Electric Josh

The following sentence is presented without irony. Lib is railing against bad spelling.
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Excellent! The television started talking at me with a thick Vermont accent, so I looked up to see a dairy farmer talking about the decline of the family farms. An aside for those of you (probably a minority) who aren't super familiar with the Vermont accent: the exceptional way that the word farm is pronounced is unlike most other things in English. I suppose it would be spelled "faerrm"---let's see if we can't get the iBook to record the sound. [Update: I seem to have lost my ability to say it properly. Oh well. Never mind.] At any rate, it rang unexpectedly loudly in the ears, giving me a quick little trip home of sorts, right there in front of the television. Turned out to be a Ben & Jerry's ad. Vermont's finest. During a show about weight loss. Nice.
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So the kid's repertoire has expanded to include the song Blew Away by Smashing Pumpkins. She thinks it's about the cartoon girl dog Blue on Nick Junior. I can never understand what the hell Billy Corgan is saying, and this song is no exception, so I'll go with that interpretation, too. (Actual silly lyrics here.) We listened to it three times on the way to and from the store the other day. It's not as good as Live at Leeds, but what are you gonna do?
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So there's going to be a live action Aeon Flux movie. Even if they'd tried not to avoid it, they'd probably have lost an awful lot in the translation from animé short to full-length human movie. However, it appears that they're not even going to try---it's rated PG-13. Sadness at the pollution of my own fond (and fifteen-year-old!) memories of watching the show is tempered slightly by the presence in my (sort of) hometown paper of harsh cartoon parody of the former cartoon. (Ignore that neither I nor the cartoon's author has seen the movie, of course.)
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So we had the kid all geared up to go watch the Christmas parade that the city of Quincy runs on the Sunday after Thanksgiving—had been talking about it for weeks, in fact—and then she picked today of all days to actually take a decent nap. Missed the whole thing. We did at least go to the parade party afterwards where she got to see her grandparents and a bunch of other people she knows, and where she got to play with the drum kit in the basement. Her mother and I are completely mortified that we let her sleep through it. Better luck next year.
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Web Zen has found a workday simulator. It is worth five minutes of your time.
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So K asked me what I want for Christmas and I can't think of anything at all. Most years I come up with, "How about an iBook," and then manage to come up with half a dozen things that might be good. This year I actually have a new iBook (and it's exceptionally nice), and I'm completely unable to come up with anything. This is less a problem than it is a sign that I don't want for much. So that's pretty cool.
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The lists at McSweeney's are a nice break from lists on Letterman or in The Onion. (Thanks, Dad!)
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Anonymous sources and the Times—discussion of long overdue adjustments.
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Euphemism generator. Hours of fun.
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We just watched Green Mountain Coffee Roasters get advertised on national television by McDonald's during an NFL game. Nice!
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So this space has long advocated that gas prices go up a factor of five or so in order to reduce long term demand. (In weaker moments I admit that I'd love to see people willing to drive four-ton trucks and SUV's have to pay several hundred dollars for a tank of gas. Heating my house would be kind of tough, but it'd be worth it.) In Iceland the other month we got to watch everyone (including us) pay eight dollars for gas, and nobody seemed overly put out—of course, the nearly free electricity sources they've developed in response to such ridiculous energy prices probably help ease the pain. One of the rare times someone agrees: Thank God for $3.50 gasoline, says Charles "I'm-a-doctor-and-I-say-John-Kerry-is-mentally-ill" Krauthammer. Note that there's also a bunch of stuff about opening up way more wilderness for oil drilling; pretend I didn't point to that part.
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New batch of kid pictures, finally.
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This space finally ponied up the cash for a nice low end iBook, but somehow managed to decide to have the thing sent by UPS to the house instead of to work, the trick being, of course, that there might not be anyone home in the middle of the day when the UPS truck comes by. On Friday I decided to simply go pick the damn thing up at the UPS distribution center, but they called and told me that it had already been put on a truck to Rhode Island (!) so I got home fuming and ended up just going for a run while the kid went to bed. (They assert that it will show up at work on Monday.) But the good news is that the family has now spent the weekend actually interacting with one another, playing around the house, drawing stuff on the sidewalk, and otherwise being sociable, which certainly would have happened a bit less had the shiny new machine arrived. Besides, the usual "spare" computing time is currently being spent sorting through the seven hundred pictures that have accumulated since the last batch of cute kid pictures got posted. So, as we're doing here, sit tight.
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