December Reading
Written by Sarah on January 8th, 2012It’s the little things
Written by Craig on January 1st, 2012A couple weeks ago, one of my Twitter accounts was followed by a spammer. This is not unusual; a huge percentage of Twitter accounts are spammers. The thing that caught my eye—though perhaps not quite as the spam machinery intended—was in the bio: “dip me over and fuck me doggystyle. Whatever you want I will try it (NO ANAL).”
Let’s say I am so naïve that I believe an actual person has set up this Twitter account, and has invited 267 other people to do her doggystyle; do I find her more enticing because her “Whatever you want” is qualified? Especially given that the qualification excludes a pretty mundane practice—am I to infer that she’s up for (in lieu of listing several other possibilities that would likely get the blog undesirable search engine attention, I’ll just say) bloodplay? I just don’t know.
Dead Mann Walking Review
Written by Craig on December 4th, 2011Dead Mann Walking: A Hessius Mann Novel, Petrucha. Yes. Petrucha has created a unique (to my knowledge) first-person narrator in Hessius Mann. I am looking forward to the next installment to see if he can maintain the level of interest, given Tana French’s rationale in giving each of her Dublin Murder Squad books a different protagonist: it’s hard to justify life-changing events happening to the same person over and over. Some aspects of DMW resonate with another recent work I also enjoyed; I think it rather validates Petrucha’s vision that a different group of talented writers went in a similar direction given a related premise. The only passage that pulled me out of the narrative was the improper (and strained) use of “to coin a phrase.”
Reaper Man Review
Written by Craig on December 4th, 2011Reaper Man: A Novel of Discworld®, Pratchett. Yes. Again, Pratchett provides reliable entertainment. This one introduces a particularly entertaining minor character, and Death can always be relied upon to add that certain something.
The universal translator merely burbles quietly
Written by Sarah on December 3rd, 2011My favorite animal chronicler, Sy Montgomery, has written a great article on the octopus and the bewildering nature of octopus intelligence.
Read the article and imagine yourself in the distant future, aboard a galactic ship crewed by beings from across the universe. You’ve got a new roomie, one from your home planet. Oh, boy! Another human, after years of being the only one onboard! Nope. It’s an octopus. She eyes you from the comfort of a brown beer bottle as you nervously search for a copy of the Octopus Enrichment Handbook in the All-Earthican Digital Library.
Antique radiation
Written by Sarah on December 3rd, 2011After the excitement over the Fukushima nuclear plant, people in Japan are (understandably) a little jumpy about radiation. This seems to have led to the discovery of a bunch of antique radiation sources. A recent radiological survey of the Puget Sound area was done to establish what the normal baseline radiation level is (because the similar surveys in Fukushima had not had a pre-reactor-problem level to compare to). They were expecting to find a lot of non-disaster related radiation, and I wonder if they found any old bottles of radium, too?
November Reading
Written by Sarah on December 3rd, 2011The Delightful Brad MacNeil
Written by Sarah on November 29th, 2011As mentioned in Stop Podcasting Yourself, the delightful Brad MacNeil performs at Senators games in exchange for tickets. Here are a few I found at the Sens YouTube account:
“Stronger”
“Friday”
Goliath Review
Written by Craig on November 14th, 2011I’m willing to believe there are 99, and it’s definitely photography; I’ll give them that
Written by Craig on November 12th, 2011It has, again, been a while since we’ve had any good FP examples here, so I was initially thrilled to see this link to 99 self-declared “Excellent Examples of Forced Perspective Photography.” When I followed the link, though, I was disappointed to find that while several of the photographs are excellent, very few of them use FP very well, if at all.