Monday Meme; Oh, It’s Tuesday

From some guy in Buffalo who really loves his city.

1. A month before it happens you’re told you’re going to lose your memory. How do you prepare for it and do you attempt to regain what you’ve lost?

Why does this remind me of the movie Memento? Anyway, some sort of redundancy- notes in the house about work, church; notes at work about home, work. Plaster my blog URL all over the place; maybe the reading will remind me. Label pictures of important people.

2. How do you describe your outlook on life?

“Life is a carnival, believe it or not.”

3. You fall in love with your soulmate, decide to get married, and then find out that person is going to die soon. Do you marry them anyway?

Absolutely. (But here’s the thing about soulmates: I’ve never believed that there’s only one.)

4. What are three of your favorite ice cream toppings?

I like strawberry, hot fudge, and Cherry Garcia.

5. Is there one article of clothing you love to wear no matter how out of style it is?

Only one?

6. Is there one color you wish would go away in fashion?

A color? Well, there DOES seem to be a notion in some circles that “orange is the new black”. More than that, though, most fashion is dumb, cyclical, and no reflector of most people’s real bodies.

7. What’s the first department you head to when you go shopping in a department store?

Increasingly, I hate going into department stores, particularly when they’re in malls. That said, when someone drags me there, I end up hanging out in the record/CD section.

8. How far away do you live from your parents?

772.62 miles from my mother, according to Mapquest.

9. Growing up, who was your favorite cartoon character?

Popeye the Sailor, who got me to eat spinach when I’d eat no other vegetable, save for peas and corn.

10. You plan a romantic evening and everything goes wrong, including the fancy dinner you burned. What do you do?

Smile on the outside, sulk on the inside, then order Indian food, apologizing profusely.

11. What’s the last thing you bought at the store?

I bought cottage cheese at the grocery store.

12. Have you ever walked out in the middle of a movie?

No, but I came very close with Fellini’s Satrycon.

13. What celebrity do most people say you look like?

No one has ever compared me to a celebrity. The high school science teacher at Albany High School, who I don’t know.

14. Is there any piece of jewelry you always wear?

I wear my wedding ring. That’s it.

15. Have you ever tried to pick someone up?

Maybe in college, but it most certainly was unsuccessful.

16. What’s the one thing you always manage to lose on your way out the door?

It’s never the same thing: sometimes it’s my keys or my wallet, or a list my wife gave me of things to pick up.

17. Out of these creatures which one are you most afraid of:
A.) Snakes
B.) Spiders
C.) Rodents

Snakes. It’s the slither thing.

18. What’s the last gift you bought for a friend?

A pass for a massage.

19. Do you ever buy people things for no reason?

Occasionally, when the item “speaks” to me.

20. What’s your favorite way to spend a lazy summer afternoon?

Reading, listening to music on the stereo.
***
Saw the Australian Prime minister practically in tears over the death yesterday of “croc hunter” Steve Irwin. Scott conveniently posted this yesterday.

Labor Day 2006



Stealing from myself.
You all right with that?
***
We went away to visit the in-laws this weekend. Love them; HATE traveling on Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends, primarily because EVERYONE else is.

Attended this baseball game Friday night in Oneonta. Although it doesn’t show up in the box score, the Oneonta pitcher made a critical mental error in the second inning. The Ironbirds runner was 35 feet off first base, but instead of going towards the runner, the pitcher threw to first base. By the time the first baseman threw to second, the runner was safe at second, and later scored the first Ironbirds run.
***
It occurred to me that I had a contest, nobody entered, so nobody won. That only means I’ll have to come up with a better contest next time. Meanwhile, the answers:

1. Angelina Jolie’s uncle wrote a #1 hit that came out in 1966. What was it? And who performed it?
Wild Thing, written by Chip Taylor, Jon Voight’s brother, and performed by The Troggs.

2. Based on the number of seasons it was broadcast and its audience size, 60 Minutes is the #1-rated program of all time, according to Brooks and Marsh. What’s #2?
Gunsmoke, 1955-1975.
***
I’m hoping for actual content tomorrow.

Passion

This is a pretty general blog, I’d say, maybe because I’m a somewhat eclectic guy. So I’m really interested that persons are focused enough to put together a single-issue website/blog:

Regret The Error reports on corrections, retractions, clarifications and trends regarding accuracy and honesty in the media.” This is a GREAT site, so great that I’ve added it to my weblog, in the News/Opinion section. Check out the Error/Correction Roundups.

Save The Catskill Game Farm. The Game Farm, maybe an hour from here, is a place I’ve visited maybe a dozen times, starting when I was three, but probably not in the last decade.

ADD’s blog about Criminal by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, because he really has nothing else to do.

The relaunch of Journalista: The Comics Journal weblog.

Bush’s Last Day. And I don’t mean Billy Bush, who irritates during the Emmy pre-show.

An interesting Next Blog find: Fear Allah as He should be Feared: ISLAMIC ARTICLES AND QUOTES

ARTICLES

Music to Soothe the Savage Searcher: Classical Music Databases and Web Resources by David Mattison, Access Services Archivist, British Columbia Archives, Royal BC Museum Corporation

Greg’s news from around our bizarro world. So bizarre, in fact, that I just had to respond.

Yet, I have no cogent response to the Katrina anniversary. Go read A Failure to Communicate: Politics, Scams, and Information Flow During Hurricane Katrina by Paul Piper, Librarian, Western Washington University and Miguel Ramos, Library and Archive Paraprofessional, WWU

Another Katrina piece: The New Blaxploitation by GayProf

The amount of nicotine in a cigarette has increased steadily over the past six years. Here’s the full report. This is disturbing news, yet not particularly surprising.

Lefty offers up free music, a great mix he put together, and directions to download free music by Christian artist Derek Webb. “[The album] Mockingbird has been somewhat controversial in the Christian community because it doesn’t tow the conservative line.”

Stealing a couple paragraphs from Blotto drummer F. Lee Harvey, I mean, distinguished intellectual property lawyer Paul Rapp:
The Cato Institute, the extreme right-wing conservative-to-the-point-of-libertarian think-tank issued a policy report titled Amateur-to-Amateur, The Rise of a New Creative Culture. In the piece, a couple of Cato scholars make the case that copyright law, as presently configured, exists primarily for the preservation of the entrenched “copyright industries,” and that the arrival of the Internet and digital media have made these “copyright industries” less important. The conclusion is maybe the time has come, as it has come before, to take a hard look at our current regime of copyright laws.
The study looked at what’s been happening on the Internet, and discussed the theories of John Perry Barlow, the ex-Grateful Dead lyricist who in the early ’90s began publishing tomes about digital media, the Web, and the end of copyright as we know it. Barlow has been mocked, ridiculed, and marginalized relentlessly by Big Media for years. One copyright newsletter I get constantly refers to him as a leader of the “anti-creator crusade.” The Cato study concludes that Barlow was pretty much right.

***

Work to do QUESTIONS

A couple weeks ago, I got this e-mail from my local newspaper:

The U.S. Bureau of the Census projects that by 2030, 20.8 percent of upstate New York’s population will be aged 65 and over, a share still slightly higher than for the nation as a whole.

In our September issue of Capitaland Quarterly, Deputy Business Editor Eric Anderson will take a look at the implications an aging baby boomer population will have on the Capital Region. And we’d like to hear from you.

If you are approaching 60, we are interested in learning about your plans for retirement, about other ways you might be adjusting your lifestyle and how you arrived at those decisions. Please respond before Aug. 30 to help us meet our deadlines.

Thank you for participating in the Times Union Reader Network.

Got a call indicating the fact that they’re interested in using an expanded version of my response. Here’s the original:

“I went back to graduate school at age 37, started working a librarian at the age of 39. I’m now 53, and I have a 2-year- old daughter, which means I’ll be 69 when she graduates from high school. And then, presumably, she will want to go to college.
Retirement just doesn’t seem to be part of my mindset right now.”

Which, of course, means that, on this Labor Day weekend, I’d like the same questions to you, even if you’re not approaching 60:
What are your plans for retirement? When? At what age? Will you relocate?
What ways might you do to adjust your lifestyle? Smaller house or an apartment or condo?
What went into those decisions?
(If you don’t mind): How old are you?

Shamus quotient

Jaquandor, another upstate New Yorker, reads this blogger named Shamus who has rules about blogs. How dost I fare?

1. Informal, conversational style. I like when the author is blunt and honest. Website “articles”, written like a magazine product review, sound too clinical and leave me cold.

Well, you know, like I write, like, like a REAL HONEST-TO-GOODNESS PERSON!!! Like, don’t I? Or am I too erudite?

2. I like people who use their real names more than those who use pseudonyms, and I like pseudonyms better than pure anonymity. (The difference between the last two being mostly how long they’ve been using their pseudonym.) I’m unlikely to read something from a never-seen-before pseudonym. Nothing wrong with that. Some people are private. Just not for me.

Lessee, my name is really George Rowan and I’m a CIA operative. Nah, as hero Popeye has said several times, “I yam what I yam.”

3. No ads. Banner ads are better today than they were seven years ago. During the dot-com boom, the internet was lousy with blinking eyesores and faux-dialog box traps. Those are still around, but anyone serious about holding an audience usually goes with something a bit more subtle. Having said that, even diminutive Blogads bug me. So, I tend to gravitate towards the ad-free sites.

This Shamus fellow sounds like a Commie. No ads? Where is his sense of capitalism?

4. I prefer dark lettering on light backgrounds. This didn’t used to be a problem, but as I decay into toothless old codgerdom I find white-on-black harder and harder to read. When I look away I see the horizontal bars burned onto my vision for a while afterwards, and that just can’t be good.

Well, as much as I’d like my site to alternate between yellow on white and purple on black – VERY readable combinations, don’t you think? – I too have readability issues. In truth, there are very interesting blogs out there I just don’t read because it’s too much of a pain to SEE them.

5. I prefer to read what adults have to say, and I’m not talking about age here. I’ve found quite a few videogame blogs that are a wasteland of juvenile flames and trash talk. Yeah kid, your guild 0wnz me. Good for you. Be sure to put that on your resumé.

If you’ve been reading my blog for any time now, you KNOW I only talk about the latest videogames. Nothing else seems to interest me. Take THAT, Lefty!

6. I like one-author blogs better than group blogs, but only because I like to know who I’m reading. I’ve never seen it done, but I would actually enjoy a group blog if each author had a little icon or something at the top of the post, similar to what I do with categories. I really can’t stand blogs where I have to look to the end of a post to know who I’m reading, since that’s the first thing I want to know.

Hamilton: Eh.
Joe Frank: Double eh.
Reynolds: What they said.
Actually, I think I’ve used an anonymous contribution once, and I have another available in case I ever need a fill-in issue. (Fill-in issue – how very comic book.) Once or twice out of 720 posts is a pretty good percentage, I think.

7. I like some info about the author. I don’t need an autobiography, but I at least like to have some idea of the age and gender of the author. I hate hunting around for clues like oblique references to their spouse and children (or absence thereof) and trying to extrapolate who the author is from that.

I am very mysterious. You wouldn’t know that I have a wife and a daughter or that I’m a librarian, a Christian, or black. Well, here’s something I really DON’T think I’ve ever told you: I’m 5’11 3/8″ tall, right-handed, and I hate anchovies.

So, I think I have pretty high Shamus Quotient, FWIW.

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