It’s Furious Balancing

I just heard that Molly Ivins passed away (62, breast cancer). I know y’all know Molly, the woman who concocted Dubya’s nickname “The Shrub.” I’m sure she and Ann Richards are having a good talk right about now.

I found this in a tribute to Molly. I think this is how I want to remember her:

For a woman who made a profession of offering her opinion to others, Molly was remarkably humble. She was known for hosting unforgettable parties at her Austin home, which would feature rollicking political discussions, and impromptu poetry recitals and satirical songs. At one such event, I noticed her dining table was littered with various awards and distinguished speaker plaques, put to use as trivets for steaming plates of tamales, chili and fajita meat. When I called this to her attention, Molly matter-of-factly replied, “Well, what else am I going to do with ‘em?”

From Anthony Zurcher’s “Molly Ivins Tribute”

This is a recent photo of the president of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz.

Now, I know nothing about the World Bank. Before I saw this picture, I couldn’t have told you anything about the World Bank. I couldn’t have told you anything about Paul Wolfowitz. I’m not the sort that reads The Economist for kicks.(1)

I am terribly amused by this photograph, but I’m not sure I can articulate exactly why I’m amused. It’s something along the lines of feet of clay. Here is this Very Important World Bank President (who can probably afford hand-made Egyptian cotton shirts and silk ties and could go out and buy 1,000 pairs of expensive socks as easily as kiss my hand) with holey socks.

All sorts of interesting ideas come to mind:

* The man clearly has more things on his mind than making sure he’s wearing presentable, photo-op socks every day.

* Did Mr. Wolfowitz’s mother nag him about wearing clean underwear just in case he was in a car accident?

* I wonder if his wife is appalled by this picture and is complaining right this second of how she can no longer hold her head high at the weekly bridge game since her Very Important Husband has been Seen In Public with holey socks.

* My walking around the office today wearing my grey slacks with a large grease spot on the left knee (which I didn’t notice until lunch time) is, comparatively, pretty small potatoes.

*******************************
(1) Now that I’ve actually looked at their web site it looks more informative than I thought, and I ought to put The Economist on my list of online media sources to attempt to read on a semi-regular basis — as if I didn’t have enough reading to keep up on to be a Reasonably Informed Citizen. Oh, bloody hell. I hate when I do this to myself…

He Who Bakes Spice Cake Chocolate Rum Balls and I went to Jim and Terri’s this afternoon, and I finally, finally, FINALLY got the cat bed started. I took advantage of Terri’s good nature and maternal patience and talked her into getting the first three or four rounds on the Double Pointed Needles of Death(tm). I was able to take it from there and made quite a lot of progress today. I am now, of course, blind and arthritic from all that knitting, but progress has been made. Amen.

critical mass (n.)
1. The smallest mass of a fissionable material that will sustain a nuclear chain reaction at a constant level.

2. The amount of matter needed to generate sufficient gravitational force to halt the current expansion of the universe.

3. An amount or level needed for a specific result or new action to occur: “The sudden national uproar over drugs and drug abuse has reached politically critical mass in Washington”

Flo vs. The Piano

I cannot even begin to describe the beauty of this game. I’m just going to post some screenies now and let you folks be the judge of whether I’m completely off my rocker wanting to spend time in this world (as opposed to the “Real World”).

Click on the screen shots to enlarge.

Alright, so I’ve been AWOL awhile; not that I was actually very far from my computer, but I’ve been a tad… distracted. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Vanguard: Saga of Heroes open beta. Nope. Not a thing. I blame the cat. I can clearly demonstrate in Photographic Exhibit A that Thomas is hogging the mouse and is preventing me from customizing my half-elven version of Laiane Wolfsong, Ranger Grrrl extraordinaire.

Actually, Laiane is going to wind up as a Wood Elf in Vanguard. The half elves, once again, got a glossing over as far as any unique lore/culture/society/history/whatever is concerned, and they had some bizarro Asian-themed thing going on in the newbie zone. When you can take this stone from my hand, Grasshopper. Yeah, right. I’m putting my money on the Wood Elves for this one, even if it does mean wearing twigs in my hair. I’ll post screenies in a few days.

The Husband spent most of last night upgrading my comp, and it is absolutely screaming fast now. Vanguard goes live tomorrow. Rock and Roll, Cats and Kittens, I’m going MMORPG-ing, again.

I still don’t think it counts as “accumulation” because you can still see the grass (near the bushes — click on the photo to enlarge). The photo doesn’t do it justice; all the trees in the city are encased in ice with a light dusting of snow. The roads themselves weren’t bad this morning, but there were a lot of limbs down in the roadways.

Sorry for another boring post. I warned you all early on in this blog that my life was rather dull. The wild, rockin’ plans for this evening? Some knitting, some reading, some eating, and some work on the Morrowind mod. I wish I had a better quest for the cat “Carter.” It’s just another ho-hum FedEx quest, but what else is there? An NPC asks you to do something. You go do it. You come back to the NPC and get a reward. I am making Carter’s quest contingent on completing the other three cats’ quests, so that should be some challenging dialog filters.

I find it interesting that there are so many modders out there who concentrate on meshes and textures, but who are uncomfortable with dialog. For any non-modders out there, a mesh is the shape or form of an object and the texture is the visual stuff that wraps around it. A modder can make one mesh of a bottle, but have ten different textures to make it look like a blue bottle, or a red one, or a green one, u.s.w. Many modders make a lot of “pretty stuff” like shiny armor and sexy dresses and cool weapons and furniture and animals, but they don’t put them in the world, or the mods are simple shops where you can buy the shiny armor and sexy dresses and cool weapons, u.s.w.

Then there are the people like me who couldn’t do any three-dimensional rendering to save my life, but I can write dialog with complicated contingencies like no one’s business.

So, tonight I flesh out some of H.P’s dialog, beef up Joshi’s lost book of poetry, and try to figure out where to put that blasted NPC. I’m thinkin’ Pelagiad, or one of the Imperial forts (perhaps Buckmoth, since it’s right by Ald-ruhn). Hmmm…..

Well, technically, it IS winter because it’s January, and cold, and horribly dark in the late afternoon, but I can’t recall having a single snowfall where we actually had accumulation. Not an inch. People are talking about El Nino and global warming and such; there were several 40-degree days last week! I dislike it because I enjoy seeing the crystal patterns in the snowflakes when they fall on my winter coat. That, and it just smells so much cleaner after a snowfall. Small things, admittedly. This winter has really been a long, chilly prelude to spring.

We did get ice today (click on the photo to enlarge).

It’s just not the same.

Between my hobbies and my job, I haven’t had much to post about lately. I’m still knitting furiously, have picked up my Morrowind mod for a lot of dialogue work, and am in the middle of three or four books (not sure…). I’m having a lot of problems today with my chronic pain issues, so I’m about to abandon the computer and sit on the couch for a couple hours (with cats, knitting, books, club soda, and other accoutrements.) The Husband is cooking King Ranch Chicken Casserole; if you’re lucky, I might post the recipe.

But now, it’s time for a gratuitous cat picture! Oh, come on now, you knew it was coming. He’s almost smiling in this picture.

I’ve never been reticent about my depression; it’s something I’m hardwired for — being depressed, that is, not being not reticent. If you’re a Smart, Well-Read, Somewhat Observant Person in this day and age, how can you NOT be depressed? But I digress. This isn’t about explaining or defending myself. I’m prone to the demon of depression. It’s a given in my world.

I felt it sneaking up on me this afternoon. It never comes all in a rush, but incrementally, slowly. Sometimes I can see it, and sometimes I can’t. I had a bad case of the “I Don’t Wanna’s”(1) at work today, that feeling of not being able to identify anything that could help you feel better. Chocolate? No. Caffeine? No. Knitting? Cats? Bath? No, no, and no. For some unfathomable reason, this thought came to me — “What Would Laiane Wolfsong Do?” — and I had to smile.

Laiane has been my gaming alter ego for years now. EverQuest, EverQuest 2, Morrowind, and Oblivion, and Vanguard (when it comes out). A smart-alecky, stealthy half elven ranger who’s absolutely deadly with a bow. Some people play fighters, some play mages, but I am always drawn to those that hide in the shadows and use their wits and guile (and an uber bow, d00d) as weapons.

So what would Laiane do? She would one-shot(2) that demon and have it drop in its tracks is what Laiane would do.

Laiane needs to come out and play. I’m thinking a good, long Morrowind session is in order tonight.

**********************
(1) The “I Don’t Wanna’s.” That particular mood when you don’t want to do anything at the office, i.e., I don’t wanna do that filing, I don’t wanna call that difficult client, I don’t wanna assemble a corporate record book, u.s.w. Severe lack of motivation.

(2) One-shot. In gaming parlance, to kill an enemy/monster from a distance with a ranged weapon using one arrow/cross bow bolt/throwing knife, u.s.w., as opposed to the “root and shoot” or the “snare and scare” approaches to mob hunting.

A long day. A long week. It’s time to get back in the habit of five-day work weeks. So, after a long, cold, wintery day of clients, I get a hot bath with eucalyptus oil (I feel a cold coming on) and The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft. I know I have another copy lurking around the house somewhere; I just couldn’t find it when I needed to reread “At the Mountain of Madness,” so I bought another copy. Sue me.

Anyhow, hot baths, Lovecraft, and a lovely quiet evening ahead of me, and I stumble across this:

There is a party game at which we are asked, “If David Letterman had a vanity license plate, what would it say?” “If Betty Boop were real, what would she eat?” “If H.P. Lovecraft were a comic book, which would it be?” The last is the only one I can answer, but I do know that. H.P. Lovecraft would be The Sandman. “Comic book” is, of course, a poor description of The Sandman, and “graphic novel” isn’t much closer; which fits perfectly, because none of the labels pinned on Lovecraft — I mean the labels meant to pigeonhole his magnificent stories — describe him very well. He was certainly not a pulp writer, merely one whose works appeared in a pulp magazine. Nor was he a horror writer, though there are horrors to be found in his stories now and then, especially if one does not look for them. Rather he was a tall and lonely man with many friends, whose soul dwelt in a haunted place beyond the world, a man who walked by night and always walked alone: a lord of dreams. A song of Lovecraft’s time says that dreams come true in Blue Hawaii, but those are daydreams and too often they don’t. C.S. Lewis has a bit in which people visit a region where dreams (real dreams like Lovecraft’s and ours) actually do come true; and those people return white and shaken. They were lucky, I think — very lucky to return at all through the gates of horn and ivory, the gates that are opened, sometimes, by the silver key.

What do you think, Mr. Carter?

– Gene Wolfe

Anyone who knows me and my “comic book” reading habits will understand why I smile at this.

Well, it’s utterly indescribably delicious yarn, is probably the reason behind that question. He Who Occasionally Lapses Into Bad British Accents and I went to the Fisher Theater in Detroit to see Spamalot. We got there early enough that we wandered around the Fisher Building for a bit before we went in to the theater, and I stumbled into City Knits (a very high-rent yarn store).

I saw the sign for the store, and I was drawn like a lamp to a flame (me and several other women with their husbands/significant others who were there to see the show). They (and this includes Yours Truly) would walk into the store; their jaw would drop and the face would light up with Possibilities. Yarn! Lovely Yarn! My God(dess), What Can I Make Out of All This YARN?! They looked like they discovered that Santa Claus was real, that fairies do dance in the moonlight, and that they had won Publishers’ Clearinghouse and Ed McMahon was in their driveway. This would be the knitters. The gentlemen who accompanied them would sigh, shake their heads despondently, and look at the floor.

If you’re a knitter, I double dog dare you to click on that photo of the yarn and not squeal. I just about squealed, and I DON’T SQUEAL. Much.

I’m thinking the Mistake Rib Scarf from WendyKnits. That’s the same web site that has the pattern for the infamous Kitty Pi (the cat bed I will eventually get around to making once I learn how to deal with knitting on two circular needles). Plans, plans, plans.

I don’t think I’m entertaining enough on my own, so I like to use other peoples’ words — a lot. I found the following in the latest issue of The Sun Magazine (January 2007):

Why do you only hear bad news about LSD? It’s always the same story about some idiot who thought he could fly, so he jumped out a fifty-story window. Why don’t we ever hear this news story? “Today a young man took LSD and realized that ego is an illusion and that we are all part of the universe experiencing itself subjectively; that death is just another journey; and love is the only reality. And now, here’s sports.” — Bill Hicks

I have absolutely fallen in love with The Sun, and will probably keep a subscription for as long as I live, or as long as it lives (I certainly hope it outlives me). Their “Readers Write” feature has an upcoming topic — “Airports” — that I want to write about, mainly my recurring dream/nightmare of trying to catch a plane and never making it, or getting caught up in absurd delays. I don’t know of anyone else who has recurring airport dreams.

Oh, and as long as I’m here, rambling aimlessly, let’s have a gratuitous cat picture. Sorry it’s so blurry. A Certain Someone was sitting on my dominant hand. He really isn’t that fat; he’s just sort of in Amoeba-Cat mode where he splooches out all over whatever horizontal surface upon which he, um, splooches. Note that HE is the one with the expression of long-suffering tolerance. “(Sigh) When will the Stupid Human Girl pay attention to my Glorious Cat-ness? Hey, I’m being CUTE here, Human!”

I’ve shown you the 17-inch rubber vulture (Edgar), but I now have over 2 feet of disturbingly realistic foam rubber rodent! His name (currently — it might change in the future) is Charles Dexter Rat (from HPL’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward). He’s atop the computer case at the moment.

We got a whole bunch of Archie McPhee toys today, and the rat was just one of the goodies. Another was the Oscar Wilde Action Figure (chipmunk sold separately — at Target):

Lots of excellent Wilde quotes on the back of the package:

I’m not young enough to know everything.

Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

I do believe that Oscar needs to come out of the package and be photographed in various action shots with my Sigmund Freud action figure, and perhaps the glow-in-the-dark, squeaky octopus.

And some people fritter their lives away watching television.