I suspect this is a bug.

With the upcoming demise of delicious bookmarks, I found myself in the process of looking about for a new place to stash all of my weblinks. After some research, I decided to give Diigo a whack.

Here it is on my phone:

To try it out, the first link I saved was their own blog.  I figured it would be a good thing to have.  Here it is:

Now, one of the things that Diigo does is give you the opportunity to download the text from your link so you can read it later, should you be offline.  Here is me trying that:

And this is what it looks like:

I think that something is wrong.

At work

Just keeping on keeping on...

The stretched twig of piece is at its melting point.

I've been home sick like a congested zombie for the last few days. The bright side is that I've finally gotten a chance to watch the DVD set of The Day Today that I picked up a while ago.

Have a taste:



Tweet

This is a wall

I've been hitting some writer's block more and more lately.

Hobo party!

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Shift Change

Excellent moments in Wikipedia vandalism

If on a winter's night a traveller

"And then there was an interception. INTERCEPTION! OOOOOH!"

The Boston Globe on the latest episode of ESPN's “30 for 30" :

As for “Four Nights in October,’’ let’s just say the inclusion of comedian Lenny Clarke as a “voice of the fan’’ is roughly the equivalent of having Gilbert Gottfried become the new voice of NFL Films, and leave it at that.

Let me now go on record.

I would love for Gilbert Gottfried to become the new voice of NFL Films.

I wonder about the backstory

"These crackers are stale!"

"No they are not!  Crackers don't go stale!"

"Yes they do!  These are old and stale!"

"I'll prove it to you by asking Facebook!  Facebook will agree with me that crackers don't go stale!"

Keely Smith does not approve of Night Train

Josephine the Monkey does not have a posse

But she deserves one!

via F*** Yeah Harold Lloyd!

Marianne Moore has a Posse

I am in the process of getting ready (again) to start blogging more in earnest.  (I hope)

While doing this, I am happily noodling around with the new features that my Blogger Overlords have nicely rolled out for me while I've been mostly dormant.

Among these... Stats!  I can now say with some certainty that this is my most popular post of all time!

Now...  Play Ball!

Great moments in marketing

 I think this blurb just had an orgasm:

“Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before. To the End of the Land is a book of this magnitude. David Grossman may be the most gifted writer I've ever read; gifted not just because of his imagination, his energy, his originality, but because he has access to the unutterable, because he can look inside a person and discover the unique essence of her humanity. For twenty-six years he has been writing novels about what it means to defend this essence, this unique light, against a world designed to extinguish it. To the End of the Land is his most powerful, shattering, and unflinching story of this defense. To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.” —Nicole Krauss

Go have a look:

2010 - Virtually everyone gets together.

I am starting to wonder if the reason why contemporary music frequently seems so unfinished is because the artists are well aware that the tracks are going to be completely dismantled and reassembled anyway.

As I go the the selection of music that I listen to, I realize that much of it is mash-ups and that many of the tracks getting mashed are ones that I don't know the originals of. So because of that my knowledge of them is part of a melange. The individual track is becoming as meaningless as the need to experience an album in track order.

And it is in some ways glorious. I've forever had times when I've had more than one song in my head at once. In the analog world I would have the hardest time simply verbalizing how I can tell that multiple songs could fit together but now...

Just listen to this:





This is not the sound of music imploding. It is the sound of music evolving.

April Smith and the Great Picture Show Tour Video

I don't think I can argue

"This is the definitive collection of pictures featuring bea arthur, mountains and pizza."

Wikipedia will teach you about the "@" symbol.

 
"In Armenian, it is "shnik", which means 'puppy'."

Nirvana - Pentecost Hotel 1968

Where I am now.

I like going places that I've never been - I love poking around a new city or riding a train or bus through town after town. It occurs to me as I think about this that there are very few places that I've been to that I haven't felt a little tug that says "you know, you could live here. You would be happy living here." I've felt it in tiny towns in the rural south and I've felt it in the depths of New York City.

I used to ride around the country on the Greyhound bus. Many times, the bus would be going through some place that I've never heard of, and I would look out the window and suddenly just want to jump off the bus and find an apartment right there.

Sometimes, when I am not expecting to, I feel it about the place where I am actually living.

From time to time I find myself pouring over blogs by people who are just writing about how they are living their lives. They take pictures of the flower bed after doing some weeding and another couple of shots of the store because they had to go for milk and eggs anyway.

I don't know if that's the sort of blog that I want to turn this into. No. I know that that is not the sort of blog that I turn this into. But from time to time I think I'm going to expand my horizon to include the close at hand.

The picture in this post was taken about half a mile from where I live. I had no reason to take it right then. But it was something to do while I was walking home.

embarrassment of riches

I have been spending the last few months noodling about with a site called 750words.com.

It is a simple site and it works like this:

I log in. It gives me a blankish page with the date on it. In the lower right corner of the page is a word counter, so as I type I can see the words accumulate. (I can anyway, what with them being written down and all, but there is something about typing and watching the word count chugging up.)

Then, once you have reached words a little box pops up that tells you that you have written the proper number of words and can now look at statistics about your writing.

For example - I see that it takes an average of 357 minutes per day to write 750 words. This makes sense because I generally wake up and do some writing in the morning and then finish up before I go to bed. My best streak is completing the 750 words 38 days in a row.

My writing is at a PG-13 level. The words I use indicate that I am introverted yet happy. I seem to think mostly about the present.

I have an adverb score of 9.4. The average adverb score is 9.9. I have no idea what that means.

In any event, I signed on a few months ago because I thought that I needed encouragement to write more. There is a school of that says that if you always write a certain amount every day, then you are always in the habit and it will help you write more. So in that way, this site works.

Two drawbacks though.

First - I find that once I have fallen off the wagon, it's hard to get back up again - those little badges and stars that pop up to tell me that I've done well start to dissapear. It easily stops being something that I am doing because I want to and turns into something that I am doing because I have to. Which is not the best way to happy me up.

Second - While 750 words a day seems a good amount, there really isn't a good mechanism to go back and strip the writing for parts. My "writing" day tends to go like this: I start writing. I write a bit about this thing and that thing. One paragraph seems like it should go to a blog post that I am meaning to write. Here's a thought about a poem that I want to come up with. "Hey my foot hurts again! I wonder if there is anything up with that?" (My foot doesn't really hurt. There is nothing up with that.)

I have now, it tells me, written 51,880 words. The problem is that I really don't have them organized in any coherent manner. There are a number of things that I have written over and over and over again. While it is a good tool to get me going, I now have all of that stuff that I don't know what to do with.

So - blogging is going to get a little strange as I now try to get into the habit of incorporating that stuff into this. Which is what I should have been doing all along.

That's five hundred twenty nine words there. Not bad for a Saturday morning.

(The number is different now. I've done a touch of editing. That's another thing about using this site. I find that I am quite frequently saying something in more words than less. I write out numbers - like five hundred twenty nine. It sort of changes that way I write, and the way I think about *what* to write).

My cunning plan for this morning was to try to chug out a 750 word (whoops, forgot to write that number out - I better add a needless parenthetical aside to make up for it. Oh and some emdashes - I have discovered that they count as words - so that changes my style a little too. (I think.) (Actually no - truth be told, I have always been an abuser of the emdash and the needless parenthetical.)) post. But I am still a bit short.

I took a break to get the coffee going. That means I get no bonus points today for writing without interruption. See - That's the sort of mindset that this site causes.

Anyhow, this sentence is going to kick me into the win column, so that means I'm off to start the day.

And don't worry. I have absolutely no intention of dumping this on you every day like this. I was just scratching it off of my increasingly long "to write about" list.

streetviewing

I've been inspired by Apres Garde to start looking through Streetview for interesting things to "take photos" of.

Here's the best I've found in my travels so far:

 

Madness : Johnny The Horse

And now, the most delightfully peppy song ever written about a homeless schizophrenic getting kicked to death. You're welcome.

Tom Russell on Letterman

I really haven't been paying attention to Ke$ha.

And yet I still somehow surf my way to this:

EW: And somehow you vomited in Paris Hilton’s closet?
K: Totally separate occasion, but yes, that did happen. They stayed in my house in Nashville when I was 17. Then fast forward six months, I’m out in LA, and I sing background vocals for her second single. And then that night we went to her house and we were all dancing, hanging out. Then I got overexcited and ralphed in her closet. I thought it was a bathroom… and it just so happened not to be a bathroom. It was a closet.
EW: Did that end things with you and her?
K: That kind of ended the relationship right there.
EW: Do you hold that against her?
K: No, I wouldn’t want to be my friend either.

The Leisure Society 'A Matter Of Time' (live)

Compare and contrast

Civil Defence spots.

Keep an eye out for Random the Squirrel. He should get his own show.

So does this mean that the look is coming back?

In the 1950's EC Comics had the best letterhead ever.

Go have a look.

Oh bother

A couple of posts down from this is a post where I was doing some quick testing.  Generally, I grab a little thing to post, but I was in a hurry so I just put up a post that said "I'm testing something.  Ignore this."

So I get a jokey comment and I make a jokey response.  Which is cool, bring on the jokey everyone.

Then I got this comment to the same post a few days ago:

"This is a fantastic, It is glad to see this blog, nice informative blog, Thanks for share this article."

Now when I saw this, my first reaction was "Oh to hell with all of this."  And I went and looked at the "delete this blog" button for a little while.

Obviously I didn't, but then I got to thinking that if some loon making a daft comment can push me to quit, perhaps I ought to switch gears.

Now, thinking about this made me go back to the comment.  I clicked on the guy's profile info and then went and had a peek at his blog.  The guy's blog has one post.  It is poorly written and explains that he is a scholar and for a reasonable fee, he will be happy to write your term paper for you.  In the comments to this one post are a couple of people who basically say "If your best level of writing is what we see in this one post and the strange comment that you put on my blog, then perhaps you ought to look for a different line of work."

Well, I'm still thinking of switching gears - not in a quitting way but in a "what am I doing here" way.

One thing for sure, I will not be writing term papers for cash. 

I love this.

"On a summer night in 1888 in Mannheim, Germany, Bertha Benz became the first person to drive an automobile on a social journey, the kind of trip we now recognize as a perfectly ordinary thing to do in a car. With her teenage sons, Eugen and Richard, Bertha pushed the prototype car built by her sleeping husband out of his workshop, far enough from the house so he would not wake when they fired it up, and set out to visit her mother on the longest trip ever taken in an automobile."

-- Georgine Clarsen, Eat my Dust: Early Women Motorists.

This is how it goes

I tried my hand at taking at least one picture a day to try to get me in the habit of taking more pictures. On day two, I realized that I hadn't taken a picture yet at 11:59 pm. So I grabbed my cell and took a picture of my nightstand. Then at a minute after midnight I took another picture of my nightstand so I could get that day out of the way.

It went downhill from there.

Nick Cave - There She Goes, My Beautiful World (Live)

I am doing some testing so right now this is not going to make much sense. Please ignore.

I am doing some testing so right now this is not going to make much sense.  Sorry for clugging up the tubes with posts of no value.  Normal internet activity will resume in a normal amount of time.

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What is the internet for you ask? This internet is for bringing you this:

meeting halfway

One of the things that I keep meaning to try to come up with a way to write is something about my habit of not wanting to write about something until I have finished it, which is balanced by my habit of starting something else immediately after finishing another thing and then being caught up in that so I never get to writing about the previous thing.

The other day I made it halfway through this podcast from Stephen Fry.  I quite like the way he can start to build his passion up in these things.  I'm still not done with it, but decided that as I am going to try to start mentioning things that I am in the middle of (in order to get myself in more of a habit of writing *anything*), I might as well throw it up here and let you know to have a listen.

And as I write this I see that he is going on social media hiatus, to write a sequel to Moab is my Washpot (US,UK), which is a book that I've had for ages, and haven't yet sat down to actually read.

I see my work is half cut out for me.

Enjoy the "Sizzle Real" for Slingers.

SLINGERS from Mike Sizemore on Vimeo.

I did that last post wrong. I am still learning. sorry.

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Untitled

I have started the year off by slacking.  I am a slacker.

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