Allow me to introduce...

...a blog you should read.

It's called The Well-Read Hooker, and it's basically about some blogger chick and the books she reads and the crocheted things she makes. It might interest you if you like, well, this blog by crazy random happenstance. It may be written by the same person. Possibly.

;-)

I'll leave this one up a spell longer, I think. Haven't decided yet. But Overeducated Twit has had its day. I anticipate this will be the last new post I make here, but please came visit at the new digs. I'll make you virtual tea and everything!

Wistful

For some reason, the last couple days have inspired me to track down songs that hold nostalgic value to me. Nostalgic, in this case, dates back to high school or so.

Hush. I know I am young yet.

This particular song stuck with me at the time, and I was surprised to find how powerful the words were when I re-visited it:

Too bad my birthday has already passed...

Ah, the Internet has everything. I've joked about wanting a "WTF" stamp for student papers.

Turns out I could have one if I wanted, thanks to the creative folks at Etsy.

Oh man. And there's "FAIL" and "epic FAIL."

I dare not. I have nothing near tenure and might actually use them...

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Now playing: Bayside - Kellum
via FoxyTunes

My latest creative venture

A friend recently asked me about making some crocheted things for her kids. For her daughter, she thought a purse would go over well. I asked for color or style preferences; good thing I did, because like most girls, her style had shifted from my last knowledge. Pink is out, and bright colors and bohemian flair are in. I took it from there.

Bohemian made me think hippie. What might be hippie-ish? Hmm, how about something green or eco friendly. A plarn purse might be good. I used the Recycled Mini Shoulder Bag pattern over at My Recycled Bags. But most plarn is dull, and these bags were a boring white. Still needed work for that "bright colors" bit, so I had a skein of rough, scratchy, irritating Red Heart acrylic yarn that I got for a steal at a garage sale. Bingo, and it used up some of my stash yarn when I worked it along with the plastic bag yarn. For the flap of the purse, I also used yarn that was already on hand, a bit of eyelash novelty yarn that I picked up for no better reason than that it was on clearance, and it was very shiny. It now had a project. The last touch, the button, was also from my existing stash.

Here's the finished product:
I hope she likes it; I had fun making it.

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Now playing: Flyleaf - Sorrow
via FoxyTunes

Progress

I've a habit of starting ten projects at once and finishing few of them in a timely manner. However, I have actually been finishing things on break. I sold off all the scarves I was crocheting, or else I'd post them here to show off.

Lemme show you my bag instead.


Closer:
It came out a little differently than planned, but I'm pleased nonetheless. I used the pattern for Inga's bag, but made a few adjustments: I used Hobby Lobby's Love This Yarn in a striping pattern. I was running very short on the color I was using by the time I got to the handle and edging, so I made a spontaneous decision to hit my grandma up for some similar yarn (what an ungrateful granddaughter I am :D), and that's the slightly lighter blue on the handle and along the edge. I also made the handle a little wider and a little longer, and with the help of my visiting crafty aunt, lined it in navy blue fabric for added sturdiness. Total, it took me two skeins, working out to a bit over five bucks for materials. Note, though, that I extended the yarn I had in the handle, and I also used some blue scrap yarn I had on hand for the joining of the squares; if you want to go for this in all one color, it'd probably be best to grab three skeins. The fabric was also scrap, so no cost there, really.

I've no intention of being a '50s housewife, but I value being able to make things that are both functional and fun and perhaps even thrifty in the process.

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Now playing: Ani DiFranco - Joyful Girl
via FoxyTunes

In Soviet Russia, sites load YOU.

I couldn't resist the subject line. One of my co-workers told me about this site the other day: English Russia. It's chock full of random, bizarre, mundane, and even ingenious glimpses into life in Russia.

Gems I've found upon a perfunctory exploration include: a new way to heat sausage, a pointed way to register discontentment with government, some photographs that are practically frame-worthy material, a glimpse into a shopping experience that could raise some awkward questions, and a series of photos that look like they are worth at least a thousand words apiece.

This one's definitely going on the sidebar under... hmm. Vices, I think.

Secrets

I've followed Postsecret for quite some time now; every Sunday, I check in to see what secrets others have posted. The idea, as people quickly figure, is that the postcards show so many facets of just being human--having fears, frustrations, joys, and many a quirk. It only updates once a week, though, and there are only so many secrets.

LJ Secret, though, takes up some of the slack. The mature concepts warning is largely a precaution implemented to avoid lawsuits, I guess, from parents who don't supervise their children's online activity and get upset at what kids can find. The secrets here tend to be more computer generated imagery, but the concept still stands--people confessing secrets in absolute anonymity. Livejournal has a reputation for being a haven of drama and teen blogs, and sections of it can be, but it's got a varied, thriving community of different people, so the secrets display a similar range of identifiable sentiments.

It may be voyeurism, but I find others' secrets fascinating. I would like one day to work up the nerve to submit one of my own, but it feels so personal all the same. *shudder* No, not there just yet.

On a light note

I had been avoiding Sinfest before the election because I got tired of the politicking. I went back a couple weeks later to see if it had gotten better; it hadn't. Tonight, on a whim (and as one last diversion before heading back to the grading stack), I checked again to see if what had been one of my favorite two web comics was back to its old self.

Ah, yes, much better:

Puts things right in perspective :).

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Now playing: Brand New - The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows
via FoxyTunes

Meh.

I don't know how long I've used the word "meh." Like "shiny," I think I picked it up off the Internet without even knowing its origins. It is quite the handy word, to indicate apathy. "Meh" is about to have its day, though--it'll be included in next year's HarperCollins dictionary. Apparently, it came from the Simpsons. Ah well, I shan't hold its origins against it.

It's cool to see language adapt and change.

Shoot, once upon a time, people probably wondered how come we started using words just invented by some scribbling hack.... Words come from the darnedest places.

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Now playing: Tom McRae - For The Restless
via FoxyTunes

Multimedia Friday: Dustin Kensrue

I've loved the music of Thrice for a while now, but I only recently explored the solo work of frontman Dustin Kensrue. Ah, be still my heart; I have a new musical crush. I have a weakness for acoustic music side projects released by punk band members; Chuck Ragan, Tim Barry, and Sundowner all fall into this category. Like the former musicians, Dustin Kensrue, capable of writing ear-crashingly yet articulate punk rock goodness, turns that gift to stripped-down, heartfelt songs.

One song, "I Knew You Before," speaks of the loss of innocence and purity of a young woman who has been taken under the spell of "magazines and media...with their plastic protocol." The song concludes, "And all I can say is I knew you before / You were beautiful back then. // You could be beautiful again."All together ladies, please, a wistful sigh. Another song, "Please Come Home," addresses a prodigal son with the plea in the title.

The song that grabbed me and made me hit re-play more times than I ought to admit, though, is "Pistol," a loving tribute to his wife. She sounds like quite the woman; I'm inclined to envy her, actually...

Embracing the random

Dear reader(s), after a little over a year in our writer-reader relationship, I feel comfortable enough to let my bloggerly vulnerability show. I shall leave last night's last-minute post as is as a demonstration that I am willing to let you see me at my less-than-best and as a token of faith that you shall not hold that against me. In fact, in my mental best-case scenario, such a post would then be interpreted as a bold and confident move, leaving you more in awe of my vivaciousness.

On the subject of blogging, I've wooed another over to the dark side. My dear, dear friend from high school has this habit of frequently posting news stories and videos and whatnot on her Facebook profile, accompanied by some commentary that frequently sparks a discussion amongst her friends. I nagged her intermittantly to start a damn blog already, and about six months later (a conservative estimate on my part, actually), she has started one.

I am happy to be the first (or at least one of the first) to welcome Sayida Siyasa of Arabia to the blogosphere.

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Now playing: Hot Water Music - Moonpies for Misfits
via FoxyTunes

Bookish adventures

For some reason, most of my reading this year has been sci fi/fantasy. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I've flown the nerd flag proudly for years now*. Most recent first.

Christopher Moore, You Suck: A Love Story. This is the perfect book for a busy, tiring week--it's morbidly entertaining, light, and quick to read. I could knock out a couple chapters before bed, get a few chuckles, and nod off. Actually first picked it up while waiting for a friend in a bookstore; read about 50 pages in one go, which says something about its ease of reading. The characters are, for lack of a better word, immature. The two main vampires were about 19 before they were turned, and their "minion" is a 16-year-old who alternates between valley girl and tragic goth caricature. I've complained about books with potty humor in them before, but I don't hold it against Moore, and indeed, a snickered quite openly at protagonist Tommy's response to the changes brought about by his transformation. Overall, a fun romp.

David Almond, Skellig. Re-read. Juvenile fiction. What I love about David Almond is the poetry in his language and deft handling of complicated issues. In this book, for example, he toys with the ideas of William Blake, death, and miracles, and he does this subtly--even though he writes "kids' books," I can re-read his books repeatedly, enjoying the room for interpretation he leaves.

Neil Gaiman, Stardust. Also re-read. Fantasy. Dry humor and an original take on old fairy tales. The recent movie was not entirely faithful, but also fun, for the record.

Patricia Gaffney, Wild at Heart. I asked my romance-reading aunt for a recommendation of a good romance novel, maybe one of her favorites. This was her rec. I will admit, it had a couple twists I didn't anticipate, but other than that, it's prety solid stock characterization and predictably outcome. Bonus points for a historical setting that didn't quite seem convincing.

Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time. Fantasy. Ah, this was golden. Religion and philosophy and death, delivered with irreverence and humor. I really do need to read more Pratchett. Up my nerd cred, so to speak.

Currently by the bedside: Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy. As far as anthologies go, this one's solid. I haven't skipped a story yet (halfway through), and it has enough variety to keep things interesting without seeming too far-flung and incoherent as a whole.

Sergei Lukyanenko, The Night Watch. This wasn't quite what I was expecting--for all the supernatural elements at work in this book, the emphasis is more on the suspense/mystery/political side of things. Some of the twists and turns had me struggling to keep up, which is probably why it's stagnated 2/3 of the way through. It's interesting, but not good bedtime reading after long days...

Currently in the car: Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses. I've decided to give audio books another try, now that I've got a long commute again. We'll see how it goes, but I tend to set them aside after the first CD or so. It's just not nearly as satisfying as actually reading the book myself. What might give this an advantage is McCarthy's amazing prose.

Next on the to-go-by-the-bedside stack: A recent XKCD comic strip reminded me that Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves was just sitting on my bookshelf, waiting to be read. So it's getting shoved to the top of Mount TBR. Also, I plan to read Ian McEwan's Atonement soon. Might as well put in a plug here: both these books made their ways into my hands courtesy of the good folks at Bookcrossing.


* - Because, you know, sci fi is more nerd cred than, say, a master's degree in Romantic-era literature...

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Now playing: Straylight Run - The Perfect Ending
via FoxyTunes

Grammar silliness

My response to an article on punctuation on Salon was somewhere between rolling my eyes at the silliness of the discussion and reveling in the innate geekiness of the subject matter. In the end, the dry humor wins out over the absurdity of the initial question: "Is the semicolon girlie?"

This had me smiling:

Catherine Price: I'd never really thought of punctuation as gendered, though I suppose the wink of the semicolon could be considered more girlish and coy than the straightforward, masculine em dash.

Tracy Clark-Flory: Clearly, men find the em dash a reassuring phallic symbol, while the semicolon reawakens their Freudian castration anxiety. What better way to cope with penis envy than to make frequent use of the semicolon?

Stick with the article for the last line; it had me cackling. And note my use of punctuation in the preceding sentence.

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Now playing: This Providence - Card House Dreamer
via FoxyTunes

It all started with "slubberdegullion"

Praise be to Google, the finder of obscure passages. Is this not a most wondrous display of verbal dexterity?

"The bun-sellers or cake-makers were in nothing inclinable to their request; but, which was worse, did injure them most outrageously, called them prattling gabblers, lickorous gluttons, freckled bittors, mangy rascals, shite-a-bed scoundrels, drunken roysters, sly knaves, drowsy loiterers, slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubberly louts, cozening foxes..."

Want more, ye noddypeak simpleton? Avaunt! I swear, the passage reads like a concentrated dose of Cranky Prof.

Found this list through the Bookcrossing.com forums: "The 9 Most Annoying People I Always See at the Bookstore." I will vouch for its validity. What gives me the credential? I, er, recognized the store in the picture as a Borders (corporate America is nifty like that--see one franchise, you've seen them all, whether it's the decor or layout).

I digress. A highlight:

FIRST-TIMERS
Hey, you who stormed in. Have you really never been to a bookstore before, or do you just enjoy drawing attention? You remind me of the old people I see at the post office who make buying a roll of stamps a 10-minute process of discovery and indecision. You gaze around in faux confusion for a moment before making a beeline for the help desk – or, aggravatingly to those of us waiting patiently in line, the checkout counter – and half-angrily ask, “Where’s (insert title here)?” as if you just arrived at the hospital emergency room and were looking for your trauma-victim daughter. Hey, Magellan, see those big signs hanging from the ceiling that point out the subject sections? That’s where you’ll find it. You’re in a nicely organized bookstore, not a vast warehouse of a Sam’s Club or Costco.

Some of the categories in the article are unique to huge chain stores (people who go just for an overpriced coffee), while others are more universal, like the above excerpt. Still, there's a way to avoid many of them: find your own local and/or used bookstores. It truly is a different demographic, generally scruffy looking college students and eccentrics. Bonus? If they're in the store buying, chances are they've sold back to said store--and what interesting reads I've found in the used book stores. That cuts down half the annoyances and certainly brings an element of serendipity to the book hunt and likely save money.

Of course, my problem is this: I can resist the $20 book I don't really need. It's the 20 books for $1 apiece that I can't pass by. Oi vey, this weekend ended up being a book binge.

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Now playing: David Rovics - Pray For The Dead And Fight Like Hell For The Living
via FoxyTunes

Sobering

In my usual erratic blog-hopping, I stumbled across a link to the photography of Chris Jordon. Jordon captures in unique ways the magnitude of our conspicuous consumerism. In particular, I recommend checking out the "Running the Numbers" pictures, where you can see the images in greater detail.

In lieu of content...

...I share a (an?) LOL Cat whose mission I thoroughly endorse. Carry on the good fight, Grammar Kitteh.


Enter the ICHC online Poker Cats Contest!

A pill for every ill, it seems

In an attempt to bring some content back to this site, I tooled around a few of my geekily-interesting sites (they'd be the links under the "get informed" heading on the right hand side) to see what was going on in the world. There's always the election, but I've been pissed about that for the last few weeks and haven't quite worked the "frothing at the mouth with rage" elements out of that post yet...

So I gravitated toward the less overtly political side--Live Science, Arts and Letters Daily, SciTech Daily. Ah, SciTech yielded this gem from National Geographic: "Early Birds, Night Owls: Blame Your Genes." A study found that yes indeed, genetics affected people's schedules. Fairly obvious, it seems, but hey, sometimes we need science to prove the obvious.

What got me was some info at the end of the article:

The research may lead to new treatments for people suffering from sleep disorders, the researchers said.

"Such treatments could potentially be used to reset a patient's 24-hour cycle to more sociable hours, so they wouldn't find themselves awake watching TV in the wee hours."

This would probably be done with drugs that target the circadian clock pathway, Brown said.

It's quite a leap to go from wired sleep patterns to "sleep disorder," I thought. So I checked the authority of all known knowledge: Wikipedia. Sleep disorders include things like teeth grinding, night terrors, sleep apnea, sleepwalking. OK, sleep walking, sure. Night terrors, it's possible. Or this: delayed sleep phase syndrome is described as "a chronic disorder of the timing of sleep, peak period of alertness, hormonal and other rhythms. People with DSPS tend to fall asleep well after midnight and also have difficulty waking up in the morning."

Yep, it's a syndrome, along with shyness, caffeinism, oppositional defiant disorder. I could name more ridiculous "syndromes," but I don't have a copy of the DSM-V at hand. A few years ago, I had time to kill between classes and spent the time in the library (social avoidance syndrome?). The reference section had any number of fascinating topics from mythology to psychology. At the time, I flipped through the psychological diagnostic manual and realized I could diagnose myself with approximately half of the disorders within its pages.

I don't mean to suggest that there are no such things as mental disorders; I know enough people with depression and a range of other problems to say otherwise. But when we're at the point where there's a pill and a treatment for any behavior that deviates however slightly from the dominant paradigm, I think we need to pause and consider the ramifications (the Boston Tea Party would have been a prime act of oppositional defiance disorder, wouldn't it? And that American Revolution. Pity it was so long ago; a pill could've quelled that impulse nicely). There are points at which such behaviors do interfere with daily living (I could probably easily land a diagnosis of social anxiety disorder, and my anxiety has gotten in my way by spells, but I can work through them with some--OK, a lot--of effort and much trembling of the hands), but I think it's dangerous to be so quick to medicate. Pills can easily become crutches if they're allowed, or worse still, maintainers of a predetermined status quo.

Besides, the world needs its night owls. Life doesn't just shut down at 10 p.m. We can't all be extroverts; someone has to listen. And if we're going to label caffeine as addiction worthy, I'd like to see Television Addiction added to the list of diagnosable disorders. And I hope they never find a pill for "oppositional defiance disorder." That just sounds like something straight out of Orwell or Huxley.
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Now playing: Lars Frederiksen & The Bastards - 1%
via FoxyTunes

Multimedia Friday: Dane Cook

I was searching for something amusing the other night, which prompted me to search for Dane Cook videos on Youtube. Ah yes, that did the job. Man's hysterical. He's a bit over the top by spells, and some may find his language coarse, but the man's a performer and he comments on a lot of things we all recognize: the old-school Kool-Aid commercials, the creepy guy at work, the DMV... He takes potshots at atheists and Catholic Mass. And I suppose it would be utterly classless for me to admit that I found this pretty funny. Well, I did.

But his brain ninja skit took the cake. Here's why women win fights, according to Dane Cook:



. . . Blogging's been a bit off lately. I've been a bit off lately. Hope to be back on course again soon. Bear with me.

Multimedia Friday: "You may say I'm a dreamer..."

I've mentioned my affinity for cover songs before. Today's video is also a cover, a John Lennon cover by one of my favorite groups, A Perfect Circle. The song appears on their album, eMOTIVe, which is largely covers of songs with socio-political themes. Most of the covers are pretty good, although "People are People" leaves much to be desired (Dope's cover is the one APC should've done. Ah well). But "Imagine" takes the cake. In an interview, frontman Maynard James Keenan explained that he envisioned John Lennon looking back 20 years later, realizing his dream hadn't come to be. The result is a more pensive, brooding version of a classic, fitting for a century that has been marked by conflict since its beginning.

Enjoy: