柯林斯傑克

Freak Day XX tomorrow!!! This will be my 17th or 18th (I can't for the life of me remember if I went in '92). I'm not planning on getting there before the gates open because they tore down my favorite coaster last year, so there's really no need to rush.

(Am I the only one who notices the mathematical error on the flyer?)

You know, I haven't been in the South Capitol St./Navy Yard area since they...did what they did to it, and I found the experience rather disconcerting. My navigational sense knew where I was, but none of it was right. Eerie. And kind of a shame. There is a place in the world for seedy neighborhoods; I'd hate to see them all turned into stadiums and high-rise condos.

Y'know, I was considering driving up for Nuclearfest at Art-o-Matic tomorrow afternoon, but it suddenly occurred to me that there is a baseball game tomorrow, meaning that parking will be impossible. I suppose I can park somewhere farther out and take the Metro. @#*%! sports...

My hamster just figured out how to unscrew the top off of one of her compartments. Good thing I never leave the house or I wouldn't have heard it.

The British Library offers a service which not only provides free access to PDFs of dissertations from British universities, moreover, if the dissertation isn't available in PDF format, they will scan it and email it to you FOR FREE! Turnaround is 30 days, but that's not bad for FREE.

More proof that the original Land of the Lost was way ahead of its time:

Years before Klingon appeared as a full-fledged language of its own in the 1980s in the Star Trek films and on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Land of the Lost hired a UCLA linguist to invent a complete language for [Cha-Ka] and his fellow Pakuni.

OK, I've been holed up with this cold way too long and I want to DO something this weekend. So what is there to do this weekend?

(And yes, Spellbound is already on the list...)

My LCD TV/monitor developed an annoying problem about a year and a half ago. Intermittently (the most hated word in tech support) it would start zipping through the on-screen menus as if someone was pushing the MENU button over and over. Initially, I thought something was sitting on the remote, but eventually it was clear it was something wrong with the monitor.

It's out of warranty, and it's actually the third one I've had because I replaced it twice when it WAS in warranty. (Lessons: ViewSonic's customer service sucks, and never buy a big-screen without an on-site service plan.) Anyway, it was annoying, but not critical. I looked into replacing it or paying to have it serviced, but being an impoverished student, I promised myself that I wouldn't spend any money on it unless it started doing it all the time.

Then it stopped. I don't remember when, but probably about 6 months ago. It took me a while to realize it was gone. Good thing I didn't waste money on it, I thought.

Then it started again, right at the end of the semester, which was particularly annoying when I was trying to type. But it was still intermittent. I tried...percussive maintenance and wiggling the buttons (you don't want to know how many stuck CTRL or ALT keys I've seen in my line...) but couldn't make it stop. The frequency increased until yesterday, it was almost constant.

Then I noticed that if I held down the ENTER button on the set, the menu turns off.

One piece of duck tape later: problem solved.

(This solution isn't perfect; the set won't go into power-save mode with the ENTER button down, so I have to remember to shut it off manually, but that's probably a good thing anyway, both energy-wise and because I'm less likely to watch TV if I have to get up to turn it on.)

A repo man is always intense...

VegeUSA Citrus Sparerib Cutlets are the most meat-like fake-meat I've ever tasted, so much so that I had to double-check and make sure it wasn't the wrong package. They're even vegan.

Should I schlep up* to Baltimore tonight to see Gogol Bordello? I'll be visiting my mom today, so I'll be halfway there.

ETA: I'm going.

____
* That is the technical verb for going to Baltimore in the same way going to Israel is always "going up" (עלייה).

W.
T.
F?

A new incarnation of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" could be coming to the big screen.

"Buffy" creator Joss Whedon isn't involved and it's not set up at a studio, but Roy Lee and Doug Davison of Vertigo Entertainment are working with original movie director Fran Rubel Kuzui and her husband, Kaz Kuzui, on what is being labeled a remake or relaunch, but not a sequel or prequel.

Am I the only one who finds "Tamil Tigers" entirely too precious a name to take seriously?

ETA: "only"

Yeah, that works. There isn't even a need to remind continuity-obsessed losers that it's just a show and they should really just relax, because, well, it WORKS.

You are more likely to die from regular flu than from swine flu. So just relax, people.

I was just making a late-night grocery run, and I noticed an unusually-large number of dazed hippie-ish folk wandering the aisles looking for snacks (one of whom was too stoned to punch in his PIN at the u-Scan). Must be a Dead show in town, I thought.

Yep.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iFAIOIDnSsgrsaXKgoEH9kaWAmlwD97HAGUO1

There has been a good amount of noise today about Amazon.com's policy of removing "adult" materials from its sales rankings, a policy which appears to have been targeted at books with any sort of LGBT content.

So I figured I'd plug a few of my favorite authors in, and I'm fucking outraged.

Among the unranked is Daniel Boyarin's Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man.

Mind you, this is by one of the leading Talmud scholars on earth. There is nothing remotely sexually explicit in this, although it does attempt (in part) to argue against homophobia in traditional Judaism.

Also unranked:

Daniel Boyarin, et al., Queer Theory and the Jewish Question

Boyarin's other books are not unranked, but quite a few books related to Queer theology are. There are RELIGIOUS books, people, not porn or erotica.