Hah! As I’ve recently mentioned, I believe the entire geek world has a crush on Kari Byron from Mythbusters. That being said, it’s good news that she’s got a four-page spread in the June issue of FHM. There’s an online video of her doing the shoot over at FHMUS, here.
Now if only I had the energy to actually buy a copy of FHM. Bah, who wants to buy FHM when you can get perfectly good hardcore smut for free? Then again, this is a special situation.
Okay, I was contacted in another post by the notorious Eurotrash punk, Mr. R., who demands my email address. Now, if I had time, I’d just type it up in Photoshop and make it an image. For those wondering why I’d do that, it’s because — let this be a lesson to you — spammers send out spiders on the internet searching for mailto links or email addresses in any form. So I’ll just post my email address in a longer line that requires logical thinking to put it together, for Mr. R. and anybody else. This isn’t one of my Super Secret Squirrel addresses, by the way, so if you mail me at it and I don’t respond, try again, because you may have been deleted accidentally along with the 300 spam emails a day I get on it. Anyway:
My email address is: my first name (or rather nickname, hint, it begins with “k”, tough, huh?), the “at” symbol, and the name of this website, without the http://www part in front of it.
Now everybody ask Mr. R. why Hasselhoff is so important!
I dug up a page with ST on it and commenced mailing her (for those of you who hate the fact that I use initials, thppthh, sorry, I hate giving out full names). There has been a great degree of catching up and it has been absolutely wonderful. I mean, ain’t it great when you find an old friend and they’re actually still interested in chatting with you and they are actually pretty much the way you remember them?
Anyway, it’s been fun. Much obliged, Ms. T.
Alright. Wikipedia has this one slightly wrong, I believe. The backstory, quickly: a man once assaulted Dan Rather shouting, “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” or, according to Rather, “Kenneth, what is the frequency?”
Now, the wiki just says that the assailant, William Tager, thought news stations were beaming things into his head and he wanted to know what the hell the frequency was so he could stop it. This is not quite what I heard, a long time ago, from a very good source.
The longer story goes like this, and is more interesting: Tager believed he was from an alternate universe, sent to our universe by the Vice President in his — and in his universe, Dan Rather, who is actually named Kenneth (they all have doubles with different names) and who is the Vice President, authorized the action to send him over into our universe. Why Tager thinks he was sent is unclear. What was clear was that he didn’t know how the hell to get back. Kenneth, or Dan Rather, was supposed to provide him with the proper “frequency” to reach his home universe/dimension and get himself out of this mess. But he never got the frequency. So, logically, he went after Dan Rather, believing him to be Kenneth from his universe, and demanded the frequency to get back home.
I know. Why do I bother remembering stuff like this, right?
Cuz it’s fun!
And that, my friends, is what I’ve heard of the story of “What’s the frequency, Kenneth” (or “Kenneth, what is the frequency?”) and I’m too damn lazy and not sure enough of myself to edit the Wikipedia, but if someone gets the urge to look up the facts on my version, please, go ahead and edit the Wikipedia.
I’ve got to do something to rein in my email-writing. I am positive that people don’t want to read all the crap I send them. Absolutely positive.
Last night I was in rare form. I spent TWO HOURS composing an email to an old friend. Now, I was writing almost the whole time, and I type at like 160 wpm so…do the math. It’s a long email. Moby Dick had shorter chapters.
I’ll, uh, work on it.
Now, there are very few people that I’ve shuffled off my mortal coil over the years that I want to get back in touch with. The ones I want to be in touch with, I’m in touch with (even if one of them can’t comprehend email and the other simply isn’t emailing me — dammit, you know who you are).
But there are a COUPLE. And one of them is Michelle Burroughs — I believe that’s how you spell her last name, although her mother’s name was Jansen, so I’m not sure about anything — and I can’t find a trace of her anywhere. Vanished off the map. First serious girlfriend. Not to be sappy or anything. They say smell is the strongest scent tied to memory, and I will say this — she smelled like really good grapes. Right. I have no idea what that means, but I always get this grape smell floating around when I think of her.
Now considering how eerily good I am at tracking people down on the Internet (spooooooky, could I be stalking YOU next…?), it’s extremely odd that in like 10 years I have never run across a trace of her anywhere online. Even with myspace and all. In fact, I just found someone else I was looking for. Hahahaha!
No, seriously, Michelle, if you ARE out there, drop in and post a comment. Anybody else I’m stalking, too.
After about six months, I’ve completed my tour of re-reading Cryptonomicon (which I consider a prequel to the Baroque Cycle) and my first readings of the Baroque Cycle novels (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World).
These are all really great books and I recommend them to everyone. It certainly doesn’t take six months to read them, I mean, don’t be thrown by the time I spent on them. I spent that much time because I buy almost all my books (I love collecting and building towards a library) and I want to get my money’s worth out of them, so I read a short amount every day at night to relax. Also, the books are filled with minutiae of all sorts which it’s really easy (and sometimes preferable) to skip over. I mean, I had no trouble with all the science trivia, but when the novels move into, oh, the trivia of silver mining and the relative strengths of currencies in a given era, my eyes glazed over a bit.
Anyway, all in all, Stephenson is a magnificent writer, and these books are a huge departure from, say, Snow Crash, so don’t go in expecting THAT. After all, these are science fiction books that take place in the past (and no, that does not mean time travel).
I’ve since moved onto a book by Chris Moriarty entitled Spin State — it has a recent sequel, Spin Control, which I will most definitely be buying. I’m struck by its similarity to Richard K. Morgan’s style, although it is by no means derivative. I thoroughly enjoy both authors and would not hesitate to tell you to go read them.
And that it’s for my literary comments this evening.
Found another nasty little trojan. Directprt.dll. Trojan “Goldun”, as NAV identifies it. NAV couldn’t do anything to it, so I booted in safe mode and ran NAV plus a few other anti-spyware anti-virus tools. Pretty sure I got rid of it.
Got an email back from DF. All is well out there, he’s hopefully going to be in a short-distance relationship soon (with the same girl *bonk*), he has two weeks left to go (roughly) until he’s out of school with a degree in…I actually don’t know EXACTLY what, but it’s centered around film and video editing.
With K-Rhyme getting his PhD in the history of the study of the history of film studies (or something like that, what are you smokin’, K-Rhyme?), and SC doing trailers for Kurdish TV, that makes three people I’ve gone to school with ending up working with film and video. Good luck to all of them.
Ah yes, also, DF read my myspace rant, and actually apologized to me for having a myspace account, so I have to point out, this is not about ALL the people I know on myspace. DF is fine on myspace, like the ideal vision of my myspace user, he has a small account, easy-to-read webpage…the rant is just about some of the people my age and the fact that they’re focused on building this huge friends lists and etc. So don’t think I hate you if you use myspace and I know you. I probably like you if I know you and you’re on there. Probably. 🙂
And me? Spent an hour today jumping a car and then it went dead again in the dark in the wrong position and I’m leaving the damn thing until tomorrow.
Over and out.
I was just reading Dick Morris’ column over at his Vote.com site and I have to quote something from it, something I think is very true:
Isolationism, a largely ignored theme in our politics, is growing rapidly in the wake of the sacrifices we are making in Iraq. It is this feeling of wanting the rest of the world to go away, not any leftward drift, that is animating the drop in President Bush’s approval ratings as the war drags on.
On April 7-9, USA Today asked a national sample of voters if the United States “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along as best they can on their own.” Almost half of all Americans, 46 percent, agreed with the statement, while 51 percent differed. These results are almost the same as the pre-Sept. 11 polling of January 2000, when Americans broke 46-50 on the same question.
In the interim, of course, came Sept. 11, when the nation found out why foreign affairs were vital to domestic peace. In the aftermath of the attack, only one-third of Americans thought we should “mind our own business.”
He concludes:
Woe to the politician, like Bush, who arouses the genie, and woe to his party that tries to win in its wake.
It’s too damn true. People have already forgotten what it felt like on September 11, 2001, to realize we were actually under attack from somebody. We panicked and rallied around our leaders and Bush’s ratings soared. Now it’s 5 years later and we’re back to sipping our mocha lattes and feeling smug and secure about ourselves. My dear Lord, why should we try to stop insane people from killing us? They obviously can’t do it anymore! They’ve had five years!
I’d like to remind people it was a good 8 years between the first plot to take down the WTC and the successful execution of said plan.
It also reminds me of, okay, here I go again plugging South Park — burying your head in the damn sand.
Wake up, people. It ain’t a pretty world, but we have to deal with it. And when I say that, I’m not just talking about Iraq, but about pre-emptive strikes on Iran. Maybe the US isn’t the good guy of the world. But we’re about the closest thing to it that the world has got. And we’re obligated to try to make it a better place. Especially when it IS going to affect us, no matter how much sand you bury your head under.