|
11:33 pm
[Link] |
Waiting for the Barbarians: on page 119 of 152 pages total.
Finished Chapter 4, much to my amazement considering how long it was and how tired I thought I was. 32 pages left.
The story is fascinating, and prose is clear and easy to read, so from that point of view it's not a struggle to read.
( Read more... )
|
02:11 am
[Link] |
Lessons you have to relearn every season.
Well, at least if you're a dumbass like me. I usually pour out a cup of water next to my bed before I go to bed. Well, I happened to glance into the inner rim before I took a sip and saw some sort of small winged insect perching there. I forgot that during the summer months when you see a lot more insects inside the house, you see them perched near water, especially inside my glass of water. That and light seem to attract them.
|
01:01 am
[Link] |
You know that animated secret agent for esurance?
Here's the lady who does her voice. It finally occurred to me to look this question up. I love her voice.
|
|
09:55 pm
[Link] |
Waiting for the Barbarians: on page 74 of 152 pages total.
Finished Chapter 3. 78 pages left. I'm almost halfway done already, which is quite a change of pace after months of reading long Dickens novels.
( Read more... )
|
02:03 pm
[Link] |
As if that's the real reason!
I received a statement from my credit union encouraging me to "Go green!" by switching to e-statements. Because, of course, my financial institution is so concerned about the environment, and not about lowering their printing and mailing costs.
This concerns my money, and I want a paper receipt, damn it!
|
12:15 am
[Link] |
Soviet Death RItual revision
During the last few days I've been working again on this project, which I had once hoped to be my doctoral thesis. Basically it looks what forms the funerary customs took in the USSR, especially those practiced by the regime, and how this in turn influence those practiced throughout the communist world.
I had a bunch of books with yellow stick-it notes in them on pages with references to this topic that I wanted to incorporate. However, I was at a loss how to keep track of all of these pieces of evidence as I did so. It finally dawned on me to write down the name of each book with all the numbers of the pages with stick-it notes on them. Then I can just cross out each number as I go through them. I really didn't want to remove these stick-its until I was absolutely sure, so this seems like a workable solution.
Tonight I flipped through a printout I made of an earlier draft of this project. At one time I had become intimidated by the thought of revising it because it had become so unwieldy because it was so long. It didn't help that I had used the technique of typing long passages from primary and secondary sources. However, it was in much more finished form than I remembered it. It'll take time to go through it, but I'm confident now that I can. You just have to take it one day and one page at a time.
|
|
11:54 pm
[Link] |
Requiem for a Biker Revision.
Yesterday I was incredibly productive. I wrote quite a bit of notes for the upcoming revision. Six pages, in fact. The plot for this novel seems to be coming together in a manner that is hopefully interesting and logical. I was also excited by the fact that I came up with what I think might be a good chapter for the prologue to this novel. I think when I have enough notes built up, I'll know when it's time to get started writing a new draft of this novel.
|
11:51 pm
[Link] |
Waiting for the Barbarians: on page 55 of 152 pages total.
Yesterday I read up to page 43, and today up to page 55, finishing Chapter 2. 98 pages left.
|
|
10:29 pm
[Link] |
Shouldn't she be in Dante's lower rings of Hell for her crime?
Lori Drew's conviction was thrown out by a judge. Whether the judge's reasoning was reasonable I'll let others decide. What I am sure of is that this bitch deserves to be a pariah for the rest of her life for what she did to that poor girl.
|
04:28 am
[Link] |
Losing weight again.
In addition to walking around drunk wearing black leather pants, another similarity between me and the Lizard King is how I'll be pudgy for a while, and then I'll lose weight yet again.
I've been trying to do at least a hundred scrunches a day, in addition to doing some weight lifting with a bar with 30lbs on it. It wasn't long after I started doing the scrunches that I noticed that my pants started getting looser yet again.
I've belatedly come to the conclusion that I have the time and the patience to do short bursts of exercises to build muscle, but I don't when it comes to cardio exercises, which you really need to do to have a well-rounded exercise routine, but they tend to take more time to do. I've just accepted that doing as much muscle-building exercises when I'm at home will just have to do, because I don't seem to have the patience/temperament to do cardio.
|
02:51 am
[Link] |
Looking up past memories on the internet.
Sometimes for whatever reason I'll suddenly think of something from years ago. Then it'll dawn on me, "Hey, dumbass: There's a thing that exists now called the internet. Why not look it up?"
Some months ago, I thought to look up those Micronaut toys I loved when I was in elementary school. It was also during that time when I was obsessed with the group KISS for a while, mainly third and fourth grade if I remember correctly. A kid I knew also loved them, and his parents bought him a lot of KISS-related items. I remember how I kept begging him to let me borrow his copy of KISS: The Originals, which was a reissue of their first three albums in a triple gatefold sleeve, along with a booklet chronicling the early KISS years and other goodies. Every day my friend would come into school, he would tell me that he had forgoet to bring it yet again. I was so obsessed with this object that I actually dreamed about it! He finally brought it to school and let me borrow it. Well, years later I happened to think of this episode from my past, and it finally hit me: He probably hadn't wanted to let me borrow it, and he kept saying he forgot to bring it so I'd give up or finally foget about it. Well, I was too stupid to catch on. :-D
|
|
08:07 pm
[Link] |
Jeff's Picks: As Time Goes By.
This is a British comedy that starred Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer about two lovers who got separated when they were young and meet back up later in life by chance. It's a very funny and rather sweet show. They've been replaying it on PBS recently. It's worth checking out.
|
07:56 pm
[Link] |
Requiem for a Biker Revision
I was pretty productive today. After I got done reading the first chapter of Waiting for the Barbarians, I wrote six pages of plot notes for this next revision of this novel. One major change concerns the protagonist, while a lot of the other notes were changes I remembered from the notes I wrote over the manuscript. I kept some of the original plot, although some of it is now in modified form.
|
07:36 pm
[Link] |
Waiting for the Barbarians: on page 24 of 152 pages left.
Finished Chapter 1. 128 pages left.
This novel is by J.M. Coetzee, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature for it in 2003. This is my friend Matt's (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ed_dirt ) favorite book, and he generously bought and sent me a copy of it.
This novel's gotten off to an intriguing start. It looks like this is going to be an interesting story.
|
07:34 pm
[Link] |
Duh!
Anybody else check the mail a couple of times before realizing that the Post office doesn't deliver on the birth date of our great nation?
|
02:05 am
[Link] |
Madame Sevigne's Letters: on page 34 of 34 pages total.
Finished!
It made me sad when I read how her family tried to censor and even destroy some of her letters to protect their family's reputation, not that there is anything in them that I personally found embarrassing. Apparently her daughter destroyed the letters she wrote to her mom, so we just have one side to their correspondence extant. I also heard how George Washington destroyed all the letters that passed between him and Martha at the end of his life so those too are lost to history. I understand how people want to have control over what the world knows about them, but I'm very uncomfortable with the censoring of history. One day we're all going to be gone. Why not just let all your personal letters, diaries, etc., remain and just allow future generations to sort it all out?
|
|
08:53 pm
[Link] |
Why couldn't she have been my teacher?
Jeez, the teachers I had in grade school were boring by comparison to the ones you keep hearing about lately in the news. To wit,
A teacher includes footage from her own personal sex tape in a class highlights DVD. Morning Express has more.
|
08:41 pm
[Link] |
The interesting truth about internet searches . . .
. . . is that you often discover that if you're curious about something, you find out that other people probably are too.
To wit, after that video excerpt from the rehearsals for Michael Jackson's upcoming tour was released, I thought, "Who's the pretty blonde guitarist he hired for that tour?" Well, I found out that other people were wondering hte same thing after seeing her in this footage. Here she is.
|
|
08:50 pm
[Link] |
Madame Sevigne's Letters: on page 25 of 34 pages total.
9 pages left.
These letters have been pretty interesting. They give an fascinating snapshot into the nobility and even the royal court of 17th century France.
|
|
11:05 pm
[Link] |
Madame Sevigne's Letters: on page 18 of 34 pages total.
16 pages left.
|
