etc.

I spent most of last night cleaning up about 50 MBs of photographs from my SD cards and computer. This many made it to the website.

I’ll be damned if I can explain it, but recently I’ve been getting a lot of mail from strangers asking stock FAQ questions, and because I am a pretty good email correspondent, I’ve answered most of them. During a routine email purge (last night was particularly purgative), while I cleared out all of my responses it became clear to me that most of my answers were the same, regardless of the question, and with only a limited number of wacky variants. So, the net result is this game. Match the FAQ with the correct A, send me your best guesses and I’ll mail you something nice.

FAQ
1. Are you that same Amanda…?
2. Can I use your CSS?
3. Should I go to library school?
4. I think I want to be a librarian. Should I?
5. Why did you change that image?
6. I’ve linked to your site. Will you link to mine?
7. Didn’t I see you at x library?
8. Why redesign?
9. I live in Toronto too, wanna go out some time?

A
1. Because it makes me feel all minty-fresh.
2. Probably not.
3. You were stealing my bandwidth.
4. We’ve only just met, but OK.
5. Not really, no.
6. Probably, yes.
7. Not likely.
8. Most likely, yes.
9. Sure. Yes, you should.

The big concert is today. I won’t be going near it.

First off, the Colin Farrell/Hollywood love affair baffles me. Furthermore, I continue to be disappointed by Hollywood’s lameass taglines. To wit: “Trust. Betrayal. Deception.” it’s almost too much to bear. Farrell plays a promising CIA agent-in-training, recruited by Al Pacino’s character who has a history of scouting winners for the agency. The training is brutal, there is a requisite romantic tryst and bizarre mind games, and to cap it off, a very poor ending. Trust, Betrayal, Deception, indeed.

Sometimes I wish I had the kind of life where I could noodle around with house projects, make art, and read all day. Not necessarily in that order, not necessarily in any order. I love my job, I enjoy most of the work-related tasks I do (most I say, because there’s always the occasional inane trifle that should be accounted for), but it’s a job all the same and it means I can’t be home working on house projects, making art, and reading.

Which furthermore means that yesterday must have been a good day because I did all three of these things, and all after a day’s work. In house projects, we picked up the stainless steel shelf we catalogue ordered for the pantry, assembled it, organised all the dry goods on it, and stood back to marvel at our work. In making art, I worked on the canvas I’m painting for the dining area, something I estimated would take me a few hours, but which has in fact turned into at least three evenings worth of art-type activity. I’m thinking I can probably stretch that out for even longer, making me come to a very real appreciation of why art projects are never fully finished. And in reading, I devoured pages and pages of a Kalle Lasn book I’m in the middle of. That man can speak convincingly about everything that is good and right about social and political activism in 20 words or less. I would read his grocery list.

Don Foster is an English professor who also happens to practice forensic linguistics. This book deals with many of the cases he has worked on, or at least the ones he can talk about (the others, one of which is the JonBenet Ramsey investigation, he can’t divulge details on due to various privacy matters and/or gag orders). Foster is a neat guy, he begins by talking about how he came to be a detective of sorts, how he went from Vassar to Quantico, how his services started being demanded at trials, how he came to be one of the U.S. justice system’s leading expert witnesses. He seems pleased as punch about the whole thing, and he tells the smalltown-English-prof-hits-fame story in a really compelling way. Of course, the most interesting bits are the cases themselves and his very readable analysis about how a person’s spelling/misspelling, punctuation, grammar, language, and words can reveal as much about them as their own fingerprint or DNA. And since he’s worked on attributions for widely known and high-profile cases like the Unabomber Manifesto, Primary Colors, ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, and Shakespeare’s Funeral Elegy, all the yummy bits of insider scoop make this a really scrumptious read.

It all started with “we should have our parents over this weekend, it’s been a while”, uttered on Friday night. It turned out to be 11 people, all related to us (but not all to each other), beef, chicken, pork, salad, potatoes, all of it on the barbecue (except the salad), creative dining arrangements (dining table, card table, lawn chairs, ottoman pulled up to the card table), and the loss of hydro for an hour half way through the meal. It was nothing a creative placement of candles and many tea lights couldn’t fix and what the hell, it ended up being all kinds of ambient. Good people, I’m glad I know all 11 of them.

I’ve decided to hold a shoe toss, or “help me get rid of all these shoes I have no room to store anymore” event. I have shoes, many pairs of shoes, and I haven’t worn most of them in over 2 years. I’ve become that person who wears birkenstocks in the summer and 1 of 2 pairs of boots in the winter and I have no need for that pair of red slides, nor did I ever probably. And while our new living situation is physically larger than our old one, we no longer have a hall closet into which shoes can go to die. If you wear a size 7½-8 shoe, I’d be happy to trade you for a paperback or two.

We saw this one a couple of weeks ago and I really should takes notes because I tend to forget stuff if I don’t. If memory serves, this was fine. Ray Liotta plays an angry cop who is also a dirty cop and we’ve seen Liotta play angry so many times that we know to watch for him to explode sometime in the film. An ok good cop-bad cop movie.

Honey, what’s all this white stuff on my Big Mac?

I never knew that voice belonged to a real person, it just sounded so machine-like.

I can’t get enough of these 3mm photographs of Paris. I found the streets we stayed on, the street we saw the big pro-Palestine march on, the street(s) we got lost on. [kottke]