Month: September 2012

ER

I may have mentioned Jeff and I are working our way through the entirety of ER (when we need a palate cleanser, 2nd season SG1).  We’ve had 8 seasons of getting to know, love and hate various people.

I took a book out of the library about Must See TV, the part of the nineties when NBC had groundbreaking shows like Third Rock from the Sun and ER and Seinfeld and Cheers and Frasier and Will and Grace and Mad About You and Friends, shows that were ALL ABOUT THE WRITING.  In the last chapter of the book, it was made abundantly clear that NBC no longer gives a tinker’s cuss about writing – sales and marketing runs the show and they run the least offensive shows that cost the least amount of money to make.  In defence of the current iteration of talent management and development at NBC, ER had a 44 market share and a top ten hit show in 2012 has a 13 (Julianna Margulies was comparing ER and The Good Wife, her current show), and it’s because there’s a lot more TV happening especially competition from HBO and AMC and Showtime, so it’s harder to have a hit.  But honestly, folks, without the writing and the courage to try something new, good tv DOES NOT HAPPEN.  It’s happening on cable  – that’s where the action is.

Well, in my little universe of time-shifted tv, main character Mark Greene just died of brain cancer, and I wept non stop for an imaginary character for 20 minutes.  Under the circumstances, mocking the ability of other people to believe in God seems a tad uncharitable…. must resolve to quit every doing it.  My imaginary friends…. sigh.

And Anthony Edwards, the actor playing Mark Greene, is back on TV, and the show description is so lame I don’t want to watch it.

Wrote 850 words of backstory on Midnite Moving Co last night.  Oh lady of the deep waves, how I love you.  Trying to write a human alien character who doesn’t speak is freaking hard….  But I now have the story of how she met George, from his perspective.  Writing it from hers will be very hard.

Off to church now.

I salute thee cherished female progenitor

My mother kept an email correspondence going with her cousin Reck for about ten years, until shortly before he passed this past spring. I have just edited 150 pages of it (it’s 800 pages in total) being the portion just before and just after Obama was elected. IT IS AMAZING. They talk about politics and family history and philosophy and ethics and Reck casually mentions that he emailed Malcolm Gladwell regarding an idea – which may have contributed to his thinking when he wrote Outliers. And my mother defends atheism with a verve and trenchancy I could only dream of emulating. Just feeling blown away right now.

My twitter comments about the current furore over A+ (Atheism Plus)

From the bottom to the top…..

Allegra Sloman ‏@TheCorrection

But hey, sorry, life isn’t like that. Life ain’t life without struggle, self-improvement, sorrow, loss, and metric crapstacks of hard work.

And I want praise for being me, glorious me, and I never want to lift a mental finger again. Or a physical one truth be told….

No matter who we are we want to rest after a battle. They want praise for being atheists, not a lecture about the next battle.

Raised atheist, but I still have to fight internalized sexism, racism, transphobia, neuro-difference, and preference for English.

If you’ve had a long journey getting to atheism, being told you’re still a clueless asshole about sexism really smarts. Hurt lashes out…

Bobcats

this spot used to hold a link to pics of bobcats in Calgary HAHA WHO KNEW THAT LESS THAN A DECADE LATER I’D SEE A BOBCAT HIKING DISTANCE FROM MY RENTAL okay back to 2012

Yesterday I saw Katie briefly.  Night before Paul and I went to Jericho after feasting here on pork chomps and green beans and corn and salad.

I was super tired yesterday and napped for a good chunk of the afternoon, with Margot fizzling and burbling and napping with me.  This morning she tried to join me long before sunrise but I thrash around too much so she left and is now guarding my door.

This sentence deleted in 2020 because it makes zero sense.

wonderful dream(s)

Last night, or more properly this morning, I had two wonderful dreams, one about a Vancouver being returned as the land of the people who first lived here, and how different things were (no privately owned cars – you had to share car ownership with housemates or family, and the transit was WAY better (there was an incredible funicular down from Burnaby mountain to the inlet that was like a fricking roller coaster ride) and you couldn’t cut down trees unless you were growing food on that land, and everybody was allowed to keep small food animals if they had the space) and then that morphed into a dream that was a wonderful cross between Dunnett and Martin about a bossy young lady who picked out her husband when she was young and then worked out a plan to marry him when she got older, and how everybody fell in line with her plans including her future father in law because it was easier than arguing with her – oh, she was a sassy little thing, and so cute.   I haven’t remembered a dream in ages, and these two made me happy.

Keith came over yesterday.  He’s been having a lovely time with friends (watching a troupe of actors rehearse on Granville Island yesterday, among other delights) and is considering his next move workwise, he’s still working part time in the lab.  Katie has vanished from our sights but will respond to texts when prodded.  I’m seeing her later this week.

I made curried chicken salad sandwiches for lunch yesterday, they were yummy.

Paul came over and we went for walk and we noodled on guitars.  I am VERY happy with Smokey, tuned to a D chord.  He sounds purty.

Sundry and various

DJD, whose poetry mentions the thousand sided dice emailed me back amid the last minute flurry of edits for a manuscript, saying ksided was ‘quite nice’.  Chipper picked a couple of very interesting words out and said ‘weehaw’, and there were many other congratulatory emails, some from people who only found out about it this weekend and some who’ve known about it from the outset.  Robof9 wants to be able to choose .ca websites.

Linked from Making Light, a poem for Neil Armstrong.  I wouldn’t have the courage to try to write a poem about that so I am glad someone else did.

A horrifying subject with a book cover to match.  Yeesh.

Neil Gaiman won another Hugo.

A poly advocacy site talks about who we are.  I’m very much following along these lines in terms of definition and emphasis.

This week is shaping up to be very busy in a lot of challenging ways.  Hopefully it will be full of work and win and not whining and whimpering.

 

 

Patricia and Damian get married.

My friend Patricia married her sweetie Damian last night on the rooftop of the Loden hotel.  The bride was radiant in a simple cream gown, the groom beaming with happiness, the weather was glorious, the bar was open (I drank two tiny glasses of champagne and three beers over 6 hours; by the time I got to Edmonds Station I was ), the om nom noms were choice (including a blowout of Levnichocolate.com, OMG, as the proprietor Paul Dincer was an attendee), and it was an Australian-Canadian dance-off with the best wedding DJ I’ve ever heard. Dude could sync beats like a shaman.  Folks from Melbourne sure know how to party!  And the dresses!  Damian’s sister was wearing the most brilliantly coloured and celebratory dress evah.  I got to sing the couple “The Happily Married Song” which I have sung for a number of couples now, (they asked me for the lyrics, w00t!) I danced like a fool, and the civil ceremony was so touching, and so mercifully brief, that those raised on Irish Catholic weddings were all “yes, this.”  Two families were blended in what I will recollect as being the most auspicious start to married life I’ve ever witnessed. Mazel tov!

Good news ever-e-body

The thousand sided dice will be on line sometime today or tomorrow. As my brother and I did the data review we removed some prefixes and suffixes and added some.  In the quarter century since the project was inaugurated, the biggest reason words got removed was for reasons of pc.  For example, one of the words that got removed was voodoo.  Voudun is a global religion even if it is centered on the Caribbean, and I can’t hack using religious slurs as part of the project.  That thought ___did not occur___ when I entered the word in the first rounds of data entry.  Other words came out because they were gendered slurs, or because the word use had shifted enough to give both me and Jeff the squick.  Jeff deferred to me in the removals, although we had some DANDY discussions on a variety of subjects. He ran tech and entry, I ran the simulsearch.  I think we took out less than ten on both sides, so I guess out of two thousand I was doing okay.  It stuns me how much English has changed in the last 25 years.  A project like this really brings it home.  http://ksided-dice.com is the link, no it’s not up yet.  ‘citing times!  Big hugs to Jeff for all the coding!  I may have had the idea, but it would be air without him.  PS the original code from the dawn of time with the data files is available, but you don’t want it; as an artefact of processing speed improvements it screeches when you roll the dice.  Like a haruspex.  AiiiEEEE!