Necessary viewing
Watch this. You must.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxschLOAr-s&eurl=http://pubrants.blogspot.com/ *
And now you don’t need to know anything else.** Ever.***
* * *
* Are those Converse All Stars he’s wearing??
** Peter and I had an appointment this afternoon with a solicitor to remake our wills. Ugggh. I thought I was doing really well to have my list of charities ready (one homeopathy, one museum, one library, one plants, one critters, one kiddies, one old geezers, one . . . each will receive £12.50 and a pat on the head), and then I get whamped with things like . . . executors. I’ve been through this before, you’d think I’d remember, but it’s one of those things I’ve blotted out. Who do you want to lumber with the awful prospect of cleaning out your house, for example? I’m an only child, so I can’t stick a sibling with it, and my treasured handful of really old friends, the ones who have known you so long you can’t possibly embarrass them any more, even to clearing out your underwear drawer, I being one of those people who doesn’t notice the condition of knicker elastic till it is so perished the knickers don’t stay up long enough for you to get your jeans on over them to keep them in place. . . . Those friends all live on the wrong side of the Atlantic, and one of them died a year ago.
So I blundered out into the daylight again after the appointment–pleasantly surprised by the fact that there was daylight to blunder out into–and had to walk past the wine shop on my way back to the cottage to take hellhounds for a surge. The wine shop was advertising a three-for-two offer. So I went in and bought three bottles of champagne.
And then hellhounds and I surged, and then we went up to Third House and I pulled up a lot of weeds and planted a verbascum to the background accompaniment of the Terrier Next Door not quite drowned out by Radio Three, by which time it was astonishingly late. The daylight kept hanging around and deluding me charmingly. Sort of May through July I go from hopeless about time to beyond hopeless about time.+ And Peter was playing bridge tonight, so I had nobody checking up on when I got back indoors again.++ But I’ve been forced to eat my supper at my desk here at the cottage because hellhounds, they tell me, see quite enough of their crate at the cottage kitchen, and their favourite bed, as I perfectly well know, is upstairs in my office. Try to enjoy your food with four glinty little eyes fixed on you. Glinty little eyes whose proximate chins will be resting in your toast and pate if you don’t get the message.
+ Any day that isn’t sheeting, anyway. Or hailing. In hot weather I’m even worse, because evening is the only time I can bear to be outdoors, and then I have 1,000,000 pots to water. And The Man put up two more hanging-basket hooks for me today. 1,000,002 pots.
++Or pointedly keeping my supper warm. Peter doesn’t actually do pointed, but he has been known to do coming downstairs at one a.m. and telling me playing the piano to go home and go to bed.
*** But I probably will post tomorrow. I still have to tell you about scrambled eggs. Oh, and I think I finally have some half decent new photos of Mme Gregoire.
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Everyone must have clicked on the video link at the same time. All I’ve gotten are little dots chasing each other in circles, ordering me to wait a moment… a very long moment. I’ll have to try again later.
Go wine sale!
Yes. But with THREE bottles of champagne sitting on the kitchen table in my tiny cottage I look the most COMPLETE lush. (Spendthrift lush.) Peter has the wine rack–I’ll take them down there and HIDE them tomorrow. :)
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Okay, and now that I complained about it, the video works. ;)
*dies and dies and DIES*
Yeah.
MySpace is EVIL and I’m pretty sure Facebook is, too. I don’t know much about Twitter except it looks annoying. (Someone on my LJ reading list updated with Twitter and I found it really obnoxious because I couldn’t read the whole post right there. So I stopped trying.)
*shudder*
*dies and dies and DIES*
*********** Uh huh. And you thought the film was supposed to be FUNNY, didn’t you? You know it’s not too late to choose another career. . . .
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Alas, I knew it was serious. I’ve seen friends struggle to market themselves and I keep getting advertisements for some dude’s book on my MySpace (*makes warding signs*) account. (Which I find obnoxious and won’t buy his book simply because he annoys me. Any reason to avoid needing more bookcases, right?)
It’s too late. I’m already obsessed. There is no hope for me, but maybe you can save someone else the pain! ;)
Yes. The not-quite-spam is a nuisance. I’m getting come ons for **ads** on blog and site. GO AWAY.
Robin said:
“*dies and dies and DIES*
*********** Uh huh. And you thought the film was supposed to be FUNNY, didn’t you? You know it’s not too late to choose another career.”
Jodi can’t choose another career because her books will threaten to eat her alive otherwise. In all seriousness. I think she has to write, or she might burst one day. =)
I know the feeling. But there are people out there who still do other things for a *living.* Some of them are successful authors. But it takes the heat off.
Loved the video – and you’re so up to date! Blog – tick. Website – tick. Now what’s that other one? Witter??!
******** Try to enjoy your food with four glinty little eyes fixed on you. Glinty little eyes whose proximate chins will be resting in your toast and pate if you don’t get the message.
Pah to your four, I raise you 22! In fact I can muster 26 glinty eyes if the cats are bothered enough to notice and do the cat starey thing. (I bet Jmeadows can muster a few glinty eyes as well :))
I’d just turn into a little stain on the carpet. Four is enough. :)
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****** a cat with extra large eyes (that’s like three eyes if you count the hugeness, so 17), plus three hamsters, but they all have tiny eyes, so they only count as one each.
I like your maths LOL
***** Southdowner, maybe we need a so-many-eyes support group or something.
Yes, we’re very sad cases and off the chart of “normality” (tho I think I’ve gone too far to return to charted seas, I can happily say :))
******* (I wrote too many at first, but then realized I wouldn’t say no to a ferret in need because I don’t have *that* many… I knew one girl who had 25 at one point. That’s fifty eyes!)
NOW we’re talking!!!!!
Oh yes, seven ferrets (so there’s 14 eyes) a cat with extra large eyes (that’s like three eyes if you count the hugeness, so 17), plus three hamsters, but they all have tiny eyes, so they only count as one each. So… 24 eyes? Close enough.
Southdowner, maybe we need a so-many-eyes support group or something. (I wrote too many at first, but then realized I wouldn’t say no to a ferret in need because I don’t have *that* many… I knew one girl who had 25 at one point. That’s fifty eyes!)
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Okay, that video was just hilarious. :D
I like the new blog-digs, btw! I *finally* got a newsreader and am now subscribed. No more playing catch-up every few weeks. Yay!
So I just found this cruising the Economist.
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11326174
Facebook isn’t so bad, although it’s not so great, just because it lets you stay in contact with everyone that would wouldn’t talk to so much. I can just click over to a friend in Berkeley’s facebook and write “I’m bored” so very easily. And that’s….good…. Not a waste of time of symbol of the degeneration of modern communication or anything….
(I was soitgoes31 on the other blog, but this one fills in my name for me, so I’m not going to bother to change it)
Yes, very interesting. I just hope if they do come up with a blood test that either it *does* cover all the variations or they admit that it can only catch a certain percentage. I still think ME is a syndrome rather than a disease, and that they’re not going to be able to nail it down . . . or at least they’ll have to break it up into separate things held down by separate nails. Having been diagnosed back in the days when we were still assumed to be malingering, I’m very anxious that no one else should suffer being told they’re imagining things or wimps or liars.
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Something of a cri de coeur here . . . Regarding “everyone has to have a web site,” one of the craftspeople at our local Renaissance Fair has a succinct response: “www . donthaveonedontwantonedontask . com”.
I know just what you mean about deluding daylight. It gets me all the time–suddenly it’s 7:00 p.m. or later and NO ONE HAS BEEN FED and dinner hasn’t even been started. But I think this is understandable in a place where it’s dark at 4:30 in the winter. Around here, though, if you are outside in the garden at 7:00 or later you are sharing the space with the mosquitoes, so you do get reminders to go inside and do something else.
It’s not the three bottles on the table that make one look like a lush, it’s the three empties in the bin! :)
“www . donthaveonedontwantonedontask . com”.
********* LOL! I hope someone HAS this address!!
It’s dark here in December and January by about 4. It’s depressing as . . . bleaugh. And at the moment, coming out of bell ringing at 9 pm, it’s still daylight. Around midsummer it’ll still be late twilight at 11. It’s entirely mad. It’s one of the things that makes me *know* that life and this planet and the universe and so on really are . . . well, magic. :)
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What do you mean you’ll post tomorrow? You posted today. You have the funniest ideas about what constitutes a post. Five paragraphs is most respectable you know. Four paragraphs and a photo is the equivalent. Heck two paragraphs constitutes a decent post. Who knows how many paragraphs responding to your comments is?
I found the video depressing too. One wants to think that a book just needs to get written, but on the other hand there are so many books out there and although time is short the idea that a potential favourite book is out there and I haven’t made contact with it depresses me. (Thank you Pollyana’s list btw) It depresses me even more to think it isn’t getting written because authors have to spend so much time promoting themselves, in order to get their books read!
I mean, obviously, I enjoy hanging out with you, but mostly I find there is TOO MUCH INFORMATION OUT THERE, most of which I would rather not have had, thank you very much. I’m a curmudgeonly person myself at times, social, but with requirements for solitude that leave me cranky and uncomfortable if they aren’t met, and I have a wide circle of acquaintances but a smaller circle of real friends (so perfectly understand the executor problem, although with two siblings and one nephew I do not share it – one of them will be forced to deal with my grotty underwear and holey socks!) and the reason for this is: I DON’T LIKE SIMPLY EVERYONE.
So overwhelmingly I would rather not be put off a favourite author because her personal tone is offputting or I learn things about her behaviour that put me off her (or him). I’d rather just enjoy the books. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I don’t go through life INTENDING not to like people: I try to keep a much more positive outlook. I simply find that the number of people I want to spend my precious time with is limited (I sound misanthropic but promise I’m not).
Yes sadly I know what you mean. And I’m perfectly prepared to call myself misanthropic! :) I have said that McKinley’s law is that 98% of men are jerks. 91% of women are. And I *do* think that there’s FAR too much irrelevent–and frequently off putting–info out there about anyone with ANY public profile, ie anyone even faintly tarred with the ‘celebrity’ brush. Which includes me, who chose blogging when my publisher said blog or tour. I can live with myself–and the blog–by trying to present myself as a Real Human Being, which is a central fixation with me, about the Othering of people perceived as somehow Other than yourself, which automatically includes all ‘celebrities’ particularly those who do something somehow or somewhat perceived as glamorous, which includes writing novels. We’re not glamorous. We’re just as good/bad interesting/boring nice/nasty whatever/whatever as anyone else. My excuse for writing the blog is to swing a little weight into that balance.
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You mean cleaning your dog’s paws of daily delight isn’t glamorous? I was thinking of your Darkness and Chaos tracking stuff into your kitchen, as someone tracked dog much all up our marble entrance staircase and ground it into the non-slip tracks. I spent half an hour trying to get it out of that stuff and thinking most uncomplimentary thoughts about this individual, as they very obviously were deliberately cleaning their shoes on the staircase and leaving the mess for some unknown entity – moi – to clean. I can tell you I felt most misanthropic then. BTW what do you call your piano? Rodanthe?
They would *hear* me in the stair well . . .
LOL! got it in one! But I spell it Rhodanthe–that’s how I found it in a More Obscure Names You Won’t Find Anywhere Else book.
Yeah, that’s the classical way to spell anything starting with an r in Greek. ROTFL – I just threw it out there, never expected to get it… Greek is so useful for “obscure” and “difficult” words :)
Yes, and *I* knew that as soon as I said ‘Greek’ you’d be all over me! I *thought* of leaving it out . . . :)
You know, before finding your blog last year, this would have meant something mildly interesting and entertaining to me but not be something that I would have watched and listened to thinking ‘oh help, oh the poor thing, yikes, the anguish…’. I particularly liked the bit where he mentioned ‘of course that’s why I went into writing and was published, so that I could spend all my time thinking about posting videos on YouTube, being baffled by software and gadgets,…’.
I wonder if the whole publicity/engagement thing for writers may be similar in some ways to concerns in the ed/tech world re introducing appropriate digital technologies? I and colleagues are always trying to find ways of measuring the impact on learning of the new technologies. If something doesn’t have a positive impact, it shouldn’t have time wasted on it…except that because daily life now includes so many of the same technologies for an increasing number of people, organisations not offering technology-enhanced learning to a greater or lesser extent find themselves regarded as dinosaurs and less supportive by many of the learners.
One of the slides in a presentation I often do with groups where an organisation is trying to encourage part-time tutors to start using some of the simpler technologies is about ‘e-living’ and the number of ways we do it (the list grows longer practically every time I show it), and how small a step it is from these to choosing and using a few digital technologies in their teaching. I think quite a few of these tutors could identify with that video clip if they watched it (and that’s paradoxical, really!).
regarding the video: oy oy oy oy. that’s all.
I always thought that:
1) I would never finish my book
2) If I did, it would never be published
3) If it was, nobody would read it
Oh, and I see myself as quite a cheerful person – I think I am an optimistic pessimist (rather than a pessimistic optimist); I don’t expect good things to happen – in fact, everything might go to h— in a handbasket, but one can always try to make the best of it and why worry anyway? (“You have nowhere to put your head, somebody came and took your bed – but don’t worry, be happy.”) Enough to the day, etc.
Anyway, as for the video – good heavens!
Mmmph. I work in a small bookstore (dying breed, and yes we do carry Robin McKinley, I threatened violence if we didn’t) and a friend and co-worker just got his book of short stories turned down by a few publishers, because while it’s good, independent short fiction doesn’t make any money unless you’re Stephen King or Orhan Pamuk or something. It’s really, really depressing to realise a)how much books cost to produce b) that many are printed in China by Genuine Slave Labour anyway c) practically no one makes real money off of writing, publishing, or selling.
I could go into the And So Few People Actually Read rant now, but I won’t, because I don’t encounter them. Because of working in a bookstore. Although we did once have someone come in and say, “I need twelve feet of books. I got twelve feet of bookshelves.” And there’s the ever-popular “Are your books in any sort of order?”
“Are your books in any sort of order?”
********** Oh dear. (I actually do know people who buy by the yard.)
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