Little Tony was sitting on a park bench munching on one candy bar after another. After the 6th candy bar, a man on the bench across from him said, "Son, you know eating all that candy isn't good for you. It will give you acne, rot your teeth, and make you fat."
"Little Tony replied, "My grandfather lived to be 107 years old."
The man asked, "Did your grandfather eat 6 candy bars at a time?"
Little Tony answered, "No, he minded his own fucking business."
"...the universe is the inside without any outside, the sound made by one eye opening. In fact, I don't even know that there is a universe. More likely, there are many multiverses, each with its own dimensions, times, spaces, laws and eccentricities. We wander between and among these multiverses, trying to convince others and ourselves that we can all walk together in a single public universe that we can all share. For to deny that axiom leads to what is called schizophrenia. Yeah, that's it: every man's skin is his own private multiverse, just like every man's home is supposed to be his castle. But the multiverses are trying to merge, to create a tru e universe such as we have only imagined previously. ...but it has to happen: the creation of a universe and the one great eye opening to see itself at last. Aum Shiva!"
"THINK FOR YOURSELF, SHMUCK!"
--Robert Anton Wilson, January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007
I like books. Here are the current top 46 books from www.whatshouldireadnext.com. Bold the books you have read. Italicise the books you might read. Leave the rest. Pass it on:
1. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown 2. The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger 3. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams 4. The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald Keep meaning to... 5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6. The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger 7. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 8. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter 6) - J.K. Rowling 9. Life of Pi - Yann Martel 10. Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell 11. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller 12. The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien 13. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon 14. Lord of the Flies - William Golding 15. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 16. 1984 - George Orwell 17. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Book 3) - J.K. Rowling 18. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 19. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden 20. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 21. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 22. Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut 23. Angels and Demons - Dan Brown 24. Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk 25. Neuromancer - William Gibson 26. Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson Everyone tells me I'll love it. 27. The Secret History - Donna Tartt 28. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess 29. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte Started it and UGH. Waaaay too over the top. 30. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 31. American Gods - Neil Gaiman 32. Ender's Game (The Ender Saga) - Orson Scott Card 33. Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson Once again...what we SHOULD have read in cyberpunk class rather than the horrifically boring Neuromancer. 34. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving 35. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis 36. Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides 37. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell 38. The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien I have tried. Multiple times. 39. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 40. Good Omens - Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman 41. Atonement - Ian McEwan 42. The Shadow Of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon 43. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway 44. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood 45. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath 46. Dune - Frank Herbert
ALSO. I got an iPod shuffle today *dances* and thus have completed my collection of Tiny Things Made By Apple.
“pockettheroach: Hello, LiveJournal. Um, I'm with lionessvalenti, say hi--
lionessvalenti: Hello!
pockettheroach: It's, um, what, five-thirty in the morning? We have been sitting on the street in Cincinnati since three AM in line for tickets to see Wicked.
lionessvalenti: Yay!
pockettheroach: Go to cincinnati.com, you can probably find pictures of us, we're probably going to be on several morning news shows in the area...
lionessvalenti: *Insane, frostbitten cackle*
pockettheroach: Um...yeah! So it's been fun, we're freezing our asses off...
lionessvalenti: Yes.
pockettheroach Um...it's damn cold, this had better be a good show and we had better get good seats. So everyone have a wonderful, lovely morning in your warm toasty homes. Would you like to say anything else?
Should I start tagging my journal? Or am I just feeling the peer pressure 'cuz everybody's doing it?
viledeacon got scarfed today! Yes, I ate him whole. Just kidding. Here is a silly picture of me with his scarf, which yes I knitted thankyouverymuch:
So now he can be warm, yay.
I've turned into a fulltime crafty mofo, and I got a Blogger account to yak about it. I'm really not sure how I feel about this. Every time I go over there, I hear this little voice going "You're being unfaithful to LJ..." Maybe I'll just make myself a little community over here so I can post about crafts without logging in and out OR feeling guilty. Which is silly, yes. But I've been with LJ for a long long time...
And...a NEW WIP! Yes, get excited! Read it here: Hello, Hogwarts! And don't yell at me after you get there. It's HP fic, I SWEAR. It really is.
Also, if anyone so cares, I've set up an RSS feed of my LibraryThing reviews at pocket_books. I review a LOT. Plus a lot of older books, not just new stuff. (I think my last review was for Moll Flanders.) So there's that, if you're interested.
lionessvalenti totally got me season one of the X-Files on DVD. And a crochet starter kit (five hooks, an afghan hook, yarn needles, markers, and an instruction booklet). I'm set.
I was tired of the same old quotes on my random quote thingy, so I added some new ones. Actually, I added a lot of new ones...actually, they're doubled. So check them out if you like. (Pretty much by refreshing my journal.) Most are about books and writing. I'm going to have to reread Robert Twigger's The Extinction Club because I know there are some damn good book quotes in there. By the way, that book is the best book you've never read and should. Bizarre, fractured travelogue talking about endangered deer and looking for a used bookstore in Cairo and numerous other seemingly unrelated storylines that all magically come together perfectly in the last few pages.
Also I have decided that Thoreau should be posthumously given the title of Western Zen master.
I was just feeding the fish (by the way, I have cute baby platies, little orange spots darting around) and the morning news was on. They were shooting from some local mall showing kids sitting on Santa's lap. There was this little girl, maybe five or six, and Santa asked her what she wanted for Christmas. She wasn't sure, so Santa threw out some suggestions: "A game? A doll?"
And I got pissed.
Seriously. People want gender equality, and yet we indoctrinate children with toy advertising. Sure, there are plenty of gender-neutral toys out there, but the kids watching Nickelodeon in the morning are repeatedly being given the message (while in the semi-hypnotic, reality-detatched, highly suggestible state brought on by having their nervous system stimulated with thirty flashes of light per second) that DOLLS ARE FOR GIRLS and TRUCKS ARE FOR BOYS. I'll grant that in this day and age, it might be possible to see a girl in a commercial playing with a remote-controlled car, but are you going to see a boy manning (no pun intended) Ken in that Barbie commercial? Hell no. Advertisers are ingraining kids with very gender-specific messages from the start.
All I want is to see Santa make the identical suggestion to that girl's brother, really.
WASHINGTON - The Senate on Friday refused to reauthorize major portions of the USA Patriot Act after critics complained they infringed too much on Americans' privacy and liberty, dealing a huge defeat to the Bush administration and Republican leaders.
In a crucial vote early Friday, the bill's Senate supporters were not able to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster by Sens. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and their allies. The final vote was 52-47.
President Bush, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Republicans congressional leaders had lobbied fiercely to make most of the expiring Patriot Act provisions permanent.
They also supported new safeguards and expiration dates to the act's two most controversial parts: authorization for roving wiretaps, which allow investigators to monitor multiple devices to keep a target from evading detection by switching phones or computers; and secret warrants for books, records and other items from businesses, hospitals and organizations such as libraries.
So The Producers was on AMC last night, and I was going to post about how the remake looks really good and brilliantly cast and whether the name Leo Bloom was a reference to Ulysses, when I realized none of you folks had heard my story of going to see GoF (except lionessblack, araviaelf, and wingzero49, who were with me). Ha ha! We had midnight premiere tickets. I had worked the night before from midnight to eight AM, had not slept all day, and promptly fell asleep as soon as the previews started. Laugh at me!
...yeah, maybe I'll actually get to see it one of these days.
I'm tired of only being connected to the internet when I'm at my computer. Sure, I can email from my cell phone, but I can't check my Gmail account. I think I want a chip implanted in my skull with Firefox, and maybe Pagespinner and Cyberduck so I can code in my spare time at work, and hell, why not Xcode too. Technology can't really be that far away from there, can it?
I WROTE a poem on the mist
And a woman asked me what I meant by it.
I had thought till then only of the beauty of the mist,
how pearl and gray of it mix and reel,
And change the drab shanties with lighted lamps at evening
into points of mystery quivering with color.
I answered:
The whole world was mist once long ago and some day
it will all go back to mist,
Our skulls and lungs are more water than bone and
tissue
And all poets love dust and mist because all the last
answers
Go running back to dust and mist.