I don’t actually write fanfic very often. but I got the idea for this the other day, and decided to write it down.
Month: June 2006 Page 1 of 2
Conversation between myself and kitanzi this morning:
autographedcat: (lying across the bed, stretching my back): I want a medieval torture rack for my birthday.
kitanzi: Um….sure.
autographedcat: I want it to help stretch out my back.
kitanzi: But where would we put it?
autographedcat: Yeah, that’s always the problem with exercise equipment.
Today in Creative Loafing, there was a sidebar article about a new DVD series designed to help parents get their toddlers well indoctrinated to follow the right university sports:
“I’m pregnant.” “I’m getting a tattoo.” “His name is Snake, and we’re in love.”
Those are all words most parents dread. But if you went to the University of Georgia, there is one phrase above all others you don’don’t want to hear from your teenager: “I’m enrolling at Florida.”
Up until now, there was only so much parents could do to instill in their children a love of all things UGA. You could take them to games,make them listen to Larry Munson, teach them the Bulldog fight song.But in the end, you just had to trust that you had raised them right.
Now Bulldog parents have a secret weapon. A company called Team Baby Entertainment has released a DVD called Baby Bulldog, which “allows parents, grandparents, alumni and friends to share their love, loyalty and passion for their university with their children.”
The DVD is targeted toward babies and toddlers and uses Sesame Street tactics to “teach” kids just how great it is to be a Bulldog.The video features young children dressed up in UGA costumes, and footage of the university’s sports teams, mascot and marching band “to expose children to the university in an exciting and playful manner.”Translation: If you’re desperate for your kid to follow in your footsteps and you’re not above brainwashing, this DVD is for you.
Didn’t attend UGA? Don’t worry, Team Baby Entertainment makes DVDs for parents from a variety of large universities, including LSU,Auburn, Florida State and — sorry, UGA fans — Florida.
A product which nicely fills a much-needed gap.
Elsewhere on LJ today, cjdoyle shared some of his Viagra-themed spam in a friends-locked entry, prompting this insta-filk. I hope you enjoy it…i spent minutes writing it:
The Love Pill
TTTO: (Theme From) The Love Boat
Love, Exciting and new
Pop the pill. She’s waiting for you
Love, life’s sweetest reward
Get it up, it stays up for you
Viiiiiiiiiiiiiiiagra
Soon you’ll be ploughing another field
Viiiiiiiiiiiiiiiagra
Four hours of fun just one dose will yield
Set a course for erection
Your mind on a new romance
Love won’t hurt anyone
See her open legs on a friendly bed
Yes LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE!
It’s LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE!
…
I’ll get me coat…
This was apparently announced back in January, but it only just came to my attention, thanks to Peter Trei over on rec.arts.comics.strips:
D+Q to publish MOOMIN THE COMPLETE TOVE JANSSON COMIC STRIP in September 2006
Drawn & Quarterly will publish the first of a five-volume series of MOOMIN: THE COMPLETE TOVE JANSSON COMIC STRIP in September 2006, it was announced today by Chris Oliveros, President & Publisher of the Montreal-based graphic novel and arts publishing house. This is the first time the strip will be published in any form in North America and will deservedly place cartoonist and author Tove Jansson among the international cartooning greats of the last century.
“All of us at D+Q are huge fans of Jansson’s Moomin children’s books, especially the editor of the series, Tom Devlin, who brought the Moomin comic strips to our attention,” said Oliveros. “The quality and quantity of what Tove created in the MOOMIN comic strip is nothing short of astounding.”
“To comic strip fans, there are few surprises or unknown strips out there that have yet to be published in North America,” said Tom Devlin, Editor and Production Designer. “To be the editor of a five-volume series that will bring the comic strip of one the most internationally renowned children’s authors and her creations to a whole new audience is thrilling. Comic strip fans as well as fans of the MOOMIN chapter books will be fascinated by the caliber of Tove’s cartooning skills.”
Jansson is revered around the world as one of the foremost children’s authors of the twentieth century for her illustrated chapter books regarding the magical worlds of her creation, the Moomins. The Moomins saw life in many forms but debuted to its biggest audience ever on the pages of world’s largest newspaper the “London Evening News”, in 1954. The strip was syndicated in newspapers around the world with millions of readers in 40 countries. MOOMIN: THE COMPLETE TOVE JANSSON COMIC STRIP; BOOK ONE is the first volume of Drawn & Quarterly publishing plan to reprint the entire strip drawn by Jansson before she handed over the reins to her brother Lars in 1960.
The Moomins are a tight-knit family – hippo-shaped creatures with easygoing and adventurous outlooks. Jansson’s art is pared down and precise, yet able to compose beautiful portraits of ambling creatures in fields of flowers or rock-strewn beaches that recall Jansson’s Nordic roots. The comic strip reached out to adults with its gentle and droll sense of humor. Whimsical but with biting undertones, Jansson’s observations of everyday life, including guests who overstay their welcome, modern art, movie stars, and high society, easily caught the attention of an international audience and still resonate today.
Oh, I want it. I want it very much. 🙂
So now I have this perfectly functioning laptop with wireless capability, thanks to baiku, who thinks I was doing HIM a favour by declutterling his house during move-time. One of the reasons I’ve avoided just outright buying a laptop is that frankly, they’re too expensive for what you get out of them, for as little as I actually *need* one for travel. It’s not as if my job is frequently sending me hither and yon to the point that I need a portable computer at all times. It’s a luxury, and as luxuries go, there’s only so much I’m willing to pay for one. As it is, I’ve put about as much actual money into this unit as I’d like.
But frugality aside, I’m still a gearhead, and that means I want to trick out my gadgets with as much mojo as I can muster. And there are a variety of upgrades I could perform on this unit that would make it even more spiffy. And people are always saying “So, what would you like for your birthday/Christmas/etc.”, and I always say “Oh, I dunno.”, because usually, I don’t.
So here’s, for my own reference and the reference of anyone interested, a list of what I’d like to upgrade on my Dell Inspiron 4000, should anyone want to contribute towards it. (I don’t expect anyone will, but just in case people who are prone to giving me presents (or who happen to have spare parts lying around that would suit — I don’t require new, just good working order) are reading this.
- A couple of new batteries
The battery in the unit will hold a charge for about an hour to 90 minutes, which is OK but not stellar. There’s room in the unit for two batteries at once, with a theoretical run-time of about 8 hours, give or take. - A larger hard drive
The drive thats in there now is a 5GB drive, which will hold the OS with enough room left over for some minor file storage. But if I want to, say, offload con photos on it, it’d be nice to have a bit more room on it. - More RAM
128 MB once seemed like so much RAM, but it’s hardly that much these days. The unit will take up to 512MB (2×256 PC100), and I’d love to max it out some day. - A portable optical mouse
I have an old fashioned USB ball mouse plugged into it right now, and that lets me work easily. (Both the touchpad and the eraserstub pointers are somewhat annoying to use.) But an optical mouse would work better on odd surfaces, so I’d like one eventually.
I’m sure there’s other nifty stuff I’d like to have for it eventually, but those are the main things. Mostly, I’m just happy that I have a working machine. Thanks to everyone who donated old parts (especially baiku, tarkrai, and katyhh) in my quest for computer mobility. 🙂
For those of you who have never seen it, Woot.Com is a website that traffics in a variety of items, usually selling one item per day at a large discount over normal retail. The stuff they offer tends by and large to be geek-tech oriented (computers, AV equipment, with the occasional oddkin tossed in for variety).
Tonight, while popping through, I saw this, prompting the following conversation:
kitanzi: What is that?
autographedcat: It’s a computer accessory set shaped like frogs. See: keyboard, mouse, and speakers. Frogs.
kitanzi: They keyboard isn’t shaped like a frog. No wait, it is.
autographedcat: Yeah, see – there’s the eyes, and there’s its little hands.
kitanzi: Roadkill frog, more like.
autographedcat: Maybe that’s why the mouse and the speakers look so alarmed. <does South Park voices> “Oh my God, they killed Kenny!” “You BASTARDS!”
Meme vectored from filkerdave and rms_butterfly:
IP logging is off and anonymous posting is allowed.
Please tell me anything you want, anonymously. It can be a secret, a fear, a wish, a hope, a dream, an insult, your great-aunt’s secret recipe for chocolate fudge banana brownies.
Post twice or more if you like, I’m not counting.
And then, if you want, post this in your journal and see what people say there!
One of the amazing, mind-staggering things about the Internet is that you can buy just about anything on it, including a Las Vegas wedding, a Mexican divorce, a solid gold Kama Sutra coffee pot, or a baby’s arm holding an apple. [1]
Now, Amazon.com, that all-things-to-all-people web merchant, has started finding the last hidden niches of e-commerce, the things that it never actually occurred to you that you might want to shop online for.
That’s right, you can now order bologna from Amazon.
The customer reviews are utterly hysterical.
At last, my search for bologna, a search that had oft awoken me in the middle of the turgid night, condensed with perspiration and mind a-swim with luncheon shortage paranoia, is over. No more eating of 2 slices of Wonder bread with naught but mustard inbetwixt, no more frustration of desiring that hot-dogged flavor in a flatter and more throwing-disc like form, no more eating of lesser substances that come not in a gleeful molded plastic tray nor come unbecircled in red plastic, no, Dear Lord, I have seen the light, and it is bologna. O loving, nay, GODLY meat, thou fulfilleth me and giveth me purpose. Amen.
Our cups truly runneth over.
[1] Yes, kitanzi, that’s your fault.
Back when I got my physical last September, one of the things that came back from the lab work was some slightly elevated liver enzyme levels. They weren’t high enough to be alarming, but they were high enough for my physician to want to run some further tests. So I spent a month abstaining from alcohol and Tylenol, and was retested, but this didn’t make any difference. So I was sent off to get an ultrasound of my abdomen. I did end up procrastinating on this for a bit, because at that time we were moving headlong towards kitanzi‘s surgery, and that, along with some personal relationship stresses, was taking up most of my emotional energy. But I did finally have the ultrasound down in February, and was told that it’s definitely a girl! No, actually, what I was told is that the ultrasound was inconclusive, and they wanted to send me for a full CT scan.
With one thing or another, I never did get called back, so when I was in getting my blood pressure medication adjusted last week, I mentioned that I’d never got a call. Ms. Schaad, the NP who I’ve been seeing about the various things that came out of my physical, rolled her eyes and told me she’d resubmit the paperwork. Yesterday, I was called and told I could come in today at 1:00pm, and to come down and pick up some barium contrast dye to take this morning.
The barium wasn’t as disgusting as I’d been led to believe, though I really don’t think its a taste sensation that will sweep the country either. The real downside of it was that once I drank it, I wasn’t allowed to have anything to eat or drink, even water, until after the procedure. This made me fairly cranky for most of the morning, as I tend to keep a full jug of water on my desk at all times.
I got to the Northside Hospital‘s Radiology facility in Alpharetta right on time, did the paperwork, and waited to be called. I was finally led back into the CT Scanner area by a very perky, pretty young nurse, who gave me some more barium and went over with me all the various ways that the procedure might kill me, and asking me to initial the paper saying that that was alright. I then divested myself of my various belongings, and made myself comfortable on the slab while the pretty nurse set up an IV that would later be used to inject me with even more dye.
The next bit was spent being shuttled back and forth through the machine, before she came in to give me the injection. Wow, what an utterly weird feeling! It wasn’t actually painful, but it felt as though a nice fire was slowly making its way through my bloodstream. it lasted for about five minutes, during which I was shuttled through the machine a couple of more times, and then it was all done. I came home and ordered some Chinese food and played City of Villains until kitanzi came home.
I won’t know the results for a few days, but it was definitely an *interesting* experience.
Courtesy of mvaldemar, I learn that a minor league ballpark in St. Louis is serving Krispy Kreme Bacon Cheeseburgers:
It’s sweet like a doughnut, and then you’ve got the hamburger. You’ve read that right. It’s a burger with cheese and bacon, sandwiched between a Krispy Kreme doughnut — a heart attack waiting to happen. A burger so perfect, they say, tampering is discouraged.“You’re ruining it! You’re not supposed to put ketchup on it!” Bowers says to a diner.
“Well, I don’t know. It’s my first time,” he replies.
For a mere $4.50 it’s breakfast, dinner, and a little dessert all in one. That it packs up to 1,000 calories — the donut alone has 10 grams of sugar — doesn’t seem to faze diabetic diner Floyd Schuetz.
“Oh, I’ll have another one of these,” he says.
That is quite possibly the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen served on a plate.