Monday, April 16, 2007

Girl Stuff


Melodi Bloggs, as you ought to know, was the winner of the Silvery Tay Poetry Competition 2007. She is a beloved friend of mine and I have begun compiling an anthology of her bons mots, gathered from emails and conversations around the edges of board games. Here is a sample:

Melodi Bloggs on ‘Fruition’: “By fruition, do you mean headgear a la Carmen Miranda? I don’t mind going this route, but it’s not strictly Geisha, and I always end up losing my bananas.”

Melodi Bloggs on dating: “My innards are those of a fifteen year old. My outers, sadly not.”

There's a lady, Ellie, who has an eponymous knitting shop in Edenvale. I can remember going there with my Ma when I was a kid. So I coveted my sister's scarf last winter, and not being able to find a similar one anywhere, went to Ellie's in hopes of finding a way to make one for myself - how difficult can it be to make a long thin woolly thing with wispy pompoms on? I found Ellie unchanged, she’s like an ancient china shepherdess. She showed me how to cast on and how to do a lovely lacy dropped-stitch thing, and I asked, "So, do you have a book with, like, stitches and patterns and stuff?" The other customers, most of them magnificent old ladies, each with a life's worth of unpicked things, started laughing and I had an epiphany: This woman IS the book. Well it’s now next winter and I still don’t have my scarf - I never got past knit-two-rows-unpick-three. I miss my granny.

For a Barbarian woman to offer help in a Greek Cypriot woman’s kitchen on Greek Easter (or any other time in fact) is foolish. Maria and Stalla and Thea Eleni will go pale for a moment, exchange panicked glances and then chorus something to the effect that everything’s almost done, ok can you take this spanakopita out to the men? Don’t drop eh?
Yes, I am Barbarian, my compound crime not only to do with not being Greek but also to do with having mostly Viking ancestors (you cannot hide that sort of thing from a Greek), which is as bahrrr-bahrr-ee-yun as it ever gets, with as much emphasis as you can muster on that second syllable. After years of wondering why they still invite you to these gatherings at all, you learn to just be very grateful that they do, and you sit quietly and eat, and eat, and eat, and you don’t argue anymore with Stellios about that dessert with the rose-cordial actually being Turkish. He’s getting on now anyway and doesn’t need the stress. When they send you off at the end of it all with a stack of tinfoiled leftovers enough to last two weeks, you don’t joke, “Do you think I can’t feed my own family or something?” You just say “Thank you,” with relish, and look forward to next year.

Sunday, April 08, 2007

An A-C of Things that Might Help


A is for Asphaltia

There is a goddess of parking spaces, apparently. She is called Asphaltia and her invocation goes, “Lady Asphaltia, full of grace, find for me a parking space.” I like it a lot and look forward to more successful parking in future.


B is for Butter-side-up

Caro Jazoni sent me a Vimrod cartoon that said, “If you are worried about having a bad week then post yourself some toast on Monday. Then Tuesday and Wednesday can be spent looking forward to what might come in the post, and then on Thursday the toast will come which will be a treat, and then on Friday it’s the end of the week.”


C is for Cat

Death, and What Comes Next.
English
Afrikaans
Many other useful translations, including Catalonian, here.

Monday, April 02, 2007

All you ever needed to know about Zombies

Over at Making Light, they’re good at grabbing a thing and running with it. They can take a piece of spam and turn it into a couple of days worth of entertaiment. I wonder where they get the time - maybe they actually live inside the internet and their comment threads are like other people’s walking the dog or dusting behind the bookcase.

This particular subthread, which kicks off at comment #53, begins with: “A spammer writes: ‘We will appreciate if you will use the following information to link us back from your web site’. I hope no-one on ML minds, but I’ve been running a Zombies simulation on a 2 Mqbit SQUID using the comment threads here as modelling data. This is not a Vingefied AI system with trapped, sentient copies of the contributors here: the agents modelled are guaranteed soulless empty software shells…”

While I suspect that the stuff re 2 Mqbit SQUID and vingeified AI systems etc was aimed squarely at gaming geeks (because that is the type of alarming language that I’ve come to associate with people of that ilk) and other ML insiders, and therefore not at me, I nevertheless had a lot of fun reading what followed.

They also have what they call a “Ritual deployment of This is Just to Say”, which is always cute. Here’s the Zombie deployment:


This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the brains
that were in
your cranium

and which
you were probably
saving
for grad school

Forgive me
they were delicious
so gray
and so warm

The Sheep Albedo Hypothesis


“Not everybody agrees with the Sheep Albedo Hypothesis. Leading the flock of skeptics is the New Zealand Sheep Farmers Guild. Their spokesman, Steve Ramsturf (no relation) was quoted as saying "Baaah, Humbug. No matter what goes wrong with the world, they're always trying to blame the poor New Zealand Sheep Farmer. First it was the methane belch tax. Now this Albedo thing.”

If you have time to read only one scientifical article today,
let it be this one.