The WKRP of Journals: Nobody's Reading It!

Check out my website! No, really, I think there may be a problem.

2011-06-20T14:19:59Z

Hey all! Didya miss me, like, at all? I been busy, and tired, and busy, and did I mention I've been exhausted?

So, one of the many things I've got on my plate these days is that I've taken over website maintenance for our store's website, lucky me. Our friend, Joe, who used to do this job (he was happy to hand it over to me) just emailed, saying that he tried to check it at work, just to see how I was doing, but he can't get to it. It's there, it just won't download for him on the screen, or something like that:

"I can resolve the IP address, meaning that the server is there, but the website is unreachable."

I checked and found a perfectly fine website, and that's on a computer that's a mile away from the computer I used to put new product up on the website all day yesterday.

Could you guys check the site and let me know if there's a problem, OR that you can see it fine. No sound, but image-heavy. LOTS OF NEAT STUFF, but yeah, it takes a moment to fill in all those pictures.

http://www.legendsofsuperheros.com

I'm hoping it's just being blocked by his work computer (not sure Joe ever used his computer at work to look at the site before!)

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Mid-80s me kills me!

2011-04-25T19:54:14Z

I found this limerick written on a pencil sketch I did at a convention back in the mid-80s of my friend Holly dressed as (Tom Baker's) Dr. Who. I'm pretty sure I wrote it:

Doctors Watson and Who were both beckoned
To a spot where a murder was reckoned.
But which came on time
To the scene of the crime?
Why, Who was on first, Watson second!

Hee! Crossover Sherlock Holmes/Dr.Who limerick (with an Abbot-and-Costello reference) from the pa-a-a-ast!

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Haven't forgotten my towel since 1980!

2011-04-23T21:11:39Z

The Favorite Thing Ever site just put up an entry on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and now I feel like I gotta get a Kindle. I never felt that way before, but I'm sold.

Pan Books published the novel as a paperback in October 1979 after the BBC turned it down, and it sold 250,000 in the first three months.

January of 1980, I was browsing the shelves in the Science Fiction Bookshop in Manhattan after class, looking for some light SciFi, preferably humor--and said as much to the guy who ran the shop. He was at the front desk, cutting open a box. He popped open the top and pulled out a paperback: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "How's this?" he said. "The guy from the distributor said it was pretty funny."

I bought that paperback, and yeah, it was "pretty funny." It wasn't easy reading it on the D train back to Brooklyn, people kept giving me looks as I tried to stifle my laughter, completely unsuccessfully. And it occurs to me that, barring tourists who brought it back with them on the plane, there's a slim possibility I'm the first person in the USA who read HHGG. ;)

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Elisabeth Sladen 1948-2011

2011-04-20T01:09:17Z

Elisabeth Sladen, a.k.a. Sarah Jane Smith of Doctor Who and her own spinoff, The Sarah Jane Adventures, passed on this morning. She was 63 and had been ill with cancer. Who knew? She looked marvelous and did not seem ill at all.

Go here for a lovely tribute from Russell T. Davies:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-13137935

She was my absolute favorite companion, and was probably yours as well.

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Move over, Mansquito.

2011-04-11T18:33:54Z

I have Syfy's Ferocious Planet, starring JFlan, on Tivo. I watched two minutes of it, then realized that when ComicbookMan gets home, I'll be forced to watch the movie all over again, so I stopped. I suspect a nice glass of wine & someone to snark it with should make it quite an enjoyable viewing experience.

( MY REVIEW OF THE FIRST TWO MINUTES, NO SPOILERS! )

When I watch the rest of the movie, I'll do a real review.

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Still waiting on the vote in Wisconsin...

2011-04-06T19:15:43Z

Over on my LJ, on an entry dated a few weeks back, called Feed the Rich, Starve the Worker: That's Bullshit... from Madison, neuralclone commented:

What bamboozles me is the way ordinary people are supporting the corporatists. Economics 101 - can't they understand that by reducing people to a subsistence level they're going to destroy the consumer economy that sustains them? It will eventually rebound upon themselves.

And my rant got kinda long, so I made it an entry:

Corporatists have been working on this for thirty to fifty years (or more, kinda hard to tell when it really started), just chipping away, and they do it by taking advantage of this annoying thing called Human Nature, the desire for short-term gains pitted against long-term gains that require patience and, more importantly, thought. It's what con men rely on. Like all scams, they need the cooperation of the person they're scamming for this shit to work. Despite what the old saying says, you *can* cheat an honest man, but it's a lot more difficult than cheating some idiot who's helping you do it, usually with a smile, because they think they're in on the con with you.

( Case in point: )

/rant! I feel better! Especially since Fox just announced they're dumping Glenn Beck! Let's hope this is a the beginning of a down-turn for all corporate shills everywhere!

In other news, LJ is messed up again. I wanted to Import my LJ to Dreamwidth, which I didn't even realize I could do until several friends mentioned it on their journals, but don't think it's a good idea to attempt it until LJ is working again. Besides, I can't get in and change my LJ password, which is suggested on the handy-dandy Import Journal page on Dreamwidth.

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Feed the Rich, Starve the Worker: That's Bullshit... from Madison

2011-03-16T20:08:51Z

I know terrible things are still happening in Japan, but it's also important to remember what's at stake in Wisconsin, too. I hate the idea that there are politicians and corporatists heaving a sigh of relief that the tragedy in Japan is the perfect distraction from their happy dismantling of the US middle class. It's not like attention the striking workers in WI had been getting from the media was anything but scant in the first place.

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Black Hat SEO warning for the Japanese Earthquake

2011-03-11T18:57:57Z

From The ESET Threat Blog: http://blog.eset.com/2011/03/11/japanese-earthquake-inevitable-seo

FYI, SEO is Search Engine Optimization. Right now, people all over the planet are doing Google searches for terms like "Japan", "Japanese", "earthquake", and tsunami". The bad guys know it, and they're plugging those words into their sites, the better to infect you with malware, spam, and pop ups that just won't quit when you do a search-and-click. They're also sending out emails with links and creating phony charities to separate the well-meaning from their hard-earned cash.

1-DO NOT click on social media and email “shocking news” or “shocking video” links. Apparently the use of the word "shocking" as a come-on is kind of a dead giveaway.

2-DO NOT go to untrusted websites for news. Could be a black-hat website waiting to infect your computer with malware.

3-And in the coming weeks, when things start settling down, DO NOT send money to unverified charities and fundraisers. Even the not-totally-criminal, "legit" ones will cheerfully take 90% and only give 10% (or even less!) to the actual charity.

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M and James Bond Support International Women's Day!

2011-03-08T19:16:39Z

What it says on the box:

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Shows I have not watched in years! They were a-okay!

2011-02-26T06:07:24Z

I watched Supernatural tonight because I heard they were having a Cheeseboard* episode (I love it when a show does meta or self-parody) and was immediately reminded as to why I stopped watching this show early-on in first season... DUDE, LIKE A WHOLE BUNCH OF PEOPLE GOT OFFED IN GRUESOME AND HORRIFIC WAYS IN THE "PREVIOUSLY-ON-SUPERNATURAL" OPENER! One guy got his throat cut and, in a truly insult-to-injury moment, someone stuck a chalice under the gusher. So wrong.

( Spoilers for The French Mistake )

( Spoilers for Fortune )

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Keith Olbermann, where are you when we need you the most?

2011-02-12T05:57:09Z

I've been neglecting my flist of late, partly because I can't seem to sit through five minutes of H50 and you guys are all in the first blush of sweet, sweet fannish lurve with it, bless your hearts, but mainly because of what's going on with regard to Wikileaks. I've been reading all things Wikileaks and I cannot stop. It's too complicated for me to cover what's going on if you haven't been keeping up via the internet*, because so damned much is happening all over the planet, but this latest turn of events is so fucking chilling, I just feel like more people desperately need to know about it. I've cribbed info from articles I've found all over the net (with URLs!), and I'll try to keep this simple, but yeah, good luck with that:

In 2010, Wikileaks announced it was going to post major shit about "a corrupt U.S. bank", unnamed, some time in 2011. Bank of America immediately assumed that bank was itself, because even they have to admit the BofA makes Luthorcorp look like a charitable organization run by nuns. BofA immediately went into KILL KILL KILL DIE DIE DIE mode.

Excerpted from Thinkprogress:

According to e-mails obtained by ThinkProgress, the (US Chamber of Commerce) hired the lobbying firm Hunton and Williams. Hunton And Williams’ attorney Richard Wyatt was hired by the Chamber in October of last year. To assist the Chamber, Wyatt and his associates solicited a set of private security firms — HBGary Federal, Palantir, and Berico Technologies (collectively called Team Themis**) — to develop tactics for damaging progressive groups and labor unions, in particular ThinkProgress, the labor coalition called Change to Win, the SEIU, US Chamber Watch, and StopTheChamber.com.

Basically these powerful minions of the major corporations as represented by the US Chamber of Commerce were conspiring to start a surreptitious sabotage campaign against anyone who might try to take power from Big Business and give it back to the people. And how did we, the people, find out about it? This is where it gets good:

From here: Poking a bear with a sharp stick is smarter than this!>

Aaron Barr, the head of the security services firm mentioned above, HBGary Federal, bragged in an interview with The Financial Times that, via Facebook and other online sources, he had identified key members of Anonymous in the U.S., Germany, Netherlands, Italy, and Australia.

If you know who Anonymous is, you know that Barr might as well have tattooed "Kick Me" on his own ass. They're the hacktivists who went after Scientology a few years ago and more recently did an internet slow down of service for Amazon, Paypal, and several credit card companies to protest when those companies refusing to service Wikileaks. (Please note that you can donate cash to the KKK via any and all of those financial service companies, just not Wikileaks.)

In less than 24 hours, Anonymous mocked Barr in a deadpan post sarcastically entitled "Anonymous admits defeat", then they hacked HBGary's emails and Barr's own private emails and posted them (50,000 emails!) on the internet. Anonymous also posted a slide presentation they'd found, the point of which was a plot detailing how to destroy Wikileaks that included threatening specific liberal-leaning journalists by name (there are actual pictures of the journalists to be attacked right there on the slides!) The emails indicated the presentation was part of a proposal to be submitted to Bank of America. That was Sunday, Feb. 5.

See also: More Fallout from Anonymous

Bank of America is doing their best Sgt. Schultz imitation -- they know "NOTHING! NOTHING!" about this dastardly and somewhat illegal plot to sow dissent, threaten journalists, and plant false documents to discredit Wikileaks. Palantir and Berico Technologies immediately distanced themselves from HBGary, and personally apologized to Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists mentioned by name and face on the slide deck. A respected journalist, Greenwald has been writing about and supporting Wikileaks and whistle-blowers in general since the beginning at Salon.com. At first he shrugged off HBGary's intent as laughable, but as the reality of the situation set in, he got angry.

An excerpt from Greenwald's article:

But the real issue highlighted by this episode is just how lawless and unrestrained is the unified axis of government and corporate power. I've written many times about this issue -- the full-scale merger between public and private spheres -- because it's easily one of the most critical yet under-discussed political topics. Especially (though by no means only) in the worlds of the Surveillance and National Security State, the powers of the state have become largely privatized. There is very little separation between government power and corporate power. Those who wield the latter intrinsically wield the former. The revolving door between the highest levels of government and corporate offices rotates so fast and continuously that it has basically flown off its track and no longer provides even the minimal barrier it once did. It's not merely that corporate power is unrestrained; it's worse than that: corporations actively exploit the power of the state to further entrench and enhance their power.

A comment by Salon's Editor in Chief: read it here!

Aaron Barr is having a bad day... but not as bad as America is having. Actually, we've been having a few bad decades. I wonder if America will one day go the way of Egypt and Tunisia, with rioting in the streets to protest corruption. I do not think the Tea Party is up to this task, as they are, themselves, a puppet organization funded by the Koch brothers of Koch Industries, Inc.

See also my main reading site: Greg Mitchell's blog called The WIKILEAKS NEWS & VIEWS BLOG. Every day he posts links to commentary and articles about what's being leaked and what the response is in the general public. It's fascinating to refresh the page and have more links and snark pop up! Go to http://www.thenation.com/ and click on their link to their blogs, you'll find a link to his blog there.

*And you would have to be reading about this on the internet because hardly anybody on TV or cable news is bothering to cover this due the overwhelming importance of reporting what Lindsey Lohan was wearing to her court date instead.

**Themis means "divine law" rather than human ordinance, literally "that which is put in place by the gods" -- which sounds pretty fucking arrogant to me.

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Operation: Head Pigeons

2011-02-10T16:52:48Z

Before I get into Operation: Head Pigeons, I just wanted to share the info that John Sheppard's "Who, me, Messiah?" silver cross necklace from the Vegas episode that he wears once he decides to stop being all self-involved and go after the Wraith in the desert--shout out to the wardrobe people who were paying attention to the script!--went for $2,376.00. I love me some crazy SGA fans who bid that up! You guys are helping to pull MGM out of the hole their idiot top management got them into. At least, I assume that's what the money's being used for, as opposed to up someone's nose or into someone's Swiss bank account. (Why yes, I *am* the Daria of LJ. So there.)

OPERATION: HEAD PIGEONS

If you love Invader Zim, and really, how could you not, may I suggest you purchase this DVD:

Invader Zim: Operation Doom

One Amazon reviewer wrote:

Last March, Nickelodeon almost brought back Invader ZIM, but didn't because there wasn't enough "demand". During the fall and winter of 2010, a group called Operation Head Pigeons started raiding Nickelodeon's phone lines with requests for more Zim. This DVD is the compromise between the two parties. If this DVD sells well, Nick will consider greenlighting a third season of Invader ZIM. That's why it is so important that you buy this DVD.

I don't know if "important" is the word I'd use, but it is a wonderfully evil, twisted cartoon of the sort that the kiddies love, but so do the adults, and it deserves a third season. This looks to be a collection of the best episodes of the show. I already have the Invader Zim special "House" collectors edition (both seasons of Zim, the two DVDs come packed in a box that looks like Zim's headquarters on Earth), but I'm still ordering this DVD.

I just noticed that the subtitles on DOOM DOOM DOOM, the DVDs of the first season of the show, are Finnish. PROGRESSIVE STUPIDITY, the second season set, isn't subtitled, but comes with a Spanish voice track in addition to the English one. Spanish dubbing is very common, but I wonder how come the Finnish subtitles on season one? Is the show particularly popular in Finland? Not to insult the Finnish people, it's just that I don't think I've ever seen anything subtitled in their language before! (The country's official languages are Finnish (92%) and Swedish (5.5%)--thank you, Wikipedia!)

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Retroactive oh, HA! for the Joke of Rassilon

2011-02-05T16:24:56Z

Once upon a time, there was a Doctor Who episode called "The Five Doctors", wherein Peter Davison's Doctor checks out a room with all kinds of "of Rassilon" objects in it as he wanders through the Gallifreyan capital city. The "of Rassilon" joke had become a mild running gag on the show (and in the fandom) at this point, that there were a multitude of objets Rassilon had left behind that had become venerated objects in Time Lord culture. Surely there must be a list somewhere of the many "of Rassilon" objects have made an appearance on the show over the years*!

In this instance, the object was "The Harp of Rassilon". The Doctor is a bit taken aback when he sees it, he reads the sign then says archly, "I didn't even know he was musical!" There's a beat, the scene ends and we cut to another scene. My reaction then was "Ha!" and "cute!", but I've long since suspected there was a joke I wasn't getting, and now I've cracked it!

Craig Ferguson (admitted pervy Dr. Who fancier and host of The Late Late Show") just revealed to a young British comic that, back in the day, "Is he musical?" was a socially-euphemistic coded phrase for "Is he gay?" (The answer being, "You should see him play the piano!" with an eyebrow quirk.) Given that the show-runner was JNT, who was certainly Out if not proud, there is no way that wasn't a double-entendre joke for the British public to smirk over.

*Ask the Internets, and ye shall find! From here: http://tardismanual.blogspot.com/2011/01/list-of-rassilon.html

The Black Scrolls of Rassilon
The Tomb of Rassilon
The Game of Rassilon
The Coronet of Rassilon
The Voice of Rassilon
The Mind of Rassilon
The Ring of Rassilon
The Seal of Rassilon
The Domain of Rassilon
The Harp of Rassilon
The Sash of Rassilon
The Crown of Rassilon
The Key of Rassilon
The Great Key of Rassilon (not the same as the apparently not-so-great "Key of Rassilon"

Also from Tardis Manual blogspot: On the DVD easter egg, there's a commentary featuring David Tennant, Helen Raynor and Phil Collinson, and they start to invent new possessions for Rassilon as the story progresses. Here's that list...

The Pisstakes of Rassilon

The Handle of Rassilon
The Coaster of Rassilon
The Curtain of Rassilon
The Clipboard of Rassilon
The Yo-Yo of Rassilon
The Casket of Rassilon
The Death Slide of Rassilon
The Ancient Nursery Rhyme of Rassilon
The Fridge Door of Rassilon
The Sheet Music of Rassilon

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I CAN HAS QUEZTIONS AND ANZWERS?!

2011-01-23T02:24:02Z

I have it on good authority (lucitania) that today is National Answer Your Cat's Questions Day! You're supposed to gaze into your cat's furry face and discern the question therein, and answer it.

Personally, my experience has been that most of them want to know, "WHERE ARE THE CRUNCHIES?", the answer they expect being, "IN YOUR BOWL, SIR OR MA'AM!" Usually my answer is more along the lines of: "Will you for cripe's sake leave me the hell alone? It's almost suppertime and you'll spoil your dinner."

I just gazed into Scully's patient face and heard her asking, "Why are you so silly?" The answer is, "To amuse you, of course." Then I bumped foreheads with her.

What I got from gazing into Gaius' face was, "JEEZ, WTF DID I DO NOW? DID I DO SOMETHING WRONG?!" A year in, and he's still a little jumpy. The answer is, "Calm down, you didn't do anything wrong. Idiot." I tried to kiss him on the forehead but he shied away.

I had to crawl part-way under a table to stare into Vala's face, and her round-eyed question was, "What the hell are you doing under this table?" The answer is, "I'm very suggestible, apparently."

Wee Zack is left, but he's outside. When he comes in, he's going to be jazzed up and fluffed out from being outside in the cold and the question he'll want answered is the previously-mentioned "Where ma cruncheez at?" question. I shall give him a few tablespoons, and he'll be happy with the answer.

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A Mighty Series of TWO!

2011-01-20T20:32:07Z

I put my second Stargate story up on AOOO...

http://archiveofourown.org/works/154017

...soon to be joined by a third set of Tiny Tales, for a total of 31 ficlets in all. Sooo clooose to finishing! But I have to come up with two more tales! I want to write a ficlet about Daniel Jackson's parents and grandfather and how their being idiots who shouldn't have been trusted with raising a child helped form his character (oh, come on! this is not a reach! Daniel is totally screwed up in delightful ways!), but it's not coming.

Ooh, while I was typing that, I suddenly had an idea to write it from Vala's perspective. She's a fresh viewpoint, with luck, that should yield results.

Not to change the subject, but I used to think the funniest thing that could come out of the Stargate program going public would be John Sheppard giving an interview to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, but no longer! Much funnier would be John Sheppard being interviewed by Craig Ferguson. I could see poor John being a bit flummoxed about Goeff, the robotic foul-mouthed skeleton who acts as Craig's Ed McMahon. I can see John sort of waving his hand over his head, trying to find the words to ask Dude, I get the suit and the glowing eyes, but what's with the metal mohawk?, prompting Craig into doing five minutes on John's cowlicks. Thanks to Tivo, I've gotten addicted to The Late, Late Show since watching the Matt Smith episode. The show is just so freakishly odd. I've never seen a talk show quite like it, not even on the outer-reaches of cable, and it's on CBS.

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Sheppard really was like Buffy the Vampire Slayer!

2011-01-19T15:37:29Z

The evil bastards known as propworx2 on eBay are at it again, selling off our hopes and dreams, aka "Stargate crap". Wouldn't have found out about this latest sell-off except that David Hewlett bitched about them auctioning off his chair back on Twitter, as he'd wanted to take the chair with him when he left the show. AND THEY WOULD NOT LET HIM. ::shakes head sadly::

So here is the thing, they're auctioning off a simple, blocky silver cross on a silver chain that is supposedly Vegas-AU-John's necklace. I can't seem to find any pix with the character wearing this necklace and the DVDs are in storage, so I can't pull those out to check the episode! Soes anybody remember this necklace? It's already going for over $200.00:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Stargate-Atlantis-Sheppard-Hero-Vegas-Necklace-/150550008332?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item230d7ad20c

If the link doesn't take you there, try doing a search for Stargate Atlantis Sheppard Hero Vegas Necklace on eBay, but be warned, it'll be gone if you look for it four days from now!

In retrospect, I'm surprised all John got was a "Kirk" accusation or two from Rodney. I would have expected a few "Buffy"s as well, considering his propensity for offing space-vampires. And wearing silver crosses around his neck, at least in the AU. Woulda been cool if one of the biologists had discovered that Wraith could be poisoned by garlic. All they'd have had to do was open a few pizza parlors around Pegasus, and everyone would have been saved!

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Album Cover Meme

2011-01-17T21:16:23Z

From such_heights, who did a freakin' awesome cover!

Go to Wikipedia and hit random. The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

Go to quotationspage.com and hit random. The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

Go to flickr and click on explore the last seven days. Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Use photoshop or similar to put it all together. Post it with this text in the caption.

Clicky to embiggen:

I had to do it in PowerPoint, translate it to PDF, then translate that to a JPG online. Yeah, I really have to invest in some sort of photo-manipulation software one of these days. But still, fun!

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Hey, the cats are afraid to go out on the porch! HAHAHA!

2011-01-12T16:23:21Z

Much hilarity in watching the cats express their deep feline disgust about Snowpocalypse Deux! I love it when they shake a little kitty paw, take a step, shake a little kitty paw, take a step, repeat. Even Zack, who resembles an Arctic Fox more than a cat, doesn't like this heavy, wet slop of a snow. Especially when he takes a step and sinks to his chest. The affronted look on his face is priceless.

From several people on my flist, here's the Birthday Best Sellers website: to display a list of New York Times best sellers for the week of your birth enter your date of birth and press the "Show me the List" button:

http://www.biblioz.com/best_sellers.php?

1 DOCTOR ZHIVAGO Boris Pasternak
2 LOLITA Vladimir Nabokov
3 AROUND THE WORLD WITH AUNTIE MAME Patrick Dennis
4 WOMEN AND THOMAS HARROW John P. Marquand
5 EXODUS Leon Uris author info
6 ANATOMY OF A MURDER Robert Traver
7 THE BEST OF EVERYTHING Rona Jaffe
8 THE UGLY AMERICAN William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick
9 FROM THE TERRACE John O'Hara
10 ANGELIQUE Sergeanne Golon
11 VICTORINE Frances Parkinson Keyes
12 THE MOUNTAIN IS YOUNG Han Suyin
13 THE RAINBOW AND THE ROSE Nevil Shute
14 THE KING MUST DIE Mary Renault

The week of Dec 8, 1958 had some heavy-hitter books on the bestseller list, the kind of books that are still remembered, loved, and read today (also? Several kick-ass movie adaptations!) Over the years, I've read numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 14.

Here is the most recent New York Times Bestsellers list that the site would give me, from December 2010:

1 THE LOST SYMBOL Dan Brown
2 THE HELP Kathryn Stockett
3 I ALEX CROSS, James Patterson
4 SIZZLE Julie Garwood
5 FIRED UP Jayne Ann Krentz
6 THE HONOR OF SPIES W. E. B. Griffin and William E. Butterworth IV
7 DEEPER THAN THE DEAD Tami Hoag
8 THE LAST SONG Nicholas Sparks
9 ALTAR OF EDEN James Rollins
10 UNDER THE DOME Stephen King
11 “U” IS FOR UNDERTOW Sue Grafton
12 PIRATE LATITUDES Michael Crichton
13 FORD COUNTY John Grisham
14 I SNIPER, Stephen Hunter
15 THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE Stieg Larsson

I see several movies in the making from these, but I wonder how many will still be read in 50 years?

STAY HOME, STAY WARM AND HAVE SOME HOT COCOA IF YOU ARE IN DEEP SNOWAGE!

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OH MIGHTY FLIST, INFO PLS?

2011-01-07T17:21:57Z

This morning I woke to find that someone quite evil grabbed my hotmail account's address list and sent out spam (or possibly worse) to the people on it. The email looks like it's from Telzey Amberdon, which is my hotmail name. It bounced to a lot of defunct addresses I still had in there. I can still get into my hotmail account, I wasn't locked out, but I changed the password because, what the hell, why not.

How did these guys get hold of my email address book? Did they actually hack my email account with my password, or did they do it by using the new Facebook-like connectivity Hotmail and Gmail seem to be trying to constantly force on us in new and clever ways? Any suggestions, other than "change your password", which I've done? I went into my account info and zeroed out all the "Isn't it neat how we're sharing all your personal info with your friends!" crap they build in, with friends being able to access all sorts of things on your account. This should not be the default, privacy should be the default!

EDITED TO ADD UPDATE: I got nothin' in my Hotmail "sent emails" folder, so this happened off-Hotmail! The spammers took info and ran and did not use my hotmail account itself to send their spam.

I recently tried to set up an Outlook account on my computer so that Hotmail would drop into it when I hit "send/receive" on my home computer, but was unsuccessful -- and my Hotmail address and password being input into Outlook were part of that attempt. Maybe the bad guys got the info that way? NOT A KLEW.

EDITED AGAINDeleted the second half of my post because I figured out how to get rid of a defunct alternate email address... man, they don't make it easy.

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Like the Wolf Howls!

2011-01-06T19:35:57Z

AOOO!*

I have achieved my first work on Archive of Our Own, Ten Tiny Tales (SGA):

http://archiveofourown.org/works/148651

It wasn't at all hard to post there, but I did have to make liberal use of the preview button to tweak it over & over. As soon as I'm allowed to by the rules of sga_flashfic, Ten Tiny Tales Redux will follow. I'm also working on the next and last in my trilogy of SGA character-study ficlets, Ten Tiny Tales the Third (must figure out a better title.)

I hope to eventually get all of my B7 stuff on there, first time on the internet for those! I've decided to re-edit them into modern-day readability before posting rather than honoring the tropes of yesteryear. No more "the Delta thief", "the curly-haired pilot", "the blonde pilot", or "the curly-haired rebel", over and over. HEY, I know it sounds awful but I swear, it was very common and completely accepted to use fannishly-set descriptive epithets like that for characters back then!

*Surely I cannot be the only fan who always thinks of a wolf howling when I see AOOO? A very small, cartoon wolf!

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Brooklyn didn't wanna let me go!

2010-12-30T03:46:27Z

FA LA LA LA LA, people! I hope you all have been having a lovely holiday long-weekend! I spent Christmas Eve day and Christmas with my mom in Brooklyn -- saw the family, made nice with my sister, had a lovely dinner; no stress, no strife. I had planned on leaving on Sunday afternoon, taking the commuter rail from Grand Central to Hartford to meet up with ComicbookMan, who was going to drive down from Boston for the Legends of Superheros Christmas Party, then we'd go home from there.

IT WAS NOT TO BE!

See, there was this hella scary snowstorm that blew in from Santa's Workshop the day after Xmas, so I stayed put in Brooklyn and ComicbookMan stayed put in our apartment in the Boston area, where he'd spent Christmas, ostensibly for cat-sitting purposes, but mostly sleeping. As the Sunday storm began to subside, I went on line and purchased a bus ticket to Boston on Peter Pan for Tuesday noon. NYC gets back on its feet very quickly after a snowstorm, and this was only the sixth-worse snowstorm on record, after all! I lived in NYC for many, many years, and I could always get to classes or my job in Manhattan the day after a snowstorm. Surely the city would be mostly navigable again by Tuesday!

OH, HA! OMG, NOT SO MUCH!

My mother's house is located in South Brooklyn. Tuesday dawned, but there were no buses running in Brooklyn, despite the false info the MTA website posted. Even if there were buses, there were no trains operating in Brooklyn. There were also no car services for hire. What was the problem? PROBLEM: there was no snow removal of any kind from any of the streets, even the major ones; at all, at all, at all. ZERO.

Peter Pan's buses were running by 5am Tuesday, so they basically laughed at me when I called to ask if they'd honor my Tuesday ticket on Wednesday (they are honoring Sunday's and Monday's tickets all week.) Customer service at Peter Pan -- a bus company named after a sociopathic little bastard! -- didn't care that there was no way for me to get into Manhattan to get on their bus unless I'd started walking out of Brooklyn on snow shoes at about midnight the night before.

Fortunately, I checked online and found a ticket on Bolt Bus for $1.50, on the 11:30am Wednesday bus to Boston. Seriously, a buck-fifty. Since Bolt is owned by the same company that owns Peter Pan, it's as if they reissued my ticket for a minor change-of-date fee. Except Bolt buses are way nicer, newer buses than Peter Pan's buses, and Bolt takes a much shorter route out of Manhattan, so there's a lot less nausea-inducing stop-and-go. It was force-of-habit that I checked and purchased from Peter Pan first, but no longer.

So if you plan on busing from Boston or Philadelphia or Washington DC to/from NYC, check out Bolt before you try Greyhound or Peter Pan. Oddly, the same company owns and operates all three bus companies, but Greyhound's buses are even worse than Peter Pan's. The weirdest thing is that Greyhound's tickets are usually the most expensive of the three! TERRIBLE buses. HIGHEST prices. Buh? IS THIS SOME SORT OF STRANGE SOCIOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT?

I left my mom's house at 9am and got home at 6pm, and yet I consider myself lucky.

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BECAUSE IT'S LOUD WITH THE SHOP VAC ON!

2010-12-23T14:49:27Z

Another little holiday gift for my flist!

I already adored Jonathan Coulton's "Shop Vac", but this video takes the song to a whole new level. This is why we're all so happy Mr. Coulton releases his work on a Creative Commons license, so that other creative types can use it to do stuff like this:

The word "clever" doesn't begin to describe it. That's 500 to 1,000 hours of work, and it looks effortless.

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I wrote another one!

2010-12-22T19:09:05Z

I wrote a follow up to Ten Tiny Tales called Ten Tiny Tales Redux and posted it to the SGA_flashfic community! \BWEE!/

One more fic to go and I'll have my own little trilogy of weird SGA fic.

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Stocking stuffers for my flist!

2010-12-18T14:54:29Z

So much love for Wil Wheaton, who is so very One of Us:

Someday, we shall give a convention and he shall invited as our Most Honored Guest, and we shall call him "Squishy" and he will be our Squishy.

Also, the cast of Dr. Who sings (for various values of "singing") "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", and the ghost of Judy Garland claps a hand over her eyes:

Through the years, they all will be together, YA GET IT?

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This, too, shall pass.

2010-12-18T00:52:39Z

From rheasilvia, it looks like Del.icio.us will be shut down soon.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/is-yahoo-shutting-down-del-icio-us/

rheasilvia suggests Diigo.com as a pretty good substitution -- you can import your Delicious bookmarks and tags, though the process apparently takes a while. Unless someone wants to weigh in with another suggestion, sounds like a plan.

* * *

From ComicbookMan, who called me up a couple of hours ago, it looks like Stargate Universe was canceled. I know people who like it, so I will not be a jerk about it and crow, but I won't miss it. I swear we tried to get into it, but it was soooo unlikeable, and arrogant about the fact that it didn't want to be liked! If you know what I mean?

http://www.gateworld.net/news/2010/12/six-reasons-sgu-was-cancelled/

Despite rumors that made me very happy -- that SGU's demise meant money was freed up to be used for the movies instead -- it seems that both SG-1 and Atlantis films are currently very much on hold:

http://www.scifiscoop.com/stargate-atlantis/stargate-sg1-and-stargate-atlantis-movies-on-hold/

ARGH! And HUMBUG! I miss the guys!

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