The Vines


У вокалиста этой группы редкое психическое расстройство синдром Аспергера, с которым и связано его неадекватное поведение.

So, decided that I needed another hefty computer science tome, this time Volume B of the Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science. Looked on Amazon.com, and found a copy in Marketplace for the very reasonable price of $35. Ordered, paid, etc.

Got a mail from the seller saying "Amazon-mandated shipping rates too low, shipping will cost more than I get from the sale, looking for cheaper options. I no longer need the book - just want someone else to have it".

Replied, pointing out that USPS Priority International costs less than his cut (the book weighs 2.5kg).

He refunded my money with a rather patronising explanation of the breakdown of his proceeds.

Pointed out that he should consider pricing his books in such a way that he doesn't lose money, and that if he doesn't want to sell internationally, he should make that clear.

He replied, asking "I wonder who you think you are".

Suggested that I was apparently someone who was under the mistaken impression that they'd just entered into a contractual agreement with a good faith seller...

We're off to Seattle for Emerald City.

Title: promising light
Pairings/Characters: Phil/Claire; Cameron/Mitchell; Ensemble
Word Count: 1,919
Rating: G
Summary: A follow-up to “Truth Be Told.” Of lackluster Hugh Grant movies, scary psycho devil women, siblingly vengeance, prospective turtle names, and good mornings (at long last).
Author's Note: What's this?? I know! Something written! By me! It is some manner of miracle, you guys. Which makes sense, in a way, because this show is miraculously joyful. This is kinda the only thing I've written all week, when I am supposed to be writing stuff like ... my thesis, but I am pretty sure this brought me considerably more joy. So there! JUSTIFIED.

(Yeah, I'm doomed.)

( 'Wow,' Claire says when they come out of the movie theater, 'Music & Lyrics was better than that.' )

surprise location tomorrow. don't really know.

hurt locker last night. some flatbread w taylor and myesha tonight. and my guilty pleasure.

work. paint. eat. sleep.

night soldier.

We're finishing up a few odds and ends before our next major release. Our mighty Ops guys continue to slay spambots and balance load times on a highwire without a safety net (which is kind of tough dressed in full ninja gear). Down on solid ground, we're celebrating this week's virtual birthday party with a warm toast to pants. If you can rearrange the letters of your favorite city, state, and/or country (feel free to combine these elements) to spell one of Frank's favorite treats (e.g., pants, wire, paper, etc.), he'll send you over a can of whipped cream to top it all off (provided you return the empty can for his midnight snack)! And, with that, let the word scrambling commence!

Stuff you should know:

We're still working on the delayed/missing notifications issue. Sorry, we're frustrated too. We'll keep you posted. Last week, we became aware that a recently-implemented script was overwriting affiliate referral fees for some of our users. Once we confirmed this, our Ops team quickly removed the script. Please be aware that, while we may beta-test other affiliate scripts down the line, we will take greater measures to ensure that no existing user-referral arrangements are impacted in any way. While we plan to stick to a weekly news schedule, if we have a release in between regular newsletters, we'll post here to keep you informed. You can also check lj_releases for current release information.

To our paid users, we send squirrels in love!

If you have a paid or permanent account, you can send five free Squirrels in love vgifts through Monday, March 15th at 4pm, PST! You'll see both the free and the $0.99 squirrels displayed until they've scurried off to their new homes. Please send only one vgift at a time. In other words, you'll need to complete check-out and start a new order for each vgift you send. If you're not receiving vgifts (from friends and/or Frank), you may have disabled them. To enable vgifts, visit Edit profile (under Profile), scroll down to the bottom of the page, and select 'Do not disable' from the drop-down menu. Have fun!

Help is on the way!

We're pleased to announce the winner of our first charitable vgift poll, Doctors without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières, which provides critical medical care to under-served populations around the world. Priced at $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of the proceeds we raise from the sale of this vgift (we'll cover credit card fees). We invite you to start recommending nonprofits for our next fundraising drive at ljnewscontests. We'll take suggestions through the month and post a poll in the news during the first week of April to let you choose the recipient. We thank you, again, for your passion and generosity.

We've crowned a header

Congratulations to ohterlus for submitting the winning header, which will go live next week and keep us leafy through mid-April! You can submit designs for our next header contest at ljnewscontests now until March 31st. We'll post a poll in the news to let you decide which header will sit at the top of LiveJournal from mid-April to mid-May. All artistic interpretations are welcome. The winner will get a $25 LiveJournal gift certificate. All other contributors will receive $5 gift certificates. Our heartfelt appreciation for sharing your talent and creativity!

For this week's winning photo and more adventures with Frank & Meme, we'll catch you under the cut!

( Read more... )

Psychotic dreams about death, aging, and mortality. I choose to blame the roast pork and brandied apples from the buffet after fighter practice...

all that remains

i first met the dog within days of its death. maybe within minutes. i wasn't even sure it was dead. it looked like it had just lain down and gone to sleep. i stood looking at it for ages, that first time, seeing if it was breathing, watching real close for signs of movement, any sort of movement. after a while, and my two dogs not paying any attention to it whatsoever, i determined it was dead. big, pretty, sheepdog-looking. laying down there, off the road, about ten or fifteen feet from the creek. it had a collar on, i could see, an orange hunting collar. but no radio transmitter, like hunting dogs have. my dogs and i walked on, me sad at the pretty dog laying there dead. more so because it was such a big, pretty dog. all animals make me feel sad when they die, human and non-human; they're not getting to see ~all this~ anymore, so i'm sad for them. but some make me sadder than others, and this big pretty dog, laying there unclaimed made me sadder. my son said, "we should bury it" but i said no. let's just leave it there to return to the earth. i figured it would start being nibbled at pretty quick. a dead deer a little further down the road was completely gone within two days, its dead body being eaten by many a passer-by. but the dog didn't get nibbled at, not obviously, anyway. it just lay there, near the creek, as if asleep, and the snow fell and melted and fell and melted, and gradually the dog started to decay, and the kids and i watched. at some point, something inside of me got the better of me and i climbed down there to see if there was a tag of any kind; any human family sitting wondering where their friend had got to. but there wasn't. just an orange collar and a chewed-through foot of string attached to it. i went to get my camera when the dogs face started to become hair and bone and teeth, a startling and amazingly beautiful image, but that was the day my camera broke, so the dog went unphotographed. still its body, just laying there, unclaimed, saddened me, but i can't quite figure out why. death is natural, it's all around us. obviously, for sanitation purposes, we can't leave large corpses just laying around everywhere, but this wasn't that kind of situation. why was the dead dog any more different laying there decaying to any bird, or possum, or groundhog? why would a dead human, laying there unclaimed, be any different?
i went away for a few weeks. the snow fell and fell and melted, and i got a new (old) camera. i came back, the snow all gone, and took my camera down to see the dog. but it was gone. all that remained were a few white and black hairs. even the collar and rope are gone. was the dog claimed, taken away to be buried somewhere? finally eaten? did its bones and collar wash into the creek and away?
"the dog's gone back to earth" my daughter explained. yes, it surely has.
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=31147727&l=377415ef77&id=1148433378

Whew. Another week of Idol.

I've gotten further in the competition this year than last, but only by the number of weeks. There's still a bajillion entrants left and it's just CRAZY.

Anyway, if you liked my entry for this week's topic, got a kick for a dog, please head on over here and throw me a vote.

As usual, check out the other good stuff there - there's tons of it!

Four is much easier than three so far. Orlaith has been taking great delight in telling every one she sees ( complete strangers included) that she is FOUR now. She knows she's a Big Girl (although she also takes great delight in being wrapped up in a towel and carried like Baby Orlaith, after her bath.)
The best thing about four so far is that the morning screaming and tantrum fits seem to have finally eased away. The first couple of months of this year were hideous. She didn't want to go to preschool, she wouldn't get dressed, she would spend half an hour to an hour every morning crying and telling me that she hated me, hated her shoes and socks, hated preschool, hated everything. She'd carry on like this all the way down the road, howling and screaming and kicking, and then we'd get to preschool and she'd suddenly snap out of it and be fine.

But the last two weeks, she's been utterly angelic. Easy about getting dressed, happy to have breakfast, put on her shoes and coat and, most delightful of all, she's been riding her bicycle! She looks so grown up, pedalling away down the pavement in front of me. She's so proud of that bicycle, of her helmet and her big honker horn. She chose all of it herself, which I think adds to her pride, and she just looks so puffed up and pleased with herself when we arrive at our destination and she knows she got there largely under her own steam.
Of course, not everyone is so delighted with Orlaith's bicycle riding activities. The Coconut resents it completely. Mostly because she desires Orlaith's bike for herself and she can't have it because her legs are too short!
Every morning we have the same miserable routine of Orlaith scooting off on her bicycle followed by angry wails from Esme of "Emmo by-kell" (Esme's bicycle). She howls the whole way down the road. I gave in the other day and made Orlaith walk while we pushed Esme on her trike. She chanted and chattered happily the whole way there and back, swinging her legs enthusiastically and occasionally swivelling the handlebars.

Poor old Esme, Orlaith abandoned her the other day on her birthday for the first time ever. She had two of her wee friends, Max and Zachary, around for cake and tea. So the big kids disappeared off up to Orlaith's bedroom where they stripped all theblanekts off her bed and hid under them on the rug, and poor old Esme was left, bereft, at the bottom of the stair case. She clung to the bars and howled "WHY? WHHHHYYYYYYYY?" with tears running down her cheeks. She was so sad.

It's weird, also, the last two weeks it's like someone's flipped a switch in Esme's head and all of a sudden she's talking in sentences. Short sentences, not always intelligible or making the most sense, but the attempt to sandwich words together is there. A lot of it is mimicry. She loves to say "Right NOW!" to her toys or to me, copying my tone of voice. She says "Wait there" and "That way". She likes to name all the parts of the body. Every time we read a book featuring an animal (especially cats and bears) she has to point out "Eyes" "toe" "poo" (for the animal's bottom.)  If we go up to the bathroom or the kitchen she now says "I tum" or "me too".

They;re both obsessed with animals at the moment, cats, dogs, mice. They desperately want a pet, but we can't get one until we've figured out about other siblings and so forth. We went round to Max's house after preschool the other day and he has a pet cat. Esme followed the bloody thing all over the house, until it figured out that she's too big to fit through the catflap. So then it went out and sat itself on the path just outside the backdoor and she wailed and wailed for about half an hour, trying to call it back in, trying to figure out how she could get at it, totally inconsolable that the "tat" didn't want to be petted by her. Poor baby.

They both now have toy friends. Esme has Batby and Bibby ( a MakkaPakka doll and a teddy bear respectively) and Orlaith has recently adopted a small zebra toy that someone sent for Esme. She has named him Noopy. I suspect Noopy will remain in her affections for a few months and then be abandoned to his fate in the Graveyard of Unloved Toys. Poor thing.

Um, what else? Oh, Orlaith is carrying on her tradition of using large words in slightly inappropriate fashion. We caught her telling Esme that she had "puny little hands and puny little fingers" the other day. She likes to say that she feels jealous of things, when what she means is that something makes her cross. "Don't do that, I am jealous of it, Mumma".  She's learned all the words to all the songs from Bagpuss and will regale you with them on request. You're not allowed to join in though unless she specifically invites you to. I get told off with a "Mumma, I have to sing that bit, it's  my turn." 

Right, well I've about exhausted everything I've got to say at the moment. I'm knackered after taking them into London today. We had a fabulous day though, ended up at Hamleys, which is an amazing toy shop. They had fun playing with all kinds of stuff, including having a ride on soem rocking horses. I was really proud of them because they weren't trying to grab everything off the shelves and when I asked them to come with me to look at other things or when I said it was time to go, there were no tantrums, they just came along nicely. 

Anyway, that's enough blethering, I am going to bed.

I went to see Alice in Wonderland earlier. I've posted my thoughts under the cut just in case you haven't seen it yet.
I really really dislike the Avril Lavigne song on the soundtrack. I want to like it but it just makes me want to hit my hand with a hammer repeatedly.

( Here be spoilers... )

Today:

4 people told me I looked pretty
3 people asked if I'd lost weight
6 people said my shoes were nice
2 people said my dress was lovely

It has been a Good Day.

The air is frigidly cold. It whips around her pudgy face, snapping lengths of hair into her eyes. It is much colder than it should be for the first week of March, the first week of her thirty-first year, and this does not please her much. She closes her eyes and desperately wishes for summer.

Her hands would be warmer if they were tucked into the pockets of her hoodie, she supposes, but this does not encourage her to put her menthol cigarette out any sooner. It dangles from her fingertips, smoke blowing frantically away in the wind. Every once in awhile the smoke makes its way to her face, slipping quietly behind the lenses of her glasses and causes her eyes to water. To the untrained eye, she appears to be crying. Maybe she is, she figures. Maybe this is the Pall Mall company telling her that she needs to let it out a little.

She'd also be much warmer, she knows, if she were inside the apartment instead of outside on the balcony with her cigarettes. Again, she shrugs this thought away. She is partaking in what has become her nightly ritual: cigarette, hoodie, slippers, headphones. While her family sleeps in the bedrooms behind her, she huddles into the cotton for warmth and turns up the earbuds as loud as they will go.

The selection of music is endless, but the playlist relies heavily on her mood. Once a key song for the evening is chosen, it is often played on repeat until her soul is saturated with it. Some nights, it is beat-laden dance music with mindless lyrics. Other nights it is hard rock, complete with screams. Tonight, though, as it has been the last few nights, she is fixated on one song.

Her headphones, expensive and exquisite as they are, are beginning to fail. She likes her music too loud, apparently, and there is an odd screech coming from the left earbud when the singer's voice gets louder. She still likes the way the headphones make the music feel, though, as though each note were being piped directly into her brain. It helps placate her mood; it helps her remember to forget and to forget to remember.

i know a cat named easter
he says will you ever learn
you're just an empty cage girl
if you kill the bird

She's been feeling like the empty cage for too long and just like the wind that is snapping her hair into her eyes, she feels something shifting and changing and moving quickly around her. That's why she comes out here, to the cold of the urban night. She comes out here to lose herself in the music and to hold on something comfortable and reliable.

After a half hour or so, she presses down on the track wheel of her iPod and the music stop abruptly in her ears. Sliding the door open, it sticks in the track like always. She struggles to get it open, then closed behind her. She pulls the headphones from her ears and drops the music player on top of the clean laundry that has taken over her mother's old recliner. Scanning the living room, observing the quiet house, she puts her hands on her hips.

She closes her eyes.

She exhales deeply.

She is always waiting.