Fans Finding Fans

"We're trying to sell peace, like a product, you know, and sell it like people sell soap or soft drinks. And it's the only way to get people aware that peace is possible, and it isn't just inevitable to have violence. Not just war -- all forms of violence." -- John Lennon (b. 1940-10-09, d. 1980-12-08), 1969-06-14 [via Wikiquote]

I should probably let folks know how I'm doing health-wise. I've felt mostly over that flu for a few days, little coughs occasionally but not having extended coughing fits any more ... until I started watching Robin Williams on Charlie Rose and laughing triggered more coughing. (Hmm. A test of respiratory function: being able to watch Robin Williams going off on a riff and still breathe okay.) Big problem now is fatigue and still feeling weak. And incredibly achy. %wince% Gradually getting there. Still haven't left the house to go shopping in a while, and lifting a pot of water to boil pasta feels like a strain, but realinterrobang says I'm sounding much more alert and sharp on the phone than I was a week ago or the week before that -- and I feel more awake now, up until the point where I go, "oops, crashing now," and pull the covers over my head again.

But apparently not as alert as I'd like -- I think I'd better stay away from moderated LJ communities until I've caught up on my sleep-deficit enough not to do something stupid.

A little worried about pain and lack of flexibility in my hands -- especially the last three fingers of my right hand being really clumsy -- because that's been going on for at least four days straight, but maybe that'll clear up as I get my strength back everywhere.

A little more worried about Perrine, who has gotten incredibly picky about food. She's not acting frail, and she's drinking plenty of water, but I haven't seen her eat anything lately except a couple of Pounce treats (if I puff the bag in her face first to give her a snootful of the smell), and a little milk. (She usually won't drink more than about a tablespoon of milk at a time, which doesn't seem to be enough to be a problem, but now she's asking for more. And I don't want to give her more at a time, lest it upset her digestion (and I'm nearly out of it anyhow). She was having trouble jumping up onto counters for a while (before she mostly stopped eating), but she seems to have gotten her strength back, so she must be getting calories from somewhere, right?

"When you take the human rights of a minority, who suffer widespread prejudice and discrimination, and put it to a popular vote, it should come as entirely no surprise that the the very people they need protecting from vote to take away that protection.

"Don't determine the human rights of minorities by popular vote. That isn't democracy, that's mob rule."

-- auntysarah, 2009-11-04

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-03-08:

"My first visual impression of Mick was that he was all ears and lips, and oh so skinny. Funnily, over the years his ears seem to have shrunk to normal proportions, and the lips, while still notoriously gigantic, have deflated from dirigible size to the more accessible thickness of a pair of meaty kielbasas." -- Long John Baldry, blues musician, in a 1989 essay, recalling his first meeting with Mick Jagger in 1962. Quoted in It Ain't Easy: Long John Baldry and the Birth of the British Blues by Paul Myers.

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)

When the weather forecast calls for only one to three inches of snow, the question I really want them to answer for me is: will it take long enough to melt that I need to take my pain meds and go clear the sidewalk, or will it melt quickly enough that I can ignore it in good conscience and save the pills for another day?

Today the answer was easy: when I looked outside, the sidewalk was wet, not white (snow stuck to parked cars but not to pavement), and it looks like the Winter Weather Event (aka French toast emergency) is nearly over, so I may want to sprinkle some salt now that the sun has gone down, but I don't need to sweep or shovel anything, so I'll probably get away with just ibuprofen.

My computer crashed last night, so I reloaded a bunch of browser tabs I'd had open before the crash. On one LiveJournal entry, when I went to that tab for the first time after the reload, a Best Buy ad showed up blocking my view of 95% of the window (with the rest greyed out), a jingle started playing, and the "close this and continue" button had a message saying I could only close it after it had played at least four seconds.

I was logged in already at the time.

A banner ad here, a margin ad there, I can skip over even if they do annoy me when I notice them. This trend of popping up ads that block my view of the content of the page is something I've been meaning to rant about (it gives me the message, "we really don't want you to read what's on this page," or possibly, "our webmaster fucked up").

Showing ads to other people, on my content, without paying me for doing so, was the reason I stopped posting complete entries on LJ and started posting fake-cut-tags linking to whole entries elsewhere (mostly Dreamwidth, also InsaneJournal and others). Paying LJ not to show my ads to my readers would've been an option if the reason I'd reverted to a free account in the first place hadn't been in protest of other policies I wanted to see changed before I gave them more money. This most recent tactic, if it persists, may finally be enough to chase me away from reading LJ (and reinforces my opinion that taking my content elsewhere was wiser than subjecting my readers to ads LJ serves). Seeing a banner ad before the comments when reading an entry by a user with a 'Plus' account is one thing. Stopping me from even seeing the entry until I've turned off my speakers and waited four seconds (at least in the browser I'm using at the moment, the clock starts ticking when I make that tab current, not as soon as the page finishes loading in the background) goes too far. I realize that the whole point is that banner ads are too easy to ignore, but here's the thing: if you make the ad foreground instead of background, its effectiveness goes from not-as-positive-as-you'd-like, to negative, or at best zero: you don't get me to pay more attention, you convince me to go read something else.

And yes, this ad did piss me off enough to warrant taking the time to write five paragraphs about it and to make an exception to my links-on-LJ-text-goes-elsewhere policy because I want to make sure my friends who only bother to lick those links when they look especially interesting (there must be a few, at least) see this too. But the basic idea is quite simple regardless of temper: make it sufficiently annoying or inconvenient to read, and I'll find something else to read instead. It's a big web; I'll find something else to read.

Read this / comment on it at dreamwidth insanejournal crazylife journalfen livejournal scribbld

"It's not widely publicized by the U.S. Agriculture Department, but marijuana is America's largest cash crop--topping the value of corn and wheat combined. A 2005 analysis by Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron found that legalization would generate $7.7 billion a year in enforcement savings for local, state, and federal taxpayers, while producing annual tax revenues of $6.2 billion." -- Jim Hightower, 2009-11-23 [thanks to Penguirl for linking to it.]

(That the next available spot in the quotes-queue when I added this was also the anniversary of the repeal of the 18th Amendment (Prohibition), was a lucky accident.)

To reporters asking for an opion regarding Tiger Woods' recent accident: "Nope. He got in a car accident. What the f---? You guys are the news. You're supposed to report the news. A guy crashed his car. You're making up s---. So are you reporting the news or are you making the news?" -- Chris Rock, 2009-11-30 [ thanks to silmaril and vvalkyri for linking to it]

"Within days of PGA golfer Tiger Woods crashing his car, the press has hounded him into disclosing in so many words that he's had some sort of affair.

"Now imagine if the press (generally) pursued with the same vigor and tenacity stories that actually serve the public interest and have value for a democratic society. For instance, consider how sad a reflection it is that the personal life of a professional golfer is bigger news than the CIA destroying evidence of illegal activity (i.e. abusive and/or torturous interrogation) and lying to a court about it."

-- Hume's Ghost, 2009-12-02

"Vaccines are victims of their own success. We have no rows and rows of iron lungs or paralyzed children to remind us how important they are, because they worked so well." -- Chuck Morrison, 2009-11-17 [thanks to realinterrobang for quoting it earlier]

"I worry about you
 dangling off the edge of my pen
 always hiding behind my commas
 and question marks
 whispering what-if's and if-only's
 in my ear"
  -- first stanza of "Incubus" by ladyteal

"The report triggered two immediate and inevitable responses. Doctors and patients began an animated discussion. And Republicans declared it was all a Democratic plot.

"'I mean, let the rationing begin. This is what happens when bureaucrats make your health care decisions,' said Representative David Camp, the ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee.

"Representative Camp is definitely on to something. Whatever happens, we do not want the government conducting any studies on whether current health practices actually do any good. Let this continue and soon you will not be able to get your hands on a good leech when you need one."

-- Gail Collins, 2009-11-19 (copied from an excerpt at DKos because the NY Times site is a PITA)

"Why is it we have finite resources for health care but unlimited money for war?" -- US Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), 2009-11-06

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-04-30:

"The reason why dirty books remain in the shadows is very simple: the book trade is not comfortable with masturbation. Books in which children are abused, women murdered and men brutalised crowd the shelves of WH Smith. Books in which consenting adults enjoy each other for the healthy entertainment of literate wankers do not." -- Rupert Smith

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/dirty-sexy-money-the-writer-rupert-smith-on-his-lucrative-pornlit-sideline-801572.html]

(submitted to the mailing list by Trevor Goodyear)

I am feeling extremely whiny, near trantrum-ish, definitely ready to sulk, today. ( But you probably don't need to hear me whine as much as I need to get it off my chest )

I hate missing out on the fun of performing -- and in front of a bunch of friends, at that. I hate feeling like I've let my bandmates down. I hate feeling like I've let the audience down. (Oh, the band can get by without me and put on a good show, but having any of us absent diminishes the effect, and this was already a less-than-the-full-band gig.) All of that is a bigger deal, emotionally, than the physical pain and illness that are keeping me home. I thought I could cover those feelings with enough reminders that illness is illness and there's just not much I can do differently right now, but it's not working. I'm frustrated and miserable and want to scream at the universe that it''s all JUST NOT FAIR and I deserve a do-over because I'm special and realities like illness aren't allowed to take away my Darkover weekend.

I'm not especially worried about the Regency ball because I have a pretty good idea who'll be there for it, and that bunch doesn't need much leading -- I get the word out and get sheet music to people, and when the dance starts I usually mostly just blend into the rythm section -- so as long as enough people brought last year's music with them, that should go okay. I still feel like I really ought to be there though.

I had a lot of 'maybe's for the Playford dance -- somebody please tell me that enough musicians showed up for that and it went smoothly?

Dvorak: "I'll keep an eye on things here."

Qwerty: "Unless you get distracted by a new idea or something shiny."

Dvorak: New ideas are shiny. That's why they're so hard to resist."

-- from Freefall by Mark Stanley, 2007-01-03

How brown do you let tomato catsup turn before you start to worry about safety rather than just aesthetics? (I'm thinking about those leftover fast-food catsup packets that I occasionally pull out of my fridge, never being sure what colour I'll find inside until I open one.)

I specify tomato catsup because the only other kind of catsup I have any experience with is mushroom, and the mushroom catsup was already brown when I first saw it and I'm pretty sure it was supposed to be that colour. Which suggests a follow-up question: how many of you have eaten non-tomato catsups?

I had a thoroughly wretched day. Woke up coughing badly and spent the rest of the morning that way, then crashed again, woke up just before the HCB gig in the evening, still at home, un-showered, and in so much pain it hurt even to push the buttons on my phone. So, a missed performance, womdigious pain ... but one encouraging sign: no coughing from about 20:00 to 23:30! A little tickle now, but down in the "maybe I can squash this with albuterol and menthol" range. Now if I can convince my body to get back to sleep again in time to wake up early enough to throw instruments in the car and head up to Darkover for the Playford dance in the morning, maybe the next twenty hours won't such as much as the last forty.

Still not really sure about playing woodwinds -- will have to see just how well I'm breathing tomorrow -- but if other melody instruments make it, I can stick to guitar and bass.

If I'm not coughing in the morning then I'm probably also not contagious, right?

"Don't think of documentation as time taken away from developing a product; think of it as time spent figuring out what exactly you're developing. Documentation is as much part of the final product as anything else; without documentation, a product is inaccessible to users." -- Peter Seebach, 2004-02-10

The flu roller-coaster continues. After a somewhat promising Wednesday (I didn't feel well enough to go to rehearsal, but if the next day had been as much better than Wednesday as Wednesday had been better than Tuesday, Thanksgiving dinner might have been doable), my Thursday was rather worse. Coughing more often and more uncomfortably, sleepy, achy, and queasy. Didn't make it to family Thanksgiving in Montgomery County (where there'd be at least one person whom it would be Very Bad to infect with what I've had). Didn't even make it next door -- fell asleep around the time things were starting up there, and was probably coughing too much to reasonably go be around a bunch of other people. I was feeling rather out-of-it most of the day anyhow.

So today and Saturday remain uncertain. I'll have to see how I'm doing this afternoon. If nothing else, I'll need to get out to buy more cough syrup again.

I've found more cat vomit (last night, Perrine threw up on my camera -- eww -- this after I found a chunky puddle in the hallway and vomit over the side of the litter box; now I found dried mess on the stairs). Either she's got a tummy bug, or the different brand of cat food disagrees with her; not sure which. (She acted as though she liked this food, before she started throwing up.) Wondering how many more messes I haven't discovered yet. Bleah. (She hasn't sneezed since the day I posted about her having multiple sneezing fits, FWIW.)

I have set lists for the Playford and Regency dances at Darkover. The Regency music will be the same as the last few years; if there's a chance you'll be able to play for the Playford dance (11:00 Saturday morning), email me and I'll send you the PDF of this year's music. Likewise if you can do the Regency ball (5PM Saturday) and don't have last year's music handy.

I'm not sure I'll get a chance to print copies, so the more folks who can print the music and bring a copy, the better.

"My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?" -- Charles M. Schulz (b. 1922-11-26, d. 2000-02-12)

To those celebrating it today, Happy Thanksgiving!

"Rights are for all. When only some people have them, they're just privileges. And privileges can be taken away." -- quixote @ Shakesville, 2009-11-08 [ thanks to realinterrobangfor pointing it out]