livingtech

I looked up all the books I had wanted to read earlier, and theyÂ’re all on hold or checked out. I was tempted to run to a library in south Minneapolis (out of my way from here) to grab a copy of Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot before they close in an hour, but I decided against it. I have plenty to read already, and besides, IÂ’d rather read the new one.

IÂ’m composing in word (Word X for Mac) right now, and I think thereÂ’s some kind of weird bug where every time I hit return it turns my font back into Times. I wanted Apple Gothic, damnit!

Earlier, I had actually written a whole blog entry about my exciting sexual adventures last night, but then, just as I had chickened out, and decided I was going to save the entry as “draft” in movable type instead of “Publish”, Eudora crashed on me hardcore, rendering the decision moot, as I lost the entire entry. (Hence my composition in word.)

Anyway, the entry was a little explicit. And while I know some of you readers would like to know what makes me come, IÂ’m not sure everybody shares that same desire. (Those of you who really want to know will just have to find out for yourselves!)

IÂ’m going to go home early now, and play more morrowind. Yay for the weekend!

I’m in a horrible mood today. Not sure what it is.. but I think it was somehow related to listening to sigur ros all morning. (got me depressed.)

Plus, laura thinks something dead might be stuck in the walls or ceiling or something. I don’t know if I ever told this story on here before, but at one point when we first bought the house, we figured out there was a dead mouse behind the refrigerator, and I paid Nate and Laura $5 (each? I can’t remember) so they’d take care of it, and I didn’t have to clean it.

And a bunch of people here at work were talking about partial birth abortion, which got me all pissed off, because I’m not sure any of them are pro-choice, but I could tell everybody was too polite (timid?) to say anything specific. Not that I wanted to talk about it anyway.

I was in a fine mood this morning when I left home (an hour late to work). I had some cloud cult song stuck in my head (Took You For Granted–It’s a sad song, now that I realize which one it was.) while laura and I rolled around trying to get out of bed, or trying not to get out of bed, I’m not sure which is more accurate.

So, speaking of booksÂ… (mopsa’s romance novels don’t count) Â…after watching The School of Rock, Jason, Tom and I stopped by the bookstore. There were about fifty books I hadn’t seen before and now (of course) have to own or read. Of course I ran home and added them to my amazon wishlist.

I’ll just list the four big ones: First, I’d read about this, but hadn’t ever actually seen it–Orson Scott Card wrote a novel called Robota that was published in a large format with illustrations by Doug Chiang (who won some awards for his CG test / trailer for the movie–who knows when that’ll come out). The book looks damn cool, and I go in for that sci-fi illustration stuff, so this is a MUST OWN for me.

Second book: Steve Martin has a new one called The Pleasure of My Company. I didn’t look at this one as much as the others, so I don’t know if it’ll be good, but I’ll read it because I’ve liked everything I’ve read by Steve Martin quite a bit so far.

Then there was Bringing Down the House : The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions I probably wouldn’t have even looked twice at this, except I was there with a guy who works one night a week at Barnes & Noble (Tom), and he said it was greatÂ… I picked it up to read some random pages in the first chapterÂ… ten minutes later I’d read the first chapter, and was onto the second. Seems quite interesting, and a compelling read!

Finally the book that we looked at first in the storeÂ… Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Tidbit from Tom: I guess when the lawsuit was announced, the book went from being WAY low on the list of top books selling on amazon to #1 in less than a day. Anyway, I picked it up, and basically found it hysterical.

School of Rock was also hysterical, by the way. Way better than I’d expected, and I even expected it to be pretty good. (I don’t know why, given Jack Black’s so-so track record.) It had just the right balance of over-the-top trademark Jack Black humor, and feel-good movie ending. You’ll understand when you see it, but more people (I’d say 98 % of the audience) stayed to watch the credits in this movie than in any other movie I’ve seen in quite a while.

Last night I started reading Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which has been on my shelf for at least two years now. A couple of things stuck with me from the first chapter. One was his definition of a scientific theory, and how it includes the ability to make predictions for the future. I sometimes forget about that stipulation when I’m making up theories on the universe and everything, but I think it’s not as important that you be able to test those predictions, so much as you have an idea for HOW to test them.

In my heart, somewhere, I want to be a scientist. I have grand hopes for my sister. She’s basically staying in math just because I’m making her (and she’s good at it). I really hope she’ll find she likes science too, because that’s really the whole reason I’ve encouraged her to stay in math.

Some other time I’ll expound about the link between science and art.

This morning I was looking for Sigur Ros’s () album on my shelf, and found that I’d miss-alphabetized her space holiday’s album Manic Expressive. I pulled it down and have been listening to it all day. They’re sorta mellow orchestral electronica with yo la tengo-esque vocals. Then I did a web search, and found out that they have a new album released just yesterday! How unlikely is that?

Also, on the way to work this morning I heard Junior Senior’s “Rhythm Bandits” again. It was another one of those “sitting in the car waiting for the song to end” mornings.

Well, I’m off now to go watch School of Rock. I’ll let you all know what I think of it… if I remember!

Last night at juggling the phrase of the night was “relax and swing”. Apparently this is the phrase a friend and fellow juggler uses to teach club juggling to people who haven’t done it before. You have to “relax” your arm with the club in hand to your side, and then “swing” it back up toward the other hand, releasing the club into the air. Maybe the phrase should be “relax, swing and release”, that would be even funnier.

Anyway, juggling sexual euphemisms abound, but this one was new to me.

Here are dictionary.com’s related definitions:

Swing:
slang
a. To be lively, trendy, and exciting.
b. To engage freely in promiscuous sex.
c. To exchange sex partners. Used especially of married couples.
d. To have a sexual orientation toward one or both sexes.

I think the last one is the most funny. Doesn’t everyone have a sexual orientation toward one or both sexes?

Relax and swing, baby. Relax and swing.

I must laugh at this from home, perhaps later tonight: T Shirt Hell.

Also, I’ve always collected quotes about poetry, but never in any sort of systematic way. (Although I have thought about it many times.) Today I discovered Bartleby.com: Great Books Online, (which is searchable) and just about doubled the number of quotes about poetry on there. I haven’t even exhausted my search results yet! I’m excited to keep searching.

I labored over this sentence today to a friend on IM:

The importance of anything in your life is only tangentially related to your perception of its importance–the true importance lies in the time you devote, whether directly or indirectly, proportional to your devotion to all the other things in your life.

Overall I only spent about 5 minutes writing the sentence, or 1/12th of an hour, or 1/288th of a day… or 1/105120th of a year. In contrast, I probably spend 1/4th of my day sleeping, (6 hours on average?). So the sentence was less than 1/70th as important as sleep is to me. This makes for some other interesting comparisons.. for example, sleep is about six times more important to me than a task at work that takes me one hour to complete. On the other hand, being at work (not necessarily working, as the case may be) is about 1 and 1/3rd more important to me than sleep.

I should have titled this entry: ‘fractions of importance’, or ‘a lesson in fractional importance’, or ‘the importance of applied rudimentary math’, or perhaps ‘why aren’t I important to you… anymore?’.

[I was just thinking I should really have some kind of warning for when I’ll be talking about my sexual perversions… I’m actually thinking about marking all my posts where I talk about sex with a new category or something. For now this will have to do. Warning! Perversion ahead!!!]

Laura and I have this book where all the pages are stuck together… wait, not like that… the pages are stuck together so you have to pull them apart to read their contents. Every once in awhile we pull two pages from the book, and we each read one of them, and surprise each other with whatever sex act it describes. The book says you should do it in the next week, but as busy people we haven’t had as much time for it lately. Anyway, the last one I pulled was just about oral sex, and I was a bit disappointed, (even though I’m sure it’s necessary to put something like that in there, as I’m sure there are plenty of guys who don’t do it.) The only thing I took from the page was this bit about spelling the alphabet with your tongue on her clitoris. (Laura liked that one until I started saying the letter as I was spelling it… heh.)

So anyway, I’m really only writing about this because I was just trying to write a poem (failing), and I came up with the idea of trying to write my own list of “sex challenges”. (BTW, if you search for “sex challenges” on google you come up with a list of all kinds of challenges to cases of sex offenders and stuff like that, so don’t bother… we’re going to have to be more sophisticated in our searching in the future.)

Anyway, my list so far is ridiculous, but I would like to write one where the goals are actually possible. Here’s the three I came up with so far: (you’ll see that the names were really the most important part.)

screwdriving — screwing while drunk on screwdrivers in a construction site with screwdrivers in the vicinity. (Your house, if it’s sufficiently torn apart will count in a pinch.)
yoyoing — hanging upside down from your ankles and doin’it.
test(icle)tubing — sex on an inner tube while sliding down a hill in the snow wearing only mad scientist costumes. (Alternately you could be pulled by a boat on a lake.)

It strikes me that I’d really just be writing a really fucked up purity test. I remember the first time I took a purity test it was at this big party… and by the time the question “[Have you ever] Used this test as a checklist for things to do.” I somehow already had! The details are fuzzy now, but I think we’d been group kissing or something equally innocuous. Actually, it’s possible I’m only thinking about the question where it asks you if you’ve ever lied on a purity test (and of course I already had)… who can remember back that far!?!

Why is it that there are individuals out there (fortunately few) who have the ability to come barging back into your life unannounced, say a few words and leave again with your stomach in ruins and your heart beating faster?

When I was a kid my dad had this old harpsichord lying around. Now, the thing about harpsichords is that they’re super easy to make sound good… if they’re in tune. Of course if they’re not in tune it’s impossible to make them sound good. And I don’t think this one was ever in tune. But I played with it! Oh boy did I.

I don’t know how this is at all relevant, but “harpsichord” is a cool word, and sounds good next to “heartstrings”.

Well, don’t waste your time on Duplex. Ben Stiller couldn’t save this horrible movie, and Danny DeVito should be ashamed of himself.

On the other hand, DO buy Cloud Cult’s CD They Live on the Sun. At times reminiscent of Modest Mouse or the Weakerthans, and at times more like Beck (Mellow Gold style). Their beats range from Beck-like to more downright techno. Anyway, I don’t know what genre pigeonholes them the best, but they’re definitely college radio material, as they’ve had a song on Radio K’s top 7 for the last couple of weeks. The song Radio Fodder gives me chills, but the whole damn thing is great.

This is not even taking into account the whole environmental bend that the band has… Earthology seems very interesting.