I spent the weekend dealing with not only the flared-up ear infection, but also an incipient eye infection. Fortunately the drugs are now taking hold, and I should be able to get the chapter up tomorrow. My apologies.
Monthly Archives
April 2006
Well, the local craziness continues (the most exciting part of it being that my ear problem is back — half back, anyway: I still have one working ear, and with any luck the other one will put itself right in a day or three). Meantime, I continuedoing the tidying-up work on chapter 3 of “Big Meow”, so that’ll go up tonight.
We interrupt this morning’s business (draining the fishpond to give it a much-needed cleaning and tend to the aquatic plants, and repeatedly going out to use the slingshot to scare off the starlings that are trying to nest under the roof above the window near my desk…) for an announcement about things that are going to start happening around here on the online end of things. Particularly this: now that DianeDuane.com is starting to look like something, I’m going to begin moving numerous other online bits and pieces over there…the main one being the weblog.
“Out of Ambit” has (as you may have noticed) been reincarnated as the WordPress blog you’re looking at now. The present Blogger version will remain where it is at outofambit.blogspot.com for some time, probably several months, until I can get all the old posts imported over here and get the WordPress edition looking and working the way I want. Then the Blogger address will probably be frozen, with a final forwarding post. The new OOA will have a lot less of the sidebar stuff that’s crept in over time (and which has made it slow to load): those frills and furbelows will mostly be moved into other locations at DianeDuane.com, where they won’t get so much in people’s way.
Meanwhile, the “Word Salad” blogs at dduane.livejournal.com and www.journalfen.net/users/diane_duane/ will stay right where they are, and “Out of Ambit” will link to them. And links to the other websites I care for (such as European Cuisines) will be added to all the weblogs. As Peter would probably say had he not been up all night writing, “Interconnectivity rules OK.”
None of this is going to happen overnight. I just thought it would be smart to give people a heads-up so that they won’t be unduly concerned when things start vanishing and turning up in strange new places.
Now back to the fishpond, where I will shortly be ankle-deep in mulm. (Isn’t that a great word? It’s used among fish-keeping people to describe the horrible glop that collects at the bottom of the aquarium. ‘Organic materials”, says one fishkeepers’ guide with an airy wave of its hand…but that definition covers a whole lot of ground. In an outdoor pond, it means rotted leaves, decaying water plants, infallen dirt, and, you guessed it, fish poop. Fortunately it doesn’t smell really bad, but it’s icky. In an aquarium you usually get rid of it by siphoning. In an outdoor pond, you drain the thing, and then bail or scoop out whatever remains…then scrub with a stiff brush, and rinse down, and bail again… What a lovely day I have ahead of me. Euuuuuuu.)
It looks as if the import of messages (though not comments) from Blogger to WordPress has gone OK. So now I can get on with other things, like refilling the fishpond (it’s clean now, thank Ghu) and finishing up the last work on chapter 3 of The Big Meow.
(Insert here a small restrained “yippee”, conditional on how fast the aspirin starts to work. Dealing with the plants around the pond has left me with a minor crick in the back.)
Somehow, while watching this event on “real” TV the other day, I missed this. OMG!
William Shatner sings (for certain values of “sing”) to George Lucas
…Worth watching just to see Harrison Ford veering dangerously close to anoxia. George’s poleaxed looks, every now and then, are also priceless.
(As it happens, P. and I are co-guests with Shatner at the Fargo Fantasy Festival later this year. I can’t wait to sit down somewhere quiet with the man — whom I haven’t seen in the flesh since he was hit with a pie at a very early New York Trek convention — and talk a little Denny Crane with him.)
This collection of questions purportedly sent to the organizers of the Sydney Olympics makes me seriously doubt that old canard of my teachers’ that “there’s no such thing as a stupid question.” Yes there is! (or at least that’s what I think before having my tea…)
Q: I have a question about a famous animal in Australia, but I forget its name. It’s a kind of bear and lives in trees. (USA)
A: It’s called a Drop Bear. They are so called because they drop out of gum trees and eat the brains of anyone walking underneath them. You can scare them off by spraying yourself with human urine before you go out walking.
Q: Which direction is North in Australia? (USA)
A: Face south and then turn 90 degrees. Contact us when you get here and we’ll send the rest of the directions.
Q: It is imperative that I find the names and addresses of places to contact for a stuffed porpoise. (Italy)
A: I’m not even going to ask…
Q: Can you send me the Vienna Boys’ Choir schedule? (USA)
A: Aus-tri-a is that quaint little country bordering Ger-man-y, which is…oh forget it. Sure, the Vienna Boys Choir plays every Tuesday night in King’s Cross, straight after the hippo races. Come naked.
(Thanks and a tip of the bush-hat-with-corks-hanging-off-it to Khorbin at Geeks Incognito.)
…my favorite tea mug that said “Caffeine First, Wizardry Later”. I got it ages ago to test the CafePress printing system (which is pretty good). Got a little careless this morning, put it down too close to the edge of the counter, turned to pick up the teapot…and crash!
Oh well. The design was a little tired anyway, and imperfect — the regular Tema Cantante font (that’s the one they use for the titles on the YW books) doesn’t work too well in smaller sizes or when there’s too much text: the thin upstrokes get lost. The sans-serif Cantante, though, works better. So I’ve pulled the old mug designs and done new ones that wrap right around the cup instead of just being on one side. For anyone who’s even slightly interested, they’re here, in tea, coffee, cocoa, and generic caffeine versions (just the molecule instead of an image of a cup). You can click on the image below for a larger image showing the tea variant.
…And now I’m gonna go off and order myself one, because all the other mugs in this house are too small for the way I drink tea in the morning.
In a purr-fect ending, a miner with a heart of gold…rescued Molly the cat last night.
After spending 14 days stuck in the guts of a 19th-century West Village building, New York’s famous fur ball was safe and sound and eating sardines.
The kitty cornered in the wall had drawn such widespread attention that she had become the city’s newest attraction, touching the hearts of locals and tourists alike.
…Between yesterday and the day she got stuck (April 1st), here are some of the ways they tried to get her out:
- Humane traps baited with mackerel
- Entreaties from cat therapist Carole Wilbourn
- Mewing kittens
- Tiny video cameras
- Recordings of whale and gull sounds (That was supposed to help how? Someone please explain that to me. Especially the gull sounds….)
- Pet psychic Maxine Albert
- Removing bricks from landmarked building
- Drilling holes in same (Before removing them, I assume.)
- Animal Care & Control officers
- NYPD Emergency Service Unit officers
- Catnip (Yes indeed, when all else fails, try drugs… [eyeroll]))
(See also [if you can get at it without a subscription] the New York Times‘s take on the story)
Oh, yeah, it was St. Patrick’s Day, and I was dealing with requests for help with people’s soda bread, or some such.
WASHINGTON — President Bush nominated infinitely rapacious cosmic entity Galactus on Thursday to be his new interior secretary.
If confirmed by the Senate, Galactus, 11 Billion, will replace Gale Norton, who resigned last week.
Bush said Galactus, Third Force of the Universe and Devourer of Worlds, wields the Power Cosmic and has broad experience needed for eating the 388 parks of the National Park system, 544 wildlife refuges and more than 260 million acres of multiple-use lands located mainly in 12 Western states, in addition to the rest of the planet.
“Galan understands that those who live closest to the land know how to manage it best, and he will begin preparations to digest our planet immediately,” Bush said.
Galactus promised to construct giant machines in the heart of Manhattan in order to “suck the very essence from the land and consume the natural resources with which your planet has been blessed.”
His chances of Senate confirmation are greatly increased by his godlike endurance, immesurable intelligence, omnipotence and possession of the Ultimate Nullifier. The Senate rarely turns down cosmic beings of utter destruction, and Republicans hold the majority with 55 of 100 seats.
“Galactus is a strong nominee,” said Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. “I look forward to his swift confirmation by the Senate.”
But for some reason, not everyone seems to have liked this idea.
Barbara Miller, a citizen activist in northern Idaho who has fought for decades to get more health screening for local people affected by historic lead and zinc pollution from the Bunker Hill Mine, said Galactus has an interest in eating the planet Earth, at the expense of the environment.
See, now, those pesky fault-finding tree-huggers, they’ll complain about just anything.