Month: January 2004

So some days I’m really, really, really slow…

I bought the new Living Colour album, ??Collideoscope??. In a welcome change from most new-albums-from-old-bands, I mostly like it, though it is an incredibly angry album–it _seeths_.

The first three tracks just flow into one another, and they are a relentless assault, but there’s a little oasis of calm on track #4, ??Flying??.

I’ve taken to putting it on and sort of vamping over it off and on for the last week–it’s a nice little chord progression, plenty of open space, I get to pretend I’m Vernon Reid, etc.

I just now figured out that it is about 9/11. More specifically, it’s about the people who jumped out of the buildings, to their certain death, to escape the fire.

I am in awe.

No, really, I don’t get out much

I had never heard of “GoogleBombing”:http://www.blah3.com/graymatter/archives/00000654.html before. But it seems like an amusing pasttime, and as Ted at Crooked Timber “said”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001111.html, well, “Ninja”:http://www.joe2004.com/site/PageServer.

I have a book

…the title of which is ??Queen Elizabeth I??. Originally published in 1934, the frontspiece–at least, that’s what I think it is, I don’t pretend to be excessively familiar with book anatomy–has the note:

bq. A new hardcover edition appeared in Britain in 1952 when the title was changed to _Queen Elizabeth I_

This is, of course, because 1952 was when QE II assumed the throne.

It turns out (and this has been an awfully long setup for what it probably going to be a somewhat disappointing link) they needn’t have bothered since “neither of them should ever have been queen”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3368731.stm.

Ah, royalty.

Surely, we have not fallen this far

“Daily Kos”:http://dailykos.com/ has a link to “a Washington Times story”:http://washingtontimes.com/national/20040105-103754-1355r.htm claiming that the Club For Growth–you know, those jokers who think that the answer to every problem is tax cuts–has prepared an anti-Dean ad described as:

bq. In the ad, a farmer says he thinks that “Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading …” before the farmer’s wife then finishes the sentence: “… Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.”

Ken MacLeod on Beagle 2

bq. The apparent loss of Beagle 2 doesn’t mean the end of British attempts to reach Mars. The Brits, after all, owe it to themselves to make the chaps with the heat-rays and tentacles sorry they ever heard of Woking.

Thank God that’s over

It’s been quite a year. Let’s hope 2004 comes out better in all sorts of ways. Yoga class this morning started it off pretty well, but then I watched ??Identity?? and discovered some reference to it I’d run across wasn’t joking when it said words to the effect of, “Remember that scene in ??Adaptation?? where Donald Kaufman is talking about the chase scene in his movie, and the killer, the cop and the victim are all personalities of the same person–this is that movie.”