Taking A Breather

I'm taking a little writing break. It might last a day, it might last twenty years. Who knows? I'm going to do some reading. I'm not thrilled with what I've got on my writing plate at the moment (that's right, I write on a plate, doesn't everyone?). It all seems pretty mundane. I want to do something different but I don't know what yet. I'm thinking.

The boy's back in the house for the summer and I'm very happy to say that he's reading voluntarily and asking me for books. Yay! He's reading the Pendragon and Ranger's Apprentice series and he told me he just began the first Elric book. Double yay! His summer reading list is really lame, a bunch of that depressing shit that schools throw at kids. Racism, poverty, Holocaust, post-apocalypse. Not our thing. I think I'm going to give him a pass this summer. I'd rather he read what he enjoys now that he's finally doing so, rather than sour him to reading once again with yuchy stuff.

The high school my daughter will be attending in the fall made Newsweek's list of top U.S. high schools as, I found, it usually does. This year it's number 312. I think that's cool.

I go to Google's street view thingy every few months hoping that views of my childhood homes will be accessible. they aren't. The damn view veers off like about a quarter mile from the cool house, the one built in the 1840's. Someday. I get sad looking at the old town though. I'm cut off from that life as by an ocean.

Paul's got a trailer for a cool looking movie called Air Doll over on his site: http://www.pulpmovies.com/trailers/air-doll

Here's some of that hard-hitting shit you'll only find at The Huffington Post:
GOP Dominated By White Conservatives: Gallup Poll
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/01/poll-finds-gop-is-dominat_n_209764.html

It's this kind of investigative journalism that gives me hope that all will not be lost when the last newspaper disappears. Who knew there were conservatives in the Republican party? Or that they were white? It gives me chills to know that they've been lurking there all this time.

A Veritable Potpourri!

Just finished a draft of Chapter 11 of The Inner Workings of the Artificial Mind and sent it out to those who may have cared once.

A new episode of Tank Riot is out. If you haven't listened before, I highly recommend it. I've never had such an enjoyable time learning about stuff I didn't know that I didn't know. The new episode is on Emma Goldman. What? You don't who Emma Goldman is? Neither do I. That's why you and I must both rush out into the net and listen to episode 74! http://www.tankriot.com/2009/074/

I actually cleaned today. The boy helped. See, we had Internet intermittence (The Goog claims I've misspelled intermittence, but I looked it up, so suck it, The Goog!) so the netty entities sent a man out. Well, the place was in its usual state: catastrophic. So we cleaned. When the daughter came over today, she couldn't believe it. "You can see the floor!" she said. "You can sit on a chair!" It was like Christmas all over again. And speaking of Christmas, I took down the Christmas tree today as part of the clean-up. The fixer-man did all his business outside and never stepped in the door, but I was happy that the place was clean. Or cleaner.

Cleanish.

I think that people who have friends have an easier time staying on top of things like that because they're thinking, "My friends could come over at any time!" Now I know how the other half lives. Quite a heady sensation.

I found this wonderful thing today. Wolfgang's Concert Vault. I'd known about the memorabilia from a spot on CBS Sunday Morning, but I didn't know that there were thousands of concerts online for free. This is one of those things that I think everyone but I knew about. You have to sign up, but it's pretty awesome. Besides, what's to stop you from writing complete bullshit on the sign-in if you want? Not that I ever would.
http://concerts.wolfgangsvault.com/al/performers/all.html