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27-Nov-2008

That time of year

All the supermarkets are playing St.Nicholas songs instead of their usual muzak.

All the supermarkets appear to have the same tape sung by a very off-key children’s choir— no, they’re not very off-key, they’re subtly, annoyingly off-key, which is worse.

They’ve set all the songs to straight 4/4 time arrangements, even the ones that aren’t. That is even more annoying than the off-keyness: instead of this
[ETA: sheet music]

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24-Nov-2008

What the bleep?

A while ago I made custom 403, 404 and 410 pages for my web site, each with a background picture of the numbers in faint green. They worked when I put them up, but last week when I wanted to show one of the pages to someone (one never sees one’s own error pages, right?) the picture was gone. And from the other error pages too.

I didn’t remember having changed anything— not to those pages. Not to the relevant rules in the stylesheet either. I had changed some other stuff in the stylesheet, but poring over it with Kate’s excellent syntax highlighting would have uncovered the most elusive missing colon or curly bracket so it couldn’t very well have been that.

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Even the celebrities use it

What the celebrities use I wouldn’t know— the message, in triplicate, was spam and I threw all three of them away immediately. Probably a remedy for “ED dysfunction”. I never tire of pointing out that if a remedy for ED dysfunction works, it will leave you with functioning ED, and that’s probably not what people want to achieve. (Yes, I know that it’s probably a case for the Department of Redundancy Department, like Bengloarafurd Ford.)

But it did make me think. Celebrities don’t usually impress me, at least not the mere fact that someone is a celebrity. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of people in the Netherlands called “BN’ers”, Bekende Nederlanders (Well-Known Dutchpeople) who seem to be known only for being well-known: TV starlets, featherweight singers, footballers’ girlfriends, all of whom I can joyfully ignore because I don’t follow the media much.

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21-Nov-2008

Snow!

first snow

First snow, November 21, 2008

Yes, this is actual snow. The ground and most other surfaces were too wet and not cold enough for it stay, but it was real all right. It even did its snowy thing in the air, fluttering every which way instead of falling straight down heavily and wetly like prettied-up rain.

Some kids and I were the only people who enjoyed it (though I don’t enjoy the way it made it both wet and cold, triggering the mild arthritis in my fingers).

Five things meme

From Jay. It has only a minimal overlap (food/snacks) with the four things meme I posted in December 2007.

I’m being elaborate on a meme that seems to call for brevity, but I don’t care.

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14-Nov-2008

An adventure!

ETA: The free version of Switch is no such thing, but a 15-day trial version. They don’t tell you that. Please read the other post as well.

Someone sent me a .msv file to transcribe and edit. To start with, it wasn’t easy for them to send it— it took me hours of troubleshooting my KMail installation, and the mail server, and the spam handler, until I finally gave up and told them to send it to my gmail address. Only to find that in all probability they’d misunderstood Secunda on the phone and tried, three times, to send the file to my address with a letter missing. (The gmail message had the old message headers embedded in tiny letters, or I’d never have known.)

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13-Nov-2008

Theme: the human back

Wednesday evening, 20:00, about to serve pumpkin and coconut soup.

Phone: Ring, ring! It’s the art-class teacher. “Am I right that you were going to sit tonight?” Me: “Isn’t that tomorrow?” Him: “Yes, but tonight as well.” Well, it wasn’t on my schedule (we still don’t know which of us made the mistake) but it’s only five minutes away, so I grabbed a piece of bread, admonished the family to save me some soup, and wasn’t much more than half an hour late for the lesson.

Only five people there, most of them old acquaintances; a bit of chaos from the chaotic start, but that wasn’t at all unpleasant. Only, when I got home I was too tired for anything except sipping a glass of wine and reading Golden Ashes (a great find from the 25-cent bin of one of the local second-hand bookshops). Oh, and eating pumpkin and coconut soup, of course.

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09-Nov-2008

Dear dream engine,

I approve wholeheartedly of the technique to get instantaneously to any place by dreaming of it and waking up there. But it did land me in Copenhagen with no cash at all and only 50 euros in the bank (which, usefully, I could see on the screen of my mobile phone, green on black like an old Hercules monitor). And when I discovered that it could be done with a web page too, and demonstrated that to someone, I ended up outside Copenhagen on the site of a news item, in a field, without a computer or any other means to get back except my own feet. This made me arrive after midnight and miss the last train.

Fortunately, the nice woman at the post office let me have 1,50 euros to phone my mother (who, in waking reality, died ten years ago this month) in exchange for about a foot of sticky tape— I gave her the rest of the roll, too, because I had nothing to cut it with.

I could conceivably have taken a plane home —the post office had some on offer— but the 50 euros sort of precluded that. When looking at plane schedules and prices I realised that the man and woman behind the counter, who I had been conversing with in a mixture of their barely adequate English and my (realistically) very inadequate Danish, were actually speaking Dutch with one another; as were the various gaudily dressed fat middle-aged women in the street, obviously well-to-do tourists.

I did get back eventually— by waking up again.

08-Nov-2008

Clueless

I’ve heard the Resurrection Gospels so often that I practically know them by heart, but now Prima stands next to me on the choir platform and that seems to make me notice different things. Today: clueless disciples.

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04-Nov-2008

Age

If Barack Obama wins the election —which I sincerely hope— he will be the first president of the United States who is younger than I am. That’s truly a sign of advancing age: that it’s not only doctors and police(wo)men who are younger than oneself, but also presidents of the United States. And when Queen Beatrix retires, the king as well.

On the upside, he will be the first president of the United States I’m conscious of who isn’t an old white man. Though technically Bill Clinton wasn’t old either: almost a year younger than Obama when he was elected. (This surprised me a bit when I looked it up.) But older than me, at the time, and undeniably white.

In fact, this post is in the first place an excuse to link to slacktivist’s post about bigotry and stupidity which everybody ought to read.

Afterthought

Orthodox Christians should write and paint and sing and dance. We should make movies and television shows. We should make clothes and produce textiles as art as well (the fullness of culture is itself too large to describe in a sentence, a paragraph or even a book). And in all these activities, they will be expressive of the fullness of our humanity without having to stick an icon on everything to prove its Orthodoxy.

—Father Stephen in Glory to God for All Things

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