Omega Institute In Your Pants, 2013 edition
It’s that magical time, folks! Once again, as in 2010, my woodland friend Susan has forwarded the In Your Pants edition of the Rhinebeck, NY, Omega Center’s course catalog.
Sign up early, if you want a spot; these pants fill up fast!
The Wayfinder Experience in Your Pants
Unlocking the Life Force in Your Pants
The Marks of Our Existence in Your Pants
Say “No” to Stress in Your Pants
Storming Heaven in Your Pants
Compose Yourself in Your Pants
Trees & Ecosystems in Your Pants
Frequencies of Healing in Your Pants
Enter Through the Image in Your Pants
Dreamgates in Your Pants
Leap of Perception in Your Pants
Timeless Loving in Your Pants
Dang me!
So Brian Beatty (y’all know Brian Beatty), he posts on Facebook
Sitting here high, just getting ideas
You’d have to be a big fool to live like I do
(quoting, more or less, Roger Miller)
which he (Brian) says “may be the best country lyrics ever”
so I post a link to a clip of Miller singing a snippet from “Chug-a-Lug”
and my friend Lou, she pipes up and tells how
I was on a plane with him once flying from LAX to Albuquerque. The luggage thingy was chewing up our luggage and he picked up his mangled garment bag and said “Dang.” True story.
and I’m thinking, Dang me, that’s good.
Headline of the day
New cunning linguist computer has got ancient tongues licked
Small Shining Light
Isn’t Small Shining Light a lovely name for a melon? (From Seed Savers.)
(Citrullus lanatus) Traditional Russian variety introduced to American gardeners by SSE in 1991. Round 10-12″ fruits with a very dark green rind and sweet red flesh. Early maturing variety that is well suited for northerly gardens and high altitudes. Great little icebox melon, holds for several weeks after picking. 80-90 days.
She’s not there (She’s still here)
From a letter penned in 1993 by my friend Lee, who can now scarcely find words at all.
Steve & I saw Indochine last night. Horrors! I’ve lost the ability to sit still that long even for La Deneuve. When I left the movie I was saying to Steve that it was remarkable how they handled the time in the movie and this blah blah metaphor for the blah blah relationship between France and Indochina and how leaving the Japs out compressed the blah blah and effectively blah blah. This morning I woke up still thinking about it — or seeing it, really — and there on the screen of my mind was the word SONY. No wonder they left out the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Well, I loved it anyway. A French Gone with the Wind. [April 1993]
From the Application Pool
Whether troubleshooting a network issue, streamlining a business process, documenting procedures, or receiving accolades for a problem solved or a job well done, I approach each challenge with the same “get it done” attitude.
Me too. Especially when receiving accolades for a problem solved or job well done, I’m all “just get it over with, will you?”
I’m hiring, by the way, if anyone wants to do some .NET or BI work for an association.
An elimae appreciation
Wigleaf editor Scott Garson posted a Facebook appreciation of elimae.
Some of you have heard that the current issue of elimae is the final one. I feel like we should be making more of this! elimae was a pioneer web journal — started up by Deron Bauman way back in ’96 (when most people still didn’t have email accounts, when you had to wait long seconds for each web page to load). Under Bauman and subsequent editors (and super-fine writers) Cooper Renner, Kim Chinquee, and Brandon Hobson, elimae specialized in a kind of fiction that was more or less disappearing in New York. Gordon Lish’s final year at Knopf was ’95, and New York was starting to narrow down to the two types of literary fiction it could hope to do profitably: moral entertainment and authorial spectacle. elimae did neither. Under Renner’s stewardship, the journal solidified its reputation for a distinctive sort of fiction — tight, minimal, sentence-aware, often very short (under three hundred words). As a reader, I didn’t always love everything I found in elimae, but I was always excited to read through the monthly issues. I always felt like an elimae story might find a way into me, changing my brain or the way I saw fiction or life on earth.
Scott Walker — Bish Bosch (Album Trailer)
Scheduled for release December 3/4 on 4AD.
Crazy Court is back in session –
– at least in reruns.
Hoisting this post is as poignant for me as it is funny. I’ve been in Dallas for a couple of weeks, in part seeing to troubles swirling around my long-time friend Lee, who’s been diagnosed with a form of dementia.
Lee’s last paying job after her formal retirement was a part-time gig writing summaries of lawsuits filed in various district courts of Galveston (TX) County. Before that, she was . . . oh-so-many and oh-so-much. Read more
what it is what it is
This morning I refereed a fight between a clinically demented woman and her caregiver. At issue: the meaning of the word “cognizant.”
— Sheila Ryan (@Cirinda) September 4, 2012
The term: Hepcat. We the cats (shall hep ya).
A long-distance friend asked me to elucidate the term “hepcat”. I referred my friend to Mr. Calloway.
Elucidate! Elucidate!
The Language of the Birds
{ untitled: under the auspices } is a book of auguring, or divination codex, where birds are the words, in particular the common starling (with a few cameos by seagulls & crows). The sequenced set of flight patterns, or murmurations, were captured over the course of the past few years in the skies over Rome, where the starlings winter in the months of October & November.
Coming September 2012 from Calamari Press.
from the archives: January 15, 2010
Without thinking, comment: What’s the first thing you think when you see . . .
VC?
“Take whatever preconception you’ve decided to reinforce . . .
. . . and cite some Flesch-Kincaid numbers to make it scientific-y.”
All yesterday this damn foolish NPR story kept popping up.
Sophomoric? Members Of Congress Talk Like 10th-Graders, Analysis Shows
I read the blog piece and wanted to tear out my hair. Why?
This, from Language Log, explains it all so much better than I could.
(Thanks to sensible @Stan Carey for tipping me and for helping me ramp down my annoyance.)
Fewt for Thought
smoke signals
@deronbauman Fort Spunky.
— Sheila Ryan (@Cirinda) May 5, 2012
@deronbauman Fort Spanky. Fort Stinky. Fort Punky. Fort Skanky. Fort Rinky-Dink. Fort Honky. Fort Monkey Butt. Fort Yankee. Fort Wonky.
— Sheila Ryan (@Cirinda) May 5, 2012
@deronbauman Fort Sphincter. Fort Laughter. Fort Spinster. Fort Munster. Fort Muenster. Fort Mustard. Fort Bustard. Fort Custard.
— Sheila Ryan (@Cirinda) May 5, 2012
dismissive phrase of the day (twitter version)
Was looking for a simple weather iPad app. Ended up with Aelios which is just a ridiculous steampunk nonsensecake. twitter.com/peteashton/sta…
— Pete Ashton (@peteashton) April 27, 2012
I’m stealing “ridiculous steampunk nonsensecake,” and I encourage you to do so as well.
In Defense of the Diaeresis
The New Yorker‘s Mary Norris responded to criticism about the diaeresis, recently maligned repeatedly by The Atlantic.
Which side are you on, boys? (and girls)
Quote out of context
The video starts by looking up into space and then goes down to see Ladyhawke playing her guitar. Then everything goes blue but Ladyhawke continues to play her guitar. Then things start to move and you see an eye while Ladyhawke keeps turning back to look at something. She continues to play her guitar while the people moving are now clearly dancing around. There is what appears to be fire but turns out to be her outline. While she sings you start to see more than one of her; also a light starts to shine on her. You see shadows dancing while lights shine onto them. While Ladyhawke sings you see other people run across the screen. The video ends with Ladyhawke singing and fades into the darkness.
From Wikipedia.
Perhaps the world needs musicvideosasprose.tumblr.com?
Snapshots from your orientation for child custody mediation
One of the few people there without visible tattoos
a 2 hour video filmed in the 80s, painfully relaying information that could’ve been put on a single sheet of paper, bad actors answering obvious questions: what is mediation, what if i cant get along with my ex-wife? The most heartbreaking nugget of advice to not strike or scream at the other parent during your mediation.
A ten minute break to go feed the (2 hr max) meters outside the courthouse.
The goth chick in the front row with sleeve tattoos from wrist to shoulder, still wearing both rings. Looking more sad than goth, despite her elaborate makeup.
The black grandmother in the back with her (18? 20?yo son) asking lots of questions while her son remained silent
The perverse combination of drivers ed/jury duty, with your marriage being ripped to shreds
The guy who was clearly in a multi-year saga who called the second mediator to talk to us “a cunt” under his breath.
Three fanny packs???
The guy who alternated between snoring asleep on the table and reading his bible.
The final 45 minute video – talking head interviews with children of divorced parents, narrated by an adult female talking in persona child of divorce. “Don’t use us as spies.”
Project Nim
From the director of Man on Wire, Project Nim:
Tells the story of a chimpanzee taken from its mother at birth and raised like a human child by a family in a brownstone on the upper West Side in the 1970s.
(via marginal revolution)
Hipsemantic Oratory from Lord Buckley
in recognition of the Ides of March.
(Cf. Willie the Shake. Julius Caesar. Act 3, Scene ii. Lines 74-108)
Hipsters, flipsters, and finger-poppin’ daddies
Knock me your lobes
I came to lay Caesar out
Not to hip you to him
The bad jazz that a cat blows
Wails long after he’s cut out.
smoke signals
hyperventilation – turbocharged HVAC systems used in Chinese districts with poor air quality indices #moderndefinitions
— Sarah Pavis (@spavis) March 3, 2012
humidor – a posh comedian, often british #moderndefinitions
— Sarah Pavis (@spavis) March 3, 2012
undesegregation – the self-deportation movement designed to make life hostile towards illegal aliens #moderndefinitions
— Sarah Pavis (@spavis) March 3, 2012
from the comments
War correspondent Marie Colvin was a swashbuckler long before the black eyepatch. She performed daring feats for a living, then partied like a rockstar. She collected men easily and left them behind. A woman told me once that the French people in the Paris bureau could not understand Marie, “in French or English. Because of the New Jersey accent.” The remark puzzled me. Marie did not have an accent. She was a fast talker, and in the days before she contributed broadcast reports was something of a mumbler. I know now she was in a hurry. She had only a few years and was rushing toward her fate.
In fact, the story goes that when chided about her smoking habit, she insisted tobacco would not be the thing that got her in the end.
Lou Carr predicted Marie wouldn’t last as a foreign correspondent. He said she would end up back in Oyster Bay, married and driving around a station wagon loaded with kids. He was wrong. But maybe that’s where Marie is headed, across the way, with the 2-year-old boy whose so quiet death broke her heart a few hours before she joined him.
tweet of the day
Almost used the word “aplomb” in an email. Time to step away from the keyboard, Frank, and pull your head out of your ass.
— Frank Chimero (@fchimero) February 22, 2012
