Bruce Willis and that other guy in Colorado Springs.

This last Wednesday, I took Ray down to the cheap theatre to see Valiant. I had been planning to get a cup of coffee from the Bear Rock Cafe and wander around for an hour or so before the movie -- but BRC was closed:

Movie crew. Bruce Willis. Pst. Did you hear?

I didn't see nothin, man.

Delight.

"That was also the year I stopped because I realized I was a dork for still going..."

My future sister-in-law, Erica, writes about Halloween.

Fortune cookie.

"He that does not understand the bitter does not understand the sweet. Lucky numbers 2, 15, 21, 47."

--That one's been sitting on my desk at work for a while. The weirdest fortune cookie I ever got said, "You like apples." That was it, no lucky numbers, no LEARN TO SPEAK CHINESE on the back. I kept asking myself, "You like apples in bed? How does that work? Do I want to know?"

Other ones that I keep at work:

"The best years of your life have not yet been lived."

"Always advance, never surrender."

Which I need to be reminded of at work from time to time...Someone reminded me about the bitter and the sweet the other day, inadvertantly. I needed it. Things haven't been delighting me as much as they used to; I'd been running away from the bitter and thus eluding the sweet.

Boink!

What's the point of wearing your favorite rocketship underpants if nobody ever asks to see 'em?

I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.

Calvin : You can't just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood.
Hobbes : What mood is that?
Calvin : Last-minute panic.

"Since September it's just gotten colder and colder. There's less daylight now, I've noticed too. This can only mean one thing - the sun is going out. In a few more months the Earth will be a dark and lifeless ball of ice. Dad says the sun isnt going out. He says its colder because the earth's orbit is taking us farther from the sun. He says winter will be here soon.
Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?"

Girls are like slugs - they probably serve some purpose, but it's hard to imagine what.

"(10:16) Forgot what debate was about. Medals of bravery awarded to all parties."

Who was the first guy that look at a cow and said, "I think that I'll drink whatever comes out of those things when I squeeze them?"

"County library? Reference desk, please. Hello? Yes, I need a word definition. Well, that's the problem. I don't know how to spell it and I'm not allowed to say it. Could you just rattle off all the swear words you know and I'll stop you when...Hello?"

FLUSSH! Whee! Ha Ha Ha. -Mom, I'm done with my bath now.

I asked Mom if I was a gifted child...she said they certainly wouldn't have paid for me.

I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas.

Obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity.

"But Calvin is no kind and loving god! He's one of the old gods! He demands sacrifice!"

"I try to make everyone's day a little more surreal."

There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want.

Well, remember what you said, because in a day or two, I'll have a witty and blistering retort! You'll be devastated THEN!

When birds burp, it must taste like bugs.

Calvin and Hobbes stips.

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.

The Grandiloquent Dictionary.

Some vocabulary words are interesting. Some are amusing. Some would make good villain names on City Of Villains when it comes out.


deiparous -
Giving birth to a god or a goddess

deisidaimonia -
The fear of supernatural powers

dentiloquent -
Pertaining to someone who talks through their teeth

deoppilate -
To remove an obstruction

deuterogamist -
A widow who chooses to remarry

dextrosinistral -
A left handed person who is trained to use their right hand

dharna -
A method of collecting a debt in which the person who is owed money sits on the debtors doorstep until payment is made, or the debtor starves to death

dippoldism -
The act of beating or whipping school children

divigate -
To stray, as in the opposite of navigate

doytin -
To walk about stupidly

dysnomy -
The creation of flawed laws which cause more problems

I especially like "divigate." My method of driving through a new town is fortuitous divigation, that is, I get to the right place but I'm often not sure how.

An example of how NOT to blog?

I'm a bad, bad blogger. This article by Jakob Nielson details 10 guidelines for having a good blog. I, uh, don't follow any of them.

(Via boingboing.)

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.
By Umberto Eco.

I've just started the novel. Like Silverlock (thanks, Randy), it's one of those books that contain a kind of map to a bajillion others. Unlike Silverlock, there probably won't be a happy ending. Some kind of tragedy will cap it off; it's Umberto Eco.

In the Eco-ian universe, books aren't merely stand-alone islands to be traversed in linear fashion; they are nodes in an exponentially expanding extranet. To read one book, you sometimes have to pass through several others, accumulating countless references and subtexts along the way. "We've been reading books in a hypertextual way ever since Homer," Eco says. "We read a page and then we jump, especially when we're rereading it. Think of the Bible. When people read it, they're always jumping here and there, constantly connecting various quotations."

-- Village Voice article.

Further quote:

Eco says he structured Mysterious Flame to mimic the free-associative behavior of electronic navigation. (Indeed, his latest nonfiction book to be published stateside, The History of Beauty, was originally conceived as a CD-ROM.) But Eco stops short when asked about the all too real physical convergence of books and online matter. "I'm very skeptical about that," he says. "The real function of a novel is to give the reader the impression that destiny can't be altered. With electronic material, you can change it whenever you want. But a novel tells you that life can't be changed. That's its power."

Link to a wiki-style annotation site added to the toolbar, so I don't forget where I put it.

Haunted Colorado.

A listing of haunted spots in Colorado. Of course the Stanley is listed (Estes Park).

Update:

Sasquatch in El Paso County, Colorado.

Jesus of the Pierogi.

An article on how people turn random information into things that seem like something else -- the process is called paredolia. Includes links to examples--the face of Jesus on a pierogi, among other things.

Babies, at birth, will respond to faces. They'll even respond to the picture of a smiley face -- two dots and a curve.

The message here is: don't base your faith on a dumpling.

Pierogies...mmmm....

Odd train of thought.

I'm going to share a somewhat nutty train of thought.

I was jotting down ideas for stories and letting my mind ramble before doing some editing, and I found myself thinking about Freddie Krueger. Now, I haven't watched all the movies, and the ones I have watched I don't recall fully.

I was wondering what would happen if Freddie met, in dreams, someone who had no fears or guilt. Not someone brave or noble, not someone innocent, but someone who had truly looked at all the demons inside, spat them up, and ate them. Someone at peace. Could there be a person like that, and if so, could you make a story about it? Or would it be meaningless?

From there I started thinking about horror. How do you deal with perfection from a horror-story perspective? Aha. Vampires cannot face crosses: a symbol of horror and a symbol of perfection.

Back to Freddie. If Freddie drew back and hissed away from a "perfect" character, that would suck. A "perfect" character would have no conflicts, wouldn't really be a part of the story.

Next tangent. What would the dreams of a perfect person be like? They'd probably never have nightmares. It must be night after night of bliss, or night after night of adventures in which nobody ever suffers anything horrible.

Next tangent. One of the characters in Sandman, Barbie, has night after night of harmless adventures for most of her life, but it doesn't make her a perfect person; contrariwise, it allows her to remain shallow and unable to cope with the more painful aspect of her life. It isn't until she has a terrible nightmare and then stops dreaming that she starts to face her problems.

Next tangent. A continuous diet of dreams without nightmares must be terrible. Imagine if you never woke in a sweat, never were relieved when you woke up. There have been quite a few points in my life where having nightmares--and learning how to conquer them--has made a big difference.

Next tangent. One of the things that Carlos Castaneda talks about in his books is the power you derive from learning how to control your dreams. I thought the idea was fascinating for a time years ago, but abandoned it because it's a little sad: if you have control over your dreams, what's to make you face up to your nightmares? What's to make you learn the things you don't want to learn? With that kind of power over yourself, what's to keep you from turning into something horrible?

Next tangent. One of the things that Zen Buddhists say is "Kill the Buddha." What if, in this context, you read nightmares as the Buddha? "Kill the Buddha." Does that mean destroy the things you use to teach yourself what you wouldn't otherwise learn? Destroy your nightmares?

So. Being a writer, I think, "What if some guy went out there to learn the truth about everything and went slightly awry, so now he has this huge amount of power, is englightened on top of that (because you can be enlightenend without meaning anything good for anybody else) and therefore has this key into other people's psyches, and has nothing to keep him in check?"

Wait. That sounds like Freddie Krueger. My theory is that he's some kind of dark Buddha, having killed his own conscience in an effort in order to better control it, and now he's going through this mockery of "enlightening" others because some kinds of understanding are like a virus, but that's another tangent.

Crit.

The story I was so nervous about has had four crits. There's a "thing" in the story, and I didn't explain what it was or where it came from, because I want people to read into it -- to come up with their own explanations, put their own pasts into it.

Everyone has called it creepy and well-written. Three people seem to have found the ending frustrating, because of the lack of information. One person didn't. Two people decided that the thing was cancer -- which wasn't the story I'd come up for it in my own head, but that was okay.

What a roller-coaster, though. It's been painful to read the reviews, both good and bad. One minute I'm brilliant; the next I'm an egotistical @#$%-up who's never going to pull this off.

I'm going to screw around with it a bit more today, beg Lee to read it, and send it off in the next week or so. I'm going to shoot for The Third Alternative first, I think.

Test.

I'm screwing around with stuff...

Fat Ducks