom asking me which I'd prefer to drink with Thanksgiving dinner. When I replied, "Oh, um, well, like, pinot grigio, pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon. I can bring my own," she asked, "What brand is that?" Long story short, I popped a quarter mile down the road to the grocery store to help her find something to drink that isn't white zinfandel or blackberry Manischewitz. We got a pinot noir and a beaujolais, and I also picked up two bottles of Spanish wine I had over the weekend for my own nefarious purposes. Mission successful. Sorta.

That's about it. I forgot to keep all the links for articles last week, so below are the four I found most memorable.

"Lunch with M." is purportedly the first-ever meeting between a journalist and a Michelin restaurant "inspector." It really isn't an interview, because the inspector cannot divulge any identifying details - even her parents aren't supposed to know her real occupation, lest they boast to their friends; the New Yorker reporter just sits down with the head of the Michelin guides and a woman who would just like to be called "M." For all that he's not allowed to tell us about their conversation, it is a surprisingly comprehensive exposé of the Michelin organization as a whole and the incredible shroud Kevlar vest of secrecy they've built up to protect it.

As we all know, the shuttle fleet is retiring next year and the new Orion capsules aren't due to come online until the middle of the next decade. At least. "Is this the end for human space flight?" Inquiring minds want to know, so the science editor of The Daily Mail (seriously?) and a science journalist in residence at some college in Canada argue about it. The former says, yes, we're done with space, because no president will take the Kennedyesque step of committing resources to something that may or may not pan out three administrations down the road. The latter says, no-well-maybe; humans are creatures of conquering exploring and inquiring stock, and we really really WANT to see what's out in space. All I have to say about it is this.

"Four ways to feed the world" provides NS readers with a very simple plan for feeding the extra 3 billion or so people who will be on the Earth in the next 15 years, in addition to the 17% of those already here who are chronically starving. It's simple, really; grow more high-yielding crops on the same amount of farmland with less water, and build more roads to move the harvest around. Genius. Why has no one thought of this before??? This is the sort of quality reporting that drew me to NS in the first place.

I don't even know what this is but the best way I can think to describe it is "forcibly stripping the porn out of the porno script" (pun fully intended). It made me giggle, anyway, if mostly in a WTF-am-I-reading way.
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Brimstone

Today is the day I'm going to buy a watercolor journal for goal 67. I need to domakecreate something other than endless amounts of paperwork. I have a job because other people have jobs that they are one day going to retire from. Or die while doing. Or get fired from. And it's my job to tell them how much money they will or will not receive when one of those days comes. I mean, I guess I don't really want one of their jobs either. The only lifelong career I could really see myself being passionate about right now is at State.

Point is, I'm producing, but I don't feel productive. Commerce is awful like that. Ergo, list; ergo, crafts. Maybe I'll buy some yarn and make a new sweater or something, too. Starting on goal 40, perhaps? I reallyreally don't need any more scarves, and I probably reallyreally don't need another blanket. Things with real shapes FTW!

PS, If you're wondering why I put watercolors on the list at all, it's because of things like this.
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pictures pictures pictures

It's incredibly late and I'm incredibly tired, but below the cut lie not only this week's SPT, but also photographic proof that I swung on swingsets numbers two and three today - if you recall, I have not actually posted a picture of the first swingset yet because... I fail. Whatever. Number 2 is at Wadsworth Park in Flagler Beach, and Number 3 is just up the highway at Holland Memorial Park in Palm Coast. Number 2, as you will see shortly, has an interesting architecture going for it, but has pretty short chains... still, in all, a very nice swinging experience. Meanwhile, I was far more pleased with the longer chains at Number 3, except that half of them were too long and, mysteriously, could not be rolled up. Very good afternoon, though :)

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Backlog

Everything has slowed down a lot, so I apologize for the lack of posts this week. I have two SPTs below the cut here, and an article post I've been writing queued up, and - not kidding - a two-week old draft of music-review for goal number 4. I promise, though, I have kept up with drabble-writing (nothing I'm confident is share-worthy, though) and reading and free rice and working on the responses for the Foreign Service app. I just haven't felt hugely compelled to write about it. Oh well. Picture-time!


This one was before work on Oct 28th. Some days I'm a really good morning person.

This one was last night, not on Thursday. Oh well. I'm not sure how I got it to double-expose, because it never does it when I actively try, but I like it.

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Never trust the Swedes.

So this post is the SPT for October 15th, even though they were actually taken on the 17th and 18th, and the post prior to this is the picture from yesterday that was actually taken today because it was a much more pleasant day for picture-taking. For real.

Once upon a time, three lovely maidens set out from the sleepy hamlet of Bushwick in search of the mythical relics rumored to lay in the far off Temple of IKEA. They bundled up against the cold, mounted their trusty steed, Subaru, and enlisted the help of a local guide who called himself Garmin. They traveled on and on and on, twisting and turning through the trails of the Lyn of Brook, stopping only for provisions of bagels and extra sweaters. Finally, thanks to Garmin's expertise, they arrived at the fabled place.

But much to their surprise, thousands upon thousands of other brave adventurers had made the very same pilgrimage! The three maidens refused to believe they had come this far for nothing. Determined not to depart empty-handed, they marched forth into the relentless waves of people entering the temple in search of relics of their own.

As they trekked through the upper levels of the magical IKEA, the energy of discovery and delight was palpable. The maidens beheld strange and glorious wonders of home furnishing the likes of which they had never before dared dream. They wandered from one cavernous chamber to the next, in awe of the sights and sounds laid out resplendently before them. The maidens yearned to collect every single relic IKEA held, but they knew it would be unfair to overburden poor, aging Subaru. They had to make some choices.

At that moment, the wonderland of delights transformed into a hellish pit of fire and brimstone stacked from floor to hundred-foot-ceiling. Suddenly, all their happy co-pilgrims became vicious competitors, each vying for the blessing of a temple priest so they could cart off their chosen relics. The maidens stood faithfully at no less than three different altars as they waited their turn to collect their beautiful relics.

And lo, the maidens were rewarded for their patience and persistence. Having used their cunning to navigate the secret shortcuts through the temple, and their disproportionate strength to lift their own relics onto their carts, they proved themselves superior to all the obstacles the great Temple of IKEA had thrown at them.

After saddling Subaru up with their prizes, and directing Garmin to bring them back safe and sound to Bushwick, the maidens enjoyed a peaceful ride all the way home.

And they lived happily ever after, until they realized they had to transport their relics up to the highest tower of their castle all by themselves!

And then they realized that the relics had to be assembled before their magical powers could be utilized. There were a lot of pieces for the maidens to sort through!

The maidens quickly worked out how to fit the strange-looking components together into something that vaguely resembled the floor model at the temple.

But their most magnificent relic, an item that would provide amazing moving pictures and yards and yards of parchment filled with wise and wonderfully enlightening words, was not to be so easily had. A demon had slipped through the temple priests' defenses and broken a vital piece of the relic! Without it, the maidens realized, the relic would never come to life as they had hoped. Forlorn, they gave up for the night and vowed to begin anew on another relic the next day.

Reinvigorated the following morning, the maidens set upon their second-favorite relic, an enchanted wardrobe that would keep all their garments in tip-top shape as soon as they put them inside of it.

As with the first relic, construction proceeded swimmingly - but only for a short while. When the time came to place the special shelf that would keep their handbags and miscellaneous medium-sized fashion accessories organized, the maidens realized that yet another demon had ingratiated itself into the very particle board of their beloved relic. The shelf simply would not follow the laws of geometry as the priests' holy instructions declared that they would.

But the maidens were fierce and tenacious. Defeated once already by the demons plaguing the temple IKEA, they wrestled with the evil one until at long last, they had forced the demon out and the shelf in. Proud of their hard work, they were at last able to pour themselves a well-deserved glass of enchanted grape juice and admire their precious relics.

Will the maidens ever return to the great temple? Will the demon yet plaguing them ever depart? WAS IT ALL WORTH IT?

The world may never know.

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I can ride my bike with no handlebars

No handlebars.

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Busy little bee...

Another busy sort of week. There's that whole thing about pictures and a thousand words, so... here's me first thing Thursday morning, and a bonus picture of my current work in progress.

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I don't think a brisket really counts as an ethnic recipe. Right?

It's been two weeks since the last articles post and although I was collecting their links, and for some, even got around to writing responses, I couldn't get around to posting them. Too much other stuff was in the way... hello, I had a FAVICON to make? But seriously, the reason the last two weeks of articles is being folded into a three-day-late weekly update post is that this weekend, my computer died. Entirely. It's a long and complicated story involving the power supply and the battery, but it's on right now because I literally forced it into place, and everything important is all backed up to an external and all that... but it's been time-consuming, and I honestly wasn't motivated to write posts on my dad's ancient Windows ME laptop (complete with Firefox version 1.0!). Plus side- I rediscovered (for the umpteenth time) an old DOS game called Lexicross, which running on a semi-modern processor is like Wheel of Fortune and Scrabble's crack baby, on speed, and meth, and... you know, those genes that gave Superman his super speed. Good times.

I also had a four-hour brisket to make on Saturday, as well as apple bread for dessert, in honor of either Rosh Hashanah (if you ask my grandmother) or my sister coming home for the weekend (if you ask her). It turned out splendidly, I think, and because the recipe calls for a cup of red wine, I had (almost) an entire bottle to myself to nurse for the afternoon while it roasted. Extra good times.

So with all that, I forgot to mention that I started writing actual! scenes! of screenplay. I'm still completely unsure about the beginning, so I decided to just skip ahead a bit and write a crucial intermediate exposition scene. I'm actually remotely satisfied with the way it's coming out so far, although it's very awkward getting used to the screenwriting software. It helps you autoformat everything more easily, so you don't have to spend so much time typing mundane things like the characters' names over and over. Theoretically a good idea, but apparently the guild-approved format calls for reentering the character's name after they have direction and speak if you want to add more direction. Anyway, perhaps when it's finished I will put it up. (Probably not.)

I also began reading a book I purchased a few years ago, right after the author was promoting it on the Daily Show, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. Aside from having an awesome title, this very well-researched book exposes the realities of both life in Baghdad's "secure" Green Zone in 2004-05 and the political conflicts that did not just hinder, but visibly set back the progress of rebuilding Iraq as an independent nation. The author lived in Baghdad, across the river from his interviewees, all of whom were employees of the various US agencies represented in the occupation government. The storytelling is so smooth that it reads almost like a novel, and I'm excited to jump back into it tonight. So I'm going to. Below the cut are links to the articles I did end up reading (and, in the case of the Economist, bothered gathering links for) and, yes, I know, it's very light on the New Yorker. Sue me.

"What to do with Moody's, S&P, and the rating agencies?" I was attracted to this New Yorker piece because I was only vaguely aware of the rating agencies' role in the financial system, not knowing much beyond the fact that they had rated AIG AAA - apparently a good rating - right before it collapsed. This article explores that theme further while demonstrating the history of increasing the entrenchment of these agencies into the system. (That very system also writes the agencies' paychecks, which is why the ratings are so slow to change.) It also advocates for a "divorce," removing the government seal of officiousness from the agencies themselves.

What's most interesting about this is the grade inflation that went on over the last three decades without anyone appearing to take notice. When AAA becomes the standard and not a way to differentiate truly low-risk investments from the rest - and when the supposedly perpetually-secure real estate busts nationally - there's no question that America's major disease is greed.

If, in high school history class, we had been given "Trial of the Century" instead of half a paragraph in our textbook to learn about the infamous Dreyfus Affair, I would almost certainly have retained enough of the details to not have clicked on a New Yorker book review to quench my curiosity. This six-page review, after giving a short summation of the book's main point - that the historical context that enabled Dreyfus to be wrongly convicted (twice) of treason by supposedly spying for the Germans before finally being allowed to return to his home - gives a detailed history lesson about that very context. The review does a very good job of it, so I won't paraphrase. Just go read it.

Normally, I wouldn't really care to read a biographical piece about the prospective new owner of the NY Nets. But any article that begins, "Being a Russian oligarch these days isn't easy" is, in my opinion, one worth taking a peek at.

"Rethinking the bees' waggle dance:" so it turns out bees might not actually be as smart and communicative as we thought. Waggledance is still fun to say, though...

"Overconsumption is the real problem" is one article in a large special feature NS published about the looming specter of overpopulation. The whole feature is good, but this is the one that spoke to me most.

"Economic Vandalism:" an anti-American-protectionism tirade. Sort of. Apparently we pissed off China by putting a tariff on shoddy tires instead of letting the market sort it out - never mind that when tires fail, BAD THINGS LIKE ACCIDENTS happen.

"The power of mobile money" explains the new trend of mobile banking in Kenya, and how it's helping jumpstart the economy there. It's a pretty nifty system; people can transfer small amounts of money from one another, which they can then withdraw at local convenience stores - useful in a nation with a very small banking infrastructure.

"Set Angela free" is a little dated now, but this piece is still an informative primer on the dynamics of Germany's multiparty government.

Last, but certainly not least, "The Best of the Ig Nobel Prizes" is best described as the Razzies for science. Two of them involve innovative applications for alcohol, so... just read it.
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Puppy

I sort of forgot to do SPT yesterday, what with all the excitement of creating the favicon, and today I made sure to keep my camera with me at all times - but I never really found a good opportunity for a shot. Until my family got back from dinner and our dog, Lucky, looked more adorable than usual on the top of the couch. (Yes, she's fully-grown; yes, we sometimes think she's a cat. In actuality, she's half Chihuahua, half Yorkie.) She's not normally this shy, though. Maybe she just didn't like the flash...

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