1. Use this site to create a UPC bar code that contains your personal data.
2. Tattoo your new bar code on your body.
3. Find people who own one of these camera cell phones, and have them scan your tattoo to read your data.
I’m not kidding; this is a real dating phenomenon.
Apparently, Boston’s famous swan couple are a same-sex couple. Testing recently revealed that the swans who have been promoted by the city as a Shakespearean romantic dream are actually both female. How very appropriate. This, however, is not:
”Each year when the swans go in, the kids immediately come to us and say, ‘Which one’s Romeo, and which one’s Juliet?’ ” parks spokeswoman Mary Hines said yesterday in response to a Globe inquiry. ”It’s just like one of those fairy tales; why spoil it?”
How offensive that the idea that a romantic pair of female swans would be considered “spoiled.” Nice.
Stephanie’s birthday is today. If you’re reading this, comment and tell her happy birthday!
I love you, honey.
There are lots of things that I like that are traditionally considered feminine. For example: big poofy white wedding dresses. There are lots of things of things that I like that are traditionally considered masculine. Like pipe tobacco smoke (which is because I have memories of my dad smoking a pipe when I was a really little kid and he played with us a lot).
I don’t reject wearing things, or decorating my house with them, because they fit one gender role or another. I simply don’t care about gender roles; if I like something, I wear it, regardless of whether it fits with society’s conventions or not. I intend to get married in a big poofy wedding dress, and if that doesn’t fit with your image of me, then you don’t know me very well.
So when it comes to the subject of purses: I just don’t like the way they look. I don’t carry one because it’s a visual that I don’t like, regardless of what the gender role of it is. If I carry a purse, I look like an old lady, or a soccer mom, which has a lot to do with the purse in conjunction with the size of my butt. It just doesn’t look right on me.
I’m started cataloging my library using Booxter software, by Deep Prose. Since 1997, I’ve kept lists of all the books I’ve read, but I’ve never been good at keeping track of the books I actually own and haven’t yet read, or books that I want to purchase. And for insurance reasons, I should have an accurate record of what I own. I’ve needed to get my library organized for a long time and it’s such a huge task that I’ve put it off forever.
But I’ve been needing to go through all my books lately to weed some out and put them in my upcoming yard sale (Saturday, August 27th, more details to follow).
This past week I started using the public library’s request and hold capabilities, and realized that I can request a book on the internet and have it sent to my nearest library to pick it up, rather than buying it full price. Duh, I know. I realize that Stephanie, Lori, Joel, Jen, Rachel, and Beth have all pointed the wisdom of obtaining books this way at one time or another. I don’t know why I never listened to them. I think that once I started being able to afford to buy books instead of checking them out (before the library had such robust online features) I went that route because I love books so much I wanted to be surrounded by them.
And Stephanie and I went to the library book sale yesterday and I successfully found several books that I had on my wishlist for a long time. If I had been better organized about what I own and what’s on my wishlist, I might have found them earlier, and I might have obtained lots of books cheaper instead of paying full price for them.
So far, into the Booxter cataloging software, I have entered 125 titles, which includes all of the books I had sitting around on tables in the living room, plus three shelves from my book case in the living room. There are 39 more shelves in the living room, plus two small bookcases upstairs and a shelf of books at work to add.
The software goes out and grabs data from numerous sources, including all the bibliographic data and the cover image of the book, and I can enter data as well, such as when and where I purchased the book and for how much, if I’ve read it and when, etc.
For the 125 books, the tally is 41,760 pages, $2,546.68 for the full price to replace the books, and $1,286.42 that I personally have spent on books. Those last two numbers scare me.
2019 Update: I never managed to get much more than this entered. I ended up switching library software, too, to Delicious Library – it had a barcode scanning tool. Cool idea, but it was a really buggy piece of software. I need to go back and try this again sometime, because scanning software is much better now.
An excellent article on the 21 white house officials who were involved in the illegal leaking of a CIA agent’s identity to the public, and the details of how they were involved. If you want to sort out the details and see who this generations version of “The Watergate 5” are, here’s your article.
I’ve posted several of these links before, but I wanted to aggregate them all in the same spot because they’re interesting. They’re all sculptures made of found objects. We were talking about this in Louisville this past weekend, because I was brainstorming some things I’d like to make, and there were a couple artists in the museum that were fascinating.
Roger Wood’s Klockwerks
Radio-Guy
Eccentric Genius
Steve Brudniak
NAO Design
Jimmy Descant’s Deluxe Rocketships
There’s one of these sculptures at Yats on College
Randall Cleaver
The Ascent Wooden Gear Clock
Ross Brown
According to a Cornell University study, when men feel their masculinity is threatened, they over compensate by adopting attitudes in support of the Iraq war, expressing interest in buying SUVs, and making homophobic threats.
We needed a study to tell us this?
This should interest my friend Doug: newspaper readers in the UK are currently being treated to a truly great series of print ads. The Stella Artois adverts place objects that may be familiar to you from various movies into a single landscape, and the challenge is to figure out what movies all the images are from.
The Town [answers]
The Park [answers]
The Beach [answers]
UK fans of the ads are calling them “cinema sudoku” after a popular number placement puzzle craze in Britain and Japan.
We wound up our long weekend on Monday by going to Chicago with Stephanie and Lisa to visit the Art Institute, do a little site-seeing, and shop at the Fluevog store for some super cool new shoes.
